Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Sid fought to sit up. His stomach seemed to be the sun around which the rest of his body orbited. “Pay her off and she’ll love you forever. Isn’t that how it works in the slave-girl movies? Tony,” he said, “I hate to hound you, but — I’d ask Malcolm—”

“I don’t have it.”

“Izzy have it?”

“Izzy has the same no-money I have.”

“The budgie room,” said Sid dreamily. “That sounds nice. Let’s go see the budgie room and talk to Izzy.”

“We’re not going to the budgie room.”

“I like budgies,” said Sid, hurt.

“I don’t.”

But Sid was already struggling to his feet.

“Je t’aime,” said the bird again, and Sid said, “Kid, you’re breaking my heart.”

Tony followed Sid, and Aldo followed Tony, and Macy, yawning, followed Aldo. They walked down the hallway Indian file. From behind, Sid had the tight-arsed bullish strut of a smuggler. His bare back looked strong; he hitched up his sweatpants with one hand and almost kicked a passing kitten down the hallway. “You seem to be infested with kittens,” he observed. “Hello, you,” he said to it, leaning down and plucking it from under Aldo’s snuffling nose. It was one of the little kittens. Tony could hear its ingratiating purr. It was true: they were infested with kittens.

“You want a kitten?” he asked.

“I still live in a truck,” said Sid. In a kingly fashion, he handed Tony his empty wine glass, as though it were a decree he wanted enacted instantly. He held on to the kitten.

“Izzy might be asleep,” said Tony.

“Oh, she’ll see me .”

Sid had epaulets of steel-gray hair on his shoulders. The kitten, high on the curve of his stomach, looked dwarfish and blissful. You kind of had to love the pair of them.

“I’ll get you a drink,” said Tony. “Second door on your left.”

In the kitchen Tony tossed the empty pineau bottle and refilled the carafe. Jamais deux sans trois . The spigot was hard to work, and the wine was running out, so he opened the cardboard box and extracted the metallic bladder and squeezed it like an udder into the carafe, from which he then filled Sid’s glass. If he’d been sober, he thought, he would never have let Sid bother Izzy; and he was very happy he wasn’t sober, because it was essential that someone bother Izzy. Aldo had followed him back and now sniffed one of the puppies skeptically. “He does so look like you,” Tony told him.

When he opened the door to the budgie room one of the budgies flew out, a yellow lutino. That left forty-nine inside.

Sid and Izzy were sitting on the awful flowered sofa holding hands; it was the room’s only piece of furniture meant for humans. The sprung-open cages of the budgies encircled them. Some budgies — the ones who feared the warden, no doubt — stayed in their cages, but most of them flew around like drunken fairies. The grouch-faced English budgie called Bomber Harris paced pacifically through Izzy’s spiky blond hair. The way Izzy and Sid sat — he still bare-chested, holding a sleeping kitten in one hand near his armpit, she with her birds — they looked like a low-budget allegorical painting, though what the allegory was, Tony couldn’t say. Izzy was a bird-inclined saint who attracted budgies with her kindness, or a crazy woman who stuffed her pockets with bread crumbs. If she’d been ten years younger and twenty pounds thinner, it would have been saint for sure.

“Should that cat be in here, with all these birds?” Tony asked.

“It’s fine,” said Sid. “I have her hypnotized.”

“Malcolm bought me a parrot,” Tony said to Izzy.

“ Malcolm did?”

“Half a parrot,” said Sid, patting the back of her hand. Then he hissed at Tony, “When did this happen ?”

“Oh, hello ,” said Bomber Harris in a ludicrously pleasant voice. “Oh, hello .”

“Week ago,” said Tony. “An African gray. Like Maud.” He began to drink the glass of wine he’d brought for Sid.

Izzy rolled her eyes at Maud’s name. “If you met that bird today, you’d never give her a second look.”

“Attention,” said Sid. “This did not happen in a week.”

“The budgies?” Izzy scooped Bomber Harris off her head and smiled at him. “They tell you that if you want to breed budgies you can’t have a pair, a pair won’t mate. You need at least two pair. So we got four pair to make sure. Eventually—”

“Because they’re swingers,” asked Sid, “or because they’re naive? Should the other pair be older and come with sex manuals or be younger and come with quaaludes?”

“Quaaludes?” said Izzy. “Do quaaludes even exist anymore?”

“Since Malcolm,” said Tony.

“Since Malcolm what ?” said Sid.

Since Malcolm had made his announcement— I’m selling the house —she’d slept in the budgie room on the old, moldy flowered sofa they’d found in the barn. At night she draped the cages, then blacked out her own head with a duvet. I’ve talked to a lawyer. It’s in my name . The budgie room had belonged to the worst of the badly behaved French boys, the one who seemed to have pissed in every corner of the room though the toilet was right there, the one who carved his name, PASQUAL, in the stone walls, and put his cigarettes out on the windowsill, and broke the lock on the window so he could creep out at night; by all evidence a feral boy — the budgies kept finding long dark hairs — but nevertheless a boy who most likely had never threatened to sell his parents’ house from under them. I’m sorry to do it . When had Malcolm become so tall? His hair was cut like the guitar players of Tony’s 1970s youth, shaggy, awful even then. It’s just when I look at my problems, I don’t see any other way . Izzy loved Malcolm, though she wasn’t his mother, and was taking his betrayal worse than Tony — which is to say, she believed it would actually happen. All right? Dad? Daddy? Everyone loved Malcolm. Sometimes Tony thought that was Malcolm’s problem, overexposure to the rays of love, a kind of melanoma of the soul.

I don’t have a choice , said Malcolm, and Izzy said, Of course you do, you make the choice to be a better person .

But Tony understood, then and now. There was a small part of him that believed he’d sell out every single person he loved, too, if it allowed him to be rid of his obligations of love forever.

He stared at the brown drapes Izzy kept drawn so the budgies wouldn’t fly into the window. That couldn’t be healthy, surely. Even a bird needed vitamin D. He couldn’t explain to Sid what Malcolm planned to do. He refused to believe in it. To believe in it was to yank at the one loose thread that would eventually, finally, unravel their entire lives. It was hot in the room, and Tony imagined a house-hunter asking about the heat. Gas? Oil? Wood?

No, actually: budgies .

Tony hoped. Izzy didn’t, and she was the one who explained it all to Sid.

When she’d finished, Sid began to sink. He sank as though the vital architecture of his skeleton were being dismantled, as though, in a moment, like a tent the gossamer bulk of him would billow to the ground. Shit , Tony thought. If Sid is appalled, it’s serious .

“No,” Sid said. “Malcolm? No.”

“Malcolm,” said Izzy. “That beautiful kid.”

“When?”

She laughed. “He says the place needs to be fixed up first, so.”

Sid got up. He pointed the kitten at Tony like a gun. “You need a lawyer. Someone French, who knows those laws, because they’re set up to fuck you every way they can. They will betray you !” The kitten curled its sleeping body around Sid’s hand. “Izzy, listen to me. Do you know a lawyer?”