THE DOE

 

 

Vince did not call last night and it took Pina a full glass of cognac to fall asleep, a sleep that at best was fitful. The image of Vince lying dead in an alley seemed to hover over her throughout the night. Why she concocted this particular dark ending, she can’t say, but once imagined she couldn’t expunge it.

She wakes before dawn and hikes up to the cemetery, which, to her surprise, no longer prohibits entry. After nearly two months of lockdown, with only three deaths from the Coronavirus in all of Sonoma County, some prohibitions are slowly being relaxed. It should be reason for celebration, but she’s in no mood for that.

Pina climbs as high in the cemetery as she can and stumbles through the old basalt quarry, closed more than a hundred years ago. She heads back down to a wall surrounding the grave of Archibald K. Sparks, and sits, awaiting the sunrise. Medallions of moss have obscured Mr. Sparks’ dates, but his grave certainly has a nice vantage. The birds begin etching their distinct songs in to the air well before the sky brightens with milky light. Soon Pina can see much of the flat town of Sonoma, and even, further south, the pale blue of the bay.

She’s perched atop Archibald K. Sparks’ retaining wall, slipping back toward sleep, when Vince calls.

“Sorry . . . sorry, I was a bit off yesterday,” he says.

She waits for him to say more but apparently that’s it. “I’m worried about you, Vince.”

“Worried? Well, Pina, your worry isn’t misplaced. I’m not going to lie.”

He sounds sober today, or has he simply engineered a calming drug for himself this morning? She shakes herself fully awake and senses the delicacy of the conversation, that her goal should be to keep Vince on the line for as long as she can. No need to scare him off by telling about her visit to the house. “What seems to be the problem?” she asks as casually as she can.

“Problem?” he echoes. “It would be nice to think of it as singular. You know the old jazz musicians had something they called the consolidation plan. They’d take all of their problems: making the rent; a fight with their old lady; the girlfriend cheating on them; their horn in hock; their car repossessed; whatever, and they’d go and get high. That reduced it all to a single problem—how to get their next fix. The consolidation plan. I’ve tried it, Pina. It’s overrated.”
“Where . . . where are you staying, Vince? Are you staying at home or does the hospital have a place for you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You know, I’ve just been hearing about hospitals that have places for their staff.”
“Are you suspecting me of something? Are you suspicious?”
She stands and walks down to the trail. “Come on, Vince. You’re scaring the shit out of me. What the hell are you up to?”
“Well . . . I . . . I . . . I’m very upset,” he says, before going silent.
“Yes,” she says, finally.
“A nurse . . . a nurse I’ve worked closely with . . . well . . . she has the virus really bad. I think I’m next.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says, and finds herself thinking about the nurse. “What’s her name?”
“Name?” Vince asks.
“The nurse.”
“Oh, Reina.”
“A beautiful name.” Something about the way he’s pronounced it tells Pina more than she wants to know about the sick nurse. He’s probably been living with her the past weeks.
“I’ve got to go,” Vince says.
“Wait, Vince, wait,” she whispers.

Call ended, pops onto her screen. She walks in a small circle around a granite grave marker, without noting the name of the dead. A knot forms in her stomach and quickly tightens. It’s like an unpleasant echo of the poor nurse’s name: Reina, Reina.

 

This afternoon she’s been invited for tea on Charlie’s deck. It will be tea for three—she and Charlie and Roscoe. She still doesn’t believe the parrot exists beyond some form of wizardly fabrication, but she’s excited to have some distraction from the Vince catastrophe.

Pina makes a point of dabbing on only a couple of drops of perfume and brings a bouquet of yellow snapdragons and chamomile flowers that have volunteered in Vince’s half barrel. In a thrift store vase, the flowers look fresh and haphazard, reminiscent of the wild bunch of blooms she ‘d pick for her mother, as a girl, when she knew she was in trouble.

“Welcome, welcome,” Charlie says at the door, and she hears the voice of the parrot pronounce the same word, in the distance. “Oh, you’ve brought flowers. Lovely.”

She can see that he doesn’t want to take the vase directly from her.

“Why not put them on the hexagon table over there.”
“Sure.”

Charlie backs away from the door and leaves her a wide berth. He’s wearing another beautiful facemask, this one made from a blue and yellow paisley fabric. She’s come in her batik facemask. So there won’t be any more touching. Maybe holding hands was an aberration, and that’s the end of it

“Roscoe’s out on the deck. Why don’t you go out and introduce yourself; I’ll just put on some water for tea.”

This time she doesn’t pause to look at Arrow’s glove paintings, or gaze to her right or left, but walks directly out to the deck. Roscoe is an actual parrot, a rather small gray one, it turns out, poised on the rail of the deck, plucking sunflower seeds from a bowl that’s set in a receptacle of the rail. She approaches the parrot. “Hello Roscoe, I’m Pina.”
“Pina, Pina, Pina,” the gray bird says, “where you been-a?”

Pina’s response begins as a chuckle, but quickly turns to hysterical laughter. The speaking bird has rendered her speechless. This is exactly what she needed. As she begins to corral her laughter, Charlie surprises her, coming up from behind and laying a hand on her shoulder. She can feel the warmth of his hand through the thin cotton of her blouse. His gesture is even more unexpected than Roscoe, who continues grazing at the seed bowl. She can’t believe Charlie’s touched her again.

“So you’ve met Roscoe,” Charlie says.
The parrot bobs its head up and down and, in a crisp but suave cadence, offers, with an uncanny rolling of his R: “Roscoe at your service.”
Pina claps her hands together. “Oh, I love you, Roscoe. You’re a regular conversationalist, and you can roll your R’s.”
“Yes,” Charlie says. “We’ve spent a lot of time on that, haven’t we Roscoe?”
“Indeed,” the bird agrees.

Now the teakettle whistles its ordinary shrill command. Before Charlie goes off to subdue the kettle, he prompts Roscoe: “Speaking of R’s, give Pina a taste of your Boston accent, Roscoe.”
The parrot’s head pivots in her direction and bobs a couple of times. “Pina, Pina, Pina,” he says, before pausing to unearth a buried phrase from his treasury, “Pak the ca in Haved Yad.”
“Is Roscoe the smartest parrot ever?” she asks, when Charlie returns with a tea tray.
“I think he’s pretty accomplished. What do you think, Roscoe? Are you the smartest parrot around?”
Roscoe’s makes a clucking sound before pronouncing his big word, one syllable at a time, “In-du-bi-tab-ly!”
“Wow.”
Charlie’s expression is like a proud father’s. “I don’t know another bird who can go five syllables.”

She watches Charlie take off his facemask and is pleased to see his sweet lips again. Some day she will kiss them. Once she removes her mask, she adores the flush of liberated breath. It is as if she’s just surfaced from underwater.

Charlie nods toward Roscoe, who’s finished the seeds in his bowl and makes a few pecking sounds, bobbing his head at Charlie before pronouncing, in a stilted British accent, “Please, Sir, may I have some more.”

Charlie’s blue eyes glint with pleasure as he refills the bowl with seeds.

Pina claps her hands again. “You are such a polite bird, Roscoe.”
Roscoe plucks a shell, seeds it, and says, “I try to be, dear.”
Pina shakes her head. “How can you do that, Roscoe?”
Roscoe spits out a shell and asserts, in something close to a Jimmy Stewart accent, “Aw shucks . . . I’m a natural.”
“We call it scripting,” Charlie says. “It’s common in parrot training.”

Pina’s in a daze, what with the human parrot and the sweetness of Charlie and, of course, Vince’s shadow, with his sick nurse Reina, spilling over everything.

As Charlie pours tea, she pulls a silver flask from her bag and holds it up toward her host. “I was thinking of having an Irish tea. Join me?”
She pours a good shot into his Darjeeling and raises her cup. “To Roscoe.”
“Roscoe.”

The bird chirps and taps the side of his cup a couple of times with his beak. When he has their attention, he sputters out a toast, returning to a British inflection: “Here’s to a pretty girl, and an honest one.”
She gets a little warm hug from the spiked tea but would prefer drinking straight from the flask. “Charlie, tell me more about your script work with Roscoe. I create scripts for my clients and they can be very efficient.”
“They really work for Roscoe. He’s grasped sequences for years now. He also has an uncanny ability to respond to the implications of a question, so he understands what you’re asking even if you vary the words of your query. It’s not purely learning by rote. But I try to keep it simple by designing short sequences, brisk repartee, and I still have him listen to hours of conversational tapes a day.

“At Industrial Light and Magic I was on a team that created a synthesizer of accents. So with that software, I can play the same phrase in dozens of variations. Roscoe seems to have an affinity for the Brit sound. I figure he hung with English pirates in a past life.”
“I’m amazed what Roscoe can do but, as he says, he’s a natural. You must be, too, Charlie.” She’s not sure what she means by that, but wonders what Charlie’s plans are for her. What can he teach her? What can he help her unlearn?

When Charlie leaves to take Roscoe in for his afternoon nap, Pina empties the flask into her teacup. Nothing like getting toasted in the middle of the afternoon.

“Charlie,” she says, once she’s finished swilling her Irish, “Roscoe is an astonishment.”
Charlie smiles at her bashfully and takes a seat. “I’ve discovered something else about Roscoe—he has an ego.”
“An ego?” she asks.
“Yes, an ego, an id, the whole shooting match.”
It’s all she can do to not break into a drunken guffaw. “And how does his ego manifest?”
“Well, I’ll put it simply—Roscoe aspires to be a human being.”
So now she’s fallen for a madmen who’s married to his clever parrot. “Do you think he’ll make it?“
“He’s getting close.”
Pina stands, a little wobbly. “Charlie, I need to leave. This has been lovely, but t’s already been a long day for me, and I have some serious thinking to do.”

She can see he wants to ask her to explain and she holds up a finger. She takes a few steps toward Charlie as he stands, and reaches out, touching his cheek with the palm of her hand. She’d like to kiss Charlie now, if only a peck on the cheek, but doesn’t want him to smell her breath. He takes a step toward her, but she shakes her head. “Not now, Charlie.”

He nods and backs away. “Thanks so much for coming, Pina.”

“Thank you.” Why does she find it so hard to break away? “I have a favor to ask. Do you have a warm shirt, a flannel or a corduroy that I could borrow?” She can see that Charlie’s surprised by the request. Even she’s taken aback by her audacity.

“Sure, sure,” he says, “I have a closet full; I never get rid of them. Be right back.”

He returns a moment later with two flannels, a subtle green tartan plaid and a solid, firehouse red, with bright white buttons. Two very different moods. “It’s hard to decide,” she says.

“Take them both. I have plenty.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
She folds the shirts over her arms. “Charlie, can we see each other soon?”
“Indubitably.”

 

Back in the condo, Pina strips off her clothes and slips on Charlie’s green tartan. She lifts a sleeve of the shirt to her nose. She doesn’t know Charlie’s smell, not yet. The shirt has a faint scent of smoke as if Charlie wore it while huddled at an open fire a generation ago.

In the late afternoon she naps in Charlie’s shirt, and then showers. Once she’s had a strong coffee, she dresses as earlier, and challenges herself to jog up Second Street to the cemetery and back. Burn some of the poison out of herself. She hasn’t run in years, and huffs to the top of the little slope, halfway to expiring. Her quick breaths bite and then she pants, bent over, with her hands on her thighs. It takes a few moments before she’s ready to walk back down and, even then, she feels off balanced and like she’s stepping through ether.

When she gets close to the condo, a flash of brown bursts through the Osage trees into the middle of the street. It’s a deer, a large one. Doe, her mind sings, a female dear. Something else, Pina realizes, the doe is pregnant. She charges down Second Street, pauses in front of Vella Cheese, skirts around a car coming north and another going south, both stopped to watch her. She spurts ahead, gliding over a covered sports car onto the sidewalk, sticks to the rail of the horse farm until, Pina guesses, a pair of munching Clydesdales freak her back onto the street, and she angles down Spain, directly toward the town square.

Pina bows her head and makes a wish: that the pregnant doe finds her way home. Sadly, she wishes the same for Vince.