Roscoe gave me the cold shoulder for more than a week. Since I’d been neglecting him, he regressed, or at least pretended to. He designed his limited speech to disturb me. Top of the morning, he’d say at nightfall, along with Sleep well at dawn. His repetition of Roscoe wants a cracker was a particular irritant. I finally won him back with a few thimbles of rum and a hike. It was a little before sunset on a warm day for January. The parrot sat squarely on my right shoulder as we made the brief climb to the cemetery. Though rarely out of his room, Roscoe knew exactly where he was, and almost immediately quoted Victor Hugo: “It’s nothing to die, Charlie, it is frightful not to live.” That came from a tape of pithy phrases I made for him; his ability to find the apt spot for using them has always amazed me. Roscoe amplified the Hugo quote in an encore performance, stretching out the fry in frightful and coming as close as he could to whispering not to live. I felt like I was being scolded.

We started up Sonoma Overlook Trail, which rises gently through a small forest to an upper meadow. Unfortunately, on a warm weekday, it was more crowded than I’ve ever seen it. Since the pandemic began, everybody’s become a hiker. Now people were out to catch the sunset. We either stepped aside or took a wide berth around the masked and chattering hikers crowding the switchbacks that climb through scrub pines, oaks, and California buckeyes to a clearing with a view of the town and the bay beyond. Voices, some of which sounded amplified, came from every direction in the woods. I half expected Puck from A Midsummer’s Night Dream to appear, singing: Up and down, up and down/ I will lead them up and down.

I realized long ago that a man could make friends too easily if he walked a dog, which is why I’ve never had one. I don’t mean to sound like a misanthrope, or do I? All of which is to say, that if you want to go up trails inconspicuously don’t wear a parrot on your shoulder.

At the top of the meadow, I sat with Roscoe on one of the stone benches. I tried to get the parrot to come down on the bench beside me but he wanted to stay on my shoulder. The sort of people who have dutifully kept their distance during the pandemic—couples in their early forties; young families, even people my age—clustered close to us as soon as they noticed Roscoe. Fortunately, the bench is recessed from the trail and nobody pushed forward beyond the trail, so I felt safe from the crowd, if not comfortable.

Once Roscoe spoke up, people became attentive. After being deprived of live performance for many months, folks held their ground. I’d spent a week trying to get the parrot to talk and now, when I wanted him quiet, he wouldn’t stop. As the crowd inched closer, Roscoe offered a cautionary speech, punctuated with a chuckle between each phrase: “Hey boys and girls, don’t forget the protocol: mask up and keep your distance, as if your life depended on it.” People’s eyes shifted from the bird to me, trying to catch me at some subtle ventriloquism. To help folks relax I mumbled discreetly with my lips. I’ve spent some time practicing my fake voice-throwing, in order to deflect attention from Roscoe and to support Sally’s conviction that a genuine thinking and speaking parrot is worth less than a talking prop crafted with clever artifice.

Two high school boys, one with a hand-rolled cigarette fixed behind his ear, posed a flurry of questions to the bird: “What’s your name, dude? How old are you? Do you have a girlfriend?” The parrot responded a bit arrogantly, “The name’s Roscoe; I don’t give away my age; what makes you think that I’m not hip to the birds and the bees?”

People in the small crowd were really taken with the performance and many addressed their appreciation to me: “You’re really good, man,” and such. A young Latina, who’d pulled out her earpiece, said, “You should take Roscoe on TV. I mean it.”

I have made up for my neglect of Roscoe in the last week, hiding out in his room for many hours each day and night since Augie Boyer shook our world, presenting the conjunction of Jesus the waiter’s murder and Pina’s name. Roscoe may as well be my shrink now. When I told him that it is becoming harder for me to disguise my chronic depression, Roscoe nodded his head and responded: “I understand, Charlie.” I’ve talked about my sense of inadequacy with Pina, how she feels like a moving target with whom I can never become fully comfortable. I’ve also spoken about my phobia regarding the dead waiter and, in the days since the insurrection, I’ve detailed my fears for the nation, particularly given the climate of disinformation that continues to hang like a toxic cloud over much of the country. I even spoke with Roscoe about my ambivalence regarding my work with him. “It’s wrong to not openly celebrate the magnificence of your intelligence, Roscoe, and to pretend it’s me speaking rather than you. I’m afraid the world is not quite ready for you.”

Although I can tell he’d been listening, Roscoe remained silent. I doubted that he understood much of what I babbled about; that’s where I was wrong.

As Roscoe sensed that the small crowd wanted more from him, he secured his position on my shoulder and used it as a soapbox.

“As an outside observer,” he began, with me mumbling shamelessly along, “I must warn you against conspiracy theories.” Conspiracy came out sounding more like conspicery, and theories like harries. “Forty percent of Americans,” he continued “believe the horseshit propagated by our rogue president.”

The two teenage boys laughed hilariously, especially when the parrot stumbled over propagated. I gazed around at the others, whose expressions ranged from incredulous to sober, as if some were actually considering the wisdom of Roscoe’s words.

“These false ideas caused what happened at the capitol on January 6,” said Roscoe. I concentrated mightily on my lip-syncing. “Do not become one of the brainwashed. The world is not flat.”

I couldn’t have said it better, but this was not a script I designed for the parrot, but an extemporaneous speech he developed on his own. Even I found that hard to believe. People began to slowly disperse, believing that it was me who had spoken, and yet they offered their farewell messages to Roscoe rather than to me.

On our way down the looping trail, the parrot offered encouragement to whomever we passed: “Follow your bliss, bucko. Keep your eyes on the prize, sister.” I noticed that hikers smiled at the parrot but regarded me as if I were an odd man, perhaps a pervert.

When we were by ourselves, Roscoe spoke to me directly, “So what’s our plan, Charlie? How can I be best utilized? What’s the message and how do we get it out?”

As we got close to the trailhead, I began to formulate a response: “I think you’re onto something, Roscoe. The question is how do we develop one kind of message to help deprogram the brainwashed, and another type for healing those suffering from PTSD?”

I heard footsteps coming our way from below and stepped aside with Roscoe as I’d been doing all afternoon.

“Those are just the kind of questions I’ve been asking myself, Charlie. At least you have somebody to talk with.”

In the gloaming, coming around a curve, I made out Augie Boyer. He stopped a good ten feet from Roscoe and I, and leaned on his polished walking stick, his head adorned in a conical brown felted hat, a rakish pheasant feather rising from the ribbon. It was hard to tell whether the detective, under his curious brim, was emulating Robin Hood or Peter Pan. Boyer’s facemask bore an ominous haiku:

Nobody knows for sure

if Jesus died for our sins.

Why was he murdered?

“So this must be Roscoe. I’ve heard a lot about you, my dude. I’m Augie Boyer.”

“The crazy detective,” the parrot said, as I dutifully lip-synced.

Boyer grinned. “That’s very clever, Charlie.”

Roscoe piped up.“ He shouldn’t get all the credit.”

Now the detective pivoted in his Blundstones and dropped a hand on his hip. He wanted to watch Roscoe and me at once.

I stroked Roscoe’s head. “Don’t say anymore,” I told the bird, “or he’ll suspect you of murder.”

Augie Boyer narrowed his eyes on Roscoe. “That’s nonsense, my dude. You can’t be incriminated. So what have you heard with your marvelous parrot ears about the murder of Jesus?”

“Good to see you, Detective.” I said, trying to clear out fast. I took a wide berth around Boyer, and in my best parrot voice said, “Jesus died a long time ago. Many of the claims about him are contested.”

Back at the condo, Bobby Sabbatini called. Without salutation, he croaked in his artificial speakerphone voice: “Give us a poem, Char.”

“Posey,” I said.

“The one and own.”

I remembered that he was restricting his speech to single syllables so his software wouldn’t make him stutter..

“Let’s hear it Char.”

I recited the haiku I’d just seen on Augie Boyer’s facemask.

“Call that a poem, Char?”

“It’s by your buddy Augie Boyer?”

“Aug, Aug. ‘Fraid he’s lost his way with verse. He gives too much weight to the syl counts.”

The irony of that struck me and I couldn’t leave it alone. “Sounds like you’ve been juggling syls, Posey.”

“Hey, I got balls in the air, Char, balls in the air. The words . . . the parts of speech . . . blaze of verbs . . . the lims that show me how free I am. Those are my balls, and if I drop one . . . I play it as it lays.”

Sabbatini was starting to affect me like he did on the pulpit, back in the day. At his best, he could inspire an entire congregation to memorize poems and recite them. Construction workers, guys on highway crews who’d never read a poem in their life, were proudly declaiming E. E. Cummings and Gary Snyder poems. That was before Sabbatini got shot in the throat at Ginsberg’s Galley in Guerneville, his religious tavern, with its poetry karaoke device. The sniper was a member of First Christ River of Blood, a local church that felt threatened by poetry and Pastor Sabbatini’s following.

Speaking in single syllables didn’t fully mitigate the problems Sabbatini had with his software. He typed out his words and the app spoke for him in discrete plinks of sound that could not be bent or accented. The steady march of his single syllables lacked the fluidity of normal speech. It must be hard for him to hear his words issue forth without the emphasis and golden euphony that characterized them; in the past.

“I’ve called to see how you are, Char. I heard ‘bout the death in Son. How are you and Peen? How is your soul? Tell me how I can help. What’s new with the pear? Have no seen him on Twit.”

I wasn’t ready to have Sabbatini become my confessor. Later I would talk with him about Roscoe but first I needed the lowdown on his friend Augie Boyer.

“Augie’s hanging out over here in Sonoma, busting our balls about the death of some poor waiter. We don’t know anything more than we’ve told him.”

“Aug knows what you think you know, Char. He wants to find that which you know but don’t know you know.”

I had trouble making sense of that machine gun round of syllables and wanted to ask Sabbatini to repeat what he just said, but didn’t think I could stand to hear it again.

“Aug will hit pay dirt soon. You can bet on it, Char.”

Somehow that pronouncement didn’t give me comfort. I shifted the conversation to Roscoe and his remarkable abilities as a speaker but also as an intelligent thinker who can synthesize complex ideas. “Nobody believes it’s actually him,” I said, “with the high cognitive intelligence and sophisticated speech. I pretend that I am the ventriloquist and he is my dummy.”

“It does not mat what peep think, Char.”

“But I need to utilize him wisely, to give him a purpose. My daughter Sal—that’s another story—thinks Roscoe loses value if he’s perceived as a he is—a thinking and speaking parrot, rather than a clever construction. What people really want, she maintains, is artifice.”

“She’s dead wrong ‘bout that. Let the pear be the pear—you owe it to him. And, of course, Rosc has a purp, Char. The God of verse chose him. He’s here to be the voice of Son.”

“The voice of Sonoma.”

“Spell it out, if you must, Char, but teach your pear poems, and soon he will write them. Like Aug Boy, he can lead us to know what we don’t know we know.”