When we entered his bungalow—Grandma Magnet had the key—the Balls was in an easy chair that faced the bay window. “Slowly now,” he told us, in a high, soft voice. “Don’t want to startle our beautiful man here.”
Our beautiful man here was a slate-gray parrot the size of a rabbit. It was perching on the shaft of a shovel on the rug, halfway between the Balls and the window. Its head was the size of a healthy tangerine, its eyes a pale yellow—skeptically, if not accusatorially, set—and its hooked black beak looked like something a ninja might strap to a thumb on his way to a regicide.
“Belt,” said my grandma. “Come on, it’s okay.”
We approached the Balls on tiptoe. The bird puffed its feathers, made itself big.
“Easy, buddy,” said the Balls, rising from his chair. He wore a Hawaiian shirt tucked into chinos, laid an arm on my shoulders, and I didn’t really mind. He smelled like a barbershop, of talcum and aftershave, clean and strong, and appeared as though he’d just been to one, too. His cheeks and white widow’s peak shone as if shellacked. There were no errant nose- or eyebrow- or ear-hairs. I won’t say he seemed young—I was six or seven, and the Balls was an adult—but apart from the watery quality of his gaze, his senior citizenship was not in evidence.
“So you’re Belt,” he said, “and I’m the Balls, or Uncle Sally, whichever one of those you’re more comfortable with. My friends call me both, and you’re my new friend, so I want you to feel at home here, alright? So that’s the first thing: you call me whichever. The second thing, now, is that you gotta meet Mouth, the real prince of this palace, so I want you to wave your hand like this, just once, like this, up then down, right? You do that and you say to the beautiful man: ‘Hello.’ Same time as the wave. ‘Hello’ and the wave. Got it? Simultaneous. The wave and ‘Hello.’ Go on now. Do it.”
I did as instructed, and, in a voice far less screechy and far more androidal than I’d ever have imagined, Mouth said, “I’m the Pottymouth shitforbrains fucken the prince. Pottymouth. Mouth. Prince Mouth cock shitforbrains.”
I laughed at the swears, as did Grandma Magnet, who giggled her way into the arms of the Balls, and Mouth’s even tone gave way to loud squawking: “Shut the fuck up Mouth! Eat shitforbrainscock! Shut your! Shut your!”
The Balls gave my grandma a squeeze on the flank, and, nudging her aside, told us, “Mouthy gets jealous.” Mouth ceased its squawking. The Balls said, “Come here, now.”
With a tilt of its head, Mouth stepped from the shovel onto the loafer-shod foot of the Balls, then climbed, beak and claw, up his clothes to his shoulder.
The Balls made some kissing noise.
“Kisses,” said Mouth. “Kisses fucken. Kisses.”
We followed them down to the wood-paneled basement. Its main room, which the Balls referred to as “the parlor,” featured a pair of pinball machines—a Playboy and a Star Wars—warmly glowing in opposite corners, and in the center of the room a billiards table, oxblood felted with hand-carved legs resembling an elephant’s. Between two doors on the parlor’s left wall stood a Mountain Dew– and Pepsi-stocked miniature fridge as well as a shelf holding two kinds of chips, three kinds of cookies, jars of chunky salsa and oily cheese, and bags upon bags of brand-name candy. One of the doors opened up on a bedroom with a television in it and a folding table stacked with paper napkins and plates, and the other to a bathroom redolent of lemons. Along the parlor’s right wall was the doorless entrance to a room half its width and matching in length. At one end of this room, Mouth’s wrought-iron cage, about the size of two phone booths set side by side, stood next to a much smaller, hairpin-legged cage, in which six small birds with marbled pink and gray feathers perched wing-to-wing on a branch, blinking slowly.
Strangely or not, I was far more interested in the opposite end of the room, where sat a leather-padded benchpress near a rack of gleaming dumbbells, but because I worried that revealing this interest might cause the Balls to lock the weights away—my parents, for reasons that, to me, were less important than possessing large biceps, explicitly forbade me from using my dad’s weights—I kept my back to the workout area, grinned widely at the sextet inside the small cage, and greeted them using the same hello-wave with which I’d greeted Mouth. In response to my greeting, the leftmost bird emitted a trisyllabic, sirenlike fweep, and then, as if passing the message along, each bird to its right fweeped identically in turn.
The Balls said these birds were called Rosy Bourkes, and they weren’t as clever as African Grays, which was the kind of bird Mouth was, but boy were they sweet and a feast for the eyes, eh? I asked the Balls their names and he named the seven dwarves, and I said there were only six birds in the cage. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said. “But they don’t know the difference. All they know is foo-WEE-ip. That’s their only word. Everything else to them is just a noise anyway. Ha!”
The Balls then explained the basement had a few rules that he wanted me to follow. I could eat and drink whatever was down there—he’d laid all the food and soda in specifically for me—but I was not allowed to set any food or drinks on the billiards table. The second rule was not to free any of the birds from their cages. I could stand around and talk to them as much as I liked, but Mouth, even though he looked as though he wanted a hug, didn’t ever want a hug; he did not want to be touched in any way, shape, or form by anyone but the Balls, and if anyone else ever tried to touch him, Mouth would use his frightening beak, which was strong enough and sharp enough to sever a finger, and as for what it could do to different parts of a face, like the eyes, the lips, the ears, or the tongue, the Balls didn’t even want to start to suggest to have me begin to consider imagining. As for the Bourkes, they couldn’t really do a person any damage, but they were far too innocent to be set free; they might stick their heads through the bars of Mouth’s cage, and that would be the end of them. Last but not least, I shouldn’t feed the birds anything that wasn’t in the cabinet under the small cage. I could feed them as much bird food as I wanted, but anything else could poison and kill them. The Bourkes, he told me, might or might not eat if I offered them some food—they had a lot of food in their cage and might not be interested—but Mouth would absolutely eat anything that I offered because Mouth’s food bowl, as I could see, was empty, since keeping Mouth hungry was part of his training.
I didn’t understand the part about the training, and I didn’t really care to, but I could tell that the Balls, who I’d decided I liked, would be disappointed if I didn’t express a lot of curiosity, so I pressed him for details on how Mouth was trained.
The Balls said that was the question of a smart individual and chucked me on the chin. He said Mouth wouldn’t learn if its belly were full; that the way you got Mouth to say new words and phrases was to stand in front of Mouth’s cage while Mouth was hungry and hold out a morsel—a hazelnut or tiny nugget of granola—so Mouth could see, and repeat a word, over and over. When Mouth said something back that sounded like the word you were repeating, you gave Mouth the morsel. Then you repeated the process again, maybe once or twice more, but after that you had to be very careful not to keep feeding Mouth for saying the same almost-word—you had to wait til Mouth formed the word even better. And so on and so forth: you fed it in degrees until it got the word perfectly. After that, you moved on, if you wanted, to a second word. Mouth, for its part, understood how this worked, the Balls said, and was, for a bird, a very quick learner. The main thing was just you had to keep it hungry, even if it did the adorable bowing thing that it sometimes did which made you want to feed it all the morsels in the world.