I hurled myself to my feet and out of the bathroom, paced around the parlor, eyes aching, pits damp, heartburn welling, learning self-hate, not liking it at all. Maybe the problem with self-hate, I thought, in my instinctive six- (or seven-) year-old way (and rather insightfully, I must say, looking back now) was less the hate than it was the self. That is: instead of pacing around trying not to hate myself, maybe it would be better to try not to think about myself; to try not to think about how I thought; to try to think about something, or someone, else.
Or maybe I’m remembering my intelligence too fondly. Maybe I was just so bored and incapable of sleep that I was willing to try anything I hadn’t yet tried.
In either case, I returned to the birdcage/weight room, thinking I’d try to train Mouth to say a word or two—“Grandma,” I was thinking, “Grandma Magnet” if possible—the idea being (at least as I recall it) that doing so would please the Balls, and my grandma in turn. When I turned on the light, though, Mouth, who’d been sleeping, did a yogic-type stretch: stood on one leg extending the opposite wing, and then did the same with the other wing and leg. This was such a nice and surprising thing to see—such a graceful, calming thing—I wanted to reward it. I held a chunk of granola up, about an inch outside the bars, and Mouth came forward slowly, deliberately, and, just as slowly and deliberately, pushed its beak between the bars, clamped down on the chunk without touching my fingers, and gently tugged til I released the chunk. This was also quite nice—it seemed almost polite—and what was nicer yet was how the bird then climbed a couple bars to a perch, removed the chunk from its beak with a foot, and, standing on the other foot, ate the chunk, bite by bite, as if—single-legged surefootedness notwithstanding—he were just some kid enjoying an apple. A sloppy kid, yes—the granola chips sprayed in every direction—but a kid nonetheless. Not a piece of furniture.
As I watched him eat, I blinked, and Mouth blinked back. Or so it seemed. I blinked a second time, longer—one-one-thousand, two—and Mouth blinked a second time, also longer. I didn’t blink again til he’d finished the chunk, and he didn’t blink until after I’d blinked, and when my third blink garnered that third blink from him, I knew he was definitely mimicking me, and this thrilled me for reasons I didn’t quite understand.
Suddenly, I yawned. And then Mouth either yawned or just opened its beak and showed me its muscly, dry black tongue.
I yawned again—faked it. Mouth yawned again or faked it.
And here was the thing. Here was what thrilled me: its beak and my mouth just didn’t look the same. One was black and sharp and obtruding, the other pink and meaty and round. For Mouth to determine that its beak was like my mouth—which is what it must have had to determine before mimicking the movements of my mouth with its beak—was a pretty big leap. It was a much larger leap than I’d have ever credited an animal capable of making. Even looking at my eyes and determining they were like his eyes—which I saw he’d had to do to mimic my blinking—even that struck me, on reflection, as a fairly big deal, for remember, I had, til about five minutes before, thought of animals strictly as machines that stunk and made messes. Suddenly I had to think of them as capable of reasoning.
“Shitcockfucker?” Mouth said. He didn’t know what that meant—hell, I didn’t really know what that meant—but if he’d had any idea at all what it meant, there’s no way he would have said it so tenderly. So why did Mouth say it? Because the Balls, at some point, had taught Mouth that saying it—or saying some slightly different version of it—would get Mouth some food. And why had the Balls done that? Why’d he taught Mouth that? He’d done it because when a bird said words, it entertained the Balls.
It had entertained me a little bit too, but not any longer; now it depressed me. In a blink—or three blinks and a couple of yawns—I’d decided it was wrong to train Mouth to swear. Correction: it was wrong to train Mouth to form any words at all. It robbed him of his dignity. It made of him a fool. The most foolish kind of fool I was able to imagine—the kind who doesn’t know he’s being laughed at, if even he can hear the laughter to begin with, if he’s even aware of what laughter is at all.
And maybe you’re someone who says of such fools, “What they don’t know can’t hurt them,” and maybe you’re correct, and maybe I’m a sap. If you’re incorrect, though, what does that make you? I don’t know the word. I didn’t know it then.
Please know I’m not attempting to moralize here, for I feared I was a sap, down there in the basement, amidst my revelations; feared becoming a guy who my father would laugh at. And had I not more strongly feared remaining whatever that other, unknown word is, or if I hadn’t ceased to find Mouth’s speech-acts entertaining, I have no idea how—if at all—I would have responded when Mouth again said, “Shitcockfucker?” and it seemed to mean “Please, sir, may I have some more?” and perhaps seemed so only because I assumed I myself would have begged for food if all I’d eaten in hours were a chunk of granola.
I found a tiny door on the side of his cage. Inside it was a ledge. On the ledge was a bowl. I opened the door, took the bowl from the ledge, filled it with nuts and granola, and replaced it. Mouth ate it all up over twenty-some minutes. He broke away once or twice to drink water from the bowl on the next ledge over, but otherwise chomped continuously, punctuating swallows with tail feather shakings and tilts of the head, glancing at me in what I took to be a state of hope fighting disbelief, though it could have been anything at all, or nothing.
After that, I turned the lights out, went to bed, and finally slept.
In the morning, my upper body was so sore and stiff, I was having trouble walking. I couldn’t hide the pain, and couldn’t seem to summon a lie to explain it, so I fessed up to having used the Balls’s weights. The Balls, who in daylight seemed a little different—blubberier of lip, yellower of eye-white, wheezier of lung, and less flirty with my grandma—gave me the impression it was no big deal, my having used his weights, and I said I wished someone would tell that to my parents, and he chuckled and said that he bet my grandma would tell them, then gave me a Cotylenol he’d been prescribed for a broken hip the year before.
I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to Mouth; the drug’s effects didn’t start til we were halfway home, and I was in too much pain to move more than I had to. Around the time the opiate started kicking in, my grandmother offered to do me the favor, just this once, of helping me keep a secret from my parents. She wouldn’t mention the weights, she said, if I didn’t want her to. I said I didn’t want her to. She said that since I looked so sleepy and slack, we should say that I hadn’t felt well since late last night. I agreed to the plan; it was, at least, half-true.
When we got to the house, though, my parents were waiting in the kitchen for us, and when they asked where we’d been—they’d missed us, they said, and had come back a little early to take us to brunch—I, high on opiates, joyfully shouted, “At Sally the Balls’s!” and my dad said, “Sally the Balls’s, huh? Ha! Where’d you hear of that scumbag? I haven’t heard that name in—”