Back in the bedroom, he pulled off his socks and shoes, and then he waited, curled up on the floor.
It surprised him how helpless he felt.
Wobbling around on their ridiculous legs, the chicks couldn’t seem to find the food. Michael Boni kept thinking about the tiny, cold weight of Caesar, the ever fainter rise and fall of his scabby, featherless breast. He tapped at the seed with his finger.
Cheep, cheep, cheep, he said. The chicks tripped over his finger as if they were blind. Maybe they were. It was impossible to tell what was going on behind those tiny black specks.
One at a time, he picked up the chicks and dipped their beaks into the food and water, and several of them stayed behind for a meal.
Within an hour, the house had turned tropical. Sweat was speeding down his spine and pooling beneath him. He got up to check the thermostat. Ninety-five. He stripped down to his briefs. In the other room, the siren still wailed. And now Priscilla was slamming her rattle against the bars of the cage, sounding like an ambulance crashing over a curb stacked with garbage cans.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’m coming.”
The moment he appeared in her doorway, the siren faded to a whistle.
“Here I am,” he said. “Here I am.”
Her head wove back and forth in sharp, halting jerks.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
She took a step back from the door of the cage. He took that as a sign she was ready to be calm.
The moment he opened the door, her beak came down like a spike.
“Fuck!” Michael Boni leaped back, pressing his hand to his mouth, a spot of sour blood on his lips.
Priscilla hopped from the cage to the bureau to the desk. He realized she was making for the hall.
“Oh, no you don’t,” he said, getting to the door just in time.
Priscilla watched with tilted head as he shook the pain from his hand. Smugly, it seemed to him. She barely reached his anklebone. He could have crushed her with one foot, but she stood her ground.
And then, with a single swift jab, she sank her beak into his toe.
The chicks didn’t sleep. Not all at the same time, anyway. They seemed to take turns keeping guard, at least two of them constantly peeping. That first night Michael Boni never managed to close his eyes.
For the next several days it was the same. Sweat ran down him like rain from an umbrella. The bandages on his hand and foot swelled into sponges. Meanwhile he could hear Priscilla down the hall. He hadn’t tried to put her back in the cage. It wasn’t worth the bloodshed. Now she was shredding his grandmother’s drapes. Her claws scraped grooves in the floor.
Twice a day he slid green beans and lettuce, delivered by Constance, under the door.
Every couple of days, while the chicks were distracted with fresh rations, Michael Boni turned the thermostat down a degree. By the beginning of the second week, he got it down below ninety for the first time. He was able to wear an undershirt again. But the evening the house hit eighty-eight, he found the birds huddling in the corner of the box like balls of socks. When he squatted down to talk to them, they wouldn’t even look in his direction.
“All right,” he said. “I get it.”
Back up the thermostat went to ninety-two.
By then, Michael Boni hardly heard the chicks anymore. The peeping was his white noise.
Since moving in, Michael Boni hadn’t touched his grandmother’s yard, her borders and hedges. The time for that would’ve been when she was still alive. The good grandson, coming over every weekend to mow and trim. Now the bushes were in a late stage of swallowing the house, another reminder of how much he’d failed her.
From the bedroom, Michael Boni’s view of Constance’s garden was mostly obstructed by an overgrown juniper. But he could catch the occasional glimpse of the old lady through some of the dead branches.
These days Constance was so busy planting and weeding and harvesting, she didn’t seem to have noticed he’d disappeared. She still left a bucket of vegetables on his porch every couple of days, but she never knocked, never came inside. And he hadn’t left the house since coming home with the chicks. They were still so small and fragile, he was afraid to leave them.
One evening just before dusk, someone new appeared in the garden. Michael Boni was sitting by the window, and a guy he’d never seen before stepped out of the weedy lot, Clementine at his side. A white guy, pale, with wild red hair. His stay was brief. Constance sent him off with a bucket.
Two nights later the guy was back. And again the night after that, always just as dusk was falling. Constance put him to work.
Just like that, Michael Boni saw he’d been replaced.
But didn’t he get some say, a vote? After all the work he’d put in, wasn’t the garden almost as much his as hers?
What worried Michael Boni was the hours the guy liked to come. The evenings soon became nights. Michael Boni would wake up in the black of morning to check on the birds, and there the guy would be, peeling lettuce leaves and picking beans by moonlight. By dawn, he’d be gone.
Soon Michael Boni was staying up all night to watch him. More than once, when the guy disappeared into one of the juniper’s blind spots, Michael Boni even crept out to the workshop to get a better view. The last thing Michael Boni needed was strangers poking around his business.
By late June, the cotton balls had acquired distinct new parts, wings and necks. Michael Boni got them a larger box. A week later they needed something even bigger. He began taking them outside during the day. The birds liked to peck in the grass. They seemed happy there, chasing bugs and kicking dirt. When he wasn’t napping to make up for lost sleep, Michael Boni was watching over them, feeling like an old mother hen.
One afternoon a week or two later, Michael Boni and the chicks were in his grandmother’s bedroom, and he glanced out the window and saw Constance alone in the garden.
He knelt over to the box by the radiator. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Constance was on her knees, sprinkling mulch. She didn’t bother raising her eyes. “I was beginning to wonder about you.”
Michael Boni stood beside a patch of something new and leafy, something he didn’t recognize. “I’ve been busy.”
Constance tilted her head toward his grandmother’s garage. “You got some fancy new saws that don’t make any noise?”
“A different kind of project.”
“Is that so?”
He didn’t know what stopped him from saying the rest. Wasn’t that why he’d come over, to tell her about the chicks? Hadn’t he gotten them in the first place just for her? But in a strange way, he and the birds had begun to feel like a family, Priscilla the bitter older sister. And it was Michael Boni’s role to protect them.
Then again, he hadn’t told her about Darius, either. He just hadn’t found the words yet, a way to put it so she’d understand. But in his mind, it was all about Constance and his grandmother, different pieces of the same thing.
“You’ve got a new helper,” he said.
Constance stabbed her little shovel into the dirt. “I’m not sure how much a help he is.”
“Who is he?”
Constance shrugged. “One of Clementine’s strays.”
“He seems to be here a lot.”
“Is that right?”
“It’s strange,” Michael Boni said. “Don’t you think? Gardening in the middle of the night?”
A fly was circling Constance’s face, and she blew at it from the corner of her mouth. “You tell me what’s strange.”