“Not okay,” said Richard, poking harder at the newspaper on my knee. “That’s my fucking window.”
“You live there?” I asked, trying to catch up.
“My headboard’s against that wall. Right above the scratching, whining, gobbling fiends themselves. They don’t sound like you’d think eagles should sound, Chase. They sound like vampires. Vampires at a buffet of dying rodents.”
A joke occurred to me. “Well, you know what they say. Go to bed with the Hawkman, wake up with the eagles.” It was now three weeks past our fateful introduction at the Woodrows’ Park Avenue duplex, and Richard Abneg had surprised me, and perhaps himself, by persisting in an affair with Georgina Hawkmanaji, Turk heiress. He called her, in his irascible way, Georgie Hawkman. Or the Hawkman, or the Hawk. The complicity between us, my having seen him infringe on Georgina’s rectitude the first time, formed the backdrop to our new friendship, a ready-made history we could allude to. If Richard seemed to bristle when I mentioned her, this was only ritual. He loved being reminded I knew of his conquest. Perkus was the one whom mentions of the Hawkman truly provoked. Perkus was a possessive friend, true enough. But he also cringed at evidence of my migrations, or Richard’s, through a milieu he viewed as corrupt.
Richard only glowered. “It’s not funny. I’ve been spending nights at the Hawkman’s just to sleep. She thinks I can’t get enough of her.”
“If it’s your window, can’t you have the nest removed?”
“You really live in a cloud, don’t you?”
Perkus had done tonguing the new joint’s glue, and he handed the result to Richard. “So, about six weeks ago Richard opened his window and pushed the whole mess into the street. The eagles went into mourning, started wheeling around crying, and all the TV news stations picked it up. The eagles flew off to Central Park, I guess. It seemed like it was going to blow over, but then the other apartments got together and held a press conference saying they loved the eagles, that the lone pusher didn’t speak for the building’s wishes. Richard got hung out to dry. That’s what they called him, the lone pusher.”
“The president of the co-op board didn’t give my name, mercifully. But I’ve had to creep in and out of the building for weeks. The Post published a telephoto picture of me in my Fruit of the Looms. Now the feathered monsters are beginning again with the nest, and everybody’s so thrilled. I’m totally stuck. There’s this bored old television star on the eighth floor, she’s made the eagles her whole raison d’être.”
“What television star?” I had an odd feeling I knew.
“You know, what’s her goddamn name?” Richard slurped air around the joint’s tip, waved his hand.
“Sandra Saunders Eppling,” supplied Perkus. “She was married to Senator Eppling for a while. She was the one who spoke at the press conference.”
“Sandra Saunders played my mom on Martyr & Pesty,” I said. I felt, as I often do at those rare times I actually choose to speak of my child stardom, as if I was boring my listeners with information too familiar to mention, and yet also evoking a distant pocket realm no living human could imagine. In either case, the result felt as though I were being humored. Possibly I did live on a cloud.
“She was in an Elvis movie,” said Perkus, frowning at me for not citing the more salient fact. I’d noticed-this may have been when I first noticed it-how Perkus didn’t browbeat Richard Abneg for his cultural illiteracy. He had me for that.
“Right, that’s the one,” said Richard, uninterested in anything but his nest. He seized the newspaper section from me now. “These days she’s a kind of fundamentalist vegetarian eagle-advocate. It’s horrendous luck for me she doesn’t have a real career to keep her busy. My whole building’s brimming with mediocrities and has-beens.”
“The whole island’s brimming with them,” said Perkus agreeably.
“Yes, but your bedroom isn’t full of the smell of moldering underbrush and the death screams of squirrels and pigeons and sewer rats,” said Richard. “Look at this.” He handed the fuming joint to me and raised the newspaper for us to consider, folded to the photograph of the eagles and their startlingly large construction. “It’s obscene. It’s practically… pubic.”
“Yes,” said Perkus. “Your building is definitely wearing a merkin.”
“That’s a polite word for it.” Richard stroked his beard, perhaps unconsciously making an association.
“I don’t think merkin is the polite word for something,” I said. “It’s more specific than that-”
“Read it to me,” interrupted Richard. Perkus had taken up the book, the Field Guide. I now saw it lay flapped open to the entry on eagles, Perkus having already delved into study on Richard’s behalf. “I’ve got to find some way to eradicate them that can’t be traced back to me…”
“I guess if you got a dog it would bark at them.” This was my pallid contribution, while Perkus studied the pages, tilting the book to favor his orderly eye.
“No, it can’t be inside my apartment, it has to be something that will crawl up the front of the building. Besides, I hate dogs.” We were deep into crime melodrama, a caper, Richard and Perkus collaborating on the perfect interspecies murder. “I’m going to need an alibi, too. I can’t be anywhere in the vicinity when those eagles go. That building is ready to come after me with torches and pitchforks.”
“So, here’s the thing.” Perkus held up a finger proclaiming Eureka! He was forever ferreting out the key, always distilling essences. “Majestic in his privilege,” he narrated from the Field Guide, “the bald eagle knows no natural enemy apart from Man.”
“What a freight of shit,” said Richard.
“Why?”
“There’s something totally insane about saying a frigging psychotic serial killer has no natural enemy! What they mean is the eagle’s enemies don’t stand a chance. All those mice and squirrels and pigeons, believe me, they’d gladly define themselves as enemies in that instant before the talons tore through their hearts.”
“In nature I think a thing doesn’t qualify as your enemy if it can’t fight back,” I said. “It’s just a victim.”
“Maybe we could corral a whole bunch of mice and squirrels and pigeons together,” suggested Perkus. “If they somehow were all run up the side of the building at once, when the eagles were sleeping…” He flipped eagerly through the Guide’s back pages, perhaps scanning the index for some precedent.
“No.” Richard leaned forward, grabbing for the joint I still held. He took it and drew in a puff and shook his shaggy head. “No, it won’t do.” His grave tone suggested real deliberation. “Prey is prey, I’m sorry to have to disenchant you two dreamers. You total Communists. If you’d heard them whimper and die, the way I have, you’d understand. A million mice couldn’t do it.”
“Didn’t mice kill the dinosaurs?” asked Perkus.
Richard shook his head. “The dinosaurs were stupid, they were on their last legs. Anyhow, the mice had help, they needed comets and glaciers, all kinds of stuff. I’m pretty certain the mice just jumped in at the end and administered the coup de grâce, then took all the credit.”
“We need a predator,” said Perkus.
“Exactly.”
“We should go up there, the three of us,” said Perkus. “Not now, but later, when it’s dark, when they’re sleeping.” We were always, Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg and I, on the verge of some tremendous expedition, like Vikings spreading nautical charts across a knife-scarred table, laying plans for plunder. Oh, how Manhattan yearned for our expert intervention! We never budged from that kitchen, however, unless if it was to tumble out coughing into the fresh chill air, and around the corner, to pile into a booth at Jackson Hole for cheeseburgers and Cokes.