Bob Tarte Read online

  If an irreplaceable possession was challenging enough to warrant several sessions of intensive gnawing, it would turn into a project with Binky. The degree to which we opposed a project defined his enthusiasm for it. To thwart his will was to energize him. As soon as we’d release him from his cage, he would make a bunny-line for his work site and eagerly resume his labors where he’d left off. Reducing a reference book to paper pulp or chewing the Egyptian motifs off a decorative pillow were favored projects. But his appetite for this line of work paled next to his obsession with gaining access to a hiding place once I had blocked its entrance. One of these was the space between the headboard shelf of our platform bed and the wall it nearly touched. Ensconced in this dark recess, Binky was virtually unreachable. Assuming we even knew he was huddled there, the only way of rousting him was to thrust a cardboard wrapping-paper tube down the crack between bed and wall and blindly whisk it back and forth.

  I first tried preventing access to this miserable lair by placing a small suitcase on the floor next to the bed, but he easily nosed it aside. When I wedged it in firmly with the help of a spare blanket, he scuttled over the roadblock. I finally had to cobble together a wall of blankets and boxes arranged around a heavy cushion. Though he was unable to surmount the obstruction, he would not be dissuaded. Day after day he would bolt from his cage and scurry directly to the bedroom, where he’d rake his front paws furiously against the pile until Linda or I finally pulled him away and shut the bedroom door. That only turned his attention to the outside of the door, the sound of his clawing reaching us in the living room.

  When you match wits with a rabbit, you cannot win. If the rabbit bests you, you’re a fool. If you best the rabbit, you’re a fool who’s bested a rabbit. This truism sunk in the day I forgot to close the basement door and Binky found the most vexing hiding place of his career. I scoured the usual places for him: behind the washing machine, between the dryer and the sink, beneath the workbench, under the fuel-oil tank, in the hellacious cubbyhole where Linda stored Halloween, Easter, and Christmas decorations, against the wall next to the water heater, in a pile of possibly clean, possibly dirty clothes, and even among the canning jars. The third time I hit the basement to search for him, Binky sat nonchalantly grooming himself in plain view as if awaiting my arrival. When I took two steps toward him, he sauntered to the end of an unfinished run of plasterboard, hopped onto a cinderblock, and disappeared behind the wall.

  Just beyond arm’s length, he resumed his toilette, oblivious to my cajoling, pleading, and threats. I tried to chase him out with a broom, but that only drove him in deeper. From a step ladder, I poked my trusty wrapping-paper tube down toward him via an opening in the unfinished ceiling, hoping to block his path and force him out into the open. But he was too fast for me. He scuttled down the full length of the wall to the far corner, where I could just make out the shape of his ears with a flashlight. I had no reasonable hope of getting to him.

  Common sense told me to wait patiently until Binky tired of this warren that lacked a single chewable wire or until his stomach beckoned him toward his food-stocked cage in the kitchen. But I wasn’t in the mood for common sense. I needed to show Binky that a rabbit wasn’t the boss of our house.

  “Leave him alone,” Linda counseled. “He’ll come out when he’s ready.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I told her, pretending to agree as I followed her upstairs. Then, while Linda was taking a bath, I sneaked back to the basement.

  With a small utility knife, I cut a vaguely rectangular shape in the plasterboard at the base of the wall exactly opposite where I knew Binky sat, then used a screwdriver to pull and tear the hunk of drywall free. The commotion should have tipped Binky off, but since no amount of thumping had ever driven him from a hiding place, he remained still just long enough for me to make a grab at him. He was sitting too far forward, with just his hindquarters framed by the wallboard cut-out, and he wriggled from my grasp just as I tried darting a hand in front of his chest. He came out from behind the wall the way he had gone in and, before I could catch him, ran across the basement floor toward the stairs to the kitchen.

  Binky’s independence angered me, and the fact that he angered me angered me further. After almost two years in our house, he wasn’t becoming any more domesticated. If anything, he seemed to be growing wilder by the day. I didn’t like the feeling of chaos that Binky brought to our environment, the notion that I could be innocently reading the Lowell Ledger newspaper thinking all was well with the world when some portion of the house was being eaten away under our feet. I also took his disobedience as a conscious thumbing of his wiggly nose at my alleged authority.

  I came to this conclusion after the most impressive of Binky’s numerous escapes from the backyard pen that I had cobbled together for him. I had based his pen around the structure of a play area and sandbox that the previous owner of my house had built. I added metal fence posts between the existing four-by-four timbers and looped a roll of chicken-wire fencing around the whole thing. At first, escaping was simply a matter of Binky perfecting his hurdling skills to clear the three-foot-high fence I had foolishly assumed would keep him in. When I raised the height a couple of feet by adding another roll of fencing, he started probing my less-than-sterling workmanship. My fence posts protruded from the ground at widely varying angles like a bad set of teeth. Upon locating the post that leaned away from the pen at the greatest angle, Binky developed the fancy footwork needed to scramble up the steeply inclined fencing. Or he would run in circles around the pen until he’d built up sufficient speed for an impressive leap onto a board and enough residual momentum to launch himself over the fence. In the end, I had no choice but to add a third level of fencing, bringing the total height to an insurmountable six feet.

  “That’s one pen he won’t get out of,” I bragged to Linda, after depositing Binky in his newly refurbished stockade. Fifteen minutes later, I was upstairs trolling for African music on my shortwave radio when Linda called to me.

  “Sweetie, I don’t see Binky.”

  “Don’t worry,” I hollered down to her. “He’s in there.”

  “I sure don’t see him.”

  Surveying his pen from the upstairs window, I couldn’t see him either. He was usually a blur of motion as he busied himself with an escape attempt, but the cage was calm and apparently quite empty.

  Linda bolted out the front door in hopes of intercepting him before he hopped out into our busy street or lodged himself under one of our cars. I ran out the side door and nearly tripped over him as I went down the outside steps. He was sitting on the second step licking himself with unusual gusto, as triumphant as Houdini at the completion of a spectacular feat. “Running away isn’t the object,” Binky’s presence at the door told me. “Escaping from your stupid pen is the point.” How had he pulled it off? I’d never paid any attention to the numerous holes Binky had excavated while out in the yard. He would dig down a foot or so, then immediately abandon his burrow to start another one. But never before had he extended a hole into a bona fide tunnel.

  “I wonder how long he was working on this?” Linda marveled, as we surveyed the exit hole that had popped up through the grass a couple of feet from the northeast corner of his pen. His ingenuity forced me to line the inside perimeter of his cage with rocks of a weight that would thwart any more escape hatches.

  “This is our last rabbit,” I subsequently told Linda. “They don’t make good pets.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Binky.”

  “He belongs in the barn,” I fumed.

  “You shouldn’t talk about Binky like that,” Linda said. “He’s crazy about you.”

  In fact, Binky had begun to exhibit one or two endearing characteristics. Often when I puttered around in my upstairs office, he would sit on the floor beside my chair and groom himself, happy as long as neither of us acknowledged the other’s presence. Sometimes when I came home from work, I’d find him upstairs under my desk, appare
ntly waiting for me. I experienced a small but unmistakable flinch of pleasure at seeing him, and if I approached him on hands and knees, pretending to be searching for a mechanical pencil that had jumped out of my pocket, he’d even tolerate a few light strokes of my fingers.

  We marveled at his brashness with our cat, Penny, whom we had brought home as a companion for him. Though Penny did play a little roughly once she had outgrown the kitten stage, Binky could give as good as he got. Head bent low, he would grunt and launch a rhinoceros charge at her, forcing her to leap to the top of the couch for safety. They were especially rambunctious in the morning, waking us by bounding onto the bed in pursuit of one another. Even without Penny, Binky had begun greeting us by jumping on the bed, scampering across our legs, then immediately returning to the floor. From any other animal, these morning leaps would have served as mere footnotes—and leg notes. From Binky they were a veritable declaration of love.

  As the first week of May rolled around, however, he failed to act as our alarm clock. He kept to himself in a corner, displaying unusual listlessness. His appetite was poor. When I would carry him back to his cage, he didn’t fight me. We knew he had to be sick, but didn’t realize that rabbits often show symptoms of illness only once it has advanced too far to easily treat. One morning his condition had obviously worsened. He barely moved at all. Linda hurried Binky to the veterinarian a half-mile up the street, but returned home less than ten minutes later with the extraordinary news that Binky had died before she could get him in to see the doctor.

  “Not Binky,” Linda wailed, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Not Binky,” she repeated through her tears.

  I put my arms around her. Well, that’s that, I thought. Life will be much simpler now. Then, it was as if a stranger had stepped into my body and taken over. I found myself sobbing like a steam engine. We wrapped him in a blue bath towel and buried him on the edge of our property beyond our backyard fence. We left the house, driving north to Greenville and eating lunch at the local Big Boy—hoping, I suppose, that things would seem better by comparison with our lackluster lunch.

  That night, though, I couldn’t get to sleep. There was a full moon, and it seemed as if all the luminescence were concentrated in a spotlight that shone on Binky’s grave.

  “I can’t stand the thought of him being all alone out there,” I said to Linda. The sense of him buried in the ground was intolerable. I was connected to him by an invisible wire, and I wished he were alive to chew through it.

  IN THE END, I memorialized Binky by building him an elaborate grave complex that would have impressed the pharaohs, crowning his grave with an inordinately large pile of rocks. One damp spring afternoon, after standing at his resting place, I brought the flat central rock into the basement workroom and with the dregs of a can of latex house paint, I inscribed a headstone: BINKY 1990–1992—FAREWELL TO OUR DEAR FRIEND.

  “This I’ve got to see,” my mother muttered when Linda told her about the monument. But I was far from finished. Using a grass whip, I cleared out all the weeds and brush between the boundary fence of our backyard and Binky’s grave beneath a stand of maples. I laid out a straight path to the site, bordering it first with two-by-fours abandoned in our barn by the previous homeowner, then anchoring the boards on both sides with cabbage-size rocks. I filled the mourning path with a three-inch-deep layer of wood chips. Then, I created a second rock-and-board-bounded, woodchip-filled path that meandered from the mourning path down the hill beyond the burn barrel, turned west to wander roughly parallel with the backyard fence, then jogged north and joined the fence, which I lowered at that point to step-over height with a pair of bolt cutters. For a distance of thirty feet or so, I tore out the weeds and brambles, turned over the soil with a hoe, and planted an incompatible mixture of ground-level creeping myrtle and billowing purple vetch. The latter spread that summer like dandelions, burying the myrtle in balls of woody vegetation.

  The next summer, only the barest traces of my paths remained, just rocks and boards to stub the toe of anyone foolish enough to fight their way through the virulent weeds, wild blackberry bushes, stinging nettles, purple thistle, mullein, and out-of-control vetch. The paint had long since flaked off Binky’s marker. I had already touched up the inscription once, but finally let it go. I soon found I had little energy to pine for him. We had unwittingly taken in a new pet who was every ounce as belligerent as Binky.

  CHAPTER 2

  Ollie Takes Over

  During the first year of our struggles with Binky, Linda bought me a yellow-and-black canary as a Christmas present. The addition of Chester to our household was as effortless as our glum bunny’s was troublesome. He sang merrily at the slightest provocation. The rush of warm air through the kitchen register, the whine of the vacuum cleaner, or the tinny sound from the speaker of our portable TV triggered ecstatic passages of warbles and rolling trills from him. Unlike Binky, Chester had little craving for freedom. Whenever we opened the door to his cage, he would flutter worriedly around our dining room and occasionally settle onto a perch I had hung from the wall. But he didn’t care for any interaction with us.

  “Maybe we can tame him,” I suggested with unfounded eagerness. When I had first moved into our house, I’d read Alfred G. Martin’s book Hand-Taming Wild Birds at the Feeder about tempting chickadees and tufted titmice to take food from a human hand. But standing motionless in front of the bird feeder, arm outstretched, cupped palm spilling black- oil sunflower seeds while birds scolded me from a nearby pine tree lost its charm after a matter of minutes. Still, if wild birds could theoretically be coaxed into fellowship, I reasoned that a bird raised and kept by humans ought to be a pushover. I extended a wooden dowel identical to his wall-mounted perch toward Chester and urged him to land on it, but this activity quickly degenerated into my chasing Chester around the room with a stick. A better way to proceed, a pet-bird magazine informed me, was to begin by merely placing my hand into his cage until he became used to its presence. From there, I could gradually acclimate him to my finger. But when I introduced my thumb into his cage, Chester threw himself against the bars in fright, a poor foundation for building a bond of trust.

  Remembering how Binky’s independence had grown rather than diminished over his months with us, we decided that we’d give up trying to change Chester’s personality and enjoy him for his effusive voice. The obvious solution was a second bird that would willingly perch upon our shoulders and enjoy our company.

  Now, if out of ignorance I decided to stretch my right leg across a set of railroad tracks and a passing freight train clipped it off just above the knee, I’d think twice before putting my left leg on the rails. But after impulse-buying Binky, I still hadn’t grasped the consequences of purchasing an animal merely because we liked its looks. No voice in our heads cautioned us to interview bird owners about which type of bird would make the least troublesome pet. Had we known anything of substance about caged birds, we would have proceeded with great caution before subjecting ourselves to a parrot. And had we known anything about parrots, we wouldn’t have blithely brought home a breed that had justifiably fallen out of favor even among the most hardboiled hookbill enthusiasts.

  Once imported in great numbers, brotogeris “pocket parrots” were sold at department stores throughout the 1960s along with goldfish, turtles, hermit crabs, budgies, and other low-maintenance critters. I remember seeing, in my high school years, these small parrots for sale under the relatively innocuous label “bee-bee parrots” (though later I’d learn that the B-B tag accurately describes the sting of a brotogeris bite). In the early 1990s, just before the 1992 Wild Bird Act banned the import of wild-caught birds for the pet trade, aviculturists across the country furiously stocked up on macaws, cockatoos, Amazon parrots, toucans, flamingoes, and anything else they could breed and unload on animal lovers. Few bothered with the pocket parrots, ostensibly because of their low selling price. I now think they probably let the brotogeris dwindle due to its temperament, which f
luctuates between a lack of civility and demonic possession.

  Our first choice for a bird was actually a cockatiel, based solely on the fact that we knew what a cockatiel looked like. One afternoon Linda rushed into the house waving a slip of paper. “Sweetie, look what I found! A lady at Food City had an ad on the bulletin board for two pet birds.”

  I took the paper from her. “I wouldn’t trust anyone with handwriting like this. It looks demented.”

  “That’s my handwriting. And it does not.” She snatched back her note. “This lady has a cockatiel for sale with cage for a hundred dollars and a Quaker parakeet with cage for a hundred and fifty.”

  “A Quaker parakeet? We don’t want one of those.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But it probably only eats oatmeal.”

  The cockatiel deal sounded good. And by the time we drove across the Grand River to find a secluded house in the woods guarded by the only ferocious Saint Bernard on the planet—“Stay in the car until I get a chain on him,” the husband recommended as the beast raked my windshield with its massive forepaws—the Quaker parakeet had already been taken off the market.

  “Our son doesn’t want us to sell his bird,” said the wife, and sure enough, a pudgy-faced boy glowered at us as if we were set on shooting his dog in the bargain. Near him hunkered the Quaker, a pudgy-faced, robin-size, green bird that glowered at us as if we were set on packing up the boy.

  In an effort to make sure we would prefer their cockatiel to the verboten Quaker, the husband had already trimmed her flight feathers for us. But he had badly botched the job by cutting them far too short. Whenever the addled creature flapped her wings, she spattered the eggshell-colored wall nearest her cage with cockatiel blood.