He knew that Jane, at the very rear of the house, absorbed in her book, wouldn’t hear him drive away, but he coasted backward down the driveway, anyway, and didn’t start the engine until he’d backed around onto the empty street. The houses all around him were warmly lit with families together for Sunday evening. Very soon he’d be back among them. The rifle on the seat beside him, he drove toward Tom Lindahl’s house.
8
The parrot saw things in black and white. He knew about this place of his, that it was very strong, and that he was very strong within it, and that whenever he thought he might be hungry, there was food in his tray. He was clean and preferred to stand on his swinging bar rather than down at the bottom of the world, even at those rare moments when the bottom of the world was made new, almost shining white and black, crisp, noisy if touched, until he began to drop upon it again.
For movement, rather than down there, he preferred to move among the swinging wooden bar and the rigid vertical black metal bars of the cage. Up and over, sometimes, for no reason at all, his strong talons gripping the bars even directly above his head, giving him, when he arched his neck back and stared with one round black and white eye at the world, this world, a whole new perspective.
There wasn’t much in this world, but not much was needed. With his strong talons and his strong beak, gripping to the metal bars, a taste like inside your brain on his tongue from the bars, he could move around and control everything he needed.
Outside the cage, enveloping it, was another cage, indifferent to him. Below him, on the one side, dim light glowed upward to suffuse that larger cage with soft auras, constantly shifting. Sometimes grating noises came up from there, too, sometimes not. Beyond, over there, a paler, larger, taller rectangular brightness sometimes briefly appeared, when Creatures entered or departed their world, the one beyond his. At other times they made that rectangle and moved through, but there was no extra light.
He had some curiosity about these Creatures, but not much. He studied them when they were present, usually observing one eye at a time, waiting for them to do something to explain themselves. So far, they had not.
Sometimes the parrot slept. He slept on the swinging bar, talons gripping tight, large button eyes closed, coarse green feathers slightly ruffled upward and forward. When he woke, he always knew he had been asleep, and that nothing had happened, and that, now he was awake, it was time to eat and shit, drink and piss, so he did.
Now it was now. Creatures went out, with not much brightness in their rectangle, and leaving no Creatures behind. The shifting lights from below continued, without the noise. Time went by and the parrot slept, suddenly awakened by a racket.
Another Creature had come in, with banging noises and shouting noises. It crossed in front of the bright square, it went into other darknesses and came back, it yelled and yelled, and then it leaned down to stare at the parrot, to stare at that left eye observing it, and yell and yell the same phrase over and over.
The parrot had never spoken. The parrot had never been in a social situation where it seemed the right thing to do was to speak. The main Creature who lived with him, in his cage outside the cage, almost never spoke. It had never occurred to the parrot to speak.
But now this Creature, some unknown foreign Creature, was yelling the same sounds over and over again, and it came to the parrot that he could make those sounds himself. It might be satisfying to make those sounds. He and the Creature could make those sounds together.
So he opened his beak, for the first time ever not to grip a bar, and the first thing he said was a rusty squawk, which was only natural. But then he got it: “Air izzi? Air izzi? Air izzi?”
The Creature reared back. It shrieked. It yelled many different things, too fast and too many and too jumbled for the parrot to assimilate. Then it jabbed the end of a metal rod into the cage, wanting to poke it against the parrot’s chest, but the parrot sidestepped it easily on his swinging bar, then clamped his left talon around the long metal rod.
The Creature had not finished yelling. The parrot joined it: “Air izzi? Air izzi?”
The parrot leaned his head down and swiveled it to the right. His left eye looked down the long round tunnel inside the metal rod. “Air izzi? Air izzi?”
The searing white flame came out so fast.
9
Trooper James Duckbundy was a health nut, which was why he liked to drive with the cruiser’s window open. Trooper Roger Ellis would have been just as happy with General Motors air, but Duckbundy was at the wheel this time out, so it was his call.
They were driving to Pooley from Barracks K because some old coot had reported mislaying his weapon, a handgun. Both troopers understood the citizens’ right to bear arms and all that, but both sincerely believed the world would be a safer place if idiots didn’t own guns. They could understand how a person at almost any age could mislay their car keys or watch, but to lose your piece? That was just the sort of individual, in their opinion, who shouldn’t be armed in the first place.
Of the sleepy little towns in the world, Pooley had to be one of the sleepiest. They drove in to few lights and no traffic, and Duckbundy parked in front of the address, a small house lit up like a Christmas tree, the only house in town that seemed to have every last light switched on, interior and exterior. Losing his handgun seemed to have made the householder nervous.
Because Duckbundy was a health nut, which meant his window was open, before he even switched off the engine they both heard the flat serious crack of a shot. Up ahead it came from, and on the other side of the road.
They looked at each other. “That was no handgun,” Ellis said.
“It wasn’t applause, either,” Duckbundy said, and put the cruiser back in gear.
There were no further shots as they eased slowly down the road, but there didn’t need to be. It is a crime to discharge a firearm within five hundred feet of a dwelling, and one time will do.
