Pick o' the Day: The Grackle Catcher

     One more step up, and he would be able to reach a grackle.  He had climbed the electrical pole slowly, almost sloth-like, so as not to startle the birds, and he made no sound at all except for the short, raspy breaths emanating from his mouth (breathing through his nose was nearly impossible thanks to a frustratingly deviated septum and its inseparable BFF, chronic sinusitis).  As he took the final step up, he inhaled deeply and then grabbed for the nearest bird in a quick, darting movement, snagging one of its panicked legs with the thumb and index finger of his right hand as it exploded in a black flurry of flailing and flapping wings.  Pulling the bird to his chest, he tucked its tail into his armpit, hushing it into a calmed, almost catatonic state as he began making his way back down the pole.  

     After reaching the weedy ground of the parking lot island, Hank Wendt turned and scanned the area thoroughly before stepping onto the pavement.  He was extremely cautious when walking through parking lots or crossing streets, relying on his eyes to alert him to approaching dangers since his ears could not.  He was almost totally deaf in his right ear, due to an unfortunate incident that had occurred when he was a child, though he rarely spoke of it.  And after years of working as a carpenter’s helper, enduring without protection the screaming screeches of power saws and the blunt-force sonic trauma of pounding hammers, he had probably lost about half the hearing in his “good” ear.  But it was an invisible disability, and as long as he was able to position himself to the right of someone who was speaking to him, he could generally hear the bulk of a conversation.  And if, due to heavy background noise, he could not, he would simply smile and nod his head as the other person spoke.  It usually didn’t matter much, for the conversations were, as a rule, one-sided, for there weren’t many who were much interested in anything he had to say.  There were even some acquaintances who thought of him as a “good listener”, and they would walk away with a warm and therapeutic feeling after talking to him, as if they had confessed to a priest, though, unbeknownst to them, he had only pretended to hear.

     Hank began to walk, or rather, limp, with his tenth grackle of the afternoon still tucked under his arm like an avian football, into the cold, easterly breeze blowing up Blessing Street.  After coming to the end of the second block, he stopped.  The chill wind and the frigid humidity made his left leg, held together with screws and plates due to a life-shattering break a few years back, ache unmercifully, so two blocks was about as far as he could go.  Taking the bird out of the snug nest made by the crook of his arm, and holding it carefully with both hands, he whispered these words into its ears; that is, where he assumed the bird’s ears should be, though he couldn’t see them: “Fly to the woodlands, away from the city!  You’ll be much happier there!”  He then released the bird into the gusty headwind, and it flapped noisily away.  “Catch and release,” chuckled Hank.  “Catch and release.”

     Since that was just about all he could take for one day, he decided to head for home.  Catching grackles in the grocery store parking lot and humanely releasing them in another location gave him a good feeling inside, for, to him, he was doing an important act of “public service”.  He had long been disturbed by the immense flocks of grackles that, at certain times of the year, would invade the neighborhood airspace and roost on the power lines and in the trees that encircled the local shopping centers.  The sheer numbers of birds, and the accompanying cacophony of cries and caws, were horrifying to many of the residents, especially the women and children, who would hurry to the store entrances, hands clasped over their heads or ears, hoping against hope they would not get pooped on.  And good luck finding a shopping cart that had not been sullied, at least a little, by the drippy droppings of these otherwise friendly and good-natured animals.  The store owners did nothing about the problem because they thought there was nothing they could do.  But Hank Wendt did not think that way.  He did not like to hear anyone say, “Someone should do something about that.”  He believed with all his heart that problems were meant to be solved, and if he could do something about a problem, then, by golly, he would do it.

            For the last five years since his beloved mother, brother, and sister moved away, he had regularly dedicated a significant portion of each week to this humble and largely unrecognized volunteer service for his community.  And doing so went a long way towards easing the silent, but nevertheless raging, river of loneliness that relentlessly ate away at the aging infrastructure of his optimism towards life.  He had known heartbreak literally as long as he could remember, for his father left home when Hank was only three, just one month after his awakening from babyhood, and had yet to return.  His memories of the man were dim, but certain features of his father stayed with him to this day: his jet black hair, his scratchy face (straight out of Hank’s favorite book of all time, Pat the Bunny), the smoke of his Lucky Strike cigarettes wrapped around his head like a Sikh’s turban.  Precious memories.  Where his father had gone, he did not know.  His mother, if she knew, never told him, and whenever she spoke of the man she would close every sentence with the words “da bum!” as if they were a new type of end punctuation mark she had invented because neither periods nor exclamation points felt quite right.  And it was his father’s absence that had made it impossible for Hank to accompany his mother and siblings when they moved away.  “Somebody’s got to be here when Dad comes back.  Otherwise, he won’t know what happened to us!” he tearfully explained to them as they packed up the family Rambler with all their belongings.  His mother just shook her head and said, “Hank, you’re an idiot,” jammed the stick into first, and roared away into the night.  “Be sure to write!” Hank yelled, and then fell into a coughing fit from the acrid smoke left behind.

(Next week:  The Grackle Catcher continues as Hank is forced to find a place to live after his mother sells the old family home.)