Bird Box

twenty-five

The husky is licking Tom’s hand. Jules snores to his left on the carpeted floor of the home’s family room. Behind him, a giant silent television rests on an oak stand. Boxes of records are set against the wall. Lamps. A plaid couch. A stone fireplace. A big painting of a beach fills the space above the mantel. Tom thinks it’s of northern Michigan. Above him, a dusty ceiling fan rests.

The dog is licking his hand because he and Jules feasted the night before on stale potato chips.

This house proved to be a little more fruitful than the last. The men packed a few canned goods, paper, two pairs of children’s boots, two small jackets, and a sturdy plastic bucket before falling asleep. Still, no phone book. In the modern age, with cell phones in everybody’s pocket, the phone book, it seems, has passed on.

There is evidence of the original homeowners deliberately leaving town. Directions to a small city in Texas at the Mexican border. A crisis survivor manual marked up in pen. Long lists of supplies that include gasoline and car parts. Receipts told Tom they’d purchased ten flashlights, three fishing poles, six knives, boxed water, propane, canned nuts, three sleeping bags, a generator, a crossbow, cooking oil, gasoline, and firewood. As the dog licks his hand, Tom thinks of Texas.

“Bad dreams,” Jules says.

Tom looks over to see his friend is awake.

“Dreamed we never found our way back to the house,” Jules continues. “I never saw Victor again.”

“Remember the stake we stuck in the lawn,” Tom says.

“I haven’t forgotten it,” Jules says. “Dreamed somebody took it.”

Jules gets up and the men eat a breakfast of nuts. The husky gets a can of tuna.

“Let’s cross the street,” Tom says.

Jules agrees. The men pack up. Soon, they leave.

Outside, the grass gives way to concrete. They are in the street again. The sun is hot. The fresh air feels good. Tom is about to say as much, but Jules suddenly calls out.

“What is this?”

Tom, blind, turns.

“What?”

“It’s a post, Tom. Like… I think this is a tent.”

“In the middle of the street?”

“Yes. In the middle of our street.”

Tom approaches Jules. The bristles of his broomstick connect with something that sounds like it’s made of metal. Cautiously, he reaches into the darkness and touches what Jules found.

“I don’t understand,” Tom says.

Setting the broomstick down, Tom uses both hands to feel above his head, along the base of the canvas tarp. It reminds him of a street fair he once took his daughter to. The roads were blocked off by orange cones. Hundreds of artists sold paintings, sculptures, drawings. They were set up side by side, too many to count. Each of them sold their goods under a floppy canvas tent.

Tom steps under it. He uses his broom to sweep a wide arc in the air above him. There is nothing here but the four poles that support the tarp.

Military, Tom thinks. The image is a far cry from a street fair.

As a boy, Tom’s mother used to brag to her friends that her son “refused to let a problem sit.” He tries to figure it out, she’d say. There isn’t a thing in this house that doesn’t interest him. Tom remembers watching the faces of his mother’s friends, how they smiled when she said these things. Toys? his mother would say. Tom doesn’t need toys. A tree branch is a toy. The wires behind the VCR are toys. The way the windows work. His whole life he’d been described this way. The kind of guy who wants to know how something works. Ask Tom. If he doesn’t know, he’ll learn it. He fixes things. Everything. But to Tom, this behavior wasn’t remarkable. Until he had Robin. Then a child’s fascination with the machinations of things overcame him. Now, standing beneath this tent, Tom can’t tell if he’s like the child who wants to figure out the tent or like the father who advises him to walk away from this one.

The men examine the thing, blindly, for many minutes.

“Maybe we could use this,” Tom says to Jules, but Jules is already calling him from a distance.

Tom crosses the street. He follows Jules’s voice until they meet up on another lawn.

The very first house they go to is unlocked. They agree they will not open their eyes in this house. They enter.

Inside is drafty. The men know that the windows are open before they check them. Tom’s broomstick tells him the first room they enter is full of boxes. These people, he thinks, were getting ready to leave.

“Jules,” Tom says, “check these. I’m going to search farther into the house.”

It’s already been twenty-four hours since they left their own house.

Now, with carpeting beneath him, he walks slowly through a stranger’s home. He comes to a couch. A chair. A television. Jules and the husky are barely audible now. Wind blows through the open windows. Tom comes to a table. He feels along its surface until his fingers stop at something.

A bowl, he thinks.

Lifting it, he hears something fall to the tabletop. He feels for it, finds it, and discovers it’s a utensil he didn’t expect.

It’s like an ice-cream scooper, but smaller.

Tom runs a finger into the scooper. There’s a thick substance in there.

He shivers. It’s not ice cream. And once, Tom touched something just like it.

On the bathtub’s edge. By her little wrist. The blood there was like this. Thick. Dead. Robin’s blood.

Shaking, he brings the bowl closer to his chest as he sets down the scooper. He slides his fingers slowly down the smooth ceramic curve of the bowl until he touches something resting in the basin. He gasps and drops the bowl onto the carpeted floor.

“Tom?”

Tom doesn’t answer at first. The thing he just touched, he once touched something like that, too.

Robin had brought it home from school. From science class. She kept it in an open coffee can full of pennies. Tom found it when Robin was at school. When he was searching the house for that smell.

He knew he’d found it when, just inside the rim of the can, atop the pile of coins, he saw a small discolored ball. Instinctively, he reached for it. It squished between his fingers.

It was a pig’s eye. Dissected. Robin had mentioned doing that in class.

“Tom? What happened in there?”

Jules is calling you. Answer him.

“Tom?”

“I’m all right, Jules! I just dropped something.”

Backing up, wanting to leave this room, his hand nudges something.

He knows this feeling, too.

That was a shoulder, he thinks. There’s a body sitting in a chair at this table.

Tom imagines it. Seated. Eyeless.

At first he cannot move. He’s facing where the body must be.

He hurries out of the room.

“Jules,” he says, “let’s get out of here.”

“What happened?”

Tom tells him. Within minutes they are out of the house. They’ve decided to work their way back home. A dog is enough. Between the tent and what Tom found in the bowl, neither of them want to be out here anymore.

They cross one lawn. Then a driveway. Then two. The dog is pulling Jules. Tom struggles to keep up. He feels like he’s getting lost out here in the darkness of his blindfold. He calls to Jules.

“I’m over here!” Jules calls.

Tom follows his voice. He catches up to him.

“Tom,” Jules says. “The dog is making a big deal about this garage.”

Still trembling from his discovery in the house, and still frightened, deeper, by the senselessness of the tent in the street, Tom says they should continue home. But Jules wants to know what the dog is so interested in.

“It’s a freestanding garage,” Jules says. “He’s acting like something’s alive in there.”

A side door is locked. Finding only one window, Jules breaks it. He tells Tom that it’s protected. Cardboard. It’s a small fit, but one of them should go inside. Jules says he’ll do it. Tom says he’ll do it, too. They tie the dog to a gutter and both men crawl in through the window.

Once inside, something growls at them.

Tom turns back toward the window. Jules calls out.

“It sounds like another dog!”

Tom thinks it does, too. His heart is beating fast, too fast he thinks, and he stands with one hand on the window ledge, ready to pull himself back out.

“I can’t believe this,” Jules says.

“What?”

“It’s another husky.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Because I’m touching his face.”

Tom eases from the window. He can hear the dog eating. Jules is feeding it.

Then, by Tom’s elbow, there is another sound.

At first, it sounds like children laughing. Then like a song.

Then the unmistakable sound of chirping.

Birds.

Gently, Tom backs away. The chirping quiets. He steps forward again. It gets louder.

Of course, Tom thinks, feeling the excitement he’d hoped for when they left the house the day before.

As Jules talks quietly to the dog, Tom approaches the birds until their squawking is unbearable. He feels along a shelf.

“Tom,” Jules says in the darkness, “be careful—”

“They’re in a box,” Tom says.

“What?”

“I grew up with a guy whose father was a hunter. His birds made the same sound. They get louder the closer you get to them.”

Tom’s hands are on the box.

He is thinking.

“Jules,” he says, “let’s go home.”

“I’d like more time with the dog.”

“You’ll have to do it at home. We can lock them in a room if there’s a problem. But we found what we set out to find. Let’s go home.”

Jules leashes the second husky. This one is less difficult. As they exit the garage by the side door, Jules asks Tom, “You’re bringing the birds?”

“Yeah. I’ve got an idea.”

Outside, they retrieve the first husky and head toward home. Jules walks with the second dog, Tom with the first. Slowly, they cross lawns, then driveways, until they reach the marker they set the day before.

On the front porch, before knocking on the door, Tom hears the housemates arguing inside. Then he thinks he hears a sound coming from the street behind him.

He turns.

He waits.

He wonders how close the tent is to where he stands.

Then he knocks.

Inside, the argument ceases. Felix calls out to him. Tom responds.

“Felix! It’s Tom!”