Annabelle loved staring at the yellow bird. She could spend hours looking into his black doll’s eyes, thinking about what it must be like to fly through the eucalyptus forests of Australia. Buddy was from Australia, or at least his parents were from there. The lady from the pet store said that Buddy had been born in the store and had never known any other life. He was a cockatiel and he would live a very long time.
Annabelle had won Buddy in a contest. All she had had to do was write her name very carefully on the back of a lid from a box of birdseed and put it in a jar. Ellie had given her the money to buy the birdseed in the first place. Ellie was good for those kinds of things. Surprises. Unexpected parties. Like buying a box of birdseed just out of the blue without much explanation.
Ellie was Annabelle’s aunt, and though she was a good speech maker she wasn’t much like a mother. Ellie was fun, but ever since her mother had died Annabelle had learned to do things for herself.
Annabelle loved Buddy even though when she first got him he would bite her hard enough to break the skin. Annabelle even suspected that the pet store lady had given him away in a contest because he was such a bad-mannered bird. Then the girl decided that it must have been a result of somebody being horribly mean to him. So Annabelle chose to be exceedingly nice to the cranky yellow bird. She fed him exactly what the books said to give him: nuts and sometimes some pieces of fruit. She gave him his food by lying for hours on the bed with the seeds cupped in her hand and her hand extended into the cage. For the first day Buddy would only shriek and hop from perch to perch, but the little girl would lie still, murmuring his name and saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” By the third day he was eating out of her hand, and by the end of the week she could put him on her shoulder while she read a book.
Annabelle rarely spoke to anyone. It wasn’t out of unfriendliness or fear. It was just that she felt that her words were like money and she wanted to spend them wisely. She loved reading books. In books there was a surfeit of words and to her a library was a kind of Fort Knox. She particularly loved books about animals. More than books and words she loved the animals themselves. There was a drawing of a leopard above the window where she stood and watched the man put Ellie and that other man with the sad face in the car.
They had been living in Seattle for a couple of years. Ellie had been in Aberdeen when Annabelle first came to live with her. They lived in her grandpa’s bar, which worked out fine for a while but Ellie wanted to give speeches in Seattle. Leaving Aberdeen seemed to have been a mistake. There were fewer and fewer men turning out for her aunt’s speeches, and more and more men coming around late in the evenings with whiskey on their breath. It had often occurred to her that one day Ellie might not be there in the morning, and this thought didn’t particularly frighten her. It didn’t frighten her like thinking about Buddy flying away, or thinking about Buddy flying into a windowpane, swooping down from some perch looking at that other yellow bird coming at him in the exact same motion. Annabelle knew about being alone. She just didn’t want Buddy to die or become lost.
So when she heard the men breaking down the door, she took Buddy and hid underneath the bed, and when she stood at the window and watched them drive away she only thought about whether there was enough birdseed in the house.
The night passed as it usually did for Annabelle. Ellie was out. The sounds of the street secreted their way into her dreams, so that she sometimes saw birds driving milk trucks and when newsboys threw their papers they would become fluttering moths before hitting the porch. So it didn’t seem odd to Annabelle that Ellie was home around daylight and was in a hurry to leave that next morning, just as the bruise across her aunt’s face hadn’t frightened her. Annabelle packed up her gear: a small bag of books, underwear, socks, two shirts, two pairs of pants, her heavy coat, and her umbrella. Ellie packed more of her clothes, furiously stuffing them into suitcases, and Annabelle walked slowly down to the kitchen and took down the big package of birdseed from the pantry shelf.
The car they were riding in was the same one in which they had driven away the day before. When Ellie opened the car’s trunk, Annabelle saw a hand that looked kind of waxy white with blood on it. The rest of the person was covered with a blanket. All Ellie said was, “Don’t look at that now,” and she slammed the trunk shut. When Annabelle got in, she saw the sad man holding a cloth to his nose with blood dripping down on the seat. He said “hello” to her in a polite voice. It was then that Annabelle knew they were going on a very long trip and she was sorry she hadn’t brought more books.
They drove on various small roads, trying to stay away from other cars or houses. Just before the sun came up, they came to a small yard near a muddy, fetid section of river. There were smokestacks behind them and rusty pieces of iron scattered in the mud. Ellie made a big point of talking to Annabelle while the man got out of the car and opened the trunk. Annabelle looked at her bird, the black dots of his eyes jittering around his cage, while just faintly along the edge of her perception she listened to the sound of someone dragging something across the mud.
Ellie started to cry and she couldn’t stop. Her nose got all snotty and her chest heaved up and down with those big boohooing sounds that little kids make when they fall off the swings and get the wind knocked out of them or when they step on a bad rusty nail and know that they might die of lockjaw. Ellie cried like that, hard and sad, but when she was done crying, she acted as if nothing at all had happened. Annabelle kept one hand on top of Buddy’s cage and she put the other hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, looking only at the bird.
The rest of the morning they drove around not going on any big street or in any one direction for very long. They stopped at a little house. Annabelle didn’t even get out of the car because people were yelling and Buddy sat with his feathers ruffled as if the sound of the angry voices were a spray of cold water. The girl looked up over the bottom of the car window toward the house where the man with the broken nose was yelling at someone, while Ellie sat off by herself on the porch smoking a cigarette. An ugly man who looked like a strongman from the circus, only about four feet tall, came out and threw a case down on the ground. The case was empty and it sat on the wet lawn like a broken clamshell. The little strong man was saying that they would be lucky if they got caught by the cops. Buddy pecked at his bell and looked at his curved reflection in his little mirror and Annabelle cooed to him to reassure the bird that everything was going to be all right.
Then the ugly man told them all to get off his property, which they did.
They drove until they came to a spot where a bunch of cars were stopped and there was a police car. The sad-looking man said a bunch of bad words and turned the car around. Then he wanted to get out of the car once they got around the corner but Ellie wouldn’t let him. So they drove back down toward the city where there were lots of cars, and the man with the broken nose said that he had had enough and he got out of the car even when it wasn’t all the way stopped.
Ellie said that they couldn’t go back to the house and they had to get rid of the car. She stopped at a gas station and made some telephone calls and then drove out to a market where a gray cat was sitting on top of the candy counter and a brown terrier was tied up to the water pump. Ellie stood outside the store and drank something from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. The dog didn’t even lift its head. Annabelle thought the dog didn’t look very happy and she was thinking about going over and seeing if she could get it something to eat or maybe just scratch his ears for a minute when Ellie came back to the car and told her that they were going to have to walk for a little ways down to a barbershop. Which they did.
They walked down the street, away from the market, away from the gray cat on the counter and away from the sad-looking dog that lifted its head just an inch off of its paws to watch them go. They would come back for the car a little bit later but the dog would be gone, its chain lying tangled in the mud and its big footprints filling up with rain.