The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [48]
“You don’t boil your beans?” he said.
“Well—” Lydia seemed slightly confused by the question.
Like any Scotsman, Mr. Morgan was proud of his resourcefulness and frugality. He took a mild interest in me but did not seem particularly surprised that his downstairs neighbor shared her apartment with a chimp, and casually made mention of the fact that he himself cohabited peacefully with ten parrots.
“Do they talk?” Lydia asked with excitement.
“Of course they talk,” said Mr. Morgan, as if he was offended that she need even have asked. Then Lydia asked to see them, and then we were all upstairs in Griph Morgan’s apartment, which was (one) less than half the size of ours, (two) situated directly above my (Bruno’s) bedroom, (three) cluttered with old newspapers stacked to the ceiling (which Mr. Morgan clearly had no intention of recycling anytime soon), and (four) did indeed have a whole flock of parrots in it, flapping and squawking and crawling all over everything in the room. There was a big pot of beans boiling busily on the stove. Half the floor space of the living room was taken up by a huge wire birdcage, the door of which was open to allow free passage for the ten parrots. There was a tiny old TV with a twisted coat hanger for an antenna, a foldout card table, a side table, and a shabby brown easy chair facing the TV. The room had no other furnishings. The chair had been sat in so many times and so often that Mr. Morgan had carved a depression in the seat and the back that was shaped like his body, such that the negative space formed a phantomlike impression of Mr. Morgan sitting in the chair in the event of his absence. Mr. Morgan inserted his form into the Mr. Morgan–shaped crater in the easy chair, and Lydia and I sat on two of the shorter stacks of newspapers. The room was tropically dank and steamy, smelling of the combined effects of the potful of boiling beans and the parrots. Lydia would later confide in me that in her opinion Mr. Morgan’s apartment “stank,” and that she was glad she had finally discovered the source of “that weird smell in the building.” I, however, actually kind of liked the smell. Mr. Morgan’s apartment had a not-unpleasant soporific effect on me; I found its biotic pungency oddly cozy. In fits and starts of attempted conversation Lydia managed to extract from Mr. Morgan that the two things he lived for were his parrots and his bagpipes. As for the latter, he was the lead bagpiper in the Veteran’s Association of Chicago & North Western Railway Bagpipe Band. When they played in parades, he would play his bagpipes from a wheelchair, which was pushed at the head of the formation by a tartan-clad volunteer. As for the former, Griph Morgan’s parrots consisted of three African greys, two macaws, two red-billed Pionuses, one blue-crowned racket-tail, one cockatiel and one Senegalese yellow-vented. All of Mr. Morgan’s parrots enjoyed free range of his small apartment. He considered these birds his friends and roommates more than his pets.
Just a few moments spent in that place provided me with all the epiphany I needed to know the source of all those screaming dreams I had been having: the screams that my sleeping brain had built dark scenarios around were obviously the noisy, prehistoric squawks of these birds. The noises they made hearkened back to the days of the dinosaurs; it wasn’t hard to imagine these sounds coming from the throats of pterodactyls or archæopteryxes.
All of them could speak at least a little. They could say a few standard parrot things in English, such as hello and good-bye and wantsome when they wanted food of some sort. For instance, they might say wantsome cracker or wantsome apple. Some of them had learned profanities and would use the word dammit as an all-purpose intensifier, as in wantsome apple dammit. That was most of what the parrots would say in English. Mr. Morgan asserted that the parrots spoke far more in Scots Gaelic, their preferred language, which he had