The Egret

As usual, the telephone rang at dinnertime. From their places around the table, Polly and the kids gave McGruder pleading looks that meant "Please don't answer it--for once, just let the damned thing ring."

As usual, McGruder ignored their silent pleas and picked up the phone.

"Did I catch you at dinner?" Harry Profitt's reedy voice wanted to know. "Too bad. But at least you got somebody to make it for you, don't you, Stork? Me, I eat out of tin cans or fry up cheap fixings for myself. And you know whose lousy goddamn fault that is, don't you? Don't you, Stork-O?"

"You're never going to let me forget, Harry."

"Damned straight I'm not. Why should I? You ruined my life, you bastard. You've got a wife and kids. You're a big-shot ranger out at the state preserve. You wear a uniform and swagger around. Me, I got nobody. I got no position. The birds fly over--sometimes I can't half tell them from tatters of smoke or cloud. And it all goes back to you, doesn't it, Mason? Forgive me--I mean, Stork the Dork."

McGruder took it. He took it every time One-Eyed Harry Profitt called. Still guilt-ridden after 30 years, he could find no easy way to lay the specter of his culpability.

As a tall, skinny 13-year-old, Mason "Stork" McGruder had shot the fateful BB. It had been a bitter-cold December day and the boys had all worn thermal parkas or heavy coats. The idea had been to score war-game points by making their BBs go kerthunk! in the folds of their enemies' winter clothes. Harry had lost one eye, and an infection had settled in the other, heaping even more guilt on the young McGruder.

So, 30 years later, he answered the phone every time it rang and resignedly took Harry's abuse. Tonight, after enduring a good five minutes of it, he said, "Harry, it's time you shut up about all that and did something with the days you've got left."

"Like what?" Harry railed. "A job? I can't see worth a mole's butt. And I get dizzy spells. They grab me when I'm not expecting them. If it wasn't for my Social Security, I couldn't keep body and soul together." McGruder knew that this was true. Harry spent some of his money on birdseed--watching birds was just about his only healthy recreation--but a hell of a lot more of it on cheap bitter beer in long-necked amber bottles.

But at last, Harry was tiring. "Damn you to very hell, Stork!" he concluded, as he usually did, and slammed his handset down with such force that the tiny bones in McGruder's inner ear began to vibrate. Polly looked across the dinner table at him with reproach in her eyes.

•

One morning, slurping a mug of lukewarm instant coffee on the top step of his tumble-down back stairs, Harry Profitt thought he saw something moving in the weeds at the far edge of his yard. He had to squint, one-eyed, to bring this living object into focus, but the focus he got made it hard to see much except a cushion-sized white torso floating above two spindly black legs. A serpentine neck, also white, coiled up from the torso, and atop the neck was a narrow head with a feathery crest pointing one way and a daggerlike beak the other.

"A snowy egret," Harry muttered. "What's it doing in my back yard?"

Usually, like herons and ibises, the egrets just flew over--long-legged tatters of soiled silk on the china-blue sky, winging inland to their rookeries. Never, in Harry's experience, had any of these birds dropped down to scout the weedy terrain of his two-bit barony. Now, though, the realization that one of the graceful egrets had landed on it truly fretted him. About 50 yards away, after all, lived a pair of tigerish toms who, when it came to birding, took no prisoners. They were too thin and impatient to toy with their victims. Already this summer, Profitt had seen them butcher a mockingbird, three brown thrashers, four robins and a couple of blue jays. Pecan trees full of squawking relatives couldn't keep those toms at bay, and Profitt himself was too achy and slow to scare the bloodthirsty critters off.

"Egret, they'll catch you," he said, squinting at the small, long-legged bird stepping daintily through the weeds. "If you're hurt, you're doomed."

He set down his mug and went to see what he could do.

Shuffling to keep from pitching headlong into the ratty bushes marking his yard's far boundary, Profitt stalked the egret. (It was definitely an egret.) The bird, prissily high-stepping, eluded him, but without panicking or trying to fly. It couldn't fly, the man decided; something had happened to one of its wings. So their pointless do-si-do continued, the long-legged bird moving to escape Profitt as the half-blind man reached out lurchingly to hug nothing but egretless air.

"To hell with this!" Profitt shouted. He straightened, turned his back on the bird and limped back to the house. Once inside, he thought, Only a real son of a bitch would leave an egret out there to fend for itself with those damned toms around.

Finally, it came to him to telephone Stork McGruder and ask him how best to handle a downed bird of this sort. Even if it meant calling the joker for some other reason than to remind him of how McGruder'd ruined his life, he'd do it to save the egret.

Profitt dialed the number of the ranger station at the preserve and asked for McGruder. A woman on the other end told him that the ranger hadn't reported today, that he'd come down with a virus. Great. Profitt could inconvenience buddy boy Stork and do something for the downed egret at the same time.

Profitt dialed again. Polly McGruder answered. She told him angrily that Mason could not come listen to his abuse.

"I'm so sorry to hear that," Profitt said. "But this is urgent enough to get poor Mason up. Tell him who's calling."

"Good day!" Polly McGruder said, and Profitt knew that she was getting ready to hang up with one of his own receiver slams--when McGruder himself intervened to take the phone from her.

"What is it this morning?" the ranger asked, and he did sound weak.

Profitt, pretty clearly to the ranger's surprise, told Stork about the snowy egret in his yard. He asked McGruder's advice. He wondered if someone couldn't come out to his house and get the poor bird before those damned marauding cats did.

"you've got to do it," McGruder said, warming to a problem that for once had nothing to do with a 30-year grudge. "Listen, Harry, you've got to go out there and fetch in the egret."

"Damn it, I've tried. I'm better than half blind, as you damn well know, and that sucker, hurt like he is, dances away from me every time I try to grab him."

"You got any meat in the house?"

"No filet mignon, Stork. No tidbits of tenderized beef."

"Some hamburger? A can of sardines, maybe?"

"Well, I've got some raw bacon that's just about gone bad on me. That the sort of thing you're looking for?"

"It'll do, Harry, it'll do. Take a strip of it and sort of duck-walk out there, holding it in your finger tips. Your egret's probably hungry. Somebody's shot it or something, and it's been tiptoeing around your back yard looking for victuals. If you go out there and feed it, you'll be able to grab it while it's lifting up its head to swallow your little peace offering."

"What do I do once the bird's in hand?"

"Carry it inside, Harry. You've got to get it out of the yard. Snowy egrets're valuable birds, and they're legally protected, but those cats over your way don't know that and probably wouldn't care even if they did. I'll call the preserve and tell'em to send somebody over to take custody of the egret."

Profitt cradled the handset with mocking gentleness, found a strip of nearly rancid bacon in his refrigerator and went down the back steps, squinting out into his lot for some sign of the egret. Ah, there it was. With the greasy bacon extended as bait, Profitt hunkered and began duck-walking awkwardly toward the bird. The hungry egret scented the bacon and began stepping gingerly toward the strange one-eyed man approaching it.

•

McGruder, exhausted, slumped to the couch beside the telephone stand. He was grimacing; but in his grimace, his wife thought, was something disturbingly akin to a smile.

"What is it?" she asked him. "You feeling sick again?"

"Much better, Polly. Much better. I might as well be hung for a hit man as a horse thief, hadn't I?"

"I don't understand."

"He'll never stop calling."

"He would if you wouldn't listen to him, Mason."

"I have to listen to him. I put out the crackpot's eye. I deserve to hear what he tells me. Some of it, anyway."

"That's foolishness, Mason."

"Well, from now on, it'll be easier to take--a whole hell of a lot easier to take."

"What're you talking about?"

"It's instinct, Polly. It's biologically dictated egret behavior from years and years back."

"Do you still have a fever? You're not making sense."

"They go for the eyes; that's all I'm saying. They take their daggerlike beaks and go straight for the glistening eye."

It took about an hour for the phone to begin ringing again, but when it did, McGruder insisted on answering it himself.