Bye Bye Blackbird

Carter Johnson quad-caned his way out to his patio with a glass of whiskey and water in his hand, ice cubes tinkling like piano notes as he did his damnedest not to spill a drop. The cane steadied his unsteady gait. The whiskey had been measured out parsimoniously by Carter's wife, Olivia. In her mind, a weak drink or two wouldn't hurt her husband, and it might help him wrap his head around his situation of diminished verbosity and mobility. Coming back from a stroke was a rough road. Three months in the rehab ward, then three months of three times a week in physical therapy after that, and just now, just past a half year since the incident—when that thin-skinned bubble on the blood vessel in Carter's brain had popped—he was finally feeling like something close to his old self, the wheelchair now taking up space in the garage. He could clunk around the house with that damned cane now, get on and off the toilet by himself, get dressed without help, even take a shower—though Olivia had insisted on one of those shower chairs, so he could sit down as the water flowed.

He settled in at the patio table. A hummingbird, a tiny, fidgety, gleaming rainbow of a bird, dipped out of the sky and hovered over the birdfeeder that Olivia had strung up on the overhang. The little avian moved in for a sip of the red fluid, and Carter sipped his whiskey. Alexa, sitting on the shelf next to a couple of potted succulents and primed by Olivia to play some Miles Davis music, issued some muted trumpet notes. "Bye Bye Blackbird." The hummingbird pulled back from its feeding, cocked a beady eye at Alexa then zipped away, leaving Carter wishing that the tune would have the same effect on the crows that crowded the doves and the small red-breasted birds away from the seed feeder out on the lawn.

"Carter, my man!" It was Dave Duncan, a lifelong friend, skulking around the south side of the house, the way he always made his approach since the incident with the jumper cables. That had pissed off Olivia, big time.

"Not so...loud, Dave...." Then Carter hesitated, losing his wife's name. So he compensated: "She's...inside." He nodded toward the house.

Dave flinched like he'd been stung by a bee, casting a glance through the windows in the French door, into the dining room.

"Care for a drink," Carter said, raising his glass. The words were coming more easily to him now. That was a complete sentence he'd just spit out.

Dave tiptoed up to the table, holding out a shoe box in front of his chest. "You think Olivia'll fix one for me?"

"No," said Carter. He smiled at this truth and his quick response.

"Well, that's O.K. I brought one with me." He placed the shoe box on the table and lifted the lid and pulled out a beer, then another. And another—four altogether.

"You...you...brought your beer? In a shoe box?"

Dave popped the pop-top, setting off a small eruption of white foam that rose from the opening. He sipped this away, along with with a mouthful of the sub-foam beer, and said, "Yep. My cooler got lost in the move out to the desert. But this works." He tapped the top of the box. "I brought you some beer, and something else." He slid the box closer to the middle of the table. "Something I think is gonna cure what ails you."

If Carter could have called up the phrase "eff me in the arse" he would have. Dave's last "cure what ails you" project—the one that earned him his banishment from the Johnson house—involved a car battery and a pair of jumper cables. Right after Carter's stroke, Old Dave had paddled into an internet surf session, dropping into a wave of dubious information that said a sudden electrical jolt would jump-start a faulty neurology. At that time Carter had been all but non-verbal, wheelchair-bound, right hand curled into a useless claw, half his face in gravity's grip, drooping toward the center of the Earth, and Dave had wheeled the battery and the jumper cables in on a small hand truck during Carter's reinstated (by Olivia) long-standing happy hour routine. He had connected the cables to the battery, grinning like a fool, and then loomed in on his paralyzed friend, brandishing the free ends of the clamps, one red, one black. It looked like he meant to attach them to Carter's arms, or maybe his ears. Fortunately, Olivia intervened, coming to the door to check on her husband. Her scream made Dave drop the cables. The clamps had connected as they fell, causing a crackling explosion before they broke apart upon impact with the cement.

"I figured," Dave said, "that the cold beer would keep this old boy chilled down, easier to handle. These guys are cold-blooded, you know." He nodded at the box.

"Old boy?" Carter said.

"Here, you want one," Dave said, pushing a beer Carter's way. Carter cast a glance at the house. The little woman was nowhere to be seen, so he grasped the beer, cracked it open, and took a long pull. Then he put the can back down on the table and slid it behind the vase that held Olivia's flower arrangement.

Dave grinned, pleased with himself at getting Carter to buck Olivia in his post-stroke alcohol routine. He took another long drink of his own, set his can back down, and reached into his box to lift out the "old boy," a toad. A big one. Almost the size of a rotisserie chicken. Ugly too. A wort-covered blob the color of the inside of an avocado gone bad. Carter shook his head to blink out the image the chicken. He replaced it with a picture of this amphibian, seared to a crispy brown, its eyelids and mouth held shut by a trio of toothpicks. And indeed, the cold cans of beer packed in around the old boy seemed to have induced a metabolic torpor. As Dave held him out for Carter's inspection, the creature's legs drooped toward the tabletop. Long legs. The toad's chin rested on its chest. To all appearances, he might have been dead. A pink tongue jutted from his mouth, between a pair of thin, oddly blue-hued lips. His eyelids hung at half-mast.

That roasted toad image that Carter had entertained was prophetic. "You got the barbecue," Dave said, nodding at the Weber as he set the toad down on the picnic table. "What do you say we cook this bad boy up for some dinner." He looked through the French door as he wiped the toad mucous off his hands on both legs of his jeans. "You guys got any teriyaki sauce in there?"

Carter could call up no words for this. He sat mute as the door swung open. "Well if it isn't Desert Dave," Olivia said. She'd given him that tag just after the jumper cable incident when he'd escaped the high coastal rents and a half dozen creditors, two angry ex-wives, one disgruntled girlfriend, and Olivia's wrath by moving out to Borrego Springs, on the western eastern edge of the Anza-Borrego Desert, just east of Mount Palomar, to live in half of his brother Larry's crumbling, sun-blasted little duplex.

Carter, in his entire life, was—except for that time with the car battery—never so happy to see her, the love of his life.

"The one and only," said Dave, displaying a weak grin. Olivia glowered and gave off heat.

"Hey 'Livia," Dave said. "Carter here was just tellin' me you might pour me a little drink. Is that mine?"

She did indeed hold a drink in her hand, Carter's second and final of the day, another whiskey with water, this one weaker than the last. "What the eff is that, Dave?" She gestured with the drink at the toad, the ice cubes dueting with the Alexa-supplied Red Garland piano solo.

"It is, my good woman, the cure for your husband's mobility problems."

"Really?"

Dave was too dumb to see she wasn't buying this.

"It is, madam, an Anza-Borrego Blue-Lipped Toad."

Carter gave the thing another once over. "Its lips...are...blue," he said.

"And you were going to do what with it?" The words snapped out; she wasn't going to like the answer, no matter what it was.

In Carter's mind, Desert Dave would be well-advised to pack that toad back in his box and head east on Highway 76, pronto, but the words to tell his friend this failed him.

"We're gonna barbecue it and eat it. These guys have all sorts of medicinal properties. We're gonna have ol' Carter here up and doin' the cha-cha-cha in about an hour." From his sitting position, Dave writhed into a brief upper body movement that he thought approximated that Cuban dance. "And look at the legs on this guy." He plucked up a foot and stretched the leg out. "You've eaten frog's legs haven't you?"

Olivia fixed Dave with a testicle-shriveling glare. Dave tugged at the crotch of his blue jeans and broke into a cold sweat.

"So let me understand this," Olivia said.

"I read up on it on the internet..." Dave said.

"Shut up, Dave." Olivia stepped out of the house and put Carter's drink down on the table. She pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket. "What kind of toad did you say it was?"

"An Anza-Borrego Blue-Lipped," said Dave, his bluster fading.

Olivia typed the name into her search, read for a minute, then said, "And you're supposed to eat him? The whole frog?"

"Toad," Dave corrected.

Her gaze rose from the screen. Carter noticed a bead of sweat on Dave's cheek freezing in place. She went back to reading. "So you brought him here live, unprepared. You didn't think to get him, maybe cut him into pieces, like a chicken?" She looked at Dave again.

"The article said that fresh was better. I was gonna prep him here."

The Alexa-supplied Miles Davis went into Thelonious Monk's "Well You Needn't."

"On our patio table?" Olivia said.

Dave shrugged. It was not a shrug that conveyed confidence. A constellation of sweat beads on his forehead had frozen solid. They looked like pearls.

"Skin secretions," Olivia said.

"Huh?" said Dave. Carter picked up his drink and drained it.

"People use its skin secretions as a drug, a psychedelic."

"Psychedelic?" Dave said.

"Yes. You don't eat the whole toad."

Carter, emboldened by his sudden infusion of whiskey, frightened by revelations concerning the secretions, said, "Dave had his beer.....in the.. the... the..."

"Box," said Dave, giving the now empty block of cardboard a slight lift from the table, hoping to defuse Olivia via his helping her husband communicate, as Carter slid his beer from out behind the flowers, then wiped his mouth hard on his sleeve.

With...the toad," Carter said.

Olivia's eyes went wide at the sight of that beer. She turned these eyes on Dave, then back to Carter, then to the toad, and then back to Dave. "So you gave my husband that can of beer that rolled around in that shoe box with that blob and was almost certainly tainted with Anza-Borrego Blue-Lipped Toad secretions?"

Carter licked his lips and wished he had some more whiskey or even just some more water.

"You gave him a beer... that had been in that box...with that toad?" Olivia intoned, pointing her finger like a gun, her words tolling like the final bell as, in Carter's view, Dave shifted into a fluid transformation, becoming himself a toad, his eyes sliding to the top of his head, looking like big black marbles, worts popping out all over his skin, his lips turning as blue as robin's eggs, his tongue shooting out to snatch an incoming hummingbird away from the feeder and pulling it back into his wide mouth. A black hummingbird. It had looked like an obsidian knick-knack that had come to life. One of the bird's feathers seesawed down to the patio, and Desert Dave smacked his blue lips, and Olivia—with, in Carter's view, the snow-white wings and long red tresses of an angel and the black talons and pointed stained teeth of the devil himself, lunged at Desert Dave, clawed his neck and wrestled him out of his chair and down to the cement, where she choked him to a gagging, hideously-writhing eventual unconsciousness, as the few hundred words that Carter had recaptured since his stroke burst up out of his skull into the air and flapped away like a startled flock of blackbirds that, as they rose, climbing the darkening sky, changed into bats, the kind with evil faces and sharp white teeth, and a disturbing taste for human blood...

All this going down as Alexa played the "Black Comedy," from Miles In The Sky the 1968 Columbia Records album by Miles Davis.

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