The Kitchen Readings by Michael Cleverly Page B

upsetting it.
    It took another week to get Hunter over to my house. I’d call Doc at seven or eight in the morning, when the bird was feeding. If Hunter picked up the telephone at seven in the morning, it’s important to remember that it was the end of his day, not the beginning. Heck, no one’s at his best at the end of a hard day. Same with Hunter. So it took a few tries for me to catch him in the mood to chase a peacock around my back room. Then one morning he said, “Anita and I will be right over.”
    They arrived a little later. Hunter was fully equipped. He had a very large tumbler of scotch, a hash pipe, a cocaine grinder, and, oh yes, an old blanket with which to bag the bird. Hunter prepared himself to do battle. A little of this; some of that; a bit of this, that, and something else; and, yes, the blanket. We peeked into the back room to observe the bird. It was completely calm and at home. Anita and I backed off. Hunter slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. Soon the screaming started: the peacock’s high-pitched shrieks and Hunter’s lower pitched sputtering. Both in a rapid staccato. No actual words discernible from either one. Anita and I sat on my couch looking at each other, waiting. The melee went on and on. No one expected this to be pretty, but we were becoming concerned. Suddenly, silence.
    Hunter emerged with the bird wrapped in the blanket. A peacock will become totally docile when enveloped in this kind of darkness. I walked Hunter and Anita and the bird to their car. Back in the cabin I inspected my back room. There was peacock shit everywhere. Not just the horizontal surfaces—the walls and even the ceiling were well smeared. While I was pondering how even such a large bird could emit so much dung, the phone rang. It was Hunter reporting that the peacock seemed fine, totally unscathed. He and Anita were going to turn in and he’d call in the evening. I promised to visit my friend, the peacock, very soon.
    Â 
    Liz Treadwell was one of the great beauties in a town full of beautiful women. She was beautiful in the old days, and she’s still beautiful now. Lucky us. Back in the day, she was linked romantically with a number of people in the entertainment industry whose names you’d recognize. She is currently hitched to a very good man, a real cowboy.
    Liz loved animals, all of them, so when she suggested to Hunter that she cook peacock for the gang for Thanksgiving dinner, Hunter was the only one who even pretended to take her seriously. She said it to bait him, to get his goat. Hunter’s goat deserved to be got, as he was usually on the giving end of the goat-getting.
    Liz was six months pregnant. She was always known as a terrific cook, so “the boys” decided that dinner with her was a truly inspired idea. Liz started cooking at first light. Being knocked up, she’d been leading the pure life and didn’t have anything better to do. By late afternoon the guys started to straggle in. It was opening day of ski season, and that’s what most of them had been doing. What Hunter had been doing until then is up for speculation. With the first arrival, the booze was broken out, along with everything else it takes to have a happy holiday, and no one seemed interested in holding back. Liz was preparing a full-blown, all-the-fixings dinner, and had been at it for about ten hours; her guests seemed bent on getting fucked up as quickly as possible.
    By the time the feast was ready, the group was far, far gone. The huge dining room table was covered by a meal out of Norman Rockwell, and no one was hungry. Liz was a little bit cranky. No, it was worse than that: her back hurt, she’d been on her feet for hours. She was homicidal. Liz’s classic beauty concealed an iron will and a nicely evolved temper; she was not one to fuck with. She watched the lads “not eating” for as long as she could stand it, cartoon steam