GABE
Whatever progress the General and I had made the night before was totally undone by the fact that he was now convinced I was trying to kidnap him. “Unhand me, swarthy villain!” he screamed as I loaded his cage into the back of Lily’s van. The bars rattled, and the bottom banged. “Help! Police! Nine-one-one! Nine-one-one!” he said in a completely different voice followed by an eerily accurate whoop-whoop like a cop car making a traffic stop and the piercing eee-ooo-eee-ooo of an ambulance.
I hopped in the back of the van with the cage. A porch light from across the street popped on, and I heard the sound of a screen door squeaking open. “Everything all right, Lily?” someone called through the dark. “What’s all that ruckus?”
“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Weatherly!” Lily cooed. “Just doing some historical reenactment! Carry on! Nothing to see here!” she said and slammed the van doors.
Lily got into the driver’s seat, muttering, “I’m going to have to make her some brownies so she doesn’t call the ASPCA,” and fired up the van. I turned on the dome light above me as she put the van in reverse and then peeled out down the street. The General’s eyes were wide open, like stick-on googly eyes from a craft store, each with a clean white rim around them. “Bad suitor!” he screamed. “Bad suuuuuuuuuitooooooooor!”
“Have a potato.” I grabbed the baggie that Lily had put together before we pulled the sheet off his cage and carried it downstairs. I broke off a piece and tried to feed it to him through the bars.
He recoiled from the potato, flapping his wings. “Live free or die, sir!” he screamed. “I say, live free or die!”
He locked on to the door of his cage, giving it a firm rattle with his beak. Lily had used two twisty ties to secure it for the drive, but I wasn’t sure how long those were going to hold. He was putting together sentences, doing voices, and copying sirens. Two sandwich bag ties weren’t going to make shit for difference. Reflected back at me in the rearview mirror, I saw Lily’s panicked face. Time to get serious about this, I realized. Time to bring out the big guns. Abandoning the bag of potato slices, I pulled out my phone, made it so the camera was in the right direction, and started filming him.
The panic gave way to wide-eyed adoration as he stared at himself. “Hellooooo,” he said.
“Is he OK?” Lily screeched to a stop and turned around to see what I was doing. “Why is he so quiet? Please don’t tell me we’ve killed him.”
I held up a finger to quiet her, and her mouth dropped open when she saw what we were doing. “I learned this last night,” I whispered. “He loves it.”
“Oh my God, that’s brilliant,” Lily said, marveling at him and at me. She placed her palm to her mouth and let out a muffled laugh. “You’re a genius!” she whispered.
“Genius!” the General said to his reflection, with what looked a whole lot like a smile. “Hello, genius!”
Ten minutes and sixteen videos later, we arrived at the parking lot. Lily pulled into a spot and hopped out. I grabbed the front end of the cage, and Lily took the back. Together, we carried him through the camp like we were carrying an emperor in a sedan chair. As we walked, he made a low and ongoing “Aaaaah!” like kids do when they go over a washboard road. We carried the General to the captain’s tent, and I stuck my head inside. Elaine Corynn was flipping over tarot cards, seeming somewhat peeved. General Lee sat across from her with his hands clasped in prayer over the Grant biography. One of Lee’s lieutenants was eating a chocolate doughnut, reading a magazine with his feet up on the table. The whole thing had a low-budget carnival palmistry-tent feel. Not good television. At all.
But I knew how to fix that. In my head I heard one of Markowitz’s Idea Farts from long ago. Know what makes really good television, Powers? Talking animals!
I cleared my throat. “Sorry, I don’t want to interrupt, but I think we have someone you might want to meet.”
Elaine paused with a card halfway off the table. I couldn’t tell if she was relieved that I’d interrupted or annoyed. It made no difference to me at all. Lily and I knew the answer to the mystery, and we were damned well going to share it.
General Lee stood up from the captain’s table and pushed past me into the clearing with his sword jangling. “A parrot. We don’t need a goddamned parrot, son!”
Meanwhile, the General looked around at the men in gray uniforms who’d gathered around his cage. He puffed up his feathers like he did when he was on camera. The happy puff. “Hello.” He hopped around in a circle, making an effort to greet everybody. “Hello, how do you do? Hello!”
As the crowd of men grew larger, Lily came closer to me and gave me a little elbow in the ribs. She held one of the GoPros in her hands, and I could tell from the red light that it was already rolling. “OK,” she whispered. “Get him to do it.”
I approached the cage and bent down so I was at eye level with him. The General turned away. “Villain,” he snarled.
“Make the Noise, man,” I told him. “This is your big moment. Go for it.”
The General eyed me again and turned away. “Swarthy Yankee,” he hissed.
I glanced at Lily. I think she probably thought she was smiling, but I saw on her face a painfully uncomfortable grimace as she glanced around at the quickly growing group of grumbling soldiers around us.
It was time to up the ante. I needed the General to make the Noise, and I knew exactly how to do it. But that said, I also thought it was probably better if Lily wasn’t within earshot. This wasn’t exactly the moment I’d been waiting for all day, that was for goddamned sure. “Give us some space, will you?” I asked her.
She wrinkled up her eyebrows and cocked her head at me in confusion. But instead of asking me what and why, she just nodded and stepped back slightly. As she did, the rest of the circle did the same. Like they were widening the ring for a bare-knuckle brawl. I leaned in close to the cage. The bird let out his angry growl, and I flicked my chin at him to egg him on. But he stopped short and turned his face away from me yet again.
So I cleared my throat, placed my hands on my quads, and got right up close to him, damn near nose to beak. “Who do you love?”
“Lily,” he croaked angrily, refusing again to look at me. He snapped his head away, spoiled and snooty. “I love Lily.”
When he said it, I saw Lily smile. That meant she was close enough to hear what I was about to say.
Well, fuck it. But there was no better time than the now. Even if I had to say it to her parrot first, at least she’d finally know.
“So do I.” I glanced over the top of the cage at her. Her, who made my heart hurt. Her, who I wanted to be with so bad it ached. Her, who had begun to change everything for me.
Her eyes sparkled by the firelight. At that moment, it was just us. There was no battalion. There were no cameras. There was nothing else in the world besides Lily and me together.
Well. Except for the General. He puffed up his feathers, and then the growl got a little louder.
“I want her,” I told him, and the growl ramped up. “I need her,” I said, and the growl changed to a low roar. “And I love her,” I said, looking right at her as I did. And that did it. The roar changed into a whoop, and the whoop into a cry, and then the General let loose with the Noise at the top of his tiny but insanely powerful lungs.
In response, the battalion erupted in full-throated I’ll be goddamned cheers. And Lily mouthed I love you too.
Telling her how I felt made me feel possessive about her in a way I hadn’t expected to feel. It almost pissed me off that the troops wanted to hear the General do the Yell again and again. History was fine and all, but right then I had a woman to make mine. A woman to undo. A woman who needed to hear I loved her as I made her come again and again.
Finally the General tuckered himself out, hoarse from doing his demo, and we packed up our gear. I drove her van and she sat shotgun, holding my hand the whole way back to her place. We didn’t say much of anything as we drove, comfortable together even in silence.
Back at her house, Lily began to pull the cage out of the van, and I reached into my pocket for my truck keys. I could see her face by the dim light of the streetlamp above, and there I saw that flash of disappointment again. But I wouldn’t make her feel it for long. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked.
I took a step into her and let my keys drop back into my pocket. Putting one hand on each of her hips, I pulled her into me. The cage rattled behind her as she pressed against it. “I’m not coming in. Because you’re coming back to the house with me. Where you belong.”
She let out a shuddering groan. Her cleavage compressed against my chest, and I felt that bolt of need through my cock again. That feeling might’ve been inside me, but it belonged to her. And her alone.
“I love the way you talk to me.” She gritted her teeth and tugged on my belt. “Absolutely love it.”
I let her feel me hard against her. “We better do something about that. But you’re gonna make too much noise to stay here.” I dragged my tongue up the side of her neck and over the curve of her ear. “You’ll wake up half the block with what I’ve got planned.”
She hooked her fingers around my belt loops and pulled me into her even closer. “What is it that you’ve got planned, Mr. Powers?” She ran her fingertips up the back of my neck and through my hair. She got up on her tiptoes and teased me, tempted me, taunted me.
But no amount of her sexiness was going to distract me. I knew what I wanted, and I was damn well going to get it. “We’ll get him set, then I’m driving you back home.”
“Home?” she said, exaggerating the bow of her lower back to press her body into mine.
“Yeah. Home.” I slid my hand down her bare ass, under her shorts and panties. Then I leaned into her. “But I need you to get one thing from here first.”
“Name it,” she whispered.
“Your vibrator.”
She was so close that I felt her smile more than I saw it. “Which one?”
That’s my girl. “All of them.”