A Redbird Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside. That night he gave the bird as much food as he would eat, and around nine o’clock he sat down and took out the chloroform and a ball of cotton. He sat there, staring at the bird hopping around the room, jumping on everything in sight and pecking at the papers on his desk. He picked him up and examined him more closely under the light. It was then he noticed that some of his feathers were just beginning to turn from brown to red. Upon closer inspection he began to see the beginnings of a small crest forming on the back of his head and a black mask starting to form around his eyes. Then it hit him. This was a redbird! What a shame, this little guy was not going to get the chance to grow up and become the beautiful bird he was meant to be. Damn! All of a sudden Roy felt like going back in the woods and finding those two boys and cracking their heads together right then and there. Finally, after sitting and staring at the bird for a few more hours, Roy stood up and threw the bottle in the trash can. “Oh, the hell with it, buddy. See you in the morning.” He turned the lights out and went home to bed. He could no more have put that bird to sleep than fly to the moon.
    After that night Roy started keeping the bird in the front of the store with him. Eventually word got out that a baby redbird was living at the grocery store, and everybody who came in got a big kick out of it. At first the bird sat on the counter beside Roy and hopped all over the cash register, but as the weeks went by he was able to fly in short spurts, many times missing his mark, but he was getting stronger and more active every day, so much so that just in case Roy put a sign on the front door:
    DON’T LET THE BIRD OUT!
     
    At night when Roy locked up and went home he left the bird in the store so he could have the whole place to himself to roam as freely as he pleased, and roam he did. One morning Roy came in and found he had pecked his way through the top of a Cracker Jack box and was hopping around with a large Cracker Jack stuck on his beak. Roy removed it and laughed. The crazy bird must like Cracker Jacks! From then on he called the bird Jack. But as Roy found out later, Jack also liked Ritz crackers, potato chips, peanut butter, and vanilla wafers, and he especially liked chocolate-covered Buddy Bars. The little bird’s appetite for sweets was relentless and not exclusive. He once pecked his way inside a large bag of marshmallows, and by the time Roy found him the next morning he was completely covered with powdered sugar. Eventually, everybody got used to buying things that had been pecked at by Jack first.
    Everyone who went in the store got a big kick out of Jack except one person. Frances’s younger sister, Mildred, made it clear that she did not like the bird and constantly complained to Frances. “I just know he walks all over everything,” she said. “There’s little peck holes in everything I pick up. He’s just a pest. The last time I was up there he landed in my hair and messed up my hairdo and I had to go home and redo the whole thing.”
    Frances, who liked the bird, said, “Oh, Mildred, he never does that to me. I think he does it just to aggravate you because he knows you don’t like him.”
    “Well, I don’t care what you say, I don’t think a place where you sell food is a sanitary place to have a bird, and I told Roy; I said, “It’s a good thing we don’t have health inspectors around here, or that bird would be against the law.”
    “Then why do you keep going up there if all you are going to do is fuss about that bird night and day?”
    “Where else am I going to shop? It’s not like we are living in the middle of twenty-five supermarkets. I don’t have a choice; I’m stuck. I’m telling you that bird is a nuisance. You can’t go up there without having it jump on you. He’s a menace to society and that’s all there is to it, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
    Frances said, “Well,