The Case of the Dirty Bird by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online

Duncan—Dunc—Culpepper sat on the corner of the window and looked at the parrot in the cage hanging from the ceiling on a rusty chain.
    “It smells like my uncle Alfred’s feet when he takes his shoes off to pick his toes,” Amos Binder said. He was Dunc’s best friend, had been forever, and was staying well back from the parrot. “I wish he didn’t do that.”
    “What?” Dunc thought he was talking about the parrot. Which wasn’t doing anything. He wondered if it was dead. No. There, the eye moved. It was alive. Just.
    “Pick his feet. He comes over for dinner whenever he gets hungry, and after he eats he sits with my father in the living room and watches football and takes his shoes off and picks his feet through the socks. You know. I wish he didn’t do that. It makes dinner hard to hold down.”
    “Tell him next time that his feet smell like a parrot.”
    “Right. I tell him anything, and he’ll knuckle my forehead like he did last time he thought I smarted off. I couldn’t focus my right eye for half a day.” Amos looked at the rest of the pet store. “Why are we here, anyway? Melissa Hansen is due to walk past my place on her way home from her dance lessons. I was thinking that if I stood just right, she would notice me. I’m pretty sure she called me last week—”
    “We’re here because of the contest.”
    “—at least I think it was her. The phone rang and I ran for it, but I stepped on the cat, which shouldn’t have been sleeping in the doorway, and that made me trip over the coffee table and jam my head under the end table with my mouth around the electricaloutlet. I think I would have made it if I hadn’t gotten that shock. I’m pretty sure it was her, even though I only heard a click. It sounded like her click. What contest?”
    Dunc was used to Amos talking about his problems getting to the phone. Amos could not get across a room without wrecking it if he thought Melissa Hansen was part of it.
    “I told you about it,” Dunc said. “I’m entering an essay contest in that wildlife magazine.
National Wildlife.
It’s for people under eighteen, and I figure I’ve got a chance.”
    “And you’re going to write about parrots?”
    Dunc nodded.
    “Oh, man, why didn’t you pick a bird that doesn’t stink? What about eagles or hawks or buzzards? I mean, parrots aren’t even wild.”
    “Yes, they are. There are tons of them living in the wild in the jungles. I just can’t get to them. So here we are.”
    He turned back to the parrot. It was green and scruffy, seemed to be missing about half its feathers, and really
did
smell bad.
    “Can I help you boys?” The owner of the pet store, a tall man who had glasses with a chain around the back of his neck and a pocket full of pens in a plastic case, came over to them.
    “I just wondered,” Dunc said, “how old this parrot is.”
    “The provenance does not go back to his birth,” the man said. His voice was high and birdlike. Like his nose, Duncan thought. “But we do know he is at least one hundred and four years old. He might be as much as one hundred and fifty.”
    Amos stared at the parrot. “A hundred and fifty years old?”
    “Yes. He’s very old—parrots are thought to live a very long time—up to two hundred years. This parrot has belonged to at least ten people and outlived them all.”
    “Does he talk?” Dunc hadn’t heard the parrot make a sound.
    “Oh, my, yes. In four languages. Sometimes he mixes them up, and he can swear in all four as well. Some words I’m not sure you should hear.”
    “It can’t be worse than my uncle Alfred,” Amos said. “He picks his feet.”
    “How singular.” The pet-store owner looked down his nose at Amos. “In public?”
    “No. Just in our living room. I wish he’d stop.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “How do you get him to talk?” Duncan asked.
    “You must talk to him—and he must be in the mood.”
    “Polly want a cracker?” Amos asked the bird. The parrot looked at