Free Bird Brained by Jessica Speart

given up on the idea of privacy soon after moving in, when I discovered Sophie painting outside my bedroom window, bright and early, at five o’clock one morning. At first, I’d been startled. But Sophie had cheerfully waved and invited me outside to inspect her latest flash of inspiration. That’s when I realized why the rent was so low—my landlady had a hard time holding on to tenants.
    I’d come to appreciate Sophie’s company during my routine bouts of insomnia. It was during those wee hours that she’d finagle me into a game of canasta, deftly cleaning me out of liquid funds. On the other hand, the woman made a mean late-night margarita, nicely accompanied by a dish of Lucinda’s black beans and rice.
    I’d asked Sophie once why she was so compelled to continually paint the house such outrageous colors.
    “I’m like a performing artist. I gotta constantly create,” she’d said. “This is my living canvas. This way my art never ends.”
    I walked past her ever-evolving creation and under Neptune’s arch to squeeze behind the wheel of my car. Destination, points south. I crossed over the MacArthur Causeway, leaving behind my Miami Beach state of mind. I was going to pay Willy Weed a visit.
    I brazenly propelled my way into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Route 1, knowing that the guy in the Beemer was a lot more worried about dents than I was. Homestead’s claim to fame was that it had been ground zero back in 1992 for that tree-smashing, trailer-bashing storm of the decade, Hurricane Andrew. Years later, not a whole lot had changed. I exited onto a small two-lane road that skirted Homestead and led straight for the boonies.
    Row upon row of stripped live oaks flashed by, their trunks bedraggled but proud, like old women who wake one morning to discover the night has stolen away with their youth and beauty. A boarded-up Baptist church stood melancholy and forlorn in a grove of Dade County pine, its battered sign promising to reopen soon. I pulled behind a blue pickup that shuffled maddeningly along at the speed limit, my mind wandering as a bald eagle soared lazily in the sky. I could have thrown a stone in any direction and hit a bird-breeder’s facility right about now. Forty-seven hundred of them are registered in this state, each and every one of whom had plopped down twenty-five bucks to the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission to obtain a license to legally ply their trade. That’s all it took.
    I knew that Homestead and its environs were especially loaded with bird breeders not only because of the number of thefts that had taken place in the area, but also because of a handy-dandy little book that listed every breeder’s name and facility, along with their address and telephone number. The book was made available by the Game and Freshwater Fish Commission to anyone willing to fork over five dollars. Unless you were high-tech and modern, that is. Then seventeen smackeroos got you a floppy from which you could download all the necessary information. It made for a convenient shopping list, one that the Cuban bird gang surely had the brains to have gotten hold of.
    As I turned off the asphalt onto a narrow dirt road that led through a forest of scrub palmetto and pine, an explosion of black starlings erupted overhead, annoyed at my unannounced presence. A gang of black-headed vultures remained languidly indifferent, content to hitch a ride on a thermal while scanning the ground for their next meal. The dirt path curved to the right and opened up to reveal a large clearing with three broken-down house trailers and two dozen decrepit cages, each containing one or two listless critters inside.
    I pulled up next to Willy’s Dodge Ram, its roof mounted with four big headlights that Weed used for jacklighting deer. A vanity tag bore the logo
HELL’S BELLS
, while slapped on the vehicle was a worn-out bumper sticker that pretty much summed up Willy’s take on life, WILL THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE