Bird Fever Robert Johnson
When the baby’s fever reached one hundred and five, they decided they could stand it no longer. A call to the pediatrician had reached an answering machine, and they’d waited an hour, but the child was hot as a charcoal briquette and had recently begun vomiting a white, mealy substance – a cross between grade school paste and cottage cheese – that was unlike any spit-up they’d seen. Finally they loaded the baby into the Volvo and drove to the emergency room. Thomas kept the accelerator to the floor, and Allison sat in back with their son. The boy cried hoarsely with each breath, and Allison asked if Thomas finally agreed the turkeys were to blame. “Let’s not go off the deep end,” he said. “We’re not the doctor.” “When this is over, you’re speaking to Danny Baker,” she said. “And don’t talk to me like I’m crazy.” The emergency room doctor took the baby’s temperature – now one hundred and six – and declared that the first order of business was to cool the child down. Seizures were a possibility if the fever remained that high. Thomas spent the next half hour lowering his screaming son again and again into cool water while a nurse tracked his temperature. The boy held tightly to him with arms and legs between soakings, and to get him free Thomas had to break the child’s hold each time. He found himself panting and crying with his son, as Allison leaned against the wall in the mercilessly bright exam room, her face in her hands. When the fever dropped to one hundred and two, the nurse wrapped the child in a towel and laid him in his mother’s arms, where he cried and then fell into a jerky, croaking sleep. The doctor, a ruddy man with watchful blue eyes, sat with them and asked how long the boy had been ill. “We think it’s bird flu,” Allison said. Thomas sighed and laid a hand on her arm. “Of course we don’t know what it is, Doctor. He’s been listless for two days, no appetite, his diapers soft and yellow. The fever came on late this morning and has been building all day.” Allison swung toward him, the child against her breast like a shield. “I was on the patio with Declan four days ago,” she said, “where we allow turkeys – wild turkeys – to come right up to the house. He was on a blanket and I was reading, and I thought I’d swept all the disgusting droppings into the grass, when I looked down and saw him playing with one of them – one of the bowel movements, I mean.” She glared at Thomas. “It was at his mouth.” The doctor’s eyes darted between them. This was good information, he said, though bird flu was doubtful. “Despite what you hear on the news, the transmission of avian influenza from bird to human is rare, and there are no reported cases in the United States. It’s more likely your boy has a case of the everyday flu, though we’ll need further – ”
“Can we at least acknowledge,” Allison cried, “that a five-monthold child handling bird shit is a bad idea? Can we at least acknowledge that?” She said “bird shit” so loudly that conversations outside the exam room went quiet. The doctor blinked and lifted his palms. Yes, he said, handling bird feces was never a good thing. Several illnesses might result from such contact, and knowing that the child had done so would inform their testing. Allison’s face crumpled, and she began to weep so convulsively that Thomas took the baby from her, and the nurse helped her to the examination table where she could lie down. In the hallway the doctor put a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “This is hard on both of you. That’s perfectly understandable.” Thomas sensed the man was prompting him to talk about Allison. He pressed his cheek against his son’s hot forehead and whispered, “It’s bad enough having Declan so miserable, but she always jumps to the worst – ” “She’s right to be concerned,” the doctor said, dropping his hand to cup the baby’s skull. “This boy is very sick.” Allison had always been fearful, though there’d been a time Thomas found her timidity appealing. She was blonde and honey-skinned and an inch taller than he, and she walked with the loping, pigeon-toed stride of a model on the runway. Her father owned three restaurants in Chicago and had played outfield for the White Sox, and he’d made it clear in word and deed that his daughter deserved better than a high school math teacher. When Allison turned girlish and needy it salved a raw spot in Thomas’s pride. Once, soon after they were engaged, she made a roast beef dinner at her apartment, and when they sat down she asked if he would light the candles. When he looked at her curiously she told him she’d never struck a match in her life. “Daddy always did it when we were little,” she said. “And then later on it became like a family custom, and before you know it I’m in high school and college and – ” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “I’ve still never done it.” Thomas lit the candles and savored knowing he’d taken the old lion’s place. He bent to kiss Allison’s lovely cheeks in the firelight and said if she needed someone to strike matches for the rest of her life, he would be that man. And he meant it. But in the four years since, her qualms and boundaries had begun to eat at him. If he stood at an open refrigerator door more than ten seconds, she worried the pork chops would spoil and give them trichinosis. If they were sitting on the patio in the evening and a bat flew overhead, she bolted for the house for fear the creature would
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