THE COMPLETE COLLECTION
William Wharton

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Birdy

Dad

A Midnight Clear

Scumbler

Pride

Tidings

Franky Furbo

Last Lovers

Ever After

Houseboat on the Seine

Shrapnel

Copyright

About the Publisher

William Wharton
Birdy

Dedication

To all my family

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Birdy

Birdy

– Aw, come on, Birdy! This is Al here, all the way from Dix. Stop it, huh!

I lean back and poke my head out into the corridor. The queer looking guard-orderly type in the white coat’s still at the other end.

I peer through the cage door. Birdy’s squatting in the middle of the floor, not even looking at me. He’s squatting the same way he used to squat in the loft when he was sewing feathers on that creepy pigeon suit of his. If this doctor-major-psychiatrist here ever finds out about that pigeon suit, he’ll sure as hell chain Birdy right to the floor.

Sometimes it’d scare the crap out of me. I’d climb up to the loft expecting only pigeons and Birdy’d be hunched in the back, in the dark, sewing feathers on those long johns. Birdy could come up with the weirdest ideas.

And now, here he is again, hunkering in the middle of this white room, ignoring me. I sneak another look along the corridor.

– Come on, Birdy. Cut it out! I know you’re not really a bird! This section eight crap doesn’t make sense. The stupid war’s over for Christ’s sake! Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, the whole shitload; kaput!

Nothing. Maybe he is a loon. I wonder if this psychiatrist knows we call him Birdy? Birdy’s old lady wouldn’t tell; probably doesn’t even know.

Birdy turns his back on me. He just spins in his squat. He keeps his hands against his sides and twists around. He’s staring up at the sky through a small, high window on the other side of the room.

The doctor-major told me I’m supposed to talk about things Birdy and I did together. They shipped me out of the hospital at Dix to come down here. My face is still wrapped in bandages. I’m between operations. It hurts to eat or talk and I’ve been talking like crazy since nine o’clock in the morning. I can’t think of any more things to say.

– Hey Birdy! How about when we built the pigeon loft up in the tree down in the woods?

Maybe talking about that’ll get him. Birdy’s old lady made us rip down the first loft, the one in his yard. Birdy’s house is part of the Cosgrove estate; used to be the gate house. The Cosgrove house and barn burned down years ago. Birdy’s house is just over the left-center field fence of the baseball field. The baseball field is built on the old Cosgrove pasture; last open place left around there.

– Hey Birdy! What in hell did your old lady do with all those baseballs?

Birdy’s old lady’d keep any baseballs that went over the fence into their yard. Ball players didn’t even try anymore. Semi-pros, everybody, gave up. Hit a homer over that fence, into Birdy’s yard; good-bye, ball. Nothing to do but throw in a new one. It got to be expensive playing in that ball park if you were a long-ball-hitting right-hander.

What the hell could she’ve done with all those baseballs? Birdy and I used to look for those baseballs everywhere around his place. Maybe she buried them, or she could’ve sold them; big black market source for used baseballs.

– Hey Birdy! Remember those Greenwood bastards? They never did find our loft up in that tree. Shit, there sure were some creeps in our neighborhood!

Those Greenwood kids’d bust up anything they could get their hands on. They’d steal bikes, pigeons, everything not nailed down.

This loft was a great place for pigeons to home on and nobody’d have any idea it was up there. We kept a rope ladder in a hole under some bushes. We had a hook on it and used to throw it over a branch to climb up.

– Remember that rope ladder we used to climb up, Birdy? Jesus, we were screwballs when you think about it!

I keep talking, watching Birdy, trying to tell if he’s listening. He’s still staring out that high window on the back wall.

He’s certainly pitiful-looking squatting on the middle of the floor in thin, white hospital pajamas. He’s squatting flat on his feet with his knees together, his head thrust forward, his arms against his sides, his fingers hooked behind him. The way he squats, you’d think maybe he just might spring up, flap his arms a few times and fly out that window he’s got his eye on.

It was a terrific loft we built down there in the woods. It was smaller than our first place, the one in his yard. Our first flock in Birdy’s yard was big. There were ten pairs, and two extra cocks. We had all good stock, no junk birds, no cornys, all purebred. I figure if you’re going to spend money on feed, you might’s well have good birds. Birdy’s always trying to bring in some kind of shitty bird just because he likes it. We used to have big arguments about this.

We had three pairs of blue bars, four pairs of blue checks, a pair of red checks and two pairs of white kings. No fancy birds, no tumblers, no fantails; none of that crap.

Now I think. I know.

Know. Think. Nothing.

When we sold the old flock, Birdy’s mother made us scrape the pigeon shit from the front porch where the birds used to roost. She had the whole porch repainted with our pigeon money.

Birdy’s mother’s a first-class bitch.

Anyway, so we have no money to buy birds for the new loft in the tree. Birdy isn’t supposed to have pigeons at all, anywhere.

We get our first two birds down at Sixty-third Street under the el. There’s a big flock of street pigeons there, mostly pure junk. We’d go watch them after school. We’d take the free bus from the railroad terminal to Sears. We’re about thirteen, fourteen then.

We’d watch the pigeons strutting around, eating, fucking, the way pigeons do all day, not paying much attention to anything else. The el’d go by and they’d soar up in big arcs as if it hadn’t been happening every five minutes for about fifty years. Birdy shows me how they usually go back to the same place and do the same things they were doing. We’d watch and try to figure who the flock leaders are and where the nests are up in the girders of the el. We try to work out the pairs. Pigeons are like people; fuck practically all year long and mostly stay in the same pairs.

Usually we’d bring along a bag of feed. Birdy can get almost any pigeon to come sit on his hand in about two minutes. He’d tell me to pick one out of a flock and he’d concentrate on that one pigeon and start making pigeon noises. Sure as hell, that exact pigeon’d begin twisting over and hop right up into his hand. He tells me once he just calls them over. How’n hell can you call a particular pigeon out of a flock? Birdy’s a terrific liar.

– Ah, come on, Birdy. Get off it, huh? This is Al here. Let’s cut this shit!

Nothing. Anyhow, this one pair of blue bars adopts Birdy. They’re beautiful birds but not banded. Birdy gets them so they’ll sit on his head or shoulders and they’ll let him hold them around the wings. He’d stretch out one wing after the other and ruffle their flight feathers. These pigeons act as if this is the most natural thing in the world; seem to like it.

Birdy’d let them go, throw them up with the other pigeons and they’d come right back. Usually pigeons will always fly to the flock. One day Birdy and I walk home instead of taking the bus, and that pair stays right with Birdy all the way to our tree loft. Those crazy birds are homed on Birdy.

Must not listen.

To hear something, must not listen.

To see something, must not look.

To know something, must not think.

To tell something, must not listen.

We had to lock the loft to keep those blue bars from following Birdy home. His old lady’d poison them if she ever caught on.

– Hey, Birdy; remember the blue bar pair you had homed on you? Jesus, that was weird!

He’s still not paying any attention. I don’t care if he is a loon, he shouldn’t just ignore me.

– Birdy, can you hear me? If you hear me and don’t say anything, you really are a loon; nothing but a fucking loon.

Christ, I’m wasting my time. He acts like he’s deaf or something. Major-doctor says he can hear, hears every word I say. Those bastards don’t know everything either. Maybe Birdy’s just scared and doesn’t want to listen. What the hell could’ve happened to him?

When we had the old flock at his house, one thing Birdy and I liked to do was take a bird or two out for a ride on our bicycles. We built a special box to carry them. These were birds already homed to the loft. Birdy’d rigged a string on the pigeon gate with an old alarm clock so we’d know exactly when they got back. We’d go out to Springfield or someplace and let them fly home with a message to ourselves.

One time when I go to the shore with my family, I take two birds with me. I wade out in the surf and let them loose; less than two hours later they’re back at the loft. That’s over ninety miles. In the message I wrote the time and told Birdy I’m letting the birds fly loose over the Atlantic Ocean.

Birdy’d sit by the hour in our loft watching those pigeons. Christ, I like pigeons myself, but not all the holy day sitting in the dark watching. Then, there’s that pigeon suit he used to wear. He started making it while we still had the loft in his back yard. It began with an old pair of long johns he dyed dark blue. He gathered pigeon feathers from everywhere and kept them in a cigar box. He’d squat, like I said, in the back of our loft, sewing feathers onto those long johns. He began at the top and worked down, round and round, one feather overlapping the other, the way a bird is.

When he got it finished and put it on, he looked like some kind of scraggly giant blue check. He’d wear this crazy suit every time he went into the loft. It’s one thing that definitely bugged his mother.

When we built the tree loft, it got worse. He started wearing gloves covered with feathers and slipped reddish-yellow long socks over his shoes and up to his knees. This was all finished off by a hood with more feathers and a yellow cardboard beak. In the back of the loft, in dark shadows, squatting, sometimes he’d look like a real pigeon, only about the size of a big dog. Somebody accidentally looking up into that tree and seeing him walking around would probably go completely nuts.

– That’s what you need here, Birdy, need the old pigeon costume. Really freak out your fatass doctor.

Birdy didn’t have any feeling for quality birds. I never could figure just what it was he looked for in a pigeon. Take this next pigeon we get for the tree loft; it’s one of the ugliest things you can imagine. She’s so corny, I wouldn’t think even a corny’d have anything to do with her. Birdy thinks she’s beautiful.

It’s about a month after we got the blue bars, Birdy comes to the loft with this pigeon one rainy day and says he found her down in the dump fighting a rat. Now, who’d believe a thing like that? Birdy’s lies are so way out nobody’d believe them. Another thing about Birdy is he’ll believe other people’s lies. Birdy’ll believe almost anything.

The earth turns and we are caught. The weight invades and we struggle in a cage of shifting tons.

This corny’s absolutely black, not shiny black but a dull smoky black. Except for her beak and the way she walks like a pigeon, you’d swear she’s a pint-size crow. She’s so small I think she’s a squab, this is after I’m convinced she’s a pigeon. I don’t want her in the loft. An extra hen in a loft is bad news, but Birdy insists. He keeps raving about how beautiful she is and how she can fly.

First thing she does is steal that blue bar cock away from the hen. He doesn’t know what hit him. He’s wearing himself out strutting around, chasing, fucking her; not even eating. Poor blue bar hen is moping on the nest.

I’m pissed; I want to throw the goddamned corny out. Pigeon witch’s what she is. Birdy says OK but he’s not happy. We throw her up and out the next day. I figure she’s a wanderer and we’ll never see her again.

When I get to the loft that afternoon, Birdy’s already there; so’s the witch. She’s with a great red check cock. They’re strutting all around the loft and the red check’s giving it to her while the blue bar’s trying to get his in but making zero. We watch all afternoon. Finally the blue bar goes back to his hen. I say, OK, the witch can stay now she has her own cock. She must’ve gotten homed to the loft in only two days.

No one knows more than they have to know. All of us locked in gravity graves.

Well, that witch is unbelievable. Next time she goes out, she comes back with a beautiful pair of purebred, banded ash. Birds like that cost a fortune, eight, nine dollars a pair. These are really show birds. We can’t imagine where they come from. The ash cock goes for the witch and the hen follows them into the loft. They’re so beautiful they light up the whole place. So now the ash is fucking the witch and the red check’s out. It’s not natural.

Things go on like that. The witch goes out and comes back with a cock or sometimes a pair. Most times it’s quality birds. This witch has sex appeal for good pigeons. She always lets the cock she brings home have it till the next one comes along, then never lets him near her again. During the three months she’s in our loft she shows no sign of nesting. Birdy says maybe she’s a whore pigeon, but I’m sure she’s a witch.

I break inside my aloneness to knowledge, the end of knowing; a billowing of an air current; a movement toward necessity.

Shit, before we know it, we have more pigeons than we can keep in the loft. Nobody even knows we have pigeons, so nobody suspects us. With our witch, we’re the biggest pigeon-nappers west of Sixty-third Street.

We start taking extra pigeons out to Cheltenham or Media on the train and selling them. Not much chance of anybody recognizing them way out here. We’re making three, four dollars each weekend that way. Working a whole paper route every day you can’t make that.

And do we ever have great pigeons in the loft. Makes our old loft look like a pig sty. Birdy insists on keeping those first blue bars and, of course, we keep the ashes. Then, we have the sweetest pair of blue checks you ever saw. Checks as clear and unblurred as a checkerboard and they’re big but still slim, with high heads. They have feet red as persimmons and clean. Banded birds, both of them, beautiful. I could watch them all day. I really go for quality pigeons. We have two pairs of red bars almost as good, so good anybody’d trade three pairs of purebreds for either pair.

The witch is in and out. Sometimes she’s gone three, four days at a time. Even though she’s making us all that money, I wish she won’t come back some time. She gives me the willies. I don’t like the way Birdy is with her, either. They’re creepy together, especially when he’s wearing that stupid pigeon costume.

I take another peek up and down the corridor. For a loony bin, it’s awful quiet. Most rooms have double doors. The outside door only has a small glass window so you can look in at the crazies; the inside door has bars. I’m sitting in the space between the two doors.

It’s a lot better looking hospital here than the one at Dix. I’m in plastic surgery there and everybody’s in and out all the time. We have to wait two, three weeks, sometimes a month, between operations. We’re not sick so they let us out while we’re waiting. I’m heading home between operations; big hero in the hoagie shop. They tell me one more will do it; but I’ll never be able to grow a beard on that part. Who the hell wants to grow a beard anyhow?

– Hey, Birdy boy!! Remember that old corny we had? She really had hot pants for you, buddy. How’d you like a little pigeon nookey, right now, huh?

I have a feeling for a minute there I got to him, just the way his fingers unfold and fold again. He really could be putting this whole thing on. What the hell, it’s no sense bucking for section eight. They’re letting everybody out anyway.

That corny used to parade back and forth in front of Birdy, cooing low and shimmying down her back the way a pigeon hen does when she wants a cock to jump her. She’s flirting with him, the witch. When Birdy’s spread some feed on the floor, she doesn’t go down and hustle with the others; oh no, she flies over on Birdy’s hand and gets him to feed her. She makes all the same moves a hen makes when she gets fed by a cock. Birdy even puts some grains between his lips and she picks them out. Christ, sometimes I used to think Birdy actually thought he was a pigeon.

To bend the tree or fill the sail is nothing. Knowledge only, not knowing. A bird knows the air without knowledge.

I want to see if I can remind Birdy of when we went on the treasure hunt. This was after the gas tank and after they made us break up the loft. We’d already graduated from elementary school and Birdy was going to a Catholic school. I’m going to Upper Merion, the public school. My parents are Catholic too, but they’re Italian Catholics and don’t go to church much. Birdy’s old man and old lady are big for mass and all that crap.

Anyway, I have to write a story for my English class and since I have practically no imagination, I decide to work this gag on Birdy and write it up just the way it happens. We’re reading ‘The Gold Bug’ in class and maybe it gave me the idea.

– Hey, Birdy!! How about when we went looking for old man Cosgrove’s buried treasure? Jesus, what a riot.

I came over to Birdy’s place with the map. I’d spent almost a week making it and getting everything else ready. I have it all browned with fire and burnt on the edges. Christ, it’s a masterpiece. It’s all in code and we figure it out in Birdy’s room. We move a model for one of Birdy’s crazy birds off his desk so we can spread out the map. It’s raining that day.

Birdy’s always making bird models. He makes them with balsa wood and paper the way you make a model airplane, only his are bird designs with rubber-band power to make the wings flap up and down. Some of them are complicated, with wings that rotate so they twist vertically on the up stroke and horizontally on the down. He’s actually gotten some of them to fly. Trouble is, none of them fly as far as a regular model airplane; it takes too much rubber-band time to flap the wings for any kind of long flight.

– Boy, you really fell like a ton of bricks for that crappy map, Birdy.

The message part has all kinds of complicated directions, like from this tree to that rock, all that treasure map talk. It leads us to a wall where we’re supposed to find another message. Birdy eats it up; Christ, he’ll believe anything. He’s talking about how he’s going to build a giant aviary with his money. I almost give away the whole thing; I don’t want to hurt Birdy, I’m just having a joke and getting my English homework done.

We go down that night. It’s raining like hell. I try getting Birdy to postpone but nothing can stop him. He believes things so hard he’s getting me to believe; I almost expect to actually find some treasure myself.

We tromp around in the dark, sopping wet, no flashlights. Birdy’s leading me to a treasure I didn’t put there. We do find the old tobacco can where I hid the second message; it’s shoved between stones of the Cosgrove ruin, beside where the fireplace used to be. Birdy slips it into his pocket and we hightail out of there and run all the way back to his house. We go in through the cellar so nobody’ll see us. Birdy’s a little runt but he runs like the wind.

We sneak back up to his room again and spread out the new map. I’ve used the same code and burnt off a part of the writing but left enough for us to figure out it’s a treasure map. There’s an X to mark the spot. Birdy wants to go straight out again. I talk him into going the next night. We need proper tools and stuff. I’m wishing I’d never started the whole damned thing. I’m sorry I don’t have some kind of treasure to bury for Birdy to find.

The treasure is supposed to be buried at the north-east corner of the old barn ruin. This is all said in treasure talk again so we have to figure it out. I help Birdy over some hard parts but he gets most of it himself. He deserves a treasure all right.

We agree to get together after supper when it’s dark. I have no trouble getting out, but Birdy has a fancy plan with a dummy in his bed and a way to lock his door from inside. He could probably just say he was coming over to my place but he’s deep into the treasure business. The Tom Sawyer of Upper Merion.

We have a shovel and he has a compass and a string and I bring along my twenty-two just in case. Naturally, it’s started raining again. Didn’t rain all day but now it’s pouring. It’s a thick, dark night. We go across center field, down the hill behind the flagpole and along the path leading to the Cosgrove barn. It’s late fall, past my birthday, so there isn’t much grass or bushes. Summer, you can hardly get into this part; wouldn’t even know the old walls are there.

I didn’t come down here when I made the map. I just made up the spot, ‘north-east corner of barn’. It runs out, with a compass, there is a north-east corner. Turns out, eerily, that there’s a slight depression in the ground right where the X should be. I’m ready to dig for gold myself. Maybe I’m getting messages from the other world. Maybe old man Cosgrove’s been getting through to me. Everybody always says Cosgrove buried his money. For years people used to dig around here hoping to find some of it.

We start digging, taking turns every five minutes. I’m torn between laughing my balls off and shitting my pants. Birdy’s dead serious, checking my watch to see I don’t get more’n my share of digging. He’s digging when he hits something. ‘That’s it!’ he says. I’m turning green. What if there is a treasure; it’s too spooky. He digs like mad, clears a corner of something made out of metal. I start digging on my turn and turn it up finally. It’s an old can of motor oil. I laugh; I figure now’s the time to tell him. I’m mud up to my ass and wet. We’re getting into clay and it’s slippery. Digging in the dark when you can’t even see the rocks you clink against is no fun.

‘There isn’t any treasure, Birdy, I made the whole thing up.’

He takes the shovel and starts digging again.

‘Christ, no sense digging anymore, Birdy, there isn’t any treasure here! I made up the map and everything. I did it as a school project.’

Birdy keeps on digging.

‘Aw, come on, Birdy. Let’s go home and get dry.’

Birdy stops, looks over at me. Then he says he knows the treasure is here and we shouldn’t give up. It’s got to be here and I only think I made up the map. That’s too much. I tell him he’s crazy and I’m leaving. He keeps digging. I stand around another five minutes, then take off. He’s still digging madly, not saying anything.

I don’t see Birdy for another two or three days. I decide not to write about the treasure hunt for school. I go down to where we’d been digging and there’s a hole at least six feet deep, deep as a grave. I don’t know how the hell Birdy got out of the hole when he was finished.

When I finally do see Birdy again, we don’t talk about the treasure hunt at first. A few days later, Birdy says he figures somebody got to it before us; that’s why the ground was sunk in like that. He still won’t believe I made it all up; even when I tell him how I did it. He only gives me one of his crazy eye-wiggling looks.

I want to think to make real this that I know and can’t hold. I’m pulled down. The earth in me is strong; the drifting dust is in my bones.

We get such a good business going, selling pigeons, we decide to go out and get some birds ourselves. That’s what we were doing up on the gas tank that night. It’s a big storage tank at Marshall Road and Long Lane. This is a place where several different flocks of pigeons roost and nest.

– How about us up on top of the gas tank, Birdy. That was wild. That night you almost convinced me you might just be part bird.

Damn; he’s not paying any attention to me at all.

– Listen here, birdbrain! I’m tired talking to the back of your head; you can’t be that crazy! Maybe if I come in and give you a coupla hard ones you’ll hear better!

Crazy ass thing to say; anybody hear me, they’d lock me up too. Anyway, Birdy’s not afraid of things people are supposed to be afraid of. No way you can make him do something he doesn’t want. No way to hurt him; like he just doesn’t feel anything he doesn’t want to. Typical of what I mean is the way I met Birdy.

Mario, my kid brother, comes in and tells me this freak down at the Cosgrove place took his knife. I ask him where he got the knife; he tells me he found it. I figure he stole it but I’m always looking for fights anyway. I’m naturally strong and I’ve already started lifting weights; have my own miniature gym down in the cellar. I’m walking around squeezing spring things to increase my grip; reading Strength and Health; York, Pennsylvania, is a kind of Mecca for me. I start all this crap when I’m only about eleven – probably because the old man used to beat me up so much. Anyway, I’ve got all this strength and I want to try it out with fights.

I’m just starting these crazy ideas when Mario tells me about Birdy taking his knife. I’m thirteen. Birdy must be all of twelve. I see us in my mind as older, not as little punks like that.

I go down and walk across the ball field. I’m wearing my new brown leather jacket and Mario’s tagging along behind me. He shows me the place. I lean over the gate in the wall and Birdy’s sitting on the steps of his back porch cleaning off the knife. I tell him to come over. He comes with a look on his face as if he’s glad to meet me.

Living things grow upward but are not free. The highest branches trap air and light but only feed endless grindings of earth. Growth itself is without meaning.

I tell him to give me the knife. He says it’s his; says he bought it from a kid named Zigenfus. He tells me I can check with this Zigenfus if I want. I ask him to let me see the knife. He gives it to me. We’re talking over the wooden gate in the wall to his house. It’s the wall of the baseball field.

I see right away this is a really good knife, a switchblade. I try to work it. Tricky kind of catch and spring; seems to be broken. Birdy reaches over to show me how it works. I pull the knife away and tell him to keep his crummy hands off my knife. He looks at me with his wiggly eyes as if I’m nuts. I turn and start walking away with Mario. He opens the gate and comes after us. We keep walking. He gets in front of us, walking backwards, and asks for his knife. I stop. I hold it up. ‘This knife?’ I say. ‘Try and take it.’ He reaches for the knife. I’m holding it up in my left hand so I can give him a good one with the right. Somehow I miss, and he gets hold of the knife. I snatch the knife out of his hand. I hold it up and he reaches again. I swing and miss again. His head is right there, but by the time my fist gets to that place, he’s gone. I swear he moves after I start the punch. I put the knife in my pocket so I can use both hands; I figure I’m really going to massacre this fool. He keeps reaching for the pocket. He’s always there and I keep swinging but can’t hit him. I start trying to set him up. Nothing doing; it’s like I’m doing everything in slow motion and he’s at full speed. He’s not doing anything like bobbing and weaving; he just moves away from the place I hit at, the way you’d step from in front of a car.

I decide to grab him. If I have to, I’ll put him on the ground where he can’t move, then clobber him. Mario’s not saying anything. Next time Birdy reaches in for the knife, I step forward and get a good headlock on him. I bend to throw him over my leg and he’s gone. The feeling is exactly the way it feels when a snake slips out of your hand. He squirmed or vibrated.

I try everything. I try tackling him. I try getting him in a bear hug. I try another headlock. Nothing holds him.

Later, when Birdy switches to old U.M. High, I want him to go out for wrestling but he won’t do it. The only exception is one time when we have an intramural competition and there’s nobody to wrestle against Vogel at a hundred thirty-five. Vogel is district champ; Birdy says he’ll suit up to fill in.

The whole school is out to see the match; intramural sports are a big thing at U.M. At the opening of the first period, Vogel misses the takedown a couple times, then he dives at Birdy. Birdy steps aside and falls on Vogel for a takedown. Birdy can’t weigh more than one twenty-five soaking wet. Vogel’s getting mad. He tries to roll. Birdy slips loose and lets Vogel roll alone onto his back. All Birdy has to do is flop on him, hold him down and he has a pin, or at least a near pin. Birdy stands up and smiles down at Vogel. Vogel scrambles for an escape. Birdy has two points for the takedown and Vogel one for the escape.

Same thing happens again and Birdie has another two points for takedown. Vogel escapes again just at the end of the period. Score: Birdy four, Vogel two. The crowd’s beginning to laugh; everybody’s rooting for Birdy. Birdy’s walking around looking goof y as ever, the wrestling suit hanging all loose on him.

The second period starts in referee position with Vogel on top. He really hunkers in on Birdy. Birdy’s not even looking at anything, just smiling to himself. I figure this is where Birdy gets pinned. Vogel’s a strong kraut bastard; he’s all red in the face he’s so mad.

The ref slaps his hand on the mat and calls ‘wrestle’. Vogel pulls Birdy’s arm for a breakdown and somehow, I don’t know what he did, some kind of forward roll, but Birdy’s standing and Vogel’s there all alone on the mat. Jesus, the crowd breaks up. Vogel’s on his hands and knees like an old bear, and Birdy is standing, looking down at him.

Vogel charges across the mat at Birdy. He fakes going into a wrestle position, then goes down for a leg drop. Birdy twists around and winds up sitting on Vogel’s head. It’s too much. I get so excited I bump my knee into the back of the guy in front of me. He has a sharp pencil in his hip pocket. The point jams into my knee and sticks there. I still have the mark; souvenir of the day Birdy beat the district champion hundred thirty-five pounder. Beat him twelve to six on points, didn’t even work up a sweat. Vogel’s so pissed he spends all season trying to make up for it. He just misses being state champion by two points; gets beaten in the final at Harrisburg.

When brought to meaning, all importance becomes small, as in death, all life seems nothing. Knowing is destroyed by thinking, not destroyed but sterilized; distilled into knowledge. Thinking, the processing of knowing to knowledge.

Finally, I’m puffing so from trying to catch Birdy I straighten up and look at him. He smiles at me. He’s still playing games. He wants his knife all right but he’s not mad at me. I’m just the long arm of fate. I take out the knife. I open it slowly to scare him. I go into a crouch like I’m going to kill him. He stands there watching me. I begin to suspect there’s no way I can get him with that knife, even if I want to. Throw it and he’s liable to reach into the air and catch it. I begin to see how funny the whole thing is. Mario’s still standing there. I throw the knife into the ground at Birdy’s feet. Birdy picks it up. He cleans it, closes it, then walks over and gives it to Mario. He says if it’s really his knife, he can have it. Says, maybe Zigenfus found it, or stole it, and maybe it’s Mario’s all the time. I tell Mario not to touch the fucking knife. I take it from Birdy, then give it back to him. I feel like General Lee surrendering his sword. That’s when Birdy asks me if I like pigeons and invites me into his yard to look at the loft he’s building. Mario goes along home and Birdy and I get to be friends.

– Birdy, you know you could’ve been state champion if you wanted to. You could’ve wrestled all those shrimps at a hundred twenty-five without even trying. Could’ve broken all kinds of track records too.

We’d sit across the street on Saturdays watching pigeons on the gas tank. Birdy has great binoculars he got at a pawn shop. They’re perfect for watching pigeons. We’d watch all day, taking turns and eating hoagie sandwiches we bought on Long Lane.

Birdy makes drawings of the pigeons. Birdy’s always drawing pigeons or any kind of bird, the way other guys draw hot rods, or motorcycles, or girls. He draws details of feathers or feet and he makes drawings of birds like blueprints, with arrows and top views and side views. When he sets himself to draw a pigeon like a pigeon, he can do that too. One of the things Birdy is, is an artist.

One day some cops sneak up on us. They say we’re peeping into people’s windows with the binoculars and they’ve had complaints. People are nuts. By luck, Birdy has a lot of his bird drawings and we say we’re making a report for school. This is something even a cop can understand. He’s going to have a hard time explaining to some lady why we’d rather look at pigeons than peep through her window and watch her pee.

There are a few good strays in those flocks at the gas tank and we want to get some. Birdy, most likely, could’ve talked them into his pocket, but we’re both sold on the idea of climbing that tank. It has to be done at night when the pigeons are roosting. There’s a fence and a night watchman but we’ve been checking and know where to go over.

It’s hard for me to do this. I must kill each bird, defeather it, disembowel it, for one bite. I must. I am hungry; I starve for knowledge. My brain spins in knowing. We trade all for knowledge.

We use our rope ladder with the hook to throw up and pull down the bottom section of the ladder on the back side of the tank. I go first; we both have gunny sacks to put birds in. We have flashlights, too, so we can see the birds and choose the ones we want.

We get to the top OK. There’s a fantastic view up there; we pick out the Tower Theater and lights going all the way into Philadelphia. We sit up there and promise ourselves we’ll come up again sometime just to watch the stars. That’s something we never get to do.

Scary as shit catching birds. We have to reach over the edge into the slits on the tank where the pigeons roost. I try it first with Birdy holding my legs, but I can’t make it. The top of the tank slants to the edge and you have to lean out so your shoulders’re clear over. I can’t get myself to do it. No matter how strong you think you are, there’re some things you can’t make yourself do.

Birdy doesn’t mind at all. He reaches under and hands them to me. If they’re junk, I hand them back; good ones I shove in the bag. We go all around the tank, stopping and checking whenever we hear pigeons. First time around, we get about ten reasonable birds that way.

Birdy says there’re more good ones in the next slit down. He shimmies out till he’s practically hanging from his waist over the edge. I put the bag of birds down and sit on his feet to keep him from flipping over. I’m ready to quit. It scares me just sitting on his feet that close to the edge. He’s leaning out so far now he can’t hand the birds back, so he takes another bag to put them in directly. I figure we’re liable to get all kinds of crap with Birdy choosing, but we can always let them go later.

That’s when there’s a clatter, and some pigeons flap in the dark behind me. I look around and see two birds getting out of the bag. Without thinking, I lean back to shut the bag. Birdy’s legs swing up in front of me and over the edge!

There’s a rush and pigeons fly out and up into the dark. I’m scared shitless; I wait, afraid to move. I have a feeling the whole tank is rocking. Nothing happens. I slide on my stomach toward the edge. Birdy’s clinging to the slits. He still has the gunny sack over his arm. He looks up and gives me one of his loose smiles. He holds out a hand.

‘Gimme a hand up, Al.’

I reach out but can’t make myself lean far enough out to grab him. I close my eyes but then I get dizzy and I’m about to fall off. He takes his hand back and shifts his grip. He tries to leg up over the edge of the tank but can’t make it. I’m beginning to shake.

‘I’ll go get somebody, Birdy!’

‘I can’t hold on that long. It’s all right, I can do it.’

He pulls his feet up to the next rung and tries to reach with one hand to the top edge of the tank. I try to reach for him but I’m absolutely paralyzed. I can’t make myself go near that edge. Birdy hangs there with his ass leaning out into the dark. I get down on my stomach and try to reach as far as I can. I get my hand to where he can reach it if he lets go with one of his hands. Birdy says, ‘When I say three, I’ll let go and grab your hand.’

Birdy counts, lets go and I catch him. Now we’re really shit up a crick. I can’t pull without slipping down off the tank. We’re just balanced there; every time he moves, I slip a little further toward the edge. That’s when I pee my pants. Jesus, I’m scared. Birdy looks back down.

‘I’ll try making it to the coal pile.’

I don’t know what he means; maybe I don’t want to know.

With his free hand, Birdy arranges the burlap bag in front of him, then lets go of me. He hovers for a second, turning himself around against the side of the tank, then leans forward into the air and shoves off. I can see him all the way down. He stays flat out and kicks his feet like somebody swimming. He keeps that burlap sack stretched across in front of him with his arms spread out.

The first time I flew, it was being alive. Nothing was pressing under me. I was living in the fullness of air; air all around me, no holding place to break the air spaces. It’s worth everything to be alone in the air, alive.

Birdy does get over to the coal pile and, just before he lands, closes up into a ball, twists and lands on his back. He doesn’t get up. I can barely see him, a white spot in the black coal. It’s a long way down.

I don’t expect him to be dead. This is stupid because it has to be over a hundred feet from the top of that tank. I even remember to bring the pigeons with me. I climb down the tank ladder, not thinking too much, just scared. I run around to the coal pile. The night watchman must’ve been asleep.

Birdy’s sitting up. He looks dead white against the coal; blood’s dripping out his nose and into the corners of his mouth. I sit down on the pile beside him. We sit there; I don’t know what to do; I can’t really believe it’s happened. The tank looks even higher from down here than it did from on top.

Birdy tries to talk a couple times but his wind’s knocked out of him. When he does talk his voice is rattly.

‘I did it. I flew. It was beautiful.’

It’s for sure he didn’t fall off that tank. If he’d fallen, he’d’ve been smashed.

‘Yeah, you flew all right; want me to go get somebody?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

Birdy tries to stand up. His face goes whiter; then he starts to vomit and there’s a lot of blood. He sits back on the coal pile and passes out.

I’m rat scared now! I run around to the night watchman’s shack! He won’t believe me! I have to drag him out to Birdy. He calls an ambulance. They come and take Birdy off to the hospital.

I stand there with the birds in the bag. Nobody pays much attention to me. Even the ambulance men don’t believe he fell off the tank; think I’m lying. I stop on my way home and put our birds in the loft. I hang around there for a while; I hate to go home. Something like that happens and all the things you think are important don’t seem like much.

Birdy shuffles over to the john in the corner to take a crap. No seat on the toilet or anything. No privacy. God, what a hell of a place for someone like Birdy.

I turn around. I’m looking up and down the corridor when the orderly or guard or whatever he is sees me. It must be some crummy job walking up and down a corridor checking on crazies.

‘How’s he doing?’

‘He’s taking a crap.’

This character looks in. Maybe he likes to see guys take a crap. Maybe he’s a part-time nut. I ask if he’s a civilian. You can’t tell anything when they all wear those white coats. He could even be a piss-ass officer or something. Never know in a hospital. He tells me he’s a CO. I think at first he’s trying to put on he’s the commanding officer. Turns out CO means conscientious objector. He’s been working in this hospital most of the war.

‘You want to knock off for lunch now? I have to feed him anyway.’

‘Whaddaya mean, “feed him”; can’t he feed himself?’

‘Nope. He won’t eat anything; wants to be fed. I have to spoon-feed him. No trouble or anything, not like some of them. I just shovel it in. He squats on the floor and I put it in.’

‘Holy Christ! He really is a loon! Won’t even eat?’

‘He’s nothing. Guy across the hall there won’t wear any clothes. Squats in the middle of his cell like your friend here; but if anybody tries to go in, he shits in his hand and throws it. Boy, he’s fun to feed. More like a zoo than a hospital on this ward.’

He looks in the cell. I look too. Birdy’s finished. He’s squatting on the floor, in about the same spot, like the pigeons after the el goes by. The orderly comes with a tray of food. He takes the key, opens the door and goes in. He tells me to stay out. He squats down beside Birdy and starts feeding him. I can’t believe it! Birdy actually flaps his arms like a baby bird being fed! The orderly looks around at me and shrugs his shoulders.

‘I forgot to tell you, Doctor Weiss wants to see you after lunch.’

‘Thanks.’

Weiss is the doctor-major. I look in once more at Birdy and go down the corridor. I know where the cafeteria is because I had breakfast there. It’s really a cafeteria, too, not a mess hall; doctors and nurses eat there; good food. I eat and think about Birdy being fed like a baby pigeon. What the hell could’ve happened?

When I go to see Weiss, I ask what’s the matter with Birdy, but he’s sly and manages not to answer. Suddenly, he gets to be the major talking to the sergeant.

He’s watching me with a shit-eating grin on his face as if I’m some kind of nut myself. He starts out asking about what they’re doing to me at Dix. I tell him about how the jaw is smashed and how they put in the metal part.

When they first told me, I thought I’d have a steel jaw like Tony Zale. Doctor there tells me, actually I’ll have to be very careful, a punch could undo the pins and shock me into the brain. So now I’ve got a glass jaw. That’s about right.

I’m telling Weiss all this stuff and then I see him. He’s smiling, hmming and ahhing just to keep me going. He doesn’t give a damn. I decide I don’t want to tell too much about Birdy.

He asks how long Birdy and I were close friends. I tell him we’ve been friends since we were thirteen. He asks this in a way so you know he really wants to know if we were queer together; if we jacked each other off, or gave each other blow jobs. I’ll say this, there’s a lot of that crap in the infantry. A four-hour stint in a foxhole with the wrong guy can get awfully funky.

Actually, I can’t remember Birdy being interested in sex at all. Take that whole scene with Doris Robinson. If he couldn’t make it with her he’s hopeless. Maybe all he had it for was birds. This quack’d sure flip if I told him that.

The doctor-major keeps trying to pump me about Birdy. I’m completely turned off. If he could just look sincere. He knows I’m holding back. He’s no dummy. I have to be careful. Under that white coat he’s solid brass. He’s liable to lower the boom on this buck-ass sergeant any minute. So far, he’s been talking like a doctor but I’m waiting for the old military manner to strike again. All doctors in the army ought to be privates.

Just as I’m thinking this, he comes out with it: ‘OK, Sergeant, you go back there this afternoon and see if you can make some contact. It’s probably the best chance we’ve got. I’ll make an appointment to see you again here, tomorrow morning at nine.’ He stands up to dismiss me. I fuck him with the salute and hold it till he returns it. Son-of-a-bitch.

On the way back to Birdy, I have a little talk with the CO orderly. Nice guy; probably not queer. I get him to talk about being a CO. He says he spent some time being starved for experiments on how little food a person really needs and then he was up in a forest planting trees and he’s been here at the hospital the last eighteen months. He tells me all this as if it’s what’s supposed to be. He’s a bit like Birdy; hard to hurt. Real losers never lose.

He asks me about my face and I tell him. He’s truly sympathetic, not like Weiss. You can see it in his face and how he reaches up and touches his own chin to see if it’s there. He opens Birdy’s door for me and I get my chair from the corridor.

Birdy’s still squatting in the middle of the floor and staring up at the window when I come in

– Hey Birdy! Just had a long talk with Weiss. He’s sure one sweet pain in the ass. If I were crazy, I’d pretend I wasn’t, just to get out of his fat hands. How about that?

Birdy actually turns his head. He doesn’t turn all the way around and look at me. He turns half way, the way a bird does when it wants to look at something directly with one eye. Of course, Birdy isn’t looking at me, he’s looking at the blank wall across the room.

– Birdy! How about the time we took off and went to Wildwood. I’ll never forget the way you jumped around in the waves.

I have the feeling Birdy’s listening. His shoulders are lowered as if he’s roosting and not getting ready to take off. It could be just my imagination, but I don’t feel alone. I keep talking.

After the gas tank, Birdy was in the hospital more than a month. It was all in the newspapers about how he’d fallen from the tank and hadn’t been killed. There was a picture with a dotted line showing where he’d jumped from, and an X where he landed. Reporters asked me what’d happened and I never should’ve said anything about flying.

Naturally, the whole business with the pigeons comes out. Birdy’s father tears down the loft and burns the wood. The pigeons fly around there for a week looking for the loft. It’s the place they’re homed to. Those first blue bars fly up to Birdy’s house and hang around there till his mother poisons them. I don’t know what happens to the pigeon witch.

The kids at school ask me the same questions about Birdy flying. Even before he gets out of the hospital, they’re calling him Birdy, the bird boy. Sister Agnes has us all write letters to Birdy and we collect money to send flowers. I don’t say anything much in my letter; I don’t tell him what’s happened to the loft and the blue bars.

When Birdy comes out of the hospital, he looks even runtier than usual and his hair’s long. He’s pale as a girl. I tell him about the loft but not about the blue bars being poisoned. He doesn’t ask. We’re in the eighth grade; Birdy catches. up and graduates with us.

After the gas tank, I knew I had to fly. Without thought, a bird denies all in a moment, with an effortless flick of wings. It would be worth everything to learn this.

If I could get close to birds and enjoy their pleasure it would be almost enough. If I could watch birds like watching a movie and become inside them, I’d know something of it. If I could get close to a bird as a friend and be there when it flies and feel what it’s thinking, then, in a certain way, I would fly. I wanted to know all about birds. I wanted to be like a bird and I still wanted to fly; really fly.

That summer, Birdy and I take off. We don’t plan it. We’re always bicycling down to Philadelphia and the Parkway. We’d go down there, play around the art museum, the aquarium, and the Franklin Institute. There’s a place on Cherry Street where they have a room full of bird pictures. We used to go look at them. Birdy’s pictures are better. Birdy says artists don’t know much about live birds. He says a dead bird isn’t a bird anymore; it’s like trying to draw a fire by looking at ashes.

We’d go down to South and Front streets where there are hock shops and stores full of live chickens and pigeons for eating. One day we buy a pair of meat pigeons. We spend all day shopping for them. We take them over to city hall where there’re some tremendous flocks. We pull a feather out of each wing, put the feathers in our shirt pockets, and throw the birds up with the others. We watch all afternoon while they find a place in the flock.

I show Birdy how if you get at a certain angle, the big statue of Billy Penn on top of city hall looks as if he has a gigantic hard-on. We have great fun there in the square with the pigeons; every time some ladies pass by, we start pointing up to Billy Penn and they look up to see old Billy with his dong sticking up.

One day we decide to bicycle across the bridge and into New Jersey. We get across and hang around Camden. We’re going to go right back that afternoon, but then we see a sign pointing to Atlantic City.

We have our whole bankroll with us, money we made selling pigeons: twenty-three dollars. Usually we kept it in the hole where we used to keep the rope ladder, but we have it with us this time.

We start down back roads leading toward Atlantic City. Now we know what we’re doing, we start watching for cops. We want to sack out before it gets dark.

That night, we sleep in a tomato field. It’s summer but it’s cold. We each eat about ten tomatoes, with some bread and coke we bought at a store in Camden. In the morning, when we wake up we’re frozen. I begin to think of going back. Birdy wants to go on to the ocean; he’s never seen it. His folks are poorer than mine and they don’t have a car. Already I’m going to get the shit beat out of me for staying out all night so what the hell. What can they do anyway? Old Vittorio can just beat me up again; he can’t kill me.

That afternoon we get to Atlantic City. Birdy goes berserk when he sees the ocean. He likes everything about it. He likes the sound and he likes the smell; he likes the sea gulls. He runs up and down the beach at the edge of the water flapping his arms. Lucky it’s late afternoon; not many people to see him.

Then, Birdy takes off, running, flying, jumping into the water. He still has his clothes on. He gets knocked on his ass by the first wave. He’s dragged out by the undertow. I think he’s going to drown, but then he stands up soaking wet, laughing madly, and falls backwards into it just as another wave crashes over him. Any ordinary person would’ve been killed. He rolls around in the water thrashing and throwing himself into the waves. Some girls start to watch and laugh. Birdy doesn’t care.

When he comes out, he flops in the sand and rolls. He rolls and rolls till he rolls limp under the water and under the waves deep into the water again. He rolls back and forth in the surf like a log or a dead person. Finally, I have to drag him out. For Christ’s sake, it’s getting late, and now his clothes are all wet.

Birdy doesn’t care. We wheel our bikes along the boardwalk to Steel Pier. We have a great time buying as many hot dogs as we want and riding all the rides. We buy a two-pound box of saltwater taffy for dinner; and move on back up the beach to where it’s deserted. We find a good place with warm sand and bury ourselves in it.

I tell Birdy about his mother poisoning the blue bars. We decide not to go home and not to write where we are, either. Hell, my old lady’s always complaining about how much I eat; it’ll save her having to feed me. I’m sick of having the old man jump on me, too. Birdy says that, except for falling off the gas tank, swimming in the ocean is probably the closest thing to flying. Says he’s going to learn to swim.

Nobody ever learned to swim the way Birdy does. He doesn’t want to swim on top of the water like everybody else. He goes out under the waves and does what he calls ‘flying in water’. He holds his breath till you think he’s drowned and then comes up someplace where you aren’t expecting him at all like a porpoise or something. That’s when he starts all the crappy business with breath holding, too.

In the water I was free. By a small movement, I could go up and move in all directions without effort. But it was slower, thicker, darker. I could not stay. Every effort would not let me stay more than five minutes.

We have left the water. Air is man’s natural place. Even if we are forced to walk in the depths of it, we live in the air. We cannot go back. It is the age of mammals and birds.

One hundred billion birds, fifty for every man alive and nobody seems to notice. We live in the slime of an immensity and no one objects. What must our enslavement seem to the birds in the magnitude of their environment?

We decide to take off down the coast to Wildwood. That’s the place my family usually goes every summer. Atlantic City is bigger but Wildwood is more open, more natural.

We roll down on the bikes. We’re still looking out for cops. It’s terrific, free feeling, no house you have to go back to, nobody waiting for you to come in and eat; nothing to do but roll along and look at the scenery. I never knew before how much I was locked in by everything.

On the way down, we decide we’ll sleep on the beaches at night, spend the days there in the sunshine. We’ll lift whatever we need from the stores. There’re also lots of garbage cans behind the restaurants where we can find all the food we need. We’ll buy a couple old blankets at the Salvation Army and a pot to cook in under the boardwalk.

It works out exactly like that. Things hardly ever do. All we spend any money on after we get the blankets and the cooking pot is the rides at night and saltwater taffy. We get to be dedicated saltwater taffy addicts. We both like the kind with red or black stripes and a strong taste.

We don’t have any trouble with cops. There’re all kinds of people down on vacation, and so a couple strange kids are hardly noticed. At nights we’ve fixed a hidden nest down where the boardwalk is only about three feet higher than the sand. We tuck ourselves in there and hide our cooking pot in the sand during the day.

Birdy is going crazy with his swimming. All day long he practices holding his breath, even when he isn’t swimming. I’d be sitting there talking to him and I’d see his eyes are bulging and then he’d blow out his breath and say, ‘Two minutes, forty-five seconds.’ He asks me to count for him sometimes. The way he wants me to count is Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two, and so on; really nuts. All day he’s in the water ‘flying’, coming up once in a great while and taking a deep breath. He’s found the local public library and is reading about whales and porpoises and dolphins. He’s a maniac. When Birdy gets started on something like that, there’s nothing you can do.

The worst thing of all is the sideshow freak called ‘Zimmy, the Human Fish’. Birdy spends a fortune watching this guy. This is a truly creepy set-up. Zimmy has both his legs chopped off just at the top, so he looks like an egg with a head and arms. He’s fat with gigantic lungs. He has a big sort of swimming pool with a glass front, like a goldfish bowl, and people look through the glass to watch him do his tricks. This guy is Birdy’s hero. You see, Zimmy can stay underwater without breathing, doing tricks down there, like smoking cigarettes, for as much as six minutes at a time.

I get tired of watching so I spend my time at the act just next to Zimmy. Two madmen drive motorcycles around the inside of a wooden bowl. They race each other. It’s wild. Then, there’s a woman who climbs into a motorcycle with a sidecar and they put a big hairy lion beside her. She revs up the motorcycle and spins around the inside of the bowl, hanging out sideways with that lion roaring all the way around. Christ, it’s amazing what people will do. There’s one young guy in the act who does acrobatics on this motorcycle – standing up with his hands on the handlebars while he’s hanging out sideways on that wooden wall. He has tremendous deltoids and forearms with tattoos all over them. He looks like he’d be one hell of a tough nut to pin.

Nights, Birdy and I ride the rides. Birdy chooses all the rides that throw you against the sky. There’s one where they start you spinning so you go faster and faster till you’re upside down, with nothing to hold you in your seat. Everybody screams except Birdy. He sits there with a big grin on his face. I do that once, that’s enough.

Another time I’m trying my strength on one of those things where you swing a sledgehammer and try to ring the bell. I ring it three times in a row and win a little Teddy bear. There are a couple cutee girls watching us and I give it to one of them. We get to talking. They’re from Lansdowne. Birdy stands around but he’s bored. I talk them into going on the roller coaster with us. One has red hair and nice beginning tits pushing out her sweater. The other is quieter, more the type for Birdy, if there is any type of girl for Birdy.

On the roller coaster, I hold her hand in her lap, tucked sort of between her legs. I can feel the slippery flesh under her dress.

I put my arm over her shoulder and she leans her head against me. While the car is clickety-clicking up for the downhill run, I look back at Birdy and his girl. He’s leaning over the edge looking down and she’s looking straight ahead, holding her own hand in her lap. She smiles at me; Birdy doesn’t notice. He could even be thinking of climbing out of the car and jumping. I wouldn’t put it past him.

After that, I talk them into going for a walk along the beach, and we walk over to where we have our nest. We get out the blankets and spread them. The girls are getting nervous. They’re here with their parents and have to be home by ten o’clock. I ask Birdy what time it is; he looks up and says it’s about nine-fifteen. I’ve never known Birdy to be wrong about the time. Birdy’s girl is more nervous than mine. She wants to take off right away. My girl, whose name is Shirley, says maybe Birdy and Claire, that’s the other girl, ought to take a walk down to the clock at the parking lot to see what time it really is. She looks at me. Now, I’m getting nervous myself. I’ve got a hard-on, and here it is coming right at me.

As soon as they’re gone, we get down on the blanket and start kissing. She opens her mouth and sticks her tongue between my lips. I begin feeling her up and then, bango, I come off. I try not to let on but she must know. We keep kissing, but it’s not the same. She lifts her sweater and puts my hand under. I touch her bra and can feel her little nipple, hard, under it. She looks around, reaches back, and undoes the bra. I put my hand over her whole tit. Jesus, my hard is coming on again. Just then, we hear Birdy and Claire. Shirley pushes away and hooks herself up. She brushes back her hair and stands up. I get up, too.

‘It’s almost nine-thirty, Shirley. We’d better get home.’

Claire stays out from under the boardwalk. Birdy stretches himself on the blanket where Shirley and I just were.

‘OK, party pooper. Good-bye, Al. See you, Birdy. Maybe tomorrow night about eight, near the merry-go-round, OK?’

I say OK and they leave. I’m still shaking, and the inside of my jockey shorts are slimy with jit. I go down toward the ocean as if I’m going to take a piss. I wipe myself off. I never knew any girl like that before.

We meet a couple more times before they leave. Birdy’s bored with the whole thing and Claire’s bored with Birdy, but Shirley and I are going hot and heavy. One night, we’re down on the blanket and I get my finger under her panties. I can feel her little hole and I slip my finger in. That’s getting close. But she pushes me away, and that’s it.

When the girls leave I’m ready to go, too, but Birdy’s still wrapped up with his swimming. I swim some myself, but Birdy’s in all day long. He keeps going without stopping till he’s pooped, and blue with cold. Then he’ll come out and lie face down in the sand till he gets his wind back, then out he’ll go again. It doesn’t look to me as if he’s having any fun, but he has a big ear-to-ear grin on his face all the time. He’s only swimming, but he’s talking about ‘flying’. That’s typical Birdy.

Well, after a few weeks, we run out of money and decide to sell the bikes. This is our big mistake. We go into a bike shop, and while we’re trying to sell them I noticed the lady go into the back and phone but I don’t think much of it. The guy keeps us in front dickering over price, and we’re about ready to walk out when two cops come in the door.

They take us down to the station house, leaving the bikes at the bike store. First, they accuse us of stealing the bikes, want us to show some papers to prove we own them. Who the hell has bike-ownership papers? Then they find us on the run-away list. Birdy’s old lady’s turned us in. We’d both written saying we were all right and we’d be back in time for school. What a bitch.

Well it all comes out that they ship us home on a train first-class with a stupid bald-headed cop. He goes all the way, eating in the dining car and everything. They stick our parents for a ninety-two dollar bill and we never see the bikes again.

My old man beats the living bejesus out of me. He chases me around the cellar with his big leather belt, hitting me with it or punching, kicking, whatever he can get me with. The old lady’s standing at the top of the cellar steps yelling, ‘Vittorio, VITTORIO! BASTA VITTORIO!’ Nothing’s going to be enough for old Vittorio except to kill me. Finally, there’s nothing for it but to roll up in a bundle on the floor and pretend I’m dead. I just about am. I swear, there on the floor nobody’s ever going to get me so they can beat me up like that again. Somehow, I’ll get so I can beat the crap out of Vittorio, too. I’ll do it before he’s too old to appreciate it, if it kills me. I’m curled up on the floor with my hands over my eyes and ears, and he’s swinging away at me and that’s what I’m thinking. What a lot of shit!!

I’m in bed for a week. I look like I’ve fallen off three gas tanks. I’m black-and-blue, sore all over. Mostly I’m sore inside. The old lady won’t let me out of the house till the worst swelling is down on my face. Old Vittorio’s a strong son-of-a-bitch. You wipe big joints and cut six-inch steel pipe all day and you get strong. I pin the bastard on my sixteenth birthday.

She is so beautiful; she’s everything I’ve imagined, everything I want to be. It’s impossible she’s mine, not really mine, just with me. If she doesn’t care to stay, I’ll let her go. I want her to love me. I want us to be close, as close as living things can be to each other. How close can we come?

When Al and I finally paid back the money, my father said I could have a bird in my room as long as I do my schoolwork and help around the house with chores. I can’t keep a pigeon indoors, so I decide on a canary.

First, I read everything I can about canaries. I find out that the original canaries came from Africa and were shipwrecked on the Canary Islands. They were dark green. The canary is valued because it can sing. However, only the male canary sings. The female looks exactly like the male but cannot sing. She is kept in cages for breeding purposes only. It seems unfair to the females.

I like canaries because of the way they fly. The canary has an undulating flight. It flies up into an almost stall, then loops down, then up to a stall and down. It’s like Tarzan swinging through the trees but without vines. It’s the way I’d like to fly. A few finches hang around down by the Cosgrove barn. I’ve watched them with my binoculars; they fly that way.

I could never keep a wild bird in a cage. If a bird already knows how to fly against the sky, I could never cage it. I know I have to buy a bird born in a cage, a bird whose parents, grandparents, ancestors had lived only in cages.

There are many types of canaries. Some are called choppers and sing a loud song; their beaks open, ending each note by closing the beak. Others are called rollers. They sing with beaks closed and deep in the throat. There are different kinds of rollers and choppers and there are contests for singing. There are also various shapes and sizes of canaries; some are so peculiarly shaped they can scarcely fly.

I decide to buy a young female because they’re less expensive. I’m interested in flying, not singing. I buy a bird magazine that comes out every month; it gives addresses of people who sell birds. I start looking at all the canary aviaries I can find, and get to, on my bicycle. It’s two months before I find her.

She’s in a large aviary in the back yard of a lady called Mrs Prevost. Mrs Prevost is fat and has little feet. She has aviaries in her back yard and breeding cages on the sun porch. She doesn’t care much about song or color or how her birds fly. I don’t think she particularly raises them for money either. She just likes canaries.

She goes into the aviary and all the birds come flying down to her and land on her arms or on her head. She’s trained the birds and has some who’ll hop up and down little ladders or ring bells to get food. She has some she can take out of the cage on a perch. They won’t fly off the perch even when she waves it around.

Mrs Prevost looks carefully for cats and hawks before she takes out a bird. She’s terrific; she should be in a circus.

Mrs Prevost lets me sit in the aviary and watch her birds as much as I want. It’s in her aviary I decide I like canaries more than pigeons. It’s mostly in the sound of wings. Pigeon wings whistle and have a crackly stiff feather sound. Canary wings make practically no sound at all, only the kind of sound you make with a fan if you flip it quickly, a pressure against the air.

I sit out there in the aviary with the females every Saturday for over a month. I never see Mr Prevost. Mrs Prevost brings me cups of tea in a thermos when it’s cold. Sometimes she puts on a coat and sits there with me. She points out different birds and tells me who the parents are and how many were in the nest and which ones got caught in the wire or were sick so she had to save them. She tells me which ones she’s thinking of breeding and why she’s choosing them. She’s going to breed thirty females that next year. She chooses them to breed just because these females are good mothers or come from good mothers. She isn’t trying to breed for anything special except more canaries. Mrs Prevost would sure make a good mother but she doesn’t have any children. I didn’t ask her; she told me.

She shows me one of her females who’s six years old and has given over sixty birds. This female comes and sits on Mrs Prevost’s finger. Mrs Prevost transfers her to my finger one afternoon. She perches there a few minutes while Mrs Prevost leans down and talks to her. Mrs Prevost talks to her birds. She doesn’t peep or whistle; she just talks in a low voice the way you’d talk to a baby.

Mrs Prevost hates cats and hawks. She has a continual war with them. There’re always stray cats coming in hoping for an easy meal. She’s tried fencing, but you can’t fence out a cat. She says she can’t get herself to poison them. A couple times there’re cats sitting outside the aviary, turning their heads back and forth watching the birds fly. Mrs Prevost’d dash out on her tiny feet and chase them. I tell her she ought to get a dog.

Once, when I’m sitting in the aviary, one of the cats comes and doesn’t see me. It must scare hell out of a bird having a cat with those little slit green eyes watching – twisting its tail back and forth. After a while, this one can’t wait and throws itself against the wire. It hangs there with its mouth open, pointed teeth against a thin ridged pink top of mouth. The sharp claws are wrapped into the wire. It almost makes me glad I’m not a bird.

I saw Birdie the first day I sat in the aviary. I actually keep going back just to watch her but I don’t tell Mrs Prevost this. The aviary is taller than it is wide either way. Birdie is the only bird who flies around the inside of the upper part of the aviary. The others fly from perch to perch or down to the floor to eat but Birdie flies around and around in banked circles. It’s the kind of thing I’d do myself if I were a bird and lived in that aviary.

Birdie is very curious. There’s a piece of string hanging from the top of the aviary. It’s not more than two inches long. Birdie has to turn herself upside down to pull it and she hangs there minutes at a time, pulling and tugging, doing her best to hang on and backing off with her wings, trying to pull it loose.

There’s another thing I like better about canaries than pigeons. Pigeons do a lot of walking. They swing their short bodies back and forth like a duck and walk around on short legs, or sometimes when they’re courting, they pull themselves up and take short soldier-like marching steps. Canaries never walk. If they move on the ground, they hop. Most times a hop means a little flit with the wings. It makes them look so independent. They hop in place, then hop to another place. I’ve noticed robins both running and hopping but canaries never walk.

Sometimes, Birdie’d just hop all over the cage. She’d pick up a tiny stone here and move it over there. She’d dig in the sand with her beak. She won’t bring anything out, just digging. It’s like she’s doing some kind of bird housekeeping.

Then, sometimes, she’ll hunch back and take a flying leap for the highest perch. This takes a careful aim because perches are spread all over the place. Mrs Prevost puts in lots of perches; she doesn’t think much about birds having long free places to fly. Birdie flies between the perches as if they aren’t there. She’s beautiful.

I go downtown and hunt around junk shops till I find a cage. It costs twenty-five cents. I take it home to fix up. First, I scrape all the paint and rust from the bars. There are two broken places; I repair them. I straighten and clean the tray in the bottom. I boil and wash out the food and water dishes. It isn’t a big cage, fifteen inches deep, thirty long and twenty high. I hate to think of taking poor Birdie away from the big cage and her friends to put her into this small cage, alone. I know I’ll make it up somehow.

After it’s all clean, I paint the cage white. I give it two coats till it looks practically new. I put some newspaper in the bottom, and bird gravel. I buy roller mix seed and put it in one cup and fresh water in the other. I’m ready to bring Birdie home.

I carry her on my bike in a shoe box with holes punched in the sides. I can hear her scrambling around inside, sliding on the slippery bottom of the box. I wonder what a bird thinks when her whole life is suddenly changed like this. She isn’t one year old and she’s lived her whole life either in the nest or the breeding cage, or in the aviary with other birds. Now she’s in a dark box with no perches, she can’t see and can’t fly. I speed home as fast as I can.

I go in the back door and up the back stairs to my room. I don’t want to show her to anyone.

I cut a hole carefully in the end of the box and put the hole next to the cage door. In only a few seconds she hops into the cage. She lands on the floor and stands straddle-legged. She looks around. She seems even more beautiful than she did in the aviary. I don’t want to scare her, so I back up to the other side of the room where I have my binoculars. I turn the chair around and rest the binoculars on the back of the chair so I can watch her without my arms getting tired.

After a few little hops, rattling sand on the paper, she hops up onto the middle perch and peeps. It’s a single note going from low to high and watery. It’s the first time I hear her voice. In the aviary, there’s so much sound you can’t hear any particular bird.

She cocks her head and looks from side to side. She knows I’m there across the room and she looks at me first with one eye, then the other. Canaries don’t look at any particular thing with both eyes at once. Most birds don’t. They only see with both eyes when they’re not really looking at anything. When they want to see something particular, they look with one eye and blind out the other. They don’t close it, just blind it.

Birdie moves lightly and quickly, heavy air means nothing. She hops up to the top perch and wipes her beak, sharpening it, checking, the way dogs sniff trees.

She’s yellow, the yellow of a lemon. Her tail feathers and wing tips are lighter, almost white. The feathers on her upper legs are lighter too. Her legs are orange-pink, lighter than pigeon legs, delicately thin. She has three toes forward and one back like all tree birds, and her nails are long and thin, translucent, with a fine vein down the center. She’s medium-sized for a canary and has a rounded, very feminine head; her eyes are bright black, her beak exactly the color of her legs. Small pink nostril holes are tucked under the feathers of her head at the top of her beak.

She peeps again and turns around on the perch to face the other way. She does this without seeming to use her wings. She springs lightly up, twists her body, and is facing the other way. It’s the same move an ice skater makes when she jump turns, only with much less effort. Birdie does this while still eyeing me left and right, shaking her head back and forth, a bird ‘no’.

Her eyes lose focus and she goes into total vision. She isn’t looking at me anymore. She jumps down to the bottom perch and sees the water cup. She tips her head in, dips her beak into the water, and tilts her head back. She does this three times. Like pigeons, she can’t swallow up. She lets the water flow down into her throat. It looks as if she closes her beak over a certain small quantity of water, not more than a drop, then holds it till she tilts up so it rolls down her throat.

After drinking, she hops to the floor of the cage. A bird needs sharp gravel to grind food in its crop. She hops around, making sand rattle on the paper again, takes a few grains, then jumps up on the bottom perch again for some birdseed.

The seed I’ve bought contains rape, a tiny black round seed; canary seed, a thin tan-colored shiny seed with a white fruit; rolled oats; and linseed. She dips into the food dish and spreads seeds around till she finds one of the rolled oats. She picks it up, peels off the shell and eats the fruit. It’s done quickly. While she’s eating, she looks over at me twice. Birds are very suspicious while they’re eating. She eats about five seeds; the rolled oat, two rape seeds and at least one canary seed. She uses a different technique to peel each type. She doesn’t eat any linseeds. Linseeds are to keep the feathers in condition.

It’s amazing how well birds can work seeds out of the shell using only their beaks; no arms, no hands.

Later, I try eating birdseed to see what it’s like. I spend hours cracking seed with my teeth. One mouthful takes a full hour. You can’t eat the shells because they’re bitter.

After Birdie’s eaten, she leaps with one slight flick of her wings, a hardly noticeable flick, from the bottom perch, turns around in midair and lands on the top perch, at least four times her height. It’s as if I jumped off the porch right up onto the roof. She peeps at me from there. I try to peep back.

She checks the bars of the cage with her beak and nibbles some cuttlebone. Cuttlebone is from a fish; it has calcium and other minerals for birds. She constantly tries to talk to me, or maybe she’s trying to discover any other birds around. There’s a sad sound in the peep, interrogative, going up at the end, peeEEP? She opens her beak half way when she says it and of ten says it just as she leaves one perch for another. Perhaps it’s a signal to let other birds know she’s changing position. I don’t really know enough about canaries.

When it gets dark, I cover her cage with a cloth to protect her from drafts.

The next day is Sunday. I see her trying to bathe in the water cup so I put a saucer of water in the cage. She goes down immediately with a peep that’s different from the others, shorter, more like PEep? She stands on the edge of the dish, shakes her feathers impossibly fast, stretches out her wings to show feathers individually, then throws herself into the water with another short PEep? She goes in and out, splashing, wiggling. There’s a concentration, a total involvement; nothing passive. I’ve watched hundreds of pigeons take baths in water or in dust but it was slow motion compared to Birdie.

After she’s splashed all the water from the saucer and made a soggy mess out of the newspapers on the floor of the cage, she flies wildly around, almost crashing into the bars. Her flight feathers are so wet, they hang bedraggled, resting on the perch. The feathers around her face clump in little bunches. She dashes back and forth, from perch to perch, shaking, vibrating her whole body. Drops of water fly across the room even onto the lenses of the binoculars. They’re like comets charging into my miniature world.

Finally, most of the water shaken off, Birdie begins to preen herself. She takes each feather in her beak and combs it out to the tip. She leans back frequently to the oil sack at the tip of her tail and spreads a thin film of oil over the newly washed feathers, one at a time. The bath, from beginning till end, finishing with a satisfied flurry of fluffiness, takes almost two hours.

I’m really in love with Birdie now. She’s so dainty, so quick, so skilled, and she flies so gracefully. I want to have her fly in my room free but I’m afraid I’ll hurt or frighten her putting her back into the cage. It’s very hard to wait.

That afternoon, I give Birdie a first taste of treat food. I try peeping when I give it to her, the question peeps, peeEEP? I give treat food in a special cup shaped to fit between the bars of the cage and rest on the edge of the middle perch. I keep my hand as near to it as I can when she comes to eat.

The feed has a smell of anise and is sweet. I only put a few grains of seed in the dish. Birdie looks at me where I am with my hand near the food. She cocks her head and tries to see me from different angles. She comes close, then flies away. She pretends she isn’t interested at all and goes down to eat the regular seed. I know she’s curious. At last she comes up and quickly steals one seed out of the dish. She goes to the other end of the perch to eat it. She queeEEP?s at me and I try to queeEEP? back. She comes again and takes another seed. She eats it looking me in the eyes. I don’t move.

She puts one foot onto the little dish to hold it and eats the rest of the seeds. Her foot’s within an inch of my fingers. I can see the tiny pink scales and light veins running down her legs next to my own massive whorled fingerprints. I can smell her, the smell of eggs when they’re still in the shell, probably the smell of feathers. I don’t remember just that smell from pigeons. Pigeon smell is musky with something of old dust; this is a thin perfume.

When she’s finished, she lets go of the dish and wipes her bill on the perch but doesn’t go away.

I queeEEP? at her but she only looks at me. I queeEEP? again. She sees me; she’s questioning what I really am. It lasts maybe ten seconds, a long time for a bird. Then she goes down to the floor of the cage and eats a few grains of sand. I’m very happy.

Next day, I think about Birdie all day at school. I don’t even want to look at people. People can be so gross, especially grown-ups. They grunt and groan, make swallowing and breathing noises all the time. They smell like putrid meat. They crawl around with heavy movements and stand as if they’re nailed to the ground.

At lunch, walking around the track, I practice jumping and turning around. It’s hard to do. It’s much easier if you do it when you’re running. Standing still and jumping up is almost impossible. You’ve got to twist hard enough to get around in the little time you have from the jump and yet not so fast you’re still twisting when you hit the ground. You have to twist back against yourself with your shoulders in the air. I almost do it once by getting down in a crouch and taking an easy jump up and a slow twist. For a second, it feels right, a little bit free, but then I hit the ground wrong and fall. I get too loose up there. I have to speed up my body thinking somehow.

When I come into my room after school, Birdie queeps at me. We keep queeping back and forth while I change from school clothes. I have to go down again and sweep off the back porch. If my mother ever gets an idea I’m spending too much time with a bird, it’ll be like the pigeons all over again.

After the gas tank, I hid my pigeon suit up in the rafters of the garage. I know she’s still looking for it, says she’s going to burn it – going to burn it for my own good, she says.

I can’t figure what she thinks is unhealthy about birds. Does she want me to spend all my time chasing after girls at school or making myself the strongest man in the world, like Al; or maybe hopping up cars and tearing them apart. What’s so healthy about that?

I don’t want any trouble, that’s all. I do a good job on the porch and water the flowers on the window sill. I pick up some papers and a couple of old rusty cans from the back yard. Kids are always throwing tin cans over the fence. If my mother’d stop running out and shaking her mop or broom at them, they’d quit. I still haven’t figured out where she keeps those baseballs. They must be worth a fortune.

Back in my room, I get out some treat food and walk quietly over to the cage. Birdie’s queeping with me. I’m listening to hear if she has anything else to say; I can’t hear anything different. Canary is still a foreign language to me. I got so I could understand most of the things pigeons have to say. They don’t really talk, they only signal each other.

I slide the dish between the wires of the cage onto the perch. She comes up to the perch and stands on the other end. Now, there’s definitely a change in her voice. It’s still queep but much louder, like somebody saying, ‘really?’ It’s qurEEPP?, from deeper in her throat. I can hear it but I can’t do it; I give her a regular queeEEp? back. After a half dozen of these loud qurEEPP?s, she hops left and right along the perch over to me. With each hop she completely turns her body direction to the perch, at the same time keeping her head toward me. Each hop lines the other eye up with mine. She’s shifting her vision from eye to eye as she advances. Incredible, almost impossible to describe, but she does it without seeming to notice.

When Birdie gets to the dish, she puts her feet on it the same as last time and takes her first seed, shelling it without going back along the perch. She has her wing and leg muscles flexed to jump back if I make a move. I’m yearning to shift my finger through the bars of the cage and touch her foot. I feel caged out of her cage.

When she’s finished with the treat food, I stay there with my hand on the cup and bring my face up till my eyes are looking through the bars not more than a foot from where she’s standing. Birdie stands there and looks at me, cocking her head one way, then the other. She gives a qurEEPP?, then jumps down to the perch below. I watch her eat some seed, then some gravel. Being really close like this is even better than watching through binoculars.

When Birdie shits, it’s a semi-hardened mass much smaller than pigeon shit. She tosses it off with a slight thumping of her ass. Most times it’s a single flip, but sometimes it takes two or three. She shits once every five minutes or so. The shit itself has three parts I can see. There’s the outside part which is clear as water, just wetness, then there’s the white part, more solid, something like cream, and then the center which is brownish-black, blacker than human shit and somewhat shaped to come out the ass, like human shit. There’s practically no smell.

Every day that week, when I come home from school, after I’ve done chores, I go upstairs to my room and watch Birdie. First, I change the feed and water; then, if she tries to take a bath in the new water, and she usually does, I give her some water in a saucer. After that, after I’ve watched her bathe and talked to her, I give her some treat food on the end of the perch. She isn’t afraid of me at all now. That is, not for a bird.

The only thing a bird has going for it is that it can fly away. If Birdie knows that living in a cage makes her so vulnerable, it must be terrible. Still, she always keeps herself ready to escape even though there’s no place to go. I try to think what it would be like to have some gigantic bird come and stick his claws into the window of my room with some potato chips or a hoagie. What would I do? Would I go over and get some, even if I had enough regular food in a dish somewhere else?

After the first few days, when I come into the room, Birdie is down on the floor of the cage, running back and forth, looking out over the barrier that holds in the gravel. I think she’s glad to see me, not just because I give her treat food, but because she’s lonely. I’m her one friend now, the only living being she gets to see.

By the end of the week, I rubber-band the treat food dish onto the end of an extra perch and put it into the cage through the door. I lock the door open with a paper clip. At first, Birdie’s shy, but then she jumps onto the perch I’m holding and side-hops over to the treat dish. It’s terrific to see her without the bars between us. She sits eating the treat food at the opening to the door and looking at me. How does she know to look into my eyes and not at the huge finger next to her?

After she’s finished eating, she retreats to the middle of the perch. I lift it gently to give her a ride and a feeling the perch is part of me and not the cage. She shifts her body and flips her wings to keep balance, then looks at me and makes a new sound, like peeEP; very sharp. She jumps off the perch to the bottom of the cage. I take out the perch and try to talk to her but she ignores me. She drinks some water. She doesn’t look at me again till she’s wiped off her beak and stretched both wings, one at a time. She uses her feet to help stretch the wings. Then, she gives a small queeEEP?

Generally, Birdie looks at me more with her right eye than her left. It doesn’t matter which side of the cage I stand. She turns so she can see me with her right eye. Also, when she reaches with her foot to hold the treat dish, or even her regular food dish, she does it with her right foot. She’d be right-handed if she had hands; she’s right-footed or right-sided. She approaches and does most things from the right side. Even when she’s stretching her wings, she always stretches her right wing first. The only exception is she sleeps on her left foot. I think when a bird sleeps you get a good idea of what birds think of the ground. A bird will usually search out the highest place it can find to sleep and then separate itself as best it can from the ground by standing on one foot; in Birdie’s case, her lesser foot. A bird, balled up in puffed-out feathers, standing on one foot, looks nothing like flying. A lizard looks more capable of flying than a sleeping bird.

Because of the way Birdie sleeps, I want to build my bed up against the ceiling of my room. My mother gets all hot and bothered, but my father says it’ll be all right if I pay for the wood myself and don’t knock holes in the walls or floor. We only rent the house.

I pinch wood from the lumberyard at night. I do it the same way Al and I got the wood for the pigeon coop. I sneak in at night and push it out under the fence in back, then go around and get it. I buy bolts and use my father’s tools. Because I can’t attach to walls or ceiling, it has to be self-supporting. The job takes me two weeks. When it’s finished, I fit the mattress and springs into the frame up high. I put the old bedstead out in the garage. I check my pigeon suit and look around for the baseballs.

I build a ladder up to the bed by drilling holes and pegging in steps. It’s like a ship’s ladder when I finish. I even run electricity up there and hang curtain rods from the ceiling. I snitch some material from Sears and make curtains. It’s a great little nest, even better than the loft in the tree. I can crawl up there, pull the curtains and turn on the light. A private place.

By now, Birdie jumps right on the stick when I put it in her cage; even without treat food. She’ll eat the treat food off my finger, too. I wet my finger, push it into the feed bag and some sticks on. I hold my finger at the same place on the perch where I usually put the treat dish and she comes over to pick it off. Her little beak moves fast and is sure and gentle. She cleans it all, down to the little bits caught in my fingernails.

Next day, when Birdie jumps on my perch, I pull it slowly out of the cage. I’ve practiced a lot with moving the perch up and down or back and forth inside the cage so she knows how to stay on and not be scared. As I pull her out through the door, she looks up at the top of the door passing over her head and hops backward to stay in the cage. When she comes to the end of the perch, she hops off into the cage. I begin all over, but it’s the same. After three or four times, I get the idea to put some treat food on my finger so she’ll be eating as I pull her through the door.

This works and when Birdie looks up she’s out of the cage. She gives me a strong qurEEP? when she sees where she is. I hold the perch as steadily as I can and she stands there looking at me. Then she unfocuses and lets the room come to her. It must feel to her like going on a rocket ship and getting out of the earth’s atmosphere.

I hold her there a minute, then slowly lower the perch back to the cage. As I push it through the door, she jumps off the perch and down to the floor. She goes over and eats one seed, then hops to the other side and takes a drink. It looks as if she’s checking to see if her world’s the same as when she left it. She queeps back and forth with me for about half an hour after that. She’s as excited as I am. It’s wonderful to have her free right there in front of me, to know she can flip her wings and fly out into the room. It makes everything different, it makes my room seem as big as the sky.

I’m getting better at queeping. You have to do it with your throat, tight, deep, and use your lips. It can’t be done by whistling.

The next day I take Birdie out of the cage again. This time she only ducks under the crosspiece at the door. I put some treat food on my finger and she hops over to eat it. She touches me for the first time when she puts her foot onto my finger while she eats. I keep her out on the perch for almost five minutes and give her some rides by slowly moving the perch up and down or back and forth. She queeps at me each time and watches my eyes.

I take her over to the cage and instead of putting her in the door, I lean the perch on top of the cage and she hops off. Then, I put the perch just into the opening of the door. After a few queeps and some peEEPs, she jumps onto the perch and into the cage. It’s really a shame to close the door after that.

She knows she’s been smart and brave. She goes over to the perch where I feed her treat food and gives a couple good loud QREEP?s. She actually is saying something new like QREEP-A-REEP?. I put some grains onto my finger and she eats them.

In a few weeks, I have Birdie so she’ll fly out of the cage when I open the door and then she’ll land on the perch when I hold it up to her. She’ll fly off the perch to the other parts of the room, up on my bed, or on the window sill or on the dresser. Then she’ll fly back to my perch. She flies so beautifully with her head out and her feet tucked back. Her wings in the room make a whispering sound. If I want her, all I do is hold out the perch and call her with PeepQuEEP. This is a sound she knows. Probably it’s more her name than Birdie. ‘Birdie’ doesn’t mean anything to her when I say it. I keep thinking of her to myself as Birdie but PeepQuEEP is the name I call her with.

At first, I give her a little grain or two of treat food when she comes to me, but after a while I don’t. I know and she knows we’re playing together.

Sometimes she teases by flying back toward the perch and then, at the last minute, swerving away and landing somewhere else. One time she lands on my head this way. I can watch her fly all day, and I even like to watch her hopping around. She searches all over the floor and finds little things I can’t even see. I watch her carefully to get any droppings. If my mother finds any bird shit on anything, the whole game is finished.

It’s a long time before Birdie lets me stroke her head or her breast. Birds are that way; they don’t even stroke each other. Birdie learns to like it though. She’ll come to my hand and puff up when I run my finger over the top of her head or down her wings. Her toenails need cutting, but every time I try to wrap my hands around her to pick her up, she panics.

Usually when I let Birdie out, I pull the window shade, but one day I forget. She flies out of the cage door when I open it and straight at the window. She hits the pane of glass in full flight and falls fluttering to the floor!

I dash over and pick her up carefully. She’s unconscious, limp in my hand. There’s nothing deader than a dead bird. Movement is most of what a bird is. When they’re dead, they’re only feathers and air.

One of her wings seems dislocated. I carefully fold it back and hold her in my two hands to warm her. She’s still breathing very lightly and quickly. Her heart’s beating against my hand. I look for something broken or bleeding. Her neck is hanging loosely over the end of my fingers and I’m sure she has a broken neck. The way she flies, with her head so far ahead of her body, confident with her flight, this is what would happen.

Her eyes are closed by a pale, bluish, almost transparent lid. There’s nothing I can think to do. I pet her head softly. I PeepQuEEP at her and try to breathe warm air over her. I’m sure she’s dying.

The first sign she shows is to move her head and lift it from hanging over my finger. She opens her eyes and looks at me. She doesn’t struggle. She blinks her eyes slowly and closes them. I PeepQuEEP at her some more. I stroke her head. Then, she opens her eyes and straightens her head. She couldn’t do that if her neck were broken. I begin to hope. I pull her legs out between my fingers and straighten the toes so she’s standing with them on my thigh while I hold her. She closes her eyes again but she keeps her head up. She doesn’t grab with her feet on my thigh. The toes are limp and fold in on themselves.

I hold her quietly some more, petting her head and queeping at her. Then she queeps back; tired, a faint queeEEp? I queep and she queeps again. I loosen my grip and she manages to stand on my thigh. She’s all puffed out in a ball and her feathers are ruffled from the sweat of my hands. I cup her on both sides with my hands so she can’t fall. I hold her again and try to smooth her feathers. I feather out her wings one after the other. They seem all right. I let go of her and she stands alone on my thigh. She bristles and fluffs out her ruffled feathers. She leans back and runs each flight feather in turn through her beak. She shits. Then, she straightens herself and hops along my knee and queeps, quite like her old self. I queep back and put my finger out to her. She hops on it and turns. She wipes her beak on my finger. She’d never done that before. It’s wonderful to see her moving again. I didn’t know I was crying but my face is wet. I carry her over to the cage and she hops off my finger and into the cage. She’s glad to be back in her safe place. She eats and drinks.

I watch her for about an hour after that but she’s fine. I can’t believe my luck. It would have been awful without her. From this time on, I can always pick her up and hold her. A few days later I cut her toenails.

I begin wanting to tell somebody about Birdie and all the things she can do. I try talking to Al about it but he isn’t interested much in birds anymore.

She’s such fun. I leave her out at night sometimes and train her to sleep on top of the cage so her droppings fall onto the cage floor instead of all over the room. I put her cage on the shelf behind my bed, so she feel comfortable. It’s the highest place in the room. In the morning, she hops down onto my head and picks at my nose or the corners of my mouth till I wake up. She never picks at my eyes.

I learn a lot of canary words and can tell her to stay and to come and I learn a sound for eat and hello and good-bye. I’m beginning to hear the differences in the things she says.

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