Birdy

I’m not giving an inch. I’m thinking of getting up from the chair slowly and moving in for a pin. He clears his throat and folds his hands just behind the spit pile.

‘Do you get these violent impulses of ten, Alfonso?’

The psychiatrist is back in the office. He’s got the Santa Claus grin on and all. Hell, I’d be a better psychiatrist than this moron. He doesn’t quite know what to do. I don’t know which way to play it myself. I’m wishing this had happened in the middle of the war instead of after it’s all over. Maybe I could’ve gotten myself a big pension as a homicidal maniac. That’s right; they turned this little neighborhood boy into a raving maniac by horrible war experiences. I’d live the rest of my life in gravy, just growl every now and then or beat up some old man.

He’s still grinning at me; not a single flinch in that grin; he’s got the psychiatrist grin down to the nickel. He’s trying to shake me up. I’m tempted to tell him how much I enjoyed pushing that hunky’s face in with the shovel. Niggers in the coal truck sure were scared shitless, too.

‘No, sir. Not of ten, sir.’

‘Would you mind telling me how it happened?’

Sure I would, but I know a direct order when I hear one.

‘Only in the army four days, sir. Corporal at Fort Cumberland grabbed me by the arm and I reacted instinctively, sir.’

‘Oh, I see.’

He doesn’t see and he knows he doesn’t see. I smile back at him. Big smiling game. Great being Italian; all the movies make everybody afraid of you. When people think of a bad guy, they think of an Italian. I give him my dangerous look again. He’s going over the wet form; doing the hmmm, ahhhaa thing some more; we’re not getting anywhere.

‘Sir, should I go back to the ward this morning?’

‘That’s right, Sergeant. I think it’s the best chance we’ve got.’

I wait. I can’t really get up and leave till he does something. When you’re in the army, you’re tied down all around. I can’t figure why he isn’t asking me if I’ve ever clobbered Birdy. That’s the first question I’d ask.

He stands up at last and I stand, too; give him the salute. I have a feeling he’s pissed at me and pissed at himself for being pissed. I scare him; this makes me feel good. I keep hoping I’m finished with that crap but when somebody starts leaning, it all comes back.

‘OK, Sergeant, I’ll see you tomorrow about this time.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Bastard’s going to write to Dix for my records. Please Lord, just let me out of the goddamned army!

I get back to Birdy and even though he’s still squatting on the floor, I know it’s different. I know he’s knowing I’m there. I know it’s Birdy and not some fake, freaky bird.

– Had another session with your doctor, Birdy. You’re going to have a great time with him when you decide to talk. Whatever you do, don’t tell him about the pigeons and the canaries and all that bird shit. He’ll have you pinned into a case as a specimen.

I know he heard me that time. I want to hang in there, keep it going.

– Hey Birdy, remember when we were selling the mags? Christ, that was a scene!

After we get back from Wildwood and I finally recover from old Vittorio’s revenge, we have to figure some way to pay back the money. We owe our parents ninety-two dollars in train fare. We get the idea to sell magazines door-to-door in apartment houses.

We work out a smooth deal. The building superintendents try to keep us out but we push all the call buttons and somebody is always lazy enough just to push the door buzzer without calling back. Once we’re inside, one of us keeps the elevator busy while the other goes from one apartment to the other selling the mags. We’re selling Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Cosmopolitan. The best time for selling is from right after school till about five-thirty, when the men start coming home. A lot of the ladies are alone because their men are off fighting the war. We get a regular route of ladies who buy from us. I’m the one who usually does the selling; Birdy does the elevator business and keeps the superintendent chasing after him. Fat chance that super has of ever catching Birdy.

Most of those ladies are bored out of their minds and I’m always getting invited in for a cup of tea or coffee. If I were older and knew what to do, I could probably really make out.

Birdy’s already started with all his crappy breath-holding. He’s getting to be more and more of a freak. He shows me once how he can hold his breath for five minutes. He sticks his head in a pan of water in my cellar. He tells me he turns his mind off breathing. That’s nuts!

Then he’s always talking about flying. He tells me once, ‘People can’t fly because they don’t believe they can. If nobody ever showed people they could swim, everybody’d drown if they were dropped into the water,’ is what he says. Really weird ideas. He’s going to a Catholic high school, now, down at Forty-ninth Street in Philadelphia. The things he tells me about that school, I begin to understand why he’s turning so crazy. It’s a regular prison.

He’s also beginning with his canary thing. He talks about that canary all the time and he starts different goof y exercises. I try getting him to work out with weights to build himself up, but he only does his arm flapping and jumping up and down. Sometimes he talks about his canary and I think he’s talking about a real person. I think maybe he’s finally noticed there are girls in the world but it’s just the canary. He calls her Birdy, named after himself I guess.

The school he goes to is too cheap to have buses so he rides in on his bike. I cut one day and ride in with him. What a miserable place. Freshmen and sophomores use outside staircases like fire escapes and everybody is always robbing everybody else’s locker. They have Christian brothers teaching there. They wear long black skirts like priests except they have little stiff bibs sticking out from under their chins; real bunch of creeps; guys who want to be priests but are too dumb or don’t have the guts.

The whole school smells funky, like a gigantic jack-off party going on all the time. Big places like that without any girls are always funky. On wet days, Birdy says it smells so bad you have to wear a gas mask.

The way you eat lunch in this school is to walk round and round the track. Brothers are standing in the middle like lion tamers. If you want to take a piss or something you have to ask for one of these wooden passes. They’ve got five passes for more than three hundred people. Everybody walking around, holding a lunch bag, eating and holding back from peeing.

Birdy starts faking library passes to get to the library during lunch. He has the inside of a book cut out and he’s eating sandwiches out of it. He gets away with it for almost three months but they catch him just before Easter vacation. Some brother bears down on Birdy in the library and bops him on the back of his head. Birdy throws books, sandwiches, the whole works at him and scoots down one of those fire escapes and away. They toss him out. He comes over to old U.M. to finish the year with the human beings. I figure it might turn him on with all the girls and everything but he only gets worse. People at U.M. start calling him Birdy, too. Jesus, he’s actually beginning to look like a bird.

He’s getting even skinnier and his chest’s beginning to stick out in front like his ribs are broken. His head juts forward from his shoulders and his eyes are always darting around loose in the sockets so he never seems to be paying much attention to any one thing. I know he’s seeing everything. Birdy sees everything but he doesn’t, what you could really call, ‘look’ at anything. Like the weather; somehow Birdy always knows about the weather. If the paper says it’s going to rain and Birdy says no; Birdy’s right.

The next summer, Birdy and I take the job as dogcatchers; Birdy’s deep into his creepy canaries. We’re standing on back of the truck with those huge nets and Birdy’s talking about how many eggs are in this nest or which bird is already cracking seed. He’s out of sight.

Then the next year, Birdy and I don’t see too much of each other. I go out for track, throw the discus; make varsity running guard, and wrestle. Birdy has no interest in sports. He’s back there with the birds.

In my junior year, soon’s I’m seventeen, I join the State Guard, I want to learn how to shoot rifles, pistols, all that shit. I go down to the Armory on Thursday nights to drill. Birdy comes along with me sometimes. He sits up in the balcony bleachers in the dark and watches us. I get issued an old Springfield 06 and learn how to dismantle it. I’m a gung-ho soldier bastard. Going to get me a few Japs before the whole thing is over.

I start going with Lucy then, too. She’s one of the cheerleaders at school and totally dumb; a commercial major. One afternoon, I’m sitting out in the parking lot at school in Higg’s car, making out with Lucy, when Birdy comes rolling up on his bicycle. We’re both juniors and he’s still tooling around on this wreck of a bicycle. Same crummy bike he got after we lost ours in Wildwood, trying to sell them. It won’t go more than about three miles an hour without wobbling. Birdy’s the only one who can ride it; he doesn’t even lock it in the bike rack. He just stands it there. Nobody’s going to steal it. It’s the only bike in the rack anyway; they built those racks back in the twenties when people rode bikes to school. Birdy’s tooling that bike to school every day, rain or shine; won’t take the school bus. Jesus, what can you do with somebody like that?

Birdy comes over and we talk about exams we’re having. Birdy and I are in a lot of the same classes; both academic, both half-assed B students. Lucy’s looking at Birdy. I don’t think she ever knew we were friends. To her, I’m big killer Al, wrestler and football player, something to cheer about.

Birdy starts talking about his canaries. Everybody at school knows he has about a thousand canaries by now. He brought some of them in to Chemistry class once to study their blood and he built a flying model in physics that actually worked, his crazy ornithopter. He even writes about them in English. Birdy, the bird freak. I’m still half interested in pigeons but Birdy’s too much. I’ve visited his aviaries and it’s about the same as his coming down to the Armory with me. We’re more a habit with each other than anything.

Birdy’s telling about some bird he’s gotten to fly with weights tied around its legs. This bird can carry almost three times a normal bird weight and still fly. The weight lifting champion of the bird world. He’s been training this poor sap of a bird since the nest. Lucy says something about Birdy being cruel and Birdy gives her one of his quick shifting glances just to show he notices, a fast almost-smile. Lucy’s mind’s too slow for it; she doesn’t see anything happening that fast.

Birdy’s so thin you can almost see through him. It’s late May and he’s wearing a sleeveless shirt and his sharp chest bone sticks out against it. He gets more spooky looking all the time. He’s the only guy in school with hair long enough so it drops in his eyes and he never pushes it back. He walks through that hair.

He’s spinning his bike around in small circles as he’s talking to us. Down inside the car, I’ve got my hand slipped up Lucy’s crotch. She’s flexing her muscle on and off against my fingers. Lucy’s got great strong legs; she can jump straight up and come down in a full split. That’s her specialty as a cheerleader. Break your heart to see her do it.

Finally, Birdy rolls off. After he goes, Lucy wants to know all about Birdy. I tell her we went to elementary school together. She opens up her legs a little so I can slip in my finger; she’s juicy already. I’ll take her down to the park in back of school. I know a great place under a bridge there. Whole bank is practically paved with condoms. Lucy gives me a good, stiff, strong tongue kiss and leans back.

‘Is he queer or something?’ she says. ‘He looks like some kind of homeysexual.’

Honest to Christ; that’s what she says, ‘homeysexual’.

I got Birdie just before Christmas and by February she’s already showing mating signs. She stands in one place and flaps her wings without flying, a kind of nervous flipping. She also starts carrying around bits of paper or thread. She’s developed a new short Peip, and sometimes a trill of little peeps. When she eats from my finger, she Peips and goes into a mating squat with her wings quivering, wanting me to feed her. I put some on the end of my wet finger and Birdie opens her mouth and wants me to put it down her throat the way you do with a baby bird. A female bird gets to be a lot like a baby when she wants to mate.

About then, my mother finds out I’ve been letting Birdie fly out of the cage and there’s a big scene. After all kinds of hysterics, my father says I can make an aviary under the place where I built the bed. My mother throws another fit but has to go along. My father understands things sometimes.

I want the aviary to be as invisible as possible, so I make it with thin steel wire. I put staples in the floor and into the joists under my bed. Then I stretch steel piano wires tight up and down between the staples. I put them the same distance apart as the bars on a canary cage. I make the door separate, just big enough for me to wiggle through. I hang it on the bed frame.

When it’s finished, you can barely see the wires. Inside, I cover the walls with light blue oilcloth and hang a light from under the bed. I put oilcloth on the floor, too, and white sand on top of it. I make different perches with dowelling and trim down a piece of twisted bush to make a natural little tree in the back corner. It looks great. I take Birdie out of her cage and carry her on my finger, through the door, and into her new house. She flies from my finger onto one of the perches and flies back and forth all over the cage. She tries the tree and eats from the new dishes on the floor. She takes a bath. While she’s still wet, she comes over and sits on my knee, sprinkling me with water when she shakes. It’s a terrific place for a bird.

I still have twenty dollars left from magazine selling. Paying off my share of the ninety-two dollars to my parents took the rest. I want to buy a male for Birdie and I want a first-class bird, a real flier.

On Saturdays, I start going to different bird places on my bike. I carry Birdie with me in a small traveling cage. I could take her on my shoulder, but you never know when you’ll see a cat or a sparrow hawk.