Birdy (15 page)

That night I take the chance when Birdie goes down to eat. I go right into the aviary and beat Alfonso to the nest. There’s still one unhatched egg. That means there’re four birds. It’s just a mass of slightly fuzzy flesh in the bottom of the nest. Then, Alfonso brazens it out and flies to the edge of the nest. As soon as his feet hit, four tiny heads poke waveringly up out of the naked flesh. Soft-looking beaks open searchingly between closed eyes. He feeds them, as if unaware of my close watching. There’s one that’s completely dark-skinned; probably will be as dark as Alfonso. There’re two light ones and one that seems spotted. I decide I’ll wait another day before I take out the egg. The birds all look the same size so I can’t tell which one was born a day after the others or if that’s the egg that hasn’t hatched.

Birdie flies up to the nest and joins Alfonso in the feeding. The little heads reach up greedily and the adults almost take the small
heads into their mouths to force the food into the throats. Alfonso flies down for more food but before he gets back, Birdie decides they’ve had enough and settles onto the nest.

The next morning I reach in among the warm squirming bodies and lift out the egg. I hold it up against the light and see that it’s clear. I hold it up closely in front of a light bulb and there’s nothing there. Somehow it didn’t get fertilized, it’s sterile. It seems amazing with all that fucking going on. I can’t throw it out, so I keep it in a little box with cotton in a drawer with my socks. It’s probably just as well it didn’t hatch; four is enough of a crowd in a nest.

The next day I have my morning session with Weiss. I’m wondering if Renaldi has told him anything. I don’t think he would, but you never know. He could be some kind of trained fink Weiss uses.

He’s definitely the psychiatrist this morning. His coat is clean white and starched, his glasses have been shined so you can only just see his eyes. He has his hands folded, fingers tucked in on the desk in front of him. He has on his best smile, calm, loving, brotherhood-of-man-and-ain’t-life-awful-but-we-can-make-it-together kind of smile. His thick thumbs give him away; they’re taking turns slipping over each other. There’s so much pressure you can almost hear the fingerprints rubbing together.

I stand, holding the salute, and he smiles at me. Then he gives up and makes a sloppy salute ending with one of his fat hands pointing; all fingers out, thumb lightly folded in, at the chair in front of the desk.

‘Have a seat, Alfonso.’

Alfonso! Shit! Nobody, not even my mother, calls me Alfonso. I wish the fuck I knew his first name. All it has is Maj. S. O. Weiss on the black tag in the corner of his desk. I’m tempted to ask what the ‘S.’ stands for, besides Shitface, but there’s no use looking for trouble. He’s only doing his job. I just wish he did it better.

Hell, no good psychiatrist would be working for the stinking army. If he were even average, he’d be in the air corps. I’ll bet any half-baked air corps psychiatrist would be better for Birdy.
It’d be a real twist. All day long they’re dealing with guys who don’t want to fly and here’s one guy who
wants
to; without an airplane, yet.

He’s still smiling at me. I wonder if he practices in a mirror. OK, if that’s the way we’re going to play. He hasn’t had much experience with Sicilians. Sicilians can sit at a table all day long smiling at each other, talking about the weather, telling each other how wonderful they are. At the same time, they know there’s poison in the glass of wine in front of the other guy; they have a knife open and ready under the table; and three friends have shot guns pointed at the other guy’s head. They can do this when they know the other guy has all these things on them, too. There’s something crazy in most Sicilians, probably has to do with all those generations of sun and then mixing the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans. It’s a bad combination. We wound up with the sneaky qualities of the Phoenicians, the cleverness of the Greeks, and the meanness of the Romans. I go into the routine. I’m smiling my ears off but with the bandages he can’t get the full effect. I figure I’ll go for openers.

‘What made you decide to be a psychiatrist, sir?’

Not a move. He could be a Jewish Sicilian.

‘I mean, sir, did you know when you were in high school or did it slip up on you the way things do, sir?’

Weiss grunts in his throat. These are fair questions. He leans forward on the desk, still holding himself down with his hands.

‘Well, Alfonso; it was in medical school, actually. You know the old joke about “What makes a psychiatrist?”’

I know it but I’m going to make him say it. I smile back. ‘No, sir.’

‘Well, they say a psychiatrist is a Jewish doctor who can’t stand the sight of blood.’

Oh, great. I don’t know what he expects me to do but I laugh. I laugh just a bit too long. Most Sicilians have a built-in fake laugh they can bring out for any occasion. They can laugh at their own funeral if it’s to their advantage. It’s a laugh that can fool anybody except another Sicilian.

‘That’s a good one, sir.’ I’m not going to cut and fill for him either. ‘But, seriously, sir. How did you get interested in dealing with crazies and loons as a profession?’

‘Well, Alfonso, all my work isn’t with abnormals you know. Many people will have some little thing that’s bothering them and I can help them work it out and make their lives better.’

‘The army pays for this, sir?’

He’s moving in fast for the kill. He’s a smooth son-of-a-bitch all right. He’s just itching to get inside my head somehow.

‘The army isn’t all bad, Sergeant. Fighting wars is never pleasant under any conditions, but the army takes care of its own.’

‘It’s certainly taken care of me, sir.’ I give this to him straight on. He’s good. He just smiles back at me.

‘Alfonso, tell me something. What was your father like?’

‘My father’s still alive, sir.’

He looks down at the pile of papers under his hands. There can’t be anything there, not about my old man anyway. He’s acting psychiatrist again. ‘Oh, yes. I mean, what is he like; how do you get along with him?’

‘Oh, he’s a great guy, sir. We were always like buddies. He used to take me out on camping trips and we made model airplanes together; things like that. He’s really a great guy; wonderful to my mother, too. She’s the best mother in the world.’

Maybe a few verses of ‘Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy’ would fit in here.

‘Ah, yes. And what does your father do for a living, Alfonso?’

‘He cleans out sewers for the city, sir. He calls himself a plumber but what he actually does is shovel shit all day. He comes in the back way nights, takes a shower in the cellar and scrubs himself with a big laundry scrub brush. He keeps his fingernails cut so short, you’d think he bit them. That’s to keep the shit out from under them, sir. When he comes up to eat dinner, you’d never know he’d been standing in shit all day. He’s just a great guy, sir. I’ve never heard him complain even once and he gives everything he earns to my mother. We’re poor but we’re clean and honest, sir. We’re glad to have a chance in this great country of ours.’

Right here a quick ‘And Who Do You See, It’s Little Orphan Annie’ would be good. Should I tell him I have a strange dog with holes instead of eyes?

I’m keeping my face straight through all this. That Sicilian blood is coming through. Uncle Nicky would be proud of me. Uncle Nicky’s making a fortune from the war. He sells certification of allergy from legitimate doctors at fifteen hundred bucks. He’s clearing a grand each. One of those certificates is a sure 4-F. He’s got another racket going, too. He’s opened ‘clinics’ where you can go and have your arm broken. Guys at the end of their furloughs go in and he breaks their arms for a price. Then they don’t get shipped overseas with their outfits. You go to him, he gives you anaesthetic and he has a little machine like a guillotine, only instead of a blade it has a heavy blunt piece of lead. Clump! You wake up and your arm’s already in a cast and in a sling. You have X-rays and a doctor’s signature, the whole thing. He does legs too, but that’s more complicated and more dangerous. He’s better at arms. If they’d ever’ve let me come home before the fucking war was over I was going to have myself done. Nicky’d’ve done it for free. Krauts beat him to it; didn’t charge me either, and I’ll get a pension on top. I wonder if Weiss’d believe all this if I told him.

He’s ruffling through the papers some more.

‘Sergeant, can you give me any information about the patient? You were close to him. Was there ever anything you observed that would give a hint to explain this sudden, complete catatonic state and the bizarre cringing positions he gets into?’

We’re back to Sergeant again. I can’t believe it! Weiss still hasn’t caught on that Birdy thinks he’s a canary! Dumb shit!

‘He was always perfectly normal, sir. Like me, poor but from a nice family. He lived in a big three-story house with lots of grounds around it. He was good in school, not a genius, sir, but he was in the academic curriculum and usually got B’s. Could you tell me, sir; what happened to him? It must’ve been something awful to make him like this.’

Let’s see him squirm out of it this time. He lifts the papers one
at a time. I don’t think he’s looking at them, reading anything, I mean; he’s stalling for time. Maybe he’s hoping my question will go away. He might know something and not want to tell me, or, more likely, he doesn’t know any more than Renaldi.

‘I’ve spoken to his mother and father. They came down to verify the identification. He’d been reported as missing for over a month. They recognized him but there was no recognition from the patient. At that time, if anyone came near he would go into frantic jumping and twisting activity, falling to the floor. It was almost as if he were trying to escape.’

‘That doesn’t sound like him at all, sir.’

He can’t be that stupid. He’ll catch onto the bird business soon. I wonder if Birdy’s old lady and old man told about Birdy raising the canaries. They probably wouldn’t think it meant anything. But they’d sure as hell tell about Birdy and me running away that time.

‘Sir, perhaps I should tell you, it might be important; the patient and I ran away. It was when we were thirteen; we went to Atlantic City and then to Wildwood in New Jersey.’

‘Yes.’

Yes, yes, yes. Yes, fathead, we did it all right. He’s interested now. I figure I’ll feed him a bit at a time. He looks down at his papers. He’s reading something from a yellow sheet.

‘Yes, Sergeant, I have that right here. There’s a police report as well. It says here you were accused of stealing some bicycles.’

Now isn’t that the shits. There’s no sense saying anything about it. Fatass Weiss isn’t going to believe anything I say. After all, he has it right there before him in black and yellow.

He leans across the desk toward me now. He’s wiped the smile off his face. He’s practicing his concerned look. I lean forward, too, and try to look as if I’m sorry for being alive. That’s not too far from the truth.

‘Tell me, Alfonso. Just between us, do you of ten get the feeling that people aren’t being fair to you? Do you think people are out to “get” you?’

What is this creep, a fucking mind reader? He looks down at his papers again, then looks up at me, stern, serious but very understanding.

‘This report on that incident at New Cumberland indicates you were in the army only five days at the time; is that true?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It says you knocked out eight of the non-commissioned officer’s teeth and broke his nose.’

I keep my mouth shut. What the fuck’s this got to do with Birdy?

‘Was he being unfair to you, Alfonso? You’re a noncom yourself now. Looking back on it, do you think you might have been over-reacting? Would you do the same thing now in the same conditions?’

I stick with my ‘bad little doggy’ routine. ‘We all make mistakes, sir. He was probably only trying to do his job like the rest of us.’

I didn’t know I could be such a good bullshitter. Maybe I’ll be a used car salesman. I’m enjoying fooling this asshole. It’s something like making some big bastard cry when you’re hurting him only it doesn’t take so much effort.

He’s catching on. His eyes disappear behind the clean glasses. He takes the papers, stands them up on end, bangs them edgewise against the desk a few times, then gets the folder and slips all the papers into it. He sits back.

‘Well, Sergeant. I guess it can’t hurt if you spend another day with the patient. It could happen all at once. Do you have any other ideas; anything you can remember about the past? If you do, let me know.’

That’s when I bring up the baseballs. I can never just let things go.

‘Sir, there’s one thing. Maybe it sounds crazy but it’s something I know has always bothered the patient. You see, he lived just over the left-center field fence of our local baseball park. Whenever anybody hit a ball over that fence for a home run, his mother used to keep the balls; wouldn’t give them up. Everybody hated her for it. The patient felt terrible about this. He used to apologize
to everybody and swear he’d get the balls back. He kept lists of all the people his mother had taken balls from. He promised to get them back for everybody some day. He spent hours looking for them in his house, in the attic and in the garage, everywhere. Maybe if you could get his mother to send those balls down here it would help. I know it would take a big load off his mind and it might be just the thing to help him remember.’

Weiss is looking at me as if I’m completely bananas. Then he realizes I couldn’t make up a thing like that. Sergeants are notorious for being unimaginative. He takes the folder back out. He starts writing in it. He looks up.

‘How long ago was this, Sergeant?’

‘Oh, it went on for years, sir. Seven years at least. There must be an awful lot of baseballs in that collection, sir.’

He’s writing and mumbling to himself. I’m biting my tongue to keep from laughing.

‘All right, Sergeant. If you come up with any more ideas like this be sure and report them to me. If you notice anything in his behavior here at the hospital you think I ought to know about, tell me that, too. In general, keep talking to him about the past. You might hit on something that’ll bring it all back.’

This time there’s no kidding around with the psychiatrist shit. He stands up. I stand up, too, and salute. He gives me a fair enough salute; I spin around and walk out, past spitface and outside into the sunlight.

I’m actually anxious to get back with Birdy. I’m beginning to feel he knows I’m there. Talking about all this stuff with him helps me more than anything. I’m wishing Birdy’d come back and we could have fun working over Weiss together. Weiss is the kind of person brings out the worst in me. I should be around him some more and try practicing self-control. It’s either that or I’ll wind up one of the meanest shits in the world, myself.

I walk across the hospital grounds and into the building where Birdy is. I’m still laughing to myself about the baseballs. I’ll shit my pants if she still does have those balls and ships them down here. I can just imagine Weiss’s telegram:

I can see it, two hundred used baseballs in a big box being shipped air freight, maybe even on a special military plane. Birdy’d love this.

I see Renaldi and tell him about the session with Weiss. He laughs when I tell him about the baseballs. I have to tell somebody. He says Weiss will sure as hell send for them.

Renaldi opens the outer door. Birdy swings around and looks at me when he hears the noise. I get my chair from out in the corridor and set myself up. Renaldi says he’ll see me at lunch.