Birdy (17 page)

All of the babies have started picking at the egg food when I put it in the bottom of the cage. The way they get started is by smearing it on themselves accidentally while jumping around Alfonso when he’s eating. They’re hopping in and out of the dish full of egg food and then, more by chance than anything, discover they can go directly to the source. This is a critical moment. I decide to leave the door of the breeding cage open and watch what happens.

As soon as it’s open, of course, Alfonso takes off out into the aviary. He’s been locked in with those babies for five days and is showing signs of going stir crazy. He flies about madly, checking
all his systems and giving the old wings a workout. It’s almost as much fun for me watching him through the binoculars as it must be for him. It isn’t long before the little yellow bird who kept falling out of the nest is on the edge of the cage door looking into the aviary. I can almost feel her mind trying to work it out. There’s a perch in front of her and slightly down, about twice as far as she’s ever jumped before. She cocks her head this way and that trying to figure the distance. Birds don’t have stereoscopic vision, and have some difficulty judging distances. She takes off for it after about three minutes pondering and makes a perfect landing. Now, she really looks little. Alfonso, almost as if he’s rewarding her, comes over and feeds her.

It’s exciting, for me watching, as each of the young birds comes out into the aviary. At first, each flight from one perch to another is a major adventure, there’s lots of falling and fluttering to the bottom. Once they’re on the bottom, it’s a major project flying back up to the lowest perch. This perch is at least two feet from the ground. They all work it out though and in a few days are making experimental test flights. They seem to enjoy fluttering down from one perch to a lower one, more than struggling their way up. It’s a couple of weeks before they catch onto gliding.

This is the opposite of the way I’ll have to do it. From what I know now, I think I’ll have to be satisfied with gliding first, then work my way to some kind of flapping.

It’s several days after they’ve left the breeding cage before one of them, the dark one, finds his way back. Birdie has finished laying her fifth egg again and I’ve put all the eggs in the nest. These days, Alfonso has been able to fly into the cage from the aviary and feed Birdie or sit on the eggs when she wants to go out to feed or take some exercise. Now, this young bird comes over to the nest and starts giving the feed-me signal. Birdie hunches down deeper on the nest and ignores him. I’m wondering if I’ll have to lock Birdie in the breeding cage, leaving Alfonso out, something I’d hate to do. Then Alfonso takes care of things himself. It’s almost as if he’d figured it out.

He flies into the breeding cage and chases that baby bird out.
When the baby, all confused at this hostile act from the ever-loving father, is outside, Alfonso feeds him. In this way, he trains all the young birds to stay away from Birdie on the nest.

But it’s no real problem. They’re all beginning to have such fun flying, they don’t do much of anything but eat and fly all day long. They practice different flying tricks. Now, I’m sure they’re watching Alfonso to learn how to do some things. It would be interesting to see how quickly a bird would learn to fly if it never saw any other bird flying. I decide to try that one out when I have enough birds.

I’m keeping a notebook of all the things I see. I’m doing a lot of drawings and I write down my observations and thoughts. I’m also writing down all the different experiments I want to try so I can figure out what flying is and how birds learn. I take ten pages of notes alone on how a bird learns to turn around on a perch. It’s definitely something they have to practice; they don’t know how to do it for almost a week after they’re out of the nest. Out in the back yard I’m working on that trick myself and it is not an easy thing to learn.

Birdie seems happy and well. She’s extraordinary, laying a second clutch of five eggs. The book says a female can have three nests a year without hurting, if she’s in good health. Birdie looks fine to me and as the young birds get more and more independent with their feeding, Alfonso gives her more help. He brings food up to feed her on the nest and sits when she flies out to eat. She takes long exercise periods, completely ignoring the baby birds; they ignore her too. It seems that after baby birds leave a nest, the mother bird just forgets them. At least, that’s Birdie’s way. The weather is getting warmer now, so Birdie isn’t so passionate at sitting as the first time. Sometimes she’ll take as much as fifteen minutes off the nest to preen her feathers. With Alfonso up there anyway, hovering over the nest, there’s no real danger. I don’t think Alfonso really sits on the eggs, not the way Birdie does. He spreads his legs and straddles the eggs, more like he’s protecting them than as if he’s trying to brood. If Birdie abandoned the nest or died, I don’t think Alfonso could hatch the eggs.

The babies are growing fast. The growth of their tails seems to
be stimulated by flight, or maybe it’s the other way around. By the time they’re five weeks old, I can scarcely tell them from grown birds. Some have started cracking seed already. Until all of them can do that, they aren’t really safe. The book says the real test is when they molt their baby feathers and grow in the first adult feathers. I’m not worried too much; they look so healthy.

It occurs to me one evening as I’m feeding the birds that all I did was put two birds in the aviary, some food and water and nothing else and now there are six of them. I know this is perfectly natural, it’s one of the things life is all about, but to have it happen in my bedroom, under my own eyes, is magic.

My aviary begins to look and sound like the real thing. There is the continual fluttering of wings, the sounds of birds calling to each other and the sounds of beaks being wiped on the perches. My mother, who hasn’t been paying too much attention, accuses me one night at dinner of having bought more birds. I explain they’re the babies of my first two. She goes
Harumph,
sneaks a look at my father, who’s putting a piece of baked potato in his mouth, then says they’re beginning to stink up the whole house. It scares me when she talks like that. She has so much power over my life and the world of birds in my bedroom
.

The next day I buy some stuff in a bottle that makes everything smell like pine trees. I put it around in all corners of my room but not in the cage. My room begins to smell like a fake forest. It’s such a terrific thing having birds, I’ll do anything to keep them.

That afternoon, I stay on again to watch Birdy being fed. I ask Renaldi if I can come in. He says it’s against the rules but it’s OK with him. He opens the door with his keys and I push the cart in behind him.

Birdy’s squatting there watching us; he’s watching me more than anything. I’m convinced he’s bullshitting me now. Maybe he wasn’t before, but now he is. I push the tray to the side and stand in front of Birdy. Renaldi goes around the cart and lifts covers off the food.

‘Well, Birdy; I’m here. This is Al and you know it, you bastard. Are you really going to squat there flapping your arms like a baby canary while this guy feeds you?’

I say this to him in a quiet voice while Renaldi tinkers with the food. Birdy is looking at me full face, no shifting from eye to eye, none of that bird business. He’s looking at me; his eyes aren’t even wiggling. I can’t say he shows any signs of recognition but he’s definitely looking me over, seeing if he can trust me. It’s Birdy all right, but he’s different. This isn’t the old Birdy who used to believe everything; he looks as if he can’t believe anything anymore. He doesn’t look as if he can even believe in himself.

Renaldi signals with some cereal and a spoon to me that I can feed him if I want. I reach over and take the bowl and spoon from Renaldi. He’s checking the doors to see if anybody’s looking in. What’re they going to do, fire him? They aren’t paying him or anything; they tried putting him in the army, that didn’t work.
They can’t kill him. It’s stupid how most of us get in the habit, looking all the time to see if somebody’s watching us, as if they’re going to catch us doing something wrong. Somewhere, when we’re kids, our parents and the shits at school get us all feeling guilty about almost everything.

I hold the food and the spoon out in front of Birdy’s face. He keeps looking at my eyes, not at the food.

He doesn’t move.

‘OK. I’ll feed you anyway. This is all ridiculous. If you could see yourself squatting there on the floor and me shoveling this crap down your throat, you’d probably laugh yourself to death.’

I push the food toward his mouth. He keeps his mouth closed and turns his head.

‘Come on, Birdy; open up! Let mommy put some mush down your throat. It’s good for you.’

He turns his head the other way. Renaldi is beginning to come around the cart. I give him a hard look to keep him away.

‘Look, Birdy. This guy’s giving me a special chance to feed you. Open up! I know the whole thing is damned undignified but what’s the difference? Either he feeds you or I feed you. If you’re going to pretend you’re a stupid bird, at least be consistent. You know you don’t crap like a bird. You can jump around all you want, but you’ll never fly out of here. They’re going to keep you in this cage the rest of your life!’

Birdy stares at me. He’s pissed. It’s hard to get Birdy mad. He doesn’t usually care enough about most things. What I’ve heard him say more than anything else is, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ According to him, nothing matters. I’d be burned up about something, at school, or his mother, or my father, and he’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Then, I notice his wings, I mean arms, coming away from his sides. For a minute, I think he’s going to spring at me like some crazed bat but he brings them around slowly in front of his face
and looks down at them. He turns them around, uncurls his fists, and feebly wiggles the fingers. He looks at me and reaches for the bowl and spoon. I put them in his hands. He doesn’t look down, his eyes are still burning into mine. Mad! I’m not sure he isn’t going to pitch the mess at my head, but I keep my eyes on his. There’s something going on and I’m not sure what it is.

After about two minutes of boring into me, he looks down at the bowl and then at the spoon. He shifts the spoon a few times in his hand as if trying to remember how to hold it. I want to reach out and help but I don’t. I’m knowing, for the first time, just how far away Birdy’s been. It’s a long way back, a long way for him to come. He gets the spoon almost right and starts moving it and the bowl together. He misses twice, then gets the spoon into the mush and stirs it. He stirs for a least three minutes. I’m beginning to ache in the back of my legs from squatting. I’m wishing I didn’t have the bandages on my face so it would be easier for Birdy to see me and recognize me.

Finally, he lifts the spoon out of the dish with some mush in it and puts it into his mouth. He has a hard time getting the spoon out of his mouth because he bites down on it. It’s like watching a baby learning to eat; he has his elbow sticking way up in the air. He probably thinks he’s a bird imitating a human being now. Maybe he is.

It takes more than an hour, but Birdy gets a fair amount of food down. He gets to where he’s spearing some of the meat with a fork. He lets me take the bowls and fork or plates from him but there’s no reaction. His face could be a beak for all the movement it makes. He looks as if he has a mask on, with his eyes glittering out from behind it.

We get outside and Renaldi’s all excited. He says this is a big breakthrough; we’ve got to tell Weiss. I ask him what the hell Weiss will do except write it in his papers or have the T-4 type it out so he can spit on it; can’t we keep it to ourselves? Renaldi listens to me. He doesn’t want to, but in the end he’s willing to go along. I ask him what good is it if Weiss is going to come watch Birdy feed himself. What good is that going to do?

Renaldi leaves and I take my place in the chair between the doors. Renaldi says there’s no way he can leave me in the cage with Birdy.

I sit there for a long while watching. I think Birdy’s beginning to feel silly squatting all the time. Twice he stretches out one leg or the other. He hasn’t done that before. He goes over to the toilet to take a leak. Instead of squatting on the crapper, the way he usually does, he half straightens himself up so he’s leaning across the john, opens up his pajamas with one hand and uses the other hand to support himself against the wall. Probably he hasn’t straightened out his back that much in months. I don’t think he can stand up anymore. Renaldi tells me Birdy sleeps in a squat; won’t use the bed. He says sometimes Birdy leans against a wall and sleeps standing on one foot. You’d know Birdy would carry it too far.

When he finishes pissing, Birdy takes a few hunched over steps toward the middle of the floor, like a skinny hunchback of Notre Dame or something, then he goes back to the old squat.

He looks straight into my eyes. I still have the feeling he’s mad at me and this is really rare. Like I said, it’s hard to get Birdy mad. Even with my old man and the car that time, Birdy wasn’t so much mad as discouraged. He couldn’t get himself to believe anybody’d do a shitty thing like that. He was sure there’d been some kind of misunderstanding and when he could talk to the person who bought the car he could make it all right again.

There was only one time I can remember Birdy actually getting mad. That’s the first time I realized what it would be like when a crazy, trapdoor-minded person like Birdy got mad. I knew then I’d never actually been mad in my life; I’d been pissed or angry, but mad is like crazy.

It wasn’t too long after Birdy and I’d met each other. We were still going to Saint Alice’s Elementary School. We were taught by sisters and it was enough to ruin anybody’s life. I’d sit in the back row and think about the nuns menstruating away under those long black, hot costumes. Habits they called them, the costumes I mean.

There was always a plaster statue of the ‘Blessed Mother’ up at the front of the room dressed in light blue, flowing, plaster robes with a snake and flowers crushed under her feet. I used to wonder if she had tits under all that. There were girls in our classes, but it was boys on one side and girls on the other. The girls all wore these crappy dark blue uniforms. I was really glad when I got to the junior high school.

This is just when we’re building the new loft in the trees down in the woods; before the gas tank. We’re stealing all the wood, but we need money for the wire screen and hinges and things.

The third floor of St Alice’s is the auditorium. They serve lunches up there and every Friday afternoon they have a movie at ten cents a head. Anybody who doesn’t go to that movie is a real pauper and doesn’t love God either. This church has more damned ways to gouge the last dime out of poor people.

Anyway, up on the third floor they also have a beat-up old piano. Half the keys don’t work and there’s practically no ivory left on them so it looks as if the piano has most of its teeth knocked out.

The church got a ‘donation’ of another piano and they want this old one taken away. The guys who brought up the new piano say it’ll cost five dollars to haul this beat up one down but Father O’Leary, the pastor, says that’s too much, so it sits up there. Everybody thumps or bangs on the piano when they go by. The other piano has a key to lock the keyboard and the music sister keeps it locked. She gives piano lessons, at another twenty cents a head, on the new piano.

Birdy tells Father O’Leary he’ll get the old piano down out of there for two dollars. O’Leary tries to talk Birdy into ‘donating’ his work for the ‘love of God’, but Birdy holds out for cash. He
tells me about the project and we go into it together. Birdy’s plan is to chop up the piano and throw it out the window into the school yard after school when everybody’s gone.

So, one day after school, Birdy gets the ax and sledgehammer from his garage and we set ourselves to hammering and hacking away at that piano. The real reason we’re doing it is for the metal. The sounding board is mounted in cast iron which is worth at least five dollars at the junk dealer’s in Greenwood. This is 1939 and everybody’s selling scrap metal to the Japs to help along their war effort.

The job goes fast. I’m thumping away and Birdy’s chucking huge hunks out of the window. We’re having a fine time. The damned piano is making great slunking, thonking noises as I swing away at it. Terrific workout. I get all the strings vibrating by hitting them with the sledgehammer and it sounds like heaven. They make a swell sound when I slice through them with the ax, too. We’ve got an OK to burn the wood in the incinerator and we’ll haul away the metal.

Now, Birdy used to ride his bike to school even then. This is the bike the cops stole from us later in Wildwood. He’d lock it to the fence outside the back gate to the play yard. We can see it from up where we are. Birdy’d made the trip right after school, to get the ax and sledgehammer, and then parked the bike in his usual place. I didn’t know it, but he didn’t lock it when he came back.

We’re just about finished with the job and the two of us are pushing a huge hunk of cast metal up onto the edge of the window, when we look down and see a kid getting on Birdy’s bike.

Birdy doesn’t say anything, he takes off across the auditorium and down the stairs. I hold onto the hunk of metal and yell down to the kid, ‘Leave that bike alone, you bastard.’ I can see who it is. It’s one of the stupidest kids in the school, Jimmy O’Neill. There are six O’Neill kids going to the school, one stupider than the other. There can’t be one complete brain in all of them put together. This Jimmy O’Neill is in the seventh grade but he’s sixteen years old. He’s short, with bunched muscles. He thinks
he’s pretty tough. I never remember him except with snot running down his lip and with frayed, torn snot-stiff sweater sleeves. He’s a great one for beating up on sixth-and seventh-graders at recess. I’ve knocked the shit out of him twice already but I don’t think he remembers from one time to the next. The last time, he picked up a horse turd and threw it at me. You wouldn’t believe a kid that stupid would be allowed to walk around, let alone go to school. He still can’t read.

He knows I see him but he rolls off on the bicycle. He’s so stupid he can hardly ride the thing. He goes across the sidewalk, wobbling, and turns up Clarke Avenue, he’s getting it straightened and is starting to pump away. About half a minute later, Birdy comes running out. I yell, ‘He went up Clarke! It’s Jimmy O’Neill!’

Birdy takes off. I want him to know what he’s going to run into when he catches the bike, if there’s any chance he can catch a bike by running after it.

I lower the big piece of cast metal onto the floor and take off down the steps myself. I figure Birdy’s going to get his block knocked off if he catches O’Neill. I’m looking forward to knocking O’Neill’s teeth in. This time I’ll have an excuse and no shit-face sister or priest to butt in and save his white Irish ass.

When I get to the corner of Clarke Avenue and Franklin Boulevard, I look up and down. Way at the end of Franklin, I see the bike on the ground; Birdy and O’Neill are having at it. I start running that way and I’m surprised when O’Neill breaks away and starts running in my direction. Birdy’s right after him. O’Neill looks up, sees me, and turns back.

I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it. Birdy leaps into the air, at least five or six feet, and lands on O’Neill’s shoulders. O’Neill keeps running and Birdy is kicking at him with his feet and punching him in the face and on the side of the head. O’Neill goes down. He shakes Birdy off and stands up. His face is bloody. He takes a shortcut through a yard and back toward the church. The church is next to the school. Birdy’s right after him. I slow down. I’m bushed from running and now I want to see what
Birdy’s going to do. He’s left the bike lying in the street up there on Franklin Boulevard.

Now, this is something to be surprised at, considering the way Birdy is about that bike. Birdy bought it with his own money when he was only about ten years old. It’s an old-time bike with giant wheels and old-time thin tubeless tires. Everybody else is getting balloon tires with coaster brakes, but Birdy wouldn’t have balloon tires with mere twenty-eight-inch wheels. He keeps his tires pumped up till they’re about to explode and tools that bike around at tremendous speeds. He can balance himself on it standing still, only twisting this front wheel once in a while. I’ve seen him sit that way five or ten minutes, watching something or somebody, then wheel off without ever putting his feet to the ground. He has a way of turning around by lifting up the front wheel and twisting like a horse in a rodeo. He keeps it clean, so the spokes and rims shine like new. Birdy practically lives on that bike.