The Fish and the Not Fish

by Peter Markus

  It was what they did.

  Was who they were.

  What they went to, night and day.

  Work.

  The mill.

  Steel.

  To make.

  Now there was no more work for these men to do.

  So some men drank.

  Some men sat in the back part of their yards and hit nails in wood.

  Some sat back in the back of their yards and stared up at the noon sky.

  Some men sat out back in the back of their yards and stared down at the ground.

  Some got in their cars and drove and drove some more and some of these men did not drive back.

  Some men found work to do in towns that were like ours but were not like our town if there was work there in these towns for them to do.

  The moms in our town who called these men Dear or Bob or Fred did what they did, day in and day out, back when the men of our town had a mill for them to go to.

  But now they did it, the moms did, while the men looked back at them with eyes that did not know what else to look at.

  Look at Bird was what we should have told them.

  But these men in our town would not have heard us say it.

  These men did not hear it when we said what we said.

  The boys in our town who called these men Dad or Sir or Pa, we went on and we did what we did like we did when these men did what they did when they had a place for them to go do their work.

  To make their steel.

  To get their steel made.

  Now these men were more in the house now to tell us what to do and to tell us to go, to get, don’t you boys got a place to be, don’t you got a thing or two for you to do, if not let us know and we’ll put you to work, and by work they did not mean for us to go to a mill to make steel in.

  We’d nod at these men with our heads and go and do what it was we could do so that these men and their gray as ash eyes would not burn holes in the backs of our heads.

  We had Bird to look at.

  We had Bird to walk through town with, to watch what it was that he might do next.

  Bird was ours.

  Bird did not have a man like this in his house by the tracks to tell him to get, to go, to scat.

  There was a man who lived in Bird’s house who went to work at the mill in our town where steel used to get and be made, but this man did not give Bird his name.

  That man in Bird’s house whose last name was Brown did not say two words to this boy we called Bird.

  Or when he would say words to Bird what he would say was, Who in God’s eyes are you?

  What could a boy like Bird say to words like these?

  I’m Bird?

  Or else:

  I’m just the boy who sleeps in a room at the back of your house with no light to push out the dark.

  II

  At night, in the dark of his room, Bird would dream of what it would be like to fly.

  In his dreams, Bird flew.

  Bird flew on top of the trees.

  Bird flew through the blue of the sky.

  One night Bird flew all the way up to the moon and when he flew through it, the moon, like a mouth that did not like the taste that Bird left in it, it spit Bird right back out.

  III.

  There was a pole in our town made out of steel that had a flag run up its side. The flag was red and white stripes with white stars framed in a square that was blue. One night Bird woke up and climbed up to this pole’s top with a wood match stuck in his mouth. He dragged this match hard on the pole’s gray steel till a spark leapt out and turned to flame. So did the flag when Bird reached out with his hand to touch it.

  When the flag caught flame its light lit up the town’s night sky. We all got out of bed to watch it burn. We stood and looked up at Bird and at this light that burned bright in the night’s sky. Bird looked down on all of our town who looked up at him perched up there with the lit up flag and Bird did not say that he did not do it when we all of us knew that he did.

  There was a man in our town who wore a steel star on his chest. We were taught to call him Chief. When the flag burned down to ash, Chief called up to Bird to climb back down, then Chief told the rest of our town to go back home to our beds.

  Most of us did. But there were a few of us who did not go, who hid out in the steel cans on the street where trash and things of no use, things that had broke, were thrown in by our town’s hands.

  Our eyes looked up from where we hid to see and hear Chief call up to Bird come on down.

  When Bird came down, he did not fly down like a bird. What Bird did was, just like Chief told him, he climbed. One hand at a time, Bird climbed down from this gray pole where this flag of red and blue and white once flew in the dark that was night.

  Chief took Bird by his hands and jerked them in back of Bird’s back. Boy, you come with me, Chief told Bird, and he walked with Bird’s cuffed hands to the place in our town where the drunks of our town got put when things with them got out of hand.

  Bird spent the night in this place where the steel bars you looked out through cut the world up in small squares. Bird liked it the way the bars made the world seem not so big. The sky, when Bird looked out to it, was not one big hunk of blue or black, but was now made up of small chunks that were blue by day and black by night and Bird, he saw, could hold a broke piece in the palm of his hand and then raise it up and press it up to that place on his chest where he knew was his heart.

  We did not see or hear from Bird for three days, but when Bird did show his face back at school he held, in the palm of his hand, not a piece of the sky, not a hunk of his heart: no, what Bird held out for all of us boys to see, there in his hand, was a bird that was as blue as the sky.

  This bird in the palm of Bird’s hand, this bird that was as blue as the noon sky, it had a wing that was broke.

  This bird, with its wing like this, it could not up to a tree fly.

  Bird would not let us touch it when we asked him could we touch it.

  Bird held it up close to his heart.

  When the bell rang for school to start, Bird put this bird in his desk so that Sir would not see it.

  Once in a while the bird would make bird sounds with its mouth, chirps and cheeps and cawed bird cries, and when it did, Sir would turn back to face us and then he would ask us, What’s that sound? Which one of you thinks he’s a bird?

  Sir looked right at Bird when he said what he did and what Bird did was this.

  Bird stood up at his desk. Then he made his mouth in the shape of an O.

  When Bird did this with his mouth, the bird in Bird’s desk chirped just like a bird trapped in a desk.

  Sir looked back at Bird and with his eyes cut at Bird Sir told Bird to stand where he was till it was time for us all to break for lunch.

  When the rest of us boys got to go to the room in our school where lunch was served to us, Sir told Bird to stand with his head pressed up to the black slate where Sir wrote down the words and the dates and the names of those things that Sir thought he was there to teach us.

  When Bird turned back to face us at the end of that day, his face was chalked white with dust.

  All the while that Sir had taught us the words and the dates and the names of those things that we did not need to know, the bird in Bird’s desk did not make a sound.

  It did not sing.

  We all thought it had gone to sleep.

  But the bird in Bird’s desk, when one of us boys looked in Bird’s desk to see it, it was not there.

  It had gone, was what we all thought.

  It had flown the coop.

  But we were boys wrong to think this.

  The bird in Bird’s desk, the bird with the broke wing that Bird had brought with him to school that day, when Bird turned to face us all at the end of this day, when Bird stood with his mouth in the shape of an O, there was the bird, as blue as the sky, it looked out at us from the O of Bird’s mouth.

  And when the bell rang t
o end the day, the bird in Bird’s mouth, it opened its mouth to sing.

  It sung.

  IV.

  We were at school with Sir the man who taught us things we did not need to know when this new boy walked in the room and told Sir and us all his name when Sir asked this boy what it was.

  This new boy’s last name was Crane, Bill Crane, so he sat in the desk right in the back of where Bird sat. It did not take all of us long to see that this boy Bill Crane was not the kind of a boy you’d want to have sit in the seat that is the seat that is right in the back of you. He liked to spit what it was that he’d put in his mouth and hit Bird on the back of the head with it.

  Bird did not turn back his head to face his face at this boy to see what it was that he spat at him.

  Bird took it, to the back of his head, till this boy could see that Bird was not the kind of a boy who would turn back with his head and spit back with his mouth or hit back at this boy with his fists.

  When school let out this boy who liked to spit things at the back of Bird’s head, he told us to call him Dog.

  If you don’t call me Dog, he said, though he did not have to say more. He had a look in his eyes that told us to do what he said, that this kid Crane was not a boy to mess with.

  So we called him Dog. He was new. He had a look in his eyes. We’ll give you a shot, we said with our heads, not with our mouths, to see if you can live up to your name.

  V.

  When Bird was a boy not as big as the boy he was now, back when Bird was not yet the name he’d get called by back when he was just plain Jim or James (if you were like the man whose job it was to teach Bird things he did not need to know), back then when Bird was just plain Jim or James, Bird liked to look with his eyes all day long up at the sky, to watch the birds, to watch the birds give shape to the blue that was up there to see.

  One look in Bird’s blue as sky eyes and you could see that Bird had it in his boy head that if he could he’d one day like to learn how to fly. But what kind of a school would a boy have to go to to learn how to fly like how a bird knew how to do it?

  Men like Sir who taught boys like Bird things that boys like us did not need to know did not teach in his school’s room how a boy like Bird could one day be a bird like a bird in the sky. So Bird knew, he learned this much from men like Sir, that he’d have to learn how to be like a bird in the sky, not a bird in some room, but a bird up in a tree which is where most birds spent most of their time when they weren’t in flight: not in some room in some school for boys but up in trees where the blue of the sky was like a lake that, like fish, birds swam through it when they were a bird in flight.

  There was a tree in our town that was as big as a tree can get to be in a town like ours. It was so big, this tree, that when we stood down at the trunk of it and looked up to see what was up in this tree, or up at its tree’s top, we could not see up to its top. This tree, it was all trunk, is what we’d like you to see, for as far as our eyes could see up it.

  One day, up in this tree, though we could not see him, Bird called down to us boys from up in the top of this tree. We did not know it was Bird till one of us looked up to see the top of this tree as it moved in the wind like a hand that waved down to us. It could have been just the wind, we knew, up there at the top of this tree that made the top of this tree sway the way that it made it. It could have been just some bird, not our Bird, as it cawed out at the sky from its top of the tree nest.

  But no, this was not just some bird that made the top of this tree move back and forth like it did this.

  This was Bird, we knew this in our hearts, though it was hard for us to hear what he said when he said it.

  Bird called out to us and he kept on with these sounds that he cried out as if to say, Look out.

  We looked up, not out.

  Bird cried out but we kept on with our looks looked up.

  That’s when we saw what we saw.

  We saw Bird.

  We saw Bird jump.

  He held out his arms out by his side to hug all the blue up in his arms.

  Like this, with the blue held in his arms, Bird flew out and up to take hold of the blue that was the sky’s blue sky.

  The wind, for a while, held Bird up in it.

  The blue, for a while, held Bird up in it.

  The sky, for a while, held Bird up in it.

  But then it let Bird go.

  The wind, the blue, the sky.

  Bird fell.

  As Bird fell, he did not move his arms to try to make him fly. Bird held his arms straight out by his sides. Like this, Bird dropped like a big drop of rain that fell from the sky’s blue sky.

  Most of us closed our eyes.

  Some of us ran so as not to get hit.

  When Bird hit the ground, face first to the dirt, Bird did not die the way we thought that he would.

  Bird got back up is what Bird did. He rubbed his head. He brushed the dirt and the dust from his hands.

  Bird looked us then all in our eyes.

  What we said to Bird then was, We thought you were a bird?

  When Bird spoke, he spit out two of his front teeth.

  I am, Bird said.

  I’m a bird in the sky.

  A bird in a tree, Bird chirped.

  We thought you’d be dead, some of us said, when you fell the way that you did.

  Some of us said, We could not look up to see it.

  One of us then asked, Why’d you do it? Why’d you jump and choose not to fly?

  I had to know how it would feel, Bird said, to fall and not have the sky be there to hold me up in it.

  I’m a bird, Bird told us. I’m not an egg, Bird said, that breaks when all you do is drop it.

  The birds in our town, when they’d see Bird perched up in a tree, or up on a pole, they saw Bird, not as just some boy up in a tree, they saw him for what he was, as one of them: a bird. Who or what else but a bird, or a cat, would sit perched up in a tree?

  But there was this one bird in our town that did not see bird eye to bird eye with most of these birds. This one bird with a stripe of red that ran down its bird head, this bird saw Bird as what he once was: a boy and not a bird. This bird cawed at Bird to get, to go, to fly, to leave, back down from this, its tree. Bird looked at this bird in its black bird eye, but Bird did not want to fight it. But Bird did not want to leave. Bird did not want to be seen, by this bird, to be not a bird. So Bird and this bird that did not see Bird to be what he was to the rest of us boys—a bird—they fought. This bird took a peck at Bird’s left eye. This bird bit down hard on the tip of Bird’s nose. Bird did not bite, but Bird fought back. Bird took hold of this bird by its black bird wing and he pulled back on it twice till the wing pulled loose from its bone. Bird held this bird wing in his hand and looked at it for what it was. He did not know what to do with it, this wing, though he knew he should make some use of it. He looked at it some more. Then he held his mouth in the shape of an O, but no, this time, Bird did not sing. What Bird did, with this wing in his hand, when he held his mouth in the shape of an O (though he did not with his mouth sing), he took this wing, he brought it up to his mouth, and then like this he ate it.

  VI.

  One day the boys in our town took some fur from some things that we found run down dead on the side of the road, this road that runs its way through and out of our town, and we stuck this fur with dirt and mud so that it stuck to the skin on Bird’s back. The fur, we thought, would make Bird look more like a bird and less like a boy and this would help him to fly. We took dirt and mud and mixed in the fur with it—black and white and brown, all mixed to make a shade like the sky at dawn when the birds like to wake up and sing—till it stuck to the skin on Bird’s back. The fur, it did, it made Bird look more like a bird than he did when he did not have fur stuck with mud and dirt to the skin on his back. Some of us boys said, so that Bird could not hear it, that Bird looked more like a dog—a dead dog run down on the side of a road—than he did like a bird, but if yo
u want to know the truth, what Bird looked most of all like was like a boy who had the fur of some dead things stuck, with mud and with dirt, to the skin on the back of his boy back.

  One day Bird came to school with twigs and leaves and bits of bark stuck to the clothes on his back. It looked as if he’d had a fight with a tree and the tree was what won out.

  The next day Bird came to school wet from head to foot as if he got caught in the rain.

  It had not rained for three weeks, not a drop. The grass in our town had all turned to dirt.

  Sir gave Bird a rag that was used to wipe the black slate that Sir wrote on in chalk all of those things that boys like us did not need to know and then Sir told Bird who the past two days had been late for school to dry his head and his hands off. Bird took it, the rag, and held it in his hand. What we thought was rain dripped off of Bird’s head and back and pooled there at his bare feet.

  The sea, the sea, the sea, the sea.

  This was the word and the sound that Bird made with his mouth, more than just once, though he said it so low Sir could not hear it.

  Where, do tell, are your shoes? Sir said this to Bird when he saw what we saw too.

  This school, Sir said to Bird, it is not some barn. I’m not here to teach you how to milk cows.

  A few of us laughed when Sir said what he did. Those of us who did not laugh gave those who did looks.

  The sea, the sea, Bird said, to make it now six times that Bird had said these sea words, though once more Sir did not hear it.

  The rest of us in class did not know what to make of what or why Bird said what he did.

  What did Bird mean when he said what he said: The sea, the sea, the sea.

  What did boys like us know of that place called the sea? The sea was not the kind of a place that boys like us had been to see.

  The road out of town, we’d been told, by Sir and by men like Sir who were here to teach us those things that we did not need to know, if you took it as far as it will go, we got told, it ends up at the sea.

  That much we knew.