The Amazing Life of Birds

by Gary Paulsen

  I never met him and I wish I had. Imagine how cool it would be to have a fighter pilot for a grandfather.

  So another thing that's happening is my voice.

  I'm talking to my grandmother and right in the middle of the words bird's nest my voice cracks, drops a couple of feet and then splatters out: “… birrrrd neawrkst.”

  It sounded like somebody hit a bullfrog with a big hammer right in the middle of a croak.

  The next few words went up and down and around, cracking and breaking. I shut my mouth and tried it slower.

  “Grandmother?”

  That came out all right.

  “What?”

  “I'm sorry. My voice did something weird. It's like I lost control of it.”

  “Sure. It's changing.”

  “Into what?”

  “You're growing up. It's natural for your voice to change. Other things should be happening too.”

  Oh, Grandma, you can't even imagine. But I didn't say anything about that. I told her about the birds. We hung up and I called Willy.

  “It's all supposed to happen.”

  “What is?”

  “All of it.”

  “Who says?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “All of it?”

  “That's what she says.”

  “Even the ELBOW in the clouds and on the side of the bus?”

  “Are you crazy? I didn't talk about that. She's my grandmother.”

  “But everything else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah. Cool.”

  “See you.”

  “Yeah.”

  And I went to bed but didn't sleep. I thought of my grandfather flying jet fighters and I thought of Amber and wondered how it would be if I was a jet fighter pilot and saved the country or maybe I saved just an old lady crossing the street….

  How would that be? I thought as I fell asleep.

  You know. Without the zit.

  Day Six

  The birds know about me.

  I've always stayed back from the window when I'm watching and I thought they would just see the reflection of the sky in the window and think it was more sky.

  But this morning the mother, or the father (I can't tell which is which but I think it must be the mother because she spends more time at the nest while the other one goes hunting), looked at the glass and then through the glass right into my eyes.

  She didn't look scared. Just curious. I smiled and nodded and she went about her work cleaning the nest. They're very clean. As soon as the baby could move around and balance, he would move to the side of the nest and go to the bathroom over the edge.

  Which is better than a lot of humans. Billy Carson makes the gym bathroom look like …

  Never mind. It's one thing to see it and talk about it, but it looks different when you write it down.

  Anyway the birds are very clean and when I turned around and looked at my room I felt like a pig. It was a complete disaster and I thought, You know, if a little bird can clean her nest that well I can surely clean up my room.

  Which made me think I was sounding like a parent. But still, I started putting things away and that brought out some sort of energy I never had before.

  Pretty soon I was going crazy. Putting everything away, making my bed, tucking in the corners, fluffing the pillows—I even straightened my shoes and aligned them, left and right, left and right, and then in the bathroom I straightened and aligned all the towels and washcloths….

  Totally crazy.

  Luckily my sister was at breakfast and that broke my mood. She's good at that. I think when she gets older and moves away and gets married—as if anybody would marry her—she'll start breaking other things. Like backs. Husbands' backs.

  “You smell bad,” she said as I walked into the kitchen. “Like you rolled around in a trailer trash hair salon …”

  Yeah. Well, I thought I'd seen a hair or two on my face and I took my father's razor and scraped a little and then used some of his aftershave cologne.

  Maybe too much.

  It felt like I was rubbing molten lead on my face and the fumes kept my eyes watering all the way down the stairs. I hoped nobody would notice.

  You've got to love having an older sister.

  Rooster, no ELBOW on the cornflakes box, quick bowl and out the door before anybody else noticed what I smelled like.

  School went about like I expected.

  Just wonderful.

  In gym I found another zit on the side of my face, near my temple, and the gym towels are so coarse that after my shower they ripped the top off of it and it bled. All they had were these big square jock Band-Aids so I put one of those on my forehead because the shower made the small one come off. And another on my temple.

  Things were going well.

  I looked like Frankenstein. All I needed was a bolt through my neck and some really big shoes to make it complete. I could stagger down the halls from class to class scaring the villagers. People chasing me with torches and pitchforks. Babies screaming.

  Doo-Doo the Zit Monster is coming! Run for your lives!

  Just to make it perfect a new girl, who apparently hadn't heard how terrible I was, said hi to me as I was leaving English.

  Rachel.

  Rachel Simpson. Dark hair. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said “Chocolate Forever!” across the front. Looked me right in the eyes as I came out of the room and said: “Hi.”

  “I can't stop to talk right now because I don't want to be late for my next class which is down the hall and to the right so I have to hurry or I'll be late and it's not good to be late for classes and that's why I'm in a hurry and can't stop to talk because I'll be late….”

  My mouth opened and all that came out. My own brain did that to me. It was like a river of stupid, just rolling past my tongue and out of my mouth.

  Once, Amber stopped me in the hall and asked which way it was to the new music room and I couldn't speak at all. Just stood there like I'd been shot with a tranquilizer dart. Some big, doofy rhino with a dart in his butt, head down, swinging left and right just before he drops and they take his temperature and tag his ear with a metal tag that says “Stupid.”

  I liked that better. Quiet. This whole motormouth thing wasn't working.

  Rachel stared at me like she wondered where the volume control was located and I turned to stagger down the hall in my giant shoes, arms out in front of me, and thought: At least she won't notice the zits. But she said: “Did something happen to your head?”

  Must go, I thought, must find master, must find Puberty Master and kill him. Zit Monster must have revenge.

  Arrgh!

  Day Seven

  You know, a week is just seven days.

  Voice changing, parts of body dropping, ELBOWS everywhere, brain disengaged, motormouth in operation, leprosy in full swing—was it possible to just turn into a zit?—all systems in full malfunction.

  Went to bed last night and lay awake for either a few minutes or ten or so years—time doesn't matter any longer. Just stages of disintegration.

  Lay awake and thought—and this will show you just how stupid I was by this point—I thought, Well, this has to be the limit. There can't be anything else that can go wrong.

  Right.

  Woke up in the middle of the night, sat up sweating, in horror, thinking, Yes, but what will I do after college?

  What then?

  I know, I know. Crazy. (As if everything else is going so normally.) But … say I somehow get through all this, you know, alive, and only slightly disfigured by zits.

  And I graduate from high school.

  And I graduate from college.

  And I pay off my student loans.

  Whatever they are. (I just heard they're awful. I'm not sure why you have to borrow money to be a student. It's not like it's fun.)

  Then what?

  I don't even know what I want to be when I grow up.

  I mean I
thought of all the stuff when I was little. Cowboy. Fireman. Somebody with a big hammer that breaks things. (When I was very little.) Heavy-equipment operator. Rock star. (I'm coming back to that one later, I think—you know, when I can sing and play an instrument. Apparently complexion doesn't matter. You can cover it with tattoos or smoke and fireworks.)

  But for now … nothing.

  So why am I worried about what happens after college?

  It took me forever to get back to sleep, especially since the bed was surrounded by snapping little terriers that looked like my sister, yapping: “You smell bad, you smell bad!”

  And when I woke up this morning, guess what?

  On television they said it was all a new day and everything's going to be all right.

  I woke up, took two steps, fell down—apparently it's something I'm going to do for a while—went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. (It should be obvious that this requires a lot of courage.)

  Two.

  New.

  Zits.

  One on the end of my nose. Another below my left eye.

  And, oh, why not, on top, like a crown, a new cowlick in my hair. It sticks up in the exact middle of the back of my head like that bushy little tail you see on the back of a warthog in National Geographic.

  Actually the front end is starting to look like a warthog too.

  So two more Band-Aids (that makes four—and the one on the end of my nose is really attractive), and a bunch of my sister's hair spray on the cowlick while I hold it down with my finger. Then some more of my father's aftershave to cover the smell of the hair spray. Down to the kitchen. Because everything is going so well I knock the cornflakes onto the floor while my sister says I stink and I don't want to pick up the cornflakes because right then the rooster has turned into …

  And then off to school.

  Day Eight

  I've got to have some kind of plan. The way it's working now, or not working, I'm just going from wreck to wreck.

  Take today—and I wish somebody could.

  School was like wilderness on the Discovery Channel and I was a wildebeest and every time I came down to a water hole a crocodile was waiting….

  Well.

  First, biology. Somehow I ended up in this advanced class for science brains. Now, at the moment I am biology—a full-fledged experiment. Somebody should just put me in a bottle of alcohol. Please.

  Add to that fact that what we're supposed to do today is dissect a cat and examine its reproductive organs.

  Reproductive organs.

  In my present condition, I am trying very hard not to think about those words.

  And my lab partner?

  Take a wild guess.

  Right.

  Amber.

  A whole period—not a word. Everybody should try this once in their life. Stand next to somebody over a table with a dead cat on a tray. A black-and-white dead cat, soaked in preservative, a black-and-white dead cat that looks apparently a lot like a cat Amber used to have; and you stand there a whole period while the other person says things like: “Here's the penis,” or “And look, here are the testicles. See how they retract?”

  I grunted and nodded but I was sure if I opened my mouth something so horrible would come out that …

  Death. I prayed for it. At one point I had the scalpel in my hand and I actually thought of suicide but knew I would probably mess it up and wind up as a vegetable in a hospital where someday a doctor named Amber would find me and remember me as the stupid grunting kid over the dead cat and she would say, “Look, there's the …”

  So I didn't kill myself.

  And the period didn't last that long anyway. Just four or five years. And I didn't rush out when the bell rang and have Amber catch up with me to give me my books, which I'd forgotten.

  Oh, no.

  And things didn't get worse.

  Unless you count gym.

  I go to gym and find out there's going to be a mixed-team volleyball tournament.

  Girls and boys mixed in two teams. And who's on my team?

  Rachel.

  Perhaps you have forgotten my condition, my physical appearance. Let me remind you. Four Band-Aids on the face, one on the end of my nose, hair spray holding my cowlick down.

  Kind of.

  As I pulled my T-shirt on over my head I felt/heard a sproiing and looked in the mirror to see the cowlick standing straight up.

  Like a spear as big as two fingers. When I touched it to bend it back down it didn't move. It felt like wood.

  I walked out of the locker room to the gym floor to find that I was right next to Rachel.

  And just so you don't think I'm negative about everything, I tried to take a positive look at my situation.

  All right. The Amber business hadn't gone too well. But, I thought, if I just play volleyball and keep my mouth shut like I did with Amber maybe I can get through this day and then I will never come back to school or leave my room again as long as I live.

  Could work.

  Meanwhile we're just in front of the net, Rachel next to me in the corner. The opposing team serves, the ball loops over, somebody in the back row lobs it to me for an easy setup….

  I would like to say that I two-handed it perfectly over to Rachel and she spiked it down over the net for the point and gave me a smile like we'd been doing this for years and perhaps after the game we could get together for a Coke and maybe take in a movie and later walk through the park in the moonlight holding hands.

  What really happened is that the easy lob caught me on the side of my head and, to protect myself, I hit it with my fist.

  Sideways.

  Into Rachel's face.

  Then I tripped and went headfirst into Rachel.

  “Your hair stuck me!”

  And because it's Rachel and not Amber, my mouth opened.

  “I'm sorry, it's because I've got a skin condition that makes my hair stand up so I had to use spray to keep it down only it didn't stay down the way the doctors said it's supposed to and that's why it stood up and stuck but the condition is only temporary and will go away … soon …”

  Whereupon (I kind of like that word) I looked around and realized the volleyball game had stopped and everybody …

  Even the coach.

  … was listening to me.

  God knows what would happen in industrial arts.

  Probably something nuclear.

  Man, I have got to get some kind of plan.

  Day Nine

  I picked up a three-ring binder notebook with color-coded spacers for different subjects and three clipboards, which I'm going to hang on the wall. I have a good wristwatch with a GPS.

  I'm going to log my destruction. This journal will catalog one level of it, but I think if I keep track and try to write down what I plan to do before I do it maybe it will help scientists understand how all this happens for other unfortunate souls.

  Last night after my perfect day, I dreamed I was a kind of puberty werewolf.

  In my dream I handcuffed myself to the bed and when the puberty full moon came up and I started to change into puberty wolf, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't make a puberty ass of myself.

  Oh, I tried. In the dream I tried to talk to Rachel and not talk to Amber—both of them were standing nearby for some reason—but it didn't work. I tripped over the bed and babbled to Rachel and when my sister came into the dream with a rolled-up newspaper to housebreak me because I'd gone puberty potty on the floor …

  Luckily I awakened before I bit somebody and spread the puberty disease.

  ELBOW.

  Yeah. Right there in front of me, right then. While I was writing. There's no predicting it.

  I don't think the three-ring binder is going to work for one simple reason: I don't have a clue what's coming next.

  Take today. No school, Saturday, so I call Willy and he comes over and we play video games and I work on my model of an F-105, which was the jet fighter my grandfather flew. It was nicknam
ed the Thud and fought in Vietnam, where he was a pilot, and I was trying to figure out what his life was like.

  Not one ELBOW all day. And when it came toward evening Willy called home and spent the night and it was just a normal day.

  That night Willy slept on the cot that turns into a chair and after all the lights were out and we were just lying there he said: “Doo-Doo, you awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever think about how it was when we were kids?”

  “I think we're still kids.”

  “No. When we were little. You remember playing with toy cars and trucks in the dirt?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wasn't that fun?”

  “Yeah. I guess so. Why?”

  “Sometimes I miss it….”

  I had a sudden mental picture of a time when I was maybe three, no, four years old. I had a yellow metal bulldozer and was pretending that I was a heavy-equipment operator making a road in a sandbox in back of my grandmother's house.

  I remembered it so clearly. I was working on a little hill and I leaned down and put my head against the ground so the hill looked bigger and the bulldozer had to push a little mountain.

  The bulldozer became real to me and the sounds I was making were real engine sounds and just then my grandmother came out of the house with a half sandwich and a glass of milk.

  “Working men have to eat,” she said, and I was proud that she'd called me a man and I explained that I was making a road.

  “What will go on it?” she asked.

  “Trucks. Lots of trucks.”

  And for just that time, just that minute, I was a real working man and it was a real bulldozer I was running on a real road….

  I started to cry and was glad it was dark and Willy couldn't see me.

  I knew all that was gone. I would never be able to pretend again, not in that way. The model plane I was building would always be just that, a model. I wouldn't be able to hold it up and make jet sounds and see it flying over Vietnam with my grandfather in the pilot's seat.