Birdy

by William Wharton

  ‘I can’t hold on that long. It’s all right, I can do it.’

  He pulls his feet up to the next rung and tries to reach with one hand to the top edge of the tank. I try to reach for him but I’m absolutely paralyzed. I can’t make myself go near that edge. Birdy hangs there with his ass leaning out into the dark. I get down on my stomach and try to reach as far as I can. I get my hand to where he can reach it if he lets go with one of his hands. Birdy says, ‘When I say three, I’ll let go and grab your hand.’

  Birdy counts, lets go and I catch him. Now we’re really shit up a crick. I can’t pull without slipping down off the tank. We’re just balanced there; every time he moves, I slip a little further toward the edge. That’s when I pee my pants. Jesus, I’m scared. Birdy looks back down.

  ‘I’ll try making it to the coal pile.’

  I don’t know what he means; maybe I don’t want to know.

  With his free hand, Birdy arranges the burlap bag in front of him, then lets go of me. He hovers for a second, turning himself around against the side of the tank, then leans forward into the air and shoves off. I can see him all the way down. He stays flat out and kicks his feet like somebody swimming. He keeps that burlap sack stretched across in front of him with his arms spread out.

  The first time I flew, it was being alive. Nothing was pressing under me. I was living in the fullness of air; air all around me, no holding place to break the air spaces. It’s worth everything to be alone in the air, alive.

  Birdy does get over to the coal pile and, just before he lands, closes up into a ball, twists and lands on his back. He doesn’t get up. I can barely see him, a white spot in the black coal. It’s a long way down.

  I don’t expect him to be dead. This is stupid because it has to be over a hundred feet from the top of that tank. I even remember to bring the pigeons with me. I climb down the tank ladder, not thinking too much, just scared. I run around to the coal pile. The night watchman must’ve been asleep.

  Birdy’s sitting up. He looks dead white against the coal; blood’s dripping out his nose and into the corners of his mouth. I sit down on the pile beside him. We sit there; I don’t know what to do; I can’t really believe it’s happened. The tank looks even higher from down here than it did from on top.

  Birdy tries to talk a couple times but his wind’s knocked out of him. When he does talk his voice is rattly.

  ‘I did it. I flew. It was beautiful.’

  It’s for sure he didn’t fall off that tank. If he’d fallen, he’d’ve been smashed.

  ‘Yeah, you flew all right; want me to go get somebody?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  Birdy tries to stand up. His face goes whiter; then he starts to vomit and there’s a lot of blood. He sits back on the coal pile and passes out.

  I’m rat scared now! I run around to the night watchman’s shack! He won’t believe me! I have to drag him out to Birdy. He calls an ambulance. They come and take Birdy off to the hospital.

  I stand there with the birds in the bag. Nobody pays much attention to me. Even the ambulance men don’t believe he fell off the tank; think I’m lying. I stop on my way home and put our birds in the loft. I hang around there for a while; I hate to go home. Something like that happens and all the things you think are important don’t seem like much.

  Birdy shuffles over to the john in the corner to take a crap. No seat on the toilet or anything. No privacy. God, what a hell of a place for someone like Birdy.

  I turn around. I’m looking up and down the corridor when the orderly or guard or whatever he is sees me. It must be some crummy job walking up and down a corridor checking on crazies.

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘He’s taking a crap.’

  This character looks in. Maybe he likes to see guys take a crap. Maybe he’s a part-time nut. I ask if he’s a civilian. You can’t tell anything when they all wear those white coats. He could even be a piss-ass officer or something. Never know in a hospital. He tells me he’s a CO. I think at first he’s trying to put on he’s the commanding officer. Turns out CO means conscientious objector. He’s been working in this hospital most of the war.

  ‘You want to knock off for lunch now? I have to feed him anyway.’

  ‘Whaddaya mean, “feed him”; can’t he feed himself?’

  ‘Nope. He won’t eat anything; wants to be fed. I have to spoon-feed him. No trouble or anything, not like some of them. I just shovel it in. He squats on the floor and I put it in.’

  ‘Holy Christ! He really is a loon! Won’t even eat?’

  ‘He’s nothing. Guy across the hall there won’t wear any clothes. Squats in the middle of his cell like your friend here; but if anybody tries to go in, he shits in his hand and throws it. Boy, he’s fun to feed. More like a zoo than a hospital on this ward.’

  He looks in the cell. I look too. Birdy’s finished. He’s squatting on the floor, in about the same spot, like the pigeons after the el goes by. The orderly comes with a tray of food. He takes the key, opens the door and goes in. He tells me to stay out. He squats down beside Birdy and starts feeding him. I can’t believe it! Birdy actually flaps his arms like a baby bird being fed! The orderly looks around at me and shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘I forgot to tell you, Doctor Weiss wants to see you after lunch.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Weiss is the doctor-major. I look in once more at Birdy and go down the corridor. I know where the cafeteria is because I had breakfast there. It’s really a cafeteria, too, not a mess hall; doctors and nurses eat there; good food. I eat and think about Birdy being fed like a baby pigeon. What the hell could’ve happened?

  When I go to see Weiss, I ask what’s the matter with Birdy, but he’s sly and manages not to answer. Suddenly, he gets to be the major talking to the sergeant.

  He’s watching me with a shit-eating grin on his face as if I’m some kind of nut myself. He starts out asking about what they’re doing to me at Dix. I tell him about how the jaw is smashed and how they put in the metal part.

  When they first told me, I thought I’d have a steel jaw like Tony Zale. Doctor there tells me, actually I’ll have to be very careful, a punch could undo the pins and shock me into the brain. So now I’ve got a glass jaw. That’s about right.

  I’m telling Weiss all this stuff and then I see him. He’s smiling, hmming and ahhing just to keep me going. He doesn’t give a damn. I decide I don’t want to tell too much about Birdy.

  He asks how long Birdy and I were close friends. I tell him we’ve been friends since we were thirteen. He asks this in a way so you know he really wants to know if we were queer together; if we jacked each other off, or gave each other blow jobs. I’ll say this, there’s a lot of that crap in the infantry. A four-hour stint in a foxhole with the wrong guy can get awfully funky.

  Actually, I can’t remember Birdy being interested in sex at all. Take that whole scene with Doris Robinson. If he couldn’t make it with her he’s hopeless. Maybe all he had it for was birds. This quack’d sure flip if I told him that.

  The doctor-major keeps trying to pump me about Birdy. I’m completely turned off. If he could just look sincere. He knows I’m holding back. He’s no dummy. I have to be careful. Under that white coat he’s solid brass. He’s liable to lower the boom on this buck-ass sergeant any minute. So far, he’s been talking like a doctor but I’m waiting for the old military manner to strike again. All doctors in the army ought to be privates.

  Just as I’m thinking this, he comes out with it: ‘OK, Sergeant, you go back there this afternoon and see if you can make some contact. It’s probably the best chance we’ve got. I’ll make an appointment to see you again here, tomorrow morning at nine.’ He stands up to dismiss me. I fuck him with the salute and hold it till he returns it. Son-of-a-bitch.

  On the way back to Birdy, I have a little talk with the CO orderly. Nice guy; probably not queer. I get him to talk about being a CO. He says he spent some time being starved for experiments on how lit
tle food a person really needs and then he was up in a forest planting trees and he’s been here at the hospital the last eighteen months. He tells me all this as if it’s what’s supposed to be. He’s a bit like Birdy; hard to hurt. Real losers never lose.

  He asks me about my face and I tell him. He’s truly sympathetic, not like Weiss. You can see it in his face and how he reaches up and touches his own chin to see if it’s there. He opens Birdy’s door for me and I get my chair from the corridor.

  Birdy’s still squatting in the middle of the floor and staring up at the window when I come in

  – Hey Birdy! Just had a long talk with Weiss. He’s sure one sweet pain in the ass. If I were crazy, I’d pretend I wasn’t, just to get out of his fat hands. How about that?

  Birdy actually turns his head. He doesn’t turn all the way around and look at me. He turns half way, the way a bird does when it wants to look at something directly with one eye. Of course, Birdy isn’t looking at me, he’s looking at the blank wall across the room.

  – Birdy! How about the time we took off and went to Wildwood. I’ll never forget the way you jumped around in the waves.

  I have the feeling Birdy’s listening. His shoulders are lowered as if he’s roosting and not getting ready to take off. It could be just my imagination, but I don’t feel alone. I keep talking.

  After the gas tank, Birdy was in the hospital more than a month. It was all in the newspapers about how he’d fallen from the tank and hadn’t been killed. There was a picture with a dotted line showing where he’d jumped from, and an X where he landed. Reporters asked me what’d happened and I never should’ve said anything about flying.

  Naturally, the whole business with the pigeons comes out. Birdy’s father tears down the loft and burns the wood. The pigeons fly around there for a week looking for the loft. It’s the place they’re homed to. Those first blue bars fly up to Birdy’s house and hang around there till his mother poisons them. I don’t know what happens to the pigeon witch.

  The kids at school ask me the same questions about Birdy flying. Even before he gets out of the hospital, they’re calling him Birdy, the bird boy. Sister Agnes has us all write letters to Birdy and we collect money to send flowers. I don’t say anything much in my letter; I don’t tell him what’s happened to the loft and the blue bars.

  When Birdy comes out of the hospital, he looks even runtier than usual and his hair’s long. He’s pale as a girl. I tell him about the loft but not about the blue bars being poisoned. He doesn’t ask. We’re in the eighth grade; Birdy catches. up and graduates with us.

  After the gas tank, I knew I had to fly. Without thought, a bird denies all in a moment, with an effortless flick of wings. It would be worth everything to learn this.

  If I could get close to birds and enjoy their pleasure it would be almost enough. If I could watch birds like watching a movie and become inside them, I’d know something of it. If I could get close to a bird as a friend and be there when it flies and feel what it’s thinking, then, in a certain way, I would fly. I wanted to know all about birds. I wanted to be like a bird and I still wanted to fly; really fly.

  That summer, Birdy and I take off. We don’t plan it. We’re always bicycling down to Philadelphia and the Parkway. We’d go down there, play around the art museum, the aquarium, and the Franklin Institute. There’s a place on Cherry Street where they have a room full of bird pictures. We used to go look at them. Birdy’s pictures are better. Birdy says artists don’t know much about live birds. He says a dead bird isn’t a bird anymore; it’s like trying to draw a fire by looking at ashes.

  We’d go down to South and Front streets where there are hock shops and stores full of live chickens and pigeons for eating. One day we buy a pair of meat pigeons. We spend all day shopping for them. We take them over to city hall where there’re some tremendous flocks. We pull a feather out of each wing, put the feathers in our shirt pockets, and throw the birds up with the others. We watch all afternoon while they find a place in the flock.

  I show Birdy how if you get at a certain angle, the big statue of Billy Penn on top of city hall looks as if he has a gigantic hard-on. We have great fun there in the square with the pigeons; every time some ladies pass by, we start pointing up to Billy Penn and they look up to see old Billy with his dong sticking up.

  One day we decide to bicycle across the bridge and into New Jersey. We get across and hang around Camden. We’re going to go right back that afternoon, but then we see a sign pointing to Atlantic City.

  We have our whole bankroll with us, money we made selling pigeons: twenty-three dollars. Usually we kept it in the hole where we used to keep the rope ladder, but we have it with us this time.

  We start down back roads leading toward Atlantic City. Now we know what we’re doing, we start watching for cops. We want to sack out before it gets dark.

  That night, we sleep in a tomato field. It’s summer but it’s cold. We each eat about ten tomatoes, with some bread and coke we bought at a store in Camden. In the morning, when we wake up we’re frozen. I begin to think of going back. Birdy wants to go on to the ocean; he’s never seen it. His folks are poorer than mine and they don’t have a car. Already I’m going to get the shit beat out of me for staying out all night so what the hell. What can they do anyway? Old Vittorio can just beat me up again; he can’t kill me.

  That afternoon we get to Atlantic City. Birdy goes berserk when he sees the ocean. He likes everything about it. He likes the sound and he likes the smell; he likes the sea gulls. He runs up and down the beach at the edge of the water flapping his arms. Lucky it’s late afternoon; not many people to see him.

  Then, Birdy takes off, running, flying, jumping into the water. He still has his clothes on. He gets knocked on his ass by the first wave. He’s dragged out by the undertow. I think he’s going to drown, but then he stands up soaking wet, laughing madly, and falls backwards into it just as another wave crashes over him. Any ordinary person would’ve been killed. He rolls around in the water thrashing and throwing himself into the waves. Some girls start to watch and laugh. Birdy doesn’t care.

  When he comes out, he flops in the sand and rolls. He rolls and rolls till he rolls limp under the water and under the waves deep into the water again. He rolls back and forth in the surf like a log or a dead person. Finally, I have to drag him out. For Christ’s sake, it’s getting late, and now his clothes are all wet.

  Birdy doesn’t care. We wheel our bikes along the boardwalk to Steel Pier. We have a great time buying as many hot dogs as we want and riding all the rides. We buy a two-pound box of saltwater taffy for dinner; and move on back up the beach to where it’s deserted. We find a good place with warm sand and bury ourselves in it.

  I tell Birdy about his mother poisoning the blue bars. We decide not to go home and not to write where we are, either. Hell, my old lady’s always complaining about how much I eat; it’ll save her having to feed me. I’m sick of having the old man jump on me, too. Birdy says that, except for falling off the gas tank, swimming in the ocean is probably the closest thing to flying. Says he’s going to learn to swim.

  Nobody ever learned to swim the way Birdy does. He doesn’t want to swim on top of the water like everybody else. He goes out under the waves and does what he calls ‘flying in water’. He holds his breath till you think he’s drowned and then comes up someplace where you aren’t expecting him at all like a porpoise or something. That’s when he starts all the crappy business with breath holding, too.

  In the water I was free. By a small movement, I could go up and move in all directions without effort. But it was slower, thicker, darker. I could not stay. Every effort would not let me stay more than five minutes.

  We have left the water. Air is man’s natural place. Even if we are forced to walk in the depths of it, we live in the air. We cannot go back. It is the age of mammals and birds.

  One hundred billion birds, fifty for every man alive and nobody seems to notice. We live in the slime of an immens
ity and no one objects. What must our enslavement seem to the birds in the magnitude of their environment?

  We decide to take off down the coast to Wildwood. That’s the place my family usually goes every summer. Atlantic City is bigger but Wildwood is more open, more natural.

  We roll down on the bikes. We’re still looking out for cops. It’s terrific, free feeling, no house you have to go back to, nobody waiting for you to come in and eat; nothing to do but roll along and look at the scenery. I never knew before how much I was locked in by everything.

  On the way down, we decide we’ll sleep on the beaches at night, spend the days there in the sunshine. We’ll lift whatever we need from the stores. There’re also lots of garbage cans behind the restaurants where we can find all the food we need. We’ll buy a couple old blankets at the Salvation Army and a pot to cook in under the boardwalk.

  It works out exactly like that. Things hardly ever do. All we spend any money on after we get the blankets and the cooking pot is the rides at night and saltwater taffy. We get to be dedicated saltwater taffy addicts. We both like the kind with red or black stripes and a strong taste.

  We don’t have any trouble with cops. There’re all kinds of people down on vacation, and so a couple strange kids are hardly noticed. At nights we’ve fixed a hidden nest down where the boardwalk is only about three feet higher than the sand. We tuck ourselves in there and hide our cooking pot in the sand during the day.

  Birdy is going crazy with his swimming. All day long he practices holding his breath, even when he isn’t swimming. I’d be sitting there talking to him and I’d see his eyes are bulging and then he’d blow out his breath and say, ‘Two minutes, forty-five seconds.’ He asks me to count for him sometimes. The way he wants me to count is Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two, and so on; really nuts. All day he’s in the water ‘flying’, coming up once in a great while and taking a deep breath. He’s found the local public library and is reading about whales and porpoises and dolphins. He’s a maniac. When Birdy gets started on something like that, there’s nothing you can do.