Birdy

by William Wharton

  The worst thing of all is the sideshow freak called ‘Zimmy, the Human Fish’. Birdy spends a fortune watching this guy. This is a truly creepy set-up. Zimmy has both his legs chopped off just at the top, so he looks like an egg with a head and arms. He’s fat with gigantic lungs. He has a big sort of swimming pool with a glass front, like a goldfish bowl, and people look through the glass to watch him do his tricks. This guy is Birdy’s hero. You see, Zimmy can stay underwater without breathing, doing tricks down there, like smoking cigarettes, for as much as six minutes at a time.

  I get tired of watching so I spend my time at the act just next to Zimmy. Two madmen drive motorcycles around the inside of a wooden bowl. They race each other. It’s wild. Then, there’s a woman who climbs into a motorcycle with a sidecar and they put a big hairy lion beside her. She revs up the motorcycle and spins around the inside of the bowl, hanging out sideways with that lion roaring all the way around. Christ, it’s amazing what people will do. There’s one young guy in the act who does acrobatics on this motorcycle – standing up with his hands on the handlebars while he’s hanging out sideways on that wooden wall. He has tremendous deltoids and forearms with tattoos all over them. He looks like he’d be one hell of a tough nut to pin.

  Nights, Birdy and I ride the rides. Birdy chooses all the rides that throw you against the sky. There’s one where they start you spinning so you go faster and faster till you’re upside down, with nothing to hold you in your seat. Everybody screams except Birdy. He sits there with a big grin on his face. I do that once, that’s enough.

  Another time I’m trying my strength on one of those things where you swing a sledgehammer and try to ring the bell. I ring it three times in a row and win a little Teddy bear. There are a couple cutee girls watching us and I give it to one of them. We get to talking. They’re from Lansdowne. Birdy stands around but he’s bored. I talk them into going on the roller coaster with us. One has red hair and nice beginning tits pushing out her sweater. The other is quieter, more the type for Birdy, if there is any type of girl for Birdy.

  On the roller coaster, I hold her hand in her lap, tucked sort of between her legs. I can feel the slippery flesh under her dress.

  I put my arm over her shoulder and she leans her head against me. While the car is clickety-clicking up for the downhill run, I look back at Birdy and his girl. He’s leaning over the edge looking down and she’s looking straight ahead, holding her own hand in her lap. She smiles at me; Birdy doesn’t notice. He could even be thinking of climbing out of the car and jumping. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  After that, I talk them into going for a walk along the beach, and we walk over to where we have our nest. We get out the blankets and spread them. The girls are getting nervous. They’re here with their parents and have to be home by ten o’clock. I ask Birdy what time it is; he looks up and says it’s about nine-fifteen. I’ve never known Birdy to be wrong about the time. Birdy’s girl is more nervous than mine. She wants to take off right away. My girl, whose name is Shirley, says maybe Birdy and Claire, that’s the other girl, ought to take a walk down to the clock at the parking lot to see what time it really is. She looks at me. Now, I’m getting nervous myself. I’ve got a hard-on, and here it is coming right at me.

  As soon as they’re gone, we get down on the blanket and start kissing. She opens her mouth and sticks her tongue between my lips. I begin feeling her up and then, bango, I come off. I try not to let on but she must know. We keep kissing, but it’s not the same. She lifts her sweater and puts my hand under. I touch her bra and can feel her little nipple, hard, under it. She looks around, reaches back, and undoes the bra. I put my hand over her whole tit. Jesus, my hard is coming on again. Just then, we hear Birdy and Claire. Shirley pushes away and hooks herself up. She brushes back her hair and stands up. I get up, too.

  ‘It’s almost nine-thirty, Shirley. We’d better get home.’

  Claire stays out from under the boardwalk. Birdy stretches himself on the blanket where Shirley and I just were.

  ‘OK, party pooper. Good-bye, Al. See you, Birdy. Maybe tomorrow night about eight, near the merry-go-round, OK?’

  I say OK and they leave. I’m still shaking, and the inside of my jockey shorts are slimy with jit. I go down toward the ocean as if I’m going to take a piss. I wipe myself off. I never knew any girl like that before.

  We meet a couple more times before they leave. Birdy’s bored with the whole thing and Claire’s bored with Birdy, but Shirley and I are going hot and heavy. One night, we’re down on the blanket and I get my finger under her panties. I can feel her little hole and I slip my finger in. That’s getting close. But she pushes me away, and that’s it.

  When the girls leave I’m ready to go, too, but Birdy’s still wrapped up with his swimming. I swim some myself, but Birdy’s in all day long. He keeps going without stopping till he’s pooped, and blue with cold. Then he’ll come out and lie face down in the sand till he gets his wind back, then out he’ll go again. It doesn’t look to me as if he’s having any fun, but he has a big ear-to-ear grin on his face all the time. He’s only swimming, but he’s talking about ‘flying’. That’s typical Birdy.

  Well, after a few weeks, we run out of money and decide to sell the bikes. This is our big mistake. We go into a bike shop, and while we’re trying to sell them I noticed the lady go into the back and phone but I don’t think much of it. The guy keeps us in front dickering over price, and we’re about ready to walk out when two cops come in the door.

  They take us down to the station house, leaving the bikes at the bike store. First, they accuse us of stealing the bikes, want us to show some papers to prove we own them. Who the hell has bike-ownership papers? Then they find us on the run-away list. Birdy’s old lady’s turned us in. We’d both written saying we were all right and we’d be back in time for school. What a bitch.

  Well it all comes out that they ship us home on a train first-class with a stupid bald-headed cop. He goes all the way, eating in the dining car and everything. They stick our parents for a ninety-two dollar bill and we never see the bikes again.

  My old man beats the living bejesus out of me. He chases me around the cellar with his big leather belt, hitting me with it or punching, kicking, whatever he can get me with. The old lady’s standing at the top of the cellar steps yelling, ‘Vittorio, VITTORIO! BASTA VITTORIO!’ Nothing’s going to be enough for old Vittorio except to kill me. Finally, there’s nothing for it but to roll up in a bundle on the floor and pretend I’m dead. I just about am. I swear, there on the floor nobody’s ever going to get me so they can beat me up like that again. Somehow, I’ll get so I can beat the crap out of Vittorio, too. I’ll do it before he’s too old to appreciate it, if it kills me. I’m curled up on the floor with my hands over my eyes and ears, and he’s swinging away at me and that’s what I’m thinking. What a lot of shit!!

  I’m in bed for a week. I look like I’ve fallen off three gas tanks. I’m black-and-blue, sore all over. Mostly I’m sore inside. The old lady won’t let me out of the house till the worst swelling is down on my face. Old Vittorio’s a strong son-of-a-bitch. You wipe big joints and cut six-inch steel pipe all day and you get strong. I pin the bastard on my sixteenth birthday.

  She is so beautiful; she’s everything I’ve imagined, everything I want to be. It’s impossible she’s mine, not really mine, just with me. If she doesn’t care to stay, I’ll let her go. I want her to love me. I want us to be close, as close as living things can be to each other. How close can we come?

  When Al and I finally paid back the money, my father said I could have a bird in my room as long as I do my schoolwork and help around the house with chores. I can’t keep a pigeon indoors, so I decide on a canary.

  First, I read everything I can about canaries. I find out that the original canaries came from Africa and were shipwrecked on the Canary Islands. They were dark green. The canary is valued because it can sing. However, only the male canary sings. The female looks exactly like the
male but cannot sing. She is kept in cages for breeding purposes only. It seems unfair to the females.

  I like canaries because of the way they fly. The canary has an undulating flight. It flies up into an almost stall, then loops down, then up to a stall and down. It’s like Tarzan swinging through the trees but without vines. It’s the way I’d like to fly. A few finches hang around down by the Cosgrove barn. I’ve watched them with my binoculars; they fly that way.

  I could never keep a wild bird in a cage. If a bird already knows how to fly against the sky, I could never cage it. I know I have to buy a bird born in a cage, a bird whose parents, grandparents, ancestors had lived only in cages.

  There are many types of canaries. Some are called choppers and sing a loud song; their beaks open, ending each note by closing the beak. Others are called rollers. They sing with beaks closed and deep in the throat. There are different kinds of rollers and choppers and there are contests for singing. There are also various shapes and sizes of canaries; some are so peculiarly shaped they can scarcely fly.

  I decide to buy a young female because they’re less expensive. I’m interested in flying, not singing. I buy a bird magazine that comes out every month; it gives addresses of people who sell birds. I start looking at all the canary aviaries I can find, and get to, on my bicycle. It’s two months before I find her.

  She’s in a large aviary in the back yard of a lady called Mrs Prevost. Mrs Prevost is fat and has little feet. She has aviaries in her back yard and breeding cages on the sun porch. She doesn’t care much about song or color or how her birds fly. I don’t think she particularly raises them for money either. She just likes canaries.

  She goes into the aviary and all the birds come flying down to her and land on her arms or on her head. She’s trained the birds and has some who’ll hop up and down little ladders or ring bells to get food. She has some she can take out of the cage on a perch. They won’t fly off the perch even when she waves it around.

  Mrs Prevost looks carefully for cats and hawks before she takes out a bird. She’s terrific; she should be in a circus.

  Mrs Prevost lets me sit in the aviary and watch her birds as much as I want. It’s in her aviary I decide I like canaries more than pigeons. It’s mostly in the sound of wings. Pigeon wings whistle and have a crackly stiff feather sound. Canary wings make practically no sound at all, only the kind of sound you make with a fan if you flip it quickly, a pressure against the air.

  I sit out there in the aviary with the females every Saturday for over a month. I never see Mr Prevost. Mrs Prevost brings me cups of tea in a thermos when it’s cold. Sometimes she puts on a coat and sits there with me. She points out different birds and tells me who the parents are and how many were in the nest and which ones got caught in the wire or were sick so she had to save them. She tells me which ones she’s thinking of breeding and why she’s choosing them. She’s going to breed thirty females that next year. She chooses them to breed just because these females are good mothers or come from good mothers. She isn’t trying to breed for anything special except more canaries. Mrs Prevost would sure make a good mother but she doesn’t have any children. I didn’t ask her; she told me.

  She shows me one of her females who’s six years old and has given over sixty birds. This female comes and sits on Mrs Prevost’s finger. Mrs Prevost transfers her to my finger one afternoon. She perches there a few minutes while Mrs Prevost leans down and talks to her. Mrs Prevost talks to her birds. She doesn’t peep or whistle; she just talks in a low voice the way you’d talk to a baby.

  Mrs Prevost hates cats and hawks. She has a continual war with them. There’re always stray cats coming in hoping for an easy meal. She’s tried fencing, but you can’t fence out a cat. She says she can’t get herself to poison them. A couple times there’re cats sitting outside the aviary, turning their heads back and forth watching the birds fly. Mrs Prevost’d dash out on her tiny feet and chase them. I tell her she ought to get a dog.

  Once, when I’m sitting in the aviary, one of the cats comes and doesn’t see me. It must scare hell out of a bird having a cat with those little slit green eyes watching – twisting its tail back and forth. After a while, this one can’t wait and throws itself against the wire. It hangs there with its mouth open, pointed teeth against a thin ridged pink top of mouth. The sharp claws are wrapped into the wire. It almost makes me glad I’m not a bird.

  I saw Birdie the first day I sat in the aviary. I actually keep going back just to watch her but I don’t tell Mrs Prevost this. The aviary is taller than it is wide either way. Birdie is the only bird who flies around the inside of the upper part of the aviary. The others fly from perch to perch or down to the floor to eat but Birdie flies around and around in banked circles. It’s the kind of thing I’d do myself if I were a bird and lived in that aviary.

  Birdie is very curious. There’s a piece of string hanging from the top of the aviary. It’s not more than two inches long. Birdie has to turn herself upside down to pull it and she hangs there minutes at a time, pulling and tugging, doing her best to hang on and backing off with her wings, trying to pull it loose.

  There’s another thing I like better about canaries than pigeons. Pigeons do a lot of walking. They swing their short bodies back and forth like a duck and walk around on short legs, or sometimes when they’re courting, they pull themselves up and take short soldier-like marching steps. Canaries never walk. If they move on the ground, they hop. Most times a hop means a little flit with the wings. It makes them look so independent. They hop in place, then hop to another place. I’ve noticed robins both running and hopping but canaries never walk.

  Sometimes, Birdie’d just hop all over the cage. She’d pick up a tiny stone here and move it over there. She’d dig in the sand with her beak. She won’t bring anything out, just digging. It’s like she’s doing some kind of bird housekeeping.

  Then, sometimes, she’ll hunch back and take a flying leap for the highest perch. This takes a careful aim because perches are spread all over the place. Mrs Prevost puts in lots of perches; she doesn’t think much about birds having long free places to fly. Birdie flies between the perches as if they aren’t there. She’s beautiful.

  I go downtown and hunt around junk shops till I find a cage. It costs twenty-five cents. I take it home to fix up. First, I scrape all the paint and rust from the bars. There are two broken places; I repair them. I straighten and clean the tray in the bottom. I boil and wash out the food and water dishes. It isn’t a big cage, fifteen inches deep, thirty long and twenty high. I hate to think of taking poor Birdie away from the big cage and her friends to put her into this small cage, alone. I know I’ll make it up somehow.

  After it’s all clean, I paint the cage white. I give it two coats till it looks practically new. I put some newspaper in the bottom, and bird gravel. I buy roller mix seed and put it in one cup and fresh water in the other. I’m ready to bring Birdie home.

  I carry her on my bike in a shoe box with holes punched in the sides. I can hear her scrambling around inside, sliding on the slippery bottom of the box. I wonder what a bird thinks when her whole life is suddenly changed like this. She isn’t one year old and she’s lived her whole life either in the nest or the breeding cage, or in the aviary with other birds. Now she’s in a dark box with no perches, she can’t see and can’t fly. I speed home as fast as I can.

  I go in the back door and up the back stairs to my room. I don’t want to show her to anyone.

  I cut a hole carefully in the end of the box and put the hole next to the cage door. In only a few seconds she hops into the cage. She lands on the floor and stands straddle-legged. She looks around. She seems even more beautiful than she did in the aviary. I don’t want to scare her, so I back up to the other side of the room where I have my binoculars. I turn the chair around and rest the binoculars on the back of the chair so I can watch her without my arms getting tired.

  After a few little hops, rattling sand on the paper, she hops up onto t
he middle perch and peeps. It’s a single note going from low to high and watery. It’s the first time I hear her voice. In the aviary, there’s so much sound you can’t hear any particular bird.

  She cocks her head and looks from side to side. She knows I’m there across the room and she looks at me first with one eye, then the other. Canaries don’t look at any particular thing with both eyes at once. Most birds don’t. They only see with both eyes when they’re not really looking at anything. When they want to see something particular, they look with one eye and blind out the other. They don’t close it, just blind it.

  Birdie moves lightly and quickly, heavy air means nothing. She hops up to the top perch and wipes her beak, sharpening it, checking, the way dogs sniff trees.

  She’s yellow, the yellow of a lemon. Her tail feathers and wing tips are lighter, almost white. The feathers on her upper legs are lighter too. Her legs are orange-pink, lighter than pigeon legs, delicately thin. She has three toes forward and one back like all tree birds, and her nails are long and thin, translucent, with a fine vein down the center. She’s medium-sized for a canary and has a rounded, very feminine head; her eyes are bright black, her beak exactly the color of her legs. Small pink nostril holes are tucked under the feathers of her head at the top of her beak.

  She peeps again and turns around on the perch to face the other way. She does this without seeming to use her wings. She springs lightly up, twists her body, and is facing the other way. It’s the same move an ice skater makes when she jump turns, only with much less effort. Birdie does this while still eyeing me left and right, shaking her head back and forth, a bird ‘no’.

  Her eyes lose focus and she goes into total vision. She isn’t looking at me anymore. She jumps down to the bottom perch and sees the water cup. She tips her head in, dips her beak into the water, and tilts her head back. She does this three times. Like pigeons, she can’t swallow up. She lets the water flow down into her throat. It looks as if she closes her beak over a certain small quantity of water, not more than a drop, then holds it till she tilts up so it rolls down her throat.