Birdy

by William Wharton

  ‘What made you decide to be a psychiatrist, sir?’

  Not a move. He could be a Jewish Sicilian.

  ‘I mean, sir, did you know when you were in high school or did it slip up on you the way things do, sir?’

  Weiss grunts in his throat. These are fair questions. He leans forward on the desk, still holding himself down with his hands.

  ‘Well, Alfonso; it was in medical school, actually. You know the old joke about “What makes a psychiatrist?”’

  I know it but I’m going to make him say it. I smile back. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, they say a psychiatrist is a Jewish doctor who can’t stand the sight of blood.’

  Oh, great. I don’t know what he expects me to do but I laugh. I laugh just a bit too long. Most Sicilians have a built-in fake laugh they can bring out for any occasion. They can laugh at their own funeral if it’s to their advantage. It’s a laugh that can fool anybody except another Sicilian.

  ‘That’s a good one, sir.’ I’m not going to cut and fill for him either. ‘But, seriously, sir. How did you get interested in dealing with crazies and loons as a profession?’

  ‘Well, Alfonso, all my work isn’t with abnormals you know. Many people will have some little thing that’s bothering them and I can help them work it out and make their lives better.’

  ‘The army pays for this, sir?’

  He’s moving in fast for the kill. He’s a smooth son-of-a-bitch all right. He’s just itching to get inside my head somehow.

  ‘The army isn’t all bad, Sergeant. Fighting wars is never pleasant under any conditions, but the army takes care of its own.’

  ‘It’s certainly taken care of me, sir.’ I give this to him straight on. He’s good. He just smiles back at me.

  ‘Alfonso, tell me something. What was your father like?’

  ‘My father’s still alive, sir.’

  He looks down at the pile of papers under his hands. There can’t be anything there, not about my old man anyway. He’s acting psychiatrist again. ‘Oh, yes. I mean, what is he like; how do you get along with him?’

  ‘Oh, he’s a great guy, sir. We were always like buddies. He used to take me out on camping trips and we made model airplanes together; things like that. He’s really a great guy; wonderful to my mother, too. She’s the best mother in the world.’

  Maybe a few verses of ‘Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy’ would fit in here.

  ‘Ah, yes. And what does your father do for a living, Alfonso?’

  ‘He cleans out sewers for the city, sir. He calls himself a plumber but what he actually does is shovel shit all day. He comes in the back way nights, takes a shower in the cellar and scrubs himself with a big laundry scrub brush. He keeps his fingernails cut so short, you’d think he bit them. That’s to keep the shit out from under them, sir. When he comes up to eat dinner, you’d never know he’d been standing in shit all day. He’s just a great guy, sir. I’ve never heard him complain even once and he gives everything he earns to my mother. We’re poor but we’re clean and honest, sir. We’re glad to have a chance in this great country of ours.’

  Right here a quick ‘And Who Do You See, It’s Little Orphan Annie’ would be good. Should I tell him I have a strange dog with holes instead of eyes?

  I’m keeping my face straight through all this. That Sicilian blood is coming through. Uncle Nicky would be proud of me. Uncle Nicky’s making a fortune from the war. He sells certification of allergy from legitimate doctors at fifteen hundred bucks. He’s clearing a grand each. One of those certificates is a sure 4-F. He’s got another racket going, too. He’s opened ‘clinics’ where you can go and have your arm broken. Guys at the end of their furloughs go in and he breaks their arms for a price. Then they don’t get shipped overseas with their outfits. You go to him, he gives you anaesthetic and he has a little machine like a guillotine, only instead of a blade it has a heavy blunt piece of lead. Clump! You wake up and your arm’s already in a cast and in a sling. You have X-rays and a doctor’s signature, the whole thing. He does legs too, but that’s more complicated and more dangerous. He’s better at arms. If they’d ever’ve let me come home before the fucking war was over I was going to have myself done. Nicky’d’ve done it for free. Krauts beat him to it; didn’t charge me either, and I’ll get a pension on top. I wonder if Weiss’d believe all this if I told him.

  He’s ruffling through the papers some more.

  ‘Sergeant, can you give me any information about the patient? You were close to him. Was there ever anything you observed that would give a hint to explain this sudden, complete catatonic state and the bizarre cringing positions he gets into?’

  We’re back to Sergeant again. I can’t believe it! Weiss still hasn’t caught on that Birdy thinks he’s a canary! Dumb shit!

  ‘He was always perfectly normal, sir. Like me, poor but from a nice family. He lived in a big three-story house with lots of grounds around it. He was good in school, not a genius, sir, but he was in the academic curriculum and usually got B’s. Could you tell me, sir; what happened to him? It must’ve been something awful to make him like this.’

  Let’s see him squirm out of it this time. He lifts the papers one at a time. I don’t think he’s looking at them, reading anything, I mean; he’s stalling for time. Maybe he’s hoping my question will go away. He might know something and not want to tell me, or, more likely, he doesn’t know any more than Renaldi.

  ‘I’ve spoken to his mother and father. They came down to verify the identification. He’d been reported as missing for over a month. They recognized him but there was no recognition from the patient. At that time, if anyone came near he would go into frantic jumping and twisting activity, falling to the floor. It was almost as if he were trying to escape.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like him at all, sir.’

  He can’t be that stupid. He’ll catch onto the bird business soon. I wonder if Birdy’s old lady and old man told about Birdy raising the canaries. They probably wouldn’t think it meant anything. But they’d sure as hell tell about Birdy and me running away that time.

  ‘Sir, perhaps I should tell you, it might be important; the patient and I ran away. It was when we were thirteen; we went to Atlantic City and then to Wildwood in New Jersey.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Yes, yes, yes. Yes, fathead, we did it all right. He’s interested now. I figure I’ll feed him a bit at a time. He looks down at his papers. He’s reading something from a yellow sheet.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant, I have that right here. There’s a police report as well. It says here you were accused of stealing some bicycles.’

  Now isn’t that the shits. There’s no sense saying anything about it. Fatass Weiss isn’t going to believe anything I say. After all, he has it right there before him in black and yellow.

  He leans across the desk toward me now. He’s wiped the smile off his face. He’s practicing his concerned look. I lean forward, too, and try to look as if I’m sorry for being alive. That’s not too far from the truth.

  ‘Tell me, Alfonso. Just between us, do you of ten get the feeling that people aren’t being fair to you? Do you think people are out to “get” you?’

  What is this creep, a fucking mind reader? He looks down at his papers again, then looks up at me, stern, serious but very understanding.

  ‘This report on that incident at New Cumberland indicates you were in the army only five days at the time; is that true?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It says you knocked out eight of the non-commissioned officer’s teeth and broke his nose.’

  I keep my mouth shut. What the fuck’s this got to do with Birdy?

  ‘Was he being unfair to you, Alfonso? You’re a noncom yourself now. Looking back on it, do you think you might have been over-reacting? Would you do the same thing now in the same conditions?’

  I stick with my ‘bad little doggy’ routine. ‘We all make mistakes, sir. He was probably only trying to do his job like the rest of us.�
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  I didn’t know I could be such a good bullshitter. Maybe I’ll be a used car salesman. I’m enjoying fooling this asshole. It’s something like making some big bastard cry when you’re hurting him only it doesn’t take so much effort.

  He’s catching on. His eyes disappear behind the clean glasses. He takes the papers, stands them up on end, bangs them edgewise against the desk a few times, then gets the folder and slips all the papers into it. He sits back.

  ‘Well, Sergeant. I guess it can’t hurt if you spend another day with the patient. It could happen all at once. Do you have any other ideas; anything you can remember about the past? If you do, let me know.’

  That’s when I bring up the baseballs. I can never just let things go.

  ‘Sir, there’s one thing. Maybe it sounds crazy but it’s something I know has always bothered the patient. You see, he lived just over the left-center field fence of our local baseball park. Whenever anybody hit a ball over that fence for a home run, his mother used to keep the balls; wouldn’t give them up. Everybody hated her for it. The patient felt terrible about this. He used to apologize to everybody and swear he’d get the balls back. He kept lists of all the people his mother had taken balls from. He promised to get them back for everybody some day. He spent hours looking for them in his house, in the attic and in the garage, everywhere. Maybe if you could get his mother to send those balls down here it would help. I know it would take a big load off his mind and it might be just the thing to help him remember.’

  Weiss is looking at me as if I’m completely bananas. Then he realizes I couldn’t make up a thing like that. Sergeants are notorious for being unimaginative. He takes the folder back out. He starts writing in it. He looks up.

  ‘How long ago was this, Sergeant?’

  ‘Oh, it went on for years, sir. Seven years at least. There must be an awful lot of baseballs in that collection, sir.’

  He’s writing and mumbling to himself. I’m biting my tongue to keep from laughing.

  ‘All right, Sergeant. If you come up with any more ideas like this be sure and report them to me. If you notice anything in his behavior here at the hospital you think I ought to know about, tell me that, too. In general, keep talking to him about the past. You might hit on something that’ll bring it all back.’

  This time there’s no kidding around with the psychiatrist shit. He stands up. I stand up, too, and salute. He gives me a fair enough salute; I spin around and walk out, past spitface and outside into the sunlight.

  I’m actually anxious to get back with Birdy. I’m beginning to feel he knows I’m there. Talking about all this stuff with him helps me more than anything. I’m wishing Birdy’d come back and we could have fun working over Weiss together. Weiss is the kind of person brings out the worst in me. I should be around him some more and try practicing self-control. It’s either that or I’ll wind up one of the meanest shits in the world, myself.

  I walk across the hospital grounds and into the building where Birdy is. I’m still laughing to myself about the baseballs. I’ll shit my pants if she still does have those balls and ships them down here. I can just imagine Weiss’s telegram:

  PLEASE SEND ALL THE BASEBALLS. STOP. NEED THEM IN TREATMENT FOR YOUR SON. STOP. MAJOR WEISS.

  I can see it, two hundred used baseballs in a big box being shipped air freight, maybe even on a special military plane. Birdy’d love this.

  I see Renaldi and tell him about the session with Weiss. He laughs when I tell him about the baseballs. I have to tell somebody. He says Weiss will sure as hell send for them.

  Renaldi opens the outer door. Birdy swings around and looks at me when he hears the noise. I get my chair from out in the corridor and set myself up. Renaldi says he’ll see me at lunch.

  I sit there for a while trying to think of something to say. Then I remember.

  – Hey Birdy! How ’bout that time we went ice skating up the creek? Remember? The time they closed the school ’cause all the pipes froze up. Remember?

  I know he’s listening now. He looks at me sometimes and he gives the Old Birdy spaced-out smile there once. I keep on talking.

  It was about zero degrees and when we got to school they sent us all back home. Even the water in the toilets was frozen. Five of us walked home from school together and decided we’d go ice skating. We said we’ll meet down at the edge of the dump, where the railroad track crosses the road.

  There’s Jim Maloney, Bill Prentice, Ray Connors, Birdy and myself. We’re all there except Prentice when Birdy says how if you put your tongue onto a frozen railroad track it’ll stick so you can’t get it loose. Jim Maloney says he’s full of shit. We get to arguing back and forth; Maloney says he’ll stick his tongue onto the track; Birdy tries to talk him out of it, but Maloney’s a smart-ass Irish bastard. He kneels down and puts his warm tongue flat on the track. Naturally it sticks there. He tries to pull it off but it’s really stuck. We’re all laughing and Maloney’s making noises and starting to cry. It’s really a bitchin’ cold day.

  Connors starts yelling he can hear a train coming. We all begin running up and down the track yelling and pretending a train’s coming. Connors runs, actually pretends he’s running, and says he’ll try to flag down the train and stop it. He takes a stick and starts pounding on the track Maloney’s stuck to, like the sound of a train going over rail junctions. Maloney’s bawling his eyes out. He’s screaming, ‘Heh ee! Heh ee!’ Birdy says the only thing that’ll help is some warm water. We’re a couple blocks from the nearest house. Connors comes running back yelling he can’t stop the train. We tell Maloney the only warm water we can think of is piss so we all whip out and start peeing on his tongue. What a crazy scene. Connors is actually peeing in Maloney’s ear. I’m laughing so hard I can hardly make it go. Birdy’s only pretending.

  Maybe it’s the pee or maybe Maloney just got mad enough, but he rips his tongue off the track. It’s bleeding and stays flat, frozen. He can’t get it back in his mouth. He starts laying out after all of us. We run in every direction, my feet are so numb it hurts to run. We can’t understand Maloney but he’s crying and cursing, trying to see his tongue. He keeps pulling at rocks to throw at us but they’re all frozen to the ground. Finally, he drops on his knees and cries. Connors says he’ll take him home; they live near each other on Clinton Road. He says it’s too cold to go skating anyway.

  Birdy and I wait a couple more minutes, but Prentice doesn’t show up. We start walking along the track up toward Marshall Road where the old mill and the dam are. In some places there’s ice frozen on the rails of the track. Birdy tries balancing on the icy rails.

  First thing when we get to the mill pond, we build a fire. We kick out some rotten timbers in the mill and there’s an old can of practically frozen motor oil. We pour it over the wood to get it burning. When our feet are warm enough, we put on our ice skates.

  The ice froze so fast it’s perfectly clear, what we call black ice. It’s so invisible it’s like walking on water. We can see catfish swimming on the bottom. They jump when we go over them and make little explosions of mud.

  We skate around and play one-on-one hockey with some sticks and a stone. We get the idea to skate upstream as far as we can. First, we throw some big pieces of wood on the fire to keep it burning, hide our shoes near it, then start out.

  It’s terrific fun skating around stones in the creek. Some of them are four feet across. Sometimes, there’s only narrow ice ways between sand bars and other times the creek widens till it’s almost as wide as the pond.

  Birdy’s really good on ice skates. He can jump turn and land on either foot. It comes from all the practicing he does getting himself ready to fly We get up speed and jump over some of the rocks. Of course, Birdy can jump over rocks twice as high as I’ll even try. I measure the distance he goes and he’s going over twenty feet on those jumps. Think of what he could do broad jumping!

  We skate all the way through the golf course, under the little bridges, then behind a factory
and along the edge of Sixty-third Street. We hear the el go by once. We’re having such a great time we aren’t even cold. The other guys were jerks not to come with us; but we’re not missing them. Birdy and I already know we’re making a little bit more of our own personal history. We’ll have fun telling about it when we get back to school. We’ll lie about it some to make it sound better and we’ll add things each time we tell it. It’s something Birdy and I do automatically without even talking about it beforehand. Birdy makes up the lying part and I back him up with details to make it seem real. What a team.

  About three miles up the creek we come to a frozen waterfall. The fall is formed by a wall at an angle. In summer, water trickles over the wall and it’s covered with moss. At the bottom there’s a good place to fish. The ice has formed great rounded white balls all down the sides of the wall. The balls are perfectly smooth and you can see through some of them.

  We want to see if we can climb to the top. There’s a good-sized pond up there that ought to be great skating. We could’ve just walked in our skates around the falls, but climbing up a frozen waterfall sounds like something Richard Halliburton would do. Birdy and I are both big fans of Halliburton. We think his was the greatest message ever sent. It was from a Chinese junk as he was trying to cross the China Sea: ‘Having a wonderful time, wish you were here, instead of me.’ It’s the last word ever heard from him.

  The wall of the waterfall must be about fifteen or twenty feet high. We use our skate points to dig in and we push our butts out for balance while our hands and face are against the ice. Birdy gets to the top first.