again. He’s going over the wet form; doing the hmmm, ahhhaa thing some more; we’re not getting anywhere.
‘Sir, should I go back to the ward this morning?’
‘That’s right, Sergeant. I think it’s the best chance we’ve got.’
I wait. I can’t really get up and leave till he does something. When you’re in the army, you’re tied down all around. I can’t figure why he isn’t asking me if I’ve ever clobbered Birdy. That’s the first question I’d ask.
He stands up at last and I stand, too; give him the salute. I have a feeling he’s pissed at me and pissed at himself for being pissed. I scare him; this makes me feel good. I keep hoping I’m finished with that crap but when somebody starts leaning, it all comes back.
‘OK, Sergeant, I’ll see you tomorrow about this time.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Bastard’s going to write to Dix for my records. Please Lord, just let me out of the goddamned army!
I get back to Birdy and even though he’s still squatting on the floor, I know it’s different. I know he’s knowing I’m there. I know it’s Birdy and not some fake, freaky bird.
– Had another session with your doctor, Birdy. You’re going to have a great time with him when you decide to talk. Whatever you do, don’t tell him about the pigeons and the canaries and all that bird shit. He’ll have you pinned into a case as a specimen.
I know he heard me that time. I want to hang in there, keep it going.
– Hey Birdy, remember when we were selling the mags? Christ, that was a scene!
After we get back from Wildwood and I finally recover from old Vittorio’s revenge, we have to figure some way to pay back the money. We owe our parents ninety-two dollars in train fare. We get the idea to sell magazines door-to-door in apartment houses.
We work out a smooth deal. The building superintendents try to keep us out but we push all the call buttons and somebody is always lazy enough just to push the door buzzer without calling back. Once we’re inside, one of us keeps the elevator busy while the other goes from one apartment to the other selling the mags. We’re selling Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Cosmopolitan. The best time for selling is from right after school till about five-thirty, when the men start coming home. A lot of the ladies are alone because their men are off fighting the war. We get a regular route of ladies who buy from us. I’m the one who usually does the selling; Birdy does the elevator business and keeps the superintendent chasing after him. Fat chance that super has of ever catching Birdy.
Most of those ladies are bored out of their minds and I’m always getting invited in for a cup of tea or coffee. If I were older and knew what to do, I could probably really make out.
Birdy’s already started with all his crappy breath-holding. He’s getting to be more and more of a freak. He shows me once how he can hold his breath for five minutes. He sticks his head in a pan of water in my cellar. He tells me he turns his mind off breathing. That’s nuts!
Then he’s always talking about flying. He tells me once, ‘People can’t fly because they don’t believe they can. If nobody ever showed people they could swim, everybody’d drown if they were dropped into the water,’ is what he says. Really weird ideas. He’s going to a Catholic high school, now, down at Forty-ninth Street in Philadelphia. The things he tells me about that school, I begin to understand why he’s turning so crazy. It’s a regular prison.
He’s also beginning with his canary thing. He talks about that canary all the time and he starts different goof y exercises. I try getting him to work out with weights to build himself up, but he only does his arm flapping and jumping up and down. Sometimes he talks about his canary and I think he’s talking about a real person. I think maybe he’s finally noticed there are girls in the world but it’s just the canary. He calls her Birdy, named after himself I guess.
The school he goes to is too cheap to have buses so he rides in on his bike. I cut one day and ride in with him. What a miserable place. Freshmen and sophomores use outside staircases like fire escapes and everybody is always robbing everybody else’s locker. They have Christian brothers teaching there. They wear long black skirts like priests except they have little stiff bibs sticking out from under their chins; real bunch of creeps; guys who want to be priests but are too dumb or don’t have the guts.
The whole school smells funky, like a gigantic jack-off party going on all the time. Big places like that without any girls are always funky. On wet days, Birdy says it smells so bad you have to wear a gas mask.
The way you eat lunch in this school is to walk round and round the track. Brothers are standing in the middle like lion tamers. If you want to take a piss or something you have to ask for one of these wooden passes. They’ve got five passes for more than three hundred people. Everybody walking around, holding a lunch bag, eating and holding back from peeing.
Birdy starts faking library passes to get to the library during lunch. He has the inside of a book cut out and he’s eating sandwiches out of it. He gets away with it for almost three months but they catch him just before Easter vacation. Some brother bears down on Birdy in the library and bops him on the back of his head. Birdy throws books, sandwiches, the whole works at him and scoots down one of those fire escapes and away. They toss him out. He comes over to old U.M. to finish the year with the human beings. I figure it might turn him on with all the girls and everything but he only gets worse. People at U.M. start calling him Birdy, too. Jesus, he’s actually beginning to look like a bird.
He’s getting even skinnier and his chest’s beginning to stick out in front like his ribs are broken. His head juts forward from his shoulders and his eyes are always darting around loose in the sockets so he never seems to be paying much attention to any one thing. I know he’s seeing everything. Birdy sees everything but he doesn’t, what you could really call, ‘look’ at anything. Like the weather; somehow Birdy always knows about the weather. If the paper says it’s going to rain and Birdy says no; Birdy’s right.
The next summer, Birdy and I take the job as dogcatchers; Birdy’s deep into his creepy canaries. We’re standing on back of the truck with those huge nets and Birdy’s talking about how many eggs are in this nest or which bird is already cracking seed. He’s out of sight.
Then the next year, Birdy and I don’t see too much of each other. I go out for track, throw the discus; make varsity running guard, and wrestle. Birdy has no interest in sports. He’s back there with the birds.
In my junior year, soon’s I’m seventeen, I join the State Guard, I want to learn how to shoot rifles, pistols, all that shit. I go down to the Armory on Thursday nights to drill. Birdy comes along with me sometimes. He sits up in the balcony bleachers in the dark and watches us. I get issued an old Springfield 06 and learn how to dismantle it. I’m a gung-ho soldier bastard. Going to get me a few Japs before the whole thing is over.
I start going with Lucy then, too. She’s one of the cheerleaders at school and totally dumb; a commercial major. One afternoon, I’m sitting out in the parking lot at school in Higg’s car, making out with Lucy, when Birdy comes rolling up on his bicycle. We’re both juniors and he’s still tooling around on this wreck of a bicycle. Same crummy bike he got after we lost ours in Wildwood, trying to sell them. It won’t go more than about three miles an hour without wobbling. Birdy’s the only one who can ride it; he doesn’t even lock it in the bike rack. He just stands it there. Nobody’s going to steal it. It’s the only bike in the rack anyway; they built those racks back in the twenties
