The Amazing Life of Birds

by Gary Paulsen

  Also by Gary Paulsen

  To my son, James, in gratitude.

  Having missed my own puberty,

  because I lived through it,

  watching you go through yours provided

  a wealth of research material.

  Thank you.

  Foreword

  I should have seen it coming.

  A long time before it came I should have known.

  I was six or seven years old and there was a girl living next door named Peggy. She was a year older than me and a lot stronger and we were wrestling and she held me down….

  Well, let's just say that some part of me didn't mind that she was holding me down even though she was a girl and I didn't like girls much. All of a sudden it seemed there was something about girls that wasn't all bad. I didn't know what it was but I should have known that this first feeling with Peggy Ollendorfer meant that down the road, later, I was in for a big surprise.

  Afterward, when I was a little older, if you'd asked me what the surprise was like, I'd have said it was about like getting hit by a train.

  Puberty.

  Day One

  This morning I became twelve years and one week old and last night I had a disturbing dream. Don't worry. It wasn't about ELBOWS.

  I'd better explain. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the female body. Not in a weird or sick way but not in an artistic or medical way either. These thoughts aren't intentional. And they happen at the strangest times. I'll be sitting there, thinking of almost nothing, maybe about tightening my loose bicycle pedal, and there it will be, bang! Stuck in my mind: part of a woman's body. The part varies and I don't think it's necessary to say what it is—most readers can probably guess—but it's almost always embarrassing when this happens. Especially if you're sitting talking to, say, the math teacher Mr. Haggerston about equations and you look down and see not math equations on the paper but an enormous …

  You get the idea. So to avoid problems, when this happens I force my mind to think the word ELBOW and I see an ELBOW and think about ELBOWS and wonder about ELBOWS and wish about ELBOWS. It helps. Sometimes.

  Anyway, I had this disturbing dream about my father. In the dream he and I are sitting in a huge bird's nest watching a movie on television. The movie is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Once a year since I was eight, my father makes me sit down and watch that movie with him.

  He thinks it helps us to bond. Which isn't necessary because we get along just fine anyway. My father is a good guy, and my mother is really nice too, and I even almost get along with my older sister, Karen. I'd do better with Karen if she weren't demon spawn born in the fires of Hades, but she's been that way as long as I can remember.

  But we have a good family. And I love them. Even my sister, I guess. We're all bonded as much as you can bond but still, once a year, my father sneaks out that old video. He and I watch it together and he proves once more that he Understands Young People and Knows What It's Like to Be a Boy.

  As if.

  All I can think when we sit there is in what possible world would I get a Ferrari to drive around Chicago in with a beautiful girl on my arm and go eat in fancy restaurants while the principal of my school gets munched on by a Rottweiler? I can't even get my bike pedal tightened without thinking about ELBOWS.

  But in the dream we're sitting in a bird's nest watching the movie and when it's over my father turns to me and puts his foot on my chest and says: “If you can ELBOW you can fly.” Only of course he doesn't say ELBOW but another word, not a body part.

  And he kicks me out of the nest.

  Even in the dream I can't fly. I plummet down and down, falling and falling until I suddenly wake up and see that I'm in my room holding the pillow like it's somebody I know really well.

  I know why I dreamed about the nest; a month ago two birds built a nest on the windowsill of my room, which is upstairs and in back by a tree. It seemed strange at first because there was the tree with lots of limbs, a much better place for a nest. But then I saw Gorm, the neighbor'stomcat, climb the tree and crawl out on the limb nearest the windowsill to try and reach the nest. Gorm is not the brightest chip in the matrix and instead of reaching the birds he rediscovered gravity, landing nicely on his feet but hitting as hard as a bowling ball because he's fat. In fact he kind of looks like a bowling ball. So that's why the birds used the windowsill. It's Gorm-proof.

  One of them laid an egg and sat on it until it hatched into the ugliest little dirty brown bird I have ever seen. Then they started to feed him. Or her. They brought it bugs and more bugs and still more bugs, both of them flying back and forth all the time getting food for the little eating machine.

  And now it's slightly bigger and still amazingly ugly, pink skinned and with bulging eyes. It has four brown scraggly feathers, two on the top of its head and two at its tail.

  The thing is they really love the little bugger, and preen it and feed it and I'm sure would show it Ferris Bueller's Day Off if they could.

  So that's where the nest comes from—I've been watching the Bird Family Channel for a month.

  But why did Dad mention ELBOW? And why kick me out?

  Wasn't it enough they'd named me Duane?

  Day Two

  Duane.

  Homer.

  Leech.

  Think about it. When you look at it that way, each word separate, it's hard to see how my parents could have done it.

  Look, we've all seen those shows on the Discovery Channel where they show a baby being born. There's a man in a hospital gown and a woman on a table and a lot of noise and sweat and there it is.

  A baby. Looking actually a lot like the little bird on my windowsill, all messy and ugly.

  Me.

  And if they'd done a video there would be my mother and my father smiling with love at me, all goobery and sloppy.

  Defenseless, new in the world, not even a clue that someday puberty would come along and body-slam me.

  And when they asked what my name would be, my father looked down probably all proud and loving and said: “Duane.

  “Homer.

  “Leech.”

  I didn't have a chance—or maybe I would have had a slight chance, if I'd been name-lucky. People could have called me DH, or skipped the first name and called me Homes, which would be cool, or gone back to the first name and called me Duey, which isn't that good, but still on the edge of being all right.

  But that's not what happened.

  Oh—this morning the bird had one new small feather growing on the end of his right wing. Five feathers now. It's hard to look at him and see that someday he's going to fly. Or date or grow up to have a family so he can make his son watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

  I decided to name the bird Connor. Which is what I wanted to be named. Or Steve, or Carl, or Clint … anything but Duane. Apparently I had a great-uncle or something named Duane and he did something important—nobody seems to remember what was so special about Duane the First. But the name was passed down and I got stuck. For my middle name, my father is a history nut and there was a famous Ancient Greek guy named Homer who did a lot of thinking, I guess, so Dad gave me that name so I would think a lot. And there must have been some wacko in our family who grew leeches once upon a time. Or maybe my family just evolved from bloodsuckers….

  So the little guy is always flapping that one-feathered wing like it's going to make him fly. That's about like me thinking I can ask Amber Masters to go to a movie with me.

  Fat chance.

  Not that she'd go. That's a given. She doesn't know I'm alive. I've never spoken to her. Or to any girl. Unless it's absolutely necessary, as in, “I'm sorry your hair is on fire,” or “I'm sorry I slammed the tetherball into you
r face when we were in the second grade.” I keep hoping Amber has forgotten both those incidents. I don't even know why I brought it up in this journal because I've never thought of asking a girl to do anything.

  See? Another weird part of puberty.

  But ask her? Never happen. It would be like the little bird flapping his one-feathered wing expecting to fly and instead learning all about plummeting the way Gorm learned about gravity.

  Crash and burn. That's what would happen to me. Flames all the way down …

  Doo-Doo.

  There it is. The kiss of death. The nickname that came into my life in the third grade, came and stuck. Doo-Doo Leech.

  My best friend, Willy Traverse, gave it to me by mistake. We were on the playground seeing if we could get the swings over the top and he looked over at me and said, “Do it, Duey!”

  And three or four other kids who were there started yelling, “Do it, Duey! Do it, Duey! Doo Doo Doo Doo …”

  So for the rest of my life I will be known as Potty Boy.

  Doo-Doo Leech.

  Flap, flap, flap … crash.

  Day Three

  I'm going insane.

  Perhaps it's all part of this puberty thing but it's still not pleasant.

  Totally crackers.

  First, I wake up this morning like somebody gave me an electric shock. One second I'm sound asleep, drooling on my pillow, out, dead, not even dreaming, and the next I'm lying flat on my back staring at the ceiling counting the square tiles.

  There are ninety-six of them.

  And strange things are happening to my body. Parts are moving inside me, and coming outside me, and other parts are tightening up, and when I went down to have breakfast I looked at the rooster on the cornflakes box and bam, ELBOW. For a split second I thought the rooster had actually changed and turned into something else and I looked around wondering if anybody else had seen it but no. My father was sipping coffee over the sink, where he drinks it because he spills, and my mother was reading the newspaper while she ate a piece of dry toast because she worries about her weight, and my sister was sitting at the table wondering how to destroy the whole human race if she can't get her hair to look just … exactly … perfect.

  So it was just me.

  And the rooster.

  And the ELBOW.

  Then it was gone.

  This morning I looked out at the birds as one of them brought the little guy a whole grasshopper, still alive, and stuck it in his mouth. It reminded me of the time Willy tried to get a whole hamburger in his mouth on a bet. It was just one of those White Castle bombs, not a big one, but still it was a mouthful and he almost choked to death before we figured out how to do the Heimlich maneuver on him. There were four of us and we each had a different idea about how it should be done until finally Pete Honer said, “He's turning blue,” and we all just grabbed something and squeezed and he gacked it up and out. Pickles and all.

  Except that the grasshopper was still alive and knew what was coming and spread his legs out across the baby bird's face and wouldn't go down until the parent bird used its beak to jam him down the baby's throat.

  And then I thought maybe my life was not like the bird's but like the grasshopper's and that I was being eaten alive by puberty … but that got too weird.

  So this afternoon after school I called Willy. He's still my best friend but his family moved to another town seven miles away, just far enough for us to be in different schools. We get together on weekends.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “This morning I woke up and counted the ceiling tiles.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Ninety-six.”

  “Cool.”

  “Then I went down to breakfast and I saw ELBOW on the side of the cereal box where the rooster was standing.”

  “I've never seen it on cereal boxes. But once on the side of a bus and twice looking up at the clouds.”

  “This morning the bird on my sill ate a whole grasshopper.”

  “Cool.”

  “It made me think of that time you choked on the burger.”

  “Cool.”

  “Well.”

  “Well.”

  “Catch you later.”

  “Cool.”

  Willy's got puberty the same as me and sometimes it helps to talk things over.

  It's good to have a friend.

  Especially if you have a nickname like Doo-Doo.

  I mean can you even imagine somebody named Doo-Doo driving a Ferrari around Chicago with a beautiful girl while a Rottweiler eats his principal?

  I didn't think so.

  Day Four

  I woke up wondering what comes next.

  This morning I was lying on my side and when my eyes opened I started counting the slats on the blind that slides down over my window.

  Twenty-seven.

  They go from side to side, not top to bottom, and lying on my side and trying to count them made me dizzy so I got out of bed and fell on my face halfway to the upstairs bathroom.

  Good start.

  Then I looked in the mirror over the sink and there was a zit in the middle of my forehead. Not just a small one. A giant. It looked like something in there was trying to get out and when I pinched it …

  Well, enough of that. But now instead of a zit I have what the TV would call a “suppurating wound.” It isn't important to know what that means—just the sound of the words makes it work.

  I have another zit on my chest which the shirt will cover but in the mirror my face looks like I tried to kiss a rotary mower.

  I can't go to school. People will puke when they see me.

  And that, journal reader, was the high point of my day.

  I went down to breakfast and my sister said: “Cover your face so I can eat.”

  “So it shows then? I was thinking nobody would notice it….” Lame joke.

  “What's that?” My father turned from the sink where he was drinking his coffee. “Oh.”

  “Maybe a Band-Aid,” my mother suggested. “A flesh-colored one. It wouldn't show too much.”

  “Right.” I turned slowly to the cornflakes box and sighed in relief. No ELBOW. Just the rooster. “Or I could just print up a bunch of three-by-five cards that say ‘I have a huge zit on my forehead' and hand them out to people. You know, so they wouldn't wonder …”

  But I finally used a small circular Band-Aid, hoping either it wouldn't show too much or people would think it was some kind of honorable wound.

  I could make up a story: An old lady was crossing the street and she fell and a bus was going to hit her but I saw what was happening and jumped to grab her, dragged her out of the way, but at the last second the rearview mirror on the bus caught me in the middle of the forehead …

  And caused a huge zit to appear.

  Yeah, that would work.

  So I went to school.

  Long day.

  Only one person said anything about my zit. My second best friend is a guy named Nick Fleming— another name I would have liked, Nick—and he asked what happened to my forehead and I said: “Zit.”

  “Oh yeah. I've got four. They're all on my butt, though.”

  “Cool.”

  “Raymond Burmeister has one on the end of his—”

  The bell let loose and I didn't hear the rest because it was time to go to science.

  It just got better and better.

  Amber was in science and I distinctly saw her look at the middle of my forehead when I walked past her lab table to get to mine.

  So she actually noticed me.

  With my wound.

  Oh, good. Doo-Doo the Zit Boy.

  And I don't know why I cared because it's not like we had a thing going. Whatever that means.

  Sure, Amber and me and my zit.

  Any second now all three of us will be driving around in my Ferrari.

  Day Five

  Bad night.

  Bad dreams.

  Mostly it
was my own fault. I watched one of those medical examiner shows last night where they showed people doing autopsies and finding the killer because of a grain of sand in the stomach lining. Then I went to bed.

  So I had medical dreams. Bad medical dreams and then I think I wake up in the middle of the night only I just think I'm awake, I'm not really, and I look up and one of my posters of Lord of the Rings comes alive and Frodo walks into the room with a basket full of cornflakes mixed with stomach linings and a rooster standing on top crowing.

  And then the rooster turns into …

  Bad.

  The bird has another feather. On the end of his left wing. So now he has one on the end of both wings, two on his head, two on his tail.

  And not a single zit.

  Meanwhile, he's eating like a wolf.

  Plus he can hold his head up by himself now. His mom and pop brought him two grasshoppers for breakfast and he nailed them both without any help, actually held one down with his foot while he wobbled his head around and swallowed the first one, then took the second.

  Part of me envies him.

  No. All of me envies him.

  He just sits in the nest and they bring him bugs and he grows feathers and he doesn't have to think about Amber or zits or Frodo and a crowing rooster that isn't a rooster….

  My grandmother called this evening to wish me a happy birthday. A week late. But that's all right because she sent me a card with a twenty-dollar bill in it and she is very cool. The reason she couldn't call right on my birthday is that she was on a pack trip in the mountains in Colorado and couldn't get to a phone.

  She's my grandmother on my mother's side and so doesn't know why they named me Duane either.

  “They should have named you Carl,” she said. “He was my husband and your grandfather and a real man. He flew fighters …”

  Whenever she talked about him she would start a story and then trail off. The memories and thinking about him made her stop talking. She never said it, but she must have loved him an awful lot.