The Amazing Life of Birds

by Gary Paulsen

  “Explain that to me.”

  “You have to think of it as an opportunity.”

  “Oh, sure. An opportunity for everybody in school to hate me.”

  “That's it. The magic word. Everybody. Everybody in school knows who you are, right?”

  “I can't deny that. Everybody knows I'm Doo-Doo the Diseased Monster slithering up and down the halls.”

  “That doesn't matter.”

  “Speak for yourself. I'm planning to wear a bag over my head.”

  “Think. Everybody knows who you are. Every single kid in the school. It's perfect.”

  “Willy?” I thought he'd gone out of his mind.

  “All you have to do is something good.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You do something good now, something cool, and you're in. Everybody will see it.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I just wish it had happened to me.”

  “Right.”

  “No. Seriously. Everybody knows who you are. You do something really cool now and they'll all know it right away. It's simple.”

  In Willy's world, it really was simple.

  But Willy's world wasn't mine.

  He didn't understand what a destructive device a shoelace can be.

  Day Fifteen

  A word on cafeteria food: ELBOW.

  Well, not really. But many of the words the kids use to describe the cafeteria food are not printable.

  The most accurate one I've heard was sludge.

  Or Desiccated Dinosaur Droppings.

  Personally, I don't really know what they have to do to actually make macaroni and cheese as bad as it is, but it's amazing. Most of the time it's inedible.

  Still, at a certain time we are all herded into the cafeteria and we move down a line and this … this stuff is put on our trays.

  I read in a history book that the school lunch program was started after the Second World War because so many men who were drafted to fight showed up with problems from eating bad food—poor bones, deformed bodies.

  Man, if what they're feeding us now is supposed to give us healthy fighting bodies, we're in big trouble.

  But here we were in line. Sort of. Where I stood with my tray there was a gap, nobody closer than four or five feet to keep from getting some dread disease.

  In a way it was all right because I was in my own little zone. The puberty zone.

  I'm thinking, All right, I can just go through life like this, walking along with a little gap around me, nobody talking to me, everybody looking away if I look at them. My own little world.

  It wouldn't be so bad.

  And then: Remember when it was cool to have tennis shoes with that wraparound Velcro strap that held them on? I liked those.

  Then there was that little period when it was very cool to wear shoes that just slipped on your feet with no fasteners at all. So easy. Up in the morning, feet on the floor, into the shoes. Gone. Even Willy, who works hard at deciding what things are or are not cool, thought the slip-ons were cool.

  But the cool/fashion pendulum has swung the other way again and we are now back in the phase where we wear tennis shoes with really long laces. So long you have to double-tie them.

  It is not a good time for me.

  I get up in a hurry, always seem to have something to do, and with the slip-ons or Velcro shoes it was easy to just get going.

  Now I have to stop and tie my shoes.

  And what with puberty and all, taking the time to tie my shoes is not that high on the list.

  So sue me.

  Well, don't, actually.

  Anyway, one of my shoelaces came untied and strung out behind me while I was in line at the cafeteria.

  I looked down and saw it.

  Not a problem, you say? The next thing would be simply to fix it.

  And the way to do that would be to gently put my tray back on the slide rail, kneel down, retie the shoe, stand up again and move on down the line for an exciting dessert of green Jell-O filled with something that I think was supposed to be small grapes but looked suspiciously like entombed bug larvae.

  But you are forgetting how my life has been going. Any little difficulty, something that would be a minor glitch in some other life, went nuclear in mine.

  I mean, a cowlick that turned into an epidemic?

  I looked down at that shoelace and any thought of rational action vanished.

  I froze. The wildebeest at the water hole when the lion stares him down, the impala when the cheetah locks on, the shoelace like a cobra, me the mouse.

  I had to do something, but what?

  I took a deep breath and started to put my tray on the slide rail just when Peter Helms, who was next in line, said: “Come on, mud hen, get moving!”

  And because he's a jock he actually broke the disease barrier and touched me, pushing me sideways.

  I took a step to keep from falling, right onto the shoelace, which stopped one shoe dead.

  There was a moment of scrambling, with my feet trying to stay under me, and then I surrendered to gravity, feet going up, face heading for the floor and the tray spraying macaroni and cheese, green dessert, dry lettuce and a plastic tomato slice with mayo all over the person in front of me.

  Rachel.

  And as I fell all I could think was Mud hen—what's a mud hen?

  Day Sixteen

  The baby bird is amazing. He seems to be changing hourly. Just two weeks ago he was this ugly little thing with bulging eyes and a huge mouth that seemed like it could swallow the world and now he's almost grown.

  He's nearly as big as his parents and his mother is trying to teach him to eat all by himself.

  Apparently puberty isn't working for him, either, because the lessons aren't going so well.

  She comes back to the nest with a grasshopper and holds it out to him. When he's standing on the edge of the nest he's bigger than she is so she has to hold it up in the air.

  When he starts to reach for it she drops it to the windowsill, to teach him to pick it up and feed himself.

  He just raises his head again, opens his beak and chirps.

  Feed me.

  So she picks up the bug, holds it up, and when he reaches for it, she drops it and the same thing happens.

  You can tell she's getting sick of it because about the tenth time she just sort of throws the grasshopper down and walks away as if to say, “Let the little bugger starve.”

  He still doesn't get it and she finally comes back and tries again. And again. And again.

  Just when I feel like screaming, “Pick it up!” through the window, he gets it. He reaches down as if discovering the grasshopper for the first time, pushes it around with his beak.

  And then grabs it and eats it.

  He sits on the edge of the nest and flaps his wings, almost like a rooster crowing. Very proud. And when he flaps he bounces up in the air.

  Not flying. Not yet. He needs more practice. But definitely a little bounce and you can see he's surprised by it and pleased, bouncing around the edge of the nest in pretend-flight, and it suddenly brings back the dream I had the night before.

  It was a flying dream. And I wasn't naked. I've had them where I was naked and that's just embarrassing; you catch yourself flying over a community and you don't know whether to fly right side up or upside down. It more or less ruins the cool part about flying. But this time I was in some kind of tights, only I didn't have a cape. But kind of like a superhero. I was soaring over the countryside, having a great time, when I went over a little canyon and saw these flashes. People were shooting surface-to-air missiles at me.

  One of them burst near me and I tumbled lower before I could regain control and saw that the people manning the missile batteries were all girls. They were wearing cheerleader outfits and helmets and whenever a missile came close they would cheer: “Die, Doo-Doo! Die, Doo-Doo! Die, die, die!”

  As I started to fly out of range a close burst injured my flight mech
anism and I started spiraling down out of control.

  Just before I hit the ground I looked at the nearest missile battery. What do you know, my sister was handling the controls, standing on the firing platform shaking her fist at me as her head split open and turned into a fiery skull while I crashed into the ground and was covered with worms.

  I woke up on the floor hugging the pillow and crying a little, only a little, hoping that whatever career was in my distant future, being a fighter pilot was not one of the things fate had in store.

  If I lived through puberty.

  Which was starting to look doubtful.

  Day Seventeen

  This morning in the kitchen, it came to me that other people weren't living this critical-mass disaster every minute of every day of their lives.

  Why?

  I looked at the cereal box. Mom had replaced the one that had the rooster on it with one that had a woman tennis player slamming a serve over a net.

  Not fair. It was bad enough with a rooster. How could I cope with a beautiful woman on the box?

  But surprise! She just stayed a tennis player and didn't turn into something embarrassing.

  This got me started thinking normal thoughts.

  Again, if other people weren't having perfectly innocent images turn into soft-core porn, why was I?

  As far as I could tell, nobody else had started a false ringworm epidemic, or seemed to be covered with fresh zits every day, or was throwing trays of food around the cafeteria.

  Only me.

  Of course, Willy had burned his hair. That counted.

  But at this level of catastrophe, it was just me.

  And I got the weirdest idea that I ought to ask somebody for advice.

  I ought to ask my parents.

  So I looked at them: father over the sink, reading the paper, dripping; mother eating dry toast, holding a hand under her chin to catch the crumbs while she read the rest of the paper.

  Sister … never mind. Sitting looking at her hair to see if the color went all the way through each strand, looking at each strand, studying each strand, thinking about each strand. If you opened her brain and looked at her thoughts that's what you would see: I'm thinking of … hair.

  And I said: “Mom, Dad, I have a …”

  And I'm not sure if I was going to say the word problem or question because right then the tennis player turned into something else and I shook my head to clear the image, which for some reason made my left foot slip through the crossbars on my kitchen stool and throw me off balance.

  For a second I teetered, then I went down like a mighty oak, dragging my full cereal bowl off the counter, splattering it (splatter was a big word for me lately) all over the counter, my mother's dress and the back of my father's pants.

  “Way to go, Grace.” My sister hadn't gotten a drop on her but felt the need to comment. “Don't hurt yourself.”

  My mother and father said: “Oh, Duane …”

  Mom added, more softly, “What's the matter with you lately?”

  “He's dumb,” my sister said. “You haven't noticed until now?”

  And you know, as I lay on the floor, I had to agree.

  And then, it was off to school, “looking with bright anticipation to what joyous things the day might bring.”

  I read that in an old pamphlet I found at the library called: Jimmy's First Day at School

  Note that it's not Duane's First Day …

  Even in pamphlets they don't name people Duane.

  If only I'd been named Jimmy.

  Day Eighteen

  Home at four o'clock.

  Nothing much to report today.

  Unless you count what happened in the library: knocking over three bookcases, breaking the fish tank and scaring three gerbils and a guinea pig so badly that apparently hair loss will be an issue.

  A humdrum kind of day.

  The thing is, I actually had a plan this time.

  I was going to go to school but limit my activity. I would walk straight to my locker, get what I needed for the next class, walk straight to class on my double-tied, carefully checked tennis shoes, sit down at the desk and stare straight ahead. Not talk to anybody. Just like a robot.

  I really meant it. It was going to work this time. I was sure.

  And for a while things went okay.

  I got to my locker without hurting anybody. Rachel was down by her locker and she looked at me but didn't say anything. I kept my mouth shut, then turned cautiously, and carefully made my way down the hall to English class, where I sat still, listening.

  I didn't take my pencil out.

  Sharp object, you know.

  Met Amber in the hall. Moved exactly two feet to the right, passed without a wreck.

  Back to my locker.

  Things going well. Opened the locker. Door stuck a little and I had to jerk it but I looked around and down at my feet—laces tied—before I tugged.

  Came open without incident.

  No books fell out.

  I put my English books back, took out books for the next class, closed my locker carefully.

  Checked my shoelaces again. Still tied.

  Moved down the hallway through a sea of kids. Eyes straight ahead, step, step …

  I was going to make it.

  The next class was in the library.

  Just for the record, I love the library. Some of my best times are in that room. I wouldn't hurt a library for the world.

  Through the door, past the guinea pig and gerbil cages, past the fish tanks, over to one of the study tables.

  Sat down carefully.

  Eyes straight ahead.

  And that's where I began to deviate from my plan.

  I had my back to the room, to avoid eye contact with anybody. That seemed to work.

  Except that it made me face the bookcases, just five feet away.

  The section in front of me was nonfiction, and right at eye level were the Ps.

  And directly in front of me was a red book with one word on the spine in large white block letters: PUBERTY

  I see the library as a place where you can go to learn things. Want to know anything, from how to track a moose to the correct spelling of Uranus or Lake Titicaca? You can find it in the library.

  And here was a book on the very thing that seemed to be bothering me.

  I forgot the plan.

  Stood up and reached across the table, one foot on chair, fingers out, stretching my whole body out out until the mass was past the critical (and I do mean critical) point.

  I fell forward, into the bookcase.

  Which rocked away, came back, rocked away, then just gave up.

  It fell into the next bookcase.

  And the next.

  Then the fish tank.

  Which went into the gerbil cage.

  Which went into the guinea pig cage.

  You couldn't have done it better with a cruise missile. Books everywhere. Fish flopping, librarian grabbing them and throwing them into the other fish tank against the wall (where the golden carp woke up: feeding time!), guinea pig squeaking and running under tables, gerbil spinning in his wheel under a chair.

  And me? The principal's office.

  “Honestly, Duane, I don't understand this. You've always been a good student, but … is it drugs? I mean one day you're fine and the next you have ringworm and now vandalism.”

  “I didn't have ringworm. It was all a mis—”

  “You wreck the cafeteria.”

  “That was an acci—”

  “Duane, we must rule out drugs. You'd better take this container into the bathroom and give me a specimen.”

  Like I said, just another boring day at school. Start well, end with a urine sample.

  You gotta love my life.

  Day Nineteen

  Stupid dream last night.

  I dreamed I was at a Puberty Anonymous meeting.

  I was standing up in front of a room of pimple-faced gawky boys and there were a lectern and
a microphone and I was saying: “Hi. My name is Duane Homer Leech and I am going through puberty.”

  Some boys said: “Hi, Duane.”

  And then we talked about pimples and ELBOWS and falling down a lot, all of us with voices that sounded like broken accordions, until my sister came crashing into the back of the room throwing boxes of cereal at everybody, screaming that we were all on drugs and had to pee in little jars….

  I woke up lying on the floor hugging the pillow. My mother yelled from downstairs: “Come on, Duane. You're going to be late for school!”

  To the mirror. I'm not even counting zits now. They come, sometimes disappear and come back in a different place. I'm sure they are the same zits, just moving around.

  I have a little fuzz growing where I cut the bald spot, growing up and out like the cowlick. Oh well.

  I went to the window to check on the bird and this simple act saved me. Or I think it did. It might be too soon to tell.

  I witnessed the miracle of flight.

  Well, first I witnessed the miracle of Gorm trying the limb-to-the-windowsill death-defying leap again, and his plummet to the ground.

  Then the miracle of the baby bird hopping on the edge of his nest while he watched Gorm go.

  Then the miracle of puberty kicking in and the baby bird's stumbling over the edge of the nest and off the windowsill. Heading directly at Gorm, like a falling meat snack, wings every which way.

  Gorm looked up, got set, and I'm thinking, Goodbye, bird. There was no way I could get outside and down there in time to help him.

  And then the miracle. Above Gorm's mouth the bird got his wings out to the side and, like a plane's, like an eagle's, they caught the air and he soared up and over the cat to land in a tree across the yard.

  Well, he didn't exactly soar. There was flapping and some feathers floating in all directions with both parents frantically zipping around him as he more or less staggered up to a limb of the elm tree and hung there like someone'd thrown mud against the bark.

  But he flew.

  First he tripped.

  Then he fell.

  And just before certain death: He flew.