After the long roll, continued unbroken, undulating in volume and pitch, for a half a minute, he breaks into three almost sobbing, soft, drawn-out melodious notes. Those three notes are enough to break your heart. Then he quickly crescendos to the top of another roll and brings it down slowly, tortuously, to a sound that has a clicking rather than a whistling quality, the kind of sound that had first caught my attention.
He stops. I hold my breath. I wish I could see him; I try to calculate where he is from the direction of the sound, but I can’t. He starts again, the same low clicks becoming melodious, increasing in volume, tone, pitch, simultaneously, moving over at least an octave but in a different register. This time there is a single drawn-out note at the top and then directly across with another very round sounding roll to a stop; three staccato, almost unmusical peeps and then the descent. He stops. I wait but nothing more happens. I turn out the light; somehow I’ve got to keep him. Listening to him sing in the dark like that was close to flying for me. I feel myself somehow unbound.
I sit there all afternoon till it’s dark. Nobody bothers me. I watch Birdy. He doesn’t do much except take a crap or pee once in a while. He does this by squatting over the toilet with his feet on the toilet seat. A bird doesn’t even know when it craps, so Birdy isn’t a real bird.
A few times he turns toward me and watches. He turns his head back and forth, shifting his whole body each time. There’s a sink in the corner filled with water and once he goes over and drinks like a bird, lifting his head to let the water run down his throat. What the hell’s he trying to prove?
When he moves anywhere, he hops. He lifts himself from the squatting position with each hop and then squats again; hopping, squatting, flipping his bent arms as wings, exactly like some awkward giant bird; like a hawk or an eagle, hopping on the ground, slow hops.
It’s getting so it doesn’t bother me as much. When he looks at me, I try smiling but he doesn’t notice. He’s curious but there’s no kind of recognition. I can’t help wondering what in hell could’ve happened to him. I don’t want to ask Weiss again, he obviously doesn’t want to tell me; probably doesn’t know. Most likely, Birdy’s the only one who knows.
I look up and down the corridor; nobody’s around. The CO’s already fed Birdy. This time I stayed on to watch. That’s the creepiest part all right. I don’t know if the CO or Weiss or anybody realizes that Birdy is imitating a baby bird being fed when he flips his bent arms like that. I’m sure as hell not going to tell.
What happens to somebody like Birdy? Will they keep him locked up like this all his life? Are there hospitals all over the country filled up with war nuts? Birdy isn’t hurting anybody. Trouble is, if they let him out, he’ll probably go jump off some high building or try to fly down a staircase or out a window or something. What the hell, if that’s what he wants to do they should let him. Birdy never was dumb, most things he did made sense in a special kind of way. I’m still not sure about this crazy business either. What’s crazy? Wars are crazy for sure.
Speaking of crazy, Birdy and I did some goofball things. An example is the spring of our sophomore year. I’d been working all winter on a diving helmet. My old man’d taught me how to cut, braze, and weld, so I made a diving helmet from a five-gallon oil can, some lead pipe, and brass fittings. I’d tested it for leaks and it was airtight. I pumped air into it by mounting two car pumps on a seesaw arrangement with an airhose going into the helmet. The pressure of the air would keep the water from coming in and the extra air came out in bubbles from the bottom.
I’d also made a spring-mounted underwater gun from some pipe. My idea was to hunt fish underwater at the Springfield reservoir. Nobody’s allowed to fish there and it’s crowded with fish. Mario said he’d help but I needed two for manning the pumps and the air line when I went under. Birdy said he’d pitch in. My half of the deal is that I’d help him with his crackpot flying machine.
Birdy’d taken one of his models that sort of worked and made a man-sized version of it. There were huge wings with harnesses you slipped your arms into. You had to flap the wings with your arms. These wings were each over eight feet long and there were vanes turning vertical on the upswing and horizontal on the downswing. The whole thing was designed so it rotated forward on a crankshaft arrangement when it was flapped. Birdy said you had to catch the air under the wings to get any lift.
Birdy’d made it with aluminum framing, thin aluminum panels, and bicycle parts. He’d worked hundreds of hours on it in the machine shop at school. I don’t know where he got the aluminum; that stuff was rationed to build airplanes for the goddamned war. Birdy also had a silk piece sewn between the legs of a pair of pants that he wore when he flew this thing. When he spread his legs he had a tail like a pigeon.
I tried the wings on and I could hardly flap the monsters. Birdy has a board over two sawhorses in his back yard. He’d lie out on this when he practiced flapping. That year of arm swinging and jumping up and down had really paid off. He could flap those wings and keep it up for more than five minutes. He’d also lie out on his back with five-pound weights hanging from the tips of these wings; then he’d flap them up. He’d calculated that five pounds on the ends was the equivalent to twenty pounds pressure under each wing at the middle. He said this gave him forty pounds of flapping power, whatever that meant. He calls this contraption an ornithopter. I thought he made up the word but I looked it up in a dictionary and it was there. It said an ornithopter was any aircraft designed to derive its chief support and propulsion from flapping wings. Who’d believe it? There’s a word for everything.
I insist on doing my thing first. I’m thinking I might be getting into another one of those gas tank affairs where he’s going to wind up in the hospital for a while. I even try to talk him out of his crackpot project, but Birdy’s hard to talk out of anything. He says he’d thought of jumping from the gas tank but he needs to get up speed before he can lift off.
His plan is to have me pedal a bicycle, with him standing on a contraption he’s rigged in front of the handlebars. Then, on a signal, I stop suddenly and he takes off. This is all going to happen down at the dump, the old part, where they don’t dump anymore. The pile of crap has piled up about thirty or forty feet, right to the edge of the creek there. Birdy’s planning to take off the edge of the pile and fly over the creek. I figure at least he’ll have something to fall into. He says he can slip out of the wings by unbuckling two buckles. I know he can hold his breath underwater forever, so I should be able to get down and pull him out.
As I said, we’re doing my thing first. One evening we pile the helmet, pumps and pump rack onto our bikes and head out for the reservoir.
It’s just getting dark when we short the electric fence with a jumper wire and start to climb over. I have on swimming trunks under my clothes and pipe nipples tied with ropes around my ankles to weigh me down. The top of the fence has barbed wire, so we throw burlap bags over it. Birdy goes up first, then I give Mario a boost and he drops on the other side. I hand the stuff up to Birdy and he drops it to Mario. We work our way down to the reservoir. There are some trees where we can set up the pump hidden from the guard house by the dam. I figure I’ll just slide down the slanted sides of the reservoir into the water and nobody will see me.
We get the pump ready and the air line laid out. I strip and put on the helmet. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t made the damned thing. Mario and Birdy try out the pumps; I’m getting air fine. We have a rope tied around my waist so I can signal them to pull me up if I get in trouble. I also have a flashlight I waterproofed to see my way around down there.
I start into the water and it’s ice cold. I pee into some of the cleanest drinking water in the Philadelphia area. The side of the reservoir is slippery with green moss and I’ve no idea how deep the goddamned thing is. I’m sliding down and feeling there isn’t enough air coming into the helmet. I can’t get my breath from the shock of the cold water. The glass face plate is already fogged so I can’t see.
I don’t want to turn on the flashlight until I’m completely under. If the guard sees the light he’ll be all over us.
The water starts coming up past the face plate of the helmet. I’m wondering if I’m going to be able to climb back up the slippery sides of the reservoir. I can feel panic grabbing me. Where the fuck did I get such a screwy idea anyway; who the hell needs to walk around underwater shooting fish. If it weren’t for Mario and Birdy watching me, I’d scramble right on up out of there. I try a few slow deep breaths. At the least, I have to get the whole helmet underwater. I take a few more sliding steps down. My feet start sinking into soft cold mud over my ankles. I turn on the light but all I can see is a blur. There isn’t going to be any shooting fish, that’s for sure. I’m just managing to beat down surging panic. I take a few more steps and the mud is up to my knees.
Then, I don’t know what brought it on; the helmet is working perfectly, the air bubbles are plopping out of the bottom, I have enough air, everything is perfect; but I need to get out of that helmet.
I rip it off and pull on the rope. I’ve ripped off the helmet before I realize I’m really underwater and I don’t know how deep. Nobody is pulling on the rope either. I’m not sure which way is the way back. I don’t even think of pulling myself back by the rope. I’m completely ape. I drop the flashlight and try to swim up to the surface. I can’t make it because of the mud and the weights on my legs. I breathe in a full swallow of water; I’m choking, drowning, when Mario and Birdy start pulling me out. They pull me sidewise up the side of the reservoir like a gaffed fish.
The air feels wonderfully warm and thin. Mario and Birdy are bent over me. I’m stretched out, shaking, choking. Jesus, I’m glad to be alive. Birdy leans close.
‘What happened, Al? Did it leak?’
I nod. I don’t look at him. Now it’s Mario.
‘You all right, Al?’
I nod again. Mario starts pulling in the helmet. Birdy is undoing the rope from around my waist; the knot slipped when they pulled me up the side of that wall and I can hardly breathe. Mario leans over the water.
‘The light’s still burning down there. Look at that.’
‘Forget it. Let the damned thing burn itself out.’
Birdy’s taking apart the pumps.
‘What happened, Al?’
I look over at him. He’ll believe anything. He wants to believe.
‘Water began coming in. It started rising up past my mouth, then past my nose. I ripped the thing off and tried to swim up but I couldn’t move; these fuckers weighed me down and the mud on the bottom is thick as cow shit.’
I’m sitting up now and trying to untie the weights from my legs; I’m starting to get cold. Birdy gives me a hand. Then I get dressed and we take all the stuff back with us. Later, I use the diving helmet as a project in Science, get an A for it. I write it up as if it really worked. Actually it did.
To try out Birdy’s crazy wings, we have to wait till the wind’s blowing from the right direction. This wind has to blow on a Saturday or a Sunday when we don’t have any school. Birdy has the whole thing planned out with written instructions so it’ll only take the two of us to pull it off. He’s already gone down and cleared a path about a hundred yards long for the bike to make its run. He’s cleaned off all the tin cans and used a shovel to fill in any dips and knock down any bumps. I hope nobody saw him flattening out the top of the dump; they’ll figure for sure he’s crazy. I go down and look at it; it’s like a short narrow runway for an airplane; in fact, Birdy’s rigged a little wind sock with an old, starched silk stocking.
Birdy doesn’t want anybody to see his machine, so we take it down at night and hide it up where we used to have the pigeon loft. We still have the rope ladder; Birdy’s old man didn’t find that. Everything’s set.
Finally, after about three weeks, the wind is blowing perfectly on a Friday night. We make arrangements to meet at home plate at seven o’clock the next morning. When I get there, Birdy’s already waiting with his crazy bicycle and the platform hooked to the front. We’ve been practicing riding around the block with him standing up there. This itself is a hot trick both for Birdy and for me. The kids in the neighborhood are laughing their asses off watching us. We don’t care; they’re just a bunch of morons anyway. I give Dan McClusky a clout on the side of the head, for the sheer hell of it. Nobody can hurt an Irishman by hitting him on the head.
When we get down to the dump, Birdy straps on those wings and runs around a little flapping them. He’d run fast into the wind, jump, and flap like mad. It does look as if he’s getting some lift. He says he can feel it. He tells me he hasn’t eaten any dinner or breakfast. He’s been dieting for a month so he’s thin as a rail. I try to talk him out of the idea again but no go. He’s all fired up to fly out over that creek. He really thinks he’s going to take off and fly into the blue. I’m glad nobody else is around; they’d lock us up.
Birdy’s figured it all out. He has a special stand to hold the bike so he can climb up on the rack while I hand him the wings. Then I help hold the bike, steady it, while he straps them on. He looks super weird standing on the front of the bike with those wings on. He looks like a gigantic Rolls Royce radiator cap, that’s what.
There’s a mark he’s made at the edge of the hill. I’m supposed to throw on the brakes there and he’s going to spring off the bike. He goes over everything with me again. He should be nervous. There he is about ready to jump off into the air at about thirty-five miles an hour over a forty-foot drop with all that hardware on his back. Not Birdy. All I can see is he’s anxious to get started.
I start pedaling the bike like mad, trying to keep on the path. After I get moving, I’m going straight. I have powerful legs and I’m giving it all I have. It’s one of those things you don’t just half do. Birdy’s crouched in front of me, wings outspread, ready to spring off. We’re really moving when we reach the line and I hit the brakes.
Birdy springs off and over the edge. He’s flapping those wings like a mechanical seagull. For a few seconds he goes straight out, his legs spread, soaring, a gigantic, silver winged bird. He actually begins to go up, but he’s losing forward momentum and he goes into a stall. Out there, way off the hill, he begins to drop, feet first, with the wings spread and still flapping but flapping sideways. They’re designed to flap down, when Birdy’s flat out. Now he can’t get his feet up again. He’s dropping down into the creek; flapping his wings uselessly all the way.
I run after him. I’m sliding down the dump hill, getting ashes into my shoes and all over me. I scare the bejesus out of a rat. When I get there, Birdy’s standing up in the middle of the creek unbuckling his wings.
‘You OK, Birdy?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘That’s what you said after you fell off the gas tank. You sure you’re OK?’
‘Sure I’m sure. When you only weigh ninety-three pounds, you don’t fall very fast; especially if you have as much air surface as I did. I didn’t come down fast at all.’
Birdy just isn’t real. He climbs out of the water, adjusts a few vanes that’d gotten bent and wants to try again. I tell him he’s going to get himself killed and I don’t want any part of it.
We scramble up the side of the dump hill, more ashes in the old shoes, dragging the wings with us. We get up there and Birdy tries to show me, drawing it out with a stick in the ashes on his runway, how with his light weight, accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second, after he’s fallen twenty feet or so, his downward velocity isn’t going to increase. He tells me he’s already learned to jump from a twenty-foot height by collapsing his legs and rolling. He gets the wind knocked out of him, but that’s all. He’s actually convinced himself he can jump off any height and not hurt himself. Now, that’s really nuts.
He tells me to look at newsreels of people falling off high places or jumping into firemen’s nets. They start accelerating fast at first but then they reach a certain speed and seem to float. He says you can throw
a cat out a three-or four-story window and it can land fine and that’s like a twenty-or thirty-story window for a person. It’s all dependent on weight and surface and density he says, and more than that, knowing you can do it. I ask him why it is they die when they hit the ground; people, that is. He says you can fall off a curb and kill yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing.
While we’re hassling this out, we haul the wings and the bike back to Birdy’s yard and put them in the garage. We take out a little time to look around for the baseballs but don’t find anything. She’s got to be selling them. Birdy shows me where he has his freaky pigeon suit hidden. I ask him if, when he learns to fly, he’s going to start wearing it, like Clark Kent slipping into his Superman costume.
Birdy’s not fighting me anymore about taking another flight right away. He’s decided he needs to do some more work on the wings and strengthen his arms. He wants to practice gliding before he tries flying again. He says he has to arch his back while he’s flapping. He’d done all his working out on the saw-horse and forgotten he needs to keep his body out stiff in the air. I try once more to talk him out of the whole cockeyed business but he’s not listening to me. He’s planning some kind of brace to go under his stomach that he can arch against.
He’s already talking up those three or four seconds when he seemed to be flying so you’d think he’d flown around the world a couple times.
When we get home he shows me how he can jump off his back porch roof without hurting himself. You wouldn’t believe it. He hunches himself down, springs out like a diver with his arms spread, then, in midair, pulls himself together, pushes his feet in front of him, just before he reaches the ground, then collapses both against the direction of his jump and the vertical drop. He says the more horizontal movement you can develop, the easier it is to absorb the vertical force.
Birdy Page 10
