Birdy

by William Wharton

  Now, this bird won’t recognize the cage. It’s full-grown but he’ll fly head-on against the wire as if it isn’t there. As a result he spends a fair amount of time on the bottom of the cage recovering from crashes. Mr Lincoln says he’s born stubborn dumb. I try to trade one of my dark females for him but Mr Lincoln doesn’t even want that. He says he thought of me as soon as he noticed this stupid bird.

  I trade away the females one for one. Mrs Prevost takes most of them and gives me the pick of hers. She’s glad I’m going to breed one male to a female. I spend two weeks in her cages trying to pick her best flying females. I work out a system. I borrow a stopwatch from school and watch a particular bird for five minutes. I only count the time the bird is actually in the air. I want my birds to like flying. I check each bird three times then add in such things as gracefulness and speed of flight. When I’m finished I have all the birds ranked on a flying scale. I’m also trying to avoid birds who are plain clumsy. This type will come in for a landing and stumble or crash into other birds. They’ll do a lot of crazy fluttering when they try to land on a perch in a tight space between other birds. I’m also avoiding any female who sings or fights. All the books say these are bad signs for a breeding bird. Singing females have a tendency to abandon the nest. I get my lists finished and give them to Mrs Prevost. There’re a few of her best breeders on the list and she won’t sell or trade those, but I get most of what I want.

  When I have all these birds in my flight cages it’s beautiful. It’s great to see a cage full of fine flying birds. These females fly much more than the males.

  There’re still two months before the breeding season starts, so I continue with flying experiments. It’s cold out in the aviary now, so I dress up in all my warm clothes when I go out to watch. I’ve got my mother convinced it’s all part of raising canaries.

  Now that the birds are full-grown, I experiment with flight feathers. A feather, if you look at it carefully, is incredible. It’s designed so that when pressure is put under it, no air can pass through. At the same time, air can pass through from the top easily. The feather has a hollow shaft with feeders for circulation of blood. On each side of the shaft grow out branches called barbs. These branch again into things called barbules which have little barbicles with hooks on the end. They all interlock and can be pulled apart or put together like a complicated fine-tooled zipper. The feather can be zipped and unzipped by the bird with its beak. This is what birds are doing when they run their feathers through their beaks; rezipping feathers that’ve come apart.

  Also, the feathers rotate on an axis, so they can be vertical on the upswing and horizontal on the down. All this complication is built into something weighing practically nothing; light as a feather. The feather is the thing I’m up against. Either I have to make something like it or learn to do without.

  I start pulling flight feathers from my hero birds, the ones who flew with their own weight hanging on their legs. I put the weights back on and pull one flight feather out from each wing. One gives up immediately. All that weight and now this. He sits on the bottom of the cage and tries to sleep. I take the weights off and let him free. He flies without trouble after a few minutes. Apparently, missing two flight feathers isn’t much to a canary if he isn’t weighted down. The other one manages flight of a sort. It’s a desperate frantic flight but he gets off the ground and makes it up to some of the first perches. I decide to leave the weights on and see how he compensates.

  At the end of a week there’s definite improvement. He gets so he can struggle his way to the top perch of the aviary. He stays up there most of the time and his flights down are hellish. They’re hardly flight, more plummeting nose dives. He spins down, missing all the perches, flapping his wings frantically. Still, he survives and manages the tough flight up again. I figure he’s suffered enough for science and take off the weights.

  In the meantime, I’m working nights on designs for mechanical feathers. I’m using designs like Venetian blinds, pivoting on pins. They close on the downstroke and open on the up. I use a bent driveshaft run by a rubber-band motor to make them flap. I’m making models in both balsa wood and thin aluminum. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of strength to activate enough flapping power in wings large enough to lift me. One big trouble is that birds flap their wings by pulling them forward on the upstroke and pushing back at the same time they flap down. It’s almost like a butterfly breaststroke in swimming. They trap air under the wings and push against it. The joint of a bird’s wing moves in a circle, clockwise into the direction of flight. It’s hard to work this out with a rubber-band motor. I get some of my models to fly but they won’t take off, they only fly when I launch them by hand. If I can’t get these little models to fly, I don’t have a chance.

  I’m still doing my exercises. I flap an hour in the morning and an hour at night. I try to twist my shoulders in circles, grabbing air under my armpits. That’s the way birds seem to do it. I’m flapping with weights in my hands now. My shoulders and neck are beginning to get bumpy. If I’m not careful, I walk around with my head sticking out in front of me.

  I work in the afternoons on the cages. It’s really great seeing them, all painted, with feed cups attached. I’ve painted the insides of the cages light blue. I have everything ready, newspaper in the floor of each cage and gravel on the newspaper. I’ll have to change all that about once a week. The nests are in place and there’s cuttlebone for each cage. I have feed in the seed cups and water in the automatic watering trough.

  The breeding lists are worked out and I have my pairs decided upon. It was fun doing all the matching. I’ll be at school and I’ll get a new breeding idea. I’ve watched all the birds until I know every one of them and they all know me. I’ve made out breeding books to keep track of the young and I’ve bought bands to put on their legs for identification. With any luck, I could wind up with a hundred and fifty young birds. I’m ready.

  Jesus, the next day Renaldi tells me the baseballs have actually arrived. They were shipped down on a military plane. The box was opened by the T-4 slob. He’s the one who tells Renaldi. He probably thinks they’ve been shipped down so he can practice his spitball.

  Renaldi tells me the T-4’s name is Ronsky and he keeps spitting because he always has a bad taste in his mouth. He hit the beaches at Normandy and flipped on D plus 3. He was in the wards here for months and used to keep spitting so much his room was soaking wet all the time. They couldn’t keep him from dehydrating.

  Before you know it, if you’re not careful, you can get to feeling sorry for everybody and there’s nobody left to hate.

  I never really thought the balls would actually come. I wonder if Birdy’s old lady has been stashing those baseballs away all these years or if she went out and bought a lot of old balls to ship down.

  ‘I’d like two hundred used baseballs, sir, so I can ship them down to the loony bin and help my crazy little boy who thinks he’s a canary.’

  Renaldi says they’re mostly a motley collection of baseballs. They go all the way from some that are almost new to some that are just black-taped. He says they’re covered with mold. These must be the original balls and she’s kept them all this time.

  What the hell could she’ve been thinking of? Keeping baseballs wasn’t going to make the ball field go away. She wasn’t making anything out of it, stealing all those balls, except enemies. It doesn’t make sense. Hardly anything seems to make sense anymore.

  Why the hell is Birdy in there trying to grow feathers and I’m hiding behind these bandages. I’m beginning to know I don’t want to come out, barefaced, into the open. It’s not because of the way I’ll look, either. The docs at Dix say everything’s fine. I’ll look OK, hardly any scars even.

  But, I have this crazy idea in the back of my mind that I’m going to come out of the bandages like a butterfly when I used to be a caterpillar. I’m still not finished being a caterpillar. I know I’m really a butterfly now and all the caterpillar part is finis
hed, but I’m not ready to come out.

  I’ll have the one more operation, then a month of bandages, then I’ll be discharged. I’ll have to go back to the old neighborhood. Everybody will see me. They tell me I’ll get thirty or forty percent disability. I’ll be eligible for Public Law 16. This means I can rake in the dough just by going to school. I have no idea what to study. The only thing I was ever good at in school was PE. Maybe I’ll be a PE teacher. That sounds like as dumb a way as any to spend the rest of my life.

  Or, maybe I’ll start wearing a mask and cape like Zorro and charge up and down the street. I’ll challenge all the kids under twelve to duels with plastic swords. That way I can work up the disability to ninety or a hundred percent. The mask part sounds good anyway.

  After breakfast, I walk over to Birdy. I pull my chair into place and make myself comfortable. Birdy turns around when I sit down. He’s still squatting flat-footed, but instead of his arms at his sides, he has them folded across his chest. He feeds himself completely now. There’s no trouble with it at all. He takes the dishes and shovels it in.

  I try to look into his eyes. He isn’t more than two paces from me. It’s like looking into the eyes of a dog or a baby. After a while, you can’t do it anymore because you know you’re hurting them, burning holes in their souls. They don’t know enough to turn away, but they’re scared. I look away.

  ‘You know, Birdy, this is really a fucked-over situation. Who the hell would’ve thought we’d wind up like this? What went wrong? I have the feeling we haven’t had anything to do with making our own lives; we’re just examples of the way we’re supposed to be. We’re a little bit different, but in the end, we were as usable as everybody else. You might be the nut and I’m the bolt but we’re all part of the plan, and it’s all worked out before we have anything to say about it.’

  I was always so damned sure about being myself and how nobody was going to make me be, or do, anything I didn’t want; now here I am. I’m not much different from my old man when you come to think about it. There’s nobody original and there’s nothing left so we can even fool ourselves.

  ‘You know, Birdy, it wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t been doing such a good job kidding myself all those years. I wouldn’t care so much; but I feel like such a jerk. You’re the same, you know. It’s terrible to see how easy it is for them to make us like everybody else. They put some clothes on us, give us a rifle, teach us some tricks and then we’re just names on a company roster, somebody to schedule for K.P. or guard duty or a patrol. They finish us off with a discharge or put us on a casualty list or whatever happens and it doesn’t matter who we are or were.’

  It’s going to take me a long time to convince myself that Alfonso Columbato is anything but another piece of moving meat with a fancy electronic control system. It’ll be hard for me to believe in myself as something separate again.

  ‘And what the hell does any of it matter? Where’s it all leading to anyhow? Look at you! Either you stay like this and they feed you and keep you warm all your life or you get better; join the human race again. If you stay back there in that fake bird-brain of yours, they have it all worked out, you’ll be written into some budget as a loss. If you come back, so you go to school, or take a job, or start raising canaries again; it doesn’t matter. Everything’s been arranged for. You’ll be fit in before you can think about it.

  ‘Even if you could reach down and bite your own jugular vein, they have a whole system with forms to fill out and everything; it’s just another kind of thing they expect. I don’t even know who they are except all other human beings, including us.’

  I stop. What’s the use talking about it. I only want Birdy to know he’s not alone thinking the world is shitty. Maybe if he knows I’m with him, that he’s not the only one who knows, it might help.

  ‘Look, Birdy. I’m going to have another operation on my face next week. That means I’ll have to leave here. I’ll only be staying around another day or two. If I stay any longer, they’ll probably lock me up in one of these rooms. That shit, Weiss, is getting close. I don’t know what he’ll think if he ever gets a really good look into my head.

  ‘You watch out for him, Birdy, he’s one smart son-of-a-bitch. He gets inside when you aren’t expecting it. He’s got you figured for at least one paper at the next psychiatric convention. He doesn’t want to cure you, he wants to keep you just like this. Your advantage is, he doesn’t know you’re a bird. When he figures that one out, you’re in trouble.

  ‘He’ll probably have some kind of giant bird cage made for you, with perches, feeding cups, and everything. He’ll search out that old pigeon suit of yours and have you shipped air freight at army expense to the big conference. He’ll keep you in this cage and lecture on the “bird boy”. When he’s finished with you he’ll probably sell you to a circus.

  ‘I can see it all. There’s the blare of trumpets and an elephant, all dressed in sequins, pulling a little cart. The cart is painted red and black; on top is a golden bird cage. The circus orchestra is playing “He’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”, and there you are, all decked out in a bird costume, only this time it’s a canary costume. Ten thousand canaries will have been defeathered to make this costume. You’ll hop from perch to perch, do some peeping and maybe warble a few songs for the people. They’ll have a giant-sized nest and you’ll jump into it and try hatching some eggs the size of medicine balls. As a finale, a dwarf clown jumps out of one of these balls, dressed like a miniature bird, and thumps you on the head with a rubber worm. You’ll get all the birdseed you can eat.’

  I’m winding down but Birdy is definitely smiling.

  ‘You know, Birdy; your old lady actually sent all those baseballs here? Having them sent was my idea; I hope you don’t mind. I told Weiss it might help you come around. Now I don’t know what the hell to tell him. He’s liable to put those baseballs and you together and figure it out.

  ‘Think of it. She had those balls all the time. Renaldi says they’re moldy, so she must’ve had them buried. Maybe she had them buried down where we hunted for the treasure. Maybe she ran down just before us and dug them up. It’d explain the depression in the ground.’

  Birdy’s watching me. He’s giving me his ‘you must be crazy’ look. I’m beginning to believe he’s been right about that all the time. I can see them sending Birdy up to Dix in about two weeks. There I am hunkering around in the ‘altogether’, throwing shit at anybody who comes near me. He’s sitting with a garbage lid for a shield talking to me about raising pigeons and running away to Wildwood, and ice skating, all that crap.

  God, it’d be great; just to let go and stop pretending; to let it all out; holler, scream, give Tarzan yells, run up walls or punch them; to spit or piss or shit at anybody who comes near! God, that’d be good! What keeps me from doing it? I’ve been hurt enough; I could do it if I really wanted to. Nobody could blame me.

  I don’t know how long I was dreaming the dream before I began to know. It’s hard to know you’re dreaming unless you catch yourself doing it.

  I was working in one of the flight cages when it first came to me. I’d put all the birds into the breeding cages and there were already eleven nests built and over thirty eggs had been laid. There were eggs being brooded under four of the females. Everything was going beautifully.

  I’d decided that sand in the bottom of the flight cages wasn’t such a good idea. The bird shit sank into it and got smelly. Also, the seeds and shells of seeds fell into the sand and rotted. I was designing a slanted concrete floor I could hose out easily through the wire.

  So, there I was, sitting in the bottom of the cage, smoothing cement, when it came to me. I realized I’d been in this cage. Now, this shouldn’t have surprised me, except my feeling was that the cage had seemed larger, much larger. My view of the inside of the cage was different; it was the view of a bird.

  I searched my mind. The only thing I could think of was that I’d dreamed about being inside this cage and was remembering
the dream. The next two days I concentrated, trying to remember the dream. I was getting more and more sure I’d dreamed it and was somehow being stopped from remembering. It’s hard to catch a dream.

  First, I set an alarm clock under my pillow so I’d wake up dreaming. I did this three nights in a row with the alarm set for different times. Each time I woke up, but by the time I shut off the alarm, the dream was gone. I’d lie there in the dark trying to make my mind go back. I’d almost make it sometimes, but then it’d slip away. I began to wonder if I wasn’t going to start making up a dream that didn’t happen.

  Then, one afternoon, I was painting the new cement floor of the flight cage with waterproof green paint, when it came back all of a sudden. I remembered being in the cage as a bird. I had to have been dreaming it. The dream came to me while I was in that open-minded non-thinking state you get into sometimes when you’re doing something easy and concentrated, like painting. At first, it was as if I were thinking it, daydreaming, then I knew I was remembering the dream. I kept painting, trying to keep it happening. I felt that if I turned my mind on to the dream too much, it’d go away.

  I could remember many nights of dreaming; it seemed to go back a long time. This could be because it was a dream. Dream time is different. In my dream, I’d been living in this flight cage with the other males. Alfonso, the bird, was here, and all his male children, along with the cinnamon, the topknot, and the crazy who kept flying into the sides of the cage. I could talk to them. I heard them speak in my mind in human language, in English, but they sounded like birds. I was a bird myself; I made sounds like a bird. I couldn’t remember in the dream how I looked. I didn’t look down at myself, but the other birds treated me as a bird, or almost like a bird.