Birdy
Page 32
Fucking Birdy! It’s the knife all over again.
‘All right, hotshot flying ace! Let’s hear your ending. Are we all going to just fly over the walls or something and pretend it didn’t happen?’
‘OK. This is the way it goes, Al. Before we leave here, after the ball game, we gather up the baseballs and put them in the box. Then we climb up onto the roof of the hospital.’
‘I knew it, Birdy, I knew it!’
‘Listen, Al! Up there, we start throwing the balls out over the walls. It’s a beautiful day, blue sky, sunshine with big, soft, fat clouds. We’re just whipping those balls underhand and overhand up against that blue sky and watching them sail over the wall.
‘Then we look behind us and there’s Weiss, he’s smiling at us gently, he isn’t wearing his glasses. You offer him a ball to throw but he just keeps smiling, a big, soft, loving smile. It’s the kind of smile that helps you know inside that you’re valuable.
‘We watch Weiss as he reaches over his head to the back of his neck. He starts pulling and it’s like a giant zipper. He unzips over his head, across his face, his neck, over his stomach and down to his crotch. Then, he steps out of his fat-major-psychiatrist suit. He stands there in the sunlight and he’s beautiful.’
‘Aw, come off it, Birdy!’
‘Let me finish, Al. Weiss is thin with long, strong sinuous muscles. His movements are quick and lithe, and he’s covered with a golden-colored down like a baby duck. Without the glasses we can see that his eyes are round. He springs to the edge, motioning us to follow him, smiles, then glides, with his back arched, his arms out flapping strongly, quickly but without hurry and his feet flipping gently. He glides across the grounds to the wall surrounding the hospital and lands there. He turns back and motions again for us to follow.’
‘Not me, Birdy. I’m not even going near the edge. I’m not going to jump off a building and get myself killed.’
‘I’m not either, Al.’
‘So what do we do then, Birdy?’
‘Well, we take the suit that Weiss molted and we put it in the box with what’re left of the moldy baseballs. We go back downstairs and check the box at the entrance. Then we walk right on out of here, out the gates.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘And, so what happens then?’
‘Nothing, Al; just the rest of our lives.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all?’
‘And that’s the way it ends?’
‘Not really, Al. It’s never that easy. Nobody gets off that way.’
But it’s worth trying.
Also by William Wharton
Dad
A Midnight Clear
Scumbler
Pride
Tidings
Franky Furbo
Last Lovers
Ever After
Houseboat on the Seine
Shrapnel
Copyright
The Friday Project
An imprint of HarperCollins
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Originally published in the United States, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1978
This edition published by The Friday Project in 2012
William Wharton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN: 978-0-00-745798-4
BIRDY. Text copyright © William Wharton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780007458097
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