Birdy - William Wharton

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major. One afternoon, I’m sitting out in the parking lot at school in Higg’s car, making out with Lucy, when Birdy comes rolling up on his bicycle. We’re both juniors and he’s still tooling around on this wreck of a bicycle. Same crummy bike he got after we lost ours in Wildwood, trying to sell them. It won’t go more than about three miles an hour without wobbling. Birdy’s the only one who can ride it; he doesn’t even lock it in the bike rack. He just stands it there. Nobody’s going to steal it. It’s the only bike in the rack anyway; they built those racks back in the twenties when people rode bikes to school. Birdy’s tooling that bike to school every day, rain or shine; won’t take the school bus. Jesus, what can you do with somebody like that?

      Birdy comes over and we talk about exams we’re having. Birdy and I are in a lot of the same classes; both academic, both half-assed B students. Lucy’s looking at Birdy. I don’t think she ever knew we were friends. To her, I’m big killer Al, wrestler and football player, something to cheer about.

      Birdy starts talking about his canaries. Everybody at school knows he has about a thousand canaries by now. He brought some of them in to Chemistry class once to study their blood and he built a flying model in physics that actually worked, his crazy ornithopter. He even writes about them in English. Birdy, the bird freak. I’m still half interested in pigeons but Birdy’s too much. I’ve visited his aviaries and it’s about the same as his coming down to the Armory with me. We’re more a habit with each other than anything.

      Birdy’s telling about some bird he’s gotten to fly with weights tied around its legs. This bird can carry almost three times a normal bird weight and still fly. The weight lifting champion of the bird world. He’s been training this poor sap of a bird since the nest. Lucy says something about Birdy being cruel and Birdy gives her one of his quick shifting glances just to show he notices, a fast almost-smile. Lucy’s mind’s too slow for it; she doesn’t see anything happening that fast.

      Birdy’s so thin you can almost see through him. It’s late May and he’s wearing a sleeveless shirt and his sharp chest bone sticks out against it. He gets more spooky looking all the time. He’s the only guy in school with hair long enough so it drops in his eyes and he never pushes it back. He walks through that hair.

      He’s spinning his bike around in small circles as he’s talking to us. Down inside the car, I’ve got my hand slipped up Lucy’s crotch. She’s flexing her muscle on and off against my fingers. Lucy’s got great strong legs; she can jump straight up and come down in a full split. That’s her specialty as a cheerleader. Break your heart to see her do it.

      Finally, Birdy rolls off. After he goes, Lucy wants to know all about Birdy. I tell her we went to elementary school together. She opens up her legs a little so I can slip in my finger; she’s juicy already. I’ll take her down to the park in back of school. I know a great place under a bridge there. Whole bank is practically paved with condoms. Lucy gives me a good, stiff, strong tongue kiss and leans back.

      ‘Is he queer or something?’ she says. ‘He looks like some kind of homeysexual.’

      Honest to Christ; that’s what she says, ‘homeysexual’.

      I got Birdie just before Christmas and by February she’s already showing mating signs. She stands in one place and flaps her wings without flying, a kind of nervous flipping. She also starts carrying around bits of paper or thread. She’s developed a new short Peip, and sometimes a trill of little peeps. When she eats from my finger, she Peips and goes into a mating squat with her wings quivering, wanting me to feed her. I put some on the end of my wet finger and Birdie opens her mouth and wants me to put it down her throat the way you do with a baby bird. A female bird gets to be a lot like a baby when she wants to mate.

      About then, my mother finds out I’ve been letting Birdie fly out of the cage and there’s a big scene. After all kinds of hysterics, my father says I can make an aviary under the place where I built the bed. My mother throws another fit but has to go along. My father understands things sometimes.

      I want the aviary to be as invisible as possible, so I make it with thin steel wire. I put staples in the floor and into the joists under my bed. Then I stretch steel piano wires tight up and down between the staples. I put them the same distance apart as the bars on a canary cage. I make the door separate, just big enough for me to wiggle through. I hang it on the bed frame.

      When it’s finished, you can barely see the wires. Inside, I cover the walls with light blue oilcloth and hang a light from under the bed. I put oilcloth on the floor, too, and white sand on top of it. I make different perches with dowelling and trim down a piece of twisted bush to make a natural little tree in the back corner. It looks great. I take Birdie out of her cage and carry her on my finger, through the door, and into her new house. She flies from my finger onto one of the perches and flies back and forth all over the cage. She tries the tree and eats from the new dishes on the floor. She takes a bath. While she’s still wet, she comes over and sits on my knee, sprinkling me with water when she shakes. It’s a terrific place for a bird.

      I still have twenty dollars left from magazine selling. Paying off my share of the ninety-two dollars to my parents took the rest. I want to buy a male for Birdie and I want a first-class bird, a real flier.

      On Saturdays, I start going to different bird places on my bike. I carry Birdie with me in a small traveling cage. I could take her on my shoulder, but you never know when you’ll see a cat or a sparrow hawk.

      Besides Mrs Prevost, there’re other people who sell birds and live near enough. The biggest is Mr Tate. He has six or seven hundred birds. He’s a short man who’s almost deaf although he isn’t very old. He wears a hearing aid and is married but I never see any children. It’s strange that a man who can’t hear should be raising singing canaries. It’s like Beethoven.

      Birds are Mr Tate’s business and all he knows or cares about is production and how much they cost. He has large flight cages filled with birds and tremendous batteries of breeding cages. He breeds two females on a male to cut down feed costs. He thinks I’m peculiar bringing Birdie with me but he doesn’t mind.

      I stand in front of the male cage and take out Birdie so she can see. She flies against the side of the cage and some males come over to visit. A few sing to her or try to feed her. I watch but there aren’t any I like especially.

      I’m looking for a green male because the books say you should breed a yellow bird to a dark bird for good feather quality. Two yellow birds give young with thin, ragged, under-developed feathers and two darks give thick, short bunchy feathers. I feel I’ll know the right bird when I see him and so will Birdie.

      Another grower near by is a lady who only has about fifty breeding birds. She’s Mrs Cox. Mr Tate has his birds in his back yard, but Mrs Cox has hers in a covered back porch. She likes her birds and knows each one. She’s like Mrs Prevost; she tells me which of her females are good mothers and which males are good fathers. She knows who all the mothers and fathers of all the birds are. Listening to her is like listening to somebody talk about people in a small town. Sometimes she even whispers when she tells me about some particular bird which did something she thinks is wrong. She has a name for every bird. She’s glad I brought Birdie with me to help select a male; she says Birdie can fly free in the cage with the females.

      The males are in one half of the flight cage and the females in the other. There’s a wire partition between them. Mrs Cox says she watches the birds and when two birds show they love each other, she puts them into a breeding cage. Listening to her is like reading Gone With the Wind or something. She points out all the flirtings going on and which bird is after which; when you listen for a while, you begin to believe it.

      Mrs Cox doesn’t use any breeding system. Her only rule is she won’t let brothers and sisters from the same nest mate; it’s in the Bible, she tells me. In her breeding cages she uses one male to a female. She thinks Mr Tate isn’t very nice the way he does it. She talks half of one whole afternoon just about that.

      Mrs Cox and Mrs Prevost are friends. Mrs Cox recognized Birdie immediately as one of Mrs Prevost’s birds. Sometimes the two of them exchange birds to get new blood in the aviary. They’re a lot alike, except

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