Birdy (16 page)

I sit there for a while trying to think of something to say. Then I remember.

I know he’s listening now. He looks at me sometimes and he gives the Old Birdy spaced-out smile there once. I keep on talking.

It was about zero degrees and when we got to school they sent us all back home. Even the water in the toilets was frozen. Five of us walked home from school together and decided we’d go ice skating. We said we’ll meet down at the edge of the dump, where the railroad track crosses the road.

There’s Jim Maloney, Bill Prentice, Ray Connors, Birdy and myself. We’re all there except Prentice when Birdy says how if you put your tongue onto a frozen railroad track it’ll stick so you can’t get it loose. Jim Maloney says he’s full of shit. We get to arguing back and forth; Maloney says he’ll stick his tongue onto the track; Birdy tries to talk him out of it, but Maloney’s a smart-ass Irish bastard. He kneels down and puts his warm tongue flat on the track. Naturally it sticks there. He tries to pull it off but it’s really stuck. We’re all laughing and Maloney’s making noises and starting to cry. It’s really a bitchin’ cold day.

Connors starts yelling he can hear a train coming. We all begin running up and down the track yelling and pretending a train’s coming. Connors runs, actually pretends he’s running, and says he’ll try to flag down the train and stop it. He takes a stick and starts pounding on the track Maloney’s stuck to, like the sound of a train going over rail junctions. Maloney’s bawling his eyes out. He’s screaming, ‘
Heh ee! Heh ee!
’ Birdy says the only thing that’ll help is some warm water. We’re a couple blocks from the nearest house. Connors comes running back yelling he can’t stop the train. We tell Maloney the only warm water we can think of is piss so we all whip out and start peeing on his tongue. What a crazy scene. Connors is actually peeing in Maloney’s ear. I’m laughing so hard I can hardly make it go. Birdy’s only pretending.

Maybe it’s the pee or maybe Maloney just got mad enough, but he rips his tongue off the track. It’s bleeding and stays flat, frozen. He can’t get it back in his mouth. He starts laying out after all of us. We run in every direction, my feet are so numb it hurts to run. We can’t understand Maloney but he’s crying and cursing, trying to see his tongue. He keeps pulling at rocks to throw at us but they’re all frozen to the ground. Finally, he drops on his knees and cries. Connors says he’ll take him home; they live near each other on Clinton Road. He says it’s too cold to go skating anyway.

Birdy and I wait a couple more minutes, but Prentice doesn’t show up. We start walking along the track up toward Marshall Road where the old mill and the dam are. In some places there’s ice frozen on the rails of the track. Birdy tries balancing on the icy rails.

First thing when we get to the mill pond, we build a fire. We kick out some rotten timbers in the mill and there’s an old can of practically frozen motor oil. We pour it over the wood to get it burning. When our feet are warm enough, we put on our ice skates.

The ice froze so fast it’s perfectly clear, what we call black ice. It’s so invisible it’s like walking on water. We can see catfish swimming on the bottom. They jump when we go over them and make little explosions of mud.

We skate around and play one-on-one hockey with some sticks and a stone. We get the idea to skate upstream as far as we can. First, we throw some big pieces of wood on the fire to keep it burning, hide our shoes near it, then start out.

It’s terrific fun skating around stones in the creek. Some of them are four feet across. Sometimes, there’s only narrow ice ways between sand bars and other times the creek widens till it’s almost as wide as the pond.

Birdy’s really good on ice skates. He can jump turn and land on either foot. It comes from all the practicing he does getting himself ready to fly We get up speed and jump over some of the rocks. Of course, Birdy can jump over rocks twice as high as I’ll even try. I measure the distance he goes and he’s going over twenty feet on those jumps. Think of what he could do broad jumping!

We skate all the way through the golf course, under the little bridges, then behind a factory and along the edge of Sixty-third Street. We hear the el go by once. We’re having such a great time we aren’t even cold. The other guys were jerks not to come with us; but we’re not missing them. Birdy and I already know we’re making a little bit more of our own personal history. We’ll have fun telling about it when we get back to school. We’ll lie about it some to make it sound better and we’ll add things each time we tell it. It’s something Birdy and I do automatically without even talking about it beforehand. Birdy makes up the lying part and I back him up with details to make it seem real. What a team.

About three miles up the creek we come to a frozen waterfall. The fall is formed by a wall at an angle. In summer, water trickles over the wall and it’s covered with moss. At the bottom there’s a good place to fish. The ice has formed great rounded white balls all down the sides of the wall. The balls are perfectly smooth and you can see through some of them.

We want to see if we can climb to the top. There’s a good-sized pond up there that ought to be great skating. We could’ve just walked in our skates around the falls, but climbing up a frozen waterfall sounds like something Richard Halliburton would do. Birdy and I are both big fans of Halliburton. We think his was
the greatest message ever sent. It was from a Chinese junk as he was trying to cross the China Sea: ‘Having a wonderful time, wish you were here, instead of me.’ It’s the last word ever heard from him.

The wall of the waterfall must be about fifteen or twenty feet high. We use our skate points to dig in and we push our butts out for balance while our hands and face are against the ice. Birdy gets to the top first.

I’m at the top and Al scrambles to the edge near me. The ice over the edge of the dam is smooth as glass. There’s nothing to get hold of. When I lean forward across the ice I lose grip with the skates. Al says he’ll give me a push. He reaches under my skate and pushes me up over the brink. I hear him tumbling down the side of the wall to the bottom. I look back and he’s turning and spinning as he goes, thumping over the ice bumps. Then he slides across the ice at the bottom.

The pond up there is beautiful; bigger than the millpond, and there are no reeds growing through the ice. I stand up and look down at Al. He’s standing, brushing himself off. He says he’s fine. He’s going to try climbing the wall again. I get down on my stomach to lean out and give him a hand when he gets close.

Al works his way to the edge and I grab him. I start pulling him slowly, my clothing is just warm enough to stick to the ice. We’re almost there, when Al pulls a bit too hard and unsticks me. We both begin sliding over the edge. There’s nothing we can do and we start laughing. For a few seconds we’re balanced, then down we go. I’m going headfirst and Al turns onto his back. The bumping isn’t as bad as it looks because we have on heavy coats. When we hit bottom there’s too much weight and we go through the ice.

I go completely under, headfirst, and come up under the ice. I bump my head against the ice and can’t break it. There’s an air space and I can see up through but the water’s freezing cold. Al breaks ice over to me and pulls me up and out. The water at the bottom of the fall there must be seven or eight feet deep. I’ve swallowed a lung full and can’t get my breath. Al spreads me on the side
bank and pumps water out of me. When I sit up I’m surprised I don’t feel cold, only limp and tired.

Al’s jumping up and down and pulling off his wet clothes. He says we have to get them off and wrung out so we can skate back to the fire before we freeze. I start getting undressed and trying to jog in place but my legs are numb. Al wrings out the clothes as we take them off and then we put them back on. They’re already freezing. Then we make the mistake of taking off our skates to wring out our socks. We can’t get the skates back on because our feet are swollen and our hands are too cold. The matches are soaked so there’s no way to build a fire. Al ties the skates around his neck somehow and says we’ll have to run back down the creek bed.

We start running and that’s when I find out I can’t breathe right. Whenever I breathe deeply I cough and can’t get my breath. Spots come before my eyes; black dots against the snow. I want to stop and rest. I’m not so much cold as tired and I can’t breathe. I stop and sit down on the ice. Al comes back and I can’t even talk. I don’t have enough breath. My ears feel like they’re filled with snow.

Al picks me up and throws me over his back in a fireman’s carry. I have no energy to resist. Al goes jogging along down the center of the creek. He can’t go fast because it’s slippery. He puts me down once and throws the ice skates under a tree growing over the ice. That’s the last I remember.

It’s a good three miles we’d skated up that creek. While I’m running along, I’m keeping my eyes open for somebody up in the old factory or on the golf course who can help us. Birdy’s passed out. I decide against trying to get up the side of the hill to Sixty-third Street. I could never make it. I’m to the point where I’m going on automatically. If I stop for anything, I’m finished.

When we get to the fire, it’s almost burned out. I put Birdy down beside it and throw on some more wood. Birdy’s gone all right. I slap him a few times to bring him around. It’s like he’s in a deep sleep. He’s breathing shallow, noisy gulps of air. I’m not cold at all myself; I’m sweating, but I’m dead tired. I lift Birdy up and walk him around to force some circulation into his legs.
The fire starts burning fine but it’s not giving off enough heat. I know I have to get Birdy home. I can’t squeeze our shoes on either of us, so I string them around my neck and pick up Birdy again. This time I carry him piggy back. I hate to face his bitchin’ old lady.

I trot up out of the woods and across the fields along the railroad tracks. I take the back way up to Birdy’s house past the Cosgrove place. The last part is uphill and I’m about pooped. I get him to his gate and put him down on his feet so it won’t look so bad. He can walk a bit now.

Lucky nobody’s home. Birdy has a key. I get him upstairs and run some water in the bathtub. Birdy can’t get his buttons undone, so I undress him and get him into the tub. I sit on the john and watch to see if he’s OK. I’m starting to get cold myself; my clothes are starting to thaw in the warm house and I’m sopping wet. The sweat is turning cold, too. The bath brings Birdy around fine. In fifteen minutes he’s almost good as new. I take off for my place.

When I get home, I jump into the tub. I throw my wet clothes into the hamper. I lie in that hot water for at least half an hour. My feet are bruised and cut. As the hot water starts to defrost them they begin to hurt. When I was running I couldn’t feel a thing.

Next day, school is still closed. Birdy and I go up the creek to get the skates. We find them OK. In this weather, nobody’s sneaking around stealing ice skates. We go on up to the place where we went in. It’s frozen over again. We check the ice and it’s more than three inches thick already. If Birdy’d been alone he’d never been able to break his way through.

We pace it off on the way back and it’s over three miles from the falls to the fire. Then, another mile to his house.

Birdy comes out without even a cold but I practically get pneumonia. I have to stay home from school for three weeks; lose ten pounds. Birdy doesn’t tell anybody about it till I get there and we have the fun of telling it together.

It’s amazing how fast they grow. By the end of one week their eyes are open and they begin laying their heads on the edge of the nest. Birdie doesn’t sit on them nearly as much and spends most of her time hauling food.

At the end of two weeks they’ve developed pin feathers and feathers over their backs. Their eyes are bright, wide open, and they cower down in the nest when I come in to look at them. Little tail feathers have started and stick out about half an inch. They’re beginning to look like birds. I even think I can tell the males from the females. I decide there are three males and one female. The dark one is definitely a male and one of the yellow ones. The spotted one is probably a male too. I judge this partly from the shape of their heads and the look in their eyes but more from the way they act in the nest. All the males keep away from the door and the wire of the cage and the little yellow one I figure for a female is less afraid. It’s this bravery which almost does her in.

By now, the nest is beginning to get messy. At the beginning, Birdie took their droppings in her mouth; then, by the time they’re a week old she has them trained to shove their butts up over the edge of the nest. Still, it doesn’t always clear the edge and the outside of the nest is covered with bird droppings. There’s so much crap I change the paper under the nest every day.

About half way into the third week, this little yellow female starts climbing up on the rampart of the nest to get a breath of fresh air and look around. I can see she’s going to be the same sort of curious
type as Birdie. She’s just a little over two weeks old when she falls out the first time. This means she falls about eight times her own height to the bottom of the cage. There are practically no feathers on her wings, so it’s a free fall. It’s like me falling off the top of our house. Weight or density has a lot to do with falling. Baby birds even fall out of trees and survive.

I don’t see her fall but I look in and there she is, trying to stand on the flat surface at the bottom of the cage. Alfonso is hopping around in total confusion. He feeds her and there’s nothing else he can do. Birdie peers down over the edge of the nest. That baby bird’ll freeze if she has to stay out there all night. She doesn’t have enough feathers.

I reach in, pick her up and put her back in the nest. She has virtually no feathers along her breast or along her thighs. Also her head is very thinly feathered. She snuggles back into the nest with the others and I think that’s the end of it.

The next day I come home from school and she’s on the floor again. Alfonso and Birdie are frantic. I have the feeling she’s been out quite a while. When I pick her up she feels cool. I hold her in my hand to warm her, then put her back in the nest and hope for the best. Birdie feeds all of them and when I go down to dinner, everything seems in order.

After dinner, she’s out of the nest again. I put her back in and wonder what I can do. I watch to see what’s happening. Birdie might’ve taken a dislike to her and is throwing her out, or maybe feels that since she left the nest voluntarily, she shouldn’t be allowed back in. Who knows what goes through a canary’s mind? In about an hour, the yellow one’s climbed up on the rampart. She looks over the edge and out into the aviary where Alfonso is flying. She stands up on her thin, bare-thighed legs and flaps her slightly feathered stubs of wings. She tumbles forward and almost off the nest. In about two minutes she does the same thing again and falls. The only solution is to make sure she’s in the nest before I turn out the lights.

During the next week, all of them start standing on the edge of the nest. It becomes the thing to do. You can see they’re preparing
themselves for flight. There’s much stretching of wings; they stand up high, stretch straight out and flap their wing stumps at faster than flight speeds. I wonder if they’re getting any lift from this flapping. I try it myself with my own arms as fast as I can but I can’t feel anything. You have to have feathers. I feel if I could only flap down without having to flap up again, I’d definitely get some lift. When I went off the gas tank, it was mostly falling.

By the end of three weeks they’re all standing on the edge of the nest, even at night, and Birdie isn’t sitting them anymore. She’s beginning to carry around pieces of burlap so I put in a new nest on the other side of the cage. Between feedings now, she begins to build again. Alfonso is more and more the main feeder of the babies. They’ve started mating again, too, and I figure it won’t be long before Birdie lays another batch of eggs.

Twice, Birdie comes over and snitches soft feathers from one or another of the babies. I’ve read how sometimes a female will pluck a whole nest of young naked to feather her new nest. This can cause all the babies to die from pain and cold. This is another one of those things that happens because canaries have been in cages so long. I wonder if it ever happens with wild birds.

The third time Birdie comes over to take a pass at one of the young for some soft down to line the new nest, Alfonso pounces on her and chases her out into the aviary. She comes back twice more and each time it’s Alfonso to the rescue. For the next few days he sits beside the nest on guard. There are so many things that can go wrong.

Finally, Birdie is finished with her new nest. In the meantime, I’ve had great fun watching the young make their first flights. The yellow female keeps falling out till she’s figured it by trial and error. I begin to think she likes falling. I’m beginning to like it myself, jumping, not falling, but free falling as far as possible. I can already jump from eight feet without hurting myself.

The first male to make the flight out of the nest definitely decides to do it. It’s the yellow one. He’s too careful to let himself fall and he’s almost too careful to fly. He spends a lot of time on the edge of the nest tottering. He flaps his wings madly there, standing high,
and nothing happening. It doesn’t look as if he’s getting any more lift than I do with my arms. It’s like somebody thrashing their arms and legs about in the water when they don’t know how to swim. You have to feel that air has substance and can hold you up. It’s mostly a matter of confidence. This yellow male can’t seem to work up enough confidence in the air to shove off. I watch him for hours, days. I become that bird. I know I can feel what he’s thinking, when he almost gets himself to do it, when he backs off.

By now, each of them looks almost like a real canary. Their tails are still short and the soft flesh around the corners of their beaks hasn’t hardened; they still have little fluff y antenna-like hairs sticking out over their eyes. Other than that they look like canaries, only half-size.

This yellow male finally makes the decision. Still, after he’s committed, he tries to go back, but it’s too late, he flutters down in a half glide to the far corner of the breeding cage. He slips and has a hard time standing on the slippery newspaper and gravel in the bottom of the cage. He starts hopping after Alfonso for something to eat.

Now, sometimes a male won’t feed the babies unless they’re in the nest, but Alfonso seems prepared to accept the inevitable. For the next while, he’ll be the prime parent for the baby birds. He feeds both of the escapees, the new yellow male and the yellow female who’s been out for a day. It’s while he’s feeding these two that the dark male, out of pure greed, having nothing to do with flight or wanting to escape from the nest, comes flying down with a bump near Alfonso and starts begging to be fed. Here he’s made one of the most important moves of his life, his first flight, and all he can think of is food. He couldn’t stand to be up there in the nest while feeding was going on down on the floor. It’s easy to miss the important things in life.

The last one, the spotted one, jumps later the same day. He’s a really timid one. He climbs out of the nest onto the perch and only winds up on the bottom because he can’t balance himself.

They all huddle on the floor in a corner, trying to recapture the warmth and security of the nest. Whenever Alfonso comes into
the cage, they chase after him and practically hound him to death with a continuous feed-me pleading. Alfonso’s very good with them and ferries food back and forth. I feel sorry for him and put a good supply of egg food in the bottom of the breeding cage.

Now is the time I’ve been waiting for. I want to watch carefully to see how the babies learn to fly. At this point, they haven’t flown much more than I have.

I watch them do all kinds of feather cleaning and wing stretching. They’re still so unsure of their footing they’ll almost fall over when they try to stretch a wing with a foot. They still can’t sleep on one foot.

They’ve been getting a good deal of wing exercise during the feeding process. Probably without realizing it, this flapping of wings while being fed is flight preparation. I can’t see any other function for it except to attract the attention of the mother or father bird. They’re flapping those stumps long before there are any feathers on them. I determine to flap my arms at least an hour every day. It seems as good a place to start as any. It’s where birds start. I flap for ten minutes that first night when the babies are out of the nest and I can’t go on. In the morning my shoulder muscles are so stiff I can barely lift my arms. My chest muscles are so sore I can’t touch them.

The first flights they make are up onto the lowest perch by the feed dish and water cup. It’s about the same kind of jump if I were to jump up onto a table. These baby birds are already trying to separate themselves from the ground. They seem to know that their place is in the air. At night, they struggle to get up onto that first little perch and somehow balance themselves. When you see their courage and determination, it’s easy to know why people can’t fly; they don’t want to hard enough.

Most of the times when the babies make that first jump up onto the feeding perch they swing right on over and off the other side; they can generate enough spring with their legs and frantic wing flapping to get up there, but they haven’t learned to use their tails yet to stop themselves and balance.

If these babies look at Alfonso and Birdie moving so easily from
perch to perch, twisting, hopping along, without a thought, without an effort, it must be discouraging. Something like flying isn’t easy even for birds; it takes practice and effort. I don’t see anything of Alfonso or Birdie trying to teach them, the babies have to work it out for themselves. I notice, though, that when one baby has figured something out, the others pick it up quickly. They seem to be learning from each other.

The next day, in the back yard, I use the old saw horses and a four-by-four as a perch to practice with. I put my perch up three feet and take a running jump flapping my arms. I realize how much spring those baby birds have in their legs already. If the spring in the legs develops in comparative strength the same as the wings, a grown bird must be able to hop even without wings, almost as well as a frog. It would be interesting to see how a bird growing up without wings would behave. I don’t mean a penguin or something that gave up flying to be able to swim, but a bird who naturally would fly but doesn’t have wings.

That night my arms are deadly sore from flapping, but I keep it up. If those little birds can do it, I can, too. I get so I can jump up on the perch and stay there. My main problem is the same one they have, that is, stopping my forward motion and not going over the other side of the perch. I flap my arms to keep myself balanced.

What I need is a tail. I could put some cloth sewn to my trousers between my legs, but that wouldn’t help. The tail has to be completely independent of the legs and controllable. Already those babies can tilt their tail up and down and spread the feathers. They got practice at this shitting from the nest. I’m still keeping up with them but already I can see that I don’t have a chance without mechanical help. The one thing I know is I don’t want a motor or anything like that. If I can’t fly on my own power, then I don’t want it.

It’s the dark male who makes the first up-flight successfully. Alfonso’d flown onto a higher perch to get away from them after he’d finished feeding and this one flies right up after him. I don’t think he even thought about this flight either. Maybe that’s part of flying; you can’t think about it too much. I don’t know how I can stop myself from thinking about it.

The dark male lands on the perch beside Alfonso and then, in the violence of his wing flapping for feeding, facing Alfonso sideways, gets unbalanced and tumbles off the perch. He catches himself midway and glides more than falls into the food dish on the side of the cage.

The baby birds seem able to take an awful beating with their falling around, and not show any sign of it. This jump of the dark male was up at least four times his outstretched height; for me this would be like jumping up onto the roof of our house. I can’t even jump
down
that far without hurting myself, and he isn’t a month old yet. It’s discouraging, but I’ll watch more closely and practice. I know I want to fly at least as much as any canary. I don’t have to fly anything as well as a canary: gliding down from high places with arm control might be enough.

Birdie has laid a new egg and we’re off on the second nest. I take it out the same as last time and put in a marble. She doesn’t sit too tightly on this first egg but she stays by the nest to protect it from the young birds. She gives off the feeling she’s finished with them and wishes they’d get out of the breeding cage. It’s a bit like some parents with teenagers. She puts up with them and she’ll feed them if they insist but her mind is elsewhere.

In a few more days they’re all capable of flying up to any perch, or the nest, and are beginning to have fun trying out their wings. Birdie starts sitting tight on the nest as soon as she’s laid her third egg. I think she’s more afraid of the babies doing the eggs harm than anything else.