Birdy (20 page)

‘Soldier, I also command you to visit Corporal Lumbowski in the hospital!’

‘I can’t do that, sir.’

He stands up and leans farther forward, vested authority pouring from his eyes.

‘And why not, soldier. That’s a direct order!’

‘I’m confined to quarters, sir.’

I keep my face straight and he’s pissed. Maybe I’ll get a second court-martial for insulting a commissioned officer. I’m working my way up.

The captain keeps his eye on me and pulls out a drawer from the desk. He writes on a pad of paper. He hands the paper across to me. I take it without looking at it.

‘That’ll get you to the hospital, private.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

I take the chance; give him a fancy salute, sharp one, he returns it. I spin on my heels and leave. I walk through the orderly room, down the steps, across the company street and into the barracks. I flop out on my bunk the way the rest of the slobs do. I borrow
a comic book from the bunk next to me, Captain Marvel. The bunk’s covered with comic books. Five days and about a hundred comic books later, I get orders for Benning. I never do get to see that T-5.

I’m finished and Weiss is wanting more. We sit there quiet for a couple minutes.

‘And that’s the whole story, Sergeant?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you don’t feel you’d do anything like that again?’

‘No, sir. I learned my lesson.’

‘Did you ever hit or use violence on the patient?’

Finally, he asks the jackpot question!

‘No, sir. We were friends.’

He pushes the pencil up and down a few more times.

‘Do you have any idea, Alfonso, why you’ve been victim to these aggressive, hostile impulses? Did your father ever beat you excessively? Do you have some deep feeling of being hurt?’

Son-of-a-bitch!! He fooled me with all the fat and the smiles and glasses. He knows. I’m beginning to know, too. I’m stuck with some crazy things, like Popeye.

I spend all that summer, when I’m not catching dogs, watching the birds. There are eighteen young birds besides Birdie and Alfonso. We get through the molt without losing a single young one. I’m really enjoying learning their different flying styles. Each bird has its own way. The flying is what interests me most. The way Mr Lincoln is interested in color, I’m interested in flying. I could watch all the time; it’s almost like flying myself.

With the warm weather, my room is definitely beginning to smell ‘birdey’. My mother keeps sticking her head into the room and sniffing. I’ve got to do something before she goes over the edge.

In the meantime, I’m doing experiments with the young birds. I want to know exactly how much weight a canary can carry and still fly. I also want to know how important wings are to flying. Would a bird without wings keep trying to fly? I take one of the young birds from the last nest and pull out its flight feathers as they grow in. It does everything the other birds do, except when it jumps out of the nest it can’t fly. It hops around the bottom of the cage. The others grow and are out flying in the aviary while it’s still bound to the bottom of the cage. However, when its flight feathers do grow in, it catches up with the others and is soon flying as well as they are.

I choose some of the best flying young birds and put weights on their legs. For weights I make little bands from solder. I increase these weights a bit at a time, putting on more and more bands. My calculations show that, with my volume, to equal the density of a
bird, I’d have to weigh less than fifty pounds. I can never make that and live. I’m hoping that birds can still fly when they have a higher density.

The way I weigh the birds is to put our kitchen platform scale in the aviary. I spread some feed on the platform and wait. When one of the birds lands to eat, I read the scale. That way I get the weights of all the birds. The birds all weigh almost the same; there’s less than a few grams separating the heaviest from the lightest. It’s hard to believe, they’re so light. I don’t put any weights on Alfonso or Birdie; I figure they’ve already worked enough.

I keep increasing the weights until a bird refuses to fly. There’s quite a difference in endurance. Some birds quit after I’ve only put two bands on each leg. They just sit on the floor of the cage puffed up and pretend they’re asleep. It seems that when a bird thinks it can’t fly, it gives up. I have to take the weights off these birds or they won’t even eat.

In the end, there are two of the young males who keep flying, without giving up, even when I’ve more than doubled their weight. They can struggle their way up to the highest perches in the aviary. These two young ones take some hard bumps before I remove the weights. Still, now, if I get myself down to below a hundred pounds and can keep my strength up, I have a chance.

One night, after dinner, my mother starts in about the birds. There’s only one thing to do and that’s let her go on. My father and I sit and wait till she winds down. My father looks at me once but I can’t tell anything.

My mother complains about the smell, the mess, the noise, the mice, the fact that I’m spending all my time with the birds and don’t even have any friends except for that wop up on Radburn Road. That’s Alfonso. I really don’t know what I could do with my life that would make her happy. When she seems to be finished, I wait a few seconds, enough to make sure she’s finished and not so long that my father is going to have to say something. I know he hates this kind of thing.

It’s too bad my parents didn’t have more children. My mother says it’s because my father chose the wrong trade and the depression
came at the wrong time and my father was out of work for four years. He did his apprenticeship making wicker chairs, the kind people have on porches. It used to be high-class to have those kinds of chairs and they were hand-made. We have a porch around two sides of the house, and my father made our chairs. There are all kinds, some rocking chairs and some with high fancy backs. It’s fun to watch him. He keeps the wicker lengths in water and weaves them into the forms of chairs with his hands and a few simple tools. It’s like watching Birdie build her nest. His hands move fast and automatically. He served a six-year apprenticeship and has his master’s papers. It’s hard to be so good at something nobody wants anymore.

I start telling him my idea. I explain how this year alone with only two birds I’ve raised eighteen young birds. The males are worth eight dollars apiece on the wholesale market. I can sell off the females and pay my feed bills. That means a profit of almost ninety dollars. That’s a month’s salary for my father, working at the high school. I point out how most canaries in the United States are imported from Germany and Japan. Now that we’re at war, these sources are drying up. Raising canaries could be a good business.

I’m talking fast. I’ve got to convince him. I take out my calculations and show how much money I could make if I had fifteen breeding couples. If they all only produced an average of ten birds, and half of them males, I’d make fifty dollars on each breeding pair, that would make seven hundred and fifty dollars. The chances are the price for canaries is going up, too.

My mother says she isn’t going to have hundreds of birds stinking up the house no matter how much money I say I can make. I tell my father I want to build an aviary in back of the garage where I used to have my pigeon loft. I tell him I have enough money saved to build the whole thing.

My father sits with his elbows on the table and his hands in a double fist in front of his mouth. He has his thumbnail jammed between his teeth while I talk. My mother stands up and starts taking the dishes off the table. She’s making a lot of noise doing it. My father doesn’t look at her.

‘You say you think you can make seven hundred and fifty dollars a year raising canaries?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s almost as much as I make working a full year, day in and day out. Are you sure of that?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. I know I can do it.’

He sits with his thumbnail still between his teeth. He only takes it out to talk. It’s then I notice how thin and thin-skinned he looks. If you didn’t know, you’d think he was sick. His veins show on his hands and on the side of his head. He looks dead next to my mother.

‘What would you do with this money?’

‘I’ll do whatever you say.’

He looks straight at me. It’s as if he’s seeing me, too. I’m glad my mother is in the kitchen.

‘All right. But you give the money to me. I’ll put it in the bank so you can go to college. I don’t want you working all your life for a lousy twenty dollars a week.’

So, that’s how it is. My mother won’t talk to me but there’s nothing she can do.

I start building my aviary on the back wall of the garage. It’s away from the ball field so nobody can see it unless they come into our yard. Still, it isn’t too visible from the house; either. It’s the perfect place.

I get most of the wood the same way I got it before. I buy the wire mesh, nails, hinges, paint, and things like that. I have over a hundred dollars from the dogcatching. I only told my parents about the dollar an hour, not about the dog money. I gave them all the actual salary but I kept the dog money for myself and hid it with my pigeon suit.

I build the frame with two-by-fours. The whole exterior dimension is twelve feet wide by six feet deep. It’s six feet high at the front and seven feet where it butts against the garage wall. I cover the roof with small, dark blue composition shingles. Inside, I divide the aviary into three parts. The center part has the outside door opening onto it. That’s where I’m going to have my breeding cages. It’s exactly six feet by six feet. On either side, and opening onto the
center section are the flight cages. These are three feet by six feet and the whole height of the aviary.

I stretch the wire mesh over the framework and nail it in place. The mesh has quarter-inch square holes. I put sand in the bottom of the flight cages and then move all the birds except Birdie down from my room. I put the females in the left cage and the males in the right. They zoom around like crazies checking everything out. They fly against the wire of the cage to look at the outside. It’s the first time the babies have seen the sky. Their world is expanded a million times. Still, the actual flying space is about the same. Sometimes, wild birds come up against the outside wire of the cage to look in. Alfonso, with some of the young, fights them off. I wish I could find a way so my birds could fly free like pigeons. It’d be great to have them loop and fly all over, singing and roosting in the trees; then come when I called them into the cage.

I paint the outside gray and white. When I’m finished it looks like a true little house. While the birds are in the flight cages I start building the breeding cages. I’ve decided to breed one male to a female. I’m not really in business. The males can help with the babies and it’s too confusing with two females.

I build five rows of cages, three cages in a row; one on top of the other, going from the floor to the roof on the back wall of the center room. Each cage has two parts with a sliding door between. That way, I can separate the male or the young ones, or both, from the female, when she’s started a new nest. I work out automatic feeders and waterers and build sliding trays in the bottoms of the cages for easy cleaning. It’s really fun building the cages; like making my own nest.

I get tremendous advice from Mr Lincoln. He builds his cages himself and has some great ideas that I use. He’s really a genius with birds. I tell him my idea about breeding canaries for flying. He laughs in a circle around his aviary. Tears come into his eyes. When he stops, he says nobody’s going to buy my canaries. He says if I can breed up a canary that can’t fly at all, then I’d really have something. People could keep them on a stick without a cage, like parrots. He says cats’d like my non-flying canaries, too.

I finish the breeding cages before Christmas. The males in the flight cages are singing their heads off. Almost anything is music to a canary. They sing when I hammer or saw or when I run water. The wind blowing is a symphonic concert to a canary.

While I’m working, I keep watching them fly. Alfonso is still the star, but there’re two or three others who have all his tricks; dive-bombing, jumping straight up, turning sharp in midair. One of them even has a new trick. He dive-bombs, then instead of landing, turns just above the ground and shoots straight up again. Somehow, he uses his downspeed to turn up. I watch it a hundred times but can’t figure how he does it. I can see he tilts his body so he’s practically standing on his tail with wings full out at the split second when he pulls out of his dive, then, he hunches his shoulders over and traps the fast air under his wings to give him the thrust up. This bird is yellow like Birdie but has all the hawk look of Alfonso. He’s not as mean as some of the dark birds, but he fights if anybody pushes too hard. Most times he just moves away to another perch. He’s one of the ones who flew with all the weight.

Alfonso II, from the first nest, is almost as mean as old Alfonso himself. The two of them get into some awful battles. Alfonso has a hard time finding any place in the aviary where he isn’t invading the territory of number-one son.

I still haven’t lost any birds. Mr Lincoln gives me some great ideas for tonics. I soak seed and mix it with egg food and cereal. I give them apples, lettuce, and dandelion leaves.

Counting Alfonso and Birdie, there are twenty birds – twelve males and eight females. The only sure breeding pair I have is Alfonso and Birdie. I could line-breed to Alfonso with one of the females but he’s so good with Birdie, I hate to break it up. It’s hard to do, but I decide to sell, or trade off, all the females. I need new blood; I can’t breed brother to sister. Some of these females are beautiful, and I hate to sell them. I feel like a slave trader.

I’m going to run fifteen breeding couples, so I need three more males as well as the females. I hunt around for two months before I find the kind of males I want. The trouble is it’s hard to see how well they fly, even in flight cages. The birds can’t get up any real speed.

One male I buy is what’s called a cinnamon. He’s sort of a golden-brown color. He’s long and slim like Alfonso, but his song type is what is called Saxon; sort of half roller.

Another male is yellow except for a black head and a topknot. A topknot has his hair parted and combed out from the center of his head. He looks as if he’s wearing a hat. This one looks almost like a clown. If you breed two topknots together you get a bald-headed bird. Mr Lincoln is disgusted that I’d buy a topknot. He doesn’t like any of the fancy birds. But this topknot can really fly. Also, he’s incredibly good at hovering. Canaries don’t hover much but this topknot can hover around the top of an aviary like a hawk hunting. He can also do a fair glide. Finches generally aren’t much for gliding, so, I have to have him.

The last one I get from Mr Lincoln. Mr Lincoln gives me the bird for nothing. He’s convinced this bird’s crazy. It keeps flying into the sides of the aviary. Most birds learn fast just what a cage is and how wire is. They get so they fly up against the cage but swing their feet up and grab hold. Only a baby bird will actually butt its head against the wire of a cage.

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.