The WWII Collection. William Wharton

Birdy. This time I stayed on to watch. That’s the creepiest part all right. I don’t know if the CO or Weiss or anybody realizes that Birdy is imitating a baby bird being fed when he flips his bent arms like that. I’m sure as hell not going to tell.

      What happens to somebody like Birdy? Will they keep him locked up like this all his life? Are there hospitals all over the country filled up with war nuts? Birdy isn’t hurting anybody. Trouble is, if they let him out, he’ll probably go jump off some high building or try to fly down a staircase or out a window or something. What the hell, if that’s what he wants to do they should let him. Birdy never was dumb, most things he did made sense in a special kind of way. I’m still not sure about this crazy business either. What’s crazy? Wars are crazy for sure.

      Speaking of crazy, Birdy and I did some goofball things. An example is the spring of our sophomore year. I’d been working all winter on a diving helmet. My old man’d taught me how to cut, braze, and weld, so I made a diving helmet from a five-gallon oil can, some lead pipe, and brass fittings. I’d tested it for leaks and it was airtight. I pumped air into it by mounting two car pumps on a seesaw arrangement with an airhose going into the helmet. The pressure of the air would keep the water from coming in and the extra air came out in bubbles from the bottom.

      I’d also made a spring-mounted underwater gun from some pipe. My idea was to hunt fish underwater at the Springfield reservoir. Nobody’s allowed to fish there and it’s crowded with fish. Mario said he’d help but I needed two for manning the pumps and the air line when I went under. Birdy said he’d pitch in. My half of the deal is that I’d help him with his crackpot flying machine.

      Birdy’d taken one of his models that sort of worked and made a man-sized version of it. There were huge wings with harnesses you slipped your arms into. You had to flap the wings with your arms. These wings were each over eight feet long and there were vanes turning vertical on the upswing and horizontal on the downswing. The whole thing was designed so it rotated forward on a crankshaft arrangement when it was flapped. Birdy said you had to catch the air under the wings to get any lift.

      Birdy’d made it with aluminum framing, thin aluminum panels, and bicycle parts. He’d worked hundreds of hours on it in the machine shop at school. I don’t know where he got the aluminum; that stuff was rationed to build airplanes for the goddamned war. Birdy also had a silk piece sewn between the legs of a pair of pants that he wore when he flew this thing. When he spread his legs he had a tail like a pigeon.

      I tried the wings on and I could hardly flap the monsters. Birdy has a board over two sawhorses in his back yard. He’d lie out on this when he practiced flapping. That year of arm swinging and jumping up and down had really paid off. He could flap those wings and keep it up for more than five minutes. He’d also lie out on his back with five-pound weights hanging from the tips of these wings; then he’d flap them up. He’d calculated that five pounds on the ends was the equivalent to twenty pounds pressure under each wing at the middle. He said this gave him forty pounds of flapping power, whatever that meant. He calls this contraption an ornithopter. I thought he made up the word but I looked it up in a dictionary and it was there. It said an ornithopter was any aircraft designed to derive its chief support and propulsion from flapping wings. Who’d believe it? There’s a word for everything.

      I insist on doing my thing first. I’m thinking I might be getting into another one of those gas tank affairs where he’s going to wind up in the hospital for a while. I even try to talk him out of his crackpot project, but Birdy’s hard to talk out of anything. He says he’d thought of jumping from the gas tank but he needs to get up speed before he can lift off.

      His plan is to have me pedal a bicycle, with him standing on a contraption he’s rigged in front of the handlebars. Then, on a signal, I stop suddenly and he takes off. This is all going to happen down at the dump, the old part, where they don’t dump anymore. The pile of crap has piled up about thirty or forty feet, right to the edge of the creek there. Birdy’s planning to take off the edge of the pile and fly over the creek. I figure at least he’ll have something to fall into. He says he can slip out of the wings by unbuckling two buckles. I know he can hold his breath underwater forever, so I should be able to get down and pull him out.

      As I said, we’re doing my thing first. One evening we pile the helmet, pumps and pump rack onto our bikes and head out for the reservoir.

      It’s just getting dark when we short the electric fence with a jumper wire and start to climb over. I have on swimming trunks under my clothes and pipe nipples tied with ropes around my ankles to weigh me down. The top of the fence has barbed wire, so we throw burlap bags over it. Birdy goes up first, then I give Mario a boost and he drops on the other side. I hand the stuff up to Birdy and he drops it to Mario. We work our way down to the reservoir. There are some trees where we can set up the pump hidden from the guard house by the dam. I figure I’ll just slide down the slanted sides of the reservoir into the water and nobody will see me.

      We get the pump ready and the air line laid out. I strip and put on the helmet. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t made the damned thing. Mario and Birdy try out the pumps; I’m getting air fine. We have a rope tied around my waist so I can signal them to pull me up if I get in trouble. I also have a flashlight I waterproofed to see my way around down there.

      I start into the water and it’s ice cold. I pee into some of the cleanest drinking water in the Philadelphia area. The side of the reservoir is slippery with green moss and I’ve no idea how deep the goddamned thing is. I’m sliding down and feeling there isn’t enough air coming into the helmet. I can’t get my breath from the shock of the cold water. The glass face plate is already fogged so I can’t see. I don’t want to turn on the flashlight until I’m completely under. If the guard sees the light he’ll be all over us.

      The water starts coming up past the face plate of the helmet. I’m wondering if I’m going to be able to climb back up the slippery sides of the reservoir. I can feel panic grabbing me. Where the fuck did I get such a screwy idea anyway; who the hell needs to walk around underwater shooting fish. If it weren’t for Mario and Birdy watching me, I’d scramble right on up out of there. I try a few slow deep breaths. At the least, I have to get the whole helmet underwater. I take a few more sliding steps down. My feet start sinking into soft cold mud over my ankles. I turn on the light but all I can see is a blur. There isn’t going to be any shooting fish, that’s for sure. I’m just managing to beat down surging panic. I take a few more steps and the mud is up to my knees.

      Then, I don’t know what brought it on; the helmet is working perfectly, the air bubbles are plopping out of the bottom, I have enough air, everything is perfect; but I need to get out of that helmet.

      I rip it off and pull on the rope. I’ve ripped off the helmet before I realize I’m really underwater and I don’t know how deep. Nobody is pulling on the rope either. I’m not sure which way is the way back. I don’t even think of pulling myself back by the rope. I’m completely ape. I drop the flashlight and try to swim up to the surface. I can’t make it because of the mud and the weights on my legs. I breathe in a full swallow of water; I’m choking, drowning, when Mario and Birdy start pulling me out. They pull me sidewise up the side of the reservoir like a gaffed fish.

      The air feels wonderfully warm and thin. Mario and Birdy are bent over me. I’m stretched out, shaking, choking. Jesus, I’m glad to be alive. Birdy leans close.

      ‘What happened, Al? Did it leak?’

      I nod. I don’t look at him. Now it’s Mario.

      ‘You all right, Al?’

      I nod again. Mario starts pulling in the helmet. Birdy is undoing the rope from around my waist; the knot slipped when they pulled me up the side of that wall and I can hardly breathe. Mario leans over the water.

      ‘The light’s still burning down there. Look at that.’

      ‘Forget it. Let the damned thing burn itself out.’

      Birdy’s taking apart the pumps.

      ‘What happened, Al?’

      I look over at him. He’ll believe anything. He wants to believe.