The Complete Collection. William Wharton

Hey Birdy! How ’bout that time we went ice skating up the creek? Remember? The time they closed the school ’cause all the pipes froze up. 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