The Complete Collection. William Wharton

      I push the food toward his mouth. He keeps his mouth closed and turns his head.

      ‘Come on, Birdy; open up! Let mommy put some mush down your throat. It’s good for you.’

      He turns his head the other way. Renaldi is beginning to come around the cart. I give him a hard look to keep him away.

      ‘Look, Birdy. This guy’s giving me a special chance to feed you. Open up! I know the whole thing is damned undignified but what’s the difference? Either he feeds you or I feed you. If you’re going to pretend you’re a stupid bird, at least be consistent. You know you don’t crap like a bird. You can jump around all you want, but you’ll never fly out of here. They’re going to keep you in this cage the rest of your life!’

      Birdy stares at me. He’s pissed. It’s hard to get Birdy mad. He doesn’t usually care enough about most things. What I’ve heard him say more than anything else is, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ According to him, nothing matters. I’d be burned up about something, at school, or his mother, or my father, and he’d say, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

      Then, I notice his wings, I mean arms, coming away from his sides. For a minute, I think he’s going to spring at me like some crazed bat but he brings them around slowly in front of his face and looks down at them. He turns them around, uncurls his fists, and feebly wiggles the fingers. He looks at me and reaches for the bowl and spoon. I put them in his hands. He doesn’t look down, his eyes are still burning into mine. Mad! I’m not sure he isn’t going to pitch the mess at my head, but I keep my eyes on his. There’s something going on and I’m not sure what it is.

      After about two minutes of boring into me, he looks down at the bowl and then at the spoon. He shifts the spoon a few times in his hand as if trying to remember how to hold it. I want to reach out and help but I don’t. I’m knowing, for the first time, just how far away Birdy’s been. It’s a long way back, a long way for him to come. He gets the spoon almost right and starts moving it and the bowl together. He misses twice, then gets the spoon into the mush and stirs it. He stirs for a least three minutes. I’m beginning to ache in the back of my legs from squatting. I’m wishing I didn’t have the bandages on my face so it would be easier for Birdy to see me and recognize me.

      Finally, he lifts the spoon out of the dish with some mush in it and puts it into his mouth. He has a hard time getting the spoon out of his mouth because he bites down on it. It’s like watching a baby learning to eat; he has his elbow sticking way up in the air. He probably thinks he’s a bird imitating a human being now. Maybe he is.

      It takes more than an hour, but Birdy gets a fair amount of food down. He gets to where he’s spearing some of the meat with a fork. He lets me take the bowls and fork or plates from him but there’s no reaction. His face could be a beak for all the movement it makes. He looks as if he has a mask on, with his eyes glittering out from behind it.

      We get outside and Renaldi’s all excited. He says this is a big breakthrough; we’ve got to tell Weiss. I ask him what the hell Weiss will do except write it in his papers or have the T-4 type it out so he can spit on it; can’t we keep it to ourselves? Renaldi listens to me. He doesn’t want to, but in the end he’s willing to go along. I ask him what good is it if Weiss is going to come watch Birdy feed himself. What good is that going to do?

      Renaldi leaves and I take my place in the chair between the doors. Renaldi says there’s no way he can leave me in the cage with Birdy.

      I sit there for a long while watching. I think Birdy’s beginning to feel silly squatting all the time. Twice he stretches out one leg or the other. He hasn’t done that before. He goes over to the toilet to take a leak. Instead of squatting on the crapper, the way he usually does, he half straightens himself up so he’s leaning across the john, opens up his pajamas with one hand and uses the other hand to support himself against the wall. Probably he hasn’t straightened out his back that much in months. I don’t think he can stand up anymore. Renaldi tells me Birdy sleeps in a squat; won’t use the bed. He says sometimes Birdy leans against a wall and sleeps standing on one foot. You’d know Birdy would carry it too far.

      When he finishes pissing, Birdy takes a few hunched over steps toward the middle of the floor, like a skinny hunchback of Notre Dame or something, then he goes back to the old squat.

      – Nobody’s watching now, Birdy. Stand up like a human being. I won’t tell anybody. This is Al, you can trust me.

      He looks straight into my eyes. I still have the feeling he’s mad at me and this is really rare. Like I said, it’s hard to get Birdy mad. Even with my old man and the car that time, Birdy wasn’t so much mad as discouraged. He couldn’t get himself to believe anybody’d do a shitty thing like that. He was sure there’d been some kind of misunderstanding and when he could talk to the person who bought the car he could make it all right again.

      There was only one time I can remember Birdy actually getting mad. That’s the first time I realized what it would be like when a crazy, trapdoor-minded person like Birdy got mad. I knew then I’d never actually been mad in my life; I’d been pissed or angry, but mad is like crazy.

      – Birdy. How about the time that O’Neill kid stole your bicycle. I really think you’d’ve killed him.

      It wasn’t too long after Birdy and I’d met each other. We were still going to Saint Alice’s Elementary School. We were taught by sisters and it was enough to ruin anybody’s life. I’d sit in the back row and think about the nuns menstruating away under those long black, hot costumes. Habits they called them, the costumes I mean.

      There was always a plaster statue of the ‘Blessed Mother’ up at the front of the room dressed in light blue, flowing, plaster robes with a snake and flowers crushed under her feet. I used to wonder if she had tits under all that. There were girls in our classes, but it was boys on one side and girls on the other. The girls all wore these crappy dark blue uniforms. I was really glad when I got to the junior high school.

      This is just when we’re building the new loft in the trees down in the woods; before the gas tank. We’re stealing all the wood, but we need money for the wire screen and hinges and things.

      The third floor of St Alice’s is the auditorium. They serve lunches up there and every Friday afternoon they have a movie at ten cents a head. Anybody who doesn’t go to that movie is a real pauper and doesn’t love God either. This church has more damned ways to gouge the last dime out of poor people.

      Anyway, up on the third floor they also have a beat-up old piano. Half the keys don’t work and there’s practically no ivory left on them so it looks as if the piano has most of its teeth knocked out.

      The church got a ‘donation’ of another piano and they want this old one taken away. The guys who brought up the new piano say it’ll cost five dollars to haul this beat up one down but Father O’Leary, the pastor, says that’s too much, so it sits up there. Everybody thumps or bangs on the piano when they go by. The other piano has a key to lock the keyboard and the music sister keeps it locked. She gives piano lessons, at another twenty cents a head, on the new piano.

      Birdy tells Father O’Leary he’ll get the old piano down out of there for two dollars. O’Leary tries to talk Birdy into ‘donating’ his work for the ‘love of God’, but Birdy holds out for cash. He tells me about the project and we go into it together. Birdy’s plan is to chop up the piano and throw it out the window into the school yard after school when everybody’s gone.

      So, one day after school, Birdy gets the ax and sledgehammer from his garage and we set ourselves to hammering and hacking away at that piano. The real reason we’re doing it is for the metal. The sounding board is mounted in cast iron which is worth at least five dollars at the junk dealer’s in Greenwood. This is 1939 and everybody’s selling scrap metal to the Japs to help along their war effort.

      The job goes fast. I’m thumping away and Birdy’s chucking huge hunks out of the window. We’re having a fine time. The damned piano is making great slunking, thonking noises as I swing away at it. Terrific workout. I get all the strings vibrating by hitting them with the