The Complete Collection. William Wharton

I can’t even get myself to worry much about being a coward either. I’ll make new tracks. I’ll find something to do so nobody will ever know. Maybe I’ll open a pizza parlor or a hoagie shop. ‘ALFONSO’S’, great name for that kind of place.

      It’s hard for me not to put on the tough guy thing with the nurses and the doctors. They want me to, I can tell. That heroic shit is hard to stop.

      By this time, the whole side of my mouth is twisting to one side. It’s getting hard to open my mouth at all. The doctors decide I’m an emergency case and put me in an airplane. I’ve never been in an airplane before; I’m wishing Birdy could be with me. He’d love it.

      I’m in America almost without knowing it. A hospital is a hospital. I’m rolled off the plane in a stretcher and into an ambulance. We go through New York with the siren blowing. I’m playing poker with another guy in the bottom bunk as we go. The nurses at Dix are different, older and very sympathetic. Everybody seems guilty. They’re practically crying over us. I’m feeling about seven years old now; great feeling. I’m turning into a great baby. Maybe I’ll win a prize in the war baby beauty contest.

      I have two days of X-rays with all kinds of doctors fingering my face flaps. Then they put me under anaesthetic and do the first operation. I still haven’t seen my face; it’s always bandaged up. I don’t really want to see it. I can see enough of what it looks like from the other people’s faces when they look at it. I know I’m not as bad as Scanlan. I’ll bet he was a nightmare for some plastic surgeon.

      I’m still just relaxing and letting things happen. They call my parents and tell them I’m in the hospital. They come tooling up in the De Soto. I can’t say I’m sorry to see them, except my old lady keeps staring at the bandages on my face and crying. The old man looks tired, much older, and for the first time I realize I’m his kid and he does care. Only he can’t allow himself to show anything. He’s standing pale and scared there trying to be the Sicilian big shot. His face lights up when I tell him I made sergeant. It’s a dumb sad life most men live.

      When they go home I turn back into my private world. My body is still my ticket. Come on, doctors, punch holes in it. Punch all the holes you want, it’s gotten me this far, all the way back to America. Punch away.

      Now, I start hurting from that first operation. I’m put on intravenous for a week and then I’m fed with a tube. I feel like a baby pigeon being fed regurgitated food. I don’t care; take care of me, world. It’s two weeks before I can even drink thin soup. I can’t chew at all, even on the good side. The doctor tells me how they’ve put in a metal plate and pins to hold my jaw. They have to get the jaw straightened before they can start any plastic surgery. He tells me I’ll have a slight malocclusion anyway. I don’t know what that is so I ask one of the nurses. I have to ask her through my teeth. She says it means my jaw won’t come together quite right. I can live with that. The doctor also tells me he’s going to bring some skin from my ass and put it on my chin. Got a match? Yeah, my face and my ass. That’s when I find out, too, I won’t be able to grow a beard. I’ve got enough hair on my ass, more hair than most people have on their faces, but it won’t help. They’re taking very thin layers.

      ‘I’m just finished with the third operation when they tell me about you, Birdy. They say you’re down in Kentucky and they want me to go talk to you. Even your shit old lady comes over to our house and asks me to go down. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to see anybody who knew me the way I used to be. I know I’m not me anymore and I don’t want any more pretending than I have to. We were too close. Birdy; we were too much to each other. But I can’t say this to your old lady; she’s crying all over my mother. The crummy pigeon poisoner and baseball crook is crying. I tell her I’ll go.

      ‘I come down and talk to fatface Weiss, here, and then I start talking to you, Birdy, about how it was with us with the pigeons and all that shit. You’re some kind of freaky bird looking out the window, crouching on the floor, not paying any attention to me.

      ‘Hell, you’re not even listening now. We’re both impossibly screwed-up, Birdy. I think maybe we put off growing up a little too long.’

      I stop talking. What’s the use? What’s the use of anything? Nobody really talks to anybody else anyway, even if they aren’t crazy. Everybody’s only strutting around, pecking and picking.

      I close my eyes, put my elbows on my knees, and lean forward with my head in my hands. I still can’t put any pressure on the left side. I figure this is the last time I’ll see Birdy. I can’t take it anymore myself. Old Weiss’s going to figure it out and lock me in one of these bins soon.

      I open my eyes and Birdy’s standing up against the bars. He has a big grin on his face and he’s looking straight at me; his eyes aren’t even wiggling.

      ‘Well, Al, you’re just as full of shit as ever.’

      ‘Holy Christ! Is that you, Birdy?!! Are you there?’

      I can’t believe it! He’s leaning against the bars, his face sticking through. He’s so thin he could turn sidewise and walk on out of the place. While he was squatting or sitting, you couldn’t tell how thin he really is. He’s taller, too. He was always a runt but now he’s taller than I am. I stand up and go close.

      ‘It’s really you, Birdy. You’re OK?’

      ‘Well, Al, I’m not OK, but it’s me.’

      It’s Birdy all right, but he sounds different.

      ‘How about all the bird shit, then? Don’t tell me you’ve been pretending all this time. If you’ve been sitting there listening and laughing, I’ll kill you barehanded!’

      ‘That’s right, Al. I was pretending. I pretended I was a bird; now I’m pretending I’m me. I figured it out while you were talking. I think I’m me now. That’s not completely true either. I don’t know who I am, but I’m not a bird.’

      ‘Holy shit! I can’t believe it. You mean you remember everything; you’re not a loon anymore?’

      ‘I’m not so sure about that either, Al.’

      Al’s heavier. He’d have to wrestle heavyweight all the time, now. He must be a hundred eighty, at least. He looks like the invisible man from the movie with all the bandages over the bottom of his face. He has the same eyes, deep, dangerous, but softer, worried-looking. You feel he’ll jump away if you make a fast move.

      ‘OK, Al, so here we are. Birdboy meets Superboy. How’re we going to work our way out of this one? Can we possibly kid ourselves into thinking all this makes sense, has some reason?’

      Birdy laughs quietly and settles into a squat in front of the bars. This is his normal squat, the way he used to squat in the pigeon coop or watch pigeons in the street. He’s squatting flat-footed with his arms out over his knees, straight out, with the palms up. He cocks his head to the side while he listens. There’s still a lot of bird there.

      I watch Al. He’s having a hard time deciding whether to talk to me as a patient, the loon in the loony bin, or to me, as myself, Birdy.

      ‘OK, Birdy, so what do we do? I’m stuck. I can’t seem to make myself different and I can never go back to fooling myself the old ways. I know it; I’m finished. The old Al isn’t there anymore!’

      ‘You don’t really know that, Al. You just want to think you know it. It’s the easy way, quiet, bloodless, deathless suicide. I’ll tell you, Al, I’ve been thinking. Maybe crazy people are the ones who see things clear but work out a way to live with it.’

      Birdy takes a long staggering breath. He talks slowly, not much like Birdy; Birdy always talked five miles a minute.

      ‘Look, Al, you and I had a going concern. We could take almost anything that happened and turn it into a personal adventure, like comic book characters. Birdboy and Superboy playing at life. We just Halliburtonized our way through everything. Nothing could really touch us. That’s something special, you know. We were so good at playing we didn’t need to make