Birdy. William Wharton

nervous than mine. She wants to take off right away. My girl, whose name is Shirley, says maybe Birdy and Claire, that’s the other girl, ought to take a walk down to the clock at the parking lot to see what time it really is. She looks at me. Now, I’m getting nervous myself. I’ve got a hard-on, and here it is coming right at me.

      As soon as they’re gone, we get down on the blanket and start kissing. She opens her mouth and sticks her tongue between my lips. I begin feeling her up and then, bango, I come off. I try not to let on but she must know. We keep kissing, but it’s not the same. She lifts her sweater and puts my hand under. I touch her bra and can feel her little nipple, hard, under it. She looks around, reaches back, and undoes the bra. I put my hand over her whole tit. Jesus, my hard is coming on again. Just then, we hear Birdy and Claire. Shirley pushes away and hooks herself up. She brushes back her hair and stands up. I get up, too.

      ‘It’s almost nine-thirty, Shirley. We’d better get home.’

      Claire stays out from under the boardwalk. Birdy stretches himself on the blanket where Shirley and I just were.

      ‘OK, party pooper. Good-bye, Al. See you, Birdy. Maybe tomorrow night about eight, near the merry-go-round, OK?’

      I say OK and they leave. I’m still shaking, and the inside of my jockey shorts are slimy with jit. I go down toward the ocean as if I’m going to take a piss. I wipe myself off. I never knew any girl like that before.

      We meet a couple more times before they leave. Birdy’s bored with the whole thing and Claire’s bored with Birdy, but Shirley and I are going hot and heavy. One night, we’re down on the blanket and I get my finger under her panties. I can feel her little hole and I slip my finger in. That’s getting close. But she pushes me away, and that’s it.

      When the girls leave I’m ready to go, too, but Birdy’s still wrapped up with his swimming. I swim some myself, but Birdy’s in all day long. He keeps going without stopping till he’s pooped, and blue with cold. Then he’ll come out and lie face down in the sand till he gets his wind back, then out he’ll go again. It doesn’t look to me as if he’s having any fun, but he has a big ear-to-ear grin on his face all the time. He’s only swimming, but he’s talking about ‘flying’. That’s typical Birdy.

      Well, after a few weeks, we run out of money and decide to sell the bikes. This is our big mistake. We go into a bike shop, and while we’re trying to sell them I noticed the lady go into the back and phone but I don’t think much of it. The guy keeps us in front dickering over price, and we’re about ready to walk out when two cops come in the door.

      They take us down to the station house, leaving the bikes at the bike store. First, they accuse us of stealing the bikes, want us to show some papers to prove we own them. Who the hell has bike-ownership papers? Then they find us on the run-away list. Birdy’s old lady’s turned us in. We’d both written saying we were all right and we’d be back in time for school. What a bitch.

      Well it all comes out that they ship us home on a train first-class with a stupid bald-headed cop. He goes all the way, eating in the dining car and everything. They stick our parents for a ninety-two dollar bill and we never see the bikes again.

      My old man beats the living bejesus out of me. He chases me around the cellar with his big leather belt, hitting me with it or punching, kicking, whatever he can get me with. The old lady’s standing at the top of the cellar steps yelling, ‘Vittorio, VITTORIO! BASTA VITTORIO!’ Nothing’s going to be enough for old Vittorio except to kill me. Finally, there’s nothing for it but to roll up in a bundle on the floor and pretend I’m dead. I just about am. I swear, there on the floor nobody’s ever going to get me so they can beat me up like that again. Somehow, I’ll get so I can beat the crap out of Vittorio, too. I’ll do it before he’s too old to appreciate it, if it kills me. I’m curled up on the floor with my hands over my eyes and ears, and he’s swinging away at me and that’s what I’m thinking. What a lot of shit!!

      I’m in bed for a week. I look like I’ve fallen off three gas tanks. I’m black-and-blue, sore all over. Mostly I’m sore inside. The old lady won’t let me out of the house till the worst swelling is down on my face. Old Vittorio’s a strong son-of-a-bitch. You wipe big joints and cut six-inch steel pipe all day and you get strong. I pin the bastard on my sixteenth birthday.

      She is so beautiful; she’s everything I’ve imagined, everything I want to be. It’s impossible she’s mine, not really mine, just with me. If she doesn’t care to stay, I’ll let her go. I want her to love me. I want us to be close, as close as living things can be to each other. How close can we come?

      When Al and I finally paid back the money, my father said I could have a bird in my room as long as I do my schoolwork and help around the house with chores. I can’t keep a pigeon indoors, so I decide on a canary.

      First, I read everything I can about canaries. I find out that the original canaries came from Africa and were shipwrecked on the Canary Islands. They were dark green. The canary is valued because it can sing. However, only the male canary sings. The female looks exactly like the male but cannot sing. She is kept in cages for breeding purposes only. It seems unfair to the females.

      I like canaries because of the way they fly. The canary has an undulating flight. It flies up into an almost stall, then loops down, then up to a stall and down. It’s like Tarzan swinging through the trees but without vines. It’s the way I’d like to fly. A few finches hang around down by the Cosgrove barn. I’ve watched them with my binoculars; they fly that way.

      I could never keep a wild bird in a cage. If a bird already knows how to fly against the sky, I could never cage it. I know I have to buy a bird born in a cage, a bird whose parents, grandparents, ancestors had lived only in cages.

      There are many types of canaries. Some are called choppers and sing a loud song; their beaks open, ending each note by closing the beak. Others are called rollers. They sing with beaks closed and deep in the throat. There are different kinds of rollers and choppers and there are contests for singing. There are also various shapes and sizes of canaries; some are so peculiarly shaped they can scarcely fly.

      I decide to buy a young female because they’re less expensive. I’m interested in flying, not singing. I buy a bird magazine that comes out every month; it gives addresses of people who sell birds. I start looking at all the canary aviaries I can find, and get to, on my bicycle. It’s two months before I find her.

      She’s in a large aviary in the back yard of a lady called Mrs Prevost. Mrs Prevost is fat and has little feet. She has aviaries in her back yard and breeding cages on the sun porch. She doesn’t care much about song or color or how her birds fly. I don’t think she particularly raises them for money either. She just likes canaries.

      She goes into the aviary and all the birds come flying down to her and land on her arms or on her head. She’s trained the birds and has some who’ll hop up and down little ladders or ring bells to get food. She has some she can take out of the cage on a perch. They won’t fly off the perch even when she waves it around.

      Mrs Prevost looks carefully for cats and hawks before she takes out a bird. She’s terrific; she should be in a circus.

      Mrs Prevost lets me sit in the aviary and watch her birds as much as I want. It’s in her aviary I decide I like canaries more than pigeons. It’s mostly in the sound of wings. Pigeon wings whistle and have a crackly stiff feather sound. Canary wings make practically no sound at all, only the kind of sound you make with a fan if you flip it quickly, a pressure against the air.

      I sit out there in the aviary with the females every Saturday for over a month. I never see Mr Prevost. Mrs Prevost brings me cups of tea in a thermos when it’s cold. Sometimes she puts on a coat and sits there with me. She points out different birds and tells me who the parents are and how many were in the nest and which ones got caught in the wire or were sick so she had to save them. She tells me which ones she’s thinking of breeding and why she’s choosing them. She’s going to breed thirty females that next year. She chooses them to breed just because these females are good mothers or come from good mothers. She isn’t trying to breed for anything special except