Birdy (34 page)

I don’t care. I’m beginning to like operations. The nurses keep telling me how brave I am. Bullshit! Nobody’s ever going to fool me there. They can keep me in the hospital and cut me up a little at a time; only no pain, please. Take my lovely, muscular body and hack away. But no shocks, no sudden pain, no dirt, no attacks, no patrols; I can’t take it.

I’m just able to sit up again when they tell me I’m being shipped back to the States. I’m being shipped to Fort Dix because it’s the military hospital nearest my home. Christ, I’m beginning to feel like a civilian already. A few pieces of metal cut into me and everything changed. I don’t even think about the squad, the platoon, none of it anymore. I read the
Stars and Stripes
every day to see how the old war’s going. The Russians are sweeping across Russia, Poland, Germany. Everybody’s squeezing the Nazis. Then, Hitler puts a bullet through his head. It’s like reading a novel; it doesn’t seem real to me. It’s as if everything went from super real to mushroom soup in one morning. I’m not complaining. 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 up games. We were the game.’

‘OK, great, so now we’ve been shot down.’

‘It’s not that bad, Al. We’re still here. I know I can’t fly and I don’t even want to anymore. You know you can’t chew nails and spit tacks; but so what. We can still go on trying to put things together, shifting, arranging, so things come out right.’

‘What’s that mean, Birdy? You going back to squatting there
in your cage, letting people feed you and I go back to leg pressing a thousand pounds and running around catching people so I can hold their shoulders to the ground for three seconds? I don’t see it.’

‘Listen, Al. I think what I’m trying to say is, we really are loons. We’re crazy because we can’t accept the idea that things happen for no reason at all and that it doesn’t mean anything. We can’t see life as just a row of hurdles we have to get over somehow. It looks to me as if everybody who isn’t crazy, just keeps hacking away to get through. They live it out day by day because each day is there and then when they run out of days they close their eyes and call themselves dead.’

Al looks straight into my eyes. He’s still not sure if I’m talking sense. I think I am, but I’ve been wrong so of ten lately. I can’t hold back a smile.

‘Aw, come on, Birdy. Let me tell you something first. You’re going to have one hell of a time just getting out of this place. Your psychiatrist, that fat slob Weiss, has you pegged for a once-in-a-lifetime case. He’s never going to let you go.’

‘He’s OK, Al. He brought you down here and I’m fine now. You’ve got to admit he did the right thing. I’m not a bird and when I decide to get out of here, I’ll go. I’m not ready yet, but when I decide to leave, I’ll go. I just need more time to put it together, to figure out what I can do so my life will be some fun and I can stay alive.’

‘You don’t seem to get it, Birdy. You’re locked in here. You can’t walk out just like that.’

‘I’m not worried, Al. I’ll get out. That’s not the problem.’

‘OK, Birdy, OK. Then we con Weiss into giving you walking papers. You get a pension and live a life of luxury with nobody on your ass. How’s that?’

‘It’s not enough, Al. That’s just hurdling, getting through, leaning back. We can do better than that.’

‘But you have no idea, Birdy. This place is a regular prison. First, there’s these two doors; we can manage that, OK; but then there’s the door to the ward. I think Renaldi’d help us there. But there’s a
fifteen-foot wall all around this place with guards at the gate. If you think you can fly over that, then you’re still a loon.’

I stare at him. I don’t want to hurt Birdy, but I’ve got to know.

‘Tell me, Birdy. What the hell happened to you? How’d you wind up here anyway?’

Al’s embarrassed asking. I know I have to tell him something.

‘Well, Al, it’s like everything else, it just happened. Would you believe I got hit going into Waiheke Island off New Guinea? I think it was one of those little Japanese twenty-five-caliber machine guns.

‘I come to in a hot tent with the sun making everything yellow. I’m connected up with tubes and pipes. I’m on my back and can’t move. There are long rows of cots and hanging bottles of blood and water. I pass out.

‘I wake up again and there’s a lot of noise. People run past the cot; I hear rifle fire. It’s either morning or evening. There’s a noise at the far end of the tent. It’s a Japanese soldier cutting through with a bayonet. He goes down the line of cots. There’s no screaming, only the thump of his rifle and the tear of the cot when his bayonet stabs through each time.

‘I rip off the tubes, crawl under the edge of the tent, and start to run. Then, begin to fly. I fly past the Japanese, over the tent, and into the jungle. I look back and see the tent on the edge of the sand and the water glistening. The next thing I’m here listening to you talk about pigeons.

‘Would you believe that, Al? It’s what I remember.’

‘Shit, Birdy. That’s crazy! Nobody can fly! What do you think really happened?’

‘That’s what happened, Al.’

‘Jesus!’

Al’s backing off again. I didn’t want to lie to him, but now he’s worried.

‘All right, Al. So everything is crazy. Maybe without knowing it, I’m making up the whole flying part; but here we are now, let’s find some endings we can live with. Let’s get the old combination going.’
We sit quiet for several minutes. It’s so wild I’m afraid to bring it up, especially after the ‘flying story’ he just told me. Birdy’s liable to wind up squatting in the middle of the room again. But, I can’t help myself; I’ve got to tell him. ‘I got an idea in sort of a dream, Birdy. It was a terrific dream after the other ones. I woke myself up laughing out loud.

‘You know, Birdy, I asked Weiss to ship all those baseballs down here, the ones your old lady used to steal.’

‘Yeah. I remember. You told me.’

‘I didn’t know you heard.’

I can’t believe my mother kept those balls all these years. There’s no end to the absurd things people will do trying to make life mean something.

‘Well, those balls tripped off this dream. I woke up in the middle of it and then kept it going, the way you do with dreams when they’re good. If we could pull this off we’d out-crazy Weiss in spades. The fucking army’ll give you a hundred and fifty percent disability just so they don’t ever have to see or hear from you again.

‘First, I’ll give Weiss a full load of bullshit about how you seem to be coming along and how when I talk about those baseballs you perk up. I’ll work up a sob story about your mother taking the balls, making you feel guilty. I might even tell him something about you wanting to fly, and balls flying through the air. I’ll give him the super dramatic version of you flying off the gas tank.

‘Now, here’s where I bring up the suggestion of bringing the balls into your cage here and watching what happens. He’ll fall for it. I can see it all.’

Weiss starts
hmm
ing and
hummm
ing. A few times he strokes his chin, then tries to wrap one arm across his fat chest so he can rest his elbow on it. He’s almost too fat to pull it off. How can you be a psychiatrist if you can’t fold one arm across your chest, rest the other elbow on it and stroke your beard with your hand? It must be terrible to be a psychiatrist in the army and
have no beard to stroke. Poor bastards go to school ten years practicing beard stroking and proper
hmm
ing and they zip the beard right out from under them. Weiss would look better with a beard, a nice black beard to hide extra chins.

So, the next morning, early, we march down the corridor, the three of us, Weiss, Renaldi, and me. Renaldi’s proof you don’t have to actually be in the army to hate it.

Weiss’s in the lead with his clipboard and fresh note paper. Renaldi’s behind him, acting very serious and professional. I bring up the rear with the box of balls. They smell moldy and are a mixed bunch, nobody could’ve bought them anywhere. These are the original baseballs, the real thing, stolen one at a time from live baseball players. This is one of the great collections in the world. Birdy’s mother, the left-center field ball hawk; burier of lost baseballs.

We get to the cell and Weiss steps aside for Renaldi to open the door. He stands there, rocking up and down from his toes to his heels, back and forth, rocking his whole body like he’s fucking the air. He has his head tilted up, looking at the ceiling of the corridor. He’s like a monster choirboy; there’s something eunuchoid in his smooth-skinned face. A nice bushy mustache might help. I can just hear him breaking out with a quick Gregorian
Kyrie eleison
in high C. I stand there sniffing the baseballs and trying to hold myself in.

I’m really into the story now and Birdy’s laughing. God, it’s good to hear him laugh.

Renaldi gets the door open and Birdy comes hopping on over to us. He’s flapping his wings to be fed. Weiss jerks out of his choirboy position and stares. He whips his clipboard into place and starts scrawling away. Renaldi gets the second door open.

‘Birdy, you start jumping up and down now, flapping your arms and running around the room bouncing against the walls with those tremendous leaps you can do. We’d need one of your greatest bird imitations. You finish off by leaping up and perching on the edge of the toilet.’

Weiss is stunned. He’s standing there, leaning forward till he’s
almost falling over. His hands are hanging at his side, pen in one hand, clipboard in the other. I give him a shove with the ball box to get him all the way into the room. Renaldi locks the door.

I walk past Weiss toward Birdy. Birdy hops off the toilet and over to me. He starts giving me the feed-me signal. I put the box beside him.

‘Here, Birdy. These are the baseballs your mother took from all the baseball players. You don’t have to worry about them anymore.’

I back off to where Weiss and Renaldi are standing. I know if I look at either one, I’ll break up.

Birdy hops around the box. He keeps his hands at his sides like wings and sticks his head into the box. He starts moving the balls around with his nose. He starts sniffing as if he’s a dog. Then he makes the big move. He spreads his legs over the box and lowers his butt on top of them, just the way a hen would lower herself onto a nest. He settles himself in and a slow smile spreads over his face.

Weiss is a little recovered, his forehead is sweating and he’s scribbling away. Birdy sits there. Then, he lifts himself slightly off the nest. He looks down. His legs are straddling the box, more the way a male hovers over a nest than the way a female sits. Birdy reaches into the box with one of his hands and pulls out a baseball. It’s one of the better ones with the stitching still intact and almost white.

He holds this ball up against the light. He peers into the light, through the ball. After somewhere between five seconds and five minutes, he stands up straight, still straddling the box of balls. ‘Sterile!’ he yells.

‘And then, Birdy, you throw the ball straight at Weiss’s head!’

It’s a perfect bean ball! His glasses go flying! He turns and looks at me bare-eyed. ‘My God, Sergeant, the patient’s turned violent! Let’s get out of here. Where are my glasses?!’

I pick up his glasses and hand them to him. The lenses are OK but the frame is bent out of line so they sit cockeyed on his face. He’s trying to get them on right when we hear the yell again.

‘Sterile!’

Weiss is bopped again right on the forehead. He goes down backwards like he’s been pole-axed. His glasses are hanging by one ear. He gets on his knees with his back to Birdy and looks at Renaldi. ‘Open the door and get me out of here!’

Weiss’s struggling to his feet when Renaldi picks up one of the balls and throws it toward the toilet.

‘Pick-off play at first!’

There’s another yell.

‘Sterile!’