Birdy (8 page)

Birdy’s telling about some bird he’s gotten to fly with weights tied around its legs. This bird can carry almost three times a normal bird weight and still fly. The weight lifting champion of the bird world. He’s been training this poor sap of a bird since the nest. Lucy says something about Birdy being cruel and Birdy gives her one of his quick shifting glances just to show he notices, a fast almost-smile. Lucy’s mind’s too slow for it; she doesn’t see anything happening that fast.

Birdy’s so thin you can almost see through him. It’s late May and he’s wearing a sleeveless shirt and his sharp chest bone sticks out against it. He gets more spooky looking all the time. He’s the only guy in school with hair long enough so it drops in his eyes and he never pushes it back. He walks through that hair.

He’s spinning his bike around in small circles as he’s talking to us. Down inside the car, I’ve got my hand slipped up Lucy’s crotch. She’s flexing her muscle on and off against my fingers. Lucy’s got great strong legs; she can jump straight up and come down in a full split. That’s her specialty as a cheerleader. Break your heart to see her do it.

Finally, Birdy rolls off. After he goes, Lucy wants to know all about Birdy. I tell her we went to elementary school together. She opens up her legs a little so I can slip in my finger; she’s juicy
already. I’ll take her down to the park in back of school. I know a great place under a bridge there. Whole bank is practically paved with condoms. Lucy gives me a good, stiff, strong tongue kiss and leans back.

‘Is he queer or something?’ she says. ‘He looks like some kind of homeysexual.’

Honest to Christ; that’s what she says, ‘homeysexual’.

I got Birdie just before Christmas and by February she’s already showing mating signs. She stands in one place and flaps her wings without flying, a kind of nervous flipping. She also starts carrying around bits of paper or thread. She’s developed a new short Peip, and sometimes a trill of little peeps. When she eats from my finger, she Peips and goes into a mating squat with her wings quivering, wanting me to feed her. I put some on the end of my wet finger and Birdie opens her mouth and wants me to put it down her throat the way you do with a baby bird. A female bird gets to be a lot like a baby when she wants to mate.

About then, my mother finds out I’ve been letting Birdie fly out of the cage and there’s a big scene. After all kinds of hysterics, my father says I can make an aviary under the place where I built the bed. My mother throws another fit but has to go along. My father understands things sometimes.

I want the aviary to be as invisible as possible, so I make it with thin steel wire. I put staples in the floor and into the joists under my bed. Then I stretch steel piano wires tight up and down between the staples. I put them the same distance apart as the bars on a canary cage. I make the door separate, just big enough for me to wiggle through. I hang it on the bed frame.

When it’s finished, you can barely see the wires. Inside, I cover the walls with light blue oilcloth and hang a light from under the bed. I put oilcloth on the floor, too, and white sand on top of it. I make different perches with dowelling and trim down a piece of
twisted bush to make a natural little tree in the back corner. It looks great. I take Birdie out of her cage and carry her on my finger, through the door, and into her new house. She flies from my finger onto one of the perches and flies back and forth all over the cage. She tries the tree and eats from the new dishes on the floor. She takes a bath. While she’s still wet, she comes over and sits on my knee, sprinkling me with water when she shakes. It’s a terrific place for a bird.

I still have twenty dollars left from magazine selling. Paying off my share of the ninety-two dollars to my parents took the rest. I want to buy a male for Birdie and I want a first-class bird, a real flier.

On Saturdays, I start going to different bird places on my bike. I carry Birdie with me in a small traveling cage. I could take her on my shoulder, but you never know when you’ll see a cat or a sparrow hawk.

Besides Mrs Prevost, there’re other people who sell birds and live near enough. The biggest is Mr Tate. He has six or seven hundred birds. He’s a short man who’s almost deaf although he isn’t very old. He wears a hearing aid and is married but I never see any children. It’s strange that a man who can’t hear should be raising singing canaries. It’s like Beethoven.

Birds are Mr Tate’s business and all he knows or cares about is production and how much they cost. He has large flight cages filled with birds and tremendous batteries of breeding cages. He breeds two females on a male to cut down feed costs. He thinks I’m peculiar bringing Birdie with me but he doesn’t mind.

I stand in front of the male cage and take out Birdie so she can see. She flies against the side of the cage and some males come over to visit. A few sing to her or try to feed her. I watch but there aren’t any I like especially.

I’m looking for a green male because the books say you should breed a yellow bird to a dark bird for good feather quality. Two yellow birds give young with thin, ragged, under-developed feathers and two darks give thick, short bunchy feathers. I feel I’ll know the right bird when I see him and so will Birdie.

Another grower near by is a lady who only has about fifty breeding birds. She’s Mrs Cox. Mr Tate has his birds in his back yard, but Mrs Cox has hers in a covered back porch. She likes her birds and knows each one. She’s like Mrs Prevost; she tells me which of her females are good mothers and which males are good fathers. She knows who all the mothers and fathers of all the birds are. Listening to her is like listening to somebody talk about people in a small town. Sometimes she even whispers when she tells me about some particular bird which did something she thinks is wrong. She has a name for every bird. She’s glad I brought Birdie with me to help select a male; she says Birdie can fly free in the cage with the females.

The males are in one half of the flight cage and the females in the other. There’s a wire partition between them. Mrs Cox says she watches the birds and when two birds show they love each other, she puts them into a breeding cage. Listening to her is like reading
Gone With the Wind
or something. She points out all the flirtings going on and which bird is after which; when you listen for a while, you begin to believe it
.

Mrs Cox doesn’t use any breeding system. Her only rule is she won’t let brothers and sisters from the same nest mate; it’s in the Bible, she tells me. In her breeding cages she uses one male to a female. She thinks Mr Tate isn’t very nice the way he does it. She talks half of one whole afternoon just about that.

Mrs Cox and Mrs Prevost are friends. Mrs Cox recognized Birdie immediately as one of Mrs Prevost’s birds. Sometimes the two of them exchange birds to get new blood in the aviary. They’re a lot alike, except Mrs Cox is skinny.

Mrs Cox says I can leave Birdie in the female cage and visit whenever I want. If Birdie takes a fancy to one of her young males, she’ll sell him to me. It’s very nice of her but I don’t want to leave Birdie like that.

I come every Saturday and let Birdie fly around with the other females. A lot of the males come over next to the partition and sing to her, but there doesn’t seem to be any particular male she prefers. There’s one male I like myself; he has a green back and a yellow-green breast with white flight feathers on the outside. His head is
flat and his legs are long. There’s a definite turn under his throat but I never see him sing. He flies very gracefully with much dignity. Mrs Cox says he’s a chopper; he sings very strongly but has some bad notes; these notes run in the family. His great-grandfather had been a roller but the rest of the family are choppers.

Mrs Cox tells me about another bird breeder named Mr Lincoln. He’s black and lives a square off Sixty-third Street on the other side of the park. She says he has all his birds in an upstairs bedroom in a row house. He’s married and has five children. He doesn’t do anything but raise birds and the whole family is on relief. Mrs Cox tells me all this in the same voice she talks about the birds and what they’ve done or haven’t done.

The first time I go to Mr Lincoln’s, he acts as if he doesn’t have any birds. It’s only after we’ve talked about birds a bit and he’s seen Birdie that he shows me three or four birds he has in a cage downstairs. We talked about them for a while and then he winks and tells me to follow him upstairs.

He’s fixed up a terrific aviary. The only trouble is it’s all inside and smells strongly of birds. He keeps it clean but with a couple hundred birds and no air, it gets smelly. He says he can’t screen and open the windows because of his neighbors. He’s afraid they might tell the relief people he has birds.

The birds are all in one room. One side is breeding cages and the other is flight cages. The door of the room opens onto a hall. He makes all his breeding cages by hand and paints them different colors according to his breeding plan. Color is what Mr Lincoln is interested in. He shows me the different projects he has. He experiments with breeding canaries to different kinds of birds to get new colors. He has some canaries he’s bred to linnets; they’re a nice buff red-orange with pale stripes. Other canaries he’s breeding to a little North African siskin; these are dark with bright red-orange breasts. He’s also breeding to something he calls an Australian fire finch. These come out with red heads and dark bodies.

Mr Lincoln talks about first crosses and second crosses and shows me birds he calls mules. He has to explain to me that a mule’s a bird who’s sterile. I don’t tell him I always thought a mule
was a special kind of horse with long ears. He tells me most of his first crosses are mules. He says sometimes he has to breed ten times before he gets a fertile bird. The only way to check is by breeding.

Mr Lincoln has tremendous books with diagrams and drawings of his breeding charts. He explains line breeding to me. He has different special foods he’s developed to make birds want to mate. He says if a man ate any of that stuff he’d probably be able to breed with a bird himself. Mr Lincoln never says ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or stuff like that. It’s always ‘breed’ or ‘mate’ and ‘droppings’. Maybe it’s because I’m young or white but I don’t think so. Mr Lincoln doesn’t seem to mind my color much.

The main thing he’s trying to do is get an absolutely black canary bird. He says he wants one so black it’ll look purple. He says there’s a lot of black hidden in green birds and he’s trying to get it out. The way he does this is breed the greenest birds, the ones with the least yellow in them, to white birds. The first time they come out white or gray or spotty. He takes the darkest ones with spots and breeds them back to the dark green father or mother bird. He’s been line breeding back like that for nine years and some of his birds are blacker than street sparrows. There isn’t a yellow feather on them; the parts that are black are deep dull black and the lighter feathers are deep gray. Mr Lincoln shows me a feather he keeps in his wallet. He says when he has a whole bird as black as that, he can die happy. This feather must be from a crow or a blackbird, it’s that black.

The interesting thing is, his dark birds are such fine singers. Mr Lincoln couldn’t care less about this but most of the young males in the black cages are singing away, beautiful deep-throated rollers. Mr Lincoln says it’s ‘’cause us niggers is always singin’.’ Mr Lincoln doesn’t really talk that way at all. He smiles and looks at me closely when he says it.

He lets me put Birdie in the female flight cage. I can tell he doesn’t think much of Birdie as a bird; she’s just a dumb blonde to him, but he’s impressed with the way she lets me pick her up and handle her. He says he’s never seen a bird so tame and I must be good with birds. He says I can sit up there in his aviary and watch the birds
all I want. I go there a lot and I watch Mr Lincoln cleaning and taking care of the cages as much as I watch the birds. His hands are sure and quick like birds themselves.

After a while, his wife starts inviting me to eat lunch with them. You can tell Mr Lincoln’s kids think he’s wonderful. He probably is. While I’m spending all this time at Mr Lincoln’s. I tell my mother I’m with Al. Al says he’ll cover for me. He wants to know if I’ve finally got a girlfriend but I tell him I’m going to watch birds in Philadelphia. I tell him about Mr Lincoln. Al says my mother will kill me if she catches on to where I’m going. He’s right.

Mr Lincoln says he won’t sell me any of the birds he has marked in his breeding charts, but he’ll sell me any of the others. There’s one bird I really like. I could watch him fly around all day and he knows I’m watching him. It’s the only canary bird I’ve met who comes over to the wire and tries to bite my finger.

This bird is constantly fighting with all the other males. That is, he’s trying to pick a fight. He’ll fly onto a perch and clear off everybody to the left and then everybody to the right. Then he’ll go to another perch and do the same thing. If he sees a bird at the food dish for more than a few seconds, he’ll swoop down on it like a hawk. I point him out to Mr Lincoln and he shakes his head. He says, ‘That’s one of the bad-blood ones.’

It turns out that in his breeding for black this one strain came through. It carries a lot of black in it, practically solid black but it’s all mixed in with yellow so they’re a deep green color. He says he’s tried everything to get that black separated out but finally had to give up. This is the last one of that strain. All the rest he’s sold off. He says the other thing is, the males in this bunch are meaner than bumblebees. They fight amongst themselves so much they practically kill each other off. They actually begin fighting before they get out of the nest. They fight the other birds until they either win or are half killed trying.

Mr Lincoln says they all came originally from a Hartz Mountain roller female, the daughter of a singing champion. Mr Lincoln bought her because she was so dark; he had to pay ten dollars for her five years ago. That’s a lot of money for a female, especially since she
was six years old, sick, almost bald, and molting all the time. Mr Lincoln doctored her up, fed her some of his sex food and got two nests out of her before she died. Mr Lincoln’s convinced the mean blood comes from her. He says there’s nothing more stubborn and mean than a German.

That’s when he tells me he’s a racist. Mr Lincoln thinks different races and people are different in their blood and this is the way it’s meant to be. He says each people should try to live its own natural life and people should leave each other alone. I ask him how this fits in with breeding canaries to linnets and siskins. Mr Lincoln gives me another one of his close looks. He says he’s a racist for people not for birds; then he laughs. He tells me most people are unhappy trying to live lives that aren’t natural to them. He wishes he could take his family back to Africa. I’d never thought about American black people coming from Africa. Sometimes it surprises me to find out the perfectly obvious things I don’t know.

I call this bird Alfonso, because he’s always looking for a fight, just like Al. You get the feeling he thinks he can take on anybody and win and if he can’t win he’d rather die. I try to get Birdie interested in him but she doesn’t pay much attention.

One time she’s forced to notice him. There are two or three males after Birdie. She’d go over near the screen between the male and female cages and these males would come over and start singing to her. Most times she flits back and forth from perch to perch as if she’s not listening but she always comes back to that perch and has her wings flitting up and down. Well, this once, Alfonso decides to cut this mob down. He comes over and pecks the nearest one till he breaks off his song and flutters to the bottom perch. The next bird turns and half jumps up with his wings spread and his mouth open to fight, the way birds do, but old Alfonso gives him two quick pecks near the eyes and he’s had enough. The third bird takes off while this is happening. Poor Birdie watches as her cheering squad is wiped out. Alfonso gives her one look, then flies against the wires of the cage with his mouth open in the canary equivalent of a roar. Birdie almost falls off the perch.