The Amazing Life of Birds (2 page)

So the little guy is always flapping that one-feathered wing like it's going to make him fly. That's about like me thinking I can ask Amber Masters to go to a movie with me.

Fat chance.

Not that she'd go. That's a given. She doesn't know I'm alive. I've never spoken to her. Or to any girl. Unless it's absolutely necessary, as in, “I'm sorry your hair is on fire,” or “I'm sorry I slammed the tetherball into your face when we were in the second grade.” I keep hoping Amber has forgotten both those incidents. I don't even know why I brought it up in this journal because I've never thought of asking a girl to do anything.

See? Another weird part of puberty.

But ask her? Never happen. It would be like the little bird flapping his one-feathered wing expecting to fly and instead learning all about plummeting the way Gorm learned about gravity.

Crash and burn. That's what would happen to me. Flames all the way down …

Doo-Doo.

There it is. The kiss of death. The nickname that came into my life in the third grade, came and stuck. Doo-Doo Leech.

My best friend, Willy Traverse, gave it to me by mistake. We were on the playground seeing if we could get the swings over the top and he looked over at me and said,
“Do it, Duey!”

And three or four other kids who were there started yelling,
“Do it, Duey! Do it, Duey! Doo Doo Doo Doo …”

So for the rest of my life I will be known as Potty Boy.

Doo-Doo Leech.

Flap, flap, flap … crash.

I'm going insane.

Perhaps it's all part of this puberty thing but it's still not pleasant.

Totally crackers.

First, I wake up this morning like somebody gave me an electric shock. One second I'm sound asleep, drooling on my pillow, out, dead, not even dreaming, and the next I'm lying flat on my back staring at the ceiling counting the square tiles.

There are ninety-six of them.

And strange things are happening to my body. Parts are moving inside me, and coming outside me, and other parts are tightening up, and when I went down to have breakfast I looked at the rooster on the cornflakes box and bam, ELBOW. For a split second I
thought the rooster had actually changed and turned into something else and I looked around wondering if anybody else had seen it but no. My father was sipping coffee over the sink, where he drinks it because he spills, and my mother was reading the newspaper while she ate a piece of dry toast because she worries about her weight, and my sister was sitting at the table wondering how to destroy the whole human race if she can't get her hair to look just … exactly …
perfect.

So it was just me.

And the rooster.

And the ELBOW.

Then it was gone.

This morning I looked out at the birds as one of them brought the little guy a whole grasshopper, still alive, and stuck it in his mouth. It reminded me of the time Willy tried to get a whole hamburger in his mouth on a bet. It was just one of those White Castle bombs, not a big one, but still it was a mouthful and he almost choked to death before we figured out how to do the Heimlich maneuver on him. There were four of us and we each had a different idea about how it should be done until finally Pete Honer said, “He's turning blue,” and we all just grabbed something and squeezed and he gacked it up and out. Pickles and all.

Except that the grasshopper was still alive and knew what was coming and spread his legs out across
the baby bird's face and wouldn't go down until the parent bird used its beak to jam him down the baby's throat.

And then I thought maybe my life was not like the bird's but like the grasshopper's and that I was being eaten alive by puberty … but that got too weird.

So this afternoon after school I called Willy. He's still my best friend but his family moved to another town seven miles away, just far enough for us to be in different schools. We get together on weekends.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“This morning I woke up and counted the ceiling tiles.”

“How many are there?”

“Ninety-six.”

“Cool.”

“Then I went down to breakfast and I saw ELBOW on the side of the cereal box where the rooster was standing.”

“I've never seen it on cereal boxes. But once on the side of a bus and twice looking up at the clouds.”

“This morning the bird on my sill ate a whole grasshopper.”

“Cool.”

“It made me think of that time you choked on the burger.”

“Cool.”

“Well.”

“Well.”

“Catch you later.”

“Cool.”

Willy's got puberty the same as me and sometimes it helps to talk things over.

It's good to have a friend.

Especially if you have a nickname like Doo-Doo.

I mean can you even
imagine
somebody named Doo-Doo driving a Ferrari around Chicago with a beautiful girl while a Rottweiler eats his principal?

I didn't think so.

I woke up wondering what comes next.

This morning I was lying on my side and when my eyes opened I started counting the slats on the blind that slides down over my window.

Twenty-seven.

They go from side to side, not top to bottom, and lying on my side and trying to count them made me dizzy so I got out of bed and fell on my face halfway to the upstairs bathroom.

Good start.

Then I looked in the mirror over the sink and there was a zit in the middle of my forehead. Not just a small one. A giant. It looked like something in there was trying to get out and when I pinched it …

Well, enough of that. But now instead of a zit I
have what the TV would call a “suppurating wound.” It isn't important to know what that means—just the sound of the words makes it work.

I have another zit on my chest which the shirt will cover but in the mirror my face looks like I tried to kiss a rotary mower.

I
can't
go to school. People will puke when they see me.

And that, journal reader, was the
high
point of my day.

I went down to breakfast and my sister said: “Cover your face so I can eat.”

“So it shows then? I was thinking nobody would notice it….” Lame joke.

“What's that?” My father turned from the sink where he was drinking his coffee. “Oh.”

“Maybe a Band-Aid,” my mother suggested. “A flesh-colored one. It wouldn't show too much.”

“Right.” I turned slowly to the cornflakes box and sighed in relief. No ELBOW. Just the rooster. “Or I could just print up a bunch of three-by-five cards that say ‘I have a huge zit on my forehead' and hand them out to people. You know, so they wouldn't wonder …”

But I finally used a small circular Band-Aid, hoping either it wouldn't show too much or people would think it was some kind of honorable wound.

I could make up a story:
An old lady was crossing the street and she fell and a bus was going to hit her but I saw what was happening and jumped to grab her, dragged her out of the way, but at the last second the rearview mirror on the bus caught me in the middle of the forehead …

And caused a huge zit to appear.

Yeah, that would work.

So I went to school.

Long day.

Only one person said anything about my zit. My second best friend is a guy named Nick Fleming— another name I would have liked, Nick—and he asked what happened to my forehead and I said: “Zit.”

“Oh yeah. I've got four. They're all on my butt, though.”

“Cool.”

“Raymond Burmeister has one on the end of his—”

The bell let loose and I didn't hear the rest because it was time to go to science.

It just got better and better.

Amber was in science and I distinctly saw her look at the middle of my forehead when I walked past her lab table to get to mine.

So she actually noticed me.

With my wound.

Oh, good. Doo-Doo the Zit Boy.

And I don't know why I cared because it's not like we had a thing going. Whatever that means.

Sure, Amber and me and my zit.

Any second now all three of us will be driving around in my Ferrari.

Bad night.

Bad dreams.

Mostly it was my own fault. I watched one of those medical examiner shows last night where they showed people doing autopsies and finding the killer because of a grain of sand in the stomach lining. Then I went to bed.

So I had medical dreams. Bad medical dreams and then I think I wake up in the middle of the night only I just
think
I'm awake, I'm not really, and I look up and one of my posters of
Lord of the Rings
comes alive and Frodo walks into the room with a basket full of cornflakes mixed with stomach linings and a rooster standing on top crowing.

And then the rooster turns into …

Bad.

The bird has another feather. On the end of his left wing. So now he has one on the end of both wings, two on his head, two on his tail.

And not a single zit.

Meanwhile, he's eating like a wolf.

Plus he can hold his head up by himself now. His mom and pop brought him two grasshoppers for breakfast and he nailed them both without any help, actually held one down with his foot while he wobbled his head around and swallowed the first one, then took the second.

Part of me envies him.

No. All of me envies him.

He just sits in the nest and they bring him bugs and he grows feathers and he doesn't have to think about Amber or zits or Frodo and a crowing rooster that isn't a rooster….

My grandmother called this evening to wish me a happy birthday. A week late. But that's all right because she sent me a card with a twenty-dollar bill in it and she is very cool. The reason she couldn't call right on my birthday is that she was on a pack trip in the mountains in Colorado and couldn't get to a phone.

She's my grandmother on my mother's side and so doesn't know why they named me Duane either.

“They should have named you Carl,” she said. “He
was my husband and your grandfather and a real man. He flew fighters …”

Whenever she talked about him she would start a story and then trail off. The memories and thinking about him made her stop talking. She never said it, but she must have loved him an awful lot.

I never met him and I wish I had. Imagine how cool it would be to have a fighter pilot for a grandfather.

So another thing that's happening is my voice.

I'm talking to my grandmother and right in the middle of the words
bird's nest
my voice cracks, drops a couple of feet and then splatters out: “… birrrrd neawrkst.”

It sounded like somebody hit a bullfrog with a big hammer right in the middle of a croak.

The next few words went up and down and around, cracking and breaking. I shut my mouth and tried it slower.

“Grandmother?”

That came out all right.

“What?”

“I'm sorry. My voice did something weird. It's like I lost control of it.”

“Sure. It's changing.”

“Into what?”

“You're growing up. It's natural for your voice to change. Other things should be happening too.”