The Complete Collection. William Wharton

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      I’ve about decided to give up and take him back to Mr Lincoln when something happens. It’s a Friday night. I’m in bed reading. The light on my bed is the only light in the room.

      At first I think I hear water running. I listen hard, then realize it’s coming from under me. The sound increases in volume, then develops into the unmistakable sound of a long rolling note. Alfonso has finally decided to sing. He sings as if he’s trying not to wake us, as if he doesn’t want anyone to hear; as if he’s a trombone with a mute, practicing some complex piece of music to himself before a performance.

      After the long roll, continued unbroken, undulating in volume and pitch, for a half a minute, he breaks into three almost sobbing, soft, drawn-out melodious notes. Those three notes are enough to break your heart. Then he quickly crescendos to the top of another roll and brings it down slowly, tortuously, to a sound that has a clicking rather than a whistling quality, the kind of sound that had first caught my attention.

      He stops. I hold my breath. I wish I could see him; I try to calculate where he is from the direction of the sound, but I can’t. He starts again, the same low clicks becoming melodious, increasing in volume, tone, pitch, simultaneously, moving over at least an octave but in a different register. This time there is a single drawn-out note at the top and then directly across with another very round sounding roll to a stop; three staccato, almost unmusical peeps and then the descent. He stops. I wait but nothing more happens. I turn out the light; somehow I’ve got to keep him. Listening to him sing in the dark like that was close to flying for me. I feel myself somehow unbound.

      I sit there all afternoon till it’s dark. Nobody bothers me. I watch Birdy. He doesn’t do much except take a crap or pee once in a while. He does this by squatting over the toilet with his feet on the toilet seat. A bird doesn’t even know when it craps, so Birdy isn’t a real bird.

      A few times he turns toward me and watches. He turns his head back and forth, shifting his whole body each time. There’s a sink in the corner filled with water and once he goes over and drinks like a bird, lifting his head to let the water run down his throat. What the hell’s he trying to prove?

      When he moves anywhere, he hops. He lifts himself from the squatting position with each hop and then squats again; hopping, squatting, flipping his bent arms as wings, exactly like some awkward giant bird; like a hawk or an eagle, hopping on the ground, slow hops.

      It’s getting so it doesn’t bother me as much. When he looks at me, I try smiling but he doesn’t notice. He’s curious but there’s no kind of recognition. I can’t help wondering what in hell could’ve happened to him. I don’t want to ask Weiss again, he obviously doesn’t want to tell me; probably doesn’t know. Most likely, Birdy’s the only one who knows.

      I look up and down the corridor; nobody’s around. The CO’s already fed Birdy. This time I stayed on to watch. That’s the creepiest part all right. I don’t know if the CO or Weiss or anybody realizes that Birdy is imitating a baby bird being fed when he flips his bent arms like that. I’m sure as hell not going to tell.

      What happens to somebody like Birdy? Will they keep him locked up like this all his life? Are there hospitals all over the country filled up with war nuts? Birdy isn’t hurting anybody. Trouble is, if they let him out, he’ll probably go jump off some high building or try to fly down a staircase or out a window or something. What the hell, if that’s what he wants to do they should let him. Birdy never was dumb, most things he did made sense in a special kind of way. I’m still not sure about this crazy business either. What’s crazy? Wars are crazy for sure.

      Speaking of crazy, Birdy and I did some goofball things. An example is the spring of our sophomore year. I’d been working all winter on a diving helmet. My old man’d taught me how to cut, braze, and weld, so I made a diving helmet from a five-gallon oil can, some lead pipe, and brass fittings. I’d tested it for leaks and it was airtight. I pumped air into it by mounting two car pumps on a seesaw arrangement with an airhose going into the helmet. The pressure of the air would keep the water from coming in and the extra air came out in bubbles from the bottom.

      I’d also made a spring-mounted underwater gun from some pipe. My idea was to hunt fish underwater at the Springfield reservoir. Nobody’s allowed to fish there and it’s crowded with fish. Mario said he’d help but I needed two for manning the pumps and the air line when I went under. Birdy said he’d pitch in. My half of the deal is that I’d help him with his crackpot flying machine.

      Birdy’d taken one of his models that sort of worked and made a man-sized version of it. There were huge wings with harnesses you slipped your arms into. You had to flap the wings with your arms. These wings were each over eight feet long and there were vanes turning vertical on the upswing and horizontal on the downswing. The whole thing was designed so it rotated forward on a crankshaft arrangement when it was flapped. Birdy said you had to catch the air under the wings to get any lift.

      Birdy’d made it with aluminum framing, thin aluminum panels, and bicycle parts. He’d worked hundreds of hours on it in the machine shop at school. I don’t know where he got the aluminum; that stuff was rationed to build airplanes for the goddamned war. Birdy also had a silk piece sewn between the legs of a pair of pants that he wore when he flew this thing. When he spread his legs he had a tail like a pigeon.

      I tried the wings on and I could hardly flap the monsters. Birdy has a board over two sawhorses in his back yard. He’d lie out on this when he practiced flapping. That year of arm swinging and jumping up and down had really paid off. He could flap those wings and keep it up for more than five minutes. He’d also lie out on his back with five-pound weights hanging from the tips of these wings; then he’d flap them up. He’d calculated that five pounds on the ends was the equivalent to twenty pounds pressure under each wing at the middle. He said this gave him forty pounds of flapping power, whatever that meant. He calls this contraption an ornithopter. I thought he made up the word but I looked it up in a dictionary and it was there. It said an ornithopter was any aircraft designed to derive its chief support and propulsion from flapping wings. Who’d believe it? There’s a word for everything.

      I insist on doing my thing first. I’m thinking I might be getting into another one of those gas tank affairs where he’s going to wind up in the hospital for a while. I even try to talk him out of his crackpot project, but Birdy’s hard to talk out of anything. He says he’d thought of jumping from the gas tank but he needs to get up speed before he can lift off.

      His plan is to have me pedal a bicycle, with him standing on a contraption he’s rigged in front of the handlebars. Then, on a signal, I stop suddenly and he takes off. This is all going to happen down at the dump, the old part, where they don’t dump anymore. The pile of crap has piled up about thirty or forty feet, right to the edge of the creek there. Birdy’s planning to take off the edge of the pile and fly over the creek. I figure at least he’ll have something to fall into. He says he can slip out of the wings by unbuckling two buckles. I know he can hold his breath underwater forever, so I should be able to get down and pull him out.

      As I said, we’re doing my thing first. One evening we pile the helmet, pumps and pump rack onto our bikes and head out for the reservoir.

      It’s just getting dark when we short the electric fence with a jumper wire and start to climb over. I have on swimming trunks under my clothes and pipe nipples tied with ropes around my ankles to weigh me down. The top of the fence has barbed wire, so we throw burlap bags over it. Birdy goes up first, then I give Mario a boost and he drops on the other side. I hand the stuff up to Birdy and he drops it to Mario. We work our way down to the reservoir. There are some trees where we can set up the pump hidden from the guard house by the dam. I figure I’ll just slide down the slanted sides of the reservoir into the water and nobody will see me.

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