Free Birdy by William Wharton Page B

a regular prison.
    He’s also beginning with his canary thing. He talks about that canary all the time and he starts different goof y exercises. I try getting him to work out with weights to build himself up, but heonly does his arm flapping and jumping up and down. Sometimes he talks about his canary and I think he’s talking about a real person. I think maybe he’s finally noticed there are girls in the world but it’s just the canary. He calls her Birdy, named after himself I guess.
    The school he goes to is too cheap to have buses so he rides in on his bike. I cut one day and ride in with him. What a miserable place. Freshmen and sophomores use outside staircases like fire escapes and everybody is always robbing everybody else’s locker. They have Christian brothers teaching there. They wear long black skirts like priests except they have little stiff bibs sticking out from under their chins; real bunch of creeps; guys who want to be priests but are too dumb or don’t have the guts.
    The whole school smells funky, like a gigantic jack-off party going on all the time. Big places like that without any girls are always funky. On wet days, Birdy says it smells so bad you have to wear a gas mask.
    The way you eat lunch in this school is to walk round and round the track. Brothers are standing in the middle like lion tamers. If you want to take a piss or something you have to ask for one of these wooden passes. They’ve got five passes for more than three hundred people. Everybody walking around, holding a lunch bag, eating and holding back from peeing.
    Birdy starts faking library passes to get to the library during lunch. He has the inside of a book cut out and he’s eating sandwiches out of it. He gets away with it for almost three months but they catch him just before Easter vacation. Some brother bears down on Birdy in the library and bops him on the back of his head. Birdy throws books, sandwiches, the whole works at him and scoots down one of those fire escapes and away. They toss him out. He comes over to old U.M. to finish the year with the human beings. I figure it might turn him on with all the girls and everything but he only gets worse. People at U.M. start calling him Birdy, too. Jesus, he’s actually beginning to look like a bird.
    He’s getting even skinnier and his chest’s beginning to stick out in front like his ribs are broken. His head juts forward from hisshoulders and his eyes are always darting around loose in the sockets so he never seems to be paying much attention to any one thing. I know he’s seeing everything. Birdy sees everything but he doesn’t, what you could really call, ‘look’ at anything. Like the weather; somehow Birdy always knows about the weather. If the paper says it’s going to rain and Birdy says no; Birdy’s right.
    The next summer, Birdy and I take the job as dogcatchers; Birdy’s deep into his creepy canaries. We’re standing on back of the truck with those huge nets and Birdy’s talking about how many eggs are in this nest or which bird is already cracking seed. He’s out of sight.
    Then the next year, Birdy and I don’t see too much of each other. I go out for track, throw the discus; make varsity running guard, and wrestle. Birdy has no interest in sports. He’s back there with the birds.
    In my junior year, soon’s I’m seventeen, I join the State Guard, I want to learn how to shoot rifles, pistols, all that shit. I go down to the Armory on Thursday nights to drill. Birdy comes along with me sometimes. He sits up in the balcony bleachers in the dark and watches us. I get issued an old Springfield 06 and learn how to dismantle it. I’m a gung-ho soldier bastard. Going to get me a few Japs before the whole thing is over.
    I start going with Lucy then, too. She’s one of the cheerleaders at school and totally dumb; a commercial major. One afternoon, I’m sitting out in the parking lot at school in Higg’s car, making out with Lucy, when Birdy comes