The WWII Collection. William Wharton
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the end of a week there’s definite improvement. He gets so he can struggle his way to the top perch of the aviary. He stays up there most of the time and his flights down are hellish. They’re hardly flight, more plummeting nose dives. He spins down, missing all the perches, flapping his wings frantically. Still, he survives and manages the tough flight up again. I figure he’s suffered enough for science and take off the weights.
In the meantime, I’m working nights on designs for mechanical feathers. I’m using designs like Venetian blinds, pivoting on pins. They close on the downstroke and open on the up. I use a bent driveshaft run by a rubber-band motor to make them flap. I’m making models in both balsa wood and thin aluminum. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of strength to activate enough flapping power in wings large enough to lift me. One big trouble is that birds flap their wings by pulling them forward on the upstroke and pushing back at the same time they flap down. It’s almost like a butterfly breaststroke in swimming. They trap air under the wings and push against it. The joint of a bird’s wing moves in a circle, clockwise into the direction of flight. It’s hard to work this out with a rubber-band motor. I get some of my models to fly but they won’t take off, they only fly when I launch them by hand. If I can’t get these little models to fly, I don’t have a chance.
I’m still doing my exercises. I flap an hour in the morning and an hour at night. I try to twist my shoulders in circles, grabbing air under my armpits. That’s the way birds seem to do it. I’m flapping with weights in my hands now. My shoulders and neck are beginning to get bumpy. If I’m not careful, I walk around with my head sticking out in front of me.
I work in the afternoons on the cages. It’s really great seeing them, all painted, with feed cups attached. I’ve painted the insides of the cages light blue. I have everything ready, newspaper in the floor of each cage and gravel on the newspaper. I’ll have to change all that about once a week. The nests are in place and there’s cuttlebone for each cage. I have feed in the seed cups and water in the automatic watering trough.
The breeding lists are worked out and I have my pairs decided upon. It was fun doing all the matching. I’ll be at school and I’ll get a new breeding idea. I’ve watched all the birds until I know every one of them and they all know me. I’ve made out breeding books to keep track of the young and I’ve bought bands to put on their legs for identification. With any luck, I could wind up with a hundred and fifty young birds. I’m ready.
Jesus, the next day Renaldi tells me the baseballs have actually arrived. They were shipped down on a military plane. The box was opened by the T-4 slob. He’s the one who tells Renaldi. He probably thinks they’ve been shipped down so he can practice his spitball.
Renaldi tells me the T-4’s name is Ronsky and he keeps spitting because he always has a bad taste in his mouth. He hit the beaches at Normandy and flipped on D plus 3. He was in the wards here for months and used to keep spitting so much his room was soaking wet all the time. They couldn’t keep him from dehydrating.
Before you know it, if you’re not careful, you can get to feeling sorry for everybody and there’s nobody left to hate.
I never really thought the balls would actually come. I wonder if Birdy’s old lady has been stashing those baseballs away all these years or if she went out and bought a lot of old balls to ship down.
‘I’d like two hundred used baseballs, sir, so I can ship them down to the loony bin and help my crazy little boy who thinks he’s a canary.’
Renaldi says they’re mostly a motley collection of baseballs. They go all the way from some that are almost new to some that are just black-taped. He says they’re covered with mold. These must be the original balls and she’s kept them all this time.
What the hell could she’ve been thinking of? Keeping baseballs wasn’t going to make the ball field go away. She wasn’t making anything out of it, stealing all those balls, except enemies. It doesn’t make sense. Hardly anything seems to make sense anymore.
Why the hell is Birdy in there trying to grow feathers and I’m hiding behind these bandages. I’m beginning to know I don’t want to come out, barefaced, into the open. It’s not because of the way I’ll look, either. The docs at Dix say everything’s fine. I’ll look OK, hardly any scars even.
But, I have this crazy idea in the back of my mind that I’m going to come out of the bandages like a butterfly when I used to be a caterpillar. I’m still not finished being a caterpillar. I know I’m really a butterfly now and all the caterpillar part is finished, but I’m not ready to come out.
I’ll have the one more operation, then a month of bandages, then I’ll be discharged. I’ll have to go back to the old neighborhood. Everybody will see me. They tell me I’ll get thirty or forty percent disability. I’ll be eligible for Public Law 16. This means I can rake in the dough just by going to school. I have no idea what to study. The only thing I was ever good at in school was PE. Maybe I’ll be a PE teacher. That sounds like as dumb a way as any to spend the rest of my life.
Or, maybe I’ll start wearing a mask and cape like Zorro and charge up and down the street. I’ll challenge all the kids under twelve to duels with plastic swords. That way I can work up the disability to ninety or a hundred percent. The mask part sounds good anyway.
After breakfast, I walk over to Birdy. I pull my chair into place and make myself comfortable. Birdy turns around when I sit down. He’s still squatting flat-footed, but instead of his arms at his sides, he has them folded across his chest. He feeds himself completely now. There’s no trouble with it at all. He takes the dishes and shovels it in.
I try to look into his eyes. He isn’t more than two paces from me. It’s like looking into the eyes of a dog or a baby. After a while, you can’t do it anymore because you know you’re hurting them, burning holes in their souls. They don’t know enough to turn away, but they’re scared. I look away.
‘You know, Birdy, this is really a fucked-over situation. Who the hell would’ve thought we’d wind up like this? What went wrong? I have the feeling we haven’t had anything to do with making our own lives; we’re just examples of the way we’re supposed to be. We’re a little bit different, but in the end, we were as usable as everybody else. You might be the nut and I’m the bolt but we’re all part of the plan, and it’s all worked out before we have anything to say about it.’
I was always so damned sure about being myself and how nobody was going to make me be, or do, anything I didn’t want; now here I am. I’m not much different from my old man when you come to think about it. There’s nobody original and there’s nothing left so we can even fool ourselves.
‘You know, Birdy, it wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t been doing such a good job kidding myself all those years. I wouldn’t care so much; but I feel like such a jerk. You’re the same, you know. It’s terrible to see how easy it is for them to make us like everybody else. They put some clothes on us, give us a rifle, teach us some tricks and then we’re just names on a company roster, somebody to schedule for K.P. or guard duty or a patrol. They finish us off with a discharge or put us on a casualty list or whatever happens and it doesn’t matter who we are or were.’
It’s going to take me a long time to convince myself that Alfonso Columbato is anything but another piece of moving meat with a fancy electronic control system. It’ll be hard for me to believe in myself as something separate again.
‘And what the hell does any of it matter? Where’s it all leading to anyhow? Look at you! Either you stay like this and they feed you and keep you warm all your life or you get better; join the human race again. If you stay back there in that fake bird-brain of yours, they have it all worked out, you’ll be written into some budget as a loss. If you come back, so you go to school, or take a job, or start raising canaries again; it doesn’t matter. Everything’s been arranged for. You’ll be fit in before you can think about it.
‘Even if you could reach down and bite your own jugular vein, they have a whole system with forms to fill out and everything; it’s just another kind of thing they expect. I don’t even know who they are except all other human beings,