Birdy

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 shewas 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,