Birdy

it’s not so bad letting somebody else make the decisions.
    God, it’d be great to be a running guard again; feel the mud sticking in my cleats, smell the mold in the shoulder pads around my ears, hear my own breathing inside a helmet. Everything simple, just knock down anybody with the wrong color shirt.
    Who the hell knows who’s really crazy? I think this Weiss is crazy along with his spitting T-4. They know Birdy’s crazy and probably think I am too. I should talk to that CO. He’s been around looneys long enough, probably knows more than most doctors. One thing I’ve learned; you want to know where an OP is, never ask an officer. He’s liable to send you to a Post Office.
    I’m even beginning to wonder if the way Birdy and I were so close all those years wasn’t a bit suspicious. Nobody else I’ve everknown had such a close friend; it was as if we were married or something. We had a private club for two. From the time I was thirteen until I was seventeen I spent more time with Birdy than with everybody else put together. Sure, I chased girls and Birdy played with birds but he was actually the only person I was ever close to. People used to say we sounded alike, our voices I mean; we were always coming out with the same sentences at the same time too. I’m missing Birdy; I needed him back to talk to.
    I sit there for over an hour between the doors not saying anything. I’m not particularly watching Birdy either. It’s like a long guard duty, I’m turned inside myself, only half there. I don’t know how I get to thinking about the dogcatching; maybe I’m remembering how it was all such a shock to us, especially hanging around the squad room talking to the cops. That was a quick injection of life-shit all right.
    – Hey, Birdy!
    He tenses up; he’s listening to me. What the hell. I don’t feel like talking to him about it. What good would it do. It’s not what I want to talk about anyway. Birdy hops up and turns around to look at me. He cocks his head both ways looking out of one eye, then the other, like a pigeon.
    – Aw, come off it, Birdy; quit this bird shit!
    It was the summer before our junior year when Birdy and I got the job as dogcatchers. Actually, we invented the job. There’d never been any dogcatchers in Upper Merion and so there were whole packs of dogs running around wild. This was especially true in the poor part of town, our neighborhood.
    These packs would have ten or twenty dogs in them and they didn’t belong to anybody. People’d buy their kids a puppy for Christmas or a birthday and then when they found out how much they ate, they’d throw them out and the dogs would find each other. It was like a jungle. Mostly they were mangy-lookingmongrels, with short legs and long tails or pointed faces and thick fur; all kinds of strange-looking animals.
    They’d roam around in the early morning knocking over garbage cans and spreading crap around. Daytimes, they’d usually avoid people and mosey around independently or sleep. Sometimes they’d even go back to the people who owned them; but at night they were regular wolf packs.
    Once in a while they’d gang up on a kid or some cat or the garbage men and there’d be a big fuss in the newspapers. This happened just as we were about ready to get out of school that summer. I got the idea of trying to pick them off with my twenty-two. By then, I’m already a real gun nut. I don’t know if I would’ve ever done it but I told Birdy. He said we should go to the police and tell them we’ll work over the summer as dogcatchers. He already has all those canaries and big feed bills.
    Surprisingly, the police buy the idea; the commissioner signs procurement slips and in only two weeks it’s all set up. They rip the back off one of the old patrol wagons, build a big cage on it, rig a wooden platform on the back bumper where we can stand with handles to hold on to.
    They assign a sergeant named Joe Sagessa to drive the wagon and we’re in business. Joe Sagessa had been on the desk and isn’t too happy with the job but he’s stuck. He has a pack of hunting dogs out in Secane so he’s the likely one for the detail.
    The deal is we’d be paid a dollar an hour plus a dollar a dog. That was a lot of money in those days. My old man was only pulling about thirty-five bucks a week as a plumber.
    While the truck is being fixed up they send us down to Philadelphia for training. We’re just on the straight dollar an hour but we don’t