Birdy

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 anotherroll 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 fedwhen 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