Birdy

fish. Mario said he’d help but I needed two for manning the pumps and the air line when I went under. Birdy said he’d pitch in. My half of the deal is that I’d help him with his crackpot flying machine.
    Birdy’d taken one of his models that sort of worked and made a man-sized version of it. There were huge wings with harnesses you slipped your arms into. You had to flap the wings with your arms. These wings were each over eight feet long and there were vanes turning vertical on the upswing and horizontal on the downswing. The whole thing was designed so it rotated forward on a crankshaft arrangement when it was flapped. Birdy said you had to catch the air under the wings to get any lift.
    Birdy’d made it with aluminum framing, thin aluminum panels,and bicycle parts. He’d worked hundreds of hours on it in the machine shop at school. I don’t know where he got the aluminum; that stuff was rationed to build airplanes for the goddamned war. Birdy also had a silk piece sewn between the legs of a pair of pants that he wore when he flew this thing. When he spread his legs he had a tail like a pigeon.
    I tried the wings on and I could hardly flap the monsters. Birdy has a board over two sawhorses in his back yard. He’d lie out on this when he practiced flapping. That year of arm swinging and jumping up and down had really paid off. He could flap those wings and keep it up for more than five minutes. He’d also lie out on his back with five-pound weights hanging from the tips of these wings; then he’d flap them up. He’d calculated that five pounds on the ends was the equivalent to twenty pounds pressure under each wing at the middle. He said this gave him forty pounds of flapping power, whatever that meant. He calls this contraption an ornithopter. I thought he made up the word but I looked it up in a dictionary and it was there. It said an ornithopter was any aircraft designed to derive its chief support and propulsion from flapping wings. Who’d believe it? There’s a word for everything.
    I insist on doing my thing first. I’m thinking I might be getting into another one of those gas tank affairs where he’s going to wind up in the hospital for a while. I even try to talk him out of his crackpot project, but Birdy’s hard to talk out of anything. He says he’d thought of jumping from the gas tank but he needs to get up speed before he can lift off.
    His plan is to have me pedal a bicycle, with him standing on a contraption he’s rigged in front of the handlebars. Then, on a signal, I stop suddenly and he takes off. This is all going to happen down at the dump, the old part, where they don’t dump anymore. The pile of crap has piled up about thirty or forty feet, right to the edge of the creek there. Birdy’s planning to take off the edge of the pile and fly over the creek. I figure at least he’ll have something to fall into. He says he can slip out of the wings by unbuckling two buckles. I know he can hold his breath underwater forever, so I should be able to get down and pull him out.
    As I said, we’re doing my thing first. One evening we pile the helmet, pumps and pump rack onto our bikes and head out for the reservoir.
    It’s just getting dark when we short the electric fence with a jumper wire and start to climb over. I have on swimming trunks under my clothes and pipe nipples tied with ropes around my ankles to weigh me down. The top of the fence has barbed wire, so we throw burlap bags over it. Birdy goes up first, then I give Mario a boost and he drops on the other side. I hand the stuff up to Birdy and he drops it to Mario. We work our way down to the reservoir. There are some trees where we can set up the pump hidden from the guard house by the dam. I figure I’ll just slide down the slanted sides of the reservoir into the water and nobody will see me.
    We get the pump ready and the air line laid out. I strip and put on the helmet. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t made the damned thing. Mario and Birdy try out the pumps; I’m getting air fine. We have a rope tied around my waist so I can signal them to pull me up if I get in trouble. I also have a flashlight I waterproofed to see my way around down there.
    I start into the water and it’s ice cold. I pee into some of the cleanest drinking water in the Philadelphia area. The side of the reservoir is slippery with green moss and I’ve no idea how deep the goddamned thing is. I’m sliding down and feeling there isn’t enough