Birdy

How ’bout that time we went ice skating up the creek? Remember? The time they closed the school ’cause all the pipes froze up. Remember?
    I know he’s listening now. He looks at me sometimes and he gives the Old Birdy spaced-out smile there once. I keep on talking.
    It was about zero degrees and when we got to school they sent us all back home. Even the water in the toilets was frozen. Five of us walked home from school together and decided we’d go ice skating. We said we’ll meet down at the edge of the dump, where the railroad track crosses the road.
    There’s Jim Maloney, Bill Prentice, Ray Connors, Birdy and myself. We’re all there except Prentice when Birdy says how if you put your tongue onto a frozen railroad track it’ll stick so you can’t get it loose. Jim Maloney says he’s full of shit. We get to arguing back and forth; Maloney says he’ll stick his tongue onto the track; Birdy tries to talk him out of it, but Maloney’s a smart-ass Irish bastard. He kneels down and puts his warm tongue flat on the track. Naturally it sticks there. He tries to pull it off but it’s really stuck. We’re all laughing and Maloney’s making noises and starting to cry. It’s really a bitchin’ cold day.
    Connors starts yelling he can hear a train coming. We all begin running up and down the track yelling and pretending a train’s coming. Connors runs, actually pretends he’s running, and says he’ll try to flag down the train and stop it. He takes a stick and starts pounding on the track Maloney’s stuck to, like the sound of a train going over rail junctions. Maloney’s bawling his eyes out. He’s screaming, ‘ Heh ee! Heh ee! ’ Birdy says the only thing that’ll help is some warm water. We’re a couple blocks from the nearest house. Connors comes running back yelling he can’t stop the train. We tell Maloney the only warm water we can think of is piss so we all whip out and start peeing on his tongue. What a crazy scene. Connors is actually peeing in Maloney’s ear. I’m laughing so hard I can hardly make it go. Birdy’s only pretending.
    Maybe it’s the pee or maybe Maloney just got mad enough, but he rips his tongue off the track. It’s bleeding and stays flat, frozen. He can’t get it back in his mouth. He starts laying out after all of us. We run in every direction, my feet are so numb it hurts to run. We can’t understand Maloney but he’s crying and cursing, trying to see his tongue. He keeps pulling at rocks to throw at us but they’re all frozen to the ground. Finally, he drops on his knees and cries. Connors says he’ll take him home; they live near each other on Clinton Road. He says it’s too cold to go skating anyway.
    Birdy and I wait a couple more minutes, but Prentice doesn’t show up. We start walking along the track up toward Marshall Road where the old mill and the dam are. In some places there’s ice frozen on the rails of the track. Birdy tries balancing on the icy rails.
    First thing when we get to the mill pond, we build a fire. We kick out some rotten timbers in the mill and there’s an old can of practically frozen motor oil. We pour it over the wood to get it burning. When our feet are warm enough, we put on our ice skates.
    The ice froze so fast it’s perfectly clear, what we call black ice. It’s so invisible it’s like walking on water. We can see catfish swimming on the bottom. They jump when we go over them and make little explosions of mud.
    We skate around and play one-on-one hockey with some sticks and a stone. We get the idea to skate upstream as far as we can. First, we throw some big pieces of wood on the fire to keep it burning, hide our shoes near it, then start out.
    It’s terrific fun skating around stones in the creek. Some of them are four feet across. Sometimes, there’s only narrow ice ways between sand bars and other times the creek widens till it’s almost as wide as the pond.
    Birdy’s really good on ice skates. He can jump turn and land on either foot. It comes from all the practicing he does getting himself ready to fly We get up speed and jump over some of the rocks. Of course, Birdy can jump over rocks twice as high as I’ll even try. I measure the distance he goes and he’s going over twenty feet on those jumps. Think of what he could do broad jumping!
    We skate all the way through the golf course, under the little bridges, then behind a factory and along the edge of Sixty-third Street. We hear the el go by once.