Birdy

finishes pissing, Birdy takes a few hunched over steps toward the middle of the floor, like a skinny hunchback of Notre Dame or something, then he goes back to the old squat.
    – Nobody’s watching now, Birdy. Stand up like a human being. I won’t tell anybody. This is Al, you can trust me.
    He looks straight into my eyes. I still have the feeling he’s mad at me and this is really rare. Like I said, it’s hard to get Birdy mad. Even with my old man and the car that time, Birdy wasn’t so much mad as discouraged. He couldn’t get himself to believe anybody’d do a shitty thing like that. He was sure there’d been some kind of misunderstanding and when he could talk to the person who bought the car he could make it all right again.
    There was only one time I can remember Birdy actually getting mad. That’s the first time I realized what it would be like when a crazy, trapdoor-minded person like Birdy got mad. I knew then I’d never actually been mad in my life; I’d been pissed or angry, but mad is like crazy.
    – Birdy. How about the time that O’Neill kid stole your bicycle. I really think you’d’ve killed him.
    It wasn’t too long after Birdy and I’d met each other. We were still going to Saint Alice’s Elementary School. We were taught by sisters and it was enough to ruin anybody’s life. I’d sit in the back row and think about the nuns menstruating away under those long black, hot costumes. Habits they called them, the costumes I mean.
    There was always a plaster statue of the ‘Blessed Mother’ up at the front of the room dressed in light blue, flowing, plaster robes with a snake and flowers crushed under her feet. I used to wonder if she had tits under all that. There were girls in our classes, but it was boys on one side and girls on the other. The girls all wore these crappy dark blue uniforms. I was really glad when I got to the junior high school.
    This is just when we’re building the new loft in the trees down in the woods; before the gas tank. We’re stealing all the wood, but we need money for the wire screen and hinges and things.
    The third floor of St Alice’s is the auditorium. They serve lunches up there and every Friday afternoon they have a movie at ten cents a head. Anybody who doesn’t go to that movie is a real pauper and doesn’t love God either. This church has more damned ways to gouge the last dime out of poor people.
    Anyway, up on the third floor they also have a beat-up old piano. Half the keys don’t work and there’s practically no ivory left on them so it looks as if the piano has most of its teeth knocked out.
    The church got a ‘donation’ of another piano and they want this old one taken away. The guys who brought up the new piano say it’ll cost five dollars to haul this beat up one down but Father O’Leary, the pastor, says that’s too much, so it sits up there. Everybody thumps or bangs on the piano when they go by. The other piano has a key to lock the keyboard and the music sister keeps it locked. She gives piano lessons, at another twenty cents a head, on the new piano.
    Birdy tells Father O’Leary he’ll get the old piano down out of there for two dollars. O’Leary tries to talk Birdy into ‘donating’ his work for the ‘love of God’, but Birdy holds out for cash. Hetells me about the project and we go into it together. Birdy’s plan is to chop up the piano and throw it out the window into the school yard after school when everybody’s gone.
    So, one day after school, Birdy gets the ax and sledgehammer from his garage and we set ourselves to hammering and hacking away at that piano. The real reason we’re doing it is for the metal. The sounding board is mounted in cast iron which is worth at least five dollars at the junk dealer’s in Greenwood. This is 1939 and everybody’s selling scrap metal to the Japs to help along their war effort.
    The job goes fast. I’m thumping away and Birdy’s chucking huge hunks out of the window. We’re having a fine time. The damned piano is making great slunking, thonking noises as I swing away at it. Terrific workout. I get all the strings vibrating by hitting them with the sledgehammer and it sounds like heaven. They make a swell sound when I slice through them with the ax, too. We’ve got an OK to burn the wood in the incinerator and we’ll haul away the metal.
    Now, Birdy used to ride his bike to school even then. This is the bike the cops stole from us later in Wildwood. He’d