Birdy

veins show on his hands and on the side of his head. He looks dead next to my mother.
    ‘What would you do with this money?’
    ‘I’ll do whatever you say.’
    He looks straight at me. It’s as if he’s seeing me, too. I’m glad my mother is in the kitchen.
    ‘All right. But you give the money to me. I’ll put it in the bank so you can go to college. I don’t want you working all your life for a lousy twenty dollars a week.’
    So, that’s how it is. My mother won’t talk to me but there’s nothing she can do.
    I start building my aviary on the back wall of the garage. It’s away from the ball field so nobody can see it unless they come into our yard. Still, it isn’t too visible from the house; either. It’s the perfect place.
    I get most of the wood the same way I got it before. I buy the wire mesh, nails, hinges, paint, and things like that. I have over a hundred dollars from the dogcatching. I only told my parents about the dollar an hour, not about the dog money. I gave them all the actual salary but I kept the dog money for myself and hid it with my pigeon suit.
    I build the frame with two-by-fours. The whole exterior dimension is twelve feet wide by six feet deep. It’s six feet high at the front and seven feet where it butts against the garage wall. I cover the roof with small, dark blue composition shingles. Inside, I divide the aviary into three parts. The center part has the outside door opening onto it. That’s where I’m going to have my breeding cages. It’s exactly six feet by six feet. On either side, and opening onto thecenter section are the flight cages. These are three feet by six feet and the whole height of the aviary.
    I stretch the wire mesh over the framework and nail it in place. The mesh has quarter-inch square holes. I put sand in the bottom of the flight cages and then move all the birds except Birdie down from my room. I put the females in the left cage and the males in the right. They zoom around like crazies checking everything out. They fly against the wire of the cage to look at the outside. It’s the first time the babies have seen the sky. Their world is expanded a million times. Still, the actual flying space is about the same. Sometimes, wild birds come up against the outside wire of the cage to look in. Alfonso, with some of the young, fights them off. I wish I could find a way so my birds could fly free like pigeons. It’d be great to have them loop and fly all over, singing and roosting in the trees; then come when I called them into the cage.
    I paint the outside gray and white. When I’m finished it looks like a true little house. While the birds are in the flight cages I start building the breeding cages. I’ve decided to breed one male to a female. I’m not really in business. The males can help with the babies and it’s too confusing with two females.
    I build five rows of cages, three cages in a row; one on top of the other, going from the floor to the roof on the back wall of the center room. Each cage has two parts with a sliding door between. That way, I can separate the male or the young ones, or both, from the female, when she’s started a new nest. I work out automatic feeders and waterers and build sliding trays in the bottoms of the cages for easy cleaning. It’s really fun building the cages; like making my own nest.
    I get tremendous advice from Mr Lincoln. He builds his cages himself and has some great ideas that I use. He’s really a genius with birds. I tell him my idea about breeding canaries for flying. He laughs in a circle around his aviary. Tears come into his eyes. When he stops, he says nobody’s going to buy my canaries. He says if I can breed up a canary that can’t fly at all, then I’d really have something. People could keep them on a stick without a cage, like parrots. He says cats’d like my non-flying canaries, too.
    I finish the breeding cages before Christmas. The males in the flight cages are singing their heads off. Almost anything is music to a canary. They sing when I hammer or saw or when I run water. The wind blowing is a symphonic concert to a canary.
    While I’m working, I keep watching them fly. Alfonso is still the star, but there’re two or three others who have all his tricks; dive-bombing, jumping straight up, turning sharp in midair. One of them even has a new trick. He dive-bombs, then instead of landing, turns just above the ground and shoots straight up again. Somehow, he uses his downspeed