Birdy

have my pairs decided upon. It was fun doing all the matching. I’ll be at school and I’ll get a new breeding idea. I’ve watched all the birds until I know every one of them and they all know me. I’ve made out breeding books to keep track of the young and I’ve bought bands to put on their legs for identification. With any luck, I could wind up with a hundred and fifty young birds. I’m ready.

Jesus, the next day Renaldi tells me the baseballs have actually arrived. They were shipped down on a military plane. The box was opened by the T-4 slob. He’s the one who tells Renaldi. He probably thinks they’ve been shipped down so he can practice his spitball.
    Renaldi tells me the T-4’s name is Ronsky and he keeps spitting because he always has a bad taste in his mouth. He hit the beaches at Normandy and flipped on D plus 3. He was in the wards here for months and used to keep spitting so much his room was soaking wet all the time. They couldn’t keep him from dehydrating.
    Before you know it, if you’re not careful, you can get to feeling sorry for everybody and there’s nobody left to hate.
    I never really thought the balls would actually come. I wonder if Birdy’s old lady has been stashing those baseballs away all these years or if she went out and bought a lot of old balls to ship down.
    ‘I’d like two hundred used baseballs, sir, so I can ship them down to the loony bin and help my crazy little boy who thinks he’s a canary.’
    Renaldi says they’re mostly a motley collection of baseballs. They go all the way from some that are almost new to some that are just black-taped. He says they’re covered with mold. These must be the original balls and she’s kept them all this time.
    What the hell could she’ve been thinking of? Keeping baseballswasn’t going to make the ball field go away. She wasn’t making anything out of it, stealing all those balls, except enemies. It doesn’t make sense. Hardly anything seems to make sense anymore.
    Why the hell is Birdy in there trying to grow feathers and I’m hiding behind these bandages. I’m beginning to know I don’t want to come out, barefaced, into the open. It’s not because of the way I’ll look, either. The docs at Dix say everything’s fine. I’ll look OK, hardly any scars even.
    But, I have this crazy idea in the back of my mind that I’m going to come out of the bandages like a butterfly when I used to be a caterpillar. I’m still not finished being a caterpillar. I know I’m really a butterfly now and all the caterpillar part is finished, but I’m not ready to come out.
    I’ll have the one more operation, then a month of bandages, then I’ll be discharged. I’ll have to go back to the old neighborhood. Everybody will see me. They tell me I’ll get thirty or forty percent disability. I’ll be eligible for Public Law 16. This means I can rake in the dough just by going to school. I have no idea what to study. The only thing I was ever good at in school was PE. Maybe I’ll be a PE teacher. That sounds like as dumb a way as any to spend the rest of my life.
    Or, maybe I’ll start wearing a mask and cape like Zorro and charge up and down the street. I’ll challenge all the kids under twelve to duels with plastic swords. That way I can work up the disability to ninety or a hundred percent. The mask part sounds good anyway.
    After breakfast, I walk over to Birdy. I pull my chair into place and make myself comfortable. Birdy turns around when I sit down. He’s still squatting flat-footed, but instead of his arms at his sides, he has them folded across his chest. He feeds himself completely now. There’s no trouble with it at all. He takes the dishes and shovels it in.
    I try to look into his eyes. He isn’t more than two paces from me. It’s like looking into the eyes of a dog or a baby. After a while, you can’t do it anymore because you know you’re hurting them,burning holes in their souls. They don’t know enough to turn away, but they’re scared. I look away.
    ‘You know, Birdy, this is really a fucked-over situation. Who the hell would’ve thought we’d wind up like this? What went wrong? I have the feeling we haven’t had anything to do with making our own lives; we’re just examples of the way we’re supposed to be. We’re a little bit different, but in the end, we were as usable as everybody else. You might be the nut and I’m the bolt but we’re all part of the plan, and it’s all worked out before we