The Complete Collection. William Wharton
the knot slipped when they pulled me up the side of that wall and I can hardly breathe. Mario leans over the water.
‘The light’s still burning down there. Look at that.’
‘Forget it. Let the damned thing burn itself out.’
Birdy’s taking apart the pumps.
‘What happened, Al?’
I look over at him. He’ll believe anything. He wants to believe.
‘Water began coming in. It started rising up past my mouth, then past my nose. I ripped the thing off and tried to swim up but I couldn’t move; these fuckers weighed me down and the mud on the bottom is thick as cow shit.’
I’m sitting up now and trying to untie the weights from my legs; I’m starting to get cold. Birdy gives me a hand. Then I get dressed and we take all the stuff back with us. Later, I use the diving helmet as a project in Science, get an A for it. I write it up as if it really worked. Actually it did.
To try out Birdy’s crazy wings, we have to wait till the wind’s blowing from the right direction. This wind has to blow on a Saturday or a Sunday when we don’t have any school. Birdy has the whole thing planned out with written instructions so it’ll only take the two of us to pull it off. He’s already gone down and cleared a path about a hundred yards long for the bike to make its run. He’s cleaned off all the tin cans and used a shovel to fill in any dips and knock down any bumps. I hope nobody saw him flattening out the top of the dump; they’ll figure for sure he’s crazy. I go down and look at it; it’s like a short narrow runway for an airplane; in fact, Birdy’s rigged a little wind sock with an old, starched silk stocking.
Birdy doesn’t want anybody to see his machine, so we take it down at night and hide it up where we used to have the pigeon loft. We still have the rope ladder; Birdy’s old man didn’t find that. Everything’s set.
Finally, after about three weeks, the wind is blowing perfectly on a Friday night. We make arrangements to meet at home plate at seven o’clock the next morning. When I get there, Birdy’s already waiting with his crazy bicycle and the platform hooked to the front. We’ve been practicing riding around the block with him standing up there. This itself is a hot trick both for Birdy and for me. The kids in the neighborhood are laughing their asses off watching us. We don’t care; they’re just a bunch of morons anyway. I give Dan McClusky a clout on the side of the head, for the sheer hell of it. Nobody can hurt an Irishman by hitting him on the head.
When we get down to the dump, Birdy straps on those wings and runs around a little flapping them. He’d run fast into the wind, jump, and flap like mad. It does look as if he’s getting some lift. He says he can feel it. He tells me he hasn’t eaten any dinner or breakfast. He’s been dieting for a month so he’s thin as a rail. I try to talk him out of the idea again but no go. He’s all fired up to fly out over that creek. He really thinks he’s going to take off and fly into the blue. I’m glad nobody else is around; they’d lock us up.
Birdy’s figured it all out. He has a special stand to hold the bike so he can climb up on the rack while I hand him the wings. Then I help hold the bike, steady it, while he straps them on. He looks super weird standing on the front of the bike with those wings on. He looks like a gigantic Rolls Royce radiator cap, that’s what.
There’s a mark he’s made at the edge of the hill. I’m supposed to throw on the brakes there and he’s going to spring off the bike. He goes over everything with me again. He should be nervous. There he is about ready to jump off into the air at about thirty-five miles an hour over a forty-foot drop with all that hardware on his back. Not Birdy. All I can see is he’s anxious to get started.
I start pedaling the bike like mad, trying to keep on the path. After I get moving, I’m going straight. I have powerful legs and I’m giving it all I have. It’s one of those things you don’t just half do. Birdy’s crouched in front of me, wings outspread, ready to spring off. We’re really moving when we reach the line and I hit the brakes.
Birdy springs off and over the edge. He’s flapping those wings like a mechanical seagull. For a few seconds he goes straight out, his legs spread, soaring, a gigantic, silver winged bird. He actually begins to go up, but he’s losing forward momentum and he goes into a stall. Out there, way off the hill, he begins to drop, feet first, with the wings spread and still flapping but flapping sideways. They’re designed to flap down, when Birdy’s flat out. Now he can’t get his feet up again. He’s dropping down into the creek; flapping his wings uselessly all the way.
I run after him. I’m sliding down the dump hill, getting ashes into my shoes and all over me. I scare the bejesus out of a rat. When I get there, Birdy’s standing up in the middle of the creek unbuckling his wings.
‘You OK, Birdy?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘That’s what you said after you fell off the gas tank. You sure you’re OK?’
‘Sure I’m sure. When you only weigh ninety-three pounds, you don’t fall very fast; especially if you have as much air surface as I did. I didn’t come down fast at all.’
Birdy just isn’t real. He climbs out of the water, adjusts a few vanes that’d gotten bent and wants to try again. I tell him he’s going to get himself killed and I don’t want any part of it.
We scramble up the side of the dump hill, more ashes in the old shoes, dragging the wings with us. We get up there and Birdy tries to show me, drawing it out with a stick in the ashes on his runway, how with his light weight, accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second, after he’s fallen twenty feet or so, his downward velocity isn’t going to increase. He tells me he’s already learned to jump from a twenty-foot height by collapsing his legs and rolling. He gets the wind knocked out of him, but that’s all. He’s actually convinced himself he can jump off any height and not hurt himself. Now, that’s really nuts.
He tells me to look at newsreels of people falling off high places or jumping into firemen’s nets. They start accelerating fast at first but then they reach a certain speed and seem to float. He says you can throw a cat out a three-or four-story window and it can land fine and that’s like a twenty-or thirty-story window for a person. It’s all dependent on weight and surface and density he says, and more than that, knowing you can do it. I ask him why it is they die when they hit the ground; people, that is. He says you can fall off a curb and kill yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing.
While we’re hassling this out, we haul the wings and the bike back to Birdy’s yard and put them in the garage. We take out a little time to look around for the baseballs but don’t find anything. She’s got to be selling them. Birdy shows me where he has his freaky pigeon suit hidden. I ask him if, when he learns to fly, he’s going to start wearing it, like Clark Kent slipping into his Superman costume.
Birdy’s not fighting me anymore about taking another flight right away. He’s decided he needs to do some more work on the wings and strengthen his arms. He wants to practice gliding before he tries flying again. He says he has to arch his back while he’s flapping. He’d done all his working out on the saw-horse and forgotten he needs to keep his body out stiff in the air. I try once more to talk him out of the whole cockeyed business but he’s not listening to me. He’s planning some kind of brace to go under his stomach that he can arch against.
He’s already talking up those three or four seconds when he seemed to be flying so you’d think he’d flown around the world a couple times.
When we get home he shows me how he can jump off his back porch roof without hurting himself. You wouldn’t believe it. He hunches himself down, springs out like a diver with his arms spread, then, in midair, pulls himself together, pushes his feet in front of him, just before he reaches the ground, then collapses both against the direction of his jump and the vertical drop. He says the more horizontal movement you can develop, the easier it is to absorb the vertical force.
He takes me upstairs to show me his drawings and calculations on this. He’s talking vectors and points of impact and trying to make it