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Flying
Lessons
Richard
Bader
Noah
took great care with the cage, as Mrs. Talbot had instructed. It
was heavy and his nine-year-old arms were exhausted, so he
stopped every block or so to set it down. He carried it out in
front of him like she said, not in one arm by his side where it
would bang against his hip. “Don’t jostle it,”
she said. “That would be bad for the bird.”
Noah
did not want to do anything bad for the bird, which was the most
beautiful thing he had ever seen. Except possibly for Annabel
Talbot, who gave it to him. Or maybe Annabel’s giving it to
him elevated her to most-beautiful-thing status, that more than
her freckles and auburn hair that smelled like apples, because no
one, ever, had given him anything like this bird, a live thing, a
thing that now depended on him for food, for water, for changing
the paper in the bottom of the cage. That was about as far as
he’d thought through the dependence part. His friends with
dogs were supposed to walk them, and he envied them this task,
but he was aware of no bird corollary to dog walking, so for now
he was pretty much content to stick with food, water, and cage
paper: fundamental things, responsibilities he readily accepted.
Greedily, even.
Mrs.
Talbot had offered him a ride home after Annabel’s birthday
party, but Noah said no thanks. That was because while he liked
Mrs. Talbot a lot, his mother did not, and if his mother knew
that Mrs. Talbot had driven him home from a party she would not
have let him go to in the first place, it might send her off into
the zone. He hated the zone, especially when he did things that
caused her to go there, like do something he knew would make her
mad, which is what accepting Mrs. Talbot’s ride offer
almost certainly would have done. This was why Noah hadn’t
told his mother about the party, but had lied and said he was
going to Jeremy’s house.
He
had bought Annabel a Make-Your-Own-Fashion-Headband kit,
exhausting nearly everything he’d saved from his allowance.
Annabel was crazy about headbands. Noah had noticed.
Annabel’s
party was the first party Noah had been to where a girl invited
boys. (His friend Thomas had once invited Nina Myerson to a party
after weeks of going around school saying he was going to marry
her, but she wisely decided not to show.) Three boys came—Noah,
Jeremy, and Brian—plus eight girls, nine counting Annabel.
Noah didn’t know what to expect from a girl’s
birthday party, but it turned out to be not all that different
from boys’ parties he’d been to. It was mid-April,
cool but nice out, so they mostly stayed outside. There was a
scavenger hunt, and then a three-legged race, for which Annabel
enthusiastically volunteered to lash onto Noah, triggering an
eruption of giggles from her girlfriends and a deep reddening of
Noah’s normally pale, thin face. They finished up with
soccer, which Mrs. Talbot abruptly stopped when the ball got
kicked into a bed full of yellow flowers, beheading several.
“That’s
where we buried Chelsea,” Annabel explained to Noah. “She
was like a hundred in dog years.”
That
year in school they had done evacuation drills where they
instructed you to avoid a “zone”—the cafeteria,
the library, a hallway—because that’s where the
pretend trouble was, the fire, or whatever. So Noah started
calling the place his mother went her zone. He never went there
when he knew she was in it. At school they numbered them,
but at Noah’s house there was only the one.
Brian
demolished the piñata on his second swing, and they all
went inside to watch Annabel open gifts.
Noah
had missed the message that Annabel loved birds. Her gifts
included a bird book, a bird puzzle, and a pair of rubber boots
with ducks on them. Lucy and Sarah each had even bought her an
actual bird, and you could hear them cheep-cheep-ing under
their dome-shaped cage covers on the Talbots’ coffee table.
Bird-as-present was a whole new concept for Noah, the closest
comparison being the two neon tetras someone once bought Brian
for his birthday, which met their end as sushi for his
dour-looking Oscar fish.
“Oh!”
Annabel gasped in amazement when she pulled off the first cover,
then “Oh!” again with equal excitement after the
second. Inside each cage was a parakeet: one pale blue and yellow
and the other yellow and green. She hugged Lucy and then Sarah.
The other girls clapped. Jeremy looked at Brian and rolled his
eyes.
Noah
suddenly felt very bad about the stupid headband kit, which
Annabel, surrounded by bird paraphernalia, an impressive pile of
bird-themed wrapping-paper, and two actual birds, picked up to
open after the excitement of the parakeets died down. He looked
at the headband Annabel was wearing at that very moment: lime
green with smiling pink birds on it. His eyes dropped down to her
feet he and saw parrots on her socks where they came up out of
her sneakers. Headbands, it seemed, were merely one of several
media deployed to carry the bird message.
His
gift looked ridiculous in its baseball-themed wrapping paper, not
a bird in sight.
“Who’s
this from?” Annabel called out. Noah had forgotten to get a
card.
“Me,”
he said. “You can take it back if you don’t like it.”
When
it came to opening gifts, Annabel was a shredder. She laid bare
the headband kit in seconds.
It
cost $19.95. It said so right there on the label Noah forgot to
take off. He had no idea what a bird and a birdcage cost, but
correctly assumed it was magnitudes more.
A
few excruciating seconds of silence passed, then, “Oh!
Noah. It’s wonderful!” It wouldn’t be a
stretch to say Annabel gushed. Noah blinked uncertainly, then
beamed.
Not
all of it had come from his allowance. Some he took from that
place in the second drawer of his mother’s dresser,
underneath her bras and things. A ten-dollar bill, to be exact,
though he had replaced the ten with a one so as to create no net
decrease in bill-wad thickness, so nine. His older brother Ben
had shown him the drawer. Actually Noah caught Ben dipping into
it, after which Ben promised to beat the living crap out of him
if Noah said anything. So instead Noah began availing himself of
this fortuitous fiscal opportunity, a couple of dollars here, a
couple of dollars there. Nine was the most he’d taken at
any one time. Sometimes there was no money to be found, and it
felt creepy trying to rearrange the bras to make it look like no
one had rummaged through them. Once he found a bottle.
Noah
felt bad about taking money, but told himself he hadn’t
taken any more than he would have had if she’d paid him his
allowance every week like she was supposed to. In math Mrs.
Stapleton had begun teaching them spreadsheets.
“I
really do love the gift, Noah,” Annabel said later, coming
up to him after everyone had scattered with cake and ice cream.
He beamed again. “You need to invite me to your birthday
party so I can get you something just as good.”
Noah
stared at a place in the air between them. He had been to many
birthday parties, not a huge number, maybe, by the standards of
the more popular kids, but a reasonably healthy number. Had any
of them been his? “I don’t usually have birthday
parties,” he said.
Annabel
looked confused. “Everybody has birthday parties,”
she said. Then she went off somewhere, leaving Noah to pick at
the pink icing on his cake with a plastic fork.
Mothers
had started retrieving children when Mrs. Talbot and Annabel
approached Noah. Annabel held one of her new birdcages. The cover
was on, so he couldn’t tell which bird it was.
“Noah,”
Mrs. Talbot said, “Annabel and I agree that with all the
pets we have, two birds is one bird too much.” The Talbots
had replaced Chelsea with a Yellow Lab named Bruno and they had a
cat with white feet called Sox.
“We’d
like you to have this one,” Annabel said.
*
* * *
The
house was quiet when Noah got home. His mother was there, in her
zone. He could tell. It was almost a smell—less a smell he
could actually smell than one he intuited, faintly sour, back in
her bedroom. He could just step in the house and know if it was
there. Its presence at this moment wasn’t exactly a good
sign, but it bought Noah some time to get the bird settled.
He
eased off the cover. The bird stood on its perch. It was the
green one, with the pale green breast and yellow face and black
and yellow wings and triangular dark-blue marks beneath its eyes.
It took three little sideways steps to the left, then three steps
back to the right. Noah wondered if it needed something. The
water bottle was three-quarters full, and there were plenty of
seeds in the food bowl, so things seemed OK. He thought about
what to tell his mother when she surfaced.
That
happened a half-hour later.
“What
on earth is that?” Noah’s mother said, the smell
fully in the olfactory realm now, no intuiting required. She sat
in her chair, took a pack of cigarettes from her bathrobe, and
lit one. The parakeet step-pivoted 180 degrees to watch.
“It’s
a bird, Mom!” Noah said, as chipperly as he could manage.
“I
can see that, Noah.” Her tone was icy. Noah could feel the
prospect of bird ownership slipping away. “What I mean
is
what is it doing in our living room?”
“Jeremy
gave it to me,” he lied.
“And
why is Jeremy giving away birds?”
“They
have like nine pets,” he said, starting to question the
sturdiness of the limb of fabrication he’d begun inching
out on. “His mother said they had to get rid of one.”
“Well,”
his mother said, blowing out a thin stream of smoke. When she was
in the mood, she blew rings that Noah would poke his fingers
through. “Your mother feels the same way.”
“Why?”
Noah pleaded.
“Pets
are too much trouble.”
“But
everybody has pets,” he said.
The
way she tilted her head suggested that this line of reasoning
held promise. “Who?”
“Jeremy,
Brian. Eric has a fish and a cat. Annabel has three pets.”
“The
Talbot girl.”
A
tactical error, bringing up Annabel. Noah changed the subject.
“I’ll take care of it all by myself. I’ll buy
food with my allowance.”
A
smoke cloud hovered around her face. When it dissipated, she
said, “I don’t want it downstairs.”
He
decided to call it Phoebe.
*
* * *
There
are limits to what you can do with a pet bird, and Noah did a
pretty good job of surmounting them. He taught Phoebe to waddle
to the side of the cage and take a sunflower seed from between
his thumb and forefinger. At first, she would take it and waddle
back to the safety of mid-cage, but with time she would stay,
comfortable being near his hand. Once Noah tried to touch
Phoebe’s head with a finger of one hand while he fed her
seeds with the other. To his utter astonishment and total joy,
she let him, and soon even began to lean into his touch. When
Noah entered the room, Phoebe would cheep excitedly and
rock back and forth like a metronome set to a Sousa march.
One
day Noah reached in the cage and extended his finger parallel to
Phoebe’s perch. She stepped in place for several seconds,
and then tentatively stepped out onto his finger. Noah’s
heart pounded so hard he thought it would frighten her. He slowly
withdrew his arm, easing hand and bird out through the cage door.
Phoebe looked around the room, her tiny yellow head pivoting from
side to side.
“Do
you want to fly, Phoebe?” Noah said softly. She turned her
head to look at him.
“Go
ahead,” Noah said. “It’ll be fun.” But
Phoebe wouldn’t budge, so Noah put her back in her cage.
She looked relieved.
Noah
considered that Phoebe didn’t know how to fly, so he
decided to teach her. Day after day he would come home from
school and hold his mother’s iPad next to the cage and play
YouTube videos of birds flying: hawks soaring, chickadees
hovering around a backyard feeder, even huge majestic
murmurations of starlings set to music, though Noah worried that
these might intimidate her.
Then
one day, she flew. Tentatively at first—just an eight-foot
jaunt from Noah’s finger to the top of his bookshelf and
then back quickly to the safety of the cage. But with time she
got more ambitious, flitting from desk to chair to lamp with
increasing ease and confidence, or even doing great soaring laps
around Noah’s bedroom. Amazing, he thought, feeling prouder
than he’d ever felt before. Annabel had to see this.
Annabel
was enthralled. Compared to her own parakeet, which she had named
Bluebell, who did nothing more exciting than eat seeds, this
creature of Noah’s was a veritable Cirque du Soleil of
adventure, swooping and diving and hovering ever so gracefully,
wings aflutter, before landing on Noah’s extended finger.
She half expected the bird to bow.
“Oh,
Noah!” Annabel said, squealing with delight and clapping
her hands.
“You
try,” Noah said. He sent Phoebe off around the room and
instructed Annabel to extend her finger for her to land on.
Phoebe surveyed the new target for a few laps and then zeroed in.
Annabel flinched when the bird touched down, unused to the bony
feel of the claws. Phoebe rose and hovered for a second, then
settled back onto Annabel’s finger. “Stay calm and
hold your hand steady,” Noah instructed, unused to being an
expert about something but fully embracing the role.
Noah’s
bedroom door flew open; his mother stood in the doorway. “What
is all the noise in here?” she said. Her bathrobe had
cigarette-burn holes. Her hair was a mess. Phoebe rose up at the
commotion and then settled back down on Annabel’s finger.
“Oh it’s you,” Noah’s mother said,
eyebrows arching impressively. “Why are you in my son’s
bedroom?”
“Mom,
close the door. Phoebe’ll get out.”
“What
is that bird doing out of its cage?”
“Close
the door, please.”
“Haven’t
I told you not to let that bird out of its cage?”
“No,”
Noah said angrily. “You said don’t let her out of my
room. And she won’t get out of my room if you close
the door!”
“Don’t
raise your voice at me, young man!” she yelled back.
Phoebe
cheeped and fluttered her wings, but stayed put. Annabel
looked uncertainly at Noah, who took her hand and gently guided
the finger with Phoebe on it back into the cage.
Noah
fumed but said nothing.
“I
think it’s time for your little friend to go home.”
*
* * *
Noah
felt great getting off the school bus, because Phoebe was close
to mastering a new trick. He would cover her cage, hide seeds
dipped in peanut butter around his room, and then let Phoebe fly
around to find them. In a week she’d gone from finding
three of ten to finding eight of ten. Today Noah had high hopes
for a perfect score.
The
smell was there, but with competition. Something cleaner, cooler,
floral, carried on a light breeze through the living room. Noah
traced it to an open kitchen window. On the counter sat Phoebe’s
cage, empty, its little wire door hanging open. “NO!”
Noah screamed.
He
ran through the house yelling Phoebe’s name, the panic in
his voice ratcheting up after each empty room. He ran into the
yard, looking up into tall trees and calling for her, birdseed in
his open left palm and his right index finger extended as a
landing pad. Two crows watched indifferently from the branches of
a tulip poplar. Noah began to sob.
He
pushed open the bedroom door and stood, arms straight at his
side, fists clenched, jaw clenched, face scrunched, eyes swollen
with tears, ninety-nine pounds of barely contained fury. “What
happened to Phoebe?” he demanded. A head poked out from the
covers. Two eyes in a wrinkled face struggled to focus. It
reminded Noah of a turtle. She muttered something he couldn’t
hear.
“What
did you do to Phoebe?”
“Go
away, Noah.” Following her words was like slipping on
gravel. “Let me sleep.”
Noah
glared.
“I’ve
told you not to come in here.”
“What
happened to my bird?” he said, pausing after each word.
“I
cleaned her cage.”
“With
the window open!”
“I
was doing you a favor.”
“You
let her go!”
“It’s
a bird, Noah. My God.”
“My
bird!”
“I’m
sleeping.”
He
left the bedroom, slamming the door with such force that Mrs.
Weldon next door thought about calling the police, thinking she’d
heard a gunshot.
*
* * *
Noah
didn’t especially like Richey Dell, who had a deserved
reputation as a bully and who kept trying to enlist Noah in
things he didn’t feel comfortable doing, like distracting a
lunch lady so Richey could swipe a piece of pie, or once blowing
up one of his—Richey’s—little sister’s
dolls with a cherry bomb. But it was Richey Dell whom Noah sought
on this Saturday morning for one reason: Richey Dell owned a
pellet rifle. He and Richey were in Richey’s huge backyard
shooting it.
The
yard backed up to a woods, and in the corner near the trees sat
an impressive shooting range with a wooden platform and thick
padded canvas to stop the pellets. Richey had standard
targets—paper bulls-eyes and human silhouettes like they
used at shooting ranges—but these were uninspiring. Vastly
preferred were various plastic toys that Richey had tired of. Old
Transformers today, for instance, six of them lined up on a
two-by-four at a distance of about fifteen yards.
The
Transformers were easy to hit, and responded in satisfying ways,
spinning off the board as chunks of plastic flew into the air.
And they were surprisingly resilient, enduring, maimed but still
prop-up-able, round after round. They were on their fourth round
of alternating shots when Noah lay prone on the ground, steadied
the rifle against his cheek, sighted down its long barrel, and
fired. The targets didn’t flinch.
“You
missed!” Richey said, delighted. “How in the world
could you miss?”
Noah
stood and walked in the direction of the targets but then past
them, veering to the right to where the Dells had a birdbath near
the tree line.
Richey
ran up beside him, and the two boys looked down at the birdbath.
A robin lay on its side in the water, a dark hole where it’s
eye had been. “Holy shit!” Richey said, as the water
turned red.
Noah
picked up the bird, holding it gently with cupped hands, feeling
the blood and water run through his fingers. He took a cloth from
his jacket pocket and wrapped the bird with it.
“I
have to go,” he said, and walked away. Richey stared in
awe.
*
* * *
It
was dark when Noah lifted the birdcage from the top of his
dresser. The dead bird lay on old newspapers in the bottom. When
the bleeding had stopped—this hadn’t taken long—he
had wrapped it in a clean cloth, a white hand-towel from the
bathroom. He left through the kitchen so he wouldn’t wake
anybody. The clock on the microwave said 1:09.
He
opened the gate, entered the yard, and stopped, waiting to be
sure Bruno wasn’t outside. The night was quiet and
moonless, cool, and very still. Noah walked across the yard and
put the cage in the damp grass next to the bed where the
daffodils had bloomed for Annabel’s party. He took a garden
trowel from his backpack and dug a small hole in the middle of
the flowers, taking care not to disturb them. Then he removed the
bird from the cage and laid it in the hole. He covered it back up
with dirt, tamping it carefully until he felt certain no one
would notice. He knelt there for a few minutes, then stood,
picked up the cage, and walked home.
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