Out of the Blue: Birdy
by Lisa Brunette
Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Brunette
Cover art: Anne Harrington
Cover concept: Lisa Brunette
Author's image photography by Allyson Photography
Author's image illustration by Lindsey Look
Published in the United States of America
by Sky Harbor LLC
PO Box 642
Chehalis, WA 98532
[email protected] Direct inquiries to the above address
All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
Neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for the use or misuse of any information contained in this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Out of the Blue: Birdy
Story Two in the Series
by Lisa Brunette
Sky Harbor LLC
A version of this story first appeared in Bellingham Review when the author won the Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Project Award.
…military brats, my lost tribe, spent their youth in service to this country, and no one even knew we were there.
— Pat Conroy
Outside Williams Air Force Base, Arizona
1976
My mom often told me the only thing different about black people was the “extra pigment” in their skin. It was the same pigment that turned me brown in the Arizona sun, she said, like she was trying to convince herself it was true. Every Christmas when she put out the wooden nut bowl, she seemed bothered by the Brazil nuts. “My father used to call these nigger toes,” she would whisper, shaking her head. “Isn’t that awful?” That word, the n-word, was something I was never supposed to say, not even as a joke. Mom never ate those Brazil nuts. She always left them for my dad, burnt-looking wedges in the bottom of the bowl when all the others were gone.
My parents came from Belleville, Illinois, which is right next to a place called East St. Louis. Anyone who’s ever been there will tell you it’s a scary place, East St. Louis, all because of the ghettos and these terrible fights called race riots. When my parents talked about East St. Louis, their stories made it seem like black people caused all the trouble. I didn’t understand that because a lot of the kids in our neighborhood were black, like my friend Birdy, who says he is a genius. Some laugh when he says that, but Birdy seemed like a genius to me; he was the first student ever to answer all the questions in the scholar bowl correctly, and he won first place in the spelling bee, too. I didn’t think geniuses would start fights. Whenever kids at school picked on Birdy, he walked away like they didn’t exist, like he was destined for much better things than they could ever imagine.
Most of the kids on our street had a dad who was in the military. We were all waiting for housing to open up on base. Williams Air Force Base was so close we could see the red-and-white checkered water tower, the red light at the top shining every night.
When I asked Dad if it was true that black people had “extra pigment” in their skin, he told me to stand up straighter, looked me in the eye and said, “Meredith. I’m only going to say this once. What matters is honor, not color.” I swallowed hard and stifled the urge to ask him what honor was. He’d probably told me before, but I didn’t remember.
Birdy showed up at my door one day with a tumbleweed balanced on his head. He walked around me like a newly-crowned king, smiling proudly, his bony arms crossed in front of him. I couldn’t stop laughing, especially when the tumbleweed fell off his head.
I showed him the magnifying glass my mother found in a drawer. Outside, we took turns burning blades of grass. The tumbleweed branches were too tough and wouldn’t burn.
“Can you see the pigment in my skin?” I asked him, holding the glass close to my arm in the sunlight until my flesh felt like it was cooking.
“What’re you talking about?” he howled. “Pigment. Jeez.”
“My mom said we all have it, but you have extra.”
“Extra!” he shouted. “Maybe you don’t have enough.”
I was quiet, thinking about that. He blew on my arm. “There it is,” he said.
“That’s chicken skin,” I said, pushing him away, and he laughed at me. He was only two years older, but he thought everything I did and said was funny, like I didn’t know what was what. I didn’t mind because I loved it when he laughed. He put his hand on his stomach—he was so thin it seemed to dip inward like a saucer—and shook his head back and forth saying, “Hold up, Swatter, hold up.” He called me Swatter because he knew I wasn’t crazy about the name Meredith and because the first time we met I was standing in our carport swatting flies.
I heard my parents talking one night when they thought I was already asleep.
“Aren’t you worried about her hanging out with that boy?” my mom asked.
“Why should I be?” my dad answered.
She was quiet awhile. I ran the hem of the bed sheet underneath my fingernails, mouthing the word boy to myself. She’d made it sound like Birdy was filthy, like the sandy-haired kid down the street who ate Milkbone dog biscuits. Boy.
“I guess you won’t make it an issue until the day your daughter wants to date a black guy.”
“She’s only five.”
“Yeah, but when she’s older…”
I heard the bedsprings creak as if my father shifted or maybe sat up in bed. “I watched a black guy carry a white guy out of the jungle in Nam,” he said, his voice serious and shaky, like it was coming from a long way away.
There was silence. My dad hardly ever talked about the war.
Finally, Mom said something: “War is different.”
He didn’t answer her, and I imagined him giving her this stony look that always meant the conversation was finished.
After that, my mom seemed to clean whatever room Birdy and I were playing in. And after supper, when all the kids rushed back outside to hang out under the streetlights, Birdy stayed at his end of the street, popping wheelies with the boys who made a ramp out of plywood. I wanted to ride down there, but my mom said, “No, come inside and help me with the dishes.”
One hot Saturday afternoon she let me go down the street to Birdy’s house, where they had the air conditioning on. Birdy and I sat on the blue-flowered couch that was covered in plastic. I always felt like lifting the plastic and running my hands along the stitching that traces the outline of each flower. I tried to get Birdy to tell me his real name, but he shook his head and said, “I’m not telling.”
I asked Birdy’s dad why they called him Birdy. His dad looked like him, skinny and the same German bread skin.
“Charlie Parker’s my hero,” his dad said, showing me a record album. The man on the cover played a saxophone, his eyes closed like he was kissing it. “People called him Bird,” he said, lifting the cover on the record player. He put the disc on the turntable and set the needle on delicately.
“What’s Birdy’s real name?” I asked. Birdy put his finger to his lips, and his dad laughed.
“Can’t tell you that,” his dad said, smiling at Birdy. “I’d be breaking the men’s code.”
The music poured into the room then, and to me, the color of it was yellow. Not the yellow like when we’re chicken to climb to the top of the monkey bars, but the kind of yellow the sun made when it fell in a wide patch on my floor in the morning. New and hopeful like that.
“That’s old-time music,” Birdy said like he was criticizing his dad, but I could tell he didn’t mean it.
Birdy’s dad danced around the room, and Birdy pointed at him and laughed like he looked ridiculous, but I thought he looked nice. His dad pretended he had a partner, his arms out in front of him, and he twirled around, stepping forward, then back. My dad sang all the time, but I’d never seen him dance.
When Birdy’s mom came home in her nurse uniform, I tried to ask her what his real name was, but Birdy beat me to her. She was too tired to put up with us anyway and went straight to the kitchen to make dinner.
The Chandler city trucks came through that week and poured thick tar onto Alguna Street. My throat itched from the burned syrup smell like it did when my mom smoked. The sun baked the street so hot it burned our bare feet. A few tumbleweeds stuck to the street as the tar dried. Birdy and I rode our bikes around the tumbleweeds like an obstacle course, kicking them free when we passed close. Bits of bleached-white branches stayed part of the road. I imagined the two of us stuck to the street, our feet baked into the tar.
The new street was so hot, it was impossible to walk on without shoes. Birdy and I played tag one day, and he was barefoot. I was wearing blue plastic Mickey Mouse sandals that I knew I was getting too old for. I ran across the street first and then kicked my sandals back over to him so he could cross. This became part of the game, and we went across several times that morning until we were hot and needed drinks. Barefoot, I walked on the grass and then onto