Peter Markus: The Fish and the Not Fish

When the wind would blow like this through the leaves of Bird’s tree, the wind that moved through the leaves and made the leaves move in the tree, it made a sound that sounds like the sound that a bird’s wing makes when the wind blows through it.

Bird said this to us too.

The sky is blue.

The sky at noon is blue.

At noon the sky is blue like a sky that is blue.

The sky at noon is blue like the blue of a noon sky.

At night the sky turns black.

Black like the black steel of the steel mill in our town where steel used to get made.

Where steel used to be made.

There was a mill in our town, where the gone to rust train tracks came to an end in the dirt, where steel used to get made.

Be made.

The men in our town made steel in this mill till there was no more steel to be made.

Get made.

When the mill shut down, when the tracks turned to rust, these men did not know what else to do.

They worked.

And worked.

It was what they did.

Was who they were.

What they went to, night and day.

Work.

The mill.

Steel.

To make.

Now there was no more work for these men to do.

So some men drank.

Some men sat in the back part of their yards and hit nails in wood.

Some sat back in the back of their yards and stared up at the noon sky.

Some men sat out back in the back of their yards and stared down at the ground.

Some got in their cars and drove and drove some more and some of these men did not drive back.

Some men found work to do in towns that were like ours but were not like our town if there was work there in these towns for them to do.

The moms in our town who called these men Dear or Bob or Fred did what they did, day in and day out, back when the men of our town had a mill for them to go to.

But now they did it, the moms did, while the men looked back at them with eyes that did not know what else to look at.

Look at Bird was what we should have told them.

But these men in our town would not have heard us say it.

These men did not hear it when we said what we said.

The boys in our town who called these men Dad or Sir or Pa, we went on and we did what we did like we did when these men did what they did when they had a place for them to go do their work.

To make their steel.

To get their steel made.

Now these men were more in the house now to tell us what to do and to tell us to go, to get, don’t you boys got a place to be, don’t you got a thing or two for you to do, if not let us know and we’ll put you to work, and by work they did not mean for us to go to a mill to make steel in.

We’d nod at these men with our heads and go and do what it was we could do so that these men and their gray as ash eyes would not burn holes in the backs of our heads.

We had Bird to look at.

We had Bird to walk through town with, to watch what it was that he might do next.

Bird was ours.

Bird did not have a man like this in his house by the tracks to tell him to get, to go, to scat.

There was a man who lived in Bird’s house who went to work at the mill in our town where steel used to get and be made, but this man did not give Bird his name.

That man in Bird’s house whose last name was Brown did not say two words to this boy we called Bird.

Or when he would say words to Bird what he would say was, Who in God’s eyes are you?

What could a boy like Bird say to words like these?

I’m Bird?

Or else:

I’m just the boy who sleeps in a room at the back of your house with no light to push out the dark.

At night, in the dark of his room, Bird would dream of what it would be like to fly.

In his dreams, Bird flew.

Bird flew on top of the trees.

Bird flew through the blue of the sky.

One night Bird flew all the way up to the moon and when he flew through it, the moon, like a mouth that did not like the taste that Bird left in it, it spit Bird right back out.

There was a pole in our town made out of steel that had a flag run up its side. The flag was red and white stripes with white stars framed in a square that was blue. One night Bird woke up and climbed up to this pole’s top with a wood match stuck in his mouth. He dragged this match hard on the pole’s gray steel till a spark leapt out and turned to flame. So did the flag when Bird reached out with his hand to touch it.

When the flag caught flame its light lit up the town’s night sky. We all got out of bed to watch it burn. We stood and looked up at Bird and at this light that burned bright in the night’s sky. Bird looked down on all of our town who looked up at him perched up there with the lit up flag and Bird did not say that he did not do it when we all of us knew that he did.

There was a man in our town who wore a steel star on his chest. We were taught to call him Chief. When the flag burned down to ash, Chief called up to Bird to climb back down, then Chief told the rest of our town to go back home to our beds.

Most of us did. But there were a few of us who did not go, who hid out in the steel cans on the street where trash and things of no use, things that had broke, were thrown in by our town’s hands.

Our eyes looked up from where we hid to see and hear Chief call up to Bird come on down.

When Bird came down, he did not fly down like a bird. What Bird did was, just like Chief told him, he climbed. One hand at a time, Bird climbed down from this gray pole where this flag of red and blue and white once flew in the dark that was night.

Chief took Bird by his hands and jerked them in back of Bird’s back. Boy, you come with me, Chief told Bird, and he walked with Bird’s cuffed hands to the place in our town where the drunks of our town got put when things with them got out of hand.

Bird spent the night in this place where the steel bars you looked out through cut the world up in small squares. Bird liked it the way the bars made the world seem not so big. The sky, when Bird looked out to it, was not one big hunk of blue or black, but was now made up of small chunks that were blue by day and black by night and Bird, he saw, could hold a broke piece in the palm of his hand and then raise it up and press it up to that place on his chest where he knew was his heart.

We did not see or hear from Bird for three days, but when Bird did show his face back at school he held, in the palm of his hand, not a piece of the sky, not a hunk of his heart: no, what Bird held out for all of us boys to see, there in his hand, was a bird that was as blue as the sky.

This bird in the palm of Bird’s hand, this bird that was as blue as the noon sky, it had a wing that was broke.

This bird, with its wing like this, it could not up to a tree fly.

Bird would not let us touch it when we asked him could we touch it.

Bird held it up close to his heart.

When the bell rang for school to start, Bird put this bird in his desk so that Sir would not see it.

Once in a while the bird would make bird sounds with its mouth, chirps and cheeps and cawed bird cries, and when it did, Sir would turn back to face us and then he would ask us, What’s that sound? Which one of you thinks he’s a bird?

Sir looked right at Bird when he said what he did and what Bird did was this.

Bird stood up at his desk. Then he made his mouth in the shape of an O.

When Bird did this with his mouth, the bird in Bird’s desk chirped just like a bird trapped in a desk.

Sir looked back at Bird and with his eyes cut at Bird Sir told Bird to stand where he was till it was time for us all to break for lunch.

When the rest of us boys got to go to the room in our school where lunch was served to us, Sir told Bird to stand with his head pressed up to the black slate where Sir wrote down the words and the dates and the names of those things that Sir thought he was there to teach us.