100 Malicious Little Mysteries

The Paternal Instinct by Al Nussbaum

Big Ben came up to me near the side entrance to Leavenworth Penitentiary’s B-cellhouse. Everyone calls him Big Ben because he tips the scales at 250 pounds and his first name is Benny. The nickname has nothing to do with time, or the famous London clock, despite the long sentence — thirty years — he’s serving.

“Hey, Bill, ya know anythin’ about boids?” Ben asked.

“What kind?” I answered, as if it made a difference.

“Sparrows.”

“No, sorry.” I looked around to make sure no guards were close. “You have one?”

“Yeah, look.”

I’d noticed that he had his right hand cupped. Now he held it out to me and opened it. There on his palm huddled the most ugly little creature I’d ever seen. It was about an inch and a half of naked flesh and the head was all beak. There were no feathers.

“That’s a bird?” I asked.

“Sure. He’s just a baby. What d’ya think I should feed him?”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Found him outside. A nest was blew down an’ all busted up. I waited a while, but there wasn’t no mama boids around, so I picked him up.”

Hearing Big Ben say “mama boids” was comical. I almost smiled — but I didn’t. I didn’t want to take the chance of having him think I was laughing at him. “Birds eat worms; bread, too. Guess you could feed it bread and worms,” I offered.

That was on Friday afternoon. I didn’t see Ben again until the following Monday. We both were assigned to the Education Building — Ben as an orderly, and I as a helper in the library — and I met him on the way to work. “Still got the bird?” I asked.

“Yeah... see?” He opened a cigar box he was carrying and thrust it proudly under my nose. He had lined the inside with soft rags and the tiny bird was nestled in the center of them.

“You taking it to work?” I asked incredulously.

“Yeah, sure. Can’t leave him in my cell. I gotta feed him. ’Sides, they might shake-down and find him. Pets ain’t allowed, ya know.”

“What’re you going to do with it?”

“Gonna put the box on one of the windowsills of A-cellhouse. He’ll get lotsa sun an’ air, an’ I can come out an’ feed him every chance I get.”

And that’s just what he did. Several times that day I looked from a side window of the Education Building. Once I saw only the cigar box on a window ledge of the building thirty feet away; the other times Ben was out there feeding the bird and whispering to it.

The next day I noticed that two pieces of corrugated cardboard about eighteen inches square were lying on the grass plot between the Education Building and A-cellhouse. This was unusual because trash doesn’t get a chance to accumulate at Leavenworth. You seldom see an empty cigarette package, let alone large pieces of paper. I was wondering how they had been left there when Big Ben appeared.

He knelt, lifted a corner of one of the squares, and quickly reached under it. He got to his feet with a pink worm dangling from between his thumb and index finger and went to the cigar box,

I went outside to see what was going on, I heard Ben say, “Ya wants another woim. Baby?” as I approached, but he stopped talking to the bird when he saw me,

“I saw you get a worm from under the cardboard,” I said. “How d’you do it?”

“Tore a couple of pieces from a box, soaked ’em in water, an’ put ’em on the grass,” he said. “Woims come outta the groun’ under the paper last night. They didn’t go back into the groun’ when it got light. They don’t move fast an’ I can catch ’em.”

I stood there watching. Ben fed three large worms to the bird, and it continued to open its beak and scream for more. When there were no more worms to catch, Ben took small pieces of bread, dipped them in water, rolled them into little balls, and then dropped them into the bird’s open mouth. The bird would be quiet for a few seconds while it swallowed the bread, then it would open its beak and yell: “Cheep! Cheep!”

“He sure likes to eat,” Ben observed fondly.

After that it seemed as though every time I looked out of the window I saw Ben feeding Baby. It wasn’t difficult to see why Leavenworth or any prison would outlaw pets. If they were all as demanding and insatiable as Baby, no work would ever get done. Pets would quickly disrupt all order and discipline.

But they would fill a need, too.

It became clear to me that just as woman has a maternal instinct, man has a need to care for and protect a fellow creature. I could see proof of this every time I looked out the window. Big Ben, who wouldn’t hesitate to break your jaw if he suspected you were slighting him, thought nothing of gently nursing a tiny bird. I suddenly realized that the empty feeling in my stomach wasn’t hunger; I wished I had a skinny, ugly bird to nurse, too.

No one in prison pays much attention to time unless scheduled to get out soon. A week or two, or a month or two, passed. Then I looked out one morning and spotted Ben near the walk at the front of the building. He was on one knee in the classic crapshooter’s pose. He opened his hand and released a small, mud-colored bird.

It was hard to believe that this was Baby; he had grown so. He wasn’t as big as an adult bird, but no one would have any trouble recognizing him as a bird. The little guy beat his wings frantically and fluttered from side to side, then landed on the soft grass about twenty feet from where he’d been launched. Big Ben lumbered over to where the bird lay on the grass and scooped him into his hand. I could see his lips moving and I knew he was muttering praise and encouragement to the bird.

I watched a few more flights from the window. Baby kept flying increasingly greater distances but wasn’t getting much altitude. Several officers entered and left A-cellhouse through its side door. Each glanced at Big Ben and his bird, then quickly looked away. None wanted to enforce the regulation against pets, so they pretended not to notice. After a while Ben stopped giving the bird flying lessons, and I left the window and went back to work.

I looked out the window several times in the next few days, but I must’ve picked the wrong times because I didn’t see Ben. Other guys kept telling me about Big Ben and his bird and how well it could fly and how it came to him when he whistled for it. Baby became the chief topic of conversation around the Education Building. A couple of men joked that they wished Big Ben would teach them to fly — they wanted to see what’s on the other side of the prison’s thirty-five foot wall.

Then one day I saw Big Ben sitting alone on the steps of A-cellhouse. I sensed that something was wrong and went over to him. “How’s Baby?” I asked.

“He’s gone,” Ben said. “Flew away. Sat up there,” he motioned vaguely toward the wall, “and looked back once, then flew away.”

“Maybe he’ll come back.”

“Naw, he won’t come back.” His voice held notes of both pain and anger. “Boids is like people. When they don’t need ya no more, they forgets ya.”

I remembered that someone had once told me Big Ben hadn’t received a letter in two years. “Maybe Baby just decided to look around,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “Birds do that all the time. It wouldn’t surprise me if he came back. The swallows always return to Capistrano.”

Ben gave me a cold look, then ignored me, so I went inside; but I was a little worried and kept going to the window to keep an eye on him. That’s how I happened to be around when the bird returned a few hours later and perched on his shoulder. He cupped it in his huge hands and sat talking to it for a long time. Tears ran down his cheeks, and his back shook. I watched as he touched the bird gently with his lips, then squeezed the life from it.