Excerpt from "The Rescue of Joey Falco"

image https://footageforpro.com/philadelphia-1963/

(Og Gorky, a bully, is on a school trip: a Delaware River boat ride. He encounters Joey Falco, often a target of Og's bullying. But Og has just imagined what it would be like to have wings—of course, he becomes in his mind a kind of warbird—and is perplexed by Joey's friendliness and oddly similar imagination.)

“The birds,” Joey said. He tilted his head sideways toward Camden, where some gulls flew low over the water.

“Birds?”

“Yeah, the birds, seagulls—well, not sea, maybe, we’re on a river, but the birds.”

Og was unaccustomed to conversations that were not conducted while he stood over a cowering victim—or himself on the ground, headlocked by one of his brothers, while the other bent down and shouted, “Tell us the truth, you goddam pipsqueak, or we’ll cream you!” So he just said “Birds?” again.

“Yeah,” Joey said, still smiling. “I was imagining I was a bird, and you were too, and we were flying downa shore, all the way to Cape May to poop on tourists!” And he laughed a good clear laugh, an inviting laugh, a sound that made promises it would keep so that everyone within earshot would know what it meant to laugh and be happy.

No such poetry ran through Og’s mind. And that laugh wasn’t what stopped him from asserting his presence as he always did, with a shove—or at least a made-you-flinch feint that earned him the binding right to pop his victim one on the upper arm. It was the pretend, the two of them with wings. He thought of his own wings, now lying flat and hidden, the guns still curling smoke, but cooling.

“What are you talking about?” he asked—and again, no challenge laid its shadow on the words. He seemed almost merely curious.