The Pigeon With the Tennis Elbow (5 page)

“Do you play games? What kind of fun do you have?”

Kevin listened eagerly, realizing that he must be one of the very,
very
few lucky people in the whole wide world who could be having a heart-to-heart talk with a pigeon. At least, he had never
heard of anyone ever talking to a pigeon before.

“Sure we play games,” replied Charlie seriously. “Follow the Leader is one of our favorites. We have some good fliers, you
know. As a matter of fact, some of those guys used to fly the old Spads and Handley Pages during World War One. You ought
to hear the stories they tell.”

“Spads and Handley Pages?” Kevin frowned. “Are they airplanes?”

“Are they airplanes?” Charlie almost died laughing. “They
were
airplanes, boy! Spads were American fighters and Handley Pages were heavy bombers. Oh, they were airplanes, all right! And
the guys who flew them were real fliers!”

A voice, coming from the house, interrupted them. “Kevin! Who are you talking to?”

Before Kevin could turn around he heard Ginnie's feet rattling down the steps.

“Oh-oh,” said Charlie. “It's that kid sister of yours.”

Kevin rolled over onto his back and looked up at Ginnie as she stopped beside him, hands on her hips. She looked from him
to Charlie, an expression on her face Kevin could describe only as sheer wonderment.

“You — you weren't carrying on a conversation with that pigeon, were you?” she said. “You — you haven't gone out of your mind?”

Kevin tightened his lips and looked at Charlie.
Well, Charlie, old uncle, what shall I tell her? She heard us talking. If I deny it, she'll really think I'm crazy. Maybe
she'll tell Mom and Dad and the next thing you know I'll be in a hospital having my head examined.

Charlie met Kevin's intense gaze, then hopped over close to Kevin and whispered into his ear, “Tell her the whole story, and
make her promise not to tell another living soul. That's going to be tough for her to do, but we have to count on it. O.K.?”

“O.K.,” said Kevin. Looking up at Ginnie, he saw her eyebrows jerked upward in surprise and her face turning the color of
paper.

Kevin said gently, “Sit down, Gin. I've got something to tell you, and you've got to keep it to yourself. Forever. Think you
can do that?”

She stared at him. Then her head bobbed as she sat down, curling her legs under her. “I — I think so,” she whispered.

“You — you know what reincarnation is, don't you?” Kevin asked her.

“Reincarnation?” She frowned. “I've heard of it.”

“O.K. It's when a person dies and his soul enters another body,” Kevin explained. “The body could be that of an insect, or
an animal, or even a bird. Different religious sects believe in it”.

Ginnie's eyes seemed to grow even wider as they hopped from Kevin to Charlie and back to Kevin. She straightened her back
as if something was crawling down it.

A chuckle broke the tense silence, and both Kevin and Ginnie looked at Charlie. The expression on Ginnie's face was one of
utmost surprise.

“What he's driving at, my dear Ginnie,” Charlie chimed in as a loving old uncle might, “is that I used to be your Great-Great
Uncle Rickard O'Toole. And after my death I returned in the form you see before you. Not as handsome, perhaps, but what can
you expect of a pigeon?”

Ginnie's face paled. Then slowly her color came back, and a happy smile came over her face.

“I can't believe it!” she cried softly. “Oh, I just can't believe it!”

“You might as well believe it,” said Charlie. “Because it's true. But don't shout the news so loud that the whole world will
hear you. This has got to be a secret just between us three. Remember that.”

Ginnie shook her head vigorously, no longer straight-backed nor as scared-looking as she was when she had first heard him
talk. “I'll remember that, Uncle…”

“Charlie,” interrupted Charlie quickly. “Never call me uncle anything. It's just Charlie. All my pigeon friends call me Charlie,
and that's what I want you and Kevin to call me, too. O.K.?”

“O.K.,” said Ginnie, bobbing her head so that her hair fell over her face and she had to whip it back. “Oh, Charlie! I'm so
happy to meet you!”

“O.K., O.K. But just keep your voice down, for Pete's sake,” reminded Charlie, sounding a bit cranky. “Now let's talk about
tennis for
a while. That's the real reason I'm here.” He cocked his head to the right so that his left eye focused on Kevin. “You're
playing Roger Murphy next Saturday, right?”

“Not unless I beat Chuck Eagan on Wednesday,” said Kevin.

Charlie chuckled. “Oh, you'll beat him. It's that Roger kid you'll have trouble with. I've watched him. He plays like his
great uncle used to.”

“Which great uncle?” Ginnie broke in.

“Sanford,” said Charlie. “Sanford Wallington Murphy. What do you think of
that
handle? Anyway, Wally — as we used to call him — had two main weaknesses which only a few of us were able to detect. A low
drive that landed near his feet, and a drive hit to his forehand side. He had trouble returning either one.”

“His
forehand
side?” Kevin frowned. “Are you sure about that, Charlie?”

“As sure as I'm standing here,” replied Charlie. “You see, Rog has probably done the same thing old Wally did. He's worked
on his
backhand stroke so much that he paid too little attention to his forehand.”

Kevin shrugged. “Makes sense — I guess,” he said.

“Of course it makes sense,” said Charlie. “Remember those two…”

“Hey!” a loud voice interrupted. “Isn't that the same pigeon that was at the tennis match this afternoon?”

“Oh-oh,” muttered Charlie. “It's the enemy. Roger, himself. See you kids later. I'm getting famished, anyway.”

He sprang up, spread out his gray-white wings, and flew off. Kevin watched him as he climbed higher and higher, gradually
diminishing into a dot and then vanishing into the fast growing dusk.

7

R
OGER CAME INTO THE YARD,
blowing a piece of bubble gum to the size of a baseball.
Explode, gum!
Kevin thought.
Stick to his face! Better yet, stick to his mouth so that he cant open it!

The gum exploded with a loud burst. But that was as far as the sticky substance went in satisfying Kevin's wish.
Rotten luck. Bet if it was me the darn stuff would stick to my face.

“As I was saying,” said Roger. “Isn't that the same…”

“It is,” Ginnie cut him off short. “And I guess you know now what pigeons think of you.”

Roger grinned that crooked grin of his, and Kevin wondered if a clean sock on the side of his jaw might straighten it out.

“Well, I'm not one for pigeons,” Roger remarked. “Not for any kind of birds, for that matter.”

He stuck his hands into his rear pants pockets and started to rock back and forth on his heels.

“He seems to be pretty friendly with you two,” he observed. “What have you got that nobody else has, anyway?”

“A friendly face,” Ginnie answered.

“We talk his language,” Kevin said.

“What? Coo coo?” said Roger, and doubled over, laughing.

I walked into that one,
Kevin thought as he saw the disgusted look that Ginnie gave him. Finally Roger straightened up. “I suppose you've got a name
for him.”

“Of course,” said Kevin.

“No kidding. What is it?”

“None of your bus…” Ginnie started to say,
but Kevin interrupted, “No, we'll tell him, Gin,” he said. “We won't have to worry about losing Charlie as a friend just because
we tell Roger
that
much about him.”

Roger frowned. “Charlie? Is that what you call him? And what do you mean about telling me
that
much about him?”

Now,
Kevin thought,
it's my turn to laugh.
And he did.

“Just sleep on that for a while, Roger,” he said. “So long. I've got some chores to do.”

“Better practice up for that game with Chuck,” Roger reminded him. “Otherwise we might not be playing each other this year.”

Kevin's ears turned red. What Roger meant, of course, was that Kevin might not beat Chuck Eagan in their forthcoming match
and earn a match with Roger.

Losing to Chuck didn't necessarily mean that an O'Toole-Murphy match could not be played. It could, if only to satisfy their
egos. Especially Roger's. But it was Kevin's hope to play the cocky Roger properly.

“Don't worry,” said Kevin. “You and I will play, all right. You can bet your big fat bubble gum on that.”

He turned and walked up to the house, expecting to hear that familiar Roger Murphy laugh. But he didn't. All he heard was
the door closing quietly behind him as Ginnie followed him into the house, then Ginnie's surprising comment, “I feel sorry
for him. Can you believe it?”

He looked at her. Sure enough she was either putting on a command performance, or the expression on her pixy face was real.

“No,” he said. “But then again, knowing you, I guess I can.”

Two days slipped by. Charlie had not been seen since Roger had broken up his conversation with Kevin and Ginnie and he had
flown off into the wild blue yonder. Where was he? Why hadn't he come around in the last two days?

Kevin got worried.

“I can't figure it out, Gin,” he said on the third day of Charlie's absence. “He's never been away from us this long before.”

“Maybe he's gone back to his friends at that old church steeple,” she said.

“Maybe. Shall we go find out?”

“It's the only way,” she said.

They got permission from their mother to take a bus to downtown New Laswell. It was only a two-block walk from where they
got off the bus to the church where Charlie had said he and his friends congregated. Good thing that Charlie had described
the church as being near a courtyard, otherwise it might have been days before they would have found the right one.

“That's it,” Ginnie said, pointing at the church steeple sticking up into the sky like a long spike. “Look at the pigeons.
There must be hundreds.”

“Look at those diving down like bombers,” said Kevin. “They must be the ones who used to fly the Spads and Handley Pages.”

They approached the courtyard.

“How can we tell which is Charlie?” said Ginnie wonderingly. “They all look alike.”

“Don't worry,” Kevin assured her. “If he's there he'll see us and come.”

They stood watching the pigeons assembled on the roof, under the cornices, and flying around the steeple and the courtyard.
There were benches in the courtyard with people sitting on them, some holding bags of peanuts which they fed to the pigeons
that fluttered fearlessly around them.

“I see what Charlie means about being well fed,” Kevin observed. “Guess it's not a bad life, at that.”

“For a pigeon,” Ginnie said.

They hung around for ten minutes, according to an electric clock on a corner of the New Laswell National Bank.

“He isn't here,” Kevin said, a lump coming to his throat. “We might as well go home.”

They took a bus, neither saying more than a few words during the whole ride.

“What are we going to do?” asked Ginnie.

“I don't know,” answered Kevin.

It wasn't until they were off the bus that Ginnie seemed to find her tongue again. “Let's ask Mom,” she said. “Maybe she can
think of something.”

Mrs. O'Toole was stirring up a cake batter when the kids got home.

“Well,” she said, surprised. “You two sure made it back in a hurry. Did you find Charlie?”

“No,” said Kevin, getting a whiff of the sweet, mouth-watering smell. “That's what we want to see you about, Mom. We're stuck.
We don't know what else to do.”

“Have you checked with some of the people in the neighborhood?” she asked, looking at her two offspring with her wide blue
eyes.

Kevin shrugged. “No. But what could they tell us? Pigeons all look alike to them.”

“Maybe something happened to your pigeon and somebody might have heard about it,” she said. “I hope for your sake and Charlie's
that nothing has happened to him, of course. But
I've seen kids with B-B guns. And a pigeon makes a pretty good-size target.”