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We buy a two-pound box of saltwater taffy for dinner; and move on back up the beach to where it’s deserted. We find a good place with warm sand and bury ourselves in it.
    I tell Birdy about his mother poisoning the blue bars. We decide not to go home and not to write where we are, either. Hell, my old lady’s always complaining about how much I eat; it’ll save her having to feed me. I’m sick of having the old man jump on me, too. Birdy says that, except for falling off the gas tank, swimming in the ocean is probably the closest thing to flying. Says he’s going to learn to swim.
    Nobody ever learned to swim the way Birdy does. He doesn’t want to swim on top of the water like everybody else. He goes out under the waves and does what he calls ‘flying in water’. He holds his breath till you think he’s drowned and then comes up someplace where you aren’t expecting him at all like a porpoise or something. That’s when he starts all the crappy business with breath holding, too.
    In the water I was free. By a small movement, I could go up and move in all directions without effort. But it was slower, thicker, darker. I could not stay. Every effort would not let me stay more than five minutes.
    We have left the water. Air is man’s natural place. Even if we are forced to walk in the depths of it, we live in the air. We cannot go back. It is the age of mammals and birds.
    One hundred billion birds, fifty for every man alive and nobody seems to notice. We live in the slime of an immensity and no one objects. What must our enslavement seem to the birds in the magnitude of their environment?
    We decide to take off down the coast to Wildwood. That’s the place my family usually goes every summer. Atlantic City is bigger but Wildwood is more open, more natural.
    We roll down on the bikes. We’re still looking out for cops. It’s terrific, free feeling, no house you have to go back to, nobody waiting for you to come in and eat; nothing to do but roll along and look at the scenery. I never knew before how much I was locked in by everything.
    On the way down, we decide we’ll sleep on the beaches at night, spend the days there in the sunshine. We’ll lift whatever we need from the stores. There’re also lots of garbage cans behind the restaurants where we can find all the food we need. We’ll buy a couple old blankets at the Salvation Army and a pot to cook in under the boardwalk.
    It works out exactly like that. Things hardly ever do. All we spend any money on after we get the blankets and the cooking pot is the rides at night and saltwater taffy. We get to be dedicated saltwater taffy addicts. We both like the kind with red or black stripes and a strong taste.
    We don’t have any trouble with cops. There’re all kinds of people down on vacation, and so a couple strange kids are hardly noticed. At nights we’ve fixed a hidden nest down where the boardwalk is only about three feet higher than the sand. We tuck ourselves in there and hide our cooking pot in the sand during the day.
    Birdy is going crazy with his swimming. All day long he practices holding his breath, even when he isn’t swimming. I’d be sitting there talking to him and I’d see his eyes are bulging and then he’d blow out his breath and say, ‘Two minutes, forty-five seconds.’ He asks me to count for him sometimes. The way he wants me to count is Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two, and so on; really nuts. All day he’s in the water ‘flying’, coming up once in a great while and taking a deep breath. He’s found the local public library and is reading about whales and porpoises and dolphins. He’s a maniac. When Birdy gets started on something like that, there’s nothing you can do.
    The worst thing of all is the sideshow freak called ‘Zimmy, the Human Fish’. Birdy spends a fortune watching this guy. This is a truly creepy set-up. Zimmy has both his legs chopped off justat the top, so he looks like an egg with a head and arms. He’s