Wringer by Jerry Spinelli Page A

down for breakfast. This time he returned not only with FrankenPuffs but Grape Nuts as well. He spread the cereal on the snow outside his window. The pigeon did not have to be coaxed. It flew out the window and attacked the food.
    Over the next week Palmer got better acquainted with the pigeon and adjusted his own life to take his new friend into account. From the library at school he borrowed a book about pigeons. Actually he sneaked it out. When it came to pigeons, he did not trust anyone in town, except maybe Dorothy Gruzik. It occurred to him that if he walked up to the front desk with a pigeon book in his hand, someone might see him (though certainly not Beans, who avoided the library like toothpaste). Or the librarian might look at him funny. Or she might act nice and then as soon as he left report him to the authorities. So he slipped the book into his bag and walked out as innocent-looking as possible. He had it back on the shelf in two days.
    From the book he learned that pigeons go to sleep as soon as the sun goes down. This was called roosting. He learned that it was okay to feed hispigeon cereal, but that outside on its own it would probably eat some gravel. The gravel goes into the gizzard and grinds the food as it comes down, since the pigeon has no teeth in its mouth to chew with. He learned that a pigeon isn’t very fussy about what it eats, because its tongue has only thirty-seven taste buds.
    He learned that a pigeon’s heart is about the size of an acorn. And that a pigeon’s heart, as measured against the size of its body, is one of the largest hearts in creation.
    Palmer learned that in the wild pigeons used to live in the nooks and crannies of high rocky cliffs. When they came to this country, they headed for the things that looked like high rocky cliffs to them, which happened to be tall buildings and skyscrapers. And that’s why pigeons live mostly in big cities.
    He read about the passenger pigeon. Flocks of them numbered in the millions. So many were there that when they flew, they would block out the sun and people below would have to light torches. And then people began to shoot them. Even dynamite them. And by 1914 the last passenger pigeon was dead.
    There’s something about pigeons, thought Palmer, that makes people want to shoot them. Whatever that thing was, he could not find it in the book.
    But he found much else. The book was eighty-nine pages long, and this surprised Palmer. He never would have guessed that there were eighty-nine pages’ worth of things to say about pigeons.
    But then, come to think of it, he himself could have written many pages about his own pigeon. (And no question now—it was his .) He could write about the pigeon tapping on the window every afternoon until he let it in. The pigeon strutting across the sill and onto his bed, then flying from spot to spot in the room, perching for a moment at every stop, as if to say, Just making sure everything’s as I left it . The pigeon banana-peeling off the comic book stack in a clownish flop. Palmer finding his pigeon roosting in the closet every night after dinner.
    And the sounds. So many, so different. There were tootles and grumbles and rumbles and sighs and gobbles and giggles and even a woof. His new roommate was a one-bird band!
    He thought about a name. He thought abouthow the pigeon nipped his ear each morning. In fact, it was always nipping at something: the Nerf ball, the gray soldiers, book covers. So there it was: Nipper . And simply because Nipper sounded like a boy’s name, “it” became “he.”
    Before long a routine had developed:
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    Wake up. (The “alarm clock” being nips on the earlobe.)
    Pretend to be groggy when Mom knocks with official wake-up call.
    Let Nipper out. Leave food on porch roof. (He had bought a box of Honey Crunchers, which he kept in his closet. He had studied cereal boxes and found out that Honey Crunchers contained a lot of fat;