It was always a Saturday or Sunday trip. Unannounced until the day we were to go. The closer we got to Canarsie, the larger the backyards became and the houses fewer until there were large open fields specked with shacks. Squatters, my father called them. Even the air changed. It was sharper. Salty.
At the end of the line, where the motorman turned the trolley around on a large turntable, they were within a few hundred feet of the bay and the Canarsie Pier, a structure made of wood to which a three masted ship was tied with thick hawsers. Sometimes my father and I would go aboard. The Sea Scouts used it until it was destroyed by the nineteen thirty- eight hurricane. But most of the time,we’d cut across the fields and go directly to Kogel’s house. A wooden ramshackle two-story affair whose open windows invited every kind of flying insect, and there were many of them because of the nearby swamps.
Kogel’s pigeon coop was in back of the house. It was very large. That was the first place they went to. I followed his father inside, who immediately began to examine certain birds. He never said what he was looking for or why he was only interested in a particular bird. When he was finished, he went back into the yard and shouted, Kogel, Sam is here.
Kogel came out of the house. The birds told me that, he said. He was a tall, rangy man with a lean face and unkempt pepper and salt hair. In summer he was bare chested and very tan. In the winter he wore a heavy flannel shirt and a torn, paint spattered sweater. Summer or winter his pants were always worn and stained with oil and paint.
Kogel scarcely looked at him. He had four sons of his own. All were older than I and wilder, often entering the house or leaving through a window rather than the door.
My father and Kogel immediately set the birds free and waved long bamboo poles to keep them in the air. To me it seemed that they did that for the entire time I was there and maybe they did. They seldom spoke. Their attention was totally focused on the weaving flock of birds and its constantly changing shape, making a myriad of geometric patterns: a kind of lace in the sky.
Not all of their visits to Kogel were the same. Those times when my father and Kogel waited for their racers to return were more important than other times. Both men puffed away on cheap cigars, spoke in low tones and drank homemade red wine and black coffee until the first bird entered the coop and clocked in. Later the arrival times of Kogel’s racers were matched against the arrival times of other birds at the local racing club. Winning the race meant money, and money was very scarce because of the Depression. My father sold diamonds but no one had the money to buy them. We lived in a railroad flat on Chester Street in Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Kogel was a bricklayer and a mason. But no one was building anything. He worked at odd jobs.
One or the other of them would spot the bird before it landed and found its way into the coop. The birds were often sent as far south as Miami or west to St Louis where they’d be released to fly back to Canarsie.
Satisfied that all of their birds returned, they shook hands and my father called me for the trolley ride home, during which I usually slept.
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Not only did my father share pigeons with Kogel, he also had his own birds. Four: two Red Checkers, one Tumbler and a Fantail. He flew them every day and taught me to fly them. Though the four never made the wonderful patterns in the sky that Kogel’s birds could make, I enjoyed watching them whirl gracefully around the pole. It was also an adventure just to be on the roof. I looked down and saw the people sitting on the stoops or near an open window to be cool. But on the roof, it was always cool, or so it seemed. During the hot summer nights, my father and I slept on the roof.
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