Bird

by Noy Holland

  The boy’s sister wound him up by his knees. It wasn’t winter here yet; they had thrown their coats to the ground. A last leaf rocked down and the boy lunged at it and swung his good leg up. He had lost his other leg at the knee. The boy’s sister wound him up on the swing, away from her, into the paltry shadows. He was a long-haired boy and his hair was loose and in his teeth was a grass blonde as he was.

  “Far enough,” he said, “too far—”

  No bigger a boy than Bird’s is. His voice bellowed in his chest like a man’s.

  The boy’s sister let loose and ducked away. He spun slowly at first, and faster, and the more he spun the faster he went, the more spinning pressed him out. His neck showed, a stalk, brockled and thin. His head seemed barely hooked to it and his hair, as if pulled, streamed out. He blurred, a body churned to butter.

  The sister hopped from foot to foot; she babbled. The sound she made made two sounds, knocked from the flat face of the house. It ran its course through corrugate fields, the furrows at the sky converging like paths of a fine-toothed comb. She snatched her brother’s hair as he passed and this slowed him, jerkily, and dragged him askew on the swing. She tried to help him; his foot struck her in the mouth. He was coming off the swing. Cripple boy. The log was tipped; the stub of his leg was off it. He hung against the rope holding on with his hands and the rope, unwound, wound up again, according to the laws of motion. The rope thickened with his hair. It wound up with the rope until he hung by his hair, a carnival act, an object still in motion, moved by the fact of its moving, spinning itself out again. His foot flopped about below him and caught his sister in the mouth again.

  “Remember the bar on Avenue B? Remember the pipe we rolled in?” Bird asked.

  “It wasn’t so long ago. I do, Bird.”

  He had asked her to marry him. It seemed impossible, marriage, anything at all.

  “He stepped on a fishing hook,” Bird said. “It broke off in his heel. He didn’t tell his folks, he was afraid to. He told his sister because nobody listens to her, not even the mother,” Bird said.

  “There’s no mother,” Bird said.

  The father was starting across the field with a pitchfork. He had let the door to the house slap shut and the girl twitched, startled, shot. You could shoot her again and again, Bird thought, and still she would refuse to die. She was burbling.

  Lunacy made her invincible. She was to blame for nothing.

  “He couldn’t get his foot in his shoe,” Bird said. “The poison was running up his leg—bolts of yellow, bolts of blue. Too late,” Bird said, “end of story.”

  “Think so?”

  “I do. It’s the old too late. Quiet and slow and deadly.”

  Bird picked up a rock and threw it and a hot little fibrous grume of blood slid into her pants again.

  “You asked me to marry me,” Bird said. “I mean you.”

  She was crying again, quietly, her hair falling over her eyes. Mickey moved off; he had her hand in his hand. The girl was hidden away in the grasses, her brother above her turning, still hanging from the rope by his hair. A tableau.

  The father had nearly reached them.

  He was jogging now with his pitchfork, shouting, “Who the hell are you?”

  They drove on. Interstates and dirt roads. Hay packed away in great round bales, wind rolling over the prairie. They saw the salt pillars in Kansas, strange and unadorned. Rock fence posts. Double rainbow. They had a route they were told to follow that they followed not at all. They saw Crazy Horse rising out of the plains, out of the town of Custer, named after Custer; they saw the fort where Crazy Horse died, a prisoner held by his people, by Little Big Man, Young Man Afraid, while Private Gentles ran the bayonet through him.

  “Cheer up, baby sweet. I wish you could,” Mickey said.

  Bird didn’t want to—not yet. But soon. The country was working on her, the low rose gone to russet, the high bright move-along clouds. She was hungry again and gorged herself on chicken fried steak and Skittles, on vermilion faces of canyons, cliffs you could dig with a spoon. Bandolier, Mesa Verde, Chaco canyon—this was her girlhood, her blood’s country, the great dry American open.

  “Open up,” Mickey said, and she did.

  Cantaloupe in the bathtub, love, the curtains drawn, the heat blasting.

  “Feed me to the furnace when I die,” Bird said, “and leave a little bit of me here—” in the bed, she meant, of the Super 8, exit 42 off the interstate, where the mirrors come down off the wall.

  They were days late, dollars short, by the time they got to Cheyenne, but the Drive Away clerk didn’t care.

  “You look happy,” she said. “Where you headed? I bet you don’t even know.”

  Which was true: they didn’t. The clerk was headed down to Denver. She would take them south if they wanted.

  “It doesn’t blow as hard in Denver,” she said. “I had a friend had a car door blow shut on her here and it broke her leg in two places.”

  “How you tell a tourist from a local?” she said. “A tourist chases his hat.”

  “I don’t get it,” Mickey said.

  “In the wind, babe. When the wind picks his hat off his head?”

  She sort of socked him in the arm, flirting.

  “What’s the difference between a rancher and a 747? When it sets down in Honolulu, a 747 quits whining.”

  “That’s a good one,” Mickey said, and socked her right back.

  She told jokes all the way to Denver, not a one of them better than these.

  “Who’s the best baby on the planet?” Bird asks. “Think: princess with 49 dresses. Little Miss sparkly shoes.”

  The baby is like a doll Bird dresses who cannot quite sit up. She would do better, like as not, in the sea. Little guppy.

  “Silly, guppies don’t live in the sea,” Bird says.

  Bird is cleaning, sort of. She sweeps. She spits on a stain on the kitchen floor and rubs the spot clean with her sock feet.

  What in the world, Bird thinks, are your sock feet? Hers are filthy; they’ll do.

  Bird slides her feet into her husband’s boots and sets off down the road with the baby breathing sweetly against her chest. The geese are moving.

  So soon? Can’t you stay?

  What if she had stayed in the west, Bird thinks, with Mickey, out in the dry wide open?

  Yep. And what if the moon were cheese?

  And what if they made you president, Bird, or better yet, the Queen?

  She’d raze the suburbs, give it all back to the animals, open the gates of the zoo.

  Was it true there was a zoo of good Christians to prove God’s impeccable design? Better throw the bolt on that one. Those people need to die. She would line them all up—the CEOs, the greedy guts, the poachers, the cheats. Let the hyenas have at them.

  Now there’s a sport for your networks, yup. Let’s get rid of the buttons and levers, return to hand-to-hand. It’s just you, High Sir, and the hyena. You get a stick. The hyena gets a loop of your colon to unspool you by. Now run.

  Nice, Bird thinks, and you’re a mother? You keep the tally for the PTP?

  The neighbor is still burning plastics: throw him in. Quick. Let his ticker quit.

  I’m sorry, is what she means to say. Sorry, sweetheart, about the elephants. About the sea turtles with their heads lopped off, and the friendly, machine-gunned whales. About the owls, my love, and the antelope. About the drowning bears, the baby seals clubbed, the cormorants grounded by oil. About that wall we threw up to keep the Mexicans out across a migratory pathway millions of years old. For the sharks, finned and starving. Sorry. The food riots. The refugees. Dioxin in Mama’s breast milk, sorry. Mercury in tuna; chickens with their beaks cut off, fed their own shit from a tube. It’s cheap. It’s worth it.

  Sorry, love.

  Welcome to the world.

  “What’s left of the world,” Bird says again, second time today.

  They walk the loop: neighbor, neighbor, sugar house, pond. Prett
y little pond you can’t swim in. You’ll come out with an extra nose.

  The baby’s happy. How did I get such a happy baby? Bird wonders.

  Blue blue day, bit of sunshine. The legendary leaves.

  They are watching a movie of us and we are watching a movie of them and everybody’s happy, Bird thinks.

  White whale. The same eye sweeping past, not so different. Small. The dark clear curious orb.

  Now there’s a word, orb, you don’t hear every day.

  Dropped your orball. I kin get it.

  The town cat, killer cat, rubs against Bird’s leg.

  “You want my happy baby, don’t you? You can’t have her, not in a million years.”

  In a million years, Bird thinks, what will the planet look like? What, in another ten?

  She walks on, feeling lighter, sobering up. She shakes out her shirt in a sunshiny field and they lie on it, Bird on her back and the baby on Bird’s chest, one heart bumping into the other. She’d like to sleep here, wake in falling dew. The baby holds up her head to look at Bird, to gnaw on Bird’s chin, but now she’s tired—spent beyond wanting and soft all at once. Everything in that baby gives way.

  It is the dearest crushing feeling.

  Bird makes a roll bar of her elbows and rolls with the baby against her, gently down the hill.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she says, “like your mama. Love and be done with it. Let go. Hold on,” she says, “may you always.”

  The baby is lying on her back, batting at Bird’s face, the silver heads of the grasses nodding all around.

  “I’ll eat you up,” Bird says, “You’re too pretty. You mustn’t be ashamed to be pretty. Don’t be proud. People will envy you; you have to let them. People will hate you—you let them. Don’t let them take anything from you, my girl. They’ll take everything. You have to give yourself away.”

  Bird kisses the baby’s pinkening cheeks, the knob of her spitty chin.

  “Be good to yourself, my little lollipop. Never love a boy like Mickey. I don’t mean that.”

  She presses her mouth against the baby’s creamy belly.

  “What I mean, lollipop, is love him. Love him hard and be done.”

  Bird picks the baby up, puts her shirt back on. The ferns are withering, sweetening the air.

  “Love me,” Bird says, “you have to promise. Promise me you will write to me when you are all gone away and grown.”

  They go inside, the kitchen dim, hard at first to see. First thing Bird sees is the telephone and she picks it up to call Mickey, hangs it up again. A grown woman. Christ above. She’s got a baby. She shakes. She is shaking that baby too.

  She tries Suzie. She wants to tell Suzie the sound Mickey made, the girlish, dry, collapsing gasp when he took her. But Suzie will say, “I know.”

  “He’s got pinworms.”

  “Mickey?”

  “My boy,” Bird says.

  “I’ll let you go,” Suzie says.

  “Come on, Suzie. You don’t want to know about pinworms? Quiet pale morsels you can see through, small as a grain of rice.”

  The pinworm eats at night, the pediatrician told Bird. “Take a look with a flashlight while he’s sleeping,” she advised. “They break apart as they leave the body—little fellows, friable, sliding out of the hole.”

  “I’m not all that wild about humans,” Suzie says. “We eat each other. We don’t behave. We thought to send Mexican free-tailed bats into Japan loaded down with napalm in the second world war. Dragged them out of their caverns. Put them on ice so they’d sleep. Another shining human endeavor to rival the exploding harpoon.”

  Suzie takes a drag on something. Bird can hear it over the phone.

  “There are too fucking many of us besides, and you and Doctor Said So just went and made two more.”

  “So get your tubes tied, you don’t like humans,” Bird says. “Be done with it.”

  “Right. Never give blood again.”

  Suzie takes another drag and a swig of something that comes in a glass with ice.

  “When humans get wiped off the planet,” Suzie says, “do you know this? The subways in New York City will engorge with sea water in days.”

  “When?” Bird says.

  “What?”

  “When humans get wiped off the planet,” Bird says. “Don’t people still say if?”

  “Matter of time,” Suzie says, it’s what she always says. “Maybe pinworms will do the trick. Something sneaky and easily broken. Friable, you like to say.”

  Bird goes back to the photo album, the bloody birth pictures, spooky, the baby still stricken and blue. Bird flips the page, going backwards, comes upon the murk that is her baby unborn, an image they make with sound.

  “Here you are,” Bird says, “waving. Here is the one of you sucking the pale peninsula of your thumb.”

  She is all spread apart, a tiny continent. A mass with migrating eyes. Little Whale, White Moon.

  The bodies toxic. Where had Bird seen that? They were rolling belugas in cellophane, men in gloves and suits. Disposing. The whole pod—the soon-to-be-dead, the living. Beached. Bodies gasping on the strand.

  You can quit the news but it finds you, some picture you didn’t mean to see. That little girl dead with her books in her lap. The illuminated page. Foot soldiers, somebody’s boy, creeping into the blast.

  There’s no way to live far enough from it. No matter the pact you make with yourself—it gets at you and eats.

  Somebody’s boy on the waterboard. Sounds okay to me.

  Says who?

  Say the fat cats, says the president. Folks, we are doing everything we can.

  Such a flocked-around helpless feeling, a rage, and Bird was chumped by it—she knew better: fat cats were making money making fear she couldn’t shake. Code orange, people, keep it calm. Now let’s bump her up to code red.

  You bet. Like ants, they were, sent to scurry. Snatching for beans and Sterno, a spade. Dig a hole. Hully up. Bring the Vizqueen.

  Sure, it passed. And when the worst of it passed you could slump back and live among the daily horrors. That was nice. The spectacle of smallpox. The war going peacably along. The icecap melted. Owright. The thing mutates, owright, but it’s a frog. Heck. It’s a elephant. It lives away off, it ain’t you.

  But it is, Bird thinks. It’s you. She thinks of an old movie she saw—mzungu in a pith helmet stepping out of a Cessna on the vast grassy savannah, not a chance in the world to hide.

  Do you say pod, as with whales, for the elephant? Pod, is it, or tribe? A murder, a pride, a herd, Bird thinks.

  They’re all out there, big as elephants, big yellow African sky.

  I want that one, says the shitball, and shoots.

  The animal takes a long time falling. It gives itself up in stages against its mighty will. He turns to the next elephant and takes a shot at it, too.

  I want that one. And then I want that and that one then and her and her and her.

  Those girls.

  Columbine, pretty name, couple of quiet boys.

  Those are the ones to kill you. The sheriff calls you for dental records and your life goes black and gray.

  It is a day like any other, Bird thinks. Pretty place, mountains at your back, tough country. Home. Been knowing it all my life. Lives of mine before it.

  Simple lives, used to be. Homesteaders, sheepherders.

  School bus coming prettily—you can’t hear it yet—up the road. You scoot her out. Not a sign, no way in the world to stop it.

  But you’re the mother.

  You are the one who is supposed to know.

  The baby hooks Bird’s lip with her finger: the baby wants Bird to sing. So she sings: little snowflake, white shell, that one. And kisses all ten toes. Bird counts her lucky stars to eleven and quits. Thinks: quit while you can and hide them, woman. The gods are greedy, too.

  She cranks the music, dances the baby upstairs. It helps. A little sunshine helps. Dewfall soon. She ought to walk back out withou
t shoes. Pass her toes through the early glittery wet, the grass with its sparky dew.

  Sparky—that’s her boy’s word.

  Count of three. Look both ways twice.

  Now move on.

  Take a picture.

  “Hey, hey, Mama. Take a little one of me.”

  “It’s a little bit, it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit hot,” her boy says.

  And drops his pants from the bridge.

  “Hey, take a little one of me.”

  What to do? Lock your babies in a closet in the dark all day and slide rice under the door? Keep them out of the sun, keep the wind from their eyes, keep them off the country road. From TV, keep them, and victorious boys, heroes hoisting the flag. From the man in a hood with the white of his palms opened skyward, wired, by head and foot and hand. From that. The next war, war to end all wars, first war of the brand new century, the unrelenting brassy gong. The poor pagans, the un- and under-chosen, the great sweeping cry to arms. To Swords! Face the Nation. From that, keep them. From the static of indecision. From desire and the absence of desire. The fly in the web that does itself in by flying. By tattered wings, by tiny dry ambitions. From that, keep them. From me, Bird thinks—goer-between, meddler. Damp consoling shade.

  She could write a letter, fat chance. Scrub commodes. Here’s that respite, the solitary hours—before suppertime, before the school bus comes. What to do, what to do. Try the treadmill—right.

  “You’d feel better,” says her husband, says Suzie.

  “Better than what?” Bird says.

  “You think I’m fat?” she asked her boy. “You think Mama’s too fat?”

  He looked her over.

  “To do what?”

  The baby’s arms swing up, silly baby, asleep: she thinks she is falling out of a tree.

  Bird washes a fork. Pays a bill and walks it to the mailbox. Comes back and picks up the phone. She won’t answer, Bird thinks, but Suzie answers.

  “Your poet?” Bird asks.