Bird

by Noy Holland

  She does the math, the years to come, the school bus whistling down the hill, small pale jostled faces. She sees a girl, another’s, braids undone, flyaway standing-up hair—that’s her face. It’s Bird’s face. The girl of herself, the little, she thinks—

  And turns away and thinks: Mickey.

  Never can see the man coming.

  Bird laughs to herself to think of it, coming, I’m coming, remembers Tuk and Doll Doll, the pair who picked them up, the pair they took a room with, briefly, finally, in the blowing heat of a roadside hotel, remembers Tuk going at it, mama-talking Doll Doll, snuffling around in her culotte, whistling through his nose.

  Back again: a speeding reel. Back in the honeyed swim and slop, a roving, animal hunger. Just a nibble.

  Not a nibble, not enough, not near.

  Bird got behind herself and bit Mickey, dug into him with a fork. The moment’s impulse.

  The body food.

  Her girl blue from the womb, dead, Bird thought: I’ll have to eat her. Want me just to eat you?

  She remembers Tuk slurping at her—not her, not Bird—at Doll Doll, Bird waking up from a dream of herself in the velvety dark of the room they shared and in it was somebody slurping pudding from a bowl like a dog. Eat you out.

  Eat you in, Bird thought—that was more like it. And having waked, she slept, and having slept, waked, and waking again heard the tidal shush of skin on skin, coming, going, Mama now, I’m coming, Mama, Tuk hollering, a drawn-out o, coooming, rwaorwaorwaor, and then he barked it out: I went! I went! I went!

  “He wore a shirt that read Big Boys Hold It,” Bird says.

  “That’s stupid,” Suzie says.

  “Bunnies are stupid,” Bird says.

  “What was your name before your name was Bird?”

  “I forget.”

  “No you don’t, sugar. You know ravens—”

  “Yes. Juggle sticks in the air.”

  “For fun,” Suzie says, “for the fuck of it.”

  “And lie in ants with their wings spread open,” Bird adds.

  “For the fuck of it. For the feeling. Ecstasy and nothing more.”

  They went up, up some more.

  “Half a mile above the mile-high city,” Mickey said, “not too shabby.”

  They would spend the last of their high at the Hyatt, why not? He had a credit card he’d swiped from his mother she didn’t yet know was gone.

  They were in a steaming bath with bubbles to their chins when Bird said, as her mother used to say, “Wonder what the poor folks are doing.”

  “This,” Mickey said, and lifted Bird by her ass to his mouth in the froth and pushed into her with his tongue.

  “Home again,” he murmured. “Hallelujah.”

  They wore their Hyatt robes, heavy as hides; they smelled of lavender and money.

  They ate prime rib, bloody rare, and a heap of mashed potatoes; drizzled-on food and reductions, a feast, a bottle of wine.

  What if they ate like this once a week like wolves, fattening and fasting, running lean, gorging themselves again?

  “What if I touched you here,” Mickey said, and slid his hand between her legs beneath the table, “and nowhere else, ever again?”

  The robe they took and the embellished towel took up half the room in their Glad bags and made a softer place to sit. Bird was tender still, seepy.

  They sat around a lot, they stood. They tried the off-ramp and the on.

  Three days—they’d made maybe a hundred miles. Too high, this country, the clouds snow-gray, too close to their heads. Unbudged.

  Somebody slowed down, stopped, backed up, peeled out. Very funny.

  Bird’s tooth throbbed in her head.

  They went back to throwing snowballs into traffic to pass the time. Drank a Pabst, split it, split the next. And the beer and being in the cold all day and the heat of Mickey’s breath when he kissed her made everything floaty and bright. The brightness, the float; the beat skipped, a hitch—Mickey felt it too. The blessed looseness of slipping out of time.

  They quit bothering to stick their thumbs out, quit bothering to stand but to fish another beer from the cooler where they sat.

  She heard her name, spoke it, understood that she had spoken it meaning to speak to him.

  Said to Mickey, “Hey, Bird?”

  Remember that?

  It had begun to snow again, the slow fat flakes suspended. They sat quietly, didn’t move.

  As at auction.

  Took a sip.

  As the old, didn’t move.

  Wanted nothing.

  The mind swept. The smallest act. A name spoken. How the heart—this was the real heartache: this happiness: this lonely, buzzing elation.

  Can’t last.

  Couldn’t last. Nature of things.

  Somebody quick say why.

  Wanting so mostly rarely withstands the presence of the thing we want.

  Say why.

  A ride, for instance. The golden Ryder. Which arrives when we are flagging, pleased, happy without it, why?

  Why—having traveled for days to reach someplace—are we nonetheless unready to stand up and walk through the door?

  Hello, hello.

  Not yet a little.

  They sat their cooler. Forgetful. Forgetting.

  The Ryder rocked to a stop on the shoulder.

  Last time.

  One more last time, says her boy.

  And so they sat some. They stood to meet it.

  There were two of each, human and dog, the pups part wolf—one was Wolfie, the other fluffed and white. This was Snowball.

  “I’m Bird,” Bird said, “and this is Mickey,” and of the two it was Tuk who spoke and said, “I expect you are.”

  He was dressed like a man of the region weathered into his middle years—in a worked-over hat, a bandanna at the neck. Doll Doll was a kid in pantyhose, in a bodysuit like bubble wrap, her culotte a bilious plaid. She had a candy necklace between her teeth she was sucking the color from. The dye left a smeary chinstrap of many muddied colors.

  She made herself small when Bird and Mickey got in, scooted over in the truck against Tuk. Tuk licked her, and licked her some more, Doll Doll offering him her neck. She had her sleeves pulled down and over her hands after the fashion of girls of the season. She brought a sleeve to her mouth and sucked at it. It was wet all the way to the elbow.

  The pups were loose in the cab of the truck and Doll Doll’s pantyhose was pinked with blood where the pups had gotten at her in the wide miles since Cheyenne. Tuk swung the truck into traffic and tumbled the pups across the floorboards—over Doll Doll’s feet and Mickey’s and Bird’s, a tidy row, tightly packed across the bench seat—like a seat on a bus, mottled and split, vinyl, a school bus smell. When Doll Doll bent to reach for a pup they all had to lean and twist away.

  Doll Doll let Wolfie walk across her lap to Mickey’s open hands. He tucked the pup under his jacket and scratched her behind her ear: this set her paw to thumping. Wolfie wrinkled her face and drooled, shaking with puppy bliss.

  “You got her spot,” Doll Doll said. “Oh, Wolfie.”

  Doll Doll reached across Bird to lay her hand on the pup snugged into Mickey’s jacket. Bird leaned out lightly against Doll Doll’s arm, her long dampened sleeve pulled longer, the crepey violet bubbles of Doll Doll’s bodysuit collapsed. Doll Doll moved away not at all. She had her arm set stiff across Bird’s chest: a reminder, a locking bar: here she was. Bird was going to be where she had put herself, now and again, decided or not: she got the kid-at-a-county-fair feeling she gets: feels the heat and wild sickening swing of what she wants, has picked and paid for, thought she wanted: rag-dolled, the snapping plunge, the quieting climb before you fall so fast you are lifted up and floating.

  She was floating: that was love.

  Love did away with the instant between wanting and doing, wanting to kiss and kissing, wanting to bite and biting—and so Bird bit the girl hard on the arm through the cheap rough crepe she w
as wearing.

  “Hey! You can’t—Tuk, she—”

  “You can’t bite her,” Tuk said. “Now you’ll have to—”

  “You have to say you’re sorry,” Doll Doll said. “And I’ll say I forgive you.”

  But she wasn’t: Bird was saving sorry up for children, a husband, a demoted family dog. For the months to come, the hand through the wall, Mickey’s tender wrists he opened. The little closures and retreats.

  “So how do you like God’s country?” Tuk wanted to know.

  Bird mumbled a mousy answer; her jaw felt soldered shut. The fat of her cheek and sinew, the woofer and tube of her ear, the pores, how it felt, sizzled; anvil and hammer and stirrup; ampulla and tragus, inward and out: nimble, any lasting pain, referred to neighbors, the wagging tongue; to the puffy glistening tab of her throat, to gingiva and palate, the string and ocherous wax of her eyes: hot, all of it, sparkling, every living cell: septum, foramen, cementum; the horn of pulp and the chamber—the tooth jigsawed into tissue, into alveolar bone. The whole bright box of Bird’s head hurt.

  She had taken to biting strangers.

  She had gotten what she deserved.

  Mickey was wearing his shirt sprung at the neck and Bird could see the upmost clusters she loved of freckles on his chest. She couldn’t stand it: Doll Doll had them too. They had like bodies, long and light for distance, the miles across the plain.

  Bird mouthed it: I want out. I want you.

  A suite with a theme, Bird wanted, something jungly, sneaky, scrawk and howl, a costume, the purr of rain, a bed set lazily spinning among the ravenous trees. She wanted Mickey to tie her by her hands and feet and work her slowly open. Make her cry out. Make her bleed.

  A tableau, she wanted. But not this one.

  Tuk was hooking snot from his nose with his long little fingernail, just the one long one, all he needed, and rolling it into a ball. He cracked the window, flicked the ball into the airstream. Hooked the next wet glob he rolled dry.

  It was warm in the truck and dewy and nice and nice to be out of the cold. And they were going where they meant to be going. Going south to Albakuke. Be there in a day.

  Bird moved away not to touch Mickey, to be some away from the heat of him and the drug of the way he smelled. She set her mind on Doll Doll—on the smeary mess she had made of her chin, on Doll Doll’s atrocious clothes. She had swiped her eyelids with blue glitter. A kid. A doll! and new to things.

  She was trying to look Bird’s age, Bird thought, and failing. That helped. And the little round hump of her belly helped: ah ha, a flaw, Doll Doll long and light, but soft, too—weak, Bird thought.

  But the next thought was creeping in: Is that a baby in your belly?

  Which it was.

  Two discs of red appeared between Doll Doll’s knees where her knees fell helplessly together. Doll Doll would come to limp and ache, Bird thought, comforted. She would age into polymer sockets, the daily complaints of living.

  Bird leaned to kiss him. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for Mickey, now and now and ever.

  But he was talking. He was missing his dog.

  “We had a dog once,” he said. “She was Maggie. She liked to take down Bird’s hair.”

  “It’s so pretty, your hair,” Doll Doll told her, and touched the ends to her lips as if to eat it.

  “She slept for heat between me and Bird with her back to me and her legs out. She stuck all four of her legs out, stiff, like this, to keep Bird off me. She used to chew Bird’s toothbrush up and stash the leftover bits of her shoes and the cast-off strands of her dental floss (and the vomited wads of tampons, Bird thinks) underneath my pillow.”

  “She found an old coat,” Bird offered, “to sleep on and she slept with it over her head.”

  “Oh, Maggie,” Doll Doll said.

  “You all stop now,” Tuk said. “You’ll make her weepy. She’s got that—syndrome, stray—whatever you call it. She’s tender and you’ll make her sad.”

  “I’m not sad,” Doll Doll said.

  “Well, you will be. Think a moment of your mule, of your turtle, back to home. Your maimed and crippled. Think of a moment of Bim and Toto, near drowned, of your colicky armadillo. The calf born without any eyeballs.”

  “The Chinese farmer who grew three tongues,” Mickey offered. “He could lick the one with two others. He could reach back and lick his ears. Think of that.”

  Mickey fluttered his tongue at Bird and Doll Doll turned in time to see it.

  “Yuck,” Doll Doll said, which was a comfort.

  Yuckity lickity schmuckity fuck. Keep your feet in a bucket.

  Keep your head.

  “We got too many to care for,” Tuk told her, and twanged her necklace against her chin.

  “We got some acres,” he admitted. “A dab of a place down to Texas. A creek with a pawky flow. Bit of grass. Bunchgrass, cheet. Whatever. Feed. I drove a stake in the dust to hitch the goat down to. Round and round he goes.”

  “It’s nice,” Doll Doll said. “It’s home and it’s dry and quiet. You can hear the beer fizz in your bottle. Sky. Wide dry blue eye quiet. And the yellow grasses move. And Tuk? We got that one cottonwood tree for shade I will never again shade under.”

  “Now, Doll.”

  “You know I won’t.”

  “I heard that.”

  “I brought this cat home,” Doll Doll offered.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “He’s ashamed. He don’t want it told.”

  “That cat—”

  “I know it. Needed helping. He needed helping bad. Such as I did, Tuk. You remember? I was eating out of a bowl.”

  “I do. And I remember that old tom popping. It spit. Ringwormy, rabid, god knows. How he howled among the leaves in the shadows, peering down.”

  “‘Get him down,’ you said, ‘or I’ll shoot him!’”

  “Little Bit, it is nothing I ever wished to do.”

  They went along some, quiet, Doll Doll sucking at her sleeve. The clouds ate away at the mountains. You couldn’t see much.

  “I can’t see.”

  She banged her head on the dashboard. She was blacking out, holding her breath, “I can’t see.”

  “Now, Doll?”

  “I fucking hate these fucking mountains and these fucking wasted trees.”

  Tuk swung the truck onto the shoulder and held her.

  “Talk it out,” he whispered. He stuffed his fingers in her ears. “Use your words.”

  Doll Doll hummed and sniffled and Tuk kissed a patch on the top of her head where the hair had been snatched out. He closed his eyes.

  Forgot, or seemed to, that they were not alone. Wind rocked the truck. Snowball whimpered and yipped. The heat was off and the cold seeped in and the steam they all made on the windows frosted prettily to ice.

  “Take your breath,” Tuk instructed, and tipped her chin up so Mickey and Bird could see.

  Doll Doll was smiling again, trying to.

  “Now make these poor people feel at home.”

  The sun smudged through the clouds as if on cue and all their faces pinked up but for Doll Doll’s, which was smeared a gluey blue.

  “What a day, what a day for driving,” Tuk declared.

  “I go for the suffering dumb.”

  “If you smack a fly—” Tuk said.

  “Eat it. You have to eat anything you run over or otherwise maim or kill. It’s a rule. So you won’t. While we travel.”

  “Friends, it isn’t only you. She’ll tug a frog, for instance, from the mouth of a snake. She’ll bring a spider in from the cold. She poured sugar out in the kitchen for the ants—they have to eat, too. Freed an ox from its traces, a honeybee from a web. She lets the cows out—”

  “—to run with the dogs—” Doll Doll said.

  “—and with the llama she’s set loose and the chickens. Plus the shoat! the open range! a 900-pound pig! Gone off to grub every posey patch, every hillock of beans in the county.”

  “I
do do that. It’s my nature,” Doll Doll said. “I have a very free and helpful nature. I like a gate that’s open. I like Wolfie here and Snowball and how we all light out together like this and let each other go.”

  “Gather up, giddyup. Take a picture. Make it quick! A hard little sprint and she’ll be gone.”

  “I’m very Doll Doll,” Doll Doll admitted. “I’m very moving on.”

  Tuk shook his head agreeably—an agreeable man, easy to love, in a hapless sort of way. Surprised by himself—that was the feeling. He clouded over at a clap and his hands shook and he shored himself up against the steering wheel to steady himself to say, “So who is it cleans up after? Tuk baby cleans up after. That’s Doll Doll all the way.”

  “After what?” Doll Doll said.

  “Whatever you’re finished with. Anything gimpy or little, try. Try the lonely. What’s weary, what’s maimed.”

  He pulled his hat up, which tweaked his eyebrows. He looked more surprised than ever.

  “Ever living one.”

  “Ever living what?” Doll Doll said.

  “Ever. Living. One.”

  “She’s not,” Bird said, “living.”

  “She?”

  “Maggie,” Bird said. “You know, the dog?”

  “Is your mama?”

  “What?”

  “Living. Dead? Is she dead?” Doll Doll asked, hopefully.

  “She—” but Bird had never said it out among strangers in the world.

  “Or your daddy either one are they—”

  “Living?”

  “Have you got any people anywhere she wants to know still living?” Tuk explained. “Because her mama is dead and her papa. Her sister is dead and her brother. And her sister’s little girl who was just a little girl and the fish and the rabbit and the dog. All her dolls burned up and her dresses and shoes and any little person or treasure that was hers and her hairbrush and matching mirror set with the handles inlaid with jewels. Flamed up. She was in the yard out watching. She was not supposed to be in the yard at all. She was supposed to be up high where her people lived, doing the morning chores.”

  “It was a little dry yard fenced around,” Doll Doll added, “how my mama wanted. So nobody could snatch me. Mama put up a high fence, singing. She sang songs from the church and the country while she worked and weaved the fence with flowers. They were flowers you could find in the desert. You could maybe find them here.”