Bird

by Noy Holland

  They were close to home and they went back and Bird’s father came out with his gun. Bird didn’t want to go back with him, but she thought if she didn’t go back with him that something worse would happen—the bear would come at her father and he would be alone and she would be a mile away, crying.

  “So I went with him. I watched him shoot the bear. I helped him drag it into the back of the car so he could take it home and skin it. A skinned bear looks like a human, they say. I never looked at it. I don’t guess I ever will.”

  Never will. Never would. Again see him, or feel now again what he had been.

  When Suzie came back with Mickey from Florida, she came back with stories to tell. He spat on his hand to shine the designer shoes of sorority girls who talked to him, and he called everybody Bird. Ignited kernels of popcorn and tossed them at women’s hair.

  He sent a postcard image of an antediluvian fish shot in the side with an arrow.

  I am having my midnight panic again, something I’d almost forgotten. I love you completely. I daydream of you and tie you to a bridge and slowly take down your hair. I can’t help you. I’m gone. Don’t try to find me.

  They went on and at last found See’s. Tuk dragged the bag of peanuts inside and the lady at See’s stood and watched him. She watched him stuff his pockets with lollipops, just as he had said he would do, and she bought his peanuts anyway, in the grip of a tender feeling. He must have looked like someone she had loved once and hoped to love again.

  When Tuk had stuffed his pockets, he collected his check and walked back to the Ryder. Tuk’s pockets made him walk as if he’d pissed himself or poured half a jug of milk down his pants, which he did before long to be funny. To make Doll Doll laugh and keep with him. To think she might forgive him. Forget he couldn’t read, forgive him. Forget he had rented a four-room truck hoping she would sleep on a bedroll with him with the peanuts in back if the snow came, if the nights were soggy or cold. Forget the little crimson patch on his ass. The way his eyes swung loose in their sockets. Forget he was a man who had been a boy who had hidden from his mother in a pile of leaves not thinking that she might, happily, in a hurry to get to her lover, drive over her boy thinking: this is a pile of leaves. Not that boy. Not a boy who set a Have-a-Heart trap his rabbit at a clap walked into. Stuck there. Pushed out her eleven babies. Which stuck.

  “Which—tell them that little story, Tuk, about the rabbits, that time, and the Have-a-Heart trap. Tell that,” Doll Doll said, “or let me.”

  She went on.

  “Eleven teensy babies. He had to drown ever one in a bucket.”

  “I didn’t want to,” Tuk said.

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  He swung the Ryder back up on the freeway, the ramp just north of the totem he had built in honor of the tumbling nugget. When he got to it again, he cut the engine.

  “Hey, rider,” Tuk said, “you riders,” pleased with his joke, “got a beer?”

  They passed another Pabst between them. “All’s we need now is tapato chips,” Tuk said.

  “And dip,” Doll Doll said. “And chocolates. I could kill for a cherry in those chocolate balls with that milky stuff that squeams out.”

  From under her bubbly bodysuit, she pulled out a box she had stolen from See’s. She clambered over the bench seat to sit on Mickey’s lap. Touched her finger to his mouth.

  “That’s pretty,” she said, and swung the near door open.

  A crow cawed in a tree. It didn’t sound right.

  It sounded too much like a human trying to sound like a crow.

  “Here’s to a first and a last.” Tuk drank. “First time we saw the baby kick.”

  “First toothache,” Bird said.

  And Mickey: “Next to last can of beer.”

  “First time I ever tried Goobers,” Doll Doll said. “I truly had no idea.”

  She slid out and left the door open.

  She stood in the cold in her culotte and bent over the totem and said, “That’s my first time I ever could feel it. Boy-oh-god that was weird.”

  “Last peanuts!” Tuk belted it out like a carny.

  “Last bag of Sunshine peanuts! Best little nut you’ll ever know.”

  They went on. The snow quit and night came on. Cars got off the freeway and left it to the trucks, to the all-night drivers jangly from milkshakes and days of dipping snuff.

  Mickey drove for a time to let Tuk sleep slumped against the door with a pup in each hand, with Bird shoved up against him.

  Tuk smelled of asparagus, cooked too long. Of age, the corridors of a nursing home, a mash of simmered prunes. He smelled of the milk he had poured down his pants.

  Or that’s me I’m smelling, Bird thought—smear of seed, her hair unwashed, the honey of her leaking gum. She probed her tooth with her tongue—nasty, tasty—nectar, brine. Hyacinths in an airtight room, the softened stalk succumbing.

  They were out from under the snow now and the sky was the velvety purple it gets and spread all around with stars. The mountains looked like cutouts of mountains, treeless and white, tacked down on the dark plateau. Through the sage the humped Brahma wandered with cactus spines poked into their muzzles.

  They saw a girl with one shoe in an organdy dress, a string of donkeys hitched to a barbed wire fence, a tinker’s lonesome wagon tricked out with ribbons and cans. The first of the Sangre de Cristo’s, they saw—blue in the moon, a blanked-out face the blood of Christ ran down.

  Scarcely a car passed. A low rider came at them in their lane with the headlights popped off. Mickey gunned it. They could see him clear. Big yellow truck in the moonlight.

  “Go easy,” Tuk said, and was asleep again.

  “Don’t sleep,” Mickey said. “I need you.”

  The moon sailed high and white overhead and the pale shaft of Mickey’s cock appeared again in his hand.

  Kill me off, Bird thought, before I lose him.

  Drive a spike into my head.

  She had her shirt off, two buttons popped, before they reached the flung shadow of a boulder Bird flattened her hands against. Mickey’s breath was fast and raspy and seemed to come not from him but from the boulders strewn, from strandings of trinket and bone. Old stomping ground, detritus of fickle gods. A patch of snow like melted nickels.

  Mickey toppled his boots for Bird to stand on, on the clothes heaped at their feet. Now he was in her, disappearing, shade to shade, his cock like a bull’s in the shadow they cast. Bird slickened with blood she was losing still; on her breasts, hieroglyphs of his hands. Mineral seep. Her feet were pewter; a beetle wandered in the swales of her tendons, daubing methodically at the spatter of her blood. A speckled wing, iridescent. Nothing more moved but Mickey, Bird—a shadow fused, a Gorgon’s head.

  “It hurts, it hurts.”

  “Shut up, Bird.”

  A cloudshadow passed across them and for an instant even the supple became stone and what quivered held its tongue. The beetle raised a leg in the air.

  Yes. Be still. Be still.

  Their time was passing.

  A star sputtered out. Now the moon appeared and Mickey began again, the panic of stillness gone.

  The beetle went about its evening, its antenna bent inquiringly, varnished in the light of the moon. Moon on the face of the mountain. They saw no one but someone was near.

  “Don’t stop,” Bird said. “It doesn’t matter. Please.”

  A coyote, a bird. Something.

  It was dark and looking on.

  Mickey muttered, “Jesus, fucking jesus.”

  No word now, something older—ragged, collapsing—hymn of the lesser animals, gibberish of the gods.

  Everybody looked to be sleeping when Bird and Mickey got back to the truck.

  Doll Doll had eaten all but the last four rounds off the string of her candy necklace; these lay like bright stones against her throat. Mickey lifted her head and laid it in his lap and started the truck and drove on. He had blood on his cheek Bird wiped clean for him, every
thing in her still thrumming.

  Doll Doll hummed along to the radio. Mickey turned the dial to country. Doll Doll was sleeping but the words came to her. He made a sound like a telephone and Doll Doll said, “Ring ring ring.”

  She howled with the coyotes. Cheered on the Lakers. He tried opera and she reached for that.

  “She’ll do that,” Tuk said, waking now. “It’s peculiar. When I found her in Waxahatchie asleep on the floor of the station, she was balled up and sucking her thumb. She sucks her thumb yet. She will in a minute. She might say something in Sioux.”

  The three of them watched Doll Doll sleep, her face shown in full to the moon.

  “She’s pretty,” Tuk said. “She’s just a kid, really. I got to care for her. I don’t quite know as I can. I cannot read nor write, this is true. I fought fires for a time but I quit that. I got burned over twice and stopped—in these mountains here once and on the prairie. I laid down where a homesteader proved up, in a ditch he had dug with a shovel when there were bison all over this country yet, before the railroad and Little Big Horn, when Custer cut his hair and they killed him. I can’t do that anymore. I’m past it. You got to be quick and young.”

  Tuk held his hands open to the moonlight like a map he could not decipher. He dropped them to his lap and went on.

  “I fought a grass fire in old Montana once. Hope not to see such a thing again. You don’t know what lives in the short grass until you set fire to it. It’s creepy with snakes and beetles, your birds that nest up on the ground. Killdeer, curlew, partridge. Fox denned up and badger, coyotes and pronghorn fawns. You can’t see it when you’re just moving through. Everybody wants to move through. Boy wants to fight fire so he starts one in a gully thinking he won’t get caught. Dumb. Fire moves. You can’t contain it. You got a whirlybird and a bucket and it’s like spitting into a storm. Pretty soon the blaze jumps out on the prairie.

  “You don’t want to live to see prairie fire, friends, in a big wind, on the move. Shit, the wind. I grew up in wind. It gets in you.

  “This little girl got in me, it took a heartbeat. I am not a free man. I gave it up to her, I cannot help that, in the Waxahatchie station. I didn’t have to go in there. I can’t remember why I did. I don’t question it. Things have a way of working—for the better, for the worse, you can’t say. I can say I never will shake her. There’s no helping what takes hold. She was burned. Her whole back’s burned up, that arm how you see. It seems peculiar but I tell you it isn’t. I carried her home. Of course I did. She was burned up. If she hadn’t of been burned up, I’d of left her right where she was.

  “The wind changes. What was at your back is coming at you again. You can’t say. You can’t say where misfortune is going, my friends. You seem to suffer. Could be the best thing that ever did happen, whatever happened to you. You get scared. You can’t think but you still have to choose. You dig in. You are out there with the hoppers and the antelope, friends, and the antelope can run. You’re just pokey. You talk to Jesus. You talk to whoever you can. God above. Your dead mama. The wind sounds like a jet coming at you, neverlanding. Purgatory plain and true. Every hopper alive is burning. The horse patties are burning. The wind picks them up and sails them off and wherever all it drops them, fire starts up there too. Fire everywhere and the flames knocked flat like the land is a sea set to burning. Knocks it all down, the wind. You lean into it. You crawl. You talk to that old homesteader who hacked out his ditches with a shovel. Proved up.

  “What are you proving now, brother? What can you stand to believe in, brother, with flames licking inside your ears?

  “I lay down in that ditch and got little. Prayed to God, prayed to Mama. You two shuffle me out of this and I will never come back again. I am good to my word. I am honest. I felt the weight of God’s hand on my back where I lay and it was a blazing hell.”

  Tuk seemed to wear out and slump away and stoke himself up again. He reached across Bird and twiddled the last stones on Doll Doll’s candy necklace.

  “I tried living someplace else,” he said. “Bluegrass country, horse country, it was pretty for a time. Was a boy there I made friends with. I worked with his pop breaking rough stock, colts fresh in off the meadows. Good people. I fairly liked it. The days were hazy. It’s wet country. The dew soaks your britches to the knees every night and come again come day.

  “A day came there was a blaze set to burning in the barn—some thug from a rival farm. It’s a fact: there is nothing a human won’t do. I got my lead rope. You can’t handle but one head at a time. It is no choice you want to make but you choose. There was a colt they were buffing for the Derby in the blaze but I went for the mare I liked. I liked her for she was gentle. She had a clear kind eye. I tied my shirt across her eyes and led her out. She was a boy’s. That boy when he saw the barn go up came hellbent down the road. I brought his mare out to him. I wisht I’d quit there. I wisht I’d thought to tell him—a horse will run back to it. Of a fright. I turned away back to the barn to see could I get another one out. I maybe could of. I wisht I hadn’t. I never can see much ahead of myself to think into what will be.

  “That boy was small and he could not hold her. The mare pulled back and broke free. Here she came. She cut hard around me. It’s the nature of things, it’s her nature. She runs back. Nothing tells her better than to run like hell to exactly what she knows. Run to home. Run to the rest of them burning.”

  “That poor boy,” Bird said, and laid her hand on Tuk’s arm.

  “That boy tried to run in after. I am fast enough I caught him and when I caught him, he kicked and scratched at me and beat me on my head. Just a kid. I held onto him. He was hateful, he never could help it. He just hated me, how he had to. He swore he always would.”

  Tuk pushed his hat down against his forehead. He looked crumpled, thrown against the seat. He let a pup gnaw at his knuckles. Wolfie tore a hole in his shirtsleeve and two tiny teeth popped out. These Tuk snapped into a pocket of his shirt to give to Doll Doll when she waked.

  “At times I think of that boy. He’d be a man now. I’d like to write him but I never did learn. That mare spoke to him. I’d say I saw that. He had to hate me, I’d say, there’s no shame in it. That mare was yours, boy. You took and kept her. You were a good boy. I never could.”

  “Well it’s a story,” Suzie says. “Nothing wrong with it. It’s something to pass the time.”

  Kill the time, Bird thinks. That’s what she’s saying.

  “Mama,” her boy says, “Mama, I wish I could buy you a time machine, Mama. Then when you get really old, we can go back to when we were babies. Or we can go back just to now.”

  “What’s the best thing of your day?” Bird asked him, asks him nightly, before she gets up and shuts the door.

  He breathed into her face and whispered, “Being right here.”

  “You wish,” Suzie says.

  “Don’t be cranky.”

  “How old would she be,” Suzie wonders, “the girl you and Mickey didn’t have?”

  “I haven’t done the math,” Bird lies.

  “You have too.”

  Fourteen. Feather of a hawk. Her mother’s scarf wound into her hair.

  “Have you?”

  “Done what?”

  “Done the math, Suzie Q.”

  “On your dead baby, or mine?”

  Suzie says, “When the black widow female is ready to mate, she vibrates her web. The male advances. He winds her in silk. The positions they take are extravagant. Great contortions. Only rarely does he get away. Commonly she devours him, a widow by choice and practice. That’s me. I sink my teeth in slowly and suck them entirely dry.”

  “I think you flatter yourself,” Bird says.

  “He hasn’t come back.”

  “Your poet.”

  “Him.”

  “He’ll be back,” Bird says. “You need to tie him up.”

  “Nail him to the cross.”

  “What more?”

  “The exploding harp
oon leaves a hole in a whale big enough for a man to lie down in.”

  “Nice.”

  “And the octopus—”

  “Is it gruesome, Suzie?”

  “It’s nature. Nature’s a maniac, too.”

  “Tell me later, okay? The baby—”

  “The male sends out a severed tentacle loaded with his seed. She tucks it away. Guards it. Waits. For death, for life, all of it. She dies days after her babies are born, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They eat what’s left of her. Simple need. Last act. It was like that, fucking Mickey. Last act every time. Like you would die from it. It would kill you.”

  “And it wouldn’t matter,” Bird says.

  “It wouldn’t matter.”

  “Like an emergency.”

  “Repeated.”

  “One more last time.”

  You’re like God used to be. Not God, I mean, but the thing in me that listens to me think and what I say. You’re all through me, Bird. I’m all you now. Cunt and mouth and eyes.

  They rode on. Two-lane road through the desert, the moon tossing shadows around. They went along for a time with the headlights off until Tuk found what he was looking for, a neon sign flashing above the sagebrush: SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP.

  They parked a ways off, left the pups and went in.

  Tuk had a key to a room he carried. They found the room vacant. Smell of smoke. Two hard narrow beds. They turned the heat on high and the TV soft and fell away into bed.

  Slept. Having slept, Tuk waked and waked Doll Doll. Mama-talked his Doll Doll. And went and went and went.

  Tuk slept in his red bandanna, in his boxers and floppy socks. He waked and paced and his socks threw sparks and Doll Doll lay sucking her thumb.

  Come morning, Doll Doll pulled his boxers down for him and rolled deodorant over his balls. Squeezed a seepy imperfection from his scrotum.