Bird

by Noy Holland

  Tuk pulled a fresh shirt over his head.

  Big Boys Hold It, the shirt read. But nobody read it to him.

  They fluffed the pillows and smoothed out the sheets. Folded the little triangle back into the tail of the toilet paper. Hustled quietly out.

  They found the Ryder locked with the keys inside. The pups had torn up the bench seat and squirmed in among the hillocks and tufts under the vinyl flap to keep warm. They yipped and lunged at the windows, the windows smeared and fogged.

  The air smelled of dust and sagebrush and the sign was still flashing: SLEEP. The S flickered out while they watched it. The sky paled above the eastern reef where the sun would soon be up. Patches of snow were shored up where sagebrush grew and there the dust lay flattened and dark.

  Everybody quiet but the birds.

  Hear the birds.

  Tuk found a rock, round a little and big enough, and Doll Doll made faces in the far window to lure the pups to a safer side. The rock bounced off the glass and struck Tuk in the teeth.

  Doll Doll found a bigger rock and handed this one to Mickey.

  “Throw it hard,” Doll Doll said, and Mickey did, and the quiet of morning was over.

  Tuk reached in and pulled the door open and the pups came tumbling out. They shot off across the parking lot and scratched at the motel doors.

  Doll Doll started out after them—too late, too slow, Tuk had her. He picked her off her feet and heaved her into the truck. She was swinging at his face and spitting, calling the puppies’ names.

  “Make your move,” Tuk said.

  At first they didn’t.

  But then Mickey and Bird got in.

  They drove an hour watching the sideview for whoever might come up behind. Nobody came. Doll Doll pouted and said not a word. She shivered: it was cold in the truck with the window out. They were thrashing each other with their hair.

  Crows pecked at roadkill, too smart to be hit, the wiseacre scolds of the roadside. A tree way off. A glum little clump of boulders.

  “The day will warm and that window won’t count. You ought to look,” Tuk said, “no matter.”

  Doll Doll dropped her face into her bodysuit and covered her ears with her hands.

  “Lookit here, lookit this country,” he said, and pulled her up by her hair to see.

  Shadows slid over the desert, over rock and sage and cactus, the bones of the Devonian, ash of the old caldera blown some millions of years ago.

  “How it lies, lookit. You ought to. The hogbacks and the coulees, the butte-tops flat as the sea. Don’t tell me. Try to make it all all over again. Try to make it from scratch, the first speck of it, from rock and dark and water. Nothing was. Yet things took hold and lived. I’m not a preacher or a church dog either. Junkyard dog, most like it. But my place and my prayers are here. Bit of sage and all the many ways of the grasses. You get up on a reef and look over. Look out. You pick up a stone and throw it. It makes a little tink that travels, light on the wind, here to Texas. It’s not the onliest thing I have come to that speaks to the lonesomeness in me. Still it speaks. Here was the first I heard it.”

  A big wind came up and shook them. A red tail swooped through the power lines and hooked a lizard in its talons. Banked away.

  It seemed the end of something.

  “I think we’ll go,” Mickey announced. “Stretch our legs some. I like everything you said.”

  They got their Glad bags out and thanked Tuk and Doll Doll, and stood in the road in the day warming up. The yellow truck got small and smaller yet on the straight road going and was gone.

  They walked. Talked a little, walking.

  Where to go. What to do.

  They could walk on back and get Wolfie. They would have to name him again. Name him Tuk—naw. Waxahatchie. Squirt.

  They walked to the bus terminal in Santa Fe. It took the day and then some. It was sunny and they walked without shoes, keeping the mountains to the east until they gave out and what was left was unbroken plateau.

  Oaxaca, they talked of, Lubbock.

  The drifting Sahara, the Nile.

  Cuernavaca, the great Sonora.

  Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, the reach of the knowable world.

  Somehow they didn’t have it in them. In the end they took a bus out of Santa Fe that went north again through Cimarron, east, east until the streets grew narrow again and the buildings were closing in. They took the turn for home. They called it home without even thinking. They went back to what they knew.

  We came home, Bird wrote to her mother. It’s not much.

  Something could have changed but it didn’t.

  I can’t say.

  We found a place for ourselves. Not the Taj Mahal but the heat works and but for one minor riot and gunshots at night, it is quiet. The train passes and rattles the windows and our dishes stacked together in the cupboards. That, too. And cops thrash the weeds with their billy sticks. We throw bottles against the walls for the fuck of it. That, too. And Mickey doesn’t touch me.

  I had my tooth pulled.

  He broke his hand slugging the wall.

  He doesn’t touch me.

  We make our trips to the hospital—he mixes this with that. Breaks his hand against the wall. Opens his wrist in the tub.

  I thought you kept people safe by watching, Mother.

  I watch Mickey. I try to.

  Something I learned from you.

  Winter eased up and set back in. The apartment was built above a garage and mornings, half asleep, they heard the landlord start up his car and go. The train passed. Bird hardly went out of their bedroom. Scarcely ate. Mickey had a doctor named Dr. Money they never paid a nickel to.

  Mickey picked up jobs and quit them or didn’t bother to show up at all. He left for work and never reached there and his boss called to ask where he was. Bird had no idea.

  And the man said, “Sweetpea, I bet you do.”

  Mickey lashed himself by his ankles to the doorway of their room.

  “I didn’t want you to find me gone,” he said.

  Else he went off.

  Sometimes she found him. He was in a coffee shop eating plantains. He was sitting on the steps of the garage.

  Else hours went by she couldn’t find him and the bars emptied and filled again and beetles went about on their snelled feet through the slick tubes of Bird’s head.

  He wrote: It is morning and I miss you. I loved you completely. You will never be loved better—how it pleases me to think this. Don’t be afraid, Bird. I feel like setting fire to our bed, Bird, to everything you have worn with me. Everything you have taken off for me. Your letters, your shoes.

  Where are you?

  Where have you been?

  Please tell me I’ve got it all wrong, Bird. Songbird. I need you. Stay.

  There were nights Bird went home when dark closed in and nights she went on walking. Past the hospital, past the morgue. She called every ER in the city but she never could call the morgue. Still she ran the loop in her head. Bird watched herself draw the sheet back; his eyes were open as when he slept. She stood in the humming refrigerated green and read the tag they had tied to his toe. It was a number and the number kept changing. It was a name Bird never had given him. Man Afraid. Looks at the Stars.

  Never to walk in sunshine again.

  He walks in his sleep. I try to follow.

  He still sleeps with his eyes open, Mother. But now I know to close them like the hinged eyes of a doll.

  I need an animal, Bird sometimes thought, something to sing to and feed. Something quiet and soft that would be hard to kill but that wasn’t meant to live too long. A rabbit. No. A tiny donkey. A monkey to ride around on her head. Too smart, she thought. Something softer. Pocket lemur. Lamb.

  Bird came back one night to find her paintings slashed—the painting of a smoking volcano, the painting of a silver-lined cloud.

  So he was home.

  No. No Mickey.

  He had come home and gone out again.

&nb
sp; Maybe he hasn’t gone far, Bird thought, or maybe he is in here hiding?

  So she looked for him and, looking, found the rest of what he had destroyed. All the many things he had made for her—the little clay pot she kept her earrings in, the earrings of salvaged tin. The box he made for her to keep her letters in, he had beaten apart with a hammer. Bird began to read the letters and stopped.

  She called Suzie and Suzie was elsewhere.

  Bird smashed a bottle against the wall and somebody outside shouted, “The fuck?”

  It wasn’t Mickey.

  Mickey could never have done this.

  Mickey was sinking in his ragtop through the cold black waters of the tidal strait, the sweet and the salt mixing, the tide tugging at his hair. He was at the bar eating soup and sobering up, preparing an explanation. Composing an apology, getting ready to begin again.

  Bird rode out on her bicycle to look for him again, slush on the streets, shh shh, the wheel still out of true. She rode past a boy walking in the street and he reached out and yanked her hair. Hauled her over, felled her.

  He’d been burned. He stood above her a minute with his boot on her cheek swinging his scarred hands. His teeth were tiny and soft and blue. He kept dragging his tongue across them. He will eat me if I move, Bird thought, and so she lay in the street in the spatter of glass until he walked off whistling. He whistled Dixie, as her mother had—loud and clear and true.

  And Mickey came home and loved her. She had glass in her elbow and her buttons were off and he kissed her everyplace slowly as though he would not ever see her again.

  “He’s like a drug they quit making. It’s tedious. You need to want something else.”

  “I do,” Bird insists.

  “He threw your clothes out, sugar. He rode your bicycle into the river. That’s love? Think. He swung into you with a Buick. That’s love? It might be love but it won’t help you live.”

  “That Buick,” Bird reminds Suzie, “is the one you went south with him in. It never smelled right. It smelled like other people. When he came back, it smelled like you.”

  “Bird,” Suzie says.

  “That’s love, I guess. You said nothing. You rode the bus back. ‘Where have you been?’ I asked. You said nothing.”

  “That was ages ago,” Suzie insists.

  “Ages, yes. The cretaceous. The mammal has scarcely appeared. And time heals, we all know that. Better yet, it erases. Never happened! Wiped out! Off the record, free and clear. I’m not so good at it. Forgive me.”

  “You’re forgiven,” Suzie says.

  “Fuck you.”

  Bird had scratched Mickey’s name in the windshield and hers with the ruby her mother had given her.

  Given her. Forgiven her.

  For the C days, the D days, Bird hoped to be forgiven.

  For pinworms, forgive me.

  For the pup tumbling down the stairs.

  For watching Mickey and not watching Mickey and the names she never called him by. By her own name he gave her, mistaken.

  For opening his eyes while he slept: I am right here.

  Bird draws a finger down the flat of the baby’s foot and her toes bunch up. Old monkey brain. The callous on her lip is like mica, bright and chipped away. Bird needs to eat, pull on a fresh pair of panties. Meet what remains of the day.

  Back by the swamp is a grave mound Bird promised to neaten and keep. It still needs a cross to say Sherderd. Her boy had named his pup Sherderd. They went down a list of names to consider: Squirt, Bump, John. Ice Cream Fucker was another, but you couldn’t call a puppy that.

  Bird had left the pup at the top of the stairs, the school bus flying down the hill. Her boy bounded into the house ahead of her.

  “First death,” Suzie said.

  Thank you, Suzie.

  “The rest will be repetitions, sugar. One more last time.”

  Bird remembered a story Tuk had told them about throwing a ball to a dog. Awful little story he had to live with. Tuk threw the ball. The dog caught it, tumbled over a near cliff and died.

  “Good thing it happened a long time ago,” Doll Doll said.

  C days, D minus days, of course everybody had them.

  The pup was heaped at the foot of the stairs. Her boy picked it up. The head swung free, the neck bone snapped.

  “Mama? You will get old and bigger next and next you will go back down,” he said. “I will be big as Papa. And you will be my baby. You will be just small, like this. I will carry you all around like this, like a baby, holding you tight in my hands.”

  “In my hands?” Suzie said. “Oh, sugar.”

  Here her breath caught.

  “He could fall off the bed and keep sleeping,” Suzie said, “all the long afternoon.”

  “Your poet?” Bird wondered.

  “Our Mickey. Mine. And hers and hers and hers.”

  We lost our little baby like you did. But we got Wolfie back. Also Snowball.

  I am writing this myself which remember I could not used to do. Doll Doll is the one what’s teaching me.

  Pretty lucky.

  Happy trails from Tuk and Doll Doll. You remember us now, dont you?

  Bird left the letter under Mickey’s coffee cup for him to come home and find. He was quiet when he came home. He led her quietly to their unmade bed.

  He hooked his feet in his boots beside the basket of her ribs. Rolled his knees against her arms into the sockets. Brought a pillow down over her face.

  You wait so long for something to happen to you and still you are surprised when it does.

  Bird took a sip of breath and waited.

  Her shoulders fell apart, bone from bone. She lay quiet, holding the sip of breath she had taken.

  She saw her mother at the end of her kite string and her bed from when she was a girl.

  Daffodils past the window.

  Blackbirds in a cottonwood tree.

  It was all getting small and smaller, the marvelous knot of what she had lived and seen.

  I wanted to die so I let him, Mother.

  I was wrong. I wanted to live.

  By morning he had gone off with Suzie.

  By morning Bird had taken her clothes off for Doctor Said So to see.

  He slept with his eyes partly open, Mother. I drew the pillow out from under his head. So to close them. So that I might sleep beside him. So to wake should he wake so to follow. Should he walk out on the street, I followed him. He walked sleeping. He walked in circuits as he slept and snapped his fingers and in minutes returned to home.

  Home.

  I can’t see you, Mother.

  I tried to leave him. I tried to quit.

  I tried to love somebody else. I never could at first. I was waiting for Mickey.

  I waited a time and then quit.

  I quit other things I can’t name quite. Quit climbing the Brooklyn Bridge. Quit junk, quit worrying he would leave me, quit worrying he would come back again.

  I wrote letters to you you stopped answering. I couldn’t hear you. I couldn’t see you anymore.

  I thought to drop off the bridge how the poets did but it seemed altogether too dumb.

  Dumb bunny. Name of Hoppy.

  Name of Bird, name of Bean, both and either.

  I kept the names Mickey gave me.

  I called him Mickey.

  I don’t know why. I never called him anything more.

  Little Whale, White Moon.

  She calls her Lollipop. Little Chicken and Wants a Lot.

  Shoofly.

  Sunshine.

  Sprocket.

  Small Fry. Wingnut. Chief.

  Buckaroo.

  Speed Racer.

  Snowball. Noodle. Knucklehead.

  Dude-a-reno. Dude.

  I don’t think he meant to kill me, Mother. I just think he didn’t know.

  Bird wrote: Something is growing against the roof of my mouth, Mother. It’s like cobwebs. It frays. It tastes like nothing. I roll it up with my tongue.

 
I feel drugged, dragged. Wasted, Mother.

  I hardly know myself.

  I can’t see your face. I try to see your face and my face appears.

  I can’t help that. I can’t see through.

  To get out to the street they had to go through two gates the landlord kept locked from outside. The gates were tin and corrugate and they swung out into the street. There was a padlock on the street side and a darkly oiled chain. There was a hole in each gate you had to reach through as big as a piece of paper. You reached blindly and fumbled through it. You couldn’t see to the other side.

  When Suzie rode the bus back from Florida, she stood in the sleet on the street side. Let her stand there, Bird thought. Explaining. She was cold. She could have said it on the phone if Bird had let her.

  “Let me in,” Suzie said. “It meant nothing.”

  Bird wanted to stand in the dark and cold with the gate swung shut between them.

  “Show me your face,” Bird said.

  Suzie needed a coat for the cold. She was sick and she had no money.

  “Show me your face,” Bird said.

  Suzie kneeled in the street. She pressed her face to the hole in the gate and every word Bird had thought to say to Suzie and the things she had thought to do to Suzie flared and burned away in her head. Nothing moved her. Bird turned away and went up the stairs. She came down with a coat her mother had worn and passed it through the gate to Suzie. The lining caught and tore on the gate and hung in the sleet like a wing. Bird remembered her mother in it and how the fur of the collar felt on her face and when she slid her hand through the arm of the coat how smooth it always felt like persimmon and lovely to touch and cool.

  And the days passed.

  And the days were weeks and the months passed.

  And a day came Bird reached her hands through the gate to open the lock to find food. She fumbled with the lock. He took hold of her hands and pulled her to him from the street side where he stood. He said nothing. Her face was pressed against the gate.

  At last she whispered, “Mickey, you came home.”