Bird

by Noy Holland

I thought if I told him a story.

  I told him about my father, I don’t know why, he flew a Cessna, I made it up as I went along.

  “I was a girl,” I said. “I was a girl let to go with her father out in the sunshine to shoot an elephant.”

  I said, “It took a long time falling. It had a small bright eye.”

  Mickey kept quiet. He had something hard he was jabbing at me between the gates where the gates swung together.

  I said, “It breaks its bones falling.”

  I said, “It has a small bright eye.”

  It was a fork maybe or a stick he had found or the key I had reached through the gate with to feel for the lock to unlock it. It was sharp and I thought it would cut me. He drew it hard up the front of me as if to open me up to my chin.

  I said, “They come at it with a torch. Up the ass end with a torch. I don’t know is it dead or living then—when they come at it with a torch. If they wait, I don’t know, to get the tusks free, to burn the body out to get the tusks free, something to show for it, to make trinkets with, a pretty chess set, to make baubles with to bring home.”

  He held me so my face was against the gate and the metal was smooth and cold. The day was cold, I remember, and graying and we stood a long time without speaking before he let my hands go and walked away.

  I went back to the apartment and undressed myself. He had not cut me, not really. He had left light bleeding marks. I deepened these with a knife I found in the kitchen among the others. I didn’t know did I hope to survive him, to suffer with him, to die. To ruin ourselves together. Live to be together. I put the knife back. I can’t say.

  I took a few small things he had made for me that he hadn’t found to destroy. I took the small bone with tooth marks in it that he had brought to me from the mountains.

  We had a window I let myself out through. I followed the tracks out. I heard sirens I had heard every day for months.

  I followed the tracks out. The tracks ran out through sumac, through the dry and stalky weeds where killers and rapists and pickpockets in seasons of growth squat to hide. We saw them fleeing down the tracks from our window. We saw cops thrash the weeds with their billy sticks, shouting to flush them out.

  It was spring and there were places to hide now. The leaves were bright and new. Somebody walked behind me. Someone shouted in the street above my head. A bottle dropped over the high wall and bounced at my feet without breaking.

  I made myself small when the train came. I felt the heat of the train and how the ground shook and in the windows as they passed I saw him see me—the man who would come for me. He would swing down over the high wall the tracks ran shining between—one pair of tracks beside the other as if to meet in a point at a distance. I saw myself twisted beneath the wheels of the train—how ugly I was and how beaten. He would wad a rag in my mouth not to hear me.

  I called up. A child who was playing came to look at me. A few of his friends came to look at me and they tied one bedsheet to another as in a movie to help me up. They got me up and over the wall and I stood in their street and let them look at me. They didn’t want to talk to me. They had hoped for somebody else. Someone oozing, something blue. I got to laughing. They were disgusted with me. I got to where I couldn’t quit laughing and I laughed until the last boy turned from me, trailing a sheet, and walked away.

  Months later I set out to look for him. I walked out of our place not knowing where I meant to go. I had money for a bus and a toothbrush, little more.

  I had a street name; I knew his car. I rode the bus days south eating peanuts, thinking of what to say. The houses brightened—washed to pink, washed to green.

  His Buick was in the street, a window smashed. I sat in it and held the wheel. I pulled on his hat he had left on the seat. The street was quiet, he walked up the middle, mouthing the words, “Go home.”

  But for the one time he came to me, that was the last time I saw him.

  “He came to me in a dream,” I told Suzie.

  But it wasn’t a dream. It was true.

  I was in the hospital after my boy was born.

  Mickey appeared in the doorway. He said nothing. I told no one, but I wanted to tell someone. I told Suzie.

  I said, “He came to me in a dream. He wore a velvet robe.”

  He brought handfuls in his pockets of petals fallen from apple trees. I was drugged still and dopey. He made a trail between us with petals he dropped and he walked on the petals to reach me. He drew the sheet back. They had cut me open. The wind had torn up his hair.

  “I loved you once,” he said, and let the sheet fall back, “but then a day came. It seemed as nothing, everything we had.”

  We had had a baby and lost her. It was common, it wasn’t uncommon. People came back from it; they endured. Suffered and endured and got on with it, that was the idea.

  But how was it we had lost her? Mickey wanted to know.

  Did she die of us not wanting her, of something he had said, of the cold?

  We had a drawer for a bed, an old dog-hairy blanket.

  Not much. More than some. Plenty.

  Was it the junk we snorted?

  Was it just that we wanted to keep on—talking how we did and digging into ourselves and climbing up the struts of the bridge in the wind—to wonder how not to do it: live: not to live: not to live long enough to lose each other and so to die in the old way, happy?

  We were happy. Was that so hard to stand?

  Was can’t last what made it bearable or can?

  Can last? Can? Can have? Could?

  What if that?

  What if they had been careful and ready to want what would be—a life, another, a baby, his, little Caroline, little Caroline, what if Bird had—he was twisting her hair around the palm of his hand—and what if he had wanted her, too?

  Bird hears a little sound like choking.

  It comes out “Ng.”

  “What is it?” Bird says. “What happened?”

  “I can’t.”

  “It’s your poet.”

  “No.”

  “He hurt you.”

  “No.”

  “You’re evicted.”

  “Bird.”

  “You’re dying. You talked to the doctor.”

  “No. No.”

  “It’s Mickey.”

  “Bird.”

  Bird waits a minute, guesses again.

  “He’s married,” Bird says. “Or you are.”

  “Ng.”

  Suzie has to hang up and call again.

  “I’m finished,” she says at last.

  She has had her tubes tied. Nothing is going to live in her.

  “I will never give blood again.”

  Bird pictures Suzie in a wedding dress.

  Pregnant. Infant in Arms.

  The picture shrinks to nothing in her head.

  She pictures Tuk and Doll Doll, a tar paper house, their pawky stream. Tuk writing to Bird in the kitchen.

  Happy trails.

  Bronco boys, limping. Tuk walking his girl to the street dance, rosy-cheeked from the sun. In the dirt, wild bunched-up rose.

  Bird sees a road roll out.

  Days of such wind you can’t walk straight. Eddies of dust, a buoyant seed. How the wind there blew, it blows.

  Hang your head over, Bird sings to the baby. Hear the wind, hear the wind blow.

  Bird carries the baby in her bouncy seat out to sit in the last of the sun. Together they wait for the school bus.

  October. The windows gilded. The luminous afternoon.

  The trees look painted—the reds, the orange and yellow. Even the tamarack is going yellow, the needles twisting down. Somebody is mowing a last time. Somebody rakes. It’s all fine. Beautiful, really. White houses, red weathering off the barn. Bird loves the barn—the dark mouth of it, swallows dipping through.

  A blue day.

  A field of seven white cows.

  It feels mild, an old person’s country.

  The shut-in day
s ahead of her, the gentle closing in. Soon the trees will be picked clean and the branches will show and the nests of birds and foxes deep in the leafless woods. The trees shade out the understory. They are old, and stand together touching.

  Here it comes: the bus whistling at last down the hill.

  Her boy leaps from the steps. He has got his coat on over his backpack, inside out and upside down.

  “Hello, my prince.”

  “Did you give away the baby yet?”

  Bird picks him up and swings him, forgetting she can’t do it.

  “Hurts,” she says, and goes to her knees and he climbs on her back to help her. He has his face in her hair. Bird feels the heat of him, the wild, swift heart. The straps of his golden backpack.

  “You smell funny, Mama. Mama, you smell like the second time you tried to make miso soup.”

  “Sprocket,” Bird says, “hop off.”

  He throws his coat to the grass and runs around. Runs to the top of the hill and rolls down it, smashing everything in his backpack until he’s lying on it, looking up at her.

  “I made you a picture of a cheetah.”

  He smoothes the paper against the grass, a cat in the grass, the crayon rubbed to a high shine where he has worked it hard for color.

  He says, “Mama, I love cheetahs wicked almost as you.”

  Bird moves her shadow across him to keep the sun from his eyes. A fly lights on his cheek and she shoos it. The baby flutters her milky arms.

  God above. Unholy love.

  Bird is burning up and collapsing. She is ash and dazzled, rapt—gone to her knees in pieces in the wind of a passing world.