Bird

by Noy Holland

  “Poor Maggie,” he kept saying. “Poor, poor girl.”

  They took pictures. Her mouth stiffened into a nasty snarl they had never seen on her in life. Mickey rubbed at his face with her ear.

  “You still smell like my Maggie,” he told her.

  At last he covered her with the rancid coat she had dragged like the dead from the river. Then he raged on the street until daybreak, smashing pay phones with a chair.

  Glory days? Bird thinks. Ridiculous.

  She is lucky to be alive.

  The morning going. The baby hungry and still in her bloated diaper. What in the world did they make those things with, with their insides like plumped tapioca, to endure the next 400 years?

  Endure, Bird thinks, prevail.

  If you are truly mine in spirit, then you must prevail, her mother said.

  There is a place you cannot get yourself back from and this is where I am. You will cut your hair like my hair. You will wear my pretty dresses. Your Mickey knows the way.

  He wrote notes on the walls and mirrors.

  Your friend Suzie called. She was snatched from the jaws of a hippo today. In Botswana, I think. Somewhere. An engine fell off a 747 today. No one was hurt. Kind of funny. I feel sick and scared without you. I have blood from you still on my hands.

  And: Going down to the corner. 3 a.m. See you soon. In about 147 hours.

  The day is blowing. The leaves flock down and shore against the barn, snagged up together, they twitch. They don’t look right. They don’t look enough like leaves.

  Bird goes barefoot through the unhappy grass and finds her boy in the drift of leaves, his pajamas splotched with dew. He has dropped to sleep again, hiding, waiting to be found.

  “Up, up,” she says, and tickles him awake.

  “Did you see your kiss on the goodbye window I left? I left you an X,” he tells her, “for when I am gone to school.”

  “Come, sprocket,” Bird says. “Hully up.”

  “Hully up, hully up, hully up,” her boy says, dragging his feet through the dew.

  His feet leave wet prints on the kitchen floor that won’t dry until after Bird’s husband is gone, after Bird calls Suzie and Suzie calls Bird and Bird is drunk with the baby and coming apart in the tub upstairs. The dog will drink from the tub while they are in it and lick at the steamed-up faucet. For now, the dog sleeps beside the woodstove. Family dog, dog of the marriage. No Maggie dog, this dog. This one sleeps the years away.

  Her boy is reading Babar to this dog, remembering the words. His head on her neck for a pillow.

  “She’s dreaming somebody,” Bird’s boy says, “look—” and catches her tail she wags in her sleep.

  The baby rocks in her singing seat, thumping softly at the dog’s ribs. A tableau, a scene perfected, luminous and dear.

  When my children were small, Bird will come to say, and the scene repeats in her head.

  Bird’s husband is still upstairs, hamming it up as he pisses, remembering mighty Achilles—fast runner, killer of men. Shit shower shave: the man will be down soon.

  “If I got a gun and shot him, Mama, would it just be me and you?”

  “Come eat,” Bird tells him.

  Bird’s boy eats down to the army guy face-up in the mealy goo. He spoons the dude out and, with his crazy teeth, crushes his plastic bazooka.

  “Those are keeping teeth,” his mother reminds him.

  “There’s this kid who he hasn’t lost even one. He still has all his babies.”

  The boy blows air up his sister’s nose, who cries, having just gone quiet. It is not enough: he bites her cheek.

  “Just you wait,” he tells her.

  He tries to wiggle her punky tooth.

  “I wish I was still like you,” he tells her.

  “Shoes,” says his mother, “backpack. Bus is on its way.”

  But does he move?

  Nope—doesn’t want to. He has grown up enough he has had the dream of reaching the schoolyard naked. He doesn’t want to go. His stomach hurts him, he says, his head. His head feels like two heads, actually, and the front head is really small.

  “Mama, can’t I just stay home, Mama, and lie around with you?”

  She keeps still for a beat to love him, loves him, a breath, like a lunatic, before she starts the push out the door. The morning hunt and gather. She finds his coat he flung under the trampoline, permission slips stuffed in the pockets. One glove. Some other kiddo’s cap.

  “Here go.”

  “No fair,” he says. “It doesn’t fit me.”

  He wants his socks that come up like. His handsome shirt, it’s pictures. He wants home lunch. He hates raisins.

  “Is this a raisin on my tongue?”

  Bird holds a hand out.

  “Spit. Now move along.”

  “Mama. Mama Mama Mama.”

  “Scoot.”

  “But really it is. It’s pictures and something’s gooey on my shirt.”

  Bird gives in. She stands guard at the end of the driveway while he runs upstairs for his handsome shirt. She listens for the bus to top the hill, listens to the baby cry. She is really belting it out, that baby. But Bird is standing guard. Bird has to flag the bus down. Bird is sort of resting, her mind a little gone.

  Her mind is on the day her boy came home from school, first day, a hundred years ago, tattling on ratty Brody.

  “Brody said the f word, I promise you he did.”

  “The f word?” Bird wondered.

  “Yep.”

  “But what’s the f word?” Bird wondered.

  “You know. Frow up?”

  “He walks in his sleep, the kid sleep-pees. He pissed last week in the freezer. Pissed in his papa’s shoes. He lies on his back, spitting. Funniest thing you ever saw.”

  “He licked the cheese grater,” Bird reported.

  “Hit a home run.”

  “He hates me, he says, he loves me. He wants to stick me in the eye with a sword.”

  “Pisgetti, he says, and gaky. Bumbanini for bumblebee. A butterfly stood on his nose.”

  “I’ve heard enough,” Suzie said.

  “There’s more.”

  The geese are moving. The town cat appears with a hummingbird clamped in its shiny mouth, the bird’s spangled wings still shaking—some fickle godhead’s sign. Bird feels her knees, unstrung; her throat seizes: she ought to keep her boy home from school. It isn’t safe, not today. Does that sound right? She can’t shake it.

  It feels like mice, Bird’s mother said, nibbling at your throat, when something is on its way.

  On its way, Bird thinks, and so you watch for it. You put your shoulder to the wheel: you’re a natural, babe. The model of the natural mother, governing by feel. You see it coming.

  But if you don’t?

  Or if you do, and look away?

  Because what about Calvin Coolidge? Bird thinks. What about his boy, a president’s boy, playing tennis on the courts at the White House? Had there been a sign, some way to know, a feather on the wind, a spider in a hat? The boy blistered his hand playing tennis and from the blister contracted blood poisoning and from the poison was dead in days.

  Crazy, the way things happen. Your life is charmed until it isn’t, until a dark day that breaks like a dream.

  Bird must have dreamed, to wake so shaken. The dream would come back to her. Something was in it.

  Phooey, her mother would say, let the boy go to school.

  Let the boy go get milk, Bird thinks—but it’s the last thing you get to say.

  Last thing the boy thought is maybe Caroline. Or: I’ll get me some Cheetos, too.

  Did that boy’s mother—the neighbor boy’s mother—have an inkling—something—anything—that he would shut the door behind him and never open it again?

  A good boy, gone to fetch milk for his mother.

  Bird can’t picture him. She pictures the father. The boy’s father strings flowers around the roadside oak the poor boy slammed the family Buick into. Bird sees
the man as she saw him last: he walks on his knees, moaning, parting the skittering leaves. When he reaches the place where his boy died, the last place his boy once lived, the father throws himself onto the road. He presses his mouth to the asphalt and scoops up stones with his tongue. He must be waiting, Bird thinks, feeling it out. Lying in the road to divine the hum of what else is yet to be.

  Bird’s nearer neighbor tends to his garbage, sets his barrel of plastic aflame. Early at his chores, wheezing, standing fast in the acrid cloud—a man doing his part for the planet. Bird waves hello and curses him. Fondler of children, petty thief, a giant with a failing heart.

  Fail better, Bird thinks. Hully up.

  Mothers all over the country are waiting in robes for the school bus. Stirring oatmeal, scrubbing at knees. Rousing their gray-eyed heroes, fast runners, killers of men. Whilst.

  Nobody gets to say whilst anymore.

  The immortals are paring their fingernails whilst, landward, the great seas surge. The mountains burst and shudder.

  Bird shuts her eyes and falls backwards. Whenever she shuts her eyes, she falls backwards, listening for her mother: I am right here.

  Sparrows rustle in the wine-dark maple. Steam is lifting away from the road.

  Here it comes: the school bus shrilling up the hill. The chain wound around the axle picks out its tinkling song. The bus grinds to a stop and the bus driver smiles—a pitying, reproachful look: Bird is in her mother’s milk-sopped bathrobe still, and barefoot, and her boy is nowhere to be seen.

  But Bird can picture him: thudding in a rush, his shoes undone, down the pitch of the narrow stairs. She draws her robe across her chest and shuts her eyes. Bird stands in the road falling backward until the bus revs to roll away.

  Hey! She throws her hands up. Her robe swings open, the color of a different day.

  “Here he comes!” she yells, and he does—papers, cap, forbidden cards flapping out of his backpack. Toothasaurus. Cotton top. He’s got his shirt a button away from being buttoned right.

  “Farewell, my prince,” she whispers.

  Her boy climbs on and trots down the aisle, his quarrel with school forgotten.

  Bird keeps standing in the road in her bathrobe in the doorway of the bus folded open—in the surge of heat, the smell of it, nothing smells like a school bus, nor a baby’s head, nor a Band-Aid. Thank you, Band-Aid, Bird thinks, and backs off.

  She waves at the bus until it tops the next hill and the last patch of yellow slides away.

  She left the teapot on and now the windows are steamed.

  The baby’s shrieking. Her papa is singing in the shower upstairs.

  He is closing in on the phase where he talks to himself, pulling on his shoes. Same shoes. He has bought the same shoes for three hundred years.

  Meaning what? Bird thinks.

  As in what?

  Bird pours his coffee, nice of her, it will be just right to chug.

  The day keeps changing: rain: and sun: and shadow. She should have sent her boy off in his frog boots. She sent him out fed, what a mama. Belly full of groats and a cracker.

  The dog is licking at the baby’s sleeper, the sack Bird puts her in. A good dog. If only she didn’t shit, Bird thinks. If only she fed herself.

  The dog turns to feasting on the mealy foam that leaks out of her bed. Her tail flares up against the woodstove.

  Better build a fence around that woodstove, Bird thinks, and that awful rhyme about the ladybird comes around again.

  Doll Doll comes around again, too. Doll Doll with her beautiful baby teeth, neat and straight and small. Milk teeth, deciduous teeth. Not your keepers. Passing through. She had skin like melted plastic glommed onto her neck and arms.

  “What’s that smell?” her husband calls down. “What are you burning?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s only the dog.”

  “Stupid dog.”

  I never wanted her.

  I never did want that dog.

  “I killed my fucking dog,” Mickey said.

  “But you didn’t,” Bird said.

  “But you didn’t,” Mickey mocked her. He took a swing at the wall.

  “I was out getting drunk with you,” he said. “Why was I with you?”

  “Mickey, stop,” Bird said.

  “I don’t mean it.” He picked a chair up and poked her in the stomach. “We don’t mean it. We don’t mean anything. Keep away from me, Bird. I’m not well.”

  “You’re not well,” Bird said, and moved toward him.

  Make yourself large, her mother had taught her, should you meet a sneak cat in the woods.

  Sneak cat, cougar, puma.

  Hold your hat in the air and sing to it until it turns to go.

  Mickey passed the night smashing pay phones and came back to Bird worn out. He was carrying an armload of daisies; he had stuffed the dowels of the splintered chair into his pants. The dog was still laid out on the bed. She had begun to bloat; she was leaking—in death as in life, only more.

  They cut her dewclaw away with a tin snip and the last little bone of her tail. They used the coat she once dragged from the muck as a sling and carried her down to the river.

  The day broke leaden and gray. They tossed the yellow-eyed blooms into the river, one by one: loves me, saying, loves me still.

  When the current took the last bright speck, they bore the dog over the bank and in in the rancid coat she once slept on. They went to their knees in the water. Mickey laid his gloves on the basket of her ribs; Bird laid her little hat. They tried an anthem—for spacious skies, a fruited plain. Garbage clogged the little eddy they stood in and ice had begun to form.

  The coat was like a raft the dog slept on. The current tugged at the coat and they let go. She sank fast when they let her go.

  But that wasn’t how they told the story. She floated briefly, how they told the story, weirdly, on the little raft, on the pull of the seabound tide. A god had stretched out his hand above her, buoyant in the shadows of the bridge they had climbed, the bridge the poets leap from, the great swags hanging down.

  “Brush my hair,” Bird asks her husband. “Will you?”

  He has a go at it, briefly, going easy in the shallows, keeping away from the knots below.

  “Pretty,” he says, so she won’t cut it. He is sentimental and superstitious. He marks Bird’s braid with his finger, saying, this much you grew while my father lived. This much you grew in Paris.

  Irregular, his reckoning, his calendar approximate. This is the month the Poles rode out, with sabers, against the German tanks. About now was the Norman invasion.

  When peepers begin in the swamp behind their house, so, too, begins the season they married. Born in the spring and married on the day his father died. He marks the morning hour his father—alone in the desert, far from home—dropped in a burning airplane out of a spotless sky.

  He plucks a strand of hair from the hairbrush and holds it over the flame until it shrinks to a ringlet of ash. He tries another, curious, so long as Bird’s back is turned.

  “I smell fire,” Bird says and finds her husband feeding the wavering flame.

  “Very funny,” Bird says and bumps him, “and wicked very smart.”

  “You widiot,” her boy would say, quick to side with her, if he were in the house to side with her and not in that stupid school.

  He would say, “One time I had a dog named Maggie. She flew her ears in my ragtop. She took down my mama’s hair.”

  “No, no, really, it’s true. This is when I was grownup,” he would say. “This is when I was in crush with you a million million times.”

  He will plunge off the bus with a sign, soon enough: Mama I mist you in skool.

  Bird means to pick herself up by the end of the day, she will have to. For her boy, she will. But for now?

  Her husband is showered, cheerful, combed. He is loitering in the kitchen with his trousers pressed burning strands of Bird’s pulled-out hair.

  He chugs his coffee, and stage
s the grownup re-make of a schoolboy’s hunt and gather, talking as he goes.

  “I got my keys, okay, I got my glasses, talked to Mother in the can, she’s fine.”

  He is goofy a little, too happy by a lot. He takes his big-man strides, preparing. “Wallet, gym bag, watch, what else?”

  The sun is on him: a man taking on the day.

  Bird takes a seat in the ragged chair and makes a curtain of her half-brushed hair. She bends her face to the baby, nuzzles the baby’s belly, wets the baby’s pilly sleeper with—

  “What, Bird? Those are tears?”

  “You’ve had a dream,” he says, “you can’t remember. But it’s got you all torn up.”

  “You need food,” he ventures. “Talk to me. I should have poured your coffee. You want me to brush your hair.”

  He keeps at it—he can’t leave until he has signed her up.

  “It’s the dog. You think the dog has Parvo. Have you gotten her shots for Parvo? I think she might have Parvo. Could be she needs her Parvo. Do you think she might be due?”

  Helps her get her mind off.

  Hiya hiya hiya yeah yeah yeah.

  This is your wife with her mind off.

  This is the little tissue I kept.

  This is the dog the landlord hanged who we took away down to the tidal strait and threw in daisies after. Mickey and I did. You know Mickey.

  “You look blasted,” he says. “What is it? Free radicals in french fries? Emissions tests and taxes? Sunscreen in aubergine, in mist and stick and tube?”

  “Or it’s me,” he says. “Something.”

  “Hush.”

  She passes her husband the phone book. Baffling to him, a phone book. He can’t think what to do.

  “The dog?” Bird says. “Parvo?”

  He backs away some, shoulders his satchel. Wise move. The baby bubbles and hums.

  “Lyme’s, could be. Heartworm? She needs her DTP?” Bird says.

  Stay, she thinks, and drives him out.