by Noy Holland
“Elsewhere. He went out for chips and beer.”
“And he’s behaving? You’re okay?”
“You worry too much.”
“It’s a habit. It’s a reason for living.”
“Ah, that one,” Suzie says.
“You’ll see.”
“Bet you five bucks I’ll never.”
“What?”
“You’ve been drinking, Bird. I hear it. You’ve been thinking and it isn’t good. The world’s done for. We’ve trashed the planet. There won’t be water when your babies are grown.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Sugar, you have to. Walk.”
“I just did.”
“Do it again. Get out. Try dancing. Make Doctor Said So keep the babies and go out and have a high time. I’ll set you up, sugar. It’s Italian you want, you want a Frenchman? In a heartbeat, with that hair of yours, I could find you a classy Latin. Why not? Dance a little, sugar. Let him sweat on you. Let him back you into the back of the room.”
“Enough.”
“Enough?” Suzie laughs. “It’s almost nothing.”
“I don’t know why I called,” Bird says.
“You’re drunk, is why. And you’re lonesome. You want someone to say his name to, but you won’t, not even to me.”
“It’s easy for you. You talk to him.”
“I do what I want. That’s me. You’re afraid to want anything. You say his name and the scenery goes to pieces. What I think? You should get in your car and find him. Leave your babies. Go to him. Find out who he still is. He’s in—”
“Cut it out, Suzie Q. Don’t tell me.”
“Why not? He’s in church next door in his underpants. He’s in Ushuaia, look it up, where I saw him last, at the far away tip of the world.”
“You loved him, too, don’t forget.”
“Fool me once,” Suzie says, “many years ago.”
“That worked nicely.”
“Don’t gloat,” Suzie says. “I wanted sunshine.”
“You wanted Mickey. A kitchen sink and a gingham apron. A patch of grass to mow.”
“I’ll let you go now, Bird. I’m going.”
“You wanted to make little red-haired babies!”
“The one time and never again.”
Mickey wouldn’t move and then he got to moving. Bird went west with him and south, a long way around, and when they came back around to Brooklyn, Mickey looked south again. He wanted out, skip the gray.
We’re soon over, said the note.
He said he was going alone. He went with Suzie.
Suzie spelled him driving south; it was winter. He had bought a car that mostly worked. His radio worked and the windows, all but one. He liked to drive in the heat with the windows down.
He would want a little place, Suzie guessed. Something. A week in a clean soft bed.
But he didn’t. He had his car he thought to sleep in. He found a boat sloshed up from a hurricane he could tack a lean-to on.
“So I’m home,” Suzie called Bird.
It was sleeting. Suzie needed a ride from the bus stop, she had tossed out her winter coat.
“That was useful,” Bird told her, digging. “You didn’t like the sun?”
Sun and wind and shadow. A boy on a swing. The grasses golden.
But the days went gray in Denver and cold and they were grounded now, evened out, and Bird’s jaw had begun to stiffen. She couldn’t talk much; she didn’t want to.
The Drive Away clerk went north again—the forecast for old Cheyenne was windy, windy and blue.
They’d go south. South for the heat and sunshine: Nogales, Cuernavaca, La Paz. Eat peyote and sweat with the Mexicans, clear the cobwebs out.
Bird had an aunt in Albuquerque—they could stay a little while with her. She would float them a loan if they asked right and pulled her weeds in the back lot and heated her enchiladas. They’d plant hollyhocks. They would walk her dogs and pick up after them and Bird’s aunt would lend them a car for a day, so Bird could show Mickey around. That’s the room I shared with my sisters, Mickey. There’s the tree house. The ditch where we swam. We had horses. Here’s where my rabbit is buried.
“Hoppy?” Mickey said. “Say you’re kidding.”
“Why?”
“I’m making the rounds with a lunkhead who named her rabbit Hoppy? Not even Hopsalong? Not Floppy?”
He was kidding, but then he wasn’t. They were in a pancake joint and he was loud.
“So what?” Bird asked.
“So what?” Mickey asked. “We nearly married. We made a baby almost. Remember? What did you think to call her?”
“Mickey, stop,” Bird said, “please.”
But he was started.
“You think it doesn’t matter, what you name a thing? Crazy Horse was Curly. When Crazy Horse became Crazy Horse, his father took the name Worm. You think that doesn’t matter?”
He jabbed a waffle with his fork and went at the rim.
“I had an aunt named Alice, my mother’s sister, I could talk to like I never talked to Mother. She had a freckle behind her ear I loved. All over, she had them all over, but that was the one I loved. She liked white food—asparagus, raspberries, cream. It was tenderer, she said, white asparagus. It made your mind clear. White food purified your thoughts. She had no children. Her skin was so white it was blue. She jumped horses. She got her foot hung up in the stirrup one day and was dragged across a field and trampled. Her skull was split. I wanted to see her. I wanted to see what her mind looked like—how clear it was, how true. Auntie Alice. My mother gave me a little pouch of her ashes. I was kid. I wet my finger and dipped it in there. White food. I ate it one flake at a time.”
He dumped sugar on the table he was flicking at Bird.
“We ought to have taken what was left of her, Bird. We kept a tissue, Bird, a piece of the bloody bedsheet. Shame on me. Shame on us. We don’t think right. Everything was there.”
He took a breath but he wasn’t finished. He took her hands in his hands. The day was darkening. It was going to get darker still.
“Bird? I’m the one who named you. Not Faith, not Hope, not Charity. Bird. There’s not a bird I don’t like, not exactly. I like ospreys. I like tiny owls living in holes. I like that cranes find their way by the stars while half their brain is sleeping. Mates for life. The condors that live in the Andes—those monsters mate for life, too. Geese do. Plenty of birds. It’s common. They log thousands of miles, wing to wingtip. They grieve. It takes a heart of rock not to believe it. What I’ve read, I believe is true: you kill a condor and its mate, done in by grief, will plunge to its death from the sky. We don’t believe it because we don’t want to. We want to kill them ourselves with bolas. Lash them to the backs of bulls. We want to climb the trees they are sleeping in and club them on their brainy heads. Call it science. Sport. Gaucho pastime. Darwin’s helpers with geology hammers. When condors sleep, they sleep hard. We call that stupid.
“Cranefly, I could have called you. I could have called you Bean. You think it matters? I called you Bird. I like birds. Birds know too fucking much, it’s spooky. Your Hoppy, no doubt, was dumb. Rabbits are dumb. They die of fright. They scream. Bunny, I could have called you, but I didn’t. I didn’t. People should be named for themselves. You never gave me a name for anything. You call my name like everyone else. Why is that, Bird? You don’t think of me? I’m Mickey like everyone else? I think you’re careless, is what. You’re not thinking. You’re making a mark you can’t see.
“Bird? If I named you for a bird I’d name you Sparrow. Maybe Wren. I thought of Phoebe, a phoebe is faithful, it comes back and goes away. Polyandrous, polyamorous, the loosely colonial—I like them all. I like chickadees, little home-body birds who stick around and sing all winter long. Chickadee. A bird named for its song. I like whippoorwills, sitting alone in the dark coming down. They go quiet. Then they sing the song they were named for in the dewfall and dimming woods. Whip-poor-will. We have to think more. We’re making trac
ks, Bird, everybody is. There are marks where anyone has been.
“But, Bird? That baby of ours was nothing. We named her to be taken, to be nothing. She was tatters, Bird. A bloody dumpling. Think. Little Caroline, little Caroline. She was nothing. I never even wanted her. I only wanted you.”
I wanted you, Bird wrote to her mother.
I’ d be you.
I would wear your dresses and carry you around and in this you would be a mother again and a baby and I wouldn’t be a dead baby’s mother and not a girl with a dying mother, over and over again. I’d be nothing at all. I’d be you.
They were going to have to move and keep moving or else they were going down. They’d go to Albuquerque. Hitch there. It was still an idea, hitching. They would appear on the old lady’s stoop in the sun and say, It’s us, hello.
Bird bought a Styrofoam cooler for beer and twelve tall boys of Pabst. She double-bagged their clothes, brought extra bags to use as slickers—for sleet, if it came, for snow.
Her jaw was swelling; it was yellowing and blue.
They made green together, yellow and blue. Blue and red made purple.
And what did yellow and Bird make?
And what did Mickey and blue?
“And Mickey and Bird?” Mickey asked.
And Bird said, “A bloody stew.”
He stuffed her hat down on her head.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “Sorry.” He kissed her. “That was dumb.”
“Bunnies are dumb,” Bird said.
She dropped a bag at her feet and stuck her thumb out. All their clothes were lumped up in Glad bags, glisteny, thick, sturdy things slouched on the snowy berm.
“I’ll call you Man Afraid,” Bird said. “Sleeps A Lot. Sound good?”
She could talk still so she was talking. Pretty soon, she would quit.
What they had come to see, they had seen by then: the salt pillars, the burying grounds. The concrete Garden of Eden—ugly, ugly, that kook in his cut-away coffin on perpetual display. They took pictures: meals they had eaten, neon signs, Mickey’s boots tipped over in the road. They took a ten-second film of a pear they ate, the pear stood up on a fencepost with a bite taken out, another bite, as with time lapse, until it was a slumping core.
This then this then this: days hooked together like pop-tops in a lacerating chain.
They hauled their cooler off into the bushes and lined out a last line of junk. A little boost. They were going to miss that: the tidy gray packets that Mickey kept with the bloody scrap of bedsheet they saved, with Maggie’s dewclaw and a daisy and the curl of a Hasidim boy.
They waited together in the bushes until they had both thrown up. Disgusting—throwing up with your jaw clamped shut. They washed out their mouths with beer.
They had left their Glad bags on the shoulder in the snow and somebody stopped, a big guy, slow, and threw them into the back of his wagon. He drove a wood-paneled wagon from the 70s, the last of its lovely kind. Government man. If it was on the shoulder, he picked it up. That was the job the state paid him to do.
They could smell the wagon before they reached it—acrid, ammoniac—but their clothes were already in back. The storm was picking up and the cloud socked in and snow had seeped into their bootsoles. They got in.
Mickey tried breathing through a sack of orange peels: that helped. Bird let her head swing down between her knees. There were bodies in back, road kill, a sticky heap, legs and legs, the mess of death and weather.
Bird saw a match on the floorboard and lit it and her tooth ignited, hideous lump, and the nectar she had tasted since Kansas bubbled up at the root of her tongue. She swung her head up and reached for the door of the car.
“Get me out.”
They got out, ferried as far as the second ramp south without their first citation.
“How you feel?” Mickey said.
“Pretty drifty. Nice.”
“Wish we had more of it.”
“Good thing we have you.”
“I’d like the Hyatt. A hot bath.”
“So nice,” Bird said.
“The lights at our feet of the city.”
“Yeah. Pizza Hut delivered.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Neither am I. I may never be hungry again.”
They tossed snowballs at passing traffic.
“We’ll cause an accident.”
“We are an accident.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t, it’s true.”
They tried hitching for a time with Mickey hidden in the brush that poked out over the driftings of snow, a new tactic: the lone female, the vagrant waif.
No dice. There was Bird’s jaw puffed up, pooched along the toothbone—blue, bruised, her mouth lumped shut.
Somebody fishtailed an El Camino, flipped her off, sent a gray dollop of slush to break against her neck. A boy leaned from his window, screaming, “I AM SCREAMING AT YOU!” and sped south, south to cactus and sage and piñon and sun, the curve of Bird’s clean horizon. Lizards in the woodpile. Frizzy-headed seeds of cottonwood, soup of the Rio Grande. Old home.
I’d like to get there, Bird thought.
They would never get there. They would piddle days away on the interstate, on the off-ramp, on the on.
She thought of an old song and sang it: the one about the bicycle, the roller skate, the key.
“Hello, love,” Mickey said, and goosed her.
He had come up out of hiding to her, creeping through the brush.
“I missed you.”
I miss Maggie, Bird thought.
“I miss Maggie,” Mickey said. “If she were here, she would take down your hair.”
He took her hair down and worked his fingers through it.
He chewed up a grape for Bird for a poultice, something to draw the heat. Every hour Bird’s tooth felt hotter, and the skin of her cheekbone sparkled, how it felt. By and by she couldn’t open her mouth more than the width of his tongue, should he wish, and he wished it, and moved to kiss her, her face blazing and plumped and solid, tight, and Bird lost for an instant the difference again—between what was hers, what his. His tongue was briefly cool in the heat of her mouth and then like something liquid, warmed, melted away, that she was free to swallow.
Free and clear, free and clear, how Bird tells it.
“You were broke,” Suzie says, “and cold.”
“We ate our meals off a bucket.”
“Meaning what?” Suzie asks.
“Didn’t matter.”
“It would matter to you now,” Suzie says.
“I’m not saying. We were kids. It’s all different.”
“You’re who’s different, sugar. I haven’t changed.”
“We were happy,” Bird insists.
“You were high. It’s nice. Get happy, get high. Have a party in your pants. It doesn’t last,” Suzie says. “It’s not supposed to.”
Mickey sat on a Glad bag beside her. Bird was cold and would cry if he touched her.
And so he touched her.
“It’s not your fault,” Bird said.
He knew it was: whatever it was she was thinking.
He turned the ring on her finger, the ruby her mother wore.
“We could pawn it,” he suggested, and wished he hadn’t.
He wished he were rich and quick on his feet and brave enough to lie down and close his eyes.
“What else?” Bird wondered.
“Taller. A pilot. A poet. And better to you.”
She would be finished soon, crying. If he kissed her, she would cry some more.
A dog lunged from the back of a pickup truck to get at them, and the sound drove a spike through Bird’s head.
“Fucking dog,” Mickey shouted, and ran after it.
A glove fluttered up on the highway in the wind of whatever was passing, a whole forest borne south on flatbeds, double-wides and I-beams, a donkey once, out in the wind, with its great swiveling ears.
America. America.
The reel was dizzying—the cattle trucks with their bellowing mobs, the soon-to-be-dead, the living, the vast flotilla of family vans, kiddos hooked up to laptops, DVDs, junkies, mavens, shit for brains.
Fuzzed out.
Made sense to them: you fuzz out. Sink in. Out of the clamorous world.
Bird lay her head in Mickey’s lap. She could feel her heart beat in her mouth and the rock she had given him in his pocket. It was a smooth, dark rock, rounded and cool they traded as they traveled.
“I wish I could make you happy, Bird.”
“I’ll be happy.”
He slid a bracelet he had woven from brittle grass onto Bird’s wrist and kissed her.
“For the next two hundred years.”
“Toss it,” Suzie says. “You keep too much. You hoard.”
Bottle caps and matchbooks. Tooth in a box. A bracelet of grass. The little dry stem of that pear.
Too little, too much, next to nothing.
Whitened bone and sucking rock, the acorn when her water broke, Baby’s first booger, Baby’s gilded shoe.
Bird carries the bloodied tissue still, slipped into a see-through plastic sleeve in her wallet where pictures go—where they would go if she could remember, or if she were a better mother, or if she weren’t so superstitious, or soft-hearted, or hard.
She gets her birth dreams back, belated. Births an enormous zucchini the doctor comes at with a knife: You don’t want to watch this.
Dreams the baby is plastered into the wall.
“Hiya,” says the baby at daybreak and by nightfall, the balm of dark, says, “Hiya hiya hiya yeah yeah yeah.”
The day’s fresh trick—going, gone.
Memorable, forgotten.
Bird wakes with her boy, with the rope of cold rolled out along her spine and thinks: Were you not, my goose, smaller by far when I last lay down with you? Before you let me have a sniff at you? Before I rose and shut the door?
They lie awake together, his soft boy-toes cramped and curled at the foot of his footed pajamas. They are watching the last green artifice of stars shrinking on his ceiling.
Pfft!
Growing, grown, unguarded in sleep. Oh, Mama.