by Noy Holland
“If you looked,” Tuk said, “if you were lucky. But you’re not lucky, sugar lump. You never have been.”
“Tuk wants to take me back there to look at it. I don’t want to, I never will.”
“A body runs and runs,” Tuk said. “Nobody gets away. People don’t think, they’re in a hurry. It isn’t small. They park the car, can’t think, can’t be bothered. City folks, big city life, too much on their minds. Park double. Save a sec. Park anywhere, park triple. Suit yourself, okey doke, move along. Make a deal! Barking on your cellaphone. Flashers in the fire lane. Hope for the best, move on. Fire trucks can’t move? Kids and babies? Okey doke. Back in a flash, back in two, hope for the best, hey Johnny? Lord. They’d be alive today, your people, if not for that fellow in a hurry parked so the fire trucks couldn’t move. It’s the truth. Show your arms, sugar lump, they’re like plastic. Melted down. And you’re the one got away. Just a kid, hanging on the chain link, watching. Just a kid how you see left living, call it living. I found her laid out in the Greyhound station in Waxahatchie, Texas. She had a little blanket she slept on. She was eating out of a bowl.”
Doll Doll had pulled up her knees to her chest and stretched her bodysuit down across them, unsnapped. The crepe made a tent to her ankles, a hole big enough at the collar to stick down her face down through.
“I found you sleeping, Little Bit. You had your thumb in your mouth. When I picked you up and carried you you never once opened your eyes or moved all the way I carried you home.”
“You called it home,” Suzie says, “but it was slumming. It was dumb. You could have lived uptown where I live. You could have moved to that beloved country where you holed up the week in that wind you both liked. That is Prairie Lee’s wind. It always was, Bird. You can’t have it. You never really could.”
“Now we have heard from one small country.”
“Be nice,” Suzie says. “You thought he’d marry, that was hard. Now it’s hard he never did. What is that? You’re not happy? You don’t want to live how you do?”
“But I do,” Bird says.
“Exactly.”
“I want to stay right here,” Bird says. “It’s quiet and I like the seasons and how it all moves out and in. It’s like rooms outside when the leaves come and every road’s a tunnel and everything’s moving in. It closes in. I’ve learned to like that.”
“You know why?” Suzie says. “Because it’s autumn. The leaves are falling. The woods open up. Anytime things are moving out, you’re in love with moving in.”
“You might be right,” Bird says.
“Trust me. You say it every spring and every fall. That’s not your place, Bird. I don’t know what is. The great dry blue-eyed quiet? Could be. But when’s the last time you saw it, sugar? How long has it been?”
Bird wrote: I saw the old place, Mother.
It was all hemmed in by houses. The ditch where the red mare threw you dried up and they filled it in. They tore the barn down. Didn’t need it, I guess. The little cross is still there for Hoppy in the mint we planted for our drinks that day. Did I want to come in? the people asked me.
I said, “Here is where my daddy backed his truck over my bike. Here is where he rolled off the rooftop from being up there on his crutches.”
The hollyhocks were blooming.
“We had horses,” I told them, “we had geese.”
Now we don’t. My kids are growing up without them. That’s all right, I guess. I don’t know.
I never went inside. I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t guess I ever will.
“Guess how old I am,” Doll Doll said.
“Twenty?” Bird guessed as a courtesy.
Doll Doll was seventeen.
“Guess what music I like.”
“Country?”
“Country, sure, but who?”
“Johnny Cash?”
“Naw.”
“Merle Haggard?”
“Guess another couple of times.”
Bird had one more name she could think of and it wasn’t Patsy Cline. It was Patsy Cline who Doll Doll loved.
“I had all of her. Ever song she ever sung. I had alligator boots like Patsy’s, a gift to me from a boy named Hank.”
“Hank was vermin,” Tuk said.
“Was not.”
“A bona-fide life-sucker.”
Doll Doll pulled out a snapshot to show them: Hank and his souped-up Trans Am, a girl tossed against the hood with her blouse half off.
“That’s you?” Mickey asked.
“It isn’t. But don’t you just love that car? Baby blue. Slant six. Seats of leather.”
“Sure.”
“That car was soon to be mine. Hank swore it.”
“Hank swore plenty,” Tuk said.
“Swore he’d kill you,” Doll Doll said.
“But he didn’t.”
“Nope. Which is why we have come to be here.”
“You’re moving?” Mickey asked.
“We’re from Texas,” Doll Doll said. “It’s big country. Big sky and a good slab of brisket. Baby blue Trans Am. You light out. Ride around, look at the country.”
She bit a disc of candy from her necklace that colored her lips and tongue.
“I like every sort of a road,” Doll Doll said, “like dirt how it rolls up behind you, the oil road, I like the smell of it. Rain! Like when it’s dry in summer and a cloud darkens up you can see away off in the basin. Maybe you have got the top down. You are driving so fast to get there. You don’t know are you going to get there before the rain quits or what. But you do! You’ve got the top down. You put your face up. Up! The rain’s like needles. And you are flying, you are flying all the way through. Then waaaa. You’re out and the rain is behind you. It’s just sun and heat and the smell of it and the blacktop is fucking steaming bright and you can scarcely breathe. Right? Do you know, Tuk? You can’t breathe right. And the cloud is lifting up with the rain hanging down and sliding off and there’s a shadow. And the shadow is like the sea. I haven’t even ever been to the sea. I haven’t been to Galveston.”
“Where the girls walk into the water with confetti in their hair,” Tuk said, like somebody quoting something. “I can take you there, I will, Little Bit. Sit out on a towel beside the sea.”
He slipped his hand in under her culotte. He had scratched a hole in her pantyhose and laid the weight of one finger there.
“How long you been driving?” Mickey asked.
“Months. Maybe six.”
“He knocked me up in the back back there. We got a bedroll in back with the peanuts where we flop most every night.”
“You sleep in the truck?”
“We do. With the peanuts. Patsy Cline on the radio. Works out all around.”
Tuk said, “Sunshine, best little nut. Cooler full of beer and tapato chips.”
“It’s real nice,” Doll Doll said. “Bit of quiet. The pups in front. It’s what we need.”
They had come into surplus peanuts, nearly half a ton of them in 40-pound mesh bags. An idea Tuk had. It would pay for the trip—they went from See’s to See’s. By day, they delivered peanuts. They hauled the mesh bags off the mattress at night and heaped them up on all sides. They lay down together in the clearing they had made—shored up, sandbagged in, a thumb stuck in the dike against doom.
“Ever penny we make, we spend it,” Doll Doll said. “Food, petroleum, beer. It’s time we got back to Texas.”
“Time for brisket.”
“It is. I haven’t eaten,” Doll Doll said, “I’ve been dizzy. Supposably I eat for two but who in the world can do that? I can’t eat. I hardly sleep. I keep dreaming. I dreamed I swallowed a wasp and died.”
“You’re homesick, is all. You miss your animals.”
“I dreamed Hank killed ever one of them. Ever. Living. One.”
“Quit, sunshine. It’s just you’re blurry.”
“There is too much of something in me—I can scarcely think or see.”
Doll Doll dro
pped her face into the tent her bodysuit made when it was stretched over her bent legs.
“That Hank is a waste of clothes,” Tuk confided.
“Hey!” She looked up. “Something happened! Something in me moved.”
Doll Doll stretched the elastic band of her culotte out to look at the hummock where the baby was. All they saw at first was Doll Doll’s heart bumping in her stomach.
“Hey, nugget,” she said. “Everybody all at once say nugget.”
It was a very obedient nugget and took a tumble in the sack on cue.
She snapped her culotte back.
“That is just too weird.”
Mickey looked at Bird. She’d gone missing.
He leaned into her and whispered, “Everything is yours.”
By then Tuk had pulled the truck over and come back up the bank with a loaf of bread.
“It’s froze,” he explained, “might be good still.”
They sat in the truck and watched him with the heat still blowing hard. Tuk was gathering rocks, searching for a flat spot on a rock to stack on the flat of another.
He meant to mark the trail: here they were when.
First proof of the life to be.
Doll Doll jabbed at the horn, sulky. How like a man—out building a shaky totem to mark the somersault of a plum. Plum, bunny, nugget. The least unsmoothened sandy ball in the bearings of the planet would bring it down. A cricket would tip it, a southbound finch.
When he had finished, Tuk motioned to them and Bird and Mickey dropped out of the truck, looking back to Doll Doll, Doll Doll mouthing, “Not me, I’m cold.”
Dusk had seeped into the land by then and from the ground grew the lifting blue of night, a shade rising, and the day-wind stilled. Cold made the wet air heavy. The dome light was on in the cab of the truck, a buttery, come-to-me yellow, and the truck was gliding away.
“There goes Doll Doll,” Tuk said. “She won’t go far. She’ll drive off the ramp to the Chevron and ask to use the phone. Call the cops to haul me off. I knock her around, she’ll tell them. Well, I’d like to. Times as these, I’d like to. She likes a scene, is all. We’ll get through it,” he said. “Adios, nugget.”
“Adios, nugget,” Mickey chimed in, and the three of them walked down the road.
Tuk was right: there was a scene and they got through it.
Bird and Mickey stayed in the truck. Mickey drove the truck around to where the dumpsters sat beside golden limber willows and a frozen pond. They heard coyotes, their high wild mourning song. He had the doors locked, Bird’s jeans at her knees.
“Love you up,” Mickey said, and gingerly, mostly quietly, it was done.
They buttoned up when they spotted Doll Doll in the fish-eye round of the side view mirror. She tossed herself at the door.
“We thought something happened. Or worse,” she said.
“We been all over this country this side of the Great Divide,” Tuk said, getting in, “and I never saw a soul so ugly as that one. I wish you wouldn’t—”
“I’m sorry,” Doll Doll said.
“And I forgive you.”
They still had one See’s to get to and it was close to closing time. Doll Doll read directions and they turned off the ramp going west.
“Remember that creep who had tattoos of flies crawling all over his neck?”
“Where was that at?” Tuk couldn’t remember.
“South Dakota,” Doll Doll said.
She was the navigator. She knew the nicknames of all fifty states: Land of Enchantment; the Show-Me State; Beehive; Cornhusker; Tar Heel; Sooner. Manly Deeds, Womanly Words; To the Stars through Difficulties. If You Seek a Pleasant Peninsula, Look about You. She Flies with Her Own Wings.
“We saw Indians,” Doll Doll said. “We saw a cross a thousand feet tall.”
“In a bean field?” Bird asked.
“That’s the one. Go right. Go right right here on Petaluma, Tuk.”
Tuk took a right on Straw.
“Shit,” Doll Doll said, “you’re a slow leak.”
“I saw a donkey in the bed of a pickup truck,” Bird said.
“Yuh huh,” Doll Doll said, “I like to see that.”
“And a kid with a pup and a Hoola Hoop. And the roadside marker where Clara died—with a wreath and a tin can of flowers at the foot and a life-sized blow-up doll. Did you see that?” Bird asked, mumbled, wanted to spit but could not.
“I need a napkin,” Bird said.
“Not mine,” Doll Doll said. “Mine’s got all the directions. Three lights, turn south, bear left, go west. We got to get back to Petaluma.”
“Hold your horses, Little Bit.”
Doll Doll didn’t like it—the start and stop, too much to see, a racket. She liked a little town to sail through. A kid mowing grass in her underpants. Old boys sipping sody, sipping sody, eating beans.
“You got kids, guys? Got a kitten?” Tuk asked. “Any little thing to look after—to get your minds off yourselves? Them little turtles? You got a cellaphone? I need to make a call.”
Doll Doll pouted and glowed.
“I’m just talking, Little Bit.”
Tuk stuck out his tongue and made a ditch of it he sucked spit loudly through.
“She wants a cellaphone,” he explained. “There’s a color of green and yellow she wants with sort of crumbs of gold. For the baby, for when the baby is ready to come out, which is pretty soon, pretty soon. We got a wind-her-up thing for it to look at.”
“It’s like nothing, Tuk. Like we made it up. It used to not even move.”
“It’ll move,” Tuk said. “Get the hiccumups, keep you awake till dawn.”
“Is it a girl?” Bird asked.
“How should he know?”
“I know several things,” Tuk said.
“Well, you don’t know Straw from Petaluma, I guess. Now take another right right here.”
He did. Next was a left on Pisgah that Tuk sailed right on through.
“I don’t get it,” Doll Doll said. “I said Pisgah. Then comes Aspen and Birch and Catalpa, like the alphabet, right in a row. He’s been doing this since Texas!”
She was banging her head on the dashboard again.
“It plain escapes me. I say Poplar he turns on Pisgah, left on Oak he takes Willow, it’s like—” but Doll Doll fell short of a likeness and covered her face with her hands.
Tuk turned the truck around and missed the turn and turned it around again. Tumbled the pups across the floorboards, drove at last past See’s.
“See’s See’s See’s! Can’t you read?” Doll Doll bellowed. “Can’t you read, Tuk?”
And then it struck her.
She was quiet. Mickey and Bird were quiet. The pups quit gnawing on Tuk’s bootsoles and sat on their tails and drooled.
“I do believe you cannot read, Tuk.”
There he was: a man squeezed into a truck with strangers, with a girl he had picked up eating from a bowl on the floor of the Greyhound station. He had thrown out her makeup kit. She was nearly too pretty without it to be seen with a cowpoke like him. Pokey boy. Never took to school. Poked the teacher with a stick in the privy. That boy, not a bad boy, good with numbers. Not a man much for words. He had mostly learned to get along without them and without people much or much in the way of tables and chairs and fresh new shirts with pearly snaps and their arms pinned back in plastic. He liked the smell of dust and sage. He liked a suitcase fine to eat his food from, a rag for a tablecloth. Pabst in cans: good enough. That was living—the rash spare days people boasted of once they’d lived a safe stretch out past them.
Poor. Fine by him.
Ignoramus. Well, it hurt. Made him mean.
What to do?
He’d give her pups away. He’d smash a schoolboy’s bike with the Ryder. Stuff his pockets with lollipops. Cheat and snitch and scream. That’d help.
“This is where you get out,” he said. “Out. O-U-T.”
Ha, spelled it. Let her chew on that.
Tuk opened a can of beer and guzzled it. Dropped the empty for the pups to cut their gums on—her pups. How about that?
“Howcome you never did tell me, Tuk? Now supposably we have got this baby coming and what are we going to do?”
He worked his tongue in his mouth.
“Oh, Tuk,” Doll Doll said.
Street signs, simple signs—what? He figured she would do it for him, him a grown man?
Tuk dropped his head onto the steering wheel, rammed the truck into a Sani-Hut, threw up in the ashtray and cried.
“Well, it’s a story,” Suzie says.
“You always say that. Something to pass the time.”
“They were misfits,” Suzie says. “You never saw them again. They were like you some way you can’t name.”
“Maybe that.”
“Gypsies. Looking for something to care for. Something to feed and flee.”
“Now we have heard from one—”
“—small country. Or else you’re making it up.”
“Making what up?”
“Your mother club. Your marriage. Your plain quiet shut-away life. It’s not enough but you can’t let on. So you tell yourself loopy stories about people you can’t love or be. The tragically illiterate. The orphan with a fluffy puppy and a getaway Trans Am. Dog people. Dogs are so people feel forgiven. Lock a dog in the cellar to starve and it shatters to happy pieces to see you again. I never wanted that. Not even a cat, even as a kid, cats are for the sad and lonely. Bossy melancholics. Give me a mouse or a turtle: it will never know I’m gone.”
“I drowned a pink-eyed mouse by accident in a bath of lavender and myrrh.”
“That counts,” Suzie says.
“It all counts. Unless you quit counting.”
“So quit counting, for a change. Stop giving grades out. Those two were up against it. Their troubles made yours look ridiculous.”
Compare and contrast. Difference between. Someone to measure themselves against. Maybe that. As in: Fluffy and a skunk named Rosemary. A bear and a cat in a tree.
Maybe the cat Tuk shot out of that tree that day made Bird think of her father, of riding around with her father—spring, and everything wants to move. Her father hit a bear. The thing leapt off the bank into the road—small still, a yearling. The bear didn’t move but it lived.