Noy Holland - Bird

When she spoke, it was to say she was ready to hear whatever Mickey had seen. Hear it all, she insisted, and be finished with it — Bird who was finished with nothing.

What was left was all tatter and thread, he told her. Broth and a bloody dumpling that caught and flinched in the tube.

“The tube?” she asked. “No, don’t tell me.”

How the brew splatted out in pickle jars, he told her— tickle jars was what Mickey said, by accident. Everything about it was accident, wantonness, and they laughed at the slip out of habit — hard for a beat and then harder until Mickey couldn’t quit.

Bird hung back and watched him. She thought, Here is a man drowning, a boy going hopelessly down.

They had set her big feet hard in stirrups: same for the dead as for the living.

“This will hurt,” she remembered. “You’re going to feel a bit of a — easy — a bit of a — pinch.” Yes. How they said it.

A pinch, a breeze, a prod. A leaf on its back with its feet in the air blown dryly down a road. Sort of that. They thought up things to say sort of about it.

“Time to go to the butcher,” they said, and after that they said nothing at all.

They found abooth in back of a coffee shop, a heater working feebly against the season. Bird pulled her chair up to it; she was cold and she couldn’t get warm. She tossed toast crumbs into the vent to burn and fed it strands of hair. Bird thought to call Suzie, but Suzie was elsewhere. Suzie was straddling an icy crevasse, rappelling down a palisade of stone. Suzie was hang gliding, you should try it, sugar, off the highest live volcano in the world.

“We lost our little Caroline,” Bird told the waitress when she came. “We had a baby and now she’s gone.”

Mickey was gone, too. Bird didn’t know where. She couldn’t think how anything happened.

“Did he tell you what I should do?” Bird asked the waitress.

“He said to wait here.”

Bird had made a mess on the bench she was trying to hide.

“Not to worry,” the waitress told her. “He’ll be back, sugar.”

Nobody called her sugar but Suzie.

A whale is closer to a camel than to a fish, sugar.

Bird would never speak to Suzie again.

The bench was Naugahyde, a mottled red, the whole world should be red when you are bleeding. Bird lay down on the bench as if into the blood she had lost and sleep carried her away.

The place was closed by the time Bird waked again, but the waitress was still there, talking to Mickey. Bird feigned sleep and watched them.

If you touch her, Bird thought, I swear to you —but she couldn’t think what she would do.

She half knew where she was. She raised her head and knocked into the table and her hair hung up in the flashing that prettified the rim.

“Hello, sleepy,” Mickey said, and walked Bird through the snow to the buckaroo’s car they were to drive across the country to Cheyenne.

He opened the door for Bird. “Nice rig.”

“I’ll drive.”

He had smoothed a garbage bag out for Bird to sit on. He laid the seat back for her; she bumped it up again. She cranked the heat to high and they turned for the west, toward the last light leaving the sky. Three exits, a bridge, and they were lost, making hard blind turns down quiet streets, squinting into the snow. These were streets without even bodegas, block upon unlit block in collapse, a maze swept of anything living. The snow floated up, spun among leaves and wrappers in the piddly light their headlights cast: the world was flat after all, flipped over, repeating its small features. Bird was queasy; she leaked. Her head was still a mile from her feet and wind blew lightly through it.

“I give up,” she said, pushed the words from her mouth.

Bird was asleep before Mickey found a road out and slept through dark and daylight; she waked to a stubble of corn on the plains and the slow-swung heads of oil wells, glad for the clean rim of the land, glad at last to see. She saw the Cross of the Plains in a bean field, the wing — ripped free — of a Cessna lashed to the bed of a truck.

She said, “My mother appeared in a box in my sleep to bring me a loop of pearls. Quick: before the doctor found out who she was. He was handsome, they are always handsome, with a ringlet of hose and a scissors.”

They had scraped the mother in Bird out. Her mother was tiny, Thumbelina, set out on a rind of lemon across a bloody stew.

They drove dirtroads, a farmy grid, the houses high and white.

“Slow,” she said, “I want to see.”

A boy sat a log hung from a rope from the generous branch of an elm. Mickey stopped the car; they rolled their windows down. The day smelled of willow and grass, the grass brittle and furred, palomino.

The boy’s sister wound him up by his knees. It wasn’t winter here yet; they had thrown their coats to the ground. A last leaf rocked down and the boy lunged at it and swung his good leg up. He had lost his other leg at the knee. The boy’s sister wound him up on the swing, away from her, into the paltry shadows. He was a long-haired boy and his hair was loose and in his teeth was a grass blonde as he was.

“Far enough,” he said, “too far—”

No bigger a boy than Bird’s is. His voice bellowed in his chest like a man’s.

The boy’s sister let loose and ducked away. He spun slowly at first, and faster, and the more he spun the faster he went, the more spinning pressed him out. His neck showed, a stalk, brockled and thin. His head seemed barely hooked to it and his hair, as if pulled, streamed out. He blurred, a body churned to butter.

The sister hopped from foot to foot; she babbled. The sound she made made two sounds, knocked from the flat face of the house. It ran its course through corrugate fields, the furrows at the sky converging like paths of a fine-toothed comb. She snatched her brother’s hair as he passed and this slowed him, jerkily, and dragged him askew on the swing. She tried to help him; his foot struck her in the mouth. He was coming off the swing. Cripple boy. The log was tipped; the stub of his leg was off it. He hung against the rope holding on with his hands and the rope, unwound, wound up again, according to the laws of motion. The rope thickened with his hair. It wound up with the rope until he hung by his hair, a carnival act, an object still in motion, moved by the fact of its moving, spinning itself out again. His foot flopped about below him and caught his sister in the mouth again.

“Remember the bar on Avenue B? Remember the pipe we rolled in?” Bird asked.

“It wasn’t so long ago. I do, Bird.”

He had asked her to marry him. It seemed impossible, marriage, anything at all.

“He stepped on a fishing hook,” Bird said. “It broke off in his heel. He didn’t tell his folks, he was afraid to. He told his sister because nobody listens to her, not even the mother,” Bird said.

“There’s no mother,” Bird said.

The father was starting across the field with a pitchfork. He had let the door to the house slap shut and the girl twitched, startled, shot. You could shoot her again and again, Bird thought, and still she would refuse to die. She was burbling.

Lunacy made her invincible. She was to blame for nothing.

“He couldn’t get his foot in his shoe,” Bird said. “The poison was running up his leg — bolts of yellow, bolts of blue. Too late,” Bird said, “end of story.”

“Think so?”

“I do. It’s the old too late. Quiet and slow and deadly.”

Bird picked up a rock and threw it and a hot little fibrous grume of blood slid into her pants again.

“You asked me to marry me,” Bird said. “I mean you.”