Noy Holland - Bird

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 goingto 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 hitchingfor 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 ona 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.