Noy Holland - Bird

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,” Suziesays. “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.

She does the math, the years to come, the school bus whistling down the hill, small pale jostled faces. She sees a girl, another’s, braids undone, flyaway standing-up hair — that’s her face. It’s Bird’s face. The girl of herself, the little, she thinks—

And turns away and thinks: Mickey.

Never can see the man coming.

Bird laughs to herself to think of it, coming, I’m coming, remembers Tuk and Doll Doll, the pair who picked them up, the pair they took a room with, briefly, finally, in the blowing heat of a roadside hotel, remembers Tuk going at it, mama-talking Doll Doll, snuffling around in her culotte, whistling through his nose.

Back again: a speeding reel. Back in the honeyed swim and slop, a roving, animal hunger. Just a nibble.

Not a nibble, not enough, not near.

Bird got behind herself and bit Mickey, dug into him with a fork. The moment’s impulse.

The body food.

Her girl blue from the womb, dead, Bird thought: I’ll have to eat her. Want me just to eat you?

She remembers Tuk slurping at her — not her, not Bird — at Doll Doll, Bird waking up from a dream of herself in the velvety dark of the room they shared and in it was somebody slurping pudding from a bowl like a dog. Eat you out.

Eat you in, Bird thought — that was more like it. And having waked, she slept, and having slept, waked, and waking again heard the tidal shush of skin on skin, coming, going, Mama now, I’m coming, Mama, Tuk hollering, a drawn-out o, coooming, rwaorwaorwaor, and then he barked it out: I went! I went! I went!

“He wore ashirt that read Big Boys Hold It ,” Bird says.

“That’s stupid,” Suzie says.

“Bunnies are stupid,” Bird says.

“What was your name before your name was Bird?”

“I forget.”

“No you don’t, sugar. You know ravens—”

“Yes. Juggle sticks in the air.”

“For fun,” Suzie says, “for the fuck of it.”

“And lie in ants with their wings spread open,” Bird adds.

“For the fuck of it. For the feeling. Ecstasy and nothing more.”

They went up,up some more.

“Half a mile above the mile-high city,” Mickey said, “not too shabby.”

They would spend the last of their high at the Hyatt, why not? He had a credit card he’d swiped from his mother she didn’t yet know was gone.

They were in a steaming bath with bubbles to their chins when Bird said, as her mother used to say, “Wonder what the poor folks are doing.”

“This,” Mickey said, and lifted Bird by her ass to his mouth in the froth and pushed into her with his tongue.

“Home again,” he murmured. “Hallelujah.”

They wore their Hyatt robes, heavy as hides; they smelled of lavender and money.

They ate prime rib, bloody rare, and a heap of mashed potatoes; drizzled-on food and reductions, a feast, a bottle of wine.

What if they ate like this once a week like wolves, fattening and fasting, running lean, gorging themselves again?

“What if I touched you here,” Mickey said, and slid his hand between her legs beneath the table, “and nowhere else, ever again?”

The robe theytook and the embellished towel took up half the room in their Glad bags and made a softer place to sit. Bird was tender still, seepy.

They sat around a lot, they stood. They tried the off-ramp and the on.

Three days — they’d made maybe a hundred miles. Too high, this country, the clouds snow-gray, too close to their heads. Unbudged.

Somebody slowed down, stopped, backed up, peeled out. Very funny.

Bird’s tooth throbbed in her head.

They went back to throwing snowballs into traffic to pass the time. Drank a Pabst, split it, split the next. And the beer and being in the cold all day and the heat of Mickey’s breath when he kissed her made everything floaty and bright. The brightness, the float; the beat skipped, a hitch — Mickey felt it too. The blessed looseness of slipping out of time.

They quit bothering to stick their thumbs out, quit bothering to stand but to fish another beer from the cooler where they sat.

She heard her name, spoke it, understood that she had spoken it meaning to speak to him.

Said to Mickey, “Hey, Bird?”

Remember that?

It had begun to snow again, the slow fat flakes suspended. They sat quietly, didn’t move.

As at auction.

Took a sip.

As the old, didn’t move.

Wanted nothing.

The mind swept. The smallest act. A name spoken. How the heart — this was the real heartache: this happiness: this lonely, buzzing elation.

Can’t last.

Couldn’t last. Nature of things.

Somebody quick say why.

Wanting so mostlyrarely withstands the presence of the thing we want.

Say why.

A ride, for instance. The golden Ryder. Which arrives when we are flagging, pleased, happy without it, why?

Why — having traveled for days to reach someplace — are we nonetheless unready to stand up and walk through the door?

Hello, hello.

Not yet a little.

They sat their cooler. Forgetful. Forgetting.

The Ryder rocked to a stop on the shoulder.

Last time.

One more last time, says her boy.

And so they sat some. They stood to meet it.

There were twoof each, human and dog, the pups part wolf — one was Wolfie, the other fluffed and white. This was Snowball.

“I’m Bird,” Bird said, “and this is Mickey,” and of the two it was Tuk who spoke and said, “I expect you are.”

He was dressed like a man of the region weathered into his middle years — in a worked-over hat, a bandanna at the neck. Doll Doll was a kid in pantyhose, in a bodysuit like bubble wrap, her culotte a bilious plaid. She had a candy necklace between her teeth she was sucking the color from. The dye left a smeary chinstrap of many muddied colors.