Noy Holland - Bird

She made herself small when Bird and Mickey got in, scooted over in the truck against Tuk. Tuk licked her, and licked her some more, Doll Doll offering him her neck. She had her sleeves pulled down and over her hands after the fashion of girls of the season. She brought a sleeve to her mouth and sucked at it. It was wet all the way to the elbow.

The pups were loose in the cab of the truck and Doll Doll’s pantyhose was pinked with blood where the pups had gotten at her in the wide miles since Cheyenne. Tuk swung the truck into traffic and tumbled the pups across the floorboards — over Doll Doll’s feet and Mickey’s and Bird’s, a tidy row, tightly packed across the bench seat — like a seat on a bus, mottled and split, vinyl, a school bus smell. When Doll Doll bent to reach for a pup they all had to lean and twist away.

Doll Doll let Wolfie walk across her lap to Mickey’s open hands. He tucked the pup under his jacket and scratched her behind her ear: this set her paw to thumping. Wolfie wrinkled her face and drooled, shaking with puppy bliss.

“You got her spot,” Doll Doll said. “Oh, Wolfie.”

Doll Doll reached across Bird to lay her hand on the pup snugged into Mickey’s jacket. Bird leaned out lightly against Doll Doll’s arm, her long dampened sleeve pulled longer, the crepey violet bubbles of Doll Doll’s bodysuit collapsed. Doll Doll moved away not at all. She had her arm set stiff across Bird’s chest: a reminder, a locking bar: here she was. Bird was going to be where she had put herself, now and again, decided or not: she got the kid-at-a-county-fair feeling she gets: feels the heat and wild sickening swing of what she wants, has picked and paid for, thought she wanted: rag-dolled, the snapping plunge, the quieting climb before you fall so fast you are lifted up and floating.

She was floating: that was love.

Love did away with the instant between wanting and doing, wanting to kiss and kissing, wanting to bite and biting — and so Bird bit the girl hard on the arm through the cheap rough crepe she was wearing.

“Hey! You can’t — Tuk, she—”

“You can’t bite her,” Tuk said. “Now you’ll have to—”

“You have to say you’re sorry,” Doll Doll said. “And I’ll say I forgive you.”

But she wasn’t: Bird was saving sorry up for children, a husband, a demoted family dog. For the months to come, the hand through the wall, Mickey’s tender wrists he opened. The little closures and retreats.

“So how do you like God’s country?” Tuk wanted to know.

Bird mumbled a mousy answer; her jaw felt soldered shut. The fat of her cheek and sinew, the woofer and tube of her ear, the pores, how it felt, sizzled; anvil and hammer and stirrup; ampulla and tragus, inward and out: nimble, any lasting pain, referred to neighbors, the wagging tongue; to the puffy glistening tab of her throat, to gingiva and palate, the string and ocherous wax of her eyes: hot, all of it, sparkling, every living cell: septum, foramen, cementum; the horn of pulp and the chamber — the tooth jigsawed into tissue, into alveolar bone. The whole bright box of Bird’s head hurt.

She had taken to biting strangers.

She had gotten what she deserved.

Mickey was wearing his shirt sprung at the neck and Bird could see the upmost clusters she loved of freckles on his chest. She couldn’t stand it: Doll Doll had them too. They had like bodies, long and light for distance, the miles across the plain.

Bird mouthed it: I want out. I want you.

A suite with a theme, Bird wanted, something jungly, sneaky, scrawk and howl, a costume, the purr of rain, a bed set lazily spinning among the ravenous trees. She wanted Mickey to tie her by her hands and feet and work her slowly open. Make her cry out. Make her bleed.

A tableau, she wanted. But not this one.

Tuk was hooking snot from his nose with his long little fingernail, just the one long one, all he needed, and rolling it into a ball. He cracked the window, flicked the ball into the airstream. Hooked the next wet glob he rolled dry.

It was warm in the truck and dewy and nice and nice to be out of the cold. And they were going where they meant to be going. Going south to Albakuke. Be there in a day.

Bird moved away not to touch Mickey, to be some away from the heat of him and the drug of the way he smelled. She set her mind on Doll Doll — on the smeary mess she had made of her chin, on Doll Doll’s atrocious clothes. She had swiped her eyelids with blue glitter. A kid. A doll! and new to things.

She was trying to look Bird’s age, Bird thought, and failing. That helped. And the little round hump of her belly helped: ah ha, a flaw, Doll Doll long and light, but soft, too — weak, Bird thought.

But the next thought was creeping in: Is that a baby in your belly?

Which it was.

Two discs of red appeared between Doll Doll’s knees where her knees fell helplessly together. Doll Doll would come to limp and ache, Bird thought, comforted. She would age into polymer sockets, the daily complaints of living.

Bird leaned to kiss him. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for Mickey, now and now and ever.

But he was talking. He was missing his dog.

“We had a dog once,” he said. “She was Maggie. She liked to take down Bird’s hair.”

“It’s so pretty, your hair,” Doll Doll told her, and touched the ends to her lips as if to eat it.

“She slept for heat between me and Bird with her back to me and her legs out. She stuck all four of her legs out, stiff, like this, to keep Bird off me. She used to chew Bird’s toothbrush up and stash the leftover bits of her shoes and the cast-off strands of her dental floss ( and the vomited wads of tampons, Bird thinks) underneath my pillow.”

“She found an old coat,” Bird offered, “to sleep on and she slept with it over her head.”

“Oh, Maggie,” Doll Doll said.

“You all stop now,” Tuk said. “You’ll make her weepy. She’s got that — syndrome, stray — whatever you call it. She’s tender and you’ll make her sad.”

“I’m not sad,” Doll Doll said.

“Well, you will be. Think a moment of your mule, of your turtle, back to home. Your maimed and crippled. Think of a moment of Bim and Toto, near drowned, of your colicky armadillo. The calf born without any eyeballs.”

“The Chinese farmer who grew three tongues,” Mickey offered. “He could lick the one with two others. He could reach back and lick his ears. Think of that.”

Mickey fluttered his tongue at Bird and Doll Doll turned in time to see it.

“Yuck,” Doll Doll said, which was a comfort.

Yuckity lickity schmuckity fuck. Keep your feet in a bucket.

Keep your head.

“We got too many to care for,” Tuk told her, and twanged her necklace against her chin.

“We got some acres,” he admitted. “A dab of a place down to Texas. A creek with a pawky flow. Bit of grass. Bunchgrass, cheet. Whatever. Feed. I drove a stake in the dust to hitch the goat down to. Round and round he goes.”

“It’s nice,” Doll Doll said. “It’s home and it’s dry and quiet. You can hear the beer fizz in your bottle. Sky. Wide dry blue eye quiet. And the yellow grasses move. And Tuk? We got that one cottonwood tree for shade I will never again shade under.”

“Now, Doll.”

“You know I won’t.”

“I heard that.”

“I brought this cat home,” Doll Doll offered.

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“He’s ashamed. He don’t want it told.”

“That cat—”

“I know it. Needed helping. He needed helping bad. Such as I did, Tuk. You remember? I was eating out of a bowl.”

“I do. And I remember that old tom popping. It spit. Ringwormy, rabid, god knows. How he howled among the leaves in the shadows, peering down.”