Noy Holland - Bird

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 oldI 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 dropped 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—”