Noy Holland - Bird

“I’m sorry,” Doll Doll said.

“And I forgive you.”

They still had one See’s to get to and it was close to closing time. Doll Doll read directions and they turned off the ramp going west.

“Remember that creep who had tattoos of flies crawling all over his neck?”

“Where was that at?” Tuk couldn’t remember.

“South Dakota,” Doll Doll said.

She was the navigator. She knew the nicknames of all fifty states: Land of Enchantment; the Show-Me State; Beehive; Cornhusker; Tar Heel; Sooner. Manly Deeds, Womanly Words; To the Stars through Difficulties. If You Seek a Pleasant Peninsula, Look about You. She Flies with Her Own Wings.

“We saw Indians,” Doll Doll said. “We saw a cross a thousand feet tall.”

“In a bean field?” Bird asked.

“That’s the one. Go right. Go right right here on Petaluma, Tuk.”

Tuk took a right on Straw.

“Shit,” Doll Doll said, “you’re a slow leak.”

“I saw a donkey in the bed of a pickup truck,” Bird said.

“Yuh huh,” Doll Doll said, “I like to see that.”

“And a kid with a pup and a Hoola Hoop. And the roadside marker where Clara died — with a wreath and a tin can of flowers at the foot and a life-sized blow-up doll. Did you see that?” Bird asked, mumbled, wanted to spit but could not.

“I need a napkin,” Bird said.

“Not mine,” Doll Doll said. “Mine’s got all the directions. Three lights, turn south, bear left, go west. We got to get back to Petaluma.”

“Hold your horses, Little Bit.”

Doll Doll didn’t like it — the start and stop, too much to see, a racket. She liked a little town to sail through. A kid mowing grass in her underpants. Old boys sipping sody, sipping sody, eating beans.

“You got kids, guys? Got a kitten?” Tuk asked. “Any little thing to look after — to get your minds off yourselves? Them little turtles? You got a cellaphone? I need to make a call.”

Doll Doll pouted and glowed.

“I’m just talking, Little Bit.”

Tuk stuck out his tongue and made a ditch of it he sucked spit loudly through.

“She wants acellaphone,” he explained. “There’s a color of green and yellow she wants with sort of crumbs of gold. For the baby, for when the baby is ready to come out, which is pretty soon, pretty soon. We got a wind-her-up thing for it to look at.”

“It’s like nothing, Tuk. Like we made it up. It used to not even move.”

“It’ll move,” Tuk said. “Get the hiccumups, keep you awake till dawn.”

“Is it a girl?” Bird asked.

“How should he know?”

“I know several things,” Tuk said.

“Well, you don’t know Straw from Petaluma, I guess. Now take another right right here.”

He did. Next was a left on Pisgah that Tuk sailed right on through.

“I don’t get it,” Doll Doll said. “I said Pisgah. Then comes Aspen and Birch and Catalpa, like the alphabet, right in a row. He’s been doing this since Texas!”

She was banging her head on the dashboard again.

“It plain escapes me. I say Poplar he turns on Pisgah, left on Oak he takes Willow, it’s like—” but Doll Doll fell short of a likeness and covered her face with her hands.

Tuk turned the truck around and missed the turn and turned it around again. Tumbled the pups across the floorboards, drove at last past See’s.

“See’s See’s See’s! Can’t you read?” Doll Doll bellowed. “Can’t you read, Tuk?”

And then it struck her.

She was quiet. Mickey and Bird were quiet. The pups quit gnawing on Tuk’s bootsoles and sat on their tails and drooled.

“I do believe you cannot read, Tuk.”

There he was: a man squeezed into a truck with strangers, with a girl he had picked up eating from a bowl on the floor of the Greyhound station. He had thrown out her makeup kit. She was nearly too pretty without it to be seen with a cowpoke like him. Pokey boy. Never took to school. Poked the teacher with a stick in the privy. That boy, not a bad boy, good with numbers. Not a man much for words. He had mostly learned to get along without them and without people much or much in the way of tables and chairs and fresh new shirts with pearly snaps and their arms pinned back in plastic. He liked the smell of dust and sage. He liked a suitcase fine to eat his food from, a rag for a tablecloth. Pabst in cans: good enough. That was living — the rash spare days people boasted of once they’d lived a safe stretch out past them.

Poor. Fine by him.

Ignoramus. Well, it hurt. Made him mean.

What to do?

He’d give her pups away. He’d smash a schoolboy’s bike with the Ryder. Stuff his pockets with lollipops. Cheat and snitch and scream. That’d help.

“This is where you get out,” he said. “Out. O-U-T.”

Ha, spelled it. Let her chew on that.

Tuk opened a can of beer and guzzled it. Dropped the empty for the pups to cut their gums on — her pups. How about that?

“Howcome you never did tell me, Tuk? Now supposably we have got this baby coming and what are we going to do?”

He worked his tongue in his mouth.

“Oh, Tuk,” Doll Doll said.

Street signs, simple signs — what? He figured she would do it for him, him a grown man?

Tuk dropped his head onto the steering wheel, rammed the truck into a Sani-Hut, threw up in the ashtray and cried.

“Well, it’s astory,” Suzie says.

“You always say that. Something to pass the time.”

“They were misfits,” Suzie says. “You never saw them again. They were like you some way you can’t name.”

“Maybe that.”

“Gypsies. Looking for something to care for. Something to feed and flee.”

“Now we have heard from one—”

“—small country. Or else you’re making it up.”

“Making what up?”

“Your mother club. Your marriage. Your plain quiet shut-away life. It’s not enough but you can’t let on. So you tell yourself loopy stories about people you can’t love or be. The tragically illiterate. The orphan with a fluffy puppy and a getaway Trans Am. Dog people. Dogs are so people feel forgiven. Lock a dog in the cellar to starve and it shatters to happy pieces to see you again. I never wanted that. Not even a cat, even as a kid, cats are for the sad and lonely. Bossy melancholics. Give me a mouse or a turtle: it will never know I’m gone.”

“I drowned a pink-eyed mouse by accident in a bath of lavender and myrrh.”

“That counts,” Suzie says.

“It all counts. Unless you quit counting.”

“So quit counting, for a change. Stop giving grades out. Those two were up against it. Their troubles made yours look ridiculous.”

Compare and contrast. Difference between. Someone to measure themselves against. Maybe that. As in: Fluffy and a skunk named Rosemary. A bear and a cat in a tree.

Maybe the catTuk shot out of that tree that day made Bird think of her father, of riding around with her father — spring, and everything wants to move. Her father hit a bear. The thing leapt off the bank into the road — small still, a yearling. The bear didn’t move but it lived.

They were close to home and they went back and Bird’s father came out with his gun. Bird didn’t want to go back with him, but she thought if she didn’t go back with him that something worse would happen — the bear would come at her father and he would be alone and she would be a mile away, crying.

“So I went with him. I watched him shoot the bear. I helped him drag it into the back of the car so he could take it home and skin it. A skinned bear looks like a human, they say. I never looked at it. I don’t guess I ever will.”

Never will. Neverwould. Again see him, or feel now again what he had been.