Noy Holland - Bird

When Suzie came back with Mickey from Florida, she came back with stories to tell. He spat on his hand to shine the designer shoes of sorority girls who talked to him, and he called everybody Bird. Ignited kernels of popcorn and tossed them at women’s hair.

He sent a postcard image of an antediluvian fish shot in the side with an arrow.

I am havingmy midnight panic again, something I’d almost forgotten. I love you completely. I daydream of you and tie you to a bridge and slowly take down your hair. I can’t help you. I’m gone. Don’t try to find me.

They went onand at last found See’s. Tuk dragged the bag of peanuts inside and the lady at See’s stood and watched him. She watched him stuff his pockets with lollipops, just as he had said he would do, and she bought his peanuts anyway, in the grip of a tender feeling. He must have looked like someone she had loved once and hoped to love again.

When Tuk had stuffed his pockets, he collected his check and walked back to the Ryder. Tuk’s pockets made him walk as if he’d pissed himself or poured half a jug of milk down his pants, which he did before long to be funny. To make Doll Doll laugh and keep with him. To think she might forgive him. Forget he couldn’t read, forgive him. Forget he had rented a four-room truck hoping she would sleep on a bedroll with him with the peanuts in back if the snow came, if the nights were soggy or cold. Forget the little crimson patch on his ass. The way his eyes swung loose in their sockets. Forget he was a man who had been a boy who had hidden from his mother in a pile of leaves not thinking that she might, happily, in a hurry to get to her lover, drive over her boy thinking: this is a pile of leaves. Not that boy. Not a boy who set a Have-a-Heart trap his rabbit at a clap walked into. Stuck there. Pushed out her eleven babies. Which stuck.

“Which — tell them that little story, Tuk, about the rabbits, that time, and the Have-a-Heart trap. Tell that,” Doll Doll said, “or let me.”

She went on.

“Eleven teensy babies. He had to drown ever one in a bucket.”

“I didn’t want to,” Tuk said.

“Of course you didn’t.”

He swung the Ryder back up on the freeway, the ramp just north of the totem he had built in honor of the tumbling nugget. When he got to it again, he cut the engine.

“Hey, rider,” Tuk said, “you riders,” pleased with his joke, “got a beer?”

They passed another Pabst between them. “All’s we need now is tapato chips,” Tuk said.

“And dip,” Doll Doll said. “And chocolates. I could kill for a cherry in those chocolate balls with that milky stuff that squeams out.”

From under her bubbly bodysuit, she pulled out a box she had stolen from See’s. She clambered over the bench seat to sit on Mickey’s lap. Touched her finger to his mouth.

“That’s pretty,” she said, and swung the near door open.

A crow cawed in a tree. It didn’t sound right.

It sounded too much like a human trying to sound like a crow.

“Here’s to a first and a last.” Tuk drank. “First time we saw the baby kick.”

“First toothache,” Bird said.

And Mickey: “Next to last can of beer.”

“First time I ever tried Goobers,” Doll Doll said. “I truly had no idea.”

She slid out and left the door open.

She stood in the cold in her culotte and bent over the totem and said, “That’s my first time I ever could feel it. Boy-oh-god that was weird.”

“Last peanuts!” Tuk belted it out like a carny.

“Last bag of Sunshine peanuts! Best little nut you’ll ever know.”

They went on.The snow quit and night came on. Cars got off the freeway and left it to the trucks, to the all-night drivers jangly from milkshakes and days of dipping snuff.

Mickey drove for a time to let Tuk sleep slumped against the door with a pup in each hand, with Bird shoved up against him.

Tuk smelled of asparagus, cooked too long. Of age, the corridors of a nursing home, a mash of simmered prunes. He smelled of the milk he had poured down his pants.

Or that’s me I’m smelling, Bird thought — smear of seed, her hair unwashed, the honey of her leaking gum. She probed her tooth with her tongue — nasty, tasty — nectar, brine. Hyacinths in an airtight room, the softened stalk succumbing.

They were out from under the snow now and the sky was the velvety purple it gets and spread all around with stars. The mountains looked like cutouts of mountains, treeless and white, tacked down on the dark plateau. Through the sage the humped Brahma wandered with cactus spines poked into their muzzles.

They saw a girl with one shoe in an organdy dress, a string of donkeys hitched to a barbed wire fence, a tinker’s lonesome wagon tricked out with ribbons and cans. The first of the Sangre de Cristo’s, they saw — blue in the moon, a blanked-out face the blood of Christ ran down.

Scarcely a car passed. A low rider came at them in their lane with the headlights popped off. Mickey gunned it. They could see him clear. Big yellow truck in the moonlight.

“Go easy,” Tuk said, and was asleep again.

“Don’t sleep,” Mickey said. “I need you.”

The moon sailed high and white overhead and the pale shaft of Mickey’s cock appeared again in his hand.

Kill me off, Bird thought, before I lose him.

Drive a spike into my head.

She had her shirt off, two buttons popped, before they reached the flung shadow of a boulder Bird flattened her hands against. Mickey’s breath was fast and raspy and seemed to come not from him but from the boulders strewn, from strandings of trinket and bone. Old stomping ground, detritus of fickle gods. A patch of snow like melted nickels.

Mickey toppled his boots for Bird to stand on, on the clothes heaped at their feet. Now he was in her, disappearing, shade to shade, his cock like a bull’s in the shadow they cast. Bird slickened with blood she was losing still; on her breasts, hieroglyphs of his hands. Mineral seep. Her feet were pewter; a beetle wandered in the swales of her tendons, daubing methodically at the spatter of her blood. A speckled wing, iridescent. Nothing more moved but Mickey, Bird — a shadow fused, a Gorgon’s head.

“It hurts, it hurts.”

“Shut up, Bird.”

A cloudshadow passed across them and for an instant even the supple became stone and what quivered held its tongue. The beetle raised a leg in the air.

Yes. Be still. Be still.

Their time was passing.

A star sputtered out. Now the moon appeared and Mickey began again, the panic of stillness gone.

The beetle went about its evening, its antenna bent inquiringly, varnished in the light of the moon. Moon on the face of the mountain. They saw no one but someone was near.

“Don’t stop,” Bird said. “It doesn’t matter. Please.”

A coyote, a bird. Something.

It was dark and looking on.

Mickey muttered, “Jesus, fucking jesus.”

No word now, something older — ragged, collapsing — hymn of the lesser animals, gibberish of the gods.

Everybody looked tobe sleeping when Bird and Mickey got back to the truck.

Doll Doll had eaten all but the last four rounds off the string of her candy necklace; these lay like bright stones against her throat. Mickey lifted her head and laid it in his lap and started the truck and drove on. He had blood on his cheek Bird wiped clean for him, everything in her still thrumming.

Doll Doll hummed along to the radio. Mickey turned the dial to country. Doll Doll was sleeping but the words came to her. He made a sound like a telephone and Doll Doll said, “Ring ring ring.”

She howled with the coyotes. Cheered on the Lakers. He tried opera and she reached for that.