Noy Holland - Bird

“He’ll be back,” Bird says. “You need to tie him up.”

“Nail him to the cross.”

“What more?”

“The exploding harpoon leaves a hole in a whale big enough for a man to lie down in.”

“Nice.”

“And the octopus—”

“Is it gruesome, Suzie?”

“It’s nature. Nature’s a maniac, too.”

“Tell me later, okay? The baby—”

“The male sends out a severed tentacle loaded with his seed. She tucks it away. Guards it. Waits. For death, for life, all of it. She dies days after her babies are born, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They eat what’s left of her. Simple need. Last act. It was like that, fucking Mickey. Last act every time. Like you would die from it. It would kill you.”

“And it wouldn’t matter,” Bird says.

“It wouldn’t matter.”

“Like an emergency.”

“Repeated.”

“One more last time.”

You’re like Godused to be. Not God, I mean, but the thing in me that listens to me think and what I say. You’re all through me, Bird. I’m all you now. Cunt and mouth and eyes.

They rode on.Two-lane road through the desert, the moon tossing shadows around. They went along for a time with the headlights off until Tuk found what he was looking for, a neon sign flashing above the sagebrush: SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP.

They parked a ways off, left the pups and went in.

Tuk had a key to a room he carried. They found the room vacant. Smell of smoke. Two hard narrow beds. They turned the heat on high and the TV soft and fell away into bed.

Slept. Having slept, Tuk waked and waked Doll Doll. Mama-talked his Doll Doll. And went and went and went.

Tuk slept in his red bandanna, in his boxers and floppy socks. He waked and paced and his socks threw sparks and Doll Doll lay sucking her thumb.

Come morning, DollDoll pulled his boxers down for him and rolled deodorant over his balls. Squeezed a seepy imperfection from his scrotum.

Tuk pulled a fresh shirt over his head.

Big Boys Hold It, the shirt read. But nobody read it to him.

They fluffed the pillows and smoothed out the sheets. Folded the little triangle back into the tail of the toilet paper. Hustled quietly out.

They found the Ryder locked with the keys inside. The pups had torn up the bench seat and squirmed in among the hillocks and tufts under the vinyl flap to keep warm. They yipped and lunged at the windows, the windows smeared and fogged.

The air smelled of dust and sagebrush and the sign was still flashing: SLEEP. The S flickered out while they watched it. The sky paled above the eastern reef where the sun would soon be up. Patches of snow were shored up where sagebrush grew and there the dust lay flattened and dark.

Everybody quiet but the birds.

Hear the birds.

Tuk found a rock, round a little and big enough, and Doll Doll made faces in the far window to lure the pups to a safer side. The rock bounced off the glass and struck Tuk in the teeth.

Doll Doll found a bigger rock and handed this one to Mickey.

“Throw it hard,” Doll Doll said, and Mickey did, and the quiet of morning was over.

Tuk reached in and pulled the door open and the pups came tumbling out. They shot off across the parking lot and scratched at the motel doors.

Doll Doll started out after them — too late, too slow, Tuk had her. He picked her off her feet and heaved her into the truck. She was swinging at his face and spitting, calling the puppies’ names.

“Make your move,” Tuk said.

At first they didn’t.

But then Mickey and Bird got in.

They drove anhour watching the sideview for whoever might come up behind. Nobody came. Doll Doll pouted and said not a word. She shivered: it was cold in the truck with the window out. They were thrashing each other with their hair.

Crows pecked at roadkill, too smart to be hit, the wiseacre scolds of the roadside. A tree way off. A glum little clump of boulders.

“The day will warm and that window won’t count. You ought to look,” Tuk said, “no matter.”

Doll Doll dropped her face into her bodysuit and covered her ears with her hands.

“Lookit here, lookit this country,” he said, and pulled her up by her hair to see.

Shadows slid over the desert, over rock and sage and cactus, the bones of the Devonian, ash of the old caldera blown some millions of years ago.

“How it lies, lookit. You ought to. The hogbacks and the coulees, the butte-tops flat as the sea. Don’t tell me. Try to make it all all over again. Try to make it from scratch, the first speck of it, from rock and dark and water. Nothing was. Yet things took hold and lived. I’m not a preacher or a church dog either. Junkyard dog, most like it. But my place and my prayers are here. Bit of sage and all the many ways of the grasses. You get up on a reef and look over. Look out. You pick up a stone and throw it. It makes a little tink that travels, light on the wind, here to Texas. It’s not the onliest thing I have come to that speaks to the lonesomeness in me. Still it speaks. Here was the first I heard it.”

A big wind came up and shook them. A red tail swooped through the power lines and hooked a lizard in its talons. Banked away.

It seemed the end of something.

“I think we’ll go,” Mickey announced. “Stretch our legs some. I like everything you said.”

They got their Glad bags out and thanked Tuk and Doll Doll, and stood in the road in the day warming up. The yellow truck got small and smaller yet on the straight road going and was gone.

They walked. Talkeda little, walking.

Where to go. What to do.

They could walk on back and get Wolfie. They would have to name him again. Name him Tuk — naw. Waxahatchie. Squirt.

They walked to the bus terminal in Santa Fe. It took the day and then some. It was sunny and they walked without shoes, keeping the mountains to the east until they gave out and what was left was unbroken plateau.

Oaxaca, they talked of, Lubbock.

The drifting Sahara, the Nile.

Cuernavaca, the great Sonora.

Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, the reach of the knowable world.

Somehow they didn’t have it in them. In the end they took a bus out of Santa Fe that went north again through Cimarron, east, east until the streets grew narrow again and the buildings were closing in. They took the turn for home. They called it home without even thinking. They went back to what they knew.

We came home, Bird wrote to her mother. It’s not much.

Something could have changed but it didn’t.

I can’t say.

We found a place for ourselves. Not the Taj Mahal but the heat works and but for one minor riot and gunshots at night, it is quiet. The train passes and rattles the windows and our dishes stacked together in the cupboards. That, too. And cops thrash the weeds with their billy sticks. We throw bottles against the walls for the fuck of it. That, too. And Mickey doesn’t touch me.

I had my tooth pulled.

He broke his hand slugging the wall.

He doesn’t touch me.

We make our trips to the hospital — he mixes this with that. Breaks his hand against the wall. Opens his wrist in the tub.

I thought you kept people safe by watching, Mother.

I watch Mickey. I try to.

Something I learned from you.

Winter eased upand set back in. The apartment was built above a garage and mornings, half asleep, they heard the landlord start up his car and go. The train passed. Bird hardly went out of their bedroom. Scarcely ate. Mickey had a doctor named Dr. Money they never paid a nickel to.