Noy Holland - Bird

Mickey picked up jobs and quit them or didn’t bother to show up at all. He left for work and never reached there and his boss called to ask where he was. Bird had no idea.

And the man said, “Sweetpea, I bet you do.”

Mickey lashed himself by his ankles to the doorway of their room.

“I didn’t want you to find me gone,” he said.

Else he went off.

Sometimes she found him. He was in a coffee shop eating plantains. He was sitting on the steps of the garage.

Else hours went by she couldn’t find him and the bars emptied and filled again and beetles went about on their snelled feet through the slick tubes of Bird’s head.

He wrote: It is morning and I miss you. I loved you completely. You will never be loved better — how it pleases me to think this. Don’t be afraid, Bird. I feel like setting fire to our bed, Bird, to everything you have worn with me. Everything you have taken off for me. Your letters, your shoes.

Where are you?

Where have you been?

Please tell me I’ve got it all wrong, Bird. Songbird. I need you. Stay.

There were nights Bird went home when dark closed in and nights she went on walking. Past the hospital, past the morgue. She called every ER in the city but she never could call the morgue. Still she ran the loop in her head. Bird watched herself draw the sheet back; his eyes were open as when he slept. She stood in the humming refrigerated green and read the tag they had tied to his toe. It was a number and the number kept changing. It was a name Bird never had given him. Man Afraid. Looks at the Stars.

Never to walk in sunshine again.

He walks inhis sleep. I try to follow.

He still sleeps with his eyes open, Mother. But now I know to close them like the hinged eyes of a doll.

I need an animal, Bird sometimes thought, something to sing to and feed. Something quiet and soft that would be hard to kill but that wasn’t meant to live too long. A rabbit. No. A tiny donkey. A monkey to ride around on her head. Too smart, she thought. Something softer. Pocket lemur. Lamb.

Bird came back one night to find her paintings slashed — the painting of a smoking volcano, the painting of a silver-lined cloud.

So he was home.

No. No Mickey.

He had come home and gone out again.

Maybe he hasn’t gone far, Bird thought, or maybe he is in here hiding?

So she looked for him and, looking, found the rest of what he had destroyed. All the many things he had made for her — the little clay pot she kept her earrings in, the earrings of salvaged tin. The box he made for her to keep her letters in, he had beaten apart with a hammer. Bird began to read the letters and stopped.

She called Suzie and Suzie was elsewhere.

Bird smashed a bottle against the wall and somebody outside shouted, “The fuck?”

It wasn’t Mickey.

Mickey could never have done this.

Mickey was sinking in his ragtop through the cold black waters of the tidal strait, the sweet and the salt mixing, the tide tugging at his hair. He was at the bar eating soup and sobering up, preparing an explanation. Composing an apology, getting ready to begin again.

Bird rode out on her bicycle to look for him again, slush on the streets, shh shh, the wheel still out of true. She rode past a boy walking in the street and he reached out and yanked her hair. Hauled her over, felled her.

He’d been burned. He stood above her a minute with his boot on her cheek swinging his scarred hands. His teeth were tiny and soft and blue. He kept dragging his tongue across them. He will eat me if I move, Bird thought, and so she lay in the street in the spatter of glass until he walked off whistling. He whistled Dixie, as her mother had — loud and clear and true.

And Mickey came home and loved her. She had glass in her elbow and her buttons were off and he kissed her everyplace slowly as though he would not ever see her again.

“He’s like adrug they quit making. It’s tedious. You need to want something else.”

“I do,” Bird insists.

“He threw your clothes out, sugar. He rode your bicycle into the river. That’s love? Think. He swung into you with a Buick. That’s love? It might be love but it won’t help you live.”

“That Buick,” Bird reminds Suzie, “is the one you went south with him in. It never smelled right. It smelled like other people. When he came back, it smelled like you.”

“Bird,” Suzie says.

“That’s love, I guess. You said nothing. You rode the bus back. ‘Where have you been?’ I asked. You said nothing.”

“That was ages ago,” Suzie insists.

“Ages, yes. The cretaceous. The mammal has scarcely appeared. And time heals, we all know that. Better yet, it erases. Never happened! Wiped out! Off the record, free and clear. I’m not so good at it. Forgive me.”

“You’re forgiven,” Suzie says.

“Fuck you.”

Bird had scratchedMickey’s name in the windshield and hers with the ruby her mother had given her.

Given her. Forgiven her.

For the C days, the D days, Bird hoped to be forgiven.

For pinworms, forgive me.

For the pup tumbling down the stairs.

For watching Mickey and not watching Mickey and the names she never called him by. By her own name he gave her, mistaken.

For opening his eyes while he slept: I am right here.

Bird draws a finger down the flat of the baby’s foot and her toes bunch up. Old monkey brain. The callous on her lip is like mica, bright and chipped away. Bird needs to eat, pull on a fresh pair of panties. Meet what remains of the day.

Back by the swamp is a grave mound Bird promised to neaten and keep. It still needs a cross to say Sherderd . Her boy had named his pup Sherderd. They went down a list of names to consider: Squirt, Bump, John. Ice Cream Fucker was another, but you couldn’t call a puppy that.

Bird had left the pup at the top of the stairs, the school bus flying down the hill. Her boy bounded into the house ahead of her.

“First death,” Suzie said.

Thank you, Suzie.

“The rest will be repetitions, sugar. One more last time. ”

Bird remembered a story Tuk had told them about throwing a ball to a dog. Awful little story he had to live with. Tuk threw the ball. The dog caught it, tumbled over a near cliff and died.

“Good thing it happened a long time ago,” Doll Doll said.

C days, D minus days, of course everybody had them.

The pup was heaped at the foot of the stairs. Her boy picked it up. The head swung free, the neck bone snapped.

“Mama? You will get old and bigger next and next you will go back down,” he said. “I will be big as Papa. And you will be my baby. You will be just small, like this. I will carry you all around like this, like a baby, holding you tight in my hands.”

“ In my hands? ” Suzie said. “Oh, sugar.”

Here her breath caught.

“He could fall off the bed and keep sleeping,” Suzie said, “all the long afternoon.”

“Your poet?” Bird wondered.

“Our Mickey. Mine. And hers and hers and hers.”

We lost ourlittle baby like you did. But we got Wolfie back. Also Snowball.

I am writing this myself which remember I could not used to do. Doll Doll is the one what’s teaching me.

Pretty lucky.

Happy trails from Tuk and Doll Doll. You remember us now, dont you?

Bird left theletter under Mickey’s coffee cup for him to come home and find. He was quiet when he came home. He led her quietly to their unmade bed.

He hooked his feet in his boots beside the basket of her ribs. Rolled his knees against her arms into the sockets. Brought a pillow down over her face.