Bird (11 page)

“I brought this cat home,” Doll Doll offered.

“I wish you wouldn't.”

“He's ashamed. He don't want it told.”

“That cat—”

“I know it. Needed helping. He needed helping bad. Such as I did, Tuk. You remember? I was eating out of a bowl.”

“I do. And I remember that old tom popping. It spit. Ringwormy, rabid, god knows. How he howled among the leaves in the shadows, peering down.”

“‘Get him down,' you said, ‘or I'll shoot him!'”

“Little Bit, it is nothing I ever wished to do.”

They went along some, quiet, Doll Doll sucking at her sleeve. The clouds ate away at the mountains. You couldn't see much.

“I can't see.”

She banged her head on the dashboard. She was blacking out, holding her breath, “I can't see.”

“Now, Doll?”

“I fucking hate these fucking mountains and these fucking wasted trees.”

Tuk swung the truck onto the shoulder and held her.

“Talk it out,” he whispered. He stuffed his fingers in her ears. “Use your words.”

Doll Doll hummed and sniffled and Tuk kissed a patch on the top of her head where the hair had been snatched out. He closed his eyes.

Forgot, or seemed to, that they were not alone. Wind rocked the truck. Snowball whimpered and yipped. The heat was off and the cold seeped in and the steam they all made on the windows frosted prettily to ice.

“Take your breath,” Tuk instructed, and tipped her chin up so Mickey and Bird could see.

Doll Doll was smiling again, trying to.

“Now make these poor people feel at home.”

The sun smudged through the clouds as if on cue and all their faces pinked up but for Doll Doll's, which was smeared a gluey blue.

“What a day, what a day for driving,” Tuk declared.

“I go for the suffering dumb.”

“If you smack a fly—” Tuk said.

“Eat it. You have to eat anything you run over or otherwise maim or kill. It's a rule. So you won't. While we travel.”

“Friends, it isn't only you. She'll tug a frog, for instance, from the mouth of a snake. She'll bring a spider in from the cold. She poured sugar out in the kitchen for the ants—
they have to eat, too.
Freed an ox from its traces, a honeybee from a web. She lets the cows out—”

“—to run with the dogs—” Doll Doll said.

“—and with the llama she's set loose and the chickens.
Plus the shoat! the open range! a 900-pound pig! Gone off to grub every posey patch, every hillock of beans in the county.”

“I do do that. It's my nature,” Doll Doll said. “I have a very free and helpful nature. I like a gate that's open. I like Wolfie here and Snowball and how we all light out together like this and let each other go.”

“Gather up, giddyup. Take a picture. Make it quick! A hard little sprint and she'll be gone.”

“I'm very Doll Doll,” Doll Doll admitted. “I'm very moving on.”

Tuk shook his head agreeably—an agreeable man, easy to love, in a hapless sort of way. Surprised by himself—that was the feeling. He clouded over at a clap and his hands shook and he shored himself up against the steering wheel to steady himself to say, “So who is it cleans up after? Tuk baby cleans up after. That's Doll Doll all the way.”

“After what?” Doll Doll said.

“Whatever you're finished with. Anything gimpy or little, try. Try the lonely. What's weary, what's maimed.”

He pulled his hat up, which tweaked his eyebrows. He looked more surprised than ever.

“Ever living one.”

“Ever living what?” Doll Doll said.

“Ever. Living. One.”

“She's not,” Bird said, “living.”

“She?”

“Maggie,” Bird said. “You know, the dog?”

“Is your mama?”

“What?”

“Living. Dead? Is she dead?” Doll Doll asked, hopefully.

“She—” but Bird had never said it out among strangers in the world.

“Or your daddy either one are they—”

“Living?”

“Have you got any people anywhere she wants to know still living?” Tuk explained. “Because her mama is dead and her papa. Her sister is dead and her brother. And her sister's little girl who was just a little girl and the fish and the rabbit and the dog. All her dolls burned up and her dresses and shoes and any little person or treasure that was hers and her hairbrush and matching mirror set with the handles inlaid with jewels. Flamed up. She was in the yard out watching. She was not supposed to be in the yard at all. She was supposed to be up high where her people lived, doing the morning chores.”

“It was a little dry yard fenced around,” Doll Doll added, “how my mama wanted. So nobody could snatch me. Mama put up a high fence, singing. She sang songs from the church and the country while she worked and weaved the fence with flowers. They were flowers you could find in the desert. You could maybe find them here.”

“If you looked,” Tuk said, “if you were lucky. But you're not lucky, sugar lump. You never have been.”

“Tuk wants to take me back there to look at it. I don't want to, I never will.”

“A body runs and runs,” Tuk said. “Nobody gets away. People don't think, they're in a hurry. It isn't small. They park the car, can't think, can't be bothered. City folks, big city life, too much on their minds. Park double. Save a sec. Park anywhere, park triple. Suit yourself, okey doke, move along. Make a deal! Barking on your cellaphone. Flashers in the fire lane. Hope for the best, move on. Fire trucks can't move? Kids and babies? Okey doke. Back in a flash, back in two, hope for the best, hey Johnny? Lord. They'd be alive today, your people, if not for that fellow in a hurry parked so the fire trucks couldn't move. It's the truth. Show your arms, sugar lump, they're like plastic. Melted down. And you're the one got away. Just a kid, hanging on the chain link, watching. Just a kid how you see left living, call it living. I found her laid out in the Greyhound station in Waxahatchie, Texas. She had a little blanket she slept on. She was eating out of a bowl.”

Doll Doll had pulled up her knees to her chest and stretched her bodysuit down across them, unsnapped. The crepe made a tent to her ankles, a hole big enough at the collar to stick down her face down through.

“I found you sleeping, Little Bit. You had your thumb in your mouth. When I picked you up and carried you you never once opened your eyes or moved all the way I carried you home.”

“You called it
home,” Suzie says, “but it was slumming. It was dumb. You could have lived uptown where I live. You could have moved to that beloved country where you holed up the week in that wind you both liked. That is Prairie Lee's wind. It always was, Bird. You can't have it. You never really could.”

“Now we have heard from one small country.”

“Be nice,” Suzie says. “You thought he'd marry, that was hard. Now it's hard he never did. What is that? You're not happy? You don't want to live how you do?”

“But I do,” Bird says.

“Exactly.”

“I want to stay right here,” Bird says. “It's quiet and I like the seasons and how it all moves out and in. It's like rooms outside when the leaves come and every road's a tunnel and everything's moving in. It closes in. I've learned to like that.”

“You know why?” Suzie says. “Because it's autumn. The leaves are falling. The woods open up. Anytime things are moving out, you're in love with moving in.”

“You might be right,” Bird says.

“Trust me. You say it every spring and every fall. That's not your place, Bird. I don't know what is. The great dry blue-eyed quiet? Could be. But when's the last time you saw it, sugar? How long has it been?”

Bird wrote:
I
saw the old place, Mother.

It was all hemmed in by houses. The ditch where the red mare threw you dried up and they filled it in. They tore the barn down. Didn't need it, I guess. The little cross is still there for Hoppy in the mint we planted for our drinks that day. Did I want to come in? the people asked me.

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 old
I 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.