Bird (3 page)

A dozen years they have passed together. He is a book she once read. A dying painter. A woman waving goodbye in the street.

Goodbye, love
, Bird thinks.

She feels her lung clap shut. That old sneak cat.

“Mama, stay awake
with me, Mama. I'm afraid to close my eyes.”

“I can't sleep,
Bird. I'm sorry to wake you.”

Trouble: she had seen him coming:
come here.

He put his cigarette out in her layered drink and brought her to bed, too jangly to sleep.

“I keep thinking if I close my eyes I will never open them again. I'm sorry to wake you. I can't help it. I want to make you proud of me. I want to fuck you until you can't bear it anymore until you wear down and cry. I should let you sleep, Bird. Little sparrow. I'm sorry to wake you. I
keep dreaming you are up on the bridge in the rain and the city is wet and blue. A boat is passing. I can't see your face. Everything is blue. You're all blue. It's beautiful. You are. And I'm in you. I'm in you and the boat is like a ghost of a boat and the stars are like snow but frantic and burning out in your hair.”

Later, months, weeks, she didn't know, Mickey gouged at himself with a penknife.

Asked, “When do I get to kill you?”

“Soon, won't be long.”

How they felt it. He meant it and she did too.

Lunacy, yes, stupid—but it had them by the throat, this idea, some spangly shock of narcotic they made, oblivion—out of nothing.

“When do I get to kill you?”

“What do I get to use?”

The answers came to them in the bedroom, sprung from the heat of fucking—bed talk, potty talk, not a plan so much as a feeling, needling, the watery sloppy hum and drift a grief in her, unhelpable. Something had to give. They would fly off a bridge, dusk coming down; they would slam the car into a wall. Nothing lasting. A moment's impulse, three.

Still an impulse: wasn't it as good most days, any old day, as intention?

The long grown list of intention, the hope of how to be.

Bird keeps grades on herself, the future school marm: a
B day, a D day, details her insufficiencies: too late, too late, forgot. Nice try! The costume hung together with straight pins, the sneakers at the bottom of the pool.

She tries the PTP, the LEC, the LCC—tries service,
attagirl
—all the ad hoc this and that. Nurses a tree in the churchyard. Nothing pure about it. She is balancing deed with the failure to do, hoping for a wash. She brokers her little mercies, pre-pays against calamity, the F and D minus days—thinks in averages, bigger pictures, the solid and sustainable C.

Oiled rusty bike chain

+

played guitar at All School

-

boy sears chin on cookie sheet

-

pup breaks neck on stairs

Bird wants to be caught. Flung out.

Her husband moans
in his sleep, he twitches—a dog chasing squirrels in a dream.

Bird resorts to a different tally, to the one she keeps against him. For dreaming, for instance, when she isn't. For
drinking the last drop of coffee. He never lets her use his toothbrush, or his 25-cent comb.

She wants all of it.

He tells her nothing. Tells her everything. Tells a good joke, his same good joke, and everybody laughs but her. Goofball, high school stories. Mellow man, man of good cheer. Easy to love, happy even asleep—but anything can be wielded.
I was happy and look what you did.

“Did you see what I did? I washed the dishes. I fed the dog. This is me feeding the dog.”

Bird loves him best in pictures, but what does this mean?

And why will he not take pictures—with the baby, her boy growing up? The irretrievable life unrecorded.

“But I do,” he says. “I took a picture. Look there, there you are. There's your pretty boy. I took that. That's a nice little picture.”

She bought a camera for her husband and he lost it in a week with seven shot frames inside.

Bird tried holding out her camera her arm's length away and aiming it down at the three of them, flat on their backs in bed. But she was pissy; she pouted, saw it each time: a woman giving grades out, a woman keeping score.

She'll get over it, fine. No matter. She will survive and die and her babies will live without a record of who they have been. Just as Bird lives. Doesn't matter. It is nothing but a life passing, a day smashed to golden shards.

Love,
she thinks,
and duration.

Sacred and narcotic.

You could fortify
yourself against it. Hedge your bets; heed the signs.

A young man sleeps in a ragtop, for instance. Duct-tapes his sneakers together. His windshield is a patch of Lucite, stitched in, that whistles and thrums when he drives. There is a bullet in the defrost vent; a sack of bite-sized hamburgers deliquesces in the trunk. There are paw prints, handprints, smudge of a nose on each windowpane, the Naugahyde seat in shreds.

Think, girl. Read the signs.

She thinks of pictures they took—Bird of Mickey and Mickey of Bird. Bird slumped over the wheel of a roadster they found rolled into the weeds along the freeway. Her face wrecked, the windows webbed: Mickey's favorite.

Bird's: Mickey afloat above a trampoline, his hair staticked up, a dorsal horn, a boy in a cape, a man shrieking.

She hears her boy getting up down the hallway.

May he be a boy always like Mickey was.

May he wind a strand of hair around his bedpost.

May he sleep for months in a ragtop with the sumac high and survive it.

What an awful word—
survive,
Bird thinks.
Sufficient,
Bird thinks.
Service.

Your porpoise is a service animal. Sufficiently intelligent to deactivate unwanted bombs
.

This is before or after they are bleeding out their brains through their ears? Fucking Navy. Bird takes a short loop through her well-worn rant against the military-industrial complex—the terrors she scarcely thought of before she brought children into the world.

“You mean what's left of the world,” Bird says out loud, and finds her boy at her shoulder saying, “Mama, don't be mad, Mama. There is pee all over my bed.”

He bats at her face gently: that's an apology. Bird kisses his sweaty head. She rises with the baby still at her breast and steps into the moving day.

Bird is washing
her boy's pissy sheets and stirring oatmeal on the stovetop when the telephone rings again.

Suzie again.

“Can't talk,” Bird says. “I'm called.”

“You dope,” Suzie says. “I'm checking in on you. You okay? You won't be able to reach me. I'll be in the sack all week, sugar. My poet's up from New Orleans. It's all cocktails and crème brulee for us. I'm not budging to pick up the phone.”

“I've been warned,” Bird says. “That should do it.”

“I mean it, sugar. You need anything? You sounded like you hurt.”

“I hurt,” Bird says, “and I improve. Every day by day. The bone knits up quite nicely. You?”

“Bruised,” Suzie says. “Nothing broken. My ass is an unsightly yellow and my head is a little green.”

“Your timing's bad.”

“I should say.”

“I'll let you go.”

“I'm broke. I want a little dope for when he's here.”

“That'd be nice,” Bird says.

“We make our choices, I guess.”

“And then we lie in them. I'm not floating you a loan.”

“I didn't ask you to. I asked if you were okay,” Suzie says.

“Well I slept and then you called and then I slept a little more. And then the baby waked.”

“We make our choices.”

“We do.”

Bird thinks again of her husband sleeping, the warmth of his breath on his pillow.

It takes a funny sort of discipline to give yourself away.

Bird tries again to summon it and balks at the want for uncharted sleep while the sun swings under the world. But who sleeps anymore? Not even Suzie.

The phone rings in the dark. Suzie needs a ride from the bus stop. Suzie spent her last nickels on pizza. Suzie's new pal she's been sleeping with shoved her lightly on accident—
on accident—
down the stairs.

“But you should see him,” Suzie says, “sleeping. He sleeps with his eyes open. He sleeps with his arms tossed over his head like a falling god. The moon is on him. It draws the tides in him toward the air—like dew, opened up, like he's blooming, like he is some succulent moon-white bloom dropped into my bed and lethal. I could tear him apart just to touch him.”

“And he is what,” Bird asks, “seventeen?”

“Newly carved. The boy glows like a skinned pear.”

Bird's boy tugs at her robe. He needs her, it's true. He needs his blue socks. He wants that yellow hat with that M.

Bird wants the heart to hang up, quit—but she can't summon it quite, never has.

The morning is going. She finds the grooved spoon, favored. She ladles oatmeal over an army guy, a gluey mass, a joke he'll get, go, “Unh?”

He wants toast. He wants a little toast with syrup. May she make him a
dosht
with
seebup
and butter and one little dust of the cinnamon, Mama, “Mama, please, if you don't, will you please?”

“If I don't?” she asks.

“I will never say good night to you again.”

“Are you talking to me?” Suzie wants to know. “I'm still here.”

“Hold on, hold on,” Bird says to both of them, and each of them says, “No way.”

Her boy plunges out the door into the morning dew and appears again at the window. He grins, a mess, his lip is split, his teeth a train wrecked in his head. He licks the glass—there's an X—and is gone.

“I'm still here,” Suzie says, “but I'm going, sugar. We may never speak again.”

“Oh, quit,” Bird says.

“I'm just saying.”

“Well, don't,” Bird says. “Take care of yourself, would you?”

“Oh, I do,” Suzie says. “I take lots of care.”

“Don't let your poet knock you down the stairs.”

“Fool me once,” Suzie says.

“Says the president.”

“Remember that mother in Brooklyn who tripped going down the stairs—”

“Goodbye, Suzie.”

“—and drove that pipe into her head?” Suzie says. “That was awful.”

“Suzie.”

“We may never speak again.”

“You would miss my milky oatmeal,” Bird says, stirring, “with the raisins plumped up just right.”

“Your scraped toast I love.”

“Exactly.”

“The smell of fire in every room.”

When it was
summer still, days you could still ride a bike in your skirt or ride your girl around town in a ragtop, your dog; summer still, days kids bang the hydrants open and drive their bodies hard through the spray; Haitians on the stoop, hypodermics; music blaring up and down the street; summer still (
No Sitting Aloud
); White Castle burgers for breakfast (too hot to cook, too easy not to want to) for dinner, if they ate it, for lunch, for a time; days the ground-up mess of their haunches still healed from skidding out on Bird's bike in the street, the skin mounding over the glass they had picked up, tried to pick out, evermore would carry; days the willows in the park wore their hair down still for Mickey and Bird to lie under, in the sun should the wind allow it, in the shadows on their faces as they slept; before the nights cooled, before the first leaves turned, Bird and Mickey thought to find a place together.

They found a place burned up by a voodoo drummer who had left his candles burning. Cat tipped over the candlestick. The kitty litter ignited. The guy was banging his skins, meantime, at a fertility rite in Queens.

It was a step up, sure, from the ragtop. But the place was sooty head to foot when Bird and Mickey moved in, velvety with ash. Every room smelled of fire.

Bird's mother appeared and said:
Run.

“Why slum?” Suzie said. “It's stupid. You could live uptown like I do.”

“You could keep your feet in a bucket,” Bird said.

But what Suzie said was true: they were broke but they didn't have to be. It was a thing to try. It was a badge of something, a feeling they liked—not to live every day a scrubbed-up life, sensibly decided, steaming on ahead. It was a way to keep things from happening: to be, and to hold themselves off from becoming.

Neighbor kids banged the hydrant open, summer days, and launched their bodies through the spray. The water seemed to drive clean through them. There was a boy Bird thought looked like Mickey as a boy—a skinny, noble, wild-looking boy who made her want to make her own wild boy and drive him far away.

Drive away, go away. We could, Bird insisted, even early on—before the signs coalesced. The trees were turning. The ragtop hadn't been towed.

Instead they scrubbed and scraped and painted, settled in. Bird took a job for a week and quit it—crumbing tables, some fancy joint. She wanted to keep to home. They built a bed from scrap. They found a table on the street and bought daisies and ate them, all but one. They threw sticks in the river for the dog to fetch, who fished out sheets of plywood, a boot, a mannish, ragged, woolly coat they dragged home for her to sleep on.

The dog slept underneath their bed. She whimpered when they fucked and clawed at the floor and bounded up and down the hall.

Run,
her mother kept saying.

And Suzie said, “Why?”

But they liked it. The sun slid a finger through the alley, afternoons, and laid it across their bed.

“It's like food,” Mickey said, and pushed her legs apart, “for your flower. Let me have a look at that flower.”

And: “I looked in the mirror just now. I reminded me of you. Does that make sense? Do you see, Bird?”