Bird (7 page)

Mickey didn't wake
right away; she had to shake him. Their phone was cut off so they bundled Bird in the dog's old hairy blanket and went down the stoop into the street. The blood kept coming, pleasant almost, warm at least, for a minute. She wished he would carry her, but this was silly. The bodegas were closed, the pay phones smashed. There was hardly a car on the street. At last a cabbie stopped, took a look at Bird, and peeled off.

By the time they got to the ER, Bird was shaking with cold and delirious. Mickey had tried to carry her. Blood was matted in his hair, streaked across his face, across Bird's face, the mark of the dream they shared. Bird whimpered and talked to her mother. She wouldn't talk to Mickey or look
at him. The room flew up if she looked at him and whipped around her head.

They knocked Bird out to finish up with it, the old D & C, the flush and suck, dilatation, curettage, good to go, up and out. She could have watched if she had wanted but she didn't. Mickey walked her in in her paisley shift, in stages helped her lie down. A gentle man, good to her. Loving of the lesser animals, good to her and kind.

They would find a way to speak of it. He would tell her in bits when she wanted to hear and stop should she ask and she didn't. She waked and slept and when she waked at last, the day was lifting and blue. She kept her head turned away and said nothing. The sun blazed through the murky window and blotted out the room.

When she spoke, it was to say she was ready to hear whatever Mickey had seen. Hear it all, she insisted, and be finished with it—Bird who was finished with nothing.

What was left was all tatter and thread, he told her. Broth and a bloody dumpling that caught and flinched in the tube.

“The tube?” she asked. “No, don't tell me.”

How the brew splatted out in pickle jars, he told her—
tickle jars
was what Mickey said, by accident. Everything about it was accident, wantonness, and they laughed at the slip out of habit—hard for a beat and then harder until Mickey couldn't quit.

Bird hung back and watched him. She thought,
Here is a man drowning, a boy going hopelessly down.

They had set her big feet hard in stirrups: same for the dead as for the living.

“This will hurt,” she remembered. “You're going to feel a bit of a—easy—a bit of a—pinch.” Yes. How they said it.

A pinch, a breeze, a prod. A leaf on its back with its feet in the air blown dryly down a road. Sort of that. They thought up things to say sort of about it.

“Time to go to the butcher,” they said, and after that they said nothing at all.

They found a
booth in back of a coffee shop, a heater working feebly against the season. Bird pulled her chair up to it; she was cold and she couldn't get warm. She tossed toast crumbs into the vent to burn and fed it strands of hair. Bird thought to call Suzie, but Suzie was elsewhere. Suzie was straddling an icy crevasse, rappelling down a palisade of stone. Suzie was hang gliding,
you should try it, sugar,
off the highest live volcano in the world.

“We lost our little Caroline,” Bird told the waitress when she came. “We had a baby and now she's gone.”

Mickey was gone, too. Bird didn't know where. She couldn't think how anything happened.

“Did he tell you what I should do?” Bird asked the waitress.

“He said to wait here.”

Bird had made a mess on the bench she was trying to hide.

“Not to worry,” the waitress told her. “He'll be back, sugar.”

Nobody called her sugar but Suzie.

A whale is closer to a camel than to a fish, sugar.

Bird would never speak to Suzie again.

The bench was Naugahyde, a mottled red, the whole world should be red when you are bleeding. Bird lay down on the bench as if into the blood she had lost and sleep carried her away.

The place was closed by the time Bird waked again, but the waitress was still there, talking to Mickey. Bird feigned sleep and watched them.

If you touch her,
Bird thought,
I swear to you
—but she couldn't think what she would do.

She half knew where she was. She raised her head and knocked into the table and her hair hung up in the flashing that prettified the rim.

“Hello, sleepy,” Mickey said, and walked Bird through the snow to the buckaroo's car they were to drive across the country to Cheyenne.

He opened the door for Bird. “Nice rig.”

“I'll drive.”

He had smoothed a garbage bag out for Bird to sit on. He laid the seat back for her; she bumped it up again. She cranked the heat to high and they turned for the west,
toward the last light leaving the sky. Three exits, a bridge, and they were lost, making hard blind turns down quiet streets, squinting into the snow. These were streets without even bodegas, block upon unlit block in collapse, a maze swept of anything living. The snow floated up, spun among leaves and wrappers in the piddly light their headlights cast: the world was flat after all, flipped over, repeating its small features. Bird was queasy; she leaked. Her head was still a mile from her feet and wind blew lightly through it.

“I give up,” she said, pushed the words from her mouth.

Bird was asleep before Mickey found a road out and slept through dark and daylight; she waked to a stubble of corn on the plains and the slow-swung heads of oil wells, glad for the clean rim of the land, glad at last to see. She saw the Cross of the Plains in a bean field, the wing—ripped free—of a Cessna lashed to the bed of a truck.

She said, “My mother appeared in a box in my sleep to bring me a loop of pearls. Quick: before the doctor found out who she was. He was handsome, they are always handsome, with a ringlet of hose and a scissors.”

They had scraped the mother in Bird out. Her mother was tiny, Thumbelina, set out on a rind of lemon across a bloody stew.

They drove dirt
roads, a farmy grid, the houses high and white.

“Slow,” she said, “I want to see.”

A boy sat a log hung from a rope from the generous branch of an elm. Mickey stopped the car; they rolled their windows down. The day smelled of willow and grass, the grass brittle and furred, palomino.

The boy's sister wound him up by his knees. It wasn't winter here yet; they had thrown their coats to the ground. A last leaf rocked down and the boy lunged at it and swung his good leg up. He had lost his other leg at the knee. The boy's sister wound him up on the swing, away from her, into the paltry shadows. He was a long-haired boy and his hair was loose and in his teeth was a grass blonde as he was.

“Far enough,” he said, “too far—”

No bigger a boy than Bird's is. His voice bellowed in his chest like a man's.

The boy's sister let loose and ducked away. He spun slowly at first, and faster, and the more he spun the faster he went, the more spinning pressed him out. His neck showed, a stalk, brockled and thin. His head seemed barely hooked to it and his hair, as if pulled, streamed out. He blurred, a body churned to butter.

The sister hopped from foot to foot; she babbled. The sound she made made two sounds, knocked from the flat face of the house. It ran its course through corrugate fields, the furrows at the sky converging like paths of a fine-toothed
comb. She snatched her brother's hair as he passed and this slowed him, jerkily, and dragged him askew on the swing. She tried to help him; his foot struck her in the mouth. He was coming off the swing. Cripple boy. The log was tipped; the stub of his leg was off it. He hung against the rope holding on with his hands and the rope, unwound, wound up again, according to the laws of motion. The rope thickened with his hair. It wound up with the rope until he hung by his hair, a carnival act, an object still in motion, moved by the fact of its moving, spinning itself out again. His foot flopped about below him and caught his sister in the mouth again.

“Remember the bar on Avenue B? Remember the pipe we rolled in?” Bird asked.

“It wasn't so long ago. I do, Bird.”

He had asked her to marry him. It seemed impossible, marriage, anything at all.

“He stepped on a fishing hook,” Bird said. “It broke off in his heel. He didn't tell his folks, he was afraid to. He told his sister because nobody listens to her, not even the mother,” Bird said.

“There's no mother,” Bird said.

The father was starting across the field with a pitchfork. He had let the door to the house slap shut and the girl twitched, startled, shot. You could shoot her again and again, Bird thought, and still she would refuse to die. She was burbling.

Lunacy made her invincible. She was to blame for nothing.

“He couldn't get his foot in his shoe,” Bird said. “The poison was running up his leg—bolts of yellow, bolts of blue. Too late,” Bird said, “end of story.”

“Think so?”

“I do. It's the old
too late.
Quiet and slow and deadly.”

Bird picked up a rock and threw it and a hot little fibrous grume of blood slid into her pants again.

“You asked me to marry me,” Bird said. “I mean you.”

She was crying again, quietly, her hair falling over her eyes. Mickey moved off; he had her hand in his hand. The girl was hidden away in the grasses, her brother above her turning, still hanging from the rope by his hair. A tableau.

The father had nearly reached them.

He was jogging now with his pitchfork, shouting, “Who the hell are you?”

They drove on.
Interstates and dirt roads. Hay packed away in great round bales, wind rolling over the prairie. They saw the salt pillars in Kansas, strange and unadorned. Rock fence posts. Double rainbow. They had a route they were told to follow that they followed not at all. They saw Crazy Horse rising out of the plains, out of the town of Custer, named after Custer; they saw the fort where Crazy Horse died, a prisoner held by his people, by Little Big Man, Young Man Afraid, while Private Gentles ran the bayonet through him.

“Cheer up, baby sweet. I wish you could,” Mickey said.

Bird didn't want to—not yet. But soon. The country was working on her, the low rose gone to russet, the high bright move-along clouds. She was hungry again and gorged herself on chicken fried steak and Skittles, on vermilion faces of canyons, cliffs you could dig with a spoon. Bandolier, Mesa Verde, Chaco canyon—this was her girlhood, her blood's country, the great dry American open.

“Open up,” Mickey said, and she did.

Cantaloupe in the bathtub, love, the curtains drawn, the heat blasting.

“Feed me to the furnace when I die,” Bird said, “and leave a little bit of me here—” in the bed, she meant, of the Super 8, exit 42 off the interstate, where the mirrors come down off the wall.

They were days
late, dollars short, by the time they got to Cheyenne, but the Drive Away clerk didn't care.

“You look happy,” she said. “Where you headed? I bet you don't even know.”

Which was true: they didn't. The clerk was headed down to Denver. She would take them south if they wanted.

“It doesn't blow as hard in Denver,” she said. “I had a friend had a car door blow shut on her here and it broke her leg in two places.”

“How you tell a tourist from a local?” she said. “A tourist chases his hat.”

“I don't get it,” Mickey said.

“In the wind, babe. When the wind picks his hat off his head?”

She sort of socked him in the arm, flirting.

“What's the difference between a rancher and a 747? When it sets down in Honolulu, a 747 quits whining.”

“That's a good one,” Mickey said, and socked her right back.

She told jokes all the way to Denver, not a one of them better than these.

“Who's the best
baby on the planet?” Bird asks. “Think: princess with 49 dresses. Little Miss sparkly shoes.”

The baby is like a doll Bird dresses who cannot quite sit up. She would do better, like as not, in the sea. Little guppy.

“Silly, guppies don't live in the sea,” Bird says.

Bird is cleaning, sort of. She sweeps. She spits on a stain on the kitchen floor and rubs the spot clean with her sock feet.

What in the world, Bird thinks, are your sock feet? Hers are filthy; they'll do.

Bird slides her feet into her husband's boots and sets off down the road with the baby breathing sweetly against her chest. The geese are moving.

So soon? Can't you stay?

What if she had stayed in the west, Bird thinks, with Mickey, out in the dry wide open?

Yep. And what if the moon were cheese?

And what if they made you president, Bird, or better yet, the Queen?

She'd raze the suburbs, give it all back to the animals, open the gates of the zoo.

Was it true there was a zoo of good Christians to prove God's impeccable design? Better throw the bolt on that one. Those people need to die. She would line them all up—the CEOs, the greedy guts, the poachers, the cheats. Let the hyenas have at them.

Now there's a sport for your networks, yup. Let's get rid of the buttons and levers, return to hand-to-hand. It's just you, High Sir, and the hyena. You get a stick. The hyena gets a loop of your colon to unspool you by.
Now run.

Nice, Bird thinks, and you're a mother? You keep the tally for the PTP?

The neighbor is still burning plastics: throw him in. Quick. Let his ticker quit.

I'm sorry, is what she means to say. Sorry, sweetheart, about the elephants. About the sea turtles with their heads lopped off, and the friendly, machine-gunned whales. About the owls, my love, and the antelope. About the drowning bears, the baby seals clubbed, the cormorants grounded by oil. About that wall we threw up to keep the Mexicans out
across a migratory pathway millions of years old. For the sharks, finned and starving. Sorry. The food riots. The refugees. Dioxin in Mama's breast milk, sorry. Mercury in tuna; chickens with their beaks cut off, fed their own shit from a tube. It's cheap. It's worth it.