Bird (8 page)

Sorry, love.

Welcome to the world.

“What's left of the world,” Bird says again, second time today.

They walk the
loop: neighbor, neighbor, sugar house, pond. Pretty little pond you can't swim in. You'll come out with an extra nose.

The baby's happy.
How did I get such a happy baby?
Bird wonders.

Blue blue day, bit of sunshine. The legendary leaves.

They are watching a movie of us and we are watching a movie of them and everybody's happy,
Bird thinks.

White whale. The same eye sweeping past, not so different. Small. The dark clear curious orb.

Now there's a word,
orb,
you don't hear every day.

Dropped your orball. I kin get it.

The town cat, killer cat, rubs against Bird's leg.

“You want my happy baby, don't you? You can't have her, not in a million years.”

In a million years, Bird thinks, what will the planet look like? What, in another ten?

She walks on, feeling lighter, sobering up. She shakes out her shirt in a sunshiny field and they lie on it, Bird on her back and the baby on Bird's chest, one heart bumping into the other. She'd like to sleep here, wake in falling dew. The baby holds up her head to look at Bird, to gnaw on Bird's chin, but now she's tired—spent beyond wanting and soft all at once. Everything in that baby gives way.

It is the dearest crushing feeling.

Bird makes a roll bar of her elbows and rolls with the baby against her, gently down the hill.

“Don't be afraid,” she says, “like your mama. Love and be done with it. Let go. Hold on,” she says, “may you always.”

The baby is lying on her back, batting at Bird's face, the silver heads of the grasses nodding all around.

“I'll eat you up,” Bird says, “You're too pretty. You mustn't be ashamed to be pretty. Don't be proud. People will envy you; you have to let them. People will hate you—you let them. Don't let them take anything from you, my girl. They'll take everything. You have to give yourself away.”

Bird kisses the baby's pinkening cheeks, the knob of her spitty chin.

“Be good to yourself, my little lollipop. Never love a boy like Mickey. I don't mean that.”

She presses her mouth against the baby's creamy belly.

“What I mean, lollipop, is love him. Love him hard and be done.”

Bird picks the baby up, puts her shirt back on. The ferns are withering, sweetening the air.

“Love me,” Bird says, “you have to promise. Promise me you will write to me when you are all gone away and grown.”

They go inside,
the kitchen dim, hard at first to see. First thing Bird sees is the telephone and she picks it up to call Mickey, hangs it up again. A grown woman. Christ above. She's got a baby. She shakes. She is shaking that baby too.

She tries Suzie. She wants to tell Suzie the sound Mickey made, the girlish, dry, collapsing gasp when he took her. But Suzie will say, “I know.”

“He's got pinworms.”

“Mickey?”

“My boy,” Bird says.

“I'll let you go,” Suzie says.

“Come on, Suzie. You don't want to know about pinworms? Quiet pale morsels you can see through, small as a grain of rice.”

The pinworm eats at night, the pediatrician told Bird. “Take a look with a flashlight while he's sleeping,” she advised. “They break apart as they leave the body—little fellows, friable, sliding out of the hole.”

“I'm not all that wild about humans,” Suzie says. “We
eat each other. We don't behave. We thought to send Mexican free-tailed bats into Japan loaded down with napalm in the second world war. Dragged them out of their caverns. Put them on ice so they'd sleep. Another shining human endeavor to rival the exploding harpoon.”

Suzie takes a drag on something. Bird can hear it over the phone.

“There are too fucking many of us besides, and you and Doctor Said So just went and made two more.”

“So get your tubes tied, you don't like humans,” Bird says. “Be done with it.”

“Right. Never give blood again.”

Suzie takes another drag and a swig of something that comes in a glass with ice.

“When humans get wiped off the planet,” Suzie says, “do you know this? The subways in New York City will engorge with sea water in days.”

“When?” Bird says.

“What?”

“
When humans get wiped off the planet
,” Bird says. “Don't people still say
if
?”

“Matter of time,” Suzie says, it's what she always says. “Maybe pinworms will do the trick. Something sneaky and easily broken. Friable, you like to say.”

Bird goes back
to the photo album, the bloody birth pictures, spooky, the baby still stricken and blue. Bird flips the page, going backwards, comes upon the murk that is her baby unborn, an image they make with sound.

“Here you are,” Bird says, “waving. Here is the one of you sucking the pale peninsula of your thumb.”

She is all spread apart, a tiny continent. A mass with migrating eyes.
Little Whale, White Moon.

The bodies toxic. Where had Bird seen that? They were rolling belugas in cellophane, men in gloves and suits. Disposing. The whole pod—the soon-to-be-dead, the living. Beached. Bodies gasping on the strand.

You can quit the news but it finds you, some picture you didn't mean to see. That little girl dead with her books in her lap. The illuminated page. Foot soldiers, somebody's boy, creeping into the blast.

There's no way to live far enough from it. No matter the pact you make with yourself—it gets at you and eats.

Somebody's boy on the waterboard. Sounds okay to me.

Says who?

Say the fat cats, says the president.
Folks, we are doing everything we can
.

Such a flocked-around helpless feeling, a rage, and Bird was chumped by it—she knew better: fat cats were making money making fear she couldn't shake.
Code orange, people, keep it calm. Now let's bump her up to code red.

You bet. Like ants, they were, sent to scurry. Snatching for beans and Sterno, a spade.
Dig a hole. Hully up. Bring the Vizqueen.

Sure, it passed. And when the worst of it passed you could slump back and live among the daily horrors. That was nice. The spectacle of smallpox. The war going peacably along. The icecap melted.
Owright.
The thing mutates,
owright,
but it's a frog. Heck. It's a elephant. It lives away off, it ain't you.

But it is, Bird thinks. It's you. She thinks of an old movie she saw—
mzungu
in a pith helmet stepping out of a Cessna on the vast grassy savannah, not a chance in the world to hide.

Do you say
pod
, as with whales, for the elephant?
Pod
, is it, or
tribe
?
A murder, a pride, a herd,
Bird thinks.

They're all out there, big as elephants, big yellow African sky.

I want that one,
says the shitball, and shoots.

The animal takes a long time falling. It gives itself up in stages against its mighty will. He turns to the next elephant and takes a shot at it, too.

I want that one. And then I want that and that one then and her and her and her.

Those girls.

Columbine,
pretty name, couple of quiet boys.

Those are the ones to kill you. The sheriff calls you for dental records and your life goes black and gray.

It is a day like any other, Bird thinks. Pretty place, mountains at your back, tough country.
Home. Been knowing it all my life. Lives of mine before it.

Simple lives, used to be. Homesteaders, sheepherders.

School bus coming prettily—you can't hear it yet—up the road. You scoot her out. Not a sign, no way in the world to stop it.

But you're the mother.

You are the one who is supposed to know.

The baby hooks
Bird's lip with her finger: the baby wants Bird to sing. So she sings: little snowflake, white shell, that one. And kisses all ten toes. Bird counts her lucky stars to eleven and quits. Thinks:
quit while you can and hide them, woman. The gods are greedy, too.

She cranks the music, dances the baby upstairs. It helps. A little sunshine helps. Dewfall soon. She ought to walk back out without shoes. Pass her toes through the early glittery wet, the grass with its sparky dew.

Sparky
—that's her boy's word.

Count of three. Look both ways twice.

Now move on.

Take a picture.

“Hey, hey, Mama. Take a little one of me.”

“It's a little bit, it's a little bit, it's a little bit hot,” her boy says.

And drops his pants from the bridge.

“Hey, take a little one of me.”

What to do?
Lock your babies in a closet in the dark all day and slide rice under the door? Keep them out of the sun, keep the wind from their eyes, keep them off the country road. From TV, keep them, and victorious boys, heroes hoisting the flag. From the man in a hood with the white of his palms opened skyward, wired, by head and foot and hand. From that. The next war, war to end all wars, first war of the brand new century, the unrelenting brassy gong. The poor pagans, the un- and under-chosen, the great sweeping cry to arms. To Swords! Face the Nation. From that, keep them. From the static of indecision. From desire and the absence of desire. The fly in the web that does itself in by flying. By tattered wings, by tiny dry ambitions. From that, keep them. From me, Bird thinks—goer-between, meddler. Damp consoling shade.

She could write a letter, fat chance. Scrub commodes. Here's that respite, the solitary hours—before suppertime, before the school bus comes. What to do, what to do. Try the treadmill—right.

“You'd feel better,” says her husband, says Suzie.

“Better than what?” Bird says.

“You think I'm fat?” she asked her boy. “You think Mama's too fat?”

He looked her over.

“To do what?”

The baby's arms swing up, silly baby, asleep: she thinks she is falling out of a tree.

Bird washes a fork. Pays a bill and walks it to the mailbox. Comes back and picks up the phone. She won't answer, Bird thinks, but Suzie answers.

“Your poet?” Bird asks.

“Elsewhere. He went out for chips and beer.”

“And he's behaving? You're okay?”

“You worry too much.”

“It's a habit. It's a reason for living.”

“Ah, that one,” Suzie says.

“You'll see.”

“Bet you five bucks I'll never.”

“What?”

“You've been drinking, Bird. I hear it. You've been thinking and it isn't good. The world's done for. We've trashed the planet. There won't be water when your babies are grown.”

“I can't help it.”

“Sugar, you have to. Walk.”

“I just did.”

“Do it again. Get out. Try dancing. Make Doctor Said So keep the babies and go out and have a high time. I'll set you up, sugar. It's Italian you want, you want a Frenchman? In a heartbeat, with that hair of yours, I could find you a
classy Latin. Why not? Dance a little, sugar. Let him sweat on you. Let him back you into the back of the room.”

“Enough.”

“Enough?” Suzie laughs. “It's almost nothing.”

“I don't know why I called,” Bird says.

“You're drunk, is why. And you're lonesome. You want someone to say his name to, but you won't, not even to me.”

“It's easy for you. You talk to him.”

“I do what I want. That's me. You're afraid to want anything. You say his name and the scenery goes to pieces. What I think? You should get in your car and find him. Leave your babies. Go to him. Find out who he still is. He's in—”

“Cut it out, Suzie Q. Don't tell me.”

“Why not? He's in church next door in his underpants. He's in Ushuaia, look it up, where I saw him last, at the far away tip of the world.”

“You loved him, too, don't forget.”

“Fool me once,” Suzie says, “many years ago.”

“That worked nicely.”

“Don't gloat,” Suzie says. “I wanted sunshine.”

“You wanted Mickey. A kitchen sink and a gingham apron. A patch of grass to mow.”

“I'll let you go now, Bird. I'm going.”

“You wanted to make little red-haired babies!”

“The one time and never again.”

Mickey wouldn't move
and then he got to moving. Bird went west with him and south, a long way around, and when they came back around to Brooklyn, Mickey looked south again. He wanted out, skip the gray.

We're soon over,
said the note.

He said he was going alone. He went with Suzie.

Suzie spelled him driving south; it was winter. He had bought a car that mostly worked. His radio worked and the windows, all but one. He liked to drive in the heat with the windows down.

He would want a little place, Suzie guessed. Something. A week in a clean soft bed.

But he didn't. He had his car he thought to sleep in. He found a boat sloshed up from a hurricane he could tack a lean-to on.

“So I'm home,” Suzie called Bird.

It was sleeting. Suzie needed a ride from the bus stop, she had tossed out her winter coat.

“That was useful,” Bird told her, digging. “You didn't like the sun?”

Sun and wind
and shadow. A boy on a swing. The grasses golden.

But the days went gray in Denver and cold and they were grounded now, evened out, and Bird's jaw had begun to stiffen. She couldn't talk much; she didn't want to.

The Drive Away clerk went north again—the forecast for old Cheyenne was windy, windy and blue.

They'd go south. South for the heat and sunshine: Nogales, Cuernavaca, La Paz. Eat peyote and sweat with the Mexicans, clear the cobwebs out.