“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.
Sorry, love.
Welcome to the world.
“What’s left of the world,” Bird says again, second time today.