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.