He dumped sugar on the table he was flicking at Bird.
“We ought to have taken what was left of her, Bird. We kept a tissue, Bird, a piece of the bloody bedsheet. Shame on me. Shame on us. We don’t think right. Everything was there.”
He took a breath but he wasn’t finished. He took her hands in his hands. The day was darkening. It was going to get darker still.
“Bird? I’m the one who named you. Not Faith, not Hope, not Charity. Bird. There’s not a bird I don’t like, not exactly. I like ospreys. I like tiny owls living in holes. I like that cranes find their way by the stars while half their brain is sleeping. Mates for life. The condors that live in the Andes — those monsters mate for life, too. Geese do. Plenty of birds. It’s common. They log thousands of miles, wing to wingtip. They grieve. It takes a heart of rock not to believe it. What I’ve read, I believe is true: you kill a condor and its mate, done in by grief, will plunge to its death from the sky. We don’t believe it because we don’t want to. We want to kill them ourselves with bolas. Lash them to the backs of bulls. We want to climb the trees they are sleeping in and club them on their brainy heads. Call it science. Sport. Gaucho pastime. Darwin’s helpers with geology hammers. When condors sleep, they sleep hard. We call that stupid.
“Cranefly, I could have called you. I could have called you Bean. You think it matters? I called you Bird. I like birds. Birds know too fucking much, it’s spooky. Your Hoppy, no doubt, was dumb. Rabbits are dumb. They die of fright. They scream. Bunny, I could have called you, but I didn’t. I didn’t. People should be named for themselves. You never gave me a name for anything. You call my name like everyone else. Why is that, Bird? You don’t think of me? I’m Mickey like everyone else? I think you’re careless, is what. You’re not thinking. You’re making a mark you can’t see.
“Bird? If I named you for a bird I’d name you Sparrow. Maybe Wren. I thought of Phoebe, a phoebe is faithful, it comes back and goes away. Polyandrous, polyamorous, the loosely colonial — I like them all. I like chickadees, little home-body birds who stick around and sing all winter long. Chickadee. A bird named for its song. I like whippoorwills, sitting alone in the dark coming down. They go quiet. Then they sing the song they were named for in the dewfall and dimming woods. Whip-poor-will. We have to think more. We’re making tracks, Bird, everybody is. There are marks where anyone has been.
“But, Bird? That baby of ours was nothing. We named her to be taken, to be nothing. She was tatters, Bird. A bloody dumpling. Think. Little Caroline, little Caroline. She was nothing. I never even wanted her. I only wanted you.”
I wanted you, Bird wrote to her mother.
I’ d be you.
I would wear your dresses and carry you around and in this you would be a mother again and a baby and I wouldn’t be a dead baby’s mother and not a girl with a dying mother, over and over again. I’d be nothing at all. I’d be you.
They were going to have to move and keep moving or else they were going down. They’d go to Albuquerque. Hitch there. It was still an idea, hitching. They would appear on the old lady’s stoop in the sun and say, It’s us, hello.
Bird bought a Styrofoam cooler for beer and twelve tall boys of Pabst. She double-bagged their clothes, brought extra bags to use as slickers — for sleet, if it came, for snow.
Her jaw was swelling; it was yellowing and blue.
They made green together, yellow and blue. Blue and red made purple.
And what did yellow and Bird make?
And what did Mickey and blue?
“And Mickey and Bird?” Mickey asked.
And Bird said, “A bloody stew.”
He stuffed her hat down on her head.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “Sorry.” He kissed her. “That was dumb.”
“Bunnies are dumb,” Bird said.
She dropped a bag at her feet and stuck her thumb out. All their clothes were lumped up in Glad bags, glisteny, thick, sturdy things slouched on the snowy berm.
“I’ll call you Man Afraid,” Bird said. “Sleeps A Lot. Sound good?”
She could talk still so she was talking. Pretty soon, she would quit.
What they had come to see, they had seen by then: the salt pillars, the burying grounds. The concrete Garden of Eden — ugly, ugly, that kook in his cut-away coffin on perpetual display. They took pictures: meals they had eaten, neon signs, Mickey’s boots tipped over in the road. They took a ten-second film of a pear they ate, the pear stood up on a fencepost with a bite taken out, another bite, as with time lapse, until it was a slumping core.
This then this then this: days hooked together like pop-tops in a lacerating chain.
They hauled their cooler off into the bushes and lined out a last line of junk. A little boost. They were going to miss that: the tidy gray packets that Mickey kept with the bloody scrap of bedsheet they saved, with Maggie’s dewclaw and a daisy and the curl of a Hasidim boy.
They waited together in the bushes until they had both thrown up. Disgusting — throwing up with your jaw clamped shut. They washed out their mouths with beer.
They had left their Glad bags on the shoulder in the snow and somebody stopped, a big guy, slow, and threw them into the back of his wagon. He drove a wood-paneled wagon from the 70s, the last of its lovely kind. Government man. If it was on the shoulder, he picked it up. That was the job the state paid him to do.
They could smell the wagon before they reached it — acrid, ammoniac — but their clothes were already in back. The storm was picking up and the cloud socked in and snow had seeped into their bootsoles. They got in.
Mickey tried breathing through a sack of orange peels: that helped. Bird let her head swing down between her knees. There were bodies in back, road kill, a sticky heap, legs and legs, the mess of death and weather.
Bird saw a match on the floorboard and lit it and her tooth ignited, hideous lump, and the nectar she had tasted since Kansas bubbled up at the root of her tongue. She swung her head up and reached for the door of the car.
“Get me out.”
They got out, ferried as far as the second ramp south without their first citation.
“How you feel?” Mickey said.
“Pretty drifty. Nice.”
“Wish we had more of it.”
“Good thing we have you.”
“I’d like the Hyatt. A hot bath.”
“So nice,” Bird said.
“The lights at our feet of the city.”
“Yeah. Pizza Hut delivered.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Neither am I. I may never be hungry again.”
They tossed snowballs at passing traffic.
“We’ll cause an accident.”
“We are an accident.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t, it’s true.”