They tried hitching for a time with Mickey hidden in the brush that poked out over the driftings of snow, a new tactic: the lone female, the vagrant waif.
No dice. There was Bird’s jaw puffed up, pooched along the toothbone — blue, bruised, her mouth lumped shut.
Somebody fishtailed an El Camino, flipped her off, sent a gray dollop of slush to break against her neck. A boy leaned from his window, screaming, “I AM SCREAMING AT YOU!” and sped south, south to cactus and sage and piñon and sun, the curve of Bird’s clean horizon. Lizards in the woodpile. Frizzy-headed seeds of cottonwood, soup of the Rio Grande. Old home.
I’d like to get there, Bird thought.
They would never get there. They would piddle days away on the interstate, on the off-ramp, on the on.
She thought of an old song and sang it: the one about the bicycle, the roller skate, the key.
“Hello, love,” Mickey said, and goosed her.
He had come up out of hiding to her, creeping through the brush.
“I missed you.”
I miss Maggie, Bird thought.
“I miss Maggie,” Mickey said. “If she were here, she would take down your hair.”
He took her hair down and worked his fingers through it.
He chewed up a grape for Bird for a poultice, something to draw the heat. Every hour Bird’s tooth felt hotter, and the skin of her cheekbone sparkled, how it felt. By and by she couldn’t open her mouth more than the width of his tongue, should he wish, and he wished it, and moved to kiss her, her face blazing and plumped and solid, tight, and Bird lost for an instant the difference again — between what was hers, what his. His tongue was briefly cool in the heat of her mouth and then like something liquid, warmed, melted away, that she was free to swallow.
Free and clear, free and clear, how Bird tells it.
“You were broke,” Suzie says, “and cold.”
“We ate our meals off a bucket.”
“Meaning what?” Suzie asks.
“Didn’t matter.”
“It would matter to you now,” Suzie says.
“I’m not saying. We were kids. It’s all different.”
“You’re who’s different, sugar. I haven’t changed.”
“We were happy,” Bird insists.
“You were high. It’s nice. Get happy, get high. Have a party in your pants. It doesn’t last,” Suzie says. “It’s not supposed to.”
Mickey sat on a Glad bag beside her. Bird was cold and would cry if he touched her.
And so he touched her.
“It’s not your fault,” Bird said.
He knew it was: whatever it was she was thinking.
He turned the ring on her finger, the ruby her mother wore.
“We could pawn it,” he suggested, and wished he hadn’t.
He wished he were rich and quick on his feet and brave enough to lie down and close his eyes.
“What else?” Bird wondered.
“Taller. A pilot. A poet. And better to you.”
She would be finished soon, crying. If he kissed her, she would cry some more.
A dog lunged from the back of a pickup truck to get at them, and the sound drove a spike through Bird’s head.
“Fucking dog,” Mickey shouted, and ran after it.
A glove fluttered up on the highway in the wind of whatever was passing, a whole forest borne south on flatbeds, double-wides and I-beams, a donkey once, out in the wind, with its great swiveling ears.
America. America.
The reel was dizzying — the cattle trucks with their bellowing mobs, the soon-to-be-dead, the living, the vast flotilla of family vans, kiddos hooked up to laptops, DVDs, junkies, mavens, shit for brains.
Fuzzed out.
Made sense to them: you fuzz out. Sink in. Out of the clamorous world.
Bird lay her head in Mickey’s lap. She could feel her heart beat in her mouth and the rock she had given him in his pocket. It was a smooth, dark rock, rounded and cool they traded as they traveled.
“I wish I could make you happy, Bird.”
“I’ll be happy.”
He slid a bracelet he had woven from brittle grass onto Bird’s wrist and kissed her.
“For the next two hundred years.”
“Toss it,” Suzie says. “You keep too much. You hoard.”
Bottle caps and matchbooks. Tooth in a box. A bracelet of grass. The little dry stem of that pear.
Too little, too much, next to nothing.
Whitened bone and sucking rock, the acorn when her water broke, Baby’s first booger, Baby’s gilded shoe.
Bird carries the bloodied tissue still, slipped into a see-through plastic sleeve in her wallet where pictures go — where they would go if she could remember, or if she were a better mother, or if she weren’t so superstitious, or soft-hearted, or hard.
She gets her birth dreams back, belated. Births an enormous zucchini the doctor comes at with a knife: You don’t want to watch this.
Dreams the baby is plastered into the wall.
“Hiya,” says the baby at daybreak and by nightfall, the balm of dark, says, “Hiya hiya hiya yeah yeah yeah.”
The day’s fresh trick — going, gone.
Memorable, forgotten.
Bird wakes with her boy, with the rope of cold rolled out along her spine and thinks: Were you not, my goose, smaller by far when I last lay down with you? Before you let me have a sniff at you? Before I rose and shut the door?
They lie awake together, his soft boy-toes cramped and curled at the foot of his footed pajamas. They are watching the last green artifice of stars shrinking on his ceiling.
Pfft!
Growing, grown, unguarded in sleep. Oh, Mama.
She does the math, the years to come, the school bus whistling down the hill, small pale jostled faces. She sees a girl, another’s, braids undone, flyaway standing-up hair — that’s her face. It’s Bird’s face. The girl of herself, the little, she thinks—
And turns away and thinks: Mickey.
Never can see the man coming.
Bird laughs to herself to think of it, coming, I’m coming, remembers Tuk and Doll Doll, the pair who picked them up, the pair they took a room with, briefly, finally, in the blowing heat of a roadside hotel, remembers Tuk going at it, mama-talking Doll Doll, snuffling around in her culotte, whistling through his nose.
Back again: a speeding reel. Back in the honeyed swim and slop, a roving, animal hunger. Just a nibble.
Not a nibble, not enough, not near.
Bird got behind herself and bit Mickey, dug into him with a fork. The moment’s impulse.
The body food.
Her girl blue from the womb, dead, Bird thought: I’ll have to eat her. Want me just to eat you?
She remembers Tuk slurping at her — not her, not Bird — at Doll Doll, Bird waking up from a dream of herself in the velvety dark of the room they shared and in it was somebody slurping pudding from a bowl like a dog. Eat you out.
Eat you in, Bird thought — that was more like it. And having waked, she slept, and having slept, waked, and waking again heard the tidal shush of skin on skin, coming, going, Mama now, I’m coming, Mama, Tuk hollering, a drawn-out o, coooming, rwaorwaorwaor, and then he barked it out: I went! I went! I went!
“He wore a shirt that read Big Boys Hold It,” Bird says.
“That’s stupid,” Suzie says.
“Bunnies are stupid,” Bird says.
“What was your name before your name was Bird?”
“I forget.”
“No you don’t, sugar. You know ravens—”