“Yes. Juggle sticks in the air.”
“For fun,” Suzie says, “for the fuck of it.”
“And lie in ants with their wings spread open,” Bird adds.
“For the fuck of it. For the feeling. Ecstasy and nothing more.”
They went up, up some more.
“Half a mile above the mile-high city,” Mickey said, “not too shabby.”
They would spend the last of their high at the Hyatt, why not? He had a credit card he’d swiped from his mother she didn’t yet know was gone.
They were in a steaming bath with bubbles to their chins when Bird said, as her mother used to say, “Wonder what the poor folks are doing.”
“This,” Mickey said, and lifted Bird by her ass to his mouth in the froth and pushed into her with his tongue.
“Home again,” he murmured. “Hallelujah.”
They wore their Hyatt robes, heavy as hides; they smelled of lavender and money.
They ate prime rib, bloody rare, and a heap of mashed potatoes; drizzled-on food and reductions, a feast, a bottle of wine.
What if they ate like this once a week like wolves, fattening and fasting, running lean, gorging themselves again?
“What if I touched you here,” Mickey said, and slid his hand between her legs beneath the table, “and nowhere else, ever again?”
The robe they took and the embellished towel took up half the room in their Glad bags and made a softer place to sit. Bird was tender still, seepy.
They sat around a lot, they stood. They tried the off-ramp and the on.
Three days — they’d made maybe a hundred miles. Too high, this country, the clouds snow-gray, too close to their heads. Unbudged.
Somebody slowed down, stopped, backed up, peeled out. Very funny.
Bird’s tooth throbbed in her head.
They went back to throwing snowballs into traffic to pass the time. Drank a Pabst, split it, split the next. And the beer and being in the cold all day and the heat of Mickey’s breath when he kissed her made everything floaty and bright. The brightness, the float; the beat skipped, a hitch — Mickey felt it too. The blessed looseness of slipping out of time.
They quit bothering to stick their thumbs out, quit bothering to stand but to fish another beer from the cooler where they sat.
She heard her name, spoke it, understood that she had spoken it meaning to speak to him.
Said to Mickey, “Hey, Bird?”
Remember that?
It had begun to snow again, the slow fat flakes suspended. They sat quietly, didn’t move.
As at auction.
Took a sip.
As the old, didn’t move.
Wanted nothing.
The mind swept. The smallest act. A name spoken. How the heart — this was the real heartache: this happiness: this lonely, buzzing elation.
Can’t last.
Couldn’t last. Nature of things.
Somebody quick say why.
Wanting so mostly rarely withstands the presence of the thing we want.
Say why.
A ride, for instance. The golden Ryder. Which arrives when we are flagging, pleased, happy without it, why?
Why — having traveled for days to reach someplace — are we nonetheless unready to stand up and walk through the door?
Hello, hello.
Not yet a little.
They sat their cooler. Forgetful. Forgetting.
The Ryder rocked to a stop on the shoulder.
Last time.
One more last time, says her boy.
And so they sat some. They stood to meet it.
There were two of each, human and dog, the pups part wolf — one was Wolfie, the other fluffed and white. This was Snowball.
“I’m Bird,” Bird said, “and this is Mickey,” and of the two it was Tuk who spoke and said, “I expect you are.”
He was dressed like a man of the region weathered into his middle years — in a worked-over hat, a bandanna at the neck. Doll Doll was a kid in pantyhose, in a bodysuit like bubble wrap, her culotte a bilious plaid. She had a candy necklace between her teeth she was sucking the color from. The dye left a smeary chinstrap of many muddied colors.
She made herself small when Bird and Mickey got in, scooted over in the truck against Tuk. Tuk licked her, and licked her some more, Doll Doll offering him her neck. She had her sleeves pulled down and over her hands after the fashion of girls of the season. She brought a sleeve to her mouth and sucked at it. It was wet all the way to the elbow.
The pups were loose in the cab of the truck and Doll Doll’s pantyhose was pinked with blood where the pups had gotten at her in the wide miles since Cheyenne. Tuk swung the truck into traffic and tumbled the pups across the floorboards — over Doll Doll’s feet and Mickey’s and Bird’s, a tidy row, tightly packed across the bench seat — like a seat on a bus, mottled and split, vinyl, a school bus smell. When Doll Doll bent to reach for a pup they all had to lean and twist away.
Doll Doll let Wolfie walk across her lap to Mickey’s open hands. He tucked the pup under his jacket and scratched her behind her ear: this set her paw to thumping. Wolfie wrinkled her face and drooled, shaking with puppy bliss.
“You got her spot,” Doll Doll said. “Oh, Wolfie.”
Doll Doll reached across Bird to lay her hand on the pup snugged into Mickey’s jacket. Bird leaned out lightly against Doll Doll’s arm, her long dampened sleeve pulled longer, the crepey violet bubbles of Doll Doll’s bodysuit collapsed. Doll Doll moved away not at all. She had her arm set stiff across Bird’s chest: a reminder, a locking bar: here she was. Bird was going to be where she had put herself, now and again, decided or not: she got the kid-at-a-county-fair feeling she gets: feels the heat and wild sickening swing of what she wants, has picked and paid for, thought she wanted: rag-dolled, the snapping plunge, the quieting climb before you fall so fast you are lifted up and floating.
She was floating: that was love.
Love did away with the instant between wanting and doing, wanting to kiss and kissing, wanting to bite and biting — and so Bird bit the girl hard on the arm through the cheap rough crepe she was wearing.
“Hey! You can’t — Tuk, she—”
“You can’t bite her,” Tuk said. “Now you’ll have to—”
“You have to say you’re sorry,” Doll Doll said. “And I’ll say I forgive you.”
But she wasn’t: Bird was saving sorry up for children, a husband, a demoted family dog. For the months to come, the hand through the wall, Mickey’s tender wrists he opened. The little closures and retreats.
“So how do you like God’s country?” Tuk wanted to know.
Bird mumbled a mousy answer; her jaw felt soldered shut. The fat of her cheek and sinew, the woofer and tube of her ear, the pores, how it felt, sizzled; anvil and hammer and stirrup; ampulla and tragus, inward and out: nimble, any lasting pain, referred to neighbors, the wagging tongue; to the puffy glistening tab of her throat, to gingiva and palate, the string and ocherous wax of her eyes: hot, all of it, sparkling, every living celclass="underline" septum, foramen, cementum; the horn of pulp and the chamber — the tooth jigsawed into tissue, into alveolar bone. The whole bright box of Bird’s head hurt.
She had taken to biting strangers.
She had gotten what she deserved.
Mickey was wearing his shirt sprung at the neck and Bird could see the upmost clusters she loved of freckles on his chest. She couldn’t stand it: Doll Doll had them too. They had like bodies, long and light for distance, the miles across the plain.
Bird mouthed it: I want out. I want you.
A suite with a theme, Bird wanted, something jungly, sneaky, scrawk and howl, a costume, the purr of rain, a bed set lazily spinning among the ravenous trees. She wanted Mickey to tie her by her hands and feet and work her slowly open. Make her cry out. Make her bleed.