A tableau, she wanted. But not this one.
Tuk was hooking snot from his nose with his long little fingernail, just the one long one, all he needed, and rolling it into a ball. He cracked the window, flicked the ball into the airstream. Hooked the next wet glob he rolled dry.
It was warm in the truck and dewy and nice and nice to be out of the cold. And they were going where they meant to be going. Going south to Albakuke. Be there in a day.
Bird moved away not to touch Mickey, to be some away from the heat of him and the drug of the way he smelled. She set her mind on Doll Doll — on the smeary mess she had made of her chin, on Doll Doll’s atrocious clothes. She had swiped her eyelids with blue glitter. A kid. A doll! and new to things.
She was trying to look Bird’s age, Bird thought, and failing. That helped. And the little round hump of her belly helped: ah ha, a flaw, Doll Doll long and light, but soft, too — weak, Bird thought.
But the next thought was creeping in: Is that a baby in your belly?
Which it was.
Two discs of red appeared between Doll Doll’s knees where her knees fell helplessly together. Doll Doll would come to limp and ache, Bird thought, comforted. She would age into polymer sockets, the daily complaints of living.
Bird leaned to kiss him. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for Mickey, now and now and ever.
But he was talking. He was missing his dog.
“We had a dog once,” he said. “She was Maggie. She liked to take down Bird’s hair.”
“It’s so pretty, your hair,” Doll Doll told her, and touched the ends to her lips as if to eat it.
“She slept for heat between me and Bird with her back to me and her legs out. She stuck all four of her legs out, stiff, like this, to keep Bird off me. She used to chew Bird’s toothbrush up and stash the leftover bits of her shoes and the cast-off strands of her dental floss (and the vomited wads of tampons, Bird thinks) underneath my pillow.”
“She found an old coat,” Bird offered, “to sleep on and she slept with it over her head.”
“Oh, Maggie,” Doll Doll said.
“You all stop now,” Tuk said. “You’ll make her weepy. She’s got that — syndrome, stray — whatever you call it. She’s tender and you’ll make her sad.”
“I’m not sad,” Doll Doll said.
“Well, you will be. Think a moment of your mule, of your turtle, back to home. Your maimed and crippled. Think of a moment of Bim and Toto, near drowned, of your colicky armadillo. The calf born without any eyeballs.”
“The Chinese farmer who grew three tongues,” Mickey offered. “He could lick the one with two others. He could reach back and lick his ears. Think of that.”
Mickey fluttered his tongue at Bird and Doll Doll turned in time to see it.
“Yuck,” Doll Doll said, which was a comfort.
Yuckity lickity schmuckity fuck. Keep your feet in a bucket.
Keep your head.
“We got too many to care for,” Tuk told her, and twanged her necklace against her chin.
“We got some acres,” he admitted. “A dab of a place down to Texas. A creek with a pawky flow. Bit of grass. Bunchgrass, cheet. Whatever. Feed. I drove a stake in the dust to hitch the goat down to. Round and round he goes.”
“It’s nice,” Doll Doll said. “It’s home and it’s dry and quiet. You can hear the beer fizz in your bottle. Sky. Wide dry blue eye quiet. And the yellow grasses move. And Tuk? We got that one cottonwood tree for shade I will never again shade under.”
“Now, Doll.”
“You know I won’t.”
“I heard that.”
“I brought this cat home,” Doll Doll offered.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“He’s ashamed. He don’t want it told.”
“That cat—”
“I know it. Needed helping. He needed helping bad. Such as I did, Tuk. You remember? I was eating out of a bowl.”
“I do. And I remember that old tom popping. It spit. Ringwormy, rabid, god knows. How he howled among the leaves in the shadows, peering down.”
“‘Get him down,’ you said, ‘or I’ll shoot him!’”
“Little Bit, it is nothing I ever wished to do.”
They went along some, quiet, Doll Doll sucking at her sleeve. The clouds ate away at the mountains. You couldn’t see much.
“I can’t see.”
She banged her head on the dashboard. She was blacking out, holding her breath, “I can’t see.”
“Now, Doll?”
“I fucking hate these fucking mountains and these fucking wasted trees.”
Tuk swung the truck onto the shoulder and held her.
“Talk it out,” he whispered. He stuffed his fingers in her ears. “Use your words.”
Doll Doll hummed and sniffled and Tuk kissed a patch on the top of her head where the hair had been snatched out. He closed his eyes.
Forgot, or seemed to, that they were not alone. Wind rocked the truck. Snowball whimpered and yipped. The heat was off and the cold seeped in and the steam they all made on the windows frosted prettily to ice.
“Take your breath,” Tuk instructed, and tipped her chin up so Mickey and Bird could see.
Doll Doll was smiling again, trying to.
“Now make these poor people feel at home.”
The sun smudged through the clouds as if on cue and all their faces pinked up but for Doll Doll’s, which was smeared a gluey blue.
“What a day, what a day for driving,” Tuk declared.
“I go for the suffering dumb.”
“If you smack a fly—” Tuk said.
“Eat it. You have to eat anything you run over or otherwise maim or kill. It’s a rule. So you won’t. While we travel.”
“Friends, it isn’t only you. She’ll tug a frog, for instance, from the mouth of a snake. She’ll bring a spider in from the cold. She poured sugar out in the kitchen for the ants—they have to eat, too. Freed an ox from its traces, a honeybee from a web. She lets the cows out—”
“—to run with the dogs—” Doll Doll said.
“—and with the llama she’s set loose and the chickens. Plus the shoat! the open range! a 900-pound pig! Gone off to grub every posey patch, every hillock of beans in the county.”
“I do do that. It’s my nature,” Doll Doll said. “I have a very free and helpful nature. I like a gate that’s open. I like Wolfie here and Snowball and how we all light out together like this and let each other go.”
“Gather up, giddyup. Take a picture. Make it quick! A hard little sprint and she’ll be gone.”
“I’m very Doll Doll,” Doll Doll admitted. “I’m very moving on.”
Tuk shook his head agreeably — an agreeable man, easy to love, in a hapless sort of way. Surprised by himself — that was the feeling. He clouded over at a clap and his hands shook and he shored himself up against the steering wheel to steady himself to say, “So who is it cleans up after? Tuk baby cleans up after. That’s Doll Doll all the way.”
“After what?” Doll Doll said.
“Whatever you’re finished with. Anything gimpy or little, try. Try the lonely. What’s weary, what’s maimed.”
He pulled his hat up, which tweaked his eyebrows. He looked more surprised than ever.
“Ever living one.”
“Ever living what?” Doll Doll said.
“Ever. Living. One.”
“She’s not,” Bird said, “living.”
“She?”
“Maggie,” Bird said. “You know, the dog?”
“Is your mama?”
“What?”
“Living. Dead? Is she dead?” Doll Doll asked, hopefully.
“She—” but Bird had never said it out among strangers in the world.