“You sleep in the truck?”
“We do. With the peanuts. Patsy Cline on the radio. Works out all around.”
Tuk said, “Sunshine, best little nut. Cooler full of beer and tapato chips.”
“It’s real nice,” Doll Doll said. “Bit of quiet. The pups in front. It’s what we need.”
They had come into surplus peanuts, nearly half a ton of them in 40-pound mesh bags. An idea Tuk had. It would pay for the trip — they went from See’s to See’s. By day, they delivered peanuts. They hauled the mesh bags off the mattress at night and heaped them up on all sides. They lay down together in the clearing they had made — shored up, sandbagged in, a thumb stuck in the dike against doom.
“Ever penny we make, we spend it,” Doll Doll said. “Food, petroleum, beer. It’s time we got back to Texas.”
“Time for brisket.”
“It is. I haven’t eaten,” Doll Doll said, “I’ve been dizzy. Supposably I eat for two but who in the world can do that? I can’t eat. I hardly sleep. I keep dreaming. I dreamed I swallowed a wasp and died.”
“You’re homesick, is all. You miss your animals.”
“I dreamed Hank killed ever one of them. Ever. Living. One.”
“Quit, sunshine. It’s just you’re blurry.”
“There is too much of something in me — I can scarcely think or see.”
Doll Doll dropped her face into the tent her bodysuit made when it was stretched over her bent legs.
“That Hank is a waste of clothes,” Tuk confided.
“Hey!” She looked up. “Something happened! Something in me moved.”
Doll Doll stretched the elastic band of her culotte out to look at the hummock where the baby was. All they saw at first was Doll Doll’s heart bumping in her stomach.
“Hey, nugget,” she said. “Everybody all at once say nugget.”
It was a very obedient nugget and took a tumble in the sack on cue.
She snapped her culotte back.
“That is just too weird.”
Mickey looked at Bird. She’d gone missing.
He leaned into her and whispered, “Everything is yours.”
By then Tuk had pulled the truck over and come back up the bank with a loaf of bread.
“It’s froze,” he explained, “might be good still.”
They sat in the truck and watched him with the heat still blowing hard. Tuk was gathering rocks, searching for a flat spot on a rock to stack on the flat of another.
He meant to mark the traiclass="underline" here they were when.
First proof of the life to be.
Doll Doll jabbed at the horn, sulky. How like a man — out building a shaky totem to mark the somersault of a plum. Plum, bunny, nugget. The least unsmoothened sandy ball in the bearings of the planet would bring it down. A cricket would tip it, a southbound finch.
When he had finished, Tuk motioned to them and Bird and Mickey dropped out of the truck, looking back to Doll Doll, Doll Doll mouthing, “Not me, I’m cold.”
Dusk had seeped into the land by then and from the ground grew the lifting blue of night, a shade rising, and the day-wind stilled. Cold made the wet air heavy. The dome light was on in the cab of the truck, a buttery, come-to-me yellow, and the truck was gliding away.
“There goes Doll Doll,” Tuk said. “She won’t go far. She’ll drive off the ramp to the Chevron and ask to use the phone. Call the cops to haul me off. I knock her around, she’ll tell them. Well, I’d like to. Times as these, I’d like to. She likes a scene, is all. We’ll get through it,” he said. “Adios, nugget.”
“Adios, nugget,” Mickey chimed in, and the three of them walked down the road.
Tuk was right: there was a scene and they got through it.
Bird and Mickey stayed in the truck. Mickey drove the truck around to where the dumpsters sat beside golden limber willows and a frozen pond. They heard coyotes, their high wild mourning song. He had the doors locked, Bird’s jeans at her knees.
“Love you up,” Mickey said, and gingerly, mostly quietly, it was done.
They buttoned up when they spotted Doll Doll in the fish-eye round of the side view mirror. She tossed herself at the door.
“We thought something happened. Or worse,” she said.
“We been all over this country this side of the Great Divide,” Tuk said, getting in, “and I never saw a soul so ugly as that one. I wish you wouldn’t—”
“I’m sorry,” Doll Doll said.
“And I forgive you.”
They still had one See’s to get to and it was close to closing time. Doll Doll read directions and they turned off the ramp going west.
“Remember that creep who had tattoos of flies crawling all over his neck?”
“Where was that at?” Tuk couldn’t remember.
“South Dakota,” Doll Doll said.
She was the navigator. She knew the nicknames of all fifty states: Land of Enchantment; the Show-Me State; Beehive; Cornhusker; Tar Heel; Sooner. Manly Deeds, Womanly Words; To the Stars through Difficulties. If You Seek a Pleasant Peninsula, Look about You. She Flies with Her Own Wings.
“We saw Indians,” Doll Doll said. “We saw a cross a thousand feet tall.”
“In a bean field?” Bird asked.
“That’s the one. Go right. Go right right here on Petaluma, Tuk.”
Tuk took a right on Straw.
“Shit,” Doll Doll said, “you’re a slow leak.”
“I saw a donkey in the bed of a pickup truck,” Bird said.
“Yuh huh,” Doll Doll said, “I like to see that.”
“And a kid with a pup and a Hoola Hoop. And the roadside marker where Clara died — with a wreath and a tin can of flowers at the foot and a life-sized blow-up doll. Did you see that?” Bird asked, mumbled, wanted to spit but could not.
“I need a napkin,” Bird said.
“Not mine,” Doll Doll said. “Mine’s got all the directions. Three lights, turn south, bear left, go west. We got to get back to Petaluma.”
“Hold your horses, Little Bit.”
Doll Doll didn’t like it — the start and stop, too much to see, a racket. She liked a little town to sail through. A kid mowing grass in her underpants. Old boys sipping sody, sipping sody, eating beans.
“You got kids, guys? Got a kitten?” Tuk asked. “Any little thing to look after — to get your minds off yourselves? Them little turtles? You got a cellaphone? I need to make a call.”
Doll Doll pouted and glowed.
“I’m just talking, Little Bit.”
Tuk stuck out his tongue and made a ditch of it he sucked spit loudly through.
“She wants a cellaphone,” he explained. “There’s a color of green and yellow she wants with sort of crumbs of gold. For the baby, for when the baby is ready to come out, which is pretty soon, pretty soon. We got a wind-her-up thing for it to look at.”
“It’s like nothing, Tuk. Like we made it up. It used to not even move.”
“It’ll move,” Tuk said. “Get the hiccumups, keep you awake till dawn.”
“Is it a girl?” Bird asked.
“How should he know?”
“I know several things,” Tuk said.
“Well, you don’t know Straw from Petaluma, I guess. Now take another right right here.”
He did. Next was a left on Pisgah that Tuk sailed right on through.
“I don’t get it,” Doll Doll said. “I said Pisgah. Then comes Aspen and Birch and Catalpa, like the alphabet, right in a row. He’s been doing this since Texas!”
She was banging her head on the dashboard again.
“It plain escapes me. I say Poplar he turns on Pisgah, left on Oak he takes Willow, it’s like—” but Doll Doll fell short of a likeness and covered her face with her hands.
Tuk turned the truck around and missed the turn and turned it around again. Tumbled the pups across the floorboards, drove at last past See’s.