And Mickey: “Next to last can of beer.”
“First time I ever tried Goobers,” Doll Doll said. “I truly had no idea.”
She slid out and left the door open.
She stood in the cold in her culotte and bent over the totem and said, “That’s my first time I ever could feel it. Boy-oh-god that was weird.”
“Last peanuts!” Tuk belted it out like a carny.
“Last bag of Sunshine peanuts! Best little nut you’ll ever know.”
They went on. The snow quit and night came on. Cars got off the freeway and left it to the trucks, to the all-night drivers jangly from milkshakes and days of dipping snuff.
Mickey drove for a time to let Tuk sleep slumped against the door with a pup in each hand, with Bird shoved up against him.
Tuk smelled of asparagus, cooked too long. Of age, the corridors of a nursing home, a mash of simmered prunes. He smelled of the milk he had poured down his pants.
Or that’s me I’m smelling, Bird thought — smear of seed, her hair unwashed, the honey of her leaking gum. She probed her tooth with her tongue — nasty, tasty — nectar, brine. Hyacinths in an airtight room, the softened stalk succumbing.
They were out from under the snow now and the sky was the velvety purple it gets and spread all around with stars. The mountains looked like cutouts of mountains, treeless and white, tacked down on the dark plateau. Through the sage the humped Brahma wandered with cactus spines poked into their muzzles.
They saw a girl with one shoe in an organdy dress, a string of donkeys hitched to a barbed wire fence, a tinker’s lonesome wagon tricked out with ribbons and cans. The first of the Sangre de Cristo’s, they saw — blue in the moon, a blanked-out face the blood of Christ ran down.
Scarcely a car passed. A low rider came at them in their lane with the headlights popped off. Mickey gunned it. They could see him clear. Big yellow truck in the moonlight.
“Go easy,” Tuk said, and was asleep again.
“Don’t sleep,” Mickey said. “I need you.”
The moon sailed high and white overhead and the pale shaft of Mickey’s cock appeared again in his hand.
Kill me off, Bird thought, before I lose him.
Drive a spike into my head.
She had her shirt off, two buttons popped, before they reached the flung shadow of a boulder Bird flattened her hands against. Mickey’s breath was fast and raspy and seemed to come not from him but from the boulders strewn, from strandings of trinket and bone. Old stomping ground, detritus of fickle gods. A patch of snow like melted nickels.
Mickey toppled his boots for Bird to stand on, on the clothes heaped at their feet. Now he was in her, disappearing, shade to shade, his cock like a bull’s in the shadow they cast. Bird slickened with blood she was losing still; on her breasts, hieroglyphs of his hands. Mineral seep. Her feet were pewter; a beetle wandered in the swales of her tendons, daubing methodically at the spatter of her blood. A speckled wing, iridescent. Nothing more moved but Mickey, Bird — a shadow fused, a Gorgon’s head.
“It hurts, it hurts.”
“Shut up, Bird.”
A cloudshadow passed across them and for an instant even the supple became stone and what quivered held its tongue. The beetle raised a leg in the air.
Yes. Be still. Be still.
Their time was passing.
A star sputtered out. Now the moon appeared and Mickey began again, the panic of stillness gone.
The beetle went about its evening, its antenna bent inquiringly, varnished in the light of the moon. Moon on the face of the mountain. They saw no one but someone was near.
“Don’t stop,” Bird said. “It doesn’t matter. Please.”
A coyote, a bird. Something.
It was dark and looking on.
Mickey muttered, “Jesus, fucking jesus.”
No word now, something older — ragged, collapsing — hymn of the lesser animals, gibberish of the gods.
Everybody looked to be sleeping when Bird and Mickey got back to the truck.
Doll Doll had eaten all but the last four rounds off the string of her candy necklace; these lay like bright stones against her throat. Mickey lifted her head and laid it in his lap and started the truck and drove on. He had blood on his cheek Bird wiped clean for him, everything in her still thrumming.
Doll Doll hummed along to the radio. Mickey turned the dial to country. Doll Doll was sleeping but the words came to her. He made a sound like a telephone and Doll Doll said, “Ring ring ring.”
She howled with the coyotes. Cheered on the Lakers. He tried opera and she reached for that.
“She’ll do that,” Tuk said, waking now. “It’s peculiar. When I found her in Waxahatchie asleep on the floor of the station, she was balled up and sucking her thumb. She sucks her thumb yet. She will in a minute. She might say something in Sioux.”
The three of them watched Doll Doll sleep, her face shown in full to the moon.
“She’s pretty,” Tuk said. “She’s just a kid, really. I got to care for her. I don’t quite know as I can. I cannot read nor write, this is true. I fought fires for a time but I quit that. I got burned over twice and stopped — in these mountains here once and on the prairie. I laid down where a homesteader proved up, in a ditch he had dug with a shovel when there were bison all over this country yet, before the railroad and Little Big Horn, when Custer cut his hair and they killed him. I can’t do that anymore. I’m past it. You got to be quick and young.”
Tuk held his hands open to the moonlight like a map he could not decipher. He dropped them to his lap and went on.
“I fought a grass fire in old Montana once. Hope not to see such a thing again. You don’t know what lives in the short grass until you set fire to it. It’s creepy with snakes and beetles, your birds that nest up on the ground. Killdeer, curlew, partridge. Fox denned up and badger, coyotes and pronghorn fawns. You can’t see it when you’re just moving through. Everybody wants to move through. Boy wants to fight fire so he starts one in a gully thinking he won’t get caught. Dumb. Fire moves. You can’t contain it. You got a whirlybird and a bucket and it’s like spitting into a storm. Pretty soon the blaze jumps out on the prairie.
“You don’t want to live to see prairie fire, friends, in a big wind, on the move. Shit, the wind. I grew up in wind. It gets in you.
“This little girl got in me, it took a heartbeat. I am not a free man. I gave it up to her, I cannot help that, in the Waxahatchie station. I didn’t have to go in there. I can’t remember why I did. I don’t question it. Things have a way of working — for the better, for the worse, you can’t say. I can say I never will shake her. There’s no helping what takes hold. She was burned. Her whole back’s burned up, that arm how you see. It seems peculiar but I tell you it isn’t. I carried her home. Of course I did. She was burned up. If she hadn’t of been burned up, I’d of left her right where she was.
“The wind changes. What was at your back is coming at you again. You can’t say. You can’t say where misfortune is going, my friends. You seem to suffer. Could be the best thing that ever did happen, whatever happened to you. You get scared. You can’t think but you still have to choose. You dig in. You are out there with the hoppers and the antelope, friends, and the antelope can run. You’re just pokey. You talk to Jesus. You talk to whoever you can. God above. Your dead mama. The wind sounds like a jet coming at you, neverlanding. Purgatory plain and true. Every hopper alive is burning. The horse patties are burning. The wind picks them up and sails them off and wherever all it drops them, fire starts up there too. Fire everywhere and the flames knocked flat like the land is a sea set to burning. Knocks it all down, the wind. You lean into it. You crawl. You talk to that old homesteader who hacked out his ditches with a shovel. Proved up.