“What are you proving now, brother? What can you stand to believe in, brother, with flames licking inside your ears?
“I lay down in that ditch and got little. Prayed to God, prayed to Mama. You two shuffle me out of this and I will never come back again. I am good to my word. I am honest. I felt the weight of God’s hand on my back where I lay and it was a blazing hell.”
Tuk seemed to wear out and slump away and stoke himself up again. He reached across Bird and twiddled the last stones on Doll Doll’s candy necklace.
“I tried living someplace else,” he said. “Bluegrass country, horse country, it was pretty for a time. Was a boy there I made friends with. I worked with his pop breaking rough stock, colts fresh in off the meadows. Good people. I fairly liked it. The days were hazy. It’s wet country. The dew soaks your britches to the knees every night and come again come day.
“A day came there was a blaze set to burning in the barn — some thug from a rival farm. It’s a fact: there is nothing a human won’t do. I got my lead rope. You can’t handle but one head at a time. It is no choice you want to make but you choose. There was a colt they were buffing for the Derby in the blaze but I went for the mare I liked. I liked her for she was gentle. She had a clear kind eye. I tied my shirt across her eyes and led her out. She was a boy’s. That boy when he saw the barn go up came hellbent down the road. I brought his mare out to him. I wisht I’d quit there. I wisht I’d thought to tell him — a horse will run back to it. Of a fright. I turned away back to the barn to see could I get another one out. I maybe could of. I wisht I hadn’t. I never can see much ahead of myself to think into what will be.
“That boy was small and he could not hold her. The mare pulled back and broke free. Here she came. She cut hard around me. It’s the nature of things, it’s her nature. She runs back. Nothing tells her better than to run like hell to exactly what she knows. Run to home. Run to the rest of them burning.”
“That poor boy,” Bird said, and laid her hand on Tuk’s arm.
“That boy tried to run in after. I am fast enough I caught him and when I caught him, he kicked and scratched at me and beat me on my head. Just a kid. I held onto him. He was hateful, he never could help it. He just hated me, how he had to. He swore he always would.”
Tuk pushed his hat down against his forehead. He looked crumpled, thrown against the seat. He let a pup gnaw at his knuckles. Wolfie tore a hole in his shirtsleeve and two tiny teeth popped out. These Tuk snapped into a pocket of his shirt to give to Doll Doll when she waked.
“At times I think of that boy. He’d be a man now. I’d like to write him but I never did learn. That mare spoke to him. I’d say I saw that. He had to hate me, I’d say, there’s no shame in it. That mare was yours, boy. You took and kept her. You were a good boy. I never could.”
“Well it’s a story,” Suzie says. “Nothing wrong with it. It’s something to pass the time.”
Kill the time, Bird thinks. That’s what she’s saying.
“Mama,” her boy says, “Mama, I wish I could buy you a time machine, Mama. Then when you get really old, we can go back to when we were babies. Or we can go back just to now.”
“What’s the best thing of your day?” Bird asked him, asks him nightly, before she gets up and shuts the door.
He breathed into her face and whispered, “Being right here.”
“You wish,” Suzie says.
“Don’t be cranky.”
“How old would she be,” Suzie wonders, “the girl you and Mickey didn’t have?”
“I haven’t done the math,” Bird lies.
“You have too.”
Fourteen. Feather of a hawk. Her mother’s scarf wound into her hair.
“Have you?”
“Done what?”
“Done the math, Suzie Q.”
“On your dead baby, or mine?”
Suzie says, “When the black widow female is ready to mate, she vibrates her web. The male advances. He winds her in silk. The positions they take are extravagant. Great contortions. Only rarely does he get away. Commonly she devours him, a widow by choice and practice. That’s me. I sink my teeth in slowly and suck them entirely dry.”
“I think you flatter yourself,” Bird says.
“He hasn’t come back.”
“Your poet.”
“Him.”
“He’ll be back,” Bird says. “You need to tie him up.”
“Nail him to the cross.”
“What more?”
“The exploding harpoon leaves a hole in a whale big enough for a man to lie down in.”
“Nice.”
“And the octopus—”
“Is it gruesome, Suzie?”
“It’s nature. Nature’s a maniac, too.”
“Tell me later, okay? The baby—”
“The male sends out a severed tentacle loaded with his seed. She tucks it away. Guards it. Waits. For death, for life, all of it. She dies days after her babies are born, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They eat what’s left of her. Simple need. Last act. It was like that, fucking Mickey. Last act every time. Like you would die from it. It would kill you.”
“And it wouldn’t matter,” Bird says.
“It wouldn’t matter.”
“Like an emergency.”
“Repeated.”
“One more last time.”
You’re like God used to be. Not God, I mean, but the thing in me that listens to me think and what I say. You’re all through me, Bird. I’m all you now. Cunt and mouth and eyes.
They rode on. Two-lane road through the desert, the moon tossing shadows around. They went along for a time with the headlights off until Tuk found what he was looking for, a neon sign flashing above the sagebrush: SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP.
They parked a ways off, left the pups and went in.
Tuk had a key to a room he carried. They found the room vacant. Smell of smoke. Two hard narrow beds. They turned the heat on high and the TV soft and fell away into bed.
Slept. Having slept, Tuk waked and waked Doll Doll. Mama-talked his Doll Doll. And went and went and went.
Tuk slept in his red bandanna, in his boxers and floppy socks. He waked and paced and his socks threw sparks and Doll Doll lay sucking her thumb.
Come morning, Doll Doll pulled his boxers down for him and rolled deodorant over his balls. Squeezed a seepy imperfection from his scrotum.
Tuk pulled a fresh shirt over his head.
Big Boys Hold It, the shirt read. But nobody read it to him.
They fluffed the pillows and smoothed out the sheets. Folded the little triangle back into the tail of the toilet paper. Hustled quietly out.
They found the Ryder locked with the keys inside. The pups had torn up the bench seat and squirmed in among the hillocks and tufts under the vinyl flap to keep warm. They yipped and lunged at the windows, the windows smeared and fogged.
The air smelled of dust and sagebrush and the sign was still flashing: SLEEP. The S flickered out while they watched it. The sky paled above the eastern reef where the sun would soon be up. Patches of snow were shored up where sagebrush grew and there the dust lay flattened and dark.
Everybody quiet but the birds.
Hear the birds.
Tuk found a rock, round a little and big enough, and Doll Doll made faces in the far window to lure the pups to a safer side. The rock bounced off the glass and struck Tuk in the teeth.