Doll Doll found a bigger rock and handed this one to Mickey.
“Throw it hard,” Doll Doll said, and Mickey did, and the quiet of morning was over.
Tuk reached in and pulled the door open and the pups came tumbling out. They shot off across the parking lot and scratched at the motel doors.
Doll Doll started out after them — too late, too slow, Tuk had her. He picked her off her feet and heaved her into the truck. She was swinging at his face and spitting, calling the puppies’ names.
“Make your move,” Tuk said.
At first they didn’t.
But then Mickey and Bird got in.
They drove an hour watching the sideview for whoever might come up behind. Nobody came. Doll Doll pouted and said not a word. She shivered: it was cold in the truck with the window out. They were thrashing each other with their hair.
Crows pecked at roadkill, too smart to be hit, the wiseacre scolds of the roadside. A tree way off. A glum little clump of boulders.
“The day will warm and that window won’t count. You ought to look,” Tuk said, “no matter.”
Doll Doll dropped her face into her bodysuit and covered her ears with her hands.
“Lookit here, lookit this country,” he said, and pulled her up by her hair to see.
Shadows slid over the desert, over rock and sage and cactus, the bones of the Devonian, ash of the old caldera blown some millions of years ago.
“How it lies, lookit. You ought to. The hogbacks and the coulees, the butte-tops flat as the sea. Don’t tell me. Try to make it all all over again. Try to make it from scratch, the first speck of it, from rock and dark and water. Nothing was. Yet things took hold and lived. I’m not a preacher or a church dog either. Junkyard dog, most like it. But my place and my prayers are here. Bit of sage and all the many ways of the grasses. You get up on a reef and look over. Look out. You pick up a stone and throw it. It makes a little tink that travels, light on the wind, here to Texas. It’s not the onliest thing I have come to that speaks to the lonesomeness in me. Still it speaks. Here was the first I heard it.”
A big wind came up and shook them. A red tail swooped through the power lines and hooked a lizard in its talons. Banked away.
It seemed the end of something.
“I think we’ll go,” Mickey announced. “Stretch our legs some. I like everything you said.”
They got their Glad bags out and thanked Tuk and Doll Doll, and stood in the road in the day warming up. The yellow truck got small and smaller yet on the straight road going and was gone.
They walked. Talked a little, walking.
Where to go. What to do.
They could walk on back and get Wolfie. They would have to name him again. Name him Tuk — naw. Waxahatchie. Squirt.
They walked to the bus terminal in Santa Fe. It took the day and then some. It was sunny and they walked without shoes, keeping the mountains to the east until they gave out and what was left was unbroken plateau.
Oaxaca, they talked of, Lubbock.
The drifting Sahara, the Nile.
Cuernavaca, the great Sonora.
Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, the reach of the knowable world.
Somehow they didn’t have it in them. In the end they took a bus out of Santa Fe that went north again through Cimarron, east, east until the streets grew narrow again and the buildings were closing in. They took the turn for home. They called it home without even thinking. They went back to what they knew.
We came home, Bird wrote to her mother. It’s not much.
Something could have changed but it didn’t.
I can’t say.
We found a place for ourselves. Not the Taj Mahal but the heat works and but for one minor riot and gunshots at night, it is quiet. The train passes and rattles the windows and our dishes stacked together in the cupboards. That, too. And cops thrash the weeds with their billy sticks. We throw bottles against the walls for the fuck of it. That, too. And Mickey doesn’t touch me.
I had my tooth pulled.
He broke his hand slugging the wall.
He doesn’t touch me.
We make our trips to the hospital — he mixes this with that. Breaks his hand against the wall. Opens his wrist in the tub.
I thought you kept people safe by watching, Mother.
I watch Mickey. I try to.
Something I learned from you.
Winter eased up and set back in. The apartment was built above a garage and mornings, half asleep, they heard the landlord start up his car and go. The train passed. Bird hardly went out of their bedroom. Scarcely ate. Mickey had a doctor named Dr. Money they never paid a nickel to.
Mickey picked up jobs and quit them or didn’t bother to show up at all. He left for work and never reached there and his boss called to ask where he was. Bird had no idea.
And the man said, “Sweetpea, I bet you do.”
Mickey lashed himself by his ankles to the doorway of their room.
“I didn’t want you to find me gone,” he said.
Else he went off.
Sometimes she found him. He was in a coffee shop eating plantains. He was sitting on the steps of the garage.
Else hours went by she couldn’t find him and the bars emptied and filled again and beetles went about on their snelled feet through the slick tubes of Bird’s head.
He wrote: It is morning and I miss you. I loved you completely. You will never be loved better — how it pleases me to think this. Don’t be afraid, Bird. I feel like setting fire to our bed, Bird, to everything you have worn with me. Everything you have taken off for me. Your letters, your shoes.
Where are you?
Where have you been?
Please tell me I’ve got it all wrong, Bird. Songbird. I need you. Stay.
There were nights Bird went home when dark closed in and nights she went on walking. Past the hospital, past the morgue. She called every ER in the city but she never could call the morgue. Still she ran the loop in her head. Bird watched herself draw the sheet back; his eyes were open as when he slept. She stood in the humming refrigerated green and read the tag they had tied to his toe. It was a number and the number kept changing. It was a name Bird never had given him. Man Afraid. Looks at the Stars.
Never to walk in sunshine again.
He walks in his sleep. I try to follow.
He still sleeps with his eyes open, Mother. But now I know to close them like the hinged eyes of a doll.
I need an animal, Bird sometimes thought, something to sing to and feed. Something quiet and soft that would be hard to kill but that wasn’t meant to live too long. A rabbit. No. A tiny donkey. A monkey to ride around on her head. Too smart, she thought. Something softer. Pocket lemur. Lamb.
Bird came back one night to find her paintings slashed — the painting of a smoking volcano, the painting of a silver-lined cloud.
So he was home.
No. No Mickey.
He had come home and gone out again.
Maybe he hasn’t gone far, Bird thought, or maybe he is in here hiding?
So she looked for him and, looking, found the rest of what he had destroyed. All the many things he had made for her — the little clay pot she kept her earrings in, the earrings of salvaged tin. The box he made for her to keep her letters in, he had beaten apart with a hammer. Bird began to read the letters and stopped.