She called Suzie and Suzie was elsewhere.
Bird smashed a bottle against the wall and somebody outside shouted, “The fuck?”
It wasn’t Mickey.
Mickey could never have done this.
Mickey was sinking in his ragtop through the cold black waters of the tidal strait, the sweet and the salt mixing, the tide tugging at his hair. He was at the bar eating soup and sobering up, preparing an explanation. Composing an apology, getting ready to begin again.
Bird rode out on her bicycle to look for him again, slush on the streets, shh shh, the wheel still out of true. She rode past a boy walking in the street and he reached out and yanked her hair. Hauled her over, felled her.
He’d been burned. He stood above her a minute with his boot on her cheek swinging his scarred hands. His teeth were tiny and soft and blue. He kept dragging his tongue across them. He will eat me if I move, Bird thought, and so she lay in the street in the spatter of glass until he walked off whistling. He whistled Dixie, as her mother had — loud and clear and true.
And Mickey came home and loved her. She had glass in her elbow and her buttons were off and he kissed her everyplace slowly as though he would not ever see her again.
“He’s like a drug they quit making. It’s tedious. You need to want something else.”
“I do,” Bird insists.
“He threw your clothes out, sugar. He rode your bicycle into the river. That’s love? Think. He swung into you with a Buick. That’s love? It might be love but it won’t help you live.”
“That Buick,” Bird reminds Suzie, “is the one you went south with him in. It never smelled right. It smelled like other people. When he came back, it smelled like you.”
“Bird,” Suzie says.
“That’s love, I guess. You said nothing. You rode the bus back. ‘Where have you been?’ I asked. You said nothing.”
“That was ages ago,” Suzie insists.
“Ages, yes. The cretaceous. The mammal has scarcely appeared. And time heals, we all know that. Better yet, it erases. Never happened! Wiped out! Off the record, free and clear. I’m not so good at it. Forgive me.”
“You’re forgiven,” Suzie says.
“Fuck you.”
Bird had scratched Mickey’s name in the windshield and hers with the ruby her mother had given her.
Given her. Forgiven her.
For the C days, the D days, Bird hoped to be forgiven.
For pinworms, forgive me.
For the pup tumbling down the stairs.
For watching Mickey and not watching Mickey and the names she never called him by. By her own name he gave her, mistaken.
For opening his eyes while he slept: I am right here.
Bird draws a finger down the flat of the baby’s foot and her toes bunch up. Old monkey brain. The callous on her lip is like mica, bright and chipped away. Bird needs to eat, pull on a fresh pair of panties. Meet what remains of the day.
Back by the swamp is a grave mound Bird promised to neaten and keep. It still needs a cross to say Sherderd. Her boy had named his pup Sherderd. They went down a list of names to consider: Squirt, Bump, John. Ice Cream Fucker was another, but you couldn’t call a puppy that.
Bird had left the pup at the top of the stairs, the school bus flying down the hill. Her boy bounded into the house ahead of her.
“First death,” Suzie said.
Thank you, Suzie.
“The rest will be repetitions, sugar. One more last time.”
Bird remembered a story Tuk had told them about throwing a ball to a dog. Awful little story he had to live with. Tuk threw the ball. The dog caught it, tumbled over a near cliff and died.
“Good thing it happened a long time ago,” Doll Doll said.
C days, D minus days, of course everybody had them.
The pup was heaped at the foot of the stairs. Her boy picked it up. The head swung free, the neck bone snapped.
“Mama? You will get old and bigger next and next you will go back down,” he said. “I will be big as Papa. And you will be my baby. You will be just small, like this. I will carry you all around like this, like a baby, holding you tight in my hands.”
“In my hands?” Suzie said. “Oh, sugar.”
Here her breath caught.
“He could fall off the bed and keep sleeping,” Suzie said, “all the long afternoon.”
“Your poet?” Bird wondered.
“Our Mickey. Mine. And hers and hers and hers.”
We lost our little baby like you did. But we got Wolfie back. Also Snowball.
I am writing this myself which remember I could not used to do. Doll Doll is the one what’s teaching me.
Pretty lucky.
Happy trails from Tuk and Doll Doll. You remember us now, dont you?
Bird left the letter under Mickey’s coffee cup for him to come home and find. He was quiet when he came home. He led her quietly to their unmade bed.
He hooked his feet in his boots beside the basket of her ribs. Rolled his knees against her arms into the sockets. Brought a pillow down over her face.
You wait so long for something to happen to you and still you are surprised when it does.
Bird took a sip of breath and waited.
Her shoulders fell apart, bone from bone. She lay quiet, holding the sip of breath she had taken.
She saw her mother at the end of her kite string and her bed from when she was a girl.
Daffodils past the window.
Blackbirds in a cottonwood tree.
It was all getting small and smaller, the marvelous knot of what she had lived and seen.
I wanted to die so I let him, Mother.
I was wrong. I wanted to live.
By morning he had gone off with Suzie.
By morning Bird had taken her clothes off for Doctor Said So to see.
He slept with his eyes partly open, Mother. I drew the pillow out from under his head. So to close them. So that I might sleep beside him. So to wake should he wake so to follow. Should he walk out on the street, I followed him. He walked sleeping. He walked in circuits as he slept and snapped his fingers and in minutes returned to home.
Home.
I can’t see you, Mother.
I tried to leave him. I tried to quit.
I tried to love somebody else. I never could at first. I was waiting for Mickey.
I waited a time and then quit.
I quit other things I can’t name quite. Quit climbing the Brooklyn Bridge. Quit junk, quit worrying he would leave me, quit worrying he would come back again.
I wrote letters to you you stopped answering. I couldn’t hear you. I couldn’t see you anymore.
I thought to drop off the bridge how the poets did but it seemed altogether too dumb.
Dumb bunny. Name of Hoppy.
Name of Bird, name of Bean, both and either.
I kept the names Mickey gave me.
I called him Mickey.
I don’t know why. I never called him anything more.
Little Whale, White Moon.