“Hold on, hold on,” Bird says to both of them, and each of them says, “No way.”
Her boy plunges out the door into the morning dew and appears again at the window. He grins, a mess, his lip is split, his teeth a train wrecked in his head. He licks the glass — there’s an X — and is gone.
“I’m still here,” Suzie says, “but I’m going, sugar. We may never speak again.”
“Oh, quit,” Bird says.
“I’m just saying.”
“Well, don’t,” Bird says. “Take care of yourself, would you?”
“Oh, I do,” Suzie says. “I take lots of care.”
“Don’t let your poet knock you down the stairs.”
“Fool me once,” Suzie says.
“Says the president.”
“Remember that mother in Brooklyn who tripped going down the stairs—”
“Goodbye, Suzie.”
“—and drove that pipe into her head?” Suzie says. “That was awful.”
“Suzie.”
“We may never speak again.”
“You would miss my milky oatmeal,” Bird says, stirring, “with the raisins plumped up just right.”
“Your scraped toast I love.”
“Exactly.”
“The smell of fire in every room.”
When it was summer still, days you could still ride a bike in your skirt or ride your girl around town in a ragtop, your dog; summer still, days kids bang the hydrants open and drive their bodies hard through the spray; Haitians on the stoop, hypodermics; music blaring up and down the street; summer still (No Sitting Aloud); White Castle burgers for breakfast (too hot to cook, too easy not to want to) for dinner, if they ate it, for lunch, for a time; days the ground-up mess of their haunches still healed from skidding out on Bird’s bike in the street, the skin mounding over the glass they had picked up, tried to pick out, evermore would carry; days the willows in the park wore their hair down still for Mickey and Bird to lie under, in the sun should the wind allow it, in the shadows on their faces as they slept; before the nights cooled, before the first leaves turned, Bird and Mickey thought to find a place together.
They found a place burned up by a voodoo drummer who had left his candles burning. Cat tipped over the candlestick. The kitty litter ignited. The guy was banging his skins, meantime, at a fertility rite in Queens.
It was a step up, sure, from the ragtop. But the place was sooty head to foot when Bird and Mickey moved in, velvety with ash. Every room smelled of fire.
Bird’s mother appeared and said: Run.
“Why slum?” Suzie said. “It’s stupid. You could live uptown like I do.”
“You could keep your feet in a bucket,” Bird said.
But what Suzie said was true: they were broke but they didn’t have to be. It was a thing to try. It was a badge of something, a feeling they liked — not to live every day a scrubbed-up life, sensibly decided, steaming on ahead. It was a way to keep things from happening: to be, and to hold themselves off from becoming.
Neighbor kids banged the hydrant open, summer days, and launched their bodies through the spray. The water seemed to drive clean through them. There was a boy Bird thought looked like Mickey as a boy — a skinny, noble, wild-looking boy who made her want to make her own wild boy and drive him far away.
Drive away, go away. We could, Bird insisted, even early on — before the signs coalesced. The trees were turning. The ragtop hadn’t been towed.
Instead they scrubbed and scraped and painted, settled in. Bird took a job for a week and quit it — crumbing tables, some fancy joint. She wanted to keep to home. They built a bed from scrap. They found a table on the street and bought daisies and ate them, all but one. They threw sticks in the river for the dog to fetch, who fished out sheets of plywood, a boot, a mannish, ragged, woolly coat they dragged home for her to sleep on.
The dog slept underneath their bed. She whimpered when they fucked and clawed at the floor and bounded up and down the hall.
Run, her mother kept saying.
And Suzie said, “Why?”
But they liked it. The sun slid a finger through the alley, afternoons, and laid it across their bed.
“It’s like food,” Mickey said, and pushed her legs apart, “for your flower. Let me have a look at that flower.”
And: “I looked in the mirror just now. I reminded me of you. Does that make sense? Do you see, Bird?”
“I can’t see right,” he said. “You make me dizzy and I want to fall down. I want to bite into your neck dust in your throat on my hand your blood on my cock and legs and I’m home sticky summer night, I am breathing your breath and you cry out and I want to fuck you so hard, Bird, now, now and for the rest of us living.”
He fed her honey. Persimmon and chocolate. Guess. Silken lumpy cream. Mickey jabbed at Bird with the honey spout, drew a bead along her belly, up, like a suture that has risen and healed. Be still. Be still.
I want to see.
But they couldn’t really — see. The world had shrunk by then to become them.
The wind picked leaves from the trees. Nobody walked the stretch they could see of their street. Nobody descended any longer in the cold on a thread to throw his bramble of sparks at the bridge. The river went its way in quiet, tugging garbage scows to sea.
They burned candles and dreamed of fire.
The cold pulled the color from the sky, the streets. The sun angled off for the season.
A band set up underneath their bed in the basement with the rats and the stopped-up john; they played sheet metal, paint can, pipe; the clacking pods of weed and tree. The sound was awful and the smell was worse: fat stools mounded and toppled in the john — the band members used the john like a bucket. The rats fled the basement and along came the mice with their paper scraps and hair they found and cobs of corn and chicken bones and they lived in the walls at Mickey and Bird’s and in the dumbwaiter shaft. When the band played, a veil of paint flickered down from the walls.
Water streamed down the walls and from the ceiling when the up-neighbors filled their tub. The pipes leaked; the joists softened with rot. The voodoo drummer lived upstairs now and pulled his pod in the tub. They heard him grinding on his ass while the tub drained out, his baby in the kitchen, whimpering. He named her Precious — who had been squeezed out into life in that tub.
The mother cut the cord and swaddled the baby and left it in the kitchen sink. She had a bag already packed. She pushed through the door, tripped on the stoop, drove the shorn end of a railing pipe hard into her brain.
A clean bargain, a swap. No one spoke of it.
At last the days, grown cold, grew colder still. The band members cast down their instruments and went elsewhere to keep warm.
Good thinking, Bird thought. Move along.
But Bird and Mickey stayed put and watched the leaden skies of winter spit the first hard knots of snow.
When the shorn-off curls of the Hasidim boys came blowing down the street, Bird picked one out to ransom. A rat came to them, hissing, dragging the trap that had snapped on its haunches.
These were signs, Bird knew, legible enough, if a person meant to read them.
“We should go,” Bird ventured, but they didn’t. To go would mean something was over — that first bright febrile feeling.
Bird wrote a letter to her mother, and addressed it to her father, and stood in line at the post office to buy a tropical stamp. A man in his hat stood behind her, a stone in robes, a band of fur, his child in the carriage asleep. Bird was dressed in a breezy skirt. She dressed for the way the day had looked when she looked out through the window. She dressed for sun, for girls with chapping midriffs, for boys with no socks and shaved heads.