But if you don’t?
Or if you do, and look away?
Because what about Calvin Coolidge? Bird thinks. What about his boy, a president’s boy, playing tennis on the courts at the White House? Had there been a sign, some way to know, a feather on the wind, a spider in a hat? The boy blistered his hand playing tennis and from the blister contracted blood poisoning and from the poison was dead in days.
Crazy, the way things happen. Your life is charmed until it isn’t, until a dark day that breaks like a dream.
Bird must have dreamed, to wake so shaken. The dream would come back to her. Something was in it.
Phooey, her mother would say, let the boy go to school.
Let the boy go get milk, Bird thinks — but it’s the last thing you get to say.
Last thing the boy thought is maybe Caroline. Or: I’ll get me some Cheetos, too.
Did that boy’s mother — the neighbor boy’s mother — have an inkling — something — anything — that he would shut the door behind him and never open it again?
A good boy, gone to fetch milk for his mother.
Bird can’t picture him. She pictures the father. The boy’s father strings flowers around the roadside oak the poor boy slammed the family Buick into. Bird sees the man as she saw him last: he walks on his knees, moaning, parting the skittering leaves. When he reaches the place where his boy died, the last place his boy once lived, the father throws himself onto the road. He presses his mouth to the asphalt and scoops up stones with his tongue. He must be waiting, Bird thinks, feeling it out. Lying in the road to divine the hum of what else is yet to be.
Bird’s nearer neighbor tends to his garbage, sets his barrel of plastic aflame. Early at his chores, wheezing, standing fast in the acrid cloud — a man doing his part for the planet. Bird waves hello and curses him. Fondler of children, petty thief, a giant with a failing heart.
Fail better, Bird thinks. Hully up.
Mothers all over the country are waiting in robes for the school bus. Stirring oatmeal, scrubbing at knees. Rousing their gray-eyed heroes, fast runners, killers of men. Whilst.
Nobody gets to say whilst anymore.
The immortals are paring their fingernails whilst, landward, the great seas surge. The mountains burst and shudder.
Bird shuts her eyes and falls backwards. Whenever she shuts her eyes, she falls backwards, listening for her mother: I am right here.
Sparrows rustle in the wine-dark maple. Steam is lifting away from the road.
Here it comes: the school bus shrilling up the hill. The chain wound around the axle picks out its tinkling song. The bus grinds to a stop and the bus driver smiles — a pitying, reproachful look: Bird is in her mother’s milk-sopped bathrobe still, and barefoot, and her boy is nowhere to be seen.
But Bird can picture him: thudding in a rush, his shoes undone, down the pitch of the narrow stairs. She draws her robe across her chest and shuts her eyes. Bird stands in the road falling backward until the bus revs to roll away.
Hey! She throws her hands up. Her robe swings open, the color of a different day.
“Here he comes!” she yells, and he does — papers, cap, forbidden cards flapping out of his backpack. Toothasaurus. Cotton top. He’s got his shirt a button away from being buttoned right.
“Farewell, my prince,” she whispers.
Her boy climbs on and trots down the aisle, his quarrel with school forgotten.
Bird keeps standing in the road in her bathrobe in the doorway of the bus folded open — in the surge of heat, the smell of it, nothing smells like a school bus, nor a baby’s head, nor a Band-Aid. Thank you, Band-Aid, Bird thinks, and backs off.
She waves at the bus until it tops the next hill and the last patch of yellow slides away.
She left the teapot on and now the windows are steamed.
The baby’s shrieking. Her papa is singing in the shower upstairs.
He is closing in on the phase where he talks to himself, pulling on his shoes. Same shoes. He has bought the same shoes for three hundred years.
Meaning what? Bird thinks.
As in what?
Bird pours his coffee, nice of her, it will be just right to chug.
The day keeps changing: rain: and sun: and shadow. She should have sent her boy off in his frog boots. She sent him out fed, what a mama. Belly full of groats and a cracker.
The dog is licking at the baby’s sleeper, the sack Bird puts her in. A good dog. If only she didn’t shit, Bird thinks. If only she fed herself.
The dog turns to feasting on the mealy foam that leaks out of her bed. Her tail flares up against the woodstove.
Better build a fence around that woodstove, Bird thinks, and that awful rhyme about the ladybird comes around again.
Doll Doll comes around again, too. Doll Doll with her beautiful baby teeth, neat and straight and small. Milk teeth, deciduous teeth. Not your keepers. Passing through. She had skin like melted plastic glommed onto her neck and arms.
“What’s that smell?” her husband calls down. “What are you burning?”
“Don’t worry. It’s only the dog.”
“Stupid dog.”
I never wanted her.
I never did want that dog.
“I killed my fucking dog,” Mickey said.
“But you didn’t,” Bird said.
“But you didn’t,” Mickey mocked her. He took a swing at the wall.
“I was out getting drunk with you,” he said. “Why was I with you?”
“Mickey, stop,” Bird said.
“I don’t mean it.” He picked a chair up and poked her in the stomach. “We don’t mean it. We don’t mean anything. Keep away from me, Bird. I’m not well.”
“You’re not well,” Bird said, and moved toward him.
Make yourself large, her mother had taught her, should you meet a sneak cat in the woods.
Sneak cat, cougar, puma.
Hold your hat in the air and sing to it until it turns to go.
Mickey passed the night smashing pay phones and came back to Bird worn out. He was carrying an armload of daisies; he had stuffed the dowels of the splintered chair into his pants. The dog was still laid out on the bed. She had begun to bloat; she was leaking — in death as in life, only more.
They cut her dewclaw away with a tin snip and the last little bone of her tail. They used the coat she once dragged from the muck as a sling and carried her down to the river.
The day broke leaden and gray. They tossed the yellow-eyed blooms into the river, one by one: loves me, saying, loves me still.
When the current took the last bright speck, they bore the dog over the bank and in in the rancid coat she once slept on. They went to their knees in the water. Mickey laid his gloves on the basket of her ribs; Bird laid her little hat. They tried an anthem — for spacious skies, a fruited plain. Garbage clogged the little eddy they stood in and ice had begun to form.
The coat was like a raft the dog slept on. The current tugged at the coat and they let go. She sank fast when they let her go.
But that wasn’t how they told the story. She floated briefly, how they told the story, weirdly, on the little raft, on the pull of the seabound tide. A god had stretched out his hand above her, buoyant in the shadows of the bridge they had climbed, the bridge the poets leap from, the great swags hanging down.