Authors: Noy Holland
Bird (12 page)
He meant to mark the trail:
here they were when.
First proof of the life to be.
Doll Doll jabbed at the horn, sulky. How like a manâout
building a shaky totem to mark the somersault of a plum. Plum, bunny, nugget. The least unsmoothened sandy ball in the bearings of the planet would bring it down. A cricket would tip it, a southbound finch.
When he had finished, Tuk motioned to them and Bird and Mickey dropped out of the truck, looking back to Doll Doll, Doll Doll mouthing, “Not me, I'm cold.”
Dusk had seeped into the land by then and from the ground grew the lifting blue of night, a shade rising, and the day-wind stilled. Cold made the wet air heavy. The dome light was on in the cab of the truck, a buttery, come-to-me yellow, and the truck was gliding away.
“There goes Doll Doll,” Tuk said. “She won't go far. She'll drive off the ramp to the Chevron and ask to use the phone. Call the cops to haul me off. I knock her around, she'll tell them. Well, I'd like to. Times as these, I'd like to. She likes a scene, is all. We'll get through it,” he said. “Adios, nugget.”
“Adios, nugget,” Mickey chimed in, and the three of them walked down the road.
Tuk was right:
there was a scene and they got through it.
Bird and Mickey stayed in the truck. Mickey drove the truck around to where the dumpsters sat beside golden limber willows and a frozen pond. They heard coyotes, their
high wild mourning song. He had the doors locked, Bird's jeans at her knees.
“Love you up,” Mickey said, and gingerly, mostly quietly, it was done.
They buttoned up when they spotted Doll Doll in the fish-eye round of the side view mirror. She tossed herself at the door.
“We thought something happened. Or worse,” she said.
“We been all over this country this side of the Great Divide,” Tuk said, getting in, “and I never saw a soul so ugly as that one. I wish you wouldn'tâ”
“I'm sorry,” Doll Doll said.
“And I forgive you.”
They still had one See's to get to and it was close to closing time. Doll Doll read directions and they turned off the ramp going west.
“Remember that creep who had tattoos of flies crawling all over his neck?”
“Where was that at?” Tuk couldn't remember.
“South Dakota,” Doll Doll said.
She was the navigator. She knew the nicknames of all fifty states: Land of Enchantment; the Show-Me State; Beehive; Cornhusker; Tar Heel; Sooner.
Manly Deeds, Womanly Words; To the Stars through Difficulties. If You Seek a Pleasant Peninsula, Look about You. She Flies with Her Own Wings.
“We saw Indians,” Doll Doll said. “We saw a cross a thousand feet tall.”
“In a bean field?” Bird asked.
“That's the one. Go right. Go right right here on Petaluma, Tuk.”
Tuk took a right on Straw.
“Shit,” Doll Doll said, “you're a slow leak.”
“I saw a donkey in the bed of a pickup truck,” Bird said.
“Yuh huh,” Doll Doll said, “I like to see that.”
“And a kid with a pup and a Hoola Hoop. And the roadside marker where Clara diedâwith a wreath and a tin can of flowers at the foot and a life-sized blow-up doll. Did you see that?” Bird asked, mumbled, wanted to spit but could not.
“I need a napkin,” Bird said.
“Not mine,” Doll Doll said. “Mine's got all the directions. Three lights, turn south, bear left, go west. We got to get back to Petaluma.”
“Hold your horses, Little Bit.”
Doll Doll didn't like itâthe start and stop, too much to see, a racket. She liked a little town to sail through. A kid mowing grass in her underpants. Old boys sipping sody, sipping sody, eating beans.
“You got kids, guys? Got a kitten?” Tuk asked. “Any little thing to look afterâto get your minds off yourselves? Them little turtles? You got a cellaphone? I need to make a call.”
Doll Doll pouted and glowed.
“I'm just talking, Little Bit.”
Tuk stuck out his tongue and made a ditch of it he sucked spit loudly through.
“She wants a
cellaphone,” he explained. “There's a color of green and yellow she wants with sort of crumbs of gold. For the baby, for when the baby is ready to come out, which is pretty soon, pretty soon. We got a wind-her-up thing for it to look at.”
“It's like nothing, Tuk. Like we made it up. It used to not even move.”
“It'll move,” Tuk said. “Get the hiccumups, keep you awake till dawn.”
“Is it a girl?” Bird asked.
“How should he know?”
“I know several things,” Tuk said.
“Well, you don't know Straw from Petaluma, I guess. Now take another right right here.”
He did. Next was a left on Pisgah that Tuk sailed right on through.
“I don't get it,” Doll Doll said. “I said Pisgah. Then comes Aspen and Birch and Catalpa, like the alphabet, right in a row. He's been doing this since Texas!”
She was banging her head on the dashboard again.
“It plain escapes me. I say Poplar he turns on Pisgah, left on Oak he takes Willow, it's likeâ” but Doll Doll fell short of a likeness and covered her face with her hands.
Tuk turned the truck around and missed the turn and turned it around again. Tumbled the pups across the floorboards, drove at last past See's.
“See's See's See's! Can't you read?” Doll Doll bellowed. “Can't you read, Tuk?”
And then it struck her.
She was quiet. Mickey and Bird were quiet. The pups quit gnawing on Tuk's bootsoles and sat on their tails and drooled.
“I do believe you cannot read, Tuk.”
There he was: a man squeezed into a truck with strangers, with a girl he had picked up eating from a bowl on the floor of the Greyhound station. He had thrown out her makeup kit. She was nearly too pretty without it to be seen with a cowpoke like him. Pokey boy. Never took to school. Poked the teacher with a stick in the privy. That boy, not a bad boy, good with numbers. Not a man much for words. He had mostly learned to get along without them and without people much or much in the way of tables and chairs and fresh new shirts with pearly snaps and their arms pinned back in plastic. He liked the smell of dust and sage. He liked a suitcase fine to eat his food from, a rag for a tablecloth. Pabst in cans: good enough. That was livingâthe rash spare days people boasted of once they'd lived a safe stretch out past them.
Poor. Fine by him.
Ignoramus. Well, it hurt. Made him mean.
What to do?
He'd give her pups away. He'd smash a schoolboy's bike with the Ryder. Stuff his pockets with lollipops. Cheat and snitch and scream. That'd help.
“This is where you get out,” he said. “Out. O-U-T.”
Ha, spelled it. Let her chew on that.
Tuk opened a can of beer and guzzled it. Dropped the empty for the pups to cut their gums onâher pups. How about that?
“Howcome you never did tell me, Tuk? Now supposably we have got this baby coming and what are we going to do?”
He worked his tongue in his mouth.
“Oh, Tuk,” Doll Doll said.
Street signs, simple signsâwhat? He figured she would do it for him, him a grown man?
Tuk dropped his head onto the steering wheel, rammed the truck into a Sani-Hut, threw up in the ashtray and cried.
“Well, it's a
story,” Suzie says.
“You always say that.
Something to pass the time.”
“They were misfits,” Suzie says. “You never saw them again. They were like you some way you can't name.”
“Maybe that.”
“Gypsies. Looking for something to care for. Something to feed and flee.”
“Now we have heard from oneâ”
“âsmall country. Or else you're making it up.”
“Making what up?”
“Your mother club. Your marriage. Your plain quiet shut-away life. It's not enough but you can't let on. So you tell yourself loopy stories about people you can't love or be. The tragically illiterate. The orphan with a fluffy puppy and a getaway Trans Am. Dog people. Dogs are so people feel forgiven. Lock a dog in the cellar to starve and it shatters to happy pieces to see you again. I never wanted that. Not even a cat, even as a kid, cats are for the sad and lonely. Bossy melancholics. Give me a mouse or a turtle: it will never know I'm gone.”
“I drowned a pink-eyed mouse by accident in a bath of lavender and myrrh.”
“That counts,” Suzie says.
“It all counts. Unless you quit counting.”
“So quit counting, for a change. Stop giving grades out. Those two were up against it. Their troubles made yours look ridiculous.”
Compare and contrast. Difference between. Someone to measure themselves against. Maybe that. As in: Fluffy and a skunk named Rosemary. A bear and a cat in a tree.
Maybe the cat
Tuk shot out of that tree that day made Bird think of her father, of riding around with her fatherâspring, and everything wants to move. Her father hit a bear. The thing leapt off the bank into the roadâsmall still, a yearling. The bear didn't move but it lived.
They were close to home and they went back and Bird's father came out with his gun. Bird didn't want to go back with him, but she thought if she didn't go back with him that something worse would happenâthe bear would come at her father and he would be alone and she would be a mile away, crying.
“So I went with him. I watched him shoot the bear. I helped him drag it into the back of the car so he could take it home and skin it. A skinned bear looks like a human, they say. I never looked at it. I don't guess I ever will.”
Never will. Never
would. Again see him, or feel now again what he had been.
When Suzie came back with Mickey from Florida, she came back with stories to tell. He spat on his hand to shine the designer shoes of sorority girls who talked to him, and he called everybody Bird. Ignited kernels of popcorn and tossed them at women's hair.
He sent a postcard image of an antediluvian fish shot in the side with an arrow.
I am having
my midnight panic again, something I'd almost forgotten. I love you completely. I daydream of you and tie you to a bridge and slowly take down your hair. I can't help you. I'm gone. Don't try to find me.
They went on
and at last found See's. Tuk dragged the bag of peanuts inside and the lady at See's stood and watched him. She watched him stuff his pockets with lollipops, just as he had said he would do, and she bought his peanuts anyway, in the grip of a tender feeling. He must have looked like someone she had loved once and hoped to love again.
When Tuk had stuffed his pockets, he collected his check and walked back to the Ryder. Tuk's pockets made him walk as if he'd pissed himself or poured half a jug of milk down his pants, which he did before long to be funny. To make Doll Doll laugh and keep with him. To think she might forgive him. Forget he couldn't read, forgive him. Forget he had rented a four-room truck hoping she would sleep on a bedroll with him with the peanuts in back if the snow came, if the nights were soggy or cold. Forget the little crimson patch on his ass. The way his eyes swung loose in their sockets. Forget he was a man who had been a boy who had hidden from his mother in a pile of leaves not thinking that she might, happily, in a hurry to get to her lover, drive over her boy thinking: this is a pile of leaves. Not that
boy. Not a boy who set a Have-a-Heart trap his rabbit at a clap walked into. Stuck there. Pushed out her eleven babies. Which stuck.
“Whichâtell them that little story, Tuk, about the rabbits, that time, and the Have-a-Heart trap. Tell that,” Doll Doll said, “or let me.”
She went on.
“Eleven teensy babies. He had to drown ever one in a bucket.”
“I didn't want to,” Tuk said.
“Of course you didn't.”
He swung the Ryder back up on the freeway, the ramp just north of the totem he had built in honor of the tumbling nugget. When he got to it again, he cut the engine.
“Hey, rider,” Tuk said, “you riders,” pleased with his joke, “got a beer?”
They passed another Pabst between them. “All's we need now is tapato chips,” Tuk said.
“And dip,” Doll Doll said. “And chocolates. I could kill for a cherry in those chocolate balls with that milky stuff that squeams out.”
From under her bubbly bodysuit, she pulled out a box she had stolen from See's. She clambered over the bench seat to sit on Mickey's lap. Touched her finger to his mouth.
“That's pretty,” she said, and swung the near door open.
A crow cawed in a tree. It didn't sound right.
It sounded too much like a human trying to sound like a crow.
“Here's to a first and a last.” Tuk drank. “First time we saw the baby kick.”
“First toothache,” Bird said.
And Mickey: “Next to last can of beer.”
“First time I ever tried Goobers,” Doll Doll said. “I truly had no idea.”
She slid out and left the door open.
She stood in the cold in her culotte and bent over the totem and said, “That's my first time I ever could feel it. Boy-oh-god that was weird.”
“Last peanuts!” Tuk belted it out like a carny.
“Last bag of Sunshine peanuts! Best little nut you'll ever know.”
They went on.
The snow quit and night came on. Cars got off the freeway and left it to the trucks, to the all-night drivers jangly from milkshakes and days of dipping snuff.
Mickey drove for a time to let Tuk sleep slumped against the door with a pup in each hand, with Bird shoved up against him.
Tuk smelled of asparagus, cooked too long. Of age, the corridors of a nursing home, a mash of simmered prunes. He smelled of the milk he had poured down his pants.
Or that's me I'm smelling, Bird thoughtâsmear of seed, her hair unwashed, the honey of her leaking gum. She probed her tooth with her tongueânasty, tastyânectar, brine. Hyacinths in an airtight room, the softened stalk succumbing.
