Bird by Noy Holland Page B

to see, they had seen by then: the salt pillars, the burying grounds. The concrete Garden ofEden—ugly, ugly, that kook in his cut-away coffin on perpetual display. They took pictures: meals they had eaten, neon signs, Mickey’s boots tipped over in the road. They took a ten-second film of a pear they ate, the pear stood up on a fencepost with a bite taken out, another bite, as with time lapse, until it was a slumping core.
    This then this then this: days hooked together like pop-tops in a lacerating chain.
    They hauled their cooler off into the bushes and lined out a last line of junk. A little boost. They were going to miss that: the tidy gray packets that Mickey kept with the bloody scrap of bedsheet they saved, with Maggie’s dewclaw and a daisy and the curl of a Hasidim boy.
    They waited together in the bushes until they had both thrown up. Disgusting—throwing up with your jaw clamped shut. They washed out their mouths with beer.
    They had left their Glad bags on the shoulder in the snow and somebody stopped, a big guy, slow, and threw them into the back of his wagon. He drove a wood-paneled wagon from the 70s, the last of its lovely kind. Government man. If it was on the shoulder, he picked it up. That was the job the state paid him to do.
    They could smell the wagon before they reached it—acrid, ammoniac—but their clothes were already in back. The storm was picking up and the cloud socked in and snow had seeped into their bootsoles. They got in.
    Mickey tried breathing through a sack of orange peels: that helped. Bird let her head swing down between her knees. There were bodies in back, road kill, a sticky heap, legs and legs, the mess of death and weather.
    Bird saw a match on the floorboard and lit it and her tooth ignited, hideous lump, and the nectar she had tasted since Kansas bubbled up at the root of her tongue. She swung her head up and reached for the door of the car.
    â€œGet me out.”
    They got out, ferried as far as the second ramp south without their first citation.
    â€œHow you feel?” Mickey said.
    â€œPretty drifty. Nice.”
    â€œWish we had more of it.”
    â€œGood thing we have you.”
    â€œI’d like the Hyatt. A hot bath.”
    â€œSo nice,” Bird said.
    â€œThe lights at our feet of the city.”
    â€œYeah. Pizza Hut delivered.”
    â€œI’m not hungry.”
    â€œNeither am I. I may never be hungry again.”
    They tossed snowballs at passing traffic.
    â€œWe’ll cause an accident.”
    â€œWe are an accident.”
    â€œYou don’t believe that.”
    â€œI don’t, it’s true.”
    They tried hitching for a time with Mickey hidden in the brush that poked out over the driftings of snow, a new tactic: the lone female, the vagrant waif.
    No dice. There was Bird’s jaw puffed up, pooched along the toothbone—blue, bruised, her mouth lumped shut.
    Somebody fishtailed an El Camino, flipped her off, sent a gray dollop of slush to break against her neck. A boy leaned from his window, screaming, “I AM SCREAMING AT YOU!” and sped south, south to cactus and sage and piñon and sun, the curve of Bird’s clean horizon. Lizards in the woodpile. Frizzy-headed seeds of cottonwood, soup of the Rio Grande. Old home.
    I’d like to get there, Bird thought.
    They would never get there. They would piddle days away on the interstate, on the off-ramp, on the on.
    She thought of an old song and sang it: the one about the bicycle, the roller skate, the key.
    â€œHello, love,” Mickey said, and goosed her.
    He had come up out of hiding to her, creeping through the brush.
    â€œI missed you.”
    I miss Maggie , Bird thought.
    â€œI miss Maggie,” Mickey said. “If she were here, she would take down your hair.”
    He took her hair down and worked his fingers through it.
    He chewed up a grape for Bird for a poultice, something to draw the heat. Every hour Bird’s