Bird Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€œWhy slum?” Suzie said. “It’s stupid. You could live uptown like I do.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œIt’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?”
    â€œI 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