Bird Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mickey said, and Bird blurted it out—the news of the missing days: dirty Jew, cantaloupe, the stick she had left in his coffee cup, a baby, they were going to have a baby, how did that sound to him?
    â€œIt was dark where I fell,” he told her. “I didn’t know where I was. A day passed before anyone came. I didn’t know would the elevator start up and what would happen if it did. I didn’t like the pictures—what I looked like zapped, what I looked like crushed. I kept seeing you when you found me. I was bleeding. I kept moving away from my blood—it would conduct the charge, I decided. I’d be fried in a puddle of blood. Or I’d be saved, but when they hauled me up the cable to lift me out, I would pick up a fatal splinter, a strand worked loose from the braided steel that would sail through me like a spear thrown into the royal chamber of my heart. You’re in my royal chamber, Bird. But my head feels broken open. Every word feels like fire I speak.”
    When they got back to their place from the hospital, the up-neighbors’ tub had fallen through. With it came diapers and droppings, a bloodied tampon, a gnawed-on bone, a poisoned rat as long as Bird’s arm with its eyes busted out of their sacks.
    â€œThat was lucky,” Mickey offered, serious.
    He was armored in pharmaceuticals, resplendent in the sun. Untouchable.
    â€œTry to touch me,” he said.
    They hadn’t been crushed, after all, by any of it—not by a rising elevator, not by a falling tub. Mickey brightened for weeks with the luck of it. He rubbed Bird’s belly sweetly, speaking her mother’s name. She would jump horses, their girl, as her mother had. She would play violin on a riverbank. She would know to fill a tub when the ice storm came and lay in wood and sit tight. She’d have hobbies—stamps and woodcuts, earrings of feathers and beads.
    â€œLittle Caroline, little Caroline,” Mickey told her, “we will knit you a poncho each year. We will sleep out under the apple trees in spring when the blossoms blow down.”
    The days grew colder still. They dragged the tub into the bedroom at last and used it like a barrel to burn in—sticks and leaves and coconut husks and books they had read, to keep warm.
    It is cold where we are and quiet , Bird wrote.
    We will have to wreck one another, she wrote.
    I am happier than ever, Mother, she wrote.
    And: I have never been so scared.
    â€œYou scared?”
    â€œYou?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œNo.”
    Mickey pressed a pillow against her face.
    â€œDon’t be scared, Bird. Do you want to die or live?”
    When Mickey had healed enough to move again, before the Vicodin ran out, they rode bikes across the bridge in the drizzle to their dark bar on Avenue B. They were swacked before they got there and shaking with cold. In the warm, they drank and drank.
    Bird knew better. The babies of drunks were lumpish. She knew better than a diet of White Castle and junk and Almond Joys. Sleep and greens, she knew, dark berries. You weren’t ever to kill a spider those months or walk through a silver web. She hung their mittens; she kept their hats up off the bed. She kept their shoes switched and sorted for luck how her mother always told her, with the left shoe inthe right foot’s place, the right in the left, lined up. Little tricks—for slipping babies out past the gods.
    But more than this, Bird worked to seem as Mickey mostly was: mostly she worked on forgetting she had a baby in her at all.
    Their song was on repeat on the jukebox; the regulars sat their stools. It was warm inside, swampy almost—wet clothes and the heat of bodies. The bartender wore a shirt slashed across the back to let his tattoo show. An ampersand, the bartender’s tat. And is truer than but, they agreed. They drank whiskey and felt exalted. Bird’s flocked-around feeling had gone.
    They pushed out of the bar and