7. 7
The Wild Wolves
of Yabba-Dabba-Doo
There’s always someone tossing cigarette butts out of a
car window and setting the Mojave on fire, and since Mom’s
been here all her life, she’s seen her share. The first fire took
her ears. Second fire took her terrier Frank. Third fire took the
hair on her legs, then the skin, then the legs themselves - or at
least the desire out of them.
Mom’s will says she wants to be turned into snakes
when she dies: says cremate me in a house fire, get the
property insurance, give all the money to the animal shelter
where we got Frank, God rest his incontinent soul. Ever since
she ran her car into the signpost at Carl’s Jr., she hasn’t been
allowed to have the keys, and I’m in charge of hiding them.
Don’t tell her, but this week they’re in the toilet tank.
When mom was a kid there were petroglyphs on
Temple Rock of snakes, fish, and the penises of our ancestors.
8. 8
Mom works at Safeway and she hates her coworkers who are
all in high school or townies who never got their GED’s. They
call her Mrs. Flintstone cause she’s old enough to remember
the dinosaurs. But she has a thing with popping their zits if
they’ll let her, she just can’t see a zit on a face and let it sit
there. I wanna work for 911. I buy arrowheads and leave em
at Temple Rock for kids to find. Mom’s a legend. When she’s
angry she threatens you with glass. Gran got raped by aliens
and that’s why she looks more like the moon every year.
Mom throws the pillows off the couch where we used
to hide her keys. The fourth fire has a name now. We name
them after witches who’ve burned - we have a book of them
that we got at Salvation Mountain, and we keep it on the
toilet tank that bubbles with the keys to Mom’s Honda. This
fire coming down the hills between the mesas, licking the
offerings and arrowheads at Temple Rock, is Ursulina, 1754.
A proper, vengeful fire will make it down to the Carl’s Jr at
least.
We get the day off school cause they can’t put
Ursulina out. At night mom begs Gran for the keys to the
Mother in All Your Disguises
9. 9
The Wild Wolves of Yabba-Dabba-Doo
car, but Gran won’t budge. Mom turns to me. She’d gotten a
premonition from a pimple she popped that afternoon. It had
burst into the shape of a heart, which meant it was okay for
her to start drinking again.
She wants me to say if she’s hot or cold on the hiding
spot, but I say we love her too much to trust her with the
car, so she says fine, she’ll walk along the highway to the
Shell station and buy her liquor there. By midnight, she still
isn’t back, and Ursulina is coming down along I-40, having
swallowed a house in its entirety. There are helicopters trying
to put her out. I sit on the roof shining my flashlight out
into her madness. I have a cold damp fear that she’s taken my
mother the way some witch before her took Frank.
That was ten years ago, the last we saw of Mom,
disappearing along the highway packed with trailers and RV’s
evacuating the burning Joshua trees. Desert fires like this will
take deer and coyotes with them, or drive them out toward
habitation, down from the hills into the valley. If I’m honest,
when mom left, a part of me wanted her gone. She had that
other life that was always reaching for her.
10. 10
Mother in All Your Disguises
But today I got an email from an address I didn’t
recognize, Sidonia1620@yahoo.com. She wanted me to
know she’d seen a chupacabra the size of a gallon of milk
having sex with a stray cat outside the Shell station in Salton
City. Said the chupacabra had mange, was blind all over, had
canine gonorrhea and smelled like anchovies. Said once he’d
finished impregnating the cat with their half-breed, he let out
a howl bigger than the whole of him, and it was answered
from all over, from the hills to the canyons, from the
dumpsters behind the fast food joints to the rusty cars in the
scrapyard. Said she didn’t really believe it herself till she called
out his name, till he turned in recognition with his milky
eyes, hesitating for half a second before he put a stray Dorito
in his mouth and vanished into the underbrush.
If we’d been wrong about Frank all this time, Sidonia
seemed to say, what else could we’ve been wrong about?
He must’ve been twenty-five years old then. Alive after all,
because of it all. He’d only run off to join the pack - the
Wild Wolves of Yabba-Dabba-Doo, the howling stone-age
brothers who remembered the dinosaurs and ate mysteries for
13. 13
Robert has a song about everything. He looks up
to children and animals. He pricks his finger and a pearl of
blood stands on end. Whatever it is, he’s worn holes in the
elbows and kissed it on the cheek. We put sunscreen on the
tattoo of his father: Feed Bob his weird milk, he says, and
I squeeze a white blob onto the flat, unsmiling face. I have
hypochondria, he has diabetes. His feet swell to cantaloupes
and I’m the one in a cold sweat on the twin-sized bed.
The mold in his bathtub is romantic. When he vacuums
the bedroom he talks to the yellowjacket that died on his
lampshade last summer. He holds onto things. The rainbow
cake I made for his last birthday is Saran-wrapped in the
fridge with the knife still in it. It’ll have its own birthday
soon.
I’m on my way to the house where he grew up with
his black cat Fuzzyface and his mother who died last week.
Ringworm
14. 14
Mother in All Your Disguises
In an old life he had a daughter without me. In Mississippi
where he poured milk into an ant hill and saw a dead horse
in the road, in Mississippi where the band played in the
driveway while the baby slept behind the window, where
every cockroach had wings. I wonder what it’s like for
someone to want a child with you. I take anxiety medicine
now, three kinds. I label the bottles with colored tape. I read
their warnings carefully: take once daily by mouth, only as
directed, take your fear out for a spin, for a milkshake and
a new pair of shoes. Beware of nausea, beware of vomiting,
beware your fear when you learn her true name.
Sunday afternoon, a week after the funeral, he kicks
me in his sleep. He’s allowed to kick me because he’s bereaved.
We wake up and brunch feels out of reach. We brush each
other’s teeth under the covers. I put my tongue in his mouth
to count his teeth, the best way to show him the bad dream
wasn’t real. He still has taxis in his eyes from the night shift,
the double pinpoints of headlights pricking his irises. Under
the covers I use their light to look at the patch of ringworm
on my thigh, which expands and contracts according to the
15. 15
Ringworm
phases of the moon. Today it’s smaller than a raisin, its flaky
brown mysteries lassoed inward by the darkness of its celestial
counterpart. I’m not afraid of the ringworm anymore, not
since the moon tamed it as no WebMD could.
I take my anxiety medicine, three kinds. Robert
takes two pills for his kidneys and pricks his finger with the
spring-loaded machine. He’s having trouble bleeding today.
He pricks his finger again and again but the calloused pad
won’t give. He doesn’t change the needles enough. We need
to buy him some new needles at the pharmacy. Need to go to
the pharmacy beside the donut shop, need to slip into a jelly
donut together, need to pump insulin into a chocolate glazed.
“Let me do it,” I say. “We need something sharp.”
I get the cake knife from the fridge and wash last
year’s rainbow crumbs from the edge. I stand over the bed.
Our life together looks very small from here. The bed gets
smaller every day, doesn’t it? Robert sticks out his finger. He’s
so vulnerable, so trusting. And yet he’s raised a child and
buried his mother, and one time in Mississippi, he got held
up in a car, a gun put to his head, the trigger pulled - and he’s
16. 16
Mother in All Your Disguises
still here, my baby boy who can’t even bleed through a hole
in his skin. I don’t know why I thought I could cut him open.
I don’t know why I wanted to. Something in me must’ve
wanted to see what he was really made of. His bed is tiny, an
Ikea crib with slats that break under any shift in weight, and I
squeeze in beside him, my arm rubbing up against the tattoo
of his father, Bob, the widower.
“I got this knife,” I say, though the saying is extra. “It
was in the fridge.”
“It’ll be cold,” he says. “It’ll be strange.”
I can see both our faces in the blade, which is not
sinister but also from Ikea, with a pale blue plastic handle.
“You do it,” I say. “I’m too scared.”
“No, you have to do it,” he says. “It’ll be more fun
that way.” He steadies my hand with his and lowers the
serrated edge of the knife to his pointed finger. “Just think of
me as a jelly donut,” he says. “Just a thing with stuff inside.
The best part is when the stuff comes out.”
I can see his bald spot from where I’m sitting, so I
kiss it. I hate blood. Blood makes me dizzy, makes me break
17. 17
Ringworm
out in a cold sweat, makes me black out. But Robert’s blood
is casual, he’s always wiping it on his jeans, dropping test
strips on the carpet and flicking them out of car windows.
Robert’s blood drinks sweet tea under wisteria vines, it drives
a pockmarked sedan and sneaks Mike and Ikes into matinees.
I want to know what it tastes like but he’s never offered and I
don’t know how to ask.
“Why do you still have that cake in your fridge?” I ask
instead.
“Because that’s where it lives,” he says. “That’s its
home.”
I pull the knife across his finger, just a little cut,
and it bleeds into the test strip, then onto the sheets, and a
little more for good measure. Robert pops the strip into the
machine. It beeps. It’s happy. It likes to have a single drop
of blood for breakfast. We read the number, and when it
disappears from the screen, we’ve already forgotten what it
said, what it meant, why we’re bleeding in the first place.
Robert flicks the test strip across the room. It knocks the
yellowjacket off the lampshade, and somehow that’s a good
18. 18
Mother in All Your Disguises
thing, like we’ve made the most of the day already, like maybe
we can just go back to sleep now. The yellowjacket shatters.
It turns to dust when it hits the ground, a good dust, like
confetti. Like glitter. Looking out at the bedroom, I can see
every one of Robert’s used test strips littering the edges of
the carpet, little bits of his DNA populating the nooks and
crannies of the ever-shrinking world. I think about how much
his mother loved him, and where that’s all gone now. I think
about how much his cat Fuzzyface loved him. When he drifts
back to sleep I find myself on my knees, collecting the test
strips in my palms, every dear discarded part of him.
19. 19
pow pow pow we are wild ones we are the killers! we
are the maniacs no one can tame! come at me. lemme see
what you’ve got, you rat-tooth sonofabitch. you bug-eyed
pimple-ass freak. we shoot rubber band guns. we shoot bb
guns, water guns, real pistol rifle guns at anyone who comes
to the scrapyard to mess with us. we shoot bb’s into each
other’s legs for fun. look at this scab i got when some ratface
damn near shot my kneecap off. see that on my knuckles?
those bloody holes? i let him have it, you should’ve seen it, i
punched him straight in the teeth and the back of his skull hit
the ground, CRACK.
we’re the wild boys, we’re the killers. the scrapyard
is ours. behind the scrapyard there’s an old half a schoolbus
sunk into the water, rusted over the color of the lake. the lake
is ours. our gmas say stay away from that sewer but we’re not
afraid of no botulism, no dead fish, no pelicans all drowned
Rattail
20. 20
Mother in All Your Disguises
up in muck and screaming. we shoot em for fun. we make
grenades outta dead tilapias and we throw em at the people
we hate. the smell don’t bother us. what we do about the
smell is we sit around the lake huffing anything we can find.
we get some glue or nail polish remover. it feels good. we get
computer duster from my cousin who works at the staples in
caliptria. if there’s nothing else we push on each other’s chests
and we pass out and no one can stop us.
one time we all got on top of a girl and took our cocks
out. we said pow pow pow you can’t stop us the wild boys are
upon you and you have to show us your titties or else! you
know what she said? she said or else what. i said you’ll get cut
up in the neck! she showed us her bra which is all she showed
us but not everyone could get it up so we told her to go home
cause she was ugly and we rode our bikes chasing her off the
road. she said she’d call the police but when they came all they
did was shoot bb’s with us cause they knew they couldn’t stop
us wild boys or tell us what to do put us in jail or make us go
to school, cause they knew we got nothin to lose got no fear
got hot metal in our blood and nobody but each other and
21. 21
Rattail
maybe our gmas on our side cause our sisters are knocked up
and our brothers are locked up and our moms and dads are
dead of drugs.
you just be nice to your grandmas back home, is what
the officers said, and we said you better believe we’re nice to
our gmas. cause you know our gmas tuck us into bed and buy
us beef jerky and watch us sleep. our gmas say we’re out like
a light the second our heads hit the pillow. our gmas say we
lie in a shape like we’re running. our gmas say they wish we
didn’t crash our bikes, wish they could’ve kept us in school
and kept us from starting on booze and huffing and cigarettes
wish they could’ve kept their own kids out of trouble and
maybe they would’ve stuck around but we don’t care. we don’t
miss our parents we watch tv we can fend for ourselves. there
are old cans of food in the pantry and we fight each other
like dogs for fun and if some kid can’t keep up, he can go
home and watch the price is right with his gma, we don’t need
anyone weak or scared.
pow pow pow we throw live grenades at the high
schoolers’ houses, dead fish that can kill you from botulism,
22. 22
Mother in All Your Disguises
and then when we smell like the inside of an ass we fight over
the shower in my gma’s trailer, sometimes we have to share it,
keeping our underwear on so we don’t turn into faggots.
there’s only one person we love besides our gmas,
and that’s philadelphia who has fake titties and used to do
pornos. she has a full bush. she showed us. she lets us see
whatever we want cause she’s god’s gift to men. she’s a natural
resource is what she says, just about the only one in the
imperial valley, unless you count the algae and the dead tilapia
and the pelicans who all have botulism and don’t fly right.
philadelphia says this place needed a wildflower and that’s
why she came.
she used to be a stripper in las vegas where every place
has air conditioning but then she bought a trailer on the
salton sea to get drunk and wild and die in, to make this place
beautiful. she has hepatitis. she has an urn full of her dead son
who drowned to death when he was a baby. she can make her
titties swing around. she can do the splits almost all the way
down to the floor. she makes us peanut butter and bologna
sandwiches or says go make your own. she has arthritis in her
23. 23
Rattail
big toe and she’ll pay you five bucks to rub it while she picks
something to watch on tv.
her trailer is the best-smelling place downwind of the
sea. in the mornings she soaks rags in orange juice and pine
sol and hangs them on the fans to drown out the smell of
tilapia washing in from the lake. she lets us eat reddi-whip
from her fridge and sometimes she cracks open an ice cold
beer for us. we’re not allowed to ask how old she is. we’re not
allowed to tell our gmas where we are. we’re not allowed to
bring over any kid with a rattail or missing teeth or anyone
who believes in jesus or the bible, that crock of shit.
philadelphia hates rattails, she says they make her
throw up in her mouth. before anyone can see her tits we got
to cut off their rattail. each summer we get a batch of new
boys who’ve never seen a single titty or a full bush, maybe
never even been in a fight or shot a gun at a mountain dew
can or anything like that. we line em up in the scrapyard. we
make a big fire out of tumbleweed and lighter fluid and old
wood. we make it taller than ourselves, the tallest thing in the
whole valley, and we say today’s the day you become one of
24. 24
Mother in All Your Disguises
us. there’s a few things you got to do. but most importantly
you got to lose your tail.
all the boys’ hands go to the backs of their necks. they
run their hands along the tails they’ve grown since babyhood,
the tails they chewed when they were scared of the dark,
the tails that marked time, the tails that were gonna grow
all the way down to their waists. some boys get attached to
their tail like it’s an arm or a leg, like it has memories. some
boys cry. we bring em up one at a time to the cut-off hood
of a red chevy impala which the sun’s made all sparkly and
hot. we hold the boy down with his cheek against the metal.
the heat of the car hood distracts him from the terror of the
armputation. sometimes he still cries like a little bitch. he
flinches. he shuts his eyes. the brave ones do it with their eyes
open. some of the tails are braided. some are wrapped in bits
of string, some dangle feathers or beads. we do the cutting
with a pocketknife, not too sharp, yanking the tail tight and
sawing through the hairs. sometimes the boy screams.
we give him the sawed-off tail and he holds it up for
all to see. he lets out a holler, his first holler as one of us. we
25. 25
Rattail
holler together and bang metal on metal. some boys bleed
from the hair. we don’t give em no bandaids. we let em bleed
out. we throw the dead rattails in the fire and they burn, each
one funneling up its own line of smoke, black and narrow,
the mass of them swirling up over the scrapyard in a tangled
cloud. smoke gets in our eyes, a hurting kind of smoke, and
the cloud running circles around itself fills up with memories
against the clear white sky: mom runs a plastic comb through
a baby curl of a tail. it grows. it gets braided in with another, a
brother’s, absorbs a gma’s kiss, flies like kite string in a bike-
blown wind, crashes through the surface of a motel pool.
the tails burn all night, long past the time our gmas
want us home: they protect us from the desert cold. we watch
em till they’re gone and all the memories gone up with em,
the moonlight cutting through the last wisps of smoke. then
we get on our bikes and ride ride ride to the trailer park. we
look for the light in philadelphia’s window.
her silhouette behind the window is almost pretty.
she’s leaning on her elbow in the red robe she always wears.
it’s as if she’s been waiting for us. we pile our bikes in the sand
26. 26
Mother in All Your Disguises
and crabgrass in front of her door, which is open except for
the screen. we push through it, all of us.
philadelphia! i shout. fresh blood!
she meets us in the little kitchen. in the white light
her robe looks loose on her body and instead of slipping it off
with a wink, she pulls it tight to cover herself.
go home, she says. you kids should be in bed.
but we cut off our rattails, the new recruits say.
go home to your grannies, she says. there’s nothing to
see here.
we get on our bikes and ride. just past the trailer park
i say, you guys keep going. i’ll meet you there.
the light is off now in philadelphia’s trailer. i push
open the screen door. her voice from out of the darkness says
who is it! but it’s a croak, a shadow of itself.
it’s me, i say. i’ve just come back to rub your toe.
she comes into the kitchen. she lets the dark hang still
and heavy over us, and then she hugs me. something about
it feels like a gma’s hug: the floppy arms, the pine sol smell
covering up something sour. her chest is flat where her titties
27. 27
Rattail
used to be. i don’t have to ask why. i know why. it’s cause we
looked too much and touched too much and used up the last
natural resource in the imperial valley.
i fall asleep in the tv room rubbing her toe. i dream
that i have a rattail that won’t stop growing and philadelphia
is braiding it all the way from the army green sofa to the
busted linoleum floor. she’s on her knees following it through
the kitchen, out the screen door, over the front steps and into
the desert. she’s weaving little bits of her life into the braid: a
feather from a raven’s nest, a bit of string from a promise ring,
a button from her favorite dress, a curl of her hair, the first
holler of a child being born.
28.
29. 29
He says now that his mom has died, he doesn’t want
to go home anymore, he just stands on street corners. He
tells me it’s over between us, that I’m not enough to heal the
broken thing in him, and I press my face to his chest where
it still feels safe. He wraps his arms around me and they are
birds’ wings. He says, “Yesterday I shit my pants at the drug
testing place. Shit? Shat? I was supposed to pee in a cup but I
shit my pants instead. Now that we’re not together anymore, I
can tell you.”
“I love you,” I say.
When you start feeling good enough about your
relationship to stop counting the months and years, that’s
when it goes to shit. It starts to rain, the first time in that long
and ashy drought. I know if we stand here long enough, it’ll
become cinematic.
“What are you gonna do today?” he asks. His eyes are
Beak
30. 30
Mother in All Your Disguises
red around the edges but the water on his face is only rain.
“Cry myself into a coma,” I say.
“You’re perfect,” he says, in lieu of an apology. “They
should name a comet after you.”
Did you know that preschoolers are the fastest-
growing market for antidepressants? Four percent of
preschoolers, over a million preschoolers, are clinically
depressed. I find comfort in that as I lie in bed with the
window open to the rain, gulping air so I don’t stop
breathing, stuffing Quilted Northern into my nose.
I dream that the bed has two exposed nails sticking
up through the mattress on the side where I sleep. I dream
that we wake up together in the night and sit cross-legged,
the covers pitching a tent over our naked bodies. We run our
fingers through each other’s fingers, then over the rusty nails,
which are tarred and feathered with blood and drywall. We’re
not surprised to see them. They explain why some nights we
wake up in a panic with a hurt we can’t articulate, though
we’re pressed against each other like pancakes and the porch
light shines softly through the blinds. We name them after
31. 31
Beak
each other and promise to take care of them.
I wake up with phantom nails in my skin. I crawl
under the musty covers though my body is heavy with sweat,
hoping to find him there. When I don’t see him, I wonder if
maybe he’s become very small, and I look for him in the lint
and the crumbs on the sheets. I find a raisin from a cookie he
ate last week, which is a good start, a sign of his life at least.
But his side of the bed is ghost cold. No matter what I do, I
can’t solve the problem of his absence, though my mind does
gymnastics around it and my body interprets the gymnastics
as choking. I gulp the air from the window but can’t seem to
come up to the surface.
It’s April again, tax day, our first date. We haven’t even
held hands yet. “I like hugs,” Robert says, “but in general,
I like to be asked if I want a hug. I don’t really like it when
people assume.”
He has a glossy paper bag full of insulin samples, five
hundred dollars’ worth. He spritzes some on my wrist so I
can smell it. He says it smells like Band Aids, but I think it’s
something else, something on the tip of my nose - if only I
32. 32
Mother in All Your Disguises
could put my finger on it. He takes a small crocheted skull
out of his pocket and puts it on his thumb like a finger
puppet. He says it used to live on the gearshift of his car,
but he had to send it to the scrapyard, so we’re walking. Our
arms get close enough for the hairs to brush up against each
other and send the world’s smallest electric shock through our
bodies. I wonder if that counts as first base. In California it’s
legal for anyone except a felon to carry a taser.
Along the overpass, a homeless man sleeps clutching a
black binder. We read the words, “The Self-Made Millionaire”
on the front cover, written in gold gel pen. Robert tucks a
dollar into the binder. He tells me his first job was picking
up urine samples from hospitals and driving them around
Mississippi. It was one of the best jobs he ever had.
He wants to go to Best Buy. We sit in the La-Z-Boys
and watch the flatscreen. He says he was strung out on dope
while his sister was strung out on Jesus. He walks me home
and we sit on the porch, which has sunk most of the way into
the gravel and sand. I walk him back down the drive and he
walks me back to the porch. I walk him to the end of the
33. 33
Beak
drive again and give him a hug without asking. He kisses me,
just barely, then pulls me close so fast I hit my chin on his
chest.
“Are you okay?” he says into the back of my neck.
“Yeah. Are you okay?”
“I’m a dinner roll.”
I take him by the hand and lead him into the
bathroom where three baby turkey vultures have just been
born in the dying lemon tree that has pressed itself against the
windowsill. We sit side-by-side on the toilet lid watching the
enormous mother stuff her beak down their gullets. The birds
are not afraid of Robert, and he doesn’t seem to mind the
carrion smell in the bathroom. I imagine us buying a scented
candle together. I imagine the birds finally having a father
figure, learning which cologne to wear.
We date all summer. We talk about buying the
scented candle someday, but we never do. The baby birds
grow out their feathers and hop into the canopy of the dying
lemon tree, one of them slipping and colliding with the gravel
below. A second brood is born naked, then puffy white,
34. 34
Mother in All Your Disguises
then creaking out pubic black feathers. When those grow
into dusters, they too climb the dying lemon tree. We spend
countless hours on the toilet seat together, watching the ballet
of gullets and feathers and skin-colored wrinkles. In August I
buy him a toothbrush on sale, purple with extra-soft bristles
for his sensitive gums.
The next day, in the middle of a meteor shower, he
breaks it off. I feel listless. I don’t drink or fuck myself out of
heartbreak like I used to when I was younger; I only cower in
fear of the endless, lonely expanse of myself. But three weeks
later he calls, asks if any new birds have been born, says we
should go out to dinner. My pride tells me to say no. “Yes,” I
say instead.
“Yes the new baby birds have been born or yes we
should go out to dinner?”
“Birds,” my pride says, swelling for an instant before
it crawls back into its cave. “Dinner. Birds and dinner. Well, I
want to but I’m scared.”
”Me too,” he says, “but hungry people have to eat.”
At the Italian restaurant, he points to a fake plant and
35. 35
Beak
asks if it’s a ficus. Across the room there are couples dancing,
some mixed young and old, one lady all by herself, bouncing
at the knees, her feet planted on the floor and her hands in
fists.
“I like her,” Robert says. “She dances like a baby.”
His salad comes with a plastic container of ranch
dressing. He says he can’t live in the boonies anymore because
he’s afraid of ghosts. That’s his version of small talk. I don’t
tell him it’s my birthday. So many of my birthdays have fallen
in the midst of heartbreaks. I feel embarrassed about the time
I told him I liked the way he eats, because he’s doing it now,
eating, and I like it. He dumps the mound of ranch dressing
onto the watery brown lettuce. I twist angel hair pasta around
my fork and wonder about the reserve of kindness in my body
that still has his name on it. Across the room the adult baby
dances wildly, thrashing, kicking her legs. I stuff the angel hair
in my mouth.
“Will you dare me to squirt insulin in my water and
drink it?” Robert says.
“Okay,” I say, “but only if I can have some too.”
36. 36
Mother in All Your Disguises
He does it, he squirts it in. He smells it. He takes a sip
and chokes on it, pounding it out of his chest.
“That’s really bad,” he says, sliding the glass toward
me. “You don’t have to have any.”
The water smells like tire treads - that’s what it is, not
Band Aids but tire treads. I don’t tell him that I’ve finally put
my finger on it. This is my discovery, and I’m not ready to
share it all so willingly with him, so trustingly. I take a sip to
be certain. Yes. Tire treads. Not Band Aids but pulling over
on the highway because your parents are fighting, not Band
Aids but sitting in the hot car with the windows up while
your mother screams and your father kicks the front bumper,
then the back. Tire treads. I take another sip. It’s poison. I
feel hot and dizzy, like I’ve been sitting in a car on the way to
Bakersfield all my life. I drink and drink the water, the tire-
infused water, the cold tire soup. Nothing can get between me
and the water even though Robert is wrestling the glass from
my hands yelling “Stop, stop.”
I stand to get away from him, and he comes around
the table, his hands on the glass. We’re spinning, or maybe
37. 37
Beak
just my head is. Spinning is enough to make you a confident
dancer, which is the same as a great dancer. The adult baby
approaches us. The music is a big band with no singing. The
band is in the restaurant, on a stage we didn’t know was there.
The adult baby takes the glass from my hand and downs the
rest of the tire water, then takes us both by the wrists and
pulls us onto the dance floor where God has hung ceiling
fans to spin a cool breeze through our sweat-matted hair. We
dance like babies. It’s all we know how to do. It doesn’t mean
we’re back together. It only means we’ll be taking home the
leftover salad and the angel hair pasta to feed to the mother
vulture. It only means she’ll chew it up with her beak or
however she does it, and swallow it, and stick her finger down
her gullet to make herself throw up, and nourish her three
bald children who are also our children - and that Robert is
welcome in my home again, and that the purple toothbrush
has been waiting all this time, prayerfully, behind the broken
mirror of the medicine cabinet.
38.
39.
40. When something troubles me, I say goodbye to my woman
body and turn into an animal. When something troubles
me I howl and gnash into the desert. I let go of my bones.
I set my shoes free. I drink milk by the gallon to grow new
teeth from my cheeks, eat toenail clippings to sprout beak
and claw. I smile at my daughter, say leave the window open
for me, I’ll buy you a Starbucks gift card when I come back.
My daughter looks for me in the face of every turkey vulture,
in the piss of every coyote. She pokes roadkill with a yardstick,
wondering if that’s her mother the pancake, her mother the
maggot-breath. She begs me not to go, says mother in all your
disguises you are still the one who bore me and signed my
permission slips and fed me Raisin Bran when I was constipated.
Kids grow up so fast these days, I write across the sky with
my black wings, the last thing they need is some half-assed
adult regulating their bowel movements. Remember when
you were a baby, I say, and I left you at the grocery store, just
drove off without you, left you screaming in the shopping
cart with nothing but a gallon of milk? I told CPS I was
going after the car alarm but I did it once at Six Flags too, I did
it at a birthday party and in the family aisle of a Blockbuster.
It’s the same every time. A cascade of goosebumps pinches my
neck. An idea washes down my spine like an epidural: Yes.
Of course. The canned food will make a wonderful mother,
especially the peas. I kiss your bald head just as the universe
cracks open its revelation along the seam of the automatic
doors. A howl bucks up my tongue from the root and I’m gone.
