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our hands.
Mine! I’ll be dirtying
my
hands with the baby’s murder.” At
least he had liberated himself from one deception, Bird thought. Not that it
brought him any joy, it was like descending a stairway into a dungeon, just one
step.
“Our hands,
Bird—you’ll see—would you mind—driving?”
Bird realized that the drawl in Himiko’s speech was a result of her extreme
tension. Walking around the front of the car, he climbed into the driver’s seat.
He saw in the rear-view mirror that Himiko’s face was ashen and splotched, as if
a whitish powder had been dabbed around her lips. His own face must have
looked equally abject. Bird tried to spit out of the car but his mouth was bone
dry and he achieved only a futile little noise like the tisking of a tongue. He
catapulted the car into the street with a rudeness learned from Himiko.
“Bird, the doctor I have in mind, he’s that middle-aged man with a head like
“Bird, the doctor I have in mind, he’s that middle-aged man with a head like
an egg who was calling outside the window the first night you stayed at the
house. You remember him?”
“I remember,” Bird said, thinking it had seemed possible at one time that he
might live out his entire life without any contact with such a man.
“When we’ve phoned him we can figure out what we’ll need to pick up the
baby.”
“The doctor told me not to forget to bring clothes.”
“We can stop off at your apartment; you must know where the clothes are put
away.”
“I think we’d better not!” With a vividness that overwhelmed him, Bird
recalled scenes of daily zealous preparation for the baby. Now he felt rejected by
all the baby paraphernalia, the white bassinet, the ivory-white baby dresser with
handles shaped to look like apples, everything.
“I can’t take clothes for the baby out of there—”
“No, I guess not, your wife would never forgive you if she knew you were
using the baby’s things for this purpose.”
There’s that, too, Bird thought. But he wouldn’t have to take anything out of
the apartment; all his wife would have to know never to forgive him was that the
baby died shortly after being moved from this hospital to another. Now that this
decision had been made it would no longer be possible to prolong their married
life by enveloping his wife in vague doubts. That was beyond his power now, no
matter what kind of anguished battle he waged against the internal itchiness of
deception. Bird hit into another reality coated with the sugars of fraud.
As the car approached a broad intersection—one of the large freeways that
circled the giant city—they were stopped by a traffic light. Bird glanced
impatiently in the direction he wanted to turn. The cloud-heavy sky hovered just
above the ground. A wind blew up, pregnant with rain, and hissed high through
the branches of the dusty trees along the street. Changing to green, the light
stood out sharply against the cloudy sky; it made Bird feel he was being drawn
into it bodily. That he was being protected by the same traffic signal as people
who had never considered murder in their entire lives, pestered his sense of
justice.
“Where do you want to phone from?” he said, feeling like a criminal on the
run.
“From the nearest grocery store. Then we can get some sausage and have a
little lunch.”
little lunch.”
“All right,” Bird said submissively, despite the unpleasant resistance he could
feel originating in his stomach. “But do you think this friend of yours will agree
to help?”
“That humpty-dumpty head of his makes him look benign, but he’s done
some really awful things. For example…” Himiko lapsed unnaturally into
silence and licked her lips with the snaking tip of her tongue. So the little man
had perpetrated such horrors that Himiko lacked the courage to report them! Bird
felt nauseous again, a lunch of sausages was out of the question. Truly.
“When we’ve phoned,” Bird said, “we should buy something for the baby to
wear instead of worrying about sausage, and a bassinet, too. I guess a department
store would be quickest. Not that I’m crazy about having to shop for baby
clothes.”
“I’ll get what we need, Bird, you can wait in the car.”
“Just after she got pregnant I went shopping with my wife, it was lousy with
mothers-to-be and screaming babies, there was something animal about the
atmosphere in there.”
Bird glanced at Himiko and saw the color draining from her face; she must
have felt nauseated, too. The two of them drove on, pale and silent. When Bird
finally spoke, it was out of a need to abuse himself:
“When the baby is dead and my wife has recovered I imagine we’ll get a
divorce. Then I’ll really be a free man now that I’ve been fired and all, and that’s
surely what I’ve been dreaming about for years. Funny, I’m not particularly
happy about it.”
The wind was stronger now and blowing from Bird toward Himiko, so that
she had to raise her voice above it. When she spoke it was nearly a shout: “Bird,
when you do become a free man, can’t we sell the house the way my father-in-
law suggested and go to Africa together?”
Africa actually in sight! But it was only a desolate, insipid Africa that Bird
was able to picture now. This was the first time since he had conceived his
passion for it as a boy that Africa had lost its radiance inside him. A free man
halted desolately in the gray Sahara. He had murdered an infant on the island
hovering like a dragonfly at one hundred forty degrees east longitude. Then he
had fled here, wandered all of Africa and failed to trap a single shrewmouse let
alone a savage wart hog. Now he stood dumbly in the Sahara.
“Africa?” Bird said woodenly.
“Africa?” Bird said woodenly.
“You’re just a little withdrawn now, Bird, like a snail inside its shell. But
you’ll get back your passion the minute you set foot on African soil.”
Bird was silent.
“Bird, I’ve become fascinated with your maps. I want you to get divorced so
we can travel to Africa together and use them as real road maps. Last night I
studied them for hours after you went to sleep and I guess I caught the fever, too.
And now your freedom has become essential to me, Bird, I need you as a free
man. You wouldn’t agree when I said we’d be dirtying
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