Free Bird

The road is eternally paved, and the sky is eternally blue, and I’ve been sitting next to her forever. She has staple-sized dimples and green eyes and coarse red hair.

An old rock song is playing, something with no bass, mostly guitar, so familiar that it irks me. The air is broken, and we sweat, a smell that contests my Black Ice pine tree. The smell is victorious. Her head turns, her lip quivers- I can see it in the window’s reflection. I won’t touch her because I don’t want glass in my car.

It’s these highways that kill me. My urban planning teacher, Mr. Maroogan, this egg-belied little tortoise, told us half a million civilians were displaced in the seventies by federal highway construction. Isn’t that fucked? I imagine wheels tearing over chicken bones, torn shingles, clipped fingernails, dollies nicknamed “Dolly.” And for what? So I can stretch a moment like today into piano wire, stretch it until it shivers and peels. Until it hurts.

My free foot, the one next to the clutch, is testing that wire, bouncing up and down. Unlike my right foot, which lays absently on the gas, my left has always been a realist. Showed up when Pauly stole those Jameson shooters from the Tom Thumb, and when I took personal communion in Father Romeo’s back office. He kinda looked like Mr. Maroogan, now that I think about it- a hairier version, cut from lilac and old postal stamps. Nothing happened, but he made me get on my knees for sacrament, and a brown hair from his thumb ended up on my lip. I blew it away like a sneeze. “Sorry,” he said.

There’s a pulse from her side of the cabin, and it seems the membrane has been compromised. There’s nothing I can do to stop it- a wet landslide, tossed gravel escaping from her throat. She doesn’t try to hide it anymore, and in my peripheral is the full breath of her image, exposed by a roll of her head. Her tears glisten and merge with the sweat, but they have a different smell. More humid, like cherries.

“So what are you trying to say?” she whispers.

Before I can answer, I hear a thunderclap, and a brown flower blossoms against our windshield. She screams. I do not, because I don’t think to do so. Most people expand in panic, but I compress. I imagine the brown consuming the windows, the rearview, and all of our oxygen. I imagine Mr. Maroogan and Father Romeo snuggling under a Turkish brown quilt, feet interlocked, shades drawn low.

My hand moves without thought, flicking the wipers up, letting the sun back in. It helps define the blemish, which is actually beautiful- an American kestrel, amber brown, a drip of yellow under an open and staring eye. I’ve never seen one before, yet somehow I know exactly what it is, benign primal knowledge sourced from an ancestor. It’s the first thing I’ve made eye contact with all day.

I want to save this bird. The feeling is so clear, so penetrative, that I almost jam the steering wheel headfirst into the green embankment on my right. But the wipers have not stopped moving, and before I can stop them, they swipe the kestrel clean off the windshield, onto the roof. It thumps twice as it catches in the wind, and then I hear nothing except a guitar solo from the stereo. She starts to scream again. In the rearview panel, I can see the bird go quietly under the wheel of a semi, as if aiming for it from a high up in the air. I wonder if there’s any better way to go.

My eyes lock back in front of me. Looking at the road feels like staring through a dream, both near and far from reality. Her tears have dried up, and so has her face, which is wrinkled tight with fear. Soft, hot breathes escape her lungs, groping my shoulder. Above the dashboard is a fuzzy crack, reminding me of a discarded cornea from a botched LASIK video. Below it, nabbed between the glass and the rubber wiper, is a light brown feather.

“What just happened?” she pants.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Why are you sorry?” she says.

There are too many answers to this question. The freckled constellations on her back that I never finished tracing. The nights where foreign skin kissed and wept against me. Third floor dorms I’ll never visit again. Egg white I’ll never scrub from my tongue. Was every “I love you” shorthand for a lie? Did it start with college, or did it end there?

When my lips refuse to move, I shrug. She doesn’t try to wrestle it from me, and for that I am grateful.

The red cocoon around her can’t hide the fact that she wants to cry again. Her hands are wrung white in her corduroy lap, and there are warning drops of a spring shower on her window. But she doesn’t cry. She just moves her hand to the radio station, turning her fingers around the volume. The drawn out guitar solo is finally wrapping up, and a raspy voice merges in with the dying wails of metal string. The lyrics are belted loud, from some other universe:

“…but if I stay here with you, girl

things just couldn’t be the same

cause I’m as free as a bird, now

and this bird you cannot change…”

And as the tempo speeds up, and the drums crunch against the guitar with ugly fangs, and the memory of a kestrel bubbles back up in my mind, grainy as if pulled from long ago, and drops of rain appear in my vision, prompting movement from my wipers, which makes the feather between us dance, a speckled and charming version of worship, stolen from the homes and lives of those exiled from this sacred ground, this sacred plane, this sacred highway, I find that I just can’t help myself.

I grip the steering wheel, push my head against it, and laugh.