Crows (15 page)

“Did you blow your whistle at her?” Buzzard asked scornfully.

“I did, as a matter of fact.”

“You're kidding.”

Olive gave him a wary look: the zebra gone mad.

“She was trying to steal,” Robert said.

“So you whistled her for that?”

“Yes.”

“What did your boss think of that?” Olive asked.

“I didn't tell him.”

Ethel was hurrying through her meal. She was going out. They had lost count of her dates with Stephen; they would think they had them totaled and then Olive would tell them of some sly meeting, laying it open like a fresh infidelity. Ethel had learned it was easiest to depart without fanfare or final instructions, that her children were old enough to tend their pains and carry on.

She cut a piece of roast beef and ate it. She gulped her coffee.

Robert took his whistle from his pocket and blew a short trill. “Insufficient mastication of foodstuffs,” he said, pointing at Ethel.

“Yeah!” Buzz exalted. “Get her!”

“Your penalty is to spend the evening at home with the rest of us,” Robert pronounced.

“I'm late,” Ethel said. “I'm also the head of this household and nobody dressed like a zebra is going to tell me to chew my food more thoroughly.”

After Ethel left the table, Robert asked Olive, “What has she said to you about this Stephen character lately?”

“She's pretty tight-­lipped, which worries me. I think it indicates a certain seeking of privacy for her feelings. Or maybe her feelings have become too strong to be comfortably shared with her daughter.”

“What if she gets married?” Duke asked.

“She
won't
,” Buzz said. “You've seen the guy. He's twenty years older than Mom. He's on death's door. She's not going to saddle herself with another guy who's going to die out from under her right away again.”

D
AVE CAME INTO
SportsHeaven the following day to buy felt letters. He demanded that Robert wait on him. He said, “My letter supplier bollixed up my order.”

He bought ten of every letter of the alphabet and ten of every numeral. Some letters, such as the rare consonants, he cleaned out, and of some he left only one or two behind.

“So there we are,” he recounted, “a T-­shirt shop without letters. Maybe this will hold me. We're not sending T-­shirts out the door in a rush, I'll grant you. I went to the stationery store and—­would you believe it?—­they didn't carry bulk felt. I didn't even hold out hope for glue-­backed felt. Just plain felt. No dice. No wonder they're going under. Nobody writes letters anymore; writes, period. What do we need with a store that sells pens and paper? It'll be gone in a year, Rob-­O. T-­shirts, however, are eternal.”

Two days remained until Thanksgiving. The temperature outdoors was 22˚, two inches of fresh snow had fallen the night before, bringing the winter's total to nineteen inches, and yet his father was dressed only in brown corduroy trousers and a white shirt with a blue T-­shirt over it that proclaimed
DANGER! TURKEY DRESSING AHEAD!

“You look good in stripes,” Dave said, touching Robert's shirt. “Puts color in your face. Makes you look taller.”

“Thanks. Buzz and Olive call me a zebra.”

“You like this slogan?” his father asked, inhaling.

“I can't lie.”

His father laughed; he feinted playfully like a boxer and punched Robert in the chest.

“I hate it, too,” Dave said. “But
you
try to come up with a good Thanksgiving slogan. It's a dead holiday.”

Joe Marsh appeared and Robert introduced him to his father. Joe took a second to read Dave's shirt; his lips moved.

“Clever,” he said absently. “Rob, there's a ­couple kids screwing around in Aisle 7. Take care of them, will you?”

“Sure, Joe. Dave, I gotta go back to work.”

“Go on,” Dave said. “I want to see you in action.”

Two boys, maybe thirteen years old, were playing basketball in Aisle 7. They did not dribble the ball and so played in an eerie silence. The rim hung tenuously from cable just seven feet off the floor and the wide white fan backboard shook and swayed when the ball bounced against it. Each time the ball went through the hoop it stuck in the net and one of the boys would flip it out and the game would resume.

“Game's over,” Robert said, whistle in his pocket. The two boys stopped and looked at him. They were lean, panting softly, with a casual, bored aspect to their expressions.

“That whole rim and backboard might come down on you,” Robert warned.

“Fuck you, ref,” one kid said, and they dropped the ball and walked away. Dave scooped the ball up, checked the aisle for emptiness, and let fly at the nearest kid's head. The shot missed, but an ear was nicked. The two kids ran without looking back and the ball hit a counter at the end of the aisle and caromed back to Robert.

“Dave! You can't do that,” he scolded.

“They'll think twice before they mouth off again,” Dave said. His face was red, excited by that one beanball. “A kid talked like that in my store I'd put his hand in the letterpress for a minute or two.”

“It doesn't work, Dave.”

“Don't tell me what doesn't work,” his father cried. “Those kids' parents haven't taught them anything. And they sure aren't going to. I might as well do what I can.”

“You're asking for trouble,” Robert warned. “If you'd hit that kid, knocked him down, broke his nose, his father would've sued you so fast.”

“Good. Let him. Give me a chance to tell him he's a crappy father.”

Robert put the basketball back on the shelf, orange and brown globes rising overhead and to either side of him.

His father traced the letters on his shirt with a finger.

“Come to dinner sometime,” he said. “I see you around town, I get all excited because I think I might not see you for a while, so I should get it all out right then. I forget we've got time, that you're right here. I start thinking and talking in T-­shirt and nothing is accomplished. So come over. Give us time to talk.”

“Sure, Dave,” Robert said.

“You fit in here,” his father said before leaving. “I told you—­sales is in your blood. You look much better as a zebra than a bag of leaves.”

 

A
VEIN OF
arctic air blew through Mozart the first week of December and for six days the warmest it got was –4˚. Robert moved in with Olive. The arrangement was traditional, a sweet time, when each needed the other and strove to be gracious. In just that way they had seen two previous winters through.

At first Robert completed the charade of climbing the dark stairs to his room on the fourth floor, where ice was a half inch thick around the white rim of the window, and he could see his breath, then sneaking back down to Olive's room when the house settled for the night. However, Olive soon told him to come directly to her room, which was hardly toasty itself. She wanted Robert beside her during those long moments the bed was coldest. It was a fine season in that regard; he nearly fell in love with Olive every winter. They made love often because that kept them warmest, then slept bound within each other.

“My mother may think I'm a slut, but at least I'm a warm slut,” Olive said, her mouth against Robert's chest.

“She doesn't,” he said. His head, where it poked its cap of hair above the covers, was cold.

“I don't know,” Olive whispered. “I think she does, but doesn't feel she has the right to tell me flat out.”

The kitchen was the only truly warm room in the house and at the height of the cold spell chairs, the TV, blankets, books, and pillows were moved there. Sometimes Ethel was out, and sometimes they were all together in the close space.

In low moments, Robert felt squeezed and reduced, the cold forcing them into an ever smaller space. He had to stand and stretch, or pace from his chair to the far end of the kitchen. It was the winter feeling and he was dismayed it had come so early; only December, not yet Christmas, not even past the winter solstice. He was surprised each year how he managed to forget about it in the mild months, and how it grabbed him like a boy and lodged in his heart without mercy. It came into the cold house through every drafty passage and crack, shepherded everyone into the warmth of the kitchen, then sat upon them where it knew they must remain.

Robert often wore his striped shirt around the house. He rarely carried the whistle, though; the novelty of it had dissipated abruptly on the shoplifter. In less than a month he had become simply a salesman of sporting goods. He liked the sound of that; he was content with it for the time being.

The ice on Oblong Lake was a solid foot thick. He saw a sleigh pulled by a black horse out on it, the runners cutting a long double script, and skaters in close to shore, their faces hidden but for eyes behind scarves.

He got off work one afternoon and went by the high school to find Buzz. The maze of the old building's hallways was placed perfectly in his memory. The walls of the front foyer were lined with athletes' pictures. He wasn't represented, but his father was. Preserved behind glass five years since its last dusting, a perfect younger likeness of Dave holding a javelin and squinting into the lens. His father's legs were muscular, his stomach flat, and his chest deep behind the block M on his track jersey. Pine trees rose in the background. His name was printed at the bottom:
DAVE CIGAR MOZART COUNTY JAVELIN CHAMPION
1944.

Classes were out for the day and most of the kids long gone. Those who remained, on their knees in the hall lettering posters or talking in intimate two-­way knots in the tiny alcoves of open lockers or shouting into an echo to a friend not three feet away, reminded Robert of those students who made him nervous with their willingness to remain at school after the point they were required to be there. He had always sought the stillness of his room, to read, to draw, to make things up, to release himself. He had been out the door of Mozart High at the earliest opportunity. His parents' house, the only house he had ever lived in before he met Ben, was two blocks from the high school. He knew by heart the topography of the sidewalk from one to the other. From his old room he could hear the band practicing so loud they might have been out in the hall, encouraging him to open his door.

A booming came from inside the gym. It was a sound without pattern. The doors to the gym were locked. He climbed the stairs to the balcony. Through a narrow pane of webbed glass set in the door he saw Buzz throwing. He wore green gym shorts over gray sweat pants, a sweat shirt with an oval of dark wet at the center of his back, and a baseball cap turned backwards on his head. He was in a long net cage hung from parallel cables that ran from one end of the balcony to the other. Another boy, a batter, waited at the far end of the tunnel. He wore a green batting helmet and as Buzz's easy pitches were released he tensed and leaned into them, giving them a fat look, but each time failing to hit more than the merest skin of the ball.

Between pitches, Robert knocked on the window. Buzz came to the door and opened it. His eyes admitted to a faint curiosity. He was not arrogant, he was not rude or overbearing. He was in a place, maybe the only place, where he was in charge of his life, and this sureness of himself flowed out in a way that made Robert sad by its rarity.

“Why are you here?”

“I wanted to see you pitch.”

“This isn't pitching. It's just looseness.” He rolled the baseball in his long fingers. In a small yellow block on a leg of his shorts was printed, in black marker,
LADYSMITH.
The school colors were green and gold, the colors of a forest tipping from summer to fall. The name of the school's teams: the Wolfgang.

Buzz let him through the door. Robert could not find a way into the net cage, but Buzz pulled at the hanging web of strings and passed like a ghost fish through.

There were baseballs all over the floor of the cage. They cast squat rounded shadows. Buzz picked one up and pitched it to the batter, who ticked it back with a crack off the wall.

“This guy's a pussy,” Buzz said in an aside to Robert, bending to retrieve another ball. He threw a pitch, then asked, “Why are you here?” He turned away as if to shield his heart from the answer.

“I had some time to kill,” Robert said. “I wondered how you were doing.”

“Mom send you?”

“No. Why?”

“Dad used to send friends of his—­other teachers—­around to talk to me. Buddy up,” Buzz said. “That sort of thing. Ben couldn't be bothered talking to me, except to praise me blindly. He thought these friends of his would break through and report back to him. Never happened.”

He wound and threw hard, a pitch with anger in it, and at the last instant he backed off and let his arm come slowly to the end of its throwing arc. Robert saw him wince.

“You hurt?”

“A little soreness,” Buzz said. “I'm just stiff. The cold. Dry air. I'll work it out.”

“Don't throw if it hurts.”

Buzzard made a face and threw an easy pitch. The batter fouled it off with a mighty swing. Buzz called down the net tunnel to him, “I'm done,” and tucked his glove under his arm.

But he did not come out of the cage.

He picked three balls up off the floor and dropped them into a canvas ball bag in the corner. He took other baseballs and shot them like basketballs, some landing in the bag, some missing and bouncing away. Robert thought it looked like fun, but he was not welcome in the cage, it seemed to him, or the entrance to it would be more apparent. The batter had disappeared from the other end through some hidden exit.

Buzz came to the net wall. He asked, “Was Ben a good teacher?”

“Didn't you ever go watch him?”

“No. I had enough problems with my own schoolwork. I couldn't see spending my free time in another schoolroom.”

“Do you think about him a lot?”

“More than I used to,” Buzz admitted. “At first, it was all the time. Then I sort of forgot about him. I'd go two or three days without him crossing my mind. Now, lately—­he's in my mind more. How about you?”

“I think about him less in the winter,” Robert said. “I know I can't get to him, so I put him out of my mind.”

“Why do you look for him?” Buzz asked. “Nobody wants you to find him.”

“I don't think that's true.”

“He'd be a mess,” Buzzard said. His eyes were fixed on the light falling on Robert's striped shirt. Buzz's skin was slick and to Robert's eye faintly marked like a leopard with the shadows of the squares of the netting.

“Do you think Mom will marry that Steve guy?”

“She might. She's still young. And pretty.”

“What does she see in the guy?”

“I can't speak for her. Ask her yourself.”

“She never got along with Dad too well,” Buzz said. He came through the opening in the cage, carrying the bag of baseballs. “I don't see why she'd be in a hurry to get married again.”

“Why didn't they get along?” Robert asked.

“I thought it was just part of being married. All my friends' parents fought. I thought it was part of the deal. He wasn't home too much. I don't think she minded.”

Buzz put the ball bag in an equipment room among a jumble of aluminum bats, scuffed footballs, and stacked bases.

“Then he died,” Buzz said, “and suddenly he's a saint.” The boy's anger flared. Outside the net cage he was more the Buzzard Robert knew. “And you hang around like Death itself reminding everybody of him.”

C
OLD AIR RUSHED
up and down the stairs like a cranky child in bare feet; it hung in slabs just inside the windows, caught and parceled out by drawn curtains; it came in as if the front door was left open a welcoming inch.

They were all in the kitchen again. Ethel mentioned selling the house. Olive made a show of checking her watch.

“Let's see,” she said. “December eleven, at eight-­twenty-­five p.m., Ethel made her first mention of the winter of selling the house. A bit ahead of schedule, but then so is the subzero cold.”

Ethel playfully snapped a dish towel at her daughter. “This time I
mean
it,” she claimed, laughing.

“No, you don't. You'll never sell this house.”

“I
would
,” she said. “It's bad news. We're all—­one or the other—­sick from September until May. It costs a fortune to heat. We don't need all the room.”

Robert said nothing. He was beating Duke at checkers. The conquered disks were stacked at the side of the board. He looked at Duke, who met his eyes with that stubborn set expression that reminded Robert of Ben. Neither Duke nor Robert believed in the possibility of Ethel's selling the house and therefore their comments were not required.

But Ethel said with forced offhandedness, “I saw a little brick house a block from the lake. It's only eight years old, tight, well constructed. There's plenty of room without all these high ceilings and worthless space eating up heat.” She shivered within the calf-­length sweater robe she wore in the house all winter; the robe was dark green with stitched white deer across the front running over a field of spiky snow.

“How do you know so much about it?” Robert asked.

“You sound like a realtor,” Olive said nervously.

“I walked through it the other day with Stephen,” Ethel said. She seemed embarrassed, caught in a bad light.

“What's going on here?” Duke asked.

“
Nothing
is going on here,” Ethel said, relieved by the general tack of the question. “We were driving around one day—­a little bored—­and saw this house for sale. The owner's trying to sell it, so we called him and went and looked at it. That's all.”

“Is Steve buying it?” Buzzard asked.

“Not that I know of,” Ethel said. “It was cold, as usual. I had a sore throat. This house was freezing,
as usual.
It just seemed like an appealing idea to stand in a house without a cold wind down your neck.”

“How was the house?” Olive asked.

“Toasty,” Ethel replied, savoring the sound and feel of the word. She drew her sweater robe tight around her. The others felt the cold she was holding out. Duke sneezed, and for one reason or another everyone but Buzzard laughed.

“Are you going to marry that loser?” he asked.

She thrust a finger at her son and cautioned, “Don't ever say
anything
like that about him again. I enjoy his company and I've gone out of my way to spare your feelings—­all of you—­about this. But I won't stand for you calling him names.” She pulled her finger back within the cocoon of knitted green she wore. “Marriage has not been discussed. We enjoy each other. Let's leave it at that. If the subject does come up, you in this room will be the first to know.”

She looked at each of them in turn, even Robert, who felt something looming and uneasy in the affection Ethel admitted for this man Stephen; another soul to charm, to convince of the necessity of his staying. In looking at the “toasty” house, Ethel probably had not included Robert when she counted bedrooms.

“Are we getting a tree this year?” Ethel asked.

“Of course,” Olive said; for a moment she seemed like the mother, Ethel the daughter seeking approval of the idea.

The previous year they had bought a tree small enough to fit on the table in the kitchen, where it was warm and they could enjoy the colored lights. Needles began to fall from it almost at once. Ben was still in the air, too, and long sad silences were the hub of the season's emotional content. They swept the needles into a pile every morning, but stray ones survived to stab them through the weave of their socks. Duke told Robert the needles were Ben punishing them for trying to have fun without him.

“We'll get a tree,” Ethel said.

“I'll pay for it,” Robert offered.

“Thank you,” Ethel said. “But save your money. You'll need it when the holidays end and you're out of a job.”

“They won't let me go. Joe likes me. I can stay at SportsHeaven forever.”