Crows (16 page)

“Is that official?”

Robert smiled at her; he knew her brain would be at work looking for ways to get him out; making room for Stephen?

“Not official,” Robert said. “Just a feeling.”

She said nothing to that, and later she allowed Robert to pay for the Christmas tree.

J
OE
M
ARSH CARRIED
six darts with genuine bird feathers in the loops of his bandoleer. He took them out one at a time, smoothed the feathers until they all leaned in a perfect row of stiff stalks like a snow fence in the wind, and tossed them at the dart board hanging in the back room.

It was after closing on another subzero night, still a week from Christmas. Robert sat on the edge of the desk; he was eager to get home. All day at work he had been unable to get warm. The store was busy and the front doors seemed open to the bitter cold more often than closed. He wore a long-­sleeved black sweat shirt beneath his stripes, and ran up and down the long blue room on the slightest pretext, and still he was cold.

Now, he had his jacket on, his hat on, and he softly, impatiently slapped his gloves against his palm. Joe Marsh drank from a can of beer, smoked, and threw darts. He had told Robert earlier in the evening that he wanted to talk to him after work. But now that the time had come Robert wondered if the request was no more than a desire for someone to keep Joe company.

“We really had the buy light lit today, didn't we?” Joe Marsh said, getting the darts from the board. They had landed with a soft
punk!
that Robert guessed could be heard all the way at the front of the dark and empty store.

“We had a good day,” Robert said.

“You like this job?”

Robert touched the stripes of his shirt; they were somehow precious to him, a sign that he possessed for the time being something beyond his tenuous place in Ben's house. “Yes, I like this job a lot,” he said.

“Come on! Level with me,” Joe said. “We're both sports hounds. You don't like this job any more than I do.”

“You don't like this job?” Robert asked, pretending surprise.

Joe Marsh fired a dart. “No, I don't,” he said, a snarl in his voice for Robert, for having this admission torn from him.

That day, Robert had seen the two kids he had earlier caught playing basketball come into the store. He did not follow them, though they seemed to expect him to, the way they scurried down an aisle and out of his sight. They might have been more relieved that Dave wasn't around.

Robert was putting price tags on boxes of golf balls and he told himself he would finish that job before he tracked down the two kids. The price gun in his hand unrolled small square orange stickers, the price printed in blue ink, onto the covers of the boxes of golf balls. On each price tag, in printing almost too small to read: SportsHeaven. The gun made a soft, mechanical racket like a turnstile counter. Robert liked the sound; it seemed to be recording the bits of work he was performing, and would total out at the end of the day to tell him what he had accomplished that shift.

From a distant aisle he thought he heard a basketball being dribbled. He stopped working. The store could be a noisy place, with calls going over the PA, the milling customers, talking, cash registers beeping, the electric hum of lights, and the deeper throbbing of the building itself—­but when Robert stopped the sound of the price gun, several moments of absolute silence followed. Then into the silence obtruded the rubbery twang of a bouncing basketball, then a young man's shout of triumph abruptly terminated.

Robert sought out these sounds. He felt unaccountably like his father at that moment, about to squash some kids' harmless good time. At the mouth of Aisle 7 he took his whistle from his pocket. He had not used it in weeks. A puff of lint lay across the air slot like a tiny footbridge.

The kids were playing again at the low basket. But Robert did not blow his whistle because Joe Marsh was playing with them. He did not see Robert. He was backing in toward the basket, dribbling the ball inches off the floor, his free hand holding off the defenders who chopped and hacked at him, laughing. All at once Joe whirled around the kids and stuffed the ball through the low hoop. The backboard shuddered but held, swinging as if caught in a storm. Joe Marsh adjusted his bandoleer; later he boasted of the moment, the way his skills remained so close to the surface and so simple to call forth.

Now he stood and took the darts from the board.

“Fucking winter,” he muttered. He lit a cigarette from his bandoleer, then took ten cigarettes from a pack in his desk and reloaded the empty slots.

“It's not even Christmas yet and already winter's got me down,” he said.

Robert felt a kinship there. He said, “It's cold everywhere I go lately. At work, at home, at my parents' store. I just can't get warm.”

“My wife keeps the heat way up,” Joe said. “It was eighty-­four degrees in there when I got home. Then she wouldn't kiss me because her lips were so dry they had cracked. What does she expect? It's fucking eighty-­four degrees in the house.”

He fired a dart. Robert looked longingly at the door, beyond which was cold night, a quick run, then home.

“I told her it's been two days since I had any,” Joe Marsh complained, “and the head of my dick has dried up and cracked.”

Robert produced a painful laugh of bogus camaraderie. He pulled on his gloves.

“Winter. Wife,” Joe mused, as if some connection was coming clear to him. “Both begin with W. Maybe I've got the W blues. Maybe that's my problem. Winter. Wife. What else?”

“I've got to go, Joe.”

“All right. Leave me here all sad and blue. You working tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Herm is expected,” Joe Marsh said. He touched a smoked sausage link in his bandoleer. “This little getup is retired when Herm's around. He's been good to me. I don't know why I'm so intimidated by him. He thinks I'm a god because I played college basketball.” Joe shook his head. He seemed sad, that a man could be so easily deceived. “If you're ever working and someone says over the PA, ‘Foul-­weather gear on one,' make sure you get busy pronto because that's our code for Herm being in the store unexpectedly. He likes to drop in. It's not a malicious thing. He just gets the urge to see his store, so he'll drive over in the middle of the day and just
appear.
That's the prerogative of a millionaire. He drives a steel blue BMW and his plates say MR SPTS. Mr. Sports, get it? Mr. Spits we call him, behind his back. I like him, though. He's done a lot for me.”

“I'm looking forward to meeting him,” Robert said.

“I told him about you,” Joe Marsh said. “His eyes lit up when he heard you used to be a sportswriter.”

“Yeah? Great. I'll bet he'd rather be a sportswriter more than anything.”

“Not in those words. But let's say that if you handle Herm right you, too, can be a minor god, like me.”

“It's what I've always wanted,” Robert said.

“Don't laugh. He has money to burn. Let him burn some your way. He pays me more than the managers at his other stores just because I once made jump shots regularly. I treat him to a basketball story or two when he's here, he loves it. Give him some juicy inside locker room stuff. He'll eat it up. He might build you your own store if your stories are really good.”

H
ERM
B
RANCH ARRIVED
a little past noon the following day, when Joe Marsh was home for lunch. Robert had been left in charge; this had become their routine and the other employees deferred to Robert as an unofficial assistant manager. His pay had risen two dollars an hour. He was in the back room loading boxes of running shoes on a cart for stocking when the PA announced, “Foul-­weather gear on one.”

Almost at once a short man in a fur coat and Russian hat appeared. He wiped his glasses with a plaid rag. His eyes were wide and vague, giving the impression of blindness as he took in the back room. The skin on his cheeks was scorched with cold. His gaze slipped over Robert and moved on.

He said, “Where's Joey?”

“At lunch.”

“Lunch. That boy's always at lunch.” He stood in the room as though he did not belong. His hat was held with both hands in front of him, as if he had come to ask a favor.

“With Joe at lunch, you're in charge?”

“He told me I was,” Robert said.

“You giving a hundred and ten percent?” Herm asked, evidently serious. “Do the workers know you are in charge?”

“It hasn't come up. There hasn't been a crisis.”

“What do you mean?
I'm
a crisis. When I arrive, it's a crisis. They let you handle me, they must consider you to be in charge.”

Robert smiled.

“You are Robert Cigar?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Herm Branch. Joey told me you were a sportswriter.”

“Long ago,” Robert said.

“A great field,” Herm said. “Why do you think I sell balls for a living? It's as close as I can get to the arena. I've got a house just outside Milwaukee and I go see the Brewers, the Bucks, the Pack, Marquette, the Badgers, my beloved M.C. I see 'em all. Sometimes one of the guys from one of those teams will come into my Milwaukee store. I keep pictures—­glossies—­of every team in the state. You can order them. ­People know me. I keep them on file in my office. Any time one of them comes in I run and get his picture out of the file and ask him to sign it. Then I put their autographed picture up on the wall of fame—­it's the first thing you see when you come into the store. I've got Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews, almost all the old Braves. Bill Bruton. Quite a few of the younger guys, the Brewers. The newer autographs look like little boys signed them. No weight behind them. Like they aren't sure. Or is that me getting old?”

He pushed a finger up behind his lens to scratch near his eye. He took off his coat and hung it on a peg, balancing the Russian hat atop it.

From one of the boxes on the cart he took a silver shoe with a slash of maroon down the sides. The soles resembled some material that would hold a bar of soap to a shower wall.

“Like paper,” Herm said. “Like dust. I can't believe ­people pay what we charge for these.” He tucked the laces inside the shoe and set it back in the box. “How's business been here?”

“Good. We've been busy.”

“You have? My Madison store, I don't know, it's been dead. Like everybody in town has back problems. We aren't even selling skis.”

“I sold a pair of skis this morning,” Robert said, though in fact the girl had said she wanted to look around.

“Downhill or cross-­country?” Herm asked.

“Downhill.”

Herm nodded. His hands sought a diversion now that the Russian hat had been hung up, and they at last took up a closed combination lock off Joe's desk. This lock put Herm at his ease; he smiled expansively at Robert, having found a pastime that might occupy him theoretically for days. He twirled the dial; just picking at it, waiting.

“It's too cold, I think,” he observed. ­“People don't want to venture out into subzero cold to get physically fit. We're a hardy ­people in Wisconsin, but it's no fun being hardy when it's ten below. You play any sports, or just write about them?”

“I
don't
write about them,” Robert said. “I've been playing a lot of checkers lately.”

“Checkers,” Herm said.

“I go diving in the summer.”

“Off a board?” Herm asked. He seemed unable to get a feel for Robert. He kept running into odd textures of interest and habit.

“No,” Robert said. “In the lake.”

“You must not smoke, then.”

“No.”

“Good. Joe smokes. Probably having one now to cap his meal. It just breaks my heart to see a kid who used to run like a gazelle and jump like a kangaroo and shoot the ball like a guided missile—­to be filling himself with smoke.”

Robert said, “You've got potential as a sportswriter.”

“Nah!” Herm said, grinning at the notion. “Why?”

“You talk in an active voice,” Robert said. “The best sportswriters always convey action, motion in their words. Every story—­the good ones—­move
at
you off the page. The reader is carried along. He's out of breath when the story is finished. He has
played
the game.” Robert added, “Those stories are rare.”

Herm said, “You've got an insight that bespeaks careful thought about the field. Why did you quit?”

“I just lost interest. My paper folded.”

Herm took the answer, but gave his mouth a twist of skepticism.

Robert said, “Take that phrase you used earlier. One hundred ten percent. Giving one hundred ten percent.
That
is sports in a nutshell. There can only be one hundred percent of anything. One hundred percent is everything; all. There can be no more than
all.
You can only give
all
you have. One hundred percent. But sports—­the writers, the athletes, the coaches—­had to come up with a phrase to exemplify a concept that can never happen. The athlete who gives more than his all. One hundred ten percent. One twenty. One forty. It's a way to make players of a game more than they are. Sports isn't happy with someone giving all they have to give. And if somebody does—­seems to be—­giving one hundred ten percent, something extra, then they weren't giving one hundred percent in the first place. Maybe eight-­five percent or ninety percent, and the increased effort brought them up to where they were truly giving their
all.
Sports does that
all
the time. It ignores the rules the rest of the world has to live by in order to appear more important than it really is.”

Herm Branch listened to all this and was disappointed. He had hoped to find a sports aficionado in Robert Cigar, someone who could talk sports on a rarefied level. Joe Marsh's basketball tales were getting stale. Herm had heard most of them more than once and had to pretend even mild interest when Joe launched a story for the third time. Herm did not come to the Mozart store as often as he should for that reason. And now Robert had his vague objections to a phrase and an idea hallowed throughout the world of sports.