Crows (19 page)

“Douglas and I have been up since two o'clock playing with the kitty,” she reported. “We had a cat once years ago, got it as an adult, and it was a nice cat. But we never realized how much fun a kitty is. Before they get so serious.”

Her husband was sitting in the center of a rug on the basement floor. He was in his robe and pajamas, the light on the ceiling turning his white hair the pink of his scalp, and he cast out a string weighted at one end with a green button for the kitten to bat and chase.

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Cigar,” he said, without looking at Robert. “I'm sorry you have come. We've had just the best time with this little critter.”

“He'll be right next door,” Robert said.

Mr. Wilson smiled at Robert's effort. “Not the same,” he said. “Not the same.”

Robert unbuttoned his coat. Through the basement windows the morning was deepest black.

“How's your father?” Mr. Wilson asked.

“He's fine.”

“I saw him downtown a while back,” the man said. “I wish it was my nature to wear a shirt with a sign on it out in public. I'd love to help your dad and mom out. But I couldn't.”

“What would your shirt say?” Mrs. Wilson asked, a loving teasing in her voice.

Her husband grinned. His teeth were the porcelain blue-­white of new dentures. “Old fart?” he said.

Mrs. Wilson giggled, blushed, turned toward Robert.

“What are you going to name the kitty?” she asked.

“That's up to the boys. This is Ethel's present to them. I'm just retrieving it.”

“We wanted to give him a name so bad,” Mr. Wilson said. “But that's too much of an attachment. You're just asking for trouble if you put a name on something you know you'll lose.”

“True, Douglas,” his wife said.

The morning still looked dark, but Robert had seen the first light coming into the sky and the orange glow from the kitchen of Ben's house. He looked at the windows, turned away.

The cat was thin, long-­legged, gawkily quick, white with a badge of black on its breast and a circle of black like a thrown punch around its left eye.

“Don't let the boys name it something stupid,” Mr. Wilson admonished.

“Or demeaning,” his wife added.

“Though any parents who would name two boys Buzzard and Duke could be expected to raise strange children.”

“Douglas!” Mrs. Wilson scolded; but she was amused, Robert saw, the scolding only for show.

Robert scooped the cat off the floor. The remark about Ben and Ethel irked him; he would deny the Wilsons the presence of the kitten. Its rib cage hummed in his hand.

“Thanks for watching him,” he said. “The kids will be surprised.”

“Don't mention it.”

“Our pleasure.”

He was ready to leave, but first he had to ask: “I was wondering . . . why are your windows painted black?”

They stared at him as if they didn't understand. Then Mr. Wilson said, “Bob! I didn't know what you meant, at first. But, yes. Our boy painted them years ago. He was playing war down here, this was an imaginary bomb shelter and he painted the windows black so the bombers couldn't see the lights from our house. How about that? We don't even notice it anymore. Over the years we've even added a ­couple extra coats.”

Mrs. Wilson said bashfully, “It sort of makes us feel safe.”

“I tell you, you can't have too much of that,” Robert said. The cat was poised in the crook of his arm. He could feel its heartbeat through his sleeve.

“They're waiting for you,” Mrs. Wilson reminded him. “Merry Christmas again, Mr. Cigar.”

He climbed the narrow stairs and went out the door into the cold. It was lighter out, but only a little. No light leaked out the Wilsons' basement windows. They were safe. He looked up to inspect the sky for bombers. Nothing there, though they'd be as careful as the Wilsons to hide their lights. From above, the Wilsons would be hidden in the glare from Ben's house. Safe.

He was walking over the frozen ground, still looking up at the peaceful blinking of the stars as they washed out against the daylight, when he tripped on a brick set at an angle in the ground. It was one of a rectangle of bricks each positioned just that way to mark the boundary of the Wilsons' flower bed. The bricks stuck like sharp tips of teeth through the crusted snow.

He went down hard and the cat flew out of his arms. It immediately ran ten feet, then stopped to sniff the cold ground. Robert stood, pain thudding in his knees, hands, and cracked toe. He made a quick, angry lunge for the cat. The shriek of frozen snow and the sudden movement startled the animal and it dashed another fifteen feet away, finally hauled to a stop by curiosity at its icy surroundings.

“Damn,” Robert muttered.

The cat was blending into the dimness and the snow pack. It was getting away. He moved after it but his steps in the snow were like shouts that pushed the cat ahead. It ran out into the road; no traffic at that hour. The road surface was a pale strip. Bits of road salt gleamed dully, much too cold for them to be of any use.

Robert turned to look back at Ben's house. He wanted Ethel to see him and understand his predicament and send reinforcements. But the front of the house was still dark. The orange glow from the kitchen was the only light. The Wilsons were hunkered down in the painted safety of their basement; or they might have gone to bed, Christmas over.

When Robert turned back the cat was gone. Then he thought he saw it in the shrubs across the street, a flickering of snow-­gray shadow. He ran to the spot but the cat was not there. He got down on hands and knees and sniffed like a dog in the cold beneath the shrubs. The earth was turned there in frozen chunks. No cats, however. Ben's house seemed a mile away and impossibly inviting on the far side of the street.

He ran down a narrow path between two houses, making a soft, panicky racket of breathing. The cat was gone, but he pursued its last verifiable direction of travel in hopes of catching up to it again. He stood very still in the backyard of a house whose rear patio door released muffled squeals of childish greed. He heard paper ripping, and a man's voice cautioning against hurry.

From where he stood, Robert could see the rear of a half dozen houses. Smoke rolled up from chimneys. Christmas had begun. He said a prayer for the lost kitten and went home.

Ethel was waiting at the door.

“I called the Wilsons to see where you were,” she said. “They said you left fifteen minutes ago.”

“I lost the cat.”

“What?”

“I was crossing the yard and tripped and dropped the cat,” Robert said. He shrugged; he couldn't believe it himself. “It got away.”

She was on the porch without a coat. He steered her by the shoulders back into the house, then hung his coat on the clothes tree.

“Don't say anything about the cat,” Ethel told him in a whisper. “Olive's been told. And Stephen. But the boys don't know. We'll pretend the cat never existed.”

“I have gifts for them,” Robert said.

She was not impressed by this. She gave him a last disbelieving look and went into the kitchen.

Everyone was waiting for him. He wished them all a Merry Christmas when he came into the kitchen. He shook Stephen's hand. He kissed Olive and attempted to kiss Ethel, but she leaned clear on a pretext of pouring coffee. He could see her infuriated face rounded in a dozen glass balls hanging from the Christmas tree.

To Ethel, he gave a thermos and a plastic coin tray with an adhesive bottom to stick on the dash of her cab. She was always complaining of having to dig through her pocket for change, and expressing a desire for hot coffee in the middle of the morning.

To Olive, he gave a new swimsuit and a pair of eyecup goggles. She thanked him and kissed him.

“I want you to swim again,” he told her. “With me. Without me. I don't care.” He did not say so, but he saw her body losing its swimmer's hardness, its contours of ridged muscles he loved so much. He knew she would not come along with him on his dives for Ben.

To Buzz, he gave a pair of new spikes with a pitching toe, a new glove, and a new ball. Buzz sat with these gifts in his lap, just staring at them. Leather's boyhood aroma filled the kitchen. He rolled the ball in his long fingers. He had not thrown since that day Robert came to see him in the cage at school. He did not need a new glove. Just holding the baseball and the memory of pitching it made Buzz think his arm ached. But he thanked Robert just the same.

To Duke, Robert gave an envelope. Duke tore it open and unfolded the brochure inside. He read it and turned it over in his hands. His eyes glistened with embarrassment.

“What is this?” he asked.

Ethel took the brochure from him.

“It's a new leg,” Robert said. “That's more or less a gift certificate, good for one new leg.”

“Robert—­”

“We have to go to Madison,” Robert said to Ethel, “to have the leg fitted. Then he's ready to ramble.”

“I don't want it,” Duke said.

“Sure you do. In a month you'll think you were born with it,” Robert said.

“No way.” Duke's mouth twisted against a desire to cry. When his mother tried to give him the brochure he swatted it away. He hopped out of the kitchen and down the hall. They waited for his door to slam, but he closed it like a gentleman, and the soft click he produced put a hole in their Christmas no one tried to fill.

R
OBERT TOOK A
nap in the afternoon with Olive in the sunny cold of her bedroom, then dressed and went to his parents' house. The house had a seductive warmth after winter at Ben's house. It had no flowing drafts or fields of cold air. The heat alone was almost reason enough to stay.

His mother kissed him Merry Christmas. She wore jeans and a dark green sweater, the sleeves pushed up above her elbows. A cluster of glazed red berries had been pinned above her heart.

“How are things over there?” she asked.

“Fair.”

Dave came to greet him. He allowed Robert to set down his packages, then hugged him. He presented Robert with a cup of eggnog, cinnamon spread lightly over the yellow skin. He wore a red T-­shirt with the green letters of the alphabet arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree. Robert glanced at it, then moved on, lacking the motivation to explore it in depth.

“How fair?” Evelyn asked.

“I lost a cat. I went next door to get it from the ­people who were watching it for Ethel. On my way back I tripped and fell and the damn cat got away.”

His parents listened to this with grim fascination. Their arms were linked behind each other's back.

“To Duke, I gave a leg.”

“A leg?” Dave said.

“Yes. A prosthetic device.”

“Isn't that expensive?”

“A small fortune,” Robert said, though the price had been less than he expected. “I've arranged to pay for it month by month.”

“That's a wonderful gift for him,” Evelyn said.

“Duke will have nothing to do with it. He's afraid of the idea, I think. He is just getting comfortable with the idea of having only one leg.”

They took seats in the living room. The tree was in its traditional corner, frosted with lights and tinsel as old as Robert. It was also a tradition: the picking of the tinsel off the dried tree in the early days of the new year. The wrinkled strands, plucked delicately as old bones from their beds, were laid to rest until the following Christmas in the box they had been bought in.

Robert was thinking about the lost cat, calculating its chances of survival. Olive had not mentioned it. Ethel had told Stephen what had happened, and the man's vague frown of disapproval whenever he regarded Robert merely deepened.

“Al Gasconade's in town,” Evelyn said.

“You saw him?”

“I saw his mother. She told me. I told her where you were working and she said she'd tell Al. He's with the
Tribune
now.”

Robert sipped his eggnog. He would like to see Al again. Al had remained on the track while he had stepped off long ago. He was curious what Al thought of all this.

His father stood up in front of Robert. He ran his hands down the tree of green letters.

“My Christmas message,” he proudly proclaimed.

*

a

bcd

efghi

jkmnopq

rstuvwxyz

***

“It's a Christmas tree,” Robert said.

“That's what
I
said,” his mother remarked. “But he says we're wrong.”

“Study it very closely.”

Robert gave it his attention: the alphabet in the shape of a Christmas tree, asterisks for a base and star. His father's hard little belly pushed the lower branches of the tree out of shape. Dave rolled his eyes.

Robert looked over at his mother. She was watching her husband, delighted somehow that he could stump them both.

“Is this shirt a big seller?” Robert asked.

“Specially made.”

“I can't figure it out.”

“You're as lame as Evelyn.”

His mother patted Robert on the knee. “Open your presents, lamebrain,” she said with a sweet smile.

“It's right
here,
” Dave exclaimed. “All you have to do is study it.”

Robert, no longer interested, turned once more to look at his father's shirt, but Dave saw in his son's eyes that he did not care and walked out of the room. When he returned he wore a T-­shirt that proclaimed simply
NOEL
and soon after Christmas was over.

 

R
OBERT EXPECTED AL
Gasconade to appear at SportsHeaven, but for the next two days there was no sign of him.

Frank Abbott came in, however. Robert saw him down an aisle with a flyrod in his hand. Robert hurried away. Frank was still tall and skinny, hair maybe a little thinner. His clothes had always hung on him like wash, the pull of gravity on them almost too great. He was a nervous man for a pilot, and his clothes always looked drenched with perspiration. His eyes had been blue the last time Robert looked into them. A small white scar had been put in the skin above his left eye; this scar never took the sun, never faded from its glowing whiteness.

Frank Abbott put the flyrod back and walked to the end of the aisle. He looked in all directions. His hands were in his pockets. He wore a light windbreaker though it was –7˚ outside. Each employee in a striped shirt he asked where he could find Bob Cigar.

Joe Marsh found Robert in back. “Guy here to see you,” he said.

“Is he outside?” Robert asked in a low voice.

“He's in the store somewhere. He keeps asking for you.”

“Tell him I went home.”

“I can't lie.”

“Sure you can.”

“Why don't you want to talk to this guy?”

“He's from out of my past,” Robert said. “I don't want to dredge him up.” He thought Frank had left town for good. He had heard he had moved to somewhere in the Southwest, Arizona or New Mexico, that the cold of Mozart no longer suited him in a number of ways.

“I'll tell him,” Joe Marsh said.

“Thanks, Joe. And watch him for me, will you? Make sure he leaves the store.”

Joe Marsh told Frank Abbott what Robert had asked him to say. Frank nodded agreeably, then wandered the store for another half hour before leaving.

“I asked him where he knew you from,” Joe Marsh told Robert.

“What did he say?”

“He said you were once in an accident together.”

A
L
G
ASCONADE CAME
in the following night at closing time. He wore a down-­filled parka and a Milwaukee Brewers cap.

“Hey, I like the shirt,” Al said, seeing Robert.

“I am one of
them
, now.”

Al chewed gum. His eyes held the quick light of intelligence. His hair was red, thick, and curly, pouring from beneath the Brewers cap. He had put on a little weight in the face and the middle, but still stood like a jock with his feet rolled over onto the sides of his shoes.

“You finished here?” he asked.

“In a minute.”

“I want to take you out. I've heard all kinds of strange stories about you.”

“They're
all
true,” Robert said with an impatient slash of his hand. “Is that all you want to talk about?”

“No. I want to brag a little, too.” Al grinned and popped his gum. “I'm at the fucking Chicago
Tribune
, Rob-­O.”

“I heard.”

“And I'm
better
than that place. I'm moving up from there.”

“Great,” Robert said. “It's a tribute to you.”

“This summer—­the British Open. Watch for my reports from Scotland. Top
that.
”

“I can't,” Robert said. “Wait here.”

In back, Joe Marsh was at his desk doing the books. He asked, “Your ghost from the past catch up with you?”

“Not the one from last night. Another one.”

“They're all over,” Joe said. “I married one of mine. Kill the lights before you go. Lock the doors.”

When he turned off the lights the huge room went cooler, blue to blackish-­violet. Al Gasconade helped him into his coat. They went out the interior doors and Robert pulled them shut and locked them top and bottom with the keys Joe Marsh had had cut for him. Slush never quite melted on the tile floor and black rubber mats of the entryway; it held the print fragments of a thousand boot soles, like an aid to crime detection placed there specifically.

Robert took his knit cap from his pocket and pulled it on his head, then put on his gloves. Al zipped his parka and set his Brewers cap tighter on his head, sheathing his ears with coils of hair.

“You like it here?” he asked.

“It's work. I like working, I've discovered.”

“I mean in Mozart.”

They stepped outside before Robert answered. The cold was always a revelation; it was forever taking on fresh dimensions. Al Gasconade stood motionless, turned out on the sides of his feet, while Robert locked the outer doors. The wide blue SportsHeaven sign, which burned around the clock, shone down upon their shoulders and made icy blue puddles all the way out to the street.

Robert said, “Where to?”

Al Gasconade led him to a yellow Porsche parked up the block. It had a black roof and salt splashed high as the door handles. Al got in and started the engine, then opened Robert's door.

Al steered the car in a U-­turn and headed out of Mozart. It was very quiet in that car, and Robert had a warm sensation of flying in a glass globe filled with green light. They sped out of town, then onto a highway that headed north into deep forests thinned periodically by small villages.

“Nice car, Al.”

“Thanks. I overreached. Overwrought? I bought it when the
Trib
hired me and now I pay $415 a month for it.” He shifted down at a county highway and the car swooped through the turn; Robert thought he saw a deer's eyes glow at the corner, then blink out.

“Where are we going?”

Al Gasconade looked over at him. “You never answered
my
question.”

“About Mozart? I like it well enough.”

“You could be the one going to Scotland,” Al said. “We both know you're better than I'll ever be.”

“You've got the desire, Al. I've explained it a million times. Don't make me explain it to you.”

They were moving through land and places Robert had spent his entire life near, but in the dark, at that speed, they were strange as the bottom of the sea. Now and then they passed a house with TV light in the window silver paint.

“I know how you feel,” Al said. “The day I opened at the
Trib
I updated my résumé and set it aside. I mailed the first half dozen things I did there to
Sports Illustrated.
They're interested. I always seem to be looking ahead.”

“You've got ambition,” Robert said.

“
That
I have,” Al said. “But sometimes I'll be sitting at my desk, or at some press table, or in this car—­and I'll just
hate
the idea of what I'm doing. Just for a moment, though. Then I'm OK.”

“Nobody loves their work all the time.”

“Sometimes—­I'll write a story and think it's done,” Al Gasconade said, “and put it aside. Ten minutes later, I'll pick it up and read it and it will be
full
of the most tired clichés. It's like opening a door in your house and there are a thousand cockroaches where an hour before there was just a room.”

Robert smiled in the green light; he thought of the clipping Herm Branch had sent him. He should show it to Al, buck him up.

Al went around a pickup truck with a twitch of the wheel. They seemed to Robert to be going very fast, at the very edge of the headlights, but also to be absolutely safe; as if the road with its marking ribbon down the center and the signs and houses and dark woods along both sides was a track bearing them along.

“You ever get down to Chicago?” Al asked.

“Not in several years. Again—­no desire.”

“It's wild, Roberto. You should visit sometime. I'll bet you could land at the
Trib
or
Sun-­Times
strictly on the basis of your M.C. clips. You shined in those days.”

“Thanks, Al.”

“But no thanks, Al,” Al finished.

They came to Green Lake and stopped in a small roadhouse.

“I used to frequent this joint when I was in school,” Al said.

They took stools at the bar and a girl came for their order of beer, cheeseburgers, and french fries. Robert thought the place was empty, but then in the darkness of booths he saw the movement of hands, or caught scraps of talk and laughter.

“Christmas break,” Al said. “Places like this die when the kids go home.” He removed his baseball cap and set it on the bar. “Tonight's on me,” he said, shaking out the matted nest of his hair. “I want that understood.”

“I can help.”

“I know, but I want to spring.” He removed a $20 bill from his wallet. The girl brought their beer.

Al Gasconade held his glass out to Robert. “To desire,” he said. “May I always keep it in some form; may you grow it in some form. Amen.”

They clicked glasses and drank.

“To the British Open,” Robert said. “Send me a postcard of the Loch Ness monster.”

“I
will
,” Al Gasconade promised. He picked popcorn out of a bowl on the bar and threw it into his mouth across a distance of inches.

“My mom said you're living with one of your old teachers' wives,” Al ventured, as if creating a loose skin for Robert to fill.

Robert laughed. “If that is the story your mother heard, then I am living a more scandalous life than I thought.”

“Then it's not true.”

“I live with a family whose father and husband was my biology teacher at M.C.,” Robert explained. “He died—­disappeared—­in that accident on Oblong Lake. You remember.”

“I do?” Al said.

“Sure you do.” The event loomed so fearsomely in Robert's life he was certain it had to hold at least a degree of importance in everyone else's. It at times seemed the lone significant event of his life.

Robert said, “He gave me a place to stay quite a while ago—­this was after the
Scale
folded and I moved back home. I wasn't even looking. Or didn't know I was. I stayed and stayed. Then he was killed and his youngest son maimed. After that, I couldn't really leave.” He drank some beer. He set the glass down so as to make a chain of linked moisture rings on the bar's smooth surface. “I see a time approaching—­in the future—­when I'll leave, Al.
That's
progress. For quite some time I couldn't imagine ever leaving and now I can.”

“Where would you go?” Al asked.

“I don't see that far ahead,” Robert said. He could not imagine beyond that dive in the future when he would find Ben. His life was divided cleanly in two phases: the diving season, and the season he was locked in at present, when winter held him out, held him almost aloft.

“Either I am diving,” Robert said, “or I am waiting to dive.”

“My mother told me about that,” Al Gasconade said. “You're looking for this teacher?”

“Ben Ladysmith. He never was found,” Robert said. “All the ­people who have drowned in Oblong Lake have been found. Ben's the only one not accounted for. I looked it up.”

“You did?”

“At the fire station. It's public record.”

“It's been a while,” Al Gasconade said. “Maybe nothing's left.”

“He's down there. He's hidden.”

Their food arrived and they ordered more beer. The girl stood beside them throwing out conversational hooks. She had brushed blond hair and green eye makeup; she told them she lived in Prince­ton and was bored by the long slow shift of a college bar at Christmastime. She tried to tell them her name but they refused to remember it. She gave up and went away.

Robert was thinking again about Frank Abbott. He thought to tell Al about Frank, but he did not know what to tell. He did not want to start without knowing where he would finish.

He poured ketchup on his fries and ate them with his fingers. Salt grains sparkled on his hands when he reached for his beer.

Al seemed disappointed in something. He ate with a morose absence of enthusiasm. He did not say a word.

Robert told the story of losing the cat. He dwelled on the coldness of the morning, the dark air, the hidden bricks set in the earth like the triggers of a trap. But as he told the story he found himself trying to make it funny, or at least ironic, because he thought that was what Al Gasconade would appreciate. Robert added the crazy Wilsons and their basement windows painted black against air raids. This made Al smile, but beyond that he did not respond.

They finished their meals and their beers. Robert thought that without the diversion of food their conversation might grow again. But Al Gasconade slid off his stool and pulled the Brewers cap down over his wild hair and got into his coat.

“Let's hit the road,” he said. “I think ten bucks each should cover it.”

Robert was too far from home to pick a fight and lose a ride. He had come expecting to pay his way, so now he would.

The blond girl waved good-­bye to them from where she stood washing glasses in a sink. Al ignored her. Robert raised a hand to her; he wished he had paid more attention when she tried to talk to them.

The yellow Porsche warmed around them, the green bubble reformed. Robert closed his eyes and folded his arms and pressed his head against the seat. It was nearly 3 a.m. They were heading south into the darkness. Al Gasconade drove at a brisk, angry clip. Robert did not mind; he would be home soon.

They reached Mozart in less than an hour. They had not said a word since leaving the roadhouse. On the street in front of SportsHeaven, Al Gasconade pulled over. Blue light fell into the car.

“Thanks for the ride, Al.” He did not ask to be driven home.

Al faced him. “I'm just a damn sportswriter,” he said, so vehemently Robert leaned away. “I write about games. Nothing as important as diving after some guy dead two years. Some guy who was long since washed away to nothing. Pardon me if I don't measure up to your fucking crusade.”