Crows (24 page)

He sensed she was agitated by his predicament and the approach of darkness. But he did not want to risk using the wing before it was ready. He also held a grain of hope now, and to try the wing and have it fail would dissolve that grain, something he could not face.

“I'll wait one more day,” he said. “If my luck holds, it holds.”

She flew away and he thought she was gone, but in less than an hour she was back. He heard her talons scrape curling around the opening edge.

She said, “I heard once about a crow who flew by mistake into a house and never got out. He flew through rooms and down hallways into other rooms, becoming more and more lost.”

“He was one of the rare stupid crows,” the crow said.

“No. He wasn't stupid. He was like you or me. He saw the sun reflect off a mirror in a room and thought it was a gold coin. When he flew into that room there were other mirrors that turned him around. There were more windows than he remembered and doors opening in every direction. The house was a labyrinth to him.”

“This is a simple house,” the crow said. Her tale annoyed him. It was dark, he was trapped, he had a wounded wing; why did she heap further gloom atop him now?

“When it was a pit in the ground it was simple,” she said. “Day by day it grows more complex. Passages have appeared and disappeared. Rooms have been built within rooms. It is no longer a simple house. The crow trapped in the house flew and flew for hours, growing more and more frightened. He kept passing through pockets of scent that terrified him—­man smells, cat smells. Finally he landed behind a chair in a distant room. And there he fell into the deepest sleep of his life. He slept all day and night and halfway through the next day.”

“He
was
stupid,” the crow harshly claimed, “to sleep like that.”

“He was stupid with fear. Stupid with exhaustion,” she said. “In sleep he could hide. When he finally woke up he had forgotten everything short of the fact he was a bird of some sort. He'd forgotten he was a crow. He'd forgotten he was trapped. He'd forgotten all the smells of danger. He'd forgotten how to fly. He came out from behind the chair and thought the house must be his home. He walked across the room into another room where a cat was sunning herself on a pillow on the floor. The cat was asleep. The crow had forgotten the cat was its mortal enemy. The crow tapped the cat once on the head to wake it and ask it some questions. Imagine the cat's surprise to be awakened by a crow in the middle of the house. Imagine the crow's surprise when the cat ate it.”

She let this last sentence stand like a sign of light in the sky. The crow could no longer see her. He counted eleven stars through the shrunken opening, where two nights before they had been countless.

“I've got to get home,” she said. Her voice had changed from the voice that told the crow tale; she was tired again and afraid of the dark.

“Maybe your luck
will
hold,” she said. “I think good luck feeds upon itself. Producing more good luck.”

The crow said, “Tomorrow I'll fly out of here.”

“Yes, you will. I'm sure of that.”

H
E PASSED THE
night in the cavern of lumber and the female's tale ran through his mind and kept him from falling asleep. His hunger was like a dream in itself; he imagined abundant food—­fat mice, mountains of corn, sweets, chocolate in gold foil—­despite the rolling and burning these images induced in his stomach.

The night seemed to last forever. But this impression was heightened because he had no way of seeing the light as it came up. His first hint that morning had come was when the men arrived for work. They tramped across the boards overhead, talking, laughing, releasing the smells of coffee and sugar into the crow's senses. He closed his eyes against these smells and for the first time in his life tried to forget. Forgetting might release him from his hunger. He knew then that he faced the worst day of his confinement; his hunger and the exhaustion of his terror and his fighting sleep had reduced him to a level where he feared for his life. It occurred to him that he might actually die in that stone pit. The house would be completed and a family of men and women and children would move in and find the dead crow in the basement and wonder at its presence there. They would find him with two perfect wings, but without the strength to use them.

He heard a sharp noise very close. Two men spoke, coming closer. The crow pushed deeper into the cave.

The men were in the pit. They dropped tools with loud sounds atop the stacked wood. They talked and laughed.

He heard a board being lifted off the pile. The men's voices went away, became faint, then were obliterated by a fierce, high-­pitched saw whine.

Then the men returned and another board was lifted off the pile.

The female crow would be sitting in a tree at the edge of the scene; she would not know what was happening, though she would learn soon enough that his luck had run out.

When the next board was lifted off the pile the crow felt the dimensions of the cavern change. A dust of stone granules and earth rained on him. The light was very different from anything he had ever seen.

His wing felt fine.

One of the men expressed amazement at the presence of the crow under the boards.

“Kill it,” said the other man. “Step on its head.”

The crow fled to the corner farthest from the two. Out in the open he felt better, braver; hiding and waiting did not suit him.

The men did not approach. They merely stood and watched; they were breathing hard, excited by their find. One called up into the house that they had found a crow.

A ladder had been lowered through the door in the ceiling to the floor of the pit. Men came to the top of the ladder and looked down. One flicked a hot cigarette at the bird, creating a small storm of sparks that frightened the crow and made some of the men laugh.

“Kill it,” said the man in the pit.

But the other man said, “No.” He advanced carefully on the crow with one hand held out. The crow struck halfheartedly at him. He did not want to hit him. The crow sensed in the man an ally.

“You gotta get it out of here,” said a man at the top of the ladder.

“Drop a rock on it.”

“Get me the jacket out of my truck,” the man said. In a minute a denim jacket with a faded plaid lining was passed down into the pit. The man held it like a bullfighter's cape, moving cautiously in on the crow, who backed as deeply into the corner as possible.

The man threw the jacket. To the crow it was like a sudden cloud streaking across the sun. The jacket was held aloft briefly by air that filled it like a bag and gave the crow time to run out from under it.

The floor of the pit spread wide before him. For an instant no men were in sight; they were behind him, scurrying sounds, laughs, curses. The shadow of the thrown jacket appeared in his wide eye and he leaped clear again at the last instant. A stiff edge of cloth ticked his tail fathers. His wings beat and carried him high off the floor, to the height of the men's heads. One face was cruel, one face was worried. The jacket revolved through the air again and missed.

The cruel man lashed out at the crow with a booted foot and missed.

“Don't do that,” the other man ordered. He was holding his jacket over his arm, as though the day was merely too warm, nothing else. He was panting softly.

“Just
kill
it,” the other man said. “We got work to do.”

From the pocket of the jacket the man took a cellophane sack of nuts. He opened the sack and rolled six nuts into his hand. He dropped them on the pit floor. They hit and bounced, but stayed whole, held together by thin skins the brown of June bugs. One nut rolled to the feet of the crow, who felt weakened by the delicious, salty smell.

He bent and pecked at the nut and the man threw the jacket. The nut broke in half, split by his beak. He saw the cloud shadow too late to flee. And once under the muffling warmth of the denim he did not struggle, but folded his wings and clung to the salted half nut in his beak.

The man carried the wrapped bird up the ladder to the first floor of the house. The man stunk of meat, sweat, smoke. He transported the crow carefully out the front door of the house.

Even through the denim, the crow sensed a change in the air. It moved without restraint; free air.

The man placed the bundle on the ground; then with a snap he yanked the jacket away, a trick of magic.

The crow beat his wings and just like that he was above the trees, a second crow rising to meet him. Flying home, he took a route around that point in the sky where he had been shot so long ago.

 

I
N THE FIRST
moments after Ara's completion of the story Robert had to hide his disappointment. She had told the story well, though without Ben's easy mix of fact and legend, then went wrong at the very end. Never before had the female crow flown off with the wounded crow; never before had a man helped the crow out of the stone pit.

She lit a cigarette, first throwing her smoked butt in a sparkling arc over the fireplace screen. Robert noticed on the stone floor before the fireplace a spattering of dark burn marks. Robert sat up straight. Did Ara lose suitors over their fear of fire?

“At first,” he said, “I thought I'd heard your story before. But then I hadn't.”

“He fashioned the stories over time,” she said. “We might've been told the same story a year apart. In that year they became two different stories.”

“It's a good story,” he said.

“But it's not Ben.”

“I didn't mean that.”

“I wasn't trying to be Ben,” she said. “I was just telling one of his stories. You've done the same yourself, I'll bet.”

“I have,” Robert agreed. “I've told his boys one or two. The crow trial is a favorite.”

She asked, “Do you ever wonder what was said out on the lake that night?”

“Yes. Not as much as I once did,” he said. “Some day Duke will decide to tell us and then the suspense will be over.”

“What if I told you I knew?”

Robert said, “I think I can wait until Duke is ready to tell me.” He stood quickly, his head swam. The set of her mouth seemed on the edge of forming words he did not want to hear.

Out the window he saw a gray wash, old water, leaking along the horizon. Ara came up behind him and slipped his coat onto his arms and up across his back. It seemed very heavy. She encircled him with her arms and did up the buttons; her hands working at his chest were disembodied and resembled pale busy crabs.

“All of this talk of crows.” She sighed. “An entire evening of it. Most ­people would think we were mad.”

“Did you ever think Ben was?”

She shook her head disapprovingly. “He was not happy with himself. He
hated
parts of himself so terribly. Things that he did. His crow stories—­his entire wealth of biological data—­were a way around that hating himself. It was something to talk about. Something that wasn't verifiably Ben.”

He got into his boots and gloves and hat. Only his eyes were without protection. In these extra skins of fabric he felt safe to ask her what she knew.

“Tell me,” he said.

“You don't want me to tell you. You're just being polite,” she said. She leaned to him and kissed his cheek; her mouth left behind a moist sensation eye-­shaped.

“But how do you know what was said?”

“Ben came to me with his problems,” Ara said. “Sometimes I felt as if he had filled me up with them.” She saw the incompleteness this left in Robert, and decided that was the way she wanted it to be. “Duke will tell you one of these days,” she promised. “And if he doesn't, and you can't wait any longer, come see me and perhaps then
I'll
tell you.”

H
E THOUGHT HE
surely was the only man or woman awake in Mozart, aside from Ara, but when he reached Ben's house he discovered he was wrong. Olive was buried under blankets in their bed, only an oval of angry face showing. Her mouth tasted of brandy when he kissed her. She watched him as he undressed in the chilly room. He left to brush his teeth and when he returned her eyes picked him up at the door. He shed his robe and crouched in shorts and a green M.C. T-­shirt at the edge of the bed, waiting for her to open the covers to him.

But with a stubborn glare she clutched the blankets to her. The cold poured up from the floor, turning his toes blue. His scrotum hung tight as a walnut.

“What is it, O?”

“Where have you been? I called Joe at home and he said you left work hours ago.”

“I was visiting a friend of Ben's,” Robert said. “I'll tell you everything. Just let me in bed.”

“You could have told me where you were going.”

“You don't tell me every move you make,” he countered. His patience broke then. He pounced and tore the covers from her grasp. The fragrant warm pocket she had been hoarding floated up to him even as he jumped into it. She shrieked at his frozen feet touching her, and the icy bone probings of his fingers.

“Serves you right,” he said, yawning, already finding his way into sleep. “Get the light.”

“You'll go to sleep.”

“Yes, that's the idea.”

She moved against him as he warmed. He felt through her cotton nightgown the solid, unbound shiftings of her body, a sensation of loose-­packed strength. She ran a fingertip up the underside of his cold-­stunted penis. It came half to life, but that was its tired peak.

“Give me a rain check,” he murmured. If she would turn out the light he would be free, but she knew that and refused to let him go.

“Who was this friend of Daddy's?”

“She taught with him. Shared an office. It was a strange night.”

“I'll bet,” she said, miffed. “Her name is Mason, right?”

He faced her, impressed. “Yes. How did you know?”

“The name surfaced in this house on rare occasions.”

Robert rolled away, closing his eyes again. She pulled open one of his eyelids, as though searching for life.

“I met a guy,” she said.

“Good. Who?”

“He coaches the women's team at M.C. He saw me working out in the pool and put a clock on me. He asked me to be on the team.”

Robert rolled back toward her. She smiled at having caught his interest. “Do you want to do that?” he asked.

“He said he might be able to find some money for me. It would help Ethel,” she said.

“But do you want to
do
it?”

She shrugged against him. “I don't want to get up at five o'clock in the morning to swim laps at six,” she said. “But I miss racing. I'll try to get into little races with other swimmers at the pool, but they never put up much of a fight.” She softly chopped her hand down Robert's chest, his belly, as if she were marking off lanes. ­“People tend to
fade
on me. Even when I race a guy, I can't hold back to keep it close, that seems unnatural. So I bury these ­people, and then don't have anyone to race against.”

“It's a dilemma,” Robert said. He dipped his head to kiss her frowning mouth.

“No monkey business.” She laughed, pushing against his chest. “I'm in training.”

“It would be awfully cold getting up at five,” Robert said. She would rise and snap the warm seal they had formed, like a butterfly emerging prematurely.

“I have to want to do this,” Olive said, nodding. “And this guy, this coach, he seems very stern and determined. He won't let me slide, I can tell that. You, you've let me slide.”

W
HEN HE AWOKE
he found Ethel in the kitchen scrubbing the faded floor tiles with a wood-­backed brush. Her hair was held out of her eyes with a pine-­green scarf. When she saw him in the doorway to the kitchen she ordered him to halt.

“Stop right there,” she said. “If you wanted to eat, you should've gotten up earlier.”

He did not argue and she returned to her work. He stood in the doorway with his arms folded, watching her. She had a narrow waist for a mother of three, flowering into hips and buttocks held tight in old pink denim pants now wet and dark at the knees. Her breasts were small, like O's. Her neck was cord taut with the exertion of work.

She stopped and faced him again. “Why are you staring at me?”

“I'm not.”

“Leave. I won't be through here for an hour. Go eat in town.”

“Too expensive,” Robert said. “I'm saving my money.”

She made a huff of disbelief.

“Did O tell you she may join the M.C. swim team?” Robert asked.

“Yes. She was quite excited that they might pay for part of her school. I don't want that to be the only reason she does it.”

“She said she wants to race.”

“She wants something in her life besides school, this cold, and an extremely reluctant suitor.”

“Am I a suitor?”

“You tell me,” Ethel said, glaring up at him from under a loosed swatch of hair. “She deserves more than what you've given her.”

“What have I given her?” Robert asked.

“From what I can tell,” she said, “a warm body to sleep next to and roll around in bed with, and not much else. She might as well be an electric blanket for all the feeling you show her.”

“We know each other too well to fall in love,” Robert said.

“Then let her go race. Sleep in your own room, or if it's too cold, move out,” Ethel said. “But she's worth more than you show her. There's more to my daughter than spread legs, pardon me.”

Robert, feeling slapped, would not back away. Ethel went on scrubbing the floor with angry, digging strokes of the brush.

“How are things with you and Steve?”

She dropped the brush into the bucket of black water at her side. With an exaggerated effort of unbending she rose to her feet. She winced at Robert. “I thought he was going to take me away from all this. But I was wrong.”

“All what?”

“This house. Driving a cab.
Worrying.
”

“He blew it New Year's Eve, didn't he?”

Considering this, she took in air until her cheeks were round, then let it escape with a
whoosh!

“Yes. He made the mistake of telling me things I already knew quite well, thank you. He got ahead of himself—­ahead of both of us. He meant well. It just backfired.”

She returned to her knees and took the dripping brush from the water. She said, “So I have returned to the life of the lonely widow, after a brief fling as a merry widow.”

“What did he say about Ben that was true?”

“I don't remember,” she said. “I just know that at the time they were the wrong things to say.”

“Do you miss him?” Robert asked. “Ben?”

“Go away. I'll never miss him as much as you think I should.”

He changed into his zebra shirt and black pants and headed into the cold. He would eat lunch in town, then go to work. But he turned away at the restaurant door and went to his parents' shop. At the sound of the door opening his father came out of the back room. His eyes were eager and hopeful. He wore no T-­shirt, just a plain white shirt with a pen in the pocket and the sleeves rolled up.

“Robert,” he said.

“How's business?”

Dave worked his hands without answering. There was no hiding the silence of the rooms, front and back.

“Where's Mom?”

“She's taking some time off,” his father said quickly. His words were jerky with their desire to carry no feeling. “A week or two,” he added.

The shop had that look it always got as it degenerated toward failure; the look of no longer trying. Care was missing in the placement of displays, shirts were crammed unfolded back into the high racks behind the counter, snips of felt lay on the floor blatant and embarrassing to Robert as dandruff flakes on his father's shoulder. A light was burned out on one wall. The dead bulb stuck out like a tumor amid the working lights, patiently waiting to spread to the others.

“Things don't look good, Dave.”

“I've been in better positions.”

“I sense you're about to fold this particular tent.”

“My son the mind reader,” Dave said. But he did not deny Robert's assertion.

“How long has Evelyn been gone?”

Dave turned to check a small calendar on the wall. He seemed to be trying to figure something, but could not. Then Robert saw the calendar was for January, when they were already well into February. Robert went behind the counter and tore off the month and crumpled it in his hand.

His father examined the new month. “This is the sixth day,” he said, as though he could not believe it. “She said she wanted to have some time to herself. She wanted to putter—­that was the exact word she used, Rob-­O—­
putter
, like she's Sam Snead, that she wanted to putter around the house. She wanted to pursue other interests.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. He said, “You tell me: What other interests?”

“I don't know,” Robert said. All his life his mother's only interest had been her husband and whatever business he was currently running into the ground. She had seemed to draw everything she required from the wiry little man who lost his hair and grew a small, round belly, as though the hair was packed there under his shirt for safekeeping.

Now she was gone; or gone home. She scared Robert, cutting Dave loose the way she had. He checked the clock. Did he have time before work to talk to her?

“I hear good things about you around town,” Dave said cagily.

“Things?”

“
Good
things. Word travels in Mozart. They talk about my son the big shot, about to take over in SportsHeaven.”

“No truth to that,” Robert said. He wondered if Joe Marsh heard the same stories; or was he removed, his ears sheltered by Mrs. Marsh's thighs?

“You've shot up like a Roman candle,” Dave said, getting into the spirit of his bragging. “Word has it you are the favorite of Mr. Branch.”

“You know Herm?”

“
Herm?
Herm, is it? In my day it would've been
Mr.
Branch for the first ten years.”

“Do you know him?”

“Not personally. But he's famous in this state. Mr. Sports. He has a cup of coffee and a piece of pie when he's in town. He talks to the locals, and what he says is you've got comer written all over you. One day you're part-­time seasonal help, the next day you're No. 2 man.”