Crows (27 page)

“Worry about that in six months,” Robert said, thinking it was an easy thing for him to say. “Do you want to be one-­legged the rest of your life?”

“I'm getting used to it.”

“No you're not,” Robert said. “You think about it every day.”

“How do
you
know, Mr. Mind Reader?”

“I just know.”

Duke said nothing. Robert pushed a checker out onto the board, like an offering of peace. Duke waited for the longest time, then sighed and made his move. He said, “The way things are now—­there's no question that I am one-­legged. ­People don't have to stare at me to make up their minds. With a phony leg there'd be a question in some ­people's minds. They'd have to look at me closer.”

“I can understand that,” Robert said.

“I'll get it some day.”

“It's paid for. It's waiting.”

They continued to the end of the game. Robert understood that no enthusiasm existed for another, and that Duke and the moment would slip away from him.

“I'll start looking for your dad again soon.”

“He's gone. You won't find him.”

“What did he tell you that night?” Robert asked.

“That's really what this is all about, isn't it?” Duke asked. “The fake leg? The palsy-­walsy shit? You're just trying to buy a story.”

“No.”

“Yes.”
Duke rose from the chair and with a throw that seemed unbalanced bounced a black checker off the bridge of Robert's nose, stinging him, bringing tears to his eyes.

T
HE WET SUIT
amazed him at how easily it went on with its network of zippers. For a first test, he half filled the bathtub with cold water and lay in it for an hour. The water caught within the suit was warmed by his body and he nearly fell asleep, he was so cozy. But then Ethel burst in on him and her derisive look chilled him.

May Day, he went into Oblong Lake for the first time since that cold night dive off the boat with Olive. The water was numbing to the touch. It felt only a scant degree removed from the ice state it had been locked in for months.

The sun was in the center of the sky. The air was moist and voluptuous with heat in that bursting way of Wisconsin springs, where the season seemed to rush to repair the damaged memories of winter. He was always amazed spring had the guile to push winter back.

Deep in the water he thought he saw a big fish dart. Girls lounged in the sun on the flat stone of the Calf, a green canoe pulled up waiting to carry them away. Their bathing suits were exuberant flags of color.

The water as he went into the lake froze, then warmed, him. His plan was to test the suit in the lake's cold, to check its seal, its maneuverability; only incidentally would he poke around for Ben. He would stay out in the open where Ben was not likely to be found. After a long winter of anticipation Robert could not bear to stumble on him the first day in the water.

The sunlight pushed deep into the water like shafts from cathedral windows. Long, sluggish fish passed through these angled beams, from blue to gold to blue. He could see red pins of light in the fishes' eyes.

He swam a leisurely hundred yards out into the lake. Head down, arms like tendrils at his sides, kicking easily, he reveled in the warmth the suit provided. When he stopped to check his position, the girls on the Calf were watching him.

He felt large as a walrus, but sleek. His new skin, a deep blue with marking yellow stripes across his shoulders and down his arms and legs, felt frictionless. He might slip through anywhere. He knew it was time to shave his beard. It sprouted out the ice cap in long tufts he imagined were slimy.

He filled his lungs and went under. Down a dozen feet he felt the water pressure as a benign ache on the sides of his skull and in the shape of his mask against his face.

But there he hung. He always seemed to move away from himself at those times, as though he was a drowned man patiently waiting to be recovered. He pictured himself in the very center of that long, thin lake, hanging without evident support in the blue, in the shafts of cathedral light. The image was one of the reasons he kept returning, one of the reasons he had extended the time that he could return.

When his lungs felt nearly squeezed shut he forced himself to descend another six feet. It was an exercise in discipline, endurance, and relaxation. He had to find that moment in himself when he was let free. He looked at his watch: he had been under ten seconds shy of a minute. Then he kicked without hurry to the surface.

The girls were gathering their belongings to depart the Calf. A line of thunderheads had come up rapidly out of the trees to cut off the sun and thin the heat of the day. The girls were getting into jeans and sweat shirts, obscuring the tantalizing display of colors.

Like foolish sailors, their giggles coming sharply to Robert even through his ice cap, all four girls got into the green canoe. One girl nearly fell into the water getting the canoe's bow off the flat rock. A single girl paddled. The others sat motionless, hands clutching the gunwales, eyes locked forward. Something about being cast upon the water made them aware of the danger they were in. The sun was gone and a wind had kicked up. The one girl paddled and her expression was already an agony of fatigue. The other girls' faces were rapt, trusting.

But rather than head for the near shore, as Robert expected, the green canoe made a wide turn around the Calf and headed into the wind toward the M.C. beach across a half mile of open water. The girl's paddle bit deep, but she was a slight girl, the smallest of the quartet, and the canoe's progress was negligible.

They were coming toward him. He had no doubt he was the warmest person in that scene of five. The paddler shouted something to the other three and they tucked themselves down into the canoe to diminish resistance to the wind. The girl reached with the blade of her paddle and pulled strongly back, but the weight in the boat and the wind worked against her. They were quite close to Robert, within fifteen yards, and they looked over at him, a bearded blue head bobbing in the water. The three riders were concerned by their lack of progress. The paddler was frightened. She sat up straight, an unbending of her knotted back, and rested the dripping paddle across the gunwales. Her face was a horrid green-­white of incipient nausea and she sucked in air with great sobs.

Robert swam to them. Water had splashed into the canoe, soaking their legs and feet.

“Go to the near shore,” he called to the paddler. She had her head between her knees. He felt a wind circle his mouth like a cold kiss. He felt safe, but frightened for these girls. Hadn't they heard about Oblong Lake?

One of the girls cried, “We rented this boat! We have to get it back!”

“You'll never make it across the lake,” he told them. “Four in the canoe. One paddle. You're insane to be out here at all.”

The paddler lifted her head. She looked a little better. A cord of saliva hung from the center of her lower lip and was pushed out like a pendulum by the wind.

Robert said, “Go to the near shore.” He pointed with his three-­fingered hand, not certain if his words were getting through. She was watching him very intently, but making no move to retake control of the craft.

The other girl cried, “It was my ID we put down on this!”

She stated this with all seriousness, leaning over the side of the canoe to shout at her reflection in Robert's mask. The girl had damp brown hair and ears that stuck out as if caught in the wind. She shouted at Robert, “It's no skin off your ass if this boat doesn't get back!”

Robert saw, beyond the girl's glaring, obstinate face, a large bird blown past, and higher still, clouds the color of oily smoke.

The girl with the paddle watched Robert. The straps of her bathing suit were tied in a yellow knot at the back of her neck and the wind blew this knot flat. She wore a green M.C. sweat shirt cut off at the elbows. Her skin was knobbed with cold.

Robert moved to the bow of the canoe and took hold of the craft's nose with one hand. Using a clumsy sidestroke of sorts, he began to pull the canoe toward the near shore. The girls watched without complaint; he was like a force as impersonal and involuntary as the storm.

At a distant point on the lake, rain began to fall. Robert heard it through his ice cap; he saw the rain as a silver mist that seemed to flow backward, from lake to cloud.

The girl with the paddle leaned forward and pulled with a deep, clean stroke. The canoe tore free of Robert's grasp. Its hull glanced achingly off his shoulder.

They went aground at a marina. The canoe scraped up onto the concrete launch ramp that angled into the water. Only the girl with the paddle looked back to see what had become of Robert. He had found the lake bottom and stood in water up to his chest. He already felt the gracelessness of the suit out of its element filling back into him. From where he stood he could hear the girl whine about getting the canoe back. Fat raindrops smacked the ramp, then advanced drumming across the marina's corrugated roof, across the lake highway, and into the trees with a rush. Robert did not go ashore.

The girl with the paddle waved for him to come closer. She was soaked and forlorn in the rain. Her knees were knocked and she held the paddle like a guitar. She ignored her friends in their shrill complaining. She waved again and his movement back out into the lake she took as an effort to communicate because she cupped a hand behind her ear to catch his message. Then he slipped under the water.

He swam fifty yards parallel to the shore, back toward the point where he had entered the lake. All the green rocks he swam above looked familiar. He wondered if the girl was following the progress of his snorkel.

When he surfaced he saw they had forgotten him in the organizing of their portage home. The canoe's green hull was flipped toward the sky, their damp gear tied inside and hanging like bagged game. Lining up, the paddler directing, the four girls got the bulky craft lifted over their heads. Transformed into a green-­shelled creature, too many legs to be an insect, they bumped clumsily getting their direction, balance, and the rhythm of the march. Then they departed.

Robert watched them go up the road that would take them around the lake to the campus. They would be protected from the rain by their burden. In their retelling of the tale they would refer to him as Neptune.

 

R
OBERT DIVED AGAIN
the following morning, going in a quarter mile north from the previous day's dive. He dropped in his blue skin of rubber over the side of the anchored rowboat. He felt released plunging into the water. He stayed in for an hour, poking careful arms in among the tumbled rocks with their small pockets of mystery, finding nothing.

In the afternoon he went to SportsHeaven.

A cashier told him a man was there to see him.

“Where is he?” Robert asked.

“In the aisles. He looks confused.”

Robert went to the back room. He always half expected to find Joe Marsh there, but Joe was gone. His bandoleer, still loaded with mints, sausage links, pens, pencils, a pencil flashlight, and cigarettes gone stale, hung from its peg. Robert was impressed Joe had been able to leave it behind. Late the night of the day he had taken over SportsHeaven, alone after closing, Robert had slipped the bandoleer over his head, settling it on his shoulder and across his chest. It had been surprisingly heavy. Not surprisingly, its smell—­of leather, tobacco, spices, Mrs. Marsh's perfume—­reminded Robert of Joe.

He missed him. Joe Marsh's sex life, in the last weeks of Joe's term as manager, became Robert's vicarious sex life. He had a face to attach to the convulsing body Joe described minutely. Although Joe's work never improved, his stories did. He seemed to hold out hope that his talent as a sexual raconteur would save his job, just as he believed his way with a hero's tales had won him the job in the first place. He went on in embarrassing length and detail. His eyes sought something in Robert, his audience; he sought reassurance that his life was not getting away from him.

Robert could not help him. In the end, Herm told Robert to tell Joe he was no longer needed. The unseemliness of the assistant manager firing the manager was not lost on Robert; it made him wonder about the footing of his own stature. But Joe Marsh did not question the hierarchy; he did not complain, as was his right, that Herm should have wielded the ax. He had known long before that Robert had moved past him. Robert was Herm's appointed one. The back room was sadly quiet, cold as a cave, an hour after Joe Marsh departed. And in the weeks that followed, theft soared, always on the shift Robert did not work. The thieves had to be employees. They knew the security, they knew when Robert was away. In charge, his ascent complete and a matter of public wonderment (his father claimed), Robert liked work less than he ever had.

He took his whistle from the desk drawer. He carried the whistle all the time at work. He could feel its speckled pill rolling within the chromed chamber in his pocket. He blew the whistle on shoplifters once or twice, thinking each time of Mrs. Marsh, and occasionally on dawdling employees, who fried him with their looks of hate when his back was turned and presumably extracted their revenge by pilfering a $75 pair of running shoes at the first opportunity.

He went out to look in the aisles for the man there to see him. He guessed it was the pilot, Frank Abbott, who had been in before.

But it was his father there to see Robert. He found him in a far aisle, alone, looking through felt letters.

“Dave the rave,” Robert said, approaching.

His father dropped the letters back in the box, mixing them, vowels with consonants.

“What brings you here?”

“Spare time,” his father said. He looked bad, pale, sunk in on himself, his clothes too loose. His hands in his pockets seemed to be keeping his pants aloft on his bony hips.

“Long lunch?”

“I'm shut down, Rob-­O,” Dave said. He touched a letter with a fingertip. “I told your mother two days ago to find herself another tenant.”

“You want a cup of coffee? A cold drink?” Robert asked.

“That would be nice.”

Robert led his father to the back room. He seated him at the desk and poured coffee in plastic cups. Dave waited for his to cool. Diving made Robert hungry for coffee, for something hot and fast in his system, and he drank his immediately.

“Now tell me all that again,” he said.

“I folded my tent two days ago. If you came by more often you'd know that.”

“I've been busy, Dave.”

“I know.
Diving.
”

Robert nodded. It pleased him that his life was of sufficient interest to be monitored by others. “And running this place,” he added. “Why did you close?”

“Why? Why do you think? No business. I hadn't sold a T-­shirt all winter.”

“Come on!”

“It's true,” his father said. “It's not a T-­shirt town, Mozart. Winter lasts too long.”

“But summer's here,” Robert said. ­“People will be in a T-­shirt mood.”

His father waved a hand dismissively. “They'll have to buy them somewhere else. You should sell them here.”

“We do,” Robert said.

Dave looked hard at him.

“It's a new line,” Robert said. He made a vague gesture with his thumb toward another corner of the store. The T-­shirt counter had been his idea, and Herm had loved it. In the week the counter had been open business had been fair, but steady, with a bell on the counter for customers to summon help, and one of the jobs Robert had that day was to hang a sign in the front window advertising the new venture.

“Since when?” Dave asked.

“It's new, Dave. Just started.”

“My own son drives me out of business,” Dave said ruefully.

“That's not true,” Robert said. “You've had problems in that store all along. It's the
location
, Dave. Nobody sees it unless they look for it. You're facing the wrong way. You're out of sight of the lake. It's like you're afraid to attract a crowd.”

“I'm glad I don't face the lake. If I did, I'd have to watch my son making a spectacle of himself.”

“OK, Dave,” Robert said, looking for an opening out.

“I never thought you'd put in a line that competed directly with me,” Dave said.

“We had a little space, Herm asked me what I thought would go. I thought T-­shirts.”

“Yeah, the T-­shirts that would go are
mine
,” Dave said. “You're a cruel kid, Robert, since you became boss.”

Robert finished his coffee and slammed the cup into the wastebasket. But then he had to fish it out because it was one of the few cups he had.

“Don't talk like that, Dave. It's business. There are a million T-­shirt shops. You blame all of them, too?”

“There aren't a million T-­shirt shops around the corner from mine,” Dave said.

“Why are you quitting?” Robert asked. “You've folded a thousand tents before, but you always came back with something else. Why not this time?”

His father tapped his thin-­haired scalp, which showed the first pink burn of the spring sun. “No ideas,” he said. “My mind has gone dry.”

“Because of Mom?”

After a moment's thought, Dave nodded. “I admit your mother's recent behavior has let some of the wind out of me.” He regarded his son with one eyebrow raised. “For thirty years I'm the prince,” he complained. “Then
wham!
She wants to be by herself, she wants to meet new ­people, she wants to be away from me for eight hours a day.”

“So let her,” Robert said. He feared his father was about to cry. “Do something on your own, for once.”

His father's face hardened. Robert's words had come forth cruel, when he had been seeking gruff good humor.

“I guess I should've expected that from you.”

Robert blurted, “All my life it's been you two and me. I always felt like I was butting in. How do
you
like being cut out?”

“No,” Dave said kindly. “We were a trio: you, me, Evelyn. We did everything together.”

Robert looked away. His father was full of imaginings.

“You had the crazy sales dreams,” Robert said, “and Mom had the money and the spine.”

“No.”

“And I was the third wheel,” Robert said. “The kid who denied you your den.”

His father stood. Dave's plastic cup, Robert noticed, had been cut down an inch around the rim by his gnawing teeth. A fleck of white plastic stuck to his chin.

“I shouldn't have come here,” Dave said.

“Why did you come here?”

“My son the manager. I wanted to see you.”

“Don't be mad, Dave. But Evelyn'll want you even less if she sees you quitting on her.”

His father was motionless, listening for Robert to go on.

“She's done so much for you—­it will kill her to see you collapse without her.”

“I'll be out of her hair,” Dave whined.

Robert slapped the mangled cup from his father's hand. It whirled through the door, out into SportsHeaven. Dave's hand remained in the position of holding the cup, a hand poised as if awaiting a burden.

“Don't be a martyr, Dave.”

“Why do you talk to me this way? I get old and suddenly nobody wants to be around me. I'm a butt of jokes. My son strikes me and talks to me like I'm a child.”

Robert longed to blow his whistle in his father's face, but he kept it in his pocket.

“I can't help you,” he said. “You're imagining all this. Maybe I imagined the way you regarded me when I was growing up. OK. We're even. Now go home, I've got work to do.”

His father went and got the cup off the floor. He brought it back and dropped it in the basket. “I want to fill out an application for a job,” he said.

“What would you do?”

“Sell!” Dave fairly shouted. “It's what I've done all my life.”

“That's debatable,” Robert said, again amazed at his cruelty.

But his father did not buckle; the idea of working at SportsHeaven, probably first put forward only to annoy Robert, had taken hold in him.

“I can run the T-­shirt counter.”

“You've proven yourself there, all right.”

“Don't be sarcastic. I'll do whatever you want. I'm sick of T-­shirts, actually.”

Robert took a pad of applications from the desk drawer and handed it to his father.

“I think we'd work well together,” Dave said.

“Look—­” Robert began. But he had bled whatever cruelty he had stored for his father. He set a pen on the table. “Don't get your hopes up.”

His father giggled. “Your mother isn't going to believe this.”

“No,” Robert said, “she isn't.”

B
UT
D
AVE HAD
placed something within Robert that he carried home with him. In the cool May darkness, an hour past midnight, he took his gear to the lake. He stayed in for only a half hour. It was uneasiness that cut short his dive. He did not trust the darkness of the water, or the light that defined its jumpy edges.

Throughout the dive, though, he thought about what his father had made clear to him. He opened it like wings, inspecting it from all sides, admiring it. He was in charge of a small domain. Being manager of SportsHeaven gave him the first power beyond himself that he had ever possessed.

He slept lightly in his room on the fourth floor. The windows of the house were open and he heard Ethel's alarm and the first stumblings of her rising for work. Then he slept through her departure, reawakening when Olive left for her first day of the new season at Good-­Ee Freez. He imagined her climbing into her fresh-­washed smock, her swim-­muscled body full of an effort to be contained in cloth. The night before, he had angled for an invitation to her room; he had even considered climbing the tree. But he didn't; that was past. Nothing had happened. He had gone to work, then gone diving.

Olive, since falling through the ice, since the end of swimming season, had turned inward, as if looking at something for the first time. She had been saddened by the end of the racing. The booty of medals she had won hung in a cluster from the light cord over the kitchen counter and clinked like a wind chime in the slightest breeze. Her friends had kept quiet about the fall through the ice and the coach never found out about it, or never let on that he knew. Joining the team late, Olive still won a green block M with a tiny gold pin of a girl diving into water, and was voted the team's best swimmer. But now she seemed stranded again.

Robert sometimes wondered if the winter had ever taken place. The air was so warm, and Olive so distant, it was as if his memory had been tricked.

He took his things down to the bathroom. Duke was sitting on the hall floor, his leg out in front of him. The light was dim there and his eyes were closed. His arms were folded and wrapped in a towel.

“Waiting for Buzz?” Robert asked.

Duke nodded without opening his eyes. Robert fingered his beard. Holding the long strands of it to his nose he could smell the lake and the ice cap and the faint chlorine scent the mask had, and deep down, Olive.

“When do you get out of school?”

“About three thirty.”

“Wise guy. For the summer.”

“Next week,” Duke said.

“And Buzz?”

“Same time. A day earlier, I think.”

“What are your plans for the summer?”

Duke's eyes opened for the first time. He wore yellow pajamas bearing a pattern of faded green footballs. His foot looked cold stretched out, a white figurine wrapped in a cheap net of faint blue strings.

Robert did not wait for Duke to answer; he feared some sarcasm. “You want to work for me?”

The bathroom door opened. Sunlight flew out as if trapped and then freed. Buzz had tufts of shaving cream at his ears, and held a razor in his hand.

Robert asked him, “You want a job at SportsHeaven for the summer?”

He loved the sound of the question; he loved the power to ask it.

Duke asked, “What would we do?”

“Stock. Sweep up. Sell.
Work.
”