Crows (3 page)

“Have you tried that on your students?” Robert asked.

“In a general way. It's a little too much like preaching, for my tastes,” Ben said. “I feel too much like a biological guru when I'm up there telling them how wonderful it is possible for them to be. And kids no longer come to see their teachers like they did.”

He went on, “Years ago, when I began teaching, there were always students visiting at all hours. Here. At the house. They just liked to talk. Butter me up. Listen to my tales. Angle for a better grade. All of which was fine with me. I loved the company and the fact of their youth. It gave me a chance to show off.” He reached and tapped a jar where a snake pressed its scaled snout, its split tongue rising up the glass.

“But today's kids don't seem to have the time,” he said. “You're the first one in a long time to seek me out.”

“It's early, yet,” Robert said.

“For you, maybe. I'm here year-­round. I teach summer school. You can see my house across the lake. Students once dropped in at my house just to talk. To see me.” Ben sighed. “Maybe it's
me.
Maybe I'm less accessible, or patient.” He sat up straight, a startling shift, and jabbed a finger at Robert. “Hell, you wouldn't be here now if my Olive hadn't brought my lunch. Right?”

Robert said, “You're probably right.”

“And I practically had to drag you here myself,” Ben said. “Believe it or not, there was a time I was quite popular.”

Ben tired of this and stood. The small office had no windows and he stuck his head out the door and looked up and down the hall. “You know Ara?” he asked. “Professor Mason?”

“No,” Robert said. He stood.

“Hey, stay,” Ben said. “You just got here.”

“You seem pretty busy.”

“Do I? I'm not. After you've been around as long as I have, everything pretty much runs on its own. I know my lectures by heart. I give the same tests. I'm like a river.” He smiled at Robert, then looked out into the hall again. Students walked past. Some said hello to Ben. He kept his back to Robert, calling greetings to students Robert could not see. Ben's voice was firm and quick, a carrying voice built over years of teaching into large halls.

He turned back into the room. “You want to get a sandwich?” he asked. “Sit in the woods?”

They went back down the inner labyrinth of stairs and tunnels, outside finally into cool air tinted green with the final dark burst of summer's health. At the end of September the leaves had gone bloody and were starting to fall. Ben bought Robert a ham sandwich and cups of iced tea for them in a small café stuffed with smoke and students. They carried the food out to a small grove of trees long ago named Rapist's Woods. A sidewalk passed through the trees and there was a bench alongside the walk, with a white-­bulbed lamp overhead. A rape had taken place there years before, when the bench and lamp were not there, when the walk was a footpath. The lamp, whose light was feeble and swallowed like cream by the trees, was in response to the rape. The rapist never had been caught and might since have died of old age, but women steered clear of the little grove even in daylight, though the path was the shortest route through that part of the campus.

“I like it here,” Ben announced, taking a seat on the bench. “I'm not bothered. If I'm very quiet I can sometimes get a bird or a squirrel to eat from my hand.” He held a fragment of bread out, as if in demonstration, then put it in his mouth.

“They're nearly tame now anyway,” he said. “They know students are basically good-­hearted. Harmless. The cruel ones have a smell to them. Word soon spreads about them. And they know the campus is a repository of abundant discarded food. All these kids and their lousy dietary habits. Corn chips, cookies, pieces of half-­eaten dried fruit, pretzel sticks.” He rubbed his hands together. “Manna,” he whispered, then took a bite of his sandwich.

A bird flew down the tunnel of light and air formed by the path through the trees. It was just a flicker of color—­a reddish-­brown—­in Robert's eye, then gone. He was chilly in the shade with the iced tea.

“He'll be back,” Ben reported, his head bowed over his sandwich to tear at the gristle in the meat. “A sparrow. Airborne cockroaches. They'll live anywhere.”

In a moment the bird returned and landed ten feet up the path. Two more joined it and they proceeded to pick at the hard bits of stone and seed on the walk, with nervous starts and turns built in, as if they knew danger was everywhere.

Ben tore small scraps of bread from his sandwich and threw them in the birds' direction. They hit the ground and scattered like snow. The sparrows, at first startled by the intrusion, bounced away, one even taking brief flight. But then they fell on the crumbs almost madly and carried most of them off.

Ben asked, “Why are you taking my class?”

“I need a science credit to get my degree.”

“Then what will you do?”

“I don't know. I worked for the
Scale
until it folded.”

“Robert Cigar,” Ben said, as if hearing the name for the first time. “You wrote about Olive, and you wrote about my boy Buzz.”

“Did I make up quotes for him, too?”

Ben laughed. “You'll have to ask him that.”

“We were instructed to get the names in the paper,” Robert said. “As many as possible. Whole rosters. Names sold papers—­though evidently not enough. I was pretty good at it. I was the best pure writer on the staff. But I was lacking in several other facets.”

Ben listened to this assessment, then said, “I like that you don't blame others for your fate.”

“No point in that.”

“But other than the need for a credit—­why take my class?”

Robert was afraid to disappoint Ben, but there was no other reason. “I can't lie,” he said.

Ben brushed crumbs from his lap. “Of course you can't,” he said. “I'm sorry to eat and run like this, but I've got another appointment in a few minutes. I hope you enjoy my class. It's intimidating, thinking I may be the last teacher you ever have.”

He started back down the path through Rapist's Woods, toward the sciences building. Robert went along with him.

“I hope I haven't offended you,” he apologized. “All the classes I ever took at M.C. I took because I needed them for a degree.”

Ben, walking, looked over at Robert. “Well, that's certainly a vote of confidence.”

They crossed the walk and entered the building, then again went into that inner core of passageways and climbed to the third floor. All the way Robert groped for some word that would set things right. At any moment Ben could have turned him loose curtly. But he didn't; he let Robert accompany him back to his office. He unlocked the door and went inside and took his seat. Putting his legs beneath his desk there was a
snap!
and Ben cried angrily, “Damn!”

He had kicked a fragile construction of wing bones off the skeleton of the crow. Ben stooped and brought the pedestal and wing up onto the table. “Damn,” he repeated. “When I put that under there I said to myself—­‘Don't do that. You'll forget it's under there and step on it.' And look what happened.”

He turned the wing bones in his hand. He blew dust from them.

“Look at this,” he said, suddenly enthusiastic, motioning Robert near. “Hollow bones. Light as a feather.
Lighter
than a feather. That's the secret of flight. Birds lack the weight that keeps us lumbering humans earthbound.”

Ben fit the fractured bone pieces together. “I think I can fix this,” he said. He turned in his chair to listen to the pneumatic sigh of a door opening and closing and a brief clatter of footsteps in the hall.

“Here's Professor Mason,” he said, just as a large, plain woman with ash blond hair and wide, pale features entered. She slipped past Robert without looking at him and set an armload of books on her desk. Robert was intrigued by the territoriality of the room; Ben dominated fully three-­quarters of the available space and this Professor Mason did not seem to mind.

“This is Professor Mason,” Ben said to Robert. “This is Robert Cigar, Ara. One of my students. He is a sportswriter of some renown. He's covered Buzzer.”

She shook Robert's hand with the barest interest. “How do you do?” she said. She asked Ben, “Will you be long?”

The three of them, and the packed papers and jars of life, had reduced the office to an uncomfortable, nearly intimate, dimension.

“Look at this,” Ben said, holding up the broken wing bones. “I put this under my desk and then kicked it.”

“Pretty dumb,” the woman said. She seemed to be waiting for an answer.

“I've got to get going,” Robert said. “And you've got your class.”

“Relax,” Professor Mason said. “Take my chair. I'm out of cigarettes. I'll be back in fifteen minutes.” She said to Ben, “Tell him a crow tale. Tell him about the crow with the broken wing.”

She left the office, first shaking Robert's hand again.

“I really do have to get going,” Robert said.

“Sure you do,” Ben said, distracted.

“What was all that about crows?”

Ben smiled thinly. “She was making fun of me. A private joke.” He had put the bad wing away in his desk drawer. “I've got a lot of work to do,” he said, “and when Professor Mason returns with her cigarettes she'll drive me away with her smoke and stink. You're lucky to be getting away while you can.”

R
OBERT MADE THE
walk home, following the road that circled the lake. He could see a speedboat way out on the cold water. The boat's hull was caked with silver and some distance behind, skipping like a stone, was a late-­season skier in a yellow wet suit. Nearer to shore a sailboat flew, its white mast checked with blue marlin. Robert could see three ­people in the boat. One girl had long blond hair that flowed like a kite's tail.

The lake road was as old as Mozart. Its pavement was turning to crumbs at the edges, and the salt of winter and the expansion and contraction of the seasons left potholes that were repaired with stinking dollops of asphalt, which broke open inside of a year. His dad had gotten him a job one summer on such a road crew—­a horrid summer; the stink took three months to leave his skin the following autumn, whiffs of it rose sneakily to him in hot showers. On the far rim of the lake, miles away, the road was unpaved for a stretch and in the summer a cloud of white gravel dust hung, coating the trees and the children who played on the beach.

Robert followed the road into downtown Mozart. He was carrying his biology text and a notebook empty but for a half page of notes; he had a pen in his pocket. A car passed and honked at him. A head vaguely familiar turned in the shadows of the front seat to call to him, to wave a hand. Robert waved back.

He stopped in Cobbler's newspaper store to buy the Madison paper. On a wall behind the counter were clippings from the
Scale
trumpeting the feats of Mozart High's and Mozart College's athletic teams. The tape holding them in place had gone brittle and useless, replaced with bright-­headed pins. Robert's by-­line was up there often; Al Gasconade's, too; Dale Turbotel's (gone to St. Louis); Bill Jenk's (gone to Wausau); Art Haig's (out of the business). The Madison paper sent a reporter to M.C.'s games, but when the
Scale
died the high school lost its press coverage. On Saturdays after Robert had written about games that Mozart High had lost, he would stay in his apartment to avoid the sniping of parents and fans who disagreed with his interpretation of the event, his reconstruction of a pivotal play, his choice of quotes, occasionally even the final score. He had seen the paper's folding as a perverse revenge against these ­people.

Del Cobbler, who had owned the store for nearly twenty years, was behind the counter. He was a petite man with an ageless face who wore a green-­billed printer's shade. The smoke from his cigarillo would rise from his mouth and bend noxiously around this outcropping, which had been stained murky and fingerprinted over the years. With delicately tough hands he snipped the wire from a bale of newspapers and slapped one still stinking of ink onto the counter. Robert put down his money.

“I saw your dad this morning,” Del said.

“You collecting plates now, Del?”

The vendor shook his head. “No. He came in for a paper. Also a box of licorice. Also some stamps.”

“Was Evelyn with him?” Robert asked, knowing she would not have been.

“No,” Del said. “He told me he had her working too hard.”

Robert read the headlines on the front page for the fifth time and still they did not register; he was thinking about his parents.

“What are you doing now, Rob?”

“I'm a student.”

“Hell, you've already been a newspaperman. Why go back to school?”

“I'm finishing a course I never took,” Robert said. “It'll help me in the field.”

“You heard the rumor the
Scale
's reopening?”

“A pipe dream,” Robert said, “of frustrated ex-­jocks who can't stand the idea of their kids not getting any ink.”

“They've got the presses over there,” Del said. “You can look in the window and see the rolls of newsprint, typewriters, some with paper still in them. This town is dying for a paper. It's ready to go.”

“It's all in receivership,” Robert said, though he was only repeating the last rumor he had heard. “Once they catch up with Thrips it'll all be sold to pay his creditors.”

Del Cobbler blew smoke at Robert, turned his back on him. “You were the only one in town who didn't hate to see that paper fold,” he said.

“Sorry, Del.”

“What sort of guy is
glad
to lose his job?”

“I hated it,” Robert said.