Crows (31 page)

“Healing takes time,” Robert said.

“That's news?”

“My point is—­you shouldn't give up on your pitching career,” Robert said. “Don't start plotting a career at SportsHeaven.”

“Why not? I like it.”

“Don't give up pitching,” Robert said, scared for the kid. “I didn't know you were going to quit the baseball team. You're too young for this place.”

“I've got a glass arm,” Buzz said casually. “I hurt it whether I throw baseballs or punches. I accept that. It's time to move on to other things.”

“I won't make you assistant manager.”

“Why not?”

“It would encourage you to stay here.”

“Where else am I going to go?” Buzz asked.

“Go to M.C. in the fall. Rest the arm, then go out for the team in the spring,” Robert said. “Maybe they'll give you a ride.”

Buzz shook his head. He encircled his right wrist with his left hand. “I'm damaged,” he said. “I'm yours.”

H
ERM
B
RANCH ARRIVED
at the hour Robert had been told to expect him.

“I like that you are always here,” Herm said, shaking Robert's hand. “You aren't planning to get married soon, I hope.”

“No.”

“Good. Marriage would cut your desire to be here in half. We'd both suffer.” He laughed. His thin-­haired scalp was boiled red and peeling ribbony flakes of skin. He touched his head with his fingertips and set loose a small storm something like snow.

Herm inspected the figures Robert had spent four nights preparing. He took a seat and lit a cigarette.

“I call you, you're here,” Herm said. “I drop in, you are here. I like that.” He touched the numbers with his cigarette hand. “A little better,” he grunted, shrugging.

“It adds up, Herm.”

“You're doing better than Joe Marsh,” Herm said. “But is that saying much?”

“You tell me.”

“You're touchy today,” Herm said. “I sensed this right away. What's wrong?”

Robert said, ­“People don't want to put their faith in summer by buying sporting goods.”

“I wonder why. Look at you. With that beard you look like something out of the ice age.” Herm laughed. “A wooly mammoth thawed and put to work here in SportsHeaven. You have a cold feel to you, Bobby. Ice water runs in your veins. It's no wonder ­people don't feel like buying a croquet set or a pair of water skis when they see you. They get cold just looking at you!”

Robert combed the thickness of his beard. Twice recently he had faced the mirror with scissors and razor, then turned away. Even in June's heat he might be inviting trouble.

“Cut it off,” Herm said, “and in a ­couple months it will be time to grow it back. That's winter. Always around the corner.” He folded the numbers for May away in his pocket.

Dave appeared in the back room, a striped apparition that nevertheless remained when Robert blinked his eyes. He had never noticed how much alike Herm and his father looked; the wiry obtuse energy, thin hair, ball-­like paunch. Dave grabbed Herm's hand and pumped, like one of the men who stopped Robert on the street to spend a few moments in his presence; loser and winner.

“My father,” Robert said.

“Is that right?” Herm said.

“Did you tell him my idea, Rob-­O?”

“No.”

“What idea?”

“Put a bike rack in front of the store to draw kids,” Dave said enthusiastically.

“It's a safety hazard,” Robert said. “It'll attract kids, but kids don't buy.”

Herm frowned at Robert. “A bike rack is lighthearted. It's summer. Who cares if kids don't buy?”

“You should,” Robert said angrily. His father shrank back, seeing the rift his harmless idea had opened.

“Even if I did let you tell me how to run my business, I'd tell you to shove it,” Herm replied evenly. “Kids are kids.”

“They steal you blind,” Robert said. “They goof around in the aisles.”

Herm lit another cigarette. “This attitude,” he said, “how long have you had it?”

“I don't know,” Robert said. He wished his father would leave; with Dave present, nothing ever seemed to work.

“Some kids steal,” Herm nodded. “Most don't. Most don't buy, some do.” He said to Dave, “We put in the bike rack.” He said to Robert, “I want you to take some time off. Three days, starting now.”

“Who'll run the store?”

“I will,” Herm said. “I started the damn thing. I can run it.”

“But—­”

“No buts. Go home,” Herm said. “You're always here and that's not always a good thing. Shave your beard. Think sunny thoughts. Come back in seventy-­two hours with the sun in your heart.”

Robert left the store without another word. A block away, he began to feel terrific; lacking an assistant manager, he had not had an entire day off in more than two months.

He walked to his parents' house. His mother was mowing the lawn barefoot. Her long toes were capped with green stains, they wiggled while she talked to her son.

“Take him back,” Robert said.

“Who?”

“You know who. The idea man.”

“What for? He loves SportsHeaven. He loves working for you. He'd be heartbroken if he left.”

“You know that's not true,” Robert said. “He hates being away from you for such a stretch. He doesn't
do
anything at the store but talk.”

“Fire him,” his mother suggested, her words eerie, the sentiment, too.

“If you took him back he'd quit in an instant,” Robert said. “All my problems would be solved.”

“Yours maybe,” she said dryly. She pushed the mower up a row and back. The yard was small; along the walk were rows of flowers, an organization of golds, crimsons, violets, greens. Most reminded Robert of the bells of trumpets.

His mother said, “You think I liked running your father's life all those years?”

Robert only wanted his father out of his hair; he did not want this. “I don't know, Mom. But now I'm asking you to take him back. He's lost without you—­” His mother grinned at that notion. “I'm lost with him,” he added.

She ran her thumbs along the polished mower handles. “What would we sell?” she asked offhandedly.

“Hell, cigars! Cigar's cigars. It's a natural.”

“Don't think he hasn't thought of it.”

“Las Palmas. El Fecundos. Havanas. Brand names. He'd love it, come home smelling like a tinder box,” Robert said. He watched his mother to see if any of his enthusiasm was catching.

She went away again with the push mower. The sound the machine produced was a childhood sound, the blade clicking against the guard in its revolutions. She cut straight rows, the cut grass paler than the uncut grass beside it, as if each blade in being cut had been emptied. His mother was so good and intent at the job it killed Robert's hope; she liked being free of her husband, of the failed store. Why should she agree to take them back?

“Take him back,” Robert said when she returned, “or I'll fire him.”

She patted his hand. “Don't make threats you have no intention of carrying out,” she said.

“If I fire him, will you take him back?”

“No,” Evelyn said. “He will drift off to a seat somewhere with coffee plentiful and somebody to talk to.”

“He needs you.”

“About as much as I need him,” she said. “Ask him. With that job to go to, see if he doesn't enjoy his time away from me. He's growing up.”

Robert kissed his mother's cheek. It was slack, felt empty. He would let her go. He said, “He had an idea to put a bike rack in front of the store. Herm liked it and told me to take three days off. Dave may be in charge when I get back.”

“That
is
a good idea,” his mother said.

“It'll draw kids.”

Evelyn laughed and scrunched her face into the mask of a much older woman. “What an old fuddy-­duddy you are,” she assessed. “ ‘It'll draw kids.' What a horrible thing to say.”

“They rob me blind.”

“Your imagination,” she said.

“You won't take him back?”

She shook her head. “In fact, I'm getting nibbles on the store. It could be rented any time.”

“It's a killer location,” Robert said. “Who'd be fool enough to move in there?”

“You're so positive,” his mother said. “That's what I like about you.”

H
E POSITIONED A
towel over the bowl of the sink to protect the drain, then chopped away at his beard with a pair of sharp scissors. Whiskers fell in clumps and in odd ribbons like fences that dissolved as they fell. Little by little a stranger swam out at him from the mirror. A man with a narrower face than he remembered, and a weaker chin. A man with paler eyes and the faint impression of swollen lips.

Cold air touched his face in wet swirls. The shaving took an hour. He sneezed. He had planned to leave a mustache, but at the last instant hacked it off. Tap water on his face felt silver and cold. The skin he could reach with the tip of his tongue had a burred, scraped feel.

Leaving the bathroom, heading for the stairs to the fourth floor (where he would shake his towel load of whiskers out the window into Ben's tree), he surprised Ethel in her robe heading for the shower. She seemed not to recognize him, but smiled slightly at the space before her, then went into the bathroom and locked the door. Perhaps he could trick her into thinking he was someone else, and thus allow him to remain past his deadline.

But when he was in his room getting into his wet suit she knocked at his door. He could hear the tub filling downstairs.

“Have you found a place to move to?” she asked, not unkindly.

“No.”

“Have you looked?”

“Oh yes. All over.”

“Well . . . I doubt that. But listen, I mean it, you have only twenty-­six days left.”

“I'll be out,” Robert said. “Maybe early.”

“There's a place for rent down the road,” she said. “A cottage, really. Three rooms. Overlooks the lake.”

“You've scouted places for me to move to?” he asked, his heart sore.

“Yes.” She pivoted and went back downstairs. She was a very sly woman. He had wanted to keep her talking, to divert her attention until the tub overflowed, the water running over the floor, down through the walls, into the wiring, ruining Ben's house.

H
E ROWED OUT
onto Oblong Lake's quiet surface. Calm, glassy, the water seemed of one piece, shaped to the contours of the distant bottom, except where oars fell tearing through it. The day's heat had been left onshore. He was sweating in the suit; his shaved face burned. Now he trailed a hand in the water. The cold climbed up through his arm like a straw. The days were getting shorter.

He dropped his coffee-­can anchor fifty yards off an island that had no name. It was an island of sufficient size to hold trees thick enough to prevent him from seeing through to the other side.

He sealed himself within the suit and stepped out of the boat. The water slapped his beardless face. He went deep a minute, then surfaced, barely looking beyond the plate glass clarity of the water. At last he settled into the pattern of his search.

Before the dive he had walked down the road in the direction Ethel had pointed and a half dozen houses from Ben's had found a casual, postcard-­sized red-­lettered
FOR RENT
sign nailed to a tree in the yard. In back was a small building of green wood, rust-­orange screens, and a roof the color of wash water. He could look through one screen, through a small room, and out another screen and see the flat plane of the lake.

A woman—­slight, tanned, a ball peen hammer in one hand, three headless nails pressed between her lips—­had come out to speak to him. She took a key from her jeans and let him into the cottage. The air was cool and somehow idle. She worked the stove in the kitchen/dining room, where the old tile with a pattern of ships and anchors curled up at the room's edges and bore a scuffed traffic valley leading toward the doors. She ran the water, flipped the lights off and on, explained the furnace in the closet and how its pilot light was temperamental.

There was a second room with bookshelves built into the wall and a wire for the TV antenna. It was the room Robert had looked through from outside. The floor was bare wood, dabbed with paint, and old burns the dark shape of beetles. There also was a fireplace, with a phone jack above the mantel.

Off this room was a narrow bedroom with a screened window, a closet, more shelves; and off this room, a bathroom barely larger than a toll booth, with a toilet, a hand-­held shower, and a steel sink with a spider on the rim that the woman flicked away too slowly for Robert not to see it.

She asked Robert if the small place was what he had in mind, but he could not give her an answer. She followed him out and locked the door behind them. He wanted to give her money to hold it but she refused; there were no other interested parties. She said she felt it was her duty to tell him the place took a chill in the wintertime, and that the cottage had its own gas meter that was the tenant's responsibility.

Swimming near the island, something cracked overhead. The air held a disturbance of recent motion when he surfaced to look. A knot of black smoke, the shape of a woman in a bridal veil, promenaded over the water thirty feet up. Even through his mask he smelled the acid of a fired gun.

An object too sudden and uniform to be a bird streaked out over the lake. In the instant before a shotgun fired Robert saw it was a clay pigeon. The shot missed and the disk began its arching descent. Robert ducked, though the target was coming down fifty yards away. The second shot rolled. Fired low and short, it kicked up one thick and elongated white fountain of water, then two dozen receding miniatures. Down range, the pigeon skipped once on the lake and went under.