Crows (32 page)

Another bird was launched. Robert found its source, the sun deck of a large cedar house built deep in among the shore's huge stones. A man was sending out the birds. A woman was shooting at them. The new pigeon tracked the path of its predecessor, sailing unharmed through the furious shot cloud sent up, skipping once and going under.

Almost at once a new bird sailed free. Out and out, Robert waiting for the gun's report. But the disk's sweet skin went unmolested. No shots were fired. The man and the woman were arguing. She propped the shotgun against the deck's railing. Robert heard nothing of their words through his ice cap. The woman turned her back on the man, her arms folded. Her hair was caught in the sunlight and made more golden than it probably was. Her red sweater was like a warning to boats.

The man took up the shotgun. Robert wondered what he was witnessing. The barrel swiveled toward the woman's back, but then moved on. The man reloaded. Robert could see the man's mouth moving.

Out of all this a black bird sailed. The man followed it down the barrel of the gun and fired so that at the apex of the bird's long flight it would be disintegrated by an intersecting flock of shot. But the man was not the marksman he thought, for the pigeon sailed on down into the lake. The woman had turned enough to watch over her shoulder. Robert saw her soundlessly laugh and clap when the shot was bad.

T
HE POLICE DROVE
Ethel home from work the following day. A blue car marked with a bluer star stopped in the street in front of Ben's house. Ethel, her face pinched tired and old, crawled out. Robert started down from the fourth floor. She was in the kitchen pouring coffee by the time he arrived, and the police were already gone.

“I foiled a holdup,” she told him.

They were alone in the house, Robert in his striped shirt. “Yeah?” he said.

Ethel pushed up her sleeves. When she set her cup down it danced seismically against the saucer.

“Yeah,” she said. “This guy got in my cab and gave an address. When I got there he had a knife—­or said he did—­and told me to turn over all my money. I gave it to him—­not much. But he must've been satisfied because he got out.” She drank coffee. She continued, “I watched him in my rearview mirror running away. You know where Falls Street parallels the woods north of town? Kind of a seedy area? Near The View?”

Robert nodded into her excited eyes.

“He was trotting along, watching the woods,” she said. “Looking for a place to duck in, I suppose. I got out of my cab and shot him.”

Robert had not heard her, or believed her, and asked her to repeat what she had said.

“I shot him through the thigh,” she said. She closed one eye as if in aiming. “A tough shot at thirty-­five to forty yards . . . moving target.”

“What gun—­”

“You know it. You took it away from Buzzard.”

“
You
kept it!”

“I spirited it away, yes,” she said. “I saw a need for it. Beneath the seat of my cab the previous driver had made a place for a gun. He pointed it out to me before he quit.”

“Are you in trouble?” Robert asked.

“I'm out of a job.”

“They fired you?”

“I quit,” she said. “I couldn't even get back in the cab. I went to where the robber was rolling around on the ground and I held the gun on him and took back my money. Then I radioed the garage to send the police and someone to pick up the cab. I got a ride home from the police when they were finished.”

Robert studied her, looking for the gun. It had disappeared again; he saw no hard shapes in the folds of her clothes. The clinking of her coffee cup had stopped. The hair on her arms was standing up.

“I won't beg you for a job,” she said softly. “But I
am
out of work.”

“I still have to move?”

Her reply was immediate. “Yes.”

Robert said, “Come in and fill out an application. I'll consider it.”

“I will,” she said, almost threatening. She took a deep breath and ran a finger under one eye. Something had made her sad.

“Tell me about you and Ben,” he said. “Why don't you miss him?”

“We were on the way out,” she said. “I'd caught him with a girl once years before—­when O was four, Buzz just a baby. I don't know why I was surprised. I thought he'd started to love me. I thought I loved him. We married under very tough circumstances. We were young. Horny.” She shook her head. “So much sex. Day and night. We were the first for each other and just crazy for it. And then I got pregnant. We got married but we didn't really know each other. I dropped out of school. I forced Ben to stay in school and finish. It was very tough. I thought we were falling in love, then I found him with this girl and kicked him out of the house for six months.” She thought back to that time, her look almost merry. “He stayed in the yard the entire six months. We had an old hammock then—­he slept in the hammock, went to the bathroom in the bushes or at his office, ate what Olive passed to him. She thought all daddies acted like hers. Six months—­snow, cold, rain—­he never left except to go to work. He just walked round and round the house.”

“Grief orbits,” Robert said.

Ethel's look flared. “Don't give me that crow shit,” she said. “Don't make it anything more than it was.”

“But you took him back.”

“I weakened,” she said. “Neither of us was ever worth a damn at doing what was right. The weather got very cold. Subzero. He wouldn't go away, wouldn't go live in his office. I was lonely raising two kids without a husband around. I told him I'd take him back on a probationary basis. A
year.
” Her chest heaved, a ragged, disbelieving breath. “We fucked that night, of course. Some probation. Duker might've been conceived that night. But I told Ben, any other women, he was gone for good. This is
my
house, too, Robert. You've never seemed to realize that. It always has been, even when Ben was alive. He knew I'd banish him for good.”

“And you caught him just before he disappeared?” Robert asked.

Ethel said, “No. I caught him on
numerous
occasions before he was good enough to disappear. Over the years it was students, waitresses, neighbors,
friends
of mine. I would banish him and he would fly grief orbits in the yard. He never left. All kinds of weather, it didn't matter. Some nights he was out there with a foot of wet snow piled on his head. Every time—­
every time!
—­I took the asshole back. He didn't know what he wanted. He didn't want his students, his waitresses, other men's wives. He didn't want me. How can you respect someone who never follows through on her threats? Each time I kicked him out, I was a challenge to him—­he
wanted
me—­until I let him back in. And once he was back, he was gone. You know that tree outside our window? He lied to you, telling you how he climbed it to get into my room. He did that, yes. But the first time he used that tree he was going the other way. Out. Down. Away. The ass. He planned it.”

Robert waited. He saw Ben standing before his class, getting into the rowboat in the dark, floating down and away in dark water.

“The night he disappeared,” Ethel said, “he was leaving on his own. He was out in that boat to tell Duke we were getting a divorce. That he was in love with a woman other than me.” Ethel rubbed her eyes. “A teacher, I think she was. Though after all this time, Rob-­O, I don't remember, nor do I care.”

R
OBERT, ON ONE
of his days off, walked to Professor Ara Mason's house. She was in the side yard, on her knees, gouging weeds from her flower bed. A glass of iced tea was balanced in the grass beside her. An ashtray no larger than a silver dollar held a cigarette.

She shaded her eyes to see Robert, who had the last of the day's sun at his back. Then she smiled.

“What do you when school is out?” Robert asked.

“This, honey. I trim. Weed. Cut grass. Why haven't you given me a call? Or left me a note? I think you owe me a crow tale.”

“I've been rude,” he said. “I work a lot. I was ordered to take some time off, so here I am.”

He followed her into the house for some iced tea. The rooms still had that feeling of packed slovenliness he remembered somewhat fondly. The sunlight passed through the front windows and ignited air thick as grain dust. There were dishes to be washed in the sink and a basket of unironed clothes on a chair in the dining room.

She poured tea over ice. She took a slice of lemon from a bowl of such slices in the refrigerator and hooked it on the rim of the glass. They went back outside.

“I don't know why,” she said, “but I feel very cut off lately. The college and the town don't really mix. And I don't mix much outside school. So when school is out I feel very alone.” She lit a cigarette from a pack she kept in a pocket of her shirt; a man's white shirt stained with dirt and grass.

“I'm running the sporting goods store,” Robert said.

“See? Didn't I predict that?”

“Did you?” Robert said. He could not remember.

“Back when it was so cold. You had just started. I predicted great things for you.”

“Well, I'm running SportsHeaven.”

“I keep wondering why you're here,” Ara said.

Robert looked into his glass. The tea was rather bland, the lemon slice half a wheel.

“I don't think I'm going to find Ben,” he said.

She sat forward. “Sure you will. Who will if you won't?”

“Nobody wants him found.”

“
You
do,” Ara said.

“I used to. I don't know now. I've been wondering if I hadn't been buffaloed by Professor Ladysmith.”

“You wouldn't be the first.”

“Were you?”

“Oh my, yes,” she said, but smiling. “He got me to do his work. Cover for him. Make his calls. His excuses.”

“Did you love him?” Robert asked, going easy on her by looking away.

“Yes,” Ara said. She drew in smoke, then stabbed her weeding tool into the ground so that the prong, shaped like a fish's tail, was buried a good three inches deep.

“I think he loved me, too,” she said, “though I could never be sure. We
were
lovers. But I kept seeing him with other woman. In the most innocent circumstances, but I always felt he wanted me to see him with them.”

“But he was leaving Ethel for you. Wasn't that what he was in the boat to tell Duke that night?”

“He wasn't leaving anybody,” Ara snapped. “Ben was a great one for symbolic gestures. He talked about leaving Ethel a million times, but he would never do it.” She ran her fingers through a pile of pulled weeds; minutes out of the ground, their furred leaves had already begun to curl in and brown. “I once spent two weeks' salary on plane tickets to Las Vegas,” she said. “We were finally going to do it. But he never came for me. He spoke to me in the office the following Monday as if it had been the usual weekend coming to an end. I could've brained him with one of his specimen jars.”

“What happened to the tickets?” Robert asked.

“I used them,” she said, abruptly bright. “I flew to Vegas with another man—­and let Ben know I did it; he was
helpless
with jealousy—­to see some shows, loll around the pool, gamble. I won money, too.”

“And you forgave him for that?”

Ara considered this. “Yes. Ben had a quality you don't find often in ­people. He had a very short memory for another person's failings. He was easy to be with because you didn't have to worry about your faults. He forgave everything. In return, he only asked that you forgive him.”

 

A
POSTCARD WAS
delivered to Robert at Ben's house in July. He returned home from work and it was on the kitchen table, floating on the chipped surface like a raft. A postcard of a body of dark green water, green banks, a tall ancient stone castle watching over the shore. Drawn with blue ink in the water was a serpent's flaming head. It was a postcard from Loch Ness, mailed by Al Gasconade.

He had written on the back in large letters, a kid's script:

Robert—­

Here for the British Open. Covered Wimbledon, too. No sign of the monster. How about you?

Later,

Al G.

Robert passed the card around at dinner.

“I think it's in there,” Duke said, peering at the card. “Plenty of ­people do.”

“I do, too,” Robert said.

“Dinosaurs who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time,” Olive said. “When the others got wiped out, they survived through a series of fortunate circumstances. The water is deep, plenty of fish to eat.”

“Plesiosaurs,” Ethel said.

“Right,” Duke said. “Plesiosaurs.”

Ethel glanced at Robert, the others. “Your father told me about them. He used to read me studies about them. Sightings, sonar readings, bathyscaphs.” She sipped her tea. The others waited, but she was finished.

Buzz was at work. Robert had been letting him close alone a ­couple of nights a week. In the long quiet minutes after midnight before Buzz was safely home, Robert listened for sirens or an explosion of compressed air or some other signal of tragedy. But nothing had happened thus far. Buzz could be counted on. His books came out balanced. The doors got locked, the alarms activated, the receipts dropped off at the bank.

Ethel put more ice in her glass, poured tea over it. She still wore her zebra suit, though her shift had ended six hours earlier. Lately, she had been approaching Robert about his lack of an assistant manager.

When he had returned to work from the three days of time off ordered by Herm Branch, Dave was in the back room sketching on a pad.

“What do you think of this?” Dave asked. “We hire a bunch of ex-­pro athletes. Old Packers. Old Braves, right? And they make a pitch something along the lines of ‘I died and went to SportsHeaven.' ”

“Dave, what am I going to do with you?”

“Why don't you call me Dad, like real sons do?”

H
ERM CAME FOR
another visit one evening. He spent more time at the store than in the past. Robert was flattered, but annoyed, too. Herm held up the works. The employees, nervous with the owner on the premises, worked too frantically and left mistakes in their wakes like slivers of chewed fingernails.

“Where's Dave the rave?” Herm asked, ducking into the back room where Robert was making out the next month's schedule; again, without an assistant manager, no days entirely free of SportsHeaven for Robert.

“He's off,” he said. It hit him like that; Herm was hanging around because he liked Dave. He should have understood that immediately. Herm enjoyed Dave's incongruous enthusiasm and string of half-­baked ideas.

“He's coming in later?”

“He's on tomorrow,” Robert said. “Can I tell you something, Herm?”

“Shoot.”

“Dave's not working out.”

Herm cleared his throat, touched his flaky hair. “Why?” he asked. “That bike rack idea was
inspired.
On the surface it's not much. But it's rooted very solidly in what I want to accomplish.”

“Too much talk, too little work,” Robert said.

Herm studied Robert critically. “I never recognized what a drudge you are.”

“Other employees are complaining all he does is gab. He wanted to take over right away, become assistant manager. He doesn't want to do his share of the mundane stuff.”

Herm said, “He's a veteran retailer, Rob. You can't put a guy with thirty years in the business on the same footing with a seventeen-­year-­old kid.”

Robert leaned back in his chair. He folded his hands across his striped middle.

“I don't know what I'm going to do,” he said.

“That bike rack,” Herm said, shaking his head appreciatively. “That was a very simple idea, but a great idea.
Elegant.
It tells the kids of Mozart they're welcome here. That transmits a good feeling to the parents, who have the money to spend.

“I think,” Herm continued, “that a man with that sort of mind should be catered to. So he isn't the world's best day-­in-­day-­out type worker. Most of those steady guys are dull as hell, if you want my opinion. But someone with that
spark
, that
brilliance
, I think we should let him remain even if he is perceived by most ­people as a goof-­off. It's worth it for that occasional flash of creativity.”

“I
like
the steady guys,” Robert said. “I don't find drudges like me dull at all. They do what I tell them and they do it right the first time. Getting Dave to stack three cans of tennis balls is like negotiating for world peace. He
never
shuts up.”

“You're exaggerating,” Herm said.

“Not much. I may fire him.”

“Don't make sick jokes about your father like that.”

“I want you to do something for me, Herm.”

The owner touched his scalp again. “How much for one of those sun hats out there?”

“Is this a quiz?”

“No. My scalp fries in the summer, I always forget to buy a summer hat.” His expression clouded. “I hate summer. I can't wear my Russian hat.”

“$11.95,” Robert reported.

“Are you kidding? That's highway robbery.”

“That's your marked-­up SportsHeaven price.”

“If I just took one, would you report me?”

“You're the boss.”

“That's right,” Herm said. “I am.” He left the back room and Robert followed. Herm walked to the display tree of sun hats. They were charmless pastel head covers, with vertical bands, two-­inch rims, and phony coats-­of-­arms glued to the front. The color, too pale, frivolous, did not suit him. But the fit was perfect and Herm grinned at the sudden shade that cooled his head.

“It's mine,” Herm said.

“Has been all along,” Robert said. “Although owner theft is a growing problem.”

Herm Branch raised an eyebrow and studied Robert. “A guy who'd threaten to fire his own father . . . what
wouldn't
a guy like that do?”

“He wouldn't put up with a poorly run store,” Robert said.

“The numbers are there. I'll grant you that.”

“And it's not all because of that damn bike rack,” Robert said, sounding petty even to himself.

“Maybe not,” Herm said. “But that
was
a brilliant idea.”

“Give him a job then,” Robert suggested.

“Who? Dave?”

“
Yes.
Call him to Milwaukee. Tell him you want to hire him as an idea man. Pay him what you pay him now, or pay him whatever you want. A retainer fee for each idea. He's got a million of them. I'm too biased toward my father to give his ideas an objective consideration.”

“Why do you want me to do this?” Herm asked.

“It'll get him out of here. It'll make him feel important. And he can be with my mother all day again, which is all that he wants in his life. He can work at home or he can hang around downtown with his friends like a big shot. When he has an idea he can call you instead of bugging me with it.”

“I don't know,” Herm said.

“It will be the perfect job for him at this time of his life.”

“I don't know.”

“It was just an idea,” Robert said. “And keep it between you and me, OK?”

They came to the front of the store. Herm shook Robert's hand. A harsh bell went off when Herm passed through the security gate, making him jump.

Robert plucked the tacky little hat from Herm's head and removed the alarm activator tag. He held it in front of Herm, and said, “If you'll remember, this alarm system was
my
idea.”

“It says a lot about you,” Herm replied, putting the hat back on. “Your dad's ideas attract customers, spread good feelings. Yours prevent theft.”

“It saves you money, but it's not
brilliant
, huh?”

B
UZZARD CAME HOME
a few minutes after midnight. They heard the song he whistled through the open windows as he came up the drive.

“He sounds happy,” Ethel murmured.

“He's got a job he likes,” Robert said.

“He also told me his arm doesn't hurt anymore.”

“Is that right?”

“He said he woke up one day and it felt fine,” Ethel said.

“He hasn't tried to throw, has he?”

“No,” Buzz, who had come into the kitchen, replied.

“Well, don't. You let it rest
all
winter. I'll fire you if you don't.”

“You really like your power, don't you?” Ethel asked with gentle derision.

“It's the only hold I have over him. You. Anybody,” Robert said.

“You don't even have that.”

Robert turned from her. He feared her concentration on him would remind her that she had given him a deadline to move, the deadline now passed and Robert still in his room on the fourth floor. He saw in that fact something of the woman who had kept allowing Ben to return from orbit.

“How'd it go tonight?” he asked Buzz.

“It went fine.”

“Sell anything?”

“After eight o'clock, nobody came into the store,” Buzz said. “But we sold a canoe. A gas camp stove. A ­couple $75 tennis rackets, $130 running shoes. An aluminum baseball bat. Among other things.” He grinned at Robert, brought his painless arm over in a mimicry of a pitch, solely to aggravate his boss.

In Oblong Lake that early morning Robert dove in water he had searched before. The lake was so large and changing he would never corner Ben through a progressive dwindling of uninspected space. Robert decided to stay close to the site of the accident, close to home. He swam in the clear green water that ringed the Cow and the Calf. The great rocks were almost memorized, every crack and dent touched previously, the same motionless fish hanging in the hidden alcoves. The diving was so effortless. The water against his face was almost warm.

He remembered a day in spring, late in the school year Ben was his teacher. They had come through a winter cold as any other in Mozart but water was running that warm day in the earth's low places, off roofs, in the gullies cut along the campus walks. Ben had found black leaves freed from the winter snow pack and set them afloat on these rivulets.

“How was class today?” Ben asked.

“Fine.”

“I never know if I'm getting through,” Ben said. “You kids have such blank looks on your faces at times. It's a very hard thing to push through that—­to even
try
to push through it. The worst teachers don't even try. What do the kids say about me?”

“I don't know. I don't talk to them.”

“When I was a student—­a child—­” Ben said, “I made a papier-­mâché cutaway model of a volcano. It was very detailed, with the layers of the mountain carefully painted on. I labeled each part. At the heart of this volcano was a pop bottle, painted the red of magma, in which I mixed vinegar, baking soda, and red food coloring to create the eruption. The volcano erupting was marvelous. I had that class in my hands as I demonstrated. Every kid craned forward waiting for that thing to
blow!
It was a complete success, although the mountain began to dissolve immediately after. It was an unintentional re-­creation of the destruction of a real volcano. But I won first place and from that moment on I was subtly pushed toward a career in science. And here I am. Here we are.”

They had come to the sciences building and climbed the inner core to Ben's office. Ara was there, smoking, her feet on the desk, reading from a pile of test papers in her lap. She smiled at them.

“I was telling Robert my volcano story,” Ben said to her.

“I became a sportswriter because for as long as I can remember I liked typewriters as a kid,” Robert said. “And of all the things I liked to type, I liked typing scores the best.”

“Why are you where
you
are, Ara?” Ben asked.

“Because I don't know how to do anything else,” she said without acrimony. “I'll be here long after you both have broken away.”

“I've always been looking for that sense of drama,” Ben said. “I someday hope to re-­create the hold I had on those kids with that volcano. So far, no luck. Only Robert will get free of here,” he said. “He will get an A in my course and graduate and be
done
with biology. The world will open before him and he'll venture into it—­forgetting all about his old teacher and the rather aloof young woman he shared an office with. What
were
their names?”

In one deep pocket between boulders the size of his fourth-­floor room Robert surprised a muskellunge chewing a meal. The beam of his light turned the fish's eyes to red glass balls. The muskie shot forward in a panic, striking Robert's chest with its half-­open plated snout. It felt like a football helmet face mask driving into him; in the morning he would discover over his heart two bruises parallel and greenish, straight and definite as rods. He rolled back in that gentle way of underwater, his mask dislodging, his light tumbling from his hand and falling with a clank down into the cave, cold water surging up his nose.

He kicked to the surface. He hung from the side of the boat for a good ten minutes, breathing, just hanging there, feeling the lake fall away beneath him. Down through the clear water he saw the faint smoke of light from the dropped beam. He adjusted his mask and snorkel, took in air, then kicked down toward the light. His intention was to retrieve the light and then go home; he had reached that point, as he did in every dive, when the water, the entire undertaking, made him feel like an intruder, endangered and unwanted.