Crows (33 page)

At the cave mouth he reached inside and curled his hand around the torch shaft. He brought the light out and its beam swept across the cave floor, illuminating a stick of something yellow-­white.

Robert surfaced but did not return to the cave. He got out of the water and sat shivering in the boat. He hauled in the anchor and rowed to shore. The stick looked perfectly carved in his imagination; a precise column of chalk or ivory. And attached to it, he remembered, made translucent by the strong, watered light, were fragile peelings like fine silk or very old leaves.

He guessed he could find the cave again; maybe he should have left his light there. It was in water he had searched often before. Long ago he had found a red-­stoned ring in the neighborhood.

H
IS MOTHER WAS
home alone. Her hair was rolled in yellow tubes held in place with fat pink plastic pins. She kissed her son on the cheek.

“Come in, Robert,” she said. She looked ludicrous and undignified with the nest of tubes in her hair.

“Where's Dave?”

“He's not here,” she said. She took his hand and led him deeper into the house, to the bathroom still steamy with the heat of her bath. Her hand felt oiled and warm.

“Your father went
somewhere
,” she said. “He wouldn't even tell me. I'm not being intentionally vague.”

“I wanted to talk to him,” Robert said. He sat on the slick rim of the tub, having to hold on. Little islands of soap bubbles, left behind in the rush to the drain, popped and disintegrated audibly on the tub floor.

“He's been very mysterious lately,” she said. “He told me to be dressed and ready for a night on the town when he gets back.”

“Have you thought about taking him under your wing again?”

“Oh! I forgot to tell you. I rented the store.”

“Big mistake,” Robert said.

“Not at all,” Evelyn said. “It will pay a nice monthly income to us. I couldn't charge top-­dollar because it is a less than ideal location. But I got a fair price—­and a year's lease. If the business is a success, I push the rate up in a year.”

“What's the business?”

“A place to make photocopies,” she said.

“Did you rent it to Dave? That sounds like one of his lines.”

His mother closely studied the skin on her face as she talked. Her breath clouded the mirror with half-­dollar-­sized blemishes that grew and vanished almost simultaneously like smoke signals.

“When I left the store it was for good,” she told him. “Nothing would change that, and nothing will. You might as well get used to it. I think your father has. He's been very chipper lately. Very full of himself.”

“Maybe he's having an affair,” Robert said.

His mother was amused. She pulled the skin taut at the outside corners of her eyes; a little girl making herself briefly a Chinaman. She smoothed the skin back; the years of her laughter bunching up as they had for thirty years. Then she did laugh, a deep laugh he would recognize anywhere. And Robert thought she would be the one to pull an affair off over her husband; Dave would never fool her.

“Your father is devoted,” Evelyn said.

“Tell him I stopped by,” Robert said, standing. She was applying foundation with a spongy pad.

Evelyn smiled at him across the reflected distance of the mirror. “He loves his job at SportsHeaven,” she said. “He says it's the best job he's ever had.”

“What has he to compare it to?” Robert asked.

They both heard the scratch of the key at the front of the house. The front door opening moved the curtain on the bathroom window. Robert felt the little house squeeze his shoulders, then let go.

“Here's the guy now,” Evelyn said. She went to meet her husband with her face half-­finished; she looked like an oval globe with a vertical equator, one side tilting ever so faintly toward night.

He heard her predict to Dave, “You have good news.” But before her husband could answer, she said, “Robert's here.” A warning. Was he bad news?

“Where?” Dave asked.

“Here,” Robert said, coming into the room. His father was uneasy, seeing him, but he grasped Robert's hand and shook it with his best salesman's lock grip. His eyes, dead, it had seemed to Robert, since Evelyn had cut him adrift, were alight with some exciting news.

“What? What?” his wife demanded to know, laughing and pulling his arm.

Dave had dressed in a yellow shirt and navy blue bow tie that was cocked some degrees shy of parallel to the Earth; he wore blue trousers and a pale blue seersucker sportcoat. He shed this coat and Robert saw that his father's shirt was dark with sweat down his ribs and across his back. With a jaunty snap he tore off the bow tie.

“What?” Evelyn repeated.

He urged her to be patient. “Before I tell you my news,” he said, “there's something I must tell Robert.”

“What is it?” Robert asked.

“I'm resigning from SportsHeaven.”

“Dave,” Robert said, “are you sure you want to do that?”

“I have a new job,” he reported, glancing at his son. “I just returned from Milwaukee.”

Evelyn's face hardened. “I'm not moving to Milwaukee.”

“No need,” Dave said. “I'm not being relocated. I can work out of the house. I may have to make a trip in-­state now and then—­but not often. I'll never be gone overnight. Or maybe you can come with me, Ev.”

“What's the job?” Robert asked. Already he felt freed.

“I'm the new idea man for SportsHeaven,” Dave said.

“You talked to Herm,” Robert said.

“A man of vision,” Dave said. “A wonderful man. He contacted me a while ago, asked me to come see him. We went around and around, haggling, getting to know each other. We've become pretty good friends. Did you know we have the same birthday?”

“No!” Evelyn said.

“We're exactly the same age.”

“You look alike, too,” Robert said.

“Do we?”

“Thinning hair. Same petite build. Same gut.”

Dave laughed. “You won't ruin my moment here, Rob-­O,” he declared.

“I'm sorry. I don't
want
to ruin it. When do you start?”

“I've already started,” Dave said. “I work twenty-­four-­hour days. Whenever my brain is working, I'm at work.”

“Coming up with ideas,” Robert said.

“Exactly. I just think of ideas and tell Herm about them, and he decides if they're implementable. I've already had one he liked. Putting a gold stripe around the sleeve of the manager's shirt. A crimson stripe for the sleeve of the assistant manager. It sets them apart and commands respect. Like a general's star.”

“Herm liked that?” Robert said.

“He loved it,” Dave said. “I also suggested we get rid of the striped uniforms in favor of some sort of team jersey. SportsHeaven on the front, the employee's name on the back. And a number, of course. The manager'd be number one. His assistant, number two. And so on.”

“Good idea. But expensive,” Robert said.

“Herm's very words.”

“And he's going to pay you to do this?” Robert asked.

His father hesitated, then shyly named a figure, and Robert had to ask him to repeat it. Herm was paying his new idea man $1 more per week than he was paying the manager of his Mozart store.

“Well, that's wonderful,” Evelyn said, kissing her husband on the ear.

“I can't tell you what a thrill it is to work for someone other than you,” Dave exclaimed. They both laughed. “I mean, I've never had to prove myself beyond you. Now I feel a little pressure. I feel alive.”

They left for dinner soon after, shooing Robert before they locked up. When he returned to Ben's house there was a message to call Herm.

“Have you talked to your father?”

“Moments ago,” Robert said.

“I've never seen a man so happy,” Herm said. “It was a good idea you had. I almost told him you suggested it.”

“Don't tell him,” Robert cautioned. “It means more coming from you. He knows me too well.”

“I see sides to your father you don't,” Herm said gently. “You see only a father, kind of an ineffectual guy. A guy who isn't much good at anything.”

Robert said, “That's Dave.”

“He's got layers and layers, Robert. If you didn't have so much at stake, being his son, you might see them, too. But he worked a bad location for thirty years and he did well enough to buy food and keep a roof over your head.”

“It was my mother's money,” Robert said.

“If it was, so what? She's no fool,” Herm said. “He had enough on the ball to win her and keep her. She didn't marry him at gunpoint.”

“He told me what you're paying him,” Robert said.

“His ideas are good.”

“He sits and dreams about red stripes and gold stripes and you pay him more than you pay me for the sixty hours a week I put in at that store?” Robert said. He was on the upstairs phone. He heard a shuffling of movement downstairs, then a listening silence.

“It's none of your business what he makes,” Herm said evenly. “But I want you to be happy.”

“Use your head, Herm! You knew he would come home and tell me. Why the little dig? Why make me feel bad?”

“You don't give him enough credit,” Herm said. “You think everything good in you came from you or your mother, and everything bad came from him.”

“That shouldn't matter,” Robert said. “This is work.”

“It was sweet, what you did, though your motives were selfish,” Herm said. “It's one of the few times I've felt there was more to you than a sort of surface brightness.”

“Thanks, Herm. Gosh.”

“And he
does
have good ideas.”

“Did he tell you his idea for old jocks who died and went to SportsHeaven?”

“Yes,” Herm said. “I like it.”

“You do?” Robert said, amazed.

“Yes. It's offbeat enough to work. Kind of irreverent. With the right ex-­jocks it can do a lot for the stores.”

Robert said good-­bye and hung up. He went downstairs, where Ethel and Olive sat at the kitchen table. Olive's skin had taken on its summer burn. She was just home from work. Plunged like a stake into the greasy jumble of her hair was a pencil bearing the label of a brand of potato chips. Ethel, freed by Robert of having to rise before dawn, now kept late hours, sitting until 2 a.m. in pools of light reading the books and magazines she had missed driving a cab.

Olive went up to bed soon after Robert appeared. She would rise to go swimming in the morning, before work. On a bicycle she had bought, she rode around the lake to the M.C. campus before the sun was entirely up to swim laps above the waiting wolves. She was famous in that small part of Mozart, the natatorium; her name was chiseled on a trophy the team had won, and her called name had echoed off those tiles, those beautiful men and women on the walls had heard her name and watched her race. Most of all, she missed the racing. Being out of water in summer made her feel slow and detained, as if threads invisible at her back snared her.

Robert, watching her depart the kitchen, the pencil in her hair, missed her, missed her races, missed the lightness that was a part of her before she fell through the ice.

Ethel poured coffee. “So here we sit,” she said.

Robert, spooked, nodded.

“I haven't forgotten our deadline,” she said.

Robert looked at his wristwatch and grimaced. “I've still got a ­couple weeks left, don't I?”

Ethel laughed. Her disposition had improved since going to SportsHeaven. “It passed about forty-­five days ago,” she said. “You run when you see me—­you think I've forgotten and you're afraid I'll remember and kick you out. But I did
not
forget.”

“Why am I still here then?”

“Not incidentally, because you gave me a job,” Ethel said. “But I also realized you are the only source of positive memory about Ben the kids have. I have none to contribute. They don't have many of their own. But they see you, see you searching for him in your spare time, and I think they see something in that that is good.”

“I don't know if I can help there anymore,” Robert said. “In talking to ­people, I've found a Ben I never knew existed.”

“Who have you talked to?” Ethel asked sharply. “No. I don't want to know. It could be anyone.”

“The kids loved him,” Robert said.

“He
hurt
them,” Ethel said. “He was never around. They looked forward to college so they could take his classes and be with him that way. He was a mythical figure: Dear old Dad, who was only present when he had been temporarily banished for his latest infidelity. Then they would walk with him around and around the house. They loved it. He would talk to them. Play catch. Just circling the house, all this went on. When I would finally crumble again and let him back they were heartbroken. They knew he would disappear.”

H
E DIVED IN
Oblong Lake without enthusiasm, because Ethel seemed to expect it. The longest he stayed in at any one time was a half hour. August burned away, but he felt the water getting colder. Soon it would be time to grow his beard again. Sometimes he would row to the Calf and sit on the flat stone with his face cranked toward the sun; who had been tending the fire on the Calf the night of the accident? Other times he would sit in the boat on the lake, sweating in his wet suit top, reading a book. At times he forgot whom he was looking for.

Late that summer Duke came into SportsHeaven. The boy had grown some over the season. Added weight in the shoulders and arms indicated he might soon pass Buzz's size. He moved easily on a single aluminum crutch; he was wearing shorts, his leg tan, the stump a pale dip of skin out of the other leg of his shorts.

“Mom told me I have to earn money if I'm going to go to college,” Duke said.