Crows (35 page)

“About an hour later someone tapped on my door. I thought it might be Buzz, or you. It was Dad . . . Ben. He looked awful. Sad. I wasn't used to that and it scared me. He was usually a happy-­go-­lucky sort, even when Mom hated his guts. He said he had to talk to me and asked me to go for a walk.

“We walked here and there. Into town. Looking into store windows. Neither of us saying anything. It was like he forgot why he had asked me to go with him. We walked back toward home along the lake. We came to where our boat was tied and this cheered him up. We sat in the boat, still tied to the dock, and he told me stories; how he used to take Mom out in it when they were younger; they were in the boat the first time they kissed; how he used to row us kids around the lake. That sort of stuff. He sounded very nervous and off the wall. He was just filling time.

“Finally, I asked him what he wanted to talk to me about and he reached over and untied the line and pushed us off. He got behind the oars and we headed for the Cow and the Calf. It was nice out there. It's always cooler on the water, but you know that. The sky was full of stars, a million of them. And lots of lights along the shore. I could see car lights moving up and down the lake road.”

“Did you see a fire on the Calf?” Robert asked.

“A fire? No.”

“The pilot said he saw a fire as he was coming in.”

“No fire,” Duke repeated. “Every now and then I heard someone on shore talking. A man and a woman, the woman telling the man something. I couldn't understand what she was saying but I really didn't listen, because Ben wasn't talking and I was getting nervous.

“I'd seen Buzzard before we left the house,” Duke continued. “He was in the living room just staring at the TV. I remember he was watching
The Fugitive.
He looked as mad as I've ever seen him. But he was scared, too. I wanted to talk to him, but Dad was standing right there and Buzz refused to look at us. I think Ben did that on purpose. He wanted to talk to me before Buzz gave me
his
version.”

Duke took a deep breath. Robert didn't speak; he might take Duke away from the lake, away from Ben's side, away from that night.

“Where were you when all this was happening?” Duke suddenly inquired, his eyes jumping fast to Robert's.

“I was there,” Robert said.

“I don't remember you.”

“I was with O. It was just another night at Ben's house.”

“Yeah.” Duke scowled. “Well, we rowed out onto the lake to about . . . you know where, Rob-­O. It was very quiet except for the words from the woman on the shore. Dad lifted the oars out of the water and we drifted for a while. I listened to the drops of water falling from the oar blades. I hated it.”

Duke said nothing for a long time. He squeezed his legs and scratched his head. He looked at a spot over Robert's shoulder.

“What had Ben wanted to tell you?” Robert asked.

“That he was a coward, basically,” Duke said. “He had first gone to Buzz, then he went to me, and if he'd lived he would probably have gone to O. All he wanted to let us know was that he no longer loved our mother, but he wasn't sure if he should leave her for good. He wanted me,
us
, to say, sure, leave us, leave Mom, go off with someone else, we forgive you. Can you imagine that?” He cleared his throat and shook his head. “What a chickenshit. He embarrassed me so much. Then just before the plane landed on us he told me he loved me. First and last time.”

R
OBERT MADE ROOM
for Duke at SportsHeaven. As Herm had said, the numbers were there.

It was around that time that Robert worked a day shift and discovered Mrs. Marsh in Aisle 7. She was wearing a gray Bucks T-­shirt and blue jeans, and she was late in a pregnancy Robert had heard nothing about. Her round belly filled Robert's brain with her husband's salacious voice; which story told to Robert had taken hold in Mrs. Marsh's womb to produce this perfect hump beneath gray cloth? Her face was lightly burned. She wore red tennis shoes and purple socks. She held her hands cupped under the weight of the baby.

He turned to slip away, but she saw him and called his name. Her face was still thin, still roughly sanded.

“Do you still have your whistle with you?” she asked with just a shading of scorn.

Robert took it from his pocket and rattled the pill for her.

“How's Joe?” he asked.

“You don't care.”

“Is he working?”

“At what? What can he do?” she asked.

“Maybe work for the park district. Maybe coach.”

She shifted upward the weight she carried. “He's talking about working out again, playing in the Milwaukee parks, and taking another tryout with the Bucks.”

“Oh?”

“He has no chance, am I right?”

“He's how old? Twenty-­six?”

Mrs. Marsh nodded.

“That's pretty old for that game,” Robert said. “I think they want younger guys.”

“Why are you working the day shift?” she asked.

“Someone's sick. Why?”

“I come days to avoid you,” she said, her voice even in its most innocent phrasing carrying a hint of flirtation. “You know my past.”

“No, I don't.”

“Joe talks, I know. He can't keep a secret to save his life. All he does is talk.”

“I don't know,” Robert said, feeling crushed by unease.

“He had a lot of problems with employee theft and shoplifting. ­People knowing the system, how to get around it. You have that problem?”

Robert smiled. “Yeah. Things disappear all the time.”

“Any chance your job'll disappear because of things disappearing?” she asked.

“I don't think so. Herm understands. I bring the cops in on occasion for effect. It runs in cycles.”

“I was hoping you'd lose
your
job,” she said.

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

She stood for a moment, just glaring at him. He tried for innocent conversation about her life, the new baby, but she dodged it as if it were lethal.

“I can't believe you fired him,” she said. “You were gunning for him right from the start, weren't you?”

“No. Herm had doubts about Joe long before I arrived.”

“Talk about a gutless shithead,” she said. “Having his assistant manager fire the manager.”

“I agree.”

“Oh you do, do you?”

“I liked Joe.”

“I'll bet.” She turned away from him and walked to the front of the store. No extra weight in her hips beyond that heaviness that had attracted him when he caught her shoplifting, a light step in her red shoes, she moved rapidly away from him. Outside, Joe Marsh awaited her, legs crossed, arms folded, leaning against a parked car.

He smiled at his wife, then beyond her saw Robert at the door to SportsHeaven.

“Hey, Rob,” he said, raising a hand. He was already moving up the sidewalk beside his wife, who looked back at Robert and with a smile lifted her Bucks shirt, showing the very smallest slice of the lower halves of her breasts, and delivering a new basketball into her husband's cradling hands.

Robert had his whistle out, but he was laughing. Joe and Mrs. Marsh were running hard up the sidewalk, laughing, too. Joe dribbling. The whistle shrieked and Robert made the call, but they didn't stop, and the last Robert ever saw of them they were going around a corner, Joe Marsh dribbling behind his back to cut the angle of the turn.

I
N AUTUMN
R
OBERT
dived again in Oblong Lake. Through a hot, busy September he had worked long hours and not entered the lake even once. But in October the leaves began to turn and the first cool weather came. He had not talked to anyone about Ben in a long time, and lately he tended to dwell on the good memories he had of him. Robert sensed the lake about to close over the winter.

He went out in the early morning before work, expeditions that left him ravenous. In mid-­October the water was warmer than the air and in the morning lengths of mist thick and defined as felled trees lay on the water. They would disappear as he dived. From under water he saw leaves hit the surface and revolve like playing cards thrown at someone's leisure.

On a later day, still in October, his new beard begun, he came to that cave near the Cow and the Calf where he had found the red-­stoned ring, the feeding muskellunge, and the yellow-­white stick on the cave floor. He had picked around the site long enough. It was getting late.

The muskie and the stick were gone, and Ethel had lost the ring in the dark on the lake road, but deeper in the cave he at last found Ben. He was a mess; fish-­chewed, clothed in shreds of washed fabric and skin that feathered down like tendrils of cheese. He bobbed at the roof of the cave, facing the ceiling, arms spread wide, one hand missing.

Robert left his light at the mouth of the cave, the beam fingering up through the water like a marking stake. He cried a little in his mask, but dried his face in the boat, then rowed ashore and went to tell the police he had found Ben Ladysmith.

The news went quickly through Mozart. The fire department divers, men who had given three days to the search three years before, found Robert's light, and then found Ben. A crowd waited on the shore. The story made page one of the Madison paper, with a head shot of Ben from the M.C. yearbook. They asked Robert for a picture of himself but he refused them.

That day, he went home and later he went to work. Ethel kissed him and thanked him and said nothing else. Olive swam in the lake once before it got too cold, and around Christmas, following a meet, she invited Robert out for coffee. She had won two medals that night, so they each had one to fiddle with.

Customers in the restaurant said hello, most moving along. Others saw him through the window and pointed and waved. He read his name on their lips. The bolder ones, those who had not heard the entire story, stopped to jingle their change, to send their best to his parents, and to ask him how he had known it was Ben after all that time. Robert said Ben was the only one still missing.

 

CHARLES DICKINSON, with seven highly acclaimed books to his credit, takes American fiction back to the complexity of modern life and love with his characteristically incisive irony and humor. Critics have compared him to such masters as Margaret Atwood, Ann Tyler, Michael Crichton, and Raymond Carver.

His stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, Esquire
, and
The Atlantic,
among others, and two stories, “Risk” and “Child in the Leaves,” were included in O. Henry collections. He has received generous praise for his novels,
Waltz in Marathon, Crows, The Widows' Adventures, Rumor Has It, A Shortcut in Time,
and its sequel,
A Family in Time,
and his collection of stories,
With or Without.

Born in Detroit, Dickinson lives near Chicago with his wife.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.

 

R
UMOR
H
AS
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W
ALTZ IN
M
ARATHON

C
RO
WS

T
HE
W
IDOWS'
A
DVEN
TURES

W
ITH OR
W
ITHOU
T

A
S
HORTCUT IN
T
IME

A
F
AMILY IN
T
IME

 

An Excerpt from
The Widows' Adventures

I
NA ASKS ME
what I see and I have to be honest: I see nothing. She asks me what color my blindness takes and I find that a curious question. I am simply blind.

I tell her the color I miss most is that vivid crimson cloud of blood filling my eyeballs. That gorgeous phenomenon was the first serious indication that I would one day be blind as a bat. Proliferative retinopathy. Deterioration of the blood vessels in my retinas caused by diabetes. The blood gushed in; I imagined I could hear it filling my eyes like buckets. But it was fluid into fluid, blood into vitreous humor, silent as an injection of dye.

I was speaking to Rudy at the time, and I remember he waited several minutes after I stopped speaking in midsentence before he asked me to continue. He was a trifle peeved by my announcement that all I could see was a scarlet cloud, that yet another trip to the hospital was required.

Ina asks me to tell her about the last thing I saw. That is difficult to say, because my eyesight did not go like a light being snapped off, but leaked away a smidgen at a time. Long ago, my doctor looked deep into my eyes and reported seeing tiny red dots in there. A bad sign, in his opinion. Capillary microaneurysms, they were called. Foreshadowing. Then came that first beautiful, terrifying cloud of blood. The clouds went away, and returned, and went away again. But they always returned, and finally they remained.

When Ina asks what was the last thing I saw, I tell her it was Rudy. It is Rudy who takes up the most space in my memory. He never forgave me my diabetes, all the planning, the expense (most of all, he never forgave the expense), and the sheer inconvenience it entailed. In granting my requests to prepare my morning and evening shots or to help test my urine, his manner was brusque and faintly disgusted. He slammed doors when I was trying to rest. He pestered my sleep with questions about the locations of household items. He had no interest in me if I was not healthy.

I talked him through the steps of preparing dinner because the stove frightened me now that I was blind. Even when it wasn't turned on I felt its presence like a patient enemy, just as I feared candles, matches, cigarettes (I'd asked Rudy to smoke only at work; imagine his chagrin). Carving knives, peelers, meat forks, they terrified me with images of gashes and punctures. Proliferative hemorrhaging; death by leaking.

Rudy proved to be an able cook. He helped me keep track of my diet, counting calories, carbohydrates, scouting for the deadly sugar that seemed an element of everything that went in my mouth, coming in so many unexpected forms. He waited outside the bathroom while I urinated in a cup, then accepted the warm offering, dipped the TesTape, and reported the color. He did all this with an impassive air of disgust, a nonjudgmental loathing.

I would try to draw Rudy into conversation, but Rudy was not a conversationalist. I would work back through my memories of the time since he had left for work that morning. I sought a funny story or an interesting scrap of news from the TV. Something to throw into the quiet. But I rarely found anything to say. The only people I talked to were Ina (and, through her, Vincent) and Amanda. Ina's amusements were tainted in Rudy's eyes by her drinking. Amanda, then nearing forty, without a husband, was a sore point with her father. Vincent, who had money, was another constant irritant to my husband.

So we sat without saying much.

“Tell me what happened at work today,” I said.

“What happened at work today? Once again, I didn't make enough money.”

“We're doing all right,” I said gently. A small pain of helplessness took root in my stomach; the nervous, helpless ache of being a burden. “No kids to raise. The house in good shape. And paid for,” I said, running through the list I kept in my head. “We aren't begging.”

“I'd like to get to a point a little more comfortable than ‘not begging,'” he said. “At least before I die.”

“You'll outlive all of us,” I said, desperate to cheer him up. “Then you can live the carefree bachelor life. A room to yourself. You can smoke. Eat bad food, whatever you want. You won't have to test someone's pee every day.”

He made the same financial complaint every day that we were together. He might have griped about the cost of the room on our wedding night, but I don't remember. We had bought our house from Vincent. The transaction was awkward in that Rudy was ashamed to be getting the money from his lifelong friend and brother-in-law; and he was outraged that Vincent possessed that amount of money to lend.

The purchase price of our house, which we had been renting for four years at $37.50 per month, was $15,500. My diabetes had been diagnosed our first summer there; I used glass syringes then. But my eyesight was crystalline. Amanda was just walking. I remember her cautious scaling of the steps up to Vincent and Ina's house on the day we signed the papers. Annie was Amanda's age, a source of competition between the moms. Ina was pregnant with Ray. When she came to the door she looked robust and lovely.

Rudy wore a tie, though I assured him it wasn't necessary. But Vincent also was wearing a tie and I was proud of my husband for having correctly read the ceremonial gravity of the event. Speaking primarily to Rudy, with an infrequent shift of his eyes toward me, Vincent explained that he had completed the purchase of our house earlier that day, and we would buy it from him over a period of time yet to be determined.

“I think we agreed on five hundred for your down payment,” said Vincent.

Rudy took a folded green check from his wallet. He had written it, complaining, just before we left the house.

Vincent took the check without a glance and slid it under a paperweight, a balanced droplet of glass.

“How much would you be comfortable paying each month?” Vincent asked, his tone implying that the amount was none of his business, but he had to ask.

“I'm not sure,” Rudy said.

“Would you be comfortable with seventy-five dollars per month?”

“Seventy-five,” Rudy repeated.

“Yes,” Vincent continued. He swiveled a sheet of paper toward Rudy that contained a precise column of typed numbers. “Seventy-five dollars per month . . . see? . . . for twelve months. That's nine hundred dollars per year for thirty years. Standard mortgage length. You'd borrow fifteen thousand dollars and pay back twenty-seven thousand dollars.”

“Twelve thousand more than I'm borrowing?” Rudy said incredulously.

“Interest, Rudy,” Vincent said. “Scandalously low, too, I might add. No bank would ever write a mortgage on these terms.”

On our way home, Rudy said, “It is beyond me how Vincent sleeps at night knowing he is charging twelve thousand dollars interest on a loan he made to his own family. His oldest friend! The woman he might have married!”

“It's only three in the afternoon, dear,” I said. “Maybe he'll have trouble sleeping tonight.”

“Why does he have to make money on everything?”

“He sells real estate. It's his business,” I said, though I too had been put off by the cool calculation of the deal, the way Vincent had all the figures typed and ready.

Rudy did not speak to Vincent for more than a year. This made our frequent social calls almost impossible to bear. At first, Rudy used our visits to the Lockwood home to present—with great ostentation and embarrassment for everyone but himself—the month's mortgage payment. Rudy took longer to write that check than he took to earn the money to cover it. When I complained about this petty ritual he began mailing the money to Vincent. But for a year he would not respond to any of Vincent's questions, would not counter any of Vincent's opinions, would not even pass the pepper if Vincent asked for it. Rudy let his silence sit over our gatherings like a condemnation. Inevitably Vincent stopped including Rudy in his sphere of conversation; he was not one to pursue a cold lead, someone in no mood to buy.

Rudy was listening carefully to Vincent, however, and memorizing his responses, which he revealed to me as we walked home at evening's end.

“What the hell does he mean, ‘How's every little thing at work?'? He's just afraid he won't get his seventy-five bucks every month if my job goes bust. He's got an opinion about everything: Truman, Korea, the Cubs, the Sox, all the kids being born, the new cars. Nobody with any brains has so many goddamned opinions. He's got to have them, though. It's good for business. An opinion for every occasion. As many opinions as he needs to make a sale. And where does he get off turning his chair so his back's to me? What a rude ass. Next time, you go alone. You want to visit your sister—do it when I'm at work. I'm tired of listening to that guy flap his jaws.”

“If anyone is rude, it's you,” I said. “As for going by myself—fine. You embarrass me. Stay home. It will save on a sitter.”

I struck off smartly, leaving him behind. It was the end of us, I realized much later. My words had transported our marriage to a strange level it would not survive.

Rudy did not move until I was a half-block ahead. Then he closed the gap between us almost at a run. His rage was something new, almost intriguing; an interesting twist in our life together. When he was upon me I ducked to the side to avoid the blow I sensed more than saw coming out of the darkness. His open hand caught me on the shoulder. I fell to one knee, cracking my other shoulder painfully against a white slat fence. Someone on the porch of the house stood up and shouted, “Hey! Stop that!”

But Rudy didn't hear and he slapped me rather ludicrously on the top of my head. Some of the blow was absorbed by my hair, but the weight of his wedding ring bore through this cushion and cracked against my skull. My eyes teared with pain. A door slammed. A light went on behind me. “We're calling the police, you animal!” screamed a woman.

I was prepared to sit there on the sidewalk, my back against the fence, until the police arrived. Rudy had moved into the shadows. It occurred to me then that I probably knew the woman on the porch. I got to my feet and moved sideways to keep my face hidden from my witness. “Don't go with him, honey,” the woman called. “You can do better!”

But I didn't think I could. Or I didn't have the energy to find out. I followed my husband home.

The two blows remained our secret, a source of embarrassment and disbelief. Rudy was sweet for a long period of time. At Christmas he gave me a full-length lavender velvet robe lined with white silk; the luxurious feel of it against my skin was staggering. We made love in the afternoon while Amanda napped and I rode eagerly on him wearing only my robe, keeping both of us warm with his gift to me.

Ina and Vincent visited in the evening, and after my dinner had been eaten I excused myself, then returned wearing the new robe over my clothes. The children, exhausted from the day's expectations and realities, ignored me, but Ina and Vincent were enthusiastic in their appreciation.

“It's beautiful,” Vincent assured me.

“Breathtaking,” Ina added.

And Rudy, from his chair by the tree, a strand of fallen tinsel twinkling in his hair, said, “Vince, that robe cost me seventy-eight dollars. Seventy-eight dollars!”

I was stunned by the price. (Vincent whistled appreciatively; Ina murmured, “My.”) Where had the money come from? What would we do without down the line to pay for my robe?

And something else: Rudy had spoken to Vincent.

I excused myself again and hung the robe in my closet. The mystery of its richness was gone, and with that a part of its allure. I owned a seventy-eight-dollar robe. The expense was ludicrous, wasteful.

At eleven o'clock I helped Amanda to bed and spent longer than necessary tucking her in, so that when I emerged from her dark bedroom into the hall light and from there into the shadowy hushed light of the front room, I recognized the sleepy silence that signaled the death of a party. Vincent and Ina left soon after, Annie draped over her father's shoulder like an extra coat, baby Ray wrapped like a parcel of laundry against the cold.

I hurried to gather up the plates, cups, and forks we'd used that night. I got down on my knees to work at a stain ground into the carpet. When Rudy appeared out of the corner of my vision, I got up and moved away. I was so tired, so anxious to sleep, but my brain was driven by a nervous desire to keep clear of my husband.

“When I told them the price, you looked like you were disappointed,” Rudy said. “Seventy-eight bucks for a bathrobe isn't enough for you?”

“It's too much,” I said. “And how much it costs isn't any of their business, either.”

“Vince tells me the price of everything he buys,” Rudy said. “His car. His clothes. His grocery bills. The beer Ina drinks. Only the best for the Lockwoods.”

He would hit me soon, I understood; the realization came clearly to me, almost like a voice from the next room, the voice of one who could see into the future.

I scraped the plates into a bag of garbage, and when I was finished I carried the bag outside. I felt certain Rudy was watching me cross the yard to the garage. But he was not in the window or the door when I turned back. I knew he was waiting for an answer, but I refused to say anything. Though I easily could have said: Vincent never mentions money. (Yet what if there was a secret vulgar side to Vincent, a way he had with vulgar men, anything for a sale?)

My one concern was to keep moving. I bumped the back door locked with my hip, and passed him nearly at a run, saying, “Get the light, please.” Ducking clear of him, hurrying down the hall, I tried to move and listen for him at the same time. I unplugged the Christmas tree lights and when they were off I felt better, less inclined to think everything was bound to turn out badly.

He was waiting for me in the hall. The kitchen light was still on. He now stood at the bottom of the stairs, one foot on the floor, the other on the second step, blocking my escape.