Crows (37 page)

“That's my boy.”

“Thanks, dear,” he said. “But now I've got to get out in it.”

“No key?”

“Try the board in the garage. Remember it? That's where I'd look, anyway,” he said. “But if you find it, promise me you won't use it.”

She put the phone down, folded her hands over it, then lifted it and dialed Annie, who lived within miles of Ray but never saw him. Annie's housekeeper answered.

“Bixler residence, to whom do you wish to speak?”

“Annie, please.”

“Momento.”

Her daughter came on the line, sounding out of breath.

“It's me,” Ina said.

“Mom. Jesus. What a surprise,” Annie said. “But I can't talk now. I've got tennis—and I overslept.”

“Just one thing. Where did Daddy keep the key to his tackle box?”

“His tackle box? I don't know. You aren't going fishing.”

“I was getting blue. I thought a little fishing might cheer me up.”

“At the river?”

“Of course, dear.”

“It's not safe there. You told me so yourself ages ago. It can only have gotten worse. It's not safe anywhere around there anymore.”

“Annie, that's an absurd California prejudice,” Ina said. “My neighborhood is fine. Where Helene lives—that frightens me a little. But this part of town is still quite nice.”

“I've got to run,” Annie said.

“Let me talk to Meg.”

“Not home. School.”

“Has she discovered boys?”

“She won't tell me,” Annie said. “She's almost fifteen, after all. That disinterest in the opposite sex is feigned.”

“What's she doing tonight?” Ina asked. She wanted something she could hold in her memory; the occasional school picture that arrived in the mail seemed dated even as it fell from the envelope.

“Nothing specific. She's very studious. She has a friend she goes down to see,” Annie said. “Her name is Katy. They're very tight. Jesus, Mom, I'm late.”

“Invite me out. I miss my girl.”

“You're always invited,” her daughter said with an abrupt enthusiasm that Ina did not trust. “A standing invitation.”

“Have Don invite me.”

“Don? Don loves you. He's too busy to show it, that's all. Come out anytime. Gotta go. Love. Bye.”

She put the phone down, abruptly sad. Her children in a rush out in Los Angeles, Vincent slipping from her memory. Her heart was in pieces for just the few moments she took to doze off.

When she awoke she wanted to go to the river more than ever; to prove that her children were wrong in their estimation of her helplessness. She sat on the side of the bed through a brief spell of dizziness. She went to the bathroom, then patted cold water on her face as she bent over the sink. Dots of dried soap speckled the mirror and faucet and struck her as slovenly. With a piece of toilet paper she wiped them away. She was starting to feel better; the little nap had refreshed her. In the bedroom she changed into blue jeans, a yellow cotton blouse, and her Nikes, feeling girlish and anxious to be on her way. She tied a scarf around her abundant white hair.

She went out the back door and down the walk to the garage. It was hot and still in there. The tackle box key was not hanging on the board above Vincent's tool bench, and she muttered, “Damn.” The garage had been Vincent's province. He did the driving, shoveled the snow, mowed the lawn, and the garage was his base. He preferred being at work, or inside reading or talking to her, but he drew satisfaction from completing mundane jobs that had to be done. Ina could find him in the garage after she had looked everywhere else.

Within a month of Vincent's death, Ray had sold his father's LTD and left a hole in the garage that always startled Ina. The space between the smudged, busy walls—with their precarious organization of tools, bikes, and junk, and years of license plates numbered LC5885—yawned at her, reminding her that she was old and bound to be tired. Reminding her that her Vincent was gone.

One Saturday morning—the LTD sparkling in the driveway after its weekly wash—Vincent had pointed out to her how the oil stains on the garage floor were always changing. He examined them like clouds. Abe Lincoln's profile. A lion. A woman bent over a dog. A tree. Two men reading one newspaper. The car leaked oil like an artist, but Vincent never did anything to fix the problem. He enjoyed the pictures.

But Ray sold the car because Ina could not drive. With the car gone, the pictures on the floor were thus frozen. She looked at the floor from different angles, in different light. The pictures soon were gone. So carefully detailed by Vincent, they were invisible to her now.

Back in the kitchen she patted cool water on her face again and took a minute to compose herself. It had been a mistake going to the garage, to venture where memories of Vincent were so thick.

When she felt able she went to the front of the house to check for the mail, knowing there was nothing, but always hoping it would come early that day. So much of what was delivered was junk, and much of it still addressed to Vincent; everyone having a sale, everyone needing money. Nevertheless, she cherished the expectancy.

The mail had not arrived. She left the front door open, storm door on the latch. She took two slices of raisin bread and dropped them in the toaster slots. She noticed the cord needed wrapping. At Helene's not long ago, Ina had seen the cord of her sister's toaster burst into flames. It was not a traditional fire, but a fast white flame around the plug, nearly painful to look at.

“What's that horrid smell?” Helene asked, her voice curling at the end with a trace of burgeoning panic. Ina stood at her sister's side to keep her away from the flame. The tiny white storm of electric fire lasted just long enough to sear through the cord and smudge the outlet with a greasy black residue.

“It's a fire in the toaster,” Ina said, carefully pinching the plug and yanking it from the socket. Helene sniffed, turning her nose frantic as a hound. “It's under control.”

“Will this delay my toast being done?” Helene had asked.

Ina put her raisin toast on a plate and took it to the table. She got a knife from the drainboard and margarine, jelly, and beer from the icebox. She buttered the toast, then spread on jam. She popped the Old Style and poured it headless into her blue glass. She took a swallow. The beer was so cold that it made her real teeth ache. She found a catalog to read while she ate. It was full of impossibly slim and beautiful young women dressed in clothes that reminded Ina of fashions in vogue during the Second World War.

She took a bite of toast, chewing carefully. The ache from the beer had not entirely diminished. With her mouth full of bread, she took another swallow. It felt lost in there. She closed her eyes, sighed, and chewed.

“I was beautiful once,” she said out loud, flipping the pages of the catalog.

There had been a time when she and Helene were considered quite a pair of beauties. “A toothsome twosome,” Vincent had called them, even when it was no longer specifically true. But there had been a time when they were vied for.

She pushed away from the table, having finished her toast and most of her glass of beer. She carried the glass down the hall to the front door. She flipped the latch and leaned outside to check the mail, although barely a quarter-hour had passed since she had last looked. She went on through the front door and sat down on the top porch step. She swallowed what remained of her beer. Po Strode would look over and see Ina drinking at ten in the morning. A cool breeze chased around her ankles. The street was empty of traffic. After a minute, a maroon car went past.

She wanted another Old Style, and to use the bathroom, but having found a comfortable seat she felt rooted to the spot for the time being. Her headache was starting again; she felt like taking another quick nap. The street was still. It was paved and amply shaded, but still gave off a summer haze as though the ghost of the original dirt hovered over it. Before they got old, Ina and Po Strode nearly made a living running a stand out at the curb. Po sold the sweet corn, tomatoes, and melons she grew in the gardens that flourished on the quarter-acre of land between the Strode house and the Lockwood house. Ina sold preserves Helene had put up, strawberries packed thick as marbles in glass jars, and the fish—mostly carp—she and Vincent pulled from the river.

Vincent would park his car by the stand and pretend to be a customer when business was slow.

“It gives the impression you've got a buyer,” he said. “Nobody likes to be the first to part with their money.”

A young man came up the stairs from the river. He stood on the top step and peered up and down the street. Ina could tell only that he was tall and thin, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a fringed leather vest. He stood in sunlight while Ina sat in shadow. She felt invisible. She felt cool, abuzz, mysterious. Vincent would have warned her to get inside, but she felt her safety lay in remaining absolutely still. She sensed the young man wanted no witnesses. He was only thirty yards away; Ina doubted she could get inside and lock the door before he was upon her.

He lit a cigarette. He possessed a callow beauty; he had muscles and youth, that vanity of stance and movement people of a certain age acquire and inevitably lose. He smoked and looked up and down the street.

In another time, if he had stayed where he was and she stepped back fifty years, Ina would have called his attention to her. She had known how to walk, how to meet an eye; she could rattle her beads. Young girls always seemed more aware of what they were doing; the dance of youth had a rhythm for them, and consequently the end of that dance was harder on them. She had once been quite a romantic, sometimes in secret. She had been a wild lover. She had ridden horses. Now she sat with her empty glass hoping the young man did not look her way. He was raptly smoking, giving the impression of performing an act terribly urbane.

Abruptly the young man looked directly at her and she felt a bolt of fear, but then his line of vision swiveled past. His hair was very long, and tied in a tail down his back. The maroon car she had seen earlier returned. It carried young men, and one of them looked directly at her, of this she was certain. The boy by the river stairs threw away his cigarette and climbed in. Gears shifted, she heard a lively raising of voices, a laugh, and the car sped away.

Ina surmised that he had been dropped by his friends at the head of the stairs to conduct some business down at the river. She pulled herself to her feet on the porch railing and went inside. Her front room was cool and dim. She supposed she should dust. Her blind sister kept a tidier home. Ina made two transits of the room, touching objects, realigning them. Most of all she wanted to go down to the river to learn what those boys were up to.

She went into the hallway and before turning right to go to the kitchen she quickly checked the mail. Helene answered the phone on the first ring.

“It's me,” Ina said. “I saw a boy on the river stairs. He's up to no good.”

“He was probably fishing,” Helene said.

“He wasn't carrying a pole.”

“What were you doing on the river stairs?”

“I wasn't on them. I was on my porch. I saw this boy come up the stairs. He had a cigarette going like he was the king bee. A minute later a car full of kids came and picked him up.”

“They're playing hooky,” Helene said.

“He was doing something by the river.”

“Did the phone company call you?”

“No. Why?”

“I told them you might be interested in a quiet-phone rate.”

“My phone rings,” Ina said huffily. “I use my phone quite often, thank you.”

“It's not a sin to pay a quiet-phone rate,” Helene said. “It's an economy feature.”

“I made two long-distance calls this morning, as a matter of fact,” Ina said. “Annie and Ray.”

“And who called whom?”

“When did you last speak to Amanda?”

“Yesterday,” Helene said, and hung up.

Ina poured a fresh beer into her blue glass and carried it down the hall to the front door. The beer was so cold and heavy; a sense of bounty. She swallowed a mouthful while snaking her hand out the door and into the mailbox. The phone rang and she let it. Helene would be calling back. She was afraid to remain on poor terms with her sister. Blind, she needed Ina for too many things.

She allowed it to ring, and then judged her delay sufficient.

“I wasn't trying to offend you.”

“I'm sorry about the Amanda remark. Neither of us have model kids.”

Ina could see the head of the river stairs through her front window and she wondered what was at the bottom of them. Her sister, sitting beside the phone with nothing else to do, was silent.

“I have to be going,” Ina said.

“When are you coming over, dear?”

“Don't worry. Soon.”

“I'm not worried.”

Ina heard a rattle at the front door and went for the mail, but there was nothing. Had she imagined the noise? She carried her glass out onto the front porch. If Po Strode was watching there was no way she could tell what Ina was drinking, or that she had refilled her glass.

Ina lowered herself onto the top step. A car went past and her heart sped up for an instant until she reminded herself it wasn't the young men in their maroon car. Having hidden something, they would surely return for it.

A landing had been built halfway down the river stairs, a plateau to break the monotony of ascent and descent. Rudy had challenged Vincent to jump from the stairs to this landing, but Vincent had refused to compete. Rudy, starting six steps above the landing, hurtled leisurely through space and touched down lightly on the balls of his feet, fingers grazing the concrete for balance. Helene and Ina applauded. Rudy beamed at the girls; it was a time when they were beautiful, all four of them, and though Vincent would not jump stairs, he was willing to compete for the sisters.