Crows (40 page)

Vincent's initials were there somewhere. She walked with her head bowed, looking for the letters her husband had cut with a bit of stick in wet cement. She always thought she remembered the exact location of the initials, but she never did. In the moments before finding them she always feared they had been eradicated, had grown faint over the long years of no one looking for them.

Even Vincent had forgotten they were there, then one evening on a visit to Rudy and Helene's he stood up and led them on an expedition into the darkness. Helene refused to go along, claiming she had dishes to do, and her disapproving look betrayed her hope that Rudy would stay put, too. Ina, seeing her sister discomfited, turned vivacious and enthusiastic about the idea. They filled their pockets with kitchen matches to aid in the search; Vincent said they were more romantic than a flashlight. Ina topped off her glass and they departed.

Ina could see the moon sectioned haphazardly through the trees overhead. Two houses down, Vincent stopped and struck a match against the sidewalk. Rudy, who believed he had etched his own initials in the same wet cement, said they had not gone far enough down the block. But Vincent was on his knees and an elbow, holding the match up, looking drunk, which he was not. He read like a blind man, with his fingertips, everything he touched a blur of punctuating stones and grit. He put out the match with a snap of his wrist.

The party moved on. Now Rudy felt the search was warming.

“We're in front of the Griffins' house—and we put the initials in their cement because they were such pricks.” Rudy fell to his knees and struck a match.

“But this isn't where the Griffins lived,” Vincent said.

That set off a second argument. They could not agree on the location of the initials, and then the composition of the neighborhood changed even as they tried to fix it in their memories. The match burned Rudy's fingers, and with a little yelp he disappeared.

Ina found the faint letters where they had always been, where Vincent finally had come upon them with a woof of triumph that night. They had been pretty old even then, the children grown and gone, their lives constricted back to the four of them again after the brief expansion of having families. They found the letters in front of Rudy's boyhood home, which was only six houses down from where he and Helene had moved after they were married. They remembered the circumstances then, too; Rudy's father mixing the cement to fix a crumbling panel in the walk, his stern warning not to mark his work, and then Rudy and Vincent sneaking back with the stick.

Rudy knelt with a match, rubbing his fingers over the letters. VL RB.

“I don't know if he ever saw what we did,” he said.

Ina arrived at Helene's house. The neighborhood lots were deep and narrow, with walks leading between the houses to niggardly back yards, then unconnected garages facing a common alley. On the front gate was a small silver sign:
RUDY & HELEN WELCOME YOU.
The sign was custom ordered, then Helene's name botched. Rudy had made a stink until the company refunded his money, but he never corrected the sign.

Ina went around to the back door. There was a strip of lawn along the walk, an old flowerbed next to the fence on the lot line. A young family lived in the house next door. They were strangers in the impersonal age. But years back, what had their name been? Joost? One hot night the four of them had sat in the parlor with their cold drinks, playing canasta and listening to Mr. and Mrs. Joost make love next door. Rudy tugged at his collar as Mrs. Joost's orgasmic shouts trumpeted through the screens. Vincent said in a fake British accent, “Seems a bit warm for that, what?” But he could not wait to get her home that night, could not wait to get her undressed and his hands on her.

“Is that you, dear?” Helene called.

She was sitting by the telephone in the kitchen. As if she had perfect vision, her eyes went immediately to Ina as she opened the back door with the key Helene had had cut for her and which Ina kept safety-pinned to the lining of her bag. She went to Helene and kissed her cheek.

“If it wasn't, would I have said so?”

“I'd know you anywhere—your tread, your scent, your aura.”

“Poo,” Ina said. “Did you know,” she continued with a trace of amazement, “that I've been living with the cellar door unlocked since Vincent died?”

“Why on earth would you want to do that?”

“I
didn't
want to,” Ina said. “That's my point. I was checking the locks on the cellar door and I discovered it's been unlocked all this time. Years!”

“Why were you checking the lock, dear?”

“I was nervous.”

“Why?”

“I'll explain later. Do you have a list?”

“Up here,” Helene said, with a tap on her skull.

“You had your hair done.”

“What do you think?”

“It's lovely,” Ina said, and touched her sister's hair as further proof.

Helene persisted in tinting her hair at a small salon run out of a woman's home down the block. Helene favored unflattering metallic colors—hard silvers, silver-blues, racy coppers—perhaps falling for the seductive names, having no idea how the colors actually looked. They were at an age when their few peers did not dare offer honest critiques of their appearance, knowing they themselves were vulnerable. A blind woman with hair the color of a saucepan was routinely assured she looked radiant. Ina did not feel she was one to argue. Vincent had cut her hair and become quite good at it. His gentle, busy fingers in her hair never failed to arouse her. Now she cut her own hair, sitting on a high stool before the mirror, but rarely consulting it. She cut her hair by touch; she was deft.

Helene asked if she had brought any coupons.

“No,” Ina said. “I don't pay any attention to them.”

“They can save you money.”

“They clutter up the drawer,” Ina said. “You have to keep track of the expiration dates. I don't want anything to do with things that expire.”

Helene huffed to register disapproval at her sister's little joke, with its overtones of spendthriftiness. Ina had never had to worry about money. She just bought what she needed. Vincent had taught her that. He made money in a way that seemed almost effortless; not in amounts that could be considered lavish, but much more than enough to satisfy the needs and desires of his family. Helene resented this ability of Vincent's, for her own husband had brought money in wrenchingly, a dollar at a time, each dollar logged and squeezed in place on the budget.

Helene snapped open a change purse and felt down inside its little cloth mouth for the money she had there: bills folded to the dimensions of small candy bars, a selection of coins. Ina would write a check.

The widows linked arms and set out. Helene took a seat on the bench in the backyard while Ina went to the garage for her sister's cart. Helene had had two carts just like it stolen, malicious thefts of the rickety contraptions with their collapsible sides and cheap red wheels. No reason to take them other than pure meanness, a simple desire to inconvenience.

In the garage, Ina put her hand on Rudy's car, an Olds Omega. Its blue steel coat was dusty and so warm the engine might have just been run. A man's hat was on the front seat, resting alongside a pair of ladies' gloves. She remembered the rides they had taken, the four of them, the way Vincent pressed ever so slightly against her on the seat, even after they had been married for years, even after she had been stretched far from her original form by two babies. He never lost that attentiveness. Up they would ride into hills Rudy found. He discovered the finest in elevated locations, where a breeze was sure to rise on the hottest evening. He amazed them. He gloated over this rare ability. The horizon was a line drawn with violet ink and straight-edge, but Rudy would have them soon enough in hills where they lost their stomachs flying over the crests. Helene would take her turn driving, Rudy close beside her. She was an excellent driver. She steered with both hands and Rudy poked like a kid at the side of her breast, or in the gap between her legs, as if he wanted her to flinch in self-protection and kill them all.

“Whose hat is that in your car?” Ina asked.

“Hat?”

“A brown hat and a pair of light gray gloves.”

“The hat is Rudy's. The gloves are mine. I can't picture Rudy in a hat.”

“When did you drive the car last?”

“Before I went blind—obviously.”

“You should turn the engine over occasionally,” Ina said. “It's not good to just sit.”

“You've let me sit all day.”

“Oh, poo.” Helene took her sister's arm and they went down the walk and through the gate. Each woman pulled a cart. Helene remarked on the chill of the shade. Her toe caught on a snag of raised concrete and for an instant her balance was gone. Then it wasn't.

“Are you all right, dear?” Ina asked.

“Yes,” Helene said. She had paused to reassemble her courage to travel. “We're at the corner.”

“Exactly.”

Ina warned Helene to step down for the curb and she did. The street had a much different feel than the sidewalk. It seemed to hum, and Helene felt endangered as she never did on the sidewalk or in her house. She hurried a bit against Ina's lead and tripped jarringly on the opposite curb, again nearly falling.

“Easy, dear,” Ina said. “I looked both ways.”

They moved into the next block. Helene counted steps. The block was precise in her memory. The houses were either crisp or uncaring in their appearance. Each fence had a tilt of its own. The yards declared dog, no dog, yard mowed. All the time she had had her eyesight she thought she hadn't been paying attention. But there it was like a movie, down to the shapes, sequences, and locations of the house-number plates.

“Here we are at Jansen and Edison,” Helene announced.

“No fair. You're counting steps.”

“Tell me about your adventure,” Helene said.

Ina hushed her with that taste for the dramatic Helene found so annoying.

“It's scary,” Ina said. “I let Po Strode in on it and now she fears for her safety—and wishes I'd never said a word.”

Helene, stung, said, “You told Po, but you won't tell me?”

“Po was there, dear. She insinuated herself into my adventure,” Ina said. She mused, “Why do you suppose Po was blessed with a husband with longevity?”

“I don't know,” Helene said, “that it's such a blessing.”

“Bite your tongue,” Ina scolded, laughing. “Rudy is just crushed at this moment.”

“I was referring to Hector Strode,” Helene said. “Do you remember what a grim young man he was? Serious to a fault.”

“The serious ones last forever,” Ina said.

Helene, in talking to her sister, had lost count of their journey. But the rhythm of being blind ticked reliably within her and she began to count from 44. At 201, the number of steps in the block, they were at Jansen and Flamingo. She told Ina so.

“You are amazing.”

“I am. Now tell me what happened.”

“I was sitting on my front porch—thinking about Vincent, waiting for the mail,” Ina said. “I saw a boy come up the stairs from the river. His very appearance radiated a suspicious presence. He was menace personified. I hoped he would walk away, but he just stood there. I sat stone still. He didn't see me. In time a car full of boys his age arrived and took him away.”

Helene, counting steps, turned left on Wilson. Preoccupied by her story, Ina followed.

“Do you remember that look boys got when they wanted to kiss you?” Ina asked.

“Only Rudy ever looked at me that way,” Helene said, somewhat stiffly.

“What about George Bigelow? And Heywood Harms?”

“They never kissed me,” Helene blurted, as if fearing a whiff of scandal fifty years after the fact.

“Never?”

“Rudy is the only man who ever touched me.”

“Well, you misremember, but I won't press the issue,” Ina said judiciously. The had come to the outer rim of the supermarket parking lot. Helene stood, arms akimbo, glaring at the space she estimated her sister to occupy.

“Rudy is the only man who ever touched me.”

“I believe you.”

“No, you don't.”

“I know for a fact that Vincent kissed you. Often.”

“He was like a brother.”

“Not before we paired off. I could've ended up with Rudy and you with Vincent. You can't deny it.”

“I can and I will,” Helene said. “Rudy only had eyes for me.”

“Dear, I'm not saying that he didn't. But we could've switched husbands in the beginning and we'd still be standing today just like this—two old fools arguing in a parking lot.”

“That's not the same. We're sisters,” Helene said.

“Maybe if you'd married Vincent and I'd married Rudy, they'd be alive today,” Ina speculated. “Maybe we wouldn't have worn the other out quite so fast.”

“You don't know that,” Helene said.

As they walked on, Ina said, “I just remember my youth as a girlish series of brief flirtations. A kiss was the ultimate in vanity and self-expression. It meant nothing. But they surely made my blood gallop. We were together so much, I assumed your experiences were the same. You taught me everything.”

Men were at work in front of the store's entrance. They shimmered in a cloud of dust and excruciating noise, cracking into the concrete with picks and a jackhammer. Helene made a sound, almost a peep of pain, that Ina barely heard. She saw a drop of blood on her sister's leg where a shard of concrete had hit and cut through the skin of her nylons. Ina drew her into the store, where the air was cool, with music in the background.

“Wait, dear,” Ina said to her sister. “You've been cut.”

She guided Helene to a chair by the window. Other old birds perched there, catching their breath, fluttering their coupons. Ina knelt and dabbed with a tissue at the blood. It was the merest drop, a gay bright red that seemed more festive than dangerous. Blood had spread behind the nylons, darkened, and begun to dry.