Crows (8 page)

“I had work to do at school,” he said, glancing at Robert. “I'll go to the next meet. I promise.”

Ethel poured her husband more coffee. She refilled Robert's cup. He was uncomfortable, but unwilling to leave.

“He never watches me play ball, either,” Buzz complained.

“It's March, for Pete's sake.”

“I mean—­I meant last season,” the boy stammered. “
You
know.”

Ben faced Buzzard. “You got bombed that one time I was there and you said you didn't want me watching. You said I made you nervous.”

“He threw a shutout the next game,” Ethel said.

“Probably because I wasn't there,” Ben said. “He could relax. I did him a favor, not showing up.”

“He didn't really not want you there,” Ethel said. Buzz turned his face away. He was lean and awkward then, with big knuckly hands and the first hint of dark hair covering the babyish skin of his face. Ethel said, “He was just venting his embarrassment over you seeing him get shellacked.”

“Thanks for explaining that, Sigmund,” Ben said snidely. “Buzz should learn to stand by what he says.” The boy listened, blowing into one palm as if to cool it. “Speak your mind. Say what you think. Don't say one thing and expect ­people to know you mean something else.”

Buzz glared miserably into his hand.

“What's your story here?” Olive asked.

It took Robert a moment to understand she was speaking to him. “I came to visit your father.”

“I've seen you around,” she said. “Don't you hang out in Rapist's Woods a lot?”

Robert smiled. “Yeah, that's me.”

“That's not even funny,” Ethel scolded. “There is nothing funny about what happened to that poor girl in there.”

“The rape took place forty years ago,” Ben said. “The rapist is probably dead now.”

“You don't know that. Why do you gloss this over? Your daughter will be walking through there many times in the next four years.”

Ben pointed a stern finger at Olive. “Don't you ever walk through those woods alone. Maybe you can hire Rob-­O here as a bodyguard.”

Olive studied him. “Too quiet,” she announced. “Probably not in shape. I'd take better care of him.”

“I'll hire you,” Robert said.

A ball of lightning bounced outside the kitchen window. The crack and boom made Olive and her father scream. Without a word Robert went to the back door. The rain was falling harder than ever, fresh lakes in the driveway's low spots, a pounding fabric unrolling through the murky light on the garage.

“Stay here tonight,” Ben said to Robert. “You can't walk home in this.”

“We could give him a ride,” Ethel offered.

“I don't want to drive in this.”

“I will. Olive will.”

“You'll catch cold running to the car,” Ben said. “We have an extra bed upstairs. He can stay there.”

“I can walk,” Robert said. “It's not far.”

“Nonsense. What were you telling me earlier?”

“About what?” Robert asked.

“If what you say is true,” Ben replied, “you have no home.” Ben faced his wife before Robert could speak, and said, “He came to me after an argument with his own father. It was a fight over career paths. He has nowhere to turn.”

Ethel blinked; her arms were folded. Robert felt some word was required of him to set himself apart from Ben's loose charade. First a crow tale, now this fable. But he said nothing. He was amazed to see the woman believed Ben; Robert was certain his own dumbfounded face had given it away.

“If you want to put him up for the night, so be it,” Ethel said with a reluctance that chilled Robert.

The room he was taken to by Olive was on the fourth floor. The climb tired him and she said, “You'll need better wind to stay with the likes of me.”

“Who said I was in a race with you?”

“Nobody.” She smiled. “But you want to keep in better shape. It's just smart.”

The room was tiny, with a window looking through the rain at a tall birch tree. There was a narrow bed in one corner, covered with a tufted pink spread.

“Ben and Ethel are in the room beneath you,” Olive said. “I'm the one below that.” She studied him for a moment, removing her cap and fluffing her packed hair. “Did you really have an argument with your parents?”

“My father is unhappy I am not more devastated by my lack of work,” Robert said. This was the truth; he was not allying himself with Ben's fanciful inventions. He said, “I'll leave in the morning.”

“The room's empty,” Olive said, shrugging. “If you've been kicked out, Ben'll let you stay. He doesn't care, he's never home.”

“I can't stay.”

No one came to wish him good night. Clean sheets were under the pink blanket. He took off his shoes and went to bed in his clothes. For a long time he heard Ben and Ethel talking in the room beneath him, but rain and the thickness of the floor blunted the precision of their speech. He was glad of that; he feared Ben's spinning even more intricate webs of untruth for his wife. He did not want to know; he would be gone in the morning.

He slept for an hour, then awakened, feeling unsettled and frightened. He sat on the edge of the bed, put on his damp shoes, then walked back through the narrow halls and down the flights of stairs to the kitchen. He called his parents' house. Evelyn answered; she might have been up reading, her true purpose being to wait, and he was insensitive enough to sleep until guilt woke him.

“It's me, Mom.”

“Where are you?”

“At a teacher's house. I walked over here and then the rain started.”

“I can come and get you,” she said.

“No. It's late. They've offered me a place to sleep for the night and I've accepted. I just wanted you to know, and not worry.”

“It's three thirty in the morning, mister. I commenced worrying six hours ago.”

“I'm sorry, Mom. I'm really sorry.”

His mother was silent for several moments, but he could hear the thoughtful rhythm of her breathing. In that tiny house, Dave might have heard it too, and been comforted that she was there.

She asked, “What's the real story here, Rob-­O?”

He smiled in the dark kitchen. His mother's skepticism was without subterfuge. She sensed her son was fooling with her.

“That
is
the whole story, Ev,” he said. “I was caught in the storm. I'm sorry I forgot to call.”

“Robert . . . tell me. Have you run away from home?”

“Does Dave want to know so he can have his den back?”

His mother laughed softly. “Yes, he does. But pay him no mind. There just were times in the past when I thought you'd run away. I know Dave disappoints you. But you can't run from that.”

“Evelyn, quit blowing this all out of proportion.” He lowered his voice; he thought he had heard the house start at the exasperated tone in his voice, as though it were a snap of lightning. He was too much a stranger to have fixed in his mind where everyone was in that huge house, where they reclined or sat reading. He did not know whom he was disturbing and so assumed he was disturbing them all.

“You both would be happier with me gone,” Robert said. “I've made it awkward since I moved back. When I was living there before, that was normal. To leave and return, though;
that's
failure. You got used to an empty house, having each other to yourselves after all those years.” He found himself very near to crying, self-­pitying.

“I don't rank the men in my life according to how much I love them,” Evelyn said. “But your father
is
my husband.”

His mother hung up in his ear after wishing him an impersonal good night's sleep. He retraced his steps back to the fourth-­floor room, and into bed.

The sun was out in the morning and he was alone in the house. A ringing phone woke him but he could not get to it before the ringing stopped; the phone was floors below, almost ticklish, something caught in the throat of the house. Clammy wood floors chilled his bare feet; cold drafts blew up the back of his shirt and almost filled it like a sail. He slapped his pebbled arms. Pockets of cold lurked in the stairwells and hallways. No notes for him in the kitchen; they expected him to be gone.

He reheated coffee and drank two cups very hot. He was happy to be alone. If Ethel had been there, without Ben to make him welcome, he would have been paralyzed with uneasiness. But the kitchen was warm and he found a sweet roll high in a cupboard and ate it with the coffee.

It seemed impolite to attend Ben's class without speaking to him afterwards. He lectured on communication behavior in wolves and concluded effortlessly two beats ahead of the bell. Its cued ringing brought a smile of bored pride to Ben's face. Robert met him in the little room behind the amphitheater and Ben asked him to come to his office.

“Why did you tell your wife I had a falling out with my parents?” Robert asked.

Ben rubbed his eyes. “Did I say that?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I don't
remember
saying that.”

“Last night,” Robert replied, willing to go along, but uneasy then in a way he had never expected. “Your wife offered to give me a ride home but you told her I had had a fight with my father in order to get her to allow me to spend the night.”

“You spent the night at my house?”

“Lord, Ben!”

He said, “Must be that forgetful sleep.”

R
OBERT STOOD AT
the base of the birch tree looking up at Olive's dark window. His legs and back ached from carrying storm windows up the ladder all day. He had not seen Olive since the evening before. Her room had been locked when they returned from the game in Baraboo; he had knocked but she had not answered.

Now he was exhausted and fighting a sadness that had no focus. Buzz had been beaten, but expressed a troubling, false good humor afterwards. Robert preferred the young man's determined sulk. Robert also had thought frequently of Ben, and the flat sheet of time that had to be crossed before spring, ages away. Ethel had complained for most of the trip home that she was up too late and sure to be out on her feet the next day.

Robert did not want to make love to Olive, but just to sleep beside her, let her warm skin carry him out of himself. He scaled up through the branches. Outside her window he crouched to catch his wind. Her window was not locked, but to be polite he tapped on the glass. She would come to the window and hold it open while he entered. She had never failed him before. He tapped at the glass again. He was about to open the window himself when she appeared. The room remained dark.

“Go away, Robert,” she hissed.

“Let me in, O. I've got to talk to you.”

“Go back down the tree like a good boy. I'm not letting you in tonight.”

“I want to talk to you. That's all.”

“No.” She leaned forward to push down the window and Robert saw swimming out into the moonlight the blue keystone of her pubic hair and the murky, swinging tips of her breasts. She also seemed to possess three hands, then two heads, one of them of a straw-­haired man, and when Robert reached with both hands to hold open the window a hard foot flashed through the window and the gap between his flailing hands and caught him squarely in the chest. Though Robert had a momentary grip on this attacking foot and leg, he was already moving backward too quickly to maintain it. Then the air propelled from his lungs by the kick in the chest and the prospect of a long fall to the hard earth intoxicated his brain with a vivid preferable blankness that remained his last memory of what happened that night.

 

H
IS BEARD GREW
thick like a harbinger of health during his week in bed; it filled and lengthened and drove him mad with itching. Ethel and her children brought him meals and juice and reading materials. They carried messages from his parents. Purplish single-­celled creatures swam in his vision, sometimes alone, in migratory schools when he was tired. In time these went away.

He was told he was lucky to be alive, even ambulatory. The birch tree branches, for all the lashing they gave him in passing, acted as brakes of a fashion, slowing his fall by degrees until he crashed through the bottom layer and hit the ground with a thud Ethel heard in her room on the other side of the house. Nothing had been broken or dislodged. He had taken most of the fall on his shoulders, strong from a summer of diving for Ben. Aches, passing dizziness, and the purple cells in his vision gave him reason to stay in bed.

He was half asleep one day when a commotion took place at the foot of his bed. Spots of sun fell across him and warmed his hands where they curled around the edge of the covers. Some time earlier in the day, when he had thought the house empty, Olive appeared on her knees at the edge of the bed and performed upon him a slow, sweet blowjob of amends that lasted better than an hour. Now he wondered as he awakened if she might be back.

But it was his mother and his father standing there.

Their peeps of consternation had been caused by an uncertainty whether to disturb him. Robert at first thought his father wore a suit and tie, but then he saw it was a black T-­shirt with lapels, striped tie, white buttons, handkerchief, and carnation painted on.

“You're awake,” Evelyn said. She had her arms around her husband's shoulder. He said, “Tell me you didn't fall out of a tree.”

“Nice shirt, Dave.”

He looked at his chest. “You like it, huh? A very hot item. I've sold four since they came in last week.”

Robert asked his mother, “That makes it a hot item?”

“We're not here to talk shop,” she scolded. She had come and sat on the edge of the bed. With fingers whose nails had been filed down for perhaps just that moment, she spread his eyelids to inspect the dilation of his pupils.

“You saw a doctor, I'm sure.”

“Yes, Evelyn.”

She took her fingers from his eyes and brushed back his hair. “Tell us what happened,” she said.

“I took a bad fall.”

“Out of a tree,” Dave added.

Robert nodded, his eyes closed. How had these ­people found their way up to him on the fourth floor?

“What were you doing in a tree?”

“That tree there,” Robert said. From the bed the birch looked patchy, thinning. The window contained more sky than he remembered. “It's kind of a tradition,” Robert said. “Ben started it.”

“Ben?”

“The
teacher
,” Evelyn said with just a flicker of impatience.

“It's a tradition to fall out of a tree?”

“I was
kicked
out of a tree,” Robert said.

“Why were you in the tree?” Evelyn asked.

“I climb it to get into Olive's room sometimes.”

“Olive?” Dave said.

“Olive's his girlfriend,” his mother said. “Why do you climb the tree to get to Olive when she's just downstairs?”

“Romance,” Robert said.

His mother smiled. She found a chair and brought it to the edge of the bed. She sat Dave in it and stood behind him with her hands cupped like epaulets over his shoulders.

“Tell us what happened,” she said.

“When Ben was alive and not getting along with his wife,” Robert said, “he used to climb the tree outside their bedroom window. Olive's room now. It was his way of getting back in her good graces. Of courting her again. You can walk right in the window from the branch there. When Ben disappeared, his wife moved out of the room and Olive moved in. I began doing the same thing Ben did. It was a way to woo Olive. And to honor Ben.”

His parents watched him without a word.

The purplish cells swam like neon ovals of grease across his vision. Talking might have brought them on. He pressed his fingers to his eyes and the cells began to dissolve. The room was darkening and he was tired. His mother turned on the light beside the bed; a last cell was thus given a golden rim before vanishing.

Nothing was said for several minutes. Then Dave, scratching his neck, said, “How long is this going to go on?”

Robert saw his mother squeeze her husband's shoulders to keep quiet. But she seemed glad the question was out, and waited for an answer.

“I don't see any end in sight,” Robert said.

“I mean—­” Dave began, his voice going high-­pitched with frustration. He spread his arms. “This small room in this old house is all you have, as far as I can see.”

“It's not much, is it?”

“Are you waiting until you find the teacher, honey?” his mother asked. Standing above and behind her husband, she winked down at Robert. Her eyes were glistening; she was Dave's small room in an old house.

“No,” Robert said. “It's not that, I don't think. That
would
make leaving easier. But everyone is still in shock here, even after two years. You can't see it, maybe, but I can. They tell me it's time for me to leave, but I know better.”

“Maybe
they
do,” Dave said.

Robert said, “No. It's as plain as Duke's missing leg. It's
missing.
Ben's missing. So much is missing. They'd miss me if I left and I won't subject them to that.”

“What about what you're missing?” Dave asked.

“Not a thing.”

“How long before you're up and around?” Evelyn asked cheerfully.

“A ­couple days.”

Dave stood. He touched the knot in his painted tie. “I hope you know what you're doing,” he said. He held out his hand and his son shook it. Evelyn's hand rested flat in the center of his back. She maneuvered around Dave to kiss Robert good-­bye. More hidden winks and smiles. When they left he heard every step they took going down three flights of stairs, and from where he lay they sounded like one person.

D
UKE BROUGHT A
board and checkers and they played. He was often quiet. The space where his leg had been, and the space where his father had been, might have rendered him speechless by their enormity.

“Looking forward to school?” Robert asked.

Duke looked up; green eyes caught in a square face. He was almost fifteen years old and there had been talk of late of fitting him with a prosthetic leg. He had once told Robert his missing foot itched. He dreamed about the leg more than he dreamed about his father.

“I like school,” he stated, moving a checker to where Robert could do it no harm. “I feel equal there,” he said offhandedly. He had once been fast; Robert recalled foot races where Duke nearly beat his older brother.

“Pretty soon you'll have girls interested in you,” Robert said.

“No,” Duke replied, in a flat way that Robert read as a capping of the subject.

After a moment, Duke asked, “Will you take us crow hunting?”

“I don't want to, Duker.”

“You don't have to shoot. You can man the record player.”

“It would be the same, regardless.”

Duke jumped one of Robert's checkers.

“Your mother could make me take you crow hunting,” Robert said.

“I know. So why not just take us?”

“I don't want it to look like I approve of the idea,” Robert said.

“Look like to whom?”

Robert almost said: Why, to Ben.

“Did your father ever tell you crow tales?”

The boy looked at him and shook his head. Robert could not tell if he was lying. Duke picked up a captured checker and bit it as though testing for gold.

“He had some wild ones,” Robert said.

“Buzzard's the one who wants to kill them,” Duke blurted. He turned the checker on its edge and gave it a spin; for the duration of its spin it was a sphere.

“Ben once told me crows hold trials to judge their fellow crows,” Robert said.

Duke glanced uneasily at him. He moved a checker poorly and Robert took it, but he did not see the sitting line of four checkers beyond that one; neither player was paying attention to the game. Ben was in the room, perched on their shoulders, and both of them watched and listened for him.

“So I could never feel comfortable hunting them,” Robert said. “They have crow funerals. Crow weddings. Brave and cowardly crows. Your father said they're just like us.”

Duke's face closed up. “I don't believe you. He wasn't crazy.”

“I didn't say he was,” Robert replied. “His crow stories were wonderful. He was very serious about them.”

“He was teasing you,” Duke said. “He was always making fun.”

They could see no further point in the game. Duke closed the board, the checkers sliding toward the fold like houses to a fault line.

“Will you leave when you're better?” Duke asked.

“I'm better now. Do you want me to leave?”

“Don't talk to me about Dad. You can stay if you don't.”

Duke left the room. He had held the story of that night of the accident within himself for the longest time. And what he finally revealed was simple and flat. It seemed he was awaiting his father's return to add corroboration.

But, Robert often thought, what could Ben be expected to add? A dark night, brief violence from out of nowhere, a leg and a man missing in the aftermath. It was a simple story Duke held in his mind and heart. He could be excused for not understanding the curiosity about the event.

But everyone had a question. Some asked, some did not. Bold children wanted to know what it felt like where his leg once was. Buzz wondered if Ben had mentioned him. Ethel wanted to know why they were in a rowboat on Oblong Lake in the dark. Frank Abbott, the pilot, had the same question. Robert wanted to know where Ben was hiding.

B
EN HAD TALKED
to Robert the week of his death in his office at school. Professor Mason was out; she always was, or Ben made a point of inviting Robert only when he knew the other chair would be free.

He said to Robert, “I never learned the secret of living comfortably in someone else's house. How have you managed?”

“Keeping quiet,” Robert said. “Always gauging my welcome.”

Ben said, “I soon reach that point where the best intentions become obnoxious. The smallest sound grates. Laughs wear at the nerves. Not laughter, which is cleansing and necessary, but the individual laugh. I don't know how you do it.”

Robert sat up straight, worried he was being heaved without knowing it, that he lacked the sensitivity to realize he had become an undesirable element; the way Ben had stressed
individual.

Ben said, “I've lived twice in places where—­over a period of time—­it dawned on me I was regarded as a complete pain in the ass. Once I was staying with the parents of a friend of mine. I stayed all summer, and then a week before I was to return to school I overheard the wife asking the husband when I was leaving. It was many years later before I realized what a boor I'd been. I was in love with a girl then. She was the only reason I was in that city. I thought of nobody else. A self-­centered ass was me.”

He paused to move something on his desk, actually just to pause. He shivered theatrically. “My stomach knots thinking about it even now. They were odd birds, sure, but my behavior was rude and selfish. I sent flowers from school but it was years before I really meant them.”

From a drawer in his desk that he first had to unlock, and then from a small book with a square hollow cut through the pages, Ben took a photograph of a young woman. The color of her hair was indistinct in the picture, merely dark, but it was bundled atop her head and conveyed a richness beyond all need for color. Her eyes were laughing but her mouth was straight and determined.

“My first love,” Ben said, setting the photograph in Robert's hands. “Marilyn Beck. Where is she now? If you told me I'd be tempted to go to her.”

He caught Robert's eye and frowned. He took the picture back and hid it in the hollow book, then locked the book in the drawer. Robert half expected him to swallow the key.

“Her image is imprinted on your memory, isn't it?”

“She's pretty,” Robert said.

“
Pretty?
Ethel is pretty. Ethel is dear and sweet and I love her very much. She is my wife and a wonderful mother to my children. But Marilyn occupies a different stratum. She would be an absolutely awful mother. Too mercurial. She hasn't the devotion God gave to a tomcat. She was a collection of elements that defied containment. She lived eleven miles from school when I was a student. I moved in with her. She was two years older than me and rented the top floor of a farmhouse. She drove a school bus in the mornings and afternoons. This amazed me. She was a tiny girl and the thought of a huge bus at her command was incongruous. Her hands were dirty by the end of the day and she entrusted their care and cleaning to me. The highlight of my day, Rob-­O. Then we would make love. She frequently fell asleep beneath me.” Ben winced and laughed. “She worked hard. Classes, driving the bus. I did nothing with my life except devote myself to her. I skipped an entire semester. I accomplished nothing more than keeping her hands clean and soft. After I dug the dirt from beneath her nails I clipped them and filed them smooth. Some nights I painted her nails. It took an hour or so every night. She'd read or write, depending on which hand I had. An entire semester of that, Robert. And I was
happy
doing it.”

He touched the locked drawer, but did not open it.

“That picture was taken out behind the house. She left one night without telling me where she was going,” he went on. “I sat and watched the door. I held in my hands a bowl of hot water and a bar of lilac soap—­her favorite. Also a towel and an emery board. I kept reheating the water. At three a.m. I went to bed. I called the police at noon the next day to report her missing. They told me to wait a day, maybe she'd come back. About eight o'clock that night I heard a key in the door. Marilyn home at last? No. The landlord. In that day's mail had come an extra month's rent and her key and a note saying she had moved out. I was amazed—­impressed—­more than hurt. Allowing even only one day for the mail, she had spent her last night with me knowing the note and check and key were on their way. She only took the clothes she was wearing and what money she'd saved. I don't know whom she met or where she went. I haven't seen her since. Needless to say, my eyes were opened.”