“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.
DUKE 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.
BEN 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.”
IN THE DARKNESS of his room Robert heard a soft sound he thought at first was part of a dream he was emerging from. He could not see a thing, and touched the thick steely coat of whisker on his face to steady himself. A swirl of cloth whispered across his eyes. Olive sat at the edge of the bed, just where his mother had sat. Her cool hand slipped beneath the covers and grasped his penis. She had been so nice to him since her boyfriend had kicked him out of the tree.
“Where’s Glenn?” Robert asked. His body felt long and sore; he still felt the footprint left on his chest and his mind still picked at the dark emptiness of the fall.
Olive toyed with his penis in the disinterested fashion of a cat batting balled socks.
“He’s busy,” she whispered. “School. Soccer. I see him occasionally. He feels terrible about what happened to you.”
They rolled around for a few minutes, kissing, cool mouths, more out of habit than desire. But nothing led anywhere and they both were grateful when Robert moved away from Olive and folded the pillow into a headrest.
“What’s with you and me, O?”
“Not a whole lot,” she said at once. “I like you. I like sleeping with you. But there’s not much between us anymore, don’t you think?”
“You’re right,” he said. His feelings were not hurt, but he was afraid if they looked too closely at their lack of affection for one another he might be asked to move out.
“What about this winter?” Robert asked.
Olive got on all fours above him, then lowered her breasts to drag them back and forth across his penis. “We have to keep warm, don’t we?” she said.
“We’ll sleep together,” he said. “But we’re not in love.”
“We can see other people.”
“Of course. But winter is coming and we’ll need each other.”
She had brought him around and so settled herself astride him and proceeded at a slow, grinding pace. Robert held her lightly at the waist. The new boundaries set down satisfied him, but they did not rekindle a new interest in Olive. He had to concentrate hard to see his way to the finish of the act, and soon he was left in the dark again, relieved to be alone, sore, then asleep.
He dreamed of Ben. It was a familiar dream composed of what Duke had told him about that night on Oblong Lake. Buzzard stood at the edge of the dream, his face skewed ugly with anger. His pant legs were rolled and he stood in water up to his knees. Ben stepped directly from his house into the boat and with an expert oar touch turned the bow toward the Cow and the Calf.
The boat was otherwise empty, then Duke was in it. Robert was sometimes in the boat, but not then. Thirty yards from the islands, where the lake was forty feet deep, Buzzard stood with hands on hips, water up to his knees.
Ben wore a red-stoned ring. He pulled strongly on the oars but the boat barely moved. He talked softly to his son, then to Ethel, then to Olive, then to Frank Abbott, then to Robert, who was now alone in the boat with Ben. Lights along the lakeshore formed a face’s smile, or a string of pearls, or short words: COOK PEN ATE STEAL.
Robert heard the prop whip of an airplane. It had no lights (Duke recalled, later, that he had seen none) and was only a sound in the air. Then the sound went away, but never all the way away. Ben smiled at Robert. Buzz stood beside the boat in forty feet of water. He asked to get in, but Ben said he had better not.
The plane returned with an abrupt storm of sound and Robert, knowing the end of the story, dove from the boat onto a frozen lake, cracking his teeth and sliding effortlessly one hundred yards. Then the plane hit the water five yards from the rowboat’s starboard side. Its pontoons cut the boat crudely into pieces. Frank Abbott stood in the water next to Buzzard. Ben vanished before Robert could see where he went, though that always seemed to be the point of the dream, to seek a clue. When he awoke his legs had fallen asleep.
Chapter Six
Crow and Owl
A SMALL ROUND of applause greeted Robert on his first descent from the fourth floor. Ethel and the boys watched him shuffle into the kitchen. The floor was chilly beneath his bare feet. The air seemed bright and full of delicious scents he had forgotten existed outside his stale room. He got to a chair and sat down. He had to close his eyes. Duke hopped over with coffee and rolls.
“Welcome back,” Ethel said. She had a pencil behind her ear. Something in her expression betrayed amusement.
“I am back,” Robert said.
“Now we must settle on this crow hunt,” Ethel said. “The boys have told me you were passing strange tales as belonging to Ben.”
Robert nodded.
“Why is this news to me?”
“I can’t speak for him. I just know what he told me.”
Ethel said sternly, “Duke and Buzzer want to go hunting for crows. Whether you think of them as birds or human beings or angels does not matter to me. I want you to take them crow hunting.”
“Or else?” Robert asked.
“Be gracious.”
“When I get my strength back, I will take them crow hunting.”
A LATER EVENING, they were grouped in the living room reading and watching TV. Buzz cleaned the shotgun and lined the green shells on the coffee table, making shapes with them, spelling short words. GUN DUK MOM CRO BEN. Ethel left the room and Olive followed her to her bedroom. Robert and Duke played checkers.
In an hour Ethel returned. She wore a black dress with a tiny orchid print, high heels, and a fine silver chain. Olive stood just off her shoulder, smiling at the stunned looks from Robert and the boys. Buzz held the shotgun as if about to load it.
Ethel’s eyes went directly to her youngest child when she explained. “I’m going on a date tonight,” she said evenly. “I would have told you earlier but I didn’t want it to be a big issue. I’m going out with a man I met some time ago. He’ll be here in a few minutes. Please don’t make this hard on me or yourselves. He’s just a friend. I just wanted a night out with another adult.”
“What about Dad?” Duke asked. She had guessed
right in thinking he would take the news hardest.
“I still love your father,” she said. “I always will.” She sat beside Duke, put her finger on his stack of captured black checkers. “But Ben is dead, Duker. He has been for more than two years. This is a fact we all must come to grips with. Going out tonight won’t change my feelings for you or your father or Olive or Buzzer. But it’s time I started rebuilding a life of my own.”
“He was never found,” Buzz complained.
“Does that really make a difference?” A glance at Robert; to keep him quiet? “He is dead because if he was alive he would be home now. He is somewhere, somewhere, but he is dead.”
“He’s been gone before,” Duke said.
“Never this long. You don’t see him circling the house.”
The front-door bell rang and she stood. She smoothed her dress. Her clean hair held light. She kissed the top of Duke’s head. A man came and stood in the hallway. He was quite tall, with the nervous hitches Robert recognized from adolescence: the young man meeting his date’s family. Nobody caught his name when Ethel introduced him. He helped her into her coat and then held the door open for them to flee.
“Nothing to worry about there,” Buzz said when they were gone. “A gentleman, though.”
“But nervous,” Olive said. “He probably smokes, and Ethel hates smokers. She’ll be home in an hour.”
“Doesn’t she have to drive tomorrow?” Robert asked.
“Sure! She can’t stay out late.”
“Be decent to her,” Olive cautioned. “She’s more than just our mother. There are other sides to her.”
“Name one,” Buzz challenged her, his eyes uneasy.
Olive paid no attention. Buzz wiped a cloth up and down the shotgun stock. Robert had told them they would leave in the morning for the crow hunt, but with Ethel out in the night with a strange man their thoughts were elsewhere. Nobody left the room even as the hours turned over toward midnight. Duke fell asleep on the couch, his arms thrown over his eyes against the light. Robert read. Olive and Buzz watched an old movie on TV. The lights in the room were small islands with ponds of shadow between.
Crows Page 9
