They heard someone on the front steps at a quarter to one. Olive snapped off the TV; a pretty girl with red hair had been about to shatter a mirror with a hammer.
“I wonder if he’ll kiss her,” Buzz whispered.
Olive waved at him to be quiet. From his chair Robert could see through a window to the front porch. There was a light on, but he could see Ethel and her date only from the waist down. They spoke in mutters and there was a moment when they faced each other close together and Robert guessed he might have kissed her then. Ethel turned immediately and came inside and the man walked away.
She stood for a moment in the dark hallway putting something in her purse. They heard her sigh. Cold night air flowed off her as she slipped out of her coat.
Finally, Buzz called in a teasing voice, “Have fun?”
She stepped into the room where they waited. Her eyes were large and startled; she looked tired.
“Why are you still up?”
“Waiting for you,” Buzzard said. “That guy might’ve gotten fresh with you and we’d have had to rescue you.”
“Go to bed,” she ordered. She touched Duke’s sleeping face. “He’s the only one of you with any sense.”
With Robert’s help she carried Duke into his room and put him to bed. His missing leg gave him an odd balance. She smoothed the covers over him.
“How did it go?” Robert asked.
“It was nice,” she said. “Sort of sad. We talked about him for about ten minutes, then we talked about me and my kids for about fifteen minutes, and the rest of the night we talked about Ben.”
“What did he say?”
She walked out of Duke’s room. In the hall, she said, “Nothing I didn’t know before. It got a little tiresome, as a matter of fact.”
“Like what?”
“He knew you were still looking for him,” she said abruptly. “He wished you luck. He said Ben deserves to be found.”
“Will you go out with him again?”
“He asked me. If he’d asked me earlier in the evening I think I’d have turned him down. He was boring me with his stories of what a great guy our Ben was. But just before he asked me he told me how Ben used to steal pencils and paper and skip staff meetings for no reason and drink coffee from the faculty pot without putting a quarter in the plate. That isn’t much, I know, but it was heading in the direction of the Ben I remember. It was the first time all night that I missed him.”
THEY DROVE NORTH out of Mozart in the morning. Through a string of small towns the land rose up in hills and filled with trees. Robert wore gloves, a sweater, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. Buzz had a hooded sweat shirt on under his camouflage jacket. He sat up in the front with Robert, the shotgun resting on its stock between his legs; he had risen at 4 a.m. from a night without sleep to clean the shotgun’s immaculate workings one more time. Ethel had found him in the kitchen when she got up to drive her cab.
They reached a crossroads. A grocery store on one corner, a gas station on another, both closed. Windows still in shadow had frost on them.
Nobody spoke loudly lest the crows hear them coming.
“They’re capable,” Robert said. “Crows aren’t mere birds. You spend enough time looking into the lives of crows, you start to understand they are not mere birds. Their brains are twice as large as other birds. Crows will amaze you if you let them.”
“Just drive,” Buzz said impatiently. “We know where you stand on crows.”
“I doubt we’ll see a crow all day,” Robert predicted. “They can smell the gun, or the oil you used to clean it, or the shot in the shells. Crows have noses like diamonds. If we drove out here without a gun, we’d have crows galore. Today, I don’t think we’ll see a single crow.”
But a mile on they rounded a curve and came upon crows in the middle of the road tearing at the scarlet strips of some car-struck animal. With a casual flick of wings the birds moved from the car’s path. In his mirror, Robert saw the crows resettle. They were lean, flat-black birds who strutted when they walked; but they just looked like birds to Robert, and he wondered how Ben knew the things he did.
“They saw the shotgun,” Robert said.
“No way. We were moving too fast.”
“They saw the reflection off the barrel. Word will be traveling north ahead of us.”
Duke soon fell asleep in the back. A soft tune whistled from Buzz’s lips, faint as a leak.
Robert said, “You can be honest with me, Buzzer. Are you planning to shoot me today?”
Buzz looked over at him, startled. “What an asshole,” he said. “I’m out to shoot crows. You’re too low-down to waste a shell on.”
This made Robert smile; it had such an Old West flavor to it.
“Where did you get that gun I found in your room?”
“None of your business.”
“But you did shoot those birds and squirrels in the gutters.”
“None of your business,” Buzz repeated. Then he shouted “Turn here!” so loudly Duke stirred in back. Robert missed the road but stopped and turned around. The new road cut through beaten blond cornfields grown in the spaces between tree and rock.
“Why this road?” Robert asked.
“I smell crows.”
Duke whimpered in his sleep. Robert turned the mirror to frame the boy’s face. He was asleep, but in anguish.
“He’s dreaming about the accident,” Buzz said softly. “He still wakes up crying. He misses his leg.”
“Maybe deep down he knows where your dad is. Maybe he dreams about that.”
“Why?”
“Maybe just once that night,” Robert said, “he put his head under the water and saw Ben floating away.”
Buzz took the shotgun and rammed the butt against Robert’s head so hard it bounced against the side window.
“Shut up, you asshole!” Buzzard screamed.
Duke awakened with a shriek that was much worse than the pain beating through Robert’s head. The car made one treacherous, swerving pass through the oncoming lane, which was blessedly empty. There was little room to pull over, so they drove on.
“Duke?” Robert asked.
The boy drew in his breath; it sounded wet and partitioned with phlegm. His eyes were filled with tears and clear snot pooled above his lips. Robert passed back his handkerchief.
“You have a good nap?”
“What do you think, asshole?” Buzz asked. “You dreaming about Dad again, Duke?”
Duke nodded. He wiped his eyes and nose. He had slumped back into the corner of his seat and watched the countryside roll past outside the window.
Buzz said to Robert, “Your head is bleeding. All this time I thought it was made of stone.”
Robert got his handkerchief back and pressed it to the contusion; not much blood, a sore egg rising.
Off that road Buzz found an even narrower vein of gravel that wound up into old hills and patches of oak and pine and birch. “No crows here,” Robert said.
“You’re wrong. I feel them. I smell them. Crows in abundance.”
Robert parked the car in the shade. It was just ten o’clock. He held the back door open for Duke as he maneuvered out and then onto his crutches. Days before, in detailed preparation, he had muted their shiny aluminum shafts with camouflage paint.
“Who’s going to carry the record player?” Robert asked.
Buzz had the shotgun to his shoulder and sighted on something in the distance. There was food to carry, and the record player. Buzz filled his pockets with green shells.
“You got the record, Duker?” he asked.
“Crow and owl,” his brother replied, taking a floppy disk from the inside of his jacket. The record was transparent red, four inches in diameter.
“The sky will blacken with crows,” Buzz foretold. He led these phantoms with the
gun and cried, “Boom! and . . . boom!”
They hiked a good half mile away from the car, Buzz afraid the sparkle of chrome and smell of gas would tip the crows. Buzz led, then Duke, then Robert. Duke picked his way ably over the loose earth and gentle rise in elevation. Walking, it was not so cold. Buzz carried the shotgun and the record player. Robert brought the small white cooler (that crows would see from a mile off) of sandwiches and soda.
Buzz reached the crest of a hill warm in the sunlight and pronounced them arrived. The sky was full and open all around them.
“A clear field of fire,” Buzz observed. “Perfect.”
The land rolled away from them like a painting dropped from the air; meadows, rock hills, a snipped thread of stream, dark plots of forest. Nothing moved. Even the wind had stopped, held its breath, so eager for death was Buzz’s aura. He stood at the topmost point of the hill with the gun to his shoulder, sweeping its long blue barrel in 180˚ arcs. He then fed five shells into the chamber.
Duke sat on a rock, his leg out in front for balance. He squinted up at his brother.
“No crows here,” he said.
Buzz turned to him. “Give it a chance,” he said. “Fire that thing up.”
Robert set the record player on a square of level ground. He had rented the machine from SportsHeaven, the sporting goods store that anchored the Mozart business district. It was a huge blue place, brightly lighted, and all the employees wore referees’ shirts.
Robert recognized the clerk who waited on him. His name was Joe Marsh, and some years earlier he had been the best basketball player Mozart College had. Robert’s stories from that period of time were filled with his name.
“You’re Robert Cigar,” Joe Marsh said, offering his hand.
“Yeah. How’re you doing?”
Joe Marsh spread his big hands. “I’m king of this joint. I’m hardly in a glory phase.” He wore a thick leather bandoleer across his striped chest, the bullet loops filled with pens, pencils, grease pencils, dried sausage links, a tire gauge, a penlight, cigarettes.
“You still writing sports? I don’t see your name anymore,” Joe said.
“The paper folded,” Robert said, wondering if he was being rude.
“Yeah, too bad. I’ve got all the clips about me. Ninety-nine percent of them have your name on them.”
“I was busy in those days,” Robert said.
“How come you never talked to us?” Joe Marsh asked. “You talked to the coach, who was a dolt, but never any of the players. And never to the best player.”
Robert thought of those days, the close air of the locker room, the racing heat sound of the showers, the players naked and happy, or naked and sad, caught in the vacuum left by the end of the game. They had been sucked empty of emotion by the totality of their effort. Robert always felt apart from them. He felt he would be intruding, asking them to replay the game. He asked the coach questions because he, too, had not played, and therefore was at a level of understanding closer to Robert’s. Sometimes a player would catch Robert’s eye, but he never went to him with a question or a remark. Joe Marsh would sit at his locker, breathing deeply and easily, idly fondling himself, waiting already for the next game. But Robert never had any questions for him.
“I didn’t think you guys wanted to be bothered,” Robert said, pained by the memories; he could have been so much better at what he did.
“Shit, we were dying to talk to you,” Joe Marsh said. “A bunch of hams. We’d kill to talk about ourselves. That other guy—the red-headed, bushy-haired guy?”
“Al Gasconade.”
“Yeah. He was always talking to us. He practically ignored the coach.”
Robert envied Al Gasconade for his ease with the players, the way they became chatterboxes at the sight of him and his notebook.
“Al was like that,” Robert said.
Joe Marsh, dreamy-eyed, sighed. “But that was yesterday. You’re going hunting tomorrow? I wish I could go with you. The last time I went hunting was for my wife. And she wasn’t hard to bag.”
SportsHeaven offered a selection of records, each with a crow in combat with a mortal enemy. Available were a crow and hawk, crow and osprey, crow and cat, crow and wild turkey, crow and eagle, crow and dog, and crow and owl, which the boys had instructed Robert in advance to rent.
The theory was simple. The hunter played a record of a crow in combat with an owl or a hawk and other crows would arrive to help. Joe Marsh had said the phonograph battery was freshly charged, good for twelve hours’ continuous use.
Duke put the record on the turntable and switched on the machine. The turntable spun and Duke set the needle in place. Buzz’s back was to them, his eyes scanning the sky.
Out of the speaker came a scratchy emptiness, then a raucous song of battle. The record was primarily the sound of an angry crow. The owl’s infrequent “Hoop!” struck Robert as phony, some guy in the studio hired especially to do an impersonation of an owl. The battle lasted less than two minutes, then the scratchy emptiness returned.
Duke started the record again. It played through and he started it a third time. Robert sat next to Duke and they took turns moving the needle to the beginning of the record. It was warm there on the hill in the sun. Insects stubborn enough to survive the night’s cold whirred and ticked all around them.
But no crows came.
“Maybe,” Robert said in a stage whisper to Duke, “the owl on this record sounds like such a pushover the crows in the neighborhood won’t even bother to come help.”
“They’ve been fighting for twenty minutes,” Duke said. “This owl is no cinch.”
Buzz said angrily, “Would you two shut up?”
“No crows here,” Duke said. He started the record again. Robert stood up.
“We ought to be closer to a town,” he said. “Crows nowadays live near civilization. Why live in the wild when humanity will feed you for a minimum of effort?”
“A good point,” Duke said.
Buzz walked over to them. “It’s that lame record,” he said. “All the fucking crows are laughing too hard to fly.”
“The guy promised it was a real crow and owl fighting,” Robert said. The record ended. Duke tried to start it again, but Buzzard said, “Don’t bother. A waste of time.”
“What’s your idea?” Robert asked.
“We move on.”
“No, Buzzer. I’m not going any deeper into the woods with Duke. You don’t know a good crow location from a bad one.”
“You said to go where there’s garbage.”
“Where’s that?” Robert asked. “I don’t even know where we are. Let’s not press our luck.”
Duke put the needle on the record. This time, when the fight commenced, it seemed to come through deep water, or from another dimension, and soon the turntable took nearly a half minute to make one revolution.
“Some twelve hours of playing time,” Robert complained.
“Maybe he said twelve plays—not twelve hours,” Buzz said. Then something jumped in his eyes and he brought the shotgun smoothly to his shoulder; he led a target that was behind Robert and Duke. Robert turned to look and the discharge went off near his ear, a roar like the explosion of something brutal and contained.
Buzz had shot at a bird a good half mile off. A winged speck passing easily over distant woods, it did not fall or flinch or turn its long-necked head at the shot. But before it passed out of sight Buzz jerked off another round.
“Motherfuck!” he shouted, and kicked a stone.
Robert took his hands from his ears. He waited a moment, then snatched the gun from Buzz’s hands. The two shots had made the air jump; the space all around slowly regained its order.
“Are you nuts?” Robert asked heatedly. “For one thing, that wasn’t a crow. For another, you couldn’t hit it from here with a bazooka.”<
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Buzz, oddly, smiled agreeably. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I just had to fire the damn thing.”
“Those shells run almost a quarter each,” Robert said.
“I’ve just been itching to fire the gun,” Buzz said. His eyes were dreamy with relief. “Cleaning it. Taking care of it. Practicing my aim, my lead. I just had to let it go.”
Buzz’s words recalled for Robert the only time he had gone hunting with Dave. The details of their being out in the fields that day were always unclear to Robert; but he was twelve years old and had begun to feel a drift in his life away from his father. More and more, Dave seemed an awkwardness in Robert’s life, an embarrassment to be avoided. He ran a store that changed lines like a hockey team, yet he was the favorite of everyone, and he maintained over Robert’s mother a baffling hold that she reveled in. The hunting trip, as much as it excited Robert, he recognized as one of his father’s blunt lunges for togetherness.
They borrowed guns from somewhere and went into the fields and woods just north of Mozart. It was a warm, early autumn day, full of swirling insect dots and birds like streaks breaking out of the woods and crumpled corn, too fast to draw on, to lead, or to shoot.
Robert remembered that his father talked too much. Dave’s voice seemed to run ahead like an overeager dog, flushing game before the hunters were ready. Robert wanted to take a position of silence and wait for the game to come to them. But his father craved meandering and talking, ignoring the fact his son was not responding; or perhaps being too keenly aware of that, and rushing to fill the gaps Robert tore in their thin bond.
Dave carried a small shotgun in the crook of his arm. It was unloaded, and he may even have forgotten to bring any ammunition for it at all. Robert’s memory of his own weapon was only of a heavy rifle, a telescopic sight affixed to it. He remembered the sight best, because the single clearest image of that day was caught and printed on his memory in the perfect-circle, cross-haired field of vision that scope provided.
As their hunt wound to a close, Dave walking a little slower, complaining about his sore feet and the sunburn on his neck, Robert grew increasingly frustrated by the absence of anything to shoot at. After the first hour, when the sky was thick with scurrying birds and the fields shivered with fleeing rabbits, the day’s heat had flattened the earth into a dazed, tan stillness upon which nothing moved.
Crows Page 10
