He followed the lake road downtown. He cut over to Booth Street, to his parents’ shop, but they were closed. A light burned in a nook behind the counter; it was faint as the first hint of a car approaching over a hill, but he could see it by a selection of stencils on the wall behind (mostly rock group logos, giant red tongues, two eggs sunny-side up that would be positioned over a girl’s breasts, smile faces, the Brewers, and the Pack), stacks of blank colored shirts on the wall behind the counter, organized according to size. The T-shirts on the mannequins in the window read: BABY UNDER CONSTRUCTION (with a downward pointing arrow); I’M WITH STUPID (with an arrow pointing to the right); YOU CAN PUT PICKLES UP YOURSELF; WHY DIDN’T GOD MAKE ME RICH, INSTEAD OF GOOD-LOOKING?; and I DON’T HAVE A DRINKING PROBLEM—I DRINK, I FALL DOWN, NO PROBLEM!
Del Cobbler was in his eyeshade in his newspaper store. He sat on a stool, his legs drawn up like a jockey on a bad mount. He was working a crossword puzzle and chewing his nails.
“I’m closed, Rob,” he said.
“Your door wasn’t locked.”
“An oversight. I’m awaiting a magazine delivery.”
“At this hour?”
Del pointed a moist finger. “Don’t be a wise-ass.”
Robert advanced into the store, fighting against Del’s glare of disapproval. He reached the counter and leaned against it as though it were a raft.
“I’m really closed, Cigar.”
“You got anything to nibble on?”
“My fingernails? They’ve got my dinner under them! Now scram.”
“Give me a couple bags of beer nuts.” He put three quarters on the counter. Del swearing, angry at having to dismount, got the bags of nuts from their hook behind him.
“Take them,” he said. “Keep your money. You need it more than me. Beat it.”
The door to the shop opened. A bell Robert had not heard on his own arrival sounded. A woman came in. She was unaccustomed to the light, and held her hands above her eyes in mimicry of Del’s green shade, which in the past moments had disappeared from his head.
The woman’s name was Gloria Kissoot. She sold real estate only often enough to keep herself interested. Her husband worked at something in Madison. Their daughter was a pretty girl Robert’s age, a little plump like her mother, and with her mother’s air of something being just slightly askew in her life. Robert had dated her twice in high school, and the outings were so uneventful he could not recall her name.
“Hello, Robert,” the woman said, blushing at being caught in the store’s papery light, all those yellowing athletes looking down upon her from the walls.
“Hello, Mrs. Kissoot. Del’s closing, so I’ll be on my way.”
She touched his hand as he tried to pass. “I saw your father today at the Optimists’ luncheon,” she said. “He gave the funniest talk.”
“Yeah?” Robert stopped, intrigued. “About what?”
“It was supposed to be about fund raising and membership drives. But it got around to what it’s like doing business in Mozart. Then life in general. He’s just so smart about life’s ups and downs,” she said. “He has such a good head on him. I don’t think anything bothers him. If only he and your mom weren’t locked into such a poor location. Your father’d make a killing, given a fair chance.”
“Nobody’s keeping them there,” Robert said.
“Sandy asks about you all the time,” the woman continued, her voice dipped in a false sparkle. “She works in the Sears Tower in Chicago—the tallest building in the world?—and her office is three floors underground! Isn’t that depressing?”
Sandy. Robert remembered their one kiss at the end of their second date: it had been a very dry kiss, without a future. He wondered if Sandy felt the weight of that building’s glowering height pressing down on her, like a boss looking over her shoulder. “Say hi to her,” Robert said, turning sideways to edge past.
“I will. I’ll tell her we talked.”
Del Cobbler locked the door behind Robert. He had left the beer nuts and his quarters on the counter.
He went on to the college. He followed the dark walkway through Rapist’s Woods, the mock-moon lamp at the center of the cluster of trees cutting shadows and frightfulness into something that did not deserve them. He emerged by the sciences building. The ground-floor exterior wall was constructed of tinted Plexiglas that looked in on a long hallway running the length of the building. Students sat on couches studying in this hallway, whose high ceiling caught footsteps off the tile floor and doubled them back. The students smoked and tapped their ashes into imitation brass urns filled with white sand. The glass wall was tinted blue.
Robert tried the door. Like a jeweled vault it swung open. Puffs of heated air kissed the cold spots of skin beneath his eyes. One or two students glanced at him, but said nothing. He fit in. Opposite the glass wall were the classrooms, the sweeping amphitheaters where Ben had taught Robert biology, where Robert had first seen Olive. The classrooms were like small arenas, seats fanning back from the front lectern, from the teacher, and beyond the teacher that inner warren of tunnels and stairs Ben had revealed to Robert.
Robert went down the hall listening to the night classes. He climbed the stairs to the third floor. He had not been up there since Ben disappeared. There had been a rumored dispute over what to do with Ben’s papers and hordes of biological minutiae and jars of specimens. Being in the sciences, his colleagues had had trouble with the indeterminacy of his death. Should they give up his office? Who would care for the living creatures he had collected? Two years after Ben vanished in Oblong Lake, the teachers who taught his classes were still officially classified as substitutes.
Ben’s office door was closed, but a light burned through the strip of opaque glass set like a perfectly straight and rippling stream in it. Robert knocked.
As the door swung open he experienced an instant of anticipation, nearly of panic: perhaps Ben had been hiding out there the past two years, free to do as he pleased among his treasured biology, presumed, as he was, dead.
But it was a sleepy-eyed woman who greeted Robert. She stood leaning to one side in the doorway with a sweater over her shoulders and a red pen in one hand. With this hand she brushed her hair back off her forehead.
Robert knew her. She had shared the office with Ben in those days Robert had visited.
“Yes?” she said. The light at her back shadowed her face.
“I’m a friend of Professor Ladysmith’s.”
The woman blinked, but nothing more; she stepped back and aside and motioned with the red pen for Robert to enter. She was grading tests; her fingers were slashed with red ink, like nicks, and she took her seat and faced him with knees held primly together.
She had kept the same desk. She had not expanded the space she had occupied when Ben shared the little room. Ben’s desk was buried beneath castellated papers, potted plants, texts, an ant farm, a stuffed ferret, charts explaining photosynthesis, the dark reactions, and, with its wing now repaired, the skeleton of Corvus brachyrhynchos.
“You have a leaf in your beard,” she said. She reached and plucked a perfectly formed birch leaf from his face. It slipped from her hand and he caught it a half foot off the floor.
“I recognize some of his things,” Robert said.
She said, “Yes, he was a popular man and . . . without a body I think some of us harbored a faint hope he might return to claim these things. So I—we . . . have been slow to remove his possessions. The living creatures were divided among the rest of the faculty to be cared for—or killed, as the case may be. Many didn’t share Ben’s passion for living things. Rumor has it the jar of cockroaches was emptied in the home of the department head. A rumor, I’m sure,” she said, smiling for the first time, “but one can hope.”
She raised her eyebrows slightly when Robert did not laugh. It was a mistake, his comi
ng there; he had brought himself too close to what Ben had been.
“I know you,” the woman said.
“You’re Professor Mason.”
“I met you here. You didn’t have the beard.”
“At first I was after his daughter,” Robert said. “Ben proved more interesting.”
“And you got both anyway.”
“For a little while,” he said, though he’d never thought about possessing them both.
She regarded him a moment, then made some connection.
“You’re the man who dives in the lake for him, aren’t you?”
“That’s me.”
“And you still live in Ben’s house?”
Robert nodded, looked away; he did not know the truth or falseness of that. This made him remember that he was hungry.
“How have you managed to stay so long?” she asked. She leaned toward him, as though pulled by great curiosity.
“I’m useful,” he said.
“There has to be more than that.”
“Ben liked me,” he said. “They put up with me for the honor of Ben.”
Behind her on the desk was a peeled orange, the segments flopped open like a flower. He asked her for one and she gave him two.
She said, in continuation of an earlier thread, “The other things he had collected I have become the caretaker for, unofficially. I have a finite space I manage easily enough within. Each semester brings more into the room, and just last semester I had the thrill of witnessing a tower of papers actually reach the ceiling. In winnowing it all down to a more manageable size, I throw my own things away, rather than Ben’s.”
The woman held her sweater close, though a dusty heat poured from the register.
Robert said, “You must remember his crow tales.”
She did not answer, so he pressed. “Did he have any of those written down? I’d love to read them. His family doesn’t believe they exist.”
Professor Mason shook her head. “They were all in his mind,” she said. “All memorized, or polished, or fabricated—I could never be sure.” Something caused her to laugh softly. “He got in the habit of telling those stories in class one semester. His students came up here to complain they weren’t being taught biology. And was the crow stuff going to be on the tests? Real humorless morons. Soulless. I see that more and more.”
She found a pack of cigarettes beneath some papers and lit one. Her ashtray was a wide pink quartz heart scooped hollow in the center. He noticed then cut marks of red ink around her mouth, and two on the top of her nose, as if deep in thought she had put the wrong end of her pen to her mouth to chew.
“Did he tell you about the porch on the roof of his house?” she asked.
“I’ve been up there.”
“He told me the man who built the house added that porch so he could watch his wife and her lover on the lake,” she said.
Robert had never heard this story and felt a small pain of exclusion. He missed Ben then a little more, wished he had discovered him earlier.
“That might have come from the same place as the crow tales,” she said, “but I tend to believe him on that.”
“You don’t believe the crow tales?”
“Crows are not radically different from other birds. Maybe a bit smarter, stronger, or cleverer. But that’s all.”
“That was the heart of his argument,” Robert said. “Crows are smarter.”
She closed her eyes. Robert wiped a hand across his damp forehead. He wondered where he would go from this hot room. He noticed her sweater held ash flakes in the weave, and that the collar of her shirt was soiled. Her hair could have used a washing, too. A teacher at home only in her own mess.
She asked, “Did he tell you how a new crow in a neighborhood has to introduce himself or herself to every other crow before being allowed to stay?”
“I hadn’t heard that one.”
She smiled, leaning back in her chair, her eyes still closed. “He said there were city crows, rural crows, forest crows, crows that perched only on power lines, crows who never set foot on the ground, crows who were happy only flying into the wind. A crow in a new neighborhood had to perform a series of good deeds for the others, had to contribute a percentage of food to a common pantry, had to gather the makings of everyone’s nest before his own.”
“Amazing,” Robert said, but missing Ben’s way of it.
“It’s hard to discount. He went into such detail, as if it really was the truth,” she said.
Robert got up to leave, pulled on his gloves.
“You know,” she said, “they never found a body. Certain cruel campus wags who claim to have detected a note of boredom in Ben’s last days, a note of career fatigue, have hypothesized that he rigged the whole thing just to get away, to get out from under the teaching grind and the life he was leading.”
Robert flared, “That’s insanity! Would Ben sacrifice his son’s leg just to get free of an unhappy life?”
“My point,” she said. She did not rise when he went to leave, but invited him to come again.
He walked back around the lake toward home. The orange sections burned in his empty stomach. When the road split away he stayed to the lake, cutting across waterfront properties, trespassing. He passed through aqua lights, then shadows deep green as seaweed. His footsteps sometimes echoed on the steel slats of a pier. Behind a small boathouse he paused and looked out at Oblong Lake. It was October; soon a thin film of ice would form, thicken, lock. He would be able to walk to the Cow and the Calf, as in a dream.
And where was Ben? And why was he taking so long to return?
NO LIGHTS WELCOMED him home. They had not set out a plate of food for him nor hidden a key beneath the doormat. He climbed the tree to Olive’s room. She must have been expecting him. Her light was on and she was reading in bed. The covers were drawn up to her chin, the book rested against her cocked legs. When Robert knocked on the glass she jumped, but did not look at him, an expression somewhere between disgust and amusement crossing her face. She turned a page.
He tapped the glass again. She closed the book and he thought that now she would let him in, but she only reached and turned off the light.
“Real fine,” he muttered to the dark window. He rested his back against the trunk of the tree. His choices were simple: up or down. Down, there was no future. Once down, he had nowhere to go.
He climbed higher. The tree trunk began to taper and sway. The extra elevation, the unaccustomed handholds, were filled with a danger he had not noticed a mere six feet below. He had left the storm window off his fourth-floor room, and he kept the latch unlocked; he had never gone in or out the window before, but it was something he kept in mind for times like this. Once or twice a week he checked the latch to be sure it was unfastened.
But the window would not open. His feet planted on a branch, he leaned with one hand pressed against the wall of the house, not daring to look down, and pushed at the window with greater force. The window, sometime, had been locked.
He crouched back against the trunk. With the leaves falling he felt cold and exposed. Stars shifted in the wind when he looked up at them. Oblong Lake was like a rent in the fabric of the sleeping Earth.
Then a light went on in his room. Ethel was there; she had been lying on his bed in the dark. She came to the window. Her face was a triumph of perfect understanding and foreshadowing.
“Hello, Eth,” he said, when she got the window open.
“So we meet again.”
Robert smiled. Maybe a nap had improved her mood.
“No wonder this room is so cold. You didn’t put the storm window on,” she said.
“May I come in? I’m cold and hungry and tired.”
She said, in the hard voice of an earlier hour, “Go home, Robert.”
“This is my home. You, Olive, the boys
, you’re my family.”
“No we’re not. You have fine parents. Go stay with them. Even Ben would have kicked you out by now.”
“No he wouldn’t,” Robert said, certain of this. “I’m begging, Ethel. Just let me back in. I’ll find a job and make some money, then I’ll move out. But tonight I’ve got nowhere to go.”
Relentless, Ethel asked, “What about that crow nonsense?”
“I can’t lie.”
She drew back her head; he feared he had lost her.
“Ben did tell me those stories,” he said quickly. Her hands were on the window frame. She could slam it closed any time she wished.
She asked, “Why did I never hear those stories? Why did he keep them secret if they were such a big part of his life?”
“I don’t know, Eth. I don’t think he meant any harm.”
She crossed her arms and clasped her shoulders, her chin fallen to her chest. The air through the window was making her cold. He hated to see her sad.
“Please let me in,” he said.
“I’ll go down and open the front door,” she said, just like that. She closed and locked the window before he could tell her he could just as easily come in through the window.
He waited ten minutes before she came to the door. He spent the time thinking of a similar scene, Ben locked out in the rain, and how they passed the time with crow tales. Robert had lived there ever since. Robert had stayed the first night, then the next. It went from night to night, Ben telling him to stay, and then it became a fact without mention. He took the offer because it was a way to be free of his parents, to free them. Dave and Evelyn did not understand what he was doing, but talking to them on the phone in those first days, when the arrangement was setting into permanence like a drying watercolor, he heard in their voices a breathing of relaxation, of being themselves again now that he was away. They sought only an assurance that he was safe; beyond that, they did not ask him home. Ben offered, Robert accepted. He stayed and stayed, and in time he thought he had been living there forever.
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