Ellie's Crows

by MaryAnn Myers

  He stopped what he was doing and just looked at her, watched her, watched her every move. She had nothing to say to him. She’d already questioned him about Damian’s injury; had he seen or heard anything, was Damian cast, what? She walked on. By the time she put Damian back into his stall, the lesson was over, and the place was thinning out. No vet. She had another hour or so before she had to be at the laundromat where she worked part-time, had already been to the nursing home to visit Grandma Betty, who was transferred back today and still suffering the effects of the Kemoran. She had the time to wait longer, but…. She thought of Diablo, still angry with her no doubt, thought of that brooding way of his; that look. And the way, when all was well between them, how that brooding look in his eyes would change, and she’d want to be devoured by them, by him.

  “Hi, Ellie!”

  Ellie turned and smiled, recognizing the little voice. It was one of the twin girls who owned the pony stabled the other side of Bubba. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay. You gonna ride?”

  “No, not today. You?”

  The little girl nodded. “As soon as the vet gets here. Mom!” she called. “Mom!” And off she went to look for her. Ellie decided to wait it out and when the vet arrived and had treated the pony, walked down and asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking a look at Damian.

  “No problem,” he said, and followed her. Damian pricked his ears. Still hoping for a carrot, Ellie figured. When he backed up uncharacteristically as they entered the stall, she chalked it up to his disappointment and pouting.

  Only one of the puncture wounds concerned the vet. It was pretty deep, he said, and already showing the beginning signs of infection. He flushed it out, gave Damian a Tetanus booster and a shot of antibiotics, and left a different type of ointment to be applied twice a day.

  “Is it all right to ride him?”

  “Oh, sure, exercise’ll do it good,” Dr. Oakley said. “Just don’t get him hot. Take it easy for a few days. I’ll check on him Friday.”

  Ellie thanked him, put the salve in her tack trunk, and walked as far as his truck with him, then on to her car. With a little luck, she’d be right on time for work. As it was, she was two minutes late, but two minutes was close enough. The laundromat was packed with the night crowd, mostly college students, a few couples with babies, an elderly man who lived upstairs and washed a load a day, mixing whites with colors. It was her job to make change and keep the peace. Keep the peace? The worst that had ever happened: a food fight between two slightly intoxicated freshmen, and Ketchup everywhere!

  It was customary for Ellie to close the laundromat around ten. She never felt threatened or frightened. It was a nice neighborhood, nice people, well lit. She glanced up from helping Mr. Franklin fold his sheets when a hush of sorts fell over the room, a silence amidst the swish of the washers and tumble of the dryers.

  There stood Diablo, his cop car parked right outside.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” he said.

  Ellie swallowed, took him in at a glance, and nodded. “All right.” She motioned to the back.

  “What’s the problem, officer?” Mr. Franklin asked.

  “No problem, sir.”

  “It’s okay,” Ellie said. “I know him,” she added. “He’s uh…he used to be my boyfriend. I’ll only be a minute.”

  Diablo followed her into the back room and when she turned to face him, again Ellie took him in entirely with a glance, gun on his hip, smoldering look in his eyes. For a moment he just looked at her. “Used to be?” he said.

  Ellie wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and shrugged. “How many times can you get mad at me, Diablo? How many times before…?”

  “As many as it takes,” he said, stepping toward her. “As many as it takes.” He touched the side of her face with the back of his hand and leaned down and kissed her, gently at first, then more urgently. “I want you,” he said. “I want you now. I want you tonight. And if you don’t make it to my place, I swear I’ll come looking for you.”

  “Then what?” Ellie said, her mouth against his. “Then what, Diablo?”

  Diablo kissed her again and looked into her eyes. “I’ll show you, Ellie,” he said, spreading her hand and running it down the front of his pants. “I’ll show you. How about you just be there, all right?”

  “Ellie?” Mr. Franklin called. “Ellie, is everything okay?”

  “Yes, thanks. The officer’s leaving.”

  Diablo walked out first, holding Ellie’s hand behind his back. When he let go, he pointed at two teens sitting on the folding-table, who jumped off instantly. Ellie watched Diablo get into the cruiser, watched as he reached for the scanner, and looked at her watch. One more hour.

  ~ 6 ~

  Grandma Betty dreamt she drowned, not once, but three times during the night. First in a river, then a clear warm pool the size of a small lake, and then a tub. She woke with a rattle in her chest and later that day was diagnosed with pneumonia.

  “No more swimming,” she told Ellie. “It just ain’t worth it anymore.”

  Ellie smiled, held her hand, and turned to the nurse. “Will she have to go to the hospital again?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Grandma Betty shook her head vehemently. “No. Ellie, go find me a chain. I’m gonna chain myself to the bed. I swear I will.”

  Lolita squawked outside the window.

  Ellie ignored her.

  “I probably got the damned pneumonia in the hospital, and now you want to send me back.”

  “You’ll need to be put on antibiotics.”

  “So. What’s wrong with giving them to me here?”

  Ellie turned to the nurse.

  The woman shook her head. “She’ll need an IV, and in order for it to be covered….”

  Ellie nodded, understanding; the Medicare-Medicaid thing. She sighed, and edged closer to Grandma Betty’s bed. “It’s all right. It’ll only be for a few days.” Three to be exact. It was always three, the customary three, the required three.

  “Easy for you to say,” Grandma Betty said. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  Ellie chuckled and gave her a hug, then sobered. Grandma Betty’s skin was on fire.

  Diablo wasn’t happy when Ellie phoned with the news she’d be late.

  “Is it too much to ask to be first on your list, just once?” he asked.

  “Yes. It is. Until Grandma Betty dies….”

  “That’s sick. You should hear yourself.”

  Ellie smiled. “I do hear myself. I’ll call you later. I gotta go, the paramedics are here.”

  “Are they cute, Ellie?” Grandma Betty wanted to know.

  Ellie glanced down the hall. “Yes, very. Now what do you want packed?”

  “Everything. I’m never coming back. I’m going to give up and die in the hospital. I’ll show ‘em.”

  “Who?”

  “The nurses. The aides. The goddamned cooks. All the sons o’ bitches! All of them!”

  Ellie chuckled again, and would have laughed had Grandma Betty not been so pale and flushed, and started putting things in her three-day bag. Slippers, diapers, always her own, (she hated the ones at the hospital, said they itched like the dickens and made her squirm in bed) and floss, Grandma Betty still had all her own teeth, and….

  “Ellie?”

  “Yes, Grandma.” Ellie turned.

  A stillness settled around them. “It won’t be long now, you know.”

  Ellie stared.

  “I’m sorry. But it won’t. Okay?”

  Ellie steeled her jaw and nodded. “You did say it was all right for me to mourn though, right…. Remember?”

  “I remember.” Grandma Betty reached for Ellie’s hand. “I remember. Just don’t mourn too much. It’ll mean regrets. And you and I, we have none between us. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  Ellie wrapped her arms around Grandma Betty and, hugging the frail little woman, fought back tears. “I’m sorry. I won’t make you eat an
ymore. I promise.”

  “And the tubes?”

  “No tubes.”

  Grandma Betty nodded gratefully and held her tight. “I love you, dear. I love you more than life itself,” she said, and for a moment, a brief moment, she allowed her granddaughter to cry. And to cry herself.

  * * *

  As a rule, Ellie would never think of going to the barn late at night, not this barn, let alone by herself. But Damian needed to be treated. She parked her car out front instead of at the side as usual, visible from the road, and opened the large arena door. With the full moon at her back, showing the way, she quickly covered the distance to the stall area.

  “Well, look who’s here,” she heard an inebriated male voice say. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Ellie fixed her eyes on the couch outside the tack room, the owner’s husband coming into focus little by little. Boots, then his jeans, open shirt. “I’m here to check on Damian,” she said. Groping for the switch, she turned on the lights.

  The man shaded his eyes and sat up, watched as she passed, and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. “You need help?”

  “No,” Ellie said, and kept walking. Damian was lying down and had to first be coaxed to his feet. She spread ointment on the puncture wounds, probably should have washed them first, probably should have taken him out for a walk as well, but not with Victor there, and this late at night. She reached into the bottom of her tack trunk for a bag of carrots, broke one in half, put it in Damian’s feed tub, and turned, startled to find the man staggering there at arm’s length.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “What?” He laughed.

  “I said, go away.”

  The man drew hard on his cigarette. “I was just coming to help.”

  “I don’t need any help,” Ellie said, adding, so as not to provoke him. “Thanks anyway.” She started past him, and swung around when he brushed her arm.

  “Whoa! Well, lookit here!” He stumbled back a step,

  amused at her reaction.

  “Don’t touch me,” Ellie said. “Don’t ever touch me.”

  “Right.” He laughed as if she were kidding, moved toward her, and it was then that Ellie turned and summoned into the night for help.

  “Come! Come now!” she cried.

  The man looked at her. She was standing with her arms raised, eyes wild….

  “Come now!”

  Victor let out another laugh, a laugh that in the next instant turned mute with a face of its own as a flock of crows swooped down on the arena. They entered in droves…circling and circling and cawing and squawking.

  “You’re a fucking freak, you know that,” the man said, backing up amidst the flutter of wings and stirring in the stalls. “A fucking freak!”

  “What the…?”

  Ellie turned to find Sheila, the farm owner, standing in the arena doorway, pajama-clad, and ducking and swatting at the birds with a gun in her hand.

  “What’s going on?” she yelled.

  “Nothing,” Ellie said, walking toward her and talking fast. “I had to put my grandmother in the hospital again, and couldn’t get here sooner to treat Damian. I’m sorry, I didn’t know Victor was here or I wouldn’t have used the arena.” Ellie waved her arms, shooing the crows, and one by one, they flew back out, cawing and cawing. “There’s a storm coming, that’s all. They were just drawn to the lights. Right, Victor?”

  When she looked at the man he nodded. “Right.”

  Sheila lowered her gun as the last crow, Lolita, descended, and turned her attention to her husband, a man fifteen years her junior. “What the hell are you doing down here? I thought you were in bed.”

  “I was checking on that Dun mare. She looked colicky earlier.”

  The woman stared a moment and then smiled, a smile that to Ellie said he could do no wrong in her eyes. “Well, if she’s all right, then come on. You must be tired. Let’s go back to bed.”

  Victor nodded and walked past Ellie by way of a huge circle.

  “Is it all right if I exercise Damian a bit?” Ellie asked.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Sheila said. “Just don’t forget to turn out the lights.”

  “I won’t. Thank you,” Ellie replied. At the door Victor glared at her. This was not over between them. It couldn’t have been clearer had he said it. It was in his eyes, in his posture, in his being, and apparently, though looking straight ahead, Sheila noticed it, too. She raised her gun and fired into the night. A warning shot!

  ~ 7 ~

  Grandma Betty hummed in her sleep; a habit that drove all three of her husbands crazy. Ellie found it endearing. “Grandma.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were saying…?”

  Grandma Betty opened her eyes, joined the living again. “That’s right. Let me see, where was I?”

  Ellie consulted her note pad. “Your ruby broach.”

  “Oh yes. I want that to go to Eloise.”

  “Eloise? I thought you didn’t like Eloise.”

  “I don’t,” she said, and smiled. “But it ain’t really a ruby, so….”

  Ellie laughed. “Okay, that just leaves your pearls.”

  Grandma Betty nodded. “Now those are real.” She paused and drew a short breath. “Give those to your mother.”

  “Okay.” Ellie wrote her mother’s name “Jewel” next to the pearls and turned the page. Going over the funeral arrangements was next.

  “Cremated.”

  “Check.”

  “Ashes scattered.”

  “Check.”

  “As far as you can go in a day.”

  “Check.”

  “And no speeches.”

  “Got it.”

  “I mean that,” Grandma Betty said. “Promise me.”

  Ellie nodded. “I promise.” Done.

  Diablo was in a good mood when he picked up Ellie on his brand new Harley. It would be just him and her and the open road.

  “Can we stop at the barn first?”

  “Why?”

  “I have to check on Damian.”

  Diablo had been to the barn only one other time, and had taken an instant dislike to the horse. The damned thing had charged at him and no matter what Ellie tried to say afterwards, he insisted the horse had it in for him.

  “Here, he’s sorry, see….” She tried to get Diablo to give him a carrot.

  “No thanks,” he said. And that was that.

  The barn and arena were all lit up as Diablo downshifted and turned onto the drive from the highway, the night air warm. “I love you,” she whispered in his ear, thanking him.

  “Five minutes,” he said, turning off the motorcycle and leaning forward slightly so she could climb off.

  “Aren’t you coming in?”

  “No.”

  Ellie laughed. “All right, I’ll be right back.”

  Damian was happy to see her, as always, and nickered at the sound of her voice. She went into the stall to check his wounds, which appeared to be healing nicely, fussed over him and hugged and kissed him, and when patting him on the neck as she turned to leave, noticed something in the corner. Manure had been piled under his feed tub. She glanced at the back corners. It was piled there, too.

  Victor.

  It had to be.

  When she finally returned, Diablo asked what took her

  so long.

  “Nothing,” she said, and climbed onto the motorcycle behind him. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Grandma Betty rang for the nurse; not her favorite, but one she liked okay and who would maybe take the time to talk, if need be. “I’m feeling rather strange,” she said to the woman.

  “Strange? How?” the nurse asked, checking her pulse.

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Never mind.” She pulled her arm away.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” Grandma Betty raised a trembling hand to her forehead. “Never mind.”

  It was after midnight. The nurse turne
d to leave.

  “Wait! Can I ask you something?”

  The nurse nodded and pulled up a chair.

  “It’s about Mr. Porter. I hear he died. It that true?”

  “Yes. This morning at o-six hundred.”

  “O-six hundred.” Grandma Betty laughed, something about that striking her as funny. She’d forgotten that this particular nurse used to be a WAC, a former sergeant. “Well, the thing I wanted to know was, was he alone when it happened?”

  “Alone. No. Mr. O’Brien was in the room at the time, and….”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. That old coot isn’t company to anyone. He don’t know up from down.”

  The nurse smiled, agreeing. “I think I know what you’re asking Betty. You mean, was there someone sitting with him? A family member maybe.”

  Grandma Betty nodded.

  “No. No one.”

  “Not even a nurse?”

  “No, you have to understand, that’s a pretty busy time for us nurses. It’s just before the shift change and we joke about patients dying most often right about then, just to muddy our day, and….” She paused. “I’m sorry. Why did you ask?”

  “Just wondering. Thank you.”

  The woman nodded and stood to leave. “Anything else? Can I get you anything?”

  Grandma Betty shook her head. “No. But tell me, you say most people die in the morning?”

  “Yes. And if it’ll make you feel better, we do try to be with a resident when their time is near. It just doesn’t always work out that way. Are you afraid you’ll be alone? Is that why you’re not sleeping?”

  “No. My granddaughter will be with me when I die. I just wanted to give her an idea what time.”

  The nurse looked at Grandma Betty and smiled. She felt a little sorry for this granddaughter. Betty was too demanding of the girl in her opinion, had her jumping through hoops half the time.

  “Are you frightened, Betty? Is that what this is about?”

  “No, not at all. I just want to make sure I do it right.”

  * * *

  Diablo came around from in front of the ice cream stand with two double-dipped chocolate cones and handed Ellie hers. “Taste,” he said, and waited, watching. “Well, what do you think?”