Crows (12 page)

She raised her eyebrows slightly when Robert did not laugh. It was a mistake, his coming 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?

N
O 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.

When she opened the door, heated air thick and fragrant enough to eat embraced him. But she held a wide, flat hand against his chest.

“Tomorrow you get a job.”

“It's a deal.”

“I want you out of here,” she said.

Robert said nothing.

“I'll set a deadline,” Ethel warned, “and then I'll kick you out. Do you want that? Or do you want to leave on your own terms?”

“I'll get a job. I'll be out of your hair in no time.”

“Good.”

“Though my presence,” he said, “is a bargain and a godsend to your family.”

She turned away without another word. Robert slipped back into the house as easily as that first time, when Ben was alive. Ben still wanted him around, he was certain, because nobody had presented him with a good reason to leave.

He went to the kitchen, where he fed himself cold chops and wine.

R
OBERT WAS ASLEEP
the next day when Ethel's hard hand battered him in the shoulder and neck, bringing him up from a sleep that had turned painful.

“I meant what I said last night.” She smelled of gasoline. Her cheeks were rouged with the cold, or her anger at him.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“One o'clock. I knew you'd think I was an easy mark,” she hissed. She was leaning over him, one hand in a fist, the other in her hair. “I
knew
you'd ignore what I said last night and sleep the day away. Get up! Get a job!” She brought her fist swinging against his shoulder, the hand opening in flight into a hard board that slapped and stung.

By the time he got downstairs she was back in her cab, talking on the radio. Then she drove away.

He had coffee and toast, then took a shower. When he was dressed, in a coat and tie he had not worn since the last days of the
Scale
, his hair combed wet, he still could not bring himself to break away from the house. He stood for a long time in the sun in the kitchen. He felt the skin on his face tighten deep beneath the canopy of beard. Try as he might, he could not think of a single job skill he possessed aside from writing sports.

He had worked summers and after school in Mozart. Jobs that other kids kept from summer to summer he lost after one; he didn't know why. Everywhere he went looking for a job, somebody knew his father. He was routinely hired for that reason. He also believed he was never rehired because over time he had proved beyond a doubt that he was
not
his father.

One man, his name was Thorp, Mozart's only wedding photographer, broke from his tradition of hiring short-­skirted high school girls and put Robert to work for the simple reason that he knew and enjoyed the whimsies of Dave Cigar. Within a month, however, Thorp had hired a girl named Audree to accompany him to the weddings, leaving Robert to busy himself at the studio. He kept him on out of respect for Dave. Robert, bored numb, quit.

“I'm sorry this didn't work out,” Thorp said on Robert's last day. “I never would've predicted it happening.”

“Thanks.”

“You're an awfully dour young man,” Thorp said, “for being the son of Dave Cigar. I thought a last name like that would have given you a sense of humor all by itself.”

He washed cars for a while. He pumped gas. He scraped the hulls of boats until a sliver of paint fell in his eye and an infection burgeoned; for a week in the summer before his junior year in high school he thought he would lose his right eye. When he recovered, the job was gone. He sold bait for a time, rising before dawn to scoop worm-­clogged earth from the plot behind the shop into Chinese food containers. He quit that job to become a lifeguard. He fueled boats. He waited tables. He applied at the Good-­Ee Freez but wasn't hired, a rejection of fate that spooked him later; how close he came to knowing Olive before he knew Ben. He passed out putters at a doomed miniature golf course in the center of town. The place closed soon after, its patchy carpeted greens, gingerbread house and windmill hazards flattened and paved over when SportsHeaven was built.