Crows (13 page)

In time the day had bled away. It would be dark soon. He changed clothes and raked leaves; he filled three more bags that joined the others at the curb. Even as he cleared a space of ground, leaves fell, laughing, behind him.

Duke was the first home. He waved at Robert from the end of the block, a salute with his crutch that sparkled in the failing sun. Robert waited, leaning on the rake. Duke was smiling and out of breath. Each school day reaffirmed his return to the scheme of his previous life. The space his leg once occupied no longer seemed to call attention to itself like neon.

“Any luck?” he asked Robert.

“With what?”

“Finding a job.”

“No. No luck at all.”

“Did you look?”

“I made a perfunctory search,” Robert said. He shifted a plump bag of leaves with the toe of his shoe, settling it more firmly in the street.

“Where's Buzz?” he asked.

“Throwing in the gym.”

“He can do that?”

“There's a net cage under the bleachers,” Duke said. “He's down there every day.”

“It's not good for him,” Robert said. “He should give it a rest.”

“Don't tell
him
that,” Duke warned. “That's all there is to Buzzer, throwing that ball.”

Ethel came home in an hour and bathed and put on a blue wool dress. She had washed the gasoline smell from her skin and out of her thick, springy hair, or hidden it beneath a sweet scent that followed her like a balloon around the kitchen as she kissed her children goodbye. Robert offered his hairy cheek, facetiously, and she surprised him by kissing it. She did not mention his present state, or his job search. She valued the prospect of the evening too much to let him ruin it.

“Same man?” Olive asked, passing a bowl of wax beans.

Her mother nodded. She looked in her handbag for something. “Don't wait up,” she said. “I love all of you but I don't need you to run my affairs.”

“So it's officially an affair?” Robert teased.

Ethel would not be angered. The doorbell sounded. She made her escape from their steady glares of disapproval.

“Two dates,” Buzz said when the commotion of her departure had died down.

“Three,” Olive said.

“Three?”

“One was less publicized. He came after you guys were in bed. He brought a bottle of something and they went for a drive.”

“Where was I?” Robert asked.

“I don't
know
,” she snapped. “Out?”

“The guy looks like two hundred and twenty pounds of cold mashed potatoes,” Buzzard complained. “What's in it for her?”

“He's a contemporary,” she said, and left it at that.

But she invited Robert to her bedroom later (Ethel not yet home, the boys edgy in their rooms, making frequent trips to the bathroom and kitchen to see if their mother had slipped in unnoticed) and said this man seemed to mean something to Ethel. She could not explain what it was, or Ethel had not voiced it sufficiently to make it understood, but something in her mother was responding to the man.

“She told me she likes the things he says,” Olive whispered into the base of his throat. They had made love and now lay in the residual warmth their friction had created. Robert hoped to be asked to stay; his room was already whip-­cold, and it was still a week shy of Halloween.

“He'll come to the end of his line,” Robert predicted. “Then she'll see through him.”

“I don't know,” Olive said. He loved the way her words broke over his skin like touchable objects. He was about to ask how anyone could compare to Ben, but refrained. Ben had never told Ethel the crow tales; what other charms had he kept from her?

“She's been on my back about you,” Olive said. “Suddenly she doesn't think it's a good idea.”

“Who? What?”

“You. This. She's full of warnings lately. I don't know why she's started now.”

“Did she ever say anything to you when I first moved in?”

“She's always telling me to be careful,” Olive said. “Nothing specific; just be careful. Everything is perilous. I think we had them fooled for a long time, early.”

“I don't,” Robert said.

He saw lights swing into the driveway. “She's home,” he whispered.

Olive wriggled out from under him and hurried to the window looking down on the front yard. Robert joined her, though it was freezing outside the bed.

Ethel and the man came up the walk from the car; they were foreshortened from that height, and before they passed out of sight under the porch overhang Robert glimpsed a pale coin of baldness at the crown of the man's head, wide thin shoulders, and the fact he was holding Ethel's hand. This contact seemed blatantly erotic to him; his used penis stirred even in the cold. With nothing further to witness, he got back in bed and Olive joined him.

“Does it worry you?” he asked.

“Does what worry me?”

“Your mother and this guy.”

She shrugged against him. The tips of her breasts were cool. “It's her decision. Right?”

“They were holding hands.”

“What? When?”

“Just now,” Robert said. “They were holding hands coming up the walk.”

“You're blind,” she exclaimed.

“It's what I saw.”

She spun in the bed until her hard back was toward him. “They were
not
holding hands,” she said out of the darkness, long after he had abandoned the argument, preferring to concede the point rather than make her angry and be told to leave.

R
OBERT HAD NOT
found work by Halloween, when Ethel asked him to take the boys out.

“Duke has been working on his costume all week,” Ethel said. “He's going as a refrigerator.”

“How about Buzzer? How about me?”

“You I don't care about,” Ethel said. “Buzz has an old Nixon mask and one of Ben's suits. He fits into Ben's suits,” she said with wonder.

“You really don't care about me?”

She made an impatient face at him. Lately she had stopped pestering him about finding a job; it evidently was sufficient that he went out and looked. He occasionally saw her on the street, or stopped at a light, with a fare in back, and she would bring one finger up off the wheel in a restrained greeting. The two of them were celebrities of sorts in Mozart, with their links to Ben, whose fame was his vanishing.

“
Yes
, I care about you,” she said. “I just don't care if you get dressed up. Just keep an eye on them.”

“I've been looking for work.”

Ethel rolled her head twice around on her neck. Her eyes were closed. “You tell me that once or twice a day,” she said, “but nothing ever happens. I don't think it ever will. Let's put it this way: I don't think you look very hard.”

“I look,” he said.

“I drive past the diner and you're in there having coffee and reading the paper. Or talking to your father.”

“I'm checking the want ads,” Robert said. His father, bored with T-­shirts but not daring to admit it, was there to be away from the store, his son only a bonus of freedom. Dave's friends stopped by to talk to him, to listen, to
be
with him for a few moments. He was an optimist. Robert, by turns amused, curious, and annoyed by these chattering men, often thought his father would not attain his proper place in life until he was the mayor of Mozart. Robert found himself wanting to keep his father to himself during these visits; he and Dave seemed to share complaints lately, of work and seeking work, something utterly new between them.

Ethel held out her hands. “Don't get me started, Bob-­O. I'm in a good mood a lot lately. You help out around here quite a bit. The boys like you. I can't complain.”

He asked, “Why are you in a good mood?”

“Don't push me,” she said, and left.

It was the man she had been seeing, Robert guessed. He had appeared so often they had had his name drummed into their memories: Stephen. He and Ethel had been on five dates (seven, by Olive's count). Each time Stephen appeared it made Duke and Buzz panicky. The man's appeal eluded them completely. They saw their mother drifting away only a little less dramatically than their father.

By cutting holes for his arms and legs in a plastic garbage bag, then stuffing it full of leaves, tying it closed around his neck, and pinning leaves to a black knit cap, Robert created a costume for the evening. He used lamp black to daub those parts of his face not bearded.

Duke used Ben's collapsible ice-­fishing shed to create his refrigerator. He built a door for the three-­sided shed with a large sheet of cardboard cut from a moving van carton. He painted these four sides and the roof with copper paint, and balanced the box on a frame of his construction over the arms of his wheelchair. He had fastened an old toaster and a vase of plastic flowers to the top of this refrigerator. The door contained false notes hung with tacks, a Philco handle, and a child's artwork. The door opened for ­people to drop candy into Duke's bag. Otherwise he traveled blind, guided by Robert or Buzz.

Buzz wore the Nixon mask and one of Ben's houndstooth jackets. He kept thrusting his arms over his head, giving peace signs. It was hackneyed stuff; he had tapped no original thoughts for his costume. At houses where there was no answer to the bell he slashed a meaningless symbol on the nearest window with a bar of motel soap he had found in the pocket of the jacket.

“Don't do that,” Robert protested.

“Don't bug me, Bob. If you give me a hard time I'll drop a match on you.”

Robert was not frightened. He would smolder for hours before the fire ate through the packed, damp leaves to the old clothes he wore. As they progressed through town he left a trail impossible to follow, the clues blending at once into the earth's autumn floor. On the doorsteps of the houses they visited he stood to the left of the refrigerator; random shapelessness alongside simple geometry.

Toward the end of the night, when they were the last three ­people on the street, they came to the door of his parents' house. The house had a fence in front with a squawking gate they had trouble getting Duke through. The house was small and neat, set back down a brick path that was murder to shovel in the winter; the house's appearance always struck Robert as effortlessly cheerful. The ground was carpeted with fallen leaves.

“This is your house, isn't it?” Buzz asked, his voice thickened by the Nixon mask.

“It's my parents' house.”

A candle burned in a small pumpkin on the front stoop, its face frozen in the same smile his father cut every year. A black cat with brass pins for joints hung in the window.

Buzz rang the bell and the door jerked open immediately. Dave had seen them coming, alerted by the unoiled gate. He wore a black T-­shirt that exclaimed
BOO
!

Dave rocked back a step, his face taking on the stock contours of horror; scared witless by a disgraced president, a refrigerator, and a bag of leaves. Evelyn stood at his back with a tray of candy corn and chocolate kisses in wrapped baskets. She was looking intently at Robert, his blackened face, his leafy hat, his obese plastic-­shiny shape. He had come to his parents last to gauge the impact of his costume. They would know him and laugh, or wince.

But the beard and the crown of leaves and the hunched way he stood in the porch light evidently was too effective. Dave looked at him closely just once and said, “I knew you'd come back to haunt me.”

Robert first thought his father meant him, his errant jobless son. But then he realized he was referring to the leaves; symbols of a hard autumn's work, and of an entering into a death phase.

Dave dropped candy corn and silver-­wrapped minarets of chocolate into the bag. Evelyn seemed to know, however; even after her husband had turned his attention to Nixon, then the refrigerator, her eyes stayed with the bag of leaves. Her tall, thin form cast a shadow like a rake across her husband's bent back. Her eyes were calm and loving, of Dave, of Robert, of this ritual taken part in. For the millionth time Robert was envious of his parents' happiness. Together all day and all night, his parents never tired of one another. Those times Dave and Robert had coffee together, his father left only because he had to see what his wife was up to, what she might be able to tell him after their hour apart. Soon they would fall asleep together in the large bed that filled their small room like a ship in a lock, while Robert roamed Ben's drafty old house, uncomfortable in Olive's arms, too cold to sleep alone.

Evelyn winked at him as he backed away. His father watched him turn the refrigerator around and steer it down the walk. Nixon held the gate open for them. Evelyn put her hand on Dave's shoulder. He got a broom and swept his son's dropped leaves off the porch.

Sometime after midnight the first snow fell.

 

H
IS FATHER SAID
in mid-­November, “Come to work for us.”

They were sitting on chairs in the back room of the T-­shirt shop; Robert, Dave, and Evelyn sharing an idle afternoon. Behind her husband's back Evelyn rolled her eyes and smiled at her son, not in disparagement of Dave, but at the absolute impossibility of that suggestion.

“You've got sales in your blood,” Dave said, slapping Robert's knee. “I've got it. Your mother's got it. Put us together,
you've
got it.”

Robert looked around at the high towers of colored shirts awaiting a message. Felt letters of every style, their backs gummed and ready for the melting kiss of the press, sat in wood trays divided alphabetically; more vowels than consonants. He had come to the shop when he had nowhere else to go on another day of looking for work. He could not sit in the restaurant because Ethel might see him. There in the back of the T-­shirt shop he was safe.

“I've been here an hour and you haven't sold a single shirt,” Robert said, not unkindly.

“Doesn't matter. This is a slow season. ­People don't think of T-­shirts in the winter,” his father said. Evelyn placed her hand on Dave's shoulder; she might have heard a note in her husband's voice that required calming.

“Where have you looked?” she asked Robert.

“The college. I thought I might teach a course in sportswriting. Tell them to steer clear of the field. Some stores here in town. The post office. A ­couple of gas stations. A ­couple of restaurants.”

“And they all said no?”

“Most. Some are pending. I'm a sportswriter, for God's sake! What good am I to them?”

Evelyn said, “I saw Al Gasconade's mother the other day.”

“How's Al?”

“He's being courted by the
Tribune
,” she said.

“Good for Al.”

Evelyn squeezed Dave's shoulders but could not hold in the expected remark: “You're twice the writer Al is,” her husband said. “He reads like a primer on clichés.”

“He's pushy,” Robert said. “He's not afraid to ask questions. I always doubted it was any of my business.”

“Work for us and you'll learn the T-­shirt biz,” Dave said.

Robert shook his head. His father's eyes held genuine hope; he seemed to believe it truly was a good idea.

“We'd have a homicide here inside of two weeks,” Robert predicted. He stretched out his arms and touched the walls of stacked shirts with the palms of his hands. “The three of us in this little space? We'd go nuts.”

“Your mother—­Evie has been talking about getting out of the business,” Dave said, looking up and behind at his wife. Robert saw that Dave didn't believe it.

“I'm surprised,” Robert said.

“I'd like to be a homemaker for once in my life,” Evelyn said. “Your father doesn't need me here.”

“I
do
,” Dave contended, anguish in his voice, his eyes; he expected trouble.

“It still wouldn't work,” Robert said. “Even just the two of us.”

But Dave was still intent on his wife. “You know I couldn't run this place without you.”

“Hush. I probably won't leave anyhow.” She winked at Robert. “I should never have brought it up,” she said.

Dave closed his eyes and tipped back his head until it pressed against her belly. She wiped a sheen of moisture off the curve of his high forehead, and he touched her hand.

Robert, embarrassed, looked into his cup. His parents were always coiling into each other in front of him, touching, kissing, running their hands across the other's shoulders, as if in disbelief at their good fortune, smiling when they thought Robert wasn't looking.

“I've got to go,” Robert said. He finished the coffee they had made for him; it was cool and oily.

“Where are you off to?”

“SportsHeaven. Buzz was in there yesterday and said they were looking for seasonal help.”

“There you go,” Dave said. “
Sales.
Sports gear you know inside out.”

“It's only until Christmas.”

“Don't be so negative,” his father admonished. “Don't look toward the end of something even before it starts. You could do so well they'll keep you on. Maybe put you in charge.”

Robert laughed. “Why not just make me owner right away?” he teased.

In the spring before he shot the jay, Dave had asked Robert to sell light bulbs door to door to raise money for one of the organizations he ran. The bulbs came in three colors—­white, yellow, and red. Dave advised Robert that the best way to sell the bulbs was to talk his way inside the house and get the bulb into a lamp socket.

“Let them see the light,” Dave said. “That's your only objective. Once they see that bulb at work you'll sell more than we can supply.”

Dave dropped Robert at the end of a block with his carton of sample bulbs. He went from house to house, trying to talk his way inside, finagle the bulb into a lamp socket, and clinch the deal. But few ­people were curious about how their rooms would appear drenched in red light; and the bulbs were obscenely overpriced, a third higher than the supermarket. Women usually answered the door, and they were brutally polite asking for the price, then sending him on with a closing of their doors. One house, whose bell he never pushed, had a personalized doormat:
GO AWAY.

“You're taking no for an answer,” Dave said in the car, where he spent the time perusing the
Scale.

“It's the only answer I'm getting,” Robert said.

“Don't give them the chance to say no. Give 'em the impression a sale is a foregone conclusion. The only question is
how many
bulbs.”

But he never sold a single bulb, except for the dozen Evelyn bought, the dozen he sold to Dave, and the dozen he paid for with his own money.

SportsHeaven was around the corner and took up an entire block. A building fronted by tall wide sheets of glass kept immaculately clean, these windows threw a customer's advancing image back at him. There was a foyer, and more polished glass, and then the store, a deep space of high blue walls and paler blue ceiling, the air made bright by banks of lights in yellow casings.

A flat-­faced girl chewed gum and read a fitness magazine at the one cash register open of the half dozen at the front of the store. Her chewing sounded like a soft bone being pulled repeatedly from its socket. She was dressed in the black pants and striped shirt of a referee.

Robert asked for the manager and the girl jerked a thumb behind her toward the long, towering shelves chock-­a-­block with sporting goods, but telling him nothing; she might have been pointing him into the enchanted forest. The room was so large the shelves nearly funneled to a vanishing point.

He ventured down one aisle and stopped in front of a wall of fielders' mitts hung on pegs. He took a glove down and put it on. Stiff as wood, the leather stitching pronounced as surgery, he loved the smell and the ritual of oil and play that would turn the glove soft and reliable. He felt himself smiling. There were catchers' mitts big as plates, first basemen's mitts like vases, infielders' gloves, mitts made of black leather; but also there were mitts of blue and red leather, with white stitching, which he thought clownish.

Next to the mitts were baseballs. The best were in boxes. The cheaper balls felt mushy in his fingers, as if they would become misshapen or explode on their first contact with the bat.

Next came the bats, long bins divided by weight and length. Pale wood, names of stars burned into the business end, the bat length impressed on the knob. There were more metal bats than he would have expected; they nearly outnumbered the wood. They were like tubes of metallic gas.

Down another aisle were soccer balls whose black patches somehow reminded Robert of globes; there were footballs and basketballs, handballs in cans. Another aisle held camping equipment: sleeping bags hanging from racks like the flags of nations; lamps whose white net wicks reminded Robert of tiny socks; portable stoves and weightless backpacks. At the end of this aisle tents were erected on the concrete floor, inviolable, skins within a skin. There were compasses and knives locked in one case, shotguns, handguns, and rifles in another. It was where he had rented the crow record and record player. Returning them, he had complained to the ex-­basketball star in the bandoleer about the juiceless battery, and had been refunded the entire rental cost.

In his wandering Robert came upon a kid with harsh bursts of acne on his face and neck. He was wheeling bicycles out of the back and into a line on the floor, each front wheel tilted just so. Robert asked again for the manager.

“He's in back,” the kid said.

In a moment, Joe Marsh appeared. He was four inches taller than Robert, light hair cut short, wide-­spaced blue eyes filled with a kind of uneasiness; he was dressed in the uniform of the place: black trousers and black-­and-­white striped referee's shirt. He also wore his bandoleer.

“Hey, it's Bob Cigar.”

“Robert.”

They shook hands. The bandoleer leather creaked.

“You know,” Joe Marsh said, “after I talked to you that one time, I went home and looked through my clippings. Your name was on almost all of them.”

“Yeah?” Robert said, though he knew.

“It was strange reading them. I'd forgotten about a lot of that stuff. The little details.”

“You were good.”

The man shrugged, pleased. The creaking bandoleer leather had an insane note; what had happened there?

“You were drafted, weren't you?”

“Tenth round by the Bucks.” Joe Marsh spread his large hands. “A six-­four white guard out of a small college in Wisconsin. What a joke. I lasted through two cuts. Then it was back to Mozart.” He looked into the distance, then returned. “I had fun. I still play a little. It's not an obsession. I was able to put it down and move on. Now I dress like the enemy.”

“That's good,” Robert said. He remembered Joe Marsh as quite fast, with a deadly shooting eye; he had been the best player on a mediocre team, and the stories Robert wrote about the games were filled with his name. His hair had been longer then, his frame leaner, and something determined and indomitable had existed in his blue eyes that had departed in the intervening time.

Joe Marsh asked, “So what can I help you with?”

“I heard you were looking for seasonal help.”

“You? You got your degree, didn't you?”

Robert nodded.

“Why don't you get a job writing sports? You don't hit your peak at thirty. You're not long gone at forty.”

Robert said, “I was long gone long ago.”

“The pay here's shit,” Joe Marsh said.

“What did you graduate in?” Robert asked.

“I was a few hours short when I got out,” Joe said directly. “I figured I'd play in the NBA for fifteen years, then buy a restaurant. Then the Bucks cut me.” He touched a roll of mints in the bandoleer. “Lately I've thought of going back and finishing, but I've got a wife now, and a kid, and by the end of the day I'm just beat.”

He said, “A guy who went to M.C. years and years ago gave me this job. He'd seen me play, called me the Great White Hope. The next Larry Bird. He owns four of these stores: one here, one in Madison, one in Milwaukee, one in La Crosse. You work here, you'll meet him. Kind of a pompous asshole, but I can't complain.”

He took a cigarette from a loop of the bandoleer and lit it with a match from a tin he also kept there. “Bullets,” he said. “You wear a fifteen, sixteen neck?”

“Fifteen and a half,” Robert said.

“I think we can fit you into some shirts,” Joe Marsh said. “You gotta supply your own black pants, OK? No jeans, no cords. Herm wants us to look like real refs. When can you start?”

“Just like that?”

“Sure. I know you know sports. I know
you.
No need for all that other rigmarole. I'll start you at $4.25 an hour, which is dandy compared to what these other twerps make. Can you start tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“OK. Let me get you some shirts. I'll take a buck a week out of your check to pay for them. Then when you quit you'll have your own set of zebra hides.”

“I can't just borrow them?” Robert asked. “If I'm seasonal I won't be here long enough to pay for them.”

“We'll see,” Joe Marsh said. “Buy the shirts, though. They're nice shirts, I wear mine all the time.”

R
OBERT CAME HOME
tired from his first day of work. He lounged in the kitchen while Ethel made a meat loaf of three pounds of ground beef he had provided. He drank beer and ate an apple, which he'd also bought on his way home. He liked the feeling of working after all that time. In losing jobs before, he had felt released, as a child is turned loose at the end of school into summer's fields. But at SportsHeaven he felt the safety of work after all those idle days under Ethel's disapproving eyes. He felt his life filling; he had a job, and he had his search for Ben. Ethel had kissed him on the cheek when he told her he had found a job, Olive had welcomed him into her bed.

He liked the strangeness of the huge blue room and the ­people he worked with and the ­people who came into the store. He liked the softness of the shirt, the authoritative look of the black and white stripes running away just under the rim of his eye.

“Mostly what we do is shepherd ­people,” he told Ethel and Olive. “Joe says it gets worse as Christmas approaches. ­People just drifting up and down. No idea what they want. Joe thinks it's TV. ­People have been taught to want everything. And when they realize they can't
have
everything, they haven't learned to be selective of what they
can
have. Our job is to get them into a position where they'll see something and that ‘buy light' will go on in their head.”