Crows (14 page)

“That's so cynical,” Olive said.

“That's the world, O. It's commerce. Buy and sell. It's advertising and consumption. I saw ­people spend $50 for a basketball. A
basketball!
Old widows bought tents that slept eight. Why? Joe said it was the buy light going on in their heads. Something touched them. Fantasy or memory, I don't know. But that's what I do all day: Stock shelves and shepherd ­people around hoping the buy light goes on.”

“You want to do that for a living?” Ethel asked.

“
You
told me to find work,” he said with a pleasant overlay of anger. “I was content helping around here. Don't start putting down what I do.”

She turned her back to him. He smiled at Olive. She had been correct that cynicism did permeate Joe Marsh's attitude toward what they did at SportsHeaven. The blue cage of balls and bats Joe perceived himself trapped within was almost palpable.

But Robert had enjoyed the first day. The first item he sold was a strap for athletes to keep their glasses on their heads during a game. The kid who bought it had thick pieces of white tape wound like casts around the temples of his glasses. He had a deep scratch over the bridge of his nose.

Robert found the straps in Aisle 4 and gave one to the kid. “You're a little late, aren't you?” Robert asked.

The boy blinked. Then he smiled; and not, Robert guessed, because he understood the remark but because he judged Robert an adult and he had found it easier to smile and slip past when confronted with adults. He tried to pay Robert for the glasses strap, and Robert pointed him to the front.

“Just follow the sound of the popping gum,” he said, but the kid missed this, too, and was gone.

Joe Marsh went home for lunch at noon. For the hour, he put Robert in charge of the store.

“Already?” Robert asked, as Joe hung his bandoleer on a peg in the back room and got his jacket from his locker. He still wore his M.C. letter jacket with tarnished gold basketball pins on the block M.

“You can handle it,” Joe Marsh said. His jacket was raveled at the tube cuffs. He put on a Packers knit cap. “I visit my wife every lunch hour. It is one of life's little pleasures. Be good. Watch the place. Don't get ambitious.”

Robert, in charge, had no idea what to do. He trusted in the momentum of the store to keep it running. He did not tell the other employees that Joe had put him in charge. He kept moving and tried to be helpful.

For some time he polished the glass on a counter full of scuba equipment: floating knives, underwater watches, depth gauges, waterproof sacs for cameras. Along the wall behind the counter, mannequins modeled wet suits. One such suit had head and foot coverings and a rich blue skin that was warm even to the touch of air. Robert checked the price and it was not outlandish, now that he was employed. He could dive for Ben year round with a suit like that.

A half hour into Joe's lunch hour Robert went into the back room. Employees had lockers there, narrow compartments for a coat and a purse or a pair of boots. A kid named Dick knelt before his locker deflating a new basketball. The air rushing out the needle hole had a rhythmic hiss like a charmed snake as Dick pushed on the ball to hurry it along. He glanced at Robert, said, “Hi,” and went on with the deflation. Now and then he stopped to see how close he was to being able to fold the ball inside his locker.

“What are you doing?” Robert asked.

Dick looked up. He appeared flabbergasted by the question. The hissing stopped.

“I'm letting the air out of this ball,” he said.

“Why?”

“So it will fit in my locker.” He stood. He was a big kid, red-­faced from the exertion of deflating the ball, which lay at his feet like a small dome, a half sphere.

“Did you pay for it?” Robert asked.

Dick, getting the idea, replied in a voice that was dead, “No.”

“You going to pay for it?”

“It's a perk,” Dick said. “They pay us shit, we take a little extra in merchandise.”

“Refill it with air,” Robert said. “Then put it back on the shelf.”

“Hey! Why?”

“Because even though the pay is shit, you want to keep your job.”

Dick slammed his locker shut and carried the ball past Robert. An air hose was built into the wall and the kid put the valve over the needle head and with a quick push shot the ball full of air again. He rolled it deftly once around in his fingers. He looked in Robert's eyes for some message of condemnation or pardon. There was neither, he decided, and left the room. He told the other employees in the store about his confrontation with Robert. A subtle cooling took place; he had worked less than a day and in that time a distance between himself and every employee but Joe Marsh had grown.

Joe was gone two hours. When he returned his hair was wet beneath his Packers cap. His eyes were softened, some mischief conducted successfully.

“How'd it go?” he asked.

“It went OK,” Robert said. He did not want to mention Dick, but the incident was on his mind so he said, instead, “You have much theft here?”

“Yeah. Why?” Joe said. “Everybody steals.”

“Everybody?”

“I haven't
caught
everybody.” He took a seat at his small desk. He was drinking a bottle of cherry pop and smoking a cigarette; he had moved the bandoleer from the peg to the corner of his chair.

“I don't doubt they all rip me—­Herm—­off,” Joe said. “Big or little. Teens, married women working part-­time, retired guys. It goes on. They have enough respect for me not to let me catch them.” He smiled broadly at Robert; he had big horsey teeth with brown furrows of nicotine between them.

“You want to get some lunch?” he asked. “I'm sorry I was gone so long. Mrs. Marsh won't let me go once she gets hold of me.” He winked, then ran his tongue across his browned teeth.

E
THEL WENT TO
the foot of the stairs to call up through the house for Buzzard. Duke hopped past her coming into the kitchen. He had caught a cold that ran deeply through him. Around his head swarmed the droplets of his sneezes like a cloud of gnats.

“How you doing, Duke?” Robert asked, setting his apple core on its base. A brown seed fell with a
pit!
to the table.

“I've been better,” he said. His voice sounded almost electronic, as if it were coming from behind him and passing through a thick filter woven of static.

Buzz came into the kitchen without a word. He took his seat and drank his entire glass of milk without pause.

“Can I have more milk, Mom?” he asked.

“You know where it is,” Olive said.

“Are you ‘Mom'? Are you in a family way?”

“Don't get smart,” Ethel warned. She filled Buzz's glass.

“Who's the zebra?” he asked.

“I got a job.”

“Doing what? Officiating high school basketball games?”

“Working at SportsHeaven. I told you last night at dinner. This is what we have to wear.”

“You look ridiculous,” Buzzard proclaimed, then turned his glowering attention elsewhere.

Olive moved bowls of food onto the table. Duke blew his nose into a blue tissue that he peeled off a roll like money. Buzz made a keening wind sound with his mouth, and pretended to have to hold down his plate and utensils.

“Buzzard!” Ethel scolded.

“The guy's sick
all
the time,” Buzz said.

“I am not.”

“I'm lucky I don't get the fucking plague from you.”

“Buzzard!”

Duke countered, “You missed more school than I did before Dad died.”

“You're full of shit!”

“Just wait,” Duke said. He got up, positioned his crutch under his arm. “I can prove it.”

“Duke,” Ethel said, “it can wait until after dinner.” But Duke was already gone; they could hear him in a distant room.

“You still throwing after school?” Robert asked, picking a safe question to absorb the malice radiating from Buzzard.

The boy glared at him, though, sizing up Robert's true interest or his intent to mollify.

“Yeah. I throw every night.”

“Don't burn your arm out.”

“You sound like Dad,” Buzz said. “I'm behind now because he made me wait to throw the curve.”

“You won two-­thirds of your team's games last year. How can you call that behind?”

He shrugged darkly. “I could be better.”

Duke returned with old report cards. “Look,” he said. “Our report cards for the year before the crash. See here? I missed four days all year. Buzz missed seven.”

“Eat your dinner,” Ethel commanded.

“One year,” Buzz scoffed. “Big fucking deal.”

“Buzzard!”

“No wonder you're such a dolt,” Duke countered. “Missing all that school. Look at these marks: C, C–, C, D+, C, C–.”

“Eat this,” Buzzard said. He leaned across the table and thrust his middle finger within a quarter-­inch of Duke's scarlet nose. “I'd whip your puny ass if you weren't already a crip.”

“Buzzard!”

Robert blew his whistle then. He took it out of his pocket and blew it hard and the sound seemed to put the room under, as if stunning it with a plunge into cold water. Ethel, last to speak, still had her mouth open on the tail of her exclamation. Olive's fork had fallen soundlessly to her plate in the shadow of the whistle's reverberation.

He had bought the whistle at work that day. It was plated in nickel, with a hard speckled pea inside. Being an employee, he got a discount. Walking home, he tried the whistle only tentatively, whistling under his breath. The cold mouthpiece warmed between his lips.

The whistle had a strong, clear note to it. He wanted to cut loose but the streets of Mozart were crowded, and with his coat over his ref's shirt ­people would not make the connection.

But now he stood over Buzz in the kitchen as the air and the other members of the family began to move again.

“You're out of here, mister,” Robert proclaimed with an exaggerated jerk of his thumb. “You've been ejected from the dinner table for gross inhumanity to your brother.”

Buzzard even began to rise, so commanding was Robert. But he thought about it, and sneered, “Fuck you, Bob.”

“You want to miss breakfast? You want to miss TV for a week?”

Buzz looked at Ethel.

“You heard him,” she said. “You've been ejected from dinner.”

“He can't do that.”

“He just did.”

“Who died and made you ref?” Buzz asked Robert.

“I've got the shirt. I've got the whistle. Now get to your room. And no lip.”

Buzz tried to remain; but the food was routed around him and the words he spoke were ignored and finally he threw back his chair so it tipped with a wooden clatter to the floor and he departed.

Ethel said cheerfully, “What an inspired idea.”

“Don't let it go to his head,” Olive cautioned. “And don't try to pull it on me.”

But she invited him to her room that night. She requested that he wear his referee shirt and bring his whistle, and when he arrived she took his pants off but not the shirt, and fucked him with the whistle in her mouth and her hands wound in the stripes to get a good hold on him, as if they were bars, and when she came her rhythmic expulsions of breath set off a musical piping Robert thought would wake the house.

“Now I can say I've been fucked by a zebra,” she whispered later, “which is just a horse with no taste in clothes.”

A
T
S
PORTS
H
EAVEN THE
following day Robert caught a woman shoplifting a grip strengthener. From the end of the aisle he saw her drop it in her purse. He took out his whistle and the woman jumped when he blew a short blast.

She turned toward him, bent at the waist, her feet wide apart; she seemed to be weighing flight.

“I'll have to ask you to put that back,” he said.

She took the grip strengthener from her purse. The device had two red plastic handles connected by a coil of chromed steel. She pleaded, “Don't turn me in. I've never done anything illegal before in my life. I'll do anything you want. My husband would die of shame if he found out. Please tell me what you want.”

Robert squeezed the grip strengthener once; it made a tinkling bell sound and turned the bunched skin of his hand white. He was sorry he had caught the woman. Her panic gave him too much responsibility; that she had allowed him to catch her angered Robert.

The woman stepped toward him. She wore red nylons and a coat of leather patches sewn together, rabbit fur at the collar and cuffs. She asked in a fearsome whisper he thought could be heard throughout SportsHeaven: “Do you want sex? A blowjob? I'll do
anything.
”

“No.” Robert shook his head. He wanted to whistle the woman long and loud for base thoughts inappropriately expressed. She had embarrassed him enough allowing him to catch her; now this compounding of embarrassment.

He said, in a low, quick voice, “I want you to leave this store and never return. If I see you in here again I'll trail you like a hound.”

Freed, she gave him a disdainful look and left without a word.

He was paged to the back of the store. Joe Marsh was at his desk, fingering the bullet loops on his bandoleer. He had a yellow flower there, and three sticks of blue chalk. He asked, “You hear a whistle?”

“A few minutes ago? Yeah. I thought I heard something a ­couple aisles over.”

“Probably kids screwing around.”

“Maybe it was the buy light going on,” Robert offered.

Joe Marsh laughed at that. “Wouldn't that be sweet? This would be a whole lot easier if a whistle blew every time someone got the hots to spend money.”

R
OBERT TOLD THE
others at dinner about the woman he caught shoplifting.