Crows (5 page)

B
EN AND
R
OBERT
might never have spoken, for all the attention teacher paid to student in the following weeks. Robert assumed Ben had been offended, a potential friendship snapped cleanly dead by his quick, blunt honesty.

Robert could not decide if Ben was a good teacher. He often let the class out early, which made him popular. Also, he brought to class each day his jars of living specimens, and this was a big hit. He would lecture for forty minutes with a python around his shoulders; or pretend unwittingly to release a flock of monarch butterflies into the room, causing the girls to shriek with delighted fear; or he would stage cockroach races on the slate flats of the front table, with tiny white numbers painted on the insects' backs.

All this spectacle often did not seem to have a point, or so Robert thought. He wondered if he was learning anything, or if he was supposed to. The tests Ben gave were faded mimeograph sheets with a date in the corner ten years in the past, the date he'd typed the stencil and filed it. The questions included: How many butterflies did I release into the room on Wednesday? (Answer: eleven). How many remain? (Two, they found a haven atop a speaker box in one high corner of the amphitheater and, safe, beat their wings slowly, as if still out of breath a week after being freed.) How many times did I forget my lunch since the last test? (Six. Olive always had wet hair, and touched Robert's ear in passing, but otherwise ignored him; when cold weather came she wore a floppy hat of thick rhubarb-­pink yarn pulled down over her head.)

At the conclusion of one Friday class Ben caught Robert's eye and motioned him into the room in back, then through the blue tunnels to his third-­floor office.

“How's my class?” Ben asked. “Am I worth a science credit?”

“More than one. Four, even. But I don't know if I'm learning anything.”

Ben unlocked his office door. His back to Robert, he turned on the light and went inside. Again Robert wondered if he had misspoken; this man kept sending out signals of friendship and Robert kept ignoring them, or misreading them.

“Are you learning anything you can use in your later life?” Ben asked rhetorically, dropping dried black specks like bacon bits from a jar marked
FLYS
into two aquariums containing a half dozen fat toads. “Not specifically, no. Nobody in your class has any interest in a career in biology. They're only there because it is a requirement. I just try to instill a sense of wonder and appreciation. That's why I race cockroaches and set butterflies loose. Maybe one day something I'll have said will be recalled by a student and he'll stop and take a closer look at something he might have walked blithely by if he hadn't taken my class. Maybe a fact he learned from me'll impress his kid someday . . . bring them closer together for a moment.”

He sat at his desk and rubbed his eyelids with his fingertips. The skeleton of his crow remained, its wing still fractured. On the floor beneath his desk was a pair of women's open-­toed high-­heeled shoes.

“I'll tell you,” he said. “You guys are more fun than the ones who
want
to be scientists. No roach races for them. They want to learn something. They
demand
it. It's tough work, then.”

Ben stood. He asked, “Are you busy? Would you like to get some dinner?”

They took Ben's car on the road around the lake. It got darker earlier each evening and Robert was always unnerved by the rapidity of it. Winter came so fast in that town. He had never lived anywhere else and had nothing to compare it with, but the coldness of the season seemed to swoop down on Mozart, the first hints of it coming in late summer, and the quick darkening at the end of the day always a reliable precursor.

But rather than go to the tall narrow green house Ben turned into a small drive-­in restaurant on the lake and ordered chili dogs, french fried onion rings, and coffee from a waitress who came out to the car in ski pants and yellow parka. They could see her breath alive with the moist droplets of chewed gum.

They took the food on to the house, but again stopped short of where Robert was sure they were bound. Ben unfolded two chairs in the shadowy backyard and the two men sat facing each other to eat their greasy meal. It was awful, just warm, and gave Robert sharp pains of gas in the upper cavities of his chest.

Now and then Robert saw different ­people—­a woman, a boy, another boy—­come to the back-­door window and look out. They took in Robert with these visual inspections, but clearly were more interested in Ben. They might have been guarding against an attempt by him to come inside.

“There is a strain in our family just now,” Ben said with peaceful resignation. Robert had seen the woman come to the window and glare frostily out. He had looked away with a small shudder. The children looking out seemed more forgiving.

“I can't really go into specifics,” Ben said. “It is one of those thorns of marriage. Do you know what crows do when they are at odds with their mate?”

The question was so strange Robert could not begin to formulate a reply. Crow tales. Professor Mason had mentioned crow tales. Were there such things?

“The crow at fault flies circles around the nest,” Ben said. “These are called grief orbits. The wronged crow at first does not entertain the notion of the other crow's ever being allowed back into the nest. Sometimes this phase lasts a long time—­depending on the depth of the wrong. But the grief orbits continue—­forever, if that is what is called for. It's a gesture of devotion; a way of admitting one was wrong, that one is sorry, willing to sacrifice—­little food, no company, just ceaseless orbits of the nest. To prove that love still exists.”

Ben sighed and folded his hands. “That's what I'm doing, Robert. Flying grief orbits.” He looked up when a boy's worried face appeared at the window. It was completely dark; the boy probably saw nothing.

“Someday I'll be allowed back in.”

“Why are they mad at you?”

“Only Ethel's mad at me,” Ben said. “My kids know nothing about it, only that there is a storm between us. I've been orbiting for three weeks now, but no progress. Ethel is relentless in her anger. I sleep in my office. My kids pass me a change of clothes. I am out here to let Ethel know nothing has changed.”

“Can you tell me what you did?”

Ben said casually, “No.”

Now and then he circled the house on foot, like a sentry. He tapped on curtained windows and drummed his fingers on porch railings and the echoing tubes of downspouts. Creating sounds, letting his wife know he was waiting, that he had not given up. Robert accompanied him on these trips. “She appreciates this, I know,” Ben said.

Returning to the backyard after one such orbit, they found a plate of food covered with foil and a silver thermos of coffee placed on the back porch. Steam rose off two warm slabs of meat loaf, scalloped potatoes, and a slice of cherry pie.

“This is Ethel,” Ben said with real exultation. “The boys couldn't do this, and Olive isn't home. It's Ethel's way of beginning to call me back in.”

Ben offered to share the food, but Robert declined. It was after midnight and he wanted to get home.

“Will you go back to your office tonight?”

Ben was eating, looking up at the house. The house was so tall it seemed to infringe unnaturally on the starlight.

“I feel there's a chance for my return tonight,” he said. “A crow is allowed back not all at once, but a little at a time. But it is always more sudden than one expects. I have hope.”

They said good night. Ben invited Robert to come to his office the next day, where he would tell him how the night concluded. Robert walked a block away and then returned. He was worried about the man sitting in the damp coolness, occasionally circling the house in search of a point of entry.

Ben was not in the backyard and Robert did not see him when he walked all around the house. Maybe Ben had been correct in his assessment of the situation and had been allowed to return.

But a low voice called down to Robert from a thick branch high in the birch tree beside the house.

“Why are you back?”

Robert could barely see Ben; he was crouching on a branch outside a third-­floor window. Robert could not see his eyes, his mouth, his hands; he was just a shape.

“I was worried about you,” Robert said.

“Thank you, Robert,” Ben said. “But you needn't worry about me. I've done this countless times before. Go home. You need your rest.”

Robert left him there, tapping at his wife's locked window.

 

R
OBERT DID NOT
fill his day sufficiently to tire himself, and after the brief sapped exhaustion from making love to Olive he lay awake and edgy. He could feel the summer rising away like a turned blanket, feel the comforter of frost beneath it. It was the end of August, the downside of summer's peak, and the lake was cold. ­People who had lived in Mozart for decades swore to the passing of distant summers when balls of blue ice never left the lake, but regrouped in late September, and there was skating by Halloween.

He shook the sleeping Olive's shoulder; bunches of muscle everywhere he touched, this long a time after she had stopped training: shoulders, legs, arms, the strong slatting on her ribs, which were ticklish, the pulling grip she exerted when he was inside her.

She had not been asleep.

“What?” she asked.

“The rain's stopped, O. Let's go look for Ben.”

She rolled toward him. “Could we?”

He crawled across her, already moving toward the lake, as if her participation was guaranteed. She clasped his arm. “What if we find him?” Her words came out of the shadows her head and body cut against the darkness, and they were words filled with a distant, buried grief and a fear of final knowledge.

“I look for him all the time,” Robert said. “He's not there. But he's somewhere. We'll never find him, but the important thing is to look.”

“Talk sense,” she said peevishly.

“I am. You want to go or not? A little night dive?”

“I'm afraid.”

“So am I,” Robert said.

They left Ben's house and walked to the lake. The Ladysmiths' rowboat was tied to a pier that poked a silver finger out into the dark water. The lake was the sky and the lights around it stars that had fallen in. For both of them these lights had the familiarity of constellations. Olive would not have come to the lake without Robert; to walk along it on her way to work or school was enough to break her heart, if allowed. She saw her father everywhere. Every distant floating board was his arched spine, every scrap of Styrofoam his bobbing head. On occasion she ended a shift certain she had waited on him sometime during the night.

She half resented her missing father for taking the lake from her. In growing up in Mozart it had been the one constant through the shifting and turning of friends, boy and girl. The summer sun darkening her skin, while her flip side was cooled by the flat stone of the Calf; the smell of beer, oil, corn chips, the radio music and her friends talking, her hand held by a boy whose identity was so myriad he had no name, no face, just the sensation of strong fingers between her own; all of that was taken from her by her father's vanishing. They had boat rentals at M.C. and she often wanted to go out on the water, just to study, or sleep, or bake her hair a shade paler, dreaming of the chlorine canyon she'd swum in so many times in high school, the black lane ribbons tiled into the pool's floor like a road that doubled back on itself infinitely. She had been a swimmer and now could not swim, could not even wade in the blue-­cold water three feet off the shore. She didn't dare; not many did, her father having closed the lake.

They were sitting in the rowboat, Robert waiting for Olive to cast off. The boat was heavy wood, painted white, unnamed. Kids once thought it not unusual to take the Ladysmiths' boat out to the Calf and return it at the end of the day; but no more. Even with a new boat, the chance was just too great.

Olive could feel the cold coming up from the lake. When she was little her father told her Oblong Lake was so cold it never thawed all the way to the bottom, that on the hottest days of summer she could dive deep and touch ice. He told of a glacier reaching south a half-­million years ago, then pulling back as if it had touched a hot stove. In its wake it left behind Oblong Lake, and the bone-­cold water.

She unknotted the rope holding the boat to the dock and Robert worked the oars until the boat was clear. The boat Duke and Ben were in the night of the accident had shattered and dispersed; it had been made of wood, a boat as old as Ben, a coffee can filled with cement for an anchor.

“We'll freeze,” Olive said. “He's just bones now resting on the lake bottom. Leave him in peace.”

“Ben wants us to look. He was a questing individual.”

“We'll freeze and sink.”

“Water temperature today was sixty degrees. That's a degree colder than the beginning of the week,” he said. He shivered. He had lived in Mozart all his life and still each approaching winter scared him. “Summer is over,” he told Olive. “This is the last chance I'll have to look this year.”

“Let's go home and go to bed,” Olive pleaded.

“You don't have to dive. You can handle the boat.” But even to row a boat across it seemed risky to her; her father might be anywhere.

Robert rowed to a point just off the Calf. He had selected it two nights before as the last place he would look before quitting for the winter. He dove in his clothes, the fabric a thin barrier infinitely warmer than bare skin. He had flippers, a mask, a snorkel, and an underwater lamp he looped by a strap around his wrist. He had three thick towels for when he returned.

It had been late at night when Ben went under and Duke was found clinging to a chunk of the rowboat. His mangled right leg did not hurt too badly only because of the numbing cold of the water. He had hung there for an hour before a police launch found him. He was half-­asleep; he had called for his father two or three times, then put him out of his mind when he didn't answer. The lake was flat and quiet after all the turmoil. He could stay there awhile or he could slide under the water, it didn't matter to him either way. He expected he would dream about this night someday. Then they came for him and he was pulled from the water. Almost at once his leg began to hurt worse than anything in his life.

Six fire department divers had gone into the lake to look for Ben. Names stenciled yellow across their black rubber backs:
WHEELWRIGHT PEREZ NOONAN HOPE PAZDERNICK GRISWOLD.
With stark light and faces blank as windows they descended. They dove for three days off the police launch, the boat anchoring at different spots on Oblong Lake, and found no trace of Professor Ben Ladysmith. No shoes. No pants. No floating reminders. No body suspended six feet below the surface, hanging peacefully, as though already laid to rest. Oblong Lake was 160 feet at its deepest and the divers wondered if perhaps the boat's anchor, in a bit of irony or frustration, had snared Ben Ladysmith on its way down and pulled him along; he was down there, maybe forever, and as time passed everyone in Mozart except Robert prayed Ben would stay down.

“We used to come to the Calf to sunbathe,” Olive said. “We'd lie directly in the sunlight but it was never quite free of chill. That flat old stone was always cold.”

“It's a glacial lake,” Robert said. He waited, but for no particular reason. He listened to his breath running in and out of him. He wanted to delay the first cold, but he also wanted to hold off the end of this final dive of the summer; to begin was to move toward the end.

“But in the summer,” Olive said, “it would be ninety or ninety-­five on land, and on the Calf it would be forty degrees cooler.”

Robert nodded. He wanted her to keep talking, but she was watching him carefully now, realizing he was afraid. He was trying to confront the fear—­present at every dive—­that he might actually find Ben. He trusted Ben to stay where he was, to remain a cog in Oblong Lake folklore. Of 106 drownings in the lake in the eighty-­four years records had been kept, every body had been recovered except Ben's. Hardy souls taking a night swim who nudged a submerged object with a toe, or had a leg brushed by a pike, thought of Ben Ladysmith and where was he anyway? Water skiing on the lake was way off two summers running. Ben discouraged water sports by the fact of his absence. Wheelwright, captain of the fire department dive team that abandoned the search after three days, would not go into Oblong Lake, certain Ben Ladysmith was waiting to surprise him.

Robert was the only person still looking for Ben.

Olive dipped a hand in the water.

“You'll be back in ten seconds,” she predicted. “Your little dick is going to look like the eye of a potato.”

“Ladylike Ladysmith.” Robert spat into the mask. The dive would wash the stickiness off his penis. When she flicked water from her fingers into his face it did not feel that cold, but it had had time to warm itself against her.

Olive asked in a whisper, “What if you find Ben?”

“We tell the police.”

“Don't tell me if you find him,” she said, sitting up straight and shutting her eyes. “I have this memory of him and if you found him I doubt he'd conform to that memory.”

“Don't worry. I won't find him.”

He held the mask against his face and rolled backwards off the starboard side of the boat. Cold and disorientation gripped him for an instant, then he determined where he was and he was only cold. He surfaced alongside the boat.

“Ha! Ha!” he gasped at Olive, who sat watching with arms folded. “Christ, it's cold!” He went under.

Daylight once passed 100 feet down through the water of Oblong Lake, it was so clear; a selling point. Old-­timers (Ben and Dave among them) claimed to remember a time when light pushed to the very bottom. Better days. Robert doubted them. The pollution of the ­people using the lake had cut the visibility somewhat, but it was still very clear water.

His light gave the night water an edge of murkiness. The space not in the direct path of the light took on an opacity that was unnerving to the imaginative. The lake was home to muskellunge, solid as lengths of lumber, to pike and walleye. The lake at night was gorged with frightening shadows and motions. And Ben was there somewhere.

Robert stayed at the surface and kicked hard toward the Cow. He watched the swing of his light down through the depths. Fleet shapes and dark colors passed through the beam. Near the island he treaded water for a moment to rest and stretch his cold lungs with deep breaths. The water was about twenty feet deep there. The glacier's retreat had left behind a casual jumble of thousand-­ton granite chips, and it was in the caves and nooks and overhangs formed by these stones that Robert sensed Ben was resting. Robert could explore, at most, three of those sites per dive before he had to get out of the water. Nothing else in his life raced his blood like sending his beam of light into a dark cave not knowing if it was the cave where Ben was waiting.

He took a last deep breath and held it, then dove down toward the stones that formed the base of the island. The pressure of the descent squeezed his head. A moment arrived, as it always did, when he questioned what he was doing there. Ethel knew about his diving and could not understand it. He had never received a satisfactory answer to his question, “Don't you want Ben found?”

Cold caked in his chest, and in his legs and arms. The exertion of swimming did not cut it or pump it away. He thought: Summer is definitely over.

Robert picked a dark space in the rocks he had not explored before and pushed his light, his arm, and his head, in that order, inside. There was a dusting of green slime on the rocks and a small pike hanging with a delicate semaphore of fins. The fish did not move when Robert appeared; he might have been an apparition too outlandish to believe.

But no Ben.

Robert tapped his chest as though to check his air. The boat drifted above, a reliable geometric shape atop the voluminous skin that held him. On a previous night he had looked up in much the same way and seen a second diver above him. His heart had shaken, thinking he had blundered into Ben's orbit.

Robert kicked to the surface and broke out alongside the boat. Olive jumped. She had been watching something in the distance, not his ascending beam.

“Let's go home now,” she said.

“One more. It's too cold. Summer's over.”

“Come out now, please.”

“One more.” He went under, but regretfully. Already he was feeling the warm embrace of the towels, the row to shore, dry clothes, a glass of brandy in Olive's bed.

He swam for a cave farther around the Cow. The Cow and the Calf were actually a part of a single formation of rock. From above the water a narrow valley ten feet wide and twenty-­five feet deep gave the impression of two islands. The Cow, a hump of granite with high sheer sides and topped with tough, undernourished pines, appeared to watch over the Calf, an almost perfectly flat bald disk of rock, a meeting point of society for the children of Mozart.

Robert found the next cave, but his lungs were hardening, holding less air, and he had time only to glance in before his lungs began to pinch shut. A circle of gold reflecting his lamplight caught his eye, though, just as he kicked away and up from the cave mouth.

Olive was paying no attention when Robert surfaced. He drew air and descended. At the cave mouth he hesitated. The circle of gold had him spooked. Ben had once shown him a molar crowned with gold. If that was what his light had winked off, what might not be extrapolated from that?

But the pockets of air in his chest were decreasing and the cold had a dangerous feel to it suddenly. He imagined the lake wanted him to remain. This was his final descent of the night and of the summer. He kicked once and glided into the cave mouth. A gold-­lit fish slid unhurriedly out over his back.

The circle of gold he had seen was a ring. It lay on a feathery pillow of algae as though being carried to a bride's finger. He picked it up and held it in his palm, under the light. A thin gold band and a red seed stone. He pocketed the treasure and backed out of the cave. In the boat, bundled in towels, he did not mention the ring to Olive, fearing he had at last found something of her father.

R
OBERT WAS ON
the roof the next day when Ethel returned from work. That morning she had touched Robert's wet clothes hanging on the shower rod and that made her think of Oblong Lake, of Ben, of her one-­legged son. She had often told Robert that enough of Ben existed for her without his physical remains being appended to her memories.