Crows (6 page)

Duke was on the front walk in his wheelchair. He had used the chair for a time after the accident, and used it still when he was tired or lazy or feeling sorry for himself. His mother cupped the back of his neck and kissed him on the forehead. They both looked up at Robert.

“How's it going?” she asked absently.

“He's slow today. He's been up there two hours and cleaned maybe a yard of gutter. He's dropped a lot. He almost fell off once. A lot of the time he just sits and stares.”

“You don't have to sit here, you know.”

Duke shrugged. “Nothing else to do.”

“I don't believe that. Are you hungry?” Before he answered she called up to Robert, “Are
you
hungry?”

He was, but he kept finding dead birds in the gutters and his enthusiasm for food had waned. Each bird, if he looked hard enough, bore a neat hole and a ragged corresponding exit wound. He needed an excuse to get off the roof. It felt so high today, as though he was looking deeper than the surface of the Earth. More than once he thought he saw Duke hovering in the air. He put a knot in the bag he was filling and left it on the small roof porch. He untied the line around his waist and came down.

Ethel made sandwiches, put chips in a bowl, arranged pickle disks like cloverleafs on a plate, poured glasses of iced tea. She always smelled automotive to Robert when she returned from work; gas or oil or seat leather, or some mix of these, clung to the uniform she had adopted for the job. Jeans worn pale in the seat and knees, a green flannel shirt over a white cotton jersey (wearing just the jersey on the hottest days), and steel-­toed black boots she often vowed to put through the teeth of some of her fares.

When she took the job she was certain she would hate it, foremost because she had to have the job. Ben's pension from the college was small because he had been denied his associate professorship twice before obtaining it just three years prior to his disappearance, which was two years shy of his being fully vested. The life insurance company, grousing about paying off on a dead man who had never been found, stalled, demanding that proof of death be furnished. And if and when they paid, Ethel figured she would go through the money in two years just on heating bills and groceries alone. The cab money was supplemental, but utterly necessary.

She thought she would hate driving a cab, and she did until she was convinced her children could survive her absence, that the house remained standing. She came to like the solitude and the motion. The money was not great, but it was sufficient. But then she was robbed twice, once by a woman, and she began to hate the job again.

She combed her hair and washed her face before sitting down to lunch.

“Where's Buzzard?” she asked.

“He's pitching tonight,” Duke said, which meant Buzz would be in his room with the lights out, doing whatever he did in the hours before a game.

“How are the gutters progressing?”

“Tediously,” Robert said. “I found two more dead birds. Both shot.”

Duke was reminded. “When are we going crow hunting?”

“Never.”

“The boys want to hunt crows,” Ethel said. She surprised him by drawing her cool, slightly oily fingertips across his cheek. “You didn't shave,” she said.

“Winter's coming,” he said. Her fingers had left tracks of sensation on his face. “Time to start my beard.”

“It's still August,” she said, laughing.

“
Late
August. September is a winter month in Mozart.”

“Your face will be hidden from us until the thaw?” Ethel asked, mocking him with her melodramatic tone.

“It's no joke. You'd grow one if you could. It's survival.” The past six winters he'd grown a beard, never regretfully, and hacked each one off in the spring like a dirty pelt.

“Take the boys crow hunting,” Ethel said.

“What would Ben say?”

Ethel remained composed in the face of this cheap tactic, but Duke was no match for it and turned his glistening eyes away. Robert bit his lip. “Crows were his favorites,” he said.

“Nonsense,” Ethel hissed. “He didn't give a good goddamn about crows or anything else he taught. He hunted crows every chance he got.”

Robert finished his meal, wondering why she had told that lie.

After a long time Ethel said, “The storm windows need to go up.”

Robert, caught, smiled. “But it's only August.”

“September is a winter month,” she said. “I spent $300 a month heating this monster last winter. Think of the storms as the house's beard.”

He clasped his shoulders with his hands, made cold by the talk of heating bills and winter months. He put bread in the toaster and stood so the heat from the orange coils rose into his face. The cold from the previous night's dive seemed to be a part of him now, a new layer of tissue he had to assimilate. It would take days to wear away, or it might never at all. His mother used to warn him not to cross his eyes because they might get stuck. That was how he felt about the lake cold; he had gone in once too often and now the cold had him for good.

He rolled the red-­stoned ring with his fingertips in his trouser pocket. He was anxious to bring it out for Ethel to see, but feared her crying or expressing an emotion he was not prepared for. He buttered the toast when it came up and let the hot slices of bread warm his fingers; he was turning to ice. If it was Ben's ring, Robert's next step should have been to search thoroughly the area where he had found it. But he was done diving for the season, and relieved at not having to go back into the cold water and being freed of finding Ben for the time being. With Ben found, what excuse would he have for staying at Ethel's?

“You went diving last night,” Ethel said.

Robert sat back down. Duke watched him without saying a word; eyes like his father's.

“Yes.”

“Don't do that for my sake.”

“I'm through for the winter,” Robert said. “You won't have to worry about it until spring. Ben's safe until then.”

She smiled ruefully at the idea of this and rolled her son's hand into her own; she cherished his hands more since he had lost the leg, they seemed so temporary. She herself did not feel safe until she had banished the interloper in her family's existence back onto the roof to complete the cleaning of the gutters.

B
UZZARD CAME INTO
the kitchen that evening and blinked his eyes. He was in his baseball uniform, his cap stylishly backwards on his head, his hose stirrups pulled so high they were just thin streaks of scarlet rising into the tapered legs of his pants. Olive was at work. Robert had showered and was drinking a beer; he felt wonderful having passed another day without losing his home or having to hunt crows.

A tall kid named Kevin Mills came up the driveway. He wore the same uniform as Buzz. His spikes, laces tied together, hung over his shoulder. He played first base, a position where his burgeoning clumsiness was least a problem. Growth had added strength to his arms and legs, but robbed him of speed and agility. He was good-­natured, though, knowing he was seventeen and on his way out of the game. He came into the kitchen smiling.

“Hello, Kevin,” Ethel said. “Would you like a glass of milk?”

“No time,” Buzz snapped. He grabbed his gear bag off the chair.

“Just a short one, maybe,” Kevin said, holding up a finger. He liked to make Buzzard wait; the aggravation gave Buzz something to think about apart from his brooding concentration on the night's pitching.

Ethel handed Kevin a full glass.

“Where's Olive?” he asked, glancing at Robert, then drinking.

“She's at work.”

“She coming to the game?”

“Call her up sometime,” Buzz said. “Stop this twenty questions bullshit. We're late.”

Kevin faced Robert. The milk was gone; a thread of it remained around his mouth like a drawstring.

“Is it OK if I call her?” Kevin asked.

“Why ask him?” Ethel said.

“Good question,” Robert said.

“He's got no ties to Olive,” Ethel said to Kevin, who blushed. “He's just a quasi-­leech—­or something to that effect.”

“Let's
go!
” Buzz said, and snatched open the back door and was gone.

Fans in cars passed, yelling greetings to the two players as they followed the lake road toward the field. Kevin waved; Buzz did not. He was in that mood he entered in his dark room before each start.

They could see the field lights through the trees like a phosphorescence. Cars honked. Brake lights winked. Words came over the PA, as hard to grab as bats.

“What's with that guy?” Kevin asked.

“Who?”

“That Bob guy.”

“He was a friend of my dad's. He and O were an item for a while. But I don't know about now. Somehow he's managed to hang on.”

“Is he doinking her?”

Buzz shot a look at his friend. “
Doinking?
Do I talk about
your
sister that way?”

“Sorry. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Buzz said, then said nothing more. He broke away in an easy trot and Kevin, embarrassed, ran to keep up.

“I got the word from Madison,” he said. “They'll take me.”

“Good,” Buzz said. “You'll play a lot of ball for the Badgers.”

“No I won't. I'm out of there.”

Buzz said nothing for a long time. They filtered like smoke through the trees ringing the park. Buzz could hear the electric hum of the scoreboard lights.

“How's the arm?” Kevin asked, nearly in a whisper, before they stepped out of the last shadows and irrevocably into the baseball light.

Buzz glanced at his friend. “The arm's been better.” He made a fist. “It takes forever to get loose.”

“Don't throw sore.”

But they had emerged from the woods; a round kid in chest pad and mask, his catcher's mitt hanging like a skillet at his side, came over to greet Buzzard and accept his warm-­up throws.

The time before Buzz pitched, the time of his pitching, were the few moments in his life of which he was certain. It was a sequence of time without history or future. He was left to shape the time to his own ends and he did that so splendidly that since the age of thirteen he had been in the eye of scouts, college and professional. And when his time on the mound was finished he was about as sad as he ever feared to be. He dreaded the end of the game, and even when it was over and the postgame gathering of players and beer was drawing to a close, he was reluctant to let go; he had nothing to hold him until he could begin looking forward to his next start. He feared the end of the game, the end of the season, and the presence of winter for the long stretches of confusion without the relief that it presented.

Robert, Ethel, and Duke walked to the field a half hour after Buzzard and sat in the bleachers along the third base side. Buzz warmed up with an easy motion. Duke balanced on his leg against the fence to watch his brother prepare for work, but Buzz did not acknowledge him.

The field was a block in from Oblong Lake. A wind scattered papers on the ground, the late-­summer serenity in the tops of trees. At the cinder-­block concession stand more coffee than beer was sold. Robert waited in a short line to buy himself a coffee, a Pay Day for Duke, a hot chocolate for Ethel. Someone grabbed his arm and he turned. It was his father.

“Hello, Dave,” he said. He was always glad, initially, to see his father.

“Bob-­O.”

“Mom here?”

“She's in the bleachers,” Dave said. “Doesn't care for baseball, but she thought we might run into you here, and damned if she wasn't right.”

“Did she want to talk to me?”

“Go say hello,” his father urged. “She worries about you.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Robert said as he stepped out of line. He found his mother sitting alone on the peeling boards with a sweater over her shoulders and her long legs tucked up against her chest. He stood on the ground below her, hands in his pockets.

“You never come see us,” she said.

“That's not true.”

“Come sit a minute.”

“I've got to get something for Ethel and Duke,” he said.

“Just for a minute. Do it for your old mother.”

He was about to climb the bleachers when a man took hold of his arm.

“Hello, Mr. Fennimore,” Robert said.

The man loosened his grip and grinned uneasily. “Call me Hal, Rob. You're a grown man. None of this Mr. Fennimore BS.” He wore a Mozart High School Boosters Club jacket and a hat studded with trout flies and school function pins. When Robert was a sportswriter, Fennimore had been a constant pain. His line of work was a water ski rental and bait-­and-­tackle shop on the lake; he busted his ass through the summer, then holed up for the winter, sticking his nose into other ­people's business. He blew out his cheeks as if stretching them to store more nuts. He appeared anxious about his mission, but so convinced of its rightness that he dared push ahead.

“You find Ben Ladysmith?” he asked. He was a stooped man with a forced smile. When Robert shook his head, Fennimore asked, “You think there's a chance you'll find him before summer's over?”

“It's over now.”

Fennimore grimaced. “It's not yet,” he claimed.

“It's over,” Robert repeated. “I'm through looking until spring.”

“You find him,” Fennimore said in a lower, private voice, “and it's worth one thousand dollars to me and my business.” He spat into the gravel. “The man has killed the lake. Are you aware of that fact?”

“I don't think he'll ever be found,” Robert said.

“Don't say that. He hasn't been found, so he's still out there. ­People know that and stay away. They go to another lake to fish or water ski.”

Robert thought the man was finished, but then Fennimore asked, “You ever see Frank Abbott?”