Crows (7 page)

Robert said, “Not often. Once or twice. He's got enough on his mind.”

Fennimore started to move away. “I hope his life is ruined. He's damn near ruined mine. Ruined Ben's and that boy's. That whole family.” He shook a finger at Robert. “Don't you give up!”

The exchange lasted barely minutes, but it tinted the remainder of Robert's night. He did not know that anyone outside Ben's family was aware of his dives. One thousand dollars; he could use the money. But it was a distasteful thought, a bounty on Ben's head.

He sat down beside his mother.

­“People ask me quite often how you're doing with Ben,” she said. “They're interested.”

“I don't expect to find him.”

“It's the effort you put forth that they appreciate,” Evelyn said. “The fire department gave up after only three days. As important as Oblong Lake is to Mozart, you'd think they'd spend more than seventy-­two hours looking for a dead body.”

“It's a big lake,” Robert said.

His mother nodded. She twisted the wedding band on her finger. “I spoke to Flora Gasconade last week,” she said. “She says Al's with the
Journal.
”

“I knew that.”

“He covers the Brewers.”

“Did you ask me over just to talk about Al?” he asked mildly. He kept in touch with Al Gasconade, he liked him, therefore the boasts of Al's mother could not touch him. It was pleasant and cool there in the stands. The high lights scooped an intimate half sphere out of the deepening dark. Players from both teams wandered over the field in a rite of preparation. Buzzard had finished warming up. He stood against the fence talking with Duke. This scene touched Robert; the two brothers rarely seemed to have anything in common.

“Flora is getting a job,” Evelyn said, her attention fixed somewhere inside her.

“Everybody's getting jobs except me,” Robert said. “Is that your point?”

“No, no. It's just strange. Here Flora has been home for years, and now she wants to go to work. And I've worked all that time, and lately it appeals to me to just stay home.”

“Is there a chance of that?”

“I'm not tired of your father, but I am tired of that store. He has a thicker skin than me, maybe,” Evelyn said. “I thought it was the other way around, but he has an enormous capacity for acceptance. I'm running short myself.” She patted her son's leg and laughed. “But it will probably never happen. Your father asked me to ask you up here,” Evelyn revealed. “He wants me to bug you about your life in general.”

“Consider me bugged. Anything else? What are you two selling at Cigar's these days?”

His mother covered her mouth, but a helpless mirth rose in her eyes. “T-­shirts,” she whispered through her hand. “I'm wearing one at the moment,” she said, almost like a girl teasing a teenage boy with the secret of her underwear. She said, “Your father calls T-­shirts the literature of the eighties.”

Dave returned then with two plastic cups of coffee. He wore a T-­shirt himself, Robert noticed, beneath his sweater. When Robert asked, Dave unbuttoned the sweater. The shirt was gold, with black lettering that proclaimed: 50,
FAT & FERTILE!

“Nice shirt, Dave,” Robert said, flabbergasted with embarrassment.

His father pulled the message taut across his torso. “I had three guys offer to buy it off my back tonight,” he boasted. “I finally buttoned my sweater so I'd get a little peace.”

“They wanted to burn it, Dave.”

“I told them to come into the shop and we'd whip one up for them,” Dave said. He gave his wife her coffee. The laughter was gone from her eyes. Robert wondered: Does she ever think her husband is a joke?

“I've got to get back,” Robert said, rising.

“Ev tell you she heard from Al Gasconade's mom?” his father asked. “He's covering the Bucks.”

“Brewers, honey.”

“Bucks. Brewers. They're both major league.”

“She told me, Dave. Al deserves it. He's a good writer.”

“Not as good as you, Bob-­O! I read you both in the
Scale
and he paled in comparison.”

“He still has the desire, though. Desire is a vital component.”

His father was not listening. Robert could see in his eyes that he had moved on.

“You didn't shave today?” Dave asked. ­People sitting nearby turned casually to examine Robert's scrabbly face.

“Summer's over, Dave.” Robert touched his face; day one, it was stubbled, unkempt, derelict. Every year his father gave him a hard time about the beard. It was a tradition.

He said good-­bye and forgot what he had gone to the concession stand for when he returned to his seat. Olive had arrived in her greasy Good-­Ee Freez uniform; she added a Coke to the order and Robert returned to the concession stand. He felt stunned by the brush with his parents and with Fennimore. His father was well past fifty, not really fat. And fertile?

He was still in line when the game began. He watched Buzz's first pitch through a grove of spectators' shoulders and heads, and it was a called strike.

O
N THE WALK
home Robert took the ring from his pocket and passed it to Ethel. The darkness was thick where they walked, however, and she could only feel the ring's shape and weight and Robert's warmth in her hand. Her son had pitched less than his best that night, but still won, then departed in that blue ether that surrounded him, win or lose, after each game. He kissed his mother good night at the edge of the field, then walked away with Kevin and some other ballplayers, going into the woods to their snuck beer and stories. She felt the night and the knowledge of the morning pushing her to bed. Now this ring.

“You found it in the lake?” she asked as they walked. Olive and Duke were just moving shapes. They all walked slowly so Duke could keep up.

“Last night,” Robert said. “Near the Cow.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” Olive asked.

“I didn't want to upset you. It's the first thing I've found. I didn't know if it was Ben's or not.”

They could see the front-­porch light ahead. Ethel put the ring in her pocket. Then she pretended to drop it.

“Oh, damn!” she exclaimed, kicking stones.

Everyone stopped. There was no light for a search and Robert had no wish to press it regardless. He had long since decided the ring was Ethel's, whether it had been Ben's or not, and hers to do with as she pleased. If she wanted it lost again, that was up to her.

“We can come back in the morning to look for it,” Robert said.

No one contested or agreed to this. They went on home.

Ethel inspected the ring in private, and wondered at what point in the past two years it had slipped from her husband's finger.

 

R
OBERT HAD STORED
the storm windows in the basement according to Ben's old system. He had wiped each pane clean on both sides and rested it against its neighbor. Each window frame bore a three-­figure code that corresponded to the code written on the frame of the house. Robert loved this touch of taxonomy. Phylum. Genus. Species.

He climbed the ladder with window 3-­E-­A—­third floor, east side, first window from left. The ladder had a perilous inward bow to it and swayed as he ascended. He had the rest of the third floor and all of the fourth to do. But putting up storm windows kept him out of any crow hunts. It gave him a clear idea of what was expected of him.

In the early days of September Olive had come home with a new boyfriend. He was on the Mozart College soccer team, his name was Glenn. His hair was the color of straw and seemed always to be wrinkled and tipped with moisture. He was small and nimble. His muscles looked stringy and hard, durable and ferretlike; just Olive's type. Robert often caught them sitting alone in the house, Glenn running his small, freckled hands over Olive's swimmer's muscles. He would look up at Robert as he passed through; Robert hoped he wondered where Robert fit in.

Robert asked Ethel, “Where does this leave me?” He could have asked Olive, but she could not answer his question. Olive had only herself to grant.

“Talk to O,” Ethel said. “That's between the two of you.”

“Not
that
,” Robert said. “Am I still welcome in this house? Do I exist as anything other than O's ex?”

Ethel licked her lips. They felt crinkled with road film. “You're handy to have around,” she admitted. “But you've been here more under the auspices of Ben than of Olive or me. He brought you here in the first place. I can't kick you out.”

Robert felt his chest ease. A pain behind his eyes diminished.

“But the time
will
come,” Ethel continued, “when I will bring myself to kick you out. Ben will fade from memory sufficiently for me to wonder what you are doing in my house. Be warned.”

“I am warned,” he said.

“I mean it.”

Robert nodded, but he felt free to touch her papery cheek and leave the room whistling. He finished the third floor late in the afternoon, a clean storm pane on every window but Olive's.

Buzz was pitching again that night. He would leave soon to walk into town, where a bus would carry his team to Baraboo. He was locked in his room at the moment. No one had seen him all day. Duke was asleep on the living-­room couch. He looked off balance and endangered with his long leg stretched out next to nothing. Duke had asked Robert to drive them to Baraboo to watch Buzzard pitch, and Robert had agreed. The benediction of belonging granted by Ethel made him eager to do things for the family. He unfolded a plaid comforter and spread it over Duke. The boy said something in his sleep and turned away.

In the mail that day had been a letter for Robert from a newspaper in Minneapolis. A sportswriting job had opened there and they wanted him to come for an interview. They would pay his way and put him up. This letter excited Ethel almost more than it would have his father, had he known.

“You'll have to shave, of course,” she said.

“I'm not interested in the field,” Robert told her.

“How do you know? When was the last time you tried it?”

Robert scratched his beard; it was growing into that length where it itched routinely. “I try it in my mind all the time,” he said. “The other night at Buzz's game, I wrote the story of that game in my mind. Quotes and all. I
knew
what those coaches and players would say after the game. I'll do the same thing at tonight's game.”

“You're a natural, then,” she said.

“Maybe,” Robert said. “I doubt it, but maybe. But it's not something I want to do, so what's the point?”

“Working is the point!” Ethel cried. “Making a living is the point!”

He plucked the letter from her fingers and departed. Her eyes were wild with an anger or frustration he had never witnessed before. On the drive to Baraboo she pursued the matter further, but their bickering made Duke so nervous he asked them to stop.

“Dad liked Rob-­O,” Duke said from the backseat, “so we must respect that.”

Ethel replied, “This goes beyond his permission to live with us. I'd think you would want to move out. Get started on something of your own.”

He was at the wheel and felt just fine, useful. Ethel drove all day and hated the roads now, the oncoming traffic, the lights of approaching cars. In less than an hour they were on their way home. Buzz had been hit hard in the first inning and removed from the game. With Buzz gone there was nothing of interest to hold the rest of his family.

R
OBERT HAD COME
to visit Olive long ago, before Ben disappeared. The month was March and it was cold and raining. Ben was sitting in a chair on the front porch reading a magazine. He wore gloves and a winter coat and the rain spattered the toe of his shoe where it poked beyond the influence of the overhang. He smiled at Robert hurrying through the downpour.

“Come to visit Olive?”

“Is she home?”

“I don't know,” Ben said. “I haven't been inside since morning.”

“More grief orbits?”

“No. No key.” He smiled as if caught at something foolish. “I climbed the tree but the window's latched. The house is locked up like a drum.”

“Where is everybody?”

“That's the mystery,” Ben said. “I went to the office this morning to work a little, feed my charges, and when I got home they were gone. I'd have taken a key if I'd known. Damned spontaneity!”

Ben pressed the doorbell and Robert heard the distant note it produced. The action was an idle gesture of frustration.

“Nobody has a spare key?” Robert asked. “Neighbors?”

“Nobody I know of,” Ben said.

“Let's go into town and I'll buy you dinner. When we come back they'll be home.”

“No. I have to wait. I'm worried,” Ben said. “I couldn't eat.” He tapped the rolled magazine against his thigh and looked both ways up the street. In a moment, he said, “I'll bet they assumed I had a key. I'll bet there's a note in the kitchen telling me where they are and when they'll be back.”

They ran through the rain to the back door, whose cement porch was half the size of the front porch, with a grudging jut of rooflet effective only in altering slightly the angle of the rainfall. Cold beads wet Ben's high forehead and slid like diamonds on an escalator down the shafts of his hair. He looked miserable and afraid as he squeezed his face to the back-­door glass to see into the house. The kitchen was dark but for one small light burning out of his frame of vision; but there was indeed a piece of paper on the table.

Ben said, “It says, ‘Gone to Paris. Be back in the summertime. Take roast out of freezer.' ” He stepped away from the window, smiling thinly. “No sense standing in the rain.”

Back at the front of the house the remaining daylight had been halved, the rain doubled. Ben took his chair while Robert perched on a slim concrete ledge that still exposed his back to the rain unless he sat up exaggeratedly straight.

“You're sure I can't buy you dinner?”

Ben shook his head. The rain fell furiously. Any brief sprint through it would soak them.

“Imagine an existence,” Ben said softly, “where this is the normal way of life. Living in the dark, at the weather's mercy, cold, danger, not knowing what has happened to your loved ones. Any predator might have dragged them off. Just a cold slab of stone to sit on. It makes me all warm inside just to think how far we've come.”

He held his watch close to his eyes. “It's six thirty, and no lights have come on,” he said. “That's good. It means she didn't activate the timer. She wasn't going on any long trips. She'll be back.”

Time passed and the rain eased a bit. Cars swished by. The lights went on at the Wilsons', the Ladysmiths' neighbors. Robert had things to do, but nothing as important as keeping Ben company. That small square of porch he shared with Ben seemed immune to other concerns. He had become part of a vigil.

“Maybe we should break in,” Ben said. “It's my house.”

“I'll bet they're home any minute.”

“An optimist!” Ben exclaimed, just a voice in the dark by then. “All crows are optimists. Did you know that?”

Robert smiled. “No, I didn't know that.”

“Oh, yes. They start fresh every day,” Ben said. “When they wake up in the morning they have no idea what they will do that day. What to eat. Where to stay. They barely realize they are crows.”

Robert folded his arms and shifted his weight, his shoulder scraping brick. He was cold and stiff from standing at the edge of the rain.

“Ben,” he said hesitantly, “what are you talking about?”

“Crows. A phenomenon unique to crows called forgetful sleep.”

“Is this just more scientific show biz?”

Ben said, “What do you think?”

“How do you know all this?” Robert asked.

“Years of study. Observation,” Ben said. “Listen now: The worst thing a crow can have is a good night's sleep. They get by on two to four hours' sleep a night. Any more than that and their brains would be absolutely empty in the morning. That's why you never see a crow working hard. He knows if he gets too tired he might fall into a deep sleep and then he'd be in trouble. They only sleep a little bit at a time, and when they awaken they must hurry to learn again what they've forgotten.”

He stood and made Robert take the chair. “You'll never see a crow sleeping apart from his or her mate,” Ben said. “Because in the morning they wouldn't remember they even had a mate.”

“Forgetful sleep,” Robert said.

“It's in the crow's brain,” Ben explained. “A chemical. A cerebral wrinkle no other creature on Earth possesses. Thousands of years ago it nearly wiped crows out. Crows were unaware of forgetful sleep—­they were routinely knocking back eight to ten hours of sleep a night. They didn't
know
any better. But in the morning they'd forget to eat, to protect themselves from their enemies, to reproduce, even to fly. They were dying by the millions, with no crows to take their places.”

“How did they figure it out?” Robert asked.

“Some of the younger crows started worrying about their dwindling species,” Ben said. “Two crows in particular, very sharp crows these were, big and glossy and smart, stayed up one night trying to get at the root of their imminent extinction. They talked long into the night but could come to no conclusions.

“Finally one of the crows was just too tired. He went to sleep. The other crow—­the smarter of the two—­was still preoccupied and couldn't sleep. He stayed up all night thinking.

“Of course, in the morning the other crow awoke and the smarter crow picked up their discussion where they'd left off. But the crow who'd slept had no idea what the other crow was talking about. He barely remembered the smarter crow was his friend.

“The smarter crow started to put things together. He coined the term ‘forgetful sleep.' Soon crows slept in shifts, with the crow that stayed awake replenishing the sleeping crow's memory when he awoke. Crows ever since have celebrated the smarter crow's life. Without him, they'd be extinct.”

“Does he have a name?” Robert asked.

“Don't be silly, Rob-­O. They're just crows. But among crows he is almost a deity, known simply as the Smarter Crow, to differentiate him from all other crows, who are merely smart.”

“Why does that make crows optimists?”

“Think about it,” Ben said. “They know when they go to sleep they are going to lose a certain amount of everything they know.”

Headlights swung off the road and into the driveway; for an instant they turned Ben's wet hair electric.

“Here they are,” he said.

“Wait. Finish.”

“The crow tale?”

“Yes,” Robert said.

“Well, if you were going to awaken every morning knowing less than when you went to bed, would you want to wake up? That requires optimism. They were further optimistic in that they regarded forgetful sleep as God's way of keeping crows from taking over.”

Ethel and the kids came up the stairs and into the house. They were glad to see Ben, tolerant of Robert. They had been to a swimming meet. Olive sat at the kitchen table with four medals fanned before her; three golds and a silver, the medals shaped like Wisconsin and suspended from wide red and white ribbons. Olive wore a stocking cap and a man's green terrycloth robe. The whites of her eyes looked burned with chlorine. She kept yawning and stretching, flattening her small breasts against the robe's thick fabric, running her legs out across the floor, rolling the ankles, tightening the calves.

Robert had work to do at home but he kept his seat at the table. He thought, much later, after he had moved in, after Ben was gone, that he was afraid of losing it so soon after attaining it.

“You mean you've been sitting in the rain all afternoon?” Ethel asked.

“It wasn't
in
the rain,” Ben said.

“We told you we were going to the meet.”

“I must have forgotten.”

“Not listening again.”

“I admit it. I was in my own little world,” Ben said. He seemed amused and proud of this. He asked Olive, “How did you do, sweetheart?”

“Won the fifty, five hundred, and thousand. Finished second in the medley relay.” She touched each medal as she named the event.

“When it was just you, you won,” Ben said. “When you had to rely on others, you lost.”

Olive responded angrily, “The other girls swam well, Dad. They
tried.
If you'd have been there you'd have seen for yourself.”