Crows Read online

  “Ben never gave you a gun, Buzzard,” Ethel said.

  “He did, too! Just before the accident.”

  “Dad didn’t even like you before the accident,” Duke piped in.

  “You’ve got it backward, asshole. I didn’t like Dad.”

  “He didn’t like you, though, either.”

  This was not what Buzz wanted to hear at the moment, and he lunged out of his chair at Duke. Robert got there first and cut him off. The blow meant for Duke, thrown with a blue-­ballooned arm, bounced harmlessly off Robert’s shoulder. The murder in Buzz’s eyes was difficult to look at.

  “Sit down, Buzzer,” Ethel said patiently. She was so tired lately nothing upset her. “Robert, before we continue this discussion, please remove those dead animals from this room.”

  In the brief scuffle she had taken possession of the pistol; she held it in her hands and expertly checked it to be certain it was not loaded.

  Robert dropped the bag of birds and squirrels in the garbage can outside the back door. The carcasses in serving their purpose had left a faint stink, and Robert stood in the doorway letting the cool air run past him, into Ben’s house.

  When he returned to the kitchen table the pistol was out of sight and some impasse had been reached he was not a part of. Buzz ate hunched over his plate as though wary of bad hops. Duke cut pieces of potato and hummed.

  Ethel said, “The boys want you to take them crow hunting.”

  “They do,” he said. Where was the gun? Had Ethel given it back to Buzzard? And now they wanted to go out with him with a shotgun.

  Duke said with genuine enthusiasm, “You can get a record and record player. I saw it at SportsHeaven. It draws crows like crazy.”

  “I don’t want to shoot crows,” Robert said.

  “Crows are a dime a dozen,” Buzz claimed. “And you don’t have to shoot ’em. We’ll shoot ’em.”

  “Sorry. I can’t help you.” He looked sternly at Ethel, but she would not meet his eye.

  Then she leaned forward so the steam from the meal rose and broke across her face. A ribbony weed of hair moistened by work in the kitchen was stuck to her temple.

  “This is something I want you to do for me, Bob-­O,” she said, mock-­sweet. Her mouth was cut in a false smile.

  “I’ve got things to do,” Robert said. He knew she had him, though; there was nothing he wouldn’t do, nothing she couldn’t make him do, to stay in that house. “I’ve got the gutters to finish,” he said. “No telling what other dead creatures I’ll find up there. What became of that gun, by the way?”

  “That has been forgotten,” Ethel said.

  He felt like an outsider at these rare times when the family knot closed him out, when he was excluded from some counsel or decision.

  “I’m busy,” he said. “And I won’t be party to shooting crows.”

  “This is important to me,” Ethel said. Her implicit question was clear: How important was staying there to him?

  ROBERT SAID GOOD-­BYE to Olive on the front porch of the house. He wanted her to think he was leaving. The house had been shut down for the night. Lights were out. The boys were sleeping or reading in their rooms. Ethel, who rose at 5 a.m. to drive her cab, had gone to bed shortly after dinner.

  A rain was falling and Robert stood for a long time at the downspout mouth waiting for the sparkling gush of water through clean gutters. But the rain was not sufficiently heavy to prove the effectiveness of his day’s work. He was tired, too, and wanted to get to bed. Olive was in her room; she would not wait forever.

  He went to the birch tree at the side of the house. Its high white length was taller than the house by twenty feet; the bark reminded him of peeling paper. Ben had taken Robert to that tree one day to show how the main branches nearest the house had been shaped and tended like the rungs of a ladder. He told of climbing that tree to Ethel’s room, where Ethel slept alone the many times she banished Ben. He would tell Robert this tale there in the birch’s silvery shadow, but withhold the details, leaving Robert on a narrow ledge of curiosity. Ben would stop at the thick base of the tree, the climbing and the reason for it left up to Robert’s imagination.

  Soon after Ben disappeared Ethel moved out of their room, down to the first floor. Olive moved into her parents’ old room. Robert kept his room on the fourth floor. Ethel wanted to be close to Duke, who had lost a leg, and also be free of the memories that bumped around and scratched at the screens of her old bedroom.

  Robert and Olive were not yet lovers. She seemed to think he was at fault for the failing of the newspaper where he had been a sportswriter. She also was suspicious of his enjoyment of his jobless state.

  Robert read a sign of good fortune in Olive’s moving into her parents’ room. He missed Ben and late at night liked to talk about him with anyone who would listen. Olive, of the four, seemed to have the warmest memories of him.

  He had chosen a night much like the present for his first ascent. A wind to shuffle the leaves and provide a covering noise, a murmuring rain, no moonlight. He took the route Ben had shown him. Each branch raised him effortlessly to the next; handholds seemed to reach out to him; the branches were grooved like the steps to a favorite monument.

  At a second-­floor window Robert paused. He could see Buzzard reading in bed in a dark room, a flashlight propped against his shoulder and neck. He was reading about baseball, but his expression was mournful. His father was gone and his life was losing its shape.

  Reaching the third floor, Robert had to wait out Ethel, who sat on Olive’s bed talking, hands folded. He pressed his spine against the trunk of the tree while the wind rose up and beat his face with birch leaves. Rain fell harder and then Ethel came to that very window and looked him straight in the eye, four feet between them, then closed the window and latched it, holding him out. Had she thought of Ben at that moment, of his suitor’s climb to make amends?

  Robert was back the next night and this time he slid up the screen and stepped into the room. The ease of entrance was breathtaking, like walking in through the door. Olive was asleep, but awakened when he pulled a chair up next to her head and began to court her in whispers. Her face, suspended dark above the pale pillow, and the mysterious swimmer’s body she kept hidden beneath the surface of the covers, had been wonders to him.

  “I have to go to sleep now, Robert,” she said when his words ran down. She allowed him one kiss before he went out the door and upstairs to his room. The following night he was back, and the night after that. He pointed his day toward that climb up the birch tree. Olive was always asleep and this was fine with Robert; it was a secret he shared with Ben.

  On a later night she said simply: “My door was locked from inside, Bob-­O. How did you get in?”

  “Ask your mom. She’ll know.”

  “Did you have a key made?”

  He loved this question, her belief in her charm and plain looks, that she was still remarkable enough to prompt men to forge keys to reach her.

  “Ask Ethel,” Robert said.

  In the course of their time together Olive stopped holding the blankets to her chin, but floated them there and waited. It was a long, agonizing time for them both before Robert noticed this subtle difference and created the courage to act upon it.

  HE WENT UP the tree with practiced steps, though he hadn’t climbed it in months; it seemed redundant now to walk out the front door of the house only to climb a tree and go back in through a window. But Olive viewed this redundancy, this commitment to the unnecessary, as vital to their soured relationship. Her mood signaled a desire to return to their old courtship rituals. He did not want to be a fixture in the house, but he definitely wanted to be in the house.

  He climbed quickly past Buzz’s room. Muzzle flash would be all he would see, death quicker than sound. Where had that gun gone? And now Ethel wanted him to take them crow hunting.

/>   Olive’s window was closed against the rain and the coolness that came up from the lake. No lights were on. He worked at the pane of glass with his fingertips but made no progress. Robert was disappointed; he thought she had anticipated this return to their old ways. Maybe she had.

  He tapped on the glass and his tapping brought a light to the room. Olive swung her legs out of bed and put on a robe over a short nightgown. She unfastened the latch and opened the window.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Very funny.”

  “Robert? We thought you’d finally gone home. I was telling Eth earlier how nice it was not to have Bob-­O lurking over everything and getting in the way.”

  “You did not,” he said.

  “Those were my exact words. Mom agreed.”

  Robert looked away. He saw scattered lights on Oblong Lake.

  “We thought you’d left, rather than hunt crows.”

  “Listen, O. I’m real tired. Can I just go to my room through yours? I’m beat.”

  “Go home, Rob-­O. Call me up and ask me out on a normal date.”

  “We’ve never had a normal date,” Robert said.

  “Try me. I’m tired of you coming for me by tree. When Ben did it with Ethel it was unique. I’m tired of us living under the same roof.”

  She was quiet a moment, sitting sidesaddle on the windowsill. She looked nice there, serene, her face made complex with shadows. Robert wished he liked her better. If they loved each other all their problems would be solved. But he had never liked her as much as he liked her father.

  He heard a noise somewhere below him, nothing startling, and it reminded him of Buzzard, who might get him with a blowgun or machete if he went back down.

  Olive was watching him. She said, as he knew she would if he gave her the time to think about it, “Oh, all right. You can come in.”

  She moved away from the window and Robert stepped into her room. He removed his wet shoes, but held them in his hand. She shed her robe, her swimmer’s body strong and graceful even out of its element. Then she switched off the light and got into bed. Robert heard her yawn and shift. He stood in the dark searching his memory for those old courting phrases that had once worked so well.

  Chapter Two

  Grief Orbits

  ROBERT HAD LIVED all his life in Mozart, and occupied a space that was neither confining nor generous. He had gone to college in the town and worked there after college, and when that job disappeared he still remained. He was just six feet tall, and in the past two years had filled his body with muscled weight from diving in the lake in the summer. In winter, he grew a beard that came in the color of his mother’s hair. Something in his stance or his eyes or the shifting of his head at a word conveyed a reluctant rootedness. His friends from school had all moved away: to La Crosse, Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago. The ­people in Mozart who themselves had stayed and grown settled with that realization years before saw in Robert that sense of being home, of having arrived without departing.

  As a child, he had worried his teachers with his unwillingness to apply himself beyond what was required to be average. His work came sheathed in a coolness of just barely caring; he ran only hard enough to finish races halfway up the pack. His recollection of his life in Mozart before he met Ben and his family was a fear not of failing, but of being found wanting in the pain of his entirety of effort.

  He was in Professor Ben Ladysmith’s Introduction to Biology class at Mozart College when he first saw Olive. She had brought her father’s lunch. Robert remembered most the chlorine scent she trailed and her damp hair combed back off her face. A tail of her untucked shirt flicked Robert’s face as she went past him down the amphitheater steps.

  He was in the class to pick up the science credit he needed for his Bachelor of Arts degree. For six semesters he had put off fulfilling the requirement. His talent as a sportswriter had been such that the editors of the Mozart Daily Scale overlooked his lack of the degree; they hired him with the stipulation that in the future he graduate. There the matter rested, unmentioned and ultimately forgotten in the hubbub of the Scale’s folding and the disappearance of the owner, a man named Thrips, in the night with what money he’d scraped together and a Mercedes-­Benz trunk full of electric typewriters.

  Al Gasconade telephoned two days after the paper collapsed. Al had joined the Scale sports staff the same day as Robert, but moved on to a job with the Milwaukee Journal a month before the Scale folded.

  “I heard, Rob,” Al said.

  Robert moved the phone from one ear to the other. He was in the apartment he rented on Oblong Lake. Losing his job, he didn’t see how he could afford to stay there; he was counting on a final paycheck to give him time to think, maneuver.

  “Thrips stole typewriters, pencils, paper, carbons, half a set of encyclopedias. M through Z,” Robert said. “Maybe he’s planning to start another newspaper somewhere.”

  “They’ll catch him,” Al Gasconade said.

  “Let him go,” Robert said.

  “How did you get the news?”

  “I went to work and the doors were chained. Chained. A bunch of ­people were hanging around, looking in the windows. Del Cobbler was there, wondering what paper ­people would buy. The ­people in Mozart were genuinely upset. Bophus finally arrived. He unlocked the chains and told us we could go to our desks and clean out our personal effects. No more. We had to come right back out. It was like he was running a tour through there.”

  Al Gasconade asked, “So what did you keep?”

  “My clips. A dictionary.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “What about your phone numbers? Your notes?”

  “I pitched them,” Robert said. “There was a big barrel in the center of the newsroom and we were throwing it all away. I wanted to drop a match on it to make sure. It’s over, Al. There’s nobody I want to call.”

  “You’re just down, Rob. You lost your job, I can understand it. But I’ve been showing your stuff around here—­not even your best stuff, either, I don’t want to make myself look bad—­and it knocks them out every time. They want you, Robby. If you get your résumé here they’ll hire you in a flash. But they won’t come to you.”

  Robert shifted the phone again. “No desire, Al.”

  “Give it time. You’re the best I ever read. You can’t turn your back on that.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, Al,” Robert replied, “but the paper closing has not been a bad thing. I didn’t like what I was doing and I didn’t have the nerve to quit. This has been great.”

  He heard Al take a deep breath. He was a much better writer than Al, but Al worker harder, enjoyed talking to athletes and coaches, wasn’t afraid to ask questions, loved the work. Robert’s writing talent didn’t stand a chance.

  “Give it some time, Rob,” Al Gasconade said. “Put it out of your mind for a week. Take walks. Sleep late. You sound like you’re in shock. Go to the movies. You need time to get over it.”

  “I’m over it now, Al. Believe me.”

  “Call me in a week. Better yet, I’ll call you.”

  “I’m thinking about going back to M.C. and getting my degree,” Robert said.

  “That’s the idea. Look to the future. You’ll need that degree to get another job.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” Robert said, but only to please his friend.

  He would get the science credit, and the degree, because it filled an awkward space of time and circumstance. School would allow him to stay in town, but not become conspicuous by his idleness. Everyone knew his parents; his life was monitored and reported, not in a malicious way, but as part of a natural benign disregard for privacy in a town the size of Mozart. He would go to school, then see what happened next.

  OLIVE REACHED THE front of the classroom and placed a brown paper bag o
n the desk. She and her father exchanged words, evidently instructions, for she picked up the sack and carried it through a door to the right of the blackboards.

  Robert had not seen her face. He did not know her name, her age, anything about her; only that her hair was wet in the middle of the day and she displayed a tantalizing weight shift from side to side when she walked.

  A minute remained in the class, the first of the semester. The teacher said he was an associate professor, but had asked that they call him Ben.

  At the bell, Robert went through the door into the back room, his mind and heart already setting limits on how far he would pursue the girl. If she was in the room, and pretty, he might smile at her; if she smiled back, he might say hello.

  But the room was empty except for a gray slate-­topped table and a half-­dozen turquoise plastic-­backed chairs. Coffee cups on the table and cigarettes in the cups. The girl was gone. Her briny smell was very faint, going out another door at the opposite end of the room. No sign of the teacher’s lunch. She would be awaiting the man named Ben, perhaps just beyond that second door.

  But Robert had reached the limit he had set for himself. He was pleased with himself for venturing as far as he had. The girl had moved beyond him. He wouldn’t follow.

  He ran into the teacher going back out the door.

  “Giving up already?” Ben asked.

  “I think I’m lost,” Robert said. He turned his shoulders in the doorway to slide past; he was thinner then. He was not diving in the lake, not playing tennis, not doing anything of interest to himself. He had had a job chronicling the athletic feats of others, but now that was gone. He left the room, climbed the steps, walked out of the sciences building, and home.

  The girl returned in two weeks, again with her father’s lunch. It was a hot late September day and she wore green linen shorts, a gray M.C. T-­shirt, and beach sandals that cracked against the bottoms of her feet as she descended the amphitheater stairs. She had tanned, muscular legs. Her hair was again wet and combed back, furrowed precisely as a plowed field. She said something to the teacher and he replied; then the girl turned and looked for a moment directly at Robert, and neither smiled nor glowered, but just took him in, then walked away.