Crows (18 page)

“The dreaded muskellunge,” Buzz panted. His face was red but his ears were a troubling white. Robert tried to force Buzz's ski mask back on his head but he swiveled his head madly and barked curses at Robert.

Unmoved between the shelter dimensions, the burning stove, and the excitement of the day's only catch, the cold squatted. A shiver of realization tore down Robert's spine. They had stayed too long out on that frozen table. It was nearly dark in a dangerous cold.

They would have to go soon.

Duke was looking for something in the tackle box. Buzz hauled endless taut line out of the dark hole in the ice. Duke found a pair of cutters and leaned forward and snipped Buzz's line. The air grew even colder.

Buzzard looked over at his brother. “What did you do?” he asked, not even sounding angry.

“I cut the line.”

Buzz examined the line end in his hand. A fresh skin of ice was already growing in the hole.

Duke said, “I was afraid you were bringing up Dad.”

Buzz opened the tackle box and dropped the line inside. Frozen bait balls rattled like shot in their container. Buzz didn't say a word. With a quick motion of his hand he cut the gas to the stove, killing their heat. He drew the ski mask back over his face.

They took down the shelter and carried the equipment back across the ice and repacked it in the car. The hole they had fished through was gone.

A fringe of daylight clung to the farthest rim of Oblong Lake. Robert feared they had stayed out too long. He could not see Ben's house, nor any of the familiar lights along the lake side. They might be anywhere or transformed into crystals of ice themselves and removed from the dimension they knew.

In the car, the breath they had expelled on the drive to the lake had turned to ice on the inside of the windshield. Robert and Buzz shaved this thin skin off as best they could. Robert prayed over the key, the ignition, the required spark he doubted existed. He put the key in his mouth to warm it, then dried it inside his coat, then slid it into the ignition slot. He repeated his prayer, then turned the key. God, it started like a summer's day.

S
TEPHEN, TRYING TO
fit in, arrived at 5 a.m. Christmas morning. He entered with a key given him by Ethel. He turned on the downstairs lights and the lights on the tree in the kitchen. Three trips out into the cold were required to get all his packages from the car.

His sounds downstairs awakened Robert. Olive was asleep on his arm and he couldn't move. For quite some time he lay wondering what he should do, but then the noise and the stirrings from below became so obvious he decided it couldn't be a burglar. In moments, he was asleep again.

Ethel got up and washed her face. She had passed Stephen the key on a previous night and asked him to come early Christmas morning. She was curious to see if he would give the key back at the end of the day, or use it for some future entries; she wondered if he would slip the key into the house's old lock in the days before Christmas, or if she would find him scaling Ben's birch tree to where Ben had told Stephen they slept at night. But nothing like that had happened. Stephen had none of Ben's precarious unpredictability. She appreciated this and was at times bored by it.

She went into the kitchen where he was making coffee. He smiled sleepily at her; he told her he had been up all night wrapping packages, then grading tests. He had feared going to sleep, afraid of sleeping through the magic early hours of Christmas.

Ethel crossed the floor and kissed him on the chin. She was always pleased to see him, but in his absence hardly thought of him at all. She had thought about Ben all the time, but rarely had she been glad to see him.

Stephen did not hold any flame within her. He did not pursue her. They had never been to bed. Their kisses were friendly, rewards for kind deeds or nice words, and this sometimes made her antsy with desire. He feared his teeth were going bad and chewed sugarless gum in a last bid to save them, his jaw muscles bunching and smoothing faintly, and when they kissed his breath was cool and sweet. She liked this. Also, she liked the moistness of his kisses. But always when he seemed about to move forward he would turn away to find his car key in the porch light, or to pour her more coffee, or to squeeze her shoulder and move on.

His Christmas gifts were wrapped like a jeweler might, with perfect tape and taut ribbons curled with a scissor blade. He had three presents for each person in the family except Robert, for whom he had bought nothing. He had also bought a box of jelly doughnuts. He put two on a saucer for Ethel and set them before her with her coffee.

“I expected the kids to be up by now,” he said, sitting across from her, chewing his gum, fiddling his hands.

“They're just older,” Ethel said. “I remember when they'd sit and talk in the hall at the top of the stairs from three o'clock on.” She drank coffee. The jelly doughnut's sugar-­topped lumpiness was not appealing.

“What are Rob's plans?”

“He's visiting his parents later,” she said. She saw Stephen's disappointment that Robert would be down soon with the others, one of the family.

“Why don't you like him?” Ethel asked.

“We've barely exchanged two words.”

“But you still don't like him.”

“He's a mooch,” Stephen said, “as far as I can see.”

“Ben helped him out a while back. We're in the process of getting disentangled from each other. He'll move out soon enough.”

“Do
you
like him?”

“I can't lie,” Ethel said. “He's a pain at times.
And
a mooch. But I like him.”

“The kids like him, don't they?” Stephen said.

“Now and then. Olive and he sleep together,” she said, watching his eyes for something she might use herself later, “and I think of my three kids she likes Robert the least. He does things with Duke and Buzz without making a production out of it. Ben always had to stick a big father-­son emotional flag in everything. That's because he rarely did anything with them. Consequently, he was stiff with his own boys.”

“Stiff,” Stephen echoed.

“He tried too hard,” she said. She was amazed: It was half past five and again—­for the millionth time, it seemed—­she was talking about her missing husband with this man who would not touch her beyond brotherly kisses. She said, “Because he didn't spend much time with them the time he did spend always had to be special. He tried too hard to make it special.”

They heard a thumping overhead. Then they heard water running.

“Somebody's awake,” Ethel said. She bit into the jelly doughnut and strawberry filling ran out the corners of her mouth. She set the doughnut down and worked her mouth clean with her tongue. Stephen watched all this with a mile of space between his eyes and his true thoughts.

She drank more coffee; she was abuzz now. She had to admit that she was horny. And, sadly enough, for Ben. They had always made love on Christmas day, slipping away through the battlefield of ripped paper, kids playing raptly or kids asleep, to their chilly bedroom and their electric blanket. Ben would lock the door while she shed her robe and got into bed. His erection would already be pushing against his robe, sometimes having sprung through the gap in his pajama bottoms. Sweet teacher of biology home for the moment.

She shifted in her seat. No percentage in those thoughts. She had an instant of anger at the man across from her, that he was so out of tune with her. There could be no stealing away later. She expected their every word and movement to be closely monitored. Her children feared this man would come and live with them someday.

Behind her, Duke clumped into the room, the tree lights sparkling on his crutches. He looked pale, his hair disrupted by sleep, but he shook Stephen's hand and kissed his mother's forehead and wished them both a Merry Christmas.

“You remember Mr. Rice,” Ethel said.

“Sure.”

“Call me Stephen.”

Duke leaned his crutches against the table. He was in an area where handholds were abundant and travel easy. Stephen watched him hop along the counter, getting down a glass, pouring orange juice into it. He stood for a long moment drinking.

A ­couple of times Stephen thought the boy was falling, tipping toward the side without the leg, but it was only the absence of the leg that gave the impression of a sliding away of balance.

“Where's everyone else?” Ethel asked.

Duke shrugged. “Upstairs, I guess.” He looked at the empty space where his robe lay. “I miss waiting on the stairs with Buzz and O.”

“They don't wait up anymore, honey. The sleep right through like grown-­ups. I looked in on you last night. You were asleep.”

“I was faking,” Duke said.

“It looked real to me. You were snoring.”

“It must've been somebody else.”

“I was up all night, Duke,” Stephen said. The boy looked at him with faint curiosity. “I was anxious about coming over here.”

Duke wanted to say: You could've saved us all some trouble by not bothering. But he was a gentleman and did not. His mother's friend seemed proud of staying up all night, a little kid's pride in an adult feat. The nights Duke had stayed up had been composed of hours long and cold, and not to be cherished. In the weeks after losing his leg and his father it seemed he was awake every instant of that time. He was always pushing against one pain or the other, trying to back them off him for an hour's peace.

He drank more orange juice. It did not feel like Christmas. He thought he heard birds outside, their calls sluggish with cold.

Buzzard came into the kitchen then. He was already dressed in the outfit he was most at home in: Mozart High gym shorts over sweat pants, hooded sweat shirt zipped closed over a baseball jersey. He shook Stephen's hand without enthusiasm, without looking into his eyes.

Ethel excused herself. She went up to the second floor and on the stairs to the third floor met Robert descending.

“Merry Christmas,” he said. He was dressed in layers of clothing, including one of Ben's sweaters. He was sure he could see his breath.

“Go out the front door,” Ethel said. “The Wilsons said they would be up at five. Go to their back door.”

“It's pitch dark over there,” Robert said. “I looked.”

“It's five forty-­five. They said they'd be up.”

Robert nodded. He slipped past her and went down the stairs. Ethel called in a whisper after him, “Don't let them see you leave.”

She had approached him with her plot the night before. She had held the secret within her until the last moment, knowing that was the safest way. She did not want the gift or the moment spoiled.

“And tonight, when you're in bed with Olive,” she had said to Robert, “don't tell her, either.”

And he had not.

In the darkness of the front hallway he pulled on his coat, his hat, and his gloves. He heard Stephen's voice from the kitchen; words were indistinct, but they had the tone of desperate prattle. Robert felt a moment's identification. Ben had welcomed him, but others took longer to be convinced; some held out to that very day.

He dreaded the walk across the yard in the cold. The thermometer in Olive's room had registered 49˚. When he stepped out onto the front porch the bitter air clasped those parts of his face not covered by his beard and pinched like a surly child. The air, dark yet, was motionless. When he set his foot down in the packed snow that had covered the ground since the first of November it shrieked as if in agony.

Olive had blown him the night before, her mouth glittered when she finished, she smiled and said, “Merry Christmas.” But even that had not warmed him from the cold out on the lake. Olive's warm mouth and five glasses of brandy had not melted that frozen nut at his center. He kept hearing Duke say, “I was afraid you were bringing up Dad.” And Buzz had not argued; he had admitted to the chance. Robert himself had been thinking the same thing, wondering at that horrid weight Buzz was pulling up from the lake, and was relieved at Duke's handling of the moment. The day had been at a definite end.

The dark windows of the Wilsons' house bore the flat motionlessness of early morning. He crossed the yard between the houses, his head down, his hands in his pockets. Light in the kitchen of Ben's house spread through the frost on the window and out onto the frozen ground. There was motion in the kitchen, a transfer of shadows.

At the Wilsons' back door he pressed the bell. The porch boards were slick, painted gray. The Wilsons were in their seventies and Mr. Wilson some time back had slipped somewhere behind his house and broken a finger in the fall. Ethel occasionally volunteered Robert to cut their lawn, rake their leaves, shovel their snow, but only when she felt mean and desired to wield the power she had over him.

He pressed the bell again. He did a little hop-­dance but the soft racket this produced was insufficient. He hated being awakened on cold mornings and supposed the Wilsons shared this aversion. They were tired and had forgotten their promise to Ethel and now they were asleep deep in the house.

Still, they were dealing with children, and Christmas, and the Wilsons should have understood that when they agreed to help. He hit the back door a series of solid shots. Mrs. Wilson pulled it open almost at once. She appeared at the door so abruptly she scared Robert.

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Cigar,” she said cheerfully, letting him into the warm house. She surprised him, kissing him on the nose.

“I know you've come for the kitty,” she said. “We've had so much fun with him we might not let you have him.” She giggled at this threat, then walked away from him. She opened a door and light rolled out. They descended a flight of narrow stairs. Affixed to the wall of the stairwell were bracket clasps to hold a broom, a mop, a dustpan, a shoe rack, a wooden box full of paper bags. Somewhere at the bottom of the stairs Robert heard the infant peep of the kitten.