Crows (20 page)

“Hey, Al—­I never said—­”

“It's the way you said what you said,” Al cut in. “ ‘Either I'm diving or I'm waiting to dive.' What a waste of time and ability. So I write sports. So I'm not searching for the holy grail like you think you are. ­People get enjoyment out of what I do. Can you say the same thing?”

“If I find Ben they will,” Robert said. “And I enjoy it. The water is always cold. On the hottest days of summer the water feels about two degrees away from turning to ice, but I still enjoy it.”

“You said you didn't have the desire any longer to write sports?” Al said. “As I recall, you never had the desire to do much of anything.”

“That isn't true,” Robert said, but he felt uneasy at the nearness of a truth.

“Sure, you were a good sportswriter,” Al said. “But there was always an emotional distance to your stuff. They always read at arm's length. I sensed a coldness. Did you ever notice who got the letters?”

“I got letters.”

“How many? In two years, how many?”

“I don't know.” Robert shrugged. “A dozen?”

“Bullshit. Two. You showed them both to me, you were so proud of them. I got two a week.”

“An avalanche of mail,” Robert needled. ­“People just write to you to point out errors in your stories.”

“You were afraid to make anybody mad, show some emotion. Afraid to have an opinion. Afraid to feel for anything you wrote about. ­People saw the great stylist with nothing behind him. A sheet of frosting and no cake, that was Bobby Cigar.”

“What's your point?” Robert asked.

“I don't know. I always had the feeling you weren't trying.”

Al Gasconade put the car in gear and accelerated away from the curb. Robert had thought the night was over, and perhaps his friendship with Al Gasconade as well, but now they were speeding through the empty streets guided only by the citrus glow of the parking lights.

They came to Olive's shuttered Good-­Ee Freez, then Al made a sharp turn and shot the car across the pale strip of frozen beach, between two trash barrels chained like lost lobster pots to iron posts, and out onto the ice of Oblong Lake.

Robert expected the ice to shiver, groan, and break open beneath them. But it did not, and the tires bit by bit took hold and soon they were flying across the perfect surface.

Al cut the wheel, laughing, to produce long triple-­jointed spins that disoriented Robert. The lights along the shore spun into a ring that circled his head. Al pulled them out of the spin just as Robert began to feel sick. They were moving forward again. They seemed to go for miles across the ice. When they were within a hundred yards of an iced pier Al began a long, wide turn like a boat dropping a skier on the shore.

“What are you doing, Al?”

“I wanted to prove to you that you're wasting your time,” Al Gasconade said. He kept his eyes on Robert for nearly a half minute, the car just skimming over the ice, heading back. “You're wasting your life,” Al said, “if all you want to do is look for this guy.”

“It's not yours to say, Al.”

“This is ice we're driving on! For how long—­eight months?—­out of your year you can't pursue the one thing you state you have any desire to do. You were such a great sportswriter! And now you work in a sporting goods store and dive for this dead teacher.”

“Don't get mad,” Robert said. “It's not worth it. It's not your business. It's something I really want to do. It's something I
try
at.”

Al Gasconade slowed the car and then they rolled back off the ice and up onto the snowy beach. Then they were on the street again, heading for home. Robert showed Al the way to Ben's house.

“Out there,” Al said, “did you see him?”

“Just now? No,” Robert replied. But skating through the dark in the green bubble, he had felt Ben must have known he was nearby, and steadfast.

T
HE HOUSE WAS
full of music on New Year's Eve, and everyone danced, even Duke. He allowed his mother to whirl him in loose circles over the kitchen tiles. He spun on one foot, his hands on her shoulders. The music, the spins, the champagne in plastic stemmed glasses made him dizzy and, later, sick in the whirling oval of the toilet.

Duke with Ethel, Ethel with Stephen, Robert with Olive, Stephen with Olive, Buzz with Ethel; and when he was full of champagne and a giddy, fizzy bravado Buzzard asked Stephen to dance and they cut a series of lumbering steps over the floor. They were nearly the same height, Buzz's lean frame boyish next to the softened contours of the older man. Buzz led. Everyone laughed.

Robert with Ethel. She asked him, first filling his glass with pink liquid effervescence as he sat like an Indian on the counter in his ref's shirt. He had worked all day and skipped dinner and the champagne flew to his head. Olive, when he held her to dance, seemed encased in a cushioning bag of air. He was losing feeling in his fingertips. But Ethel took his hand and he set down his glass and unfurled off the counter as the music came up.

She was a deft enough dancer to keep out of the way of his lurching arrhythmia. She seemed to spin clear of him at the right moments like a clairvoyant running back. She guided him to the table and forced him to eat crackers decorated with flowery peaks of cheese to absorb the champagne. Stephen cut in, leaving Robert free.

Buzz danced with his sister. They looked good together, Ben's kids. Robert stole away down the hall and looked in on Duke. He lay on his back, arms and legs outstretched as if to float on the sea of champagne and vomit that had carried him to bed. He slept with sucking intakes of air, these released with soft whimpers of discomfort. He would hurt in the morning. He rolled to one side and for a moment, like a doll whose head carried a counterweight for waking and sleeping, his eyes opened. Another hour remained in the year.

One song had ended and another begun by the time Robert returned. Ethel was sitting on Buzz's lap. Stephen and Olive danced. Stephen was not a good dancer, Robert decided. But he managed to keep Olive occupied, which was more than Robert could manage. He wondered idly if Stephen felt that layer of air that surrounded her.

The music was full of pianos, horns, and strings. It had a nostalgic quality of distant sadness that was of no immediate danger; it could be enjoyed for the sake of regret at the death of a year, but a year forty years gone. Stephen had picked the radio station and nobody complained.

Robert took a new bottle of champagne from the refrigerator. He filled his own glass and everyone else's. The glasses were the sort that could be disassembled, bowl and stem; they could be washed and stacked back in their plastic sleeve; but Robert doubted that ever happened. They felt so cheap they dictated being thrown away.

Robert took his glass of champagne and left the party again. He went to the living room at the front of the house. Two lights were on there. It was quiet in that room, chilly after the kitchen, which had been steamed with the friction of dance and champagne.

He took a seat on the couch. He balanced his glass on the arm of the couch and for several minutes watched the ascent of pinhead bubbles up through the champagne. They reached the surface and moved horizontally across it a ways, each bubble pushed by the one behind, before popping.

He was chilly suddenly. It was that kind of house, that kind of winter. One below for the day's high temperature. A frozen pipe in the third-­floor bathroom had created problems and expense the day before. Robert helped pay for the plumber; Stephen helped also, making a show of his check, which was pale brown with geese in a V-­flight printed on it. The plumber took money all around. He seemed glad to have made their acquaintance; and in leaving, in a strange shuffling of departure at the back door not unlike awkward mingling on a dance floor, he appeared to kiss Ethel's hand.

Robert found a sweater of Ben's in the hall closet and put it on. He drank champagne and that warmed him also.

Stephen came to the entrance to the living room. Robert expected the man to see him and turn back. They were always avoiding each other, one moving away at the sight of the other.

But now Stephen took a seat at the far end of the couch from Robert. He set his champagne on the end table and turned on the lamp there. For some time he just sat, saying nothing, then he looked at his watch.

“Thirty minutes to go,” he said.

“I'm always a little sad this time of year,” Robert admitted, made voluble by unease. “A year is going and we'll never see that year again.”

“A good time for a change, don't you think?” Stephen asked.

“I never make resolutions.”

“Maybe you should.”

Robert, sensing a fight, stiffened. He found he enjoyed the sensation; the bristling of his neck, the quick pump of heat and champagne, the sudden clarity of dislike for this soft, pale man trying to worm into Ben's place.

“What should I resolve?” Robert asked.

Stephen sat up straight, turning his body toward Robert. He, likewise, had caught something in Robert's voice and was rising to it.

“If I were you, I'd resolve to quit being a parasite and quit bothering Ethel and her family,” Stephen said.

“That's quite a resolution.”

“Furthermore, I'd resolve to sleep in my own bed, treat Olive with a little respect—­not like some tramp—­and not subject Ethel to the embarrassment of you staying in her daughter's room every night.”

“Gee, Steve, you sound like you thought all this up ahead of time. Did Ethel put you up to this?”

“I know how Ethel feels,” he said. “She's too polite to say these things. She's too polite to kick you out.”

“But you're not,” Robert said.

“Oh, if only I had that power,” Stephen said, rubbing his hands.

“What about your resolutions?” Robert said. “Lose weight? Grow a personality? Grow a sense of humor?”

Stephen sipped his champagne, staring straight ahead. Robert felt cornered. He did not think he could get to this man; he did not know him well enough.

“I plan to ask Ethel to marry me,” Stephen said. “And when she—­”

“No chance.”

“And when she accepts and we marry, I plan to adopt her three children,” he continued. “And believe me, you will be
long
gone by then.”

“Won't happen, Steve. Adopt them? You're a laughingstock to them as it is.”

Stephen remained calm. Robert felt himself start to panic, wondering how to defend against the man. If he was Ethel's instrument in removing him, Robert had no chance; but Robert could not tell who was behind this scene.

“More than anything, I want you out of here,” Stephen said. “It is my fondest wish for the new year that you remove your leeching self from this house as soon as possible.”

Robert stood. “We'll see,” he said. “Ethel?” he called.

Stephen said, “Don't involve her!”

Robert was thrilled by the breaking apart of the man's calm. It told him so much. He called, “Ethel? Can you come here? O? Buzz?”

They came curiously down the hall, the light at their back turning them into tipsy advancing shadows. Stephen shaded his eyes with both hands, his elbows out like wings.

“Steve and I have been talking,” Robert said.

“A private conversation,” Stephen said from under the canopy of his hands.

“Steverino wants me gone. He wants in.”

In the final minutes of the year they heard Duke cry in his sleep; thinking of Ben? Drunk in a boat on the lake?

Ethel placed herself on the couch between the two men. Buzz and Olive stood close together, their champagne glasses balanced before them.

Robert almost said to Olive: He called you a tramp. But he saw no point in that. He had won easily already. He was a member of the family.

“Are you fighting over me?” Ethel teased.

“Not you,” Robert said.
“Here.”
He swept his hand to take in the cold room. “My home. Steve wants to get me out of
my
home so he can marry you and adopt the kids.”

Sometime in those moments, Olive and Buzzard left the room. Ethel, patient, maybe frightened, asked Stephen, “Is that true?”

“We've talked about it.”

“You and me? Marriage? Adoption?”

Stephen, shrunken, said, “Not specifics. But we've discussed the future.”

“The kids are grown,” Ethel said. “They're Ben's kids.”

“Ben was a philanderer,” Stephen blurted. “He was a mediocre teacher, a cheat, and you all treat him like some sort of god.”

“You've got your fucking nerve,” Robert said.

Ethel slapped his leg. “Take a hike,” she ordered. “I want to talk to Stephen alone.”

Robert went to the doorway and turned. He flipped his empty, cheap glass in the air and caught it. Stephen looked at him.

“I'm not sorry,” Robert said. “You moved too soon. You
asked
for it.”

Sometime around midnight, in the warm nest of the kitchen, Robert, Olive, and Buzz heard the front door open and close. Cold air passed among them like an attentive hostess. Ethel came to the kitchen to say good night, then disappeared. Duke cried out again in his sleep. When they looked at the clock the new year was eleven minutes old.

 

R
OBERT REMEMBERED THE
first day of the new year for its parades and football games; and for the persistent champagne headache behind the upper curve of his forehead. But the other days of January passed in a deadening cold chunk memorable only for their historic low temperatures.

Ethel drove her cab; she was busy and making good money. Her cab ran dependably, which could not be said for many of the cars in Mozart. Her customers, delivered through winter's perils to their destinations, were grateful with tips.

Robert worked at SportsHeaven. Not a day of the month passed that he did not punch in at the store and work. He liked the money, the quiet of slack hours, the occasional spurts of busyness, Joe Marsh, the being employed.

Olive, in the suit Robert gave her for Christmas, began to swim each day in the Mozart College pool. She refused to rise early in the morning, it reminded her too much of the regimen of training, but she gladly stayed after her classes were over to swim laps. The pool was forty years old. Mosaics of dark green, blue, and coral tile squares, arranged in the shapes of slender young men and women, running, catching, reposing, were built into the walls of the natatorium. The floor of the pool was an elaborate tiled scene of three wolves, a gang, sitting, waiting, holding their breaths. Olive dove into the cold green water promptly at 4 p.m. and swam without pause for one hour. Then she emerged to wrap herself in a scratchy towel and tilt her head to one side, then the other, to empty the water from her ears.

She felt at first that in her time away from swimming she had grown some hidden anchors that dragged behind her, holding her back. Her breasts, though small, felt enlarged and hung beneath her like two soft keels grabbing at the water, in danger of being nipped by the wolves. She felt uncoordinated and fat.

But with two weeks of consistent work she sensed herself beginning to knife through the water, as in the days when she raced. A simplicity returned to her stroke. Her muscles tightened and obstacles to efficient swimming fell away. She was becoming fast again.

This hour of swimming each day left her ravenous for dinner. She hurried home through the cold; her hair, the tips frozen into spikes outside the knit cap she wore, reminded Robert of the days when they had first met, smelling of chlorine and baby shampoo.

After one swim, she was approached by a man in a maroon sweat suit who asked her to join the M.C. women's swim team. He had surreptitiously timed her and liked what he had learned. Without hard training, she was already faster than all but two of the girls on the team. When she told him her name he smiled and admitted to knowing it. He knew her swimming; he also had heard about her father, though it was his first year at M.C. His eyes traveled the boundary of her left shoulder, her face, her right shoulder. She admitted to a reluctance to begin serious swimming again. He had no answer for that; he didn't want her if she had doubts about her willingness to work. She asked if there was any scholarship money in his offer and he said he would look into it. Olive said she would think about it.

She changed in the locker room, bundled in her coat, scarf, and hat, and stepped out into the cold. The moon was crisp in the sky, frost ferns shading the man's wide-­mouthed face. Oblong Lake was a flat sheet of darkness and crossing it would cut her trip home in half. But she could not manage it. The ice, a foot thick, nevertheless would feel too tenuous. She walked the lake road home; toward the end she flagged a ride with a girl she knew from high school, and cherished the two hundred yards the girl took her, her hands cupped like a catcher's toward the heater's seductive pitch.

There existed in the family a certain grimly uplifting determination to waiting out the winter. The end was not in sight; the pure evidence of the calendar made looking ahead to spring a foolish thing. Robert thought it was something like hibernation. He felt his soul turned down a notch like a gas flame. Huddled in blankets, reading, playing checkers, dozing, the TV an electric hum, entire evenings would pass without conversation of any consequence passing among them. Getting through the day was reward in itself. They were engaged in a march against winter's grip.

But in the middle days of February Robert began to look forward to the distant warm days. There was no sign of them anywhere except in the imperceptible diurnal extending of light, but March was next, then fickle April, and by then the ice skin on Oblong Lake would start to break apart.

Robert cherished these facts while ignoring the day's high (–2˚) and the snow that had hidden the ground since Halloween. He allowed himself to hope and plan.

Consequently, within seventy-­two hours he was crazy with hatred for winter, for the old, cold house, for those who shared the house's meager warm spaces with him, and for the creeping implacability of the season. He had awakened too soon.

He rose from his kitchen chair and folded the comforter he had been wrapped in and carefully set it on the seat. Olive watched him with only the faintest curiosity. Ethel did not look up from her undertaking of counting tips out onto the table, stacking coins and dollar bills and marking them on a ledger sheet. Duke read. Buzz held his arm motionless against his side; he had thrown three pitches in the net cage that day at school, each throw hurting more than the previous one.

Robert dressed in his coat and hat and left the house. That nobody asked where he was bound was not a sign of lack of care. The others had managed to avoid looking forward to the end of winter. When Robert spoke of his plans for spring and the dwindling days until that time, they asked him politely to keep quiet. They did not dare look at him when they asked this; he might take them along if they looked in his eyes. He was paying now for his anticipation, while their souls burned at a cooler, safer pitch.

Robert struck off down the plowed road and when he reached the lake he walked across it toward the M.C. campus. It was a place to go, that was all. He expected only the solace of motion. Winter did provide a certain ease of travel. The pure geometry of a straight line cut in half the time required to get to the other side of Oblong Lake. He made long sliding tracks in the snow that covered the ice. In places where the wind had brushed the snow down he cut blue-­black ribbons of ice behind him.

He stepped off the far side onto a beach owned by the college. In his student days he had never once used it. The kids who lazed in the warm sand or ventured out into the cold water always appeared to possess advanced social skills he despaired of ever developing. He was by then a sportswriter, and already the doom of that life was eating into him. He had not yet met Ben, who would turn him loose.

He sidestepped awkwardly up a hill slick with ice and snow. The campus was deserted. The lights in the windows appeared preventive; turned on to make ­people think someone was home.

Rapist's Woods looked stripped and embarrassed. Without leaves to darken the air they held, the trees were scrawny and shamefaced. The streetlight erected for safe passage through the wood was not lit. The trash basket next to the bench was turned half over, caught by drifted snow in the midst of falling.

The walk leading to the sciences building had been swept clean with a broom and the broom stuck handle first into a snowdrift by the door. It reminded Robert of a hand raised in greeting.

There were no students in the long hallway. He recalled his own school days in deep winter, when that bearish lethargy took hold of him and most of his friends. Sleep beneath thick covers became cherished and unassailable. Trips to class were like Arctic expeditions. He filled his pockets with pieces of chocolate and red bags of raisins and wrapped himself in garments until only his eyes were showing, then he put on sunglasses. Often when he reached class he learned that the teacher, seized by the same winter ennui, had not bothered to come.

He climbed the stairs to Ben's old office. He met no one along the way. The office was locked and dark. A student had taped a note to the door:
PROF. MASON . . . HAVE BAD STREP THROAT . . . MUST MISS EXAM . . . MAKE-­UP POSSIBLE? WILL CALL. O. HEDDIFF. SEC 3-­A.

“I'll bet,” Robert muttered. O. Heddiff was taking a chance leaving a note in the heart of winter where anyone could get at it.

He left a note of his own:
ANY CROW TALES? CALL ROBERT. A FRIEND OF BEN'S.
675-­5227.
PLEASE.

His hope was that the woman would return while he stood outside her office door. He did not want to go home to wait for her to call. But after a half hour, Professor Mason had not appeared. He feared that she too was holed up at home for the winter; teachers and students, disgusted with their lots, passing bogus notes back and forth to each other, neither knowing the other had also gone into hiding.

Robert went down the stairs and back outside. Across the wide white sweep of the campus not a single person moved. Wind picked up snow and threw it against vertical surfaces with the solid pattering of sand.

He headed for home. The wind was at his back and he progressed easily across the campus to the lake. His exertion kept him warm and he found he liked it out there on the ice. The wind had blown his tracks from the first crossing faint; they were straight as smoke rising on a calm day, testament to his determination to be in out of the cold.

Feeling fine, warm, he altered his course slightly, heading for the Cow and the Calf. The Calf, that low flat plate of stone, was covered with snow. Only a rise in the plane of the lake, and memory, told him of its presence.

The Cow had high sheer sides glazed with thin ice. It felt grainy to Robert's touch. He had never been on the Cow; very few ­people had. The Calf's smooth accessibility, the way it lay like a griddle for the summer sunbathers, made the difficult climb onto the Cow unnecessary. It was a graceless hump of stone thirty feet higher than the water level. Scratchy pines grew like wild hairs in the creases of the rock.

Robert walked all around the island looking for a way up. Already the cold was worming back into him. He allowed himself one orbit of the hunched rock and found on the side away from Ben's house (which comforted him with its green book shape) a narrow foothold that led up to another narrower foothold. From there he grabbed a pine branch and pulled himself up the icy face, and onto the Cow.

And once up, he wondered why he had bothered. He had thought he might find some clue to Ben, or Ben himself. But there was nothing; not even the litter of picnickers. The thin pines hastened the impression of darkness. They turned the wind into sad music. The surface of the Cow was not level at any one place, and with its icy casing made him feel he could slide off at any moment.

He looked for the way down, shivering. He could not find the small steps in the rock he had taken up. Reaching blindly with his foot for a purchase, he started to slip. No pines came forward to be clutched. The rock scraped ferociously along the inside of his lead leg. Then he went over the side. In summer he would have torn his body badly, scraping it, plunging into the cold water and cracking his bones on the rocks just below the surface.

But in winter the fall was short and the ice held. He hit with a jolt that cut his tongue; Ben might have heard the thud. Some muscle in that warm, lightless meeting place of legs, buttocks, and testicles was stretched or torn and it hurt to walk. It would ache in the morning and exhibit a bruise that Olive, but not Robert, could see.

When he reached home limping he was told a Professor Mason had called for him while he was out.

S
HE WAS WAITING
for him in a booth of the restaurant the following day. The gray sweater she wore had a collar tugged so slack with use that it hung almost like a bib, specks of white ash caught in it. She was smoking and drinking coffee and appeared utterly comfortable with herself, her clothes, her surroundings. She smiled when she saw Robert, half rose to shake his hand, then hooked ash blond hair behind her ears.

“I'm glad you left that note,” she said at once.

He smiled and lowered himself gingerly into the booth. He had limped down the restaurant aisle, full of an odd anxiety, a sense he was on display; thinking everyone knew his reason for being there, everyone knew this woman, everyone knew Ben and the crow tales, everyone knew everything.

“I pulled a muscle yesterday,” Robert explained, when the woman remarked with her eyes on his careful motion.

“Too bad.”

Her eyes matched her sweater; the same gray, and somehow pulled out of shape.

She jabbed out a cigarette and lit another.

“You'd be surprised how many kids just drop around,” she said. “Some claim to not know he's dead. Others just stand in the doorway and look around. Take in the essence. It's sad. They make me miss him again.”

Robert glanced out the window. The temperature that day at noon was exactly 0˚.

“I was told a while ago that he was a mediocre teacher,” Robert said. “Also that he was a cheat. And—­” He forced his voice to be still, let the last charge die. “If so, why do students come to see him now?”

“He was a charming man,” the woman said. “That is a poor assessment, but it's the best I can do.”

“Was he a bad teacher?”

“Not
bad.
There were better teachers, teachers who got the material across more effectively. But do students visit their offices like they're shrines? I doubt it sincerely.”

She exhaled smoke. Robert became lost in it, coughed. She said, “I get to work in the morning sometimes and find the lock picked. I've had it changed three times.”

“Are things missing?”

“
His
things,” she said. “They are respectful, though, these thieves. They don't empty the shrine. They just take one or two things, maybe a grade book or an old petri dish or a water glass. They're understanding.”

“Maybe it's one person cleaning you out a little at a time.”