Crows (26 page)

“I don't buy that,” Robert said.

Herm laughed. “What a saint! Why do you feel sorry for him? Maybe I should, too.”

“What else has he got? He's an old ex-­basketball star with no job skills. He knows he's just hanging on here. Why do you think he talks about his sex life so much?”

“Why?”

“It's like basketball. It's just play-­by-­play of something in his present life he's good at.”

“I don't know about that,” Herm said. “But even if it is true, I
can't
feel sorry for him. He's not working out. I've let it ride too long as it is.”

“Is it true you built this store for him?”

Herm's eyes widened. “He tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“I had plans for a Mozart store when Joe Marsh was in junior high school. The answer is no. I enjoyed watching the goon play and when I heard he needed a job after the Bucks cut him I had an opening here. He trained for a month in the Milwaukee store and the ­people there—­four years ago—­had doubts about him. But he's got charm and I thought he'd come around. Now, either he's not here when he's supposed to be, or he is, and he is wearing that damned bandoleer.”

Robert recalled that airy sense of rightness in Joe Marsh's eyes and hands, his entire body, when he shot the paper balls at the wastebasket. Was that the only time he had a purpose to himself? Shooting imaginary baskets and making love to his wife?

Robert took up his pencil. “I'm going to have to run you out, Herm. I've got a lot of work to do.”

“Sure.” He positioned the Russian hat on his head. “Even
that
I like. For you, it's work to do. With Joe, it's PR. When I'm here he'd regale me for nine hours with his basketball stories. How he beat Ripon. How he beat the Badgers. How he snubbed Marquette. How he almost made the Bucks. But you, you have work to do.”

Herm picked Joe Marsh's bandoleer off the peg and hooked it over one shoulder.

“Tell Joe to come see me,” he said. “We have to talk.”

And he departed, flakes of tobacco and the smell of dried meat trailing after him.

I
N THE EMPTINESS
of the locked blue store the phone's ring, its winking yellow panel light, made Robert jump and lose his place in the night's receipts. At first, he was not going to answer it. The time was past midnight, the store had been closed two hours. He did not want to talk to anyone. He wanted to finish and take his wet suit home to try on and impress Olive, maybe the others.

But the phone rang on and he snatched it up. A woman was on the other end; she spoke in a hushed voice, as if she had nothing to hide. “I thought you might still be there.”

“Olive? Ara?”

“What funny names for the women in your life, Robert.”

“Who is this?”

“Did you tell Joe you caught me shoplifting?”

He closed his eyes. He saw the slim hand parting the curtain; the spoon ring and pink nails. “No,” he said. “No reason to. I didn't know you at the time.”

“Will you tell him now?” she asked.

He saw her in the farthest corner of their apartment, Joe asleep, the light by the phone the only light. The image of the hand slipped free and all that remained in his imagination were the faceless sexual contortions her husband had put there.

“No, I won't,” he said.

“Will you tell him what I offered you?”

“No.”

“How can I be sure?” The teasing edge he heard in her voice he consigned to his imagination. But he thought:
Poor Joe.

“Trust me. I don't want to hurt you or Joe,” he said.

“Call me Debby. If you don't, I'll steal you blind.”

Robert asked, “Is Joe handy?”

“No. He fell asleep.”

“It can wait,” he said. He had been about to tell about Herm's visit, and Herm's request to have Joe see him. But the news would only ruin Joe's sleep, and Robert's desire to hurry Joe's fate was based on only a sudden overwhelming urge to be clear of this woman.

 

O
BLONG
L
AKE'S ICE
began to break apart in the early days of April. Robert could hear the groans and booms of separation from his room on the fourth floor of Ben's house. Winter had ceased and Olive was on the Mozart College women's swimming team. She studied and she swam, and she had no time for Robert; she had just locked the door to her room the night before her first morning practice, while Robert was at work, first setting the few belongings he had brought to her room in the hall. He took clean sheets and blankets to his old room and made the bed, and slept remarkably well for the solitude and for missing Olive. He regretted also his sense of everything's being done for the last time. He would not pass another winter at Olive's side, he guessed; he might never sleep with her again. More important, Ethel would be sure he was not there when winter came round again.

He sometimes awoke to Olive's alarm in the darkness at 5 a.m. She was quick to rise and brush her teeth and gather her things. She drank a glass of milk in the kitchen, meeting her mother there; they would talk in low voices, a house of sleeping men around them. For breakfast, Olive ate a small, sweet brick of fruits and grains provided by the coach to every girl on the team. This seemed to rest in her stomach for the next hour, then burn off like honey as she swam. The cold outside completed her awakening.

The swimmers would change in silence at that hour. They stripped off their clothes and got into their silken suits and rubber caps and goggles, as if in a race to enter an element that was horrid but yielding, knowing there was warmth in work. The coach smiled mockingly at them as they emerged blinking into the natatorium, where the wolves at the bottom looked up at them with wavering eyes.

He worked Olive hardest right from the start, because she had joined late and because she had some talent. He sent her twenty-­five lengths beyond what the other girls were required to do, and hounded her again and again about her technique off the block, where she would unaccountably throw her butt up during the thrusting dive into the water, as if trying to catch a braking wind. When practice ended for the others, Olive was made to stay, to swim fifty extra lengths, to prove to the coach she had gotten over her expressed reluctance to work hard.

She came home from these sessions weary and discouraged. Her hair seemed to be wet all the time now. The ends split like rivers dividing.

“All we do is swim,” she complained one late night, as if surprised. “Laps and laps. He walks along the side with his whistle in his mouth criticizing. I finished one lap and at the turn he was waiting—­kneeling there waiting—­and when I raised my head up to start back he yanked off my cap. He asked me very sarcastically when that day's practice began for me.”

Another night, Olive was crying when she got home.

“He won't let me race,” she sobbed, her eyes so red from tears and chlorine they looked like gashes in her face. “He says I haven't earned it.”

But on Friday night in early April, Robert, Ethel, and the boys drove to M.C. to watch her swim in her first meet. The bleachers that ringed the pool were up a floor, and sparsely occupied. A coach's whispered instructions were clear to everyone who cared to listen. The air was hot and tropical, nearly green with the smell of chlorine, mildew, and the possibility of sudden growth.

Olive, in her green and gold M.C. sweat shirt, a green swim cap atop her head, saw her family in the bleachers and raised a hand in greeting. To Robert, her bare legs looked packed with muscles, and he knew from those rare times Olive let him touch her that her shoulders, arms, and back were wound tight and smooth. The team had won two inconsequential meets since she had joined it, and she had not been allowed to swim in either. The coach was again testing her limits, gauging how hard she was willing to work for the right to race. He felt with Olive Ladysmith he was holding her back, stoking her eagerness, and he would let her loose tonight, the first meet on the conference schedule.

She stepped up onto the block at the start of her first event—­a sprint, four lengths of the pool—­as if to accept a medal. She shook out her arms. She filled her chest with the moist air and released it. The wolves watched. She bent at the waist until she was grabbing her ankles, and stayed there for long seconds, flexing her legs.

A hair ahead of the starter's gun, she was off. She stretched out over the green pool, a blur of determination, and as she cracked the water the second shot signaling a false start rang off the tiles. Buzz and Duke stood and cheered.

“I like her aggressiveness,” Duke said. “She's
ready.
”

Afraid of a second false start, Olive was last off the blocks, and hit the water in eighth place. But she was immediately strong and smooth. Her stroke impressed Robert with its compact efficiency and when she turned at the wall she was in fifth place.

“She's bringing them back to her,” Robert said.

Ethel's fist pounded his thigh. Olive turned, halfway home, in fourth place.

The meet was against St. Burt's of the Woods College, a small girls' school 150 miles north of Mozart. They fielded good athletic teams because the girls had nothing else to do in the winter and sports was a way to keep warm. Their lead swimmer was a long, lean girl named Hughes, who made the last turn of the race a body length in front of Olive.

The small crowd in that hot chamber pushed at the thick green air with their cries of wonder and encouragement. Olive and Hughes, in lanes side by side, stroked down toward the end, where officials in white shirts knelt with their stopwatches poised to cut the string of time the girls were weaving.

Ten yards from the finish, Robert said to no one, because no one could hear him, “She's got it.”

Olive's lead hand was digging just ahead of Hughes, who in the midst of such a close race gave one too many thoughts of the mechanics of her stroke and hitched for the instant that sprung Olive loose to slap the wall a solid half-­second before her.

Olive leaned over the string of green and yellow floats that divided the lanes and shook hands with Hughes, then they hugged. Then Olive turned and blew a kiss up to her family.

A
YOUNG GIRL
fell through the weakened ice of Oblong Lake while skating in the dark. She was an M.C. student, drunk, possessed of a desire for the sensation of flight. Her friends helped her into her skates, then stood on the M.C. beach and shouted encouragement as the girl spun and glided over the crackling ice. She skated onto a spot already low and slushy and, to her friends on the beach, appeared to be chopped in half as she plunged in up to her waist. Her first scream was half a laugh of disbelief. She pushed on the ice around her and it broke easily under her hands. She dropped in up to her chest, and there her feet touched bottom. That was all that saved her; her proximity to the shore and the fact the lake in that spot did not drop off for another ten yards out.

From his fourth-­floor room Robert saw the lights of the ambulance and fire engines at the edge of Oblong Lake. He wondered if Ben had turned up unexpectedly. The telephone rang minutes later and Robert was certain they were calling to tell Ethel Ben had been found. Robert sat waiting in his room and found himself praying that Ben stayed put. Ethel's quick steps rose toward him through the house. Coming to tell him first, knowing it would turn his life around, she climbed the flights of stairs until she reached his room, slightly winded, and said Olive had fallen through the ice and was at that moment in the Mozart County Hospital emergency room.

They sped through the empty streets made treacherous by the nightly freezing of the water produced by the thaw. Ethel was silent and contained. She did not reveal anything beyond the fact Olive was expected to survive.

“This doesn't seem like O,” Robert ventured.

“She was excited about winning tonight,” she said. “She was celebrating. You can't blame her for that.”

He held Ethel's arm passing through the harsh, icy light of the emergency room waiting area, his hope being they would be regarded as a pair, granting him passage with the mother into the inner rooms where Olive lay. Automatic doors hissed open before them. The room had six beds separated by green curtains on overhead tracks. Five of the beds were empty, their sheets taut and crisp. Olive was in the bed nearest the nurses' station. Her face was bluish around the lips and eyelids. A bubble of saliva shivered in the corner of her mouth. The pink blanket covering her rose and fell gently as she slept.

A doctor came to the side of the bed. “She's going to be fine,” he said. “She's an exceptionally strong girl. From what we could gather from her friends she fell through the ice and then literally walked back to shore, just breaking through the ice as she went. We'd like to keep her overnight. Just to keep an eye on her.”

“She's a swimmer,” Ethel said.

The doctor took this in without comment.

“Any frostbite?” Robert asked.

“We don't think so. She does have a sprained ankle. We think she twisted it running drunk on skates to a warm car.”

“She was drunk?” Robert said.

“Still is. She's knocked out.”

Ethel had her hand on her daughter's cheek. “She's very warm.”

“That's the blood at her skin attempting to warm her,” the doctor said. “I don't want to minimize this. On the other hand, I don't want to alarm you. Your daughter is very lucky. If she hadn't touched bottom she very likely would have drowned and the fire department would be looking for her body. Her friends were in no condition to rescue her. They were barely able to call the police. In her state, with skates on her feet, and fifty feet of cold water beneath her, she was a goner but for a fortuitous set of circumstances.”

Robert had to leave, to go out into the icy light of the waiting area; he kept seeing the seal-­slick skins of the fire department divers looking for Ben, imagined them doing the same for Olive. Would they give it more than three days?

When Robert returned, a woman in a pale green smock with a heart-­shaped blood-­red pin over one breast approached Ethel with forms to be filled out. They conferred with heads bowed almost piously toward one another, their voices dry and soft as wind in a distant grove. The woman printed very slowly and Ethel was patient, looking at Olive as she answered each question.

Finally the woman had learned all she needed and departed. Robert touched Ethel's shoulder.

“Let's go home, Eth,” he whispered.

“I want to stay.”

“The boys'll be worrying. O's fine. They won't let you stay. She'll wake up in the morning with the worst cold and the worst hangover she's ever had. She won't want you around for that.”

“You make a lot of sense,” Ethel said.

Robert found the doctor, who confirmed to Ethel that the night's danger had passed, that Olive was merely in an expensive drunken sleep.

“She'll wish she'd died in the morning,” the doctor said, and grinned as though that was hilarious.

They each kissed Olive good night on the warm curve of her forehead. Robert thought he could taste the lake on her skin. Back through the waiting room light, Robert held Ethel's arm again.

Buzz and Duke were waiting in the kitchen when they returned home. The coffee Ethel had been about to drink when the call came sat untouched, cooled, a meniscus of crusted cream atop it. A game of checkers was set between the brothers, but no moves had been made. An electric cord ran off Buzzard to the wall outlet, powering the heating pad he kept on his sore arm. Duke stood on one leg.

“She's fine,” Ethel reported evenly. “She did a foolish thing—­” She paused to unstick her voice. “A stupid thing. It backfired on her, but she will be fine.”

“You said she's fine
now
,” Buzz challenged.

“She's sleeping, Buzzard. She's drunk. She's fine, though. Believe me. There's nothing to worry about.” She kissed her sons. She would have to awaken soon to drive her cab. Before going up to bed, she admonished her sons, “Stay away from that lake, you understand?”

“I never go near it,” Buzz said.

Duke said nothing. She glared at Robert before leaving the room; Oblong Lake had taken her husband, and that night had nearly taken her daughter. She had seen Robert's new wet suit. She knew he would be diving again soon, but she left without a word to him, though her eyes were full of a scolding light.

Buzz asked Robert, “What happened?”

“She got drunk and went skating on the lake,” he replied. “She fell through the ice.”

“What an idiot.”

Duke stared at the squared board, his finger on a red checker.

“You want to play?” Robert asked. Duke drew his finger back.

“You can hear the ice breaking apart all over town,” Buzz said. “Why was she so stupid?”

“She was drunk. Maybe she forgot. The winter was so cold—­maybe she thought the ice would hold through June.”

“It's typical,” Duke said bitterly. “She has a night of triumph—­wins four races and the meet—­then screws it up with this.”

Buzz disconnected himself from the wall outlet. He reminded Robert of a Roman emperor, with his robe and his heating pad draped over his shoulder.

“How's the arm?”

Buzz shrugged and left the room.

Robert poured glasses of milk for himself and Duke. The boy stayed in his chair, but he would not look at Robert.

Robert pushed a checker out onto the board. This initiative freed Duke to respond and they played a game, then another, splitting, without exchanging a word.

When Duke yawned and shifted in his chair, Robert asked, “Why don't you have your new leg yet?”

“I have to go to a doctor and have it fitted.”

“So? Have it fitted.”

“I'm still growing, too,” Duke complained. “In six months I'll need a new leg.” He slapped angrily through the emptiness of his pajama leg, striking the chair.