Crows (28 page)

“What's the pay?” Buzz asked.

“About four an hour.”

Buzz ran hot water on the razor. He drew the blue blade with an extended scraping action over the pink flats of his cheeks. He was taller than Robert, wider in the shoulders, feathery hair at the center of his chest.

“Do we have to wear those half-­assed zebra suits?”

“Yes.”

“I'll do it,” Duke said. He had gotten to his foot. He was full of excitement, bobbing there in the hall, and then touching a finger to the wall for balance.

“First,” Robert said, “get your artificial leg.”

Duke whipped an open hand out and caught Robert's shoulder. The slap rang in the hall, but did not hurt. Duke was thrown off balance, but Robert steadied him.

“This was just a sneaky trick to get me to wear that fucking phony leg!”

“Yes,” Robert said. “On your crutch you'd only get half as much done as you would with both hands free.”

“I won't do it,” Duke said.

“What do I have to do?” Buzz asked.

“Nothing. Just come to work when you're supposed to.”

“That's not fair,” Duke said. “He's getting off easy.”

“He's not hiding from something like you are.”

“Are you done?” Duke snarled at Buzz.

Buzz washed his face and dried it with a hand towel. He put his razor back in the medicine cabinet, whose four glass shelves were glutted with the boys' things and Ethel's and Olive's myriad equipment, rolled tubes and colored pots, as well as Ben's double-­blade razor packed with cut whiskers and dried soap, his stick deodorant and his toothbrush. Nobody dared throw them out.

“Now I'm finished,” Buzz said. Duke shoved past and slammed and locked the door.

“Why are you doing this?” Buzz asked.

“Because I want to. Because I'm
able
to. I'm giving my father a job, too.”

“What about Mom and Olive?”

“Hell,” Robert said, “I'll give
them
jobs, too, if they ask for them.”

“You have that many openings?”

“Openings can be made. If you're interested, stop in after school. We'll fit you out in a zebra suit.”

“Baseball practice,” Buzz said. “I've got baseball practice.”

“Can you throw?”

“I try. There's always a little pain.”

“Give your arm a rest,” Robert said. “Come work for me. I'll leave it up to you. But you can't throw away the pain you've got. The human arm doesn't work that way.”

He remained in his room, his wet suit top on, until the boys left and the house was empty. Then he carried his gear down the street to the lake. He rowed a half mile beyond the point he had entered Oblong Lake the previous dive. The houses he saw on the shore were not familiar. He could barely see Ben's tall house. The spiked spine of the Cow was at his back, and bulked up to hide the Calf.

His search for Ben in the past had been haphazard; hunches played, feelings trusted to pick those spots Ben was likely to be. But the diving season had brought a need for pattern to him now. He had a strategy for a progressive covering of the lake. This patterned search made him feel the lake was shrinking; he was backing Ben into a corner of inevitability.

The water folded around him, pressed him down, warmed him. Two thin pike, seeing him, shot away like daggers that abruptly stopped and hung in midair. He poked in the shadows beneath a wooden pier, his heart racing. He stayed near the shore for the first half hour. He occasionally wondered what was being stolen from SportsHeaven that morning. He found nothing. He turned out toward the center of the lake, the bottom opening beneath him as he swam easily out. He made the crossing in forty minutes, stopping twice to rest. He was in the widest part of Oblong Lake. Nothing moved on the bottom. No pale reflections, no sharp pricks of light caught his eye. At the opposite shore he swam parallel to the land for a quarter mile, again sticking his frightened hands and steady light into the shadows beneath rocks and ledges, in his mind adding the spaces to the list of the safe. When he judged it was time, he set off back across the lake.

A hundred yards from shore, twenty-­five feet down, light flashed for him to see. It was his habit to hover over these not uncommon sparkles like a bird, to give them time to prove themselves a fish, or a trick of light and water. But this light remained a mystery.

He filled his lungs with air, then kicked down through the water. The pressure seemed to thicken the water. Whirling little pains fizzed in his ears and in the flat corridors of his temples.

The light was glancing off three coins on a flat rock. They reminded Robert of money placed on a counter for milk, or bread, or a newspaper. They were clean and shiny out there in Oblong Lake. He picked them up one at a time—­quarter, dime, quarter—­and put them in a pocket of his suit. The cold water made his bare hand ache when he removed the clumsy three-­fingered glove to grasp the coins.

He stayed down a moment longer. His arms fluttered like wings against a wind, keeping him in place. His squeezed vision took in the water to all sides of him. The sun coming down turned everything golden directly; but viewed at an angle the water was the color of mint candies, and infinitely colder. Even with the glove back on, the cold pushed up his arm, reaching like a hand for his heart. He told no one of the coins, of finding them so carefully placed and out of place.

B
UZZ TOLD HIS
coach his arm was shot and quit the baseball team in order to take a job at SportsHeaven. Robert fitted Buzz into a striped shirt and put him to work cleaning glass. Buzz took the bucket of rags and the spray bottle filled with a liquid that reminded him of grape soda.

“This may be my lot in life,” he told Robert, fingering the stripes on his ref's shirt.

“It's not so bad,” Robert said. ­“People are in a good mood in a sporting goods store. It reminds them of play. Of their youth.”

He expected Buzz to complain about the meniality of his first task; Robert had given him the job of wiping the counters down for just that reason. But Buzz said nothing. He went almost cheerfully to work.

Robert had seen his father at Del Cobbler's store, standing with three men by the long rack of magazines. Del had winked at Robert when he came in. The men with his father were all businessmen—­Tom Mott, who sold insurance; Clarence Forrester, who ran a small farm and also an auto parts store at the north end of Mozart; and Frank Clark, who owned a camera store—­dressed in shirts and ties, all of them a little overweight, smoking cigars, leaning in to catch his father's words. They appeared annoyed at Robert's interruption, these men whose sons had all moved away.

“Go on, Dave. Give them the punch line,” Robert said.

“No punch line,” Dave said. “No joke.” His friends said goodbye and departed.

“Sorry,” Robert said, feeling the drudge. “It could have waited.”

“I'll finish with them later. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to offer you a job,” Robert said, the words surprising him with their emotion, the tears they almost pulled from him.

“Damn,” Dave said, sniffing himself. “When do I start?”

And on his first day of work, his father was a half hour late. Robert called home and his mother answered.

“Where's Dave?”

“He left for work an hour ago,” she replied.

“He's late,” Robert said.

“Maybe he's having coffee with his friends. He doesn't feel he has to be open all the time. Nobody's buying.”

Robert, suddenly careful, asked, “Buying what?”

“T-­shirts, silly.”

“Mom, Dave closed the shop for good last week.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Go by there. The door's locked, the lights are out, and all the leftover stock has been shipped back to the supplier. I was sure you knew.”

“That old fool!” Evelyn exclaimed. “Thirty years we're together day and night. Now he won't let me have a moment to myself.”

“You trained him otherwise.”

“That's nonsense. When I was with him all day he was full of talk—­mostly his interpretation of things we had done together. Now—­when I'm hungry for fresh news at the end of the day—­he won't tell me
anything.
”

“I don't know, Mom. He's sure lost without you. I hired him to work for me here.”

His mother laughed with disbelief. “You
are
kidding, aren't you?”

“No. That's why I called. He's a half hour late. Not too impressive on your first day at a new job.”

She sighed. “Have him call me when he shows up.”

Robert had no one to put in charge while he went looking for his father. He told Buzz to sit in the back room and put price stickers on volleyballs, and to tell anyone who came looking for him that he would return in ten minutes.

He ran down the street to the restaurant. His father was at a booth by the window, holding a chunky white mug of coffee to his lips. He wore a zebra shirt. Robert had given it to Dave when he hired him, so he would not have to face the indignity of changing in the back room, and so that Robert would not be subject to that spectacle himself.

Robert took the seat across from his father.

“You're late, Dave. Look at me.”

His father would not comply.

“Why didn't you tell Evelyn you closed the store?”

His father slurped coffee. The underside of his jaw looked sore with razor burn.

“She'd crown me,” he muttered.

“Nonsense,” Robert said, an echo of Evelyn. “But regardless—­I've got a business to run, and I've hired you. Are you coming to work or not?”

“Don't use that tone with me.”

Robert leaned forward. “I
can
use that tone with you, Dave. I'm your boss.”

His father's eyes opened wide; he might not have thought of it in those terms.

“I've never had a boss before,” he reflected. “I'm almost sixty years old and I've never worked for anyone else. Just your mother.”

Robert smiled. “And now your son.” He slapped his father's shoulder, then stood. “I've got to get going. I've got to fire somebody. Don't make it be you.”

They walked to SportsHeaven together. Buzzard was still in the back room. Nobody had been in to see Robert. SportsHeaven seemed to run itself. Robert picked up one of the volleyballs and spun it on his fingertip. In purple ink on the orange price sticker was the figure $1.295.

“Wrong price, Buzzer,” Robert said. He took the price gun from Buzz's hand. “You put the decimal point in the wrong—­one place to the left of where it should be,” he explained. “These balls are $12.95.”

Robert felt his father's presence behind him, his smoky breath and old man's scent, the displacement of his body, pushing against him; and before him, Buzzard's hurt, chastised face, and three dozen mispriced volleyballs.

“You never
showed
me how to work the fucking gun,” Buzz cried.

“You're right. I should have. Watch your mouth.” He set the price and returned the gun to Buzz. He said evenly, “No harm, no foul.”

“Now I've gotta pull all the stickers off,” Buzz complained.

“You're right,” Robert said. He turned and there was Dave, who backtracked from the hot light in his son's face.

“Little snot,” Dave whispered when they were clear of the back room.

“He's just nervous. It's his first day, too. He was on time.”

His father sniffed. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Evelyn wants you to call her.”

His father's cocky look fell away. He jammed his hands in his pockets.

“She'll just read me the riot act, Rob-­O.”

“No she won't. She's never raised her voice to you as long as I can remember.”

“Oh . . . you don't hear the half of it,” Dave said, his eyes wide.

“Call her. Then report back to me.”

“Who're you going to fire?”

“A kid,” Robert said. “A thief.”

He left his father. He could not recall his mother ever chewing his father out; she seemed to love him so carelessly, even his failures had charm. She found something radiant in the way he lived off her. In the night, in their room, did she turn on him in secret?

Hiring his father had brought SportsHeaven to the employee limit allowed by Herm Branch. Hiring Buzz had put Robert one over that limit.

He found Dick by the bicycles. Long ago, when Robert was only seasonal help, he had discovered Dick deflating a basketball to fold into the narrow space of his locker. Robert had stored the incident. When he became assistant manager, Dick called in sick two days running. He returned to work with a fresh haircut. The back of his neck was smoothed and powdered, as if in preparation for a falling blade. But nothing had happened then.

Robert was promoted to manager and Dick again came to work the first day with his hair cut. He worked hard, arriving early, staying late. But Robert never forgot that half-­emptied ball, the casual lack of guilt in the kid's eyes; Robert saved the moment like a favor for the day he needed to be rid of Dick.

Dick was wiping spots of oil from the bikes. They were newly arrived, and in shipping oil had dripped onto the hard rubber seats and spidery frames. Dick's hair had grown out; Robert had been in charge for a while.

He tapped the kid on the shoulder. “Time to go,” he said.

“Time to go where?” Dick asked.

“Wherever you want. You're through here.”

Dick picked at the SportsHeaven patch sewn to the shoulder of his zebra shirt. The patch was the shape of a comet, with a star at the head and a tail of sporting goods—­baseball, basketball, bicycle, ski poles, baseball bat, tennis racket, pistol—­pouring away behind it, into heaven.

“Why'd you wait so long?”

“You were on borrowed time as soon as I caught you,” Robert said. “It's your bad luck I became boss.”