Crows

by Charles Dickinson

  Robert had work to do at home but he kept his seat at the table. He thought, much later, after he had moved in, after Ben was gone, that he was afraid of losing it so soon after attaining it.

  “You mean you’ve been sitting in the rain all afternoon?” Ethel asked.

  “It wasn’t in the rain,” Ben said.

  “We told you we were going to the meet.”

  “I must have forgotten.”

  “Not listening again.”

  “I admit it. I was in my own little world,” Ben said. He seemed amused and proud of this. He asked Olive, “How did you do, sweetheart?”

  “Won the fifty, five hundred, and thousand. Finished second in the medley relay.” She touched each medal as she named the event.

  “When it was just you, you won,” Ben said. “When you had to rely on others, you lost.”

  Olive responded angrily, “The other girls swam well, Dad. They tried. If you’d have been there you’d have seen for yourself.”

  “I had work to do at school,” he said, glancing at Robert. “I’ll go to the next meet. I promise.”

  Ethel poured her husband more coffee. She refilled Robert’s cup. He was uncomfortable, but unwilling to leave.

  “He never watches me play ball, either,” Buzz complained.

  “It’s March, for Pete’s sake.”

  “I mean—­I meant last season,” the boy stammered. “You know.”

  Ben faced Buzzard. “You got bombed that one time I was there and you said you didn’t want me watching. You said I made you nervous.”

  “He threw a shutout the next game,” Ethel said.

  “Probably because I wasn’t there,” Ben said. “He could relax. I did him a favor, not showing up.”

  “He didn’t really not want you there,” Ethel said. Buzz turned his face away. He was lean and awkward then, with big knuckly hands and the first hint of dark hair covering the babyish skin of his face. Ethel said, “He was just venting his embarrassment over you seeing him get shellacked.”

  “Thanks for explaining that, Sigmund,” Ben said snidely. “Buzz should learn to stand by what he says.” The boy listened, blowing into one palm as if to cool it. “Speak your mind. Say what you think. Don’t say one thing and expect ­people to know you mean something else.”

  Buzz glared miserably into his hand.

  “What’s your story here?” Olive asked.

  It took Robert a moment to understand she was speaking to him. “I came to visit your father.”

  “I’ve seen you around,” she said. “Don’t you hang out in Rapist’s Woods a lot?”

  Robert smiled. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “That’s not even funny,” Ethel scolded. “There is nothing funny about what happened to that poor girl in there.”

  “The rape took place forty years ago,” Ben said. “The rapist is probably dead now.”

  “You don’t know that. Why do you gloss this over? Your daughter will be walking through there many times in the next four years.”

  Ben pointed a stern finger at Olive. “Don’t you ever walk through those woods alone. Maybe you can hire Rob-­O here as a bodyguard.”

  Olive studied him. “Too quiet,” she announced. “Probably not in shape. I’d take better care of him.”

  “I’ll hire you,” Robert said.

  A ball of lightning bounced outside the kitchen window. The crack and boom made Olive and her father scream. Without a word Robert went to the back door. The rain was falling harder than ever, fresh lakes in the driveway’s low spots, a pounding fabric unrolling through the murky light on the garage.

  “Stay here tonight,” Ben said to Robert. “You can’t walk home in this.”

  “We could give him a ride,” Ethel offered.

  “I don’t want to drive in this.”

  “I will. Olive will.”

  “You’ll catch cold running to the car,” Ben said. “We have an extra bed upstairs. He can stay there.”

  “I can walk,” Robert said. “It’s not far.”

  “Nonsense. What were you telling me earlier?”

  “About what?” Robert asked.

  “If what you say is true,” Ben replied, “you have no home.” Ben faced his wife before Robert could speak, and said, “He came to me after an argument with his own father. It was a fight over career paths. He has nowhere to turn.”

  Ethel blinked; her arms were folded. Robert felt some word was required of him to set himself apart from Ben’s loose charade. First a crow tale, now this fable. But he said nothing. He was amazed to see the woman believed Ben; Robert was certain his own dumbfounded face had given it away.

  “If you want to put him up for the night, so be it,” Ethel said with a reluctance that chilled Robert.

  The room he was taken to by Olive was on the fourth floor. The climb tired him and she said, “You’ll need better wind to stay with the likes of me.”

  “Who said I was in a race with you?”

  “Nobody.” She smiled. “But you want to keep in better shape. It’s just smart.”

  The room was tiny, with a window looking through the rain at a tall birch tree. There was a narrow bed in one corner, covered with a tufted pink spread.

  “Ben and Ethel are in the room beneath you,” Olive said. “I’m the one below that.” She studied him for a moment, removing her cap and fluffing her packed hair. “Did you really have an argument with your parents?”

  “My father is unhappy I am not more devastated by my lack of work,” Robert said. This was the truth; he was not allying himself with Ben’s fanciful inventions. He said, “I’ll leave in the morning.”

  “The room’s empty,” Olive said, shrugging. “If you’ve been kicked out, Ben’ll let you stay. He doesn’t care, he’s never home.”

  “I can’t stay.”

  No one came to wish him good night. Clean sheets were under the pink blanket. He took off his shoes and went to bed in his clothes. For a long time he heard Ben and Ethel talking in the room beneath him, but rain and the thickness of the floor blunted the precision of their speech. He was glad of that; he feared Ben’s spinning even more intricate webs of untruth for his wife. He did not want to know; he would be gone in the morning.

  He slept for an hour, then awakened, feeling unsettled and frightened. He sat on the edge of the bed, put on his damp shoes, then walked back through the narrow halls and down the flights of stairs to the kitchen. He called his parents’ house. Evelyn answered; she might have been up reading, her true purpose being to wait, and he was insensitive enough to sleep until guilt woke him.

  “It’s me, Mom.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At a teacher’s house. I walked over here and then the rain started.”

  “I can come and get you,” she said.

  “No. It’s late. They’ve offered me a place to sleep for the night and I’ve accepted. I just wanted you to know, and not worry.”

  “It’s three thirty in the morning, mister. I commenced worrying six hours ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m really sorry.”

  His mother was silent for several moments, but he could hear the thoughtful rhythm of her breathing. In that tiny house, Dave might have heard it too, and been comforted that she was there.

  She asked, “What’s the real story here, Rob-­O?”

  He smiled in the dark kitchen. His mother’s skepticism was without subterfuge. She sensed her son was fooling with her.

  “That is the whole story, Ev,” he said. “I was caught in the storm. I’m sorry I forgot to call.”

  “Robert . . . tell me. Have you run away from home?”

  “Does Dave want to know so he can have his den back?”

  His mother laughed softly. “Yes, he does. But pay him no mind. There just were times in the past when I
thought you’d run away. I know Dave disappoints you. But you can’t run from that.”

  “Evelyn, quit blowing this all out of proportion.” He lowered his voice; he thought he had heard the house start at the exasperated tone in his voice, as though it were a snap of lightning. He was too much a stranger to have fixed in his mind where everyone was in that huge house, where they reclined or sat reading. He did not know whom he was disturbing and so assumed he was disturbing them all.

  “You both would be happier with me gone,” Robert said. “I’ve made it awkward since I moved back. When I was living there before, that was normal. To leave and return, though; that’s failure. You got used to an empty house, having each other to yourselves after all those years.” He found himself very near to crying, self-­pitying.

  “I don’t rank the men in my life according to how much I love them,” Evelyn said. “But your father is my husband.”

  His mother hung up in his ear after wishing him an impersonal good night’s sleep. He retraced his steps back to the fourth-­floor room, and into bed.

  The sun was out in the morning and he was alone in the house. A ringing phone woke him but he could not get to it before the ringing stopped; the phone was floors below, almost ticklish, something caught in the throat of the house. Clammy wood floors chilled his bare feet; cold drafts blew up the back of his shirt and almost filled it like a sail. He slapped his pebbled arms. Pockets of cold lurked in the stairwells and hallways. No notes for him in the kitchen; they expected him to be gone.

  He reheated coffee and drank two cups very hot. He was happy to be alone. If Ethel had been there, without Ben to make him welcome, he would have been paralyzed with uneasiness. But the kitchen was warm and he found a sweet roll high in a cupboard and ate it with the coffee.

  It seemed impolite to attend Ben’s class without speaking to him afterwards. He lectured on communication behavior in wolves and concluded effortlessly two beats ahead of the bell. Its cued ringing brought a smile of bored pride to Ben’s face. Robert met him in the little room behind the amphitheater and Ben asked him to come to his office.

  “Why did you tell your wife I had a falling out with my parents?” Robert asked.

  Ben rubbed his eyes. “Did I say that?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “Last night,” Robert replied, willing to go along, but uneasy then in a way he had never expected. “Your wife offered to give me a ride home but you told her I had had a fight with my father in order to get her to allow me to spend the night.”

  “You spent the night at my house?”

  “Lord, Ben!”

  He said, “Must be that forgetful sleep.”

  ROBERT STOOD AT the base of the birch tree looking up at Olive’s dark window. His legs and back ached from carrying storm windows up the ladder all day. He had not seen Olive since the evening before. Her room had been locked when they returned from the game in Baraboo; he had knocked but she had not answered.

  Now he was exhausted and fighting a sadness that had no focus. Buzz had been beaten, but expressed a troubling, false good humor afterwards. Robert preferred the young man’s determined sulk. Robert also had thought frequently of Ben, and the flat sheet of time that had to be crossed before spring, ages away. Ethel had complained for most of the trip home that she was up too late and sure to be out on her feet the next day.

  Robert did not want to make love to Olive, but just to sleep beside her, let her warm skin carry him out of himself. He scaled up through the branches. Outside her window he crouched to catch his wind. Her window was not locked, but to be polite he tapped on the glass. She would come to the window and hold it open while he entered. She had never failed him before. He tapped at the glass again. He was about to open the window himself when she appeared. The room remained dark.

  “Go away, Robert,” she hissed.

  “Let me in, O. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Go back down the tree like a good boy. I’m not letting you in tonight.”

  “I want to talk to you. That’s all.”

  “No.” She leaned forward to push down the window and Robert saw swimming out into the moonlight the blue keystone of her pubic hair and the murky, swinging tips of her breasts. She also seemed to possess three hands, then two heads, one of them of a straw-­haired man, and when Robert reached with both hands to hold open the window a hard foot flashed through the window and the gap between his flailing hands and caught him squarely in the chest. Though Robert had a momentary grip on this attacking foot and leg, he was already moving backward too quickly to maintain it. Then the air propelled from his lungs by the kick in the chest and the prospect of a long fall to the hard earth intoxicated his brain with a vivid preferable blankness that remained his last memory of what happened that night.

  Chapter Five

  Missing

  HIS BEARD GREW thick like a harbinger of health during his week in bed; it filled and lengthened and drove him mad with itching. Ethel and her children brought him meals and juice and reading materials. They carried messages from his parents. Purplish single-­celled creatures swam in his vision, sometimes alone, in migratory schools when he was tired. In time these went away.

  He was told he was lucky to be alive, even ambulatory. The birch tree branches, for all the lashing they gave him in passing, acted as brakes of a fashion, slowing his fall by degrees until he crashed through the bottom layer and hit the ground with a thud Ethel heard in her room on the other side of the house. Nothing had been broken or dislodged. He had taken most of the fall on his shoulders, strong from a summer of diving for Ben. Aches, passing dizziness, and the purple cells in his vision gave him reason to stay in bed.

  He was half asleep one day when a commotion took place at the foot of his bed. Spots of sun fell across him and warmed his hands where they curled around the edge of the covers. Some time earlier in the day, when he had thought the house empty, Olive appeared on her knees at the edge of the bed and performed upon him a slow, sweet blowjob of amends that lasted better than an hour. Now he wondered as he awakened if she might be back.

  But it was his mother and his father standing there.

  Their peeps of consternation had been caused by an uncertainty whether to disturb him. Robert at first thought his father wore a suit and tie, but then he saw it was a black T-­shirt with lapels, striped tie, white buttons, handkerchief, and carnation painted on.

  “You’re awake,” Evelyn said. She had her arms around her husband’s shoulder. He said, “Tell me you didn’t fall out of a tree.”

  “Nice shirt, Dave.”

  He looked at his chest. “You like it, huh? A very hot item. I’ve sold four since they came in last week.”

  Robert asked his mother, “That makes it a hot item?”

  “We’re not here to talk shop,” she scolded. She had come and sat on the edge of the bed. With fingers whose nails had been filed down for perhaps just that moment, she spread his eyelids to inspect the dilation of his pupils.

  “You saw a doctor, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, Evelyn.”

  She took her fingers from his eyes and brushed back his hair. “Tell us what happened,” she said.

  “I took a bad fall.”

  “Out of a tree,” Dave added.

  Robert nodded, his eyes closed. How had these ­people found their way up to him on the fourth floor?

  “What were you doing in a tree?”

  “That tree there,” Robert said. From the bed the birch looked patchy, thinning. The window contained more sky than he remembered. “It’s kind of a tradition,” Robert said. “Ben started it.”

  “Ben?”

  “The teacher,” Evelyn said with just a flicker of impatience.

  “It’s a tradition to fall out of a tree?”

  “I was kicked out of a tr
ee,” Robert said.

  “Why were you in the tree?” Evelyn asked.

  “I climb it to get into Olive’s room sometimes.”

  “Olive?” Dave said.

  “Olive’s his girlfriend,” his mother said. “Why do you climb the tree to get to Olive when she’s just downstairs?”

  “Romance,” Robert said.

  His mother smiled. She found a chair and brought it to the edge of the bed. She sat Dave in it and stood behind him with her hands cupped like epaulets over his shoulders.

  “Tell us what happened,” she said.

  “When Ben was alive and not getting along with his wife,” Robert said, “he used to climb the tree outside their bedroom window. Olive’s room now. It was his way of getting back in her good graces. Of courting her again. You can walk right in the window from the branch there. When Ben disappeared, his wife moved out of the room and Olive moved in. I began doing the same thing Ben did. It was a way to woo Olive. And to honor Ben.”

  His parents watched him without a word.

  The purplish cells swam like neon ovals of grease across his vision. Talking might have brought them on. He pressed his fingers to his eyes and the cells began to dissolve. The room was darkening and he was tired. His mother turned on the light beside the bed; a last cell was thus given a golden rim before vanishing.

  Nothing was said for several minutes. Then Dave, scratching his neck, said, “How long is this going to go on?”

  Robert saw his mother squeeze her husband’s shoulders to keep quiet. But she seemed glad the question was out, and waited for an answer.

  “I don’t see any end in sight,” Robert said.

  “I mean—­” Dave began, his voice going high-­pitched with frustration. He spread his arms. “This small room in this old house is all you have, as far as I can see.”