Crows
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“It’s a Christmas tree,” Robert said.
“That’s what I said,” his mother remarked. “But he says we’re wrong.”
“Study it very closely.”
Robert gave it his attention: the alphabet in the shape of a Christmas tree, asterisks for a base and star. His father’s hard little belly pushed the lower branches of the tree out of shape. Dave rolled his eyes.
Robert looked over at his mother. She was watching her husband, delighted somehow that he could stump them both.
“Is this shirt a big seller?” Robert asked.
“Specially made.”
“I can’t figure it out.”
“You’re as lame as Evelyn.”
His mother patted Robert on the knee. “Open your presents, lamebrain,” she said with a sweet smile.
“It’s right here,” Dave exclaimed. “All you have to do is study it.”
Robert, no longer interested, turned once more to look at his father’s shirt, but Dave saw in his son’s eyes that he did not care and walked out of the room. When he returned he wore a T-shirt that proclaimed simply NOEL and soon after Christmas was over.
Chapter Eleven
Desire
ROBERT EXPECTED AL Gasconade to appear at SportsHeaven, but for the next two days there was no sign of him.
Frank Abbott came in, however. Robert saw him down an aisle with a flyrod in his hand. Robert hurried away. Frank was still tall and skinny, hair maybe a little thinner. His clothes had always hung on him like wash, the pull of gravity on them almost too great. He was a nervous man for a pilot, and his clothes always looked drenched with perspiration. His eyes had been blue the last time Robert looked into them. A small white scar had been put in the skin above his left eye; this scar never took the sun, never faded from its glowing whiteness.
Frank Abbott put the flyrod back and walked to the end of the aisle. He looked in all directions. His hands were in his pockets. He wore a light windbreaker though it was –7˚ outside. Each employee in a striped shirt he asked where he could find Bob Cigar.
Joe Marsh found Robert in back. “Guy here to see you,” he said.
“Is he outside?” Robert asked in a low voice.
“He’s in the store somewhere. He keeps asking for you.”
“Tell him I went home.”
“I can’t lie.”
“Sure you can.”
“Why don’t you want to talk to this guy?”
“He’s from out of my past,” Robert said. “I don’t want to dredge him up.” He thought Frank had left town for good. He had heard he had moved to somewhere in the Southwest, Arizona or New Mexico, that the cold of Mozart no longer suited him in a number of ways.
“I’ll tell him,” Joe Marsh said.
“Thanks, Joe. And watch him for me, will you? Make sure he leaves the store.”
Joe Marsh told Frank Abbott what Robert had asked him to say. Frank nodded agreeably, then wandered the store for another half hour before leaving.
“I asked him where he knew you from,” Joe Marsh told Robert.
“What did he say?”
“He said you were once in an accident together.”
AL GASCONADE CAME in the following night at closing time. He wore a down-filled parka and a Milwaukee Brewers cap.
“Hey, I like the shirt,” Al said, seeing Robert.
“I am one of them, now.”
Al chewed gum. His eyes held the quick light of intelligence. His hair was red, thick, and curly, pouring from beneath the Brewers cap. He had put on a little weight in the face and the middle, but still stood like a jock with his feet rolled over onto the sides of his shoes.
“You finished here?” he asked.
“In a minute.”
“I want to take you out. I’ve heard all kinds of strange stories about you.”
“They’re all true,” Robert said with an impatient slash of his hand. “Is that all you want to talk about?”
“No. I want to brag a little, too.” Al grinned and popped his gum. “I’m at the fucking Chicago Tribune, Rob-O.”
“I heard.”
“And I’m better than that place. I’m moving up from there.”
“Great,” Robert said. “It’s a tribute to you.”
“This summer—the British Open. Watch for my reports from Scotland. Top that.”
“I can’t,” Robert said. “Wait here.”
In back, Joe Marsh was at his desk doing the books. He asked, “Your ghost from the past catch up with you?”
“Not the one from last night. Another one.”
“They’re all over,” Joe said. “I married one of mine. Kill the lights before you go. Lock the doors.”
When he turned off the lights the huge room went cooler, blue to blackish-violet. Al Gasconade helped him into his coat. They went out the interior doors and Robert pulled them shut and locked them top and bottom with the keys Joe Marsh had had cut for him. Slush never quite melted on the tile floor and black rubber mats of the entryway; it held the print fragments of a thousand boot soles, like an aid to crime detection placed there specifically.
Robert took his knit cap from his pocket and pulled it on his head, then put on his gloves. Al zipped his parka and set his Brewers cap tighter on his head, sheathing his ears with coils of hair.
“You like it here?” he asked.
“It’s work. I like working, I’ve discovered.”
“I mean in Mozart.”
They stepped outside before Robert answered. The cold was always a revelation; it was forever taking on fresh dimensions. Al Gasconade stood motionless, turned out on the sides of his feet, while Robert locked the outer doors. The wide blue SportsHeaven sign, which burned around the clock, shone down upon their shoulders and made icy blue puddles all the way out to the street.
Robert said, “Where to?”
Al Gasconade led him to a yellow Porsche parked up the block. It had a black roof and salt splashed high as the door handles. Al got in and started the engine, then opened Robert’s door.
Al steered the car in a U-turn and headed out of Mozart. It was very quiet in that car, and Robert had a warm sensation of flying in a glass globe filled with green light. They sped out of town, then onto a highway that headed north into deep forests thinned periodically by small villages.
“Nice car, Al.”
“Thanks. I overreached. Overwrought? I bought it when the Trib hired me and now I pay $415 a month for it.” He shifted down at a county highway and the car swooped through the turn; Robert thought he saw a deer’s eyes glow at the corner, then blink out.
“Where are we going?”
Al Gasconade looked over at him. “You never answered my question.”
“About Mozart? I like it well enough.”
“You could be the one going to Scotland,” Al said. “We both know you’re better than I’ll ever be.”
“You’ve got the desire, Al. I’ve explained it a million times. Don’t make me explain it to you.”
They were moving through land and places Robert had spent his entire life near, but in the dark, at that speed, they were strange as the bottom of the sea. Now and then they passed a house with TV light in the window silver paint.
“I know how you feel,” Al said. “The day I opened at the Trib I updated my résumé and set it aside. I mailed the first half dozen things I did there to Sports Illustrated. They’re interested. I always seem to be looking ahead.”
“You’ve got ambition,” Robert said.
“That I have,” Al said. “But sometimes I’ll be sitting at my desk, or at some press table, or in this car—and I’ll just hate the idea of what I
’m doing. Just for a moment, though. Then I’m OK.”
“Nobody loves their work all the time.”
“Sometimes—I’ll write a story and think it’s done,” Al Gasconade said, “and put it aside. Ten minutes later, I’ll pick it up and read it and it will be full of the most tired clichés. It’s like opening a door in your house and there are a thousand cockroaches where an hour before there was just a room.”
Robert smiled in the green light; he thought of the clipping Herm Branch had sent him. He should show it to Al, buck him up.
Al went around a pickup truck with a twitch of the wheel. They seemed to Robert to be going very fast, at the very edge of the headlights, but also to be absolutely safe; as if the road with its marking ribbon down the center and the signs and houses and dark woods along both sides was a track bearing them along.
“You ever get down to Chicago?” Al asked.
“Not in several years. Again—no desire.”
“It’s wild, Roberto. You should visit sometime. I’ll bet you could land at the Trib or Sun-Times strictly on the basis of your M.C. clips. You shined in those days.”
“Thanks, Al.”
“But no thanks, Al,” Al finished.
They came to Green Lake and stopped in a small roadhouse.
“I used to frequent this joint when I was in school,” Al said.
They took stools at the bar and a girl came for their order of beer, cheeseburgers, and french fries. Robert thought the place was empty, but then in the darkness of booths he saw the movement of hands, or caught scraps of talk and laughter.
“Christmas break,” Al said. “Places like this die when the kids go home.” He removed his baseball cap and set it on the bar. “Tonight’s on me,” he said, shaking out the matted nest of his hair. “I want that understood.”
“I can help.”
“I know, but I want to spring.” He removed a $20 bill from his wallet. The girl brought their beer.
Al Gasconade held his glass out to Robert. “To desire,” he said. “May I always keep it in some form; may you grow it in some form. Amen.”
They clicked glasses and drank.
“To the British Open,” Robert said. “Send me a postcard of the Loch Ness monster.”
“I will,” Al Gasconade promised. He picked popcorn out of a bowl on the bar and threw it into his mouth across a distance of inches.
“My mom said you’re living with one of your old teachers’ wives,” Al ventured, as if creating a loose skin for Robert to fill.
Robert laughed. “If that is the story your mother heard, then I am living a more scandalous life than I thought.”
“Then it’s not true.”
“I live with a family whose father and husband was my biology teacher at M.C.,” Robert explained. “He died—disappeared—in that accident on Oblong Lake. You remember.”
“I do?” Al said.
“Sure you do.” The event loomed so fearsomely in Robert’s life he was certain it had to hold at least a degree of importance in everyone else’s. It at times seemed the lone significant event of his life.
Robert said, “He gave me a place to stay quite a while ago—this was after the Scale folded and I moved back home. I wasn’t even looking. Or didn’t know I was. I stayed and stayed. Then he was killed and his youngest son maimed. After that, I couldn’t really leave.” He drank some beer. He set the glass down so as to make a chain of linked moisture rings on the bar’s smooth surface. “I see a time approaching—in the future—when I’ll leave, Al. That’s progress. For quite some time I couldn’t imagine ever leaving and now I can.”
“Where would you go?” Al asked.
“I don’t see that far ahead,” Robert said. He could not imagine beyond that dive in the future when he would find Ben. His life was divided cleanly in two phases: the diving season, and the season he was locked in at present, when winter held him out, held him almost aloft.
“Either I am diving,” Robert said, “or I am waiting to dive.”
“My mother told me about that,” Al Gasconade said. “You’re looking for this teacher?”
“Ben Ladysmith. He never was found,” Robert said. “All the people who have drowned in Oblong Lake have been found. Ben’s the only one not accounted for. I looked it up.”
“You did?”
“At the fire station. It’s public record.”
“It’s been a while,” Al Gasconade said. “Maybe nothing’s left.”
“He’s down there. He’s hidden.”
Their food arrived and they ordered more beer. The girl stood beside them throwing out conversational hooks. She had brushed blond hair and green eye makeup; she told them she lived in Princeton and was bored by the long slow shift of a college bar at Christmastime. She tried to tell them her name but they refused to remember it. She gave up and went away.
Robert was thinking again about Frank Abbott. He thought to tell Al about Frank, but he did not know what to tell. He did not want to start without knowing where he would finish.
He poured ketchup on his fries and ate them with his fingers. Salt grains sparkled on his hands when he reached for his beer.
Al seemed disappointed in something. He ate with a morose absence of enthusiasm. He did not say a word.
Robert told the story of losing the cat. He dwelled on the coldness of the morning, the dark air, the hidden bricks set in the earth like the triggers of a trap. But as he told the story he found himself trying to make it funny, or at least ironic, because he thought that was what Al Gasconade would appreciate. Robert added the crazy Wilsons and their basement windows painted black against air raids. This made Al smile, but beyond that he did not respond.
They finished their meals and their beers. Robert thought that without the diversion of food their conversation might grow again. But Al Gasconade slid off his stool and pulled the Brewers cap down over his wild hair and got into his coat.
“Let’s hit the road,” he said. “I think ten bucks each should cover it.”
Robert was too far from home to pick a fight and lose a ride. He had come expecting to pay his way, so now he would.
The blond girl waved good-bye to them from where she stood washing glasses in a sink. Al ignored her. Robert raised a hand to her; he wished he had paid more attention when she tried to talk to them.
The yellow Porsche warmed around them, the green bubble reformed. Robert closed his eyes and folded his arms and pressed his head against the seat. It was nearly 3 a.m. They were heading south into the darkness. Al Gasconade drove at a brisk, angry clip. Robert did not mind; he would be home soon.
They reached Mozart in less than an hour. They had not said a word since leaving the roadhouse. On the street in front of SportsHeaven, Al Gasconade pulled over. Blue light fell into the car.
“Thanks for the ride, Al.” He did not ask to be driven home.
Al faced him. “I’m just a damn sportswriter,” he said, so vehemently Robert leaned away. “I write about games. Nothing as important as diving after some guy dead two years. Some guy who was long since washed away to nothing. Pardon me if I don’t measure up to your fucking crusade.”
“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.”
“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.”