Crows

by Charles Dickinson

  “Why? Why do you think? No business. I hadn’t sold a T-­shirt all winter.”

  “Come on!”

  “It’s true,” his father said. “It’s not a T-­shirt town, Mozart. Winter lasts too long.”

  “But summer’s here,” Robert said. ­“People will be in a T-­shirt mood.”

  His father waved a hand dismissively. “They’ll have to buy them somewhere else. You should sell them here.”

  “We do,” Robert said.

  Dave looked hard at him.

  “It’s a new line,” Robert said. He made a vague gesture with his thumb toward another corner of the store. The T-­shirt counter had been his idea, and Herm had loved it. In the week the counter had been open business had been fair, but steady, with a bell on the counter for customers to summon help, and one of the jobs Robert had that day was to hang a sign in the front window advertising the new venture.

  “Since when?” Dave asked.

  “It’s new, Dave. Just started.”

  “My own son drives me out of business,” Dave said ruefully.

  “That’s not true,” Robert said. “You’ve had problems in that store all along. It’s the location, Dave. Nobody sees it unless they look for it. You’re facing the wrong way. You’re out of sight of the lake. It’s like you’re afraid to attract a crowd.”

  “I’m glad I don’t face the lake. If I did, I’d have to watch my son making a spectacle of himself.”

  “OK, Dave,” Robert said, looking for an opening out.

  “I never thought you’d put in a line that competed directly with me,” Dave said.

  “We had a little space, Herm asked me what I thought would go. I thought T-­shirts.”

  “Yeah, the T-­shirts that would go are mine,” Dave said. “You’re a cruel kid, Robert, since you became boss.”

  Robert finished his coffee and slammed the cup into the wastebasket. But then he had to fish it out because it was one of the few cups he had.

  “Don’t talk like that, Dave. It’s business. There are a million T-­shirt shops. You blame all of them, too?”

  “There aren’t a million T-­shirt shops around the corner from mine,” Dave said.

  “Why are you quitting?” Robert asked. “You’ve folded a thousand tents before, but you always came back with something else. Why not this time?”

  His father tapped his thin-­haired scalp, which showed the first pink burn of the spring sun. “No ideas,” he said. “My mind has gone dry.”

  “Because of Mom?”

  After a moment’s thought, Dave nodded. “I admit your mother’s recent behavior has let some of the wind out of me.” He regarded his son with one eyebrow raised. “For thirty years I’m the prince,” he complained. “Then wham! She wants to be by herself, she wants to meet new ­people, she wants to be away from me for eight hours a day.”

  “So let her,” Robert said. He feared his father was about to cry. “Do something on your own, for once.”

  His father’s face hardened. Robert’s words had come forth cruel, when he had been seeking gruff good humor.

  “I guess I should’ve expected that from you.”

  Robert blurted, “All my life it’s been you two and me. I always felt like I was butting in. How do you like being cut out?”

  “No,” Dave said kindly. “We were a trio: you, me, Evelyn. We did everything together.”

  Robert looked away. His father was full of imaginings.

  “You had the crazy sales dreams,” Robert said, “and Mom had the money and the spine.”

  “No.”

  “And I was the third wheel,” Robert said. “The kid who denied you your den.”

  His father stood. Dave’s plastic cup, Robert noticed, had been cut down an inch around the rim by his gnawing teeth. A fleck of white plastic stuck to his chin.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” Dave said.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “My son the manager. I wanted to see you.”

  “Don’t be mad, Dave. But Evelyn’ll want you even less if she sees you quitting on her.”

  His father was motionless, listening for Robert to go on.

  “She’s done so much for you—­it will kill her to see you collapse without her.”

  “I’ll be out of her hair,” Dave whined.

  Robert slapped the mangled cup from his father’s hand. It whirled through the door, out into SportsHeaven. Dave’s hand remained in the position of holding the cup, a hand poised as if awaiting a burden.

  “Don’t be a martyr, Dave.”

  “Why do you talk to me this way? I get old and suddenly nobody wants to be around me. I’m a butt of jokes. My son strikes me and talks to me like I’m a child.”

  Robert longed to blow his whistle in his father’s face, but he kept it in his pocket.

  “I can’t help you,” he said. “You’re imagining all this. Maybe I imagined the way you regarded me when I was growing up. OK. We’re even. Now go home, I’ve got work to do.”

  His father went and got the cup off the floor. He brought it back and dropped it in the basket. “I want to fill out an application for a job,” he said.

  “What would you do?”

  “Sell!” Dave fairly shouted. “It’s what I’ve done all my life.”

  “That’s debatable,” Robert said, again amazed at his cruelty.

  But his father did not buckle; the idea of working at SportsHeaven, probably first put forward only to annoy Robert, had taken hold in him.

  “I can run the T-­shirt counter.”

  “You’ve proven yourself there, all right.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. I’ll do whatever you want. I’m sick of T-­shirts, actually.”

  Robert took a pad of applications from the desk drawer and handed it to his father.

  “I think we’d work well together,” Dave said.

  “Look—­” Robert began. But he had bled whatever cruelty he had stored for his father. He set a pen on the table. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  His father giggled. “Your mother isn’t going to believe this.”

  “No,” Robert said, “she isn’t.”

  BUT DAVE HAD placed something within Robert that he carried home with him. In the cool May darkness, an hour past midnight, he took his gear to the lake. He stayed in for only a half hour. It was uneasiness that cut short his dive. He did not trust the darkness of the water, or the light that defined its jumpy edges.

  Throughout the dive, though, he thought about what his father had made clear to him. He opened it like wings, inspecting it from all sides, admiring it. He was in charge of a small domain. Being manager of SportsHeaven gave him the first power beyond himself that he had ever possessed.

  He slept lightly in his room on the fourth floor. The windows of the house were open and he heard Ethel’s alarm and the first stumblings of her rising for work. Then he slept through her departure, reawakening when Olive left for her first day of the new season at Good-­Ee Freez. He imagined her climbing into her fresh-­washed smock, her swim-­muscled body full of an effort to be contained in cloth. The night before, he had angled for an invitation to her room; he had even considered climbing the tree. But he didn’t; that was past. Nothing had happened. He had gone to work, then gone diving.

  Olive, since falling through the ice, since the end of swimming season, had turned inward, as if looking at something for the first time. She had been saddened by the end of the racing. The booty of medals she had won hung in a cluster from the light cord over the kitchen counter and clinked like a wind chime in the slightest breeze. Her friends had kept quiet about the fall through the ice and the coach never found out about it, or never let on that he knew. Joining the team late, Olive still won a green block M with a tiny gold pin of a girl diving into water, and was voted the team�
�s best swimmer. But now she seemed stranded again.

  Robert sometimes wondered if the winter had ever taken place. The air was so warm, and Olive so distant, it was as if his memory had been tricked.

  He took his things down to the bathroom. Duke was sitting on the hall floor, his leg out in front of him. The light was dim there and his eyes were closed. His arms were folded and wrapped in a towel.

  “Waiting for Buzz?” Robert asked.

  Duke nodded without opening his eyes. Robert fingered his beard. Holding the long strands of it to his nose he could smell the lake and the ice cap and the faint chlorine scent the mask had, and deep down, Olive.

  “When do you get out of school?”

  “About three thirty.”

  “Wise guy. For the summer.”

  “Next week,” Duke said.

  “And Buzz?”

  “Same time. A day earlier, I think.”

  “What are your plans for the summer?”

  Duke’s eyes opened for the first time. He wore yellow pajamas bearing a pattern of faded green footballs. His foot looked cold stretched out, a white figurine wrapped in a cheap net of faint blue strings.

  Robert did not wait for Duke to answer; he feared some sarcasm. “You want to work for me?”

  The bathroom door opened. Sunlight flew out as if trapped and then freed. Buzz had tufts of shaving cream at his ears, and held a razor in his hand.

  Robert asked him, “You want a job at SportsHeaven for the summer?”

  He loved the sound of the question; he loved the power to ask it.

  Duke asked, “What would we do?”

  “Stock. Sweep up. Sell. Work.”

  “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.

  BUZZ 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 Cobb
ler’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.”