Crows

by Charles Dickinson

  “There’s a place for rent down the road,” she said. “A cottage, really. Three rooms. Overlooks the lake.”

  “You’ve scouted places for me to move to?” he asked, his heart sore.

  “Yes.” She pivoted and went back downstairs. She was a very sly woman. He had wanted to keep her talking, to divert her attention until the tub overflowed, the water running over the floor, down through the walls, into the wiring, ruining Ben’s house.

  HE ROWED OUT onto Oblong Lake’s quiet surface. Calm, glassy, the water seemed of one piece, shaped to the contours of the distant bottom, except where oars fell tearing through it. The day’s heat had been left onshore. He was sweating in the suit; his shaved face burned. Now he trailed a hand in the water. The cold climbed up through his arm like a straw. The days were getting shorter.

  He dropped his coffee-­can anchor fifty yards off an island that had no name. It was an island of sufficient size to hold trees thick enough to prevent him from seeing through to the other side.

  He sealed himself within the suit and stepped out of the boat. The water slapped his beardless face. He went deep a minute, then surfaced, barely looking beyond the plate glass clarity of the water. At last he settled into the pattern of his search.

  Before the dive he had walked down the road in the direction Ethel had pointed and a half dozen houses from Ben’s had found a casual, postcard-­sized red-­lettered FOR RENT sign nailed to a tree in the yard. In back was a small building of green wood, rust-­orange screens, and a roof the color of wash water. He could look through one screen, through a small room, and out another screen and see the flat plane of the lake.

  A woman—­slight, tanned, a ball peen hammer in one hand, three headless nails pressed between her lips—­had come out to speak to him. She took a key from her jeans and let him into the cottage. The air was cool and somehow idle. She worked the stove in the kitchen/dining room, where the old tile with a pattern of ships and anchors curled up at the room’s edges and bore a scuffed traffic valley leading toward the doors. She ran the water, flipped the lights off and on, explained the furnace in the closet and how its pilot light was temperamental.

  There was a second room with bookshelves built into the wall and a wire for the TV antenna. It was the room Robert had looked through from outside. The floor was bare wood, dabbed with paint, and old burns the dark shape of beetles. There also was a fireplace, with a phone jack above the mantel.

  Off this room was a narrow bedroom with a screened window, a closet, more shelves; and off this room, a bathroom barely larger than a toll booth, with a toilet, a hand-­held shower, and a steel sink with a spider on the rim that the woman flicked away too slowly for Robert not to see it.

  She asked Robert if the small place was what he had in mind, but he could not give her an answer. She followed him out and locked the door behind them. He wanted to give her money to hold it but she refused; there were no other interested parties. She said she felt it was her duty to tell him the place took a chill in the wintertime, and that the cottage had its own gas meter that was the tenant’s responsibility.

  Swimming near the island, something cracked overhead. The air held a disturbance of recent motion when he surfaced to look. A knot of black smoke, the shape of a woman in a bridal veil, promenaded over the water thirty feet up. Even through his mask he smelled the acid of a fired gun.

  An object too sudden and uniform to be a bird streaked out over the lake. In the instant before a shotgun fired Robert saw it was a clay pigeon. The shot missed and the disk began its arching descent. Robert ducked, though the target was coming down fifty yards away. The second shot rolled. Fired low and short, it kicked up one thick and elongated white fountain of water, then two dozen receding miniatures. Down range, the pigeon skipped once on the lake and went under.

  Another bird was launched. Robert found its source, the sun deck of a large cedar house built deep in among the shore’s huge stones. A man was sending out the birds. A woman was shooting at them. The new pigeon tracked the path of its predecessor, sailing unharmed through the furious shot cloud sent up, skipping once and going under.

  Almost at once a new bird sailed free. Out and out, Robert waiting for the gun’s report. But the disk’s sweet skin went unmolested. No shots were fired. The man and the woman were arguing. She propped the shotgun against the deck’s railing. Robert heard nothing of their words through his ice cap. The woman turned her back on the man, her arms folded. Her hair was caught in the sunlight and made more golden than it probably was. Her red sweater was like a warning to boats.

  The man took up the shotgun. Robert wondered what he was witnessing. The barrel swiveled toward the woman’s back, but then moved on. The man reloaded. Robert could see the man’s mouth moving.

  Out of all this a black bird sailed. The man followed it down the barrel of the gun and fired so that at the apex of the bird’s long flight it would be disintegrated by an intersecting flock of shot. But the man was not the marksman he thought, for the pigeon sailed on down into the lake. The woman had turned enough to watch over her shoulder. Robert saw her soundlessly laugh and clap when the shot was bad.

  THE POLICE DROVE Ethel home from work the following day. A blue car marked with a bluer star stopped in the street in front of Ben’s house. Ethel, her face pinched tired and old, crawled out. Robert started down from the fourth floor. She was in the kitchen pouring coffee by the time he arrived, and the police were already gone.

  “I foiled a holdup,” she told him.

  They were alone in the house, Robert in his striped shirt. “Yeah?” he said.

  Ethel pushed up her sleeves. When she set her cup down it danced seismically against the saucer.

  “Yeah,” she said. “This guy got in my cab and gave an address. When I got there he had a knife—­or said he did—­and told me to turn over all my money. I gave it to him—­not much. But he must’ve been satisfied because he got out.” She drank coffee. She continued, “I watched him in my rearview mirror running away. You know where Falls Street parallels the woods north of town? Kind of a seedy area? Near The View?”

  Robert nodded into her excited eyes.

  “He was trotting along, watching the woods,” she said. “Looking for a place to duck in, I suppose. I got out of my cab and shot him.”

  Robert had not heard her, or believed her, and asked her to repeat what she had said.

  “I shot him through the thigh,” she said. She closed one eye as if in aiming. “A tough shot at thirty-­five to forty yards . . . moving target.”

  “What gun—­”

  “You know it. You took it away from Buzzard.”

  “You kept it!”

  “I spirited it away, yes,” she said. “I saw a need for it. Beneath the seat of my cab the previous driver had made a place for a gun. He pointed it out to me before he quit.”

  “Are you in trouble?” Robert asked.

  “I’m out of a job.”

  “They fired you?”

  “I quit,” she said. “I couldn’t even get back in the cab. I went to where the robber was rolling around on the ground and I held the gun on him and took back my money. Then I radioed the garage to send the police and someone to pick up the cab. I got a ride home from the police when they were finished.”

  Robert studied her, looking for the gun. It had disappeared again; he saw no hard shapes in the folds of her clothes. The clinking of her coffee cup had stopped. The hair on her arms was standing up.

  “I won’t beg you for a job,” she said softly. “But I am out of work.”

  “I still have to move?”

  Her reply was immediate. “Yes.”

  Robert said, “Come in and fill out an application. I’ll consider it.”

  “I will,” she said, almost threatening. She took a deep breath and ran a finger under one eye. Something had made her sad.

&nbs
p; “Tell me about you and Ben,” he said. “Why don’t you miss him?”

  “We were on the way out,” she said. “I’d caught him with a girl once years before—­when O was four, Buzz just a baby. I don’t know why I was surprised. I thought he’d started to love me. I thought I loved him. We married under very tough circumstances. We were young. Horny.” She shook her head. “So much sex. Day and night. We were the first for each other and just crazy for it. And then I got pregnant. We got married but we didn’t really know each other. I dropped out of school. I forced Ben to stay in school and finish. It was very tough. I thought we were falling in love, then I found him with this girl and kicked him out of the house for six months.” She thought back to that time, her look almost merry. “He stayed in the yard the entire six months. We had an old hammock then—­he slept in the hammock, went to the bathroom in the bushes or at his office, ate what Olive passed to him. She thought all daddies acted like hers. Six months—­snow, cold, rain—­he never left except to go to work. He just walked round and round the house.”

  “Grief orbits,” Robert said.

  Ethel’s look flared. “Don’t give me that crow shit,” she said. “Don’t make it anything more than it was.”

  “But you took him back.”

  “I weakened,” she said. “Neither of us was ever worth a damn at doing what was right. The weather got very cold. Subzero. He wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t go live in his office. I was lonely raising two kids without a husband around. I told him I’d take him back on a probationary basis. A year.” Her chest heaved, a ragged, disbelieving breath. “We fucked that night, of course. Some probation. Duker might’ve been conceived that night. But I told Ben, any other women, he was gone for good. This is my house, too, Robert. You’ve never seemed to realize that. It always has been, even when Ben was alive. He knew I’d banish him for good.”

  “And you caught him just before he disappeared?” Robert asked.

  Ethel said, “No. I caught him on numerous occasions before he was good enough to disappear. Over the years it was students, waitresses, neighbors, friends of mine. I would banish him and he would fly grief orbits in the yard. He never left. All kinds of weather, it didn’t matter. Some nights he was out there with a foot of wet snow piled on his head. Every time—­every time!—­I took the asshole back. He didn’t know what he wanted. He didn’t want his students, his waitresses, other men’s wives. He didn’t want me. How can you respect someone who never follows through on her threats? Each time I kicked him out, I was a challenge to him—­he wanted me—­until I let him back in. And once he was back, he was gone. You know that tree outside our window? He lied to you, telling you how he climbed it to get into my room. He did that, yes. But the first time he used that tree he was going the other way. Out. Down. Away. The ass. He planned it.”

  Robert waited. He saw Ben standing before his class, getting into the rowboat in the dark, floating down and away in dark water.

  “The night he disappeared,” Ethel said, “he was leaving on his own. He was out in that boat to tell Duke we were getting a divorce. That he was in love with a woman other than me.” Ethel rubbed her eyes. “A teacher, I think she was. Though after all this time, Rob-­O, I don’t remember, nor do I care.”

  ROBERT, ON ONE of his days off, walked to Professor Ara Mason’s house. She was in the side yard, on her knees, gouging weeds from her flower bed. A glass of iced tea was balanced in the grass beside her. An ashtray no larger than a silver dollar held a cigarette.

  She shaded her eyes to see Robert, who had the last of the day’s sun at his back. Then she smiled.

  “What do you when school is out?” Robert asked.

  “This, honey. I trim. Weed. Cut grass. Why haven’t you given me a call? Or left me a note? I think you owe me a crow tale.”

  “I’ve been rude,” he said. “I work a lot. I was ordered to take some time off, so here I am.”

  He followed her into the house for some iced tea. The rooms still had that feeling of packed slovenliness he remembered somewhat fondly. The sunlight passed through the front windows and ignited air thick as grain dust. There were dishes to be washed in the sink and a basket of unironed clothes on a chair in the dining room.

  She poured tea over ice. She took a slice of lemon from a bowl of such slices in the refrigerator and hooked it on the rim of the glass. They went back outside.

  “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I feel very cut off lately. The college and the town don’t really mix. And I don’t mix much outside school. So when school is out I feel very alone.” She lit a cigarette from a pack she kept in a pocket of her shirt; a man’s white shirt stained with dirt and grass.

  “I’m running the sporting goods store,” Robert said.

  “See? Didn’t I predict that?”

  “Did you?” Robert said. He could not remember.

  “Back when it was so cold. You had just started. I predicted great things for you.”

  “Well, I’m running SportsHeaven.”

  “I keep wondering why you’re here,” Ara said.

  Robert looked into his glass. The tea was rather bland, the lemon slice half a wheel.

  “I don’t think I’m going to find Ben,” he said.

  She sat forward. “Sure you will. Who will if you won’t?”

  “Nobody wants him found.”

  “You do,” Ara said.

  “I used to. I don’t know now. I’ve been wondering if I hadn’t been buffaloed by Professor Ladysmith.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Were you?”

  “Oh my, yes,” she said, but smiling. “He got me to do his work. Cover for him. Make his calls. His excuses.”

  “Did you love him?” Robert asked, going easy on her by looking away.

  “Yes,” Ara said. She drew in smoke, then stabbed her weeding tool into the ground so that the prong, shaped like a fish’s tail, was buried a good three inches deep.

  “I think he loved me, too,” she said, “though I could never be sure. We were lovers. But I kept seeing him with other woman. In the most innocent circumstances, but I always felt he wanted me to see him with them.”

  “But he was leaving Ethel for you. Wasn’t that what he was in the boat to tell Duke that night?”

  “He wasn’t leaving anybody,” Ara snapped. “Ben was a great one for symbolic gestures. He talked about leaving Ethel a million times, but he would never do it.” She ran her fingers through a pile of pulled weeds; minutes out of the ground, their furred leaves had already begun to curl in and brown. “I once spent two weeks’ salary on plane tickets to Las Vegas,” she said. “We were finally going to do it. But he never came for me. He spoke to me in the office the following Monday as if it had been the usual weekend coming to an end. I could’ve brained him with one of his specimen jars.”

  “What happened to the tickets?” Robert asked.

  “I used them,” she said, abruptly bright. “I flew to Vegas with another man—­and let Ben know I did it; he was helpless with jealousy—­to see some shows, loll around the pool, gamble. I won money, too.”

  “And you forgave him for that?”

  Ara considered this. “Yes. Ben had a quality you don’t find often in ­people. He had a very short memory for another person’s failings. He was easy to be with because you didn’t have to worry about your faults. He forgave everything. In return, he only asked that you forgive him.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Cow and the Calf

  A POSTCARD WAS delivered to Robert at Ben’s house in July. He returned home from work and it was on the kitchen table, floating on the chipped surface like a raft. A postcard of a body of dark green water, green banks, a tall ancient stone castle watching over the shore. Drawn with blue ink in the water was a serpent’s flaming head. It was a postcard from Loch Ness, mailed by Al Gasconade.
/>   He had written on the back in large letters, a kid’s script:

  Robert—­

  Here for the British Open. Covered Wimbledon, too. No sign of the monster. How about you?

  Later,

  Al G.

  Robert passed the card around at dinner.

  “I think it’s in there,” Duke said, peering at the card. “Plenty of ­people do.”

  “I do, too,” Robert said.

  “Dinosaurs who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time,” Olive said. “When the others got wiped out, they survived through a series of fortunate circumstances. The water is deep, plenty of fish to eat.”

  “Plesiosaurs,” Ethel said.

  “Right,” Duke said. “Plesiosaurs.”

  Ethel glanced at Robert, the others. “Your father told me about them. He used to read me studies about them. Sightings, sonar readings, bathyscaphs.” She sipped her tea. The others waited, but she was finished.

  Buzz was at work. Robert had been letting him close alone a ­couple of nights a week. In the long quiet minutes after midnight before Buzz was safely home, Robert listened for sirens or an explosion of compressed air or some other signal of tragedy. But nothing had happened thus far. Buzz could be counted on. His books came out balanced. The doors got locked, the alarms activated, the receipts dropped off at the bank.

  Ethel put more ice in her glass, poured tea over it. She still wore her zebra suit, though her shift had ended six hours earlier. Lately, she had been approaching Robert about his lack of an assistant manager.

  When he had returned to work from the three days of time off ordered by Herm Branch, Dave was in the back room sketching on a pad.

  “What do you think of this?” Dave asked. “We hire a bunch of ex-­pro athletes. Old Packers. Old Braves, right? And they make a pitch something along the lines of ‘I died and went to SportsHeaven.’ ”

  “Dave, what am I going to do with you?”

  “Why don’t you call me Dad, like real sons do?”