Crows

by Charles Dickinson

  HERM CAME FOR another visit one evening. He spent more time at the store than in the past. Robert was flattered, but annoyed, too. Herm held up the works. The employees, nervous with the owner on the premises, worked too frantically and left mistakes in their wakes like slivers of chewed fingernails.

  “Where’s Dave the rave?” Herm asked, ducking into the back room where Robert was making out the next month’s schedule; again, without an assistant manager, no days entirely free of SportsHeaven for Robert.

  “He’s off,” he said. It hit him like that; Herm was hanging around because he liked Dave. He should have understood that immediately. Herm enjoyed Dave’s incongruous enthusiasm and string of half-­baked ideas.

  “He’s coming in later?”

  “He’s on tomorrow,” Robert said. “Can I tell you something, Herm?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Dave’s not working out.”

  Herm cleared his throat, touched his flaky hair. “Why?” he asked. “That bike rack idea was inspired. On the surface it’s not much. But it’s rooted very solidly in what I want to accomplish.”

  “Too much talk, too little work,” Robert said.

  Herm studied Robert critically. “I never recognized what a drudge you are.”

  “Other employees are complaining all he does is gab. He wanted to take over right away, become assistant manager. He doesn’t want to do his share of the mundane stuff.”

  Herm said, “He’s a veteran retailer, Rob. You can’t put a guy with thirty years in the business on the same footing with a seventeen-­year-­old kid.”

  Robert leaned back in his chair. He folded his hands across his striped middle.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.

  “That bike rack,” Herm said, shaking his head appreciatively. “That was a very simple idea, but a great idea. Elegant. It tells the kids of Mozart they’re welcome here. That transmits a good feeling to the parents, who have the money to spend.

  “I think,” Herm continued, “that a man with that sort of mind should be catered to. So he isn’t the world’s best day-­in-­day-­out type worker. Most of those steady guys are dull as hell, if you want my opinion. But someone with that spark, that brilliance, I think we should let him remain even if he is perceived by most ­people as a goof-­off. It’s worth it for that occasional flash of creativity.”

  “I like the steady guys,” Robert said. “I don’t find drudges like me dull at all. They do what I tell them and they do it right the first time. Getting Dave to stack three cans of tennis balls is like negotiating for world peace. He never shuts up.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Herm said.

  “Not much. I may fire him.”

  “Don’t make sick jokes about your father like that.”

  “I want you to do something for me, Herm.”

  The owner touched his scalp again. “How much for one of those sun hats out there?”

  “Is this a quiz?”

  “No. My scalp fries in the summer, I always forget to buy a summer hat.” His expression clouded. “I hate summer. I can’t wear my Russian hat.”

  “$11.95,” Robert reported.

  “Are you kidding? That’s highway robbery.”

  “That’s your marked-­up SportsHeaven price.”

  “If I just took one, would you report me?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “That’s right,” Herm said. “I am.” He left the back room and Robert followed. Herm walked to the display tree of sun hats. They were charmless pastel head covers, with vertical bands, two-­inch rims, and phony coats-­of-­arms glued to the front. The color, too pale, frivolous, did not suit him. But the fit was perfect and Herm grinned at the sudden shade that cooled his head.

  “It’s mine,” Herm said.

  “Has been all along,” Robert said. “Although owner theft is a growing problem.”

  Herm Branch raised an eyebrow and studied Robert. “A guy who’d threaten to fire his own father . . . what wouldn’t a guy like that do?”

  “He wouldn’t put up with a poorly run store,” Robert said.

  “The numbers are there. I’ll grant you that.”

  “And it’s not all because of that damn bike rack,” Robert said, sounding petty even to himself.

  “Maybe not,” Herm said. “But that was a brilliant idea.”

  “Give him a job then,” Robert suggested.

  “Who? Dave?”

  “Yes. Call him to Milwaukee. Tell him you want to hire him as an idea man. Pay him what you pay him now, or pay him whatever you want. A retainer fee for each idea. He’s got a million of them. I’m too biased toward my father to give his ideas an objective consideration.”

  “Why do you want me to do this?” Herm asked.

  “It’ll get him out of here. It’ll make him feel important. And he can be with my mother all day again, which is all that he wants in his life. He can work at home or he can hang around downtown with his friends like a big shot. When he has an idea he can call you instead of bugging me with it.”

  “I don’t know,” Herm said.

  “It will be the perfect job for him at this time of his life.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It was just an idea,” Robert said. “And keep it between you and me, OK?”

  They came to the front of the store. Herm shook Robert’s hand. A harsh bell went off when Herm passed through the security gate, making him jump.

  Robert plucked the tacky little hat from Herm’s head and removed the alarm activator tag. He held it in front of Herm, and said, “If you’ll remember, this alarm system was my idea.”

  “It says a lot about you,” Herm replied, putting the hat back on. “Your dad’s ideas attract customers, spread good feelings. Yours prevent theft.”

  “It saves you money, but it’s not brilliant, huh?”

  BUZZARD CAME HOME a few minutes after midnight. They heard the song he whistled through the open windows as he came up the drive.

  “He sounds happy,” Ethel murmured.

  “He’s got a job he likes,” Robert said.

  “He also told me his arm doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  “Is that right?”

  “He said he woke up one day and it felt fine,” Ethel said.

  “He hasn’t tried to throw, has he?”

  “No,” Buzz, who had come into the kitchen, replied.

  “Well, don’t. You let it rest all winter. I’ll fire you if you don’t.”

  “You really like your power, don’t you?” Ethel asked with gentle derision.

  “It’s the only hold I have over him. You. Anybody,” Robert said.

  “You don’t even have that.”

  Robert turned from her. He feared her concentration on him would remind her that she had given him a deadline to move, the deadline now passed and Robert still in his room on the fourth floor. He saw in that fact something of the woman who had kept allowing Ben to return from orbit.

  “How’d it go tonight?” he asked Buzz.

  “It went fine.”

  “Sell anything?”

  “After eight o’clock, nobody came into the store,” Buzz said. “But we sold a canoe. A gas camp stove. A ­couple $75 tennis rackets, $130 running shoes. An aluminum baseball bat. Among other things.” He grinned at Robert, brought his painless arm over in a mimicry of a pitch, solely to aggravate his boss.

  In Oblong Lake that early morning Robert dove in water he had searched before. The lake was so large and changing he would never corner Ben through a progressive dwindling of uninspected space. Robert decided to stay close to the site of the accident, close to home. He swam in the clear green water that ringed the Cow and the Calf. The great rocks were almost memorized, every crack and dent touched previously, the same motionless fish han
ging in the hidden alcoves. The diving was so effortless. The water against his face was almost warm.

  He remembered a day in spring, late in the school year Ben was his teacher. They had come through a winter cold as any other in Mozart but water was running that warm day in the earth’s low places, off roofs, in the gullies cut along the campus walks. Ben had found black leaves freed from the winter snow pack and set them afloat on these rivulets.

  “How was class today?” Ben asked.

  “Fine.”

  “I never know if I’m getting through,” Ben said. “You kids have such blank looks on your faces at times. It’s a very hard thing to push through that—­to even try to push through it. The worst teachers don’t even try. What do the kids say about me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t talk to them.”

  “When I was a student—­a child—­” Ben said, “I made a papier-­mâché cutaway model of a volcano. It was very detailed, with the layers of the mountain carefully painted on. I labeled each part. At the heart of this volcano was a pop bottle, painted the red of magma, in which I mixed vinegar, baking soda, and red food coloring to create the eruption. The volcano erupting was marvelous. I had that class in my hands as I demonstrated. Every kid craned forward waiting for that thing to blow! It was a complete success, although the mountain began to dissolve immediately after. It was an unintentional re-­creation of the destruction of a real volcano. But I won first place and from that moment on I was subtly pushed toward a career in science. And here I am. Here we are.”

  They had come to the sciences building and climbed the inner core to Ben’s office. Ara was there, smoking, her feet on the desk, reading from a pile of test papers in her lap. She smiled at them.

  “I was telling Robert my volcano story,” Ben said to her.

  “I became a sportswriter because for as long as I can remember I liked typewriters as a kid,” Robert said. “And of all the things I liked to type, I liked typing scores the best.”

  “Why are you where you are, Ara?” Ben asked.

  “Because I don’t know how to do anything else,” she said without acrimony. “I’ll be here long after you both have broken away.”

  “I’ve always been looking for that sense of drama,” Ben said. “I someday hope to re-­create the hold I had on those kids with that volcano. So far, no luck. Only Robert will get free of here,” he said. “He will get an A in my course and graduate and be done with biology. The world will open before him and he’ll venture into it—­forgetting all about his old teacher and the rather aloof young woman he shared an office with. What were their names?”

  In one deep pocket between boulders the size of his fourth-­floor room Robert surprised a muskellunge chewing a meal. The beam of his light turned the fish’s eyes to red glass balls. The muskie shot forward in a panic, striking Robert’s chest with its half-­open plated snout. It felt like a football helmet face mask driving into him; in the morning he would discover over his heart two bruises parallel and greenish, straight and definite as rods. He rolled back in that gentle way of underwater, his mask dislodging, his light tumbling from his hand and falling with a clank down into the cave, cold water surging up his nose.

  He kicked to the surface. He hung from the side of the boat for a good ten minutes, breathing, just hanging there, feeling the lake fall away beneath him. Down through the clear water he saw the faint smoke of light from the dropped beam. He adjusted his mask and snorkel, took in air, then kicked down toward the light. His intention was to retrieve the light and then go home; he had reached that point, as he did in every dive, when the water, the entire undertaking, made him feel like an intruder, endangered and unwanted.

  At the cave mouth he reached inside and curled his hand around the torch shaft. He brought the light out and its beam swept across the cave floor, illuminating a stick of something yellow-­white.

  Robert surfaced but did not return to the cave. He got out of the water and sat shivering in the boat. He hauled in the anchor and rowed to shore. The stick looked perfectly carved in his imagination; a precise column of chalk or ivory. And attached to it, he remembered, made translucent by the strong, watered light, were fragile peelings like fine silk or very old leaves.

  He guessed he could find the cave again; maybe he should have left his light there. It was in water he had searched often before. Long ago he had found a red-­stoned ring in the neighborhood.

  HIS MOTHER WAS home alone. Her hair was rolled in yellow tubes held in place with fat pink plastic pins. She kissed her son on the cheek.

  “Come in, Robert,” she said. She looked ludicrous and undignified with the nest of tubes in her hair.

  “Where’s Dave?”

  “He’s not here,” she said. She took his hand and led him deeper into the house, to the bathroom still steamy with the heat of her bath. Her hand felt oiled and warm.

  “Your father went somewhere,” she said. “He wouldn’t even tell me. I’m not being intentionally vague.”

  “I wanted to talk to him,” Robert said. He sat on the slick rim of the tub, having to hold on. Little islands of soap bubbles, left behind in the rush to the drain, popped and disintegrated audibly on the tub floor.

  “He’s been very mysterious lately,” she said. “He told me to be dressed and ready for a night on the town when he gets back.”

  “Have you thought about taking him under your wing again?”

  “Oh! I forgot to tell you. I rented the store.”

  “Big mistake,” Robert said.

  “Not at all,” Evelyn said. “It will pay a nice monthly income to us. I couldn’t charge top-­dollar because it is a less than ideal location. But I got a fair price—­and a year’s lease. If the business is a success, I push the rate up in a year.”

  “What’s the business?”

  “A place to make photocopies,” she said.

  “Did you rent it to Dave? That sounds like one of his lines.”

  His mother closely studied the skin on her face as she talked. Her breath clouded the mirror with half-­dollar-­sized blemishes that grew and vanished almost simultaneously like smoke signals.

  “When I left the store it was for good,” she told him. “Nothing would change that, and nothing will. You might as well get used to it. I think your father has. He’s been very chipper lately. Very full of himself.”

  “Maybe he’s having an affair,” Robert said.

  His mother was amused. She pulled the skin taut at the outside corners of her eyes; a little girl making herself briefly a Chinaman. She smoothed the skin back; the years of her laughter bunching up as they had for thirty years. Then she did laugh, a deep laugh he would recognize anywhere. And Robert thought she would be the one to pull an affair off over her husband; Dave would never fool her.

  “Your father is devoted,” Evelyn said.

  “Tell him I stopped by,” Robert said, standing. She was applying foundation with a spongy pad.

  Evelyn smiled at him across the reflected distance of the mirror. “He loves his job at SportsHeaven,” she said. “He says it’s the best job he’s ever had.”

  “What has he to compare it to?” Robert asked.

  They both heard the scratch of the key at the front of the house. The front door opening moved the curtain on the bathroom window. Robert felt the little house squeeze his shoulders, then let go.

  “Here’s the guy now,” Evelyn said. She went to meet her husband with her face half-­finished; she looked like an oval globe with a vertical equator, one side tilting ever so faintly toward night.

  He heard her predict to Dave, “You have good news.” But before her husband could answer, she said, “Robert’s here.” A warning. Was he bad news?

  “Where?” Dave asked.

  “Here,” Robert said, coming into the room. His father was uneasy, seeing him, but he grasped Robert’s hand and shook
it with his best salesman’s lock grip. His eyes, dead, it had seemed to Robert, since Evelyn had cut him adrift, were alight with some exciting news.

  “What? What?” his wife demanded to know, laughing and pulling his arm.

  Dave had dressed in a yellow shirt and navy blue bow tie that was cocked some degrees shy of parallel to the Earth; he wore blue trousers and a pale blue seersucker sportcoat. He shed this coat and Robert saw that his father’s shirt was dark with sweat down his ribs and across his back. With a jaunty snap he tore off the bow tie.

  “What?” Evelyn repeated.

  He urged her to be patient. “Before I tell you my news,” he said, “there’s something I must tell Robert.”

  “What is it?” Robert asked.

  “I’m resigning from SportsHeaven.”

  “Dave,” Robert said, “are you sure you want to do that?”

  “I have a new job,” he reported, glancing at his son. “I just returned from Milwaukee.”

  Evelyn’s face hardened. “I’m not moving to Milwaukee.”

  “No need,” Dave said. “I’m not being relocated. I can work out of the house. I may have to make a trip in-­state now and then—­but not often. I’ll never be gone overnight. Or maybe you can come with me, Ev.”

  “What’s the job?” Robert asked. Already he felt freed.

  “I’m the new idea man for SportsHeaven,” Dave said.

  “You talked to Herm,” Robert said.

  “A man of vision,” Dave said. “A wonderful man. He contacted me a while ago, asked me to come see him. We went around and around, haggling, getting to know each other. We’ve become pretty good friends. Did you know we have the same birthday?”

  “No!” Evelyn said.

  “We’re exactly the same age.”

  “You look alike, too,” Robert said.

  “Do we?”

  “Thinning hair. Same petite build. Same gut.”

  Dave laughed. “You won’t ruin my moment here, Rob-­O,” he declared.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t want to ruin it. When do you start?”

  “I’ve already started,” Dave said. “I work twenty-­four-­hour days. Whenever my brain is working, I’m at work.”