Crows

by Charles Dickinson

  “Coming up with ideas,” Robert said.

  “Exactly. I just think of ideas and tell Herm about them, and he decides if they’re implementable. I’ve already had one he liked. Putting a gold stripe around the sleeve of the manager’s shirt. A crimson stripe for the sleeve of the assistant manager. It sets them apart and commands respect. Like a general’s star.”

  “Herm liked that?” Robert said.

  “He loved it,” Dave said. “I also suggested we get rid of the striped uniforms in favor of some sort of team jersey. SportsHeaven on the front, the employee’s name on the back. And a number, of course. The manager’d be number one. His assistant, number two. And so on.”

  “Good idea. But expensive,” Robert said.

  “Herm’s very words.”

  “And he’s going to pay you to do this?” Robert asked.

  His father hesitated, then shyly named a figure, and Robert had to ask him to repeat it. Herm was paying his new idea man $1 more per week than he was paying the manager of his Mozart store.

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” Evelyn said, kissing her husband on the ear.

  “I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to work for someone other than you,” Dave exclaimed. They both laughed. “I mean, I’ve never had to prove myself beyond you. Now I feel a little pressure. I feel alive.”

  They left for dinner soon after, shooing Robert before they locked up. When he returned to Ben’s house there was a message to call Herm.

  “Have you talked to your father?”

  “Moments ago,” Robert said.

  “I’ve never seen a man so happy,” Herm said. “It was a good idea you had. I almost told him you suggested it.”

  “Don’t tell him,” Robert cautioned. “It means more coming from you. He knows me too well.”

  “I see sides to your father you don’t,” Herm said gently. “You see only a father, kind of an ineffectual guy. A guy who isn’t much good at anything.”

  Robert said, “That’s Dave.”

  “He’s got layers and layers, Robert. If you didn’t have so much at stake, being his son, you might see them, too. But he worked a bad location for thirty years and he did well enough to buy food and keep a roof over your head.”

  “It was my mother’s money,” Robert said.

  “If it was, so what? She’s no fool,” Herm said. “He had enough on the ball to win her and keep her. She didn’t marry him at gunpoint.”

  “He told me what you’re paying him,” Robert said.

  “His ideas are good.”

  “He sits and dreams about red stripes and gold stripes and you pay him more than you pay me for the sixty hours a week I put in at that store?” Robert said. He was on the upstairs phone. He heard a shuffling of movement downstairs, then a listening silence.

  “It’s none of your business what he makes,” Herm said evenly. “But I want you to be happy.”

  “Use your head, Herm! You knew he would come home and tell me. Why the little dig? Why make me feel bad?”

  “You don’t give him enough credit,” Herm said. “You think everything good in you came from you or your mother, and everything bad came from him.”

  “That shouldn’t matter,” Robert said. “This is work.”

  “It was sweet, what you did, though your motives were selfish,” Herm said. “It’s one of the few times I’ve felt there was more to you than a sort of surface brightness.”

  “Thanks, Herm. Gosh.”

  “And he does have good ideas.”

  “Did he tell you his idea for old jocks who died and went to SportsHeaven?”

  “Yes,” Herm said. “I like it.”

  “You do?” Robert said, amazed.

  “Yes. It’s offbeat enough to work. Kind of irreverent. With the right ex-­jocks it can do a lot for the stores.”

  Robert said good-­bye and hung up. He went downstairs, where Ethel and Olive sat at the kitchen table. Olive’s skin had taken on its summer burn. She was just home from work. Plunged like a stake into the greasy jumble of her hair was a pencil bearing the label of a brand of potato chips. Ethel, freed by Robert of having to rise before dawn, now kept late hours, sitting until 2 a.m. in pools of light reading the books and magazines she had missed driving a cab.

  Olive went up to bed soon after Robert appeared. She would rise to go swimming in the morning, before work. On a bicycle she had bought, she rode around the lake to the M.C. campus before the sun was entirely up to swim laps above the waiting wolves. She was famous in that small part of Mozart, the natatorium; her name was chiseled on a trophy the team had won, and her called name had echoed off those tiles, those beautiful men and women on the walls had heard her name and watched her race. Most of all, she missed the racing. Being out of water in summer made her feel slow and detained, as if threads invisible at her back snared her.

  Robert, watching her depart the kitchen, the pencil in her hair, missed her, missed her races, missed the lightness that was a part of her before she fell through the ice.

  Ethel poured coffee. “So here we sit,” she said.

  Robert, spooked, nodded.

  “I haven’t forgotten our deadline,” she said.

  Robert looked at his wristwatch and grimaced. “I’ve still got a ­couple weeks left, don’t I?”

  Ethel laughed. Her disposition had improved since going to SportsHeaven. “It passed about forty-­five days ago,” she said. “You run when you see me—­you think I’ve forgotten and you’re afraid I’ll remember and kick you out. But I did not forget.”

  “Why am I still here then?”

  “Not incidentally, because you gave me a job,” Ethel said. “But I also realized you are the only source of positive memory about Ben the kids have. I have none to contribute. They don’t have many of their own. But they see you, see you searching for him in your spare time, and I think they see something in that that is good.”

  “I don’t know if I can help there anymore,” Robert said. “In talking to ­people, I’ve found a Ben I never knew existed.”

  “Who have you talked to?” Ethel asked sharply. “No. I don’t want to know. It could be anyone.”

  “The kids loved him,” Robert said.

  “He hurt them,” Ethel said. “He was never around. They looked forward to college so they could take his classes and be with him that way. He was a mythical figure: Dear old Dad, who was only present when he had been temporarily banished for his latest infidelity. Then they would walk with him around and around the house. They loved it. He would talk to them. Play catch. Just circling the house, all this went on. When I would finally crumble again and let him back they were heartbroken. They knew he would disappear.”

  HE DIVED IN Oblong Lake without enthusiasm, because Ethel seemed to expect it. The longest he stayed in at any one time was a half hour. August burned away, but he felt the water getting colder. Soon it would be time to grow his beard again. Sometimes he would row to the Calf and sit on the flat stone with his face cranked toward the sun; who had been tending the fire on the Calf the night of the accident? Other times he would sit in the boat on the lake, sweating in his wet suit top, reading a book. At times he forgot whom he was looking for.

  Late that summer Duke came into SportsHeaven. The boy had grown some over the season. Added weight in the shoulders and arms indicated he might soon pass Buzz’s size. He moved easily on a single aluminum crutch; he was wearing shorts, his leg tan, the stump a pale dip of skin out of the other leg of his shorts.

  “Mom told me I have to earn money if I’m going to go to college,” Duke said.

  “That’s a good idea,” Robert said.

  “If I get the leg, I go to work, right?”

  “Get the leg, then we’ll see.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you haven’t got the leg yet,” Robert
said. “This is the first interest you’ve ever shown in it. When you’re wearing it, come see me. Then we’ll discuss a job.”

  Robert waited to see where Duke would go with his thoughts and emotions. He expected him to run again, to come little by little finally to the decision just to get the leg and be done with it.

  But Duke said, “Let’s make an appointment for a fitting, then.”

  “OK. When?”

  “Right away. You tell me when and I’ll be there.”

  Robert laughed. “Why’d you change your mind?”

  “A new school year’s starting,” Duke said. “Everyone—­even ­people you knew last year—­are kind of strangers the first few days or so. I thought it would be a good time to have the leg not be noticed. My dad used to tell me how worrying what other ­people thought of the way you looked was a waste of time, because everyone was thinking about themselves. I’ve found that’s true. Nobody cares that I only have one leg. I don’t think they’ll care I have a fake one, either. And, I need the money I’ll make working at SportsHeaven.”

  Robert called and made an appointment and later in the week he and Duke left for Madison, with Buzz riding along. Duke was nervous about the fitting, about having a stranger probe clinically at the stump he had worked so hard at incorporating into invisibility, and then voluntarily to hook on appendage of wood and plastic to the end of it, like a party gag, or weights on a racehorse.

  “What’s the name of this place?” Buzz asked.

  “Land O’ Limbs,” Duke replied. “Limbtique. Dairy State Prosthetics.”

  “Knock it off,” Robert said calmly, and Duke subsided with a breaking wave of forced laughter.

  Robert had had to go to Ethel to find out why Duke suddenly changed his mind about the leg. “It can’t simply be money,” he said.

  “O and I suspect it is a girl,” Ethel said, smiling. “What else is there to make boys that age act counter to themselves? Or in their own best interests?”

  “Who is she?”

  “We don’t know. She may not surface until school starts. He’s like his father that way. His women were like little mystery storms beneath the surface. You always sensed they were there, you just didn’t know where.”

  “Did they surface when school started?” Robert asked.

  Ethel, as if reaching the limits of her examination of a buried memory, said curtly, “Yes.”

  In the car, Robert wondered to what extent Duke was willing to open himself.

  “Remember the crow hunt?” Robert asked.

  “Oh yes,” Duke said. “I thought Buzzard would shoot us.”

  “And that lame-­ass record player,” Buzz said from the back, scoffing. “We haven’t rented that thing once since I started work.”

  “It’s a hot item,” Robert said. “Always good for twelve hours of continuous play.”

  “We were around here, weren’t we?”

  “We were way north of here,” Robert said. “The other direction entirely.”

  Duke said, “I try to tell my friends that story you told us—­about the crows? But I can never remember half of it.”

  “Mostly it was about a crow trial. And crow deception.”

  “You really heard it from Dad?” Duke asked.

  Robert nodded. “I’ve forgotten the story, though.”

  “You can’t forget,” Duke cried, panicky.

  Robert was made sad suddenly, that he had gone so long without a thought to the crow tales. Once so large in his life, they had lately fallen away, hiding at the bottom of the lake with Ben. Another of Ara’s predictions coming true, he was letting Ben die all over again.

  “Crows have a flaw in their brains that causes them to lose parts of their memory when they sleep,” Robert said. “The longer a crow sleeps, the more he forgets. That’s why you rarely see a crow work hard. They don’t want to tire themselves out. Crows, of course, conceited and arrogant as they are, see this flaw as God’s way of keeping the crows from taking over.” He shifted down, braked at corner, turned, then resumed.

  “Crows call it forgetful sleep. It nearly meant the extinction of the species, because crows—­before they understood forgetful sleep—­were sleeping long nights and waking up complete mental blanks. They were forgetting to eat, to protect themselves, to reproduce. It wasn’t until a certain crow—­concerned naturally by the imminent demise of his kind—­figured out what was happening. He did this simply by going without sleep one night, purely by chance. He was worried, couldn’t sleep, and another crow he had been talking with did go to sleep. In the morning, this crow who had fallen asleep remembered nothing of what they had talked about the night before.”

  “Dad told you this?”

  Robert glanced at Duke. “Parts of it,” he admitted. “The crow who had figured out forgetful sleep became known as the Smarter Crow. All crows consider themselves smart, so he was the Smarter Crow because he had saved the species. He was elevated from an ordinary crow to a major figure in crow society. He was celebrated every day, nearly to the end of his life. The Smarter Crow. And the sad part is that his life was brought up short by that one discovery. It defined him so rigidly he was never able to do anything or go anywhere that he was not deferred to as the Smarter Crow, and called upon to recount for any crows present how he came to save them from extinction. He never took a mate because he never could be sure if any female crow loved him or the fact he was who he was. He never had a family. He was never allowed just to be an average crow. In having the wisdom to save the species, he had doomed himself. He had done one thing so encompassing that he was never allowed to do anything else. He had saved the species. What else was there?”

  “What happened to him?” Duke asked.

  “He got old,” Robert said. “Or older. He got tired—­very tired—­of being the Smarter Crow. There was a banquet planned in his honor. He had been to ten thousand banquets just like it. He would be celebrated and he would be asked to stand before the assembled crows and recount for the umpteenth time how he had saved Corvus brachyrhynchos. They would applaud, as crows do, by clicking their beaks sharply together. Then they would cluster around him to express their personal gratitude, and wait for him to recount in even more detailed terms how he had saved their species. And he was like an actor who had done one play for years and years. He knew how to draw out the suspense, how to insert humor, how to manufacture emotion. It was what he did: He was the Smarter Crow.

  “But this one night, old, near the end of his life,” Robert said, “he decided he had had enough. He made up his mind he was through being the Smarter Crow. He simply went for a long flight over the countryside, miles and miles, and only stopped when he was very tired. He proceeded to fall into a deep sleep. He slept through the night and into the afternoon of the following day. The longest, most refreshing sleep of his life. When he awoke he had forgotten who he was. He knew he was a bird, but he wasn’t sure what kind. He did not know where he was. He did not know he was the Smarter Crow. He felt wonderful, lighthearted, and young. He spread his wings and flew farther away. The crows who were holding the banquet for him became worried when he did not appear. A few flew to where the Smarter Crow was staying, and when they could not find him a great uproar went across the sky. It was assumed he had been called back, and he passed into folklore. Over the next few years the Smarter Crow was sighted in different places around the world, but these sightings were discounted. The Smarter Crow in fact lived several more seasons as an ordinary crow. He took a mate. He had long felt the only way one could beat forgetful sleep was to have a mate who could stay awake while the other slept, then fill in the parts of memory lost in sleep. He raised a family and finally died wrapped in the warm wings of his mate. His children thought he was boring because he had forgotten most of what he had experienced in his life, and he was sure it could not have been important or he would have remembered it.”

&nbs
p; AN ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON wrote Duke a prescription for a temporary leg.

  “You’re still growing,” the doctor said. “In three or four years we’ll fit you with a leg for life. A leg to dance in.”

  He was a fat little man with a close beard of white whiskers. He sat on a rolling stool at Duke’s foot, examining the stump of leg, poking at it with his fingertips. Duke did not look at him.

  “We will get you a sock to put over this,” he said, cupping the rounded pink end of the leg. He made some measurements with a cloth tape and a pair of calipers. “Three years this has been? Why do you wait so long? Why depress yourself?”

  Duke said nothing. He chewed his lower lip, then shrugged.

  “Well, better late,” the doctor said, patting the stump and rolling away to a small desk across the room. He wrote in ink on a yellow notepad, tore the sheet off, and handed it to Duke.

  “You’re in business, young man,” he said. “Come see me when the leg arrives. I’ll give you some tips.” He hiked up one trouser leg and tapped with his pen on a shin of flesh-­colored plastic.

  “Thirty-­seven years I’ve lugged this cannon around,” he said. “I love it. It lets me work, lets me dance with my wife. You are young and proud and have time to sit and sulk. Go. Come see me when the leg arrives.”

  The week after school began, Duke came into SportsHeaven. Robert’s eyes went to him, his expectant face, the filled tube of his missing leg.

  “You got it,” Robert said.

  Duke bent over and rapped the leg, producing a solid sound. The shoes he had on, one was worn, one was new.

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Strange,” Duke said, still looking down. “I have a little trouble controlling it. I haven’t fallen over yet. Small triumph. Anyway, Rob-­O, I’ve come for my job.”

  “Just like that?”

  “It’s what I want to do now. I need money. You and Buzzer and Mom seem to have so much fun.”

  “Not so much,” Robert said.

  “So there’s no job? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Robert pointed to the new leg. “Does that chafe?”