Crows

by Charles Dickinson

  “Some. It’s to be expected. They gave me a sock to wear. Plus a tube of ointment. I ask girls to put it on for me,” Duke said, grinning.

  “Any takers?”

  “Not yet. Hey, do I have a job, or not?”

  Robert gave him an application. “Fill this out. It’s standard.”

  The pad of forms was nearly empty; kids came in every day, from Mozart High or M.C., or one of the towns down the road; some of the kids he knew, but most were strangers. Robert let them fill in the easy blanks of the application; they could tell their parents they had tried. But he had not been hiring since taking on Ethel.

  He went into the store while Duke sat at the desk filing out the form. He felt safe in the blue expanse; he was in charge there. His numbers were up. Theft seemed to be diminishing of late. Faintly, like a fight song heard in a stadium a half mile away, came the strains of “On, Wisconsin.” It played from speakers hidden at the back of the store. Dave’s idea, it was one of thirty-­three college fight songs on a tape that ran all day, with three minutes between selections. Herm loved the idea; he said it “filled the air with the taste of sports.” Robert often hummed along.

  He made a tour of the store, walking down or looking into every aisle. His employees did not jump into false busyness at his appearance; this pleased him. He wanted them to be comfortable with him, he wanted their work to be fulfilling enough that they would not need to put counterfeit enthusiasm into it.

  But in this orbit of his he saw no one who deserved to be fired to make room for Duke. He paused at the time clock to read on the cards the names of those ­people not at work. They were all good workers, drudges like himself.

  Duke was finished when Robert returned. He took his seat and read the sheet. Duke’s printing was small and clear, not the juvenile hacking of ink he saw so often on applications.

  “I don’t have an opening right now, Duke.”

  Duke leaned forward; his false leg stuck out awkwardly as a roll of carpet and for a moment he had to shift it with his hands. “But you made openings for Buzz and Ethel,” he said.

  “There was deadwood here,” Robert said. “Those ­people are long gone. I’ve only got good ­people working here now.”

  Duke swiped at his eyes. “You promised,” he said.

  “I didn’t promise you anything, Duke,” Robert said. “I offered you a job months ago. It’s not the nature of work to expect that job to be there whenever you decide you want it.”

  The boy got to his feet. He arranged the new leg beneath him. He was getting tall. He looked more like his father than Buzz did, but without his father’s self-­absorption.

  “Sit down, Duke,” Robert said.

  Duke waited ten seconds, then sat.

  Robert said, “Tell me what happened that night.”

  Duke’s eyes went dry and cold. “Is that a stipulation of my employment?”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Robert said. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m not saying you’ll have a job even if you do tell me. I’ve just always wanted to know.”

  Duke sighed, then began to speak.

  “He’d had a fight with Buzz. I didn’t know about what. Buzz was a very angry kid in those days. Dad let him blow off steam pretty regularly, but that night Buzz was laying into Dad like nothing I’d ever heard before. I was sitting in my room just listening to this. Buzzer had a filthy mouth on him and Dad usually put a stop to it eventually. But not that night. Buzz just went on and on and on. It was nearly dark when he finally quit. I stayed in my room. The house was very quiet. I thought they might have left.

  “About an hour later someone tapped on my door. I thought it might be Buzz, or you. It was Dad . . . Ben. He looked awful. Sad. I wasn’t used to that and it scared me. He was usually a happy-­go-­lucky sort, even when Mom hated his guts. He said he had to talk to me and asked me to go for a walk.

  “We walked here and there. Into town. Looking into store windows. Neither of us saying anything. It was like he forgot why he had asked me to go with him. We walked back toward home along the lake. We came to where our boat was tied and this cheered him up. We sat in the boat, still tied to the dock, and he told me stories; how he used to take Mom out in it when they were younger; they were in the boat the first time they kissed; how he used to row us kids around the lake. That sort of stuff. He sounded very nervous and off the wall. He was just filling time.

  “Finally, I asked him what he wanted to talk to me about and he reached over and untied the line and pushed us off. He got behind the oars and we headed for the Cow and the Calf. It was nice out there. It’s always cooler on the water, but you know that. The sky was full of stars, a million of them. And lots of lights along the shore. I could see car lights moving up and down the lake road.”

  “Did you see a fire on the Calf?” Robert asked.

  “A fire? No.”

  “The pilot said he saw a fire as he was coming in.”

  “No fire,” Duke repeated. “Every now and then I heard someone on shore talking. A man and a woman, the woman telling the man something. I couldn’t understand what she was saying but I really didn’t listen, because Ben wasn’t talking and I was getting nervous.

  “I’d seen Buzzard before we left the house,” Duke continued. “He was in the living room just staring at the TV. I remember he was watching The Fugitive. He looked as mad as I’ve ever seen him. But he was scared, too. I wanted to talk to him, but Dad was standing right there and Buzz refused to look at us. I think Ben did that on purpose. He wanted to talk to me before Buzz gave me his version.”

  Duke took a deep breath. Robert didn’t speak; he might take Duke away from the lake, away from Ben’s side, away from that night.

  “Where were you when all this was happening?” Duke suddenly inquired, his eyes jumping fast to Robert’s.

  “I was there,” Robert said.

  “I don’t remember you.”

  “I was with O. It was just another night at Ben’s house.”

  “Yeah.” Duke scowled. “Well, we rowed out onto the lake to about . . . you know where, Rob-­O. It was very quiet except for the words from the woman on the shore. Dad lifted the oars out of the water and we drifted for a while. I listened to the drops of water falling from the oar blades. I hated it.”

  Duke said nothing for a long time. He squeezed his legs and scratched his head. He looked at a spot over Robert’s shoulder.

  “What had Ben wanted to tell you?” Robert asked.

  “That he was a coward, basically,” Duke said. “He had first gone to Buzz, then he went to me, and if he’d lived he would probably have gone to O. All he wanted to let us know was that he no longer loved our mother, but he wasn’t sure if he should leave her for good. He wanted me, us, to say, sure, leave us, leave Mom, go off with someone else, we forgive you. Can you imagine that?” He cleared his throat and shook his head. “What a chickenshit. He embarrassed me so much. Then just before the plane landed on us he told me he loved me. First and last time.”

  ROBERT MADE ROOM for Duke at SportsHeaven. As Herm had said, the numbers were there.

  It was around that time that Robert worked a day shift and discovered Mrs. Marsh in Aisle 7. She was wearing a gray Bucks T-­shirt and blue jeans, and she was late in a pregnancy Robert had heard nothing about. Her round belly filled Robert’s brain with her husband’s salacious voice; which story told to Robert had taken hold in Mrs. Marsh’s womb to produce this perfect hump beneath gray cloth? Her face was lightly burned. She wore red tennis shoes and purple socks. She held her hands cupped under the weight of the baby.

  He turned to slip away, but she saw him and called his name. Her face was still thin, still roughly sanded.

  “Do you still have your whistle with you?” she asked with just a shading of scorn.

  Robert took it from his pocket and rattled the pill for her.

&nbs
p; “How’s Joe?” he asked.

  “You don’t care.”

  “Is he working?”

  “At what? What can he do?” she asked.

  “Maybe work for the park district. Maybe coach.”

  She shifted upward the weight she carried. “He’s talking about working out again, playing in the Milwaukee parks, and taking another tryout with the Bucks.”

  “Oh?”

  “He has no chance, am I right?”

  “He’s how old? Twenty-­six?”

  Mrs. Marsh nodded.

  “That’s pretty old for that game,” Robert said. “I think they want younger guys.”

  “Why are you working the day shift?” she asked.

  “Someone’s sick. Why?”

  “I come days to avoid you,” she said, her voice even in its most innocent phrasing carrying a hint of flirtation. “You know my past.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Joe talks, I know. He can’t keep a secret to save his life. All he does is talk.”

  “I don’t know,” Robert said, feeling crushed by unease.

  “He had a lot of problems with employee theft and shoplifting. ­People knowing the system, how to get around it. You have that problem?”

  Robert smiled. “Yeah. Things disappear all the time.”

  “Any chance your job’ll disappear because of things disappearing?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. Herm understands. I bring the cops in on occasion for effect. It runs in cycles.”

  “I was hoping you’d lose your job,” she said.

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  She stood for a moment, just glaring at him. He tried for innocent conversation about her life, the new baby, but she dodged it as if it were lethal.

  “I can’t believe you fired him,” she said. “You were gunning for him right from the start, weren’t you?”

  “No. Herm had doubts about Joe long before I arrived.”

  “Talk about a gutless shithead,” she said. “Having his assistant manager fire the manager.”

  “I agree.”

  “Oh you do, do you?”

  “I liked Joe.”

  “I’ll bet.” She turned away from him and walked to the front of the store. No extra weight in her hips beyond that heaviness that had attracted him when he caught her shoplifting, a light step in her red shoes, she moved rapidly away from him. Outside, Joe Marsh awaited her, legs crossed, arms folded, leaning against a parked car.

  He smiled at his wife, then beyond her saw Robert at the door to SportsHeaven.

  “Hey, Rob,” he said, raising a hand. He was already moving up the sidewalk beside his wife, who looked back at Robert and with a smile lifted her Bucks shirt, showing the very smallest slice of the lower halves of her breasts, and delivering a new basketball into her husband’s cradling hands.

  Robert had his whistle out, but he was laughing. Joe and Mrs. Marsh were running hard up the sidewalk, laughing, too. Joe dribbling. The whistle shrieked and Robert made the call, but they didn’t stop, and the last Robert ever saw of them they were going around a corner, Joe Marsh dribbling behind his back to cut the angle of the turn.

  IN AUTUMN ROBERT dived again in Oblong Lake. Through a hot, busy September he had worked long hours and not entered the lake even once. But in October the leaves began to turn and the first cool weather came. He had not talked to anyone about Ben in a long time, and lately he tended to dwell on the good memories he had of him. Robert sensed the lake about to close over the winter.

  He went out in the early morning before work, expeditions that left him ravenous. In mid-­October the water was warmer than the air and in the morning lengths of mist thick and defined as felled trees lay on the water. They would disappear as he dived. From under water he saw leaves hit the surface and revolve like playing cards thrown at someone’s leisure.

  On a later day, still in October, his new beard begun, he came to that cave near the Cow and the Calf where he had found the red-­stoned ring, the feeding muskellunge, and the yellow-­white stick on the cave floor. He had picked around the site long enough. It was getting late.

  The muskie and the stick were gone, and Ethel had lost the ring in the dark on the lake road, but deeper in the cave he at last found Ben. He was a mess; fish-­chewed, clothed in shreds of washed fabric and skin that feathered down like tendrils of cheese. He bobbed at the roof of the cave, facing the ceiling, arms spread wide, one hand missing.

  Robert left his light at the mouth of the cave, the beam fingering up through the water like a marking stake. He cried a little in his mask, but dried his face in the boat, then rowed ashore and went to tell the police he had found Ben Ladysmith.

  The news went quickly through Mozart. The fire department divers, men who had given three days to the search three years before, found Robert’s light, and then found Ben. A crowd waited on the shore. The story made page one of the Madison paper, with a head shot of Ben from the M.C. yearbook. They asked Robert for a picture of himself but he refused them.

  That day, he went home and later he went to work. Ethel kissed him and thanked him and said nothing else. Olive swam in the lake once before it got too cold, and around Christmas, following a meet, she invited Robert out for coffee. She had won two medals that night, so they each had one to fiddle with.

  Customers in the restaurant said hello, most moving along. Others saw him through the window and pointed and waved. He read his name on their lips. The bolder ones, those who had not heard the entire story, stopped to jingle their change, to send their best to his parents, and to ask him how he had known it was Ben after all that time. Robert said Ben was the only one still missing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHARLES DICKINSON, with seven highly acclaimed books to his credit, takes American fiction back to the complexity of modern life and love with his characteristically incisive irony and humor. Critics have compared him to such masters as Margaret Atwood, Ann Tyler, Michael Crichton, and Raymond Carver.

  His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Atlantic, among others, and two stories, “Risk” and “Child in the Leaves,” were included in O. Henry collections. He has received generous praise for his novels, Waltz in Marathon, Crows, The Widows’ Adventures, Rumor Has It, A Shortcut in Time, and its sequel, A Family in Time, and his collection of stories, With or Without.

  Born in Detroit, Dickinson lives near Chicago with his wife.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by

  Charles Dickinson

  RUMOR HAS IT

  WALTZ IN MARATHON

  CROWS

  THE WIDOWS’ ADVENTURES

  WITH OR WITHOUT

  A SHORTCUT IN TIME

  A FAMILY IN TIME

  An Excerpt from The Widows' Adventures

  Prologue

  Helene

  INA ASKS ME what I see and I have to be honest: I see nothing. She asks me what color my blindness takes and I find that a curious question. I am simply blind.

  I tell her the color I miss most is that vivid crimson cloud of blood filling my eyeballs. That gorgeous phenomenon was the first serious indication that I would one day be blind as a bat. Proliferative retinopathy. Deterioration of the blood vessels in my retinas caused by diabetes. The blood gushed in; I imagined I could hear it filling my eyes like buckets. But it was fluid into fluid, blood into vitreous humor, silent as an injection of dye.

  I was speaking to Rudy at the time, and I remember he waited several minutes after I stopped speaking in midsentence before he asked me to continue. He was a trifle peeved by my announcement that all I could see was a scarlet cloud, that yet another trip to the hospital was required.

  Ina asks me to tell her about the last thing I saw. That is difficult to say, because my eyesight did not
go like a light being snapped off, but leaked away a smidgen at a time. Long ago, my doctor looked deep into my eyes and reported seeing tiny red dots in there. A bad sign, in his opinion. Capillary microaneurysms, they were called. Foreshadowing. Then came that first beautiful, terrifying cloud of blood. The clouds went away, and returned, and went away again. But they always returned, and finally they remained.

  When Ina asks what was the last thing I saw, I tell her it was Rudy. It is Rudy who takes up the most space in my memory. He never forgave me my diabetes, all the planning, the expense (most of all, he never forgave the expense), and the sheer inconvenience it entailed. In granting my requests to prepare my morning and evening shots or to help test my urine, his manner was brusque and faintly disgusted. He slammed doors when I was trying to rest. He pestered my sleep with questions about the locations of household items. He had no interest in me if I was not healthy.

  I talked him through the steps of preparing dinner because the stove frightened me now that I was blind. Even when it wasn’t turned on I felt its presence like a patient enemy, just as I feared candles, matches, cigarettes (I’d asked Rudy to smoke only at work; imagine his chagrin). Carving knives, peelers, meat forks, they terrified me with images of gashes and punctures. Proliferative hemorrhaging; death by leaking.

  Rudy proved to be an able cook. He helped me keep track of my diet, counting calories, carbohydrates, scouting for the deadly sugar that seemed an element of everything that went in my mouth, coming in so many unexpected forms. He waited outside the bathroom while I urinated in a cup, then accepted the warm offering, dipped the TesTape, and reported the color. He did all this with an impassive air of disgust, a nonjudgmental loathing.

  I would try to draw Rudy into conversation, but Rudy was not a conversationalist. I would work back through my memories of the time since he had left for work that morning. I sought a funny story or an interesting scrap of news from the TV. Something to throw into the quiet. But I rarely found anything to say. The only people I talked to were Ina (and, through her, Vincent) and Amanda. Ina’s amusements were tainted in Rudy’s eyes by her drinking. Amanda, then nearing forty, without a husband, was a sore point with her father. Vincent, who had money, was another constant irritant to my husband.