Ravens

by George Dawes Green

  Though after all, who was he to judge anyone’s career? Considering the state of his own.

  She said, “Well anyway, sir, I think I might know something.”

  “Know something?”

  She’d been in Barbara’s Bible study class, he remembered that, and he wondered if she was about to spring some kind of religious thing on him. Like, Sir, I think I know that Jesus was resurrected in the flesh, but how can I be sure I know? If she asked something like that, he’d be useless.

  But then she said, “It’s something about the jackpot.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The jackpot. We sold the winning ticket at our store.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “And the guy who won it? Not the Boatwrights, but the other guy?”

  “What other guy?”

  “Shaw McBride.”

  That name meant nothing to him.

  She said, “You didn’t see the announcement? On TV?”

  He shook his head. “I was there, but I was working. Security. Out in the parking lot. I didn’t really see anything. There’s another winner?”

  “Uh-huh. The Boatwrights are splitting the jackpot with this guy Shaw McBride. Supposedly he’s a friend of Mr. Boatwright. Supposedly he gave money to Mr. Boatwright to buy tickets.”

  “Oh.”

  “But the thing is,” she said, “this guy? He was in our store on Thursday morning. OK? The day after the drawing? I remember, ’cause it was when the TV people came to the store. And he asked me, he said, like, what’s this all about? He didn’t even know there had been a jackpot. I had to tell him about it.”

  Burris held up a hand. “Wait.”

  She sat quietly.

  He said, “I’m trying to make sense of this.” He wrinkled his brow. “This guy came in… when?”

  “Thursday.”

  “After the drawing?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. And just now I was watching TV? And I saw him up on stage, that same guy, but now he’s saying how he’s Mr. Boatwright’s old friend. And like, half the jackpot is his. But I, I mean, I think… .” She trailed off.

  Burris prompted: “You think he’s lying?”

  She nodded.

  “But why would Mitch Boatwright go along with that?”

  She shrugged.

  But the answer was self-evident, and he spoke it: “You think Mitch is scared?”

  “I guess, yes sir.”

  All over Burris’s brain, lights were flickering on, doors were creaking open. Some of those doors led directly to Nell Boatwright (of course everything led to her eventually). But there was also a voice inside him that was saying, Whoa.

  Don’t just leap into this, Burris.

  This is how he had screwed himself every time — leaping too damn fast. Thinking he’d been given some kind of private window on the truth. In the past, this had led him to big errors. This is why he was just a corporal when he had once been a detective in the Coastal Area Drug Abuse Task Force, when he could have made captain inside of five years — but no, he was hungry for instant glory; he was susceptible to con men who led him around by the ring that hung from his snout, and so he wound up with nothing. And now he was the object of derision and would be for the rest of his ignominious career.

  So slow down here. Proceed with caution.

  Ask yourself: what might this girl want that isn’t showing? Does she have an ax to grind? Look for the hidden motivation.

  He said, “OK. Well now, Cheryl, when this guy was in your store, how did he act?”

  “Kind of weird. He was using our tire thing, like for the air pressure? And he comes back and says something about how his tires had like led him to the store or something. I don’t know, I didn’t know what he was saying.”

  “Did it get personal?”

  “Huh?”

  “Did he say anything about you personally?”

  A thoughtful tug at the corner of her lips. “No, sir.”

  Burris wondered, had she been flirting with the guy? And somehow gotten her feelings hurt? And was she now retaliating? That happens all the time. There’s an injury; injury festers; false witness is born. Better proceed with light paws. There’s thin ice here, and if you go stomping along in your usual manner you’ll break through, you fat idiot, and who will come to your rescue? Nobody.

  Shaw rode in the Liberty, still marinating in his fury. He said nothing though, and soon they were back at the Boatwrights’ street. That’s when he saw the three satellite TV trucks and all the reporters and rubberneckers.

  Tara pulled up the drive to the carport. A baby-faced man was awaiting them beside his motorcycle, which was big as a bison. He wore dreadlocks and ikat trousers. He looked like a hippie assassin.

  Shaw got out. The reporters shouted at him from the edge of the lawn. But the baby-faced man said, “Them insects, I told them they had to stay off the property.”

  “You told them?” Shaw asked.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Trevor Miller, sir. I’d like to serve you, if that would be possible.”

  “Serve me? How?”

  “Any way you like.”

  Shaw kept his hand close to his hip, ready to reach for the .32. Was this a setup? Could this guy possibly be for real?

  Said Trevor, “I been up in Hinesville. Fort Stewart, but I got discharged in February. Working Pantry Pride? A butcher? But I come down here for the beach. I was in a bar and you was up on the TV. I asked ’em who you was, and they sent me over here. I got a feeling about you. I know you don’t know me from Adam but I bet there’s a way I can serve you.”

  Trevor had a searchingness in his gaze, and seemed to be carrying some hurt, some deep wound. Shaw relaxed a little. Thinking, an apostle? Do I really have an apostle now?

  “Trevor, you were in the army?”

  “Yes sir. 3rd Infantry.”

  “Iraq?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did you kill anyone?”

  “They carry their dead with them, sir, when they can. But I would surmise that I did.”

  Such formality of speech! And the look he was giving was kin to that abyss-black adoration that Shaw had faced at the press conference. This is what he needed! This was the personnel the cause required. He glanced back at the Boatwrights. They were standing there meekly: heads bowed, gazes averted, awaiting his pleasure. And the reporters at the end of the driveway were calling to him, and the crowd waved its fronds and gave praise.

  He turned back to Trevor. “Tell me, those that you killed, you think they’re at peace?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I thought you might know that.”

  “I do,” said Shaw. “They are.”

  “Well. OK then.”

  “You can serve me as long as you like. You hungry, Trevor?”

  “A little.”

  “Patsy’ll fix you something. Then let’s talk about security.”

  Romeo was on 17, supposedly on his rounds, but this time he didn’t take his usual left turn at Chapel Crossing Road. He just kept heading up 17. Northward. As if breaking for home, as if returning to Piqua, Ohio. He passed the Humane Society, then an old rice plantation, and then a sign that said DARIEN 6 MILES. A shut-down garage: Chancy’s Auto Painting and Refinishing. The missionary girls had said this was where you could get a “body suspension” if you needed one.

  Next he passed a cemetery with no headstones, just little brass markers on a vast lawn. The sign had Saturn and the moon and shooting stars, and the name: HEAVEN’S VIEW.

  The shooting stars reminded him of an event a few years back: a summer night, a little party.

  Shaw had organized it. Everyone was supposed to gather at the spillway to watch the meteor shower, the Perseids. Shaw said the spillway was situated over a ‘ley line of power’ — whatever that was — and from that vantage point the meteor shower would spell out some essential truth about the universe. He said forty people had agreed to come
. He said there were pretty girls on that list. Romeo went with him to the liquor store where they bought six quarts of Johnnie Walker and a lot of beer, cups, ice, and Doritos; then they climbed up onto the levee above the rushing water. It was a perfectly clear August night. But nobody showed except Chris and Pissboy and Ricky Cobb’s cousin from Toledo.

  The five of them sat there and drank. Looking up at the sky, making comments about the bitches who hadn’t shown. The meteor shower was disappointing. It wasn’t like a fireworks show; it was just occasional pale streaks in the sky. But the watchers were patient, since they had nothing else to do, and finally there came a sky-crossing that was worth the wait. Slow and pompous, a fiery strut, a star that knew it was a star. The boys on the levee cheered and whistled and were sad to see it burn out. Then they got quiet. Romeo was trying to figure out why nobody had come. Obviously, Shaw wasn’t as popular as he’d been in the old days. The stupid tech job was eating him up. He was doing too much chronic and too much dex, and the years were elbowing past him. Maybe he was getting a little weird. Restless, too strident, a surfeit of visions. These days he scared away a lot more girls than he scored. You started to think he’d be doing tech support in the Piqua/Dayton area when he was sixty — unless he got adventurous and moved to Cincinnati.

  And me the same, Romeo thought.

  One by one Chris and Pissboy and the guy from Toledo passed out. Then it was just Shaw and Romeo. Shaw said that, in his judgment, nobody in southwestern Ohio knew how to fucking live. He talked about the need to live passionately. “Which of our friends lives passionately? Not one. Not one. I mean there’s a difference between existing and really living.”

  Then he told Romeo, “Now what you do, is you live. If it weren’t for you, I believe I might fucking kill myself.” He was serious. And drunk, and in a state of agitation.

  He said, “I don’t know if anything lasts or not. Give it a thousand years, does anything count for shit? I don’t know. You look up at those fucking billion-year-old stars, could anything down here count for shit? Does anything last? But I bet one thing lasts. This thing we have, between the two of us. This friendship? This will last. In some form. Because this is the only worthwhile fucking thing in history.”

  Romeo was too moved to say anything.

  Shaw went on, “No, I mean it, you and me, we’re gonna keep reverberating through this universe. When all the dull assholes who didn’t show up tonight have been reduced to their fucking muons and quarks, you’ll still get an echo of us — this I guarantee.”

  And now, remembering all this two years later, Romeo didn’t feel like driving anymore. He couldn’t go home to Ohio. He couldn’t leave Shaw.

  Just short of Darien, at the entrance to the Two-Way Fish Camp, he turned around and drove back to the Wick.

  Tara was made crazy by all the calls. The calls came in from Fox News, from the Bombay Times, from some megachurch evangelist who begged an audience. Various unknown Boatwrights called. The Faith Renewal Church of Greenville, South Carolina, called. Senator DeWine’s office called. Mom’s friends called to say they were organizing a big Jackpot Party for tonight.

  By now nobody in the family was bothering to pick up, but the recording kept playing. The voice of Jase: “Yeah, you got the Boatwrights, but we’re too lazy to answer,” then the beep, then importunities from all over the world. This routine growing more and more unbearable till finally Tara said, “Hey, could we shut that off for a while?”

  Shaw was at the little faux-empire desk, studying Mom’s Bible, marking key passages in yellow. He looked beaky, owlish, fevered. “What?”

  “The message machine. Do we have to keep it on?”

  He said, “What if Oprah calls?”

  Tara knew she was supposed to smile, but she was too weary. She lowered her eyes. He relented: “Yeah, sure. Turn it off. Oprah knows where to find us when she’s ready.”

  She pulled the plug. Then they just sat there, listening to the squeak of Shaw’s magic marker, and the dying on Jase’s Micro, and the accumulating hubbub out on the street. You’d think all this might disturb a man trying to pull off a hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar extortion. But Shaw kept serenely highlighting that Bible. If anything, the fuss seemed to please him. He chuckled when he heard some woman outside insisting: “We’re from the Today show! Don’t tell me you don’t know what the Today show is!”

  Then Trevor: “The family’s not giving any interviews. But I’ll give them the message.”

  “Just two minutes! If you could let Matt Lauer have two minutes —”

  “Ma’am, I gotta say, you’re trespassing.”

  “Think of the good that Shaw could do with an appearance on —”

  Trevor: “You see the number I’m dialing here? I’m dialing 911.”

  Romeo got back to the trailer and found that Claude was still by himself. Looking wretched and smelling like a pot of fermented cabbage. Romeo gave him a few pumps of morphine, and straightened up the trailer. He washed the dishes. He took out the garbage. He vacuumed. Then he gave the old man a sponge bath.

  At Hermann’s Candle Shoppe in the mall, he’d bought a true sponge from the ocean. Now he found an enamel pot under the sink — which reminded him of the bedpan his mother used to set out whenever he was sick — and he scrubbed out the grime and the cobwebs, and filled it full of hot soapy water. He set down clean towels on one side of the bed, and rolled Claude onto them. In turning him on his belly you had to be careful not to bruise him, and make sure he was breathing OK. Bear in mind you’ve never handled anything so perishable before.

  Claude groaned when the sponge touched his back.

  “Too hot?” said Romeo.

  “No no. It’s. Good.”

  Romeo started at Claude’s shoulders and worked his way down. Where the skin was pocked and mottled, its texture resembled the sponge, but Romeo didn’t find that repellent. Even Claude’s swollen calves didn’t bother him — even that horseshoe-crab mockery of a pelvis, even cleaning around the withered asshole. When he had finished the feet, he turned Claude back over, and did his front. The old man’s testicles were prodigious: a brace of quail in a leather sack. Everything else had shrunk up, but not his nuts.

  But his stomach was ticklish, like a little child’s.

  Romeo had made it all the way up to the gossamer ribcage when he heard a car outside. He looked out and saw Wynetta’s pickup, and the sight dismayed him.

  “Your daughter’s here.”

  “Oh.” Claude made a gesture: cover me. Romeo got the sheet pulled up just before Wynetta came bursting in. She went right to her father’s side and spoke with unnatural volume, as though a court bailiff had just told her to speak up: “Oh, Daddy, I’m sorry! I haven’t had no fuckin cell phone! If you knew how crazy everything’s been!”

  Claude gave her his sweet wobbly toothless smile. “It’s OK.”

  “I’m so fuckin sorry.”

  “No. Problem.”

  Now she regarded Romeo. Her lips curled into a sneer. “Oh, shit, the stoned elf. What you doing here?”

  Claude explained, “He’s taking. Care of me.”

  She said, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Were you giving him medicine?”

  “Yeah,” Romeo admitted.

  She said, “You an RN?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t give him medicine. God. Daddy, he didn’t make you mess with your will, did he?”

  Claude shut his eyes.

  “God,” she said, “Where the hell is Joanie? She’s supposed to be here. God damn it to hell. I knew I shouldn’t trust that bitch.”

  “It’s OK,” said Claude. “I’m good.”

  “Daddy, you know where I was? I was in Tifton. I went to Tifton with that Greek fucktard? And it’s like, I lost my cell phone, I don’t even know the number of my own father, ’cause all the numbers were on my cell phone. And then I was trying to get that shitwad to give me a ride home like he said he would, but he’s like Numero Uno Selfish Cocksucker of t
he Universe, oh, Jesus, and I keep telling him, my daddy! My poor daddy’s sick. God fuck it.”

  Claude smiled at her, with all the forgiveness he could bring to bear.

  Wynetta turned to Romeo. “Hey, fucktoad. I know what you want, but you ain’t gonna get it. My daddy is not your meal ticket. You can clear the fuck out of here. Right now.”

  Claude said, “Wynetta.”

  “What?”

  “He’s been good. To me.”

  “Oh, Daddy. If you knew. I been crying all the way back here. I ’bout had a wreck in Nahunta. Is there any beer?” She opened the fridge. Stuck her head in, and moved things while she searched. Her voice came out flattened. “You didn’t drink the PBRs in here, did you?”

  Claude took Romeo’s hand and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  But Wynetta had already pulled her head out of the fridge, and she heard this. She said: “Uh-uh. No sir. You come between me and my daddy? I’ll make you bleed outta your ass.”

  Patsy set up her laptop in the kitchen, and went to Bible Gateway.com, to spend some serious time with Scripture. Vowing to herself to go easy on the gin today, and keep far from the temptations of Malibu. Just let me find some gentle parable to give me strength. Sweet Jesus? I’m in your hands. This is your little lost lamb Patsy. Please, Lord. Deliver me from Evil and from these Demons who have come into my life!

  But while scrolling through the pages of the Holy Book, she felt more lost than ever. What the hell was all this gobbledy gobbledy? The massacres of Chronicles, the oppression of Kings, the merciless butchery of Judges: where was the comfort? Pretty soon her eyes began to glaze over. She sighed, and huddled herself closer to the screen. And sneaked a quick trip over to Google. Keying in:

  luxury homes

  Just for one minute, she thought.

  But the houses she found seemed too generic and suburbs-of-Fort-Worth, so she amended her search to:

  luxury homes ca

  That was better — she got some very nice pictures of estates in Brentwood and Bel Air. The residents were maybe not the cream of the A-list, but they weren’t warmed-over reality stars either. They had respectable properties. Cobblestoned drives, box hedges. Still, there was something missing. Everything looked kind of stodgy and lonely, and she surfed from one house to another without satisfaction until finally she gave in and added that magic elixir: