Seven Crow Stories

by Robert J. Wiersema

  But he knew there was no riding this out. He could feel himself getting weaker, his life draining away through the hole in his chest. His vision swam. The gravel path under him was a slurry of blood and dirt.

  He could barely move. When he tried to turn, his body screamed out in pain, and the darkness threatened to take him again. He could barely breathe, and he coughed blood in mouthfuls onto the ground. He pushed his hand into his jacket, pressed it against the wound in his chest. His shirt was wet and hot with his own blood, and the opening seemed to suck at his hand.

  It was no good. It was all too much. There was no way he was going to make it.

  As the darkness was about to take him, the park seemed to fill with light. Not anything electrical—not a floodlight. Not a police car. This was a warm golden light, a light that felt of summer evenings, a light that felt of ease, of long mornings in bed, of walks along the rocky beach with a girl. Of a life he had never known.

  Andrew . . .

  He opened his eyes, watched the light move along the dugout walls.

  It took him almost all of his strength to turn over, to face the source of the light.

  It seemed to be a rectangle, a door, hanging in the air in the darkness. The light spilled from it in what seemed to be waves, a slow undulation of warmth that seemed to beckon him, to call him toward it.

  Grinding his teeth together, he pulled himself to his knees, pressing his left hand against the hole in his chest. Every motion caused blood to gush from it, and his body was slick.

  Looking into the light, he pushed himself slowly, unsteadily, to his feet. Narrowing his eyes, he thought he could see motion in the light, movement like shifting shadows. People. He could hear music. Voices.

  He took a step forward, almost falling as the world lurched away from him.

  His right hand fell to the butt of the gun, and he pulled it from his pants. He could barely lift it, and the pistol hung at his waist.

  The light seemed to brighten, the golden warmth brighter than anything he had ever seen, but not blinding. He could feel the heat against his face, the warmth enveloping him, holding him tight, the voices seeming to whisper to him.

  He took another step forward.

  He had been waiting for this moment for his entire life. He had chased and sought the light through every moment, waiting to taste that ease, that warmth, that comfort. . . .

  The gun fell to the ground as he took another step.

  The shadows moved within the light, shifted and swam, dissolved and coalesced. Figures. People. He thought he could see dark figures moving toward him, shades against the bright warmth, shades gaining form as they moved toward him, as he moved toward them. A tall, dark shape. A smaller one. A man. A boy.

  A boy . . .

  Martin choked back a sob, couldn’t bring his mouth to form words. He took another halting step forward. Another. He couldn’t hold up his arm anymore, and it fell to his side. His blood flowed freely, spilling onto the ground as he took another step.

  And another.

  Toward the light.

  The Small Rain Down

  The rain came as I pulled into my parents’ driveway. It had been threatening since I crossed the bridge, the air heavy and wet on my face when I stopped at the railroad tracks, stinging slightly as I drove.

  I parked the car beside the house and scrambled out to put up the top. The asphalt was slippery, plastered with the first of the fallen leaves.

  The sound of laughter from the shadow under the chestnut tree made me look up. Isabel was leaning against her car in the near-darkness, arms folded across her chest, watching me.

  I smiled, and finished putting up the top with a methodical nonchalance before walking over to her.

  “Afraid you’re gonna melt?” she asked, biting her lip.

  “You’re the one hiding under the tree.”

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “You did.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should kiss her or give her a noncommittal, keep-it-brief, keep-it-safe hug. How do you say hello to someone you haven’t seen in twenty years, someone who you once shared everything with?

  She took care of my uncertainty by leaning forward and kissing me, her lips lingering a moment too long on mine. She pulled away but stayed close, leaning her forehead against my chest just below the hollow of my throat. Her hand came up to toy with the hair at the back of my head.

  “Too late putting the top up,” she said, showing me the wet on her hand from my hair. “You’re already starting to melt.”

  “I told you before,” I said, closing my eyes a little at her touch. “I’m not that sweet.”

  “I haven’t heard you say that in—”

  “Twenty years,” I finished for her. “I haven’t gotten any sweeter.”

  She stepped away from me, and I immediately began to miss the warmth of her, the smell of her hair, her perfume.

  “No, I bet you haven’t.” She made it almost sound like a joke, but she had folded her arms across her chest again.

  I took a step back, kicked at a chestnut husk. “So how did you know I’d be here?”

  “I knew you’d come back for the funeral.”

  “Yeah.”

  The rain picked up, and echoed off the canopy of yellow leaves. I glanced back at my car, triple-checking that the windows were closed.

  “But how did you know when? Did you just guess, or . . .”

  She shrugged. She hadn’t changed. “I was fine waiting.”

  “You could have gone into the house. I’m sure Mom and Dad . . .” I stopped myself.

  “I was fine in the car. I turned the heater up, put on some music.”

  She smiled a teasing smile, and it took me a moment to put it together. “Holy shit,” I said, leaning over to look at the car more closely. “Is this the same piece of shit car—?”

  She nodded, her smile broadening. “The one and only.”

  I tapped at the rust patch by the front wheel-well with the toe of my shoe. Flakes fell to the driveway. “Unbelievable,” I muttered. “This car was a junker back when. . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever get the steering fixed?”

  She shrugged again. “It does the job.”

  “Unbelievable,” I repeated. “We sure had some good times in this car.”

  When I looked up, she was watching me. Our eyes met. “Yeah.”

  “I remember driving up to the lake in the middle of the night, windows down, listening to that REM tape.”

  “Yeah.”

  I’d said all that I really felt comfortable saying. More than. “Yeah,” I agreed, with myself.

  The chestnut hit the roof in an explosion of spiny shell segments.

  “Shit!” she shouted, jumping away from the car.

  I laughed. “That’s why we don’t park under the tree in the fall. I figured you would have remembered that.”

  “Apparently not.”

  A stronger wind caught under the leaves, and the canopy shifted overhead. More chestnuts fell around us, and the rain blew in, cold and hard.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”

  We hurried across the driveway and up the walk to the back door. It was only when I bent to pick up the flowerpot where Mom had always hidden the spare key that I realized we were holding hands. It felt entirely natural. I didn’t know which one of us had reached out first.

  I had to let go to unlock the door. She was looking at the ground when I turned to her.

  “Some things never change,” I said, as I turned the key in the lock, only realizing what I had said when I put it back into the flowerpot.

  She still wasn’t looking at me.

  “Well,” I said as I opened the back door. “Can I take your coat?”

  Inside, the house was c
ool and dim, with the silence and stillness that only an empty house can possess. I kicked my shoes onto the mat instinctively, the way I always had. Catching myself, I bent over and placed them neatly together, toes against the wall.

  Isabel was watching me, half-smiling. “Danny the champion of the world, all growed up.”

  She stepped out of her shoes as I tried to figure out how I should take her comment.

  She hung her jacket on the hook behind the door and ran her fingers over her hair, flicking the water away.

  I realized, watching her, that I had absolutely no idea what to say to her next. It seemed like there should be so much, so many words, but I couldn’t think of anything.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  She smiled.

  In the kitchen, I opened the cupboard door and looked at the bottles within. It was dim in the room, but the glass caught the light.

  “Twenty years later and I’m still pilfering my parents’ liquor. What’ll you have?”

  She looked over my shoulder. “Rum and Coke sounds good.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered, my mouth curling as I remembered the cloying taste. “How can you drink that?” I asked as I put the rum bottle on the counter.

  She shrugged. “It reminds me of high school.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem,” I said, putting a bottle of gin beside the rum, sliding the cupboard door shut.

  “Why is rum and Coke a problem?”

  “Rum and Coke,” I answered from the fridge, looking for mix. “Is what teenage girls drink when they know they should be drinking but they don’t really want to. All in the name of getting to the stuff they know they shouldn’t be doing, but really want to.”

  “I seem to recall that working out pretty well for you.”

  I smiled. “A time or two.”

  “Hence my fond memories of rum and Coke.”

  “The good old days,” I said. I handed her glass to her.

  “To the good old days,” she said, tilting her glass toward me.

  We clinked the rims, and drank.

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “This isn’t nearly as strong as you used to make them,” she said, studying her glass.

  “I’m not trying to get into your pants.” I smiled broadly.

  She seemed a bit surprised, and took another drink. “Hmm.”

  She turned to face the room, and I followed her gaze: the dining room table with its runner and wooden bowl of nuts. The photographs on the walls. The view through the trees to the road beyond.

  “This feels awfully familiar,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You and me in this house, your parents gone. . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “For a weekend or a week or a whole month.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I seem to recall that working out pretty well for you, too.”

  The year that Isabel and I were seeing each other, the year we were fifteen and sixteen, my parents were away a lot. Contracts in Vancouver and Toronto, holidays to the Bahamas and Europe. A cruise vacation up the Yangtze River that kept them away for five weeks. Isabel and I spent practically every waking moment together, most of them alone in this house. We’d watch movies and work on our homework, take baths together, smoking dope in the tub, reading poetry. We spent whole days naked, cooking soup, making love in front of the fire—

  “Should we light a fire?” she asked.

  It was like she had been reading my mind, but of course she’d be having the same memories.

  “Sure,” I said, following her into the living room.

  “Well,” she said, stopping in front of the fireplace and leaning over. “Do you want to do the honours?”

  True to form, my father had left a fire laid in the hearth. Fumbling with the flue and the vents, I struck one of the long matches and touched it to the crumpled newspaper. The flames raced along the edge of the paper, the kindling caught and then there was a fire, better than I could have built.

  “That’s nice,” she said, sinking into one of the chairs. “I would have thought that your parents would have upgraded to natural gas, though.”

  I shrugged and settled myself across from her. The flames crackled loudly. “I . . . I wouldn’t really know.”

  She nodded, took a sip from her drink. “I guess,” she said. “What happened there? With your folks I mean? With you just . . .”

  “Leaving?” I asked.

  “I was going to say ‘disappeared,’” she said. “You were just gone. I mean, you let everyone know where you were going, but you never. . . . This is your first trip back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “In twenty years.”

  “And not the best of circumstances,” I said, thinking ahead to the funeral the next afternoon.

  “No, not the best,” she agreed. “So what happened, back then, back when you left?”

  “It’s not like there’s any big secret or anything,” I said, taking a swallow of my drink. The gin and tonic had been a mistake. It made me think of a hot summer day in New York, a patio in the Village or a rooftop party, and I wished I had chosen something else, something more appropriate. Next time. Maybe rye next time. Or scotch. Something dark, smoky, tasting of the fall.

  “Danny Rush, always rushing off,” she teased me, the way she used to.

  I smiled. “I didn’t have a big fight with my parents or anything. I just—it was time. I had to go. I had to start, had to start my life, you know? It was what we had always talked about, getting out. Getting free. I mean, Henderson, it’s a good place to come from—”

  “People build good lives here, Danny,” she said, and I thought I heard defensiveness in her voice.

  “Oh, I know. And that’s why I had to go. Right then. Why I had to go and keep going. It would have been so easy, so tempting, to just build a life here. Get a job, get married, have kids. Too easy.”

  “So you went to Paris.” She set her empty glass on the coffee table.

  “Do you want—” I gestured at the glass.

  She shook her head. “I want to hear about Paris.”

  “Well, I thought I should make some use of my hard-won grade twelve French before it disappeared entirely. Turns out you don’t need a lot of French to live in Paris.” I drained my glass and set it on the table across from hers.

  “Did you stay there, or . . . ?”

  “Not then, no. No, I spent, God, I don’t even remember how long, just travelling around. Europe, North Africa. I spent a winter in Greece tending bar, practically living on the beach. I saw the pyramids, and the Hagia Sophia. I ran with the bulls in Pamplona, crossed the Sahara, smoked opium with tribesmen in Morocco.”

  “Everything you dreamed of in high school,” she said. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t seem too surprised. I assumed she’d already heard most of the stories. Or read about them.

  “And more,” I said. “After that, I went back to Paris. I had a little money, but all I could afford was this dive, five floors up. I spent the winter writing in cafes, in these French school notebooks, these cahiers, with a secondhand fountain pen—”

  “How very Hemingway of you,” she said drily.

  I smiled, knowing how I sounded. “Very Moveable Feast, yeah.”

  She folded her legs under herself, leaning back in the chair. “And then?”

  “And then . . .” I sighed. “And then I published a book. And another. I got a nicer apartment, but I decided to move to New York.”

  “And you’re still there.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got a place in the Village. I’m still writing, but it’s more movies now than books. I’ve got a place in San Francisco where I spend most of my time. Close enough to be close enough to L.A., but not so close I have to be part of it. That’s where I was when I heard.
. . .”

  “And you drove up.”

  “Yeah. I like to drive. Especially the 1 and the 101 up the coast through California and Oregon. Good for the soul.”

  She nodded as if she understood. “And you never came back. You never hopped in your car and just decided, ‘Hey, I’m gonna pay the old hometown a visit.’”

  “I thought about it. Especially being so close. But all this—” I gestured around the room, the house, the town “—it’s best in the past for me. A memory. It’s a good place to come from—”

  The burnt, reduced embers of a log fell against the fireplace grate and I stood up to throw another log on the dying flames.

  “Leave it,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  “What?” I asked, turning to her.

  She unfolded herself from the chair. “Leave the fire. Let’s go for a drive.”

  Neither of us said much as we drove around the valley. I had the wheel, turning where she asked me to turn, slowing down when she told me to slow down.

  She had grabbed a tape from her car and popped it into the stereo as I pulled us out of the driveway. The familiar, folksy guitars brought a smile to my face.

  “REM?”

  “Hey, if you’re gonna take a journey through the past, you might as well do it right.”

  We did it right that afternoon. We drove miles down those country roads, the yellowing corn growing right to the edge of the asphalt in places. I kept the top up against the intermittent rain that spattered the windshield, but we both had our windows down. The air smelled of autumn, of drying leaves and rain, smoke from backyard fires and an undertone of decay, of fields plowed under and waiting for the spring.

  “You know what I remember?” she said as we rolled along a familiar stretch of road. “I remember us frantically getting dressed and getting on our bikes to race my curfew home. Every night. You used to kiss me goodnight at the top of the driveway so my dad wouldn’t see.”

  I smiled at the memory. “Did you know I used to stop in town on the way home? I’d go to the pizza place, have a slice, find someone to play a game of chess.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know. Why’d you do that?”