Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  She leaned against the doorframe. Dust rose around her. “Didn’t I see you at the bar Saturday night?” she asked, crossing her left arm over her chest.

  “Opey’s?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “Were you there?”

  “Yeah,” she said, lifting herself slightly off the door frame. “You didn’t see me?”

  It was her turn to look surprised.

  I struggled to keep my eyes on her face as her hand dropped back to her hip. “I was a little drunk,” I said, smiling and shrugging. I didn’t have to fake embarrassment.

  She laughed. “You didn’t seem it!” She shook her head. “But that’s me – I get really silly when I’m drunk.” She flashed an embarrassed smile that relaxed me. “I saw you sitting at the bar but didn’t get a chance to say hi. You know, I had a date and all. I didn’t want to leave him, you know what I mean?” She shrugged a lot. “Were you waiting for someone?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “A friend of mine, she couldn’t make it. I didn’t know until later. No cell phone.”

  “You don’t have a cell phone?”

  “Uh, no – there’s no service at my house. It just seems like a waste.”

  “You don’t need it when you’re at your house, silly!” she laughed. “Anyway, sorry your friend couldn’t come.”

  “Me too,” I told her.

  “You hang out there much?” she asked brightly, not seeming really too concerned with how I felt about being stood up, which was perfect with me.

  “Nah, no,” I said, running my hand through my hair and looking away from her to keep from looking too much at her, every time she shrugged or shifted her weight to a different hip. “That was kind of random.”

  “That’s too bad. I should’ve just invited you over to hang out with us. I was with some other friends too.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Well you should call me if you ever go there again,” she said. “I hang out there a lot with my friends. You know, there’s nothing around here really so we always go there.”

  “I’d hate to go there and get stood up again,” I said, giving a little laugh. “Apparently people notice.”

  She smiled warmly. “That’s why you have to call me,” she said, turning back into her office to her desk. “Let me get your number.”

  I stepped into the doorway as she rummaged through folders and papers on her desk, a fine cloud of sawdust billowing up around her. She looked back at me, confused. She sneezed.

  “Bless you,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t find my appointment book,” she said, digging through a purse on her desk, pulling out a tissue. “And I don’t have my cell with me.”

  “Damn,” I said coolly, looking at the clock on her desk. “Listen, I’ve got to get back to work. Van’ll kill me.”

  “That guy’s scary,” she said, making a face.

  “No kidding,” I laughed. “Why don’t you just give me your number? I’ll give you a call if I head over there some time.”

  “Sure,” she said, reaching for a pen but knocking it on the floor as she sneezed again. It landed not too far from the bottle of White-Out I dropped on Friday. She picked them both up. “I must have spilled this,” she said, showing the bottle to me. “It’s all over the floor.”

  I grimaced, remembering the body outline I drew on the desk, now buried beneath a sloppy pile of folders. “Hm,” I said, watching her climb back up. “I guess you’ve really got to keep an eye on your stuff in this mess around here,” I offered, looking around in the office.

  “I’ll find my book or cell and get your number from you sometime, don’t worry,” she said, thrusting a torn piece of yellow paper with her number on it at me. “So call me next time you’re going over there. You won’t have to sit alone.”

  I took it from her, stepping out of the doorway. “Alright, I got to go,” I said, feeling a little freaked out. That was more than I had ever spoken with her - and she had practically asked me about. I thought.

  Exhilarated and guilty, though, I burned with the realization – the knowledge, the fear – that I had done something really weird again.

  8.

  “So the trick to keeping your woman is to have sex with her all the time,” Van said, feeding another bottom into the planer. “No matter what.”

  We got really ahead on the glue wheel last week and the bottoms we’d made were backed up at the planer still. So we switched jobs for the night, which was fine with me. After the bottoms are assembled, they get planed and then trimmed into smooth, perfectly shaped replicas of each other. We often had to hop up the production line to keep the bottoms moving because we got so far ahead; we’d probably get bumped up the line later this week to finish these same panels.

  Van fed the boards into the planer faster than he loaded boards on the conveyor belt to the glue wheel. I busted my ass to keep up, but Van didn’t pay any attention.

  “You got to just keep doing it,” he rambled on, shouting. The planer was ear-splittingly loud and I wore ear plugs but Van simply raised his booming voice like the grinding wood was no more than the humming of a fluorescent light. “Even when you don’t want to,” he shouted. He had been talking like this for a couple of hours now. “Think about it, right? It’s better to do it whenever she wants than have someone else do it.” He rammed another panel into the planer. “Drinking helps.”

  He paused and lit a smoke real quick, taking short puffs and blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth, turning his head toward the window slightly. The window was usually closed but Van wanted to smoke while he worked since there wasn’t anyone around anyway. We were in a crowded corner of the factory, near the break room and the back porch, facing the waste site. No one would really see us back here, if anyone was actually here. Except Digger.

  “So what’s your girlfriend like?” Van asked, blowing out his last drag. He butted the cigarette on the windowsill and leaned out to throw it over by the back porch, where people smoked all the time. “Skinny girl? Big rack?” he asked.

  Van lit another cigarette and exhaled, looking over at me. He set it down so the burning tip hung off the edge of the planer near his leg. “You got to really like her. You don’t want to be getting bored,” he said, shoving another panel into the planer and automatically raising his voice above the grinding noise. “Women can sense that. So what’s she like, hah?” he shouted. “You told me you live with some girl. You two have a lot of sex or what?”

  The roaring buzz of the planer spared me having to answer him.

  “You ought to meet my wife,” he bellowed, taking another drag off of his cigarette. “Give you a hard-on just looking a picture of her,” he laughed.

  The machine was screeching loud but it felt awkward to just not answer any of Van’s questions.

  “Got one?” I shouted above the grind, looking over at him, with a wry grin.

  It was hard enough to hear, much less to hear sarcasm, so he looked at me like I was crazy, stopped feeding boards long enough to chuck the butt of his smoke out the window again, toward the porch steps where dozens of other butts lay – some new, some weathered, some for years, all stamped into the ground, except Van’s. They lay there, unflattened, still cylindrical, rocking minutely back and forth in the breeze, so close to the ground, mostly unnoticed.

  “I thought you were going to call me over the weekend?” he said, as he fed another board into the planer. “Come over and have a few beers and meet my wife and the girls?”

  “Does your wife drink a lot like you?” I shouted over to him.

  “Hell, yeah,” he said, pausing. “We like to have a good time together, we always make sure we’re having fun. We get drunk all the time!”

  “I get high all the time,” Digger said, appearing in the doorway from the glue room, behind Van. “Just makes everything more enjoyable.”

  “Shit, you need to get high just to put up with t
hat woman of yours,” Van snapped, relaxing his arms as Digger shuffled up to him.

  “Fuck you, man,” Digger said. “I’ve got enough trouble at home already without your bullshit.”

  “What’s up, your wife party you right out of the house again?” Van asked, grinning.

  Digger glared at Van before snorting, “She’s a lot to take care of.”

  “Does your wife really eat a lot?” I asked Digger.

  He glanced my way, shaking his head. “Shit,” he started to say, but Van fed another board into the planer as soon as he spoke. He raised his voice to a near scream. “You should see my paycheck disappear.”

  As I pulled the board off the planer and the grinding ended, Van asked Digger, “So what’s so rough at home, man? Is it really that bad?”

  “I don’t know, man,” Digger started to say but Van cut him off.

  “She fucking someone else again?”

  “What the fuck?” Digger snapped, but Van fed another board, making Digger shout even louder again. “She ain’t ever messed around on me! Christ, it ain’t even her that’s the problem, really.”

  The board came out of the planer but Digger was still shouting. “It’s my boy – he’s in trouble at school again.” He dropped his voice while Van and I laughed. “And they think it’s mine and Stell’s fault. Now some asshole’s going to come and have a talk with us. Some dipshit from the county. Your kids ever in trouble at school?” he asked Van.

  Van leaned on the next panel instead of feeding it for a moment. “Hell no, man,” he said, grinning in his cocky way. “My wife takes good care of them girls, and they got the fear of God in them. Both them girls and their mother, too,” he said, laughing. “All she got to say is,” Van chuckled, raising his voice to imitate a nagging woman, “I’ll tell your father, and bam!” he shouted dropping the tone of his voice as he smacked his hand in his palm. “Those kids don’t complain about nothing. I don’t even have to talk to them. They’re just scared of making me mad. Them girls love me. I ain’t never had to holler or lay a hand on either one of them.”

  “I guess I just work too much,” Digger said, shaking his head, stretching his arms behind his head. “Kid don’t ever see me, why’s he going to care if I’m mad or not? Shit, little punk’s bigger’n his mama already, so he don’t care what she thinks either.”

  “I’m feeling sorry for you, man,” Van said, and I think he was sincere, even if not deeply. That’s why I liked Van. He was incapable of depth. “You want a beer or something?”

  “Sure,” Digger said, but Van had shoved the last board into the planer. “I’d love one,” Digger screamed at the top of is lungs, barely audible over the grinding of the machine.

  As the bottom fed through the planer to me and I piled it, Van announced, “Let’s take a break.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I agreed. “Maybe Digger’s got a picture of his wife.”

  Everybody laughed for no reason and headed toward the break room, me in the lead, since I was closest. Van passed me to get to the fridge, though. He yanked it open and came out with three beers. He had a twelve pack of Utica Club instead of his usual six pack.

  “Shit, that’s a lot of beer,” I said.

  “This is just a warm-up, boy,” Van grinned.

  “Must’ve known I was trying to quit buying booze,” Digger said, nodding his head, impressed.

  Van shot him a dirty-assed look. “Last thing I’m going to do is support your drinking habit. Next thing you know you’re going to want me to buy your dope too. Fucking smoke my cigarettes all the time already.”

  “Dude, I’m going to have send my kid to private school or something,” Digger pleaded. “Or the military. Some place to make that kid behave.”

  “Well, you work all the time!” Van gasped. “Where’s your money go?” he asked, tossing back his beer. “Hah? Why don’t your wife take care of that kid, either?”

  “Fuck off, Van,” Digger said seriously. “I ain’t got to take this shit from you just to get a beer.”

  “No, you don’t, man,” Van said, relaxing. “I’m sorry, I’m just getting pissed for you. You got a load of shit to deal with. You’re not a bad guy.”

  Digger looked at me. “You see how it is, man?” he asked, shaking his head with a resigned grin. “I’m getting it from everywhere. You’re the only one that don’t give me no shit.”

  “Got a picture of your wife on you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, my boy, too,” he said, yanking out his wallet, tossing it open. “That’s the little one. Spitting image of me except he’s fat. Look at that, he’s only eleven years old. Huge motherfucker, isn’t he? But he’s my boy!” Digger beamed with pride.

  “This your wife?” I asked, flipping the picture pocket in his wallet.

  She was standing next to a Christmas tree in a dark room with some dirty curtains around a window and a messy desk littered with envelopes and catalogs and toys behind her. She stretched her arm toward the top of the tree, trying to place a lit angel up there, radiating its plastic benevolence. She had brown hair, straight except where it had been curled up on top. The rest fell around her shoulders down to the decal on her sweatshirt of a purebred husky, poised to obey. She wore red wool socks and had a grin as big as Santa’s long johns. Digger snapped his wallet closed. Van handed me a beer and one to Digger.

  “So what did you bring all that beer for?” I asked Van.

  “My wife’s friend is coming over,” he grumbled. “I can’t hardly hang out with the two of them unless I’m drunk,” he said, taking a long pull off his bottle.

  Or do anything else, I thought.

  9.

  The rest of a shift and four beers later, I cruised home, but not straight home, the night shaking outside the rumble of the original but suffering engine of my 1976 Buick. It was older than me, and it had seen and done more than me in those years too, I was sure. But maybe not. Maybe it had also spent its years trapped in central New York, insulated from everything but winter and poverty, had staked out its existence in a stark countryside bare of opportunity or fortune. Maybe it would just continue to putter along until it broke down or disintegrated into rust and sat forgotten in some farmer’s field.

  The car was blue with a white top and was missing the driver’s side window. I had a piece of plastic duct-taped over the window, from the inside, so I could tear it loose and roll it up and stick it to the ceiling when it wasn’t raining. The edges of the tape had become grimy and covered with grit, though, so it didn’t stick so well and rain sometimes leaked in, or the plastic would come loose from the ceiling and flap around, slapping at my head and clinging to my hair and face while I was driving.

  It was a humid July night and hot, sticky air rushed in through the open window and laboriously chased its thick, wet self around the spacious cab of the Buick. I got the car from Duke at the beginning of the summer, after I got the job at the factory. He didn’t want to sell it to me but couldn’t say no because I lived with his daughter and we needed it bad. He wouldn’t drive it anymore because it smelled like gas and he was paranoid breathing things in after putting insects to death all day with toxic vapors. I thought it smelled like fumes too. It sloped down in the back, a long, gentle descent and jutted upward and outward along its lengthy front, regal except for the collection of dents and rust tarnishing it. It was a wealthy man’s car once, a teacher or a salesman, a king of upstate New York, someone who didn’t work in a factory or on a farm or strip his flesh to the bone laboring for some rat bastard with a tight wallet.

  I didn’t even have a key to the Buick. Or, more exactly, the key was broken in the ignition so you could just turn the switch to start the car. Theft wasn’t a big worry in Still Creek, especially with an old bucket topping a quarter of a century old. The car wouldn’t make it very far away anyway, and everyone in the whole damned town knew it was mine, or at least still thought it was Duke’s.

  I was a little bit drunk and I could smell the alcohol on my breath. The car, st
eering wheel vibrating in my hand, was fluid and fragile, a shaking, shimmying testament to the tenacity of all that existed in the foothills of the Adirondacks, in the shadow of just about everything else in the universe. I thought about the cigarette butts gathered for years around the back porch of the factory, stomped into the ground, weathered, grayed, worn, but never really disappearing, perhaps just becoming the background to other cigarettes more recently thrown. That was enough to make them seem natural, like they should be there, like things should be that way. Letting them pile there, and spread there and decay there by half-lives, betrayed the laziness, and the indifference, the resignation and the destructiveness, of the people that inhabited these towns, and worked these factories and didn’t know much about how they fit in with everything else on the planet, and didn’t know much more than themselves and the folks immediately around them. And that was enough for them.

  I was no different. Logan’s death helped me realize it. Sometimes, no matter how close you are to something, you don’t always see it for what it is, the true value of what that thing does for you, nor the danger or even destruction that kind of ignorance breeds.

  I hit County Route 68 and raced down its length, unmowed fields of green and purple-topped grass stretching out on either side of me. A tiny piece of caution tape flapped on a fence post in the peripheral reaches of my headlights and I eased the Buick to a gravelly halt on the side of the road. I left the lights on as I hopped out and opened the trunk. The flashers didn’t work. I pulled a can of white paint out; I had swiped it on my way out of work, along with a dirty old brush. I popped the lid off of it with my fingernails and leaned down into it closely, the tip of my nose barely skimming the surface, until I yanked my head back up, inhaling the fresh crisp night air, refreshingly contrasting the leaden, sluggish fume of the paint.

  Squatting in the low beams of my headlights, I used the brush and paint to draw the silent outline of a twisted body, much as I pictured Logan lying there that day. I smelled the paint and wondered what animals had been drawn to the smell of burnt, shredded flesh and bone, or if the fumes had kept them all at bay. How long before the crows and flies arrived, the ants marched in and away, carrying micro-hunks of his flesh above their heads?