Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  10.

  Logan was my oldest friend. I knew him since we were three years old – more than anyone except someone I was related to. I played in pre-school with him, wearing plaid pants and racing in circles around the orange and green romper room. During play time, we talked to each other on plastic telephones from around a corner where we couldn’t see each other, pretending there was a great distance between us.

  We remained near each other our entire lives, though we weren’t always that tight with one another as years came and went. We built our first bomb together when we were thirteen – we graduated from setting every little thing on fire with our first stolen lighters to dropping bullets in gasoline-filled jars and igniting them with homemade fuses. When we got caught I lied to my folks but he got a beating from his daddy. He was pissed that I got out of trouble, but it was something he always respected about me, even when we weren’t much friends. I got away and he didn’t, and he always called me a survivor, an apathetic bastard who was all laid back and easy going yet would cut my friend’s throat to stay out of trouble. It wasn’t the way I saw myself, but I guess he had his reasons to think that about me.

  But it didn’t matter, because that is exactly why Logan liked me. He said he would fight and scrap and cheat and lie to survive if he had to. And he probably saw it in me too, something cunning and unapologetic, no matter how seemingly indifferent or disengaged I sometimes was. Logan believed humans were just like other animals. He admired my apathy; I was just trying to mimic his. These things make us human, I figured.

  Sometimes surviving really only meant getting what he wanted for Logan. Later in our high school years, he learned to ride motorcycles and spent all his time fixing them or hunting, pretty much his two favorite things. I didn’t really care much about bikes or hunting, or anything in particular, for that matter. I liked to just drift around, from place to place, people to people, seeing what they were up to, what it was like to be around them. Not that were too many people in high school, or all of Still Creek for that matter, or that they were up to too much. But no matter how small a place, people still form their groups and alliances and rivalries.

  I had a God-given talent for pretense, something that really separated me from Logan while actually bringing him, begrudgingly, to like me more for it. Mostly, he liked it when I paid attention to him, when he was the most interesting person around me.

  I’d get distracted after a while and then after a while longer, Logan would be up to something new and we’d kill some more time together. So lots of our lives, we often didn’t talk to each other in hallways in high school, or at parties, even though the school and the town were so damned small we couldn’t have possibly avoided each other. But occasionally we’d get together and it would be different; we’d talk for hours, talking about everything, talking about what made people do the things they do. We’d talk about how shitty it was where we lived and how we were stuck there and couldn’t wait to get out of the vacuum of central New York someday. We’d talk about tits on the cheerleaders at school or Black Sabbath or who had gotten arrested or wrecked their car recently.

  “Everybody in this town is either going to jail or going to hell,” Logan growled one day, stomping a cigarette out as we leaned against the back of his truck. “It ain’t fair.”

  “Nothing is fair,” I told him. “Not in our minds, at least.”

  I was reading a novel about some prig-headed philosopher and his motorcycle ride across the country. It didn’t really give me much to say to Logan though since it didn’t really talk much about fixing bikes. Titles don’t mean any more than covers do.

  Actually, a girl, Juliet, gave it to me. That was the only reason I read it.

  “That’s just the nature of human consciousness,” I explained.

  “There ain’t no fucking human consciousness,” Logan snapped. “People don’t know shit.”

  Then there were times again when all that friendship just fizzled away into meaningless hellos and good-byes or maybe, at the most, wordless glances of recognition over bonfires while drinking beers amongst a small group of classmates we liked even less.

  Right before he died, we spent little time together. I saw him around town but we barely stopped to speak – the distance was conscious between us, even if not spoken, or understood. Coincidence caused our meetings; familiarity fueled our conversations.

  Still, even this was nothing new to us. I believed we were always friends and any day could sit down and have a meaningful conversation that would reveal something about ourselves to ourselves, that would take us back to being three years old, answering plastic telephones, and still propel us forward too, toward hearing aids and pacemakers. I imagined we would grow old together, sometimes close, perhaps often not, but either way, whoever stood over the other’s grave would hear the quiet click of something disconnecting.

  Most disturbing was that Logan and I argued the day he died, and I was certain, if not for that, he wouldn’t have died. The last time I saw him I couldn’t even look him in the eye as he climbed on his bike. I thought, maybe later, that our eyes had met in the mirror of his motorcycle, but there was no way to know. I should have felt probably angrier or had more of some kind of emotion. But I didn’t. It takes a long time for thoughts and feelings to emerge, and it’s the things we do later on that truly define us, probably more so than what we do in a moment. That’s just what I’m like.

  Logan’s gravestone was a ridiculous Hallmark In Loving Memory piece of bullshit. A flowery border was engraved on it, even. Logan was anything but flowery, a ballbreaker with a jagged, patchy beard. He always wore T-shirts and denim or leather. He had a tattoo of a cross and a set of wings. This is what he would have put on his grave. It made me sick when the priest spewed all that God-loving crap, because Logan thought religion was stupid and death was nothing but a sudden, jarring end. It was jarring if you were lucky – the sad ones drifted into incompetence and retardation, if you asked Logan. The Logan I knew wouldn’t have given a shit if he didn’t even have a gravestone.

  He died like a Viking.

  11.

  Driving down my road, I still pictured the white outline I had just painted fresh onto County Route 68. I noticed Besse’s car on the street. She always parked in the driveway; I got the garage. The garage door was open, as usual, but I saw a truck in there even before I reached the house. I killed the lights and coasted into the driveway, braking quietly as soon as the Buick was completely off the road. I hopped out, leaving my door partially open so I didn’t make noise slamming it.

  It was only a one-car garage, and a one-car driveway. Geechie and Beulah always parked on the street, since their apartment extended over the garage and was larger than ours and that was part of the deal. It was the landlord’s way of making things fair; we got the garage and the driveway for our cars, they got a bigger apartment. Besse left before me for work and didn’t like backing around the Buick so she always took the driveway and I pulled around her when I got home, turning a piece of the lawn into a tracked down dirt patch along the side of the driveway. That pissed the landlord and Geechie and Beulah off, but fuck them, I thought. It didn’t do any good to have a garage and a driveway if you can’t use them both to park your cars.

  We always used the entrance from the garage into the kitchen, even though there was one from the front lawn into the living room as well. Besse worked in a child care center in Riverside near some office park and had to be in before all the office workers dropped off their kids on their way to work. She didn’t want to ever have children. We never varied the parking arrangement much.

  I waited, standing just outside the door of my car, watching the front windows of our apartment. The lights were off in the living room inside the front windows; nothing seemed visible from down the hallway either. But somebody was parked in the garage – somebody was in there. And no lights were on.

  I’d caught them. I nearly kicked the car door closed but forced myself to take a deep breath.
I started into the garage toward the door into the kitchen but stopped.

  I wanted to catch Besse; I wanted to prove she was lying, that she was cheating. She knew I’d be home by now. Why would someone still be there? Had they accidentally fallen asleep after screwing? Maybe she wanted me to catch them; maybe this was a trick – she was setting me up and wanted me to charge in there pissed off and turn the tables on me somehow. I knew she was capable of dishonesty; I did not know its depth.

  I darted instead across the front lawn and around the side of the house, ducking flat against the wall. There was a narrow stretch of lawn between our house and the neighbor’s. I shot across the little stretch and crouched near where his house met the ground and crept down the grassy strip. From here I could see all the windows down the side of my house; there didn’t seem to be a single light on back there either. The bedroom was at the back of the house and I headed toward it, still crouching along the cement block wall of my neighbor’s basement. The bedroom window on the first floor of my house was just higher than my head, but even crouched down against the neighbor’s basement, I couldn’t see into it.

  There was a light on upstairs though, in Geechie and Beulah’s apartment, toward the back of the house. I scurried over there and tilted my head back as far as possible to look into it. A curtain was pulled but I could still see a silhouette. I could even tell it was Beulah by the shape of her hair and her height. She was dancing slightly and holding different clothes up to her. Geechie’s car wasn’t parked on the street, and Beulah was home trying on different outfits. If Beulah got laid tonight, I would know if it was her that made all the noise.

  But first I had to find out if Besse was getting a little action of her own. I wondered if she was ever super noisy like Geechie or Beulah when she had sex with someone else. What if my neighbors listened to my girlfriend getting screwed while I wasn’t there, but never felt like they needed to tell me, or should tell me? There was no reason to suspect I occupied their thoughts much, even if they figured largely into mine.

  I jogged quickly back around the front of the house to where we keep the garage and grabbed our heavy duty plastic trash barrel with its lid clasped onto it. We had to invest in this because raccoons or something we’re tearing our garbage up when we just threw it outside in bags.

  I took a closer look at the truck – it was a small blue Dodge with rust spreading along the bottom. Inside, the floor was littered with empty Styrofoam coffee cups. There was nothing to reveal who the owner was, and the doors were locked. I hauled the trash barrel back around to the side of the building and down the narrow stretch and dropped it gently onto its side beneath our bedroom window. I had to get a look. I stepped onto the side if the trash can, tested my weight on it, and stepped up, lifting my other foot to place them both next to each other on side of the barrel. It rolled and shifted some beneath me, buckling under my weight, but I trusted that, with its cap securely locked on, it would hold me at least long enough to peek past the blinds.

  The smell of rotten apples leaked from the depths of the barrel.

  The blinds were closed, though, and with the lights off I really couldn’t make anything out.

  Only fruit dies sweetly, I thought, doubting that Logan smelled this nicely now.

  I couldn’t believe the nerve of that bitch. How could she not get whoever the hell was in there out before I was home? Who was it? The father of some snot-mouthed brat at the child care center? Did he pick his kid up every day eyeing Besse and think about rolling her around in the Tumble Forms? Did he get his chance some day, or today even? Did Besse not bother to tell him she lived with someone and he might be home any second? Did she know I would want to kill him if I caught him in there right now? Drag his ass right back out into his rusty, littered Dodge and send it skidding down the street in a fireball of smoke and screaming and sizzling flesh? I stomped my foot in anger, decided to just charge inside and see what the fuck was going on. I was not going to let this keep happening to me.

  The trash barrel collapsed under me suddenly, though. All of my weight shifted onto the one foot I had just stomped. The top of the bucket popped violently off like a champagne cork, like boiling water, like a load of trouble, the retort of a handgun. I collided with the ground in a brain-jarring bounce. Even as I clambered back to my feet, I saw lights pop on in the bedroom and then the living room within seconds. I knew I had them caught, and raced down the stretch along the side of the house toward the front lawn. Someone was coming down the front steps of the living room door, the one we never used, as I rounded the corner.

  I had whoever it was in my sights. No one was going to fuck around on me in my own home. I slammed into him as soon as he set foot off the steps and drove him hard and straight into the earth. I knocked the wind right out of myself and my whole body spasmed in pain.

  I remember once I was doing 75 down the Thruway once and choked on some coffee; I couldn’t breathe and as long as I couldn’t breathe I couldn’t steer or brake or accelerate either and I didn’t know whether that was going to end with me choking or crashing but I was pretty sure I couldn’t keep one or the other or both from happening for too much longer. I felt like that now, pouncing on this guy out of the darkness, when all the oxygen exited my body, not unlike the way the trash can lid bounced off the garbage barrel. Except without the sweet smell of rotten apples. My lungs cramped and I was paralyzed for a moment. The front door flew wide open once again, showering me and the other guy, still crushed beneath me, in light from the living room.

  “What the fuck?” Besse shouted from the doorway above us, her shadow now crashing onto us, her arms thrusting a pistol in our direction.

  I didn’t even know she owned a pistol. A car door slammed from the street behind me as I rolled over and started to push myself back to my feet. I lifted my hand slowly in the air as footsteps ran up from behind me. I slowly turned my head, never quite looking away from Besse, still shaking and waving a pistol at me and everyone else on the lawn.

  I expected to see the cops, and was scrambling anxiously to be able to see who I had tackled.

  But it was Geechie approaching from the street, stopping suddenly on the lawn, not long after she entered my vision. So it wasn’t the police, but I still felt guilty, awkward somehow. She was as surprised by the violence on the front lawn as I was. I sensed Besse relaxing with the gun behind me, comprehension probably dawning on her as well.

  “Hey Geechie,” I greeted her, my hands still over my head, hoping she’d scream at the scene. That would give her away if she was the screamer. So I whipped my leg back and suddenly just kicked the man, who was still rolling around in the gravel in front of our steps, a whopping blow to the ribs that shot pain straight up my shin.

  It barely warranted a gasp from Geechie, though, much less a scream. And not even enough of a gasp to be recognizable.

  “How’s it going tonight?” I asked her.

  “Dad! Are you alright?” Besse shouted from behind me.

  Geechie just scrambled past us toward her door, between ours and the garage. I glanced slowly down to take a peek at Duke, and a little bit up also to see how mad Besse might be.

  12.

  “Goddamnit, boy,” Duke said, shaking his head and wheezing occasionally. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking a small glass of whiskey on the rocks, the last drops poured from the half pint that always started the day full and ended empty. “What the hell you doing crawling around the house like that?” he snapped, indignant, scolding me. “Scaring me and knocking the shit outta my ass? Hah?”

  I stood in the kitchen doorway, scowling at Besse where she leaned against the refrigerator. Dozens of little magnets, each shaped like a state of the Union, each a jagged puzzle piece, stuck to the metal doors, scattered around the surface of the fridge behind her. You could never create any unity out of those misshapen magnetic states, even if they were all there. Everything on them was vague and imprecisely defined, only barely recalling the original sharpness of t
he borders that in truth joined them. Besse had been all around before she knew me. She glared at me now with her arms folded, lines on her brow mapped out like the Mississippi delta, joining and flowing down her forehead toward her nose.

  “What the hell are you doing with this?” I shouted at her, holding the pistol, a little snub-nosed .38, in the air. I opened the cylinder and shook the bullets out of it.

  “Everybody around here owns a gun,” Duke said in a low growl.

  “I thought you were peeping,” Besse snapped, putting her hands on Duke’s shoulder, keeping him between us, calming, or restraining, him.

  I continued to shake the pistol, my most reasonable source of anger. “You’re going to shoot a peeper? Is that why you have a fucking pistol?”

  “Christ, boy, you’re the one sneaking around the house, knocking over garbage barrels,” Duke said, on the offensive.

  “That’s because I saw that piece of shit truck you got out there and I thought somebody was in the house!” I snapped at him. “Where the hell is your truck anyway?”

  “I told you – it was broke down so I couldn’t drive it so I had to borrow my friend’s truck,” he explained, more exasperated.

  “Duke – everything is broke down in your life. What’s your problem? And what are you doing here at midnight, even if your own truck won’t run?” I asked, not convinced about anything he ever said.

  “I already told you. A pipe or something broke around my place, and there’s fumes in there, and I can’t stay there. I was sleeping on the couch when I heard you making a racket out there. I thought someone was trying to bust in here. What the hell you doing peeping in your own home?”