Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  “Trying to see if I was with someone,” Besse snapped from the cool refrigerator corner. “Asshole here don’t trust me. Thinks I got some other boyfriend.”

  “That’s not true!” I shouted, but without conviction.

  “You’re always trying to catch me,” Besse argued.

  “You’re one paranoid little shit,” Duke said, sipping his whiskey, slinking down in his chair. “I don’t know why Besse even puts up with you.”

  I shook my head, bouncing bullets in my palm. I was damned if I was the one acting strange, and not these two. “Fuck this,” I told them. “I’m the one that’s coming home just like I always do,” I said, shaking the empty .38 at Duke. “You’re the one that can’t drive his own truck or sleep in his own house! What the fuck is up with that?”

  “Shit, boy, I’ll tell you something else,” Duke said, rising from his chair and pointing at me. “I’m worried about my daughter around you, and maybe that’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re calling me paranoid, Duke? Have you ever listened to yourself for five freaking minutes?”

  Nobody said anything more but the silence only fused the tension. Duke, indignant, kept drinking his whiskey with a shaking hand, sitting back down. Besse just glared at me with violence. I stormed down the hallway away from the kitchen, toward our bedroom, the apartment feeling increasingly smaller, the ridiculousness of its smallness striking me with wall-punching fury as I arrived in less than a second at the end of the hall and stared at my closed bedroom door. I expected to see the evidence of some trespass on the other side - a bed wildly rumpled, a litter of clothing, someone waiting inside, but was afraid too of becoming any angrier. I kicked open the door and whipped the handful of bullets into the room. They spread like buckshot into the air, clattering against the wall, the mirror, the window, bouncing back on the bed, which was neatly made except where a corner where Besse had probably climbed out of it. I stood there, bullets rolling around my feet, listening to the silence that still emanated from the kitchen.

  “Oh God …” a voice drifted through the ceiling from upstairs.

  I snatched a couple of bullets from the floor and stomped back into the hallway. Clenching my jaw to keep from screaming in rage, I whipped them down the length of the hall. They bounced off the living room wall and rolled silently onto the carpet. I wondered if Besse or Duke saw them buzz past. They didn’t make a sound either way.

  “Don’t stop,” a woman’s voice said from upstairs.

  Geechie and Beulah were both home now. It could have been anyone’s voice.

  God damn it, God damn it, God damn it.

  That’s all I thought.

  I marched back into the bedroom, slamming the door closed behind me and throwing the closet open. I had to hide the gun. From Besse. From Duke. From me. I dropped it into the inside pocket of my suit, my only suit, which I never wore except to funerals. It was still hanging at the front of my closet.

  13.

  I didn’t bring flowers. I just sat on top of Logan’s grave and ignored the headstone, looking out instead at the rows and columns of other people’s grave stones. I imagined a city of the dead, all zoned and gridlocked, regulated so that the expensive memorials were all near each other, each enhancing the value of the other. The graveyard radiated out from this thriving center to a suburban sprawl of increasingly impoverished regions of headstones with letters too faded to read, whose stones were cracked, whose flowers wilted. Those who had nothing in life had nothing in the grave either, and that was it. The more money you had, the better remembered you were. In the city of the dead, at least.

  But the most important memories are in the minds of the left behind. I knew this; it didn’t matter to me what Logan’s headstone looked like.

  Crows perched in the sparsely planted spruce trees in the graveyard, watching stupidly over it. One cawed ominously, probably at me, and flew over my head. Another, from the tree he just left, cawed as well. The flying one landed on a tree near me, and cawed back. It flexed its wings without flying, turned its head to the side. It reminded me of the eagle on the quarter. It had that confidence.

  I think it waited with the knowledge that I too would die eventually, and that gave it the bravado. Someday it might feed on me. I would wait dead perhaps for days before anyone knew where I was, and the small things of the world would feast on me. Yet I would never do anything to that crow except lay my eyes on it. I could, in fact, do something to it, but I never would. Killing that bird, or eating that bird, was within my ability, but not my nature.

  Not so of the crow.

  It knew what Logan didn’t, and what I was learning under the weight of guilt as I sat on Logan’s grave. In all of the digging and pecking and clawing amongst animals, bones break, wings snap, and blood eventually runs cold. Crushed skulls feed the earth. A feast of corpses keeps us alive, provides us our livelihood.

  We all dig our own graves.

  But more than that, every night, for the sake of some coin, I built the coffins of everybody around me, too. I built coffins for thousands of people, as a matter of fact, maybe for everybody in this whole county. I had already built Logan’s. And one night, one of the coffins I built would end up being mine.

  I had seen Logan nearly die once when we were in high school. We had been arguing, largely over a girl named Juliet, the one who had lent me the motorcycle novel, an exchange student from South Africa with the misfortune of being exchanged to upstate New York. Logan was dating this girl Michelle, a classmate of ours for years. She was his first steady girlfriend and I found myself around them a lot, usually feeling I was in the way. And jealous.

  We hung out and drank beers and they necked and made out in the middle of conversations and I’m sure they were groping and banging each other as soon as I left. I didn’t like or dislike Michelle, and didn’t mind Logan going out with her. I just wanted to bang a chick myself, and didn’t like being the odd man out.

  Juliet transferred into our school as an overseas exchange student in the beginning of the school year, in September. She was very outgoing, which I assumed you had to be to trade places for a year. She was friendly to me in school and we had conversations throughout the day some times. When she switched host families after a couple of months, she lived with Michelle’s friend Heather and I got to hang out with her outside of school and we talked to each other at parties a lot.

  We left school together some days and once walked down the trails behind the school toward the outskirts of town. We headed down the crumbling old railroad tracks outside town and even crawled out onto the rotting wooden limbs of the trestle there, which extended over a deep gully with the creek running at the bottom, the floor and walls of the little valley immersed in green overgrowth and leafy, healthy life.

  She was the only girl I was comfortable like that with, was really the only person I was close to at all besides Logan, in fact.

  She was smarter than me, brilliant even. She spoke a funny, proper kind of English like an Elizabethan schoolteacher. She seemed aristocratic – superior, but tempered with a fair and relaxed humor. Her politeness humbled my crudity, shamed me with my tendency to swear, to mispronounce words, and to use verbs wrongly. She was simply better than me, without even knowing it, and yet she listened to me talk, however clumsily, like I was reading from Webster’s own dictionary. She made humility seem noble – at first mine, but ultimately hers. Her intentions were elegant, so evidently honest they bowled over my distrust of confidence, my complete lack of faith in everything.

  Logan, too, found something reassuring in her.

  “She makes me feel like I’m not stupid,” he told me one day as we sat in his car, drinking cans of Genesee on Winkler Road - a dirt road outside of town one day. “Like the way everyone always gives me shit for doing whatever I want to do, but she just seems interested in it, no matter how fucked up or dumb it is.”

  “Michelle doesn’t seem to have any problems with anything you do,” I reminded him, openin
g a can of beer and trying to suck the foam as it spilled over the side and on to my hand. Logan had stolen a six-pack from his father. We didn’t drink often; it seemed limited only to what we scraped up at parties we found on weekends. I tended to sip them, consume very little in reality, and still end up drunk. Just the same, we acted like we’d grown up with beers in our hands, holding them and talking, taking small slurping sips every few sentences. “Does she make you feel stupid?”

  He just seemed pissed. “Michelle’s trashy, man,” he said. “She’s too stupid to make me feel stupid. I just put up with her, that’s why she likes me. But Juliet’s better than me, and she likes me anyway, like she don’t know she’s better than me.”

  “Nobody’s better than you, man.” I shook my head. “You know, and you’re not better than anybody else. That’s true for everyone,” I said.

  “Nah, man,” Logan said, though. “People can definitely be better than other people. You’re smarter than me, for instance. You don’t know it, so you don’t act it, and that’s what’s good about you. But I’m better than you because I’m more honest. You never say the truth because you’re afraid. You always pussyfoot around the truth and end up fucking lying.”

  “So I’m better than you, and you’re better than me. That means nobody’s really better than nobody,” I pointed out.

  “I think I’m going to break up with Michelle,” he said. “I want to hook up with Juliet before she has to leave.”

  “Well, you’ve only got a week,” I pointed out, wiping beer off my chin from a clumsy swallow. “She’s finishing the year on the west coast.”

  The thought of it gripped me. The truth was I wanted Juliet too, but not just to have sex with her. I wanted to have sex with most of the girls I ever met in my life. I wanted Juliet to accept me. I could never ask, though; you can’t ask somebody to accept you. You have to hope they recognize who you really are and are okay with that.

  “There’s a party this Saturday if you want to go,” Logan said. “I’m going to break up with Michelle and hook up with Juliet. All in one night.”

  “Yeah, man, sure,” I said. “Can you pick me up?” I asked, trying to swallow more beer.

  14.

  That Saturday I had the same problem, nervously swallowing beer. Juliet leaned over and wiped the beer off my chin with her thumb, flattening my lip against my teeth. “You’re so messy,” she said. “Totally irreverent.”

  We were sitting on the tailgate of my friend Todd’s S-10 pick-up in the same spot on Winkler road that Logan and I had just drank beers the other day and talked about Juliet. There was a bonfire and small circles of kids from school but we were out on the edge of all that. While the flames danced distantly at our backs, cold shadows flicked over the woods in front of us. I didn’t even know what irreverent meant. I didn’t care either.

  “You won’t have to put up with my irreverentness much longer,” I promised, making her laugh. “You get to leave soon.”

  “I know,” she said, looking quietly out into the breathing night, where shimmering points of light and shadow danced intricately before us.

  “You’ll be psyched to get out of this place,” I assured her. “It’s all backwards here. Go to California. You don’t want to come to America and say this is where you went.”

  “I like it here, though,” she said. “It’s simple here. You don’t understand what it’s like in Pretoria; it always feels on the verge of some great massive instability. Here, nothing changes, nothing is ever going to change. I love that.”

  “Oh, they change,” I promised her with a laugh, “For the worse. All the time. Wait till you see other places here, you’ll know what I mean.”

  “Places aren’t all that matter. People matter. And I like you and Logan and Michelle and Heather.”

  “Yeah, I’ll miss hanging out with you,” I confessed. “Logan said he’s going to miss you, too,” I added, curious to see her reaction.

  Behind us, the fire dwindled and shadows grew.

  She grinned, embarrassed. My heart sank, as I stood up from the tailgate, feeling awkward. I should have told her how I felt, but I wanted to walk away. She grabbed my hand, though, and pulled me back, onto the tailgate, almost into her lap, except that I didn’t quite make it, landing clumsily next to her instead. She looked embarrassed now, as I fought for my balance, until she just laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to stand gracefully again, but she pulled me back down, giggling.

  I kissed her. I just did it. She had lifted her head, her mouth was open with laughter. I didn’t know how soft lips were pressed against each other, or how dry at first. I never thought about actually kissing her before. It was sudden but she wasn’t surprised by the kiss. Instead, she immediately kissed me back, and didn’t stop. I slowly reached toward her, rested my hands lightly on her legs, reaching my left arm around her.

  She retreated and the kiss ended. “Easy,” she said, sitting me on the tailgate next to her. “We’re not exactly alone.”

  I felt stupid and exalted, out of place and out of character. My stomach churned and I had no idea what to do with myself. I must have looked worried, or even horrified, because Juliet just cocked her head and grinned up at me.

  “Hey,” she said, pulling me back closer to her. “Just be gentle,” she said and tried to kiss me again.

  Terrified of fucking it up, though, my heart beat itself silly and I trembled in front of her. But she understood, and touched my chest gently until my heart beat even faster but my breathing slowed. She kissed me again, slower this time, with just her lips. I was afraid to touch her, though there was nothing else I wanted to do, my hands just poised tentatively in the air. She pulled me closer to her, circling her arms around my back and pressing our chests together. I relaxed, slid my arms around her.

  “There you guys are,” I heard Logan say out loud from several yards away, approaching from the fire.

  Juliet separated herself from me completely. I felt the cool night air rush around my warm chest.

  Logan approached us without hesitation. He didn’t see what we were doing, or more likely, he did, and ignored it. “Michelle and I just broke up,” he announced, arriving to stand right next to me, in front of Juliet, where we still sat on the tailgate.

  “Oh my God, Logan,” Juliet said, hopping to her feet.

  I was not as surprised as she was.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Where’s Michelle? Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head, troubled. “I need to talk to someone about it. Do you still need a ride home?” he asked.

  “Um, yeah,” she said, glancing at me, looking back to Logan.

  “Let’s go then,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of here.” He started toward his car.

  I put my hand on Juliet’s arm. “But what about …”

  “Relax,” she said, smiling cautiously at me, holding my arm with her hand. “Logan needs a friend now and I need a ride home anyway. I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, kissing me quickly. “Have some confidence,” she said, ruffling my hair before taking off after Logan.

  The thrill of kissing Juliet began to dissipate in the wake of anger and confusion. That lying and selfish bastard knew exactly what he just did. The thought of him making a move on Juliet, only minutes after I kissed her, made my jaw clench. I walked back to the fire to get a beer, snarling, annoyed. That was the first night I ever got drunk for real.

  I saw Michelle standing near a beer cooler, looking dejected, very near tears. Not unlike me.

  “That son of a bitch Logan,” she said, opening a Bartles and Jaymes.

  “I know how you feel,” I said, cracking open a Schlitz.

  We wandered back to the tailgate together where Juliet and Logan had just left me and sat down to stare at the shadows. The flickering absences of light from the fire grew even darker in the tresses of Michelle’s short blonde curls, and that darkness accentuated the hurt on her small round face. N
othing I could have said would have brightened the darkness at the edge of the party, or strengthened the fragility of her heart. I sat uncomfortably next to hear, slurping my can of beer, as we otherwise just waited in silence for nothing to happen.

  15.

  A couple of days after Logan betrayed me like that, I sat on the steps of my parents’ house and quietly strummed my guitar, wincing at the buzz of its untuned strings. It was actually my uncle’s acoustic, hanging around my dad’s house from the 60’s when they played honky tonk tunes and crooned like Hank Williams about whiskey and cheating women. And guns. It may never have been tuned then, and it certainly wasn’t now. I couldn’t tune it very well so I never learned to play it much, but when no one was at my house I would haul it out and pound on the strings like I was Led Zeppelin or something. Over the hills and far fucking away.

  It was a rare thing that no one was at my house. I had four older brothers and three kid sisters, and there was never enough space or peace or quiet or solitude, or never really enough of anything, for that matter. My dad worked long shifts at a warehouse and it was easy for me to make sure I wasn’t much looked after for most of my life. I just lingered on the fringe of all the other brothers and sisters, smiling somewhere at the back of the family picture, not needing much, not saying much, trying to make sure I got at least some of whatever I wanted. My mother watched us and all the other kids in the neighborhood too since Dad never could have afforded to pay a babysitter for all of us, and I could have been just any one of the kids running around playing kickball in our backyard except that I stayed there for meals too.

  Now, though, a motorcycle rumbled down the street, drowning out the hum and buzz of the guitar strings and interrupting my peace and solitude. I watched Logan race down my road on his bike well after I first heard him. He yanked the bike into my driveway and then right across our lawn and skidded to a halt in front of me where I sat on the steps into my house. He left the bike running, still sitting on it, tearing his helmet off.