Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  “What the fuck?” he shouted, almost as soon as his head was free. “I saw you kissing Juliet the other night. What were you doing?”

  “We were kissing each other,” I said wryly, strumming the guitar noiselessly beneath the motorcycle’s engine. “But that didn’t stop you from interrupting. So screw you, man.”

  Logan revved his engine louder as I finished my question. “Well, it didn’t do me any fucking good! All she could talk about was you anyway,” he shouted as he let the engine quiet back down. “Thanks a lot!” he snapped as he slammed his helmet back on and spun the bike back around, tearing out across the lawn, grass and dirt spraying out behind the back tire. My father was going to kill me for that. He wouldn’t get mad at Logan, though, just me – he liked Logan.

  “No, thank fucking you,” I snapped uselessly, banging another dissonant chord out of the guitar, its sharp reverberations ringing out across my lawn in the wake of the engine’s growl.

  I tried to see Juliet before she left but I could only get her on the phone. Her host family kept her pretty busy before she could leave, had her out of town for at least a couple of days.

  “I’m sorry I caused a fight between you and Logan,” she told me over the phone before she left.

  “To hell with Logan,” I said. “I think I love you, Juliet.”

  “I wish we had more time,” she said, whispering.

  Depression, or at least disappointment, followed Juliet’s departure. She was more than just the first girl I kissed, or a missed opportunity. She was the only girl I had ever related to, my only friend besides Logan, for that matter, and I feared that I would never feel that again.

  When Michelle called me shortly after Juliet left, I was surprised.

  “You know, I never thanked you,” she said, “for hanging out with me the night Logan broke up with me. I’m glad we’re still friends.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “I was feeling the same way, really.”

  “Well, I always liked it when you hung out with us. Maybe we can do something sometime, if you’re ever bored. I suddenly feel like I don’t have anyone to hang out with anymore.”

  I sympathized; with Juliet gone and Logan pissed at me, it made sense for Michelle and me to pine some time away in shared misery. “You want to go for a walk or something?” I asked.

  We met on the pedestrian bridge over the creek behind the slipper factory, the major industry in this town, besides professional unemployment. The sun was just sinking below the tops of the trees, introducing dusk to our placid town. I felt more relaxed than I had in days, since the kiss with Juliet, inheriting the tranquility of the sunset, perhaps. We scampered down the bank at the end of the bridge and found some rocks to sit on underneath it. Michelle opened up her backpack and slid out a bottle of Old Crow whiskey, a cheap bourbon smuggled from her dad’s hidden stash.

  “I lifted it from my folks,” she said, grinning.

  “Won’t they notice?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Hells yeah,” she promised with a laugh, “they’re going to kill me.”

  She pulled out two cups and a six-pack of cokes, which we put in the stream after opening one, to hopefully keep them cold. We poured the whiskey into the cups with the coke, without ice, and proceeded to drink them together in silence while the darkness gathered around us and the creek just kept murmuring by. Maybe we just didn’t have much to actually say to each other, but we didn’t need to either, apparently, and there was something comforting in that.

  The sun was long gone, and the whiskey half gone, when Michelle finally started to talk. I was dazed from the booze and wallowing in thoughts about Juliet being gone, and I looked sideways at Michelle when her voice suddenly broke the silence.

  “You know, Logan wasn’t the first person I’d ever been with,” she confided.

  That was no secret. I knew Michelle had screwed a guy when she was in our eighth grade class, before just about anyone else we knew had ever had sex, with a high school junior named Bart Stevens. In fact, that was the sole reason Logan had asked her to go out with him.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Logan and I had sex, but it wasn’t the same as with the first guy, you know?” she said, grabbing another coke out of the stream. She poised there for a moment, crouched, one arm hugging and holding herself to her knees, the other stuck gently into the stream, little currents breaking around her fingers.

  “Nah,” I said. I had no idea.

  “When I first did it,” she said, sitting back down and pouring the coke into her cup with more whiskey, “it was really exciting. I mean it was scary and it hurt, but it was just really exciting. And even times after that, the first couple of boyfriends.”

  “Nothing lasts forever,” I suggested, shrugging and throwing a stone into the stream as she refilled my cup.

  “But some things can happen more than once,” she told me.

  I laughed. She was right, I figured.

  “It just never did, though,” she said, looking sad. “Hey, do you want to go see something?” she asked, suddenly changing her tone.

  I followed her out from underneath the bridge and down the road that stretched past the factory and through the back of the town. The slipper factory actually stretched through a good portion of Still Creek, between Main Street and the creek itself, and everything behind the factory was separated from the rest of Still Creek. This is where people with money lived; there weren’t many places back here and they all had a lot of privacy from one another.

  We didn’t go too far before we stopped at the yard of a huge house with a long, nicely manicured front lawn. I recognized the house; though I didn’t know who owned it, it was totally the wealthiest place in the whole town, not easily afforded around here. There was no money to be made here working in factories. Most people lived in modest, or even decrepit, old homes in town without much property, and the further out of town you went the worse it got, right down to tarpaper shacks on dirt roads with two or three cars on cement blocks in the yard and a junkyard for decoration and a brand new snowmobile to call all the surrounding poverty into sharp contrast.

  “Come on,” she said, pulling my hand and starting to run across the lawn.

  I glanced nervously around us but followed her anyway until we were on the back section of their illustrious property, where we ran through an opening in some hedgerows. Inside was an immaculate garden of dirt paths lined with stones twisting their way through perfectly trimmed shrubbery, carefully shaped trees, flowers in rows of organized color, and rocks as smooth as ones on the bottom of a river. We ran until we found a little lawn in the center, with a stone bench and a fountain.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked, pulling the bottle of Old Crow out of her backpack again and twisting the cap so that it flew loosely down to the ground. She took a drink right out of the bottle.

  She handed it to me and I took a drink but could barely swallow, out of breath from running, whiskey already pounding in my blood.

  “I come here when I’m bored,” she announced, throwing her arms into the air as if to embrace the whole garden, drunk. “It feels forbidden or something, because it’s like someone’s home, you know, like we’re not supposed to be here or something.”

  “We’re definitely not supposed to be here,” I said in a slur. “How did you find this place?”

  “I lost my virginity here,” she told me, looking at me and then away - her face sweet and happy for a moment, and then sad, before she just went back on happily, “I like to think of myself as one of the flowers in this garden. The guy was older than me and he was really sweet, and we snuck out here one night. It was so romantic and exciting, and I had sex with him, even though I was scared shitless. But it was okay.”

  I pulled on the whiskey again, embarrassed. “I need to get laid,” I said, without even realizing it, letting myself collapse onto the lawn, looking up at Michelle’s silhouette against the sky.

  “Me too,” she said, la
nding on her back next to me.

  I dragged my eyes down the profile of her forehead and over the slope of her nose, the smile on her lips and the descent of her neck, and over the protrusion of her breasts against a backdrop of flowers. I reached over and began undressing her as fast as I could while her hands pawed at my jeans.

  16.

  Logan and Michelle were back together shortly after that. Michelle must have told him what happened, because he showed up at my house on his motorcycle again, this time getting off the bike, throwing the helmet down to march right at me. I tried to hop to my feet, lifting the guitar off my lap, but he shoved me right back down, my ass slamming into the front steps of my porch.

  “Think you can just do whatever you want, hah?” he shouted, punching me across the jaw. “You stole Juliet, and then you fucked Michelle behind my back. What’s your problem?”

  I barely even tried to sit up, instead just wiping blood from my mouth. “Fuck you,” I said, but he kicked me in the side and started back to his motorcycle.

  “Did you come here just to kick me and leave?” I shouted after him, sitting up in pain.

  Logan tore out of the driveway, dirt and pebbles flying, and never slowed down even as he yanked out right in front of a car, colliding with its bumper. He flew several feet through the air before hitting the pavement and rolling a few more feet.

  Sitting now, a couple of years later, in the only graveyard in our town, with crows squawking and flying around me and eyeing me hungrily, I remembered the pain I was in that day from Logan’s punch even as I ran out onto the road to see if he was alive. I knew my bruises couldn’t compare to what had just happened to him. I ran like I had no pain. I lifted his head and he looked at me, conscious and grimacing in fear. The driver – Lacy Turner, a mother from the neighborhood – was standing there too.

  “Watch him!” I had shouted. “Watch for more cars!” I ran back into the house and called an ambulance.

  Crows continued to gather around me now and talk to each other, as I sat on his grave in the cemetery, and I pictured Logan looking much like he did that day when he died a couple of weeks ago, sprawled in the road, but this time without me crouched over him, or calling the ambulance. Perhaps only the crows watched that time. I looked around at the rows and rows of graves and imagined how many of their occupants had died alone.

  And I wondered at the crows in the graveyard.

  Did they really find a meal there?

  17.

  I knew Elle still lived at home. I was familiar with where her house was on Old Plant Road; it was out past where Logan wrecked his bike for the last time, on the way out to the old dirt Winkler Road where Juliet had kissed me that time, where Logan began a series of events he would ultimately blame me for.

  I idled the Buick at the stop sign, at the crossroads of Old Plant Road and where 68 ran back around into town. Route 68 stretched ahead, a stretch that Logan had skidded half the length of the day he died. There was nothing but fields around otherwise, fields that spread for miles and were dotted with dairy farms and corn fields and the occasional Podunk central New York town, like Still Creek, where nothing happened of consequence except that people lived and died, sometimes young, many of them never driving beyond those fields and farms in their whole lives, and nothing ever changed except for the first names.

  Only Elle and Logan made a difference to me out here. And one of them was dead.

  I stepped on the gas and peeled out around the corner up Old Plant Road, still picturing Elle in my head.

  18.

  “I think my girlfriend is fucking somebody.”

  Van looked at me suspiciously as he dipped a coffin bottom into the vat of brown stain.

  “And her dad knows or something,” I continued. “And he’s covering for her, like maybe it’s his buddy. He knows she’s cheating on me.”

  Van stopped still right in the middle of lifting the bottom out of the stain. “What the fuck are you talking about, boy?”

  Staining the bottoms was the last thing you did to them. After this they were ready to be assembled with the rest of the parts. It was an easy Friday evening thing to do. We never felt much like working on Friday nights. Van brought a twelve-pack in again tonight, but swore he wasn’t going to share any with Digger this time. “This is just for me and you,” he said. “Fuck Digger.” He was drinking one already.

  We were about an hour into the shift. The other employees had only just left, less than half an hour ago, and Van had opened a beer immediately, the second he was positive everyone was gone.

  I’d seen Elle earlier, when I first came into the building, wandering past her office and hoping to cross paths with her. Digger was out on the loading dock and I headed over like I’d wanted to talk to him.

  “Shit, kid,” Digger had cursed, shaking his head at me as he neared. “Ain’t even supposed to be working today. Wasn’t fucking payday, I wouldn’t even be down here.”

  “Well, you got your check, you can leave, right?” I asked him, pausing as we passed each other, while I looked for Elle out of the corner of my eye.

  Digger stopped long enough to pace around me. “Yeah, but someone’s got to check the boilers. Might as well get some hours in while I’m here. Got more shit than I can deal with at home, so I ain’t going back there, that’s for sure.”

  Digger made me feel anxious, just pacing like that, all troubled and wearing his worries on his face.

  “You work too much,” I told him.

  I worried that Elle would see me out here talking to Digger too much. I didn’t want her to see me as just another loser in this factory. At the same time, I did want her to see me. I didn’t want to have to talk to her. I wanted to have sex with her. I didn’t want to do anything to make it happen. I wanted one thing to happen in my life of its own accord, that wasn’t manipulated, that had no ulterior motives. I wanted something bare and exposed, vulnerable but willing, challenging but yielding. I was afraid of making things happen. I was afraid that acting on desire made the wrong things happen.

  “It makes you worry too much,” I told Digger.

  Digger half-snarled at me after that, standing out by the loading dock, sunlight pouring in the warehouse door. “You don’t know what worry is,” he snapped. “These damn boilers are going to blow any time,” he promised, stomping off and shaking his head.

  I had started after him, under the premise in my mind of looking for Van, but poked my head into Elle’s office when I saw her crouched down in there. Just what I wanted. She was bent low to the ground with several files spread out on the floor in front of her.

  “Wow, they’ve got you doing the real groundwork, hah?” I asked, with a little laugh.

  She had looked back up at me and smiled. Her red hair slid and fell in front of her shoulders and around her face. “Anything to keep me down,” she said with a grin.

  By then, Van had started looking for me to get working.

  “Now why the hell would you say that?” Van asked me, after I disregarded him the first time.

  I was still thinking about my abbreviated encounter with Elle from earlier, all the promise held in one quick little exchange, wondering how to amplify that.

  Van was still paused halfway through lifting the bottom out of the stain.

  I let my side of the panel drop back in. “He was there when I came home the other night. Real late.”

  “So what?” Van snapped, slamming his end of the bottom down into the vat of thin brown stain. “It’s her father, you little shit. Why do you think he’d let his daughter pull something like that? You’re sick, sick for even thinking it.”

  “There was someone else’s car there. And he was there too. And I know she’s fucking someone else. She’s done it before,” I said. “I just put it together the other night. He must know something. It’s like he’s trying to protect her from me. She must have done something he knows would piss me off.”

  “Well, what was he doing there? Did you see anyone else?�
�� Van asked, with little patience.

  “No, I didn’t. And I don’t know what he was doing there,” I conceded begrudgingly.

  “And you think he was hanging out while some guy’s banging his daughter?” Van said, staring intently at me.

  “No,” I said, defensively. “But something funny is going on. The strange cars, the late nights. They totally attacked me when I got there – Van, I’m telling you, it’s weird.”

  “Alright, so it’s weird, but it don’t mean she’s cheating on you, and it definitely don’t mean he knows something about it,” Van insisted.

  “You’re right,” I said, sighing. “But I know she’s cheating on me.”

  We lifted the bottom out of the stain, piled it on the cart with the rest. Van took a long pull off his beer, finishing it. “Come on,” he said. “I better get you one of these before they’re all gone,” he declared, walking toward the break room.

  I followed him, but paused in the entrance of the break room when he handed me the beer.

  “Come on,” Van said, sighing in exasperation. “What the fuck’s up? I got to twist your arm to get you to drink a beer?”

  “Ah, Van,” I shrugged, “I can’t control myself when I drink,” I explained. “I got all crazy last time. That’s when the whole thing with Duke and the gun and Besse happened.”

  Van looked at me like I was nuts. “Kid, you’re crazy whether you drink beer or not – you ever listen to yourself talk?”

  I shook my head, tilting it sideways to look at him hopelessly. Van did not take no for an answer.

  “You can’t control yourself when you drink because you don’t drink,” he explained, offering me the beer. “Now take it. Some time your life might depend on how well you can keep your shit together when you’re drunk,” he said, grinning. “Consider this practice.”