Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  I took the beer.

  “Anyway, like I was saying,” he went on. “If it was something weird, he wouldn’t just be there when you got home like that. She knows you’re coming. So even if she’s cheating on you, and even if her dad knows it, it’s not what was going on. Did you ask him what he was doing there?”

  “He said his house stinks so he had to stay at ours. And that his car stinks, and everything in his whole life stinks. It’s like lying, when you keep using the same excuses.”

  Van thought about it for a minute, shaking, then nodding, his head. “Maybe it’s him that stinks,” he said, laughing and drinking.

  I put my beer down mid-sip. “Something stinks, that’s for sure,” I said. “I can smell trouble and I’m in it.”

  “Shit, boy, come on,” Van said, turning his head away, drinking to hide his smile. “You got to have more evidence than that. You just don’t think shit like that.”

  “He was in his underwear,” I said quickly.

  “Hey, that’s weird, but that ain’t the same as what you’re talking about,” Van said, not buying it, but laughing just the same.

  I took a sip from my beer because I didn’t know what else to say. “She wasn’t wearing nothing,” I mumbled, pausing for dramatic effect.

  Van laughed out loud. “You’re full of shit, kid. You either got one crazy imagination or one fucked up life.”

  “I’m telling you, man,” I insisted. “She’s hiding something from me. And he knows. He’s been spending a lot of time around there lately. And they’re teaming up against me.”

  “You know what, kid?” Van asked, heading back into the factory. “You ain’t said a goddamned word all summer, and now you come out with shit like this? Now I know why you’re so quiet. You done lost your mind.”

  “Hey Van,” I shouted after him.

  He paused to look back at me.

  “Your wife ever cheated on you?” I asked.

  We started immediately back to work, dropping another bottom into the vat of stain.

  Van stopped short again to look at me. “What have I been telling you all summer, kid? If you just keep paying attention to your woman, she won’t cheat on you. Don’t know why you ain’t listening to me. What’s wrong, ain’t you two spending any time together?”

  “Well, sure, but --”

  “Listen, kid, me and Retha find all kinds of ways of making staying together fun. You know, we make sure we challenge each other, at least a little, you know? And I don’t mean playing board games. We like to see what each other are capable of.”

  “Well, we ain’t like that, but -”

  “Look, kid,” Van said, pausing again so I could get it straight. “I’ll bet you ten to one you want nothing more than to nail some other piece of ass right now. Your mind’s already started to wander to some other chick.”

  All I could picture was Elle crouched to the ground in her office earlier.

  “At least they can only keep you down while you’re here,” I had told her.

  “I know,” she had said back, looking up to me past the red hair, the sunlight from the office windows glowing on its waves. “I can’t wait to get out of here and go out tonight.”

  “Ha,” I groaned. “I get to spend my whole night here.”

  “Are you going to Opey’s later, though?” she asked. “I’ll be there.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” I said.

  But was suddenly thinking I should take her up on the offer.

  Grabbing another bottom to dip, Van continued to ramble. “Come on, I see you looking at that little girl working in the office over there. That’s all you’re thinking about, right?”

  My face burned red. “Well, sure, but -”

  “Then why the hell don’t you?” he asked, almost angry. “Hah? I told you, you got to keep it interesting.”

  “I know, but it ain’t that easy, either,” I pleaded.

  “Hey,” Van said, his tone totally changing gear. “I thought you was going to give me a call me some time? Hah? Why don’t you and your girlfriend come over some night and we’ll all have some dinner. My wife’s a good cook – maybe it’ll knock some sense into you kids to see how a good married couple gets along. So you ain’t making up all these crazy stories about her and spending all your time thinking about someone else. It don’t have to be that way.”

  “Sure,” I said, seeing Digger walking in from the glue room.

  Van saw him too. “What the hell you looking for today?” he shouted. “Don’t tell me you quit working, so you need some money, because I don’t want to hear about it. I’m sick of supporting your ass, no matter how bad you got it.”

  Van wasn’t one to waste time making you guess what’s on his mind.

  “Shit, relax, man,” Digger said. “I come with something today.”

  “What the fuck you got?” Van sneered. “I thought you quit buying just about everything. I got to get me another job just to pay for you.”

  “Check out this fattie,” Digger announced with pride, though, pulling out a finger-sized joint – a wrinkly, pregnant doobie probably stuffed with some commercial Mexican block weed.

  “Wellie, well, well,” Van said, shaking his head and grinning. “Just about when I was thinking you was useless.”

  “Come on, dude, it’s Friday,” Digger said, grinning, a sheepish, excited smile. “Maybe I ain’t got much money but a guy’s got to kick down for something for himself at least once in a while. And I want to get you back for hooking me up with smokes all the time. I appreciate it.”

  “You can’t stop living, man,” Van assured him. “Even if they take that goddamned kid of yours away from you. I fucking salute you.”

  “So what do you say?” Digger asked, looking up back and forth at us. “Do you want to fire this bad boy up?”

  “I’ll be honest, I don’t smoke that shit much anymore,” Van said. “But what the hell, it’s Friday. And I ain’t doing nothing but hanging with Retha tonight.”

  “How about you, kid?” Digger asked, nodding at me. “Want to get high?”

  “Shit,” Van cut in. “That kid’s already one paranoid motherfucker. Thinks his girlfriend and her dad are conspiring against him. He don’t need no dope.”

  “What the hell?” Digger snapped at Van. “You got to tell everybody what to do? This shit’ll do the kid some good. Make him look at everything a little different for once.”

  “You don’t know this kid,” Van told Digger. “He ain’t looking at it right already.”

  “Then maybe this’ll fix him.”

  “Shit,” Van said. “It’ll fix you if you’re too straight. But if you’re already fucked up, it makes you real crazy.”

  “Well it ain’t up to you,” Digger said, shrugging and waving the joint in the air. “It’s my dope and his life.”

  I watched them argue over my decision. Neither of them had a clue what I thought.

  “What do you say?” Digger asked me, eager to prove Van wrong. “You down or what?”

  “Down?” I asked. “Sure – I’m down.”

  Digger laughed and bobbed his head at Van.

  Van looked troubled. I’d never seen him look like this. Nice to know I could scare him.

  “Whatever,” he said. “I need another beer anyway.”

  19.

  I leaned on the railing of the porch at the back of the factory, pressing the soft flesh of my forearms against its red, flaking paint, my head dangling over the rail, and staring at the heel prints of workbooks pressed into cigarette butts, scattered like dandelions late in the summer. Van and Digger were inside, fashioning paddles out of 2x4s and laughing at everything they said.

  “A good old-fashioned wife beater,” Digger said, smacking the raw wood against his palm.

  “You ain’t ever laid a hand on your wife,” Van laughed.

  Van had, though.

  “Except to get her attention,” Digger giggled.

  Earlier, at break time, when Van and Digger had
stepped out onto the porch to smoke the joint, I disappeared.

  “I’ve got to take a piss,” I lied and told them, and after they went outside I walked over to Elle’s dust-covered office. I stood in the doorway, the room quietly frozen in the sunlight from the window, for a moment. I stuffed her appointment book in between the desk and the wall, as though it had fallen or been knocked there, before joining Van and Digger out on the porch.

  “Here, try this,” Digger said, handing me the joint.

  I took a searing blast of smoke to my lungs and choked, coughing. Saliva shot out of my mouth and hung dripping from my lower lip as I bent over, still gasping occasionally. I leaned on the rail and panted until I could breathe again. I didn’t notice Van and Digger go back inside at first, still staring cross-eyed at my own dangling spit.

  I lifted my head but remained leaning on the railing and gazed out at the rolling mounds of the dumpsite, uncrossing my eyes to focus on the white candy cane-shaped pipes lined in rows on top of those mounds. I imagined church crosses arranged in a similar grid, a graveyard for the anonymous, a memorial, a dedication to some great ineffable mystery, a reminder that, no matter what, nature visits us with death. Life is burdened with inescapable ignorance. We don’t know where we go. We don’t know why we live. And we don’t know when we will be visited.

  20.

  “Hey!” a voice snapped, quickly followed by a hand slap. “Kid! Wake up!”

  I heard the sound before I felt the sting or the jarring of my head. My first consciousness was of the night sky and a thousand stars, and when the voice reached me, it took me by surprise. I couldn’t see anything but lights until I heard Van’s voice, and once I realized there were people and things around me that I couldn’t see, things began taking form in my mind. The lights, those were people, though there were only two of them, not thousands – Van and Digger, each a cluster of stars in my dark unconsciousness. I focused on Van’s voice telling me to wake up until I could see his face looking down at me. No sooner did the present register in my brain than did the last minutes before I went unconscious.

  I had been leaning on the railing staring at the ventilation pipes poking out of the ground in the dump site behind the factory. Time passed without me even blinking; drool dangled precariously from my lip; the pipes slowly transformed themselves into white cemetery crosses and late afternoon shadows of clouds moved silently but forcefully over me, and around me, like a flock of black crows racing along the ground. They gathered into one great sacred darkness that stretched from the sky to the earth. I left the porch to walk out into that darkness, and even climbed the chain link fence to get out there as it intensified around me. I wanted to be consumed in that shadow, to drown all of my thoughts and emotions. I envisioned Logan, and how he had died, racing toward a great blackness himself, without knowing it.

  But the afternoon shadows retreated and I could never quite reach them, always withdrawing just out of my reach. I stopped and stood on the top of one of the mounds, its ventilator pipe at my feet. I dropped down to my knees and looked back at the factory like it was a million miles away, some strange palace for the working man that I didn’t really belong in, a backwards foreign country I had been exchanged accidentally to. I was never meant to be here; I had escaped once. Why had I ever returned?

  The rot was putrid out here on the mound, a noxious gas permeating the air around me. I wondered if the stench was really just flowing out of the pipe, if I could feel it like a breeze. I leaned my head down underneath its craned neck, choking vomit back as I got closer, and cupped its end with my hands. I shoved my face in the cup and took a long deep breath of the wretched air. The shadow, now a single flock of crows with interconnected wings, descended on me, like a thick, black blanket intent on suffocating me.

  Van forced my eyelids to stay open, even as the memory threatened to consume me in darkness again. “Jesus Christ, he’s alright,” he said to Digger, lifting my head up.

  The fuzzy, dumb confusion of the darkness retreated from my mind, like when you hold a lighter to a cobweb and every single thread vanishes almost instantly. I sat up, shaking my head.

  “You passed out again, kid,” Van said. “Like in the cleaning closet that time. That’s twice now,” he sighed. “And you ain’t been right since the first time either. You better go home.”

  His eyes were wide like he didn’t know what he had just witnessed. His mouth was drawn tight into a worried frown. I never saw him so worried before.

  “Did I scare you?” I asked, trying to grin, as he sat unmoving over me.

  “I don’t scare easy, boy,” he said.

  But I could tell he was frightened.

  21.

  I drove past my house to make sure none of the lights were on before I stopped. Van sent me home early, kicking himself in the ass for letting me get so fucked up. Well, after shoving Digger flat onto the ground and blaming it on him, that is. He didn’t even want to let me drive, but there really wasn’t any other option.

  “Boy, you better just drive that piece of shit car of yours straight to your house and go right to fucking bed,” he told me.

  I mumbled some consent, but I was already thinking about Opey’s. Besse wasn’t expecting me home for at least three more hours and I was convinced by now that Elle had been seriously flirting with me earlier. I was chicken to acknowledge it at the time, though. But Van was right. If what I wanted was to fuck Elle, and that was interfering with my relationship with Besse, or what was left of it, then that’s what I needed. And if Besse was screwing somebody else, and I was certain she was, then Elle was definitely what I needed.

  After passing my house and confirming Besse wasn’t home, I yanked into the driveway and ran in. No sign of Besse having even come home after work. How did she spend her evenings? Who filled her time? Her legs?

  I shot straight to the bedroom to change, heart thumping, praying that Besse wouldn’t show up while I was still there. I removed my dirty work jeans and threw on some clean ones, pulled on a new shirt quickly, and started immediately back down the hall, bringing my work clothes with me. I would need to change back into them later, so Besse wouldn’t know I’d left work early.

  A voice rippled through the silence as I neared the bedroom at the dark end of the hallway, pushing its insistent way through the floorboards from above. “Oh God … that feels so good …oh, right there … Jesus, God, don’t stop …”

  I thought of Elle, kneeling on the floor and looking back over her shoulder at me, and seconds later rushed out of my apartment and into my car, tearing out of the driveway and racing off, the pavement groaning beneath my whirring tires.

  I wasn’t at Opey’s to drink. Van had already fed me beers and Digger had gotten me high. I’d huffed a near-toxic waste ventilation pipe and watched death crowd around me. A thousand black crows had cawed my name.

  The bartender came over anyway. How could she have known?

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked. “Something to drink? A menu?”

  Elle sat at a table in the center of the rustic bar room, surrounded by a few of her friends, some of whom I recognized from high school in Still Creek. Though only a few years younger than me, they seemed years away in their carefree joy. I was damned, but outside of work, out of her professional clothes, in her hip-hugging jeans and belly shirt, she looked young. She looked barely out of high school, which is all she was. Not that I was much older, but I knew something had changed within me already. I would never look at life the same as they did, as I once did, with unsaddened hope that everything always grows and gets stronger and finds happiness.

  I perched at the bar so her back was mostly to me, casually watching her interact with her friends, half hoping, half fearing she’d notice me, wondering if I’d have the balls to admit to her I knew she was there. I couldn’t eat; my equilibrium was completely off, so I ordered a beer, to at least look like I belonged in the bar, like I had some obvious reason to be there.

  “Can I hav
e a beer?” I asked.

  “What kind of beer do you want, darling?” she asked.

  She called me darling like I’d expect a waitress as old as my mother to call me darling. But she wasn’t that much older than me, still in her twenties, but her late ones, I guessed. She had curly brown hair tied loosely around itself behind her neck, but her face looked tired, thin lines set lightly into the contours of her cheeks around her eyes and her mouth, a fixed frown forced into a smile. But a smile nonetheless. She wore a tight shirt low cut across the top of her breasts, cleavage jamming up and out, asking patrons for attention and, more importantly, tips.

  “What kind of beer, honey?” she asked again, tilting her head to the side, betraying her forced patience. Her eyes were blue, not the bright kind everybody loves in blue eyes, the cadet blue kind, steely and serious. “You just get out of work?” she asked. “You look pretty frazzled.”

  “I did, actually,” I confessed. “I left early, that’s why I’m here,” I told her, hardly lifting my gaze above those hard-working tits. “They sent me home because I was so frazzled, as a matter of fact.”

  “Shit, lucky you,” she said, relaxing, smiling for real now, not just because she was my server. It was a rare slow moment at the bar; she had time to wait for me to figure out what I was drinking. “On Friday night too! That’s great – I’ve got to work until the bar closes tonight.”

  “What time is that?” I asked, looking up to her face again finally.

  She looked at me strangely. “Two A.M.,” she said. “All the bars close at two A.M.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “You don’t get out much, do you?” she asked, completely dropping her guard and leaning on the bar in front of me. This opened up an amazing view of her cleavage that I dared not take much advantage of, instead making me focus on her face, now much closer to mine. Maybe she felt safe with the kind of guy that didn’t know what time bars closed.