Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  “What’d you tell him?” I asked.

  “That you weren’t here. He was so worried that you didn’t show up that I got real upset too,” she said, staring at me like I was a lunatic.

  “Van was worried?” I asked.

  “Pissed is more like it,” she snarled. “Me too.”

  I slumped toward the headboard, freeing my arm of the burden of holding my drunk weight up, unable to think of a lie now. Besse now towered over me, glaring down.

  “You don’t even have anything to fucking say, do you?” she shouted at me. “You never talk and when you do it’s always bullshit fucking lies! You’re the biggest fucking liar I ever met!” She boiled with anger and I was afraid of how far it would go. “And you know what? You don’t even have anything to lie about! That’s what really pisses me off – you just won’t ever admit the fucking truth. I don’t even care where the hell you were. I did earlier, but then I just said fuck you, you’re a lying prick anyways!”

  She stopped screaming long enough to take a few breaths. I took advantage of this pause to hop to my feet and snag the pillow where it dangled from her left hand. “I’m sleeping on the couch,” I announced.

  “You don’t have any secrets to lie about,” she shouted after me as I started down the hall. “You just don’t trust anyone. You don’t even trust yourself,” she hissed, anger bursting out of the bedroom and exploding down the hallway like a fireball.

  I threw myself down on the couch and buried my head beneath the pillow, pressing my skull against the cushioned arm, finally letting my eyes close and longed for the sounds of people having sex above me before I passed out.

  23.

  “That’s my boy!” Van shouted enthusiastically, slapping me on my back as we sat on the back porch of the factory. “What was you, just playing sick so you could get out of here and meet her?” he asked, laughing with joy.

  “Playing dead is more like it,” I jeered at myself, looking out from the back of the factory at the waste site that had nearly proved my grave.

  Van’s eyes narrowed around the corners, his smile tightened into a frown. “You ain’t kidding about that. You scared the hell out of me and Digger. Sounds like you recovered alright, though,” he said, the grin bouncing back onto his face.

  “If only her friend hadn’t attacked me,” I said, shaking my head.

  “You’ll get your chance,” Van promised. “I don’t think you got nothing to worry about.”

  “Except Besse,” I offered, taking my turn to frown.

  “I fucked that one up for you,” Van confessed, a rare admission of error. “That’s my fault – but I didn’t know what you was up to. How’s it going? Is it pretty bad?”

  “Well, she ain’t talked to me since then,” I shrugged. “She’s pretty mad.”

  “That’s because she don’t understand is all. And you’re not helping her to. Which ain’t good. You got to just lie to women sometimes to appease their minds. Tell them anything, all they need is to hear something,” Van said, looking directly at me and slapping the back of one hand into the palm of another. “Just don’t let them think whatever they’re thinking. That’s bad.”

  “Well that was Friday and now it’s Monday, so it’s a little past telling her something.” I couldn’t keep the exasperation out of my voice. “She thinks I’m a fucking liar anyways, so making something up isn’t going to do much good.”

  “Shit, kid, I never met someone more honest than you. You don’t talk enough to get around to telling lies, for Christ’s sake,” Van said.

  “Well, it’s more like weathering the storm right now and hoping it blows over.”

  “You know what you need?” Van asked, tossing his head back and looking up toward the roof of the building before looking back at me and answering his own question. “Besides a shrink – you need to get away for a couple of days. Let the tension die down a little. Let her miss you a little, spend a couple of nights alone, see what it’s like to be alone.”

  “Except she probably won’t spend them alone. Besides, where the hell am I going to go, Van?” I asked, curling my lips.

  “Why don’t you come out of town with me this weekend?” he asked. “We’ll head up to my buddy’s camp and hang out with me and some friends of mine. Ride some bikes for a couple of days. It’s a great way to kill some stress. We’ll put some beers away. I got some business to take care of up there but it ain’t much and we’ll have a lot of time to just hang out at the lake and party and fucking forget about your troubles.”

  Digger wandered out onto the porch. Van shuffled a cigarette out of his pack before Digger even asked. “It is one damned fine evening out here,” he announced, taking the smoke from Van and sparking it. “No wonder you guys are just sitting here and not doing no work,” he chuckled, exhaling and then breathing the smoke right back in through his nostrils.

  “We ain’t working because we’re done for tonight,” Van snapped.

  “What, kid pass out again?” Digger snickered, snorting at his own joke. “Huffing the smell of your bullshit?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Van snapped. “We’re leaving early ‘cause I got to watch my girls tonight and I don’t want the boy to have to sit here by himself with you, asshole.”

  “Fuck off,” Digger said, taking a long puff.

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Van said, heading down the steps. “I’ll catch you assholes tomorrow.”

  “Looks like you got the night off,” Digger said, lowering the cigarette from his mouth and flicking the ashes onto the top of his boot.

  “Yup,” I said, squinting at the sun.

  “Mind doing me a favor?” he asked, smoke chasing the words out of his mouth.

  24.

  Digger lived outside of Still Creek. His closest neighbor was a mile away. The road to his house was a straight faded blacktop lane through the trees with no lines on it. It was barely wide enough for two cars. You knew a car was coming from at least half a mile away, even in the daytime when there’s no headlights on. You could see the lights forever at night, but you could hear a car from even further. The trees lining the side of the road, hovering, like sentinels, created a tunnel effect that propelled the sound down the road faster than the speed of a pickup truck.

  Logan and I used to drive out past here, even farther out really, to Willie Mitchell’s shack and pick him up and drive him around to help us find pot. Willie’s place was little more than a shamble of boards hammered together with a dirt floor and a lantern hanging in the corner. A kerosene heater lay dormant in the summer but glowed orange all winter non-stop and the place smelt like kerosene no matter what time of year you stopped by. Willie hadn’t shaved his beard since Viet Nam probably and was usually pretty dirty; he’d be sitting there doing nothing at all in the lantern light, but didn’t think much of it when me and Logan, a couple of teenagers who barely even knew him, would just pop by and ask him if he had a couple of hours to kill. He always did.

  Willie lived out past Digger’s trailer, out on what my grandfather used to call Nigger Hill. I didn’t know why. Nothing but white people lived anywhere around here, for miles and miles, at least until Riverside.

  When I pulled into Digger’s gravel driveway, his wife was already standing in the doorway of the trailer. She was heavier than I remembered her from the picture in Digger’s wallet, like a woman who puts on weight after a baby and never really loses it. I wondered if Van was telling the truth when he said he had fucked her. I wondered if she was skinnier then. She wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt under a flannel she held closed around her, leaning against the doorway like she’d been there a while. I waved to her. I hoped Digger had let her know I was coming, because otherwise, she would have no idea who I was. I hopped out of the Buick.

  “You look like you work at the factory,” she said, looking at my clothes.

  “I left early,” I told her. “Digger wanted me to drop some money off for you.”

  “I appreciate it,” sh
e said. “Come on in.”

  “I just wanted to drop the money off, actually,” I said. I wanted to make this quick. Besse didn’t know I was out early, so I wanted to swing by or drive around town and see if I could find out what she was doing. Maybe I could catch her again, like before, but this time for real. And finally bust her for whatever she was up to.

  “Oh.” Digger’s wife stood there a second longer, and took a drag on her cigarette, still leaning on the doorway and holding her flannel closed. “Look, could you do me a favor?” she asked.

  I was slow to respond.

  “Look, kid,” she said. “I got to run into town and use the money you brought and get something for dinner for me and the boy. I can’t take him with me, and if them county assholes come by and he’s here by himself, I’m fucked, alright?” she pleaded. “Will you watch him? Take me ten minutes.”

  “Why can’t you take him with you?” I asked, confused.

  “Look, it’s important,” she begged. “He ain’t feeling well. Boy’s a lot of trouble when he’s feeling good, and he ain’t no better when he’s feeling shitty. Only take me ten minutes.”

  I knew from Digger they were hurting for the money, and I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t have anything to eat in the house. It’s why Digger had asked to borrow the cash and for me to bring it out here in the first place. The damned boy was probably not feeling well because he hadn’t eaten all day. If there was any food in the house, Digger’s wife probably ate it already, I figured. I couldn’t leave the boy to starve.

  “What’s his name?” I asked her. “Digger never told me your boy’s name.”

  “We call him Pounder,” she said.

  “Shit,” I laughed. “Pounder?”

  “Yeah,” she said, laughing too.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Stell,” she said, smiling still. “So what about it? Ten minutes.”

  “Alright,” I said, “Stell.”

  25.

  Pounder was one fat kid. No wonder Stell put some weight on popping that kid out. I got one thing straight right away – Pounder wasn’t starving to death. He wasn’t sick either. But he had a bad bruised face, which clarified why he couldn’t go to town. It sounded like Digger and Stell had some issues with Social Services, and it couldn’t bode well to be seen in the grocery store with Pounder looking like that.

  “Pounder,” I said to him from where I sat on the couch. The living room of the trailer was a mess, mostly kid’s toys, action figures and video games to an old Nintendo. No Sega or anything extravagant. There were clothes too, though, for both kids and adults, some folded but others just strewn around too, and none of it put away. There were dirty dishes on the coffee and end tables.

  Pounder was sitting on the floor eating a devil’s food cake right out of the plastic and watching some action cartoon I didn’t even know the name of. It was high tech and Japanese and futuristic even though they used swords instead of lasers for some reason. It was completely unrecognizable to me, not like the Hanna Barbara shit that made sense to me. I wondered if these cartoons shaped Pounder’s imagination the way Scooby Doo did when I was kid, or Super Friends, waiting an entire week for a couple of hours of escapism, a sugar high Saturday morning. Or did he have cartoons all the time? Did he even notice them, or ever have a need to imagine things? Would that even still qualify as escapism?

  “Hey Pounder,” I said again.

  “Yeah?” he asked, turning to look at me, devil food and cream clinging to his upper lip as he lowered the rest of the cake.

  “Did you get in a fight in school?” I asked him.

  “Nah,” he shook his head, unconcerned, except for taking another bite of the cake, more white stuffing mushing itself around his mouth. “Dad popped me one.”

  “Happen a lot?” I asked him.

  “Nah,” he shrugged, nonchalant, looking from me back to the TV.

  “That the only time?” I continued anyway.

  “Only time he ever punched me,” Pounder said, turning around to look at me again during a commercial break. “Spanks me sometimes.”

  “Bruise you?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he said, “Just spanking. You from the damned ass county, too?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I work with your dad. He’s a friend of mine. I lent him some money and brought it over to your mom. I just come from the factory where your dad works.”

  “I been there,” Pounder said. “Didn’t see you nowhere.”

  “I haven’t worked there very long,” I explained.

  “Oh.”

  “What was that for?” I asked him, nodding my head at his bruise. “Looks pretty bad.”

  “I made him good and mad,” Pounder said, grinning slyly. “He didn’t know what he was doing he was so damned mad.” He broke into a laugh at the memory. “He come running at me and fell right over the coffee table. Broke a plate and spilled milk. They was mine. And then he got real, real mad on account of that too. That was the last breakable plate.”

  I laughed too, picturing little Digger so mad, scrambling after big fat Pounder, knocking things over, getting madder. He was so laid back at work. I bet he could only get mad like that at his own family. He always had shit going on at home, but he came to work and he got away from it all.

  “I was running from him ‘cause I knew he was so mad and he punched me right in my side from the ground while he was falling. I was running when he popped me and that’s how I fell too. And hit my face. Me and Dad was both laying on the floor. Mom was just pissed and laughing at Dad. She says he’s real stupid,” Pounder explained, wiping the white frosting from his lips.

  “How old are you, Pounder?”

  “Eleven,” he said, licking the frosting from his fingers and the back of his hand.

  He seemed about the size of that hay-tosser the other night.

  The Japanese space cartoon with swords started again and he turned back to it. “Don’t tell my mom I told you nothing,” he said. “Even if she gets you high.”

  I heard a car rumbling down the lane through the trees. Around here, people could recognize you by the particular sounds your car makes. Nobody had the same piece of junk. “Don’t no two of them sound alike,” Van always said. “They all got different problems.” At last I heard dirt getting kicked up by tires in the driveway, and eventually a car door slam. The trailer door opened.

  “Hey, still here, hah?” Stell asked once inside the door. “Pounder didn’t give you no trouble, did he?” She held a paper bag of groceries in one arm and a cigarette with the other.

  “Nah, I was good, Ma,” he told her.

  “You can thank TV for that,” I said.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “That boy ain’t even supposed to be watching TV. He’s grounded.”

  “Ma,” Pounder whined.

  “I’m serious, Pounder,” she said with no patience whatsoever. “Get in your bedroom now.”

  Pounder kicked an action figure at Stell but walked down to the trailer hall to his bedroom anyway, snatching up another package of Devil’s Food Cake off the counter as he stomped by.

  “I brought you a beer,” Stell said, holding one out to me, putting the rest in the fridge, all the while dangling a cigarette from her mouth. Her flannel fell loosely around her while her hands were full and I could see the fleshy swell of her breasts straining against the grip of her T-shirt as she leaned forward. I don’t think she had a bra on even. When she turned from the fridge she had another beer in her hand too but was now able to pull her flannel back around her chest. She caught me completely in between staring and looking the other way. I got up from the couch in the living room and started toward the kitchen. There was no wall between the two rooms, just the counter with a stack of Little Debbie treats

  “Do you like Genesee?” she asked, taking the cigarette from her mouth with her beer hand.

  “Never had one,” I said, eyeing the Genny Screamer thirstily. I had, of course, drunk Genny before. There wa
s something about Genesee and backroads, like peanut butter and jelly, or ground beef and potatoes.

  “You never had Genesee?” she laughed, looking at me crooked. “Ain’t you something.”

  “Van always drinks Utica Club,” I explained.

  “Van, hah?” she asked. “You work with that piece of shit down at that factory? You don’t listen to that asshole, do you? Digger better not be spending no time with that guy. He ain’t nothing but a son of a bitch.”

  I popped the Genesee open and handed it to her, taking the unopened one from her, forcing her to let the flannel loose again.

  “Thanks,” she said, looking happy and relaxed. “Sit down, enjoy that beer.” She pointed to one of the chairs crowded around at cluttered table in the tiny kitchen.

  Whatever Besse was doing, I could probably catch her at it later. It wasn’t even 8PM yet. I sat down.

  “So Van ever say anything to you about me?” she asked, sitting down across from me on the other side of a table littered with dirty dishes, beer bottles, a hammer and nails, and days worth of unread newspapers. She propped herself on the table with the elbow of her cigarette hand and took a pull off her beer, the flannel unattended to once again.

  “He told me you guys were together before,” I said, trying not to be too blunt, setting my beer on the table.

  She snorted. “You and everybody else. Usually he’s got a mouthful to say about me. That’s ‘cause I told that fucker to take a hike. He’s a twisted asshole, gets his kicks out of hating everything and everybody. He’s a mean son of a bitch.”

  “Likes me,” I said.

  “That’s ‘cause you’re so nice,” she said. “You don’t seem like the kind of person anybody hates. Digger says you’re a good kid.”

  I blushed, sipped my beer. Genesee tasted like Utica Club to me. Bad. Like a raccoon pissed in a bottle. “I get my job done, that’s all. He likes that. Van always says I don’t give a shit about my job and still get my work done.”