Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  “You don’t give a shit about your job?’ she asked, slugging her beer. “It’s all Digger cares about.”

  “What, are you crazy?” I asked, with a sneer. “I work in a coffin factory.” That deserved another sip of beer.

  “Here, drink it like this,” she said, holding her beer up for a couple of seconds and taking swallows of it. “It don’t do you no good sipping it like that.” Beer ran from her mouth down and off her chin and dropped on her shirt. She looked down at the flannel, as if for the first time, and looked up, embarrassed, at me. “Look at me, I’m a mess,” she apologized.

  I lifted my bottle up and swallowed twice, like she did.

  “But so are you,” she laughed. “You look just like you came right from that factory. You smell like Digger when he comes home but without the pot.” She snorted. “You must do alright down at the factory, though, right? Make some kind of money. God knows Digger don’t, but you’re young, you don’t got to work there.”

  “It’s alright,” I assured her.

  “You like that beer?” she asked.

  “It’s good,” I attested, drinking more of it.

  “Finish it up, we’ll open another. Then I got to get high,” she said, eyes twinkling like never before.

  I lifted the beer, and drained the rest of it. When I put it down my stomach bubbled and my mouth filled with saliva, so much it all but poured over my lips. Stell laughed. So did I.

  “You’re a funny one,” she giggled, turning to the fridge without getting out of her chair. She swung back with two more beers. “You like to get high?”

  “I smoked some pot last week,” I told her, remembering dozens of times riding past her house in Logan’s car and passing a joint around after taking Willie back out to his shack out on the Hill.

  “Well, ain’t this just a hell of a week for you. Pot, Genesee, and now I’ll really show you something.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  She pulled out a tiny corner of plastic ripped from a sandwich bag and twisted like a Bach’s candy on the open edges, full of thin white powder, and dumped it onto a little mirror already on the table. She began chopping and sifting and pushing it around with a credit card sitting right there. “Credit card ain’t good for much more anymore,” she laughed, shooting a glance up at me, cutting the little bit into four tiny lines. “It ain’t much,” she said, “but if you like it maybe we’ll go get some more if you got some more money.”

  “What’s it taste like?”

  “It don’t taste like anything,” she said. “Because you don’t taste things you sniff. It burns. Especially at first. Then it’s like a blowjob from Peppermint Patty,” she chuckled. She pushed the mirror in front of me and handed me a tube – really the plastic shell of a Bic pen cut in half with the ink tube pulled out. “You can’t complain about that, can you?” she asked. “Here, just hold one nostril closed and suck with the other through the straw.”

  I don’t think any made it to my brain. It just tore through my nose. My eyes watered.

  “Nice job,” she laughed. “Now do the other one.”

  When I finished, she quickly pulled the mirror in front of her and grabbed the pen case from me. She held that with one hand and her nostril with the other. She bent over the table and I could see a crease of her thick flesh folding over, trapping the T-shirt within it. She ripped through the two lines without taking any other breath.

  “You know, I know what you’re probably thinking about Pounder,” she said, snorting and pressing the sides of her nose while talking. “We didn’t beat him or nothing.”

  I pulled my eyes away from the T-shirt, freeing itself from her folded flesh, as she straightened herself and finished snorting.

  “You like that?” she asked.

  I had no idea what she was referring to, but she fixed me with her eyes either way, leaning forward over the table and touching me with her feet under it. “What do you think?” she asked me conspiringly. “You got a few bucks to spend?”

  She touched my hand gently on the table and when I didn’t pull it away, she pulled it toward her and leaned closer to me, pressing her breast against the back of my hand. “You got any money?” she asked. “We could do this all night.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, already seeing I wasn’t getting the hundred back I gave her for Digger earlier, ever.

  She turned my hand over, still holding it with both of hers.

  “It looks like Digger can get pretty mad,” I told her.

  “Digger don’t get like that. Pounder done that to himself. Besides, Digger ain’t ever home until morning,” she promised.

  “Oh yeah, what’d the boy do?” I asked, but I didn’t really care, more interested in the fleshy breast she was squeezing into the palm of my hand all of a sudden, leaning even more toward me.

  “I beat my teacher up,” Pounder said from the edge of the hallway.

  “Pounder! Jesus Christ!” Stell hollered, pulling away, yanking her flannel back around her.

  I snatched my hand back, scooping my beer up on the way, and took a quick pull off of it.

  “I thought I told you to get in your room!” Stell screamed at Pounder.

  He ignored her, looking right at me. He wore camouflage shorts now that hung to his knees, cut off, and no shirt at all, his own flabby breast flesh hanging over his waistline, a line of Devil’s Food Cake crumbs sprinkled down the front of him.

  “She come over here,” Pounder told me anyway, fast, before Stell could stop him. “She wanted to talk to Ma because I missed so many days of school and I was failing everything. Then I knew I’d be in trouble, and Ma too, so I knocked her down. I taped her up and I put her in the trunk. But I couldn’t drive,” he said, speeding through his story and daring to look away from Stell only long enough to look at me. “I’m in a lot of trouble. So’s Ma.”

  “Jesus Christ, boy, you better shut your mouth!” Stell hollered at him, getting up, turning and starting toward him all at once, chair flying out behind her.

  “He ain’t from the county, Ma,” Pounder shouted, retreating.

  “It ain’t nobody’s business,” Stell snapped, starting toward him. “So you just shut up about it.”

  He shuffled backwards down the hallway, huge fat belly bouncing with every step, a plastic wrapper floating in the air behind him. “They’re going to take me away!” he cried, desperate, over his shoulder, retreating.

  “Pounder!” Stell shouted, chasing after him, shaking her fist. “You little shit!”

  He ran the last couple of steps into his room and slammed the door closed.

  “And stay in there,” she snapped at him from right outside his door. I pictured his fat little frame hiding, shivering, stuck halfway under his bed, his pudgy arm stretching toward a secret stash of stale Little Debbies.

  Stell turned toward me, walking back down the hallway to the kitchen. Her eyes searched me. Tight lips betrayed her worry. What she was worried about I didn’t know – me, the kid, the coke, the money, the county – I just didn’t know.

  “I got to go,” I announced unceremoniously, stopping her where she was. She held her flannel wrapped around her. “Thanks for the beer.”

  I stepped quickly out the door and stood on the steps of the trailer, feeling the tension flee my body. It was mostly dark now, which surprised me. The fresh air jockeyed my mind too and I felt every breath pour into me, ten degrees cooler than the rest of my body, which was pounding with blood, and I felt the cold, cold oxygen finger its way through my tiniest capillaries until every nerve inside me seethed alternatingly with focus and revelation, focus and revelation. I visualized a great current of energy pulled down from above through my head and mind and hands and out of my feet to the earth where it slowly bled back to the sky and moved through me again.

  There was a good chance Besse was home by now.

  26.

  I raced down the dark road away from Digger’s trailer, imagining the grumbling of the Buick’s engine f
ading as it must have in Stell’s ears, resounding down the tunnel of crowded trees. It grew quieter with my own heart, now softly thudding like a flat tire on a smooth road. I couldn’t think straight, much less drive that way.

  Headlights slowly brightened down the long stretch of road before me. High beams blinded me long before they actually got near me, so that I had to slam my eyes closed by the time they were actually there. Fucking SUVs. The force of that thing passing me moved my car like a strong wind sways an empty tractor trailer on the road. When I opened my eyes, my own headlights seemed pitifully dark, barely illuminating the black canopy of the lane.

  The orange line of my speedometer hung resentfully just short of 80 miles an hour, though my foot pushed the gas pedal right to the floor, nothing fast enough for me right now.

  Permeating patterns of geometric purple and tangent waves of green ripples superimposed themselves on everything I saw, coloring the impenetrable and multidimensional darkness beyond the glare of my headlights. I watched the colors take the shape and shades of Pounder’s camouflage shorts and the remaining burning white spots from the SUV’s headlights blistering my eyes became of the flesh of Pounder’s white flab bouncing in the dark hallway while I tugged his mother across the table to paw at her swollen flesh.

  My hands felt empty now, no matter how hard I clenched the steering wheel. Its fake leather grips just could not reassure me regardless of how violently the car shook within my fists. The more I thought of Stell, thrusting herself upon me, the more I thought of Besse and her breasts and her stomach and her ass thrust in someone else’s hands, filling some emptiness in her, the same emptiness that haunted me now, that I wanted so desperately to destroy.

  But Besse wasn’t at my house when I arrived there. I yanked the car back out of the driveway and sped off the way I’d come.

  27.

  I didn’t head back to Stell’s though, like I thought I would at first. I had an itch to snort another line of cocaine. Booze and the drug were making more than my driving reckless. My hands were still warm from the feel of Stell’s big soft tits, a warmth that spread like tingling fire through the rest of my body, not diminished by the alcohol in me, nor cooled by the cocaine. In fact, it was just the opposite.

  I hit Old Plant Road making the orange needle of my car touch and stay on the 80 miles per hour dash mark this time, the peak of my Buick’s performance. I reached Elle’s house, barely screeching to a stop in front of it, my engine still running loudly even in park, while I stared out the windowless side of my car, across the street at the front of her house. I didn’t have a plan, but whatever I was thinking hadn’t included her parents being home.

  I saw a face peek from behind a curtain and knew I should just keep driving before this became awkward. But I didn’t. What if it was Elle who peeked out and knew it was me? She had tried to kiss me at Opey’s the other night, after all. She didn’t appear in the doorway like I hoped, and I knew this was creepy, so I yanked the car back in drive and was about to peel out of there when the door finally opened. I slid the gear back into park. Elle walked out of the house and started across the lawn toward me. Maybe she had needed time to dress; maybe I should have just gone in.

  She moved with great trepidation as she set her foot on the road, hesitantly, arms held out on either side, balancing herself, slippered feet landing delicately on the rough gravel of Old Plant Road. She was only coming to tell me to get the hell out of there, but I waited patiently just the same. I stared as she carefully picked her steps toward me, her head down to watch every footfall, shooting an occasional glance for traffic that would never come.

  I was still tempted to just drive away, but by now she had arrived at the side of my car.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, her tone exasperated, but she actually seemed pleased to see me, if surprised. “You’re freaking my parents out,” she whispered, glancing back at the house, grinning.

  “I was looking for you,” I explained, smiling back at her. “I was wondering if you wanted to go to Opey’s.”

  “It’s a Monday night,” she gasped, still exasperated, but not looking angry exactly. “Besides,” she said, softer, looking over her shoulder and leaning closer. “I got in trouble when I came home the other night, you know, on Friday, for being drunk. My boyfriend had to carry me in the house. And he’s even more pissed than my parents!”

  “He’s your boyfriend?” I asked, not sure if she had ever mentioned that or not, even though I knew.

  “Well, I’m sort of seeing him, or something,” she said, stepping back some.

  I was out of my mind. What the hell was I even doing here? I lived with a woman myself; regardless of how bad my relationship was with Besse, I wasn’t exactly an available man. Elle was years younger than me and seeing someone else. I had no business showing up at her parents’ house just because some fat coke slut gave me a hard-on. “Shit,” I said shaking my head, trying to hide from feeling stupid. “I should probably go before you get in any more trouble,” I apologized. “Hope your parents aren’t too freaked out.”

  “They’re probably watching me right now,” she whispered with a giggle, looking back at the house over her shoulder. Her smooth neck twisted as she looked back, its long stretch exposed to me.

  “Hell, I’d be watching you too,” I told her.

  She grinned, a mixture of embarrassment and fake anger, touching her neck with her fingers as though it burnt from my stare. “Of course you would,” she said. “That’s why you’re so creepy.”

  She was right.

  “I better get out of here,” I said.

  “Before my dad comes with a shotgun,” she warned, her smile partly fading.

  I watched her in my review mirror as I pulled away, her slim figure standing in the road, one leg straightened, the other bent, on the tip-toe of her slipper, red hair falling unkempt around her head and shoulders. I shifted my eyes from her to the road to the speedometer making its slow incremental climb toward that magical 80MPH line.

  28.

  Duke’s truck was at the house, but I didn’t even have the heart left in me to try to sneak up on Besse. Hell, truth told, I didn’t even really know that I would actually catch her at anything, and even if I did, the whole scene could just escalate like it did last time. So I drove around for a couple of more hours before going home around the time I normally would have gotten out. It helped cool the venom in me; now my head and heart sagged and both pounded slowly. All of my energy from earlier seemed to collect itself into a heavy black stone that pulled down my limbs and my brain and dragged them like anchors through quicksand. I wanted sleep.

  The lights were off inside but I could hear a soft snore rolling out of the living room. As my eyes adjusted, I could see Duke on the couch, sound asleep. I tip-toed down the hallway and carefully turned the knob of the bedroom door. The handle turned but the door wouldn’t open, probably blocked by a chair or something on the other side. My bed wasn’t an option, apparently, and the couch was occupied. I was out of a place to sleep in my own home. However, wasted and exhausted as I was, I didn’t need much in the line of comfort. I pulled the two cushions off of the chair in the living room and fell onto them in a single motion.

  Beautiful sounds of sex drifted down from upstairs, but I didn’t bother to wonder whose they were. I relaxed and just took joy in hearing some woman’s pleasure. I envisioned the look on her face after her last sigh faded and disappeared, imagined that look on Elle’s face. But despair set in even as sleep did, the last feeling to be put to rest within me. I would probably never get near Elle. Or maybe even Besse again. Hell, not even that desperate whore Stell.

  29.

  After I’d slept with Michelle in the garden that night, I didn’t really have much more luck with girls. Logan and Michelle got back together, but it didn’t last long. There was something just way too awkward about the three of us being near each other, and eventually Michelle fell out of the picture. Logan didn’t care.
I secretly hoped she would call me again that summer.

  I left for college in August on a spur of the moment decision, though, enrolling at SUNY Albany as a late admission and getting out of Still Creek, escaping Michelle and Logan and my still thriving memory of Juliet. Competing with Logan over her had only ruined any chance I might have had. I was baffled, and pissed, that it had become an argument over Michelle too, because I really didn’t care about her. Logan didn’t seem to actually care about either of the girls; he had done this on purpose – making me lose the girl I wanted, and leaving me to succeed only where he had also, but after him.

  I was tired of Still Creek, and decided that it just didn’t have much more to offer me.

  There wasn’t anything I needed to study and I just enrolled as undeclared and took a bunch of crap freshman classes I really didn’t care much about. I paid little attention and did less work, but managed some passing grades, and kept the government aid and loans rolling in for a few semesters. I hadn’t imagined that making a decision like going to college would allow me to remain so perfectly directionless, or provide me with so much distraction, but I was able to put Still Creek, and its residents, behind me with surprising ease.

  I holed up in a grimy basement apartment in a rundown house in Albany’s student ghetto and breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t have much in common with the clan of Long Island kids swarming the campus and the streets and bars of the student ghetto, but I managed to keep a low profile and not stand out much, at least.

  I boozed it up most of the time I was there with a smooth, shit-talking New York City kid named Gould, who was getting a free ride at college to improve himself because his dad was a fuck-up in jail and his mother was dead from a heroin overdose. Since he had no money, some higher educational opportunity program gave him lots of it, and he had the whole upstairs flat of the house that harbored my basement dive. He just knocked on my door one day, probably bored, having seen me come in and out of the house, and introduced himself.