Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  “Shhh,” he said, poised dramatically, an ear projected, listening for the hounds. They had stopped barking. “They lost the scent. Do you hear that? The little motherfucker got away!” he cursed under his breath. “Nice shot, by the way,” he snapped.

  “Whatever,” I snapped back.

  “Shhhhhh!” he hissed at me, lifting his head to the wind again. A faint howl could be heard in the distance. “Shit, they’re on the other side of this gully. We got to get over there.” He started into a trot and I took off after him. “They’re on him,” he whispered, “but they haven’t treed it yet.” He breathed heavily but kept up the pace, a light sprint, slower than we had gone before. “Let’s just try to get over there and we’ll find them once they get it caught.”

  We raced at a deliberate, steady pace down the gully and up the other side, where the barking became much louder all of a sudden. Logan smiled. “It ran back down the edge of this gully. There’s probably water down there and if that bastard makes it he’ll lose the dogs for sure.” Logan paused to think and breathe. “Once it gets closer to the bottom there, he’s going to cut back up toward the water. Do you hear it there?” He pointed his gun into the pitch darkness. I couldn’t see a thing, but I knew where he meant because I could hear a stream of water flowing gently from higher up the ravine. I could smell the rotting stench of great moisture in the woods, the fallen logs and the leaves gaining weight and growing soggy in the valley of the wet ravine. Where else would something go to die?

  A bat once flew into the window fan I used to cool my bedroom, held into place by the rotting boards of the house’s window frames. Faulty sonar steered the thing into the plastic grid protecting the fan blades. It smacked into it with a thud that woke me at four in the morning, the bat screeching in pain, like a squirrel suddenly seized by a cat, another thing I saw once. With its last strength, with its blood smearing behind it on the fan’s white shell, it pulled itself down the length of the window and squeezed its rodent body, losing even more blood, between the fan and the windowsill, nearly making into my home, just to die.

  Logan pulled to a halt suddenly as we cut diagonally along the gully side to intercept the coon. Radar, the Plott hound, suddenly let out an ear-splitting whelp. Even though he fell silent right afterward, we never lost track of where that cry came from. We couldn’t forget it, because that dog was hurt and frightened and silenced all of a sudden. I ran so hard to find Radar I nearly passed Logan but pulled up short when he hollered, “Look out, there’s something wrong.”

  We both crashed through the woods to a halt. Logan flashed his light around, twisting his head everywhere. Eventually, he settled the light on Radar’s body stretched out along a huge, fallen limb, on the other side of the tiny trickling stream that ran the length of the crevice on this side of the gully.

  “What the fuck happened?” he said, handing his gun to me and stepping over the stream to grab Radar’s legs.

  Logan’s whole body snapped and he arched back sharply like a crack of lightning, frozen and bent violently backwards for a second, arms stretched and clutching to Radar’s legs, until he was lifted straight off the ground and suddenly jolted backward. I raced over there but I didn’t know what to do. Logan was lying in the stream. Radar yelped in pain again. I reached for both of them, only feet away from each other. I felt the electric current smack through me in an instant too and Radar and Logan and me all heaved in a mighty convulsion before I let go of both. Logan and Radar slipped from my hands and fell away from me. Logan and I both crawled slowly to our feet, but the dog was dead at our feet between us, still twitching from the downed power line beneath the broken branch.

  35.

  “Boy, you should see the girls that have had the time of their life in the back of that Buick,” Tyler laughed, scooping his beer off the bar in Friend’s Tavern. “We sure used to party out on them back roads round here in the Eighties. I’ll tell you something, girls back then knew how to have a good time.”

  “Don’t listen to him, boy,” Van’s mother said from behind the bar, where she opened a beer for another customer who walked in shortly after Tyler. It was getting late now, but others started to drift in now also. “Wouldn’t no girls go near this shithead when he was a boy. No more than any of them do now. And if he says anything different about it, he’s a liar.”

  Van’s mother stopped insisting we leave the bar not long after Tyler showed up, probably realizing it was hopeless by now. She just fed us beers mechanically instead, not even bothering to collect money from Van anymore. A couple more bikers arrived, and some locals too, and they mingled throughout the tavern, lounging on the bar and at tables.

  Tyler scoffed. “Christ, Janie,” he said to Van’s mother. “I had your own niece in the back of that Buick more than once, if I recall,” he said, pretending to make out with the air and feel up an invisible woman.

  Janie stopped pouring a draft beer and glared at him angrily. “You watch it, Tyler Johnson,” she warned him. “I’ll cut your goddamned balls right off, you say shit like that around me.”

  Tyler stopped making out with the air in front of him and snatched his beer off the bar as Janie reached to take it away. “How about you?” he asked, turning back to me. “That thing still a magnet for the ladies or what?”

  “Don’t I wish,” I assured him, starting to wonder why I was in this bar in the middle of the sticks when I could be in Opey’s chasing Elle and scoring my own action in the back of the Buick.

  I grabbed Van’s shoulder to get his attention. “Hey man, I think I’m going to get out of here,” I told him, interrupting a conversation he was having with some skanky woman.

  “Hell you are,” he said, pushing quickly off the bar and turning to face me. “Number one, you’ve been drinking for a couple of hours now and it’s nearly an hour’s drive back,” he pointed out, his finger shaking at me, “so you ain’t driving nowhere. Number two, the whole reason you’re here is to get out of that load of horseshit you’re going through at home. So no matter what it is you think you’ve got to go home for, you can’t anyway.” He dropped his hand finally to lean back at the bar, still looking at me. “Ma, grab a couple more beers.” He passed one of them onto me. “Drink this. Relax. Now what’s the problem?”

  I looked sideways, didn’t want to take the beer from him. But I couldn’t argue with Van either. I snatched the beer from him.

  “That’s the spirit, boy,” he said, laughing. “Come on, we’re going to have a good time tonight. That’s what we came here for.”

  “Van, I want to hook up with Elle,” I told him. “And I don’t know what sitting up here in the middle of this shithole is doing for me.”

  Van really laughed. “Ah, now I get it,” he said, grinning. “Tell you what, boy, you’ll get your chance with Elle. First you got to get rid of that girl you’re living with, though. That’s what’s your problem. And this weekend is going to help you with that. Give you two a little time away from each other.”

  He was right, of course. “You’re right,” I said, surrendering and drinking the beer. “But I thought coming up here was to help the Besse problem, not get rid of it.”

  “Of course,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder, not answering what I said at all. “That a boy. Hey, this is my new friend, Jill,” he said, turning back toward the woman he’d been talking to. “Keep her company while I take a piss,” he said, shuffling off toward the bathroom.

  “You here with Van and all these bikers?” she asked me. She had brown hair that was a little wavy but mostly flat, poking out from underneath a baseball hat. She was either looking at me funny or her eyes were a little crossed. Smoke rolled off her cigarette and curled up under the brim of her hat. Her face looked devilish in the shadow and smoke.

  “Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “Well, I guess, sort of,” I explained, noticing the slur of my own words and feeling slow. “I came with Van, but I don’t know any of these other people.”

  “That’s cool,”
she said. “I don’t really like these bikers. They’re fun and all, but they’re always trouble.”

  “You got that right, honey,” Janie shouted over her shoulder from behind the bar, making me laugh.

  I suddenly understood Janie – all the roughness, the cursing, the anger – it’s how you deal with drunks, and when you’re an aging woman behind a bar in the sticks of upstate New York, that’s all you’ve dealt with forever. She didn’t mean a word she said, it was the same type of bullshit Van always spouted – a beautiful, thoughtless confidence that I envied in both of them. To never have it cross your mind that what you’re doing, what you’re saying, is the wrong thing, could ever be wrong, would be bliss.

  “I don’t know what a nice young man like you is doing with that no good son of mine,” Janie said, walking over to us and leaning on the bar.

  “Van’s my friend,” I said simply. “We work together.”

  “You must not know a lot of people,” Janie said, snorting.

  “What did Van go to jail for?” I asked her.

  She really snorted then, stood up from leaning on the bar. “Ask him, he’ll tell you, I’m sure,” she said, and walked off to pour a beer for a skinny biker with a fat mustache.

  “Where do you guys work?” Jill asked, laughing at Janie too. She wore a tight black T-shirt beneath her flowered cotton button-down.

  “Down at the coffin factory in Still Creek,” I told her.

  “Really?” she asked, intrigued, depriving me of the usual shock value of revealing my employment. “I’m a woodworker, too.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, surprised. “What do you do?”

  She laughed. “It was sort of a joke, actually,” she said, head bobbing beneath her hat. “You’re too sweet. So where are you guys staying?”

  “Van’s got a camp on the lake,” I told her.

  She grinned, lips tightening at the corners of her mouth while she exhaled more smoke. “Nice place to swim?” she asked.

  “I ain’t ever been there,” I told her.

  Van sidled back up to the bar between us again, not even noticing our conversation, much less that he interrupted it. “I’m back, darling,” he said. “How about another beer, Ma,” he ordered.

  The bar was pretty damned near full now, and Janie was a flurry of motion behind it, pouring liquor, popping bottles open, spitting venom at everyone that no one took any notice of. She slid a beer down to Van without even glancing his way. “One for the boy, too,” he told her.

  “What’d you go to jail for, Van?” I asked.

  He took a longer than usual draw off his beer, watched Jill as she walked across the barroom toward the toilet, while some hillbilly playing pool slapped her on the ass and got a kiss on the cheek for it.

  “Boy, I done something ain’t no one should do,” he said, more serious than I had ever seen him.

  I always had a suspicion that Van had gone to jail for killing someone. Not necessarily murder, but manslaughter maybe, or murder in the third at the most. In a fight or something. I had a fear that it was something worse than that too, though, that maybe he’d raped somebody, or maybe had killed someone on purpose. And if he had, either one, I needed to know how he felt about it – now, after doing his time, after getting on with his life – this man who never seemed to think anything he said or did was wrong, could ever be wrong.

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked him. “You know, right and wrong, heaven and hell?”

  “Shit. There ain’t no God, boy,” Van sneered. “There’s just a bunch of assholes that believe in one. And think everyone else got to too. And that’s more wrong than right.”

  “So what did you do, Van?” I asked again, the rest of the bar vanishing in my consciousness as I looked at his regretful face, chewing the inside of his lip, a white soberness creeping over his face.

  “I stole my daughters when my wife and me was separated,” he said quietly, so quiet I could barely hear him over the voices in the bar, suddenly noisy again in my head. “I tired to take off to Texas, got pulled over in New Jersey. Fucking New Jersey!” he cursed.

  I saw the pain in his eyes, the guilt, the regret. “Van, that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” I told him.

  “I did it because I loved them, you know, and they wouldn’t let me see them,” he explained.

  “I understand that, Van,” I said, looking squarely at him, but he gazed off at the ceiling.

  “Well the courts don’t,” he snapped. “Besides, they’s right. I got a violent past besides that, a pretty long criminal record. They didn’t belong with me, far as everybody was concerned. I was too drunk and high to know they was right.”

  “That’s not criminal,” I told him. “It’s human.”

  He sneered. “I done more shit I ain’t done time for than they could ever keep me locked up for, boy,” he said. “They just got me for the one thing I ever cared about.”

  “Why’d your wife ever take you back?” I asked.

  “She knew why I did it, that I loved those girls and she knew that was important. This was when we was young and she found out I fucked Digger’s fat wife there. We was nothing but kids, really. She threw me right out of the house. That stuff don’t matter in the long run, though, and you get older, you realize that.”

  “Van,” Janie cut in, sharply, interrupting him, demanding his attention.

  “Yeah?” he asked, still distracted by memory and sadness.

  “Your friend’s here,” she told him with little patience. “The guy whose wife you screwed in the bathroom the last time you was here.” She spat the words out, indicting him for his sheer, stupid recklessness.

  “That was a year ago,” Van said. “He don’t still got no problem with me.”

  “To hell he don’t,” Janie warned. “I don’t want no trouble here.”

  “Won’t be no trouble,” Van told her.

  I saw Van’s friend Jill leaving, cutting straight from the bathroom to the door. She shot one glance back toward Van and me and ducked outside. I worried about what she heard me and Van say, if we had frightened her. I followed her. Outside, I caught up to her as she closed her car door. She leaned toward the steering wheel to look up at me, her left arm tugging repeatedly on the window handle beneath me, rolling it down, even as she fired the engine up.

  “Darling,” she said with a smile. “I got to go home.”

  “Just making sure you are alright,” I said, as I stepped to head back toward the bar. “Drive carefully.”

  “You always take a woman so seriously?” she asked.

  “This guy bugging you?” Van asked, suddenly arriving, drunk, lurching back and forth, landing between me and the door, one arm grasping the tip of Jill’s car, one arm circling me. “Come on, buddy,” he said. “We’re getting wasted tonight. Not chasing trash.”

  “Fuck you, dick,” Jill snapped, slamming her car in reverse and hitting the gas.

  Van collapsed through my arms as the car yanked out from underneath him. He struggled to a sitting position and from there worked on standing. “Where’s she going?” he asked, as he turned himself over. “Did I say something?”

  “You’ve always got something to say, Van,” I assured him, heading back to the bar as he clambered back to his feet. I pushed my way past a group of guys heading out of the bar, pissing them off some except they just seemed to not really care about me at all.

  36.

  “Oh my God!” Besse had cried when she heard the story of how Radar was electrocuted. “Are you okay?” she asked Logan as he told the story. As though we both hadn’t taken a shot from the fence.

  Of course, as Logan told the story, he heroically tried to save a dog he knew was being electrocuted, and he didn’t even mentioned my part. I tried to interject but it was like I wasn’t even in the apartment with them.

  After we’d shaken the electrical cobwebs from our racked minds and limbs, we called Kentucky in. He was reluctant to give up the coon, and was quite a ways away, baying into the win
d, his howl soaring through the dark woods to us. My body was stiff, wet, and numb, from the electricity, the stream and the cool autumn air, but I picked up Radar’s front legs and Logan picked up his back legs and we marched silently up out of the gully and then out of the woods. Logan called periodically for Kentucky until he caught back up to us, the coon running free off into the night. Kentucky’s tongue lagged out as he chased alongside of us, sniffing Radar’s electrocuted corpse.

  That’s not how Logan told the story to Besse that day, though, even as Emily walked into the apartment where Logan, Besse and I stood in the kitchen talking about it after we got back from the hunting trip.

  “What happened?” Emily asked as she walked into the apartment, closing the door behind her, sensing the electricity in the air.

  “Logan got electrocuted,” Besse told her, upset.

  Emily looked scared for a second. “Are you alright?” she asked him.

  “We both did, actually,” I mentioned, winning a glance from them all.

  “Only because you were stupid enough to grab the dog after I already got shocked,” Logan snapped with scorn.

  Besse shook her head curtly at me, and Emily brushed past me to check Logan’s hands for burns.

  Besse and I eventually retired to our room, and Logan to Emily’s, but they were chilling, quiet moments lying there as I contemplated the shock of Besse’s scornful electricity.

  I never should have lied about wrecking her car.

  About three weeks before that, I had skidded around a curve by the Halfway House between Still Creek and Riverside. I slammed the side of the car into a guard rail and bounced down the length of it.