Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  I was driving Besse’s car.

  I told her I had parked it in town, and somebody had crashed into it and scraped along the side of it, while I was gone, and driven off.

  But Emily knew I was lying; she was here when the police showed up, and though she didn’t tell them that I’d been drinking all morning, like I did every morning before going to work at the factory, she told Besse. She told her about the accident, and about the drinking.

  “You son of a bitch,” Besse exploded at me, waving a finger in my face. “That better be the only lie you ever tell me. And you either quit drinking,” she said, pretty freaking serious, “or we’re done.”

  I was terrified that she meant it. As crowded and uncomfortable as the apartment was, I didn’t want there to ever be any space between me and Besse, couldn’t imagine her not being the center of my life.

  Emily moved out shortly after that. Tensions were high. I might have threatened her life.

  I did everything I could to convince Besse to stay.

  37.

  Lights were bright back inside Friend’s Lake Tavern after the parking lot. My eyes burned red with blood as I tried to slip inconspicuously between rednecks and bikers. I assumed everyone in this bar was primed for a fight, so I kept my head down and moved quickly between and through the crowd. Nobody gave me much attention when I did brush past them; bikers wanted to fight rednecks and rednecks wanted to fight bikers and each other, but no one needed to fight me, no one was threatened by me, and no one had anything to gain by kicking my ass. I made it to the bar and waved to Janie for attention.

  “I thought you was long gone with that tramp,” she said to me.

  “Figured I better stay here and keep an eye on Van,” I said. “Sounds like he has a nose for trouble.”

  Janie snorted and came the closest to smiling she’d been all night. “Sounds like you really his friend,” she said. “But let me tell you what friends are like. Love you when they need you, forget about you when they don’t. People say friends come and go, but I say they just go. When they come back, they ain’t your friend.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said, frowning.

  “Ain’t nothing to get upset about,” she said. “Just the way it is. Now cheer up and drink that beer,” she ordered.

  I glanced around the room and saw that Van hadn’t come back in yet. I leaned closer to Janie. “Actually, can I get a shot of whiskey?” I asked her.

  She looked at me suspiciously. “You sure drink a lot for a boy Van said don’t drink much. He told me keep an eye on you.”

  “I’m alright,” I assured her.

  Bringing the shot back, she scanned the room. “Where is Van?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, out in the parking lot still, I guess,” I said, downing the shot and gasping at the burn.

  “He ain’t got no reason to be out there this long,” she said, worried. “Get out there and find him,” she ordered.

  She was right. I cut my way back across the bar again and hurried out the door. I found Van surrounded in the parking lot by a gang of rednecks, the guys who all bumped against me on my way back into the bar. He was staggering drunkenly in a circle so that his back wasn’t to anyone in particular for too long.

  “I didn’t touch your wife,” he was shouting, but he didn’t know who he was supposed to be shouting at. “She was way too ugly,” he assured them all defiantly, and someone finally shoved him from behind.

  When he stumbled forward, some guy in front of him popped him right in the stomach, but he didn’t go down. Van was a big guy and probably a mean fighter if he was sober enough to defend himself. He continued to spin inside the circle and eventually saw me over his shoulder, behind the circle of rednecks.

  “There’s my boy,” he snarled. “You guys are dead now,” he slurred. “Let’s get them, kid,” he screamed, lunging at one of them, and they all just set in, pounding the living piss out of him.

  One of them looked at me to see what I was going to do, and I slunk back inside the tavern.

  “Where the hell is he?” Janie asked as I arrived back at the bar.

  “Ain’t no one out there,” I told her, drinking sheepishly from my beer.

  38.

  Silence hung like the coffin over our heads at work on Monday. I didn’t know if Van had any idea that I’d abandoned him the Friend’s Lake Tavern the other night. He was beaten and injured now, even three days later, and I knew this was in some way my fault, too. Bruises swelled, purple and black hills, on his face, and he frequently had to pause and put his arms around his ribs, like he was holding them or making sure they were in place. Van, usually mighty and confident, was subdued and defeated. Beneath the bruises, his expression was stern and he avoided me with his gaze, all too frequently looking up and away as pain racked his body.

  He was ashamed of the beating he took, or at least humbled. Maybe he saw the justice of his beating for messing with some guy’s wife. But I was pretty certain he knew I’d walked away and left him there.

  We loaded bottoms onto a cart and strapped bundles of thirty together with flat plastic cables and metal clamps. Every time we lifted a bottom onto the cart, his face grimaced in pain. Every gasp that slipped out of him felt like an accusation of betrayal.

  I’d never seen Van even remotely quiet, much less perfectly silent, and guilt lashed out inside me. Van was the best friend I had. I was afraid to speak, but eventually I was more afraid of losing another friend. After all, I’d really only had two in my life, and one was already dead.

  “What’d you tell your wife?” I asked quietly. “About why it happened?”

  Van paused working for a minute, probably more than happy to do so, stretching sore muscles. He snorted and looked everywhere but at me. “Told her you was hitting on some redneck’s wife and I stepped in when he started giving you trouble and that a whole big fight broke out and that there was just too many for you and me.”

  I laughed, but fell silent quickly, feeling wrong for even laughing. Van actually broke a little grin for a second himself.

  “How’d I do in that fight?” I asked.

  He snorted again. “Only a little better than you did the other night for real,” he said.

  “You know, Van,” I said. “I couldn’t have helped you.”

  “They’d have killed you,” he said. “For real.”

  “I should’ve done something, though,” I told him, looking at the loosening knot of my shoelaces.

  “Wasn’t nothing you could’ve done,” he assured me. “Wasn’t none of your business either anyway.”

  “Don’t matter,” I said, feeling helpless still. “I should’ve been able to do something. You’d have done something for me, and I know it. What kind of friend doesn’t do anything to help his buddy out?”

  Van looked at me, silent for a long second, and I realized something was bothering him besides the pain of the beating. “Look, kid,” he said, very quietly. “When I said it wasn’t none of your business, I wasn’t lying to excuse what you did. Or didn’t do.” He paused and looked around the factory room, even though he knew no one was here, and then looked back at me. “I known that guy for a long time, and there’s more to the story than me fucking his wife.”

  “Doesn’t make a difference,” I said, my lips tightening at the corners. I shook my head back and forth.

  “Listen,” he said, talking even quieter. “I went over to see that guy – Willie – the next morning to get him back. I figured he wouldn’t be so tough when I was sober and he didn’t have so many friends around.” He paused again, leaned against the cart full of bottoms, no pretense of even looking like he was working, or that he wasn’t in extreme pain. “Well, we got into an argument about some things in the past. You see, he knows about something I did a few years back.” He took a deep breath. “There was a cocaine deal up there at the Tavern that gone wrong, with some biker from the city, and a guy got killed. A guy Willie was involved with.”

  Van stared
dead into my eyes, to see how I was taking the story. I took it without question, just looked silently back at him. “It was me that done it. I shot him and Willie knows I done it. But he was in on that deal too and he kept his mouth shut to stay out of trouble, with the law and with a lot of other people too, who ain’t half as nice as the law is. Troopers still don’t know what happened that day or who was there. A lot of bikers was in town. And they ain’t going around there bugging my Ma because of a bar fight between me and Willie. They always figured it was related to that shooting because it was so many of the same people involved in both, and they’ve been itching to find out who done it. Of course, that’s all my family and friends there and don’t nobody ever say anything. Or even if they ain’t my friend, they’re guilty somehow too. Like Willie.”

  “I don’t have to know this,” I told Van, my mind racing with the implications.

  “Well, the thing is,” Van went on anyway, “is that Willie’s got himself in a shitload of trouble again, and when we was arguing the other day, he threatened to come clean. Unless I get him some money to help him get out of the trouble he’s in. That bastard don’t give a shit that I fucked his wife in a bathroom. He gives a shit that someone’s going to fuck him up, though, for snorting instead a selling a big pile of coke.”

  I didn’t know what to say, that was for sure, and a couple of awkward moments of silence ensued.

  “The deal is,” Van said, breaking the silence, “is that me and Willie and plenty of other people are in this together, regardless of how much or how little we like it, and once one of us goes down, we’re all going to jail or getting killed. And there ain’t no pretty way out of this, so the fact of the god-damned matter is, I got to get Willie some money, or a whole world of trouble is going to be visited on a whole bunch of people and the onus of the whole damned thing is on my back right now.”

  I looked down at the coffin bottoms stacked one on top of each other. “We’ll get you some money, Van,” I told him.

  He smirked. “You know what I always liked about you, kid?” he asked, his tone lightening for the first time. “You’re honest. As honest as they come.”

  “You think?” I asked, surprised.

  “God knows I told so many lies in my life that I can’t ever tell the truth now,” he said, smiling again at last as he tightened the last clamp on another bundle of thirty. “Now push this shit over to the dock and we’ll take a break.”

  I wheeled the cartload of coffin bottoms out past the planer and around to the loading dock. All the coffin parts we’d built, and everyone in the factory had built, were piled in the loading dock, nearly to the ceiling in some places. Tops, bottoms, heads, feet, sides all waiting to be loaded and shipped off somewhere else to be finally assembled into one carefully constructed, brightly polished final resting place for someone. We shipped our parts off to one of the largest coffin distributors on the east coast and I had little doubt in my mind that should I die soon, I would lie in a coffin that I helped to build with my own hands. That was a fitting fate, I believed, not unlike Van’s beating the other night, like hillbilly karma. There are a lot of things to spend your life doing, but in the end, one way or another, we all construct the end that eventually traps us and holds us prisoner forever.

  I left the cart sitting in the middle of an aisle and walked away from the loading dock. I didn’t care if I ever put the cart away. “Van,” I said, walking into the break room where he sat uncomfortably, trying not to lean his bruised body against anything, painfully holding himself up. He looked at me, face solemn again.

  “Van, where are you going to get the money to pay Willie?” I asked.

  He shrugged, sending shudders of pain through his body. “I don’t know, kid. I just don’t know.”

  “Elle told me how to get in the safe in the office,” I confided.

  “Bullshit,” he said, looking up quickly, magnifying the pain on his face.

  “For real,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he asked. “Why didn’t you ever mention this before?”

  “The computers too,” I said. “But I don’t know much about what we can do with that.”

  “What’s in the safe?” he asked.

  “Thousands,” I said. “Not too many, but a couple at least.”

  “I don’t fucking believe you,” he said. “And if it is true, I’m not sure I can trust you. You fucked up the other night.”

  “Fuck you,” I snapped, making him really pay attention to me. “We have to do it early in the week. There’s always more petty cash in there then,” I told him.

  He nodded his head, grimacing at the motion. “Let’s not waste any time then. Let’s do it tonight. I got some dues to pay.”

  My head snapped up. “No, tonight’s not any good,” I said, my heart racing. “Elle said they do a bank run on Tuesdays with the final Monday receipts from the week before, and that’s when they refresh the petty cash.”

  “Alright,” he said. “Tomorrow, then. While we’re still on, so nobody wonders why we’re hanging around here after hours,” he said.

  “Sounds good,” I told him.

  39.

  I needed to find out how to get in the safe. Elle had never actually told me. I had to find her and convince her to help me. That didn’t seem too difficult, except that I needed to do it pronto to get Van out of trouble. I wished I was a woman, and she was a man, because then I could just trade sex for whatever I wanted. To get a woman, though, you have to pretend you don’t like her, or so Van always said. But winning women over that way takes a hell of a lot longer than just swapping up sex for whatever you want. Women have it easy when it comes to the manipulation game, if they’re willing to put out.

  First, I had to find her, though. I was afraid to call her; it made it too easy for her to say no to helping me, to even meeting me. I had to catch her, to cage her, to trick her.

  Opey’s was empty on a Monday night at midnight, so it didn’t take long to see she wasn’t there. A couple of middle-aged drunks sat at the bar, ordering pints and catching the ninth inning of a Mets game. Every time the bartender turned around, the drunk on the left, sporting bushy, curly brown hair and a mustache, would throw peanuts at her ass and they’d both laugh like eighth graders. It was the same woman that was serving the last time I was here. She bore the peanut-throwing with amazing grace, laughing at them and threatening to spit in their beers, which she really should have done. She noticed me observing the whole thing from the end of the bar and walked down to where I was pulling a stool up.

  “It’s the weirdo,” she said, smiling half sincerely, cadet eyes almost twinkling for a second, which is more than I would have expected.

  “Is that how you greet all of your customers?” I asked, responding to her playfulness.

  “Just the lying, lecherous ones,” she said, tightening her lips and raising her eyebrows at me.

  “At least I don’t throw peanuts at your ass,” I pointed out to her.

  “I would definitely spit in your beer if you did,” she said. “I should anyways. You just sat here the other night making up lies for no reason at all.”

  “There’s truth in every lie,” I told her, toying with a napkin on the bar. A bowl of peanuts sat inches away, mostly picked through. I hadn’t ordered a drink yet, and now wasn’t sure I wanted to be here. I came to find Elle but couldn’t just walk out now that I had been noticed by the bartender. I didn’t want to draw any unusual attention to me.

  I didn’t want to go home and see Besse yet either. I had never told her I was going to Friend’s Lake on Friday and I never went home that night, something I had never done before. She had to have wondered where I was, even if she didn’t care. If she did care, she’d be pretty upset by now, on Monday, especially since I normally would have been home by this hour even.

  When I had got back from Friend’s Lake on Saturday, she wasn’t there so I showered and left before she returned. I had slept in my car in the Tavern’s gravel lot the night before bec
ause I was too drunk to drive anywhere and Van was gone by the time I returned to the parking lot to find him. I was feeling grubby and hung over by the time I made it back to Still Creek.

  After showering, though, I had nowhere to go so I drove the Buick in circles, ultimately past Elle’s house a dozen or so times in the course of a few hours. Once I was sure Besse was sound asleep I snuck back into the house and passed out on the couch. When she woke Sunday morning, I pretended to be completely knocked out even as she slammed doors and stomped feet and opened every curtain and vacuumed and cracked eggs and ran the blender to mix their yolks when she could have done it with a fork and smashed their empty shells with a spatula, but still I pretended I was asleep in some dark, quiet, still place. It was nothing short of a brilliant performance on my part, in fact, and eventually she stormed out of the apartment, pounding on her car horn as she left, tires squealing as she raced away. I could smell the burnt eggs and the burnt rubber as I hopped off the couch and stretched my arms and legs.

  Frightened of Besse’s anger, though, I couldn’t go home that night either, fearing that she would confront me no matter how impressively I pretended to be asleep. She would be waiting for me anyway. There would be no chance to pretend anything. So I couldn’t go home. I slept in my car again that night on the old dirt Winkler Road past Elle’s house, in the sandy pullout, where we used to build bonfires and drink beers. I didn’t go home until I was sure Besse was at work. Needless to say, to go home now would be extremely awkward, and I didn’t have anywhere to go unless I was ready to knock on the door at Elle’s house after midnight. I didn’t think waking her father up would be the best way to get her to help me rob a safe. I needed a drink and a minute to think. So, Elle or no, I was spending some time in Opey’s.

  “And a lie in every truth, I suppose,” the bartender retorted, cocking her head and looking at me like I was full of shit. “But the real truth is that people lie because they don’t have the balls to tell the truth.”