Crow Fair (7 page)

“Who’s this?” his mother said, but got no answer. Instead, she turned to Owen. “Your father and I are going to take a break from each other.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We thought you’d want to know.”

“Sure.”

His father lifted his head to glance at Owen, then returned to the paper. Owen knew better than to say a single word, unless it was about the weather. He wanted his parents to be distracted, so that he could fit in more baseball and get any kind of haircut he liked, but he worried about things falling apart entirely.
He was unable to picture what might lie beyond that. School, of course, out there like a black cloud.

His mother said, “Ma said she’d take me in.”

At this, his father raised his head from the paper. “For God’s sake, Alice, no one is ‘taking you in.’ You’re not homeless.”

“Why don’t
you
go someplace, and I’ll stay here? Maybe someone will take you in.”

“I’ll tell you why: I’ve got a business to run.” His business, which dispatched plumbers and electricians to emergencies, was called Don’t Get Mad, Get Egan and made the sort of living known as decent. With tradesmen on retainer, he worked from an office, a hole-in-the-wall above a florist’s shop. An answering service gave the impression that it was a bigger operation than it was.

“Ma will think you’ve failed.”

“Well, you tell Ma I haven’t failed.”

“No, you tell her, sport.”

“I’m not calling your mother to tell her that I haven’t failed. That doesn’t make sense. Owen, where have you been? You look like you’ve been in the swamp.”

“I’ve been in the swamp.”

“Would you like to add anything to that?”

“No.”

His mother stubbed out her cigarette and said, “I think you owe your father a more complete answer, young man.”

“It’s nothing more than a little old swamp,” Owen said. “Mind turning that up? It’s the top of the eighth.”

Nobody was going anywhere except back to the newspaper.

Mr. Kershaw was an agricultural chemist for the state—a white-collar position that was much respected locally—but, despite his sophisticated education and job, he was a country boy through and through, with all the practical and improvisatory skills he’d acquired growing up on a subsistence farm. He wore bib overalls on the weekends and had a passion for Native American history. He was interested in anything from the remote past. He had a closet full of Civil War muskets that had been passed down through his family and a cutlass given by a slave on the Underground Railroad to a forebear who had run a safe house on the route to Canada. This same forebear, by family legend, while pretending to help find a runaway, had pushed a Virginia slave hunter out of a rowboat and held him off with an oar until he drowned.

When baseball was rained out one Saturday, Mr. Kershaw took Owen aside. “How’s everything at your house?”

“Great,” Owen said suspiciously, assuming he was being asked about the grease fire in the kitchen.

Mr. Kershaw looked at him closely and said, “Now, Owen, after it rains I hunt arrowheads. The rain washes away the soil around them, and if you’re lucky you can see them. My boys don’t care, but maybe you’d like to come along.”

They drove a few miles to a farm that belonged to a friend of Mr. Kershaw’s. The long plowed rows in front of the farmhouse stretched to a line of trees that shielded the fields from wind off the lake. A depression, not quite plowed in, ran diagonally across the main field, from corner to corner.

“That was a creek, Owen. The Potawatomi hunted and
camped along it. Their palisades were right over there, where you see the stacks of the electric plant. So you go down the left side of the old creek, and I’ll go down the right. If you have anything at all on your mind, you will never find an arrowhead.”

The two walked in close sight of each other, staring at the ground. From time to time, Mr. Kershaw stooped to examine something, while Owen strained to catch sight of an arrowhead among the stones. At length, Mr. Kershaw summoned him to look at a broken point. Owen was amazed to see how its symmetrical flakes distinguished it from an ordinary stone. When Mr. Kershaw called him over again, he had an arrowhead in his hand, perfect as a jewel. “Bird point,” Mr. Kershaw said, and Owen stared in possessive longing. Mr. Kershaw dropped it into his shirt pocket with a smile. “Don’t think and you’ll find one,” he said.

Owen resumed the search with greater intensity as they approached the row of trees, whose tops were ignited by lake light. Sticking out of a clod was a pale white object that Owen picked up and gazed at without recognition. “What’ve you got there?” Mr. Kershaw called. “Bring it here.” Owen crossed the depression and handed it to Mr. Kershaw. “Oh, you lucky boy. It’s a”—he shook dirt from it—“French trade pipe. Indians got them from the trappers such a long time ago. Want to swap for my arrowhead?”

“Which is worth more?”

Mr. Kershaw laughed. “Probably your trade pipe, but that’s a good question. So good, in fact, that I’ll give you my arrowhead. Perhaps I’ll find another.” He reached into his shirt pocket, removed the arrowhead, and dropped it, warm, into Owen’s palm, where its glittering perfection nearly overwhelmed him.

The ground had dried, and by the time Owen got back to the diamond the other boys were choosing up sides. Mike Stallings was captain of one team and Bobby Waldron captain of the other. Owen wanted to put his finds in a safe place; he ran toward his house, a hand pressed over the lumps of arrowhead and clay pipe in his shirt pocket, the late sun starting to flash from the windows of the neighborhood, a lake freighter moaning as it passed to the east.

The early football game with Flat Rock a week later was played under lights and in the mud from another afternoon rain. It was a bloody affair from the start, with poorly understood game plans and pent-up, random excitement among the players. At the end of the first quarter, Ben dashed out with his tray of water, tripped, and fell in a melee of paper cups. The stands erupted in laughter. Owen ran onto the field and squatted beside Ben to pick up the mess, stacking wet cups while Ben stood by, helpless and ashamed. The players waited, hands on hips, while Ben and Owen carried the remains back to the sidelines. The game resumed, and Owen wandered behind the bleachers, hoping that Flat Rock would kick the home team’s asses and give the handful of visitors something to cheer about. He headed over to the parking lot, thinking he might spot some Oldsmobile spinner hubcaps to steal for his collection but settled for a set of Pontiac baby moons, which he stashed in the bushes to be picked up later. The car didn’t look quite the same with its greasy wheel studs exposed, and he really wanted to stop there, but then he saw Bradley Ingram’s Thunderbird and soon had all four of its dog-dish ten-inch caps.

On the bus the next morning, the twins were arguing with each other, a welcome change, as it kept their attention away from others. Ben watched them with delight, despite all their teasing. The twins were as knowledgeable about radio hits as Ben was about baseball, and he was drawn to their statistical world. Also, he had begun to notice girls. These days he often sat at the back of the bus by the twins, who seemed to regard him as a trophy stolen from Owen. They sensed that Owen’s popularity was falling, and they enjoyed seeing him sitting by himself. On good days now, Ben was their playmate, their mascot. They alone—thanks to their status—could make liking Ben fashionable. Owen used his new privacy to peek into the false bottom of his lunch box and check on the well-being of his turtles. He liked finding his bottle cap empty of flies. The safety patrol, an unsmiling senior with angry acne and an attitude that went with the official white belt across his chest, had been steadily expanding his list of prohibitions from standing while the bus was in motion to eating from lunch boxes and arm wrestling. He had never bothered Owen but appeared to watch him in expectation of an infraction. Owen watched him back.

The low autumn light left barely enough time for a few innings after school. The chalk on the base paths had faded into the underlying dirt, and a ring of weeds had formed around third base. Horse chestnuts were strewn across the road between the Kershaws’ house and the diamond. Somehow, partial teams were fielded, though even the meagerest grounders ended up in the outfield, to be run down by Stanley Ayotte, who was proud of his arm and managed to rifle them back. Shortstop had been eliminated for lack of candidates. The score ran up quickly.

Owen’s father appeared and boomed that an umpire was
needed. He hung his suit coat on the backstop, tugged his tie to one side, stepped behind the catcher, folded his arms behind him, and bent forward for the next pitch. There was no next pitch. The players saw his condition, and the game dissolved. As Owen started to walk home with his father, Mr. Kershaw, observant, came out his front door and gave them a curt wave. Owen tried to think of hubcaps he didn’t have yet while his father strode along, looking far ahead into some empty place toward home.

On the school bus the next day, Owen fielded questions about “the ump” and sat quietly, sensing the small movements of the turtles in the bottom of his lunch box, which was otherwise filled with the random sorts of things his mother put in there—Hostess Twinkies, not particularly fresh fruit, packaged peanut butter and crackers. Ben was sitting on the broad bench seat at the back, between the twins, who tied things in his hair and pretended to help him with his homework while enjoying his incomprehension. He must have begun to feel rewarded by his limitations. The twins whispered to each other and to Ben and made his face red with the things they said. Then Ben told the twins about Owen’s turtles, and the twins told the safety patrol, who towered over Owen’s seat and asked to see his lunch box.

“Why do you want to see it?”

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

The safety patrol worked his way forward to the driver and said something, then returned. “Give it to me or I’m putting you off the bus.”

Owen slowly handed the lunch box to him. The safety patrol undid the catch, opened the lid, and dumped the food. Then he
pried out the false bottom and looked in. “You know the rules,” he said. He gingerly lifted the turtles out of the box, leaned toward an open window, and threw them out. Owen jumped up to see them burst on the pavement. He fell back into his seat and pulled his coat over his head.

“You knew the rules,” the safety patrol said.

Life went on as though nothing had happened, and nothing really had happened. Ben was the twins’ plaything for several months, and then something occurred that no one wanted to talk about—if one twin was asked about it, the question was referred to the other—and Ben had to transfer to a special school, one where he couldn’t come and go as he pleased, or maybe it was worse than that, since he was never seen at home again or in town or on the football field with his water tray. Owen continued to attend the football games, not to watch but to wander the darkened parking lot, building his hubcap collection. As time went on, it wasn’t only the games: any public event would do.

I’d have thought we would have met the Jewells sooner, since we all had the same commute down the long dirt road to the interstate and thence to town and jobs; to say they never reached out would be an understatement. The first year they didn’t so much as wave to either Ann or me, a courtesy conspicuously hard to avoid given that passing on our road is virtually a windshield-to-windshield affair, and an even slightly averted gaze is a very strong bit of semaphore. That we could see their faces in extraordinary detail, his round and pink with rimless glasses, hers an old Bohemian look with stringy hair parted in the middle, hardly seemed to matter. He looked sharply toward us while she just stared away.

“It’s just fine with me,” Ann said. “We don’t spend nearly enough time with the friends we already have.”

“Oh, baby, we need new ones.”

“No, not really. We’ve got good friends.”

“Like the vaunted Clearys?” I was egging her on.

“That wasn’t great, I’ll admit,” she said. “Maybe they need another chance.” This was a reference to a dinner celebrating the Clearys’ seventeenth wedding anniversary. The big party on an odd year was their idea of a joke. They had us wearing paper
hats and twirling noisemakers, all part of their bullying cheer, which made us feel they were making fun of us. I wouldn’t have put it past a guy like Craig Cleary, regional super-salesman and fireworks mogul, with a Saddam Hussein mustache that somehow matched the black bangs his dour wife wore down to her eyebrows. Before we even went, I had told Ann that I’d rather go to town and watch haircuts, but she pronounced the whole thing clever. “Cleary’s an oxygen thief,” I pleaded. “You can hardly breathe around him.”

Unneighborly though they were, the Jewells had the fascination of mystery, but that was likely due to the extent of their remodeling project. For half a year, tradesmen were parked all around their house, the familiar plumber and electrician, but also the wildly expensive Prairie Kitchens people must have been there for two months, with those long slabs of polished black granite in the front yard lying under a tarp that blew off regularly and was just as regularly replaced. “It’s granite,” I said. “Stop worrying about it.”