Crows

 

For my father and mother;

for Donna, Louis, and Casey;

and for Rose and Al, who told

me my first crow tale

 

With love and affection for all

 

Contents

 

He was on the roof to clean the gutters. These troughs were choked with leaf rot, the burst triskelion pods of a billion seeds, scurrying insect life disrupted by his digging hands. He stored this disquieting mulch in plastic bags. A rope was tied around his waist, the other end around the chimney. He felt this link as something vital. The Earth pulled at him from over the roof edge. Dropped clumps of rot, wet and black, plummeted out of sight.

He was on the roof also to hold his place in that house. Ethel, Ben's wife, had shown him the way. He had followed her up the stairs through the house; the narrow rooms and high-­ceilinged hallways reminded Robert of books standing on end. The house was four stories tall, the only four-­story house in Mozart. Looking from the opposite side of Oblong Lake Ben's house poked above the trees like a green file folder.

Ethel took him by the hand through the thick heat of the attic. She unlocked a last door that opened out to a small porch. The air there was cool as mint, and thin. Ethel's hair was a wooly brown; her eyes were cynical, fed up with him.

“You seem to want to become a fixture in this family,” she told him. Robert could see the lake from there. He could see the Cow and the Calf, a pair of islands, the Calf colored with the bathing suits of teenagers like candies on a plate.

“I can't tell you what Ben would do,” she continued, “but if you persist in living here you'll have to do your share.”

“Olive needs me,” Robert said. “Duke needs me. Buzz needs me.”

She watched him, waiting for him to add her to the list. But he did not. She would refute him and that would be that. The others were not present to tell him otherwise.

“That's debatable,” was all she said. She stepped over the railing around the roof porch, a feat that took Robert's breath away. She squatted and picked with unheeding, ungloved fingers rot from the gutter and pitched it over the side.

“These haven't been cleaned out in years,” she said. “Ben was worthless at it. They'll rot if it isn't done.” She smiled sarcastically up at him. “So you get to do it.”

Ethel rose every morning to drive a cab and there in the heart of Mozart, Wisconsin, with forest at three sides of the town and a lake at the fourth, she had been robbed twice. These crimes made her angry, then frightened, then sad. She hated getting up in the morning. She sometimes looked at Robert as though he was one of the robbers.

“I'm scared of heights, Eth,” Robert said.

“You won't fall.”

“I'm trained to write sports. That's all I know how to do.”

She came off the roof to stand before him. “You'll clean the gutters or you'll move, Rob-­O,” she said.

He progressed along the roof edge and when a bag was full he lowered it to the ground by a rope, down to where Duke waited. His eager young face was craned up to watch Robert. He was in the wheelchair that day, sitting and watching Robert work. He spent less and less time in the chair. He was fourteen years old, three years younger than Buzz, six years younger than Olive. He was missing his right leg, and only in the past months had he allowed Robert to see the space in the air the leg once occupied. The sight at first shocked Robert; the air seemed to shiver.

Duke now and then jumped out of the chair to perform an exotic hop-­dance to loosen the muscles he said kinked up faster now that they did the work of two; he spoke often of searching for the balance he was sure existed in his maimed form. He found it a little more day by day. Although Robert was Olive's lover, he liked Duke best of Ben's children.

Duke returned from carrying the full bag of mulch to the garage. He traveled on his leg with an uncanny throwing of hips and arms that he had learned within months of the healing of his wound. He used crutches for longer distances; they were aluminum, with red hard-­rubber ends and black spongy armpit cushions. He looked up at Robert, who had begun to fill another bag. Duke had his mother's square face, his father's way of concentrating intensely on an individual.

Robert had the last bag to fill before he could feel justified in descending. The house under him was empty at the moment. Olive was at work at the Good-­Ee Freez in town, across the highway from the lake. He had seen Ethel leave in the car. Buzz was somewhere pitching baseballs.

At one end of the gutter Robert came upon a gruesome clot of dead birds and squirrels; two of each. They had been washed by summer rains to the point in the gutter where they plugged the downspout mouth. They were the same dark rot color of everything else he had taken from the gutter. In the head of one squirrel was a neat, round hole. Robert found a similar hole in the head of the other squirrel, and in the breast of one of the birds. They had been shot; he might have heard the shots sometime during the summer. The woods around Mozart were full of hunters, boys with guns, men on larks; distant rounds went off at all hours like sectioned lightning.

The squirrels were gray squirrels; the trees were full of them working hour after hour pursued by the memory of Mozart winters. They mated, they gathered food, life was complete. He rolled them out of the gutter and into a bag.

The birds were black but lacked the dimensions to be crows. They were probably starlings. As he dropped them into the bag they felt granular through the wet leather of his gloves.

This discovery ended his workday. He untied himself from the chimney and slid down the roof to the small porch. On a picnic table in the backyard he displayed the four carcasses to Duke.

“I found them in the gutter,” Robert said. “They've been shot.”

Duke turned them over with the tip of a stick. “Buzz shot them,” he said in a moment.

“How do you know that?”

“He told me. I saw him do it once. He sits up on the porch there and waits for something to come in range.”

Robert put the squirrels and starlings back in the bag. “He has a gun?”

“It was Dad's. After the accident Buzzer got hold of it. A .22 pistol. He's a good shot.”

“Does Ethel know?”

Duke shrugged. “I doubt it,” he said. “She might. She's full of surprises lately. She doesn't seem like my mother half the time.”

At work early, out all day, then quick to sleep at night, Ethel had drawn away from her family in her search for money.

“She complains so much now,” Duke said. “About lights. Leaving the icebox door open. Leaving the back door open too long in winter. As if we should be able to pass through without opening it at all.”

Robert did not respond to this. He had cleaned the gutters because he had little money to offer; he was trained to write sports, and hated that, which left him little to do. He had worked as a sportswriter for two years before the paper went out from under him. He alone in the newsroom the day they folded the paper had not been upset; he had felt released.

He had covered Buzz Ladysmith then without knowing who he was beyond his pitching; never imagining one day they would live under the same roof, argue with the same women, get on each other's nerves. Buzz had been a young, hard thrower, the only freshman on the Mozart High School varsity baseball team. His father might have been in the stands the games Robert attended. He couldn't remember. Much later he searched the faces in the stands in his memory, looking for Ben, but they had all run together, bad watercolors, and Ben was in every seat. Buzz pitched well that day and won, and when Robert tried to talk to him afterwards he was drawn within himself so completely that words seemed to squeeze free from his mouth like tightly wound springs. Robert asked him about his name and Buzz said it was just his name. He asked him about his fine control (nine strikeouts, no walks that day) and Buzz said it was something that came naturally to him, his good eye. Baseballs, then. Later, bullets, passing through squirrels and starlings.

Robert showered and by then it was time to meet Olive. He walked the four blocks to the Good-­Ee Freez, arriving as she came out the back door carrying her shoes. Her toenails bore chipped coats of red polish. She had on a pink smock smeared with ice cream around the pockets. The smock was taut across her wide hips. Olive had muscular legs and arms, and small breasts. She was not ordinary looking, but she wasn't pretty, either, and her face shone with sweat and fatigue after her ten-­hour shift.

They did not say a word, they had been together so long. They fell into step and Olive did not seem to notice the road's sharp pebbles. The Good-­Ee Freez was on the lake, across the lake road from a beach, and they walked on the road parallel to the water. The coolness swirled around them and Olive threw her head back to catch this against her soiled neck.

Olive had been a swimmer in high school and her body still retained the muscles she'd developed training for that sport. Her shoulders were nearly wider than Robert's, though she was shorter by half a foot. He had witnessed when she slept her efficiently cupped hands pulling through the night air, swimming clear of her dreams. She liked men with stamina, lung capacity, strong legs. She dated mostly athletes; they seemed to understand her. When she was a senior in high school she had juggled three members of the Mozart College soccer team. She attended the games with her father, who taught biology at M.C., and they switched seats three or four times a game to keep her suitors off balance.

She was hard-­pressed to explain her interest in Robert, who had merely once written about sports. Mixed into the attraction were her father, her mother, and a tall old birch tree that grew beside the house, and which her father had shaped with a saw to conform to legend.

Robert had also pursued her, which was a change. She ordinarily was the pursuer of any men she kept company with.

She walked up the hill two steps ahead, subtly impatient, but Robert didn't mind. Accustomed as they were to each other, they were still held by a strong sexual tie, almost a link of pure biology. Robert enjoyed the sight of Olive's muscled legs and ass rolling under the greasy smock. She dropped her shoe and he picked it up for her.

“What did you do all day?” she asked, not interested.

“I cleaned the gutters.”

“What else?” She had been listening to her mother and sought proof of his value to the household every minute of the day.

“I emptied the ashtrays. I made your bed.”

“You should, after sleeping until noon. And nobody smokes at our house.”

“Did you know Buzzer has a gun?” he asked.

“Who says?”

“Duke. I found dead birds and squirrels in the gutter. Duke said Buzz shot them.”

Olive was silent. They had come to the top of a hill, and from there could see Ben's house, a firmer green through the disparate and shifting greens and golds of the trees.

“Duke said the gun belonged to your father,” Robert said, “and in all the confusion after the accident Buzz was able to keep the gun for himself without anyone realizing it.”

Olive looked at him; her eyes were wet with word of her father. Two years, and still everyone came unhinged to some extent at mention of Ben. She had put on her shoes and lit a cigarette. Her strong swimmer's shoulders, tired now, had folded in perceptibly, like wings. Robert threw an arm around her sticky waist.

“Sounds like a Buzzard ploy,” she said.

“What should we do, O?”

They were home. She clumped up the front stairs of the high, narrow house, pulled free of his arm. “I don't know,” she said, glancing back at him. “At the moment, I don't care.”

R
OBERT HEARD HER
shower running and tried the door. She sometimes left it unlocked if she desired his company. But not now. When she returned to her room he was in a chair reading. Her hair was bound in a towel. She had let it grow out from the swimmer's bullet sleekness he remembered from those days when he had first seen her in her father's biology class. It had returned to its inherent wooly state; from behind, her head looked like her mother's.

Spots of moisture dabbed her robe from inside. She sat on the bed and worked at the calluses on her feet with a small file. Robert could look up through her gapped robe to a dark, spongy cave. He stirred.

“I miss the old days, Rob-­O,” she said without looking at him. “I think I see too much of you. I miss when you used to come to me at night through the window. You wore dark clothes. A love burglar. That was so exciting.”

“I could do that again,” he said. “But it seems kind of impractical. I'm just a floor above you now anyway.”

“But what's love if not impractical?” she asked. “Now I wait behind you to use the shower. I hear you shave and use the john. Where's the romance in that?”

“I've become a brother,” Robert said.

“In a way, I guess,” Olive said. She stretched her legs in front of her and wiggled her toes; they were long toes, they reminded Robert of piano hammers. She missed how he stole in on her at night, just as her father had stolen in on her mother. She missed their past already. She had been terrified awakening to find him at the foot of her bed the first time. He always arrived when she was deep asleep and months passed before she learned how he came so effortlessly through a locked door. She never would believe that her father had told Robert how to approach her originally.

B
UZZ ATE WITH
his hair brushed wet and his right arm encased in a special blue rubber sleeve filled with shaved ice. He did not talk to anyone; he had pitched that day without a decision.

“How's the arm?” Robert asked.

Buzz nodded at him, chewing. He swallowed, then said, “The arm's good.”

“You pitched a fine game,” Ethel contended. “You didn't have your best stuff, but you survived.”

“I was crafty,” Buzz smiled. “Wily. I should've got the win.”

“You saw it?” Robert asked Ethel.

“A few innings. It was slow today. I didn't have any fares so I swung by and watched from my cab.”