Crows (4 page)

“Without the
Scale
, this town's got no identity.”

“I'm not to blame for that.”

“And my business has gone to hell without a local paper to push,” Del complained. When he became angry the strip of skin above the rim of his shade turned scarlet, like contrary thoughts pinched and boiling. “Nobody wants to read about Madison or Milwaukee. They get sports and weather off TV. I do less business than your folks, for Christ's sake.”

“You
have
reached the bottom of the barrel,” Robert said, his sarcasm in vague defense of his parents.

He was living with Dave and Evelyn then, in the small house a short walk from their store. When he worked at the
Scale
he had taken some rooms in a house on Oblong Lake. But he had failed to save his money and was forced to return home, though in the days after losing his job he sat alone counting his money, trying to stretch it. There had been rumors of a final paycheck, and with it he might have made it another month, but Thrips had left nothing behind and Robert had no choice.

His father by then had repainted Robert's old room and converted it into a den, with a leather-­covered loveseat, a TV, an NFL wastebasket, and a small dry bar with an ice bucket, glasses, and nothing stronger than grape soda to drink.

Robert went to the house a week after the paper closed. Through the front-­door window he saw his mother and father lying in each other's arms on the couch. They were dressed, his mother's eyes were closed, and Dave's face was tucked out of sight against her breast. For a moment, Robert almost turned away. But his parents only lay there in the half darkness, and soon Robert heard faint music through the door, and a motion at the edge of the scene was Evelyn keeping time with her foot.

He rang the bell. They did not break away as if embarrassed. Evelyn's eyes opened, and Dave's head pivoted from its nook of sanctuary to peer at the door. Robert held a hand to the glass. Then they slowly unwound from each other, arms and legs taking turns letting the opposite number free, a person unraveling, becoming two ­people. Arm in arm, they came to the door.

“Robert. Come in,” Evelyn said. She was wearing a red robe, and smoothed the front with her hands.

“I was expecting this visit,” Dave said.

“Dreading it?” Robert asked.

“Dreading it.”

“Now, Dave,” Evelyn said. “We may be regaining a son.”

“But losing a den,” Robert said, finishing for his father, who nodded and smiled, pleased he and his son thought alike.

“Didn't you save your money?” Dave asked.

“Sure. But not enough to live without a job,” Robert said. His father's question, with its gross ignoring of the facts, annoyed him no end.

His mother went over to turn down the stereo. Dave watched her move away. Her feet were bare and the cloth of her robe swished as she walked.

“What are your job prospects?” Dave asked.

“None.”

“You've got to work,” Evelyn said.

“I have no marketable skills.”

“You're a sportswriter,” Dave said shrilly. “A damn good one.”

“There aren't many sportswriting jobs left in Mozart,” Robert said.

“So leave town!” Dave exclaimed.

Robert slipped past the two of them. He always wished for a brother or sister in moments such as this, someone to share the burden of their attention; someone to share the sense he was butting in.

Two empty wine glasses sat on the counter beside the kitchen sink. Bits of cork clung stickily to the inner rim of one. They had each had a glass of wine, then went to wrap in each other's arms on the couch and listen to music. In blundered their only child.

He took the wine from the refrigerator and poured some into one of the dirty glasses. He drank it leaning against the counter, his legs crossed, pleased perversely to be horning in on his parents' good time.

Evelyn and Dave stood in the doorway. They might have been trying to block him from penetrating back into the house, his only way out the back door.

His parents' store was in a poor location, at the very end of Booth Street, which faced away from the heart of downtown Mozart, away from Oblong Lake. The choicest locations were on the lake road, where the summer tourist shoppers and towns­people with money to spend strolled the wide walks. Cigar's, four blocks in and the last store on a dead-­end street, was not in a location where shoppers would come upon it in the course of a day and decide to buy.

But poor business did not upset Robert's parents and he was in college before he learned why. His mother owned the store; her name was Evelyn Pine when she met Dave Cigar. The favored only child of the Waukesha Pines, she was the recipient of a moderate inheritance when her grandmother, and some years later her parents, passed away. She had bought the store for Dave as a wedding present, and ever since he had been running countless going concerns out of it, and into the ground.

Dave was a short, wiry man with thinning hair, a paunch, and deep parentheses cut on both sides of his mouth by a million hearty smiles, genuine and false, over the years. Robert got his height from his mother. Evelyn was six feet tall; Robert could remember her for years beating him at basketball under the hoop on the garage. She had a funny little shot from behind her head that her son could not block and which always went in.

She kept the books at the store, placed orders, changed dead bulbs, and eased Dave through those pained transitions from one failed line to the next sure thing. In years past, Cigar's had sold bone-­handled cutlery, wood-­burned home address plaques, bicentennial souvenirs, stationery, party gags and favors, costume jewelry, manicure and pedicure instruments, Italian ice cream blown so full of air it seemed in danger of floating to the ceiling, beer steins of the fifty states, wall and desk calendars of every description, macrame wall hangings and flavored cigarette rolling papers, golf supplies, stuffed bears imported from England, and fishing bait and tackle. Each line had moments of early success; Dave and Evelyn's friends always came in to look and buy something. But the store never matched the golden promise predicted by Dave. They could never overcome the barrenness of their store's location.

Poor business did not matter to Evelyn. She had found in Dave Cigar the person who made her happiest in her life. Her father had been a busy, forbidding man, immensely successful at his work, polite to his wife and child. When she was in high school it occurred to her that her father was never summoned to the phone when he was home. She began to count the days that passed without a call for him. She counted fifty-­one straight days before he got a call from work in the evening, and he cursed and hung up and hurried out into the darkness. She loved her father, but he had no friends and he rarely laughed. All he did was work.

Dave Cigar tended the store and she was pleased when he sold something, but she liked him best when he told jokes on the phone, or talked to his friends when they stopped in, or when he strolled over to the restaurant on the lake road and killed the afternoon visiting. He was in charge of several civic organizations; he was good at those sorts of duties, but Evelyn suspected Mozart's businessmen put him in charge because they assumed he had plenty of time to spare, with an heiress wife and a dead location.

She loved the sound of his voice, his smile, his enthusiasm for each new line, and the way he did not see the goodness in himself that she cherished so. He in turn used her as a barometer of his self-­worth, content to assume that if she stayed with him for years he must have been doing something right, though he could not say what.

They did not plan to have children. However, Evelyn became pregnant in the third year of their marriage. They were selling monogrammed aluminum awnings at the time, and not doing well. Money was not a worry, but Evelyn was uneasy about what a baby would do to their marriage. She wanted Dave to herself. She was afraid the child would not see what it was she loved in the child's father; she knew Dave could not bear not to be loved entirely by her. Dave was afraid the child would see him for the man he thought he was, not the man Evelyn loved him for being.

Robert was born and he was indeed a wedge that she worked hard to adjust to. Dave proved to be a gentle father, giving up sleep, talking softly to Robert as he carried him through the house on colicky nights. But she was also careful to assure Dave he remained all she needed or wanted. She knew she loved Dave; it was still a mystery what sort of person Robert would become.

R
OBERT WAS WATCHING
the news when his parents arrived home. He was drinking a beer and thinking about the wet-­haired girl who brought his biology teacher lunch.

Dave just about came to his wife's shoulders.

“Roberto,” Dave exclaimed, “did you leave a dollar in the icebox for that beer?” The question was put forth with a smile, but with an edge, too. Dave had not forgiven Robert for returning home, for pushing him out of the small den he had waited years for, all that time looking forward to the day his son left home.

Evelyn kissed Robert on the top of his head. She gave him a wink hidden from Dave.

“How was business today?” Robert asked.

“Don't ask,” Dave said. He got a beer of his own and sat on the couch opposite his son.

“Your father sold a pewter mug today.”

“Is that right? Engraved?”

Dave licked beer foam from his upper lip. “Go ahead, Evie. Rub it in.”

Evelyn was laughing in a soundless way that was a clue to great hilarity. Robert had been amazed all his life at the quickness with which his mother laughed helplessly at something his father had done or said.

“What?” Robert demanded to know, irritated at the way they held him out of their lives at times like that.

“A woman came in today and ordered a pewter mug for her husband,” Evelyn said. “She was the only person in the store all day. The mug was to say, ‘To my darling, Frank. Happy twenty-­fifth anniversary. Love, Peppy.' She wrote this message on a piece of paper and left it for your father. He promised to have it ready for her in two hours.”

“Do I have to listen to this?” Dave asked, loving the moment, at home with his wife and the center of attention.

“Your father set to work like he had been entrusted to cut the Hope diamond,” Evelyn continued. “She had bought a sixteen-­ounce mug—­the King's Cup—­top of the line. Plus fifty-­seven characters, spaces, and punctuation marks. A fortune in one mug. A day's profits!” She winked again, hidden, at her son. Dave emitted a grunt of disgust. “But also a big responsibility for the first
real
engraving your father'd ever done,” she said. “Practically a book to engrave on the side of this mug.”

Dave had invested $1,100 in the engraving stylus and lessons to operate it, and in the four months since had yet to engrave a single letter in earnest. This did not discourage him or Evelyn, for they frequently went months without selling a particular item in their inventory.

“No telling what the public will take a fancy to,” Dave would say. “It's the man who'll go crazy who'll try to figure out the public.”

Dave and Evelyn had moved into their small store before Robert was born, and hung the painted plywood sign—­
CIGAR'S
—­over the door. The wooden sign was in the basement now, succeeded by an electric number that cost a fortune when the letters that frequently burned out—­
CI AR'S IGAR'S GAR S
—­needed to be replaced.

Robert remembered his father practicing on the engraving stylus. Curls of pewter, some fine as thread, some thick as nail clippings, dropped to the desk beneath him. Dave saved these shavings and sold them to an alloy wholesaler in Milwaukee. The practice mug filled with cut letters: the English alphabet, upper and lower case, a dozen times; numerals; Congratulations!; Champions; Bravo!; University; World's Greatest Dad; Anniversary; Glee Club; To A Great Fellow; the Greek alphabet. A storm of letters in a swirl without beginning or end.

“He worked for two hours straight and then the woman returned,” Evelyn said. “I got her a cup of coffee and a chair out of the back. She said she was perfectly happy to wait.”

“She hovered like a vulture,” Dave cut in. His beer bottle rested on the hard little ball of his paunch. He was in his late fifties, smug in his contentment and the path smoothed by his loving wife. “She sighed and rustled her packages and checked her watch,” he complained. “That store is so tiny, I heard every beat of her heart.”

“An hour passed,” Evelyn said. “Peppy was
very
impatient.”

“Maybe she was afraid of missing her twenty-­sixth anniversary,” Robert said.

Dave sneered, but his mother laughed, and Robert felt a part of them for a moment.

“Finally, your father finished. He polished the mug, got all his fingerprints off, and passed it lovingly to Peppy, holding it with a soft cloth.”

Evelyn abruptly left the room. Robert, alone with his father, did not know what to say. Was that the story? His father drank his beer. Evelyn returned with a large pewter mug.

“Voilà!” she said. “The result of your father's nearly four hours of work.”

She placed the mug in Robert's hands. It read: “To my darling, Frank. Happy 25th anniversary. Love, Puppy.”

“She was a vulture,” Dave said. “She just hovered and skulked and drove me to distraction with her impatience.” He flailed his arms for exclamation. “Peppy, Puppy, what's the difference? One stupid name is as good as another, right?”

“Right!” Evelyn said.

“She'll be back! Mark my words.”

Robert said, “Right, Dave.”

His mother, going to get her husband a fresh beer, winked at Robert above Dave's shiny head.

Robert ran his fingers over the letters carved in the mug. They were scratchy, of uneven depth and spacing; but when he took his eyes out of focus, the message and the workmanship approached perfection.