Crows by Charles Dickinson Page B

troubling, false good humor afterwards. Robert preferred the young man’s determined sulk. Robert also had thought frequently of Ben, and the flat sheet of time that had to be crossed before spring, ages away. Ethel had complained for most of the trip home that she was up too late and sure to be out on her feet the next day.
    Robert did not want to make love to Olive, but just to sleep beside her, let her warm skin carry him out of himself. He scaled up through the branches. Outside her window he crouched to catch his wind. Her window was not locked, but to be polite he tapped on the glass. She would come to the window and hold it open while he entered. She had never failed him before. He tapped at the glass again. He was about to open the window himself when she appeared. The room remained dark.
    â€œGo away, Robert,” she hissed.
    â€œLet me in, O. I’ve got to talk to you.”
    â€œGo back down the tree like a good boy. I’m not letting you in tonight.”
    â€œI want to talk to you. That’s all.”
    â€œNo.” She leaned forward to push down the window and Robert saw swimming out into the moonlight the blue keystone of her pubic hair and the murky, swinging tips of her breasts. She also seemed to possess three hands, then two heads, one of them of a straw-­haired man, and when Robert reached with both hands to hold open the window a hard foot flashed through the window and the gap between his flailing hands and caught him squarely in the chest. Though Robert had a momentary grip on this attacking foot and leg, he was already moving backward too quickly to maintain it. Then the air propelled from his lungs by the kick in the chest and the prospect of a long fall to the hard earth intoxicated his brain with a vivid preferable blankness that remained his last memory of what happened that night.

 
Chapter Five
    Missing
    H IS BEARD GREW thick like a harbinger of health during his week in bed; it filled and lengthened and drove him mad with itching. Ethel and her children brought him meals and juice and reading materials. They carried messages from his parents. Purplish single-­celled creatures swam in his vision, sometimes alone, in migratory schools when he was tired. In time these went away.
    He was told he was lucky to be alive, even ambulatory. The birch tree branches, for all the lashing they gave him in passing, acted as brakes of a fashion, slowing his fall by degrees until he crashed through the bottom layer and hit the ground with a thud Ethel heard in her room on the other side of the house. Nothing had been broken or dislodged. He had taken most of the fall on his shoulders, strong from a summer of diving for Ben. Aches, passing dizziness, and the purple cells in his vision gave him reason to stay in bed.
    He was half asleep one day when a commotion took place at the foot of his bed. Spots of sun fell across him and warmed his hands where they curled around the edge of the covers. Some time earlier in the day, when he had thought the house empty, Olive appeared on her knees at the edge of the bed and performed upon him a slow, sweet blowjob of amends that lasted better than an hour. Now he wondered as he awakened if she might be back.
    But it was his mother and his father standing there.
    Their peeps of consternation had been caused by an uncertainty whether to disturb him. Robert at first thought his father wore a suit and tie, but then he saw it was a black T-­shirt with lapels, striped tie, white buttons, handkerchief, and carnation painted on.
    â€œYou’re awake,” Evelyn said. She had her arms around her husband’s shoulder. He said, “Tell me you didn’t fall out of a tree.”
    â€œNice shirt, Dave.”
    He looked at his chest. “You like it, huh? A very hot item. I’ve sold four since they came in last week.”
    Robert asked his mother, “That makes it a hot item?”
    â€œWe’re not here to talk