Seeing Crows Read online

  Seeing Crows

  A Novel by Matthew Miles

  Published by Brain Tax Included Enterprises

  2009 All Rights Reserved

  Special thanks to all of my early readers and the invaluable feedback loop: Shorty, Busta, Earl, and everybody else who read it and gave me encouragement: Amy, Dan, Earl’s dad, the Count, Karate, Fleming, Di, DK – did I miss anyone?

  Even more special thanks to Busta for supplying the cover photo, and for all the kicks we had drinking Old Crow in the graveyard taking pinhole photos. And to Stacy for providing the crow, even if it didn’t make it into the photos.

  And most of all to Amy, for always making room for a little creativity in our lives.

  Any resemblance to real persons or events is, of course, purely coincidental.

  1.

  The smell on my hands wasn’t booze and it wasn’t dope and it wasn’t some girl either. Nor was it the glue we used to piece the coffin parts together, pungent and ever-present, clinging like mold in lava patterns to the sides of the glue bins I leaned over every night – leaned over and sniffed, at first gently, but then inhaled in deep, important breaths.

  I stood over Logan’s coffin much like this at the wake last week, searching for the scent of death that wasn’t there – carefully removed, as were the bruises and the cuts and the scars that evidenced the injuries of the motorcycle accident that took his life.

  When the police found him the smell of gasoline was so strong the fumes created ripples in the air before his motionless body, giving the effect that he was dying right in front of them, not dead already. I am pretty sure of what they saw, if not of what they thought, or of what they knew.

  Logan’s older brother Dan called to tell me. I spent the conversation wondering what it would be like to have to call people and tell them someone they loved was dead. At twenty, when it terrified us all to learn it. I opened the phone book where it sat, inches from the refrigerator, on a narrow patch of counter, where months of yellowed mail were always piled, and continued to pile. Envelopes, torn open but never emptied, spilled down over advertisement-filled pages and I brushed them aside as Dan told me what happened, choking back tears amidst deep breaths, just to perform this duty this for me. I wondered if there was a service that could make this kind of call for you. I didn’t know what to look under. Nothing leapt out of the phone book at me.

  No matter how it could have been hidden, though, death hung in the air of the factory as I glued the pieces of the caskets together, night after night. Suspended from the ceiling, dangling over us, a perfectly polished coffin reminded everyone in the factory what it was we worked for, what our labors produced.

  2.

  My face flushed when Besse closed her thighs, almost snuffing my breath out. My heart beat rapidly, but I stayed perfectly still, crouched in the dark, on my elbows, my knees bunched up under me on the bed. The stubble on my face betrayed me more than my nervousness, prickling her flesh. My body tightened even more; Besse’s began to relax – at first slowly, then all of her muscles at once, and she fell back to sleep. Her thighs opened in front of me, and I gently leaned forward again.

  “Knock it off,” she muttered, angry even in her sleep. She woke enough to kick me away from her and the bed. I slid right off the end of the mattress, tumbling toward the corner of the tiny bedroom, pulling the comforter with me.

  “Jesus Christ,” she cursed, pulling the sheet around her and curling into a ball.

  I lay on the floor, the thin, hard carpet chafing my skin, clutching the comforter still, tucked in the corner of the cramped room. Because I knew. Clear as rubbing alcohol. She’d gotten laid somewhere. I smelled the sex on her, and it wasn’t mine.

  3.

  “See, what happens, is you meet a girl and all you want to do is get in her pants, right?” Van asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. Van didn’t talk to hear me talk back. “It’s all you think about, and if you get the chance, it’s all you do.”

  Van was infatuated with the sound of his voice, its depth and volume betraying his overwhelming self-assuredness. Every night, he prattled on all shift long over the perpetual din of machinery, without pause, without reflection.

  “So there you are, you finally get her to give it up and you don’t know how long that’s going to last so you figure you got to get as much in as you can so you just want to have sex all the time. It’s nature, right?” he said, but still didn’t pause. “At first you’re all frantic and excited and you rush everything. But you relax eventually, after a couple of weeks, once you know you’re getting it from her steady, and you start thinking about her a little bit, and how she’s feeling, and then BAM!” Van smacked a wooden board on the metal arm of the glue wheel. The clang rattled around the empty factory. “Best night of her whole fucking life.”

  Van tossed the board onto the conveyor belt with a few others, sending them over a glue-soaked spindle to where I waited. Each of the boards was an inch thick and Van placed them on their edges, applying glue to them as they ran over the spindle. The conveyor belt was made of metal bars about two inches from each other and glue dripped off the edges and through the bars and formed pools on the cardboard mats we placed below it. Glue dripped everywhere, slowly, steadily, one drop at a time. Each board was a couple of inches wide and a couple of feet long. We used them to piece together panels for the bottoms of coffins.

  Van stood at one end of the conveyor belt loading several boards at a time; I stood just past the glue spindle and snatched them up once the glue was applied and slapped them down on the metal arms of the huge glue wheel. I flopped them on their sides on the brackets of three different arms on the wheel, so that the glue-soaked edge of one board faced the dry edge of another. I glued several pieces of wood into one panel a foot and a half wide and a couple of feet long. I tightened them down on the brackets with clamps to press the glued edges tightly together, and advanced the glue wheel one more set of arms. They would then sit, clamped down, until those arms made it back to me on the wheel. By then, they would be one solid, unbreakable panel. Every time I rotated the wheel forward by one set of arms, I took three glued and dried panels off and set three more up.

  Over and over.

  Later, each would be cut to a specific size and have its edges grooved so it could be glued again and fit tightly into the grooves of another panel. About six of these panels would make a single coffin bottom.

  I had made all the parts of a coffin, at one time or another, but we made each part by the hundreds when we made them. It was mindless, repetitive – I took three panels off the wheel and stacked them on a pallet, and then I made three more panels, all evening long.

  I passed the time lost in my own thoughts. Mostly I just wondered who Besse might be screwing at that particular moment. Van’s conversation rarely assuaged my thoughts.

  Yet he continued to run off at the mouth. “See, but you really only screw like that for so long, when you first meet someone, you know what I mean?” He could have had no idea if I knew what he meant, as he plowed right on. “After a while, you slow down. But you’re a man, of course, so really no sex is enough sex.”

  Van shook his head in disbelief at his own words, his ponytail swinging from one shoulder to the other behind his head. His arms never stopped loading boards on the belt. Mine never stopped loading them on the glue wheel.

  He kept talking over the clatter of boards and the clank and groan of the machinery, not unlike a machine himself.

  Load boards, run mouth, load boards, run mouth.

  “Next thing you know, there’s some fine piece of ass walking around your job or something, something where you’re looking at her all the time, and all you can think is you’d like to kick your goddamned wife’s ass right out the door fo
rever for just once chance to nail that pretty little thing.” He looked up at me to nod for emphasis. “So one day you’re sitting home alone thinking about her and fuck it, man, you just can’t help jerking off over her.”

  As far as Van was concerned, this was probably the only inevitability in life.

  “And your wife catches you, and then she thinks you just don’t want her no more. Which ain’t true.”

  No sir, I thought.

  “It’s just that you’d rather bang this chick at work, is what it is. But it’s not like you’re really even trying to do that, of course. So anyways, to make a long story short, your wife’ll start doing some other guy just to get back at you, and then you realize you’re the only one that ain’t getting laid no more.”

  It was hard to imagine how this could happen to Van, considering how well he had thought it out.

  “Not at home, and not at work neither,” he assured me.

  I believed him.

  He finally paused to stretch his arms and snorted at his own knowledge. He finished, flexing them in front of him. He had a tattoo on each of his forearms. One was a dagger, the other a medieval morning star, both just the crude blue outlines of the objects.

  They stank of prison.

  “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, boy?” he asked, looking up from his flexing.

  Van was just short of twice my age, late thirties, probably. Knew everything about everything, and fully intended to impart every square inch of his knowledge unto me. One thing I knew quick – Van needed my attention. He always needed my attention.

  If I wasn’t thinking about who Besse might be in bed with, I was thinking about getting in bed myself with one of those cute little things at work he was talking about – specifically, a girl working in the business office of the factory for the summer. She had only just graduated from high school, and worked in the factory office to earn some dough to go to the community college a few towns over. I remember her from when I was in school, only about three years ago myself, but I never knew her too well - even though the school was tiny and everybody knew who everybody was. All I did was show up there, though, I wasn’t too popular. I didn’t hang out with many people. I remembered her quite well, despite all that. She drove all the guys nuts.

  Now, for me, she was the light through the bars in the factory.

  I knew exactly what Van meant. “Shit,” I said.

  Digger appeared behind Van in the doorway from the saw room.

  Van and I worked the evening shift together, coming in around 2:30 in the afternoon and working until 11 at night. The rest of the factory worked from 6 in the morning until 3, then Van and I arrived and finished any leftover work so everything was caught up for the next day. Usually more wood came out of the saw room than made it past the glue wheel and into the planing room where the panels were finished.

  Digger was the only other person around after 3. He was the night watchman or something and stayed later even than us, sometimes all night. He made sure the boilers didn’t blow or the rats didn’t get too bold. Mostly he smoked pot and looked at porno mags down by the boiler room, probably left there from the ‘80s, pages yellowed and hard to separate, corners warped and bindings swollen. He had a thick blonde mustache that reached around his lips and down toward his chin, his hair square on all the corners around his head. One pair of faded Wranglers and the same beat-up black Dokken concert T-shirt constituted his work clothes nearly every day. Dokken opened for Aerosmith in 1987 at the Riverside Auditorium, fifteen years ago or so. It was probably the last night Digger had off. He was skinny as a hat rack and only about shoulder height to me, and I was just about normal. He’d fallen asleep stoned at least three times at work while the boilers overheated and nearly blew the place down every time. He’d never been fired from a job.

  “Hey, can I bum a smoke, man?” he asked Van, walking coolly up to him.

  Van carefully ignored him, continuing to load boards on the belt and sending them on down to me.

  “Shit, looks like you guys got a lot done tonight,” Digger announced, looking around in approval.

  Digger was clever; Van would gladly ignore him for a while, but one way to get Van to notice you was to mention how good he was at something.

  “Yeah,” Van agreed. “You know how that fucking dayshift is. Ten times the people getting half the work done. Ought to just fire all them assholes and let me get it done myself. Save everybody a lot of hassle.”

  “What about your boy, here, though?” Digger asked, nodding my way. “What would he do? Kid needs a job, too.”

  Van scowled at Digger, but kept working just the same. “Ain’t got no problem with that boy. He can work right here with me. Kid don’t give a shit about nothing and still works harder than all those assholes. Put together.”

  Van liked me. Maybe because I listened to his perpetual advice almost without interjection whatsoever. Maybe it was because he thought I was smart. Maybe he thought I was dumb. Maybe I just never managed to piss him off, which was practically impossible. Maybe no one put a coffin bottom together like I did. When you’re doing something, you want it to last. I always figured folks spent so much time sitting around without doing much that when you actually do something, you should at least give it a half-assed effort.

  “Alright,” Digger sighed, shifting his weight in frustration. “Can I bum a smoke or what?”

  Van stopped for a minute. I flexed my shoulders. The wood wasn’t heavy or anything but there were loads of it and the repetitive motion tired out my biceps and the muscles at the very top of my shoulders. Van rarely paused except for breaks, which were supposed to be about every two hours, except the breaks usually lasted about half an hour instead of ten minutes. There weren’t any bosses around, so Van didn’t care much about company policy. We’d sit on the back porch and Van would smoke cigarettes and bullshit. We’d lean on the porch railing and look out into the afternoon or night sky behind the factory. Small mounds stretched out across a field back there, heading toward the crick that ran behind the factory, a shallow but fast-moving stream that never really froze in the winter. White pipes stuck out of the mounds like candy canes. I think they ventilated waste buried beneath the ground back there. If it weren’t for those pipes, it would have looked like little Irish hills rolling off into the distance.

  Van stopped the conveyor belt and grabbed his cigarettes from the flannel behind him on the wall. “Here you go, fuckhead,” Van said, shuffling the pack of Marlboros so one popped out for Digger.

  “Care if I grab two while I’m up here?” Digger asked, looking up to Van, who was several inches taller than me - probably a foot taller than Digger.

  “What the hell, man?” barked Van. “I thought you quit smoking. You’re bumming them off me every fucking night now.”

  “No, man,” Digger explained, shaking his head while lighting the cigarette.

  Van handed him another and he stuck it behind his ear.

  “I tried quitting but I couldn’t do it. I was freaking out. Getting mad at the wife all the time, chasing my boy around all pissed off all the frigging time. I couldn’t relax.”

  “Jesus Christ, man,” Van said, unusually sympathetic. “Take a couple more.” He shuffled the pack again.

  “So I just quit buying them,” Digger went on, taking three. “Can’t afford to smoke no more, trying to feed that wife, and the kid, especially. So I had to quit buying them, is all. Hell, my wife’s just burning through my paychecks,” he snorted. “Figured if I ain’t buying them, it’s like I ain’t spending any money on them.” Digger didn’t notice Van’s glare, or pretended not to. “Catch y’all later,” he said, shuffling off and disappearing into the darkness of the saw room.

  Van shook his head. “That’s got to be the single dumbest motherfucker on the face of this planet.”

  “Hey Van,” I said, “Is Digger’s family really fat or something? He always says he can’t afford to feed them, way they eat.”

  “Sh
it, their kid’s fat as fuck, but that bitch is blowing that idiot’s dough on coke and everybody but him knows it. He works two shifts a day and so does she, I like to say.”

  “Girls who do coke don’t get fat, do they?” I asked.

  “No, man, she’s alright looking. I fucked her, once, way back when. Right before or after those assholes got married. You get that slut out in a bar with a few beers in her and she thinks she can’t live without a dick to stick in her. Don’t even mention it if you got some coke.”

  “That’s funny. I’d like to meet her sometime,” I said.

  “Shit you would, boy,” Van laughed. “We might as well take a break now. That damned fool made me need a smoke myself.”

  We wandered out through the planing room to the back porch and Van hopped over to his truck and pulled a six pack out from behind his seat. “Ain’t too warm yet,” he announced happily. “Want one?”

  “I don’t really drink,” I said.

  Van had never brought beer in before.

  “Well it’s time you ought to,” he told me, handing me one.

  It seemed harder to refuse Van than to drink the beer, so I agreed. The way Van assumed I wanted the beer made me feel like I wouldn’t ever consider anything else anyway. It didn’t occur to him I didn’t want one, even after I turned it down. He took a pounding gulp out of one and wiped the back of his hand across his lips and then stared down at the line of moisture reaching from his knuckles to his wrist. I twisted the cap off mine and dropped it into my shirt pocket. I didn’t want to leave caps around. We’d get fired. Van threw his onto the floor bed of his truck.

  “Hey,” he said, pointing with his beer. “Go grab me some pen and paper in the office.”

  The old business office was off the planing room, past the break room. I didn’t even bother to click on the light as I entered the messy office. It had windows, so sunlight streamed in, and also out into the factory, where huge fluorescent lights beamed down from the ceiling. A layer of sawdust covered everything since they moved the office out of the factory itself and into a little building between the parking lot and the factory. Only Elle, the little vixen from my old high school, still worked in this office; I saw her when I came in, leaning over ledgers and typing on a computer. I think she had to enter accounts and other business stuff into the new computer system the company just invested in, so they didn’t have to transfer all the paper files over. The coffin business must have been booming because they could afford to set up the new office and hook up computers for the first time. Or maybe time was creeping ahead in this backward little town despite our local celebration of ignorance.