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AS THE CROW FLIES
BY
KEITH M. RODGERS
Ken Demeyer's hands darted recklessly about the temperature controls, searching for defrost. The passenger side tire momentarily slipped off the road. Loose gravel tugged at the stray wheel, yanking it further off course, forcing the back tire to follow. Ken won a brief wrestling contest with the soft shoulder and muscled both wheels back on to the pavement. He was getting careless. His speed was increasing with every turn, and the driving conditions were becoming steadily worse. What had started out as a mild drizzle had grown ominously into a major storm.
His left hand tapped nervously as the speedometer began creeping upward again. The road to the cemetery had become a familiar one to him recently. How many times had he traveled to the very same destination? How many times indeed; perhaps as many times as he had felt the smooth steering wheel slide underneath his hands. The feel of the leather reminded him of when all this started: a summer day in '72 when he was holding his Grandmother's hand in the cemetery that felt leathery smooth.
He remembered his Grandmother's hands well. She had those "I've worked all my life" hands, hardened through years of picking cotton as a girl in Mississippi. Even in the summer humidity her hands were bone dry from the years she spent scrubbing floors after coming north to escape the "hardships" of life as a sharecropper.
Her name, Rae, came from a popular song of the period. She was a big, strong woman at the time, Aunt Jemimma - like: not overly tall, but big in girth the way a grandmother was supposed to be. She had what they called "salt and pepper" colored hair, exactly every other strand of hair was gray.
He could remember that she had real sad eyes, with large bags, and coffee rings around the pupils. It seemed her eyes were always yellow, or bloodshot. They were even more so on this particular day, as she had been crying at Uncle Matty's funeral.
“Uncle Matty”, wasn't Ken's Uncle, but rather his Great Uncle, his Grandmother's brother. He had served in the Army during World War I. His military status as a veteran of a foreign war qualified him for a military burial and a twenty-one gun salute.
"Ready!" barked the Squad Leader. Their weapons clacked in their hands in drilled unison, cocking their M-1 rifles.
"Aim!" They pointed their weapons skyward as if one mind controlled all fourteen white - gloved hands.
"Fire!" Their shots echoed across the clear June sky, scaring a flock of crows in the vicinity. Puffs of black smoke floated gently upward in the breezeless air. The spent cartridges did a little tap dance on the ground before rolling to a stop, giving a brassy glint in the bright noon-day sun.
"Ready!" The squad leader ordered again. The soldier’s hands cocked their weapons uniformly.
"Aim!" The one mind raised the weapons skyward again.
"Fire!" Another volley pierced the blue blanketed sky, a rookery crows scattered into the air. They circled above the cemetery like vultures with a supernatural hunger looking for dead souls before beginning to settle. The expended cartridges did their little dance like windup toy soldiers that wound down too quickly.
"Ready!" The Squad Leader ordered for the third time. The one mind moved all the white gloves simultaneously.
"Aim!"
"Fire!" The shots cracked in the air. The crows scattered, and then reformed into a semblance of a formation. An eight year old Ken held his Grandmother's hand and watched the crows like it was television, an untouchable picture of an imaginary place with the tap dancing shells composing the background music.
"Lookit there Kenny," his Grandmother said to him, gesturing toward the crows that now circled overhead. "See that there," she said, "the crows try to steal the soul on its way to heab‘n. That’s why dey calls him de’ grave robber. An’ see der’?” Grandma pointed to a solitary crow that had broken away from the group. “He’s goin’ ta’ swoop down and try to scare dat der’ pregnant gurl. He’s goin’ try to scare the baby outta her and get the baby’s soul too. Go on, Mr. Crow!” Grandma shouted at the solitary bird. “Get outta har!” Grandma closed her eyes and mumbled something beneath her breath and shouted at the top of her lungs. “Be gone!” The crow squawked loudly and flew off to join the rookery. “Dat’s why ya’ gotta’ always beware of de’ grave robber.”
They lowered Uncle Matty into the ground. The soldiers were marching away and the Reverend said the final ... "from dust to dust, from ashes to ashes."
The women stifled their crying and dried their eyes long enough to make a mad dash for the potted plants as if they were at a fire sale. Kenny's brother Lee and their cousins dove on the ground in search of the brass casings. Young Ken merely held his Grandmother's hand the entire time, watching the crows circling above.
Now, as he sped down a rain-soaked back road destined for that very same cemetery, he found that he could still remember those leathery hands.
A streak of black darted out of the growing darkness. Instinctively Ken swerved, sending the right tire off the road into the grip of the soft shoulder. Again, Ken managed to wrestle it free of the shoulder's grasp. The streak of black dove out of the rain-soaked sky. A black crow with talons poised dove straight for him. He swerved again, this time crossing the double solid yellow "No Passing" lines. The crow pounded against the windshield with the force of a cannonball, cracking the glass. The crow was momentarily frozen to the windshield; its tiny black eyes stared hungrily through him, to a tasty soul.
The wipers swiped at the bird, pinning a few of its silky black feathers to the windshield to be wiped back and forth in front of his face as a bloody reminder; a reminder of what had happened so many years ago to that very crow. The crow darted across the headlights in the pouring rain and crashed into the windshield, further cracking glass, and taking him back again to his Uncle Matty's funeral.
They were driving home Grandmother's car, an olive drab ‘67 Polaris. The speed limit was sixty-five, seventy-five in some places but his Grandmother was doing eighty-five. She drove like she learned how to drive while hauling moonshine. Everywhere she went, she went as fast as possible.
Kenny was playing on the floor in the backseat with one of the empty shell casings his brother had given him (after his Grandmother had "persuaded" him to share). All four windows were rolled all the way down; the noise of the wind rushing in was deafening.
Young Kenny was looking through the inside of the shell casing like a telescope out of the casing through the back window, there it was: a crow, right behind them. He climbed up on the backseat to see better. It was following them. When the road would turn, it would disappear and then reappear when the road straightened out. When they went under a stretch of trees that hung over the highway, it hid from them, but when the trees would pass the crow would again be there.
Kenny's eyes grew larger as the bird drew nearer. It came down from up high in the blue June sky, gathering speed. Rasping caws rivaled the roaring road noises. Black talons splayed wide, filling the boy's view through the window. The crow dove into the rear window. The crow's blood splattered on the glass as it cracked. The window became a web of cracked and bloody lines; feathers stuck to it in blood soaked patches. Kenny watched in mute horror, huddled on the floor boards as the window bowed inward under the blow. A shower of blood, feathers, and glass sprayed everywhere. Through it all Kenny could see those tiny black eyes’ where hunger for his soul.
He awoke screaming, only to find himself safely in the backseat of his Grandmother's car, parked in the driveway of at his Grandmother's house. He looked through the back window, still intact, and there wasn't a crow to be seen.
Presumably, his Grandmother and brother had gone inside. The engine was still making those cooling down noises, so they couldn't have been there very long. He got out of the car and slammed the heavy rear door. He could smell the pepper his Grandmother was using while she was "frying up a mess of pork chops." She always used too much pepper on her pork chops.
He had started for the front door when he heard something moving in the backyard. He didn't go in the backyard very often, and never alone (not even his brother would go back there alone). An eight-foot high wooden fence completely enclosed the backyard. Spider webs grew between boards that would creak, even if there was no breeze. Sometimes there would be bugs in them, hopelessly tangled in a knot of sticky webbing, furiously fighting for their life while a spider nimbly traversed the gossamer thin strands to deliver the coup de grace. There were lots of trees and bushes, some from neighboring yards that would hang over, casting the yard into perpetual shadows.
Everywhere you turned something would be moving just out of sight. A leaf would fall slowly, doing a little spiral dance on the windless air. A bush would rustle in the breeze, making a scratching sound against the house that could make flesh crawl. Every now and again one of a family of black squirrels would make a mad dash out of nowhere and scurry up a tree, kicking up leaves and debris in its wake. All these things happened simultaneously; he never knew which way to turn. It always felt like there was something creeping up behind him, something evil going on behind his back. He definitely knew that he never wanted to turn his back on the garage.
The garage was set back on the rear of the plot. His Grandmother never parked her car in it; he thought maybe she was scared of it too. It was dark red; one might even say “blood red”. It always stood open. Both sides of its barn-like doors thrust wide to expose its gaping maw. Inside was a blackness that exuded a musty odor like hell's bad breath. Cob webs hung from the opening. When the wind blew, the sides would bow in and out, making it appear to breathe. No one in the neighborhood would go anywhere near that garage, even with a friend on a dare.
His Uncle Willie had gone into it once. He didn't disappear but everyone who knew him wished that he had. He was, however, changed after that. All his teeth had rotted and his mouth exuded some foul, evil odor. His face had a permanent five o'clock shadow and no matter what he did, he never seemed to be clean.
Kenny heard a sound, a ruffling noise, from somewhere in the backyard. He was drawn irresistibly to it. Some power from beyond seemed to be moving his feet slowly, one small, scared step at a time, toward the garage. Young Ken's little size-four shoes scraped in the gravel as he passed the edge of the house and entered the backyard. The shadows began to move, just as he knew they would. He tried to look, to keep one eye on the dancing shadows and the other on the looming darkness of the garage.
His head was frozen with fear. He could not turn away from the gaping maw. His heart pounded inside his chest. A gust of wind blew … or did the garage inhale? It swelled with breath, and then exhaled. Its foul breath cascaded over him, leaving him covered in a musty smelling layer of decay. His skin crawled at the touch of the thin layer of cob web that trapped dead leaves to him.
He forced his eyes shut. Reluctantly, his feet stopped as he tried to wipe the veil of cob web from his face and arms. He spat out the taste of mildew and dust that coated his tongue. When he opened his eyes, there was a crow sitting on top of the garage. He had the distinct feeling that it had just appeared from nowhere. It was the same crow that he had watched as it followed his Grandmother's car! He knew it, he felt it. It cocked its head from side to side, looking him over, sizing up the opposition, or its prey? It squawked a single caw. The noise it made pierced the silence like a knife to the heart. Warmness spread through his pants.
The crow preened its chest feathers with its beak. Free of eye contact, the spell was temporarily broken. A sun beam broke briefly through the dense foliage, just long enough to illuminate a small smooth stone. He bent over in slow motion and picked up the rock from the gravel driveway. Without looking at the bird, he hurled the rock. His eyes followed the flight of the rock, which appeared almost to float toward its target. It struck the crow just above the eye. Feathers flew up; the crow tumbled to the ground.
Kenny stood there for what seemed an eternity, rooted to the spot. His eyes stretched wide, his heart pounded in his dry throat. The black bird lay in the gravel, making slight movements with its legs, beak and wings. It was more curiosity than an abundance of courage that caused him to move his feet toward the wounded bird. Blood was oozing from its brow. Ken saw a distorted image of himself in the black marble of an eye as he reached down toward its open wound. A lump the size of a golf ball worked its way into his throat as he stretched his shaking finger closer and closer to the bleeding crow.
In the instant he touched its feathers; the crow sprang to life, pecking his finger. The bird lifted itself into the air, and it was as if a flock of birds had descended upon him. The very air seemed to be alive with wings and beaks. Talons scratched at him from all directions.
Kenny raised his hands over his head for protection from the angry bird as he ran screaming for his Grandmother to save him. He slipped on a loose rock and he fell on the front steps, with a million beaks and two million wings beating and poking at him.
Grandma burst through the screen door brandishing her broom and uttering her mojo. She whacked the crow, and Kenny, a couple of times before the bird finally gave up the fight and flew off. Kenny watched it fly toward the backyard. The garage inhaled, sucking in cobwebs and dead leaves as the bird flew in. The crow disappeared into the darkness, but strangely, the garage didn't exhale.
His Grandmother wrapped her arms around him; the smell of fried pork chops heavily seasoned with pepper was strong around her she always smelled like pork chops. It smelled wonderful, and her arms felt safe.
Ken's second encounter with the crow had come just last week at his Grandmother's funeral. He was standing over her freshly covered grave long after everyone else had left. He watched in disbelief as raindrop after raindrop splattered on the marble headstone. He didn't have an umbrella, or even a hat for that matter. He didn't want one. He wanted to feel the ice cold drops of rain pounding on his head drowning his sorrow, washing away his anguish, and numbing his soul.
He read the headstone over and over in search of some last message, some final hope of capturing the essence of his Grandmother.
He was lost in thought, hypnotized by the repetition of the splattering raindrops when a black object fluttered out of the gloom. It paraded itself up and down the headstone in front of him, its thin claws clicking and gripping on the marble. It paused briefly and cocked its head from one side to the other, casting one of its black eyes at him in a sideways glance, in a familiar manner. It was a crow with a crest of red blood above its brow. Ken thought he saw something moving in its gullet when the crow strolled up and down the headstone. Something was alive inside the crow, and wanted out.
It squawked three times. The patter of the constant rain had been driven into the background, creating a wall of noise, shielding them from interruption. Their eyes locked together, Ken in mute horror, the crow a silent statuette.
"Beware the grave robber,” He heard his Grandmother’s voice say in the back of his mind. Something in the bird’s gullet began kicking and writhing furiously. The crow cocked its head sideways, and looked around a final time before it flapped its wings and disappeared, swallowed up in a veil of rain. "Beware the grave robber." He heard his Grandmother’s voice telling him again and he knew that that something kicking in the crow’s stomach was his Grandmother’s soul. It was a warning. A warning that it would be back, for someone close to him. He watched the bird disappear into the grayness of the rain.
‘Grandma always was a fighter.’ He thought to himself.
As his mind drifted so too did his car until Ken found himself staring at the bright lights of an on-coming semi. Air horns drowned out the wipers and the blasting music. His heart jumped into his throat as he maniacally twisted the wheel, aiming the car back across the endless black ribbon.
The tires bit into the wet asphalt and the car swerved off the road. Kenny jerked the steering wheel in the opposite direction. The driver’s side dipped, thrusting him into the door. The force of his weight popped the door open like a champagne cork, and Ken found himself reading the license plate of the out-of-state truck. Ken hung halfway out of the car, the shoulder harness pulled taut around his neck, choking him, while his fingers struggled desperately to maintain their grip on the wheel.
The car rocketed across the yellow line at a bizarre angle, skipped over the shoulder and across a patch of wet grass into a stand of trees. The driver side air bag deployed, popping him in the face. For a brief moment he couldn't get any air as the bone jarring impact forced his face deeper into the air bag's smothering embrace. The car rocked forward, the driver side door flapping loosely, and then fell back on its haunches.
Ken beat the air bag off him and, like a pearl diver coming up for air, he gasped a sweet lungful of life-giving air. He sat for a moment, dazed and confused. He heard the sound of the truck's air horns fading into the distance. The radio had died, so too had the windshield wipers.
Ken reached out a trembling hand and pulled the door closed. The collapsed airbag was everywhere. His mouth hung open as he hunched over the wheel, twisting the key in the ignition. The engine made a funny kind of grinding, clicking death moan. Ken tried it a few more times before officially pronouncing it dead as well. There was no choice, he would have to walk. Luckily, the cemetery was only about a mile and a half from here.
Ken got out of the car. He slammed the door shut like an old drunk. The car hissed a final sigh of relief at its passing. He looked back at the deep ruts the car had dug into the wet earth and began to make his way back up to the road.
His first steps toward the road told him why the ruts where so deep: the ground was almost liquid. Grass and mud ran into his loafers. He tried to shake the muck off, but it threatened to pull his shoe free of his foot. Ken decided it would be more prudent to walk with mud-caked shoes than to walk barefooted.
Ken began walking along the shoulder of the road, drawing his coat tightly about him. "Beware the grave robber," his Grandmother had called crows. The stealer of dead souls and the unborn. They would swoop down on expectant mothers and scare the unborn life from the pregnant mothers, then gobble up the hapless soul before it reached heaven. Ken had merely thought of the things his Grandmother had told him as old wives tales, nothing more, the same as death coming in threes. But the first two episodes with the crow weren't enough to convince him otherwise, and then surely the third one was.
It happened when he was sitting at home with his wife, Cassie. Ken was in the kitchen fixing Cassie one of those "you've got to be pregnant to eat these kind of snacks" when he heard her scream. By the time he got to the living room, she was hysterical. She was running around the coffee table and swinging her hands over her head.
"What are you doing?" Ken asked.
"There's a bird in here, Ken! Kill it! Kill it!"
"Where? I don't ..." It swooped down out of nowhere, cutting him of in mid-sentence. It was a black bird with a crest of red over its brow. He picked up a broom, like his Grandmother had done all those years ago, and swatted at it. He chased it around the living room, but proved not to be as skillful as his Grandmother. He thought he had the bird cornered and let fly with a vicious cut any major leaguer would be proud of, but the bird threw him a curve and the only thing he managed to hit was a lamp.
"Be careful!" Cassie ordered from behind him. "Don't break anything!"
Ken pledged to be careful, but to kill the bird. The bird settled in another corner. "Trapped!" Ken thought, and let loose with another mighty swing. But, like Casey at the bat, he missed again. He missed his target, but not Cassie’s knickknacks. The bird flew over the mantle and tried to hide, but Ken's next swing brought all the decorations crashing to the ground. The bird fluttered about the room. Ken made mad dashes from one corner to the next, stepping from couches to tables and back again. He swung furiously - without result. Just when he thought he had it cornered, his intended victim escaped up the chimney.
"So, that's how it got in," he said, "someone left the flue open." He looked around accusingly for Cassie, but didn't see her. Then it struck him: when he was knocking over the various knick-knacks and standing on the furniture she hadn't protested once. He heard a moan coming from the bathroom. He looked down to where her picture lay at his feet, the one she had taken in her maternity dress, showing the roundness of her stomach. It had fallen during the battle with the crow. Had he knocked it down? Or had the bird?
Ken raced into the bathroom where the pungent odor of fresh vomit slapped him in the face. Cassie lay on the floor; half her face pressed against the cold tile, soft moaning sounds eased their way from between her lips.
There followed a quick trip to the hospital. Cassie didn't utter a word the entire trip; she merely made soft, almost bird-like, cooing sounds. He rushed her into the emergency room. The prognosis was bad from the first. The nurse ushered him out to the waiting room while the doctor and the emergency staff worked over her feverishly.
He stepped outside to get a breath of air while he waited, and that was when he saw it: the crow was sitting on the roof of a nearby car. He heard the sound of a new born baby crying. It started to rain. The crow flapped its wings and headed south, towards the cemetery. Ken knew intuitively knew he had to follow.
The gates of the cemetery stood open, blown off their hinges. A crack of lightening illuminated the entrance briefly, followed closely by a clap of thunder that sent shivers through Ken's body. Ken forced himself to enter the gates, and although the lightning and thunder continued to rage, the rain stopped. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. The wind-blown clouds swirled at incredible speeds, yet all remained calm around him. In the spinning clouds he saw things that should have been earthbound. Headstones, coffins, and even bodies were spinning out of control. He pushed onward; his Grandmother's grave was over the hill and down the left side. As Ken walked the maelstrom moved with him, keeping him in its eye, until he finally arrived at his Grandmother's grave site.
"Where are you?!" Ken's screams were quickly gobbled up by the swirling winds and swept away. "I'm here! That's what you wanted isn't it?!" Silence.
The magnified sound of flapping wings rolled over him, and the caw of the crow ripped through the silence. The bird came out of the winds, climbed into the dark clouds overhead and swooped low over the ground, finally coming to rest on his Grandmother's headstone.
The crow dropped three stones, three rocks roughly the size of a child's hand. Ken wondered what he was supposed to do with them. Was the bird challenging him? Daring him to try and hit it again?
"What do you want from me?" Ken cried. Silence. He bent over and picked up the first stone. He clenched its smooth surface in his fist; it was cold to his touch. It felt good in his hands, the way a baseball feels to a pitcher.
Ken clutched the rock to his breast and mumbled a prayer, "Dear God Almighty in Heaven guide my hand." He closed his eyes tight and flung the rock with all his might. God must have answered his prayer and guided his hand as the stricken crow tumbled from the sky. A deathly wail escaped from the depths of the bird's battered body, a wail that reminded him strangely of Cassie. The crippled crow limped away, one of its wings dragging on the ground.
Ken picked up the second rock, it was icy cold in his hand and heavier than the first. He wasted no time. He screamed with hatred for the vile creature and hurled the second rock. The bird gained the air and the rock sailed wide of its mark. The crow cawed, and then cackled. Ken could hear the screams of a baby in pain, tortured.
The crow circled weakly over Ken's head as he bent to pick up the third rock - his last chance. This one was so cold it burned; he clenched it in his fist despite the pain. "Please God!" He took all his love for his family, all his hate and frustration that the crow had come to symbolize and screamed as he took aim on the bird in flight. The sound of his own effort resounded in his ears as he strained to throw the rock with every fiber of his being. All other sound ceased, all other movement stopped; it was as if the future of the entire world, his world, hung in the balance, waiting for the scales to tip to one side or the other.
The rock struck the crow just above the eye, the same spot it had the first time. Lightening filled the sky as the crow plummeted to the ground.
A ray of sunlight broke through the clouds and sought him out. From somewhere Ken could here the faint cries of a baby, the cry of a new born babe as it makes its way into the new world.
This time, Ken wasn't going to stick out a finger. He looked at the bird lying helplessly on the ground at his mercy, its black eye flickering back and forth. Something in its gullet kicked and poked to get out. Ken lifted his mud-caked loafer and rammed the heel into its skull. Brilliant lightning flashed all about. A thunder clap knock him off his feet.
His ears were ringing as he struggled upright. Through the ringing in his ears he thought he heard his Grandmother's voice say, "Thank you and I love you."
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Riding The Witch II: Dancing With The Devil
