dessert. Cledge had ordered ice cream, but she had a figure to maintain.
Conversation resumed with the dessert. By then Cledge had forgotten about the boy and queried Dubykky and Mildred about local politicians. Mildred barely responded, which seemed to distress him. But Mildred did not have a problem with Cledge. It was just that nothing would fix in her mind except the sight of that strange boy across Main Street, his eyes trained right their way. Uncanny.
Cledge left first, shaking her hand and again assuming a stilted style of address to profess great pleasure in meeting her and sharing a meal. Watching him leave, she was interested to find him a sturdy figure and tallish, maybe five eleven, but a little ungainly in gait. Large feet. The soles of his wingtips, canted back at her as he stepped, were clean, hardly scuffed. She approved.
“Well, Milly,” said Dubykky, and Mildred snapped her eyes away from the retreating figure. Dubykky had a little smile, the one with just the very corners of his mouth turned up that he used to tease her sometimes. “What do you think of your future husband?”
Mildred flushed and spluttered protests. He just shook his head once and turned to watch out the window. Mildred was glad of the opportunity to switch the subject. Sometimes Will Dubykky just—she had been going to say to herself “went too far,” but the words didn’t suit her, and she balked. Her frank, inner voice finished the sentence with, acts like a weirdo. She compressed her whole face, which was how she got rid of unpleasantness in her mind. Back to the subject: “You saw him, didn’t you? The odd-looking boy?”
Dubykky nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“Wasn’t it strange, though? I mean, there he was across the street. And looking right at us. Will?”
Dubykky continued to stare out the window. Mildred kept her eyes on his ear while she spoke, because with the approaching dusk she felt a compulsion not to look where he was looking. “Don’t you wonder why he was there? I do. Maybe he wanted something from me. But how would he know I was here in the restaurant? Will? And what could he possibly want from me now that the library is closed? Will? Say something!”
Dubykky sighed, which astonished Mildred. She had not heard such a sound from him before, a sigh that said something like, All right, there it is, I’ll have to attend to it. Or so it seemed to her.
At last he replied and did so in a tone hardly more than a murmur, but a tone nonetheless firm and clear, the tone he used when he told her something that she was absolutely supposed to take to heart. Sometimes, on the infrequent occasions when she heard that particular tone from him, Mildred wondered whether Dubykky regarded himself as a replacement father to her.
“It’s a warning,” he said.
Ridiculous as the remark sounded, a chill swept through Mildred.
“Nonsense,” she managed to say, prim and steady despite the frisson. “What warning would a boy want to give me?”
Now Dubykky took his eyes away from Main Street and directed them hard at her. The little teasing smile played on his lips for a moment, yet the fatherly tone was still there when he said, “A warning not to let yourself get interested in Matthew Gans, Senior.”
“William Dubykky! I never—”
But he cut her off, and playfully. “Milly, Milly. A married man. Really! What would Gladys say?”
That brought him exactly what Mildred expected he wanted: flurried protestations of surprise and dismay at the very idea. Of course, she would never, ever entertain … But even as Mildred was running through her denials, her absolute assurances of propriety, even then she understood that Dubykky had not been teasing her. The warning, whether the boy’s or just Dubykky’s or from them both, was genuine. After they parted, Mildred did not tarry to enjoy the sensuous evening air, now that the wind had slackened. The sky was darkening. Mildred wanted nothing more than to hurry home before night set in.
Nevada was the state of endurance and defiance. Nevadans endured nature and happily defied each other; they happily defied nature and endured each other. But no one with a grain of sense tempted the desert night, not without cause, not without trepidation. Outside the busy lights, boundless and bare, it mocked humanity.
Two
All the next day, Will Dubykky had the fey boy, “Matthew Gans, Jr.,” on his mind. He suspected what the boy really was. Not a boy. Not a human, but a related, though darkly distinct, creature. He intended to find out for sure. Duty required it, in fact.
After work he returned home and got into his ‘51 Ford pickup, venerably battered and covered with lumpy pea-green enamel by its previous owner. Perched on his shoulder, clutching so hard that the claws dug into Dubykky, was a new friend, a young crow. Together they drove out of town looking for obscure back roads where they might come across abandoned shacks. In some such place, Dubykky expected, they would find the boylike creature.
The crow and Dubykky had met only hours earlier. He was walking home from his office, as he liked to do on a fine spring day, and on a whim diverted to the Mineral County Courthouse park to enjoy the sunlight filtering through its cottonwood trees. He felt an affinity for trees, difficult to satisfy in Hawthorne. It was a lucky whim.
He had cocked back his fedora and was just settling himself onto a bench to have a careful, undisturbed think about the creature when a plaintive, anxious squawk rang out nearby. He searched among the middle branches of a cottonwood until he spotted the squawker, a crow.
Dubykky liked crows and was immediately entranced. It looked like a fledgling. Even when they reached more or less full size, the juveniles were distinct from their elders. Their feathers were finer, fluffier around the neck, and had a subtle gray overtone; their bills showed faint red streaks at the back. In the nest, when an adult arrived the chicks crooned a low, harsh, breathy sound, like wax paper being crumpled slowly, and the adults crooned back in kind. These were identification sounds, Dubykky supposed. There was something so intimate and comfortable and trusting about crows when they were together that Dubykky was almost envious. They belonged to each other. Belonging—it was a mysterious concept to him, but recently, an appealing one.
The crow was looking downward intently and shifting its weight from claw to claw. Dubykky followed its gaze, and as he did so, he heard a disorderly flapping of wings in the lower limbs of a nearby tree. There he spotted a second fledgling, this one hanging upside down, thoroughly flummoxed. It flapped its wings to right itself but failed. The limbs were too close together. It tried and tried. Finally, it let go and dropped to the next limb. But it missed its grasp and ended hanging again, this time by one claw.
Dubykky’s first impulse was to go to its aid. The bird was easily within reach. He didn’t dare, though. Crows were rightly shy of humans, and the first crow might call in others to mob him and drive him away. Then he would not get to watch how things turned out for the youngster. Instead, he called out for it to drop to the ground and get its bearings there.
Dubykky was half in earnest, too, yet he did not expect the crow to take the advice. Whether by chance or choice, though, it did. It let go again, landing in a heap on the grass, and for a moment lay there stunned. Finally, it struggled up on its claws and looked around, then waddled seemingly at random over the lawn in a side-to-side roll, tail wagging to balance, shoulders hunched, the head jutting forward with each step. This fledgling had not yet mastered the crow walk. It stumbled once and had to flare its wings. Dubykky chuckled in an appreciative way. The kid had gumption!
