a respectful distance, Dubykky got up and followed the bird as it ambled along. Its sibling was cawing aggressively now. Still, he considered catching the bird. Crows were smart, great mimics of human words if cared for and educated properly. And they were companionable. While Dubykky was mulling the idea, the fledgling came to its own decision. It hunched down, jumped up with wings outstretched and, flapping like a feather-duster in a whirlwind, made it atop the park’s lone picnic table. For a long time it perched there, looking by turns confused and bored, yawning wide its beak, then probing among its wing feathers. When Dubykky paced a few more steps forward, it canted its head to keep an eye trained on him, the whitish membrane blinking rhythmically over the black bulge, but it did not flee.
And so there the two stood, eying each other, only a dozen feet apart. Suddenly aware that the cawing had stopped, Dubykky glanced upward. The sibling was gone.
Then something happened that Dubykky had never before experienced, not ever in his long observation of crows and their cousins. The youngster crooned to him. Not only that, but it gathered itself and leapt into the air once more, windmilling its wings for all it was worth until it came to rest on Dubykky’s shoulder, knocking off his hat.
Terrifically pleased, Dubykky left the hat on the ground and made his way slowly homeward, assuring the young crow of his respect and goodwill in a polite, careful voice. There was no one about to goggle at the outlandish sight, a prominent local attorney with a crow on his shoulder. Dinnertime, the town’s central daily ritual, kept people indoors.
It was all a very good omen and irresistibly flattering. Befriending him, the fledgling clearly perceived that Dubykky was fundamentally different. That Dubykky could be a friend.
Dubykky decided to call him Jurgen, for he was male. He caressed feathers under the crow’s beak and spoke the name aloud each time. Jurgen remained rooted to Dubykky’s shoulder all the way home. The bird sometimes gurgled gently in response but seemed on the whole content to listen to whatever Dubykky said, and he had a lot to say, because he had a specific purpose in mind for Jurgen. It required, first, that Dubykky teach the vocabulary of his own existence: of destiny, crime and retribution, evil and duty, pursuit and punishment, vengeance and death. Dubykky took care to repeat important words in as many contexts as possible.
His house lay at the end of English Street at the town’s edge, a half mile from the park, single-story, flat-roofed, pale ochre, and tidy as a new deck of cards. Inside, he set Jurgen on the back of a dining table chair. A quick survey of his refrigerator, and he laid out a plate of raw hamburger. For himself, Dubykky grilled a pork chop and heated up canned spinach. He didn’t really care what he ate.
They sat companionably together, Jurgen mostly quiet after the excited outburst of screeching that came with his first taste of hamburger. In the slanting light through the tiny kitchen window above the sink, his black eyes glinted like ebony. When he finished, he hopped back onto Dubykky’s shoulder and pecked affectionately at his earlobe. At that point, Dubykky’s fondness for him was cemented. Yet it would not be his to enjoy for long, and Dubykky felt a pang of regret.
He squelched it. The boylike creature would benefit far more from a boon companion like Jurgen. The creature was far needier.
NOW IN THE PICKUP, Jurgen might have been having second thoughts about his new acquaintance. When Dubykky had turned the key in the ignition and the engine ground and fired, Jurgen flared his wings, uttering a censorious hiccoughing sound. Dubykky murmured soothing words as they backed out. “Grawp,” Jurgen objected after Dubykky shifted into first gear and the truck lurched forward down English Street. It seemed wrong to him that while he was standing still the world moved past, and at a steadily increasing pace.
Matthew Gans, Jr.—if that was indeed the correct name, which Dubykky had no reason yet to believe—might be lurking anywhere. Miles upon miles of sand and scrub, mountains, gullies, and lake shore all lay within the walking range of a sturdy boy. And, if Dubykky’s suspicions proved correct, the creature was more than merely sturdy. This could mean days of searching. Yet Dubykky’s experience told him that the creature would seek to conceal himself until he was ready to strike. That gave Dubykky the idea where to look.
“I’ll call you Junior,” he said aloud, just to get the feel of the name, “whether you’re Matthew Gans or not.” Jurgen took a small step sideways and peeped around at him, curious.
Hawthorne was one of those high desert towns that had always seen better days. It was surrounded by a halo of neglect. From its outskirts, dirt roads cut through the sand flats and into and out of ravines and around little knolls of rock and greasewood, where invariably stood trailers or tarpaper shacks at irregular intervals, most empty, at least temporarily, companions to scavenged automobiles and jumbled appliances. If Nevada’s highways linked its far-flung towns into a state, it was the dirt roads that lashed a town to the landscape. Where the sandy ruts ultimately led revealed what the community cared about, past and present—a mine, a ranch, a reservoir, a fossil bed, a hunting range, a campground, a field cabin, a hot spring, a graveyard, a lake, an inexplicable pasture, or, as was sometimes the endpoint, a petering out, an idea abandoned.
Dubykky started down three of the roads until each time he came upon a shack leaking light from behind a sheet-curtained window, then turned back. A deserted road was what he sought. The fourth he explored proved to be just that. He followed its ruts until they dwindled away and put the Ford into reverse. It was too risky to turn around in the soft sand, so he stayed in reverse until he returned to the last of the shacks he had passed.
He stopped nearby, letting the truck idle while he emptied his mind of every thought and sense impression. It was an old familiar practice of his, and the nighttime desert produced nothing to distract him. The last thing he noted before he achieved complete blankness was the faint susurrus of Jurgen’s even breathing. The crow had fallen asleep.
Nothing from the first shack intruded on his inner void, not the least whisper. He was wearing a wool sweater and heavy corduroy trousers against the intensifying night chill. Even so, cold soon penetrated, and he realized it, a mentation that ended the trance. He tried to re-enter it but shivered. Strange, that. So slight a chill had never distracted him. It was one more instance, if a small one, of change creeping into his long, errant life, a life in which change, if it came at all, came for a reason, foreseeably.
That had not been the case recently. That very morning Dubykky had experienced something nearly unprecedented: a gush of warmth for a human. This unaccustomed emotion arose while he was standing behind his desk at Dubykky & Cledge, Esq., Attorneys at Law. It was evoked, in fact, by his brand-new partner.
Dubykky and Milton Cledge could not have been more dissimilar, even discounting that Cledge was a twenty-six-year-old human and Dubykky had lived more than half a millennium as something that only looked human. It was their here-and-now temperamental differences that mattered, and they did not put Dubykky off. He got along with humans just fine when he needed to. But Milt was proving to be almost superhuman in a modest, inadvertent way. The exceptional thing about him was his face. Not its appearance, which was somewhat adolescent and doughy. Its expressions. Milt could not control them—did not even realize he couldn’t. That ought to have simply been ridiculous, yet the first time they met, Dubykky perceived at once that there was much more to Milt’s expressions than mannerism. They were the emotional eruptions of a decent person. The perfect antithesis of Dubykky.
He had been interviewing applicants to become his partner in the Hawthorne law practice, until then a solo concern. Cledge was among them. He walked into the interview looking determined but wary. It took place in Reno because that was Nevada’s largest city and conveniently near the California border. Nevada had no law school of its own, so most fledgling lawyers came from those in
