LITMIR.BIZ

      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!

      Maintaining 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.