Crowsong

Lonny Gallagher and Jennifer Tudor were right about one thing: their third grade time capsule is no longer in the ground behind the school. They had no way of knowing this when they went digging for it, but wouldn’t it be something for them to somehow find out that it is still intact, and has landed in good hands? Hands of one of their own, in fact. It is very near. Nearer still as the crow flies, so let’s say you’re the crow. Doing your thing up on the top rung of the guardrail encircling the vast tank of the water tower at the Arboretum. Let’s say you go winging off the rail and soar over Ian McAvoy’s Boy Scout bench and the spot where Terra Fisk held Regan Tudor’s hand in her own and then onward in a southeasterly direction over the house where Shane and Shelly Razor live with Wyatt and leave the crusts of their grilled cheeses out for you, then over the Stop sign where the ghost bike gleams and where ooooh, there’s a lot of eye-catching shiny treasure, don’t let your walnut of a brain get distracted but don’t let anybody call you bird brain, either: you’re a crow.

You are practically made of memory.

You know the people of this town by the very outlines of their bodies; you can see their grief from the trees, know that when they gather that way around the ghost bike, when they leave their secret gifts, they’re behaving exactly like you and your razor-sharp corvid kin. The gathering is called mobbing. It’s in the hollows of your bones. Re-caching is what the treasuring is called, you do it all the time, you mate for life and life of course means long long after death, look at you in the feathers of your mourning cloak, you never take it off.

Soar on now, you avian brainiac, over the high school playing fields toward that fancy gated neighborhood where the houses back up to the lake, where you like to scare the herons as they tiptoe grandly around on their pterodactyl legs and where Ryan Ayers lives in the grand white house with the canoe out back. You like to rummage around in the bottom of that canoe, banked now but always at the ready to ferry Ryan Ayers out to the middle of the lake whenever he feels like forgetting himself for a while. When Ryan was young he’d ride his bike over here—he was drawn even then to this lakeside house, the expanse of water beyond. In order to dream himself out of his own childhood home he promised himself: I will live in that house one day. Just me and me alone.

And now he does! Talk about crowlike focus.

Keep your focus about you: glide now to the garage, where Ryan has stashed the box.

Ryan Ayers isn’t the Ambulance Chaser some might think he is. You and your murder of friends could see it in the way his face changed when he came upon the box. What happened was, he got called out to the elementary school site on a worker’s comp case: the man operating the excavator got injured when the machine hit the conduit and the underground stream burst to life. By the time Ryan arrived on the scene, the water was already being pumped and funneled up and away, but the place looked like a disaster zone.

Now if Ryan were possessed of crow-memory like yours, he might’ve remembered the time capsule as soon as one of the crewman dug it up and shouted Come look at this, but as it happened the lightbulb in Ryan’s head was slow to burn and didn’t fully shine until he had the thing in his hands, put it gently on the ground, pried it open to find cache that sang straight to the heart of his boy-self. There was his Darth Vader, still in its plastic shell. This one had come as a birthday present after the real one, the one his father had given him after taking him to his very first movie in a theatre: The Empire Strikes Back. Seeing that movie is one of Ryan’s first and best memories, one of precious few good ones he has of his father. Two hours of safe, uncomplicated nearness to his dad in the movie theatre dark: that sweetness. But two hours is not many. It’s not enough.

In the days after Shane’s accident, Ryan had told his old friend: You don’t see me having kids, not when it’s nothing but heartbreak. It was part of the truth. The unspoken rest is that the chance of turning into his father was one Ryan would never take.

From your high perch on the elementary school basketball hoop, you cocked your shiny onyx head and watched Ryan Ayers think these thoughts. You watched him remove the action figure from the packaging and cry for the first time since his divorce. Watched him remember how, on the morning they filled the time capsule, Ms. See had taught them the meaning of syllables, clapped out Ian’s name to show five: I-an Mc-A-voy. Oh, how Ryan had loved Ms. See. She had known. Had asked if someone was hurting him, and in his shame he’d told her no. Ryan could see her now. In the things his classmates had loved, he could see them all.

The skate, the baseball card, the view finder, the two-dollar bill, all the glorious rest: now lined up like trophies in the garage of Ryan Ayers, who in just a short while will be the one to rescue the white bicycle up at the four-way Stop by the high school. He’ll be driving by and see the guy from Coldstream Electric burning through the chain, will pull over and say, Just what in fresh hell is this?

It’s against city ordinance for this thing to be here, the guy will explain. It’s a danger to folks and if we don’t clear it on out there could be another kid hit, liability out the wazoo, we’ve got a loitering problem on our hands, distracted drivers, et cetera on and on, I’m just following orders here, sir.

Ryan Ayers, re-cacher extraordinaire, will re-cache the ghost bike in his garage. Will remember his own childhood bicycle—the one his father crushed with the car—as he gives the Schwinn some love and a fresh coat of paint. He will save it for his old classmate Jennifer M., whose battered panda now watches over the garage, listens with one good ear from his perch on the shelf. Someday soon, Jennifer M. might want that bike to keep. He’ll deliver it under cover of darkness, anonymous for once, because Ryan Ayers isn’t a full-time asshole. He can be nice—thoughtful, even—for longer than two hours at a time. He’ll perch the stuffed panda on the seat. He’ll drop off Lonny Gallagher’s skate like a thief in the night, return the tape and the two-dollar bill to Shane, see what he can do about all this other stuff—he’s lost track of some of these people, but he’ll find them, the ones still in the world. It’s a project now, and he’s always had a knack for those.

Oh my god, this smashed-up box of Luden’s cough drops! That was Charlie K, Ryan will eventually remember. Charlie forgot they had the capsule assignment that day; the cough drops were all he had. The mint-green My Little Pony with a shamrock on its butt: Jenny Silver, divorced now with a couple-few kids, but still in Coldstream and smoking hot as ever. I should give her a call, Ryan will think and then do. Give this pony back to her, just for shits and giggles.

Ian McAvoy’s Pete Rose baseball card? Ryan Ayers will keep that relic for himself. Keep it on his person for the rest of his life. Because you know what, Ryan will think to himself, you don’t have to have a child to have been one.