The Story Garden 5.0
Fiction
Therapy By Crows
"BITCH!"
"WHORE!"
Cackle, cackle.
"Shithead!"
"Dickface."
Cackle, cackle, cackle.
The two of them had been at it all morning, right outside Melvin's window, under the pear tree. Both blacker than darkness and apparently disinterested in flight this morning. Two big crows.
He'd felt a little panicky at first, hearing them talk. He'd had plenty of troubles lately and thought maybe he'd finally lost it completely. But as he watched and listened to them through the screen of the open window while they played their insipid insult game, Melvin became fascinated and engrossed. Thus forgetting his unease.
"Hey, fartbreath!"
"What you want, littledick?"
"Look at this mess. Guy's got some serious problems lives here."
"Prob'ly one a them psychos. Check out the bird bath. Not a drop of water in a year."
Cackle.
"Like to see the sonofabitch. Bet he's got a big fat ass."
Melvin wiggled in his chair and blushed at his plumpness.
"Let's get `im out here." The crow flapped his wings and landed on a branch not three feet from Melvin's face, frightening him with its sudden aggression.
CAAAAAAAWWWWWW! "Get the hell out here, you stupid ass. We gotta talk to you."
Melvin leaned toward the window, not believing that he was about to talk to a bird. "You...you mean me?" he asked.
"Fuck yes, we mean you, numbnuts." Now the other crow flew to an adjoining branch and offered, "Get yer ass out here, shit-for-brains!"
Melvin looked around to see if any of his neighbors were about. Not a soul. He walked over to the back door and picked up an old gray hat off the hook. Then he reached, reluctantly, for the door knob and donned the hat as he stepped onto the back porch.
The crows dropped from their perches and strode about in front of him like crazed soldiers. The first one to speak bent his head over and Melvin swore he spit on the ground first. "Listen, jackass, see that old sofa you got out there by the garage? What you think your neighbors wanna do with that? I'll tell you, BIRDBRAIN! They wanna set it on fire, and your damned shabby garage, too."
Melvin glanced at discarded sofa he'd shoved in back of the garage, getting it out of the way. Like all the other junk in his yard, it was just waiting for him to accumulate a critical mass and call the junk man to haul it away. But he never called. He eyed the crows and stammered, "Uhm...You...uh..."
"Whatsamatter? Cat got your tongue?" Cackle, cackle. "Them fuckers are bad. Cat's one mean sumbitch, man. Yeah. But look, Melvin--that's right, ain't it? That's what it says on the mailbox--you gotta clean this place up. You got people pissed off, Mel."
"Waiting for the junk man," Melvin finally said.
"Waiting?" said the crow that Melvin noticed had a limp. "This shit's waiting for the junk man? Hey, Happy, go axe that engine block if it's waitin' on the junk man."
The other crow flew off and landed on top of the Chrysler V-8 block that Melvin had given up on and dropped off the chain beneath a maple tree three years ago. The bird bobbed up and down a minute and flew back. "Block says it don't know nothin' `bout the junk man." Cackle.
Melvin said, "I haven't called him yet. Waiting to get enough stuff." It felt truly odd, being defensive to a pair of birds.
"Oh, so you're the one who's waiting," said limping crow. "Well look around, you cheap bastard. This yard's a disgrace, even to this godforsaken neighborhood." Then the bird flew up to the railing on the porch and Melvin stepped back, bumping into the door. "Ain't gonna peck you, brother. Relax." It twisted its neck and gestured at the pile of tires. "Fire hazard. Ever see one a them tire blazes? Man does that stink! Pretty color, though, tires."
The crow stepped gingerly along the rail, spitting over the side of the porch. "Melvin, get yer fat butt over to the phone and call the dude. Do it now!" Then it flew back under the pear tree and the bird he called Happy strutted around the tree and cackled. "Pinhead! Edgar, that guy's dumber than a stone. Did you see that friggin' hat? Dude looked like one of the musketeers. Dopey, I think."
Happy and Edgar, Melvin thought. He was being ordered by two crows named Happy and Edgar to call the junk man. He looked out the window and surveyed the trash in his yard. It had accumulated like all the other disasters in his life: his son in prison; his wife--ex-wife--run off with her hairdresser, Ruby; his job as a mechanic at the Citgo station pretty much lost to a kid from the technical college; his indeed fat butt growing fatter; his checking account containing maybe five dollars; his old dog vomiting on the rugs. "One sorry sumbitch," he heard one of the crows say. "Ain't worth a good goddam." Cackle. And cackle in return.
MOTHERFUCKER!
COCKSUCKER!
Cackle, cackle. It went on like that while Melvin looked up the junk man's number in the wad of grimy business cards he kept wrapped with a rubber band. There it was: Wiley the Junk Man. Melvin looked out the window and watched the crows dip and yawl around the yard. Then he called Wiley's number. Just before noon, the crows took flight, first to the oak tree in his next-door neighbor's yard and then off into the distance.
By the end of the day, Wiley had the yard scoured of junk. It still looked like a wasteland, but an empty one now. Melvin walked out and looked around. Place was much improved. His neighbor, Mrs. DeSantis, a widow, came out her back door and called to him. "Yard's lookin' real nice, Melvin." Then she went back inside. First time he'd seen her in months, first time she'd spoken to him in a couple of years. Melvin was stunned.
That night, he dreamed he was holding a conversation with a pair of crows.
Next morning, Melvin is sleeping, six a.m.
CUNT!
PIG!
Cackle, cackle. CAAAAWWWW! "Get the fuck outta bed, you lazy lardass!"
He turned over and gazed at the two birds on his windowsill. They waddled oddly, one of them limping. Melvin rose on one elbow and checked the clock radio. "It's six in the morning, you guys."
"It's time to get up, shit-for-brains, and you stink anyway. Get in the shower." They flew off.
Awake now, two hours at least before his usual rising time, Melvin stepped into the tub and picked up a hair-laden chunk of soap. He looked at it for a moment and even though it looked no different than any other chunk of soap he'd had in the bathroom, it was suddenly disgusting to him. His own dark hairs. Repulsive.
Just as he walked out into the morning light to pick up the newspaper, the paper boy pulled up on his bicycle and looked at him as if he were an apparition. "Are you Mister Reeves?" the boy asked. "Yes I am," Melvin replied. The boy said, "Thanks for getting that stuff off the sidewalk!" Then he rode off and one of the crows lit on the rack over his back wheel, getting a free ride for fifty yards, then, silently, taking flight and circling back to Melvin's front door. The crow limped around for a minute and Melvin searched the yard for Happy, who soon flew up, coughing, and spit on his doorstep. "Okay, pissant, get to work."
Melvin went down to the Citgo station and ducked under the open bay door on four. Alex, his new competition, was bent over a blue Ford and looked up at him, wiping his hands off on a flannel cloth. Melvin said "Hey," and the mechanic said "Hey" back. Melvin walked past the three other bays, all with cars rolled onto the lifts awaiting repair and walked into the office. Macy Reynolds, who owned the station, was looking over his bifocals at the filthy screen of the computer. "Melvin," he said. "What's up? Wanna fix some cars?"
Putting back the air filter on a Plymouth Duster, Melvin saw the woman pass beside the car. She smiled at him and he nearly fell down. It was Carol Collins, a girl he had gone to high school with--well, a woman now, and he knew she had three children and was divorced--but she obviously didn't recognize him. She looked right through his substantial girth and down into the engine of her car. "You done yet?" she asked. "Gotta go. Gotta get this Duster a little more dusty." Melvin looked at the car and saw it was clean. "Yeah," he said, "A clean car's worth more, but who cares about money?" Carol flipped her red-tipped fingernails against his shirt sleeve and said, "I'll be damned. Aren't you Melvin Reeves?"
Because he could think of no other response, Melvin said, "Yes."
"Well you're lookin' healthy, Melvin. Who's cookin' you all them big dinners?"
Melvin felt tortured by her beauty and sarcasm--at least what he took to be sarcasm. "Cook `em myself," he said, and shut the hood of the car. "Ready to go, Carol."
But she shot right back: "Hey, we're just getting' started, Melvin. We gotta lotta catchin' up to do. You done for the day?" He looked at the giant clock on the back wall of the garage and saw he was already on his own overtime. "Guess so," he said.
"Well, honey, why don't you run on home and wash up then come by my house `bout seven. We'll wing it from there." She handed Melvin a business card, which he held by its crisp white edges. "Sure, " he said. "Seven."
When he got home, Melvin noticed that he felt...lighter. He hopped up onto the porch but then, CAAAAAWWWWWWWWWW! "What the hell you think yer doin', fat boy?" It was Edgar, perched in the pear tree.
"Got a hot date, Edgar. Gotta get cleaned up."
"You got a date? A hot date? Bullshit!"
"I kid you not." Melvin felt somewhat collegial with the crows now.
Cackle, cackle. "Happy! This turkey's got himself a date!" To which Happy flew over and remarked, "Prob'ly some porker just like you, right Mel?"
"No. She's beautiful. A divorcee with grown kids."
"Think about it, sucker. What's she want from you?"
Now that the bird had asked, Melvin honestly couldn't say what interested Carol in him.
~ ~ ~
He took her to the Crow's Nest, a boite down by the wharf. They settled in at a table and she ordered a glass of chardonnay. He ordered an Old Crow. On the rocks. She smiled. "You bring me to the Crow's Nest and you order an Old Crow. Are you a raven maniac?" Then she burst out laughing. "Just kidding. Get it?"
"I get it, Carol. Even though a raven is not, strictly, a crow."
"Birds of a feather."
"Let's just say I've got something to crow about."
~ ~ ~
Morning found them snorting and rooting around on each other's bodies like truffle hunters. Carol was naked. There were no covers, not even a sheet on the bed. Melvin, unaccountably, was wearing glow-in-the-dark boxer shorts, now wrapped around his bulging knees. Then it came back to him that she had presented him with the shorts as a "first date present." She'd said, "I'm giving you these because I've got a feeling about us, Melvin."
Together, they smelled like a bottle of bad whiskey spilled in an overipe ashtray. Above them the room fan blew that odor back at them, and eventually he reached for the switch and turned it off. Carol went back to sleep. Melvin lay there nearly comatose himself, listening with fondness to the hissing mass of overwrought sinuses that was bunched up beside him like an old dog. To Melvin it was music.
The sun was raising one eye over the horizon, a squint that drew a line across the bedroom from the window to Carol's lace panties hanging from the headrest of the vinyl front passenger-side bucket seat from a 1967 Mustang that Melvin used as an easy chair in his bedroom. The sunlight across the room was like a rod of gold, he thought, and surely he was in heaven.
Then CAAAAAWWWWWWWWWW!
"Hey, dogfart, get the fuck up!"
"Get yer ass outa bed, lumpy."
Carol sprang up from the bed in her birthday suit as if she were a coiled spring released from a vise. She surveyed the room, ending her gaze on Melvin's puffy body. "Melvin," she said. "There's someone `round the house and they're cussin' up a storm."
Melvin propped himself up on one elbow and looked out the window. Happy and Edgar were bickering over the shiny wrapper of an inside-out potato chip bag. When Happy flew off with the prize, Edgar hopped over to Melvin's windowsill and spied the gloriously naked Carol cringing at the foot of Melvin's bed. He said nothing and Carol didn't see him. "I didn't hear anything, Carol," was what Melvin ventured.
Then, having stashed his gleaming prize, Happy returned and fluttered loudly to a perch beside Edgar on the windowsill. "Jesus Fucking Christ, Mel..." but Edgar kicked him hard with his good leg, lurching dangerously toward his bad one. Carol spun toward the window like an anti-missle system focusing on an incoming projectile.
Melvin arose from the bed and stood on the floor the way a mountain might roll over onto the plain beside it. Moving toward the window and blocking it with his mass, he said to her, "I forgot to tell you I have some trained birds, Carol." She stepped over to him and spun him around like a globe. Carol's milky posterior was now firmly pressed against the screen and one small part of it protruded through a hole in the mesh. Happy couldn't resist.
But Carol thought it was Melvin who had pinched her ass. She gave him another spin and pressed his own ample butt against the screen. "Trained birds?" she squeaked. "I like a man who's nice to animals."
Feeling a sudden pressure from the previous night's indulgence, and spun away from her as he were, Melvin farted through the screen. The birds took off like black jets to the safe remove of the pear tree. "Wish I'd had a lighter," Happy said.
Edgar spit. "Tell the bitch to get lost," he screamed, and Carol gave Melvin another turn. "I heard that," she said out the window. Melvin leaned onto the sill and shook his head. "Listen. Edgar. Happy. Please don't talk like that to Carol."
"Carol," is it? Happy flew over to the sill just as it dawned on Carol that these were no trained birds. She leaped away from the window. "What the fuck...? Melvin you can't be talkin' with crows. That's like some kind of devil worship! Satanism."
Melvin couldn't see the connection, so he said, "They're my friends, Carol. They're helping me out around here." A look of perplexity passed over Carol's smeared makeup like a winter storm. She looked again at the crows and then back at Melvin. "You're defending these jerks, Melvin? You're taking the side of these birds who have cursed me?" And with that she swiped her panties from the end of the rod of golden light, an act which Melvin knew was a prelude to her swift exit.
"Goddam crows," she said, climbing into her clothing, "and goddam you too, Melvin Reeves." And then she marched out, carrying her stiletto heels.
~ ~ ~
"Who the hell was that, slimeball?" Carol's car had barely skidded out of his driveway and he could still hear its racing engine when Edgar raised the question. Melvin walked out into the dawn naked and sat down on his porch steps and began to weep. Edgar limped up a few feet in front of him. The bird tilted its head several different ways and then flew up and perched on top of Melvin's head. "I'm sorry, bird turd" he said. "We didn't know..." Then he flitted back to the pear tree and Melvin could hear him laughing under his crow breath.
Melvin picked up a half-pint can of paint thinner from the stack of similar leftovers by the back door and hurled it at the bird, but missed. Edgar jumped into the air and screamed. CAAAWWW! "Shit fire, man, I said I was sorry!"
Happy landed on the porch rail. "Listen, ape dung, whoever that bitch is, you're lucky she split. Woman who'd ask you to give up your friends is a non starter, Melvin." The crow pointed his wing in the direction in which Carol had just departed. "That's some high maintenance pussy there, buddy. You should be thanking us, you dumb fuck."
At that moment, Mrs. DeSantis from next door came out to water her zinnias. Pouring from the can, she slowly scanned Melvin's back yard and smiled. Happy was the first to see what was about to come down. He dropped onto the disconsolate Melvin, who was unrelieved from his grief when the crow landed on his swollen thigh and spread its wings to cover his bareness from butt to belly. The bird then buried his head beneath Melvin's pendulous balls, which awakened him from his stupor, and Melvin heard Happy's muffled order: "Freeze, dirt bag, or I'll peck your pecker into a rotten banana!"
Mrs. DeSantis looked down at her zinnias.
Edgar, who was following this scene from the top of the single hubcap that Wiley had leaned against the garage, thinking it belonged on Melvin's rusting Lincoln, flew into action, sinking his talons just a little too deeply into Melvin's porcine shoulder then engulfing a hairy chest and back with his feathery black appendages. "You heard the man!" Edgar spit, then slipped his head into Melvin's armpit.
Melvin winced.
Mrs. DeSantis continued her gaze of Melvin's property, over where the engine block no longer rested under the maple, past the missing wringer washing machine and ending at the naked, but bird-covered Melvin. She squinted, then stopped watering. "Melvin," she called, "That's a damn nice outfit you're wearing this morning! And your yard looks so nice! Why don't you come over for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee?"
Melvin was overwhelmed with her enthusiasm. He began to giggle. Mrs. DeSantis set down her bucket. Happy and Edgar fluttered with laughter in his most private places. Melvin shouted, "Thanks, Mrs. DeSantis. Just give me a minute."
"Please. Call me Dolly," she hollered and tottered back into her house, waving in her arthritic way an indication that she would see him shortly. Then the birds pulled out their heads and began to sing in harmony, "...four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie..."
Melvin laughed then shooed them off and went into the house, looking for something black to wear.
--Glenn Osborn
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