The boy was a little afraid. Am I a monster, he asked after a while, and the crow didn't answer. Are you one of my friends, the little boy asked.
Of course I am, said the crow. In fact, I'm your best friend in the whole wide world.'
The children stirred as the applause faded, and they could hear the first of the grown-ups drifting down the central path. The young man frowned briefly. He thought he had planned the story better, to end just as the band did, but he had gotten too carried away, elaborating and posturing to get the kids laughing so they wouldn't be bored. Now he had lost them. He could see it in their eyes, in the shifting on the benches, in the way their heads turned slightly, too polite to ignore him outright though their gazes were drawn to the blacktopped walk that came out of the dark on its way to the south exit.
'Crows don't talk,' one ski-capped boy suddenly declared with a know-it-all smile as he slipped off his seat.
'Sure they do,' a girl in a puffy jacket argued.
'Oh, yeah? You ever hear one, smarty?'
'Bet you never even saw one, Cheryl,' another boy said. 'I'll bet you don't even know what they look like.'
The girl turned, hands outstretched. 'Donald, I do so know what one looks like.'
The others were lost now, noisily lining up as if choosing sides for a game. The crow's supporters were outnumbered, but they made up for it with indignant gestures and shrill protests, while the mocking opposition- mostly boys, mostly the older ones-sneered knowingly and laughed and punched each other's arms.
'Everyone knows what a crow looks like,' Don said, in such a harshly quiet way that they all turned to look. 'And everyone knows what the biggest crow in the world looks like, right?'
A few heads instantly nodded. The rest were unconvinced.
Don smiled as evilly as he could, and stood, and pointed to the nearest tree, directly behind them. Most of them looked with him; the others, sensing a trick and not wanting to give him the satisfaction, resisted.
Until the little girl put a hand to her mouth, and gasped.
'That's right.' He kept pointing. 'See? Right there, just out of the light? Look real hard now. Real hard and you won't miss it. You can see his feathers kind of all black and shiny. And his beak, right there by that leaf, it's sort of gold and pointed like a dagger, right?'
The little girl nodded slowly. No one else moved.
'And his eyes! Look at them, they're red. If you look real hard-but don't say anything or you'll scare him away-you can see one just over there. See it? That little bit of red up in the air? It looks like blood, doesn't it. Like a raindrop of blood hanging up there in the air.'
They stared.
They backed away.
It was quiet in the park now, except for the leaves.
'Aw, you're fulla crap,' the ski-capped boy said, and walked off in a hurry, just in time to greet his parents strolling down from the concert. He laughed and hugged them tightly, and Don without moving seemed to stand to one side while the children broke apart and the oval filled with voices, with feet, with faces he knew that thanked him for watching the little ones who would have been bored stiff listening to the music, and it was certainly cheaper than hiring a sitter.
He slipped his hands into his jeans pockets and rolled his shoulder under the black denim jacket and grey sweatshirt.
His light brown hair fell in strands over his forehead, curled back of his ears, curled up at the nape. He was slender, not tall, his face almost but not quite touched by a line here and there that made him appear somewhat older than he was.
Within moments the parents and their children were gone.
'Hey, Boyd, playing Story Hour again?'
He looked across the pond and grinned self-consciously. Three boys walked around the pond toward him, grinned back, and roughed him a bit when they joined him, then pushed him in their midst and herded him laughing toward the bike stand just inside the south gate.
'You should've been there, Donny,' Fleet Robinson told him, leaning close with a freckled hand on Don's arm. 'Chris Snowden was there.' He rolled his eyes heavenward as the other boys whistled. 'God, how she can see that keyboard with those gazongas is a miracle.'
'Hey, you'd better not say stuff like that in front of Donny the Duck,'
said Brian Pratt solemnly. Then he winked broadly, and not kindly. 'You know he doesn't believe in that kind of talk. It's sexist, don't you guys know that? It's demeaning to the broads who jerk him off on the porch.'
'Drop dead, Brian,' Don said quietly.
Pratt ignored him. With a sharp slap to Robinson's side he jumped ahead of the others and walked arrogantly backward, his cut-off T-shirt and soccer shorts both an electric red and defiant of the night's early autumn chill. 'But if you want to talk about gazongas, you crude bastards, if you're really gonna get down in the gutter, then let me tell you about Trace tonight. Christ! I mean, you want to talk excellent development? Jesus, I could smother, you know what I mean? And she was waiting for it, just waiting for it, y'know? I mean, you could see it in her eyes! Christ, she was fucking asking for it right there on the stage! Oh, my god, I wish to hell her old man wasn't there, he should've been on duty or something. Soon as she put down that stupid flute I'd've planked her so damned fast ... oh god, I think I'm dying!'
Robinson's hand tightened when he felt the muscle beneath it tense.
'Don't listen to him, Don. In the first place, Tracey hasn't talked to him since the first day of kindergarten except to tell him to get the hell out of her way, and in the second place, he don't know nothing he don't see in a magazine.'
'Magazine, shit,' scoffed Jeff Lichter. 'The man can't even read, for god's sake.'
'Read?' Pratt said, wide-eyed. 'What the hell's that?'
'Reading,' explained Tar Boston, 'is what you do when you open a book.'
He paused and put his hands on his hips. 'You remember books, Brian.
They're those things you got growing mold on in your locker.'
Pratt sneered and lifted his middle finger. Robinson and Boston, both heavy set and both wearing football jackets over light sweaters, took off after him, hollering, windmilling their arms as though they were plummeting down a hill.
Ahead was the south gate, and beyond it the lights of Parkside Boulevard.
Jeff stayed behind. He was the shortest of the group, and the only one wearing glasses, his brown hair reaching almost to his shoulders. 'Nice guys.'
Don shrugged. 'Okay, I guess.'
They walked from dark to light to dark again as the lampposts marked the edge of the pathway. Jeffs tapped heels smacked on the pavement; Don's sneakers sounded solid, as if they were made of hard rubber.
'How'd you get stuck with that?' Lichter asked with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder.
'What, the story stuff?'
'Yeah.'
'I didn't get stuck with it. Mrs. Klass asked me if I'd watch Cheryl for a while. Said she'd give me a couple of bucks to keep her out of her hair. Next thing I knew I had a gang.'
'Yeah, story of your life, I think.'
Don looked but saw nothing on his friend's face to indicate sarcasm, or pity.
'She pay you?'
'I'll get it tomorrow, at school.'
'Like I said-story of your life.'
At the bike stand they paused, staring through the high stone pillars to the empty street beyond. Pratt and the others were gone, and there was little traffic left to break the park's silence.
'That creep got away with another one, you know,' Jeff said then, looking nervously back over his shoulder at the trees. 'The Howler, I mean.'
'I heard.' He didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to talk about some nut over in New York who went around tearing up kids with his bare hands and howling like a wolf when he was done. Five or six by now, he
