Still singing, Campos reached over and shoved the last bottle of rum into his hand. Mr. Rebeck drank from it and felt the wall of thorns in the back of his throat go down and the song step over it. He drank once more, to wash the last thorns away, handed the bottle back to Campos, and began to sing again.
Arru, arruru,
Arruru, arruru. . . .
When the chorus came to an end, he began to sing it all over again. He sang alone, his voice loud and joyous, losing the tune at once and finding scraps of it as he went along, changing the key when he couldn't hit the top notes. Laura and Michael smiled at each other, and he was sure they were laughing at him. I am making a fool of myself, he thought, but I was born to be a fool and I have had a long enough vacation from being a fool. Of course they are laughing. I would laugh myself if I weren't singing.
But he also thought, Sleep, child, sleep, little pumpkinhead—and he sang the meaningless syllables with his eyes shut because he thought he might stop if he saw them laughing at him.
Then Michael began to sing with him, softly, absently, not looking at him, not looking at anyone. They finished the song together.
Arru, arruru,
Arruru, Arruru.
Michael sang the last note and stopped, but Mr. Rebeck held on to the note as long as he could, until there was no breath in him and he had to let it go.
A black feather dropped into the dim light, and they heard a snort of disgust in the darkness above them. Then the raven plumped down into their midst, beating his wings wildly as if he had just fallen off the wind. He regained his balance, blinked at the four of them, and said, "What the hell is this, group therapy?"
Michael was the first to recover. He pointed at the feather in the grass. "You dropped something, I believe."
The raven looked ruefully down at the lost feather. "I'm a lousy lander," he said. "Never in my life have I made one decent landing."
"Hummingbirds land well," Michael said. "Like helicopters."
"Hummingbirds are great," the raven agreed. "You should have seen me when I found out I wasn't ever going to be a hummingbird. I cried like a baby. Hell of a thing to tell a kid."
"What are you doing up so late?" Mr. Rebeck asked. "It must be four in the morning."
"I'm up early. You're up late. Too hot to sleep, anyway. I was flying around and I heard the glee club. Celebrating something?"
"No," Mr. Rebeck said. "We couldn't sleep either."
The raven cocked his head to look at Campos. "This one I know from somewhere."
"Campos," the big man said. "I'm a terrible guard."
"Yeah," the raven said. "I remember you. I hitched a ride on your truck once."
Campos shrugged. "Ride all you like. Ain't my truck. Belongs to the city."
"Healthy attitude," the raven said.
"He can see Michael and Laura," Mr. Rebeck told the raven. "Like me."
The raven looked from Campos to Mr. Rebeck and back. "Figures. You got the same nutty look."
"What kind of look is that?" Laura asked.
"Half here and half there," the raven answered. "Half in and half out. A nutty look. I know it when I see it."
He turned to Michael. "Latest news and weather forecast. Your old lady's in more trouble than there is in the world."
"Sandra," Michael said. He sat up quickly. "What's happened?"
Laura did not move, but Mr. Rebeck thought that she had become a little more transparent, harder to see. He tried to catch her eye, but she would not look at him.
"The cops found a piece of paper on the floor," the raven said. "Little piece of paper, folded up like a cone. Grains of poison all over it. Everybody's making a big fuss about it."
"Are her fingerprints on it?" Michael asked. He looked hungry, Mr. Rebeck thought, and somehow tired.
"No fingerprints," the raven said. "They figure she held it in a handkerchief when she used it and lost the thing before she could burn it. It was torn off a sheet of typing paper. They're trying to find the rest of the paper now."
Michael sank back slowly. "That's it, then. That's got to be it. It's over."
"Michael," Laura said softly, "drop it. Let it alone. It doesn't matter now."
Michael's voice was fierce and angry. "It matters to me. She's trying to prove I committed suicide. If they let her off, they'll come charging out here with their little shovels and dig me up. Bury me somewhere else, with all the other suicides. Would you like that? Do you want that to happen?"
"No," Laura said. "No. But I don't want her to die."
They stared at each other, ghost and ghost now, oblivious of the two men and the black bird. It was Michael who lowered his eyes first.
"I don't want her to die," he said. "I thought I did, but it doesn't matter. I don't care what happens to her, but I hope she doesn't die."
"Big discovery," the raven grunted. He cackled softly at some private joke. "Her lawyer asked for a postponement. They gave him a week. Trial's on for the fifteenth now."
"They've got her," Michael said without joy. "She must know it. The rest is just ritual. Will you let me know how it goes?"
"Don't nag me," the raven said. "I'll come around again today, after I get a look at the afternoon papers. Anything's in them, I'll let you know."
"Thank you," Michael said.
Campos was sitting cross-legged, with his head tilted far back on his neck, looking straight up into the sky.
"Lose something?" the raven asked him.
Campos lowered his head and rubbed the back of his neck. "Nobody gonna do any flying today. Rain coming."
The raven fell in with the change of subject. "How the hell do you know?"
"No birds singing," Campos said earnestly. "You hear birds singing, it's not gonna rain. Birds don't go out in the rain."
"That," said the raven, "is a large crock. I used to believe that stuff myself. No more. I woke up one morning and it was all gray, like it was going to storm any minute. But I hear the little birds singing and I think, Nah, my feathered friends wouldn't be out there singing if it was going to rain. They know what they're doing. So I went out to get breakfast, and as soon as I was out in the open it rained like hallelujah, brethren. Just sitting up there, waiting until it could get a good shot at me. And those feathered little bastards sang right through it. They sat in trees and sang. I didn't get dry for a week. Never trusted a bird from that day to this. Never going to."
"You don't like birds, do you?" Laura asked. "I've never heard you say a good word for them."
"It's not I don't like them. I just don't trust them. Every damn bird's a little bit nuts."
"You too," Campos muttered. "You too."
"Me too. Me most of all." The raven poked the lost black feather with a yellow claw. Finally he picked it up in his beak and gave it to Mr. Rebeck. "Put it somewhere," he said. Mr. Rebeck put it in his pocket.
"Tell you something," the raven said. "I was flying over the Midwest once." He stopped abruptly, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and began again. "I was flying over the Midwest. Iowa or Illinois, or some place like that. And I saw this big damn seagull. Right in the middle of Iowa, a seagull. And he was flying around in big, wide circles, real sweeping circles, the way a seagull flies, flapping his wings just enough to keep on the updrafts. Every time he saw water he'd go flying down toward it, yelling, 'I found it! I found it!' The poor sonofabitch was looking for the ocean. And every time he saw water, he thought that was the ocean. He didn't know anything about ponds or lakes or anything. All the water he ever saw was the ocean. He thought that was all the water there was."