Crows Read Online Free PDF

“Hell, you wouldn’t be here now if my Olive hadn’t brought my lunch. Right?”
    Robert said, “You’re probably right.”
    â€œAnd I practically had to drag you here myself,” Ben said. “Believe it or not, there was a time I was quite popular.”
    Ben tired of this and stood. The small office had no windows and he stuck his head out the door and looked up and down the hall. “You know Ara?” he asked. “Professor Mason?”
    â€œNo,” Robert said. He stood.
    â€œHey, stay,” Ben said. “You just got here.”
    â€œYou seem pretty busy.”
    â€œDo I? I’m not. After you’ve been around as long as I have, everything pretty much runs on its own. I know my lectures by heart. I give the same tests. I’m like a river.” He smiled at Robert, then looked out into the hall again. Students walked past. Some said hello to Ben. He kept his back to Robert, calling greetings to students Robert could not see. Ben’s voice was firm and quick, a carrying voice built over years of teaching into large halls.
    He turned back into the room. “You want to get a sandwich?” he asked. “Sit in the woods?”
    They went back down the inner labyrinth of stairs and tunnels, outside finally into cool air tinted green with the final dark burst of summer’s health. At the end of September the leaves had gone bloody and were starting to fall. Ben bought Robert a ham sandwich and cups of iced tea for them in a small café stuffed with smoke and students. They carried the food out to a small grove of trees long ago named Rapist’s Woods. A sidewalk passed through the trees and there was a bench alongside the walk, with a white-­bulbed lamp overhead. A rape had taken place there years before, when the bench and lamp were not there, when the walk was a footpath. The lamp, whose light was feeble and swallowed like cream by the trees, was in response to the rape. The rapist never had been caught and might since have died of old age, but women steered clear of the little grove even in daylight, though the path was the shortest route through that part of the campus.
    â€œI like it here,” Ben announced, taking a seat on the bench. “I’m not bothered. If I’m very quiet I can sometimes get a bird or a squirrel to eat from my hand.” He held a fragment of bread out, as if in demonstration, then put it in his mouth.
    â€œThey’re nearly tame now anyway,” he said. “They know students are basically good-­hearted. Harmless. The cruel ones have a smell to them. Word soon spreads about them. And they know the campus is a repository of abundant discarded food. All these kids and their lousy dietary habits. Corn chips, cookies, pieces of half-­eaten dried fruit, pretzel sticks.” He rubbed his hands together. “Manna,” he whispered, then took a bite of his sandwich.
    A bird flew down the tunnel of light and air formed by the path through the trees. It was just a flicker of color—­a reddish-­brown—­in Robert’s eye, then gone. He was chilly in the shade with the iced tea.
    â€œHe’ll be back,” Ben reported, his head bowed over his sandwich to tear at the gristle in the meat. “A sparrow. Airborne cockroaches. They’ll live anywhere.”
    In a moment the bird returned and landed ten feet up the path. Two more joined it and they proceeded to pick at the hard bits of stone and seed on the walk, with nervous starts and turns built in, as if they knew danger was everywhere.
    Ben tore small scraps of bread from his sandwich and threw them in the birds’ direction. They hit the ground and scattered like snow. The sparrows, at first startled by the intrusion, bounced away, one even taking brief flight. But then they fell on the crumbs almost madly and carried most of them off.
    Ben asked, “Why are you taking my class?”
    â€œI need a science