A Murder of Crows Read Free Page B

lurched from his mouth and splattered on the rocky Vancouver Island beach.
    He’d had his BCG treatment less than an hour ago. Usually it took longer for him to get sick. His urologist had lowered the dosage when Seth told him of his reaction to the treatment for his bladder cancer, but he also warned Seth that they couldn’t lower it much more or it wouldn’t have any protective effect. Then he’d said the words that Seth had dreaded hearing since he first began to pee blood just over two years ago: “We may be near the end of the benefits that BCG can offer you.”
    â€œIf that’s so, what’s next?” he’d asked.
    The doctor hesitated then said, “Surgery.”
    â€œRemove my bladder?”
    â€œYes . . . and your prostate.”
    â€œI’m only twenty-one years old.”
    â€œYou have cancer, Seth, cancer.”
    He retched again, just missing his boot.
    â€œThanks, Dad. Thanks a lot.” He swore as he wiped his mouthwith his sleeve then shouted at the surf, “Stop feeling fucking sorry for yourself and fucking do something. Do something!”
    When he began his research, references to a Wellness Dream Clinic kept popping up on the sidebar of his Gmail account. And almost every time he opened a bladder cancer site there was a link to that clinic prominently displayed.
    Five full days of research on the Web and phone calls and time in the reference library and he’d called Eddie.
    â€œTwenty thousand dollars—that’s a lot of money, Seth.”
    â€œYeah,” he’d said.
    â€œGonna tell me why all of a sudden you need so much money?”
    â€œNo, Eddie, I’m not going to tell you.”
    After a moment Eddie said, “I’ll get it for you.”
    â€œThanks, Eddie,” he’d said, then asked, “How’re you doing?”
    â€œGreat.”
    Seth cared about Eddie, and despite the fact that he couldn’t see him he knew, beyond knowing, without closing his eyes, that Eddie had not told him the truth.
    He walked down to the water’s edge. The surfers in their thick wet suits waited on their boards for a wave—something to carry them. They rose and fell with the swell. Like a heartbeat, Seth thought. No, he corrected himself, like a dream.
    He knelt and plunged his hands into the freezing cold Pacific and tossed the salty water into his mouth. Better the bitterness of the ocean than the taste of death—his inheritance from his dad for his “gift.”
    And there he stayed for more than an hour, as the tide slowly crept around his feet, then his knees.
    Then he saw them, darting in the shallows—crimson torpedoes, salmon, salmon heading toward the mouth of the river.
    He marvelled at the power of life in the fish, returning—after years at sea returning home. He got to his feet and ran to his car, gunned it back up the logging road, then took the first fork north and ground to a stop. He threw open the door and plunged into the bush. Ignoring the branches tearing at his pants and face and armshe forced his way through the brush until he got to the river . . . and there they were—hundreds and hundreds of them fighting the fierce current, moving, no, fighting upstream toward the making of new life and the giving up of their own.
    He made his way upstream watching the fish battling to gain every inch, leaping over rock dams and fallen trees, moving, always moving upstream toward the completion of their dream.
    Four or five hundred yards farther upstream he saw the first of the carcasses floating back downstream. Around the bend there were hundreds more on the sandy shore—those who didn’t make it, those not chosen to complete the dream. Chosen, he thought. Some are chosen .
    A fish jumped high out of the water in a vain effort to leap a log, the fading sunlight glistening off its back, and Seth thought for a moment that the creature had turned toward him