Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (12 page)

She dreamed that she was sitting in a lawn chair in her backyard in the early hours of morning. She was very old and her feet were bare and cold in the wet grass. There was just enough chill in the air to make her think it must be September already, or maybe October, and she was glad to have a mug of hot tea cupped in her hands, its subtle fragrance of oranges warm on her face and the cup warming her palms and fingers. She could still hear the rain, but it was falling against her house, gurgling down the drain pipes, but not touching her, some ten yards away. The night was very dark, the sky overcast. She could make out five stars in the Big Dipper plus the hazy reddish glow that was either Mars or a communications satellite. She was aware of being very old in her dream and very tired, yet she did not wish to go inside the house where she could be warm and dry and alone. She wanted to remain outside awhile longer, looking at the stars and asking them,
Who's up there?
and waiting to see if one of them winked at her in any fashion that could be interpreted as a response. She found that if she stared at the stars long enough, their fuzzy edges would elongate somewhat, stretch out a bit like hazy wings, and it seemed then that she might be staring at the negative image of a daytime sky, the sky black instead of sunlit, and the birds, instead of black, were full of light.

After a while she became aware of somebody walking toward her from the direction of the pond. She could not see him at first but only felt him coming. The figure of a man was perhaps twenty-five yards away when he finally began to take form in the darkness, but he came to a stop, still sufficiently distant, at least fifteen feet away, so that the features of his face were not distinguishable and he remained little more than a silhouette imposed upon a lighter darkness. Even so, she could feel his eyes on her, and she felt emanating from him a not unkind emotion, something neither particularly warm nor cold but interested and curious. She was not afraid of him, but neither was she comfortable with his presence. She felt that he was looking at her much as she had been regarding the stars. When he finally turned and walked away from her and disappeared completely in the darkness again—not just concealed by the darkness, but more like a man who, walking into a deep pool of water, gradually returns to water himself, actually becomes the water—she was overcome with a terrible sorrow, a sense of loss that rose up out of the darkness to surround and engulf her, a sorrow so intense and suffocating that she awoke herself with the breathless violence of her sobs.

A
LL night long the wind whistled and pulled at the house. The windows rattled sometimes and the house seemed to be straining to hold on to its foundations, and Charlotte had the peculiar feeling that the darkness itself was doing the blowing, that it was trying to pull her up by the roots and hurl her away.

After waking from the dream of the man made of shadow, after sobbing for a long while until she convinced herself that it had only been a dream, she had dragged herself up the stairs and crawled into bed, but she could not sleep well for thinking about the morning. At times she felt feverish and at other times she shivered, and the few times she dozed off through the next five hours, she always awoke with a start.

The dawn came gray and dirty as she lay listening to the rain gurgle down through the gutter and drain pipe. She was not aware of when the gurgling stopped, but when she heard distant voices, she knew that the search party was beginning to gather. She climbed out of bed and went to the window. The four vehicles parked along Metcalf Road near the edge of the woods were indistinguishable in the mist except as two sedans and two pickup trucks, and near the tailgate of the last truck, two orange embers glowed dully in the mist, moving as the men moved the cigarettes to their mouths and away again.

She stood there for several minutes, still feeling the sadness of her dream and the awful hollow heaviness it had invoked in her. There was also the very strange feeling that things were happening peripherally or behind or above her that she could not discern, that her head could not turn fast enough or her eyes could not be quick enough to catch the activity. It was a feeling she had experienced only once before, in the city with June, who had insisted that they visit the Guggenheim for the King Tut exhibit, so Charlotte, who had wanted only to suffer her head cold alone in bed in an unlit room, took four antihistamines and a Valium on an empty stomach and joined her friend.

Consequently, every artifact in the exhibit appeared menacing and evil to Charlotte and seemed to permeate sinister intentions. The same was true for all of the other visitors and especially for the security guards. The old lady docents who stood by smiling or prattling on helpfully were frauds of the highest order. Charlotte had felt that the moment she walked past any of these individuals they immediately dropped their facade and whispered conspiratorially about her.

That had been a very long morning for her, and this one, she knew, promised to be even more of an ordeal. As she dragged herself away from the window and into the bathroom, she was aware of a pressure accumulating against her, as if the air itself had force and weight and was pushing against her chest and down onto her shoulders.

In the bathroom she splashed warm water over her face and pulled hard at the corners of her eyes. The smallest, most routine movement felt alien. Nearly thirty minutes passed before she was able to prepare a half pot of strong coffee and pour it into the largest cup she could find, an old German beer stein she had saved from her college days, and then to lace up her Timberlands and pull on the tan Carhartt jacket with the quilt lining—items she had once thought of gleefully as part of her “country ensemble.” She then jammed her floppy wide-brimmed gardening hat down low on her forehead and, shuffling like an ancient crone, hands cupped around the beer mug and holding it close to her face, made her way outside and toward the lengthening line of vehicles parked along the road.

A heavy dew still covered the ground, and the air was so cold that her ears and nose stung. The steady wind made her cheeks feel tight, and she wished then that she had taken the time to put on some makeup and conceal the damage done to her by the night.

She estimated that there were between thirty and forty people standing around in small groups, some still along the macadam road and some already in the stubbly field, all waiting for the sheriff to put them into motion. She was aware of their eyes on her as she approached. She tried to anticipate what they must be thinking.
She's the one who would have seen him last. She's the one who told the sheriff about Dylan. She's the one . . . She's the one . . .

She looked down at the broken cornstalks, watched the water accumulate around her boots. She held the mug of coffee close to her face and felt the warmth and steam soothe her eyes.
If at any previous moment in your life,
she told herself,
if you had made a decision other than the one you made . . . you wouldn't be here now.

Where would you be?
she wondered, and forced herself to imagine the most pleasant alternative. You could be strolling through a souk in Morocco now. Studying the silks or the fragrant bins of spices. You could be sipping café au lait at a brasserie. You could be lying in the arms of your ceramics prof from Smith.
No,
she told herself,
he must be in his seventies by now.
Then,
I don't care, I wish I were there with him. I wish we were far away from here.

She was still twenty yards from the last vehicle in the line when Mike Verner broke off from a small group and walked out to meet her. He handed her an orange plastic vest. “Mornin',” he said. Charlotte answered with a grumble that she hoped would amuse him.

But he, too, was in a somber mood and did not laugh or even smile. “Rough night?” he asked.

She knew how she must appear to him. Puffy face, red eyes and nose—the look of somebody who has been dragged screaming over rough ground. “Couldn't sleep,” she told him. “Sought refuge in a bottle of wine.”

“Me neither,” he said, “except that I watched television. Same numbing effect except that you don't feel quite as bad in the morning.”

“Now you tell me,” she said.

Soon the sheriff called everyone together and a few minutes later had them spread out in a line with their backs to Charlotte's house. They stood an arm's length apart, local farmers and retirees, Gatesman and one of his deputies and two state troopers.

Gatesman said, “We'll send the dogs in ahead and let them do what they do best. The rest of us should just try to maintain the line more or less and keep our eyes open. What you're looking for is anything at all that's not a natural part of these woods. Any signs of a disturbance in the surroundings that doesn't look natural. I mean, hell, you all know what we're here for. Just keep your eyes and ears open, that's all you can do.”

A state trooper leading a German shepherd on a leash started into the woods near one end of the line, and halfway down the line a man in coveralls and boots started in as well, pulled along by a small beagle straining at its lead. The others followed a few moments behind, trudging, Charlotte thought, like pallbearers. She imagined how they all must look from her farmhouse, gray figures in a mist, their orange vests winking behind the trees like the dying lights of huge, exhausted fireflies. Every once in a while she heard somebody murmuring to somebody else, but she could not distinguish the words. She tried to keep her attention on the ground, but the sibilance of whispers distracted her.

For several minutes the routine continued without change. Then suddenly the little beagle made a quick movement to its right and pulled its handler out of his easy step. A little gasp caught in Charlotte's chest when she saw where they were headed—straight toward the fallen tree where she had first come upon the boy, the place where he used to sit.

“Slow, deep breaths,” June used to advise her. “Sloooowly in through the mouth. Then blow it out just as slowly. I know you feel like you're suffocating but you aren't. You can control this, don't let it control you. Slowly in . . . slowly out. That's all there is to it.”

Charlotte had thought she'd left that sniveling, panicked version of herself behind. Thought she'd left her behind as a ghost in June's office. But now she watched the beagle sniffing all around the log, pulling its handler in a wide, erratic circle. The pain radiating through her chest and crushing the air from her lungs made her think that this time, truly, the heart was in real danger, overtaxed and insufficient.

But a minute later the beagle stopped sniffing at the wet ground. It looked up at his handler. The man said, “Let's go then,” and pulled the dog back toward the center of the forest. Only then did Charlotte realize that she, too, had come to a stop, she and half the line on both sides of her, all waiting for the moment of discovery, the surprised call of either tragedy or relief. Now, with the dog moving again, the others resumed their pace as well.

Every now and then someone fell out of the ragged line to look closely at the ground, to scuff away the leaves from a shallow depression, or to stoop and squint into a fallen log. When this happened, all the searchers in the vicinity slowed and waited, all hoping for the shout of discovery. But their were no shouts, no voices raised. They moved on solemnly, eyes scouring the leaf-matted earth, every step a little heavier now.

Only by turning her head to the left or right could Charlotte get a full picture of the woods. The woods seemed to her far denser than they actually were, close on all sides and dark around the edges in a way they had never been. Ever since the searchers had entered the woods, her field of vision had become constricted, her breath shallow and leaden, so that she felt herself to be walking down a tunnel made of trees, a tunnel walled in by darkness and holding insufficient air. She thought of Pissarro's
Path Through the Woods
with its walls of trees and its blind turn in the narrow path, but then told herself, no, those trees were heavy and black in their leafiness, but there are no leaves in these woods, no path; the limbs here were bare and black unless she lifted her gaze into the canopy where the reddening buds made a domelike roof, a porous cover backlit by the rising sun so that the sky glowed like a fresh bruise.

She thought of the painting she could make of this scene, all grays and black, people and trees, bodies leaning slightly forward, all eyes on the ground, three-fourths of the canvas somber and colorless, only the topmost section brighter. But then she told herself,
Stop it. How dare you?
and she brought her eyes down to the ground again, brought her attention back to the damp brown earth.

After a while Charlotte could see the light through the far end of the tree line, a clouded yellow glow. She had never walked the entire way through the trees before, had never been interested in what lay beyond the trees—another field, the road, the houses, the town—but only in the woods themselves, the hushed silence and the cool ensconcing shade. But now, just as they were about to step out of the trees on the far side and into the adjoining field, something she had been holding on to with every breath now broke loose in her. She started shivering and sobbing and was helpless to hold it back. Mike Verner moved close and laid a hand on her shoulder, then rubbed his hand in a circle on her back, the plastic vest crinkling with the movement of his hand. Only when she had managed to get her sobbing under control did he lift his hand away from her. Then, without speaking, he stood there with the others as they watched the dogs sniffing at the broken cornstalks.