Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (19 page)

Pinned to the center of the corkboard was a five-by-seven of Jesse, his most recent school picture. Pinned around this photo, framing it, were four pencil drawings. They were primitive drawings, childlike, but when Charlotte looked at the first one, then immediately at the other three, she heard her own sudden intake of breath, then the exhalation, and her chest felt suddenly empty, hollow with disbelief.

Under other circumstances—at the school's open house, for example; at a community picnic; at a local art contest she had been asked to judge—Charlotte might have looked at those sketches and thought,
For a twelve-year-old, they're very good
. But these were Jesse's drawings and Jesse was gone. These drawings had been made by the hand of a boy who had disappeared within view of Charlotte's house. Under those circumstances, Charlotte was stunned.

Pinned directly above Jesse's photo—and he wasn't smiling in the photo, but almost, with just a corner of his mouth in a tentative lift, while his chin was low and he regarded the camera with hooded eyes, suspicious eyes, the very same eyes with which he had once regarded Charlotte—was a sketch of a collie in profile. With a few careful strokes, Jesse had captured not only the fur hanging down from the animal's chest, but the lifelike lilt of its tail, and even something of the animal's dignity and intelligence. The talent was raw but obvious to Charlotte's trained eye. The other three sketches were equally good and honest: the trailer where he and his mother lived; a hawk on a branch; and the one that broke her heart in half, the woods in deep shadow. This last one was the most impressive, because with cross-hatching and white space, he had instinctively lit up the cheap poster paper with the play of light and shadow—so real that she could sense in those lines the faint shimmer of what the woods must have meant to him, its comforting silence and hushed, breathing soul.

Later Charlotte would remember those sketches and remember, too, the cold, desiccating wind that swept through her. She would remember that the night went suddenly black and rushed in to crush her from all sides. She would remember that the world collapsed like the closing iris of a camera until all she could see, as if at the end of a long tunnel, so painfully clear though seemingly miles away, was Jesse's photo, his face, those sad, wary eyes and the hard line of an almost-smile.

“Thank you,” she heard, a weak, feminine voice, as unexpected and quickly gone as the sputter of a candle. But Charlotte knew in an instant who the voice belonged to, and though she did not want to look up, did not want to have to face Jesse's mother and her irremediable grief, she was unable to resist as her gaze rose and her head lifted, and there she saw Livvie Rankin with her small, sad smile, and Jesse's mother told her, “He'll be back,” in a voice so soft and hoarse that it could only be a mother's voice, “I know he will.”

The darkness roared in at Charlotte then from all sides; it roared inside her head, a black storm without sound of its own but demolishing all other sound. Later, alone in her bed, Charlotte would try to remember those moments but could find not the smallest trace of what had happened next, of how or when she had returned to the edge of the crowd to stand again with Mike and Claudia, of the songs they might have sung before the evening ended. She must have walked with Mike and Claudia back to her Jeep, or at least as far as the parking lot. She must have driven home, or how else would she have ended up in her own bed? A week earlier she might have considered it incredible, unbelievable, that a person could conduct herself in a normal manner for an hour or more yet have not a moment's retention of that hour. Isolated pieces of memory were visible, individual instants, but they had no correlation to the whole, no contiguity, and drifted across the blackness of that hour like old clips of celluloid, a few frames each: Sheriff Gatesman standing off on his own, his little smile and nod; Denny Rankin with his hard mouth frowning as he looked at her; a deer in the road, a small doe, frozen by her headlights, then turning to flee, skittering and falling onto a hip, then clambering to its feet again and finally bounding into the weeds.

Charlotte could find nothing more of the last hour of that evening, no matter how long she searched the dark ceiling. She lay on her bed, atop the blankets and comforter, still wearing her stadium jacket and knit cap, still wearing her shoes.

F
OR a while in the morning, Charlotte stood before her easel, considering the lines, warming her hands with a mug of hot tea, trying, too, to warm herself with the reminder that this was just another day, a day like any other. Her eyelids felt heavy because she had slept very little, and her body weary.
But it's just another day,
she told herself.
There's no reason why you shouldn't paint.
The light through the windows was soft, the gray light of an April dawn.
But at least you opened the curtains,
she told herself.
At least you made a start.

She saw again that the lines on the canvas were not quite right. They did not convey what she wished to convey. What she wanted was for the viewer to take in the entire canvas, the Amish boy and girl, the old biker, the buggy coming down the road, but then for the whole to coalesce around a single image, a single image that in this case was situated off to the side, the Amish buggy, so that the viewer would be drawn closer, would step up to the very side of the buggy and peer into its dark interior, see there the young husband, just a boy himself, with the reins in his hands, a few fine, long whiskers on his chin, the girl-wife beside him, and the toddler on her lap, pulling forward to see the old biker, the baby's eyes wide with wonder. What Charlotte wanted was for the viewer to be pulled
into
the painting, and very nearly into the buggy itself.

She sipped her tea and wondered,
Who did you learn that from?

From Boudin, of course, she thought. The way he makes you walk that little scrap of beach in
Rivage de Portrieux
. Makes you crowd onto the jetty with all the other people. Makes you stroll the dock in Rotterdam. And then there was Degas too, Monet, Cézanne sometimes. And Cozens.

And Chase's studio, she thought. How every time I look at it I ache to duck under the curtain and through the doorway to his easel in the farthest corner of his studio! Or to walk that wide dirt road to Clara Southern's Warrandyte Hotel. And Lilla Cabot Perry's woods and barn—how could anyone not go sneaking into that dark rectangle of door, or try for a peek through the window of that little house in the woods?
What sly dogs they were,
she told herself.
What seducers!

She went as far as to cross to her table and set down the mug of tea. But when she reached for the charcoal pencil, when she held it between her finger and thumb, Jesse's four sketches appeared in her mind's eye just as she had first seen them the previous night, his photo centered between them. And she dropped the pencil and turned away and walked out of her studio and pulled shut the door.

W
HEN she awoke on the La-Z-Boy, the living room was full of light. She glanced at the cable box. 8:37 A.M. A truck was rumbling down the highway, a fading drone. And there was something else, too, a memory. Claudia had said, “A couple hundred dollars dropped into a collection box is one thing. But what Livvie needs right now is to know that her neighbors care. That we're all praying with her.” She planned to bake a few loaves of banana bread and take them to Livvie in the morning, this morning. “She's probably not even feeding herself,” Claudia had said.

And Mike had told her, “You go ahead and whip up a seven-course dinner if it makes you feel better. I'll cart it over for you.”

Charlotte heeled down the footrest and went into the kitchen.

C
HRIST Almighty,” Gatesman said out loud. He was alone in his vehicle in the hospital parking lot, had only seconds earlier heaved himself inside and slammed shut the door. He never swore in front of his deputies or anybody else, but on occasion he allowed himself the luxury of a few explosive curse words delivered in solitude, never in his own home, never where the spirits of Patrice and Chelsea might be lingering, nor in the courthouse, where Tina or some citizen in the anteroom might hear. But in his car with the windows up was just fine. “Goddamn it all to fucking hell,” he said.

He hated hospitals. He hated the smell of them, the sound of them, the very atmosphere that filled them. He had had a dream last year of himself dying in a hospital room, tubes and wires hooked up to his body, machines beeping, a terrible weight crushing all the air from his lungs. In his dream he lay there gasping, paralyzed by the invisible weight while nurses calmly strolled past his door, ignoring the beeps of alarm.

Coming to the hospital, or even driving past it, always reminded him of that dream. But what angered him now had nothing to do with his own death. “Now you have to go hunt that little fucker down again,” he told himself.

Gatesman had long ago ceased to be surprised by the cruelty and stupidity of his own species. But what continued to amaze him was the tolerance otherwise intelligent people displayed for allowing certain obviously defective specimens to wander around at will.

I
T was nearly three in the afternoon when Charlotte parked her Jeep in the little gravel driveway that ran almost to the trailer's door. She was glad to see only one vehicle already parked there, a tired-looking Datsun hatchback at least a dozen years old. Somebody had painted the whole contraption sage green, even the naked rims. Both rear fenders were banged in, and there was a long crack in the windshield. Denny Rankin, she knew, drove a small, red pickup truck.
So that's Livvie's car,
she thought.

I should buy her a car,
she told herself.
Have it delivered with a note:
From a friend. But how to keep it from her husband? That would be a problem.