Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (23 page)

Smiling at the aptness of the title—
In German, even! What the Amish speak among themselves!
—she headed for the garage. Along the way she glanced at the mulch and flower beds, told herself what plants she would put in each bed this year, imagined the splashes of color placed here and there and there. As soon as all danger of frost had passed—
maybe this weekend if the long-range forecast looks good
—she would drive to the nursery.

She unlocked the garage door and swung it up, and almost immediately she heard the noise, a loud buzzing sound. Because of the high windows on three sides of the garage, she could see everything clearly, but the noise startled her and for several seconds she did not move from the entrance but stood there listening intently, afraid to progress. At first she thought
rattlesnake
, but the noise was incessant, it did not stop. Then she peered into the rafters, tried to spot a wasp's nest. But the rafters were clear except for the spiderwebs.

Then she became aware of the clicking sound mixed in with the buzzing, and that sound she recognized. Flies knocking against glass. There were certainly flies at each of the garage windows, but not nearly enough to account for the unrelenting buzz. Only after two tentative steps along the side of the Jeep and an increase in the volume of the buzzing did she notice the shadow moving across the inside of the driver's-side window.

She stepped up to the door and leaned closer. A mass of darkness seethed across the inside of the glass, almost bubbling. Another mass of flies was crawling over the windshield. There were flies, she saw, on every pane of glass inside the vehicle, but especially in the front. The Jeep was literally abuzz with them. They made a muffled, but no less ominous drone, and for a few moments the sight and sound of those thousands of fat black flies disoriented her, made her dizzy with incomprehension.

Then she remembered. The braciola. She had left it on the car seat. She had driven from Livvie's trailer to the hospital to visit Dylan, and then, returning home, had been so distraught that she had rushed straight into the house without giving a thought to the braciola. For most of four days, then, she had never left the house except to walk to the mailbox, and all that time the Jeep had been a little greenhouse, incubating flies by the thousands. And they had all been gorging themselves on spoiled meat, laying their eggs in it, fucking and feeding and doubling their numbers every few hours or so. Charlotte gagged at the very thought of it.

She wanted to run away from the Jeep, away from the garage— wanted to run away from everything. All of her previous hopefulness evaporated in an instant. It seemed to Charlotte that the flies were mocking her, buzzing,
This is your fucking life, Char-lottttttte. Get used to itttttttt.

She stood motionless for a long two minutes, even reached into her jacket pocket, wrapped a hand around her cell phone, thought about calling Mike Verner. Then she told herself,
No. No, damn it. You made this problem. You made all these problems. Now you have to deal with them.

In the end she could think of no solution but to hold her breath while she raced around the Jeep, flinging open all the doors. In an instant, the muted buzzing became a chainsaw. She ran out of the garage, swatting at her head long after the flies had left her, and retreated to the porch. Flies flew out of the garage, they flew back in. Even from the porch she could hear them clicking against the garage windows, bouncing against the windshield. They weren't going to leave, she realized, as long as their rancid feast remained there on the front seat of the Jeep.

Her stomach churned. She fought down the nausea, swallowed and swallowed. Finally she went into the house, dropped her purse on the hallway table, went upstairs and dug through a dresser drawer until she found a red bandana, tied it around her nose and mouth. In the kitchen she armed herself with a pair of oven mitts and a can of flying-insect spray.

At the mouth of the garage, she started spraying, filling the air with poison, swinging her arm from side to side. By the time she reached the driver's door, the can was empty. By now her eyes were stinging and she was afraid of going blind from the spray, so she tossed the can aside and ran back outside the garage, whipped off the bandanna, and wiped the dampness from her face. She could still hear the buzzing cloud, but she was out of ammunition. And the yard had grown dark around the edges again, the world was constricting.

She retied the bandanna over her nose and mouth, rushed back into the garage, seized the baking dish, and raced away as fast as she could, across the yard to the high weeds on the near edge of the field, all the while holding her breath and shaking her head violently to dislodge the flies crawling over her face. She would not look down at the baking dish because she knew that at least a corner of the foil would be lifted up and that inside would be a writhing bed of maggots and larvae. Flies buzzed up out of the dish and headed straight for her face, hummed in her ears, crawled through her hair, pelted her forehead.

Finally she was near enough to the weeds that she gave the dish a two-handed toss, hurled it as far as she could. She did not even wait to see it land and break and spill but turned and ran back to the house, still swatting at her head. One of the oven mitts fell off but she did not stop to retrieve it. She raced inside and slammed the door shut behind her.

She stood in the downstairs powder room, gagging over the toilet. When she had her breath back, she went upstairs, hurriedly pulled off her clothes, and stepped into the shower. Afterward she brushed her teeth and gargled and then sat in the kitchen wrapped in her robe. She could still taste the mouthwash, but she could also taste, or imagined she could, something maggoty and greasy. She made a cup of lemon tea, swished it around in her mouth before each swallow, and then made a second cup. Still, her tongue felt coated. Still, her stomach churned.

Initially she had no intention of retrieving the baking dish. She reassured herself that animals would come in the night to devour the contents—raccoons, stray cats, a dog, something to lick the glass clean. If the dish remained untouched till morning, maybe the turkey vultures would find it, drawn by the scent of putrefaction. Maybe the crows would come.

And let's say the sheriff happens to be looking in the woods again,
she thought.
Or maybe he drives by and sees a half dozen buzzards sitting on the edge of my lawn. What then?

Fuck,
she told herself.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

This time she dressed in her gardening clothes, jeans stained with a hardened spatter of old paint, one of her father's discarded sweatshirts, white socks, and her Timberlands. Outside she opened the garden shed and dragged out the hundred-foot length of hose that had somehow become uncoiled over the winter. She hooked up the hose, turned on the spigot, dragged the hose toward the edge of the field.

It fell several yards short. By setting the nozzle on a tight stream, she was able to send it gushing at the baking dish, which to her surprise had remained intact, and to her dismay was lying facedown. For a moment she stared numbly as the water sprayed off the bottom of the dish. Then, disgusted by her own stupidity and carelessness, she threw down the hose and strode to the dish and flipped it over. For good measure she gave it a couple of bangs against the ground to empty it. All the while the flies attacked her. “Fuck you!” she told them. “Fuck everything!”

She sprayed and sprayed and sprayed. She sprayed until not a fly or maggot moved either inside the dish or on the ground. Then she sprayed until all but the baked crust of sauce had been rinsed from the Ovenware. Then she picked up the dish, dragged the hose back toward the house, left it lying there uncoiled. She shut off the fucking spigot. Carried the fucking dish inside, stuck it into a fucking garbage bag, rammed it into the fucking trash container on the back porch, went upstairs and took off her fucking clothes, and took another fucking shower and fucking climbed back into bed.

No escape,
she kept telling herself.
No escape ever from this fucking mess you have made.

T
WO days later she finally forced herself to visit the nursing home. The long drive had tired her, but the sight of the lovely grounds, the low, white buildings set against a backdrop of trees and the Tioga State Forest, was strangely soothing. She stood on the concrete veranda—all the chairs empty now, the air still too cool for the elderly residents—and filled her lungs with slow, deep breaths.
It does smell different here,
she thought, and wondered why she had not moved back to Wellsboro after the divorce, wondered why she had chosen an unknown town instead. She could only vaguely remember the impetus for her decision, something about independence, something about self-reliance.

Wrong again,
she told herself, then swung open the door and went inside.

Lunch odors still permeated the corridors.
Meatloaf,
she guessed, and her stomach turned at the thought of it. All the food was soft here, cooked to a mush. In the locked ward where her father was kept, few residents could feed themselves, though many were still ambulatory and free to wander about in their pajamas and slippers. She found her father in the solarium, a wide sunny room with windows all along the south and west walls. A half dozen residents stood along those walls, peering out. A dozen or so others sat at small tables with boxes of dominoes or blocks emptied out in front of them. A single attendant in a cubicle in the rear corner of the room kept watch, though at the moment he seemed more engaged by his computer monitor and looked up only briefly when Charlotte came into the room.

Her father was seated out of the sunlight, alone at his table. His head was bowed, but he was not asleep, eyes open, staring, apparently, at his hands folded in his lap. A cardboard picture book lay open in front of him. Charlotte slid an empty chair close to him, sat and took his hands in hers. The pain in her chest, midway between her throat and sternum, burned like a thin blade.

“Why aren't you enjoying the sunshine, Daddy?” she said. She watched his face closely, but there was no reaction, not even an extra blink from his eyes.

She thought about gently lifting his chin so that their eyes could meet, but then she noticed the gob of something white stuck to his shirt front—mashed potatoes—and she leaned away from him, suddenly angry. She snapped open her purse, took out a couple of tissues and cleaned the food off his shirt. She balled up the tissues and stood, looked for a trash can, saw none, and marched to the attendant's cubicle. “Do you have a trash can back here?” she asked, and the young man, not yet thirty, scruffy-bearded and momentarily startled by her question, said, “Sure, under here,” and nodded toward the small chrome receptacle beneath his desk. Charlotte tossed the wad of tissues in and turned away.

She took only two steps before turning back to the attendant. She said, “Doesn't anybody clean these people off after they've eaten?”

Again, the startled look. “Of course,” he said.

“Well you're not doing a very good job of it, are you?”

He leaned a few inches back in his chair.

“And whose idea was it to comb his hair straight down over his forehead like that?” she demanded.

He opened both hands in a gesture of helpless. “I couldn't say for sure,” he told her. “Sorry.” She nodded and thought about turning away, told herself,
You should go now, let it go.
But she could feel something building inside her now, some anger out of all proportion to the situation, and she could not step away from it.

“Do you have any idea what that man has
done
in his life?” she asked. She could hear her voice rising, could feel the heat coming into her face, but could do nothing to stop it.

“That man has more education than your entire fucking staff put together!” she said. “His students have won Pulitzers and National Book Awards and fucking MacArthur Fellowships! And you can't even put a clean shirt on him and comb his fucking hair the way he's combed it for the last seventy fucking years?”

The attendant sat with both hands on the edge of his metal desk now, his chair pushed back against the wall. He looked up at her and spoke very softly, “I'm sorry, I'll let everybody know. We take good care of our residents, I promise you we do.”

The anger broke in her suddenly and she felt the tears coming. “Not fucking good enough,” she said evenly, then turned away and went back to her father.

She leaned into him and cried with her eyes pressed against the sharp rail of his shoulder. She wanted his scent but could smell only the nursing home. She wanted his warmth but the sunshine was across the room. She clutched both of his hands and lay against him and tried to remember the way he used to hold her. She would sit on his lap while they watched television together and he would wrap his left arm around her belly and sometimes hold her right hand in his and she would feel the rise and fall of his breathing against her back, the safe, warm steadiness of his presence.