Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (30 page)

A
T the farmhouse, Gatesman sat in his car for a while before going inside. He wrote a few things on a clipboard and told himself that he wanted to give Charlotte time to wake Livvie and explain things to her. Charlotte could do a better job than him, than any man could, in convincing Livvie that the right thing to do was to file charges against her husband. That no woman should ever put up with the kind of things Denny Rankin did. Gatesman had no time for cowards, and to his mind, men who bullied women or children were the worst kind of cowards.

And as he sat there in the car looking up at the porch, he could not help but remember Charlotte sitting on the swing with her face in her hands, sobbing after he had asked her out for sushi. She had run from him in tears, yet she had used his private number when she needed help. Women confounded him.

After maybe fifteen minutes, Charlotte appeared in the doorway and motioned for him to come inside. She met him in the foyer. “She's still fairly groggy,” she told him. “I gave her a Vicodin less than an hour ago.”

“I can't take her statement if she's out of it,” Gatesman said.

“She's groggy but coherent,” Charlotte said. “We're in the living room. Coffee or tea?”

“Whatever's easiest,” he said.

“Same difference.”

“Coffee, then. Black.”

“I remember,” she said, and walked away from him.

He watched her go down the short corridor and into the kitchen.
Little things like that,
he thought.
She remembers how I take my coffee. Does that mean anything or not?

Livvie was in the living room holding a mug of tea with both hands, one foot tucked up under the opposite knee as she leaned into the corner of the sofa. He stepped into the room quietly, not yet in her range of vision as he considered the layout. If he were alone with Livvie, he would sit on the sofa beside her, but in this case, he thought he should leave that space for Charlotte and take the recliner for himself. In this case, Livvie would be more comfortable with another woman at her side.

He cleared his throat softly so that he did not surprise her, then he came into the room and crossed to the recliner. He sat on the edge of the cushion and said, “You doing okay?”

She smiled over the rim of her mug. “I was sleeping.”

“I know. I'm sorry we had to wake you. Are you okay to talk about this now?”

She blinked once and continued to smile. “I was sitting here thinking about how quickly things change,” she said.

“In the blink of an eye sometimes.”

“You live your life day after day, just hoping for a change. Then when it comes, you wish things could be the way they were.”

“Some things are hard in the beginning,” he told her. “But over time . . .” He stopped himself because he realized then that he was thinking about the change in her relationship with her husband, while she might be thinking about her son.

He leaned forward and set a little tape recorder on the coffee table. He pressed the record button, and then, just as he had done twenty minutes earlier with Charlotte, stated the date and time and the individuals present. Then he leaned back and smiled at her. “Ready to start, Livvie?”

She nodded.

He said, “Can you tell me how you got that split lip and that bruise on your face?”

Her own smile did not fade. He recognized it as the same kind of smile that came to his own mouth when he gazed into the distance and thought about the lake, the red canoe, the little girl on the dock.

“Denny,” she said.

“How many times did he hit you?”

“You mean this last time? Last night?”

“Yes,” Gatesman said.

“Four or five probably.”

“Did he use his open hand or a fist?”

“Oh . . . I guess I'd have to say both. Punched and slapped and pushed, you know?”

“And this wasn't the first time he assaulted you?”

“The first this week maybe.”

“So it's been a regular thing?”

“It's not usually so . . . I don't know,” she said. “He grabs me and shoves me, he pushes me around. It's always been like that.”

“So it's long past time it stopped,” Gatesman said. “Would you agree?”

He waited at least ten seconds for Livvie's response. She answered with a nod.

“Would you mind responding orally,” he said. “The recorder can't—”

“Yes,” Livvie said. “The answer is yes.”

“Your husband assaulted you and you wish to file a charge of assault. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” she said. “Except that he isn't my husband.”

Charlotte came into the room then, handed him the cup of coffee, then stood there beside his chair. He questioned Charlotte with his eyes, and she answered with her own look of surprise.

To Livvie he said, “Could you explain that statement please? Denny Rankin is not your husband?”

“I just mean that we never got married. We never had a ceremony or anything. Never got a license.”

“So,” he said, “the wedding band you wear . . .”

She looked at her hand, shifted the mug to her left hand, then worked the ring off her finger and laid it on the opposite edge of the coffee table. “He said it's white gold but I know it's not.”

Gatesman did not know what more to say or do. Sometimes, he knew, comfort is impossible. Sometimes it is better to say nothing.

He looked up at Charlotte still standing beside his chair. “It would be good to get some photographs of both of you. The sooner the better. I hate to ask you to come into the courthouse now, but . . .”

“I have a camera here,” she told him. “You can take the memory card with you. Would that work?”

“As long as I'm the one taking the photos,” he said.

She said, “The kitchen has the brightest lights.”

He remembered the tape recorder then and shut it off.

In the kitchen he was uncomfortable with having them stand against the white wall, with asking them to turn this way and that way, with asking Charlotte to pull the top of her bra a little lower to expose the entire scratch. He kept apologizing and told them, “I should really have a female deputy doing this,” but Charlotte said, “It's all right, Marcus. Livvie and I are here together. We trust you.”

Afterward he had them sign three separate sheets of paper each. Charlotte handed him the memory card from the camera. He slipped it into his shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket and then stood there uncomfortably.

He was finished doing what he had to do, yet he felt there was more to be done, though he had no idea what it might be. “I know how hard this must be for you,” he told Livvie. She was seated now at the little kitchen table against the window, her arms crossed atop the table. “It's not, really,” she said. “I just don't want him around me anymore.” After a few seconds she leaned forward and laid her head atop her arms and closed her eyes.

Charlotte said, “Why don't I get her back into bed?”

Gatesman said, “I'll wait for you out on the porch.”

He stood for a while on the edge of the porch looking off toward the mountains. The day had become clear and bright, a perfect spring day.
Except that there's no such thing as perfection,
he told himself.
Not as long as there's a human in the picture.

He took his tape recorder and clipboard to his vehicle and placed them inside. Then he sat for a while on the car seat with the door open and his feet on the ground.

He thought,
This job would be a piece of cake if I just had a couple of switches inside my head I could shut off.

When Charlotte came out onto the porch, he stood and crossed to the bottom of the steps. She had changed out of her torn blouse and now wore a dark blue knit shirt with long sleeves. He could see that she had been crying, and in his imagination he pictured the two women upstairs, Livvie lying in bed and Charlotte sitting beside her, holding her hand; Livvie sleeping peacefully because of the Vicodin and the soporific effects of trauma, Charlotte softly weeping on Livvie's behalf. He told himself that he could probably love this woman if only she would let him. He felt a powerful tenderness for Livvie as well, wished that he could enfold her in his arms and take away all of her pain, but for Charlotte there was something else as well, something whose name he had never learned.

“Well that was a surprise, wasn't it?” he said.

“That they were never married? I guess so.”

He nodded, smiled, asked himself what else he should say.

“So what happens now?” Charlotte asked.

“Now I give my report to the DA; he swears out a warrant for Rankin's arrest. We keep looking for him until we find him.”

“Does this . . .” she said, “I mean what he did to Livvie, and to me . . . this proclivity for violence . . . does it suggest to you that maybe he
is
responsible for the boy?”

Gatesman took a slow breath, released it through his mouth. “I wish I had an answer for that. For that and a lot of other things.”

She studied his face, then smiled softly. “Did you ever think that maybe this isn't the right job for you?”

“Hourly,” he said. “But nobody's offered to pay me to catch trout, so here I am.”

She continued to stand there just outside the screen door. He pictured himself striding onto the porch, then abruptly stopped that image and made a small turn toward his car.

He said, “She's probably going to want to go back to her own place as soon as she wakes up. In my opinion that wouldn't be a very good idea.”

“I'll keep her here,” Charlotte said.

“I'm sure you'll take good care of her.”

“You don't know Livvie. An hour from now she'll be trying to take care of me.”

“Either way sounds good,” he said.

W
HILE Livvie slept, Charlotte found little things to do and tried to keep her thoughts focused only on those activities, on mopping her muddy tracks off the kitchen and mudroom floors, on washing out the morning's tea and coffee mugs, drying them meticulously, setting them neatly in the cupboard, then rearranging the cups in a more orderly fashion. She swept the tiles in the foyer and her studio's hardwood floor and thought about running the vacuum in the living room but was afraid it would wake Livvie. She wanted Livvie to lie in the soft bed with the goose-down coverlet for as long as possible, to luxuriate in the warmth and softness and be unable to resist comparing it to the bed in her trailer, the tight quarters there, everything made of plastic or vinyl or molded fiberglass, a place where the windows frosted up so badly in winter that she couldn't see outside without scraping a circle in the frost, a place whose security was always at best tenuous, where the roof probably leaked and the propane tank heated unevenly and where the bedroom in the summer was a sweatbox. She wanted Livvie to awaken in the spacious perfumed bed and think,
This is the nicest bed I have ever been in
. She tried to put herself in Livvie's place and wondered if Livvie would feel the same envy and longing that she, Charlotte, would feel if their positions were reversed.

For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, Charlotte's mind raced with such thoughts, even when she was thumbing through her cookbooks and especially when she was lying stretched out on the sofa and trying to concentrate on the soft music coming from the speakers, Taj Majal on continuous repeat, the soft Hawaiian vowels,
Lele, lele e nā manu
. . .
Paint my mailbox blue . . . Please take off your shoes, I slice me some sashimi . . .
And all the time her mind kept racing, racing, growling like an overheated engine, like the engine of a high-performance race car flying around the track at top speed, the throttle full-open, pedal to the floor.
How many more laps can it take at this speed?
she wondered.
How many more miles before the whole thing blows apart?

It was midafternoon when Livvie finally stirred. Several hours beyond the time when Charlotte thought she would surely go mad with all this waiting. Charlotte's head had been throbbing so insistently that she feared another migraine might be coming, a real migraine this time like the ones she used to have in her hotel room in the weeks after leaving her husband, when every fear and worry was multiplied tenfold. But then she heard the toilet flush upstairs and she immediately leapt up from the sofa and turned the volume very low on the CD player and stood there listening. Water running in the lavatory. The soft scrape of feet.

Charlotte went to her desk in the corner of the room, sat down and jiggled the mouse to awaken the monitor. She opened her e-mail, and for several seconds after she heard Livvie at the threshold, she remained staring at the screen, pretending to be reading.