Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (41 page)

Along the way I passed a dead deer along the side of the road, and the sight of it gave me another idea. I felt sure that the police would use dogs when they conducted a search, probably the kind that can detect cadavers. But could the dog distinguish between species? I pulled over to the shoulder and thought about trying to load that deer into the Jeep but then realized that it didn't make any sense. Why would a deer jump the pasture fence, go into a stall and lie down and die?

So something smaller maybe. But what kind of animal? Of course I thought of the raccoons then, the ones who raided my garbage every month. So I got back on the road but kept my eyes open for the right piece of roadkill.

I wasn't even sure what the opossum was when I spotted it. It was white and mangled, and that long, ratlike tail, that ugly snout—just the sight of it made me sick to my stomach. But I was already thoroughly sick to my stomach with even worse, more indelible images in my head. So I pulled over just behind the flattened opossum, and when the road was clear in both directions, I jumped out. The only thing I had in the Jeep to pick the animal up with were the baby wipes I keep in the glove box, so, with one in each hand, I grabbed the thing by its tail and one paw and dumped it on the floor mat on the passenger side. I gagged the whole way to Walmart.

There were three registers in the garden supply area. One was tended by a young man with a wispy beard, maybe midtwenties but no older. But he looked too bright-eyed and sharp, I could see his intelligence even from twenty feet away, where I was pretending to appraise the display of solar patio lights. Then there was a sullen, emaciated teenage girl who was more interested in her conversation with the adjacent cashier, a weary-looking woman old enough to be the girl's grandmother, than in her customers, whom she rang up without even looking at them. Most of the time she kept stealing glances at the young man.

I waited until her line was empty, then hurried to fill it. “I need ten bags of that fertilizer mix outside,” I told her. “No, make it a dozen. Twelve bags.”

She reached for the laminated card with a lot of bar codes on it. “The Miracle-Gro?”

“No, the Earthscape, I think it's called.”

“Twenty- or forty-pound bags?”

“Forty.”

She ran the bar code over the scanner but still didn't lift her eyes to me. “Twelve, you said?”

“Yes. Please.”

I paid with cash. The only time she met my eyes was when she handed me the receipt. “I'll ring for somebody to load them for you. You have a truck, right?”

“Right,” I said. “But I don't need any help, thanks.”

Her gaze had already wandered back to the young man. “Just show the receipt if anybody asks.”

Nobody asked. I heaved all twelve bags into the back of my Jeep, then slammed down the tailgate. And that's when it hit me. The clarity. The full, sudden acknowledgment of what I was doing and why I was doing it. I swear to God, it hit me like a searing, blinding blast of heat. As if the sun had exploded right before my eyes. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see anything but a throbbing brightness. I stood there gasping and half collapsed against the tailgate. The brightness was inside my head as well as outside and all around me, and I thought to myself that maybe this is what a stroke feels like, maybe this is what Daddy feels every time he has one of those little explosions in his brain. And I
hoped
that I was having a stroke. I hoped that it would kill me right then and there. Because I understood with a sudden damning clarity that now my life was forever changed. That nothing I could do could ever change what I had done.

Eventually I climbed back into the Jeep and drove home. That dead opossum on the floor stank to high heaven. The stink stuck in my nose and throat, so I kept the window down in case I vomited. The only way I could hold down the nausea was to stare at that mangled little body with all the hatred I could summon and think,
That's you there, Charlotte. That's you from this day on.

O
KAY, I'm back. Sometimes I have to take a break from this, have to go crawl into a corner and sob my eyes out. But I'm trying to get this written as quickly as possible. I need to.

So back to that day, that endless, excruciating day. I pulled the Jeep down around to the pasture but not into the pasture. I knew that I would leave tracks if I went off the lane that Mike's tractor and wagon had worn through the grass. So I had to haul those bags one at a time into the stall. But first I laid down the opossum. Then stacked the bags on top. But then it all looked too neat and new. So I ripped open the top bag and spilled some of the fertilizer around.

What more can you do?
I kept asking myself.
What more can you do?
Nobody who has never experienced this kind of senseless panic can understand what it is like. I felt like I was overdosing on speed, like my head and my heart and my lungs were literally going to explode at any second. I wanted to scream and scream and scream and scream. I still want to. I guess, though, that what I'm doing now is a kind of scream. I do feel a lessening of pressure the more I write. But I am not doing this for me. In fact, this is the first time all month, and probably well before that, that I am doing something not for myself.

So I burned the floor mat and sprayed air freshener through the Jeep. Went back inside and waited for the shit storm to hit.

In the afternoon I heard the rumbling of Mike Verner's old red Farmall. I hadn't looked outside in a couple of hours by then, so I was surprised to see that the sky had darkened off to the west and that a massive dark cloud was slowly moving in. Then I just stood by the window in my numbed state of shock and watched Dylan spreading lime over the cornfield. I wondered if he had gotten that tattoo yet, and, if so, if he had tried yet to scratch it off.

After a while, and I really have no idea how long, Dylan brought the tractor to a halt. He wasn't far from where Jesse and I had exited the woods that morning, so when Dylan hopped down off his seat, my heart seized. I felt another panic attack coming on. I kept thinking,
Get back on your tractor, get back on your tractor.

But Dylan reached in behind the tractor's seat and pulled something out. At first I couldn't see what it was, but then I saw that it was white. A roll of toilet paper. He glanced back toward the house, just a quick look over his shoulder. I ducked away from the window for a few seconds, and when I peeked out again, he was nowhere to be seen.

I sat breathless at the corner of the window, and Jesus, how my chest ached. I can feel it again right now, that crushing, airless fear. I felt like I was holding my breath the whole time he was in the woods. But it wasn't long before he came trotting back out, shoved the toilet paper behind the seat again, climbed up, yanked at a couple of levers, and the tractor rolled forward once more.

The surge of relief that hit me when he went back to spreading lime, how strange that seems to me now. But no stranger than the fact that a minute or two later, the relief turned into uncontrollable, convulsive sobbing again. I just wanted to give up, that's how I remember it. I just wanted to pass out and never wake up.

I slid down to the floor, curled up into a tight little ball. My body felt so sore and beaten, and I kept sobbing because I didn't know how to quit, didn't know how to sob myself back to something better. Eventually I must have sobbed myself to sleep.

When I woke up, Dylan and the tractor were gone and the massive cloud was so close that I could see the charcoal squall lines reaching down to the ground. Plus the wind had picked up and there was a chill in the air. Most chilling of all, though, was the fear that maybe Dylan had noticed something out there in the woods, something that meant nothing to him at the time, but later when the police questioned everybody would take on new meaning. Had either Jesse or I left something out there? Had I dropped anything? Had Jesse? At that moment, in the state I was in, everything was significant, everything was incriminating. So I hurried back outside, coatless this time, and into the woods.

The only thing I could find was the little pile Dylan had left behind and the dirty wad of toilet paper. Did it matter? I wondered.
Think, Charlotte, think! Should it be there or not?

I couldn't think straight, obviously. So I just scooped it all up in my hands, kicked some leaves over where it had been, and ran back home. I dropped it in my garden plot, then thought twice about burying the toilet paper. Picked it out, carried it inside and flushed three times. Then I raced back outside and with my hands mixed Dylan's scat in with the soil. I was too exhausted, too numb, too fucking delirious to even wash my hands right away. Because I stood there in the yard staring across the field at the woods, and there were my footprints in the lime. One set going into the woods, another set coming back. I stood there utterly breathless.
I can't do it,
I thought.
I can't erase all those footprints.

It was done, it was over, I was going to be caught. And the only thing I felt was relief. And with that relief, a little of my strength returned. Enough that I was able to go back inside, take a shower, and get myself ready.

I was seated at the vanity, brushing my hair, when the rain hit the windows. I looked out and could see nothing but the wall of rain slanting hard toward the house.

An hour or so later, the rain stopped. The black cloud was grinding its way to the east, leaving only a filmy layer of gray for the sun to shine through. I went back upstairs to the window and looked out at the field. Nearly all of the lime, and my footprints with it, had been washed into earth.

Strangely, this time I felt no relief. Because nothing was over. In fact, that was the only thought I was capable of for the rest of the afternoon and evening, the one that kept playing on a loop in my brain until I finally silenced it with wine and pills,
It's not over, it's not over, it's not over, it's not over . . .

A
ND you know the rest, Marcus. Most of it, anyway. You showed up the next morning. I told you I'd had a migraine, which was only partially true. Everything I told you from that day on was only partially true. I am very, very sorry.

It's taken me most of two days to write this, and now the rest is up to you. I don't know anybody else who has the shoulders for this kind of work. Only you. I'm sorry for this as well.

One last bit of information: I talked to Dylan's father this past Friday, the same day I mailed my note to you. I drove out to the house to ask if they had had any news from the boy. He looked so old, Marcus, though he is younger than me, I think. But there was a slackness to his posture, dark moons beneath his eyes. His complexion was pale, face drawn, none of that hard, muscled, sinewy look I imagine he sported just a few months ago. He was doing something in his garage when I pulled into the driveway, turned and saw me behind the windshield, then eventually came up to my door. I could feel his exhaustion.

“I'm Charlotte Dunleavy?” I told him. “I live out on the old Simmons' place?”

He blinked. Gave me a little nod.

“I was just wondering . . . I mean I think about Dylan all the time.”

He blinked again, though this one looked more like a wince.

“I used to talk to him sometimes when he was out in the field for Mike Verner. Sometimes he'd stop by the house for a glass of lemonade.”

Something sparked in his eyes then. I thought surely he must remember me from the night I had visited Dylan in the hospital; surely he would say something now, accuse me, whip me bloody with his words. Maybe that was what I wanted. But all he said was, “Is that right?”

“Sometimes he'd just get a drink from my garden hose. On really hot days he used to wash himself down with it.”