Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (6 page)

Sometimes Gatesman could stand very still and listen to something he had never identified by name, a wordless intuition that told him, yes, there's something here, or no, look somewhere else. He tried it here, eyes half closed and losing focus, blurring the world. But in the warmth of the sun on his face, he smelled the warmth of Charlotte's kitchen, remembered the tiny canary of sunlight that rested on the top of her hand as it lay motionless atop the table.

Man, you better get your fucking head straight,
he told himself, but he softly laughed because the feeling that warmed his chest was so pleasant and so rare. Through no intention of his own, he had always been very particular when it came to females. He could name only three in his life with whom he had felt a sudden, unexplainable connection. Two of them were gone, and since their departure, he had expected to feel such a pull on his soul never again. He did not really want the feeling now and wished he could postpone it until nightfall, but he had to admit that the vague breathlessness he felt, the quickening of his pulse, made him think of himself as a bear coming out of hibernation, dragged out of a long numbness by the first scent of spring.

Still, he had a job to do.
Look for the boy,
he told himself.
Even though you know he's not here, you need to at least have a thorough look.

Gatesman lifted the latch to step inside the fence, took his time approaching the barn. No harm in allowing himself a moment to admire the last jewels of moisture clinging to the weeds like tiny glass balls, the scent of greenery still damp with morning.

Then he stood under the overhang, the cantilevered barn floor two feet above his head. He surveyed the cobwebs hanging from the beams and posts.
Too bad we can't send those off to some lab,
he thought. Have the memories extracted from them. Splice them all together into a little movie of what they saw.

Then he looked through the wide doorway framed in heavy beams, wide enough for the cows to come lumbering out two abreast. The floor was bare earth trampled hard, the air cooler, dimmer, but not as pleasantly scented as the pasture, the sour leathery smell of cowhide, the years of urine and dung. From the doorway, an open corridor ran to the front edge of the barn. On each side of that corridor were three rows of stalls lined up lengthwise to the barn, the rows separated by perpendicular corridors. Gatesman had never been inside this barn before, but he had seen enough of cow barns to know the basic setup, even though all of the milking equipment had been removed and sold off. The milking machines would have taken up the now-empty space at the front of the barn, the lines and hoses secured to the ceiling so that the octopus-armed suction rigs could be pulled down from their swivels into the stalls. A relatively small operation that, even had the Simmons boys wanted to keep it going, would not have survived much longer.

Gatesman walked through the door to the end of the central corridor, then slowly back and forth across the length of the barn, up and down the aisles. He glanced into each stall as he passed it, his head turning left to right and back again, eyes squinting in the meager light that bled in through the cracked and broken boards. Bare, dusty bulbs hung overhead, but the power for the barn had long ago been turned off because every stall but one was empty but for an occasional bit of windblown leaf or papery wasp's nest. In the stall in the northwestern corner were twelve bags of garden manure in a rectangular stack, four rows of three bags each. One of the bags on top had split open and spilled half its contents onto the floor. But no boy. No sign of a boy anywhere, no sign he had ever been here.

Back in the driveway again, hand on his car door, Gatesman wondered about going back up onto the porch and finally decided no.
No, you need to get your breath back first,
he thought, and climbed into the car and pulled the door shut.
You need to be smarter than that dog chasing a rabbit it couldn't catch.

He started the car and backed out of the driveway, turned and drove toward Metcalf Road. At the end of her driveway, he sat staring straight ahead through the windshield.
You got to figure out if you even want to catch that rabbit,
he told himself.

The bushes were thick along the side of the road, tense and tangled but budding with new leaves, but the sunlight made the field of low scrub grass behind the bushes seem to glow, a backdrop of soft radiance, and miles beyond the scrub grass the Tuscarora Mountains, blue and rounded against a cobalt sky.

Christ, it's a beautiful morning,
he thought. But then he remembered why he had come there that morning, and he turned left onto the macadam and drove away down the road.

W
HEN Charlotte heard the car engine's low rumble, she stood and went to the window and pulled the blinds to the side. She stood there and watched the sheriff 's car stop at the end of her driveway. It did not move for what seemed to her a very long time. Only when it finally swung left and disappeared down Metcalf Road did the heaviness in her chest begin to lift a little. Afterward she stood a long time at the window. Finally, she went out onto the porch and sat on the porch swing. She could not look straight into the sun-filled yard without squinting, though her headache was not as debilitating as she had implied. Because she did not want to think about the younger boy, she thought about Dylan Hayes and wondered what he would say when the sheriff questioned him. She wished she had not had to tell the sheriff about Dylan going into the woods yesterday. She liked the teenager but had sensed at their very first meeting that he was certainly capable of violence, that there was a tautness to him, the tension of a steel string pulled nearly tight enough to snap.

It had happened the previous summer, just weeks after she had moved in.

Dylan was out there with the harvester, she was sitting at the edge of her garden, pulling a few weeds probably, enjoying the sunshine. Out in the field, the old red Farmall belched black smoke and stalled. Dylan hammered and cursed at it for ten minutes or so, then came trudging across the field and introduced himself and asked to use her phone. Afterward, he and Charlotte sat on the front porch and drank lemonade until Mike Verner arrived. During that time, Dylan told her, at first a bit shyly in answer to her questions, then with increasing volubility, that he really wanted to be a studio musician, a guitar player in Muscle Shoals. But he was dating a girl named Reenie . . .

“Short for Irene?” Charlotte asked.

He thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “I don't think so.”

Reenie, in his words, was “high maintenance.” Besides the movies and fast-food dinners every Friday and Saturday night, she was insisting that she and Dylan get each other's names tattooed on their shoulders—at his expense, of course—as evidence of their abiding love until he could afford an engagement ring.

“But damn if I can get it through her head,” he complained, “that two tattoos will cost me near as much as a diamond ring at Sears.”

An hour later, after Mike Verner had arrived and got the old beast huffing and puffing out in the field again, with Dylan once again jouncing along at the wheel, Mike came over to the house to thank Charlotte for the use of her phone.

“The boy didn't cause you any problems, did he?” Mike asked.

“None whatsoever. What kind of problems were you anticipating?”

“I just wanted to make sure he was polite and all. Respectful. You know how kids can be.”

“He was a perfect gentleman.”

At that, Mike smiled. “Yes, well . . . as much as can be expected, I suppose.”

She invited Mike to sit and have some lemonade, and soon, without much coaxing, she pulled a fuller explanation out of him. According to Mike, Dylan had a well-documented history of antiauthoritarian behavior. A handful of arrests as a minor for vandalism and destruction of private property, a regular routine of smart-mouthing and defying his teachers, of fistfights in the school corridors with other students—he harbored a particular animosity for the athletes—and a general attitude of contempt for the world at large.

“His father has just about wore himself out trying to beat some sense into the boy,” Mike said. “And I mean that literally. He was at the end of his rope when he came and asked if maybe I could find something to keep Dylan busy. So last year we got him enrolled in the co-op program. To this day there are teachers who want to shake my hand every time they see me. In fact there's one who's even offered to sleep with me. A female teacher, mind you.”

“You take her up on it yet?” Charlotte asked.

He grinned. “I left it up to my wife. She's still thinking it over.” He finished off his lemonade then, thanked her for her hospitality, and headed on back to his own place.

Charlotte remembered that afternoon, remembered it all quite clearly, so much clearer and more real than even the past twenty-four hours.
Dylan has a history,
she told herself.
So you shouldn't feel bad about what you said. You told it the way you remember it, didn't you?

She winced then, a cold shiver out of nowhere.

You should get a sweater,
she told herself, but did not get up from the porch swing.

She thought of the younger boy then. Jesse. Did not want to think of him because it made her heart ache. All the sorrow in the world, all the tears.
If you stop too long to think about all the pain in the world, it will be too much,
she told herself.
It could turn a soul to stone.

She tried instead to pull up a mental image of the painting under the sheet in her studio, but instead of the face of the little Amish boy, she saw Jesse's face. She saw Jesse sitting in the woods on a fallen log.

The previous winter she had seen Jesse close up, had stood within a foot or so of him. Why hadn't she told the sheriff that? Because it was months ago, she told herself, and counted back—April, March, February, January. Four months ago. Ancient history.

The trees had been bare then, the sky gray. A chilly morning, she remembered. It sent a chill through her even now.

Several times before that morning she had seen the boy going into or coming out of the woods. To her eyes he appeared the size of a ten-year-old, maybe four-and-a-half-feet tall, though it was difficult to be sure at that distance, but too young, she thought, to be out there alone, trudging across the far edge of the field, following the tree line before disappearing into the darkness of trunks and limbs. Too young to be carrying a shotgun that seemed as long as he was tall. It would be just after dawn, usually, while she was repositioning the easel so as to catch the coming light from the dining room's bay window. On a few other occasions she had spotted him at dusk, when she was busy with something or other outside, sweeping leaves off the back porch or splitting wood for the fireplace, or she would be washing dishes at the sink, or just standing by the window and sipping a glass of pinot grigio. Maybe a dozen times between the fall and the spring she had watched him entering or coming out of the woods.

But it was that very first time—that first jarring volley of gunshots, three blasts in rapid succession echoing across the field while the crows squawked and burst from the treetops—that made her begin to bristle at the sight of the boy, to always associate him with that thunderclap of violence, to birds in panicked flight.

She had put up with those jarring interruptions for a while, though each time they sounded she reacted as if her own house had been dynamited. Went rigid with the very first decibel to reach her, stood frozen while the paint dripped off her brush or down over a wrist. It always took her a while to get her breath back and to calm the thump of her heart, but even then when she tried to work it was as if her eyes had become unfocused, and she could not capture again the clarity of the vision of the image she intended to paint. The echo of the shotgun blasts seemed to lodge just behind her forehead in a tight, heavy cloud of darkness. It would be impossible to paint for the rest of the day, impossible to lose herself in the world she was coaxing from the canvas. The next morning and several thereafter would begin with a residue of that cloud inside her head, but when dawn came and then full sunlight, and the crows did not shriek in terror, only then would her body relax and the cloud dissipate. Only then could she work for a few hours without the outside world intruding.

Until one day something snapped in her. It was late January, she told herself. Maybe four in the afternoon. Overcast. Frigid. The sun had been nothing more than a dull ember barely showing through the gray.

She had been standing at the sink, washing a handful of baby carrots under a stream of cool water. The last of the ahi tuna steaks, a box of eight June had sent at Thanksgiving, had been thawed out and crusted with coarsely ground black pepper. Charlotte planned to braise the baby carrots and a few brussels sprouts in olive oil, then add a tablespoon of butter and caramelize them slightly. At the last minute, she would lay the tuna steak in a very hot skillet, sear each side for less than a minute, then enjoy her dinner in front of the TV while watching Gerard Butler as the Phantom of the Opera. But the sudden jolt of booms startled her so that she dropped the carrots into the sink. Half of them went down the garbage disposal. She felt the shotgun blasts coming off the window, three icy slaps out of nowhere, as if they had exploded only inches away and not a hundred yards distant in the woods. “Goddamn it!” she screamed at the window. Then she spun away from the sink without drying her hands or shutting off the water spewing from the tap and strode into the mudroom. She grabbed her heavy Woolrich jacket off the coatrack nailed to the wall, rammed her feet into her still-new Timberlands, and with the laces flapping and dragging, she marched outside and across the snowy field. She found the boy's footsteps at the far edge of the field and followed them into the trees, stomped on them, obliterated his boot marks with her own.