Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (2 page)

S
HERIFF Marcus Gatesman wondered if he should knock a second time, louder, or if he should assume that the woman who lived here was still asleep. But who slept with the front door standing open these days—with only a flimsy screen door, unlatched, between her and a violent world—especially on a cool morning so early in April? Even here in the softly folded hills of Pennsylvania, in the small towns and mostly Amish farmlands, there was no shortage of cruelty and violence. From the porch he could gaze in any direction and name a violence that had been perpetrated there. Some of it, the worst of it, he had experienced firsthand.

The morning was still chilly, though the day promised to be unseasonably warm. In the distance beyond the highway, a line of blue hills was rising to the sky, seeming to grow minute by minute out of the evanescing fog. “The Tuscarora Mountains,” he said aloud. It was comforting to be able to name things.

Off to his right, just a hundred yards or so across the stubbly cornfield, crows were cawing from the trees, a tentative chorus of four or five. They would sit in the treetops awhile longer, he knew, drying their wings, then they would fly off to scavenge the countryside. It would not take them long to find a small animal or two along the highway, a road-killed rabbit or raccoon or opossum or squirrel. Dead things were always plentiful here, the detritus of every night—groundhogs and stray cats, somebody's dog, sometimes a white-tailed deer or two. Even in winter there was never any shortage of carrion to keep the crows fed.

He faced the door again. This unpleasant business of the morning as well as half of yesterday had engendered in him a deliberateness of movement even greater than usual. It was at times such as this that he felt unsuited for his job. He had not anticipated so much sadness.

He knocked a second time, only slightly louder, and followed it by calling through the screen, into the foyer not yet illuminated by southern light, “Hello? Mrs. Dunleavy? Anybody home this morning?”

H
EARING her name spoken aloud, misspoken in the usual way with the long
e
sound of the second syllable, and with the objectionable
Mrs.
as prefix, would have startled Charlotte even more had the unfamiliar voice been more demanding. But it conveyed a warmth and gentleness that sounded like an apology. She felt, for some reason this morning, particularly receptive to gentleness. Yesterday had struck her like one long migraine, her first since moving to Pennsylvania, and in its aftermath her spirit felt restless, unfocused, as if, like a small ship after a daylong storm, she had been torn from her moorings and was uncertain of the waters through which she now drifted.

She stood and walked back through the kitchen and into the relative dimness of the foyer. A man she had never seen before was standing on her porch, hands cupped around his eyes and pressed to the screen door as he peered inside. The yard behind him was filled with light, and for just a moment she paused with the sudden recognition of the scene's possibilities. Its impact would depend on how she painted the figure of the stranger. The light behind him could either contrast or accompany his intentions.

“There you are,” he said, and lowered his hands. He smiled. “I hope I'm not disturbing you.”

She saw the uniform only peripherally, the beige jacket and trousers. His face filled the foreground, such a shockingly familiar face that she experienced a second soft jolt of disorientation.

He kept smiling, though he was caught more than a little off guard by the sight of her, the nicely tight blue jeans, the loose yellow shirt hanging over the jeans. She was barefoot and wore no makeup, and her eyes held a startled, almost frightened look that made him immediately want to calm her.

“I caught you in the middle of something, didn't I?” He concentrated on keeping his voice soft. “I apologize for interrupting you like this.”

“No, no I just . . . You're the spitting image of James Dickey,” she said.

“Ma'am?”

“James Dickey. The writer. You look just like him.”

“I guess I don't know who that is,” he said.

She moved a step closer and stared at him through the screen. St. Mark's Cathedral, she thought.
To the White Sea
. She and June sitting near the center of the first row, enraptured by the man's stillness and the slow melodic flow of words that bespoke a greater sorrow than the words alone. Behind him the soft yellow lights of the sanctuary. The scents of incense and candle wax. The hovering darkness in the faraway ceiling.

And now here outside her door stood a police officer looking like Dickey's twin. The same broad forehead and soft face, the same thin strands of hair combed over a prominent skull. The same extra twenty pounds around his belly. All this man lacked was the vague Southern accent.

“I'm ashamed to say that I don't do much reading,” Gatesman said.

She could only nod. It all felt just too strange to her, and on a day so new, yet already ripe with an odd imbalance.

“Imagine that,” he said, and smiled again. “Me looking like a writer.”

There was such a total lack of menace in his smile, not the slightest hint of threat, that Charlotte smiled too.

“The thing is,” he continued, the note of apology still in his voice, “we've got a little boy who didn't show up at his house last night. So I'm just driving around and asking if anybody's seen him lately. He's about this tall,” the man said, and held his hand level with his chest. “Twelve years old. He's got a thick mop of black hair, brown eyes, probably wearing jeans and boots.”

“Jesse,” Charlotte said. The name came out before she knew she was going to say it.

“You know the boy?”

“Well it's . . .” And then it happened again—the vague, almost distant nausea, the aura of scintillating light. She saw Gatesman as if he wore a softly burning veil of sunlight—the scotoma, June had called it, the aura that sometimes precedes a migraine and sometimes occurs independently of one.

“I can't really say that I know him,” she said.

Gatesman waited, still smiling that patient, understanding smile.

The aura was fascinating but it hurt her eyes, so she took a step backward and averted her gaze, looked into the corner of the foyer. A spindly ficus in a ceramic planter. Stillness and shade. She concentrated on breathing evenly, eyes half closed. With luck she could will the aura away.

“I've only seen him from a distance,” she said. “A few times this past winter I saw him cutting across the field out there and going into the woods. Every time I've seen him he's been carrying a gun that looks bigger than he is.”

A pause. She imagined that Gatesman nodded and continued to smile. He said, “Any chance we could get this screen door out from between us?”

When the screen door swung open, she turned away at the waist, raised a hand to block the sunlight. She kept her eyes on the stairway, third step from the bottom.

“I'm sorry,” she said, because she had felt his reaction, the sudden pause when she turned away. She released a slow breath. “I had a monster of a migraine all day yesterday. I thought it was over but . . . apparently I'm still sensitive to light.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—”

“No, no it's okay, I . . .” She lowered her hand. “How about if you come inside? The kitchen faces north. Very soft light. I'll be fine there.”

“Let me get my shoes off,” he said.

The screen door closed with the dullest of thuds. She thought any other man would have let it bang shut. She retreated another step before looking toward the door again. Gatesman was bent double just outside the screen, untying his shoes. The aura had all but dissipated, leaving only a few sparkles scattered over the yard.

“You really needn't do that,” she told him.

“I don't want to track mud into your house. I feel bad enough getting it on your porch like I did.”

Only then did she realize that the sparkles in the yard were real. “It rained last night, didn't it?” she said.

“All night. You didn't hear it?”

She did not answer. She had ceased trying to explain the altered reality brought on by a migraine, then the lingering sense of displacement, of being both inside and outside the body. The feeling lasted for days sometimes, was sometimes accompanied by a trembling sense of euphoria, a feeling of transcendence. She had created two of her favorite paintings in such a state.

For now she hazarded another look beyond Gatesman and saw that it was indeed a glistening morning. The grass and tree trunks shone with dampness, the light was soft and golden. A brown sedan sat directly under the big tulip poplar, the car's fenders and tires splashed with mud.

Unfortunately she felt no buoyancy of spirit this morning. Sometimes the migraine left in its wake a deep, unnameable sadness, a profound sense of loss made evident wherever she looked. Once, not long before the divorce, she had taken a jar of capers from the refrigerator, unscrewed the cap and found a layer of gray mold, and wept uncontrollably for most of the afternoon. Today she saw loss in the quality of the light. She saw tragedy in Gatesman's smile as again he swung open the screen door and this time stepped inside. His socks were either dark blue or black. She stared at them for a moment, trying to discern the color, then finally realized, as he brought his feet together and waited there for her to move, that he wore one of each, one sock dark blue, the other faded black, and instead of smiling, amused, she turned away, led him toward the kitchen, and asked, as her throat thickened with sadness, “How do you take your coffee?”

O
VER the years Gatesman had learned that, as an interviewer, observation and silence were his most effective tools. Both activities suited his temperament.

Atop the small table by the window, on the eastern side, lay a notepad and pen and an empty mug with the white tab of tea bag stuck to the rim. He took the western seat and faced the rising sun. He could see a portion of the woods a hundred or so yards away, across the field that last year had been planted in feed corn for Mike Verner's Angus cattle. The sun was rising behind the woods, bleeding through the trees with a broken light, leaving some of the field in shadow, some of it streaked golden. In places, the low stubble looked as black as old sticks; in others, like bleached bone. The field, still wet, showed only smeared traces of the white lime that had been spread over the ground the previous afternoon. From within the trees, crows cawed.

Gatesman looked at the notepad, saw a list of upside-down words.
Chorizo
was the first word,
andouille
the second. Some other language, he told himself, because neither word was familiar to him.

He turned a few degrees to the right. Charlotte was pouring water from a kettle into a blue enamel mug. A small white tab attached to a string hung alongside the handle. Gatesman thought,
I thought she said coffee.

When she set the mug in front of him, he smelled the coffee and understood. She said, “If that's too weak, I can make a full pot instead. I have a French press, but it's quite a production.”

He dunked the bag several times, waited for the brew to darken. Then said, “Maybe another bag?” He looked up at her and smiled. “I prefer mine the color of motor oil.”

“Of course,” she said, and turned away. A few moments later she lowered another coffee single into the cup.

He waited for her to sit, but she stood with her right hand resting on the edge of the table. Her nails were manicured but painted with a clear lacquer, her fingers long and, though no longer slender, as lovely a hand as he had seen in a while. Across the webbing of skin between finger and thumb was a small Band-Aid. She wore an identical one on the other hand. He felt a subtle weakness in his chest at the sight of those injuries, an unprofessional awkwardness he hurried to suppress. “You're a tea drinker?” he asked.