Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (7 page)

Twenty yards into the woods, he was standing over a bird whose feathers lay scattered across the white ground, a black splash, crooked winged. Like a Pollack painting, she told herself. The snow around the bird was speckled with blood.

“I suppose you're going to have that crow for supper now?” she said. Her voice was louder in the woods than she intended, as if her anger, coming out, suddenly expanded in the thin light.

He jerked his head around to look at her. “People don't eat crows,” he said.

His voice was not loud, but she could hear the disdain in it. She had hoped to frighten and startle him as his gunshots had startled her, but his face showed no sign of fear. He knew who she was, she could see the recognition in his dark eyes. She was the rich city lady who had bought the old Simmons farm, the woman who did nothing all day but paint pictures and walk the narrow lanes and take photographs of crumbling foundations and wind-gnarled trees. She thought it obvious from the way the boy looked at her that he considered her the intruder here, the interloper. Those woods were his domain, not hers.

“If you don't eat them, why shoot them?” Charlotte demanded, her voice softer now, the anger slowly leaking away in the chill. “What are they hurting?”

He regarded her boots, the laces hanging loose and crusted with snow. Only then did she become aware that her socks were soaked through, the open boots filled with snow. Her toes burned with cold. And she had rushed out of the house without mittens or a cap. She cupped her hands together and blew on them.

The boy looked at her with sleepy eyes. His hooded gaze and small crooked smile made her aware of how ridiculous she looked, and with this recognition, she almost smiled too, almost conceded the foolishness of her actions. She had never thought of herself as an impulsive woman, had always thought things through, considered all the angles and probabilities. Now she could scarcely remember having exited the house or the brisk stiff march across the field. She felt more than a little embarrassed by this confrontation with a child. He was, she now had to admit, a strikingly handsome boy. Had he been thirty years older and a foot or so taller, he would have disarmed her utterly with those dark, sleepy eyes, the head full of lush, black hair, and a soft, full mouth with the hint of a sneer. Later that evening, in the notebook in which she gathered quick pencil sketches, half-formed ideas, and stray bits of description that might someday be rendered in strokes and dabs of color, she wrote, “Dermot Mulroney as a boy but with a glint of menace in his eyes instead of Dermot's sparkle of mischief.”

The boy looked at her for a full ten seconds. Then he simply turned and walked away, retracing her footsteps out to the field.

“You're just going to leave it lying here like this?” she called.

He didn't answer.

“You're going to kill it and then just leave it out here to rot?”

“The other crows will eat it,” he said without looking back. “Or you can.”

Charlotte stood motionless, watching him go. She felt the anger still inside her but now in a deep and distant place. Closer to the surface was weariness and sorrow.
What makes a little boy want to kill things?
she wondered.
Where does such an urge come from? And then to just walk away as if the death of a living thing doesn't matter.
The thought saddened her, made her feel tired and old.

With the side of an unlaced boot, she scraped a pile of snow over the shiny black feathers. Then she regarded the mound of snow. She knew that it would accomplish nothing. A fox or raccoon or a stray dog or cat would sniff out the crow sooner or later, drag it home to its burrow, grind up the frozen muscle and hollow shattered bones. Yet what more could she do? She turned away and trudged back home.

A few minutes later, barefoot, fingers and toes and ears and the tip of her nose all burning, she came into the kitchen and saw the water still flowing from the tap. She shut it off, then leaned against the sink. Slipped her hands under her armpits, hugged herself tightly, rubbed one foot atop the other. She gazed out the window, stared across the no-longer-lovely emptiness outside. “Desecrated,” she said aloud.

When she thought about that afternoon now, some four months later, she could not remember any more of that day. What had she done with the remaining hours?
What did I do with the tuna?
she wondered.
It was the last one. Did I eat it or not?

A
FTER leaving Charlotte Dunleavy's driveway, Gatesman turned west on Metcalf Road. As he drove, he telephoned the high school, informed Karen in the front office that he was on his way. Could she pull Dylan Hayes out of class and have him waiting in the conference room, please?

Karen said, “Hold on just a second, Mark. Let me check something.”

Fifteen seconds later she spoke again. “Dylan's off on a field trip with Mr. Lewis's class. Science center in Harrisburg.”

“All day?” Gatesman asked.

“I wouldn't expect them till way after dark. They're doing the science center, then, let's see, a nature film at the IMAX. Then dinner at a place called Nala's.”

“Middle Eastern food,” Gatesman told her.

“Sour grape leaves and crackery bread? Yeah, that's going to be a big hit with the kids.”

“Might expand their horizons a little.”

“What do you bet they stop at McDonald's after dinner?”

“I'd give it a fifty-fifty chance.”

“I'd say it's a certainty.” Then she asked, “Were you wanting to talk to Dylan about Jesse Rankin being gone?”

“Thanks for your help,” he told her, and snapped his cell phone shut.

He slowed the vehicle to forty miles an hour.
All right, now what?
he asked himself. He had passed the Rankins' trailer less than a quarter-mile back, and though he could not think of anything concrete to be gained from speaking with Livvie again so soon, he felt compelled to do so. Whether for his own sake or hers, he did not know. At the next driveway, he pulled in and made the turn.

Except for the single-wides in the Sunset Springs retirement village out by the interstate, or the even older ones recycled to hunting and fishing camps throughout the county, Livvie and Denny Rankin's trailer was one of the last of its kind. He could think of no other family that actually lived in one of the long, narrow boxes. Even the unemployed dopers throughout the county had HUD double-wides. Denny and Livvie could have had one, too, if Denny weren't so stubborn and prideful. Livvie, too, Gatesman thought. She'd never take anything from anybody.

He pulled into the driveway and parked behind Livvie's battered Datsun. Still no sign of Denny's pickup truck.

Within seconds, Livvie had the door open and was standing on the threshold, looking out at him with red eyes as he approached. Eyes, he thought, both hopeful and fearful.

“Nothing yet,” he told her. “I just came to talk a bit.”

She stood aside, then closed the door behind him. “Nobody's seen him?” she asked.

“Not a soul.”

“Where in the world can he be?”

There was such plaintiveness to her voice, such frailty to the way she carried herself, as if even the slightest movement ached, that Gatesman could not help himself; he took her hand and led her to the sofa, sat down next to her, patted the back of her hand twice, wanted to hold it longer but then finally let it go.

“How about if we go through it again,” he said. “Everything you saw and did when you got home yesterday morning.”

She sat hunched forward slightly, hands locked together atop her lap, fingers dovetailed. He noticed that she was wearing the same jeans and plain gray sweatshirt she had had on yesterday. Probably slept in it, he thought. Not enough energy to look after herself.

Her head made little jerking movements back and forth. She blinked, squinted at the floor with its pattern of green and red tiles, then looked up at him as if he had spoken in a forgotten language.

“Take your time,” he told her. And he thought,
I know what you're feeling now. You can't breathe, can't get any air into your lungs. You can't keep a straight thought in your head. You haven't eaten anything all day, can't stomach the thought of food. You'd rather just die than feel this misery.

“It must've been about a quarter after eight or close to it,” she finally said. “That's when I always get home. Denny's truck was gone and I just figured . . . he put Jesse on the bus and then went off somewhere.”

“And that's fairly typical?”

“It is,” she said.

“But Denny didn't mention anything to you the night before? He had a job somewhere or . . . whatever he had planned for the day?”

Her head moved back and forth, a barely perceptible answer.

“Has he had any work lately?”

“Three days last week. A big warehouse of some kind over in Carlisle. Fifty-two hundred square feet, he said.”

“Must be well heated to seal concrete at this time of year.”

She made no movement, offered no reply.

“And you have no idea where he is today? No phone call yet?”

“I haven't seen or heard from him since the day before yesterday.”

Gatesman nodded. He looked into the little kitchen area. Everything was spick-and-span, not so much as a dirty coffee cup. He wondered how many dozens of times in the past twenty-four hours she had wiped off the counter and tabletop. How many times she had rearranged the soup cans in the cupboard. She could clean the place a hundred times but not remember to change her clothes or brush her hair.

Of course there was another reason for it too, he remembered that as well. You blame yourself for what has happened. You want nothing to do with yourself. Maybe you intend to punish yourself by showing your own body disrespect, by not feeding it or keeping it clean, not brushing your teeth. What you want is for your self and its goddamn consciousness to disappear.

Gatesman remembered it all. He had done laundry. Day after day after day. Patrice's and Chelsea's underclothes. First the whites, then the bright colors. Patrice's and Chelsea's socks. The shorts. The jeans. The cotton items. The synthetics. He ironed everything whether it was wrinkled or not. Folded the items and put them in the drawers. Everything done, he started again.

“So you came home from the generating plant,” he said, “about a quarter after eight that morning. And then what? What's the place look like when you get here? I'm sure it wasn't as clean and neat as it is now.”

“Jesse's cereal bowl is all,” she said. “On the kitchen table there. The bowl and the spoon. I washed things up and put them away. Then I went to bed to get a few hours' sleep.”

“You didn't happen to take a quick look in Jesse's bedroom first, see if anything was out of place or, I don't know . . .”

“Not then,” she said. “Why would I?”

“You wouldn't. There'd be no reason to. You thought he was at school.”

“He keeps his door closed usually. I always told him it's his space and only his.”

“That's something kids need, I think. Something everybody needs.”

“Even after I got up,” she told him, “it never occurred to me that something was wrong. I made myself a sandwich, drank a glass of milk. I was at Mrs. Shaner's place by 12:30. Finished up there and got back here in time to meet the bus.”

“Which is usually around 3:10 or so.”

“Give or take a few minutes either way.”

“I know you already told me all this, Livvie. I just need to hear it all again.”

“The bus didn't stop,” she said. “Never even slowed down when it went by.”

“Which has happened before, though.”

“A few times, yes. She gets distracted or something, you know. Misses the stop.”

“So you're thinking she'll let Jesse off down at the Conners'.”

“And I go out and get in the car and drive on down, so he doesn't have to walk the whole way back. And that Nolan Conner, he's in the same homeroom as Jesse, when the bus starts pulling away I call out to Nolan before he gets into the house. And he tells me that Jesse wasn't at school all day. Lori stopped the bus out front, beeped the horn. Jesse never came out, so she just drove on by without him. So now I'm thinking, okay, he's playing some kind of game with me. He's back home hiding under the bed or something like that. Plus, he knows he's not supposed to be playing hooky anymore. He and I were both told that if he misses any more classes, he'll either have to go to summer school or they're going to hold him back.”

“But when you get back to the house, that's when you find his backpack down between the bed and the wall in his room.”