Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (9 page)

BOOK: Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797)
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“I'd love some, but no. I've got this little hypertension thing I need to watch out for. Who are Judy and Joanne?”
“My bartenders. Twins. Judy's a redhead and Joanne's a bottle-blonde.”
“That should be good for business,” he said.
“And I'll tell you what else. Those two can defuse an argument faster and with far less blood than a SWAT team. They've been working here not quite a year, and what a godsend they've been.”
“I've always heard that women make the best bartenders.”
“The best everything,” she said. “Now about that blood pressure of yours. I was just reading in here about how important it is for men your age to have a good love life.”
“Show me that,” he said. “I'd like to read it.”
She smiled. The steadiness of her gaze made him look away for a moment. “Ten years,” she said. “I can still remember it like yesterday. Do you?”
He leaned away from the table and looked at the ceiling. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about we don't go there right now, okay?”
“Not now or not ever?”
“Bonnie, please.”
“So you're still not over it yet,” she said.
“Are you?”
“I mean the guilt. That's the one thing I never felt. You still dragging that little red wagon around with you everywhere you go?”
“I've got a child turned up missing yesterday. That's what I need to concentrate on right now.”
“Denny Rankin's little boy?”
“That's the one.”
“Missing how?” she asked. “Like abducted?”
“Just not at home, that's all we know. I'm betting he's off with his dad somewhere. But Livvie's worried sick.”
“How could she not be?” She slid to the edge of the booth, stood and looked down at him. “I'm going to throw some eggs and hash browns on the flat top.” She collected the broom and dustpan and started toward the kitchen. “Judy and Joanne will know if he's been here or not. You want a glass of juice while you're waiting for the eggs? I've got orange and I think pineapple.”
“All I need is some information, Bonnie.”
She turned, came back to him, stood so close that the tip of the broomstick hovered only inches from his head. “What you need is to start taking care of yourself. You look like roadkill, you know that? It's been twelve years, Mark.”
“I don't need anybody to remind me how long it's been.” He heard the resentment in his voice then and pulled it back. “All I need to know is if Denny Rankin's been in here the last couple of nights or not.”
“You
think
that's all you need to know.” She turned and walked away then. “Scrambled wet with Swiss cheese and hot sauce, as I recall.”
“Bonnie, for God's sake.”
She turned hard and glared at him across a pool table. “Take a fucking breath once in a while, why don't you? I'm making scrambled eggs and hash browns and you're going to eat them, or else I'm going to hunt you down and cram them down your throat.”
Only after she had disappeared into the kitchen did he allow his smile to return. He called out, “Eggs are bad for my cholesterol.”
“Bullshit,” she said. A refrigerator door banged shut. “Eggs are incredible, they're edible, and they're nature's perfect food.”
“That's just advertising,” he said.
“What isn't?”
9
F
OR most of the morning that January, the morning following the day she had first approached and spoken to Jesse Rankin, Charlotte seethed. The previous afternoon, she had returned to her farmhouse, kicked off her boots in the mudroom, and peeled off the sodden socks, then sat in the kitchen by the window and tried to warm and calm herself with a cup of tea. She was still tense when she climbed into bed that night, and the hours of restless sleep did nothing to relax or refresh her. The next morning, she went into her studio and stood in front of the painting and tried to see the scene come alive again, tried to imagine it filling with color and the tension of movement. But she could not shake from her mind the image of a dead crow splayed across a field of blood-specked white. When she stared at the canvas, she imagined that scene showing through from underneath the other one.
Those woods,
she told herself.
Those beautiful woods
—as if they were forever gone now, her cathedral woods blasted asunder. All the preceding summer and fall and the first weeks of winter, she had enjoyed gazing out a window and imagining some quiet woodsy scene: the young Hemingway fresh from the Italian front, camping within earshot of the Big Two-Hearted River; Thomas Moran's dark tunnel of autumnal woods with their portal into blue splendor; hoary old Robert Frost out there astride his plow horse, watching the slow flutter of snowflakes and pondering all the miles yet to travel. She had imagined that those woods and fields and distant mountains would become her Abiquiu, that here she would discover her own Black Place, her own White Place, and in the intersection of the two, she would relocate her soul. But how could she sustain that romance now, when all she could see in her mind's eye was a dead black bird on blood-speckled snow?
Maybe in the spring, she had told herself. Maybe when all the snow is gone. The sunlight would come slanting down in long narrow shafts then, spears of green poking up pale and eager through leaf-matted earth, the canopy a whispering sky of new leaves. Maybe then she would be able to stroll through those woods again, again sit with her back to rough bark, her legs splayed out across soft ground. Maybe in summer when the woods and their coolness became a world of its own, sibilant with the breeze, lush and all-enveloping.
But then the anger surged in her again, the sorrow. She stared out the window and said aloud, “You might as well have come in and taken a shit on my carpet.”
What kept coming back to her that morning was the look on the boy's face. Unafraid. Disdainful. Contemptuous. And so, so familiar.
All of the hard work of the previous two years seemed suddenly for naught. All of the sobbing and sniffling in June's office, the sisyphean struggle to find herself again, to resuscitate everything Mark had crushed with his smug, disdainful smirk. Suddenly she was that woman again, untethered by a look.
Neck stiff, shoulders aching, all she had wanted to do that morning after her first meeting with Jesse Rankin was to fling paint at the canvas. Any other possibility seemed lost to her. The long, deliberate strokes, all lost. The sensuality, the organic curves of nature, the graceful sweeps of the palette knife, her muscles could not execute them now, her hands would betray her. She wanted the music again, but there was only percussion now.
Bam
.
Bam
.
Bam
.
How did they do it, she wondered? How did they sustain the music? Those long violin moans of Van Gogh, his pizzicatos. And Turner's wonderful oboe breezes that pushed the clouds and drove the waves. Hopper's plaintive trumpet blasts of light. Magritte's teasing whispers, Klee's dreamlike harmonies . . . My God, how did they do it?
It was only by thinking of those others, those troubled, beleaguered, but resolute others, that she was finally able to push herself from the window and her anger.
Write to June,
she told herself. She sat on the sofa with a tablet and pen.
What to tell her?
she wondered.
How little I learned from her? How quickly I regress?
In the end she made up a little fiction about a stroll she had taken “back in August, I think. Did I already tell you about this?” A story about finding a new covered bridge with an unmanned tollhouse beside it. The lavish description continued for a full page, and when Charlotte read it over to herself she was amused to see the possibility of dreamlike symbolism in those dreamed-up structures, and so she decided to accentuate the symbolism for June's sake, and wrote about “the dim tunnel over burbling water,” and “the tall, narrow tollbooth with majestic spire,” but “empty, unmanned.” She wrapped up the description with: “At the end of the covered bridge, or the opening, depending on which way you enter, I looked down into the clear water and saw a school of tiny minnows. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, all wriggling and squirming as they fought against the current, each struggling to lash its way upstream. For some reason I felt compelled to take a coin out of my pocket and drop it into the center of the school, which provoked such a tizzy of confusion that the minnows scattered and lost their momentum and were all carried away in the opposite direction.”
She laughed when she thought of what June, who considered herself “a modified Jungian,” would make of that description.
Charlotte sealed the letter in an envelope, addressed it, and would have carried it outside to the mailbox, except that there were no stamps in the desk drawer. Instead of being annoyed by this discovery—as something unexpected might usually annoy her—on that morning, Charlotte welcomed the absence of stamps as an excuse to get out of the house for a while. Perhaps if she frittered away the day an hour at a time, kept her mind on trivial things, maybe tomorrow would bring a return of the old peacefulness.
Thirty minutes later, after she had showered and dressed and put on a little lipstick, she drove four miles to the post office on the opposite edge of town. After nearly half a year in Belinda, the quaintness of the post office still amused her, still reminded her of the post office in Ike Godsey's general store in the old television serial
The Waltons
. Belinda's post office was little more than a counter and cubicle inside a butcher shop. Shortly after moving to Pennsylvania, Charlotte had written to June, “You can stand at the post office window and buy a stamp, move three steps to your right and order a nice rump roast. One-stop shopping! How quaint is that?”
Now with a new letter in hand, Charlotte threw open the door to Shinder's Meats and stepped inside. The postmistress, Cindy, still petite but acquiring the fleshiness of middle age, thickening in all of the least attractive places, had been leaning forward on her post office counter and jabbering away at Rex Shinder, who was trimming stew beef at the butcher's block table behind the meat case. Both fell silent and looked to their right when the little bell above the door tinkled.
“Well, hello, stranger,” Rex said. Charlotte, at their first meeting months earlier, had assessed his age in the midforties range, perhaps a few years younger than Cindy. He was as bald as a cue ball and built like a wine barrel. Charlotte could never look at him without being reminded of a wrestler from Pittsburgh named Bruno Sammartino, who had been active in the sixties and into the late seventies. As a little girl she used to sit on her father's lap to watch Bruno and “Jumpin' ” Johnny DeFazio and “Haystacks” Calhoun and all of the others as they knocked and threw one another around the ring. “They're all a bunch of frauds,” her father would tell her, one arm wrapped around her waist, a glass of Chivas and melting ice in his other hand. “But we love them, don't we, sweetheart?” When she thought of her father now, this was the way she liked to envision him, when he was strong and articulate, a venerated English professor and Lost Generation scholar with a secret fascination for choreographed violence.
A couple of times since coming to Belinda, she had slipped and called Rex “Bruno.” Now she always took the time to smile at him for a moment and remind herself,
Not Bruno, Rex
. She had begun to suspect that her smile might have given him the wrong impression, because ever since Christmas, whenever he looked at her, she was sure she saw the twinkle of testosterone in his eyes. Not long after that visit, she wrote to June, “Rex tried to chat me up again today. Unfortunately the poor man had a gob of beef fat stuck to his cheek just below his left eye, flung off his mighty cleaver, no doubt. It sat there and quivered like a big throbbing mole every time he grinned at me. He has a beautiful smile but that quivering pink mole kind of made my throat thicken and my stomach burble. I don't think I'll ever be able to look at him again without searching his face for another glistening gob of fat.”
On this day, he immediately stopped trimming chunks of stew beef to call out, “Well, hello, stranger.” Cindy chimed in, “What a nice surprise! Where you been keeping yourself?”
This was followed by the usual volley of words from Cindy. “So how's everything out there at your place? Got enough wood to get you through? Your pipes didn't freeze up last week, did they? Temperature drops as low as it did last week, you got to keep a close eye on those pipes. Big drafty place like yours . . . You staying warm all right? Rex, you got any ideas on how to keep this lady warm and toasty through the winter?”
BOOK: Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797)
4.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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