Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) Read online

  “He’s been in a nursing home the last couple of years. Started having these little ministrokes not long after Mother passed. Last time I visited him, he didn’t even recognize me.”

  “Jesus,” Mike said. “Life really sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “Right now it seems like that’s all it does. How about your folks? Are they still with you?”

  “Only by telephone. They have a condo down in Naples, Florida. They belong to a senior citizen’s swingers club. Orgies every night.”

  She looked at him for a moment. “You’re such a liar, Mike.”

  “I’m just speculating, of course.”

  “More like fantasizing, maybe?”

  “Hey, a man’s gotta have something to look forward to.”

  She set her coffee mug on the concrete, then put her hands atop her knees. “So back to the original question. What brings you here this morning?”

  “So you’re not in the mood to talk about orgies right now. Okay then, moving on. I just came by to make sure you knew about the thing for Jesse tonight.”

  For a few moments she had hoped for a slow revitalization at work as the result of Mike’s company, an opening up of her sun-filled yard, but now, at the mention of Jesse’s name, the world darkened and shrank in on her again. “What thing?” she asked.

  “I figured you might not have heard. There’s going to be a candlelight thing over at the elementary school tonight.”

  “A candlelight vigil?”

  “That’s the word I couldn’t think of. You know how words sometimes do that? Just disappear from the memory banks for a while?”

  She said nothing.

  “I lost vigil sometime in the middle of the night. Couldn’t lay a hand on it all morning until you just now gave it back to me.”

  “It happens,” she said.

  “Too much of late. But anyway. It’s starting around eight, I guess. Why it’s being held at the school, I have no idea. From what I hear, the boy hated school with a passion. Spent as little time there as he could get away with.”

  “In the gymnasium?”

  “Probably outside is my guess. Supposed to be a clear night and all. You want Claudia and me to swing by about a quarter till and pick you up?”

  “No, I . . . I guess if I go I’ll drive over myself.”

  “Not that you’re obligated or anything.”

  “I know.”

  “Just thought it might be a good way to, you know, get involved with the community. Nobody’s going to hold it against you, though, if you decide not to come.”

  “No, I want to. I just . . .”

  “Things like this,” he said, “it’s always seemed funny to me. If it weren’t for things like this—weddings, funerals, you know what I mean—people might not even talk to one another anymore. Everybody’s too busy being busy.”

  “I’ll probably be there. Watch for me, okay? You might be the only person I know.”

  “You bet. The thing’ll probably last only an hour or two at most. A lot of crying and praying, then back to our busy lives.”

  “There might be some music too,” she said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I went to one for John Lennon.”

  “No kidding. Where was this?”

  “It was actually on the first anniversary of his death. 1981. In that park in Manhattan they named after the song. Strawberry Fields.”

  “ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’ That must have been something.”

  “I stayed in bed for two days afterward. Just didn’t want to move.”

  “Well, yeah. I imagine this one will be rough on some people too. So if you don’t feel like going . . .”

  “I do, though. I mean . . . What are people saying about me, Mike? I mean because of my house being right here beside the woods . . .”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all as far as I know. Hell, whatever they’re saying about you, they’re probably saying about me too. So who gives a rat’s ass, am I right?”

  She could tell that he was lying. “Dylan, though,” she said. “He has some thoughts about me, I’m sure.”

  “Naw, he knows you cleared things up yesterday with the sheriff.”

  “He does?”

  “Sure. His parents, you know . . . his dad especially, he’s stayed in fairly close touch with the sheriff. Mark told him you called. Said as far as he’s concerned, Dylan’s story checks out.”

  “Thank God for that,” she said.

  “So about tonight. It’s no problem to swing by and pick you up. Save you the trouble of driving there yourself.”

  “I appreciate the offer, thanks. But I’ll meet you there, okay?”

  “We’d come in Claudia’s Sonata, by the way, not my truck. I was thinking maybe we let her drive, you and me can ride over in the backseat together. See if maybe we can get some practice in for when we all move to Florida.”

  She wanted to laugh but it came out as a single-syllable grunt.

  “I’m not saying we have to actually do anything in the backseat. Not on the way over, anyway. On the way back, okay, if you can contain your natural attraction for me that long.”

  “That’s why I think it’s better if I drive myself.”

  “How about if I throw in a video camera?”

  “Now you’re getting out of hand.”

  “I’m on my sixth cup of coffee this morning, can you tell?”

  “You’re on something, all right.”

  “But, hey, since you’ve been to one of these things already and know how they work: Are we supposed to take our own candles or what?”

  “Usually whoever organizes the vigil will provide them. Was it a church group?”

  “One of the teachers, I think.”

  “Even though Jesse hated school?”

  “So I hear. I don’t have to wear a coat and tie, do I? Like for a funeral?”

  Her heart, which had been quieting again to the lull of Mike’s slow baritone, now jumped like a stomach-hooked trout. “Funeral?” she asked. “Is that what this is supposed to be tonight?”

  “Naw, nobody’s giving up on him. Not publicly anyway. There’s one of those AMBER Alerts out on him. You’ve seen it on the local news probably.”

  “I hardly ever turn the television on. Maybe the History Channel, Discovery Channel, an old movie now and then.”

  “This thing tonight is just to show our support, you know? Claudia says it’s mainly for the boy’s mother.”

  A sudden flare of brightness, then a darkening, a tightening down to tunnel vision again. “How is she, Mike? How is she doing?”

  “Claudia? Mean and spiteful as ever. By the way, when I introduce you to her tonight, try not to look surprised if she turns around and pops me a good one on the jaw.”

  “What?” Charlotte said, because the conversation seemed broken now, the edges did not match.

  “I told her back when you and me first met that you’re fat and ugly,” he said. “Even more so than she is. And that takes a lot of doing. Any chance you could put on a hundred pounds or so before tonight? Maybe twist your face up a little and pull out most of your teeth?”

  “Oh, Mike,” she said.

  “Just giving you fair warning, is all.” He set his cup on the concrete, then stood. “We’ll see you tonight. If you have a Kevlar vest, probably wouldn’t hurt to put it on.”

  She watched him walking away then, around the corner of the house and toward the front. Only ten minutes later, as she sat there staring straight ahead, did she realize that she had never heard Mike’s truck arriving in her driveway that morning, nor had any sound of departure reached her ears. This realization about herself, the ease with which she was able to drown out reality by sinking into a swamp of self-pity, her self-absorption, her narcissism, it struck her with the force of a blow, and she understood suddenly how wholly she had deserved those smirks of contempt, the look from Mark, the look from Jesse, and that it was by her own selfishness that she had come to this point in time, this world of da
rkness and grief, this fear without end.

  20

  GATESMAN spent the morning returning phone calls, reading and signing a small pile of the endless paperwork that came and went from his desk. With each chime of the old clock in the courthouse corridor, he felt another portion of heaviness accumulating in his gut. What he did not know was whether the heaviness was real or psychological, only that something wasn’t right inside him. He felt bloated, his belt too tight, even though he had skipped breakfast again that morning. But he kept his discomfort to himself. He knew that if he so much as hinted of the tender spot in his lower abdomen, Tina would take it upon herself to make an appointment for him with Doc Stevens. She might go so far as to schedule a colonoscopy. And Gatesman could envision no good coming from any such procedure or investigation.

  When the clock in the hallway started chiming again, and then continued to chime long after he thought it should have stopped, he opened his cell phone and saw that the time was twelve o’clock. He turned in his chair and looked out the window. The morning is gone, he told himself. Where did it go?

  The day was bright and clear. Vehicles moved up and down the street outside his window. Pedestrians hurried past. Everybody is going somewhere, he thought. There’s always somewhere else they have to be.

  For a reason he could not discern, his thoughts turned to Livvie Rankin then. The last two times he had visited her, she had seemed inordinately still. She, among all the people he knew, had stopped trying to be somewhere else. What she wanted was to be sometime else.

  And then he asked himself, Isn’t that what you want too?

  And he acknowledged, Yes. That is exactly what I want.

  He wished he could walk away from his office and the courthouse and the town of Belinda and go up into the mountains with his wife where the air was not so heavy, where the lake was cold and sparkling clear and they could sit on the porch of a rented cabin and hold hands and not speak and feel almost weightless in their happiness. The sunlight would dance across the surface of the lake like a scattering of silver leaves. A red canoe would be overturned on shore beside somebody’s dock, and maybe a little girl would be standing on the dock and plinking stones into the water.

  But he knew that he was wishing for what he could never have, especially not now. Not after what had happened two days ago. Another child gone under his watch. He did not know if he could bear the weight of that error. Nor the knowledge that there was nothing he could have done to prevent it, not this time or the next time, not unless he did the impossible and herded all the children together into one place and stood guard over them 24-7.

  Worst was the weight of what might yet occur. He had the sense that even more ugliness was building out there in his jurisdiction, maybe more to do with Jesse, maybe not. In any case there would be more of it, always more of it. There might yet come another day with the sunlight and the red canoe and the little girl, some other little girl, but as for the weightlessness of happiness, as for Patrice and Chelsea, none of that could come again. The last time had been the last time.

  Up until a few days ago, he had from time to time been blessed with what he now perceived as a kind of ignorance, blindness, that cautious optimism that fuels all of human perseverance, that maybe he was finally done with most of the darkness, was maybe able now, with mindfulness and careful tread, to venture out beyond the shadows. But now Jesse was gone and Gatesman could find no trace of him, did not even know where else to look for him, and now Livvie’s hard life had closed and hardened all around her, and there was nothing Gatesman could do for either of them.

  “You can’t help anybody,” he told himself.

  The day was clear and bright and the lake in the mountains would be so pretty now, and in a couple of days the trout season would open. But you should probably skip the first day of trout season this year, he told himself. You should probably skip the entire season.

  21

  ALL through the morning and well into the afternoon, the sounds and the scents of the search stayed with her. If she stretched out on the La-Z-Boy and closed her eyes, Charlotte could hear again the whispers of all those footsteps moving through damp leaves. The scent of those leaves, of slow decomposition in dim, damp light, seemed to be stuck low in her throat and could not be dislodged no matter how often she tried to clear it. When she moved throughout the house, she avoided mirrors and all reflective surfaces. If she glimpsed herself even peripherally, she was quick to look away. She could find no place in the house to rest, though she could not remember ever being so weary.

  Several times that day she stood in front of her easel to consider the image half-completed on the canvas. Amish boy, Amish girl. The grizzled, grinning biker. How long ago did I do that? she wondered. It had only been four days, yet the lines seemed to have been drawn by somebody else, the sketch some relic of the long ago.

  The painting was no longer hers, but she understood what the painter had been trying for, she could see the possibilities. The perspective of the biker wasn’t quite right—she noticed that when she stood just to the right of the easel; the rear wheel should be pulled just slightly closer to the viewer so that the biker appeared to be driving deeper into the scene instead of merely across it. I could fix that if I wanted to, she thought, but she made no move to do so.

  What kept her from reaching for the charcoal pencil was an unsettling sensation of being watched. She was aware of herself as both inside and outside the room, one self standing near the easel, thinking painterly thoughts, the other watching from a short distance away and thinking, You fraud.

  As evening approached, her restlessness and weariness grew. Only with the television turned on could she keep herself from moving from window to window, peering out from behind the curtain or blind. The programs she found most soothing were the slow-paced, quiet ones on the Discovery and National Geographic and History Channels. For twenty minutes or so, she fell asleep to the ponderous, graceful movements of elephants bathing in dust, but when she woke she was momentarily anxious and surfed through the channel guide for several minutes before coming back to the elephants.

  Finally the blue readout on the DVD told her that it was 6:30 P.M., and she said to herself, “You can get ready now, Charlotte.”

  But even after she was showered and dressed, she kept finding little things to tend to. She took the garbage from the kitchen receptacle to the larger container on the back porch. Then she told herself, You might as well do the rest of them too, so she also gathered up the little wire basket in her bathroom and the tall wicker basket beside her desk and emptied those into the trash as well. Then she happened to look up at the kitchen light as her hand went to the switch to shut it off, and she noticed that the plastic shade over the light had several black specks inside it, some dark blurs that she knew to be dead flies. So she climbed onto a kitchen chair and removed the shade, emptied the flies into the trash, and washed and dried the shade before putting it back in place. She did the same with the shades in both bathrooms and the two overhead lights in the upstairs hallway. Then the light in the downstairs foyer. Then she thought, Maybe I should just stay home and give this house a good cleaning. She took the vacuum out of the hallway closet, but then suddenly she was out of breath and her heart was racing and every beat felt like a bruise inside her chest. “Oh God,” she said aloud, and leaned against the closet door, forehead to the wood, until the panic gradually subsided.

  “You have to go,” she told herself then. “You have to.”

  A few minutes later she went into the living room and looked at the DVD. The readout said 8:05 P.M.

  By the time she had the Jeep out of the garage, the first few lines of an old Moby Grape song were playing on a continuous loop through her mind. Eight oh-five . . . I guess you’re leaving soon. I can’t go on without you, it’s useless to try. She was able to drown the lyrics out finally only by grabbing a CD from the four she kept in the console, shoving it into the player, and turning the volume up loud. She wanted only
sound, no words, no memories or associations, just noise she could feel on her skin and in her teeth, noise to drum all thoughts from her brain, so all the way to the elementary school she swam through the punishing current of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Beethoven’s Last Night—swam, she told herself, like an old, barren salmon struggling upstream to die.

  22

  THE parking lot at the elementary school was jammed full, and the only parking space Charlotte could find was out along the highway. She parked with the Jeep’s right wheels inches from a drainage ditch. She could see hundreds of cars and trucks but not a single person in sight.

  She climbed out of the Jeep and closed the door softly and stood there on the gravel shoulder. There on the highway, she was enveloped in darkness. The sky was black, no moon and no stars visible. The air was cool but clean-smelling, with just a hint of wood smoke from somebody’s chimney. The nearest light was forty yards away, across the schoolyard at the corner of the parking lot, a sodium-vapor light mounted at the top of a thirty-foot pole.

  Nobody even knows you’re here, she told herself. It would have been a more comforting thought had she believed the anonymity could last.

  Then she heard the singing. The words were indistinguishable, little more than a muddy drone of voices, but a wavering melody made its way to her through the darkness, broken bits of which she thought she could identify as John Denver’s “Sunshine.” She thought it a strange choice to be singing in darkness for a surly little boy whose favorite place had been the darkened woods. But maybe it’s his mother’s favorite song, she thought. Or his father’s. They probably don’t have much money for music. Or maybe it’s not even that song at all.

  She thought the night felt more like October than April. A crisp night of gathering excitement. Football season. Homecoming. The high-voltage drama of adolescence.

  But no, this night was an ending, not a beginning. Charlotte wondered if any candlelight vigils anywhere had ever ended with happiness. Were missing children ever returned safely to their families? Did all those songs and prayers ever pierce the heart of heaven?