Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) Read online

  The sheet draped over the easel seemed to be capturing all of the filtered sunlight that entered the room. And the longer Charlotte stared at it, the more there seemed an ominous quality to the shape the sheet held, its headless triangularity, the motionless folds. It seemed to Charlotte like a kind of dead smoke, unhealthy and cold. It was at that moment that she lost all desire to finish the painting underneath the sheet, saw all of her previous work, her decades of obsession with color and light, as trivial and selfish. It was at that moment that she started to be afraid of the unfinished painting. It was at that moment, she would tell herself later, that she started to be afraid of almost everything.

  5

  GATESMAN wanted to keep his mind on the morning’s duties, but his thoughts kept returning to Charlotte Dunleavy. Even as he stood gazing into the cobwebby emptiness of her garden shed, he was remembering his first glimpse of her. She had emerged silently from the shadows of the little foyer, and the moment her face came into the light, he had felt a kind of soft blow inside his chest, as if somebody or something had rapped its knuckles on his heart. And it was all because of her eyes and her hands. She was pretty, yes, and in a way few women in his county remained after their teens. Local women, even the beautiful ones, usually developed a veneer of hardness by the age of thirty or so, a cynicism that brittled their femininity. But Charlotte’s beauty was still soft and womanly, and her eyes were the evidence of this. The eyes of someone who could still be startled, impressed, have her breath stolen by a sudden flash of beauty. And the delicacy of her hands. When the sunlight fell on them, the fine golden hairs at her wrist . . .

  He pulled away from the thought. Closed the shed door and strode purposefully toward the barn. A glance into the burn barrel along the way. It was a third full of ashes, just like his own, just like everybody else’s. Keep your eyes open, he told himself. Focus.

  The barn door swung open easily, so well balanced that the considerable weight of the left-hand panel, eight feet wide and twelve high, felt negligible in his hand. A metal stake stopped its swing not quite parallel to the exterior wall. Not far from the stake lay a cement block, which he slid in front of the door to hold it open.

  He paused on the threshold. A flutter of wings in the rafters. The warm scent of hay, a thick scent of dust and enclosure, a cavernous space. Thin shafts of light thick with dancing motes, tiny planets rising and falling in brief, unpredictable orbits.

  A few farming implements hung from hooks along the front wall, probably left over from Old Bert’s days. The plank floor was empty all the way back to the loft, though scarred and scored with the movements of eighty-odd years, dotted with a few splatters of pigeon droppings. Gatesman leaned down close to the floor, turned his head this way and that in search of footprints but saw none, only a few stray straws of hay here and there. He knew from previous conversations with Mike Verner that Mike sometimes had to make work for Dylan, find simple tasks, like sweeping out a barn, to keep the boy busy. Mike was known throughout the county for the tidiness of his farm, the impeccable state in which he maintained all of his equipment, a fastidiousness Mike was always quick to blame on Claudia, his wife. “She makes me wash up and brush my teeth before I’m allowed to open the refrigerator,” he liked to joke.

  Gatesman brought himself back to the matter at hand. No dusty footprints crossing the floor. So much for the theory that Jesse fell down the feed shoot into the stalls, he told himself. It had happened to Gatesman when he was a boy, ten years old and playing barn basketball with a couple of friends, running around heedlessly. Straight down through the feed shoot he had dropped, whacking his head on the edge. He had lain unconscious on the mucked-up floor until awakened by his friend’s mother flicking water in his face.

  But not here, not Jesse. Even so, Gatesman told himself, you’re here so just keep looking, don’t be sloppy about it.

  He crossed to the ladder and hauled himself up into the loft. Warm currents of air rose off the hay. The dust made his eyes itch. He gazed from wall to wall across the stacked rows of rectangular bales. Nearest the loft window, bales were missing from three of the rows, those bales nearest the window and easiest for Dylan to reach the last time he had tossed bales down to Mike’s wagon. But there was no sign that Jesse had climbed into the loft, no sign that he had built himself a little cave of hay to keep himself warm through the night.

  Anyway, you had to look, Gatesman thought. There had been the Rose boy, what, maybe ten or eleven years ago come summer? Built himself a little cubbyhole in the loft while his daddy and two brothers were stacking hay in the barn, then climbed in, dragged a bale close to seal himself inside, and fell asleep. His daddy and brothers went off to eat lunch.

  “Where’s Ronnie?” Mrs. Rose had asked.

  The oldest boy said, “Last I seen him he was pestering me about taking him to a movie. I told him to shut up and get out of my way.”

  “Why do you always have to be so mean to him?” his mother asked. “Now he’s gone off somewhere to pout.”

  “Let him pout,” the boy said. “At least I won’t be tripping over him all afternoon.”

  After lunch, the work resumed. Bales were stacked eight deep on top of the sleeping child. Impossible to believe that a boy could sleep through that, except that it had happened. They never would have found him till the next summer but for the mother’s dream three days after the boy disappeared. She shook her husband, Walter, awake and told him, “He’s in the hay.” Walt Rose was a serious man who knew not to doubt his wife. He left his other sons to sleep, then single-handedly tossed two hundred bales of hay down onto the barn floor. By dawn, when he pulled the last one aside, the coroner was waiting in the kitchen.

  But not this time, not for Jesse. Besides, the heat in the loft was getting to Gatesman. The air was both heavy and dry, sitting like sand in Gatesman’s chest. He let himself down the ladder, returned outside, swung the door shut, and latched it. The exterior air was cool in comparison and soothing to his eyes. You never could’ve made it as a farmer, he told himself. He walked along the side of the barn, following the rutted wagon path to where it ended at the gate to a fenced-in pasture.

  Everywhere he went, Gatesman carried with him the tragedies of his county. He was in his sixteenth year as sheriff, and ever since Patrice’s and Chelsea’s deaths in the September of his third year, he seemed to retain the miseries too vividly. People got married and had babies and won lotteries and fishing tournaments and got their grinning faces in the paper, but it was the car wrecks and house fires and bar knifings that stuck with him, the suicides and beatings, the pregnant young wife who fell over dead in her yard from an aneurysm, the Amish carpenter who raped his twelve-year-old daughter. Life’s happy moments, he imagined, were of a lighter nature and tended to float away from him, pretty but momentary butterflies that soon caught an updraft and sailed away. The pain of life, on the other hand, clung to him ounce by ounce, incident by incident. When his wife and daughter rolled over an embankment on that wet, foggy night, he had weighed one hundred ninety-two pounds. Since then, he had gained an average of four pounds per year. Exercise didn’t help and neither did diet, mainly because he practiced neither of them. By his calculations, he could hold his job another five years, another twenty pounds of accumulated misery, then retire to a mountain cabin with a moderate pension and a fighting chance of avoiding a heart attack before AARP started sending him recruitment letters.

  At the rear of the barn, the lower level opened onto a fenced-in pasture of approximately fifteen acres. Gatesman stood against the plank fence and gazed across the high weeds to the other side and to the row of trees beyond. No cows had grazed in that pasture for several years, not since the auction a year before Old Bert packed up for Kansas City. Scattered among the weeds were spindly, top-heavy umbrellas of Queen Anne’s lace and yellow splashes of wild mustard. Running through these weeds was a skinny, sinuous path, still fresh enough that the weeds, heavy from last night’s rain, had not sprung back up to c
onceal it; but the path was so arbitrary and directionless, no clear aim to its weaving, circling convolutions, that it certainly had not been cut by a boy who, coming out of the trees, bored with waiting for something to shoot at, had wandered across the corn stubble to the fence, then had slipped between the flat boards to make his way to the open entrance at the back of the barn. More like a stray dog chasing a rabbit, Gatesman surmised, because of the quick darting and zigzagging movements a terrified rabbit would make. And that’s where the dog lost him and lay down to catch his breath, Gatesman thought, that trampled down spot up against the fence.

  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.

  6

  WHEN 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 som
e 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.

  You should get yourself a cup of tea.

  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.