Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (10 page)

Meantime, Rex, grinning and blushing, went to work organizing the chunks of meat atop the cutting board, rearranging them on the block as if to piece them back together into a cow.

Eventually Cindy made change for Charlotte's dollar, peeled off a stamp, and stuck it to the envelope. She stood there reading the address, eyebrows slightly raised, mouth getting ready, Charlotte knew, to produce yet another query about what is New York City
really
like.

“By the way,” Charlotte said, a preemptive strike, “is there such a thing as a hunting season on crows?”

“You need to get rid of some?” Rex asked. Suddenly his eyes were large with hope. “Wouldn't be no problem for me to come out there sometime and get rid of them for you.”

“He would too,” Cindy said. “Probably even bring half a filet with him so the two of you can celebrate afterward.”

Rex blushed so violently that his face took on the color of raw beef.

Charlotte said, “I only ask because I've been seeing this little boy going into the woods across from my place. He looks to be nine, ten years old maybe? Big mop of black hair? And he's always carrying a shotgun or rifle of some kind that's nearly as big as he is.”

“Twelve,” Cindy said. “Twelve, Rex?”

“Seventh grade, yep. So yeah, I'd say twelve.”

“Jesse Rankin,” Cindy said. “Cute little boy, isn't he? Him and his mom live in that old single-wide about a half mile down the road from you.”

Charlotte nodded. “Okay. I know where you mean.”

Rex asked, “He's not causing you any problems, is he?”

“No, no problems. It's just that I've seen him going into those woods several times . . . and later on I hear gunshots, you know? And then the crows all go flying out of the trees.”

“Shooting crows,” Rex said with a chuckle. “I got more'n my share of them back when I was his age, I'll tell you that.”

“So it's legal, then?”

“Oh, all the boys do it,” Cindy said. “Crows, chippies, rats at the dump . . . If it moves, they'll shoot at it.”

“So it's not illegal?”

Rex said, “I think there might be some kind of season on crows nowadays. But nobody pays any attention to it if there is. I mean, kids these days could do a lot worse than taking potshots at birds. And believe you me, they hit fifteen or sixteen years old, they find a lot worse things to do.”

“If Jesse is bothering you somehow,” Cindy told her, “I can say something to Livvie next time she comes in.”

“Livvie is his mother?”

“She does the cleaning over at the generating plant. Night shift. Cleans all the offices over there. Plus she's got some places in town she cleans during the day.”

“My gosh.”

“Works her skinny butt off, that's for sure.” Now Cindy flashed Charlotte another wink, then leaned over the counter and said to Rex, “She's not all that bad looking either, is she, big boy?”

“Who's not?” he said, as if he had not been following every word of the conversation.

“Livvie Rankin. Who do you think we're talking about?”

“What about her?”

“Just wondering why you don't go after her instead and quit wasting your time pining over Mrs. Dunleavy here.”

Rex turned away then, banged another heavy chunk of beef onto the butcher's block and hacked away at it, his big ears as red as fresh blood.

“It's pronounced Dunn-levvy,” Charlotte reminded Cindy.

“And it's not Mrs. anymore, it's Ms.”

“I'm a good fifteen years older than her,” Rex said.

“Livvie wouldn't care. You take her a nice big package of your buffalo meat, she won't give a hoot how old you are.”

To which Charlotte asked, “You sell buffalo meat here?”

“Inside joke,” Cindy said.

Rex told her, “I don't chase after married women.”

“Well, you ask me, in Livvie's case, somebody ought to. She sure is wasted on that one she's got.”

“I can agree with that,” Rex said.

Now Cindy turned back to Charlotte. “Some men just . . . Well, heck, you're divorced. You know what I mean.”

“I'm not sure I do.”

“He's the kind that almost never comes around. But when he does, you wish he hadn't.”

“He doesn't live with them?”

“Thank God for small favors.” She gave Charlotte a knowing look, conspiratorial, as if to suggest that they shared a secret or a common bond.

Charlotte said, “Well, I guess I should be going. I just stopped by to mail that letter.”

“Two o'clock tomorrow afternoon and it'll be off to New York. Wish I was going with it.”

Rex asked, “You don't need nothing else? I got some nice chops in. And the ham loaf was made just a couple hours ago.”

“Why don't you show her your buffalo meat?”

“Good God, Cindy,” he said, and buried half his body inside the display case where he busied himself with lining up the chicken breasts. And Charlotte thought,
Like corpses at Arlington.

“Nice seeing you both again,” she told them, and turned for the door.

Talk about a stranger in a strange land,
Charlotte thought as she climbed back into her Jeep. She had emerged from the post office that day, the butcher shop, that surreal little hybrid she had thought of as a throwback to an ancient time, feeling unpleasantly odd and awkward to the point of claustrophobia. More than a year earlier, when she had been pouring over guidebooks and real estate brochures, the word invariably used to describe Belinda and similar small towns was
quaint
. Initially she had relied on the word herself whenever she described her new hometown to June or Margo at the gallery or to any of her former friends and acquaintances. “Straight out of that Harrison Ford movie,
Witness
,” she had told them. “Wide, quiet streets, clapboard buildings, clean, inviting storefronts, Amish buggies parked alongside visiting Volvos and Saabs.”

Suddenly, however, the word
quaint
no longer seemed to fit. Not for the town and not for the farm itself, that wide bowl of land with its fields and trees and then, in the distance, those high, soft hills that people in the East call
mountains
.

Until that January afternoon, the woods and the farm and the amusing quaintness of Belinda had been her sanctuary and inspiration. Until then she had never given a thought to ever leaving it.

But now, four months later, winter gone, April budding on the trees, now not an hour after the sheriff's visit, she remembered the dead crow and now the missing boy, and in her mind they seemed somehow one and the same, and those woods outlying her house, those desecrated woods, and as she sat there in her darkened studio and felt the air grow tight and too warm and heavy in her chest, she wondered if she could ever feel at home in that shattered place or any other ever again.

G
ATESMAN had finished the eggs and hash browns, had finished the glass of orange juice and even the small bowl of applesauce Bonnie had set before him, and now, with nothing on the table in front of him but for a glass of water and the newspaper Bonnie had left behind, he felt, finally, something opening up in him, some small release of the pressure that, for as long as he could remember now, had pushed at the insides of his skull. Ever since she had unloaded the tray of food in front of him, then walked away, trailing her fingertips across the nape of his neck and saying, “Eat up, big boy. It's good for you,” Bonnie had busied herself behind the bar, filling the ice bin and washing glasses, then shredding potatoes and chopping onions in the kitchen for the half dozen or so men who would show up shortly after the bar officially opened.

Whether because of the scent and simple fulsomeness of the food, or the act of eating alone while Bonnie moved about with very little noise, or the feel of her fingertips that still lingered on the back of his neck, Gatesman felt a strange and pleasant lightness coming over him. It was true that ever since the last time he had been with Bonnie he had avoided her, always set himself apart from her at high school football games, community picnics, and other public events. They had been together three times after Patrice's and Chelsea's deaths, and when he ended it, when he told her that it just wasn't right to be like this with his wife's best friend, Bonnie had told him, “That's bullshit. What's bothering you is that you like being with me. And after two years you're still unwilling to let yourself enjoy anything.”

And now, in the barroom ten years later, he finally realized that she had been right. She had felt no guilt because she knew that Patrice would have felt no anger. Bonnie's touch and her kindness had made him let go of something he had hoarded too long, and now the pressure inside his head had finally relented, and when he looked at the newspaper now, he saw only watery squiggles of black on white instead of words and tragedy and the daily grief in two-inch columns.

Then came the roar of a car engine and the slide of tires on gravel. A few loud bars of Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Then sudden silence. One door slammed shut and then another. Female voices laughing. The front door swung open and a tall thinnish redhead strode in, followed closely by her blond, more amply curvy twin. They spotted Gatesman at the same moment, stopped laughing, came to a sudden halt. Then, as if by some telepathic signal, they both threw their hands into the air.

“I'm innocent!” the redhead told him.

“I'm not!” said the blonde.

Then they both laughed and dropped their hands, and holding on to each other, they hurried into the kitchen.

A couple of minutes later, after introductions, Gatesman faced them from across the bar. The blonde, Joanne, fourteen minutes older than her sister, told him that Denny Rankin had been there two nights earlier, the night before his son's disappearance. “Do you remember how long he stayed?” Gatesman asked.

“Till we threw everybody out,” she said.

“About two-thirty,” Judy added.

“He was shooting pool by himself,” Joanne said. “Other than that, it was just one couple and two single guys. He was the last one out the door.”

“Left by himself?” Gatesman asked.

“All by his lonesome,” Joanne said.

“He didn't say where he was headed, where he planned to spend the night?”

“I locked the door behind him,” Judy said. “He offered me a twenty to go out to his truck with him.”

“And you didn't take him up on it?” Joanne asked.

“Hell no.”

Joanne looked at Gatesman and said, “She usually charges fifty.”

“Whore,” Judy said. She gave her sister a shove, and they both laughed and bumped against each other.

Gatesman waited until they settled down. “So he was here, left alone at two-thirty, and there's nothing more you can tell me, right?”

“Well,” said Judy, and looked at her sister. They were on the verge of laughter again when Bonnie said, “Girls. Be serious.”

“That's all,” they said in a single voice.

Moments later, Bonnie walked with Gatesman to the door. He looked back at the girls giggling behind the bar. “You are a very smart businesswoman,” he told her.

She put a hand on his arm. “I'm also good at other things. Like being a friend.”

“Yes, you are,” he said, and patted her hand. He knew that she wanted more and certainly deserved more but that he was not the man to give it to her. “Thanks for breakfast. And everything else.”

He saw the way her face went soft then, saw the distance that came into her eyes. “Drive carefully,” she said.