Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (16 page)

But this time, instead of sitting there patiently as she had always done—
instead of sitting there sipping my wine like a good insipid wife,
she thought—this time Charlotte stood and laid down her linen napkin, walked to the door, and peeked outside. And there was her husband, striding briskly down the block, cell phone nowhere to be seen.

The rear door swung open on a black Lexus parked at the curb, and Mark climbed inside.
And that's when I knew,
she thought.
That's when I absolutely knew why my mother had looked at him and said “That man . . .” I finally understood, without the shadow of a doubt, why he insisted on going to Tambellini's every Thursday night. For the pasta fazul, my ass.

If Charlotte had not followed her husband down the street that night, ten minutes later he would have come strolling back inside, pretending to be annoyed about having had to take the call. Then, halfway through the entrée he would have slipped off his Italian loafer, always the right one, and slid his foot between her legs. He would have winked at her with his mouth full of mascarpone.

And, of course,
she remembered,
I'd let him fool around like that. I wanted it. I'd been wanting it all week long. A real kiss, a lingering touch,
any
authentic display of affection. So what did I care if it took a plate full of semolina to get him aroused?

Until that night. When Charlotte yanked open the rear door on that shiny black Lexus, and her husband looked out at her staring in at him, he made no move to cover himself or to pull away from the woman with her face in his lap. He kept his hand on the back of her head. The dome light had come on when Charlotte yanked the door open, so she could see clearly the look in his eyes, and what she saw wasn't fear or surprise but excitement.

I think the sonofabitch actually pushed her head down harder,
she told herself.
I think he came in her mouth the moment he realized he'd been caught.

Afterward, when Charlotte and her husband met at the elevator outside their apartment, with him coming up and she and her suitcases waiting to go down, he looked at her and smiled sheepishly and said, “You have to understand how
bored
I get.”

“Get out of the elevator,” she told him. But he would not.

“I'll take the stairs,” she said.

He said, “Baby, wait,” and reached out and grabbed hold of one of the suitcases, pulled it and Charlotte into the elevator with him, and held her by the arm so that she could not exit. She repeatedly jabbed the
L
button until she felt the jerk of descent.

He released her arm then and dropped the suitcase to the floor and leaned into the corner. “I never go all the way with her,” he said. “It's just prelude, that's all.”

“You did tonight, though, didn't you?”

He tried for another sheepish grin, but this one came out as a smirk. “It's the only time I see her,” he said. “I swear.”

“Fuck you,” Charlotte told him. Then the pain returned, another nauseating wave. She staggered back against the chrome wall. “So that's the only way you can get aroused enough to fuck me? Is that what it takes for you?”

He answered with a smirk and a shrug.

“How much does she cost?” she demanded.

“Don't,” he said.

“I want to know. How much are you willing to pay to make you horny enough to want to fuck your wife? Tell me!”

“She charges five hundred dollars.”

“Two thousand a month,” Charlotte said. “You're paying her two thousand dollars a month. She gets twenty-four thousand dollars a year from you, and I get maybe twenty minutes of mediocre sex once a week.”

“I knew you would get nasty about this,” he said.

“Nasty? You lousy, rotten, stupid bastard. You ruin our marriage, and I'm the one getting nasty? What, you never heard of Viagra? Five dollars a fucking pill!”

“It's not physical, you know that. It's all mental. If you'd just relax and look at this rationally . . .”

The elevator bucked to a stop then; the door slid open. Charlotte jerked her suitcase off the floor and stepped out. “
You're
mental,” she told him. “You're sick and disgusting.” And she headed for the lobby doors.

“And you,” he said, his voice increasing in volume now, “are, as always, unbelievably provincial. I thought you were an artist. You're supposed to be creative. Instead you're just plain boring.”

She made the mistake then of looking back at him. She was already halfway across the lobby, the doorman had pulled the door open for her, she had only to step over the threshold and be free.

But I just had to turn around and look back at him,
she reminded herself.
Just like Lot's stupid wife. So not only did he get the satisfaction of seeing the tears streaming down my cheeks, but I had to witness that damn smirk of his one last time.

She spent the next two years trying to scour that smirk out of her consciousness. And she thought she had done so. Moved to Pennsylvania, bought a farm, remodeled it to suit nobody but herself, started a brand-new life. Made her own schedule: slept, ate, worked, hiked, did whatever she wanted whenever she wanted to. She had at long last reached the point where she could close her eyes at night and not see Mark's god-awful handsome face with its haunting and obliterating smirk.

Then came the boy who shoots crows.

M
IDMORNING the day after the search of the woods, Charlotte sat on the concrete edge of her rear porch. She had made a pot of coffee that morning using eight coffee singles, but even this cup, her third in a little more than an hour, did not ease the heaviness of her eyelids or lighten the heaviness of every movement. Her intention was to start the labor of working the soil in her garden, mixing in the fertilizer Mike Verner had left, and thereby distract herself one spadeful at a time from the horrors of the previous days. But she had made it no farther than the edge of her porch, had stood there awhile after her second cup of coffee and considered the distance to her garden shed, the effort required to step inside, pull down the garden rake from the rack of hand tools, go back to her garden, hack open the bag of fertilizer, spill the mix over the soil, and then drag the rake through the earth, push it forward, again and again and again several hundreds of times. The mere thought of walking to the shed exhausted her. Only two weeks earlier she had spent a quietly joyful evening poring over the new seed catalog, reading about all of the new varieties from which she might choose and envisioning the abundance of her garden come late summer, the scent of a sunny kitchen with an ever-present basket of green and yellow squash arranged in an edible bouquet: the plump tomatoes, cucumbers, red and green sweet peppers, and yellow banana peppers, the bright little jalapeños like little penises, the clumps of carrots, the scallions, and all of the herbs in little jars of water lined up across the windowsills. But this morning she had gazed upon the brown, rectangular plot and felt no joy. Her mouth no longer watered and she no longer thought of the dizzying thrill of biting into a fat tomato, warm from the vine. That morning she had appraised her garden plot and told herself,
I'll have another cup of coffee first.

The crows had fallen silent and flown off hours earlier. In the silence, she felt only a stupefied slackness in a body no longer her own. When Mike Verner's voice echoed through her house—“Hey, Charlotte! Good morning!”—her recognition of his voice was not immediate, and the sound only made her clutch the coffee mug even tighter.

“I'm in your house,” she heard, “and walking toward your kitchen. Don't bother to get dressed on my account, I'm naked too.” She smiled then, but also felt how detached she was from that smile, how Mike's humor registered only on the surface, only lingered on the air for a moment, and then was quickly gone.

“I'm on the back porch,” she called over her shoulder.

“I think I smell coffee,” he said.

“Follow your nose. You'll find it.”

“Aha!” he said a few moments later. Then, “Cups?” he asked.

“Where cups usually are.”

She heard a couple of cabinet doors open and close, then nothing, and thirty seconds later he stepped out onto the porch. “Good morning, Miss Charlotte. How's everything out here at Green Acres this morning?”

“Pensive,” she said. “How's everything with you?”

He sat beside her, took a sip of the coffee, made a face, but quickly changed it to a more neutral expression. He said, “
Pensive
is one of those words I forgot to learn in high school. I'm guessing, though, judging from the look on your face, that it means something like sad.”

“Thoughtful,” she said. “But yes, in a sad way, I suppose. It is a sad day, isn't it? Sort of like my coffee.”

“It's not all that bad. Your coffee, I mean. Just not what I'm used to.”

She said nothing for a moment. Then looked at him and said, “Did you bring more bad news this morning?”

“Jesus, is that what I am? The messenger of bad tidings?”

“You have too much work to just sit and enjoy a cup of coffee with me, I know that much. So what's up?”

“You're a little out of sorts this morning, aren't you? Yesterday took all the starch out of you.”

She smiled. “My mother used to use that expression.”

“It's a good one.” Then, “Used to? She's no longer with you?”

“It's going on five years now. Ovarian cancer.”

“I'm so sorry, Charlotte.”

“She was one of the lucky ones. Went very quickly.”

“If you have to go, and we all do, that's the way to do it.” He sipped his coffee, considered her yard, his field beyond, the distant sky, the far unseen. “How about your father?” he asked.

“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.”