Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (21 page)

As he drove he considered the confluence of incidents over the past few days. He wanted to believe that each of the separate incidents had been accidental. Most crimes, he knew, most violent incidents, were the result of an act of passion, an accidental surge of adrenaline, a sudden impulse, a perfect storm of chance. Only a very low percentage of crimes were premeditated. For that reason he continued to believe that Jesse's disappearance was the result of some accident, that Charlotte Dunleavy had unintentionally implicated Dylan Hayes, that Denny Rankin had been induced by the combination of excessive alcohol and paternal fear to confront Dylan, and that Rankin's ensuing rage had flared up unexpectedly, with no malice aforethought.
It's like a twelve-car pileup on a foggy night,
he told himself.
Just one big chain-reaction accident.

It's what all of life is, isn't it?
he asked himself.
Life starts out with an accident, the accident of birth. Even the planned ones are accidents when you think about the thousands of things that could go wrong. And in most cases life ends with an accident. If an accident is any event that goes against plan or expectation, an outcome that goes against the odds whether it is desirable or not, then my guess is that the course of most lives is determined not by one's will but by one's adaptation to the storm of life's accidents.

In the courthouse, the 9-1-1 dispatchers' office was located just across the hall from his, and now and then Gatesman would pause in the doorway to eavesdrop on the calls coming in. On occasion, all three dispatchers, two women and one man, would be handling calls at the same time. This generally happened on Friday and Saturday nights in the summer, usually on full-moon nights.
But those are just the accidents that get called in,
Gatesman told himself.
Those are just the pleas for help.

There's all the other ones too,
he thought.
There's the blow to the head, there's the ruptured appendix. There's the cancerous cell, the cerebrovascular accident. The teenage pregnancy, the miscarriage, the icy road, the argument . . . the office seduction, the rejection, the telephone call in the middle of the night. There's the blind-side hit, the sucker punch, the bean ball, the helmet-to-helmet blow. There's the flame that leaps from candle to curtain. The cigarette that falls out of the ashtray. There's the earthquake, the hurricane, the landslide. The beautiful doe in the middle of the road. There's the flash of the skirt on the sidewalk. The insult, the compliment, the wink, the smirk. The something or other that pulls at your heart, that turns your head, that makes you look the other way.

Jesus,
Gatesman thought as he scanned the houses and bars and the bends in the road,
the infinitude of chance!

What sadist crafted this existence?

T
HE nearest hospital was twenty minutes away in Carlisle. At the information desk in the hospital lobby, Charlotte inquired of Dylan's room number, then took the stairs to the fourth floor because she did not want to encounter anybody in the elevator. As anxious as she was to reassure herself of Dylan's well-being, she was in no hurry to face him. She hoped that the door to his room stood open so that she could glance inside, see him sleeping peacefully or, better yet, laughing at some stupid show on the television, and then she could slip back to her Jeep and drive back to the solitude of her house. Every step she climbed seemed steeper than the previous one. Near the top she experienced a moment of dizziness, thought she might topple over backward like an old birch, and so she clung tightly to the handrail until she felt able to drag herself up the last few steps.

She had been walking too briskly down the corridor and came upon Dylan's room too quickly, stood squarely in the open doorway before she told herself,
Here. This room.
423. Dylan's mother and father were in the room with him, Mama in a green vinyl chair pulled close to the bed, holding Dylan's big, childish hand in hers while she stared at the far wall. Dad was in a chair on the other side of the bed, staring up at the television mounted near the ceiling on a little platform; the screen was black and empty. Charlotte understood with just a glance what both parents were seeing at the end of those hundred-yard stares. They were seeing the end of their fragile dreams.
You live a good, decent life,
they must have been thinking,
you work hard and go to church and do the best you can with what little you've been given, and this is what you get for it. You get your only son lying battered and swollen in a hospital bed. You get a blizzard of accusations and gossip that will cling to you now like stink, a stink that might fade in time but can never be completely scrubbed away.

To Charlotte, Dylan's parents looked as button-eyed, as sagging and limp as rag dolls.

Dylan looked even worse. His mouth was swollen and bruised, the lower lip split open, one eye blue-black and swollen shut. One ear was stuffed with cotton and looked twice its normal size, and his naked chest had been made somehow even thinner by the yards of elastic bandage wrapped around his ribs. His nose was the color of a beet and humped at the bridge, with two strips of white tape over the hump. The thumb of his right hand was in a splint, the pinky and ring fingers taped together. His stare was as vacant as his parents' and went straight up to the ceiling.

Whether it was another moaning exhalation from Charlotte or just the adamancy of her thought that she should move, step away, Dylan rolled his head slightly and saw her there in the doorway. “Hey,” he mumbled, his voice raspy with phlegm.

Immediately Dylan's parents looked her way. She felt suddenly pinioned by their eyes.

“My God, Dylan,” Charlotte said, “are you all right? I mean how could this . . . why would anybody do this to you?” Even as she heard her voice and its detestable shrillness, she felt her neck and face flushing scarlet, felt the sudden heat of her skin.

Dylan's father pushed himself to his feet. “Let's go get us some coffee, Mother. Son, you ready for that milkshake yet?”

Dylan's mother did not answer or acknowledge her husband. Her eyes were fierce and locked on Charlotte's, remained on Charlotte even as the woman released her son's hand, then stood abruptly and crossed toward the door. She was not a small woman, as tall as Charlotte but fuller-bodied, filled out by the daily grind of rural life. Charlotte stood aside to let her pass, but Dylan's mother turned toward her and stood close, their faces only inches apart.

“You're the woman who told the sheriff my son hurt that boy.” Her soft monotone did nothing to soften the blow of her words.

“No, I didn't say that, I didn't. In fact I called him afterward and told him I was absolutely certain Dylan did
not
hurt Jesse.”

“Did a lot of good, didn't it?” she said.

Her eyes were gray-blue, dirty ice, and Charlotte felt herself shrinking beneath the gaze. Felt her bones turning brittle. Felt exhaustion shutting down her brain so that she could think of nothing else to say, wanted only to close her eyes and drift into a black unconsciousness.

“Come on, Mother,” Dylan's father said, and took his wife by the arm. He would not look at Charlotte as they squeezed past. She stared at the floor until their footsteps faded around a corner.

“You can come in if you want,” Dylan said. His words were raspy and deep and he cleared his throat after speaking. Charlotte wondered but did not have the courage to ask if he had been punched in the throat, or if the paramedics had to force something down his esophagus.

With tentative steps she approached the bed. She stood looking down at the chair where his mother had sat, the indentation in the cushion. Then she looked at Dylan. His hand still lay exactly where his mother had placed it, fingers splayed across his chest. Charlotte wanted to seize that hand but she did not. She wanted to touch the boy, lean down close to him, but she did not.

“I'm so sorry, Dylan,” Charlotte said. “I don't know what to say, what to do about this. Is there anything, something I can do for you?”

“I can't stay here anymore,” he said.

“But you need to stay until they release you. You need to let them tend to you.”

“I mean in this town. I can't stay in this town now.”

“But what . . . ? I mean . . . there's school and . . . you have your work . . .”

“Do you know anybody might give me a job somewhere? The farther away, the better.”

“Dylan, you can't,” she said. “You have your senior year to think about. Just a couple of months left now, right? And what about your parents? Surely they don't want you thinking like this.”

“They want me to go. Thing is, they don't have any money.”

“Your parents want you to leave?”

“That asshole's going to come back and kill me, I know he will.”

“You mean Jesse's dad?”

He nodded. “If not him, somebody else.”

“Where did this happen?” she asked, and immediately thought,
As if that makes any difference.
“How did it get started?”

“It was at the football field. Must've been around midnight sometime.”

“After the candlelight vigil?”

Another nod. He cleared his throat again, grimaced when he did so. “There was just twenty, thirty people still hanging around. Standing around drinking. I was just laying on the front seat of my truck in the parking lot. I hadn't even gone up to the field or anything. Just wanted to be there, is all.”

“Were you by yourself?”

“Who else would I be with?” He licked his bottom lip where it had cracked open and was bleeding again. “I heard these steps coming toward me and I sat up to look. And he just reaches in through the window and grabs me around the neck and starts hammering on me.”

“Oh God, honey, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry that happened.”

“At some point he yanked open the door and dragged me out onto the blacktop. Nobody even tried to stop him. They was all just standing around, laughing, you know? It wasn't like I was fighting back or anything. He'd already busted me along the head a couple of good ones.”

Charlotte lowered herself into the green vinyl chair. She reached for his hand to pull it close, but her grip was too desperate and he winced, his entire body jerked, and she released him, pulled back, clamped her hands between her knees. She heard the little whimpers coming out again, detested them but felt incapable of silence.

“He just kept stomping and kicking at me,” Dylan said. “He's a grown man for chrissakes. And I never even did a goddamn thing to that boy!”

He was crying and Charlotte was crying, and with every breath she felt emptier, more hollowed out, so that soon she was sitting on the edge of the chair cushion and leaning toward him, then she lowered herself further until her forehead rested on the edge of the mattress. She could not control the sobbing now or the way her body shook. She could hear Dylan sniffing and clearing his throat, and then he startled her by laying a hand atop her back, in the space between her shoulder blades, and though his hand was warm and heavy, she took no comfort from it; that is, the intended comfort of his touch entered her emptiness and became its opposite, so that it felt, she would later remember, like a cold wind howling down an abandoned well.

It wasn't long before his hand lifted away. The place where he had touched her felt burned, and the phrase
frozen fire
came to her mind. She forced herself to sit upright. She pulled two tissues from the box on the stand beside his bed, wiped her eyes and nose and tried to pull herself together. “You need to stay with your family,” she told him. “The police will find the man who did this. And then he'll go to jail for it.”

“He might, but what about the rest of the town?” the boy asked. “Everybody believes the same thing he does.”

“That isn't true, Dylan. People
know
you. They know you would never do such a thing.”

He looked at her and blinked once, then again, and winced a little with each blink. Then he said, “There's nobody else I can ask to help me.”

All Charlotte wanted was to close her eyes. She ached for forgetfulness and sleep. “How long before they release you?”

“They said maybe tomorrow. Next day at the latest.”

“All right,” she told him.

“Dad said I should drive to Lancaster or Harrisburg and try to sell the truck for a coupla thousand. Then I should get on a bus and go someplace else.”

She nodded. “How about Muscle Shoals? Isn't that where you always wanted to go?”

“I got three broken fingers,” he said.

She had barely enough breath to speak. “Can you come see me before you go?”