Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (36 page)

T
HE passing of days, each one a bit warmer. Sometimes it rained, and if it happened in the afternoon, the yard would seem to steam afterward, the grass brilliant green in the sunlight, and the Credence Clearwater song would come into her mind then and play over and over,
Have you ever seen the rain comin' down on a sunny day?

She took to walking again because it was a good way to pass the time. But she carried no camera now, no little sketch pad tucked into a pocket. She kept to abandoned logging trails now, where she knew she would encounter no one, only chipmunks and squirrels, a fat groundhog waddling across her path.

If she saw buzzards or crows, she always paused to consider them, watched them in flight or studied them while they, from a high branch, studied her. She had read that crows like shiny things, that they are monogamous birds who will gather bits of shiny things to decorate their nests, pop-can ring-tops, cellophane, and foil. So for a week she went into the woods at midmorning, after the crows had departed for the day, and on a stump near their roost, she laid a piece of jewelry small enough for their beaks—an earring, a broken silver clasp—and on every subsequent day the item was gone, so she replaced it with another. On the seventh day she gave them the Tiffany diamond, the Christmas ring she had always resented.

From time to time, in no set pattern—sometimes in the middle of the day when she was reading, sometimes as she lay awake at night listening to the rain—she would be convulsed with sobs that struck her from out of nowhere, that left her breathless and weak and feeling kicked in the stomach.

She answered none of the phone calls or e-mails, kept her doors locked, ignored the knocks on her door. One time Livvie came and knocked on the door, then sat on the porch swing for an hour before finally driving away in the car she had driven there, a used beige Corolla with a dent in one fender.

Charlotte bought her groceries at a convenience store in Andersonburg, well south of Belinda, well east of Carlisle. She ordered her medications online.

F
OUR days before May, on a warm pleasant evening in the hour of magic light, Charlotte could not resist the scent of the air, the perennials poking up in little splashes of color, the lemony glow she loved only second-best to the light of morning, and she sat on the porch swing, rocking slowly back and forth. On that peculiarly peaceful evening, two things happened that caused her to understand that the interlude was over, that the days of quietude, as she had always known they would, had come to an end.

Had she not been looking out across the porch at the copse of birches that hid the blueberry patch, she might have had time, just as the shiny, black pickup truck turned into her driveway, to scurry inside and lock the door. But not even the sound of the vehicle's approach registered on her until it was close enough that, turning abruptly to look, she could see Rex through the windshield, could see his smile as he lifted his hand in a wave.

Oh God,
she thought, and wanted to run but held to her seat and only stopped the swing from moving.

He climbed out of his truck and crossed to her with a shuffling, lumbering stride. His cheeks and skull were freshly shaved and gleaming, his smile sheepish. It was the first time Charlotte had ever seen him in anything other than his bloody smock and apron, and just the sight of him now in his tan guayabera shirt over chocolate khakis, his chest and shoulders and stomach huge, filled her with a sudden sadness and made the lemon light go gray. Worst of all, he shuffled toward the porch with a Whitman's Sampler in one hand, a spray of daffodils and baby's breath in the other. She thought,
Such a sad cliché
, and immediately despised herself for the thought.

He remained at the bottom of the stairs, just as Gatesman had done. Charlotte felt her sinuses thicken, felt the bruise return to her chest.

He said, “Nobody's seen you around for a while.”

“Working,” she told him. “Just . . . always too much to do.”

“Cindy figured you had enough of us hicks as you could stand and moved back to the city. I'm glad to see you didn't.”

“Still here,” she told him. And told herself, as she watched him smile and nod,
He's going to come closer now, going to put one foot up on the step.

Ten seconds later, he did. “I was thinking,” he said.

“Rex,” she said, and leaned forward on the swing, put both hands atop her knees, and shook her head. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Well,” he said, and looked off to the right for a while, then turned his gaze to her again. She thought,
You can't blame a man
—

“—for trying,” he said.

“I'm flattered,” she told him. “I truly am. And if things were different . . .”

“What things would that be?”

“Me, actually. If I were different.”

“It's not a different you I'm interested in.”

“I'm sorry,” she told him. “I truly am.”

He nodded again and stared at the edge of the porch. Then he leaned forward to set the box of candy and flowers on the boards.

“Rex, no,” she told him. “Please don't.”

But he was already moving away. A blush of blood reddened the back of his neck and spread upward, until finally every inch of his lovely round head looked inflamed.

Long after the sound of his truck had faded, she remained motionless on the porch swing. She sat leaning forward, hollowed out. Every now and then she looked to the things he had left behind. The box of candy struck her as tragicomic. But the flowers looked funereal, like something stolen from a baby's grave.

T
HE second incident occurred just before ten the same evening. Her cell phone vibrated atop her desk, four rings until it switched to voice mail. A minute later, a single vibration. She considered ignoring the message until morning, but finally crossed to her desk, picked up the phone, and listened to the message.

“Hey, beautiful,” Mike Verner said, “where the hell have you been keeping yourself? How am I going to keep Claudia on her toes if you're not around for me to flirt with? Anyway . . . I just wanted to give you a heads-up. I hope you love country life as much as you claim you do, 'cause you're about to be getting a nose full of it. Two weeks from now there's an auction up near Lewistown, and if all goes the way I hope it does, I'll be coming back from it with ten head of Belted Galloways. Those are the ones people call Oreo-cookie cows? Black on each end and white in the middle? Anyway, I'll be unloading them over there in the pasture behind the barn. In fact, I'll be keeping them there until I can fatten them up enough to sell off again. So you're going to have some company, is what I'm saying. I apologize for this. I mean, I know how much your peace and quiet means to you. But it's not going to be as bad as you might think, I promise. Hell, you might end up being the Van Gogh of Oreo cows, make all of us famous . . .”

The message lasted another ten seconds or more, but none of it registered on her, none of it mattered. She clicked the phone shut and laid it on the desk and stood there motionless, barely breathing. She knew that if she moved, everything would come crashing down at once, everything that had loomed over her the entire month, all of life balanced like a teetering boulder just above her head.

Eventually she made her way back to the recliner, sat down, and stared at the black face of the television set. After a while she closed her eyes. Every breath made a sound when it left her, a syllable of pain, as distant yet as near as the crow-black trees.

And there on the recliner in the darkness of her house she saw herself for what she was, what she had become in the space of a month, less than a month, a creature composed now of nothing but fear and a constant, desperate need. This house that had been her blessing, this luxurious solitude and the peace that came with it—it had become nothing more than a place in which to hide, windows to cower behind, doors to keep locked. And the thing that her work had given her, that glorious ineffable thing, that brilliant glow of creation she had imagined herself surrounded in as she stood at her easel each morning, it was all gone now, shriveled away. No, worse than shriveled; rotted away. Rotted away like a once-lovely piece of fruit. Consequently she was old and empty, made brittle by fear.
You don't even have the strength to climb the stairs,
she told herself.

And she told herself,
You cannot live like this.

She had to hear it only once to know that it was true.

A
S Gatesman drove toward Charlotte's driveway at a few minutes past seven in the morning, with a thin, damp fog hugging the fields and muting the spring colors, with the weak light only now opening up to reveal the distant, rounded hills, he was not yet aware of any sense of urgency, no need to rush through those last minutes of stillness before the sun cleared the treetops and the school buses rumbled. She was probably already gone, off to wherever. “I have to meet with someone soon and likely won't be around when you get here,” her note had said, “but it's important to me that you and only you pick up the package at your earliest convenience.”

He was curious, of course, as to the nature of the package and why she had chosen him to retrieve it, and for what purpose. Her short note had been written on the blank interior of a small thank-you card whose artwork, a simple rendering of a leafy branch with a few ripe cherries hanging from it, seemed to him vaguely Japanese. According to its time stamp, the envelope had been processed in Belinda on Saturday morning and did not land on his desk until Monday night. Separating the afternoon mail was usually the last thing Tina did every night. And there it had been this morning, Tuesday, May first, laid smack in the center of his desk blotter on top of his empty coffeemug—Tina'sway of letting him know that she had seen the feminine handwriting and knew that he had received either a thank-you card or an invitation from a woman, and that Tina would not rest until he revealed the contents to her.

That was one of the reasons he had slipped out before Tina arrived. The moment he saw that the note was from Charlotte, after he hurriedly checked the other mail and listened to his phone messages, none of any urgency, he decided to take care of this matter first, this private and as-yet-unknown matter. The note neither identified the package nor included any instruction as to what to do with the package after he had picked it up, but he felt certain there would be another note of some kind at the house. A small part of him resented Charlotte's assumption that the county sheriff had nothing better to do first thing in the morning than to respond to her summons, but another part of him, the larger part, was amused and flattered by the trust implied by her request.