Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (24 page)

Your hair smells like strawberries, babygirl,
he might say.
Have you been rolling around in strawberries?

She would giggle and tell him,
You're being silly. It's just my shampoo.

She heard him ask,
Do you make your hair smell like that for your boyfriend?

“Oh, Daddy,” she told him, and she sobbed against his shoulder.

G
ATESMAN sat in his vehicle parked outside the mobile home. He had shut off his engine a minute earlier and could hear the heat crackling beneath the hood.

Mobile home,
he thought, and the phrase sounded strange inside his head.
The last time you were mobile was when some truck hauled you away from the factory.

Then he told himself,
Maybe you should just call her.
He didn't think she would be asleep already; it was only a few minutes after three. Maybe she did not sleep even after cleaning Mrs. Shaner's place. Maybe she was inside there, sitting at the window, waiting for the school bus to come by and drop Jesse off.

He swung open the door finally, climbed out, and went to the front door.

“Come on in,” Livvie said after his three soft knocks, and he knew even before he stepped over the threshold that, yes, she had seen him outside in his vehicle, and now she would be sitting there waiting for him to come in and give her the news,
There's a witness claims she saw him getting into a dark blue van
, or maybe
There's this fella over in Elliottsburg, a registered pedophile. We're pretty sure he's involved in this.
Or maybe it would be,
We found his body, Livvie, I'm sorry.
What else could she be expecting by now, after all these days? The best news she could expect would be no news at all, no change in status quo, no witness, no pedophile, no body.

He looked at her there on the orange vinyl sofa, not even a cup of coffee in her hands, nothing but that hollow, waiting look. He closed the door, crossed to the sofa, and sat beside her. “How are you holding up?” he asked.

She said, “Do you have something to tell me?”

He looked at his hands. “I told the state boys that they need to be handling this. I just don't have the resources to do it right. Honestly . . . I don't have the know-how.”

“So . . .” she said, “what does that mean?”

“Nothing, really, except that they'll probably be sending somebody around to ask you all the same questions I already did. They were with us when we went through the woods, so it's not likely they'll go all over that again. It's just that from here on in, you'll be dealing with them instead of with me.”

“So nothing's really changed,” she said.

“I guess that's right.”

She didn't nod or otherwise respond.

He had never seen a person so still. “Have you heard from Denny, by any chance?”

“What would I hear?” she asked.

“Has he contacted you about anything?”

Five seconds passed before she shook her head no.

“And you don't have any idea where he might be?”

She looked at him, said nothing, then looked away again. “No.”

“Well,” he said, “I don't know if you'll consider this good news or bad news, but there's no charges against him for what he did to the Hayes boy.”

“Why not?” she said.

“Dylan took off somewhere. He was supposed to come by the courthouse and sign a statement when he got out of the hospital. Instead he just packed up and left town. His folks claim to have no idea where he went to.”

“Then it was Dylan,” she said.

“Now, we don't know that, do we?”

“Why else would he leave and not tell anybody where he was going?”

“I don't know. Maybe he was scared of getting beaten again.”

“But if he'd stayed and signed that statement . . .”

“Then, yes. We'd have had to pick Denny up for it.”

“So then Dylan wouldn't have had any reason to be scared.”

“Look,” the sheriff told her, “the truth is that nobody knows anything. It's hard enough to understand why we do things ourselves, let alone figuring out other people's actions.”

She continued to look at him without speaking, but the expression on her face was impossible to read.
She's probably not even seeing me,
he told himself.
She's looking somewhere else that's not even here.

“I just wanted to let you know,” he told her. “Denny's sure to hear it from one of his buddies sooner or later. I don't know if you want him back here or not, but . . . this is where he's likely to come.”

After a while, she leaned away from him, leaned back into the corner of the sofa and closed her eyes. “All right,” she said. “Thank you, Sheriff.”

He did not interpret her dismissal as an insult.
It's nothing personal,
he told himself as he drove away.
Right now, I barely even exist as far as she's concerned.

T
HE crows were so noisy the next morning that they woke her. The evening before, after returning from the nursing home—there had been no ice cream cone afterward, no contemplation of the lit fountain and whimsical statue—she had opted for a glass of wine instead of fixing herself anything for dinner. For dessert she took two more Ambiens with another glass of wine, then lay back in the recliner with the television on. Just after four in the morning she awoke to a program on the History Channel, a dramatized biography of Clyde Barrow. She was able to lose herself in the footage for a while, watched the outlaw run from one crime to the next.
Men are so lucky,
she found herself thinking,
the way they can take whatever they want and feel no remorse. All that swagger and swinging testicles.
She thought the History Channel's version of Clyde Barrow's death much more realistic and therefore anticlimactic than Arthur Penn's operatic treatment of the event, and it was then that she began to lose interest in the program. The last thing she remembered before the crows woke her was the postmortem newsreel footage of Bonnie and Clyde. But even before she woke, the crows' squawking reached her in the living room and infiltrated her dream. She went from Clyde and Bonnie on the coroner's slabs to a Hitchcock nightmare of the crows laying siege to her house. Black, cawing clouds banging at every window, ramming impossibly long beaks through the door and the walls. Charlotte ran from room to room in her dream, looking for a safe place to hide but finding none. So many crows landed on her roof that the house began to creak. Eventually the roof upstairs collapsed and she raced back downstairs and cowered in her studio against the curtained window.

She could remember standing off to the side of the bay window and clutching the curtain while she peeked outside, dead certain that the crows were going to come swooping down the stairway at any second, smash through the studio's French doors, and tear her to shreds. In her dream she had her cell phone in her hand and was frantically punching numbers but could get no dial tone. Strangely, when she peeked out the window, the glass was clear, completely unmarked by feathers and blood, as if none of the thousands of crows had ever hurled themselves against the glass. She could see all the way across the field and to the row of trees now, and only then did she realize that the horrible midnight of her dream was now in daylight, the soft yellow light of a clear day a half hour after dawn. The nightmare soundtrack had ended. The only crows she could see or hear were the dozen or so real ones soaring and diving high above the trees. They were attacking three turkey vultures that had encroached on the crows' territory. The crows kept diving up and down at the buzzards like little kamikaze planes, but those big black airbuses just kept circling and circling in a leisurely gyre.

It took her a while to realize that she was awake and had walked to the window in her sleep. She stood there watching the birds for another ten minutes, feeling her heartbeat gradually slow and become close to normal again. When the crows finally chased the buzzards out of sight, all of the birds disappearing behind the trees, she went to the kitchen and prepared a cup of tea.

She did not want to settle in front of the television again and knew she could not paint, but she also knew that she had to keep her mind distracted, had to find something on which to focus her thoughts. She had found it interesting how the smaller birds, maybe a fourth the size of the turkey vultures, had acted so aggressively to protect their territory. She went to the computer and first researched crows. She read that some Native Americans think of the crow as the keeper of the Great Spirit, that others see it as a trickster and a shape-shifter, a creature free of the constraints of time, able to see into and occupy the past, present, and future simultaneously. Some believe that the crow created the world. The Alaskan Chuylens say that the crow can shape-shift into a handsome young man who can trick women into doing his will. In Celtic symbolism, seeing a crow is an omen that something special or unexpected will soon occur. Early American folklore held that a crow was a messenger bringing secret knowledge. Others view the crow as a messenger of death.

Charlotte then spent another two hours on the family
Cathartidae
, the “cleanser.” She learned that the vulture is mute—unlike the crow, which can mimic human speech. Vultures can only grunt and hiss, usually to warn another vulture away from some meal of rotting flesh, but they allegedly grunt their loudest when fucking.
Just like a vulturous ex-husband I used to know,
Charlotte told herself. She thought it unusual and more than a little sad that such a graceful bird in the sky should lack a larynx, have no song to sing and no voice to sing one.

On one website she found a long essay by Lee Zacharias, a piece whose focus shifted back and forth between the vultures and Zacharias's father. There were two lines in the essay that Charlotte liked so much she copied them onto a sheet of lined paper: “The bird's muteness sits upon its shoulders. It knows what death tastes like, but cannot speak of the flavor.”

In another passage, she read about vultures in the mountains of Tibet and was intrigued to learn that Buddhists there will hack a deceased loved one into portable pieces and leave them out on the rocks for the vultures. The birds will descend and swiftly carry the pieces away to be devoured. The practice is called
jhator
, a sky burial. Charlotte thought it equally gruesome and poetic.

After that long morning at the computer, Charlotte was unable to look at the crows or vultures or even to hear the crows cawing in the distance without thinking of them as presiding over a funeral, a sky burial, and remembering her father sitting like a corpse with his chin on his chest, and wishing she had the courage of doing him the honor of a
jhator
, wishing she had the courage and the wings and the crows' gift of song to spirit them both away.