Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (38 page)

When I entered the woods I became very deliberate in my movements. I wanted to sneak up on the boy, throw a good scare into him. I felt confident he would be sitting near the same fallen tree where I had found him the first time. That seat gave him a nice clean shot into the crows' roost. And sure enough, there he was.

He was sitting there with the shotgun resting beside him, propped against the log. The roost was empty and he sat staring off into the dimness of the woods. Maybe he was waiting for the crows to return or for an unlucky bushy-tail to happen by, I don't know. Maybe he was pondering life's mysteries. In any case, he was just sitting there, as still as a mushroom. He was capless, wearing one of those tan duck-cloth hunting coats, jeans, and muddy, old boots. The coat was way too big for him, a man's coat, and it made him look even smaller than he was.

I circled around behind him. The ground was sodden and muted my steps. Rain was still dripping from the canopy,
plop-plop-plopp
ing onto the soft ground, plopping onto my old hat and then rolling around to the rear of the brim to drip down my shirt. It felt like little icy pellets trickling down my spine. Even so, I was in no hurry. I had the patience and resolve and the blind, stupid wrath of Jehovah in my blood. I stood and watched and waited for the perfect plan of revenge to come to me.

I remember now how it amazed me that Jesse did not turn or even cock an ear as I crept up behind him in the woods. Every crunch of damp leaf beneath my boots sounded loud to me, every scraping scuff of my heels. Jesus, I can even
smell
those woods again. That damp, chill, rich, rotting leaf smell: I used to love it, used to revel in it—no more concrete and exhaust fumes! No more clamorous, crowded, stinking congestion of people! I remember reveling in all that every time I went into the woods, exulting in it. Even as I sneaked up on Jesse. The woodsy scent was the scent of my freedom, what I thought of as my hard-won, well-deserved freedom, and I was inhaling it with every breath, cherishing it even as the outrage built inside me that somebody, a little boy for God's sake, had the audacity to intrude upon it.

Jesse never heard me coming, never flinched. He was in his own world, I suppose, dreaming his twelve-year-old dreams. But when I spoke, he jerked upright so abruptly that he slid right off the log and landed on his butt, facing me. I didn't even try to keep the evil grin off my face.

To feel such animosity toward a child—me, a grown adult, a compassionate person—it burns my face with shame.

“Kill anything today?” I said.

He sat there and blinked at me. More accurately, at the black pistol I held leveled at his chest. He didn't answer. Didn't so much as breathe.

“How does this make you feel?” I asked. “You like being on this end of a gun for a change?”

He said, “All I was doing was shooting at crows.”

And at that moment, I swear to God, something snapped inside of me, some part of me saw him exactly as he was, just a boy, just a lonely little boy. And my heart ballooned with love for him. I looked at him with his raven hair all slicked down by the misting rain, his dark eyes like polished onyx, him sitting there on the sodden ground, a child who found more solace in the damp woods than in a schoolroom, and something trembled all the way through me. Something quivered in my soul.

My chest felt heavy all of a sudden, as if I couldn't get any oxygen into my lungs, just a lot of sterile air. I saw myself standing there like a bully, and I saw myself as I truly was, weak and selfish and ridiculous. All I wanted at that moment was to go to the boy and kneel down beside him and gather him into my arms, apologize for frightening him, lay his head against my shoulder, hold him as tightly as I could.

I wonder how many people have experienced such a total inversion of emotions. How many people have looked at somebody else, somebody not their own flesh and blood, a stranger even, and suddenly felt themselves drowning in love for that person? I don't know, maybe I'm making too much of it. Maybe it was just my maternal instinct kicking in, my unfulfilled longing for a child of my own. June once suggested—this was a few months after Mark and I split up—that I should make a withdrawal from the sperm bank and cook up a little honey bun in my Susie Homemaker oven. But by then I was building a different kind of fantasy, one I hadn't even shared yet with June. I was thinking that maybe I could make like O'Keeffe, that my peace and fulfillment (and maybe a new man) lay west of New York City. Pennsylvania was no Abiquiu, and Mark was sure as hell no Steiglitz, but, let's face it now, I was no O'Keeffe. But if I could do even in miniature what she had done . . .

So I'll concede maternal instinct for part of what I felt for Jesse that day, but not for all of it. Something about the sudden feeling that surged through me when I looked at him sitting there on the wet ground, something about that tableau, for just a few pure moments, made me . . . I don't know. I don't know how to express it. I felt so connected to that instant in time. And, therefore, connected to Jesse. Bound, soul to soul. And the truth is, funny as it might seem to others, I still feel connected to him. Even as I write this, I can feel that connection pulling at me, trying to take me somewhere.

As for the boy, after he sat there on the ground and blinked at me for half a minute or so, I told him, “You ever stop to think how the crows feel about being shot at? You ever think about how it feels when you hit one of them?” The moment I said that my voice quavered and I almost broke into tears, because I ached for the crows too. This was the moment when I was bursting with yearning or agape or whatever the heck it was, so I was aching, truly aching inside, for everybody and everything.

I remember so vividly the moment that feeling peaked. But how to describe something that words can't capture?

There's an old movie from the forties or so, Van Johnson is the star, I think. He's a test pilot for some little company struggling to stay afloat, trying to get a fat government contract, so he's desperate to break a high-altitude record in his new little plane. So he puts it into a steep climb and starts slicing up through the clouds. Then he's above the clouds and everything is clear and still and perfect, and he's still climbing. This was me getting high on agape. He's only three thousand feet from a new altitude record, but now the little plane is starting to strain from the effort. Now two thousand feet, and the cockpit is starting to rattle. Now, only a thousand feet to go, but the engines are screaming, rivets are popping, and the experience is so heady, so intoxicating and euphoric, that poor Van's skull feels like Vesuvius about to blow. Then the altimeter crosses over into that magical realm of untouched altitude, and Van's partner down on the ground is screaming into the radio that enough is enough, but Van is so fucking
high
that he just keeps pushing it. And, of course, the engines flame out. The plane stalls. Starts to fall back to Earth. Flips nose down. And goes into a deadly, maniacal spin, down down down through a deathly blue silence.

That was me on agape. After the peak, the plummet.

The chill that seized me then, it was terrifying. All of the warming love and sense of connection simply vanished, and in that absence, a cold, icy wind washed through my veins and into my heart. A chilling, freezing sadness. How did Neil Young put it?
Out of the blue and into the black.

I stood there shivering with cold. My hand was trembling and so was the black pistol it held.

The boy noticed it too. Something shifted in his eyes then, a turning of the light, the disappearance of fear. The cocky lilt returned to his mouth. Without moving his head he looked to his right where his shotgun still rested against the fallen log. I jerked the pellet gun at him, which had the desired effect of making him flinch, and in the next instant I strode forward and grabbed the shotgun low on the barrel and pulled it out of his reach. It was a stupid thing to do, I know. Not what I did but how I did it, yanking it away from the boy like that. Had the trigger snagged on a spike of bark or twig, had the boy lunged for it and gotten a hand on it, I might have blown my own head off. I can't tell you how many dozens of times I have played that possible ending over and over in my imagination.

Obviously, it never happened. The boy made a grab for his shotgun, but I was too close, I had only to reach out for it, and his fingers never touched it.

I've never seen such fearlessness in a person so young. Where does that capacity come from? By now I'm standing there with his shotgun in my left hand, my pistol in the right. I'm breathing hard and shivering and I've got a tunnel vision that has thrown the surrounding woods in deep shadow. There's just me and Jesse and the empty space between us. And I'm feeling
strange
. I'm a little bit nauseated, a little bit dizzy now that all the Gaia goofiness has drained out of me. I feel disembodied. Like I'm up there on one of those branches and looking down at a crazy woman below.

From that perspective I watched Jesse climb to his feet in no hurry at all. He brushed some dirt off the palms of his hands, pushed that long, wet hair off his forehead, and gave me a smirk. “These ain't your woods, lady,” he said.

The crazy lady tried to grin at him, but she was sucking darkness with every breath, not a whiff of oxygen in any of it. She said, “And those ain't your crows.”

His answer was a tiny snort of disdain. Then, “I need my shotgun back.”

“Do you? Well guess what. You can't have it.”

“That's my dad's shotgun. You can't keep it.”

“So tell your dad to come to my house and pick it up. I'd like to have a little talk with him.”

He held that smirk awhile longer. Then his eyes went sleepy and hooded. And then he dismissed me utterly, he turned away as if he were the one holding a weapon in each hand, me the defenseless one, and started walking toward the edge of the woods.

How many times had Mark done that to me? How many times had he dismissed me with a smirk, then nonchalantly walked away, just to show me how meaningless I was, how insignificant ? And now a child was treating me the same way, a boy barely half my size. I couldn't let him get away with it.

“Isn't this a school day?” I said as I followed him out of the woods. Rain dripped down from the canopy, big heavy drops on my shoulders and the brim of my floppy hat. Each one felt like an icy stab. “Why aren't you in school instead of out here killing harmless birds?”

He just kept walking, almost leisurely, as if I were of no concern whatsoever. As if I didn't even exist. For me the situation was becoming increasingly dreamlike, the kind of nightmare when you are trying and trying and trying to remember the combination to your school locker but the halls are emptying and the classroom doors are slamming shut and you still can't get your locker open, and maybe this isn't your locker after all—is this the right locker, is this the right school?

“Just tell me why you feel the need to shoot birds,” I demanded. “Explain it to me so that I can understand.”

Out in the field now, he turned left and followed the tree line toward Metcalf Road. Way out on the horizon, the sun was poking up out of the fog bank that hugged the ridges, and it had turned the fog a pale orange, a beautiful, soft pastel orange that for some reason, I can't explain why, made me inexpressibly, overwhelmingly sad. The beauty of it was like a cold slap that brought me up short. The misting rain had all but stopped by now, and the wash of sunrise made every other color more vibrant too, the dark, wet bark of the trees and the short, stiff stubble of cornstalks in the field and even the chalky white clapboards of my house. And now, seeing my house, I had the feeling that I was standing way over there behind my window and watching Jesse walking toward the road with some loony woman hurrying after him. The old bat had a shotgun in one hand and a shiny black pistol in the other.

“Why don't you just stop for a minute and look at that sunrise ?” I demanded. My voice sounded shrill and desperate.

He snorted again, made that dismissive sound that's like a suppressed laugh but isn't suppressed at all, a sound so resonant with contempt.

That snort of his set something off in me. I took one long stride and came up behind him a lot harder than I intended. And with my right hand, the one holding the pellet pistol, I grabbed hold of the collar of his jacket, that too-large, heavy duck-cloth coat, and I jerked him away from the woods and shoved him straight across the field.

I didn't mean for the barrel of the pistol to slap up against his cheek when I grabbed him, but it did, and it must have felt so icy-cold against his skin. I remember that he walked with his head cocked to the side a little, not wanting the barrel to touch him. And I'm ashamed to admit it, but I took a malicious glee from that observation.

“What's the matter? You afraid of a little pistol? Afraid it might go off?”

He was afraid, I could feel it. And I am so, so ashamed of the pleasure I derived from that. I liked that he was afraid of me. I liked it very much.

I think I kept harping at him as I shoved him across that field, but I see that part of the scene from a distance, as if I'm back home behind my window. I can see my mouth moving, I see his hunched-up shoulders and our awkward little march. I held tight to his collar and gloated every time the cold metal touched his cheek and he twisted away from it.

I pushed him toward the house, but as we came into the yard I knew I didn't want to go inside yet, didn't want this to fizzle out with a telephone call to his mother. Didn't want that dark scowl of his spreading like soot throughout my sunny rooms. So instead I pushed him toward the barn.

“Slide open the door,” I told him.

“What for?” he asked, and now it was his voice that sounded small and frightened, and God, how I reveled in that!