Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (39 page)

“Open it!” I said.

He slid the door open and I shoved him inside. The room was cavernous and dim and smelled of last year's hay, hundreds of bales of it still stacked in the loft and in the rear corner of the main floor. Mike will come over with his wagon every now and then and load it up and take the hay back to his cattle, and sometimes on sunny days I stand in the corner of the porch and watch, and I see the motes of dust glinting like mica in the sunlight, and I remember how I used to love the raw, clean, dry, earthy scent of hay. I used to love the barn.

I have no idea why I took Jesse there. But as my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, I noticed the stairs leading to the lower floor, so I pushed him toward them. I can't account for any of my actions, why I did what I did. After his snort of derision I seemed to be moving in a dark dream, kind of jumping jerkily from one piece of action to the next, illuminated only by a flashing strobe light. When a thought occurred to me, it was only a piece of a thought, nothing whole or coherent, a mere splinter of light in a fuzzy room.
Downstairs!
I thought when I saw the stairway. So I shoved him toward the stairs.

The lower floor contains several stalls plus a wide corridor for when the cows were let out to pasture. There's no wooden floor, just trampled earth pounded rock-hard under decades of hooves. And unlike the main floor, this area is relatively bright, if cobwebby, and aerated by lots of missing boards. So it's damper, too, and has a vaguely cloying funk to it of steaming hides and old manure and mildew.

“What are we down here for?” Jesse wanted to know.

I shoved him into the corner stall, pushed him toward the wall. He stumbled forward a few steps, then turned to look at me.

For a moment I just smiled at him. He pushed the hair off his forehead. “So?” he finally said. “Now what?”

His bravado had returned, and I didn't like it one bit. I wanted to squelch it again. “Now you find out what it feels like to be shot at,” I told him.

I waited for the fear to return to his eyes, but it didn't. His eyes narrowed and his jaw went tight. He even lifted his chin a little and looked down his nose at me. If only he had reacted differently, if only he had let his lip quiver, or if his eyes had shone with tears. If just for a few moments he had acted like a frightened little boy . . .

He didn't, though. He looked like Mark looking at me from across the lobby, the day I walked away from that life. That beautiful face of his with the fuck-you smirk.

Above Jesse and to his left, a board was missing from the rear wall. A beam of pale morning light lay across his shoulder. But then he raised a hand and shoved the wet hair off his forehead, and in doing so, he moved a few inches to the side, and the beam of light lit up the left side of his face. But the other half remained in shadow, so his handsome little face looked asymmetrical and misshapen, and that smirk looked so evil to me, and a sudden dizzy fear shot through me.

“You're not going to do anything,” he said. He was so damn sure of himself. Where does such confidence come from? In my entire life, I doubt I ever once felt such confidence. So, of course, I couldn't abide it in a child.

I propped his shotgun against the wall, then leveled the pistol at his chest.

“Yeah,” he said. “Like you're going to do it.”

I tried to match my sneer to his, but inside I felt on the verge of tears. On the verge of hysterical collapse. But I just couldn't let it happen again. Not again, damn it! I remember thinking those exact words
. Not again, damn it!
As if that little boy was Mark all over again.

I slipped the safety off, just as I had been taught back when I fired a few pellets into a rubber sheet in the back room of that shop in Queens. And I pulled the trigger. The pistol was set on automatic, so a dozen or more pellets thudded into the dry wood just above his shoulder. With the first pop, Jesse cringed and huddled up small and covered his face with his hands. But the volley lasted only a second or two, and when it ended he straightened up and looked at me with furious eyes—black, raging eyes. And, of course, that hard, crooked turn to his lips.

“It's just a BB gun,” he said.

“You think it won't hurt if I actually shoot at you? Maybe next time I will.”

“No you won't,” he said. He startled me by striding forward. He knew me now, knew that the pistol and I were a couple of frauds. And he was such a brave little boy, so fearless. When I think now of all he must have endured in his twelve years to become that way, the painful life he must have lived . . . Even now, even as I write this, I can't stop the tears. I ache for him. I ache and ache and ache and ache.

G
ATESMAN could not catch his breath. He pushed off the swing and stood, closed the journal on his index finger, the finger marking the page, held the book in one hand as he turned and stared at the barn.
I looked in the barn!
he told himself.
I fucking looked!
He lurched forward but then stopped himself, thought,
Wait!
and stood there blowing out his breath, panting as if he had run a couple of miles.

“This can't be true,” he said to the barn. “Dear God, please make it not be true.”

He felt momentarily as if he might pass out, and leaned one shoulder against a support post, felt the sharp corner bite into his skin. It hurt but he did not move, he needed the pain to keep him alert. He remained in that position for thirty seconds or more, eyes closed as he fought the vertigo and struggled to fill his lungs with air.

Finally he stood upright again, and with watery eyes, considered the yard, the road, the field of scrub grass. “Goddamn it, Charlotte,” he said.

He stood there breathing, trying to do nothing but breathe, trying to hold everything else in check. Finally he was ready to return to the swing. He crossed to it and sat, but even then held the journal closed atop his lap, one hand flat atop the cover.

Most of the crows were silent now. Two still calling to each other.
A couple of slackers,
he thought, though he did not turn to look toward the woods now, he preferred the mountains in the distance, found they helped him catch his breath. No matter how things changed, the mountains were always there. Through everything he had seen and heard and experienced in his life, the mountains never moved. They changed in color, perhaps, looked more rounded in full-leaf than when the limbs were bare, and there were a couple of towers poking out of them now that had not been there five years earlier, but the mountains themselves did not move or diminish, and the road that wound through them was the same road he had driven a hundred times, and though there were more houses along the lakeshore now, a couple more houses every summer, the lake was the same and so was the way the sunlight shimmered on the water, and there was a trout stream deep in the woods that he kept for just himself. It would all be there when he needed it.

He opened the journal again. Ran his finger down the page. And found his place.

H
E probably intended to simply pick up his shotgun and walk away from me, smirking to himself the whole way home. I know that now. I know that's what he would have done.

But at the moment all this happened, I saw everything through my own self-righteous anger. There was only me and Jesse, standing a few feet apart in a dim and dusty barn, and the rest of the world had gone dark around the edges. I had threatened him, tried to scare him, but he wasn't the least bit afraid or intimidated by me. In the dark shine of his eyes I saw myself as he saw me—a fraud. And I hated him for showing me that.

He came forward and reached for the shotgun and I made a grab for it too. There was no thought behind my action—not then, anyway—though I know now what unthought intention made me go for the shotgun. I would not let it happen again—that look Mark had fired at me across the lobby, that flippant disregard with which he had reduced me to insignificance. I reached for the shotgun low on the barrel this time. Jesse grabbed it near the end of the barrel. He seized it with both hands and yanked hard, pulling it through my hands, through my stupid, clutching, blind, indecent hands.

The boom of the shotgun hit me full in the face. It knocked the breath out of me, and the sudden sight of Jesse blasted into the corner of the stall nearly knocked me unconscious. He had pulled the barrel straight toward his chest and now he lay there in a tiny dark heap in the dark corner of the stall. The air stank of gun smoke, and it burned my nostrils and eyes, and the boom just kept echoing and echoing inside my head. All the strength just went out of me then, and I fell down onto my knees, just dropped down and flopped sideways against the wall and sat there on that cold, sour ground and gasped and gasped and gasped for breath.

I recall how excruciatingly hard it was to drag myself up onto my feet again that morning, up off that shit-permeated floor. I remember the effort it took not to look into the stall as I half-stumbled, half-crawled down that stinking dirt hallway, that cow-run or whatever it is called, to the wide opening at the rear of the barn. The pasture was all weedy and overgrown by then; no cow had grazed or shat or mooed there since long before I moved in.

I made it just outside the door before my body collapsed. Still gasping and wheezing, still struggling to inhale just one fucking lungful of air, I dropped down onto all fours with my face in the grass, and I just kept gasping and moaning for I don't know how long. It was all just too impossible to comprehend. Both my mind and my body were reeling, as if Earth itself was spinning and lurching and bucking through space like a kicked ball. One second, the universe was black and swirling, and then I would have what seemed a lucid thought, the realization that I was only dreaming, and I would lift up my head and see an impossibly bright world, then I would think,
No, you are not dreaming
, and the awful pain would smash through me again, a vicious, hot, smashing swell of pain, and I would bury my face in the grass again and rip out clumps of grass and cram them against my eyes, wanting only to black out my consciousness.

Then, out of this black swirl of disbelief, a thought came to me: I hadn't even checked on Jesse to see if he was alive! Maybe he was still alive!

I jumped up and flew, and I mean I
flew
back to the stall. At the stall door, though, I slammed into the sight of him again and could go no farther. He looked so tiny there in that shadowy corner, a baby of a boy in a man's hunting coat. In the dimness, the front of the coat was black with blood, though there was not as much blood as I expected. I expected to have to wade through the blood to get to him. And I knew then that he was dead and had been dead within a millisecond of the blast. His heart had stopped pumping.

The shotgun was right where we had dropped it, only a few feet from Jesse's boots. I stared at it awhile. I envisioned myself picking it up and standing the butt on the ground, slipping my mouth over the barrel, sliding a hand down the barrel to the trigger housing. In my mind, I saw myself flying backward out of the stall, dead and free before my body hit the ground.

So many times since then I've wished I'd had the courage. As many times as there have been days and nights since then.

What I actually did was turn away and head outside again. At some point I started running, running blindly into the pasture and then toward the far fence, running and falling. I came up against the fence and then ran alongside it for a while, searching for the gate, then gave up and turned around and ran in the other direction. At least I think that's what I did. Maybe that's just one of the nightmares I've had since then. If so, it's the one that seems the most real to me, the most vivid. In any case, it's fair to say that I was in all ways incoherent and had no idea what I was doing or why. Maybe I was hoping to plow into something and bash my brains out. All I know for a fact is that I eventually got my wish and fainted dead away out there in the weeds.