Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797)

by Silvis, Randall;

  Livvie inhaled and drew back when Charlotte touched her mouth—not a sudden movement but sufficient to wake Livvie. She saw Charlotte’s face so close and drew back farther, blinked, coming alert. Her eyes opened wider, and only then, in the look that came into Livvie’s eyes then, only then did Charlotte realize what she had done, see where she was, and feel the coldness return.

  “No,” Charlotte said pulling away, pushed away by the look in Livvie’s eyes, “it’s not . . . I was so cold . . . I’ve been so cold.”

  Livvie said nothing. Then looked away. And reached to the foot of the bed, pulled the comforter up, covered her body, and turned toward the window, curled and covered on the edge of the bed.

  Charlotte turned in the opposite direction, put her feet to the floor. She hurried across the ice to her own room, the sheets cold, and cocooned herself in the comforter, too cold to move again, too cold to reach out and extinguish the light.

  64

  NEXT morning a misty dawn. Charlotte lay still cocooned, listening as Livvie packed up her things. Footsteps on the stairway, three trips up and down to carry everything onto the porch. How will she carry it all home? Charlotte wondered. But then she heard a car arriving, again the slow crunch of gravel. She climbed out of bed with the comforter still wrapped around her shoulders and went to the window. There was Gatesman’s brown sedan at the end of the driveway, the engine idling. Waves of heat rose off the hood. He climbed out and came toward the house and disappeared from Charlotte’s view. His voice was low, a few whispered words. And soon he reappeared on his way back to the car, Livvie’s suitcase in one hand, a grocery bag in the other. He opened the rear door and set them inside on the seat.

  Charlotte held the comforter tight around her as she hurried down the stairs. At the foyer she stood behind the screen door, looked out onto the porch, saw Livvie handing Gatesman the final overstuffed grocery bag. Livvie stood there for a moment, watching Gatesman, then said in a soft voice, “I’ll be right back.” When she turned to the door, she saw Charlotte looking out.

  Livvie said, “I was coming up to say good-bye.”

  “You don’t need to do this,” Charlotte said. “It wasn’t what you think last night.”

  Livvie came close to the screen but did not reach for the door. “I just think this is better,” she said. “I want to be back at the trailer anyway. I mean, if Jesse comes back . . .”

  “I was just feeling lonely is all. I just . . .”

  “I know,” Livvie said.

  And Charlotte thought, But you don’t.

  Livvie said, “I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done.”

  “What about getting back and forth to work? You can use my Jeep, I’ll get you the keys.”

  “It’s okay. Mark is going to go to the bank with me today. He says he can get them to give me a loan.”

  “I’m sure he can,” Charlotte said. Then, “What if Denny comes back?”

  “We don’t think he will.”

  We? Charlotte thought. It’s we already.

  And why not? she asked herself later. She had gone to the Windsor chair in her studio, sat wrapped in the goose-down comforter while the orange glow of morning slowly turned the window and curtains into a portrait of light. Why should it not be we already? she thought. They’re entitled, she told herself. They’re deserving.

  Unlike you, she told herself. Who deserves only you.

  65

  THE 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.

  66

  FOUR 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.

  67

  THE 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.

  You don’t even have the strength to brush your hair.

  And she told herself, You cannot live like this.

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

  68

  AS 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.

  But why now? he wondered. Their contact in the past month had been negligible. In fact, not a single word had passed between them since that morning in the hospital. A couple of times he had suggested to Livvie that one or both of them should call on her, but Livvie had cautioned, “Let’s just give her some space.” He knew that something had passed between the two women, but Livvie would provide no details, would say only, “It wasn’t even an argument, just a feeling, is all. She needed her own space and I needed mine. Let’s just leave it at that.” But on those occasions he had not failed to notice the look that came into Livvie’s eyes, what seemed to him like a passing cloud of sadness. But he never tried to probe the secrets they shared. Women had always been a mystery to him, and he saw no reason to assume that that would change.

  “I’ll leave it on the secretary in the foyer,” Charlotte had written. “I’ll put a key under the mat on the front porch. Just let yourself in.”

  He reasoned that it was a matter of trust and nothing more. Charlotte trusted him, it was as simple as that. There was a time when he had hoped for more than trust from her, but he was satisfied now with the way things had worked out, and he considered himself a man who knew enough to count his blessings.

  This fine spring morning, for example. Within an hour or so, the fog would all be burned away, the air clear and cool and the new leaves flicking like little green tongues whenever a small breeze stirred. So after he parked and climbed out and crossed the yard to her porch, after he laid back the corner of the welcome mat and recovered the key and inserted the key in the lock and eased open the door, he paused to look again at the line of trees beyond the garage, the barn and the field, to enjoy, just a few moments longer, the look and feel and scent of a hushed morning soon to fade.

  Sfumato, she had called it once. The effect of the fog as it smokes and blurs the trees. A painter’s technique. A story about da Vinci, he remembered. Yes, right there on that porch swing, that’s where she had told it to him, da Vinci and The
Last Supper . Or had it been in the kitchen? He couldn’t quite remember where that particular conversation had taken place, couldn’t remember the exact circumstances. Not that it mattered.

  “Sfu-mato,” he said aloud now, then smiled at the peculiarity of the word. A peculiar word for such a lovely morning. Leave it to Charlotte to even know such a word.

  He pushed open the door then and stepped inside. The house was cool and dark and silent. He had hoped to smell coffee but instead detected the scent of wet ashes. She had probably made a fire recently, then closed the screen and gone to bed and allowed the fire to burn itself out, without ever remembering to close the flue. A lot of BTUs going up the chimney now, he thought. He told himself that he would close the flue before leaving, save her a few dollars on her gas bill.

  Maybe it was only the stillness of the house that quieted him. He knew that he was alone in the house, no need for stealth or any attempt to maintain the silence, yet he found himself moving with a deliberate, even delicate step across the foyer. He didn’t bother to turn on the hall light because he could already see the secretary against the wall, could see it well enough to make out the only item atop the slender shelf. It was a book of some kind, a slender, oversize book with a plain canvas cover. Dark green, he thought, though he would have to carry it outside to see the color clearly. Stuck to the cover was a Post-It note whose message in the dimness he could not read.

  He stepped back to the doorway, held the book in the light.

  For you, Marcus. Thank you.

  That’s it? he thought. Does she mean it’s a gift for me? Or does she expect me to do something else with it?

  He opened the cover to the first page and saw that the book was a journal of some kind. It was, in fact, a sketchbook, but he had never seen one of those before and so assumed that the writing, a tight, cursive script in blue ink, with lines that slanted slightly downward across the page, defined the object. The first words were, The morning of April third . . .