Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797)

by Silvis, Randall;

  He stopped reading and looked up, looked out through the screen. He knew that date. How could he not? And suddenly there came a shortness of breath, a flush of heat. “God, no,” he said.

  And then, another thought. He turned abruptly, looked up the stairs. “Charlotte?” he called. No answer. He laid the journal on the secretary and raced up the stairs, yanked himself forward with his hand on the banister rail. He found her bedroom quickly, knew in an instant that it was hers, but was relieved to see the bed empty and neatly made, relieved to see the dresser and nightstands and all else looking perfectly normal.

  He then checked each of the other rooms but found nothing amiss. Went downstairs then and made a quick check of the house, glanced into every room, no sign of Charlotte. “So okay,” he told himself. “You’re jumping to conclusions here. Now calm down.”

  Yet his heart would not quit racing. He returned to the foyer, retrieved the journal, and stepped onto the porch.

  He was reluctant to open the journal again but knew he had to do so. On the edge of the porch, he stood for a moment to look out across the yard. His morning, in the past two minutes, had taken on a quality of strangeness. He had always considered Charlotte Dunleavy an unconventional woman, and that was part of the attraction, but this was something more, an incongruency of actions that troubled him. The edges did not line up.

  The rumble of a school bus came into his consciousness only after he saw the bus out on the highway, bus number seven, long and yellow and lumbering toward the middle school. Then the bus passed and the morning was quiet again, but the strangeness remained.

  He looked down at the journal.

  For you, Marcus, the note said.

  He needed a few moments to think. He needed to sit and catch his breath. He turned, considered the porch swing.

  The one time he and Charlotte had sat together on that swing now seemed impossibly distant to him. In fact, he was not even certain that they had ever sat side-by-side on the swing. Wasn’t I in the wicker chair? he asked himself.

  He remembered words and looks that had passed between them and many things that had been left unsaid. He had to admit that the feelings from that time were still tangible, not as raw or clumsy as they had originally been, not as bruising, but still there nonetheless. The feelings as they returned to him now made the morning seem to shrink even tighter around him, made a kind of cloudiness fill his mind so that nothing seemed clear.

  “Sfumato,” he said again.

  The morning was still cool, though the day promised to be warm. In the distance beyond the highway, a line of blue hills was rising to the sky, seeming to grow minute by minute out of the evanescing fog. “The Tuscarora Mountains,” he said.

  At his back, in the trees behind the cornfield, a crow cawed. In front of him, wisps of fog rose off the lawn. He could smell the wet grass. The sky was brightening in the east. In an hour the yard and the porch would be filled with light. Sunlight would stream in through the windows. But for now the porch was cool and dim and the house was quiet and smelled of ash. The crows were awakening in the treetops, beginning their noisy aria to morning.

  He crossed to the swing and sat down in the center of the slatted wooden seat. The chains creaked with his weight. He laid the journal on his lap, he laid back the cover, and he read.

  69

  THE morning of April third was a soft, damp morning but one that smelled pink with promise. I awoke before dawn and sat in the darkness of my studio with the curtains open and a mug of green tea in my hands. By degrees the night slowly faded away, and after a while I was able to see a mist of rain coming down outside, a mist so soft that it made no sound on the roof or against the window. Only when I stood close to the glass could I hear a gurgle in the rainspout and see the gentle bubbling in a shallow puddle in the driveway.

  When the morning was nearly light enough, I went to my easel, lifted off the sheet, and looked at the painting in progress, the Amish children standing in a yard as a buggy and a Harley pass in front of them.

  I never finished that painting, but to this day I can see the finished work inside my head. I can see other paintings too, other scenes I will never paint, all of them complete here inside my head, each one of them a mockery of who I thought I was and would be.

  Anyway, that morning. I stood there looking at my painting, sipping my tea, and feeling very pleased with how things were going. That misty rain and cat-footed dawn were quieting and made me tranquil. It wasn’t exactly an overcast morning, the sun was softly veiled. I would call it instead a luminous morning. The line of fog across the horizon did not block the sunlight but diffused it. I remember thinking of it as a tempera wash. The important thing here is this: Thanks to the morning or my painting or whatever, I felt—and my phrasing is inadequate, I’m sure—quietly jubilant. I felt on the verge of something.

  And I was, I surely was. My mistake was in thinking it would be something wonderful.

  Anyway, when the light was sufficient, I opened up my paints, prepared my palette, dried off the brushes. I sipped the last of my tea and set the mug aside. And within minutes I was utterly lost inside the painting. By which I mean that I was simultaneously in it and outside of it. That’s the strange thing that happened to me sometimes, the way I separated and became the unemotional artist wielding the brush, conscious of the length of stroke and the heaviness of the pigment and the degree of light that emanates from it, yet I became a part of the imagined scene as well. That second me was standing at the roadside, just outside the frame of the picture, watching as the biker and buggy passed each other. I could smell the cut grass as it flew up in little green splinters behind the whirring blades. I could smell the horse as it gamboled by and could feel the heat rising from its muscled flanks. I could feel the rumble of the Harley’s engine vibrating my eardrums and feel the heat coming off its flared exhaust pipes. It was a moment frozen, yet alive and dynamic, with everything slowed down and stretched out so that all the details and undercurrents were exquisitely vivid to me. It was one of those moments that just happened sometimes. One of those wonderful moments.

  The gunshot exploded as if it had been fired past my ear. I swear the room shook with it. I gasped and staggered backward and felt physically knocked away from my painting, literally yanked out of it. Then came three more shots. Bam! Bam! Bam! By the fourth one I was standing at the window, trembling and rigid while the paint dripped down the brush and onto my fingers. Twenty, maybe thirty crows were in frantic flight away from the trees. And me . . . It is no exaggeration to say that I felt assaulted. My head was suddenly throbbing, my blood pressure sky-high. And moment by moment my fury grew.

  I ran to the kitchen as fast as I could. I don’t remember now if a plan of action had occurred to me or not. If so, I didn’t pause to think it out beyond the first step or two. When I try to recreate those moments in my memory, all I see is a furious, red-faced woman with her face made ugly by rage.

  On a shelf on the wall beside the door leading into the mudroom I kept a pistol. Before I left New York, June had insisted—make that ordered me to buy one. “A woman living alone in the country needs to protect herself,” she said. But I fooled her and only bought an air pistol, a pellet gun that to an untrained eye looked exactly like a real gun. And I kept this pistol in the mudroom because it had already come in handy several times for chasing raccoons out of my garbage cans.

  So there it was on the shelf that morning, my tranquil morning shattered yet again. I jammed the pistol down into my waistband of my baggy jeans and shoved my feet into my boots. And this time I laced them up—not like the first time I had confronted Jesse out there. Yes, this was the second time. The first time, despite my anger, I had tried to be pleasant, tried to reason with him, but he had treated me with such contempt that . . . I don’t know, but maybe that had something to do with why I was furious now, because of the way he had already humiliated me. I felt in no hurry this time, furious but strangely calm and deliberate. Every little thing I
did, right down to pulling my old gardening hat off the hook and jamming it onto my head, felt ordained.

  As if I were my own painting come to life, I watched myself march outside and across the wet yard. In fact I can still see those moments in exquisite detail. The grass was glistening and jewel-like. With every step I sent tiny diamonds of moisture flying. I was wearing my Timberlands, baggy jeans, and a loose blue shirt with short sleeves and a V-neck. And I wasn’t wearing a bra. I never wore a bra when I was working. It was one of those silly little superstitions artists have, I suppose, but I always wanted my work to be unfettered, unrestrained, and going braless helped me to feel that way. I remember the way the shirt rubbed up and down over my nipples as I marched across the field that morning. And the air was chilly, so my nipples were hard. It was a good feeling. I’m ashamed to admit that now, but it was. I felt predatory. Like a big game hunter with a nipple erection.

  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 sa
dness. 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.