Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797)

by Silvis, Randall;

  I couldn’t think straight, obviously. So I just scooped it all up in my hands, kicked some leaves over where it had been, and ran back home. I dropped it in my garden plot, then thought twice about burying the toilet paper. Picked it out, carried it inside and flushed three times. Then I raced back outside and with my hands mixed Dylan’s scat in with the soil. I was too exhausted, too numb, too fucking delirious to even wash my hands right away. Because I stood there in the yard staring across the field at the woods, and there were my footprints in the lime. One set going into the woods, another set coming back. I stood there utterly breathless. I can’t do it, I thought. I can’t erase all those footprints.

  It was done, it was over, I was going to be caught. And the only thing I felt was relief. And with that relief, a little of my strength returned. Enough that I was able to go back inside, take a shower, and get myself ready.

  I was seated at the vanity, brushing my hair, when the rain hit the windows. I looked out and could see nothing but the wall of rain slanting hard toward the house.

  An hour or so later, the rain stopped. The black cloud was grinding its way to the east, leaving only a filmy layer of gray for the sun to shine through. I went back upstairs to the window and looked out at the field. Nearly all of the lime, and my footprints with it, had been washed into earth.

  Strangely, this time I felt no relief. Because nothing was over. In fact, that was the only thought I was capable of for the rest of the afternoon and evening, the one that kept playing on a loop in my brain until I finally silenced it with wine and pills, It’s not over, it’s not over, it’s not over, it’s not over . . .

  75

  AND you know the rest, Marcus. Most of it, anyway. You showed up the next morning. I told you I’d had a migraine, which was only partially true. Everything I told you from that day on was only partially true. I am very, very sorry.

  It’s taken me most of two days to write this, and now the rest is up to you. I don’t know anybody else who has the shoulders for this kind of work. Only you. I’m sorry for this as well.

  One last bit of information: I talked to Dylan’s father this past Friday, the same day I mailed my note to you. I drove out to the house to ask if they had had any news from the boy. He looked so old, Marcus, though he is younger than me, I think. But there was a slackness to his posture, dark moons beneath his eyes. His complexion was pale, face drawn, none of that hard, muscled, sinewy look I imagine he sported just a few months ago. He was doing something in his garage when I pulled into the driveway, turned and saw me behind the windshield, then eventually came up to my door. I could feel his exhaustion.

  “I’m Charlotte Dunleavy?” I told him. “I live out on the old Simmons’ place?”

  He blinked. Gave me a little nod.

  “I was just wondering . . . I mean I think about Dylan all the time.”

  He blinked again, though this one looked more like a wince.

  “I used to talk to him sometimes when he was out in the field for Mike Verner. Sometimes he’d stop by the house for a glass of lemonade.”

  Something sparked in his eyes then. I thought surely he must remember me from the night I had visited Dylan in the hospital; surely he would say something now, accuse me, whip me bloody with his words. Maybe that was what I wanted. But all he said was, “Is that right?”

  “Sometimes he’d just get a drink from my garden hose. On really hot days he used to wash himself down with it.”

  I have no idea where this fiction came from. But even as I spewed it out, I could see Dylan drenching himself, could see him gasping when the first gush of cold water hit his shoulders and back. I could see that broad big-toothed grin. I could see the spray from the hose making a rainbow in the air.

  His father smiled. “I think he might have mentioned you to his mother and me.”

  “We had some pleasant conversations,” I told him. “About his music. His girlfriend. And I was just wondering. How is Dylan doing these days? Do you know . . . I mean . . . Where is he living now? Is he still playing music?”

  Maybe fifteen seconds passed. “Last time we heard anything was a couple days after he left here.”

  It was what I expected, what I already knew in my heart. I asked, “Was he in Tennessee by any chance? He always used to talk about going to Muscle Shoals to become a musician.”

  “He didn’t talk long. Said he was using a friend’s phone. We called the number back, but it just kept ringing. A week later there was a recording said the line had been disconnected.”

  “Did he say where he was?”

  “Missouri,” he said.

  “Branson?”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t the right area code for Missouri. I looked it up.”

  “He might have been using a cell phone.”

  “His mother said he sounded like he’d been drinking or something. He hung up before I got a chance to talk to him.”

  I have sent a letter to Margo, the woman who sells my paintings in Manhattan, instructing her to send to you all profits from the sale of the paintings still in her gallery—and by the time you read this, my paintings will have more than tripled in value! Please distribute the money equally between Livvie and Dylan’s parents. I hope that Dylan’s mother and father will use the money to track him down, hire a good investigator, get the boy home again. I hope they can salvage his life better than I was able to.

  In my studio you will find a new painting on the easel. This goes to Livvie. When you see it, you will know why. Tell Livvie that I painted Jesse as I see him now, not those other times but now, with my eyes wide open.

  The Jeep is hers too. The house and everything in it. The necessary papers are all in the safe in my closet. The door to the safe is open. Maybe she won’t want any of these things after you tell her what I did. Maybe she couldn’t stand to live here. In that case, she can sell everything and keep the money, I don’t care. Or maybe you don’t have to tell her, Marcus. I don’t know what’s best. I’m leaving all that to you. You are my clean-up man.

  As for this journal, you decide. If you think Livvie should have it, give it to her. I trust to your expertise and your compassion. If you want to give it to the newspaper, show it to the world, so be it. I do not care. My reputation, my work, it is all behind me now. Now there is only the something else. The next something else.

  There’s a word I would like you to look up, if you will. It’s important, Marcus, so please, after you’ve finished reading this journal, please do this before you do anything else. I need for you to know this word. Jhator.

  I went back into the woods this morning, Marcus, just to see how it might feel. And you know what? It felt fine. So I will be returning there this evening, in the hour of magic light. I think that if anybody can understand why I have made this choice, you can. You cared about me when no one else did, not even myself, and that has meant so very much. Please forgive all I have done. And please understand why I must go now. There are no answers here, but I have to believe that there are answers to be found. And I am anxious to discover them. I love you and I love Livvie, but I love Jesse more. And the boy who shoots crows is waiting.

  76

  THERE were more pages in the journal but no more writing. Gatesman sat there turning page after empty page until he had turned the final one.

  He closed the back cover and sat there awhile. Then he used his cell phone to call his office. He spelled jhator for Tina and asked her to call back as soon as she had found a good definition. She pretended to be irritated with him, said, “Do you think that’s all I have to do? Help you improve your very limited vocabulary?” And he knew that she would make him wait fifteen, maybe twenty minutes or more, only because he had refused to tell her why he wanted the information, refused to satisfy her curiosity. This made him smile. And the sound of her voice brought him back to his own world again, back to where he needed to be in order to get his work done.

  During the past hour he had been aware in a distant way of the few ca
rs passing out on the asphalt, those lives in hurried movement, those purposeful lives. His own car had surely been noticed parked there in Charlotte’s driveway. What’s the sheriff doing out here this morning? people must have wondered.

  He went to his vehicle then and popped open the trunk, zipped open a black canvas duffle bag in which he always kept a change of clothes—khaki trousers and a navy blue sweatshirt with a white Nittany Lions logo across the chest. He lifted the clothes out, laid the journal inside, laid the clothes on top, and zipped the bag shut. He closed the trunk lid. Then he stood there in the driveway and tried to slow his breath. The air was clean and light, but his limbs still felt heavy. Maybe one matter had been resolved, but there was still work to be done. There was still, as always, unpleasant duty to attend to.

  He had some calls to make, but he would wait for Tina’s call first. Charlotte had asked him to wait. And he was in no hurry now.

  The air was so clear and the sunlight so sharp that it stung his eyes. He thought the scent of the air unusually light and clean, in a way it can be only in spring—not the sad, still cleanness of autumn nor the sharp, stinging cleanness of winter; not the heavier, clean quiet before a summer thunderstorm, but the almost-cool, trembling cleanness of fields and trees greening, and he felt this cleanness deep in his chest, an ache that felt as deep as the sky.

  “Jhator,” he repeated to himself, and wondered what it meant, though he had his suspicions. He turned to face the woods then. From where he stood, it all looked so quiet.