Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) by Randall Silvis Read Free Book Online

that’s where the dog lost him and lay down to catch his breath, Gatesman thought, that trampled down spot up against the fence.
    Sometimes Gatesman could stand very still and listen to something he had never identified by name, a wordless intuition that told him, yes, there’s something here, or no, look somewhere else. He tried it here, eyes half closed and losing focus, blurring the world. But in the warmth of the sun on his face, he smelled the warmth of Charlotte’s kitchen, remembered the tiny canary of sunlight that rested on the top of her hand as it lay motionless atop the table.
    Man, you better get your fucking head straight, he told himself, but he softly laughed because the feeling that warmed his chest was so pleasant and so rare. Through no intention of his own, he had always been very particular when it came to females. He could name only three in his life with whom he had felt a sudden, unexplainable connection. Two of them were gone, and since their departure, he had expected to feel such a pull on his soul never again. He did not really want the feeling now and wished he could postpone it until nightfall, but he had to admit that the vague breathlessness he felt, the quickening of his pulse, made him think of himself as a bear coming out of hibernation, dragged out of a long numbness by the first scent of spring.
    Still, he had a job to do. Look for the boy, he told himself. Even though you know he’s not here, you need to at least have a thorough look.
    Gatesman lifted the latch to step inside the fence, took his time approaching the barn. No harm in allowing himself a moment to admire the last jewels of moisture clinging to the weeds like tiny glass balls, the scent of greenery still damp with morning.
    Then he stood under the overhang, the cantilevered barn floor two feet above his head. He surveyed the cobwebs hanging from the beams and posts. Too bad we can’t send those off to some lab, he thought. Have the memories extracted from them. Splice them all together into a little movie of what they saw.
    Then he looked through the wide doorway framed in heavy beams, wide enough for the cows to come lumbering out two abreast. The floor was bare earth trampled hard, the air cooler, dimmer, but not as pleasantly scented as the pasture, the sour leathery smell of cowhide, the years of urine and dung. From the doorway, an open corridor ran to the front edge of the barn. On each side of that corridor were three rows of stalls lined up lengthwise to the barn, the rows separated by perpendicular corridors. Gatesman had never been inside this barn before, but he had seen enough of cow barns to know the basic setup, even though all of the milking equipment had been removed and sold off. The milking machines would have taken up the now-empty space at the front of the barn, the lines and hoses secured to the ceiling so that the octopus-armed suction rigs could be pulled down from their swivels into the stalls. A relatively small operation that, even had the Simmons boys wanted to keep it going, would not have survived much longer.
    Gatesman walked through the door to the end of the central corridor, then slowly back and forth across the length of the barn, up and down the aisles. He glanced into each stall as he passed it, his head turning left to right and back again, eyes squinting in the meager light that bled in through the cracked and broken boards. Bare, dusty bulbs hung overhead, but the power for the barn had long ago been turned off because every stall but one was empty but for an occasional bit of windblown leaf or papery wasp’s nest. In the stall in the northwestern corner were twelve bags of garden manure in a rectangular stack, four rows of three bags each. One of the bags on top had split open and spilled half its contents onto the floor. But no boy. No sign of a boy anywhere, no sign he had ever been here.
    Back in the driveway again, hand on his car door, Gatesman wondered about