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

going back up onto the porch and finally decided no. No, you need to get your breath back first, he thought, and climbed into the car and pulled the door shut. You need to be smarter than that dog chasing a rabbit it couldn’t catch.
    He started the car and backed out of the driveway, turned and drove toward Metcalf Road. At the end of her driveway, he sat staring straight ahead through the windshield. You got to figure out if you even want to catch that rabbit, he told himself.
    The bushes were thick along the side of the road, tense and tangled but budding with new leaves, but the sunlight made the field of low scrub grass behind the bushes seem to glow, a backdrop of soft radiance, and miles beyond the scrub grass the Tuscarora Mountains, blue and rounded against a cobalt sky.
    Christ, it’s a beautiful morning, he thought. But then he remembered why he had come there that morning, and he turned left onto the macadam and drove away down the road.

6

    W HEN Charlotte heard the car engine’s low rumble, she stood and went to the window and pulled the blinds to the side. She stood there and watched the sheriff ’s car stop at the end of her driveway. It did not move for what seemed to her a very long time. Only when it finally swung left and disappeared down Metcalf Road did the heaviness in her chest begin to lift a little. Afterward she stood a long time at the window. Finally, she went out onto the porch and sat on the porch swing. She could not look straight into the sun-filled yard without squinting, though her headache was not as debilitating as she had implied. Because she did not want to think about the younger boy, she thought about Dylan Hayes and wondered what he would say when the sheriff questioned him. She wished she had not had to tell the sheriff about Dylan going into the woods yesterday. She liked the teenager but had sensed at their very first meeting that he was certainly capable of violence, that there was a tautness to him, the tension of a steel string pulled nearly tight enough to snap.
    It had happened the previous summer, just weeks after she had moved in.
    Dylan was out there with the harvester, she was sitting at the edge of her garden, pulling a few weeds probably, enjoying the sunshine. Out in the field, the old red Farmall belched black smoke and stalled. Dylan hammered and cursed at it for ten minutes or so, then came trudging across the field and introduced himself and asked to use her phone. Afterward, he and Charlotte sat on the front porch and drank lemonade until Mike Verner arrived. During that time, Dylan told her, at first a bit shyly in answer to her questions, then with increasing volubility, that he really wanted to be a studio musician, a guitar player in Muscle Shoals. But he was dating a girl named Reenie . . .
    â€œShort for Irene?” Charlotte asked.
    He thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t think so.”
    Reenie, in his words, was “high maintenance.” Besides the movies and fast-food dinners every Friday and Saturday night, she was insisting that she and Dylan get each other’s names tattooed on their shoulders—at his expense, of course—as evidence of their abiding love until he could afford an engagement ring.
    â€œBut damn if I can get it through her head,” he complained, “that two tattoos will cost me near as much as a diamond ring at Sears.”
    An hour later, after Mike Verner had arrived and got the old beast huffing and puffing out in the field again, with Dylan once again jouncing along at the wheel, Mike came over to the house to thank Charlotte for the use of her phone.
    â€œThe boy didn’t cause you any problems, did he?” Mike asked.
    â€œNone whatsoever. What kind of problems were you anticipating?”
    â€œI just wanted to make sure he was polite and all. Respectful. You know how kids can be.”
    â€œHe was a perfect gentleman.”
    At that, Mike smiled.