Free Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) by Randall Silvis Page B

somewhere. But Livvie’s worried sick.”
    â€œHow could she not be?” She slid to the edge of the booth, stood and looked down at him. “I’m going to throw some eggs and hash browns on the flat top.” She collected the broom and dustpan and started toward the kitchen. “Judy and Joanne will know if he’s been here or not. You want a glass of juice while you’re waiting for the eggs? I’ve got orange and I think pineapple.”
    â€œAll I need is some information, Bonnie.”
    She turned, came back to him, stood so close that the tip of the broomstick hovered only inches from his head. “What you need is to start taking care of yourself. You look like roadkill, you know that? It’s been twelve years, Mark.”
    â€œI don’t need anybody to remind me how long it’s been.” He heard the resentment in his voice then and pulled it back. “All I need to know is if Denny Rankin’s been in here the last couple of nights or not.”
    â€œYou think that’s all you need to know.” She turned and walked away then. “Scrambled wet with Swiss cheese and hot sauce, as I recall.”
    â€œBonnie, for God’s sake.”
    She turned hard and glared at him across a pool table. “Take a fucking breath once in a while, why don’t you? I’m making scrambled eggs and hash browns and you’re going to eat them, or else I’m going to hunt you down and cram them down your throat.”
    Only after she had disappeared into the kitchen did he allow his smile to return. He called out, “Eggs are bad for my cholesterol.”
    â€œBullshit,” she said. A refrigerator door banged shut. “Eggs are incredible, they’re edible, and they’re nature’s perfect food.”
    â€œThat’s just advertising,” he said.
    â€œWhat isn’t?”

9

    F OR most of the morning that January, the morning following the day she had first approached and spoken to Jesse Rankin, Charlotte seethed. The previous afternoon, she had returned to her farmhouse, kicked off her boots in the mudroom, and peeled off the sodden socks, then sat in the kitchen by the window and tried to warm and calm herself with a cup of tea. She was still tense when she climbed into bed that night, and the hours of restless sleep did nothing to relax or refresh her. The next morning, she went into her studio and stood in front of the painting and tried to see the scene come alive again, tried to imagine it filling with color and the tension of movement. But she could not shake from her mind the image of a dead crow splayed across a field of blood-specked white. When she stared at the canvas, she imagined that scene showing through from underneath the other one. Those woods, she told herself. Those beautiful woods —as if they were forever gone now, her cathedral woods blasted asunder. All the preceding summer and fall and the first weeks of winter, she had enjoyed gazing out a window and imagining some quiet woodsy scene: the young Hemingway fresh from the Italian front, camping within earshot of the Big Two-Hearted River; Thomas Moran’s dark tunnel of autumnal woods with their portal into blue splendor; hoary old Robert Frost out there astride his plow horse, watching the slow flutter of snowflakes and pondering all the miles yet to travel. She had imagined that those woods and fields and distant mountains would become her Abiquiu, that here she would discover her own Black Place, her own White Place, and in the intersection of the two, she would relocate her soul. But how could she sustain that romance now, when all she could see in her mind’s eye was a dead black bird on blood-speckled snow?
    Maybe in the spring, she had told herself. Maybe when all the snow is gone. The sunlight would come slanting down in long narrow shafts then, spears of green poking up pale and eager through leaf-matted earth, the canopy a whispering sky of