Man in The Woods (5 page)

I’m not even innocent. I won’t even be able to say it was self-defense, because I was never in danger. I did it. I’m going to be arrested
.

But what difference does the possibility of arrest make next to the overriding fact that a man’s life has just ended? A man is dead, a heart has stopped, a future has been canceled. A wife. Children. Friends. All of the pleasures of love, sky, music, touch, food, wine have just been taken away forever. A man is dead, no more able to share in the glories of the earth than if he had never been born. Paul clutches his head.

It is so difficult to think. This much he knows: his life is a coin that has been flipped and now against the darkening sky it turns over and over.

From the morass, there rises a question:
How can this be happening?
And he wishes suddenly, fervently, that there
was
a God looking on, with his eye on the sparrow and everything else, knowing what we did, what we meant, what we did not mean, what was deliberate, what was accidental, what was so perplexing and mixed you couldn’t with any confidence say what was what.

What if he’s wrong? What if that man is alive? What if it’s not as bad as it seemed—so many things turn out that way.

Back down the path, the man lies where Paul left him. The night seems to be hurrying in; already half the trees are invisible and, as Paul approaches the man, his legs are missing, eaten by the darkness. The dog, still tethered, is busying himself with a stick, chewing on it diligently, every now and then shaking it back and forth as he would a small animal whose neck he wishes to snap.

In the failing light, Paul scours the ground for something he might have dropped.
Hurry, hurry
, he thinks, but he doesn’t know if he means hurry and get help, or hurry and make sure you haven’t left something here that can connect you to this place. As he walks in a circle that encompasses where he had been sitting and where the man first appeared, Paul wonders if he ought also to be kicking dirt over his own footprints. But he realizes that he would never be able to remove his every footprint; best to let them take their place with the dozens of other footprints.

It isn’t as if feet are on file somewhere. Ditto his fingerprints, and his DNA. Paul in the day-to-day pursuit of his duties and pleasures generally has an agreeable sense of invisibility as he swims through the vast American sea. As far as the state is concerned he may as well be unborn.

During his sixth time around the circumference of the circle he had drawn in his mind, something catches Paul’s attention. The watch Kate gave him on his birthday is on the picnic table. The catastrophic potential of leaving it behind is so vast it almost buckles his knees. With terror and relief, he snatches up the watch and slips it back onto his wrist, and as he does, something suddenly settles within him: he is not a criminal. A court of law would certainly find him guilty of manslaughter and sentence him to prison. How stiff a sentence does the charge carry? Three? Seven? More?

But no matter how many months or years Paul spends in prison, the man on the forest floor will not be any less dead.

The dog continues to chew at the stick. “You going to be all right here?” Paul asks the dog, but the animal gives no sign of having heard him, any more than he reacts to the fact that his former master is dead on the ground. If the dog had been motivated to, he could have reached Will’s body, but he seems to know that whatever use this man had once been is now a thing of the past. Paul feels the stir-rings of panic. He needs to leave. Yet he stands for an extra moment, looking at the dog, this living witness to the thing that has happened.

What do they do with a dog found with a corpse? What if they kill him? It would be asking for trouble to take the dog with him. But what if they put him in a shelter? A middle-aged brown dog with a stick in his mouth. Who would want him? What if by the man dying, the dog dies, too?

“All right,” Paul says. “You come with me.”

But where? Where will I take him?
He approaches the dog slowly, remembering that mistreated dogs often turn mean. When he is close, the dog grips the stick tighter in his jaws and shakes his head back and forth. It seems his primary concern is to keep that stick away from Paul.

“The stick’s yours,” Paul says, touching the dog behind the ear, ready to jerk his hand away if the dog makes a sudden move. In fact he is ready to leave the dog right where he is if need be. But the dog doesn’t mind being touched. He drops the stick and licks the back of Paul’s hand, a quick lilac flash, a deep yet cryptic intimacy.

“Oh dog,” Paul says, his voice quavering. He unties the black nylon leash. As soon as he is freed, the dog scrambles to his feet, ready to get on to whatever is next. Paul picks up the end of the leash and the dog picks up his stick.

The trees are black against the slate-gray sky, tied together by a band of orange that runs like a skein of silk along the horizon.

CHAPTER FIVE

Paul drives north toward home, checking the stability of his teeth with the tip of his tongue. The truck’s headlights are askew. They illuminate the edges of the road but barely touch the center, leaving the middle of Route 100 in darkness. He has taken local roads for the entire drive, adding at least an hour to the journey. He drives slowly, intently looking for a deer, or a turkey, or even a possum that might come darting out into harm’s way.

The brown dog sitting next to him, whom Paul has already named Shep, is salivating anxiously and shedding fur at a prodigious rate. The dog is clearly falling apart, but he is trying to keep his dignity. He is like a minor character in a Mafia movie who knows he is being taken for a ride from which he is never going to return, but who has for so long subscribed to the code that ordains his very undoing that it is beneath him, or beyond him, to protest.

Is anybody looking?
Paul wonders. He looks up at the rearview mirror and sees only his eyes.

Kate sits in the studio Paul has made for her. He has put in wise old windows that seem to increase and enrich every bit of available light, and even the darkness seems to have a luster as it presses against the wavy glass. Above her is a ceiling fan, salvaged from a plantation-style house in Biloxi, and near her desk is a blue enamel woodstove from Finland, brand-new. The floors are pale pine, the plaster walls conceal modern wonders of insulation—most particularly a hybrid weave of recycled newspaper, wool, and fiberglass, made by a friend of Paul’s and gotten in exchange for a cherrywood bedside table, a spindly, coltish piece with frail legs and a sunny finish, which took Paul an entire month to build and which Kate came to love so much that she practically cried when it left the house.

“Every gain comes with a loss,” she’d said to Paul, as they stood in the driveway and watched the precious little table bounce around the gritty, straw-flecked bed of Ken Schmidt’s old truck.

“Don’t worry,” he’d said, “I can make a hundred tables like that.”

“But you won’t.”

Schmidt’s truck was out of view, but they could still hear it. The funnels of dust kicked up by the back tires rolled lazily in the sunlight.

“I’m glad to get that insulation,” Paul said.

Kate shook her head, with the passive, rueful sadness of someone who realizes a mistake when it’s too late to correct it. “We should have just paid for it,” she said. “And who the hell even wants insulation?”

“Katey,” Paul said, “come on.” He put his arm around her, turned her around, walked to the house with her. “Now, if I come out here on a cold winter morning and slip my hands under your shirt, your breasts will be nice and warm.”

She stopped, carved a faint line in the gravel with the toe of her shoe. “Don’t ever leave me,” she said with abandon, not caring what it sounded like or what he might say in response.

Next to the stove, Paul has stacked seasoned, stove-sized pieces of wood, and there is a battered old tin bucket, itself a piece of found art, filled with kindling. All Kate needs to do is strike a match and the studio could be warm in ten minutes, but she has, guiltily, turned on the electric space heater instead. The space heater emits a hot flannel smell, its coils crinkle like cellophane, the heat itself corrugates the air around it. Kate has been at her computer, answering e-mails from readers in the order they have arrived. She writes quickly, as if not really writing but talking. Every now and then she comes up with an idea or a phrase that might be used in her real writing and she records it in a notebook next to her computer. Every little bit helps—now that her career is bringing in money, she has put herself on a serious production schedule, with the understanding that good things don’t last forever.

The door to Kate’s studio opens and there, framed by bare trees and cold, dark, gray air, is her daughter, home from her after-school program. “Hey there,” Kate calls, doing her best to sound thrilled.

“Hi there,” Ruby answers, in her powerful voice. Her cheeks are red with cold and wind; her pale green eyes sparkle. She shrugs off her lavender backpack and lets it fall to the pine floor.

“Ho there,” Kate says, making a rah-rah gesture, rocking her fist back and forth. “Will you look what somebody sent me?” She goes through the day’s mail until she finds it, a delicate little crucifix on an even more delicate chain. She dangles the cross before Ruby as if trying to hypnotize her.

“It’s the most beautiful cross in the world,” Ruby says, managing to sound both fervent and ironic. She clasps her hands together and places them beneath her chin, posing. She is a nine-year-old trying to be funny, and, to Kate, she actually
is
amusing—there is something sincere in the girl’s love of hyperbole. Lately, with Ruby, everything good is the best, everything at all fetching is the most beautiful in the world.

“I know. One of my readers sent it to me. It
is
quite pretty,” Kate says, a little tug of instruction in her carefully modulated voice. “So I guess it only makes sense that I would give it to a very pretty girl.”

Ruby shakes her head and makes a sweeping gesture, an actress playing to the second balcony. “I’m not pretty,” she says, “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.” And her eyes well up.

How is she able to do that? Surely, she is not that upset, she can’t be. But she can imitate any of the surface emotions. She can do a credible gaiety, with a tinkling, convincing laugh, she can do fear, and she is particularly expert at remorse. All these thespian wiles are self-taught; though Ruby has frequently asked to be given acting lessons, Kate resists, on the (unspoken) grounds that any more proficiency in manufacturing emotions and her skills will have to be registered with the police, just as professional boxers are said to register their fists. Still, Kate cannot help but be amazed at how realistic Ruby’s performance is. Those sea-green eyes blurring with tears, the little trembling hand against the heaving chest—it’s like double-jointedness, at once astonishing and nauseating.

The phone rings, Kate’s recently installed private line to which only Paul has the number. Her pulse quickens. He still has that effect on her. “Are you using your phone!” Kate asks, with unalloyed delight. The snazzy little Nokia was a present to him a few months ago, and since then it has seen little else but the inside of his glove compartment.

“I’m a ways,” Paul says, his voice mixed with the hum of the road and the wind. Also, he doesn’t seem to be aiming his voice at the phone’s little triad of speaker holes. Kate feels a weirdly erotic twist of annoyance. He could very well be doing this on purpose, as a demonstration of the technology’s deficiencies. Yet the frequent but fleeting moments of irritation Kate feels around Paul are cool air that only oxygenates the fire.

“Where exactly are you?” Kate says.

“I’ll be there in a half hour or an hour, something in there,” Paul says. He never really answers the questions she asks. And how can he not know the difference between being thirty and sixty minutes away? It’s not as if he needs to make an allowance for traffic. There is no traffic at this hour. Does he intend to make a stop?

“I’m supposed to be at an AA meeting at seven,” Kate says. “Will you be here in time for me to go?”

“I don’t know,” Paul says.

She waits for the explanation or the apology that should follow but it does not come. She’s always a little off-rhythm with him; it’s how they dance.

“Well, I guess I’ll take Ruby with me,” Kate says.

“Okay, but I’d like to see her. I’ve got a surprise for her.”

“Really?”

Not a sound from Paul’s end. Perhaps he has gone out of range. Kate waits for another few moments, and then, acknowledging the lost connection, hangs up her phone.

Ruby has poured the contents of her backpack onto the floor and now paws through the jumble of books, notebooks, crumpled-up papers, pencils and pens and hair clips, looking for a juice box.

“Paul’s coming home soon,” Kate says. “And he’s got a wonderful surprise for you.” She instantly regrets saying this. What if it’s not a wonderful surprise, what if it’s just a passing everyday surprise, like a toy ring from a vending machine, or a book of puzzles, and now, because it has been overhyped, Ruby will feel let down. Kate feels she has committed an act of social gracelessness reminiscent of what her ex-husband, Ruby’s long-absent father, used to do to her at dinner parties. He always managed to step on Kate’s best lines; he had an uncanny instinct for coughing or offering to refill someone’s wineglass just when Kate was getting to the punch line of a story. And if he wasn’t wrong-footing her like that, he was up to some alternate form of sabotage, like announcing to a table of guests,
Oh, you’ve got to hear this, Kate has just had the most amazing experience of her life
, and all eyes would be on her, and all she could do was tell her story about how the man who came to fix the refrigerator turned out to be an old patient of her father’s.

Kate sits on the floor, and commences to put the cross on her daughter. “What are you doing?” Ruby asks, without looking up.

“I’m putting the little cross on you, it looks so pretty.”
Why do they have to make the fucking clasp so small?
Kate says to herself. The circle she is trying to get the hook through is tiny, the size of an air bubble exhaled by a goldfish. There: at last.

Ruby feels the cool slither of the chain on her neck, the infinitesimal weight of the cross itself as it drops onto the bib of her overalls, with barely more substance than a shadow.

A couple of towns south of Leyden, Paul stops at a supermarket to get a bag of dog food, and a bowl for Shep to eat out of, in case Kate has views about a dog using her dinnerware. The strip mall is ringed by tall metal lampposts and bathed in enough bright silvery light to illuminate a night baseball game, yet the parking area is nearly bereft of cars—all this electricity and what it takes to make it, the utter mindless waste of it disgusts him.

When Paul opens the door, Shep makes a move to jump out. “No, no, stop,” Paul says, grabbing at the dog’s collar. But Shep is determined to get out. He twists away from Paul and a moment later the dog is on the asphalt, his tail twirling around in that helicopter-ish way. “What are you doing, man, get back in the truck,” Paul says, hoping to strike a tone that is both commanding and reassuring.

The dog turns its back on Paul and trots over to the nearest lamp pole. He lifts his leg. The light above illuminates the stream of urine that arcs out of him.

“Good boy!” Paul says, “what a good dog you are.” Shep looks off into the distance, patiently waiting for his bladder to empty, and when he is finished he turns and trots back toward Paul. Paul gives him a pat on the head and the dog hops back into the truck. It is this that brings back the man in the woods with a stunning all-at-onceness. Because who had trained this dog to be so well-mannered if not that man? Paul stands there coping with this thought, and slowly, steadily, with the patience you need to sand down a slab of walnut until it is perfectly smooth, he applies the purifying abrasion of contrary reasoning: who but a terrorized, brutalized dog would hold its urine for such a long time without so much as a whimper of complaint?

He walks across the parking lot toward the supermarket. It is the first time he has been away from the dog since leaving the woods. A dozen times at least he has told himself he needs to find a place to leave that dog. Even after he drove through Tarrytown and kept going right past the police station, not stopping, not slowing down, keeping his eyes locked on the road in front of him, even then he was thinking,
If I am going to have a chance of really walking away from this, I need to get rid of this dog
. But he could not think it through, he couldn’t figure out where he would bring the dog, where the dog would be safe. The dog had suffered enough, that much was clear. That one fact was true north. Paul could not beat a man to death for kicking the dog in the ribs and then just open the door of his truck and let the dog fend for itself.

The dog is his witness, his confessor, he has seen it all and can still sit next to Paul, breathing with him, trusting him, the dog is the reason, the dog is what has been salvaged from the worst moment of Paul’s life, the dog is the bridge which Paul walks upon as he inches his way over the abyss, the dog is
God
spelled backward. Paul turns for another look at Shep, but can’t see him. The dog has drowned in the darkness of the truck’s cabin.

The inside of the supermarket is a bright, throbbing riot of colors, but is nevertheless somewhat desolate. It is an immense store but there are only a half dozen or so shoppers, lonely, bedraggled-looking people in late middle age in no hurry to bring their groceries home. The piped-in music is string arrangements of Rod Stewart hits. Even in the best of circumstances, there is something disquieting about seeing so much food, fruit piled up like cannonballs, slabs of meat seething beneath airtight plastic wrap, whole aisles devoted to potato chips. On his way to the pet food aisle, Paul passes two elderly men whose carts have bumped up against each other. One of them has poet-laureate white hair with a yellowish tinge, like the keys of an old piano; the other is stooped, using his cart as an ad hoc walker. They are sharing a great laugh over something, and when the stooped man picks out an item from his basket—a small jar of tartar sauce—and shows it to his friend, their laughter increases. And the sound of those old men laughing plunges Paul into a sense of despair and remorse greater than anything he has felt since the fight in the woods. Just the sound of their voices makes his hand throb, his heart lurch drunkenly.

“Something we can do for you, young man?” the white-haired fellow says to Paul.

“Not that we will!” his stooped-over friend quips.

Paul carries a fifty-pound sack of dry dog food slung over his shoulder; a month’s supply of kibble makes it seem as if life were predictable, that there are things you can plan on and measures you can take. When he pays at the checkout counter, the woman working the cash register looks at him strangely, and when he gives her the money he sees his hand: it is swollen and red. And his face, too, must tell some version of the story of what he has been through.