The Spirit Wood (22 page)

Twenty-seven

T
HE
VET WASN'T
terribly curious; he gave Diogenes the necessary shots, shaved and stitched the wound, and gave Byron an antiseptic salve to apply to it twice a day. Meg drove them back to Arcadia, with Dodger, still half-drugged, laid across Byron's lap in the back seat.

As soon as Dodger had curled up on his familiar blue bath mat in the corner of the kitchen, Meg washed her hands at the sink and said, “Now I think it's time to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”

“What are you going to do?” Byron asked.

“I'm going to go and find Nikos and tell him those damned dogs of his have got to be kept under lock and key from now on.”

Byron looked dubious. “You think he'll listen?”

“He's going to have to.”

Byron laughed with pleasure and pride at Meg's determination. “God, you're wasted out here. You ought to be storming the barricades somewhere.” He slapped his hands together. “Well, let's go to it, then. You don't think I'd let you undertake a mission like this without reinforcements, do you?”

Meg should have known Byron wouldn't let her go alone—just she knew that Peter, whom she would once have trusted with her life, wouldn't go at all. She
wished she could have left this in Peter's hands, but that sort of thing wasn't possible anymore.

Outside, it was another hot and sunny day, like so many had been that summer. But with a heavy stillness in the air, a sense of suspension that she'd come to associate with Arcadia. Approaching Nikos's cottage, she heard at first the sound of a flute and then a percussive jangling—a tambourine.

“A jam session?” Byron asked, raising his eyebrows.

The mastiffs must have picked up their scent or heard them coming, because there was an explosion of barking. As Meg and Byron came up the path to Nikos's door, they could hear the dogs rattling the chain fence of their kennel.

“Come in.” Leah was already holding open the screen door for them. She held a tambourine by her side.

Peter was seated at the table, his flute in his hands, flanked by Nikos and Angelos. Byron ducked as a strand of the hanging herbs brushed across the top of his head. The room was dim and cool. Meg felt as if she'd entered a cave.

“I didn't expect to find you here,” she said to Peter.

Peter, looking as if he hadn't expected to be found, lowered the flute still farther. Nikos, smacking the table with the palm of his hand, said, “Welcome—sit down with us.” Angelos, taking his cue, slowly lifted his bulk from his chair and went to lean against the kitchen sink. Leah scurried about, putting glasses beside the straw-covered wine bottle on the table.

“We're not staying,” Meg said. “We only came to make sure that what happened yesterday doesn't happen again.”

Nikos grunted, so at least he knew what she was talking about.

“Fritz and Fifi are going to have to stay locked in their kennel.”

“Not possible,” Nikos said, pouring out wine into their glasses. “It is too small. They must be allowed to run.”

“They can run in there.”

“They must protect Arcadia, too.”

“From what?” Meg asked.

“I wasn't aware we were under attack,” Byron said.

Peter gave his friend a long, level stare. “We've got trespassers,” he said. “Somebody, probably kids from town, cut a hole through the fence the other night. They were
here,
on the grounds.” He said it as if a holy shrine had been desecrated.

Was it true, Meg wondered, or just a convenient lie? She could never tell with Peter anymore. “Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you're right. What if some teenagers
did
sneak in? Do you want Fritz and Fifi catching up with them and mauling them the way they did Dodger? Is that what you want?”

“They wouldn't do that,” Peter replied.

“No? How come?”

“Because they know better.”

Meg was speechless—they'd attacked Dodger, and that was with someone there to control them.

“Please,” Nikos interjected, pushing the wineglasses toward them.

“No, thank you,” Byron said. Meg didn't move either. Nikos shrugged.

“Unless there's something else you think we should discuss . . . ,” said Peter, purposely trailing off.

“That's it, I guess,” Meg replied brusquely. Why even now did she expect him, and desperately want him, to get up from his chair and leave the cottage with them? When would she realize she couldn't count on him anymore?

“I'm sure you two can find something to occupy your afternoon,” Peter said, suggestively, as a parting shot.

It went straight to Meg's heart, just as he must have
intended it to. And yet strangely enough, she thought she saw a look of pain and remorse starting up in his own dark eyes, as if he were sorry he'd said it at all, and sorrier still that there might be some unacknowledged truth to it. Meg felt as if she'd glimpsed, behind a scrim, Peter as he used to be, struggling like a drowning man to reach the surface again, and breathe. But as quickly as that look had come, it was swallowed up, while Nikos reclaimed the brimming glasses that had been poured for her and Byron. “Let me show you something,” he then said, taking the flute from Peter's hands and playing, as Meg and Byron passed through the verdant front yard, a trilling, and subtly derisive, snatch of ancient melody.

Twenty-eight

N
O
ONE HAD
told her these other people would be there. Peter had merely said the Caswells wanted to meet her; Mrs. Constantine hadn't expected to find herself at a busy little party, with herself as the main attraction. But that's what had happened.

Lazaroff she had met, and not liked, once before, when she'd accompanied Meg into town. The Simons and Plettners she'd only heard about. They were all very cordial, asking her how she liked Passet Bay and, of course, Arcadia, offering to refresh her drink, or suggesting she try a sliver of the St. André cheese. But more than once she had noticed herself observed from a corner of the room; more than once she'd felt that an innocuous question—how long she planned to stay, or whether she'd noticed how tanned and healthy Peter looked—wasn't quite so innocuous as it seemed. There was a bit too much curiosity about her—and that, she thought, must have had something to do with her father. These people may have known him far better than they pretended.

“How about it?” Jack was saying to Peter. “Why don't you trade in that jalopy of yours for something a little more upscale? No need to masquerade as an impoverished grad student anymore.”

“I didn't know it was so conspicuous,” Peter said with an embarrassed smile. Mrs. Constantine could
see that her son, for whatever reason, was cowed by this man.

“In a town this small, everything's conspicuous.”

“Don't let him rag you,” Joan Caswell intervened.

“Jack owns five hundred shares of Audi and he's just trying to boost the stock.”

“A thousand shares,” Jack corrected, “but who's counting.” Then, redirecting the conversation to Mrs. Constantine, he asked, “Don't you agree, Ellen?
Carpe diem
and all that—if you've got it, flaunt it?” He posed it as a question, but of course it wasn't.

Mrs. Constantine mumbled something about Peter's never caring very much about material things or about making an impression, for that matter. “Even as a boy, he was content with very little. His imagination always supplied him with whatever else he needed.”

“Jesus, what I'd give for an imagination like that,” Al Plettner said, laughing and smoothing his sparse red hair. His wife handed him another cracker.

Meg and Byron were in another corner of the room, near the fireplace. Anita Simon was running on to them about the auction; Mrs. Constantine could hear an occasional reference to the nature preserve.

“Yeah, what do you think about that?” Jack said, having overheard some of it himself. “It looks like we might be able to get a letter from a junior branch of the Army Corps of Engineers stating there'd be measurable damage to the bay ecology if any more housing or construction were allowed on those wetland areas.” He took a long, hard swallow from his glass. “Now that, I think, would cinch it.”

“But we haven't got it yet,” Anita cautioned. “We're still going to need every penny raised by the auction this year.”

“Oh, definitely,” Jack assented.

“Did I mention that I drove by there early this morning,” Lazaroff chimed in, “on my way home from Ginny's?” Ginny, Mrs. Constantine presumed,
was his girlfriend—though she wondered how happy the girl would be to have their private schedule publicized. “There were egrets all over the place. And I nearly ran over a turtle the size of a hubcap. I'd say the animal kingdom has already made its
own
plans for the place.”

Everyone seemed pleased with the way things were going so far. Jack said the nature preserve was just what Passet Bay needed; a refuge, he declared, “for all the wildlife, with purer instincts and more noble natures than human beings ever had or will have.”

“Please,” Stan Simon groaned. “Spare me one of the nature sermons. Let's drink,” he said, raising his glass, “to property values. Long may they rise!”

But Jack appeared to take offense at the insinuation that there was no more than that behind it. Maybe he just didn't want it suggested in front of the Constantine faction, whose estate, after all, was being used for the auction. With seeming sincerity, he launched into a peroration on the virtues of the primitive and untamed. Mrs. Constantine suspected he'd had too much to drink.

“You know, with all due respect to nuclear reactors and garbage disposals, the progress of man is a lot of crap. Jacob Bronowski and Channel 13 are full of it. It took us thousands,
millions,
of years, to get to what? The state we're in? We're ruled today, as much as we ever were, by the reptile core, the nugget of brain that makes us as cruel as crocodiles, and just as slimy. And you know what the answer is to that? You know what we should be doing about it?”

“Brain surgery?” Lazaroff suggested in the awkward pause.

“Brain cultivation,” Jack replied. “Brain development. You can't get rid of that stem. The thing to do is to develop it, to give it free rein. It's primitive, yes, but it doesn't have to be malignant. It's raw, but it doesn't have to be ruthless. Inside every one of us there's an
animal—a natural, ungovernable, impulsive animal—that takes us back, pardon the cliché, to the dawn of time . . . when we drank from streams and slept on the ground.”

“With
your
back?” Joan interjected, a little embarrassed and trying to deflect him.

“My back is fucked up from sitting in an office for thirty years. Keep that in mind, Peter, when you're making your own plans.”

Peter, suddenly made the focus of Jack's speech, was caught off guard. “I'll write standing up from now on,” he said. Instinctively, while mulling over what Jack had said—and where, he wondered, had all of that come from?—he gravitated toward Byron. Meg was sitting with his mother now.

“Any news from Omaha?” he asked. He swirled the liquor in his glass nervously.

“Semester begins on the eighth,” Byron replied. “I've been thinking of moving out there a little sooner than I'd planned. To get acclimated and all that.”

“When do you think you'll leave?”

“Depends on the housing question. The last time I called the only thing the university could offer me was an apartment in an off-campus house with a strict ‘no pets’ policy.”

Peter appeared to be thinking it over. “Maybe you could put Dodger into a kennel for a couple of weeks, until something else opened up.”

“I suppose,” said Byron, knowing that he never would. And knowing that Peter knew it, too.

“Not that you're not welcome to stay at Arcadia for as long as you like. Meg and I have really enjoyed having you out here.”

Byron did not fail to notice how quickly the conversation had fallen into the past tense.

“Of course, with my mother in the house now, too, I can understand you're wanting to recover your privacy and get established in a place of your own.”

“Yes,” Byron said, unable to resist adding, “that nonstop reggae music of hers is beginning to get to me.” If Peter wanted him gone, it wasn't for Byron's own good. It was to secure the run of Arcadia for himself—and Nikos, and the dogs. As far as Byron was concerned, that was fine; the sooner he got to Omaha, the sooner he'd have Dodger out of danger and a place of his own to which he could implore Meg to come. There didn't seem to be a whole lot more he could accomplish by staying—he'd given up on trying to figure his old friend out.

Mrs. Constantine had risen from her seat on the sofa; Meg was saying good-night to Joan. The other guests appeared to be lingering on. It was only when Joan flicked on the outside lights to the driveway that Byron realized that Peter wasn't coming with them. Jack was standing behind him as Peter tossed Byron the car keys.

“I'm going to play a little billiards here,” he said. “Be back in a couple of hours.”

“I'll be sure he gets home safe and sound,” Jack said.

“Just remember to leave the front gates unlocked. Pull them closed, but don't let the lock catch.”

Twenty-nine

H
E FELT AS
if someone had lightly pummeled him all over his body. His arms were sore; his legs seemed weighted with lead. He was so very, very tired, so very deeply immersed in sleep. It made him angry that something was disturbing him, shaking him harder and harder, that someone was saying something to him from what seemed a very great distance. He tried to turn his head away from the sound, but it wouldn't go away. It gradually grew louder; it was his name.
Peter,
the voice was saying.
Peter.
It was so hard to make that long and slippery ascent, to open his eyes.

When he did, he saw, first, a blank and limitless wall of gray. The sky. There was a sun, beating vainly, dimly, far behind the curtain of clouds. Meg was leaning toward him on the other side; he was outdoors, on the balcony, asleep on one of the lawn chairs. His legs were up, resting on the stone balustrade. His neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head.

“Peter,” she was saying, “are you all right?” She was wearing her blue flannel robe; her hair had not been brushed.

His mouth was dry, and it hurt when he swallowed.

“Have you been out here all night?” she said. “You're going to catch pneumonia in this wind.”

He was wearing his clothes from the night before; his shoes were untied, the laces hanging down and
tickling his ankles. There
was
a wind blowing; he felt it now.

“What time did you get in last night? I didn't even hear you.”

“I don't know,” he mumbled. Last night, last night . . . he tried to recollect it all. It seemed so very long ago.

“Peter,” she said, crouching down beside him now, “do you remember seeing Dodger when you got in? Did you go into the kitchen for anything? Did you let him out, by any chance?”

He tried to lower his legs from the balustrade, but they were as stiff as stilts. He winced as he straightened up in the chair. “What?” he asked. “What do you want to know?”

She repeated her question. But Peter couldn't recall. “Why?”

“Because Byron just discovered he's missing. He's not in the kitchen, and By asked me to ask you if you knew anything about it.”

Why should he know anything about it? It was Byron's damned dog—let him keep track of it. He told Meg he had no idea where Diogenes was.

She stood up again, clutching the neck of her bathrobe shut. “I better go tell him,” she said. “He's starting to get frantic.” She paused before going. “Are you coming inside now?”

“If I can move,” he grumbled.

On his way to the bathroom, he glanced over at the clock—it wasn't even nine yet. And already the place was getting into a panic. Meg had left the door to the hall open; he stopped to close it. No use encouraging any more visits just now.

What
did
happen last night? He remembered that little soirée at the Caswells. And a game of billiards afterwards. He'd lost some money, too—he remembered handing a twenty-dollar bill to Jack. Not a lot
else came to mind. He ran some lukewarm water into the sink and lapped it over his cold hands and wrists. He rubbed his face, then looked at it in the mirror. He had a thick, dark stubble, even the beginning of a faint moustache. Hadn't he shaved just last night, before going to the Caswells? God, this was getting to be a nuisance. Maybe he should just let it be. Grow a beard and forget it.

He'd seldom seen himself look so bad. His eyes looked puffy and dull. His skin was dark from the sun, but at the same time sallow and inelastic—it felt taut. As for his hair . . . well, maybe it was time to get a regular haircut, after all. It was getting so long, particularly on the sides, that he was starting to look like a musketeer. Jesus, he thought, noticing a tiny bit of twig caught in the curls above his right ear, he was even starting to collect things in it. When did that get there? He plucked it out—at first it didn't want to come—then irritably swept back his hair behind both ears. More like he used to wear it. Now he looked a little more like his old self again.

Except for one thing.

He looked more closely into the mirror, then, still not sure of what he was seeing, went in search of his glasses. He found them outside, under the chair on the balcony. He opened the medicine chest mirror to get a better view of the side of his head. He held back the hair with his fingers.

Now there was no mistaking it. His ears, or at least the one he was looking at now, were—he could hardly believe it—pointed. He quickly felt at the other. Yes, it, too—and worse. His fingers recoiled at the first touch, at the first contact with the fine—so fine it was almost invisible—matting of short, soft hairs. They had sprouted like fur all over the lobe and up around the outer rim. He hurriedly touched the first ear—and felt the same downy cover. So blond it was almost white, so soft it was like the first hairs on the head of a
baby. His breath stopped. He stared, refusing to believe it, into the mirror.

When had this happened? Was it actually happening
now?
His mind was torn between finding some rational explanation for the change and denying it altogether. Maybe his ears had always been shaped like that. Maybe those fine hairs had always been there, and he'd just never noticed them. He tried desperately to believe it, to tell himself there was nothing wrong. But the evidence in the mirror wouldn't go away—no matter how he angled the glass or tilted his head. His ears were different; they had never before looked like this.

He moved away from the sink, sat down heavily on the thick ledge of the sunken tub. He'd have to think; he'd have to concentrate. Something was happening, something needed to be done, and he'd have to shake off his stupor and deal with it. He heard the bedroom door open, then close again. Meg called his name, and before he could get up and close the door to the bathroom, she was standing on the threshold. He dropped his head and swatted his hair forward, over his ears again.

“Still no sign of him,” she said, as if that's what he'd been thinking about all that time. “I'm going to get dressed and go help Byron look.”

She went back into the bedroom, and he could hear her moving about, putting on her clothes. “One thing
did
occur to me,” she said in worried tones from somewhere near the closet. “We left the gates open for you. If Dodger got out of the kitchen after we'd gone to bed and before you got home, he could be anywhere by now.”

He heard hangers being pushed along the rod.

“Though I'm amazed he can get around at all yet, with that shoulder still healing,” she added. The closet door swung shut. “What are you doing in there, anyway?”

“I was about to shave.”

She was over by the bed now; he heard her robe being thrown across the mattress, then her jeans being pulled up. “Well, as soon as you're done, if you could come downstairs and help us with the search . . .” She zipped the zipper.

“I'll be down in a few minutes,” he said. When would she finish up in there and leave? “I'm sure nothing's wrong.” Now she was buttoning her shirt; he could hear the plastic button click against her fingernail, then slip through the starched fabric.

And then, it occurred to him what he'd just heard—such infinitesimal sounds, hardly sounds at all, but as audible and clear to him now as the roaring of a cannon. He hadn't even strained; he'd simply heard them, effortlessly, and with perfect clarity.

She was tying the laces on her sneakers now. “I hope you're right,” she said. “I hope Dodger is okay, wherever he is.” The beating of her heart—he could hear
that,
too, as if he'd laid his head against her breasts. She finished with the shoes and got up off the edge of the bed. “I'll see you downstairs,” she said, and just before leaving, added, “and maybe later on we can discuss your new
al fresco
sleeping arrangement.”

He heard the door close, her footsteps on the stairs; if he'd wanted, he felt he could even listen to her thoughts somehow. As Leah seemed able to listen to his. He got up unsteadily, his legs still aching, and left the bathroom without even a glance at the mirror. He'd worry about shaving some other time. In the bedroom, he changed his shirt, straightened himself up, and still feeling too shaken, too irresolute, to face anyone downstairs yet—and who cared what happened to Diogenes? he'd turn up—went into his study.

First, he locked the door behind him. Then, after flicking on the desk lamp, he took the key to the latticed bookcase from its new hiding place under an
empty thermidor and opened the cabinet. He withdrew the squat black box—the pyxis—and put it on the desk. According to Byron, its original purpose had probably been to hold salves or medications; well, here it was, doing just that again. It crossed his mind, as he took out the plastic bag of cocaine, that maybe this had something to do with what he'd seen in the mirror—or thought he'd seen. He still wasn't prepared to admit it as fact yet. Maybe the drug was giving him hallucinations. It wasn't supposed to, but who knew? Maybe it had.

Not that he'd quit, even over that. His hands methodically went about pouring the coke onto the inner lid of the box, then chopping it into powder with the razor blade that he kept in the folder of Ko-Rec-Type beside his typewriter. With the edge of the blade, he gathered the fine white silt into two equal piles, then straightened the piles into two narrow lines. There wasn't a lot left in the baggie; he'd have to call Lazaroff. Or ask Jack. Jack virtually pressed the stuff on him—and gratis. He rolled an index card covered with notes on Matthew Arnold's
Culture and Anarchy
into a tight funnel, put one end in his left nostril and the other to one end of a line of coke; with the right side of his nose pinched shut, he inhaled in one swift snort. He threw back his head, felt the hot, familiar tingling in his nose and septum. When it subsided, he repeated the procedure on the other side, then flopped into the leather armchair to wait for, and enjoy, the full rush.

It came quickly, and with it the surge of energy and vitality that he'd come to count on. To do his work. To face his doubts. To get through the long, hard days. What he had, or hadn't, seen in the mirror that morning became increasingly irrelevant—everything lost its terror for him, its power over him. He was the sole master of his fate, and what he didn't will to happen wouldn't happen. He closed his eyes and rode the
wave for a while. This was the way he always wanted to feel. Fast, and abandoned. There was one other thing that made him feel it, too—and that was Leah. When they made love. In the bay. Or her bedroom. Or the secret glade she'd shown him. The coke made him want her, made him want her right now. He could feel the blood pulsing in his thighs, and in his crotch, and in his hands. But that wasn't possible now. Diogenes was missing; he had to put in an appearance downstairs. A concerned appearance. A command performance. He flew up out of the chair, stashed the drug paraphernalia back in the bookcase. He glanced at the notes on the index card, laughed to himself, and dropped the card in the wastebasket.

His mother, he thought, was undoubtedly awaiting him downstairs. So it was time to put a face on, a bright and happy and
optimistic
face. He mustn't, he reminded himself strongly, betray even the slightest doubt about Dodger's safety . . . even though something—a flickering image of fire and a forest by night—kept bobbing up in his mind's eye, like a ripe, blood-red apple, temptingly close but impossible to catch hold of.

“Where haven't you looked?” Meg asked as Byron paced along the edge of the fountain.

“I don't know,” he said, becoming more and more worried. “I don't know where he could be that I haven't already looked.” He was wearing his brown sport coat; the wind was still blowing, cool and damp.

Though she was almost afraid to ask, afraid of what the answer might be, she
did
ask if he'd been to Nikos's cottage; had the mastiffs been locked in their kennel?

“Yes,” he said, quickly and decisively, as if reminding himself of that provided some fleeting comfort. “They were asleep, in fact. Nikos said he was obeying orders.”

“You saw Nikos? Did you tell him about Dodger?”

“He didn't look like he was going to lose any sleep over it. He was tending the vines along the side of his house. He said he'd help us look as soon as he'd finished with whatever the hell he was doing with them.”

“And you've been up and down the road outside the front gates?”

“Yep,” he said, “though to tell you the truth, I can't believe Dodger would have left the estate. He just ain't that adventurous—at least not when he's alone. I don't even know how he got out of the kitchen.”

“Well, we can figure that out later,” Meg said, “after we've found him.” She tried to make his discovery sound certain. “Let's do some reconnoitering.”

With Mrs. Constantine manning the phone inside, just in case anyone called to say Dodger had been found wandering the streets of Passet Bay, Meg and Byron set off around the grounds again. They started with the land in front, combing through the wooded acres, hollering out Dodger's name, looking, often with their hearts in their mouths, into particularly dense patches of shrubbery. Byron picked up a large fallen branch and, stepping on one end, snapped off a four- or five-foot length; he used the staff to swat aside bracken that obstructed their path and once or twice to help with his footing when climbing over moss-covered tree trunks. Meg, in her sneakers and jeans, scrambled along beside, or after, him.

In the area between the house and Huntingdon Road, there was no sign of Dodger. But when they were halfway down the back lawn, Meg thought she detected, on the stiffening breeze from the water, the faintest scent of something burning, like a pile of leaves on an autumn day. She waited to see if Byron would notice it, too.

He dropped his hands. “Do you smell something?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Like smoke?”

The first night in Arcadia came back to Byron—with the chase he'd witnessed on the back lawn and the smell of something smoldering. “Where's it coming from, do you think?”

“I'd say that direction,” Meg said, pointing toward the woods that bordered the lawn. Toward the thick ranks of black-trunked trees, whose leaves rustled and swayed under the gray morning sky. Toward the hidden glade that she had discovered, weeks before, with Diogenes. She had told Byron about the incident there; he remembered it too, and squinted at her.