by William Gay
Then the stars were gone and he was rocking down the sleek wall of the night. He could feel the ambulance beneath him wild and fierce as a beast, the heavy shocks taking stockgap and curve, then there was a sharp pain in his wrist and a voice was saying, Lay back, old-timer, this’ll cool you off.
He was in a cold glacial world of wind-formed ice, ice the exact blue of frozen Aqua Velva, a world so arctic and alien life was not even rumored and he struggled up to see.
Help me hold him, Ray, he’s trying to get up.
But the frieze of night was familiar. Why I believe we’ve crossed over into Alabama, he said to himself in wonder, and in truth they were descending into a landscape sculpted by memory. The ambulance rocked on past pastoral farmhouses whose residents’ dust these sixty years still dreamed their simple dreams behind darkened windows, past curving lazy creeks he had fished and waded as a boy, past surreal cotton fields white as snow in the moonlight.
He pressed his face to the glass as a child might and watched the irrevocable slide of scenery, tree and field and sleeping farmhouse, studying each object as it hove into view and went slipstreaming off the dark glass as if it might have something to tell him, might give him some intimation as to his destination.
A Death in the Woods
CARLENE WAS STANDING naked before the window when Pettijohn awoke. She was holding the curtains aside with an upraised arm and she was peering into the night, the flesh of her left breast lacquered by a pulsing light that cycled red to blue, red to blue, and back again.
What the hell is that? Pettijohn asked.
I don’t know, she said. Lights.
When she turned from the window, her eyes were just dark slots in the shadows of her face and lit so by the strobic light she might have been some erotic neon succubus he’d conjured from a fever dream.
What woke you up?
I don’t know. I was just looking toward those woods and there were lights everywhere.
There was no way there could have been any lights. Beyond the glass lay only fallow fields, deep woods. He got out of bed and crossed the carpet to stand beside her. Her hair brushed his shoulder. Silver beads of rain strung off the eaves. Past the dark stain of the fields that were more sensed than seen, moving lights turned and swayed and darted through the slanting rain in a curious ballet that seemed senseless, profoundly alien.
What the hell is it? he asked again.
She just shook her head.
He was pulling on pants and a shirt, looking about for his shoes. She was watching him.
What in the world are you doing?
He looked up sharply, as if she’d taken leave of her senses. He’d found both shoes and how he was tying them. I’m going to see what that is.
In this rain? Why don’t you just let it alone? It’s nothing to us.
The way I see it, it’s something to us. Those are our woods. Nobody’s got any business even being there.
He went out of the house and around the side in the rain and to the edge of the backyard. Here he climbed a woven-wire fence and descended in the grown-up field. All the time, he was staring toward the dark blur where the woods began and his face was half perplexed and half angry.
Lights twisted and turned, smaller white lights like flashlights strung out of the woods. Soon vehicles began to shape themselves out of the blue murk—police cars, ambulances. A pickup truck. An emptiness swung in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t fathom what might have happened. A wind was blowing the rain in slant gusts. He buttoned his shirt and wished he’d worn a jacket.
An ambulance was backed to the edge of the woods, lights revolving, rear door sprung. Attendants were carrying a stretcher out of the trees. They loaded it and its plastic-wrapped freight into the rear: All this in a silent tableau, then in a rush the sound came up. The first sound he heard through the muting rain was the slam of the ambulance door. As he approached, he became aware of the detached and mechanical crackling of voices from the police radio, the rush of windy rain in the dripping woods.
The high sheriff that year was a man named Holly Roller. Folks when they kidded him called him Holy Roller, but none were kidding him tonight. When he finished with the radio, Pettijohn asked, What’s going on back here, Sheriff?
Roller hung the microphone back in its rack on the dash. Couple of coon hunters found a body back in here last night.
A what?
A body, a dead man.
Pettijohn stared toward the woods. The coon hunters stood in the shelter of an enormous cedar. Denim jumpered, felt hatted, wet. Rifles kept dry under their coats. Coonhounds were curled at their feet like curious black-and-tan familiars. The two men looked as if they wished they were anywhere but here. Like unwilling passersby called up to witness or attest something.
One of the attendants knelt against the bole of a tree. He was very young. A green surgical mask hung from his neck. He’d vomited into it, and as Pettijohn watched, he vomited on his shoes. His hands were encased in translucent plastic gloves and he kept trying to strip them off.
A dead man, Pettijohn said.
I hope I never see one deader. He’s deader than I ever want to get.
Who was he?
His driver’s license said he was a Waters. You couldn’t prove it any other way, or I couldn’t. He must have been there two or three weeks and everything from dogs on down had been eating on him. Where’d you come from, anyway?
I live right across that field.
Where that light is?
Yes.
These woods belong to you?
Yes, Pettijohn said again.
That’s pretty damn close. What, a couple of hundred yards? You ain’t seen or heard anything out of the way?
Out of the way? Like what?
I don’t know. Like folks wandering around back in here. Shots. You ain’t even seen buzzards after him?
No, Pettijohn said.
Who else lives over there?
Just my wife. He wondered was she still standing against the window, watching him, or watching where he was.
She say anything about seeing anything unusual?
No. What killed him?
Best I can tell a twelve-gauge shotgun. There was one laying by a log, back in that thick brush. Come on, I’ll show you.
Pettijohn wasn’t sure he wanted to see, but he went anyway. It seemed to be required; new rules seemed to apply here. All these official comings and goings had padded out a trail through the sodden leaves. He went through a tangle of winter huckleberry bushes. They entered a shadowed glade. The light flitted about, fixed on a dead beech tree the winds had taken, and abruptly the woods altered, became somber, like an abandoned graveyard, like a church where the religion has no name.
What I think he done was set on that beech yonder and study about it a long time. We found a Marlboro pack and seventeen cigarette butts, all Marlboros. He was doing some serious studying. That black spot’s where he was, where the torso was. The head was over yonder where that smaller round spot is. I reckon dogs or something drug it there.
The light moved. Pettijohn’s eyes followed it.
He had one boot on and one boot off. That TBI man said that’s how he pulled the trigger.
A dull anger ached in Pettijohn. He’d loved these woods. He could walk in summer dusk, watch silent winter snowfalls. Now they had a quality of unease. Perhaps they were not even his woods anymore. Possession seemed to have shifted subtly to the dead man. They felt defiled.
I need to get back to the house, Pettijohn said.
Well, if anything comes up, I guess I know where you live.
I won’t know any more then than I do now.
Halfway across the field, he noticed day was coming. Shapes accruing bleakly out of the gray, rainy dawn. After a while, he could see the green roof of his house. The black truck he drove to work and the blue Ford he’d bought Carlene last year. They seemed commonplace, no part of the woods he’d been in, and there was something vaguely reassuring about t
hem.
SHE OFFERED BREAKFAST, but he wanted no part of it. All he could handle was coffee. The woods were too much with him.
He’s ruined the damned woods, he said. There’s something different about them. Something … I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it. Just different.
She ate unperturbed. She dipped a triangle of toast delicately into egg yolk. You’re just too sensitive, she told him. She put the toast in her mouth and began to chew. He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.
Well, he said, I was back there, you weren’t. What I can’t figure is why he picked our woods to blow himself away. Those woods run all the way to Deerlick Creek. Why couldn’t he do it there?
You see everything from your own selfish perspective, she said. I’m sure that while he was thinking about shooting himself he didn’t stop to consider whether it was an inconvenience to you.
Inconvenience? That’s not what I mean and you know it.
I never know what you mean anymore. Sometimes I wonder if I ever did.
What I want to know is why he did it and why he did it there.
You never know when to leave a thing alone. Maybe he was hunting there when the impulse or whatever hit him. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he was on drugs. Besides, it’s none of our business. Let it go, Bobby.
It was Sunday and he didn’t have to go to work. After noon the rain ceased and the sun broke through and burnt away the clouds. The sky was marvelously blue and it held an autumnal look of distances. A warm wind looping up from the south brought them distant voices and children’s laughter. They went out to see. Across the field, the edge of the woods thronged with people. A family strung out across the field like miswandered carnival folk. Young girls in Sunday dresses bright as cut flowers.
Why, goddamn, he said. I wish you’d look at those morbid freaks. All I need is a roll of tickets.
She didn’t answer.
HE DROVE THROUGH THE GATE in the chain-link fence at the hose factory where he worked and parked in the lot and cut the switch and pocketed the keys. He dreaded going in. He always did. He told himself if he could make it another year he would have enough money saved to buy a few horses and he was going to say to hell with industrial hose and try to make it raising horses and farming. Live simple. Just him and Carlene and the farm. The world seemed to have gone volatile and unpredictable, but there was something timeless and reassuring about horses. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel and thought about horses for a while and then got out of the truck and walked toward the brick factory. It looked like a prison. A dull hammering emanated from it. Ceaseless, rhythmic. Here the machinery ground metal on metal twenty-four hours a day. He showed his pass at the guardhouse and went through gray steel doors into the din and clocked in and went to the break room.
Reuben and Stayrook were already sitting at a red Formica table, drinking coffee from paper cups. The three of them formed the crew that operated the number three press. Reuben was an enormous, gentle man shaped like a round-shouldered mountain, and winter and summer he wore overalls and long-sleeve khaki shirts that were perpetually sweated through.
There he is, Stayrook sang out. There’s the infamous shotgunner of meter readers. And we didn’t even know they had a bounty on them.
Pettijohn put coins in a Coke machine, then sat down at the table across from Reuben and Stayrook. What the hell are you talking about?
That Waters feller they found in the woods behind your house worked for the power company. Went round readin folks’ meters, how much electricity they used. Did you not know him? Pettijohn was making interlocking circles with the wet bottom of the Coke can. No, he said. Anyway, it wasn’t all that close.
Not that close? What I heard, you could of stood on your back doorstep and pissed on him.
Reuben glanced at the clock and took out a package of Bugler smoking tobacco and a packet of papers and began to build himself a cigarette. I guess you know them woods is haunted now.
What?
They’re ruined. Something happening like that ruins a place. He’ll be tied to wherever he done it and you won’t never be able to look at them woods without thinking of Waters.
Oh, for Christ’s sake. Give me a break, Reuben.
Say, Pettijohn, Stayrook said. When’re we going out to Goblin’s Knob and drink a few cold ones? Get out amongst em and run some wild women?
Pettijohn studied him. His last friend out of the wild lost years. Beneath the flesh of tHe man Stayrook had become, Pettijohn could see the face of the child he’d been and in some curious way the old man he’d be if he was lucky enough to live that long.
I quit all that.
Yeah. I had a wife looked like Carlene I might stay home with her, too. Keep a eye on her. I ever marry I aim to marry some old gal so ugly nobody else’d ever try to take her away from me. That way I could rest easy and she’d be grateful for any passin kindness I might offer.
Reuben glanced at the clock. About time to get it, he said.
We had some wild times though, didn’t we? Stayrook asked.
Pettijohn nodded, but he didn’t think about all that much anymore. The high times were blurred in mist, sharp edges already rounded off by time. Wild times had come and gone like telephone poles veering up drunkenly in speeding headlights, but they seemed to have little to do with this new and improved Pettijohn.
As they rose from the table, Stayrook punched him in the ribs and grinned. Tell Reuben about that time in Chicago when we saw that drunk Indian throw that piano down the stairs.
Pettijohn, try though he might, could call no such incident to mind, and there was something mildly disquieting about it. You ought to remember a thing like that. Maybe he’d seen one too many drunk Indians throw one too many pianos down one too many stairways and it was time to get on to something else.
He just smiled his noncommittal smile, taking no position at all, and Stayrook shook his head. You ain’t been no fun since you got married, he said.
THAT NIGHT HE GOT HURT for the first time in the three years he’d worked there. It happened as they were changing the die in the press. He was thinking about the black oval of earth in the woods and holding the wrench positioned on the die for Reuben to hit with the sledgehammer. Something he’d done a thousand times before. The wrench weighed fifty or sixty pounds and had always reminded Pettijohn of something lost from the toolbox of a giant.
He must have been standing off-balance, for when the clang of steel on steel came and the wrench slipped, he fell headfirst into the press, the wrench ringing again when it struck the concrete floor. He felt no pain when his head struck the press, just a dull, sick concussion and a wave of red behind his eyelids and the sensation that his knees had turned to water. A hand stabbed at the floor to break his fall, index finger splayed out beneath his boneless weight. He felt that. A rush of nausea washed over him and he could taste sour bile at the back of his mouth.
When he came to himself, he had arisen to his knees and Reuben was stooped peering down at him. Reuben leaned forward with his enormous hands cupping his knees and his face was very close to Pettijohn’s. Behind the thick twin layers of safety glass, his eyes were rabbitlike and benign. His entire face was rabbitlike, Pettijohn suddenly saw—the soft twitching nose, the magnified eyes pinked-rimmed and myopic. Behind Reuben other workers had gathered, but Pettijohn saw no face he could put a name to and they might have been strangers staring down at some mishap in the street.
Goddamn, Bobby. Are you all right?
I think I hurt my finger, he said.
Finger, hell. You may be hurt bad. You knocked the shit out of your head and you’re bleedin like a stuck hog. Stayrook, help me get him to the nurse’s station.
I believe he’s busted that press, Stayrook said.
In the infirmary a middle-aged woman with a beehive of purple hair and an air of professional detachment cleaned and bandaged his cut. You’re going to need a few stitches in the corner of that eye, she said. I’m afraid yo
u’re going to have a scar there, too. I’m sending you out to the hospital.
No. I’m not going to any hospital.
You don’t have a choice. It’s company policy. You have to go.
I don’t have to do anything. It’s my head. He felt dull and angry. He should not have fallen. He’d never done anything this foolish before.
Very well, then. Suit yourself. But your medical insurance won’t pay any expenses you might incur later. And you’ll have to sign a release.
Get it.
Coming out of the infirmary, he saw Reuben still awaiting him, cap in hand, out of place in this antiseptic world of steel and spotless tile.
They sendin you out to the hospital? he asked solicitously.
No. I’m taking the rest of the day off. Maybe a day or two.
Oh, Reuben said, crestfallen. Pettijohn knew that Reuben had been counting on driving him out to the hospital and waiting on him, thirty minutes or more of idle time that he’d be paid for and that he could easily stretch to an hour.
Ain’t you in no pain?
She gave me a bunch of pain pills. Anyway, my head’s all right. It’s my damn finger that’s giving me a fit.
You ought to have it X-rayed, Reuben said, trying one last time.
No. They’re liable to just sew me up and slap me into the hospital overnight. I’m going home.
That’s the ticket. Go home and soak it inside her; that’s the best thing for it.
In cider?
Yeah, inside her, Reuben said. That’ll draw the soreness out of it. A leering eye closed in a lewd wink.
Halfway to the parking lot and for no good reason, the remark angered him. Reuben hadn’t meant anything by it; that was just the way people talked. Still, it made an assumption he wasn’t comfortable with. It assumed an intimacy that he wasn’t sure existed anymore.
HIS HEAD HURT TOO MUCH for sleep and he sat beside the bed where she lay, his feet propped on the hearth of the dead fireplace.
Can you not sleep, Bobby?
Not right now.
Do you want me to get you a pain pill?
No, I’m all right. The one pill he’d taken had eased the pain but had made him lightheaded and drunk. He felt curiously off balance, out of sync, as if something somewhere needed to be adjusted half a turn. Everything looked and felt skewed; the level and plumb of the world seemed subtly off He wasn’t sure though how much of it was caused by the accident. He’d been feeling eerie and disassociated ever since he’d stood peering down at the dark oval in the woods.
