Man in the Woods
A Novel
Scott Spencer
Contents
Part I
Chapter One
It might be for pity’s sake—for surely there must be…
Chapter Two
“Hey there,” Kate Ellis calls out, shielding her eyes with…
Chapter Three
It is unnerving to wake up in the hotel bed,…
Chapter Four
At first Will Claff seems frightened to encounter someone here,…
Chapter Five
Paul drives north toward home, checking the stability of his…
Chapter Six
Four days after his death, a picture of William Robert…
Chapter Seven
Ruby has once again attempted to get the dog to…
Chapter Eight
Walking through the woods, it’s step by step, one foot…
Chapter Nine
“Don’t touch nothing more in the apartment,” Jerry Caltagirone says…
Chapter Ten
Kate has been invited to speak before a group in…
Chapter Eleven
No thanks to anyone but himself, things are starting to…
Chapter Twelve
The next night Paul’s sister, Annabelle, comes to dinner with…
Chapter Thirteen
“You seem unusually quiet today,” Todd Lawson says.
Chapter Fourteen
In the silence of the car, he has been composing…
Chapter Fifteen
At the end of the next month, the very last…
Part II
Chapter Sixteen
Could it really be that simple? Could a human being…
Chapter Seventeen
“Hey Sonny,” says Kate, “may I ask you a question?”…
Chapter Eighteen
Sergeant Lee Tarwater stands in front of Jerry Caltagirone, wringing…
Chapter Nineteen
Summer arrives early, full of temper—scorching blue-gray days, brooding starless…
Chapter Twenty
Usually the dreams Paul remembers are the morning dreams, the…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Scott Spencer
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
a cognizant original v5 release october 01 2010
PART I
The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars.
—JOHNNY CASH
CHAPTER ONE
It might be for pity’s sake—for surely there must be pity for Will Claff somewhere along the cold curve of the universe—but now and again a woman finds him compelling, and offers him a meal, a caress, a few extra dollars, and a place to stay, and lately that is the main thing keeping him alive. He is thousands of miles away from his home. His income, his job, his professional reputation are all long gone, and now he has been on the run for so long, living out of one suitcase, changing his name once in Minnesota, once in Highland Park, Illinois, and once again in Philadelphia, that it is becoming difficult to remember that just six months ago he had his own office, a closet full of suits, and a nice rental off Ventura Boulevard, which he shared with Madeline Powers, who, like Will, worked as an accountant at Bank of America.
He used to think that women wouldn’t pay you any attention unless you were dressed in decent clothes and had some money to spend, but it isn’t true. He has been underestimating the kindness of women. Women are so nice, it could make you ashamed to be a man. Here he was, running for his life, buying his shirts at the dollar store, his shoes at Payless, and getting his hair cut at the Quaker Corner Barber and Beauty College in Philadelphia. Will had a guardian angel there, too, in the form of Dinah Maloney, whom he met while she was jogging with her dog. Dinah, small and bony, with short russet hair, worried eyes, and nervous little hands, was thirty years old, ten years younger than Will, and she happened to take a breather on the same bench he was sitting on, and somewhere in the conversation, when she told him that she owned a catering service called Elkins Park Gourmet, he said, “You should call it Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah,” and saw in her eyes something that gave him a little bump of courage. He invited her to coffee at a place with outdoor seating, and they sat there for an hour with her dog lashed to the leg of a chair. He told her the same story he had already worked a couple of times—it might have been on Doris in Bakersfield, or Soo-Li in Colorado Springs, or Kirsten in Highland Park—about how he had come to town for a job, only to find that the guy who had hired him had hung himself with his own belt the day before. A lot of women didn’t believe this story, and some who did couldn’t figure out how that would mean he had almost no money and needed a place to stay, but a small, saving percentage took the story at face value, or decided to trust the good feeling they had about him. Dinah has turned out to be one of those.
She was a spiky, truculent sort, wary of customers, suppliers, and competitors, but ready to make Will (she knew him as Robert) the first man ever to spend the night in her house, partly because he seemed to find her attractive and partly on the weight of her dog’s apparent trust of him. (“Woody is my emotional barometer,” she said.) She was a shy, basically solitary woman, an expert in the culinary arts, a baker, a woman who gave off the scent of butter and vanilla, an arranger of flowers, all of which led Will to assume in her an old-fashioned faithfulness. He saw only her plainness, her lack of makeup, her loose-fitting checkered pants, her perforated tan clogs, the dark circles under her eyes from the late hours working corporate dinners and Main Line birthday parties, and he assumed that she had a lonely woman’s lack of resistance to anyone who would choose her. He had no idea that Dinah had another boyfriend, whom she had been seeing for six years, one of the mayor’s assistants, a married man whose wife worked in Baltimore on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Will is grateful to be an American; he doubts there is anywhere else on earth where you can lose yourself like he needs to get lost, where you can just go from state to state, city to city, not like in cowboy times, but, still, no one has to know where you are. You can drive across a state line but it’s only a line on the map and the tires of your car don’t register the slightest bump. There’s no guard, no gate, no border, no one asks you for an ID, because no one cares. First you are here, then you are there, until you’re in Tarrytown, New York, and it’s time for your afternoon jog. He’s still trying to lose the belly fat acquired in the kitchen with Dinah.
The new apartment smells of emptiness, fresh paint, take-out coffee, and the dog, Woody, stolen from Dinah the day she finally came clean with him.
Will parts the blinds with two fingers and peeks out the window. The cars parked on his street are all familiar and he knows by now who owns each one. There’s no one unusual walking the street, either. All very routine, all very familiar. He often reminds himself that the great danger is complacency, the way you can get so used to checking things over that the world becomes like wallpaper and you get too used to everything being nothing until one day when there actually is something unusual you don’t even notice it. He goes over the compass points, north south east west. “The lion sleeps tonight,” he sings, surprising himself. The sudden merriment excites the dog, a brown shepherd mutt, whose thick, graying tail thumps against the bare wooden floor. Will imagines the people in Mi Delicioso, the luncheonette downstairs, looking up from their yellow rice and chicken.
“Easy, Woody Woodpecker,” he says. Will feels a rush of affection for the dog, and crouches in front of him, tugs the dog’s ears roughly. Woody is large, but his ears look like they belong on a dog half his size. Considering the circumstances of Will’s acquiring him, t
he dog has been a good sport about the whole thing. “You and me, Woody,” Will says, taking the leash down from the nail next to the front door. The dog scrambles up, tail wagging, but with a cringing, uncertain quality to his excitement, squirming and bowing.
When the dog lived with Dinah Maloney in that dimly recalled paradise called Philadelphia, his life was markedly different. He had his own feather-filled bed on the floor and spent the coldest nights sleeping in his mistress’s bed. Food was plentiful and there were frequent surprises—especially when she came home from work with shopping bags full of leftovers from whatever party she had catered. The inchoate memories the dog holds of the food, and the woman and the smells of the old house, live within him as bewilderment, but his heart and mind have now re-formed around the loss, just as he would compensate for an injured paw by changing his gait.
Will goes back to the window. It sometimes seems that he has been peeking out of windows his whole life, always afraid that someone or something was going to do a lot of harm to him, but everything that has led up to these past few months has been like a puppet show. The old fear was like an afternoon nap compared to what he feels now.
He yanks the cord to raise the blinds and they crookedly cooperate. He puts his hand to the glass. Cool November afternoon, gray as old bathwater. He misses the California sun and wishes he had soaked up more of it. Oh well. Best not to think of it. Self-pity dulls the senses.
Yet he does not consider it self-pity to bear in mind that even in his nearly invisible state, he is a target. What tempts him toward the siren song of self-pity is that it is not his fault. Back home in LA, he had a run of bad luck that turned into very bad luck that made a quantum leap to horrendous luck—a last second shot from a third-string forward, undrafted out of college, a heave from the mid-court line that clanged off the back of the rim, popped straight up in the air, and dropped down through the hoop, barely ruffling the net. There was nothing at stake in the late-season game, excepting, of course, the five thousand dollars Will placed on the Portland Trailblazers to beat the Clippers, an aggressive bet on his part, but when he got the morning line and saw the Clippers weren’t even being given points, it seemed he was being offered a license to print money. He would have bet more, if he could have, but he was already into his guy for three thousand dollars and five more was all the credit he could get. Not having bet more than 5K was the needle of good fortune he could find in the haystack of bad luck.
But this is what he knows: it all happens for a reason.
The thing is, he was a good gambler. He was sensible, cool-headed, and his bets were based on reality, not blue sky—even the bet on the Portland Trailblazers was smart, and he is sure that a lot of people who knew the game, were real students of the NBA, would have said it was a good bet. You can make a smart bet that doesn’t pay off. Some clown heaving up a shot from half-court, some once-in-a-lifetime buzzer-beater? These things occur outside the arc of probability. It was still a good bet.
Except he couldn’t pay it off. The man through whom Will used to place his bets was an old surfer, a Hawaiian named Tommy Butler. Will never quite got it how Butler figured into the scheme of things, if he was high up or peripheral to the organization, or if there even was an organization. When Butler told him Accounts Receivable was going to have to get involved—“This is automatic, man, when you get to a certain size debt and more than five days pass, it’s not personal”—Will had no idea who was now in charge of collecting the money. That’s what made it so agonizing—it could be anyone! Every car door, every footstep, every ring of the phone: it was a matter of anyone turning into everyone.
Someone is going to come looking for him, but Will doesn’t know who. Someone is somewhere or will be sometime soon. So much mystery. But it all happens for a reason. Every detour, every zigzag, every stinking night in a shit-box motel, even this brown mutt—it’s all adding up to something. He just doesn’t know what, not yet. The trick is to still be around when the game is revealed.
Hiding out and lying low are not unnatural acts for Will. He doesn’t need the creature comforts so important to others—the favorite robe, the favorite coffee cup, the favorite chair. What do things like that mean in comparison to survival? Survival is the main course, everything else is carrots and peas. As for hiding—it heightens the senses, like double overtime, or a photo finish.
Three weeks into his escape he had called Madeline, who was still living in his old apartment on Ventura, even though she had her own place. He was in Denver. It was about ten o’clock at night; he was using the phone booth next to a convenience store, two blocks from the motel where he was week by week. Two teenagers were playing a game, tossing a Rockies hat back and forth and trying to get it to land on the other guy’s head. It was a thick, murky night, no moon, no stars, the sky just a bucket of black paint someone accidentally kicked over.
“Hey, it’s me,” he said, as soon as she picked up. He didn’t want to use his name.
“My God, where are you?” Madeline had a low, beautiful voice; it used to make him feel pretty good just to hear it.
“Never mind that, I’m just letting you know.”
“But where are you, I’ve been going crazy. How could you just do this?”
“I’m sorry. It was not exactly a planned thing.”
“Okay, baby,” she said. “I hear you. Okay. Just tell me where you are. Tell me exactly where you are.”
It was then that it hit him—she was in on it, a part of it.
“Things cool there?” he asked her.
“Do you have any idea how this feels? Has anyone ever done something like this to you? Three weeks and you don’t even call?”
“Well, I’m calling, but I gotta go.”
“You gotta go where? This is nuts. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Where are you?”
Will felt his heart harden and shrink to walnut size. This call was a horrible mistake, but not for the reasons he had worried about. He would like to have carried fond memories of Madeline, but there she was, putting snakes in his garden. Who knew? Maybe they offered her a piece of whatever they got out of him.
“You know what?” she said. “Now I really need you to listen to this, baby, okay? Will you at least try and listen?” He had never heard her voice quite like that, like he was her kid and she was going to try to explain life to him.
“Go ahead,” he said, daring her.
“Baby, this thing you’re going through,” she said. “It’s all in your head. I know you took some losses and I know you’ve got debts and I’m pretty sure they’re serious debts. But it’s all gotten into your mind. You’re really not seeing it clearly. I know it’s a serious situation, but it’s not all you’re making it out to be. You don’t need to be running and hiding like this. What do you think they’re going to do to you? Kill you? How will they ever get their money? Break your arms and legs? How will you be able to work and make money that by the way would otherwise be going right into their pocket?”
“You mind if I ask you a question,” he said to her. “Has anyone been by the place looking for me?”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “You want to know who’s chasing you? You, you’re chasing you!” By now her voice was rising so much that he held the phone away from his ear, wincing.
“Okay,” he said, with exaggerated calm. “Let me ask you another question—how did you know I took some losses? I never said that to you. I am not the type of guy who goes around boo-hooing about his losses. How did you even know that?”
“Oh Jesus,” she said, like she was crying or something. But why would she cry? She once told him that Paxil or whatever the drug she was on made it impossible for her to cry. So that had to be acting.
He wasn’t sure how it all clicked together—it is something he still turns around and around, a Rubik’s cube of motives and reasons and possibilities. Why would she do that to him? What would flip her?
He hung up the phone and forced himself to saunter.
He walked past the hat punks and into the 7-Eleven, bought some chips and salsa and a bottle of diet grape soda, some local Colorado brand. All around the cash register, hanging down in colorful strips, were shiny lottery tickets printed up in bright comic-book colors—Pick 4, Powerball, sucker bets, pitiful little prayers for some impossible dream to come true, and though he had never bothered with lottery tickets the sight of them closed a door inside of him. With the bottle of grape soda sweating on the checkout counter, and the Mexican kid working the register counting out his change, Will realized he would never place another bet for as long as he lived.
“Okay,” he says now to the dog, as he clips the leash to the metal choke collar. “We’re going to do five miles, and we’re going to go at a pretty good clip, no stopping, no squirrels, just straight ahead.” Will pats the pocket of his tracksuit to make sure he’s got his car keys and the apartment keys. He gives the choke collar a sharp tug to remind the dog who is in charge, which, he believes, ultimately makes the dog feel better about himself and his place in the scheme of things. The dog makes a little yelp of protest, which Will is quite sure is the dog’s way of manipulating him. So as to not give ground, Will yanks the leash again, and the dog yelps again, and sits down, which makes Will feel terrible, though the dog’s tail is still more or less wagging, so it still seems possible that the dog is just screwing with him.
CHAPTER TWO
“Hey there,” Kate Ellis calls out, shielding her eyes with a loose, left-handed salute against the askew aim of the spotlight.
“Hi there!” calls back a booming brocade of five hundred voices, their owners seated before her in church pews—this evening’s talk was meant to be in a bookstore near Lincoln Center, but the turnout is so massive that the venue needed to be changed at the last minute.
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