Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “I want that wood and the hardware, too,” Goodwin says, pointing at him and smiling falsely. He makes a sudden move, as if to throw his shoulder into Paul or make some insane attempt to tackle him, and Paul feels a spout of adrenaline rising through him.

  “Haydn, she wants you,” a voice says. It’s one of Goodwin’s crew, a young, cherub-faced man in his twenties, with his protective eye-wear pulled back into his plaster-flecked hair.

  “Is anything wrong?” Goodwin anxiously asks.

  The young helper shrugs. “She just said get you.”

  Without another word, Goodwin leaves the kitchen and disappears into the apartment. Paul stands there for a moment; it is only in the wake of Goodwin’s absence that Paul realizes how angry he feels. As he finds his way back to the front door he thinks: I should have clocked him.

  His agitation continues on the walk back to the Episcopal church where he defied both God and Caesar by parking his truck, and even from a distance he can see the parking ticket lodged beneath his windshield wiper, one end shuddering in the dank November breeze, the other stuck to the windshield’s condensation. Oh come on, Paul says, as if there were something petty and unjust about his getting a parking ticket, though, in fact, he has gotten caught four times this year alone. It’s easy for him to forget that, since he hasn’t yet paid any of the fines. He pulls the ticket free of the wiper blade and sticks it in his back pocket, where he will keep it before it joins the others shoved into the rear of the glove compartment.

  Driving uptown, and getting ready to turn west so he can head back to Leyden, Paul finds that the street he was going to take is closed and he must go east a block and then north before heading west again. But while he is going east he decides, almost without thought, to keep going all the way to First Avenue so he can drive past the apartment building where his father spent the last year of his life.

  When Matthew Phillips left his wife, she was in no mood to make it easy for him to see either Paul or his sister, Annabelle. This was agreeable enough to Annabelle but not to Paul, even though he had been the main target of his father’s rages, the worst of which being the time he clamped his hand over Paul’s nose and mouth and kept it there until Paul lost consciousness. Despite this, and despite other acts of violence both petty and prosecutable, Paul had missed Matthew. He was afraid he would hurt his mother’s feelings if he asked her for help in seeing his father, and so he mowed lawns and shoveled snow to make money for train fare from Connecticut to New York. It was his only reprieve from what was otherwise a world of women—mother, sister, teachers, even his customers: all women.

  Matthew had rented a railroad apartment, a narrow, shadowy alley of faltering bachelorhood, with soft walls and scarred floorboards, a tub in the kitchen and accordion gates on all the windows. The bedroom was in the back—a mattress on the floor beneath a grimy window—and the front, marginally sunnier half of the apartment was given over to easel and paints. From one end to the other, the paintings were propped against the walls three and four deep in an almost defiant display of nobody’s wanting them. Matthew was interested in the color brown, which he said was the most soulful of all the colors, and each canvas was heavily painted in some shade of brown with one stripe of another color bisecting the field. Toward the end of his life, Matthew was placing the stripe on the upper third of the canvas, and in the very last painting he made there were two stripes, one pale green, the other black, and he called that one “Easter.” He was like a man possessed by an incommunicable vision, an apprehension of something vast and eternal, a compulsion of the soul’s deepest recesses, powerful enough to jolt a man from society but not quite powerful enough to transport him anywhere else.

  When Paul had come calling Matthew would be dressed in paint-spattered jeans, huaraches from Mexico, his pale green eyes wet and unfocused, like olives at the bottom of a martini glass. Away from the pressures of family life, Matthew was placid, distant, polite. He had become someone who didn’t want anything looked at too closely, someone whose peace of mind depended on things being glossed over. Matthew held forth, speaking in generalizations; in fact, he lived in generalizations. Soon, one day, and not quite yet were his measurements of time; some, a bit, and not quite enough were his customary monetary denominations. A guy I knew, this woman, a fella, a couple of girls, a neighbor, and a bunch of folks were the people in his life.

  One warm spring day, Paul had left Connecticut without telling his mother or sister, taking the commuter train to Grand Central, along with the businessmen, office workers, and the well-to-do shoppers. He thought he would surprise his father. He walked the couple of miles from Grand Central; the sun was a hot, oily smudge in a gray sky. Displayed on the buzzer board was one of the return address stickers UNICEF had sent Matthew. Paul pressed the button, waited, tried the door, found it open, and trudged up, feeling some nameless queasy dread, a sense of foreboding he would never again ignore.

  His father’s door was unlocked. The apartment was a diorama illustrating man left to his own devices. Socks drying on table lamps, curls of dust as dark as steel wool beneath the radiators, the walls thick and soft with paint, stacks of newspapers in the corners, empty bottles, unfinished meals turned into ashtrays, the imploring notes taped strategically to the door, between the locks and the peephole, admonishing himself to Turn Off Lights! Check Stove!

  Matthew was dead; alone and undressed in the bedroom. Later, Paul would learn that his father had had a massive heart attack and had probably died instantly. His top half was on the bare mattress, his feet were on the floor. It felt like it was a hundred degrees inside that apartment; the smell was something Paul would never forget. He knew his father was dead, but he didn’t know you were supposed to call the police when someone died. He thought this was a family matter and what must be done was to put his father upright, cover his nakedness, and then figure out how to get the body back to Connecticut where he and his mother and sister could bury it. With his hand over his nose and mouth, Paul approached the body, peered into his father’s ruined face. He tried to lift Matthew, and, for a moment, he succeeded, but then the worst thing happened. The body slowly came down like a drawbridge, and try as he might Paul could do nothing to stop it until it was on top of him. At first, he couldn’t utter a sound, and then he cried out for his mother. He began to shout. The weight, the odor, the great and terrible darkness closing in. He pushed Matthew’s lifeless, expressionless face away from his. He must have done it more roughly than he realized, and the push left a mark.

  For years after his father’s death, Paul walked by the apartment house whenever he came to the city—it seemed disloyal and callous not to, especially since Matthew had been cremated and there was no grave to visit. But by the time he turned twenty, he was making the sad pilgrimage less and less often, and now as the traffic dumps him out onto First Avenue, he realizes he has not seen his father’s apartment house in maybe eight years.

  Approaching 90th Street, he sees that the little shop where Matthew bought his art supplies has been turned into a Verizon store, and Zurich and Kaufman Quality Shoes has been turned into a coffee boutique, and, worse, the very building in which Matthew lived and died has been razed, along with the buildings on either side. In their place has been built a glass-and-steel apartment building calling itself The Verdi, a twenty-story hive of windowsills and reflecting glass, indistinguishable from hundreds of nearly identical buildings all over town. Paul doesn’t even slow down; his thoughts disappear behind an engulfing blankness. If I hurry, he thinks, I can make the light before it turns red.

  On the way out of the city, there is a long, infuriating delay—minutes pass, a quarter hour, half an hour, forty-five minutes. He is surrounded by the rumble of idling engines, heartsick over the wasted day, yet he is in no hurry to get back to Leyden. He would like to see something beautiful that might neutralize the sourness of the day. Halfway up the Saw Mill Parkway, and finally free of the city’s gravitational pull, Paul exits the highway on a sudd
en impulse, and heads toward a two-thousand-acre park he came to know the year before, when he was working in Westchester, building a wine cellar for a French banker. The road follows the shoreline of a man-made lagoon full of Canada geese rocking back and forth like hundreds of little boats, then he turns onto a county blacktop and the approach to Martingham State Park.

  The booth at the park’s east entrance is boarded up for the winter, and leaves blow this way and that across the stripes of the parking lot. The maple leaves are gaily colored red, orange, and yellow; the oaks are somber brown, like bread crust, though some have a tinge of what looks like dried blood.

  Paul parks and walks along a footpath, a quarter of a mile into the woods, past pine, spruce, hemlock, locust, oak, and maple, all permitted by state decree to flourish and age, with time their only natural enemy. The pine rots when it dies, growing softer, more and more fragrant. The maple and the birch, the alder and the black cherry refuse to die. Even if they are cut down, they send up a new crown of leaves as quickly as possible, new growth eager for the sun. The leaves beneath Paul’s feet are starting to decompose; the loamy soil beneath them is soft and black.

  A small picnic area. Today it is a staging area for some vast squirrel jamboree—big gray ones with thick coats and pom-pom tails, darting little red ones with mad eyes and skinny feet, all working frantically against the oncoming winter. There are eight tables in the clearing, painted green and needing a bit of maintenance. Shitty mass-produced tables. Paul sits at the one closest to the path. He breathes deeply, drawing the sharp, autumnal air into his nose, slowly exhaling it through his mouth. He hears cries above him and he tilts his head back to find the source—an old, peeling white birch’s leafless crown has filled with orioles, all of them surely hastening south. The birds are waiting for the rest of the flock, and when the crown is black with feathers and alive with high-pitched screeches, the birds explode into flight again, funnel up into the air, wheeling left, then right, until they are in formation again. The sky is a moody luminous greenish blue. He sees a sparrow perched on the swaying branch of an empty mountain ash and he thinks of a song Kate likes to sing, in her throaty, touching, tuneless way: His eye is on the sparrow, so I know God is watching over me. Pretty sentiment, but nothing could be further from the truth, as Paul sees it. The sparrow is alone, and you are alone, too.

  He is not entirely sure why he is here but he is glad he has turned off the highway and taken this time to absorb the melancholy solitude of the woods and the poignancy of the autumn. Alone with the silence of these trees, their crowns slowly waving in the wind, their empty branches splayed out like nerves, their roots plunged deep in the earth, extracting nutrients with a gorgeous greed. The watch Kate gave him for his birthday feels heavy and he takes it off, places it on the picnic table, and rubs away the imprint the metal band has left on his wrist. Far above him, a passenger jet streaks across the sky, heading south toward LaGuardia or Kennedy. Paul watches the plane disappear and when he returns his gaze to the world around him, he realizes he is no longer alone—a dark-haired, barrel-chested man in his forties, in a white thermal shirt, black satin workout pants, and running shoes has joined him in this secluded clearing in the woods.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At first Will Claff seems frightened to encounter someone here, but he gains his composure and he glares at Paul. Will sits down at one of the picnic benches, his chest heaving, a shimmering girdle of pain cinched around every breath. With him is the dog, whose leash he loops around the leg of the bench.

  Will produces a water bottle and begins to drink from it. The tall, bony, brown-and-gray dog places his paws up on the picnic table and gazes imploringly with his perfectly round eyes. “Down!” Will Claff says, and smacks the dog hard on its snout, causing him to quickly drop back down. Will does this for Paul’s sake, wants him to know that Will is no one to be pushed around.

  Woody continues to behave as if there is still some hope of getting a drink. He cocks his head to the left and then to the right, and his narrow tail wags enthusiastically, around and around, like a helicopter propeller. “Down,” Will says, and this time the dog obeys. Will feels a surge of confidence. Yet as soon as Woody sits, he is up again, freshly agitated.

  No respect.

  Once upon a time, the brown dog was used to tender treatment, and to this day he cannot completely rid himself of the idea that humans are a friendly, useful species. He misinterprets Will’s momentary reverie as a softening and he barks again, and again, his front paw scratching at the ground, his rear half shimmying back and forth.

  “What did I tell you?” Will shouts at the dog, so loudly that the animal immediately falls silent. But the cessation of barking isn’t enough for Will; stirred by the sound of his own voice, he grabs the dog by his silver choke collar and pulls it close to him, shaking Woody’s head back and forth with such force that the dog, clearly afraid for its own life, lets out a yelp that is close to the sound of a human scream.

  “Hey, hey,” Paul says. “Take it easy.” The man squints in Paul’s direction, juts out his chin.

  “Do I know you?” he asks.

  “All I’m saying is don’t hit the dog,” Paul says, his tone indicating, he thinks, a reasonable nature.

  It’s happening, Will thinks, it’s happening right now. He feels a whoosh within, as if he has begun to fall from a great height, and he cuffs the dog, hitting it harder than he has ever hit it before, serving notice to this man who has come to do him harm. Will does a calculation. What does he owe? Eight grand? This guy—well you have to give him credit for one thing, he had found him, right here at the end of his jog. But he doesn’t look particularly tough, and what’s he going to get for collecting the debt? Thirty percent? Tops. So what is that? Twenty-four hundred bucks?

  “Will you stop doing that?” Paul says, moving toward the man, and feeling his own fury, shocking in its intensity: it is like opening a closet door and discovering it is filled with the brightest, most vivid light.

  Will Claff stares at Paul, who has just said the word Will. That he knows his name tells Will everything he needs to know. For instance, only one of them is walking away from this. He tries to shove the dog aside, but it is on a leash and tethered to the thick leg of the bench.

  Paul continues to face the man, with his hands folded monkishly before him, hoping to communicate, to both of them, his intention to do no harm, though he does semiwordlessly say to himself, I would like to fucking kill this guy.

  He can hear a sparrow, its sharp, tuneless exclamation.

  “This is a beautiful part of the state, don’t you think?” Paul says. The man doesn’t say anything at first, as if this is a statement that needs to be inspected for possible hidden meanings.

  “It’s f-f-fine,” Will Claff manages to say. He lets out his breath.

  Paul notes the stammer, wonders if that will make this guy somehow easier to deal with. “I don’t know why you’d want to hit him,” he says. “Seems like a nice enough dog.” He has stopped walking toward the man and stands now, ten, fifteen feet away, too far for the man to take a swing at him, and far enough to react should he make a move.

  “Hear that, dog?” Will says. He feels as if he were walking on air, somehow putting one foot in front of the other, a mile high, terrified and omnipotent. “Our friend here wants to know why I want to hit you. Guess he’d rather I use my foot.” And with that he lands a swift kick into the dog’s rib cage. The dog leaps with fright, yelping again and instinctively baring its teeth and growling menacingly, drawing from its meager arsenal.

  “What the fuck?” Will cries, as if betrayed. “You turning on me, is that what you’re doing? Biting the hand that feeds you?”

  Will feels Paul’s eyes upon him, and he understands this and this alone: there is only one way out, and that is more of the same. His next kick lands in the middle of the dog’s rib cage and knocks the wind out of the animal; the beast’s mouth gapes open, his tongue unfurls, and he drops to his side,
whimpering.

  Paul puts his hands on either side of his head, as if his skull will otherwise explode. What he had wanted most was to sit somewhere and not deal with another human being. Behind his thoughts is a steady roar of hatred, like the noise of traffic. Now he is only a couple of feet away from the man and all he can think of to say is “How would you like someone to kick you around like that?”

  To which Will Claff replies, “You th-think I don’t kn-know?”

  Paul is no expert in conflict. He hasn’t had a fight since he was a teenager, a fight whose origins and purpose are now forgotten, but what is remembered of that afternoon remains unsettling: the five sets of hands dragging Paul off of Marshall Judd, who was bleeding, crying. Instinct tells Paul to stand close to the man, so close that he will be able to react instantly if the guy tries to use something he may be carrying in his pocket—a knife, a gun. Paul is standing now barely six inches away.

  “Watch yourself,” Paul says, jabbing his finger toward the man, moving his face so close that their noses are almost touching. The dog looks up with interest; his tail thumps against the leaves. “You can’t do that to a dog.”

  “It’s m-mine,” the man says.

  “I don’t care,” Paul says. “It’s not about that.”

  So it’s true, Will thinks. He has just admitted it. He feels a wave of grief, as if he had already been killed and is now standing at his own grave, watching as the casket is lowered into the ground.

  The dog is looking uneasily at his own side, where the kicks have landed. Paul shoves the man’s shoulder, not so hard as to hurt him but hard enough to let him know that physical pain might very well be on the way.

  Will steps quickly away and then launches himself at Paul, slamming into him with his considerable weight, grabbing Paul’s hair with one hand, while using the other to deliver a series of quick blows to the side of Paul’s head.