Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  There is more fury than strength behind the wild punches. Paul shoves Will back, steps out of the chaotic spray of punches, and then, as if to put one toe into the ocean of violence which so much of life springs from and so much of it returns to, he slaps the man across the face. It is meant to insult and demoralize the man, but it’s a direct hit, with more force behind it than Paul intended, and the man lets out a howl. “Okay?” Paul says, by which he means Had enough?

  Will keeps his distance for the moment; torn between the impulse to lay a comforting hand on his own face and to strike back, he seems lost and infirm. His hand trembles, he blinks rapidly, he turns his head to the right and to the left. He is looking for something to throw at Paul.

  First comes the water bottle, which he pitches at Paul with surprising accuracy, hitting him in the chin, and though it barely hurts, it is startling. The bottle falls to the ground; the water flows into the leaves, darkening them. The man tries to lift the picnic table, to heave that at Paul, but he forgets he lashed his dog to the leg of it, and as soon as he lifts the table, the dog’s choke collar tightens, and the animal scrambles in fear.

  “Put it down!” Paul shouts, and he rushes Claff, shoving him in the chest and then watching as the man falls backward.

  But already he is scrambling onto his feet again. A sterner lesson will have to be taught, Paul thinks, and he considers kicking the man in the head, but—a kick to the head? No: too much. Instead, Paul drops to one knee, grabs the man by the shirt, and delivers one abrupt, discrete punch—aiming for the nose and landing on the cheekbone. The man’s body bucks back and forth. As if doing a sit-up, he is able to elevate the top half of his body and then, momentarily rearing back, he smashes his head into Paul’s mouth. Paul’s lips go numb and he feels his mouth fill with warm, greasy blood. Motherfucker, he whispers, or thinks, and he hits the man again, this time with greater accuracy, greater force, and then again, and once more.

  The strangest thing about it is that he isn’t really all that mad, or at least he is not whirling in some mind-altering vortex of fury. He is coldly angry, and even in his anger he mainly wants to put a stop to the whole fight before the man lands another lucky punch. And even as his anger increases—as the numbness in his lips turns to pain, and he wonders if that head butt has cost him a tooth—it is not the kind of anger that is a portal to madness. No. What is taking place is more like a realignment of inner forces, in which the voice of reason grows fainter and the voice of animal instinct becomes more and more dominant, expressing itself in a long, low, guttural roar. Except for that interior roar, Paul feels strangely calm.

  “Go away! P-p-please,” Will cries out, sorry now, truly sorry, sorry for kicking the dog, sorry for not having the money to pay his debts, sorry for running, sorry for everything. But he is also flailing, and each time he swings his arms another blow lands on Paul.

  “Stop!” Paul cries. His own voice sounds unfamiliar to him. His breath comes in jagged bursts; his heart races. Yet all the while a serene, confident self, a shadow self, remains aloof, silently urging him on. Fucking punch his ticket, the voice suggests. Each time the man takes a swing, Paul punishes him with a real blow. There are slaps, just to demoralize the guy and drain his strength, and there are punches, on the side of the head—how many? Paul has lost count—and then on the chin, with the hope of knocking him unconscious and then, as luck would have it, a blow to the throat.

  With that final blow, Paul falls forward, practically on top of the man. Will grabs Paul’s hair but even as he pulls and twists he seems to be surrendering. “No, no,” Will Claff says, his voice soft and thick, a bubble rising in his throat, spit and blood, the mortal lava of him.

  No, no are his last words. Whatever pity the universe has shown him has run its course.

  Paul does not know this, not quite yet. The violence is still coursing through him; he is like a runner who cannot stop his legs from churning, even after he has snapped through the tape at the finish line. He grips the man’s throat. He is not trying to choke him. He is trying to hold him at bay, as you might pin a poisonous snake beneath the crook of a branch.

  “All right?” Paul says, in that voice you use when you have fulfilled someone’s worst expectations. “All right? All right? Will you stop now?”

  The man makes a deep sound of distress, an urgent, guttural cry. Startled, Paul relaxes his grip a little. But the sound persists; it takes a moment for Paul to realize that the sound is not the man choking but the dog barking.

  “Uh-oh,” Paul says, getting quickly to his feet.

  A stain spreads out over the front of the man’s workout pants; as his crotch darkens, the color drains from his face, making each of his whiskers appear blacker and more distinct. Paul feels a sharp, wrenching pain in his hand, looks at it and realizes he is gripping the side of his jeans and squeezing the denim with all his might. He lets go and falls to his knees, places his ear on the man’s chest, but all he hears is the pounding of his own heart. He shakes the man by the shoulders and places one finger beneath his nostrils, though he already knows there will be no breath to feel.

  The trees encircling the clearing seem to have gotten closer, their empty crowns etched against the soft sky like ten thousand cracks in a mirror. Paul turns in a circle, willing his eyes to see someone, anyone, but all is stillness, and, except for the wind and the wooden creaking of the trees, all is silent.

  He runs back to the parking area. Once he is there, he leans on the hood of his truck, his head pitched forward, his heart beating so violently that his own death seems to be pounding up the stairs.

  What just happened? What have I done?

  He knows he must think clearly now. In the chaos of surging, disconnected thoughts, he remembers: call 911. He opens his truck’s door, finds his cell phone in the glove compartment, turns it on, waits. What do I say?

  There is no reception in this dense preserve of forest. He stares at the silent phone and, suddenly, adrenaline begins to course through him. He can feel the blood draining from his face, and his skin growing colder with each heartbeat. A scalding, churning distress of the bowels. He clutches his stomach and thinks Oh my God I’m going to be sick. Guided by animal instinct, he hurries into the woods at the very edge of the parking area, unbuckles his jeans, squats. A momentary ecstasy of relief, vile, burning, stinking relief. He closes his eyes, holds his breath, creating an inner silence in which the spatter of his sickness sounds thunderous against the brittle forest floor. Still in a crouch, he staggers forward. He loses his balance, falls to his knees.

  Oh God, God, God, he whispers, and the word brings him up short. He shakes his head, as if to dispel it. He grabs a handful of leaves, makes an effort to clean himself, and then, still half-undressed, still on his knees, he kicks leaves, twigs, dirt, and stones on the foulness, and shuffles back to the truck but does not get in. His mind whirs uselessly, an engine that will not turn over.

  He will find the proper authorities in Tarrytown, nearby; small towns are laid out with a predictable plan and he will have no trouble finding the police station. Or he can call them from the first house he sees. He can explain and direct them to this spot. Or he can ride with them, sit in the backseat, and explain while they drive. Whatever happens, he should probably contact a lawyer—though the only lawyer he knows is the man who used to live with Kate. Or no, there’s Gilbert Silverman, a lawyer Paul worked for last year. Loft. Chambers Street. Bedroom ruined by leaking skylight. But Silverman’s practice was taken up with artists and gallery owners. A man lying dead in a park outside of Tarrytown would not be in his area of expertise.

  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, musi
c, 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 mo
ney, 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.