Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to.”

  “I just proposed and you look like I pulled a knife on you.”

  Paul takes her in his arms, holds her close to comfort her and make her feel loved, and to relieve her from having to study his face for clues. He is bereft, abandoned: how can she not know he is a ruined man?

  “My God,” Kate says, “your poor heart is pounding.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You know what?” Kate extricates herself from his embrace. She clears her throat. “We don’t have to get married. Maybe we’ll just have a party, a big old party so everyone in Leyden can see us together and, you know, all the women can just be sick with envy that I’ve snagged the most desirable man in New York State.” She waits for him to say something. “We can do it on New Year’s Eve. Everyone needs a place to go on New Year’s Eve, especially this one, since the world is supposed to come to an end, and I can invite all my sober friends who need a place to go where there is plenty of seltzer and cranberry juice. We’ll have booze, and lots of chocolate. And smoking will be allowed because a few of my AA friends need to smoke—I think their self-image depends on having at least one horrible habit.”

  She rolls onto her back and tucks her hands behind her head, and looks up at the ceiling. Reflected light from the fireplace dashes across the smooth white plaster. She is still waiting for Paul to say something—not necessarily about the proposal of marriage, or even the proposal of a party. She would just like him to say something.

  Cold midnight. The moon is parked outside the bedroom window and Kate’s breathing buzzes richly, oddly soothing to Paul, though he would love to be asleep himself. He lifts his corner of the comforter and slips out of bed. The wooden wide-board floor is cold on his bare feet.

  I did it.

  I ended a life.

  The night air moves through the room like black water. Paul steps back, stumbles on Shep, who has still not found a stable sleeping spot. The dog’s tail thumps on the floor. “Shhh, Sheppie, shhh,” Paul says, but the sound of Paul’s voice makes him wag his tail with more vigor and intensity. “All right, come on, let’s go,” Paul whispers, and the dog scrambles up noisily.

  Kate and Paul’s bedroom is on the second floor; the house’s other substantial bedroom, Ruby’s, is at the other end of the landing. Between the bedrooms are three smaller rooms, including the garretlike one, with faded rose wallpaper, described once by the real estate saleswoman as the sewing room, and used by Kate as her office before Paul built her a real studio. Paul has now made it his own, where he stores his tool and fixtures catalogs, issues of architecture and home-decorating magazines in which his work has been featured, and where, with a sleek little computer Kate gave him a few months ago, he searches the Internet for materials. Whereas he was once confined to a hundred-mile radius to find old windows, barn boards, salvaged mantels, and old-growth lumber, now he has a nation-spanning network of contractors, carpenters, lumber brokers, hardware collectors, salvagers, rural archaeologists willing to sell anything from a steeple to a stall. He had even recently succumbed to an impulse buy of six 125-year-old ladders rescued from an abandoned apple orchard in Yakima, Washington, the wood as smooth and gray as fog, the length and taper so beautiful and so perfect and so deeply redolent of the past that it moved Paul practically to tears when he dismantled them to incorporate their parts in new construction.

  He appreciates the sleek design of his computer, its compactness, its waste-free functionality, but, aside from the action of the keyboard and the hinges of the case, how his laptop actually works is mysterious to him. In his personal life, what brings him joy are animal pleasures—eating, drinking, sex, air, freedom. Most of what the world offers at the push of a button or the flick of a switch does not appeal to him.

  The computer sits on a table his assistant, Evangeline Durand, gave him for his birthday two months ago, a trim four-by-three piece of white oak she had somehow planed and burnished without his noticing. Her card informed him that his birthday was once known in England as Royal Oak Day. She had fastened a sprig of oak to the card, and in her own calligraphy she copied a poem by John Evelyn, linking the oak tree to kingliness:

  A rugged Seat of Wood became a Throne

  Th’ obsequious Boughs his Canopy of State

  With bowing Tops the Tree their King did own

  And silently ador’d him as he sate.

  “Are you sure she’s a lesbian?” Kate had said, when he showed her Evangeline’s present. She ran her palm over the smooth, waxed wood, and furrowed her brow. “I think you’re so used to women having crushes on you, you don’t even see it when it’s right in front of you.”

  “She lives with a woman,” Paul said. “Who she calls her husband.”

  “I don’t know,” Kate had persisted. “She wears that little pearl necklace to work.”

  “Maybe from her husband,” Paul replied.

  The computer has already taught him the difference between murder and manslaughter and that his crime, if he were to be tried for it and found guilty, as he surely would be, carries a sentence of somewhere between three and ten years, though by now he would probably be given the harshest sentence allowable—the law seems to hold a particular loathing for runners and hiders. Tonight Paul wants to find out anything he can about the man who died in the woods. He turns the computer on and cringes at the heartless chord it plays when it is powered up. Shep is next to him on the bare floor, sighing and snoring in an almost human way, snout resting on his front paws. The dog, this seventy-five pounds of consciousness, is the only part of the universe, except for the trees and the sky, that has seen what Paul can do when fury and instinct take the place of thought, and yet this dog seems to have bestowed his fealty upon him, totally and unshakably.

  Thank you, Shep, old buddy, Paul thinks as he goes to the AOL site and types in Recent Deaths Westchester. An innumerable list of options presents itself, most of them months old. Not only are the entries outdated but he has seen them all himself, though in slightly different order, on previous nights. Suddenly, he sees a new one: “Recent University Study on Westchester Deaths.”

  Paul clicks on the story, and waits nervously while it simmers up to the surface.

  If you are found dead or go missing in Westchester County, there is a 1 in 22 chance that local law enforcement authorities will do little or nothing to determine the cause of your death. Even in cases where it is clear that a crime has been committed, Westchester leads New York State counties in police inaction. This is the conclusion come to by Dr. Mansfield Trumbull, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.

  “Given the number of local and state police we have in Westchester,” Dr. Trumbull said, “the number of unexplained and uninvestigated deaths and disappearances is remarkable. The only area in the U.S. we found with a comparable number of unexplained deaths and disappearances is in the Native American reservations in North Dakota, where law enforcement has been almost nonexistent. Westchester, with its numerous police forces and adequate funding, is not going to be the next North Dakota, but nevertheless the pattern emerging of official inaction is, quite frankly, disturbing.”

  Paul reads, shaking his head with worry. This voice from the mysterious regions of his computer, this blather of opinion that may have been written five years ago and has perhaps gone unread since then, these pixelated paragraphs floating around the Internet like garbage in outer space…Shut the fuck up, professor, Paul thinks.

  Stumbling around the Internet, slowly going from one site to the next, Paul happens upon a page that is more than he can bear. The site is called They Are Missed and basically it is a bulletin board for posting pictures of and rudimentary information about missing persons. Page after page of pictures—smiling faces from high school yearbooks, serious stares taken off driver’s licenses, or employee IDs, young men in tuxedos, young women in bridal gowns, suggesting lives in which no one had bothered to take their photograph except on their wedding day, missing m
en and women, boys and girls, with their heads cocked, brows furrowed, flirty, furious, fucked up on booze or drugs, an astonishing number of them last seen going out to a convenience store at some forsaken hour, a likewise astonishing number coming from either Texas or Maryland, black, white, Asian, Latino, all of them citizens of a vast underground archipelago of suffering, whose inhabitants include not only the murdered and the missing but all those who loved them and who wait for some final word. And also: those who were responsible for their violent ends, they were condemned to the archipelago, too.

  Paul looks at each of the missing people and does not find one of them who looks like the man in the woods. Next he must look at the pages containing images of bodies the police have yet to identify, but before the site will allow him access to these images there is a warning: Some of the content profiled in the Unidentified section may be disturbing and contains postmortem photographs that are not suitable for children. Do you wish to continue? Paul has no choice but to click Yes and, through a frightened squint, as if his eyelashes can soften the blow of those thumbnail pictures, he looks for the evidence of what he has done in the photos of the horribly decomposed faces, or, in some cases, the graphite renderings of the suspiciously deceased, when the body, once discovered (most often by hunters, joggers, or dog walkers) has been pulled too deeply into the vortex of decomposition to photograph.

  There is a tap at his door and Paul quickly closes his computer.

  “Paul? Are you in there?” Kate says in a dry, cracked whisper. She opens the door and gives him a quizzical look. “I rolled over and you weren’t there.”

  “Well you found me,” Paul says, rising from his chair, taking her in his arms. She smells of the bed, and the lingering lilac scent of her evening bath. Even as he holds her he feels as if he is remembering her. “Thank you for finding me,” he whispers.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Walking through the woods, it’s step by step, one foot in front of the other. What could be more fundamental? It’s like breathing—inhale through the nostrils, exhale through the mouth, the taste and tickle of your own mortality coursing over your lips like running water over stones. We are under a sea of air, to which we have adapted just as fish have adapted to their life underwater.

  A walk in the woods is like wading through a river; you can’t walk in the same woods twice, no matter how you may try. You can tread the same path and at the same pace and at the same time of day, you can measure your steps so that Tuesday’s walk matches Monday’s as closely as possible, but no matter what, the walk will be singular and unique. Leaves will have fallen since your last time here, pinecones, acorns, berries, shit, a beer can, a candy wrapper. Procreation will have taken place, pursuit, death, shoots will have been eaten, brush will have been trampled, bark will have peeled, roots will have grown deeper. Decay and regeneration are a wheel that will not stop turning, even now, autumn by the calendar, winter by the bone, the gray wash-water sky, the liquefying leaves underfoot, even now the wheel turns, slower than in the warmer months but with a bleak grandeur.

  “My soul,” Paul says, “there’s steam coming off this pile of deer shit.” My soul, my soul, he repeats to himself. It was his mother’s phrase, a verbal keepsake now. She used to deliver it full of irony, just as she did Land’s sake, and Lamb’s sake, too, because both seemed right to her, she just wasn’t sure which was which, and it didn’t entirely matter either because it was all a part of an act, the part she liked to play of a good country woman hanging on to her Christian principles in an evil, crazy world, a pose among many and no less or more true than her other assumed identities—the antimaterialist wild child, the fallen American aristocrat full of frontier virtue, the self-sacrificing mother hen, the natural artist, the woman with a surfeit of common sense.

  Shep is hovering over the fresh scat, his bristly muzzle less than a quarter inch from the soft pile, which looks like a mound of plump raisins. “Don’t do that, boy,” Paul says, but the dog only half-listens—he hasn’t put any deer shit in his mouth yet but his nostrils dilate and contract as he takes in the full sensual delight of his find. His thin black lips part, his tongue emerges to taste nature’s bounty. “Shep, that’s no good,” Paul says, this time pressing two fingers on the back of the dog’s neck.

  “Something to bear in mind the next time you give that dog a big old smooch on the lips,” says Todd Lawson, with whom Paul is walking.

  Lawson, like many in Leyden, is hard to place occupationally, or socioeconomically. He is loosely but not profitably related to various local big shots, politicians, ministers, and the owners of riverfront estates, but whatever local pedigree he may claim, none of it is of much material use. Right now, Lawson has five jobs, which altogether generate enough income to support his modest, solitary life, including spending the coldest part of the New York winter in Mexico, which might strike some as a luxury for a man who is often in arrears on his rent, but the urge to head south for the winter is a trait Lawson has inherited from his flush forebears. The original makers of the family’s fortune were industrious, driven men, but there followed generations of idlers, ending with Lawson’s father, Harley, who worked two days a week at a brokerage off Maiden Lane managing to lose so much money that his family was grateful he didn’t work full-time.

  Idleness is not an option for Todd. Part of his income comes from Marlowe College, whose tennis team he coaches. He also works at a horse farm on the edge of Leyden, where he gives riding lessons. He makes two hundred dollars a month touring visitors through one of the most spectacular of the river estates, a Victorian monstrosity painted black and gray, whose exterior has been used by the makers of several horror films, and whose interior, full of dark wood and clashing wallpapers and overall sense of foreboding, leaves most visitors feeling quite content not to have been born into nineteenth-century wealth. He also makes deliveries for Of the Manor, his brother’s antiques store, and he has yet another source of occasional income, which is choosing the wines for three local restaurants owned by a woman named Indigo Blue, who is drawn to Lawson but reluctant to get involved with him, and for whom keeping him around as a part-time employee is an ideal solution.

  Paul and Lawson are walking on posted land. They come to a small cluster of fallen hemlocks and then to a couple of large granite boulders, with open seams of glistening mica running through them. Lawson has picked up a long, bare branch and is using it as a walking stick.

  “It’s as tall as you,” Paul says.

  “You know,” says Lawson, “Daniel Boone was about an inch taller than his gun and it weighed almost ten pounds, plus the buffalo horn full of powder and a bag full of shot. It must have really gotten old after a while, carrying all that. I think that’s why he was so fond of buffalo jerky and johnnycakes. They weighed next to nothing and he was always looking to lessen his load.”

  It is their habit, Paul’s and Lawson’s, to speak of Daniel Boone when they meet for their walks in the woods. They have been conducting this informal seminar for over a year, but today Paul is finding it difficult to enter into the spirit of it. Waking this morning and remembering he was going to see Lawson, he felt, and still feels, that here is a chance for him to spend time with someone he can show his worst side, or if not the whole freak show, with all the human monsters in their unkempt cages, then at least he can momentarily pull the curtain to one side, giving Todd a glimpse. No, he does not think he will ever tell Todd about what happened in those Westchester woods, but there might be words he can say that will relieve the silent fever.

  They hear a distant rustling. Shep lifts his head, tenses, and Lawson whirls toward the sound, holding his walking stick like a rifle.

  “Deer,” Paul says.

  “Boone was a good shot, but you had to be,” Lawson says. “If you missed it took almost a minute to get your musket ready for a second shot. And by that time it was often too late.”

  Paul stops, listens to the invisible birds cawing and squawking in the treetops. These are th
e hardy ones, willing to brave the oncoming winter. “It’s so beautiful here,” Paul says, in a whisper. “Hey, by the way, do you ever check out Martingham State Park, down near Tarrytown?”

  Either the question doesn’t interest Lawson, or he hasn’t heard it. “Let’s sit,” he says, fishing a cigarette out of his denim jacket. He has an olive complexion, long black hair; he looks like he might be part American Indian. Yet for all his vigorous looks, it is always Lawson who needs to rest when they walk together. His body has accumulated the many mishaps he has endured in the course of making a living. The horse barn has taken its toll, and so has moving furniture—the weight of some of those pieces squeezes the life out of him. Last year he got his pant cuff snagged in a tractor’s PTO and for months after that he dragged his right leg around like a useless thirty pounds of meat. That’s finally healed, but he is always nursing something, always banged up, and he’s not sure but he may be dependent on painkillers.

  The men sit on the boulder and the dog sits on the ground with his back to them, looking out through the woods, at the dim world beyond, divided into strips by the intersection of countless trees.

  “Back in the day,” Lawson says, “this is where the preachers told everyone you had to go to find God. No Jesus in the parlor, that’s what they said.”

  “I’ll tell that one to Kate,” Paul says.

  “So,” Lawson says, leaning back on his elbows, stretching out his legs. “How are things at the place?”

  Paul has noticed that Lawson doesn’t ever call where Paul lives his home. Or house. He will say the place, even your place, he will say crib, pad, domicile, abode, residence, residencia, he has called it a tent, he will even go so far as to refer to it as your corner of the zip code. But he evades ever calling it Paul’s home, and this can have only one meaning: Lawson does not believe that Paul belongs in Kate’s house. Does he think Paul is somehow too good to allow himself to be installed in a position that might call into question his independence? Does he worry that Paul has become one of those men who manage to saw and hammer their way into a period of cohabitation with the lady of the house, a period that, at least in Windsor County, is always short-lived and always ends with the bourgeois lady coming to her bourgeois senses and the carpenter out on his proletarian ear? Or is it that Todd Lawson believes Paul Phillips is not worthy of that house? Is there in Lawson’s view something incongruous about Paul’s inhabiting those prim and proper rooms, and that to see him there is to witness a display that is inherently absurd, upsetting, and distasteful, like a chimp in a tux?