Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “Get it before it goes down there,” Kate says.

  “I’m trying,” Paul says, his temper rising as his heart sinks: a part of him already knows he is going to kill this snake.

  He takes quick strides toward the retreating rat snake and tries to step on its tail to stop it, but it feels as if the tail of the thing actually shrinks once it feels the pressure of Paul’s shoe, and now, with the snake just a moment or two from the space at the bottom of the cellar door, Paul grabs the thing—it feels as hard and alive as a garden hose through which cold water surges—and flings it, hoping it will land near the back door where he can eventually shove it out into the night. But the snake is heavy, ungainly, and it lands in the middle of the kitchen, where Shep, whose instincts have been reignited by the commotion, lunges upon it and sinks his teeth into its body, roughly midway between head and tail. Kate has her hand over her mouth, hoping her muffled cries will not awaken Ruby. Paul is trying to get Shep to drop the snake, which he is now subjecting to rapid-fire shakes, hoping to snap its neck. The snake, however, is far too pliable to be killed like this; indeed, its head has turned now and even as it is caught between the dog’s jaws, its mouth is open and its tongue is flickering. Shep by now has gotten a taste of what he has bitten, and by the look of him he finds it repulsive; he draws himself up to his full height and his mouth slowly opens and the mangled, bleeding snake drops wetly to the floor, though it continues to swerve, this time in the direction of the kitchen cabinets, which still are wide-open. Shep watches the snake, his head cocked to one side, in a pose that might be mistaken for adorable. While he is still tonguing the taste of the snake out of his mouth, the snake’s movement makes it irresistible to Shep and he gives every indication of getting ready to attack it again. In the meanwhile, however, Paul has grabbed the teakettle off the burner, and he uses it as a cudgel, slamming the bottom of it hard against the snake’s head, stunning it, and then slamming it again, finishing it off.

  “Is it dead?” Kate asks.

  Paul, looming over the now-inert creature, watches it for signs of life, and Shep, standing between Paul and Kate, looks first at the snake and then at Paul, and Paul, his chest heaving from the exertion and the emotion of the kill, wonders if the dog is remembering what he is remembering.

  Paul takes the dead snake outside and throws it in the tall brown grass along the driveway, where crows will find it and pick it to pieces. He stands there for a few extra moments and looks at the moon, his thoughts rapid and indecipherable. At last, he comes back into the house, where Kate has been mopping up the smear left by the snake.

  “Well, that was like having two hundred and fifty cups of coffee,” she says, throwing away the paper towels and running the base of the teakettle under the hot-water tap.

  “Are you okay?” Paul asks.

  “Needless to say, I am not a big fan of the snake.”

  Paul slumps into a kitchen chair, but when Kate is finished cleaning the teakettle, she comes behind him and makes an effort to lift him out of his seat. “Let’s go to the dining room,” she says. “I need to share something with you. Plus I can’t believe I said ‘share.’”

  They sit across from each other at the dining table. The ring of moisture left by the platter holding tonight’s roasted chicken is still visible. Kate is holding the letter from the radio programmers. She moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue, takes a deep, steadying breath.

  “‘Dear Ms. Ellis,’” Kate reads. “‘As you know, we here at Heartland Radio are huge fans of you and your work. Prays Well with Others has been a company favorite since its publication and we have also followed with keen interest your numerous public appearances, in person, on television, and on radio.’” She suddenly puts the letter down. “Okay, I’m not going to read this letter after all. But long story short? They want me to have my own show. Once a week, it would go out to about two hundred of their stations.” She smiles. “I used to think this concentration of ownership and the whole media conglomerates situation was a bad thing for our culture and democracy, but now I have entered the Tour de France of backpedaling and I think it’s all good.”

  Paul rests his chin in his hand, struggling to be a part of this conversation. “It sounds good,” he finally says.

  Kate gives no indication of finding his response tepid. “I don’t know,” she says. “They don’t mention money, maybe it isn’t even worth that much. And I have no idea what it will do to my writing. I don’t want it to all fizz out as a bunch of radio talk.” She picks the letter up again, glances at it, places it carefully on the table, smoothes it down. “What would you think about that? Me on the radio? Do you think that would be, I mean something you’d be all right with, I mean does it strike you as a good idea?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never thought about being on the radio before. Do they want you to talk about the Bible?”

  “I’m not a theologian—and I’m not going to play one on radio. I don’t really know the Bible all that well. So many real estate deals and so much revenge.”

  “So what would you do?”

  “Just talk. About…” She flutters her eyelashes, places her hand over her heart. “…moi. The same as my book, the same as every one of my events. All I know is what I know. The story of finding a little bit of grace in a life that is otherwise pretty crazy.”

  “I’ll sure listen.”

  “This is making me so frightened,” Kate says. “I’m used to things being a certain way, and now everything’s changing.” She reaches across the table, takes his hand. “Everything’s so different now—and it’s all so much more than I ever expected. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself. It’s as if I woke up one morning and I had red hair and was six feet tall. I mean it’s interesting to be so tall and have red hair—but what happened to me? Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Paul says. “But we have to be willing to change,” he adds, somewhat tentatively.

  “I know,” she says. “Life on life’s terms. Okay, I’m in. Deal the cards. Right? You want to know what I know? I know that our lives are unfolding under God. He’s really there, in the most primitive and absolute way. Just the way people thought thousands of years ago, all those people who didn’t know shit, they knew that, and they were right.”

  “But no one can see him,” Paul says.

  “Of course not,” Kate says. “Can you imagine how boring everything would be if you could see God the way you can see Cleveland or a box of paper clips?”

  Kate gets out of her chair, walks over to Paul, and leads him out of the dining room, up the staircase, into their bedroom. They are still clothed but she gets on top of him, aligns herself just so. “How much happiness can one woman stand?” she asks. She glances up quickly, to where God might be, and then lowers her eyes gently, covering Paul with her gaze as if it were a soft blanket. “Am I freaking you out? It’s too much, isn’t it?”

  He shakes his head, not daring to speak. Somewhere out in the night, in that vast, cold wilderness between the treetops and eternity, a small plane drones, its engines straining. He imagines the pilot, rigid with fear as the plane loses altitude, and he imagines the plane crashing through the roof, its lethal propellers cutting through the fragile flesh of them. Kate arches her back, presses herself against him, and as she continues to gaze at him she moves her head so the ends of her hair trail lightly over his face.

  “All right,” she whispers, “I’m through talking, it’s a moratorium.” She lowers her face to kiss him, and Paul holds her by her hips, to stop her, but she misinterprets his touch and presses her pelvic bone into him. He increases the strength of his grip, holding her fast, an inch or two away from him.

  “But one more thing?” Kate says.

  “Okay,” he says. “You can say as many more things as you want. I love when you talk.”

  “You really do?”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “All right, that settles it,” Kate says. “We have to get married. I need to
put this whole thing in writing. I need it signed, sealed, and delivered. I need the law on my side.”

  She kisses him as she speaks, until he turns his head.

  “What?” Kate asks.

  “I have to tell you something,” he says.

  She can barely see him in the dim light from the hallway. “That’s never good,” she says.

  He is silent for a few moments. He knows what she cannot know—he is about to change everything. “It’s not,” he says. “It’s not good.”

  “Oh Paul…What is it? Just tell me.”

  “A couple of weeks ago,” he says, and stops. He wants to live for one more moment in a world in which he has not said this. Once it starts it cannot stop; it will be like having taken an ax to a tree.

  “What?” she says. “A couple of weeks ago. What?”

  “I killed a man,” he says. “A couple of weeks ago I killed a man.”

  The way he was leading up to it, she would have bet anything that he was going to tell her he was involved with somebody else, and in spite of herself her first reaction is a rush of relief. Her second reaction is the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “You seem unusually quiet today,” Todd Lawson says.

  Paul does not trust himself to speak, and he is doing his best to keep his mind occupied by listening to the moist crunch of his footsteps through the hardening, thickening loam of the woods, and to the furious territorial squawks of the blue jays, those holdout birds who never leave, a dozen of them circling. The sky is a wrinkled purple-and-gray shawl. Below, rain, melt, and runoff have pooled shallowly and formed a fragile skin of ice. It’s difficult to resist applying the rude nudge of a toe to the spun-sugar puddles, turning them into spiderwebs of cracks and fissures.

  Now that he has told Kate what he has done, the pressure to say it again and again and again builds daily. Today, Paul, Evangeline, and Shep were at the painter Hunter DeMille’s house, a reclaimed lighthouse in the middle of the Hudson. Paul was showing DeMille plans he had drawn up to build a network of wooden walkways, upon which the boggy two acres of land the lighthouse stands might be traversed, and while they spoke Shep effortlessly won the heart of DeMille’s seven-year-old son, Cooper, from whom laughter was such an infrequent sound that DeMille immediately put in a bid to buy the dog. As outrageous as it was to think that Paul might spontaneously decide to unload his dog, DeMille carried on in his attempts to buy Shep, and Evangeline looked on, disheartened to see a man whom she had studied in her Marlowe College art history classes behave in such a presumptuous manner. Paul, wishing only to silence the insistent painter, started mentally rehearsing the shocking reveal of why he could never give Shep up, and as DeMille angrily raised the price higher and higher, until he was offering Paul ten thousand dollars for the dog, the urge to simply tell the old guy that he had killed a man over this dog became so strong that the desire to confess to violence became violence in itself. Similarly, he has wanted to tell Evangeline the actual story of how he found Shep, and he has wanted to tell Annabelle, who, last Sunday, when Paul at last got around to repairing the steps on her porch, told him he was being unusually quiet.

  The need to talk about what he has done surges behind a dam of common sense, but common sense is not enough to hold such a deep and powerful force and so the dam must be shored up, spackled with words. Yet small talk is impossible for Paul right now and so the words he says are perilously close to the words he is afraid to say.

  “Do you think you could make it through if you were ever put in jail?” he asks Lawson.

  Lawson has been walking a few paces in front of Paul but stops, turns. “For a night?”

  “For a year, or ten years.”

  “Live free or die, baby, like the license plate says. But why? Thinking of committing a crime?” Lawson plucks a tiny brown and withered pinecone from the end of an icy branch, rubs it between his thumb and forefinger, and lets it fall to the ground. Shep comes seesawing over to check out what has dropped to the ground, sniffs it, and looks up with a cheerful expression, as if to jolly Lawson into dropping something of higher value.

  “So do you think you could do it?” Paul persists.

  “I don’t know. It would be hard. I can’t even sit through a movie.”

  They have been hiking what was once the Leyden Gun Club but which has been recently sold and slated for development: the hundred-unit condo will be called Turkey Hollow, presumably in honor of the many wild turkeys who have met their end on these acres. Suddenly, they are standing on the edge of a winding blacktop road. A couple of joggers come chugging by, two men in their forties and, by the look of them, corporate types, with salt-and-pepper hair, slender legs, sweatshirts announcing their patronage of the Four Seasons Istanbul and a place called Smuggler’s Cove, which, by the look of it, with its palm trees and parrots, is somewhere in the Caribbean. The joggers give no indication of having any awareness of either Paul or Todd’s presence. A tattered trail of their conversation wafts behind them—the one with the sweatshirt from the Four Seasons is talking about measures his company is taking to back up their data in case worst predictions about Y2K come true.

  “That guy in the Istanbul shirt?” Lawson says when the joggers are a safe distance away. “He’s married to an old girlfriend of yours.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Lynn Dobkin.”

  “I thought she moved to London or someplace.”

  “I think that’s where they met, but now they’re here. Part of the time, anyhow.” Lawson takes a deep breath, the way people do when their thoughts turn to the past. “She was so good-looking she made you good-looking.” Todd presents his palm to be slapped, but Paul pretends not to notice.

  “That was never going to go anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?” Todd says. “You were already there, there was nowhere left to go.”

  “Lynn was very involved with being Jewish,” Paul says. “I was the first non-Jew she had ever gone out with.”

  “And who were you seeing before that?” Todd asks. “The acupuncturist?”

  “Pauline. Not an acupuncturist. Shiatsu massage. And you know what? Someone named Paul cannot go out with someone named Pauline.”

  “Really?” Todd says. “I could deal with a problem like that. She was gorgeous.”

  Paul shrugs. He hears the distant hum of a car engine and the lit-fuse hiss of tire treads on wet blacktop; he snaps his fingers and Shep comes to his side, and Paul hooks his finger through the dog’s collar. The dog seems wised up to cars, but you never know. An animal is liable to do anything, any animal.

  “She was gorgeous and the sex was amazing,” Todd says. “Remember?”

  Paul frowns. He doubts he said such a thing, but where else would Todd get the idea? Because it was true, truer words were never spoken, there were times when the sense memory of being with Pauline comes back to him, brilliant and unbidden.

  “And what about Indigo Albright?” Lawson asks.

  “Now you’re really reaching into the past,” Paul says, but he feels the sweetness of being known. It amazes him that Todd has been so mindful all these years. How long have they actually known each other? He cannot affix a date to the time of their first meeting. Todd is one of those people whom you feel you have always known, even though you have a difficult time imagining where he goes when he is not standing directly in front of you. He seems, both in his remarks and his actions, without motive—but is such a thing possible? Is there any human being without motive? Doesn’t motive rule the inner life as commandingly as gravity rules the outer?

  “Let me ask you a question,” Paul says. They have come to the part of the road that begins the eastern edge of Kate’s property; a dying locust tree, its trunk, bulging with cancers, bears a yellow plastic no hunting sign with her name written on it in Magic Marker. The lights of the house are not visible from here, but the glow of them rises through the late-afternoon air like a cool yellowish mist. Paul feels the blind mammalian weigh
t of Shep leaning against his legs. “Did you know the guy Kate was with, before me?”

  “Sure. I still do. Daniel Emerson. Why? Need a lawyer?”

  “I might,” Paul says, and forces himself to smile. “But what happened with him? Something bad, right?”

  “Yeah. A fireworks accident. On Ferguson Richmond’s property. Thing is, men get into the woods—we go back to our elemental selves, and shit happens. Anyhow, the guy recovered, though it took a while. And in the meanwhile Dan ended up with the guy’s wife. Welcome to Leyden.”

  “He really broke Kate’s heart,” Paul says.

  “I know. Everybody knows.”

  “She won’t even say his name.”

  “Well now you have her all to yourself.”

  Paul shakes his head. “What is it with us?”

  “With who?”

  “You know. Men.”

  “Men do what men do. We’re just part of the scheme of things,” Todd says, punching Paul lightly on the arm. “We’re just nature.”

  “Poor Kate,” Paul says.

  “Well happy ending. She’s got you now.” Todd reaches down, picks up a rock from the side of the road, and heaves it high into the air, over the trees. Long seconds go by before they hear it come back to earth.

  “But what’s going on, Paul?” Todd asks softly. “Are you in trouble? Something you want to tell me? I mean, you don’t have to. But if you want to, I’m here.”

  “I know,” Paul says. “And it’s much appreciated.”

  They make the turn around another bend in the road. The northern end of Kate’s house is visible here; the lights of the room she has designated as the library burn bright yellow against the sudden deep blue of the evening. If Paul’s heart had knees it would fall to them right now.