Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “I want to tell you something, Ruby,” Annabelle is saying. “Paul said you are feeling a little weird because you gave me something to keep me safe and now you think maybe it didn’t do the job. And maybe I’m mad at you or something?”

  Ruby has listened to only a few words of this, but enough to glean the sense of it. “I guess,” she says.

  “Well I want to show you something,” Annabelle says. She slips her hand beneath the afghan and gropes around her lap for a moment and pulls out the gold cross Ruby gave her, wrapping the delicate chain around her finger and lifting it slowly, and then enveloping the entire thing in her palm. “I think having this saved my life, Ruby. The car that hit me? It was going over sixty miles an hour, really fast. Everyone says I was just unbelievably lucky to survive.”

  Ruby’s eyes widen. Her lips part and then close; she lowers her chin and looks at Annabelle through the tops of her eyes.

  The sound of Shep barking comes from outside; he’s had it with being in the truck.

  “I don’t know if it’s something about this cross or because you gave it to me,” Annabelle says. “Who knows what or why? But this thing?” She opens her hand, moves it back and forth so the crucifix and its chain slither left to right. “This thing saved my life.”

  “Really?” Ruby asks.

  “Really,” says Annabelle. “Really and really. So can you come here?”

  Ruby starts to slide over but thinks better of it because it messes up the couch. She stands up and then sits down again, directly next to Annabelle, and when Annabelle gives her a small kiss on the top of her head Ruby leans her head on Annabelle’s shoulder and closes her eyes. A birdy angel fairy man is there to greet her in the darkness, all eyes and smiles and flashing wings, but she tells him to go away and for once he does.

  Paul goes outside to tend to Shep. Bernard has said it’s all right to bring the dog in the house, but when Paul unties him Shep seems reluctant to jump down from the back of the truck. Paul has lowered the tailgate and thumps it encouragingly, but Shep will venture only a few feet. Paul could make a quick grab for the dog, take his collar, and more or less drag him to the edge, at which point Shep would probably have no choice but to hop down. But there is something in the way the dog stands that warns Paul away from any sudden moves. The dog has stiffened his legs and his claws are extended, as he tries to gain a firmer purchase on the corrugated floor. He lowers his head and trains his eyes on Paul, and Paul stops trying to reason with the dog and just stares back. Man and beast stand there and regard each other silently, neither of them able to fathom what the other is thinking.

  “Paul! Paul!” Ruby has come running out of the house. She is carrying her flip-flops pressed to her chest and her feet are bare. Her hair, the color of weak tea, rises and falls, rises and falls.

  Paul turns toward her, with every possible feeling eclipsed by dread. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “Were you going?”

  “No, no. Of course not. Just looking in on this idiot.” He jabs his thumb toward Shep.

  “Oh, I got scared.” Ruby throws her arms around Paul’s waist and presses her ear against his midsection. He feels the strength of her, the childish, unharnessed power of her biological self. It is like standing in the center of a moving stream and feeling the throbbing pulse of the water as it shakes your bones.

  Using his forearm, Tom Butler pushes the dishes of dried toast and the unfinished cups of coffee and the sour wince of half grapefruit in its snug little bowl over to the far side of his kitchen table. Using a paper towel, he dries the area and places fifty sleeping pills and his notebook in front of him. He creaks back in the wooden chair and folds his arms over his chest. He is in his underwear and his Hawaiian shirt is unbuttoned. This bottle of pills, this blue spiral notebook, they are all that is left of the kingdom of his life. Even the dishes and cups have receded into the darkness, the clock ticking on the wall is invisible, the exhaust fan over the cookstove is running, just in case it takes them a while to find his body. As for the rest of his place (four rooms down and two rooms up in a stucco house near Griffith Park) it may as well have ceased to exist, the bed, the sofa, the TV, the Bowflex, the free weights, the safe in the wall, and the world beyond these walls, the houses, the stunned palm trees, the pale yellow sky, the ponies, the gamers, the oohs and the odds, the favorites, the long shots, the spreads, the people and the money, the money that is owed them and the money they owe. A dream, a dream, a dream, a dream you can’t remember.

  He empties the pills, ovoid and arctic white, and they sound a rattlesnake’s warning as they puddle onto the table. He spreads them out with an open hand, as if before a game of Scrabble, yet here, of course, every letter is the same, or would be if adios were a letter. Oops. He almost forgot. He needs something to wash these bad boys down.

  He gets up a little too quickly and his chair tips over, hits the blue-and-tan linoleum with a mighty bang. Well bang bang right back at you, Butler thinks, righting the chair. He opens the refrigerator. He and Tori never eat at home and it shows. There are a few packets of soy sauce, the liquid brown of old blood, an economy-size jar of yeast powder, and twenty or so bottles of various vitamins and supplements, which he glares at with fury. The vegetable drawer has been turned into a nest for beer bottles and he grabs a longneck and takes it back to the table with him. He has certain misgivings about washing the Ambien down with beer—his greatest fear is choking on his own spew—but taking these pills with tap water or even Fuji water is more depressing than suicide.

  He opens the beer and takes one pill, just to get the ball rolling. Life was better when you needed a church key to get into a fucking beer. He flips his notebook open, it’s first-day-of-school clean and crisp, and he uncaps his pen and writes:

  To: Tori Oliver

  From: Thomas V. Butler

  Subject: You are to Blame

  YOU are making me do this. YOUR loveless cruel cheating whoring sluttishly fucked-up unforgivable behavior is making me kill myself and you should be tried for murder. I will see you in Hell but you are so lucky lucky there probably is no Hell. Like Lennon said, no Hell below us, above us only Sky. I know there’s nothing more, it’s ashes to ashes dust to dust. I’ll tell you one thing Tori and that’s being in the gaming business all these years you really learn to hate all the bullshit people believe. The lucky tie, the lucky shirt, the lucky socks, how it’s good luck to dial the phone with your left hand and hold the receiver with your right when you’re placing a bet on an NFL game, best if you’re sitting down if you’re placing an AFC bet, or hockey, and a lizard skin belt is good luck if you’re betting baseball but reams you out good if you’re betting hoops.

  Butler stops to take another pill, swallowing it with barely any beer because the last thing he wants is a full bladder. What he wants her to find is a body, not a puddle.

  He has never before taken a sleeping pill; he shook these down from Sonia Dropkin, whose apartment he ransacked two nights ago. Sonia is fifty, with the birthmarked, splotchy skinniness and flyaway orange hair of a recluse slowly going mad. Family money, but not enough for her gambling. For someone who places as many bets as Sonia, she knows remarkably little about cards and next to nothing about sports. In Vegas, she plays blackjack and waits for the dealer to either sweep away her chips or match them with a pile of his own. The bets she places with Butler’s organization are invariably on underdogs—they all call her Dog Lady, in fact. She gives no evidence of interest in team histories, match-ups, and she seems utterly without sentiment. Her focus is entirely on long odds or fistfuls of points. She might actually believe that these odds are figured and handicaps granted somehow at random, or the whole operation is in the hands of imbeciles. She doesn’t realize there’s a science to all of this and she also doesn’t realize that in gambling as in life itself the favorites generally win. Sonia, therefore, usually is running about two grand in the red. But she always comes up with it, until recently when the two turned into four and su
ddenly she was carrying almost 9K in debt, that stuff can get away from you: wildfire indebtedness is what Butler himself used to call it, wildfire stoked by the Santa Ana winds of bad decision making.

  Butler visited Sonia on the assumption that she was going to be making a significant payoff—at least four grand—and when Sonia gave him an envelope with six twenty-dollar bills and three tens in it, he patrolled her airless and askew apartment looking for something of value to take, and also wanting to scare a little sense into her: without fear, the whole system broke down. If she’d ever had anything of value it was probably in the pawnshop. She wanted him to take her watch. She slipped it off and handed it to him, but the point of grabbing her stuff was to make her miserable, not to collect the bric-a-brac of her slipping-down life. It wasn’t even a watch, it was a Swatch. Come on!

  He settled on taking her meds—sleeping pills, a couple of asthma inhalers, and a blood thinner. He told her he was coming back in three days and she’d better have at least four thousand dollars to give him, and then he yanked her hair, hard, like starting a lawn mower. He half-expected that orange mop to come right off her head, but it was rooted and she screamed in pain and called him a dick. This is what I do for a living, he shouted at her. His own passion surprised him; usually, he was on automatic pilot. They don’t get paid, I don’t get paid, he said to her. You place a bunch of idiotic bets? Find a fucking Bingo parlor somewhere and leave us alone. Sonia was massaging her scalp; her arcade eyes were wet with tears. She asked him to give her back her pills and when he said no she asked for the inhalers and he said no to that, too. And then she said she’d be in trouble without the blood thinners, she was a candidate for an embolism. Well good luck on that, he said. She caught on that she wasn’t going to get any breaks and she spit on the floor, her own floor, right in her own house. Do me a favor, she said. Take those sleeping pills, take them all. Put them in your filthy mouth and swallow them. You’re a worthless human being and we don’t want you here with us anymore.

  The idea stuck. It went around and around in his mind like a horrible jingle you can’t stop hearing, a little tune that somehow has a purchase on your consciousness and there’s nothing you can do to dislodge it. You can’t stop it and you can’t even trump it with another ditty, even one equally inane.

  He takes one more pill and promises himself that next time he will take ten then ten and then ten again. But for now he needs to hold on to consciousness, which comes slanting into the darkened room of his mind like light through venetian blinds.

  It makes me sick that you are the closest thing to family. But I guess if mom and dad were still around or I had a sister or brother I’d have to feel Oh shit this is going to make them feel bad. But you’re the only one who is going to feel bad and maybe it’s because when you finally get your cruel little body out of bed you’re going to find me and it’s going to be too bad for you because you’re going to have to call the fire department and the police and wait here with my CORPSE until they come. Too bad for you you whore. Too bad for you you destroyer. And I fucking loved you, I gave you my heart.

  Butler stops to read what he has written. The page looks as if it were floating in water. At first he thinks the pills have already started taking effect, but he realizes he is crying. He tears the sheet off its spiral spine and rips it in half and then in half again and then again. He takes two more pills—that makes four—and a discreet little swallow of beer.

  He throws the shredded suicide note into the garbage pail under the sink and realizes he needs to piss. He does not want to be found with a wet lap but in order to empty his bladder one last time he must steal into the bedroom and pass by Tori in bed on his way to the toilet. She came in about three this morning and refused to talk to him about where she had been or about anything else. Her face was streaked with tears; she was carrying one of her shoes, broken at the heel. He forced her to kiss him—it was like drinking beer out of an ashtray. Then she pushed him away and threw herself into bed and was asleep in five seconds, still wearing her little lilac cardigan with the pearlized buttons.

  Now it is nine in the morning and she sleeps still. He stands in front of her. Her lips are parted. Her greedy little hands clasp the satin border of the blanket, as if she were worried that someone was going to try and take it away from her.

  “Hello, Tori,” he says, standing close to her side of the bed.

  She sleeps.

  “You’re a murdering whore,” he says, his voice at the decibel level of normal conversation. He doesn’t want to cater to her deep, drunken snooze, but he doesn’t want to awaken her, either. “And that’s too bad,” he continues. “It’s really a shame.”

  The urgency to urinate increases, and Butler unzips his fly and takes a couple of steps closer to Tori. Standing there on the thin line between living and dying is like being on a mountain peak. He can see farther than ever before. He can see the lay of the land, its emptiness, and how it’s been trashed, and he is certain as never before of how alone he is. Above us only sky.

  Imagine all the people…The keening, pleading lyric, and the memory of Lennon’s voice…Imagine all the pee-pee, and suddenly he hears a stunned laugh that turns out to be his own. Imagine all the pee-pee. And then he realizes what he is going to do and he unzips his pants and hurriedly takes out his dick. Maybe he should make a real effort to wake Tori up. A big, slow, hazy No, dark orange and veined with blue, dissolving at the edges.

  Actually this could work. This will be better than the note.

  He goes back to the kitchen and sweeps the sleeping pills into his hand, and grabs the beer with his other hand. He stumbles. His mind has taken its first nibble of its own demise.

  Back in the bedroom, the air like dirty velvet, he silently sets the beer bottle on her night table, alongside The Celestine Prophecy, a sleep mask, a little bottle of Visine. His fly is still unzipped, his penis half-exposed. He pulls it forward, but in all the movement back and forth his desire to urinate has become elusive.

  Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin’ for to carry me home.

  Ah, good, that’s doing it. He hears Eric Clapton’s voice singing the words along with him, a beautiful duet, with the guitar lines wrapping them both in bright silver. And he can feel his urine, silver, too, rising like mercury in a thermometer. What women don’t understand about men, Butler thinks, is how often we defy gravity. We must go up up in a world where everything is pushing down.

  Swinglowsweetchariotcomin’ fortocarrymehome.

  Fucking Clapton, man. That guitar. Even messed up he was God.

  Butler moves stealthily, ever closer, until the slit of his penis is three inches from Tori’s sleeping face, with its worried brow and hawk nose. He picks up the beer, takes another swig, and then looks up at the low ceiling, blue and wavy as water. I looked over Jordan and what did I see? A band of angels coming after me.

  Thomas spreads his arms. Beer pours out of the bottle’s open mouth, fizzing and hissing onto the carpet. His legs tremble and he thinks for a moment he will fall to his knees. He hears voices. Something is happening. When you walk to the border of life, things occur. You have entered a secret place.

  “What’s going on?” Tori asks, lifting herself up on her elbows. Her eyes are creases. She kicks the covers a little to one side, to free one bare foot. “What are you doing?”

  Butler staggers to the window, zipping himself up. A black-and-white from the LAPD has pulled in front of the house. An old lady he’s never noticed before is standing in her bathrobe on her front porch, waiting to see what will happen. The mailman has been stopped by one of the cops, and he is nodding agreeably and stepping back and then completely turning around.

  The cop who turned the letter carrier around is joined by another cop, even younger. In their contoured britches and gleaming knee-high boots—or were they in plain clothes? Coming for to carry me home. Butler will never quite be able to keep this life-saving moment clear in his own mind, this fucked-up miracle, this fully armed
band of angels sent for him and him alone. The two cops have a few words with each other and one of them points to Butler’s house and the other one rests the heel of his left hand on the butt of his revolver and they make their way to Butler’s front door.

  Now that they have a positive ID on him they can proceed with placing him under arrest for the murder of William Claff, in the town of Tarrytown, New York.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Usually the dreams Paul remembers are the morning dreams, the often nonsensical neural narratives he creates to keep himself asleep. This morning, with Kate already out of bed and Shep trying to bark a squirrel down from a tree, he is dreaming that Annabelle is telling him that they are going to dig up their father so that he may be buried next to their mother’s grave in Kent. As he objects to this plan, Shep’s barking becomes more insistent, pulling Paul halfway out of sleep, and when he returns to his dream he is walking behind his sister as they mount the steps to their father’s First Avenue apartment and Paul is saying to Annabelle, “He’s still here?” but she does not answer. My sister has a nice ass, he dreamthinks and then they are on the third floor where droopy, bedraggled-looking people are milling about the landing in undershirts, smoking cigarettes, drinking strong-smelling coffee. “Are you here to see your father?” one of them asks, a skinny, unshaved guy, with something ingratiating and evil about him. Paul follows Annabelle inside but she’s no longer there and as he walks through the rooms in his father’s apartment there are paintings lined up on the floor, leaning against the walls, and he hears some dog barking, a dog he cannot see, and he stops and looks for Annabelle and now she’s back in the dream but as a younger self, maybe twenty years old, and he says to her, “He’s still here?” to which she answers with such intensity that she is practically hissing at him, “He’s always here,” at which point Paul awakens, and lies quietly on his back in the warm bed, surprised to find that his heart is squirming with anxiety and that he is near tears.