Raveling

by Peter Moore Smith

  “Well, he isn’t here.” I doused the wood with the fluid, then dropped a lit match on top of it. The whole thing exploded into flames. “Is that how he does it?”

  “That’s the way it’s done.”

  She was being condescending, I knew, treating me like a child. But for some reason I didn’t mind. I was probably acting like one. I glanced at the treeline. From here we could see the ocean, and I wondered if my psychosis might cause me to fear the water as well as the woods. The waves licked the shore. They receded. They came back. They went away again. I wasn’t afraid of the waves in Santa Monica, I remembered, where I sat for hours—days, actually—on the beach, mesmerized by their repetition. As a matter of fact, I had walked into them, hadn’t I, totally unafraid. But I wasn’t psychotic then, either, I told myself. Just depressed. I felt jittery. I had brought some books—an old literature anthology, a science-fiction novel. But I had left them in the seaplane, too.

  Even though it was uncomfortably warm, Patricia and I sat by the fire until the wood began to burn evenly.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she said. “I can start cooking something, anything you—”

  “No,” I told her. “I’m not hungry.” I hadn’t had anything but the coffee she had given me on the plane, but for some reason, probably nervousness, I wasn’t hungry.

  “Would you like to play cards?”

  “Patricia, I’m having a bit of trouble concentrating right now,” I confessed.

  “Are you—”

  “I left my medication on the plane,” I said. “I mean, don’t worry about me or anything. I’ll be all right. It’s just that—”

  “You’re a little nervous, I understand.”

  I nodded, then I pushed a little stick deeper into the fire. Was the fire going to come alive somehow? I wondered. Would it reach out for me the way I thought the woods had at home? There were so many possibilities for craziness here. The sea, the fire, the wind, the earth.

  All the elements.

  “Let me know if you need anything or, or just want to lie down.”

  “I’m all right. I think I am, anyway.” I played with the fire some more.

  “He’ll be back soon.”

  Patricia and I waited, sitting on the sandy ground, toying with bits of wood. I got up from time to time to walk through the little forest to the other side. I circumnavigated the beach. The sun moved in its natural arc from the sky’s highest point to the west. A wind rose from the east, blowing across the little island, causing the leaves of the trees to shiver and rustle. I wondered, had to wonder, if I was imagining it.

  In the woods behind my mother’s house, Katherine moved slowly, a step at a time, trying to think like a psychotic. Where would I have put the evidence? she asked herself. She had never been out here before. In fact, she had hardly been inside any forest. She certainly had never been in one like this: a suburban strip of deciduous maples and oaks, on one side the highway, on the other a cul-de-sac of houses. The season was nearly over now, the leaves all descended and crackling, frozen underfoot. It was winter, to be truthful, and the cold moved through the tree trunks like a million slippery eels gliding around water weeds at the speed of wind. Katherine tried to remember the way I had described these woods to her. She knew that when I was at the hospital I had imagined the trees creeping forward, moving toward me almost imperceptibly. I thought they would swallow me, lash out across the expanse of asphalt highway and draw me inside the way an amoeba swallows its food. She knew how I had pretended to be the wolf boy when I was little, free of language, untouched by humans. Is that what I was afraid of? she thought. That I’d be swallowed by the woods and become the wolf boy again?

  Katherine asked herself this: where would a wolf boy hide a plastic bag of evidence?

  It was an absurd question.

  Near my mother’s house she found the path and stepped along it gingerly, trying not to disturb anything or make a noise. She had the strange feeling that she could be discovered out here and get in trouble. Then, just beyond a thicket of bushes, she saw a clearing. In the distance, she could hear the highway, the hiss of tires, the whir of engines. She imagined our boyhoods taking place in these woods, Eric’s and mine. Eric’s first kisses with girls. My first joint with Eric. There in front of her was the broken concrete pipe. Was this the same one? It had to be. Around it, cigarette butts and crushed beer cans littered the earth. Katherine looked inside the hollow, but there was nothing in it besides some old, disintegrating Penthouse magazines. She sat down on the pipe for a moment and put her hands on her knees. There seemed to be a stillness enfolding her, a quiet like the inside of a trunk. Beyond the highway sounds was something quieter. It was the sound of the branches moving in the wind. It was the sound of winter birds fluttering high up and of leaves settling. It was a single, simple pulse in her ears. It was a stillness Katherine could understand going crazy in.

  And now it was broken—Katherine was almost thankful—by a pair of girls’ voices. Up ahead, two junior high girls laughed their way into the clearing and, seeing Katherine there, stopped talking. They moved past her, heads down, one of them muttering a faint, “Hello.” One was blond and thin, the other a brunette and heavier, wearing far too much makeup. Katherine only smiled, remembering her own dreadful junior high experience. Then she had a thought. She got up and called after them.

  “Excuse me!” Her voice felt loud and awkward. “Excuse me!”

  The girls stopped. They turned around and looked at her, astonished.

  “Excuse me,” Katherine said again. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  One of them, the dark-haired one, looked frightened. “Sure,” she said. “Okay.”

  “Do you come through these woods often?”

  “Sometimes,” the blond one said, more boldly.

  The other only shrugged.

  “Do you live around here?”

  “We live on Willow Road,” the brunette said. She spoke as if confessing.

  “Do you walk through here every day?”

  “Almost,” the frightened one said.

  The other said, “Not every day.”

  “Did you ever see a man hanging around in here? Sandy-brown hair, about twenty-five, thirty years old, around two or three months ago?”

  “The Airie guy?”

  “You know him?” Katherine said.

  The one who had been silent was now bold. “He’s the one who went crazy, right? My mother told me.”

  Neighborhood gossip, Katherine thought. She said, “I’m his psychologist.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh my God, did he do something wrong?”

  “No,” Katherine said. “No, nothing like that. I was just wondering if you ever saw him in the woods, and if you did, what part of the woods you saw him in, where he might have hung out.”

  “He used to just walk around, really. I figured he was harmless.”

  “Didn’t they find him out by the highway?”

  “Do kids hang out by the highway?” Katherine asked.

  “Certain kids do,” the brunette said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Katherine wasn’t sure, but she nodded anyway.

  “There’s a tunnel under the highway,” the blond one said. “I would never go in there. But some girls go in there all the time.”

  “I see.”

  “Edwina Carlson goes in there.”

  “Who’s she?” Katherine said.

  “Just a girl.”

  “Can you tell me which way the tunnel is?”

  “Just walk straight to the highway,” the blond one said, “and then walk in the direction of the shopping plaza.”

  “Are you really going to go there?” the brunette said.

  “Why not?”

  “Be careful.”

  “And look out for the Tunnel Man.”

  She walked away from the two girls cautiously, a little frightened now. But then she chided
herself, how stupid it was to let a couple of teenagers scare her like that. What could possibly be so scary in the tunnel under the highway? That’s where the bad kids go, Katherine said to herself, the pot smokers and the girls who allow boys to touch them under their clothes. She remembered secret places in Central Park when she was in high school, the nervous laughing inside a thicket of bushes, tremulous hands groping around beneath her shirt, how a boy could lose his breath by just touching the rough material of her bra. The wind was stronger now, bracing, the afternoon wearing away. Following the path the girls had been walking, Katherine found the highway and began to travel north, the sounds of late afternoon traffic whipping by over the embankment to her right. It was nearing rush hour.

  She looked around. This was where they found me, she realized, alone and raving, incoherent, psychotic, on this path near the highway. This must have been where I had hidden the evidence, too. Katherine closed her eyes and tried to imagine what I had been feeling that day. I believed, at that point, that Eric was out to kill me. I was clutching a plastic Wonderbread bag with a red sneaker and a knife inside it. I felt that the woods had swallowed me. I was aware that my mother had cancer forming around her optical nerve. All my life I had believed my sister was taken out here somewhere and killed by my own brother.

  Where would someone in that state of mind hide something? Katherine asked herself.

  Then, far up ahead, she saw it, the tunnel. It must be in there, she thought. I must have hidden the evidence somewhere inside the tunnel. There was a trickle of water coming out. In the spring, she told herself, it must fill halfway up with the thaw. Katherine had to step on some carefully placed rocks to cross the deep puddle forming at its base. She poked her head around the corner and saw that it was just large enough for a normal person to stand inside. Anyone over six feet would have had to duck.

  She stepped in. There seemed to be something blocking the other end, because the light was dim, darker than it should have been at this time of day.

  “Hey,” a voice shouted.

  Katherine squinted. Was someone down there?

  “Hey,” the voice said again.

  “Hello?” Katherine said.

  “Get… the… flying… fuck…”

  “I’m just looking around,” said Katherine. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “… out… of… my…”

  “I don’t mean any harm.”

  “… tunnel.” There was a man, she could see now, standing in the middle of the long tube. He had emerged, like the billy goat gruff, from an enclosure of cardboard and plastic.

  “My name is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy,” she said to the silhouette. “I’m a psychologist.”

  “Katherine DeQuincey-Joy,” the man said, “you are a major pain in my ass.” It was the voice of a forty-year-old man.

  “Can I ask who you are?”

  He came forward, sloshing through the liquid grime.

  Katherine took a step back. How fast could she move through the woods, she asked herself, and get to the highway?

  “I am no one,” he said. “No-fucking-body.”

  She could see him clearly now. He was homeless, evidently, or, more accurately, this was his home, and he wore the usual overgrown thicket of black and gray facial hair, the heavy coat, the orange wool hat. “Of course you’re somebody,” Katherine said, thinking, he must know everything that’s around here. Perhaps he saw something. Perhaps he had seen me that day, she thought. “I was just wondering if you could help me.”

  “Help you?” His tone was derisive.

  “Yes,” she said. “Help me.”

  It was a good ten degrees colder in here. She shivered.

  “Why would I?”

  “To be nice?”

  He laughed. “I am the man who lives in the tunnel and frightens children. I am not nice.” There was a halo of light forming behind him. The homeless always made Katherine think of biblical figures. It was their hair, she thought. “I am the direct opposite of nice.”

  “I just have a couple of questions.”

  He rolled his eyes, and she could see his whites in the gray light of the tunnel. “Hit me,” he said. “Lay it on me.”

  “There was a, a man found out here, right around here, anyway, I think,” Katherine said. “His name is Pilot. He was, he was sick, you know, seeing things and—”

  “I know Pilot,” the Tunnel Man said. “I know him.”

  “You do?”

  “What do you want?” he laughed now. “His stuff?”

  Katherine couldn’t believe it. “Do you have it?”

  “No… I do not have it. But perhaps… perhaps I know where it can be found,” he said teasingly.

  “Where?” She stepped forward, his face coming into clearer focus in the dark. She could see that he was actually handsome, with delicate features beneath all that hair.

  He threw a hand in the air, startling her. “I cannot tell you my name and I will not tell you my name,” the Tunnel Man began, “but I will tell you that I know the Pilot of whom you speak, I know the secrets and the daylight particles that fall through the cracks in hospital floors, and that I knew, know, will forever be advised, of where he left things, where things are hidden and placed accordingly, each along their lines, by their kind, color coded.” He smiled at Katherine, yellow toothed. This was an act, she knew. He had been far more lucid just a moment ago. He was pretending to be insane. This was schtick.

  “Pilot told you where he hid his things?”

  “He hid himself, didn’t he?” the Tunnel Man said. “Pilot of the golden light, dreamer of the weary dark, trembler under blankets, didn’t he? He hid himself well.”

  Katherine heard the reason beneath the Tunnel Man’s strange locution. From here she could smell him, as well, the alcohol stench. “I’m Pilot’s friend, too,” she said. “A good friend.”

  “Friends are found in the places of transport,” he said, “at an hour when only the criminals are expected to depart.”

  “Pilot was your friend?”

  “… of a friend of a friend of a friend…”

  Katherine smiled at him. “I’m wondering if you might help me find where Pilot hid his things. It’s very important, and he asked me to help him. Can you help me help our friend Pilot?”

  The Tunnel Man walked back and forth quickly within the confines of the small tunnel, his feet splashing in the water. Katherine wondered why he hadn’t died of exposure by now. “Thinking, thinking, thinking,” he was saying. “How do I know about you? What are your credentials?”

  “Well,” Katherine started to say. “I’m—”

  But he cut her off. “How do I know that Pilot is living and that a simulacrum has not been placed in his place and that you are not party to the council of time, when all lost—”

  Katherine held out her hand. She reached into her purse and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, extending it toward him. “He wanted me to give you this,” she said. “He said you could use it.”

  The Tunnel Man looked at the money, his eyes narrowing comically, a smile forming beneath his beard.

  “He wanted to offer his help to you,” she said.

  The Tunnel Man moved forward, toward Katherine, shuffling, sloshing. “He thought,” he said. “Pilot—he’s a thinker.”

  “Pilot is very thoughtful,” Katherine said, “yes.”

  Close enough to reach, he snatched the bill, brought it to his nose, and sniffed. More schtick, Katherine realized.

  “Will you help Pilot now?” she said. “Will you?”

  The twenty disappeared somewhere inside the Tunnel Man’s layers of clothing, and now his arms made little circles in the air. “Helpfulness is next to cleanliness,” he was saying, “cleanliness is connected to the funny bone, the funny bone’s connected to the brain stem, and the brain stem leads down, down, down in the ground, the underneath of things thinking, always thinking.”

  “Where did Pilot hide his things?” Katherine asked hopefully.

&
nbsp; The Tunnel Man looked incredulous. “I just told you,” he said. “Didn’t I?”

  “I didn’t understand.” Was it lost somewhere in his word salad? Katherine wondered.

  “Understanding the moon landing.”

  “Where?” Katherine asked.

  The Tunnel Man shook his head.

  “Will you show me?” she pled.

  “I knew Pilot,” the Tunnel Man said, his face held up. “He came and talked to me until the winds and trees made him afraid and my tunnel turned to him, curling, a wave over him, unsmiling, and so I went out and said hello to the highway, and they came for him.”

  “You went for help?”

  “Pilot is all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Katherine said. “He’s with his father.”

  The Tunnel Man smiled. “Fathers are feathers.”

  “Show me,” Katherine said. “Show me where he hid his things. Please.”

  He looked left and he looked right. He touched his fingers methodically, one by one, each dirty fingertip touching the next. “Can you return?” he said. “On the day after the day after the—”

  “Can I—”

  “I’ll have to find you the things,” he said lucidly, “all the evidence, the naughty evidence, and if you come back in three days”—he held three blackened fingers up—“I’ll have everything ready for you.”

  “You can’t show me now?”

  “Three days,” the Tunnel Man said. “A blink.”

  Katherine wondered if it would even be worth it to come back here in three days. Was this homeless man even remotely competent? Was he lying? Did he really know me? Was he only hoping for more money? Katherine smiled as warmly as she could. This man, the Tunnel Man, either didn’t know or he was simply unwilling to tell her now. “Three days,” Katherine said. “And then I’ll be back.”

  On Nowhere Island the night came and the light dropped from the sky and there was no sign of my father. Walking down to the beach every fifteen minutes, my hand over my brow in a salute to the descending sun, I squinted my eyes for any speck of darkness in the corner of the sky that could be his little seaplane. There was nothing, though, only the cold creeping in through the medium of a strengthening wind. Patricia had packed sweaters, at least. I kept my one eye on the treeline around the small clearing where the tent was, waiting for it to move an inch, to creep forward a single millimeter. Would it strike out? Would it grab me or Patricia? I couldn’t remember then if I had ever actually seen the woods strike out in my craziness or if I had only been waiting for them to do it.