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The Man In White
It was after school had let out for summer vacation on his last day in the eighth grade that Tad first met the man who called himself Daddy. In the times that followed, Tad would learn of a good many other monikers, many of them self-applied, but Daddy was how he’d first introduced himself, and it was the name that Tad would forever after associate with the man in the woods. It was late May, and unseasonably warm. Tad had decided not to take the bus home that day, partly out of a desire to avoid his brother, and partly because he’d wanted some time to himself, some time to crunch the numbers and see what they added up to. Lately he’d been feeling that a phase of his life was drawing to a close and another was soon to begin. He would leave middle school behind and shake off another of childhood’s vestiges, plodding on toward the adult world that would spread itself rippling out before him just over the next rise like the folds of a magic carpet. But high school was still three months off. This was to be the Summer In Between.
He was covered in sweat before he’d made it half the distance from school to the welcome shade of the first trees that marked the edge of his family’s property, and this was getting on toward late afternoon, well past the sun’s most oppressive hours. It made him think of his father, who sitting at the dinner table in hundred-degree heat was fond of saying, “I’m hot. Anyone else hot?” Walt Surrey’s vernacular consisted of a few dozen platitudes of this sort that he recycled ad nauseam. Presumably he’d come out of the womb saying, “I’m hot. Anyone else hot?” Tad had an elaborate running bet with his younger sister Daisy concerning his father’s adages. On the first day of each new month they drew slips of paper from a hat with twenty of the most popular ones written on them, and then throughout the month, whenever Walt let one slip where both of them could hear it, the one who’d selected that particular saying would get a point. At the end of the month the loser would buy the winner an ice-cream cone. Casey, their elder brother, didn’t participate, but then, Casey detested every game but football, especially ones that reeked suspiciously of imagination.
When Tad had reached the border of the woods he stopped by the crude plank fence and set his book bag on the ground beside him. He used the lower half of his shirt to mop at the sweat on his brow, then he leaned against the fence, facing the trees. He was of average height for his age, slim, with straight auburn hair cut long in the back and a barely noticeable downy fuzz of the same color just starting to make an appearance on his upper lip; his eyes were a deep, gold-tinged hazel. They projected a keen intellect and had the tendency to twinkle whenever something was heard or said that tickled his dry, somewhat ironic sense of humor. He wore faded blue jeans, heavily patched at the knees, and a gray gym shirt with the emblem of a snarling puma over the left breast and beneath it the words Feral School District.
Now he tilted his head back, filling his lungs, and stretched, stretched all the way to his full height and up on his tiptoes as though he would break free of gravity’s restraints and go sailing away like a seed pod in an updraft, over the hills, streams and pastures that he knew so well. There was nothing on the horizon but pick-up softball games, skinned knees and fireflies. He could smell fresh cut grass, pine and wood smoke, flowers in bloom. He could hear the chattering of a fat old squirrel, the call of larks in the boughs somewhere above, the drone of bees busy at their work. And for a moment, he thought he could hear, too, something else. He opened his eyes and faced the green and gold maze of the trees. Yes, it was there. He tilted his head and tried to quiet the rest of his senses. Harder to detect, but present still, like the slightest of amplitude modulations speaking to something deep inside him, thrumming him like a bow string. He chuckled at it as though it were some surprising but welcome friend come traipsing out of the woods to pay him a visit. He could feel it like a warming tickle, starting in his chest, at his core, and radiating outward, marching down his arms and legs, making the new grown hairs stand up, and making his fingers jump and quiver excitedly. Was it a pleasant sensation? Yes, he thought it was. If he was wary of it, he was wary in the way that one is when experiencing something delightful, yet unfamiliar.
Tad turned his head to the right and scrutinized the familiar path, the driveway between the trees that led back to his family’s house about another half mile further along. The path was easily broad enough to admit Walt Surrey’s battered old pickup truck, or broad enough so that Tad and several others could have walked down it comfortably, shoulder to shoulder. It saw enough use so that it wasn’t the least bit overgrown, and it spoke of familiarity and the ordinary. Shady and picturesque, it spoke of comfort. But it was not from down that path that the feeling originated. Tad felt sure of that, in the same inarguable way that he was sure what he was feeling was not imagination, and a moment later, when he picked up his book bag and turned left, moving slightly uphill and toward the denser section of trees, he felt fiercely glad, as though forces outside of himself were silently approving his new course and were watching him knowingly and wisely. The absurdity of this thought brought a smile to his lips. The notion of some benevolent entity looking down at him and gently prodding him this way or that was simply ludicrous. This was just another new game he’d invented, with no basis in reality, the same as all the others that had been established residents within his mind for as far back as he could remember. All of this he told himself, approaching the trees, but the feeling would be neither discarded nor ignored, and he found he didn’t want to do either.
He stopped when still a few paces from the green wall which reared up now before him. Here there was no path, and the trees grew closer together than nearly any other spot he was familiar with on the Surrey’s property; also there were thorns and brambles in tangled clumps, some reaching higher than his waist. He mopped the sweat from his face again, and now that his feet were no longer moving forward he felt a slight sense of disappointment. The feeling was real, but strangely enough, he felt that it was not his disappointment he was feeling. That was completely silly, of course. But as he stood there contemplating this, all of a sudden there was a great rush, like a wind behind him, though he felt no breeze at that moment, and the leaves on the branches were still. Yet it was as though a wall had risen up behind him and pressed him sternly forward, and he took two small steps, teetering like someone at the edge of a steep drop. And at the same time he heard something, or thought he did, a sound that he knew he had never heard before, and yet was somehow familiar too. It was a sort of sudden explosion of noise, similar, he thought, to the emissions that burst from the throats of his father and a roomful of his friends when they were sprawled around the living room watching the game and the kicker pushed the ball wide or there was a sudden critical turnover. The language of frustration, released all at once, suddenly, violently. This was a similar noise, but its duration was shorter. It slammed against his eardrums and simply evaporated.
He spun around, hands clenching, but there was no one, not a soul in sight, only bees and butterflies attending to their daily simplicities. He had never been on this section of the property up ahead, and there was no reason for him to be there now. Except for a feeling, a desire which at that moment would have had him rush forward into an electric fence, had there been one in front of him. And step forward he did, entering the woods by ducking under a
gnarled branch loaded with thorns. Immediately he felt the sensation again, flooding him, a combination of joy and relief, coupled with the understanding that moving forward, in this direction, was the finest, best thing he had ever done.
Ten minutes had passed, perhaps, from the time he had fought his way into the woods, when abruptly his sneakers squelched into thick, brackish mud. “Fuck!” he said under his breath, and stopped. Ahead of him the taller trees were considerably more spread out, with beards of dark slimy algae climbing their trunks, and there were several pools of standing water, with clouds of midges and flies swarming and buzzing. A bullfrog belched once, and another answered it further off. He had arrived at the marshland that bordered the southwestern part of the Surrey’s property. He swung his book bag down from his shoulder, unzipped it, and fished around for a moment in its innards, eventually producing a rather mealy looking specimen of a Macintosh apple. He took a bite and presently began to swat at his ears and neck. The midges had found him and were now descending in droves. Looking about for an escape route, his eyes came to rest on a sort of broad bank skirting the water’s edge. He stepped onto it and began to pick his way gingerly along. Looking to his left again, he saw that he was no more than a few feet from a rusted barbed wire fence which ran as far as he could see in either direction. It wasn’t much of an obstacle, or much of a fence, for that matter, just three strands of barbed wire, the highest at about his face level, the second at his midsection, the lowest at his knees. Every few feet a plain wooden post stuck in the ground. On the other side of the fence he could see what appeared to be a ridge of solid ground meandering away from him, surrounded on either side by swamp. Further up on the right, the trees were not spaced so closely together and the ground looked more solid. Also there were no thorns to be seen. The options, then, beyond plunging off into the bog, seemed to be to scale the fence or go back the way he had come. As he was in eminent danger of being devoured alive, he had to make the decision quickly. And it was at that moment that he felt it again, that strange but irresistible caress, that slightest of tantalizing sensations, as though something was urging him along, playfully but insistently. Biting into the apple and thus securing it in his mouth, he reached up and grasped the top strand of wire in between two of the barbs and hoisted himself up. This required a great deal of balance. He found himself tipping backward for a moment, wobbling like a trapeze artist, then he managed to get his feet under him and crouched tenuously atop the wire before hopping down to land safely on the other side.
He was now off his family’s property, he knew, and this knowledge alone thrilled him. After a certain distance he was able to begin drifting to his right, toward more solid ground, and gradually he made his way uphill and away from the swampier sections. It felt differently over here, he thought. It could have been his imagination, perhaps, but it seemed the colors of the trees and the leaves were slightly altered. Not so much as to be really obvious, the difference, maybe, between yellow-green and green-yellow in Daisy’s big box of Crayolas back at the house. He turned to his right and began walking uphill between the trees, heading north along the fence line. He was still sweating, though it was cooler here, and he could feel several bites on his forearms and the back of his neck beginning to itch and swell.
He marched uphill, the mud on his sneakers and the bottoms of his jeans drying quickly in the heat. The fence ran along beside him, a few yards away, more or less in a straight line. He assumed that he was on the McKenton’s land, and that worried him somewhat. Many of the farmers in the county kept dogs to guard their property against trespassers, and Roy McKenton was no exception. Why am I here, anyway, filthy and drenched in sweat, when I could be sitting at home in the kitchen with a cold glass of lemonade? He had reached the top of the hill, and he stood there resting, his back against a trunk. It was then that it hit him again, blindsiding him, a pull like a magnet this time. He could feel it yanking at his chest and shoulders, like a headstrong child taking him by the hand and trying stubbornly to drag him to where it wanted him to go, and he was delighted again by the strangeness of the feeling. It’s like discovering a sixth sense you were never aware of. And so once again he followed where it led him, and again was met with an intense feeling of pleasure, and the assurance from something, somewhere, that by going this way, everything will be all right. It was to the west that he now found himself moving, away from the fence and further from the Surrey’s property, along the top of the hill. It was getting now into the final stage of the afternoon, and the shadows were gradually lengthening as the sun dipped further in the cloudless sky. He felt no fatigue at all, despite all the exercise he had gotten in the past hour, and might easily have gone on walking for some time, when suddenly he glanced up, halted, and dropped his apple to the ground, almost crying out in surprise.
He had come to a small clearing of sorts, almost perfectly circular. There was a large stump, nearly in its exact center, about three feet high, and there was someone sitting on it. Tad had stopped just at the edge of the clearing, and now he fairly gaped, riveted to the spot, for never in his life had he come across an image that remotely resembled the one before him. It was a man, in a perfectly spotless white tuxedo, a smart waistcoat with shining onyx buttons, matching shoes, immaculately polished, and a foppish top hat of the same color. His legs were dangling over the side of the stump, and across his lap was a cane of some dark wood, with a glittering stone at its head that looked for all the world like a diamond at least the size of a fist. But it can’t be a real diamond, can it? He had on tightly fitting white gloves, and his hands were clasped neatly in his lap. But what had really caused Tad’s fright was that the man had been looking straight ahead, and had presumably been watching his approach for some time before Tad had ever been aware of his presence. And the man was smiling. Nor indeed was it a little smile, but a tremendous grin stretching from ear to ear. The only visible skin, that of the man’s face, was extremely pale; the face itself was long and narrow, with very high, pronounced cheekbones. He had full, pouting lips of a deep, distinctly feminine red, a sharp chin, and hardly any eyebrows at all, merely a few thin strands of white hair over each eye. But it was the eyes themselves that caused Tad to very nearly bolt back in the direction that he had come as fast as his legs might carry him. They seemed, quite literally, to be too large for the man’s face. They bulged most unpleasantly, in a way that made Tad think of rows of fish hanging in shop windows with the heads still attached. They were an extremely pale blue, of the sort that is sometimes referred to as cornflower blue. And they were fixed, not blinking, directly on him.
For several heartbeats nothing was said. Indeed, all sound in the forest seemed to have halted altogether. Not a bird chirped or insect buzzed. There was no wind. All was perfectly quiet and still. There was just enough time, in fact, for Tad to realize that the feeling had altogether stopped, or rather vanished, and that he was completely and undoubtedly on his own again. On his own, that is, except for the peculiar creature that seemed to have materialized in front of him. Blue eyes met hazel, unblinking. It was the man on the stump that broke the silence. “Ah!” he cried, his head jerking to the side in a way that seemed unintentional, causing Tad to flinch again. “Um! Hey, hup, ha! Yes! Whaddaya know, whaddaya do, whaddaya say, old sport, old top, old paint?”
Tad groped for a response and eventually decided on, “Hello.”
“Yes! Yes, yes, yes! Well you might say hello, and a right poorly hello it is. Why, I’d say it’s about as poorly of a specimen as I’ve yet encountered!” He bobbed his head up and down, once, twice, birdlike. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you yourself are about as poorly of a specimen as ever me old eyes see! Why, I’d bet American dollars you wouldn’t last ten seconds in the ring with a starving Ethiopian child of five!”
“Well, that’s your opinion,” Tad said, starting to get over his fright and feeling understandably annoyed by this comment.
“Indeed it is, and I thank you for pointing that
out! Bright young lad that y’are. You know what they say, opinions are like assholes. Everybody is one.” Tad opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. His newfound companion was looking at the fallen apple core lying on the ground. “It appears you’ve fumbled your fruit.”
Tad licked his lips and regained the power of speech with an effort. “Yes, thanks to you.” He still wasn’t entirely sure that this person wasn’t some bizarre figment of his imagination conjured up by a sudden onset of heatstroke.
“Me! Base slanderer! I am not to blame for your pestilential clumsiness. It’s a trait passed down on the maternal side of the family; any Oxford scholar will tell you the same. Go complain to your mother. ‘Twas her who gave you the rickets, too, I shouldn’t think.”
“You startled me,” Tad said, ignoring the rest of this rather meaningless prattling. He had begun to rub the palms of his hands together in a way that he normally reserved for giving oral reports in school. “I thought I was alone. What are you doing out here in the middle of the woods, anyway, dressed like that? This is private property,” he added as an afterthought, crossing his arms over his narrow chest and fixing this person with his most authoritative glare. He had decided for the moment that the best way to handle a situation where he’d been beset suddenly by the extremely illogical was by throwing as much logic at it as possible. Considering who he was dealing with, trying to counter in such a way would likely prove a mistake, but Tad had no way of knowing this.
“Private?” said the man in white, who was smiling again in that slightly mad way. As he spoke he slid the cane from his lap up to his right shoulder, closed one bulging eye, and appeared to aim it at Tad like a gun. He pulled an imaginary trigger and Tad flinched. “Secluded, I would say, hrmm, hem, and indeed, why should I not come and go as I please, on my own estates? In fact, impetuous spirit of irrepressible youth that y’are, hmm, yes, I might ask you the same question, why you are skylarking (this last in a truly terrible voice, frowning suddenly and dangerously in a way that froze Tad to the spot, immobile as an icicle) on the personal property of the Grand Potentate himself? Why, you’ve interrupted my meditations! I’ve a good mind to sick the frogs on you!”
Woods Page 1
