The Man in the Woods

by Rosemary Wells

  Puzzled, Helen realized that since she’d gotten up and begun walking back to the house, she’d been humming. She stopped herself. Helen was not the kind of person who went around humming.

  Suddenly she knew why. She was humming without thinking because the man in the woods had been whistling. Whistling quite happily, and that was why she had thought that if he’d seen her, he’d be smiling.

  She hummed the melody once over, but the name of it and the words would not come. She looked back up the hill. He was somewhere there in the profound depths of the woods, but all she could say about him was that he whistled, and he whistled perfectly, liltingly, sweetly, with dulcet double notes, like a flute or a nightingale with an astonishingly haunting call.

  Chapter 3

  “NAME PLEASE?” ASKED THE police officer after he’d taken in Helen’s appearance.

  “Helen Curragh, Five Twenty-five Prospect Avenue,” said Helen. She’d caught sight of herself in a mirror on the way into the house. Her skirt was torn at the hem, her face crisscrossed with ugly scratches, and her hair a wild mass of curls, dotted with leaves. Her clothes were entirely covered with smears of earth.

  “Well, Helen, you’ve certainly done a job on yourself,” said the policeman with a broad grin.

  “I saw him!” said Helen. “I saw the Punk Rock Thrower. I went up in the woods after him, and I saw him!”

  “Hold your horses,” said the policeman. He inched a worn leather notebook out from one of his fat pockets, licked his thumb, opened it, and sat down on the sofa. “Okay, honey. Who’d you see?”

  “The rock thrower,” Helen began.

  “Did you see him throw the rock at the car?” asked the policeman.

  “Well, not actually, but—”

  “You didn’t see him throw the rock?”

  “No, but he was watching, from in front of this house, while we were yelling for help down at the road. I thought he lived in this house. I thought he went in to call for help. But the house was empty when we got here. He must have run away.”

  “So you followed him?”

  “No. Not just then. We had to get the lady and the little girl up the hill to the house. Pinky was afraid of the gas tank catching fire, so we sort of carried them up here …

  “And how did you get into the house?” asked the policeman.

  “A window was open,” said Pinky quickly. Pinky was squirming in a hard-backed chair, quite impatiently.

  At least the policeman hadn’t called him “honey,” Helen thought.

  The policeman went on in a monotone. “So you didn’t actually see this person run away?”

  “No, sir. I saw him later through the window. Then I chased after him.”

  “And he ran.”

  “No, he walked.”

  “Walked? How do you know it was the same person?”

  “I … It had to be.”

  “I see. Describe him.”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “I thought you said you saw him.”

  “Well, I did, but …

  “How do you know it wasn’t a woman?”

  “Because … because it wasn’t. I hid under a stump. I could just see his jogging shoes. Nikes. But he was whistling. It wasn’t a woman’s whistling—”

  “Whistling!” The policeman snapped shut his report book. “Honey, you saw a jogger,” he said.

  “Now wait just a cotton pickin’ minute,” Pinky interjected. “This girl did the number-one bravest thing I ever saw anybody do, and you won’t let her get a word in edgewise.”

  The policeman stood and sighed good-naturedly. “Keep your pants on, son,” he said. “Your girl friend was, first of all, very foolish to follow anybody up through the woods. You are good, helpful kids, but that was stupid.” He let this sink in while Pinky fidgeted and Helen tried to keep from shouting at him in frustration. “Now, second of all, she didn’t see any rock thrown. She doesn’t know if it was a man, woman, or child in the woods. It was probably a jogger—”

  “He wasn’t jogging,” interrupted Helen.

  “Who knows?” said the policeman. “There’s even an old Indian who lives up in the woods somewhere.”

  “He wasn’t old,” Helen insisted.

  “If it was the guy who threw the rock,” the policeman drawled on, as if she’d said nothing, “he’d have run away. Look, there’s even some company, a contractor, been talking about building a condominium up here for ten years. She might have seen a land surveyor. We get a hundred witnesses to every dog bite in this business.”

  “I heard the police sirens way up in the woods,” said Helen, “and the ambulance when it came for the woman and the little girl. I could tell. The sound is different. He had to have heard them too. He knew you were too far away to catch him. If it wasn’t the rock thrower, why didn’t he even turn around?”

  “Believe me, honey,” said the policeman, “the guy who threw the rock through the windshield would have run like a deer. Especially if he heard the sirens. He’s probably in the next county by now.”

  Helen did not bother to mention the apple.

  Another policeman stuck his head in the door. “Ready to go,” he said.

  “We’ll send you both good citizenship awards,” said the first policeman kindly, “and, honey, don’t go chasing guys through the woods anymore. You might get more than your pretty dress messed up next time.”

  Pinky and Helen trudged down the hill. They both spoke at once. “Thanks for sticking up for me,” said Helen. “Want a ride home?” asked Pinky. They laughed.

  “A ride?” asked Helen.

  Pinky glanced around, as if the bushes contained microphones. “I keep a trail bike not far from here,” he said in a low voice. “There’s room for two on it.”

  Helen wanted to ask if it was illegal, but she decided it was and didn’t ask.

  They walked down the hill to the highway and collected their books and Helen’s pocketbook, which the policemen had thoughtfully heaped against a guardrail. Helen tried to remember the tune the man had been whistling. She’d forgotten it cleanly.

  Pinky led Helen away from the road, down into a dried-up ditch. Beyond that, under a tangle of wild grapevines, was a decrepit shed, its roof caved in and most of the walls destroyed by a long-ago fire. Just inside was a sheet of burned plywood; out from under it Pinky pulled a very old motorcycle. “It isn’t really a trail bike,” he said. “But I thought you might get scared if I said motorcycle.”

  “It isn’t really a motorcycle either,” said Helen, looking at it curiously.

  “Oh, but it is,” Pinky answered proudly. “World War Two German Army bike. My dad picked it up when he was young in an Army surplus store. I got it fixed so it runs like a champ. Got a super muffler on it too. Doesn’t make any more noise than a refrigerator.”

  Helen, wondering what Aunt Stella would think if she could see her now, sat down on the back of the bike, locked her arms and hands around Pinky’s middle, and held on to him as if she were about to take a rocket to the moon.

  “Not so tight!” Pinky objected. “It only goes ten miles an hour! I can’t breathe with you hanging on like that!”

  Helen relaxed. Pinky was right. The bike made almost no noise at all. He headed it onto a trail that ran in a different direction from the one she’d followed to the deep woods. The only sound was the flapping of their books in the two saddlebags against the exhaust pipes.

  Pinky cleared his throat. “Sorry for being such a grouch before,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” said Helen. “It’s got to be a royal pain in the neck to have some freshman come up to you after a hard day’s work and tell you you made a spelling mistake.”

  “I’m a freshman too,” he said after a minute.

  “I thought … you were older,” said Helen. “The Whaler people know you …

  “Left back a year,” Pinky answered.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Helen, as if she’d stumbled on a death in the family.
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br />   “Going to quit school when I’m sixteen next year,” Pinky went on. “I hate school. I hate books. I’m not cut out for a desk job, so I’m going to jump a freighter and then join the Navy as soon as I’m old enough. Meantime I like printing for the Whaler. My uncle’s a printer. It gets in your blood.”

  “Well,” said Helen, “if you want help with homework, give me a call. It must be awful to hate books and school and have to take tests on the Revolutionary War and Silas Marner.”

  “We have a test Monday,” said Pinky. “History.”

  “Come over and study Sunday,” said Helen.

  “Lemme know when I can return the favor,” Pinky answered stiffly.

  Helen calculated. “Saturday,” she said.

  “Saturday?”

  “I want to do some drawings of football players to make decent-looking booster tags. I’m sort of embarrassed to go to the game alone,” she explained wistfully, “and—”

  “It’s a deal,” said Pinky. “Gee, you’re a funny girl.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because.”

  For several minutes they rode in silence. Then Helen asked quietly, “Did you believe me? About the man in the woods? I mean about it being strange that he didn’t help and he was just walking away whistling?”

  “Yup,” said Pinky shortly. “But if the cops don’t believe you, forget it. Cops!” he said. “Cops wouldn’t believe a kid if you told them the sun was out.”

  “We better get off here,” Helen said. “My Aunt Stella’d have a fit if she saw me on a motorbike.”

  Pinky stopped and parked the motorcycle against a tree. The first houses along Prospect Avenue were a minute away. “Who’s Aunt Stella?” he asked.

  “My dad’s sister. She lives with us. My mom died years ago. Pinky…. She frowned. The song was coming back now. At first she could hum only a few notes. Then the tune unfolded like a well rehearsed chant. “It’s a hiking song, Pinky. We used to sing it at camp. Something about wandering through the mountains with a knapsack.” Helen sang several lines of it ending with the chorus “… Valderi, valdera…. Pinky, what’s the name of that song?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pinky. “It’s just one of those songs. Kind of like ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’”

  “Well, that’s what the man was whistling. Pinky, it makes no sense. He had to have thrown the rock. Of course he walked away whistling. He’s a nut. He didn’t know I was after him, and he knew he’d get away from the cops easily. They didn’t show up for ten minutes. He was already a mile away up in the woods when the sirens started.”

  Pinky clucked his tongue. “Won’t do any good to think about it,” he said. “Even if the cops did catch him, they’d probably put him away for two months in a nuthouse. Good behavior and he’d be out in thirty days. For what he did they ought to give him a buzz in the chair.”

  “Thank God!” said Aunt Stella. Her hand rested against her heart as she led Pinky and Helen into the house and sat herself down on a button-plush settee. “I just notified the police that you were missing,” she said, adjusting her silk flower-print dress over her motherly, comfortable bulk. “Who is this, Helen?”

  “This is Pinky Levy, Aunt Stella. He—”

  “Well, I think it’s time he went home to his mother,” said Aunt Stella. “The policeman on the telephone told me all about what you’ve been up to. You took a fright, Helen. What on earth were you doing running up into the woods after a lunatic?” Aunt Stella looked over at Pinky, who seemed rooted to the rug. “I repeat, young man, I believe you’ll be wanted at home.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Pinky. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  “Good-bye,” said Aunt Stella.

  Pinky backed out the door.

  “Now, tell me what this is all about, young lady! You could have been killed. Molested! Wait till I tell your father!”

  Helen went into the kitchen and made two cups of tea. While the water boiled, she let Aunt Stella boil, and when Aunt Stella could think of nothing more to say and had finished her tea, Helen told her about the little girl crying and the injured mother. “I tried to be a good citizen, Aunt Stella,” she said.

  “I suppose,” Aunt Stella said, slightly mollified.

  “And wait till I tell you about my terrific new job on the school paper. They gave me a junior’s job, Aunt Stella!” Helen went on about the press badge and the paste-up and the ad for Perry and Crowe.

  Aunt Stella was duly impressed and much happier when Helen had assured her that no freshman had ever had such a job in the history of the school.

  “Now I think it’s time for a bath,” said Aunt Stella. “You look like Attila the Hun.”

  Helen agreed.

  “I see you’ve lost your silver locket!”

  Helen clutched at her breastbone. The locket with her mother’s picture was not on its chain. “I think I dropped it in the Whaler office,” she said. She tried to remember. The whole afternoon was such a blur. Helen recalled the cuff of the chino pants as clear as a photograph. Two threads hanging off. She remembered the white sweat sock, a burr stuck to it, the Nike sneaker with the e worn off, and the stump. The stump with the soft, black humus where she’d hidden. She knew she’d lost the locket there. “I’ll check in the lost-and-found at school,” she told Aunt Stella and went up and ran the water for her bath. There was no negative of her mother’s picture. And the only print had been in the locket. The picture was one of her mother laughing. She loved it more than any other. Without it safely against her breastbone she felt curiously unprotected, as if someone could now do her harm.

  Through the bathroom walls Helen heard her father arrive. She heard his conversation with Aunt Stella as an exchange of muffled grunts and high-pitched squeals about the rock thrower and the Whaler. She put on a fresh shirt and jeans and made sure she looked as clean, combed, and innocent as possible. The scratches were angrier than ever. They stung like bee bites from the water and soap. If I had straight hair, Helen decided, I could brush a big swoosh of it over half the scratches on my face, but of course she didn’t have straight hair.

  Her father took her into his arms and held a glass of beer around the small of her back while he hugged her. He was a compact man with bushy eyebrows, bushy hair, and baggy suits that always seemed to wrinkle and sag even before he came down in the mornings, no matter how many times Aunt Stella had them pressed. His life’s work was a passion, carried out on behalf of the Massachusetts Department of Water Purification. For them he traveled the state, sampling water supplies for signs of toxic pollution. He railed against those industries and nameless dumpers that dared contaminate the drinking water of innocent citizens. “From me,” he told Helen often, “you’ve got a head of wild hair and a heart on the side of the angels. Let us hope you’ve inherited your mother’s caution and quiet ways.”

  This part of Helen’s inheritance had not yet shown itself.

  “Now, tell me,” he said, kissing her on the forehead, “what’s all this I hear about you tailing some bloody hell-kite up a hill into the woods?”

  “I wanted to see who it was, Dad. If he’s the one who’s been throwing rocks at cars, the Punk Rock Thrower, I could have identified him. I could have—”

  “You wanted to catch him, didn’t you?” asked her father, smiling.

  “Well, you should have seen the poor little girl and her mom. They were nearly killed.”

  “And so could you have been. A slip of a girl like you up in the woods with a psychopath twice your size.” Her father held her close. “Promise never to do such a thing again?”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “You’re all I have in the world. Remember that, Sweet Pea,” he said.

  “You’ve got me!” Aunt Stella snapped from the kitchen. Helen’s father bent to pick a yellowed leaf off one of his geraniums in the window. “And I don’t know what I’d do without you, Stella!” he called into the kitchen.

  Aunt Stella answered him with “Dinner!”

/>   Helen and her father walked arm in arm to the table. Her father said grace, and as they began slicing up Aunt Stella’s rock-hard macaroni and cheese with steak knives, he winked and congratulated Helen on her new job at the Whaler. “Stella tells me you have to draw a picture for an ad, is it?”

  “A Hummel figurine,” said Helen. She got up and took the box out of her pocketbook. “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s chipped. The policemen must have banged it when they piled all our stuff on the edge of the highway. What am I going to do? It costs fifty dollars.”

  Helen’s father picked up the figurine and examined it. The chip was right on the staff the little boy was holding. “Ugly thing,” he said, putting it down in disgust. “Ordinarily you’d have to pay for it yourself, but this was a good cause, babe. Stella, can you pick her up one just like it?”

  “Please, Aunt Stella,” Helen begged. “Barry de Wolf will kill me if he sees it’s been broken.”

  “Who is Barry de Wolf?” asked Aunt Stella.

  “Some senior,” said Helen, “on the Whaler. He’s the business manager, I think. His name’s right under Jerry Rosen’s on the masthead. Jerry’s the editor, and he’ll probably fire me from my new job. And then there’s Beverly Boone. She’s another senior. If she sees I’ve messed up on my first day, she won’t ever let me help her with the paste-up. I don’t have fifty dollars, Aunt Stella.” Actually Helen did have forty-eight dollars. It was stashed away in the back of her closet. She was saving up until she had sixty dollars in hand, and then she intended to go out and have her hair straightened.

  “Well,” said Aunt Stella with an agreeable sigh, “it would be unwise to disappoint the people on the newspaper. They sound very nice, by the way. Young people with a future ahead of them. Unlike that weedy creature you brought in today with the dirty fingernails. He’ll never amount to a hill of beans.”