The Man in the Woods

by Rosemary Wells

  “That’s not fair, Aunt Stella,” said Helen. “Pinky Levy runs the printing press for the Whaler. His nails are inky, not dirty. Besides, he was terrific helping the mother and the little girl at the accident, and I like him.”

  “Who are you talking about?” asked Helen’s father.

  “Something that the cat dragged in,” said Aunt Stella.

  “Is that Sam Levy’s boy?” asked Helen’s father. “Skinny with freckles and a cowlick sticking up like an Indian feather?”

  “His cowlick—” Helen began, but her father interrupted.

  “He’s all right, that kid. I took samples from the cistern near the motel they own. Mother’s a widow. Sam died years ago. She’s Swedish, I think. The Seafarer is a clean place, and the boy and the mother were very helpful.”

  “Motel!” said Aunt Stella. “Taking riffraff off the streets.”

  Helen did not stay to argue. She went to her room and finished as many of the homework assignments as were still legible on the crumpled papers she’d collected during the day’s classes. Then she placed the Hummel figurine on her desk top and began to draw it.

  Once Aunt Stella came up to say good night and to bring Helen a bowl of slightly melted frozen custard. She looked at the Hummel boy with admiration. “Let’s hear him play,” she said. “He’s so adorable.”

  “No!” said Helen. “I can hardly stand looking at him, much less listening to one of those awful little tunes.”

  Her father came in for his kiss good night. He scrutinized her drawings. “Not your usual style, is it, Sweet Pea?” he asked. “Still and all, I suppose it may come in handy one day to know how to draw such a thing.”

  “Dad,” said Helen, “if I sing you a song, can you tell me the name of it?”

  “I might. If it’s an Irish ballad, I might.”

  “It isn’t. It goes like this.” Helen began humming and then singing the words she could remember from hearing the song many times. She did not try to whistle it as the man in the woods had done.

  “Hm … said her father. “That’s … that’s whatchamajiggy … ‘The Happy … ‘The Happy Wanderer.’ That’s the name of it. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I just heard it somewhere is all,” she said airily. She looked into her father’s intense blue eyes. He knew she wasn’t telling him all of the truth, but he let it go and kissed her good night and tucked her in after her prayers were said, just as he had done when she was little.

  Helen was very nearly asleep when the sound of the television downstairs in the living room woke her up. In seconds she was crouched on the landing listening to the late local news. “New Bedford area drivers can rest easily tonight for the first time in two months,” the announcer droned. Helen positioned herself so she could just see his flickering face on the old black-and-white TV. “Since mid-summer random rock throwings along Route Six outside of New Bedford have terrorized local drivers and resulted in several accidents. An intensive manhunt was called off tonight with the arrest of Duane ‘Stubby’ Atlas of Forty-two Dock Street, New Bedford. An anonymous tipster directed police to a bar in the wharf area. Atlas was found in possession of several grams of heroin. The latest incident occurred today, when Mrs. J. J. Sokol of Dartmouth and her young daughter narrowly missed death as a rock hit their car. Atlas is believed to have been under the influence of drugs at the time.”

  Helen’s father turned off the TV and without looking up said, “I know you’re there listening, Sweet Pea.”

  “Okay, Dad. I am,” said Helen.

  She could hear the smile in her father’s voice. “Your worries are over,” he said. “Thank God they got him.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “And to think you chased him, a near murderer, a drug addict, up through the woods. You promise me you’ll never do anything so foolish again?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “He went to St. Theresa’s, the Atlas boy, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, Dad,” she repeated automatically. “Three or four years ahead of me.”

  “You never know,” said her father.

  Helen tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. Over and over the song, whistled so beautifully, repeated itself. Over and over Helen came to the same flat certainty. It hadn’t been Stubby she’d seen in the woods. Never in a hundred years would Stubby whistle that song.

  Chapter 4

  BY SATURDAY MORNING HELEN, sitting in her bedroom, had lost count of her drawings. She supposed she was up to sixty or seventy. On Wednesday and Thursday and then on Friday she had presented several to Jerry Rosen and Barry de Wolf. Too much expression in the eyes was their verdict each time. Not cute enough, not round and dimpled and Hummelly enough. Maybe Beverly could do it. But Beverly was not interested in doing a drawing for free, now that she made a nice bit of money selling her caterpillar jewelry.

  Helen sweated over her latest sketch and waited for Pinky to come and take her to the football game. She hated the Hummel music box more than ever. She hated Jerry and Barry for being so superior and rejecting her hateful drawings over and over again. She was grimly determined to get it right. She was sure Jerry and Barry and Beverly would be more respectful toward her if her hair were straight and her figure anything but pencil-like.

  As the morning hours passed, Helen’s concentration dwindled. She began to doodle distractedly. In the back of her mind, taking wonderful turns and growing surely, was a whole new idea. The Whaler ran a weekly contest for the best story written by a student. At the end of the year the very best of these articles was given a gold medal. If Barry de Wolf can win a gold medal with a sleep-inducing essay about the birds of New Bedford, then I can win it too, she had decided. Her father had said it was a splendid idea. Aunt Stella had said it was not the right thing for a young girl to go chasing people up into the woods or to write about it either. Nonetheless, Helen had decided to do it and had announced her intention over breakfast the morning after the accident.

  Surely, she thought, the other articles that she’d seen so far on a clipboard outside Jerry’s office didn’t hold a candle to hers. One was about growing potatoes under the sea. Another was entitled “Why I Want to Be a Teacher.” Helen began trying out titles for her story. She was good at lettering. Earlier in the week she had thought of calling her story “Near Death for Mother and Baby.” That sounded like a headline in the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout. “Witness to an Accident” was too tame and boring. The story she had in mind would be light on the description of blood and gore and heavy on the part about chasing the rock thrower through the woods. She decided at last to call it “The Man in the Woods.” Her lettering was perfect. It looked printed. She smiled and daydreamed of the gold medal she would win. The story would be so good, she was sure it would win not only the gold medal but help earn the Whaler its state journalism prize. Then Jerry and Barry and Beverly would sit up and take notice of her. How sorry they would be that they had given her such a hard time. How admiring they’d have to be, squirming in their seats on Class Day when the principal called her name and handed her the gold medal. How grateful Jerry would be.

  Aunt Stella pretended to be surprised when Pinky rang the doorbell. “Somebody here to see you!” her soprano voice called up the stairway.

  Helen jumped and ran to the mirror. She pulled a hairbrush as vigorously as she could through her curls, trying, as always, to deny their existence. I can’t wait to get twelve more dollars saved, she said angrily to herself. I’m going to have my hair straightened and look like a normal human being for once instead of someone who stuck her hand in an electric socket.

  Pinky was doing his best to appear respectable to Aunt Stella. Helen could hear polite noises coming from him down in the living room. She could also hear Aunt Stella pacing, picking up her little knickknacks and dusting them off as she always did when she was nervous.

  “I’m going to drive both of you to the stadium,” Aunt Stella announced when Helen ran downstairs.

  Helen saw Pinky
’s face fall slightly. “Oh, Aunt Stella,” she said, “there’s so much traffic. We’ll take the bus like everybody else.”

  Aunt Stella settled her gaze on Pinky’s cowlick, which was coming slowly unstuck. Helen hoped she wouldn’t attempt to fix it. “I have to pick up your new music box at Perry and Crowe anyway,” said Aunt Stella, still looking at the cowlick. She prided herself on having a way with hair. Helen knew better than to argue.

  During the ride to the stadium Aunt Stella recounted her favorite experiences from high school when she had been their age. This was bad enough, but the high school in Ireland had been called a grammar school, which somehow made things worse. She told them who had asked her to dance at the graduation ball. Helen closed her eyes. She’d heard the story many times before. Then Aunt Stella told them how difficult schools were back then. Everyone could recite from memory all thirty-six verses of “The Downfall of the Gael.” Helen prepared her arguments for taking the bus home instead of being picked up after the game. What she wanted to do was to go back to the woods and look for her lost locket. She was sure it must have been torn off by a tree branch. Perhaps it had fallen off when she’d hidden under the stump. What she said she wanted to do was to have a soda with the rest of the kids from the Whaler after the game. Aunt Stella believed that having a soda with other clean-cut high school achievers was a step up the ladder of being popular, Helen knew. Pinky helped. “We’ll just be about an hour at Howard Johnson’s,” he said encouragingly. No high school groups ever went to Howard Johnson’s. They went to Vito’s Time Warp or Pizza City. Aunt Stella could not think of a reply quickly enough. The car in back of them honked. Pinky and Helen leaped out and, fading into the crowd, yelled, “Good-bye!”

  Aunt Stella, hopelessly caught in the snaking traffic, yelled back fortissimo, “Don’t get into any strangers’ cars!” over the honking horns behind her.

  Most of the people pouring into the stadium entrances wore partisan colors, red and white for New Bedford, black and orange for Fall River. Chrysanthemums with ribbons in both combinations sold briskly at the sidewalk stands. The leaves on the elms that lined the street were turning yellow at the edges. The trees were dwarfed by the huge stadium. The stadium had been built many years ago and had been meant to look like a Roman coliseum. Helen decided to let herself be caught up in the spirit of the day. She never would have imagined, a week ago, that she would be at a football game with a boy, but here she was, with her drawing pad clasped tightly under her arm and the still summery air laced with the promise of autumn. She and Pinky found seats at the thirty-yard line on the New Bedford side, as close to the field as they could so that Helen would have a good view of the players. Helen apologized to Pinky for Aunt Stella’s awful conversation. “I don’t mind,” said Pinky. “Actually the conversation can get much worse at my house. Especially when my relatives from Norway visit us. They speak English and Norwegian, and of course I only speak English, so they feel all superior. They can’t understand why my mom married an American. A Jewish American too. Since my dad’s been dead, eight years, they’ve been pushing her to move back to Norway. They think she’ll find some nice Norwegian widower to marry. Jeez Louise, that’s all she needs. Some clown who manufactures frozen fish cakes next door to the North Pole. My relatives think it would be good for me and my sister to go to school there.” Pinky made a noise as if he were spitting out vinegar. “My mom’s plenty proud of me and my sister the way we are,” he added. “Wednesday afternoon she sent the relatives the article from the paper.”

  Helen took the newspaper article from last Wednesday’s Post-Dispatch out of her wallet. DRUG-CRAZED ROCK THROWER TRACKED BY CLEVER COPS was the headline. “Maniac with Bad Aim Sought to Loot Jewelry Trucks” was the sub-headline. Helen read the whole thing over for the twentieth time.

  New Bedford police ended a two-month search and a two-month siege of terror for local residents with the arrest Tuesday night of Duane “Stubby” Atlas of 42 Dock Street. Police sources have suspected for some time that there was a pattern to the rock throwing. Their suspicions proved correct when they arrested a heroin addict and son of local mobster Chet Atlas. Atlas was aiming his rocks at the UPS delivery trucks that routinely carry merchandise for Perry and Crowe’s huge mail order business. According to police sources he was hoping to cause an accident and loot the trucks of their jewelry and money. A spokesman for Perry and Crowe expressed horror at the incidents and informed this paper that all valuables, jewelry and cash, are shipped at irregular intervals in Brinks armored vans. “All this madman could hope to do was take human life and smash up a little china and glass,” said the spokesman.

  Atlas has been charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and possession of heroin. His last victims, a mother and child from Dartmouth, were slightly injured Tuesday afternoon when Atlas hit their car instead of the UPS truck in front of them. Two local teenagers, Olaf Levy, 15, of Seafarer Way, and Mary Helen Curragh, 14, of Prospect Avenue, New Bedford, will be awarded good citizenship certificates by the Chamber of Commerce for giving first aid to the victims.

  “Olaf Levy!” said Helen.

  “Yeah, well,” said Pinky, “I was named after my mom’s father. Anyway, look who’s talking, Mary.”

  Helen sighed. “Named after you know who,” she said.

  “What a record that Atlas guy had,” said Pinky as they watched the football teams doing vigorous push-ups on the field. “Heard it over the radio. Petty larceny, possession of a knife, purse snatching, vandalism, drugs. Since he’s been eight years old, that guy’s been making trouble. They ought to drop him over Siberia at ten thousand feet.”

  Helen frowned. “I wonder,” she said.

  “You wonder what?”

  “Oh, nothing.” She tossed her head as if to rid herself of a thought too large to think. “I hope they got the right guy.”

  “Are you kidding?” Pinky asked. “They got Atlas dead to rights! He was a crazy doped-up weirdo with a record a mile long. Can you just imagine what he’d have done to you if he’d found out you were following him up through the woods? Gives me the shakes just to think about it.”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Helen.

  “Right? Right about what?”

  “It must have been Stubby after all that I followed. It had to be. Anybody else would have helped us.”

  “So why should you think it wasn’t him?”

  “Just … the whistling. It didn’t sound like him. ‘The Happy Wanderer’ doesn’t sound like a song that a person like Stubby would know.”

  “Eh!” said Pinky. “He could have heard it on the Musak.”

  “Well, I hope they put him in jail for fifty years,” said Helen, her eyes on one of the football players who was jogging in place. She sketched the player with quick, sure lines, fascinated by the straining, powerful muscles under the endless layers of tape, pads, and out-sized plastic devices stuck under the shoulders of his shirt. The cheerleaders, bright-eyed and squeaky clean, leaping in their heavy white sweaters with red N.B.’s, urged the crowd to “Gimme an N! Gimme an E!” As she drew, Helen yelled back to them with Pinky and the rest of the crowd.

  At half time the Fall River band worked its way out of the opposite side of the grandstand playing “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.” They formed a strange pattern at midfield which Helen could not identify until the PA microphone announced it was a diamond and the theme for the half-time entertainment was precious stones.

  “You want a hot dog?” Pinky asked.

  “Yes, sure,” said Helen, and she followed him over the benches, down a set of granite steps, and into the darkness of the stadium’s interior. “Your first football game?” Pinky asked.

  “Yup,” said Helen.

  “Like it?”

  “I do,” she answered. “I didn’t think I would. I hate it on television, and I only came to draw the booster tags, but it’s fun!” Helen did not say I wouldn’t like it nearly so much if you weren’t here with me. She only though
t that. They had reached the very back of the crowd that stood in the lines for the hot-dog concession. Pigeons and swallows nested high up in the secret hollows of the stone rafters. Every voice echoed to twice its volume in the cool darkness of the enormous granite arches.

  “Wait here,” shouted Pinky, and he began squeezing between people, working his way to the counter. Helen could see his cowlick bobbing up and down as he got closer to the front. Being with a boy at a football game had always been something she imagined happened to other people, like free trips to Hawaii. It was something that pretty, popular, normal girls did.

  The crowds converged thickly at the tunnels which led back to the grandstand. Helen felt Pinky’s hand close tightly around hers in the chilly gloom, three pushing girls going in different directions between herself and Pinky. It really didn’t count as holding her hand of course. He was just trying to guide her through the crowd, and there was nothing romantic in both of them holding dripping hot dogs away from the bumping bodies. Still, she felt a peculiar lightness and happiness inside. She didn’t want him to let go of her hand. Then she heard it.

  Not far behind them someone was whistling, and her heart, or whatever it was in the middle of her that a minute before had felt like the inside of a star, now flopped over and turned to ice. Sweat beaded her whole body. Silvery, perfectly modulated notes, again like the tremulo of a flute, drifted over the clot of people chattering and pushing around her. Her hand slipped out of Pinky’s, and she stood pinned until the crowd moved again. Pinned as she had been under the stump in the woods, listening to the same tune and the same whistler with her pulse rattling like a freight train and her mouth as dry as sand.

  Pinky managed to grab her arm and pull her up the stairs to the daylight. “Listen!” she whispered. “Do you hear it? Do you hear it?”