Man in The Woods (11 page)

But since the banks will be broken

I recommend a good mattress.

As the poem trots toward its conclusion, Paul finds something in it oddly soothing, and he sinks into a waking dream of universal anarchy, a world of chaos, not only ungoverned by God but immune to the entreaties of humankind as well, swept over by an all-destroying mania brought on by every computer’s being abandoned by its internal clock and therefore sinking into a lobotomized state, unable to monitor the worldwide transit of money, the takeoffs and landings of jets, the traffic of the shipping lanes, the flow of electricity, the phones, the schools, the mail, the hospitals, that final zero in the year 2000 exploding in civilization’s brain, a ruptured blood vessel of data that brings us to our knees.

Last night, Paul had walked through the front room, where Kate was watching TV, and they listened to a senator from Utah going on about what was going to happen to all of us when the twentieth century’s end crippled our computers. The senator was in a gray suit, a red tie, oval glasses, he had an ingratiating but invincible smile. Even as he delivered his apocalyptic message, the smile endured—he probably meant it to be reassuring, but it was unnerving.

The senator placed his hands on his radiant desk. “When people say to me, ‘Is the world going to come to an end?’ I say, ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know whether this will be a bump in the road—that’s the most optimistic assessment of what we’ve got, a fairly serious bump in the road—or whether this will, in fact, trigger a major worldwide recession with absolutely devastating economic consequences in some parts of the world…We must coldly, calculatingly divide up the next weeks to determine what we can do, what we can’t do, do what we can, and then provide for contingency plans for that which we cannot.”

“What the fuck?” Kate had said. “For the first time in my life I’m making money and now the monetary system has to collapse? Where’s the justice in that?”

Yet now Paul sees a glimmer of hope in the impending chaos of Y2K, a rough, approximate justice in, of all things, his escape from justice. If this impending doomsday for accountants is real, or even half-real, so much will be lost, so much data will disappear, it will be like the world will have to start from scratch, a universal amnesty.

In the meanwhile, Ruby and four children from her third-grade class have mounted the stage. All of them are wearing black pants and black T-shirts, except for Ruby, who must have forgotten about the agreed-upon costume and is wearing blue jeans and a red-and-tan cowgirl shirt, though it’s conceivable she simply saw herself as the lead singer in this quintet with the others in black taking on the doo-wop duties.

The third-graders are singing the old Cyndi Lauper song “Time After Time.” An unseen piano is accompanying them and the five children seem ardent and uncertain. Ruby is the largest of them, and a full head taller than the child next to her, a wiry little red-haired boy with bony arms and a freckle-splattered face. Ruby seems to be in her own world. She is looking off to the side, possibly for help.

Has she practiced this song? Does she know the words to it? When the children sing, “Sometimes you picture me/I’m walking too far ahead,” Ruby touches her head, unconsciously. She appears lost and not completely functional, and though, as the tallest of the quintet, she has been placed in the center, the other children have subtly moved away from her and re-formed as a quartet, with Ruby vaguely behind them, where she now looks out at the audience, wide-eyed and alarmed, as if she has just awakened from a dream.

Paul feels nauseated on Ruby’s behalf. Normally, Paul thinks she is extraordinarily fortunate to have Kate as her mother, lucky for the safety of a home where the next month’s mortgage is not an issue, lucky for the humor, lucky to be taught through example that women can achieve extraordinary success. His own sister, Annabelle, had no such luck, being raised by their depressive mother, with raccoon circles around her eyes and the smell of medicine on her breath. “She was my role model,” Annabelle has said. “Everything I know about pajamas I learned from Mom.”

Similarly, what great life lessons could Paul have learned from his father? The choreography of running away from a family? The egomaniacal stubbornness of giving your life to painting when the paintings themselves could barely be given away? The wisdom of keeping your door unlocked so as to not make it overly difficult for someone—preferably someone young and impressionable—to find your body?

No, Ruby was a lucky child, lucky to be healthy, lucky to be loved—yet now, making clownish, outsized gestures one moment and slipping into a catatonic stillness the next, she looked neither healthy nor loved, and she seemed to have no idea of how she was appearing to others.

But how can we ever see ourselves, let alone see ourselves as others see us, when the person seeing is the same as the person seen? And when our senses are clouded by wishes and fears and preexisting images, what chance do we have to glimpse ourselves as others see us?

Joyce nudges Leonard, rather emphatically, and he lifts his camcorder again, capturing Ruby and her classmates as they trudge through the song. Ruby is fading further back—
what has happened to that poor girl?
—her face all but obscured by the suddenly raised arms of her classmates as they sway back and forth in a ticktock motion and chant “time after time” over and over. Paul feels a lurch of pure, pulverizing terror.

When the millennium assembly is over, a platoon of older students efficiently moves the chairs to one side and the old Norris ballroom is the reception area for the parents and children who mill around, drinking punch out of paper cups and eating pastries off of paper plates. It takes Paul a while to wind his way through the crowd and find Ruby, and when he does, she is sitting on the three-step staircase leading to the stage, along with a small, angry-looking boy in a White Zombie T-shirt and gelled blue hair.

She looks at Paul as if surprised to see him here. There is no theatrical widening of the eyes. All expression leaves her small, smooth face, and what remains is the plain prettiness of a powerless little girl. “Were you here?” she asks.

“Sure. I was sitting in the back row.” He points, but there are no more rows, just adults and children in a milling mass, with the flash of strobe lights going off steadily—all those wonderful children and jolly parents and everyone happier than they are.

“I gotta go,” the blue-haired boy says, Ruby’s partner in misfit-ness. She doesn’t say anything back to him and doesn’t even glance in his direction as he heads aimlessly into the center of the room, craning his neck as if on the lookout for someone.

“I’ve always liked that song,” Paul says. “Cyndi Lauper, right?”

Ruby shrugs. Her face is blotchy and her eyes sparkle; she looks as if she has been slapped. Paul has never tried to be a father to her—he would rather assume an avuncular role. But even an uncle needs to be a protector, and in the months in which he has lived in the same house with Ruby, driven her here and there, shared meals with her, read to her at night, he has never seen her look so meek, so crushed. The brash, blaring little girl, so brimming with personality, so full of drama and poses, may have tried his patience now and then, but this tender, wounded, undefended girl is almost more than he can bear.

“Did you have lunch yet?”

“Sort of,” she says.

“I’m pretty hungry,” Paul says. “Why don’t we go and have a big Y2K lunch at the George Washington Inn? They make these amazing hamburgers.”

“I have school,” Ruby says forlornly.

“That’s okay,” Paul says. “I heard on the radio that the public schools are on half-day. We could get in on that.” He extends his hand to her and pulls her out of her sitting position. “Where’s your teacher?”

An hour later they’ve had their lunch and are walking around Leyden. There are a few children around this afternoon but they are for the most part unknown to Ruby, kids who attend the public school. A couple of ten-year-olds clatter past them on skateboards and Ruby gives what seems to Paul a longing look at them over her shoulder. It occurs to Paul that Ruby might be happier going to Leyden Central School, and as he has the thought she unexpectedly takes his hand.

As the afternoon wears on, the air seems to soften; it is nearly winter but the air is warm, and the sky is dark blue with masses of white clouds. Paul and Ruby go to the candle and incense shop, the ice cream parlor, the boutique selling South American sweaters, the diner where the old guard still likes to congregate over hamburgers and fried eggs, and the health food counter where the new people eat dandelion greens and drink special teas from Africa. When there are no more shops to go into, and the sky is suddenly darkening, returning to its stern autumn hue, they drive home and collect Shep for a walk in the woods.

“Look at him wagging,” Evangeline says, as the dog greets Paul. “He wouldn’t give me even a courtesy wag.”

Paul takes Ruby for a walk in her own woods, trees and stones and dirt she may one day come to own herself. He wants her to love it here, and to know there’s a place where she belongs. “Can I tell you something, a secret?” he says to her. Despite the warmth of the early afternoon, a brief damp snow has fallen; the gold and red leaves blanketed on the ground now bear a sheen of translucent ice. He holds on to the child’s hand as they walk. Twice she has stumbled, first over a tangle of vines, then over the pulpy remains of a log. The trees are black and silver against the sky.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Ruby says. She swings their arms back and forth, as if his holding her is part of a game, but her grip is adamant. She is wearing a parka with a hood, jeans, hiking shoes. Her clothes seem tight.

Paul stops, gestures at the numberless trees around them. “I think you should pick a tree, some tree you really like, and then I’m going to take that tree down and use the wood to make you something.”

“What will you make me?”

“Well that depends on what tree you pick. Different woods are for different things.”

“But what if I pick the wrong kind?”

“You can’t, honey, there is no wrong kind. In nature there is no wrong.”

“God says some things are wrong,” Ruby says.

“You know that’s not your mom’s kind of God, honey.”

“Well it’s mine,” Ruby says.

“In nature, it doesn’t work that way,” Paul says. “In nature there is no right and wrong, there’s just life and death.” He hears a sound, and it startles him—but it’s Shep, who has found an appealing branch half buried in the leaves and is dragging it along.

Ruby looks out at the trees, unnamed and mysterious.

Shep drops the branch and cocks his head, looking at Paul suspiciously. He has somehow become worried that Paul is going to run away from him, and even as the deep, moldering scent of the forest floor urges the dog onward, he continues to throw anxious glances over his shoulder. But something new seizes the brown dog’s attention and for a few moments he paws and snuffles at the ground, dislodging bright, crunching leaves, twigs, and black organic matter, moist and stringy like the pulp of a pumpkin.

“What’s Shep doing?” Ruby asks.

“He’s got something,” Paul tells her, to which she nods sagely.

“I wonder if he misses his old family,” she muses.

Shep has dug out an inch or two of dirt and has his nose in the small hole, inhaling its information. There is something down there and he would like to kill it.

“Shep!” Ruby cries, if only to break the spell.

He looks up, his eyes glittering, his nose ringed with dirt. “Come here, Shep,” Ruby says, clapping her hands. The dog shifts his gaze to Paul and Paul nods curtly, privately, and the dog trots over to the little girl.

“He’s starting to listen to me,” Ruby says. When the dog is close enough she takes his collar, pulls him the last couple of inches. “You must obey me,” she says, her voice deep and tremulous, like a hypnotist up to no good. Shep turns his body so that the middle of his torso presses against Ruby’s knees.

“He’s guarding you,” Paul says. It renders her speechless for a moment—that a beast, a wild thing of nature, would do such a thing.

“Thank you, Shep,” she says, in the softest voice Paul has ever heard her speak in. She strokes the dog’s ears and he moves even closer, almost toppling her.

“Do you know what I wish?” Ruby says. “I wish we could see him from the beginning. I wish we could rewind him.”

Paul laughs, putting his hand lightly on her shoulder. “So do you see a tree you might want? We’ll cut it down and then we’ll plant a new one where the old one used to be, and we can make you a bookcase.”

She cocks her head. “Is this the secret you wanted to say?”

“That’s it.”

“Why is it a secret? Because they’re Mom’s trees?”

“I guess it’s not really a secret,” Paul says. “Except you’re going to build it with me.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Ruby says insistently.

“Well, I’m going to teach you. I’m going to teach you how to cut things straight and true. We’re going to be very careful and you’re going to be good at it, that’s what I think. You’re going to be really good at it.”

“Okay,” Ruby says. She looks suddenly worried.

“Are you all right?” Paul asks. She nods uncertainly and Paul lets it pass.

“Come here,” he says, “I’ll show you something.”

He touches her elbow, guides her toward a couple of old wild cherry trees. Their bark is the color of bright ash, speckled, bent, at the end of their cycle. He places his hand on one of the trees, like holding someone by the back of the neck. “These are probably about forty years old. All the hemlock block out the light so the cherry trees don’t get enough sun. Pretty soon they’re just going to fall over. But they have nice wood, sort of reddish. It ages well and if we made you a bookcase it would be something you always had. You could take it to college with you, if you wanted.”