Man in The Woods (20 page)

“You know what I mean,” Kate says. “Jesus. God. Whatever you want to call the divine beauty of the universe.”

“Is that why nobody’s caught me? Is that why this whole thing seems to be going away on its own?”

“Don’t joke,” she says, and then she realizes he’s not. He’s not joking, he’s not teasing, he’s not what-if-ing. He means it. And in a spasm of spiritual panic she wishes she had never brought it up. It’s one thing to tell someone they are your angel, but it’s something else to see that person suddenly begin flapping their arms as if expecting to fly.

PART II

Where is the next one coming from?

—J
OHN
H
IATT

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Could it really be that simple? Could a human being be removed from the ranks of the living with little or no fuss, and no consequences? What about his house? What about his belongings? Was there no one out there to come forward and say, Where’s my husband, where is my father, where is my lover, where is the man who worked for me, where is the guy at the next desk, where is my buddy I went to the track with every July, or played cards with, or jogged with, where is that grumpy bastard with the good-looking brown dog, where is my tenant, where is my next-door neighbor? Was no one curious? Was no one making a stink? Wasn’t there anyone wanting an answer? Could a man really be plucked from the body of life like a little splinter and just blow away and leave no trace of himself?

But he has left a trace—in Paul. Here he is, carrying a black garbage bag into which he has already placed some broken Coors bottles, an empty bleach container, three crumpled cigarette packs, and a waterlogged paperback edition of
Bonjour Tristesse
, with his animal companion trotting a few feet in front of him. He’s walking Shep and cleaning the country road of the winter’s debris that spring has exposed, hoping to remove the toxins in his bloodstream through the dialysis of good deeds.

Once a week, Paul goes to the Windsor County SPCA, where he joins the other volunteers who get the dogs out of their cages for a couple of hours. Once a month, he goes to Northern Windsor Hospital and gives plasma, and once a month to the Red Cross and donates blood, and if there is some ridiculous, intrusive law against doing both in the same month he has so far gotten away with it. He feels no loss of vigor, and the various technicians who tap into his veins treat him with good cheer and a soft touch. The hospital gives him fifty dollars for his plasma. He cashes the check immediately and like his sister on her postal rounds he drives the winding road through a nearby mobile-home park, putting ten-dollar bills in random mailboxes. It makes him light-headed to do so.

There are a half dozen elderly people he looks in on. Cal Bowen lives a half mile south of Kate’s house and Paul shovels his walkway, and now and again calls on him, usually with a couple of ripe pears or some soft cheese, chosen to complement the dark red wine Cal likes to pour. Cal lives simply but he was once an oenophile and has a cellar filled with old French Bordeaux, and no one to drink them with.

After every snowfall, Paul is sure to stop by and shovel out Margaret Hurley and Dorothy Freeman, both frail and getting apprehensive about strangers, whose little steep cottage is not too far from Bowen’s house. They make him ginger tea and honey when he is finished and Margaret, the more outgoing of the two women, invariably says,
Boy oh boy you really like that tea
, as if Paul’s showing up is his way of getting a free cup of tea.

To the south of Kate’s house lives John Lucy, who until a couple of years ago taught philosophy at nearby Marlowe College and who seems to have gone mad (shaved head, eyeliner). Dr. Lucy, though only fifty-seven, is easily overwhelmed by the details of running his life, and he has come to count on Paul to shore up gutters, repair leaks, and to keep the vermin out of his kitchen by filling in holes in the foundation of his house, whose rapid disintegration seems to mirror Lucy’s own.

Farther away, just a mile from the center of Leyden, Bill Veldhuis, the farmer from whom Paul has been getting chicken and duck eggs for the past ten years, is practically crippled from arthritis, and Paul is part of a loosely organized team, consisting mainly of Veldhuis’s grandchildren, who make sure that the bossy, scarlet-knuckled old man has what he needs, that there is food in the refrigerator, clean clothes.

When he can, Paul tries to help Liza Moots, a woman he met through Kate—no one mentions it, but Paul assumes that Liza and Kate attend AA meetings together. Liza lives in a four-room apartment over what had once been Forrestal’s Soda Shop, and which is now Impulsively Yours, a sundries shop whose name was meant to describe, or perhaps conjure, the spending habits of the rich newcomers. Liza is not a newcomer, and she just manages to support herself and her two young children through a sort of Rube Gold-berg economic arrangement in which reading astrological charts, housecleaning, pottery making, and wedding photography combine to create an engine that keeps her hovering just an inch above the poverty line. Paul visits her once a week and, upon her request, brings Shep with him because Liza is terrified of dogs and despairs over passing this fear on to her daughters. Her fear of dogs also prevents her from riding her bicycle around Windsor County, and has forced her to quit two of her most lucrative housekeeping jobs, one because of a Rottweiler and the other because of a Jack Russell. Paul has been keeping Shep on a leash while he visits Liza, sometimes staying for an hour while he plays with Maria and Florencia and Shep snoozes peacefully, lashed to a radiator pipe. In the past couple of weeks, Liza has gathered the courage to approach Shep and pat him gravely on top of his head, and Shep, seemingly aware of the momentousness of the occasion, has thumped his tail against the wide-plank oak floor and, with his chin resting on his forepaws, looked mildly up at Liza through the tops of his eyes.

Kate hasn’t mentioned that Paul’s concentration on good works has cut his workweek in half. Money is, in fact, not an issue.
Prays Well
continues to attract readers, and her radio program’s initial syndication has grown from twenty-five “markets” to ninety-eight.

To make up for the decrease in work hours Paul has increased his fees and also the markup on materials. Not entirely to his surprise, this has perversely generated an increased demand for his services, and so the bookkeeping on his charity would have to conclude that it’s not only good for the soul but also beneficial to the purse. Paul has been making things out of wood for wealthy clients for over ten years, and this is the first time he has raised the prices on his labor. Over time, the price of materials has risen and he has passed these increases along to his customers, but what Paul himself needs to live on has remained essentially unchanged, and until now it has not really occurred to him that he ought to be putting money aside or making investments or owning property. Even this sudden increase in his prices has left his income essentially undisturbed. He makes about sixty thousand dollars a year, though if he worked faster and ran his business more efficiently he could triple that amount, but money is not important to him. In fact, he has always felt a certain disdain for it, seeing it as an enemy of freedom, and believing that those people who say they need money
in order
to be free are merely taking the society’s bait. And everyone knows money won’t get you into heaven.

Paul and Shep come to a rise in the road and the chimney of Kate’s house comes into distant view, emerging from the sea of green like a periscope. Paul stops, shifts the burden of his trash bag from the left shoulder to the right, and reaches down to scratch Shep’s head. The day has turned hot, and the trees, still in their delicate spring foliage, look dazed and exhausted, as if it were already mid-August. The industrious, untiring drone of insects is in the air. On the west side of the road, a thirty-acre field and a jumble of slate, sash, and stucco that was once a house, and on the east side a swath of woods gone wild, a thick, boggy tangle of stunted pine, gnarled locust, dying maple, and swirls of thornbushes, as forbidding as barbed wire.

Soon, Paul and the dog are heading down the long driveway leading to Kate’s house. It is late morning. Kate is in her writing cabin, preparing her next broadcast. Evangeline’s girlfriend’s green Subaru is in front of the workshop, and Evangeline is inside sanding down an expensive ten-foot length of black walnut. The double doors to the workshop are open and as Paul approaches he can hear the hoarse whine of the sander.

The sun has been radiating down on the tin roof and even with the doors open it’s fiercely hot inside the workshop. It’s too early in the season to run the air conditioner, and the sound of the exhaust fans unnerves Evangeline. She is bent over the walnut plank, working the sander around in small circles. Her hair is plastered to her forehead and the sides of her face, and her white T-shirt is dark at the armpits. She is wearing long, baggy shorts and work boots, the tops of which are covered in sawdust. She turns off the handheld sander, holds it shoulder-high as if it were a pistol, and, after licking the palm of her free hand, strokes the section of board she’s been working on.

“Should I wait outside?” Paul says.

“Oh hi,” she says. “You caught me coming on to the wood.”

Paul finds another sander. He squeezes the trigger and the tool comes to life with a pugnacious roar. It’s weirdly startling: there seems something violent about striding toward another human being while revving up a power tool. Buried beneath all the things he used to think of as his true and essential nature, his nonconfrontational personality, his live-and-let-live character, beneath the steadily accrued rules of self-government, the limits of what he will do and what he will not do, beneath everything familiar and everything assumed, beneath his style and beneath his ideals, beneath it all he may be a beast.

He notices Evangeline is talking and he turns off the sander, letting it dangle from two fingers.

“Thank you for hiring me, Paul. I just want to tell you that to me you’re as much an artist as half the guys in galleries.”

“I’m just a carpenter.”

“That’s like calling Yves Saint Laurent a tailor.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a tailor. I’m a carpenter. Anyhow,” he says, jerking the reins of the conversation, “how come you drove Cheryl’s car to work? Is something wrong with your Honda?”

“Oh the Honda,” Evangeline says, in the tone you use to discuss some dear but hopeless friend, some ceaselessly backsliding old comrade whom you love despite the many frustrations. “All these old Hondas need new timing belts when they pass a hundred thousand miles, and it needs a water pump.”

“Well that’s not going to work,” Paul says. “You have to have a car.”

“I know,” says Evangeline. “But Cheryl’s got two cars right now because her brother moved to Brooklyn and he keeps his Rabbit up here.”

Evangeline is swaying back and forth as she says this and Paul realizes that her motion mirrors his own, that she is merely following him with her eyes and letting the rest of her come along for the ride.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“I’m fine.”

He used to say I’m good, until Kate pointed out that saying I’m fine is more correct, and to say that you are good refers to moral rather than physical variables. Now, not only is he not good but he doesn’t feel fine, either. He’s light-headed and though it is hot in the workshop he feels cold.

“You’re sort of alabaster,” Evangeline says.

“It was a long winter,” he says.

“Well,” Evangeline says, “at least I got to use the word
alabaster
in a sentence.”

Paul drags a chair from the drafting table, turns it around, and sits. It alarms him to feel the relief of it. Once, he saw his father heaving himself exhaustedly into a chair, taking off his shoes, and rubbing his feet, making little murmurs of pleasure, and the gesture seemed so foul and defeated that it has remained something Paul would never do: he sits with his back straight, his feet firmly on the floor.

“I’m worried about this car situation,” he says to Evangeline.

“I actually have a plan,” Evangeline says. Her voice is scratchy and dry; she sounds like a little girl who has stayed up far past her bedtime. “There’s these two dykes up in Lemon Bridge who run an auto repair shop right out of their house? Cheryl is friends with them and I think I can get them to do all the work on my car if I carve them one of those big salad bowls.”

“The cherry?” Paul asks.

“Definitely the cherry,” says Evangeline.

“You could sell one of those in the city for a thousand dollars,” Paul says.

“I don’t think so,” Evangeline says. “There’s a store on Madison called Maison Extraordinaire and they bought one off me for three hundred and fifty bucks and sold it for thirteen hundred.”

“That doesn’t seem very fair,” Paul says.

Evangeline shrugs. “Cheryl and I were going to drive down there and burn the place down, or just fucking stab the guy in the forehead, or something. But what the fuck. It’s how the world works.”

“You know what,” Paul says, placing his hands on his kneecaps, taking a deep breath. It takes a bit of effort for him to stand. It feels for a moment as if an implacable, invisible hand is holding him down. The workshop, the machines, the tools, the boards, the shelves lined up with various types of stains, the new computer still not out of the box in which it was delivered, the stools, the chairs, the drawings of future projects, the snapshots of past work, the rafters, the windows, the sawdust drifting in the sunlight, it all dims, almost to the point of disappearing. But, to his relief, it all comes back and it’s as if it never happened, this sudden shrinking of consciousness, this rush to the edge of his own demise.

In its wake, he feels a glowing disorder, as if his sense of the world has for a moment been turned into pure luminescence. And at the shimmering core of this sudden radiance trembles an idea. He walks to the drafting table, dragging the chair behind him, sits, finds paper and pen.

“I’m writing up an agreement,” Paul tells Evangeline. “I’m going to make you a partner in this company.” He looks over his shoulder so he can see her. “Is that all right with you, Evangeline?”

She opens her mouth to speak, not really sure what she wants to say. At last, her face reddening, her eyes swimming, she says, “You’re either a saint or you’re crazy.”

Kate is pointing out the items on the table one by one.

“The lasagna comes from that new Italian deli—I got it especially for Ruby, but there’s enough for everyone. The stuffed peppers come from Streamside Catering, they’ve got a little take-out counter now. The broccoli and almonds, also from Streamside. The chicken is from the rotisserie place where they have a name that is impossible for me to remember. And the salad, such as it is, I made myself.”