Man in The Woods (8 page)

Thank you, Shep, old buddy
, Paul thinks as he goes to the AOL site and types in Recent Deaths Westchester. An innumerable list of options presents itself, most of them months old. Not only are the entries outdated but he has seen them all himself, though in slightly different order, on previous nights. Suddenly, he sees a new one: “Recent University Study on Westchester Deaths.”

Paul clicks on the story, and waits nervously while it simmers up to the surface.

If you are found dead or go missing in Westchester County, there is a 1 in 22 chance that local law enforcement authorities will do little or nothing to determine the cause of your death. Even in cases where it is clear that a crime has been committed, Westchester leads New York State counties in police inaction. This is the conclusion come to by Dr. Mansfield Trumbull, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.

“Given the number of local and state police we have in Westchester,” Dr. Trumbull said, “the number of unexplained and uninvestigated deaths and disappearances is remarkable. The only area in the U.S. we found with a comparable number of unexplained deaths and disappearances is in the Native American reservations in North Dakota, where law enforcement has been almost nonexistent. Westchester, with its numerous police forces and adequate funding, is not going to be the next North Dakota, but nevertheless the pattern emerging of official inaction is, quite frankly, disturbing.”

Paul reads, shaking his head with worry. This voice from the mysterious regions of his computer, this blather of opinion that may have been written five years ago and has perhaps gone unread since then, these pixelated paragraphs floating around the Internet like garbage in outer space…
Shut the fuck up, professor
, Paul thinks.

Stumbling around the Internet, slowly going from one site to the next, Paul happens upon a page that is more than he can bear. The site is called
They Are Missed
and basically it is a bulletin board for posting pictures of and rudimentary information about missing persons. Page after page of pictures—smiling faces from high school yearbooks, serious stares taken off driver’s licenses, or employee IDs, young men in tuxedos, young women in bridal gowns, suggesting lives in which no one had bothered to take their photograph except on their wedding day, missing men and women, boys and girls, with their heads cocked, brows furrowed, flirty, furious, fucked up on booze or drugs, an astonishing number of them last seen going out to a convenience store at some forsaken hour, a likewise astonishing number coming from either Texas or Maryland, black, white, Asian, Latino, all of them citizens of a vast underground archipelago of suffering, whose inhabitants include not only the murdered and the missing but all those who loved them and who wait for some final word. And also: those who were responsible for their violent ends, they were condemned to the archipelago, too.

Paul looks at each of the missing people and does not find one of them who looks like the man in the woods. Next he must look at the pages containing images of bodies the police have yet to identify, but before the site will allow him access to these images there is a warning:
Some of the content profiled in the Unidentified section may be disturbing and contains postmortem photographs that are not suitable for children. Do you wish to continue?
Paul has no choice but to click Yes and, through a frightened squint, as if his eyelashes can soften the blow of those thumbnail pictures, he looks for the evidence of what he has done in the photos of the horribly decomposed faces, or, in some cases, the graphite renderings of the suspiciously deceased, when the body, once discovered (most often by hunters, joggers, or dog walkers) has been pulled too deeply into the vortex of decomposition to photograph.

There is a tap at his door and Paul quickly closes his computer.

“Paul? Are you in there?” Kate says in a dry, cracked whisper. She opens the door and gives him a quizzical look. “I rolled over and you weren’t there.”

“Well you found me,” Paul says, rising from his chair, taking her in his arms. She smells of the bed, and the lingering lilac scent of her evening bath. Even as he holds her he feels as if he is remembering her. “Thank you for finding me,” he whispers.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Walking through the woods, it’s step by step, one foot in front of the other. What could be more fundamental? It’s like breathing—inhale through the nostrils, exhale through the mouth, the taste and tickle of your own mortality coursing over your lips like running water over stones. We are under a sea of air, to which we have adapted just as fish have adapted to their life underwater.

A walk in the woods is like wading through a river; you can’t walk in the same woods twice, no matter how you may try. You can tread the same path and at the same pace and at the same time of day, you can measure your steps so that Tuesday’s walk matches Monday’s as closely as possible, but no matter what, the walk will be singular and unique. Leaves will have fallen since your last time here, pinecones, acorns, berries, shit, a beer can, a candy wrapper. Procreation will have taken place, pursuit, death, shoots will have been eaten, brush will have been trampled, bark will have peeled, roots will have grown deeper. Decay and regeneration are a wheel that will not stop turning, even now, autumn by the calendar, winter by the bone, the gray wash-water sky, the liquefying leaves underfoot, even now the wheel turns, slower than in the warmer months but with a bleak grandeur.

“My soul,” Paul says, “there’s steam coming off this pile of deer shit.”
My soul, my soul
, he repeats to himself. It was his mother’s phrase, a verbal keepsake now. She used to deliver it full of irony, just as she did
Land’s sake
, and
Lamb’s sake
, too, because both seemed right to her, she just wasn’t sure which was which, and it didn’t entirely matter either because it was all a part of an act, the part she liked to play of a good country woman hanging on to her Christian principles in an evil, crazy world, a pose among many and no less or more true than her other assumed identities—the antimaterialist wild child, the fallen American aristocrat full of frontier virtue, the self-sacrificing mother hen, the natural artist, the woman with a surfeit of common sense.

Shep is hovering over the fresh scat, his bristly muzzle less than a quarter inch from the soft pile, which looks like a mound of plump raisins. “Don’t do that, boy,” Paul says, but the dog only half-listens—he hasn’t put any deer shit in his mouth yet but his nostrils dilate and contract as he takes in the full sensual delight of his find. His thin black lips part, his tongue emerges to taste nature’s bounty. “Shep, that’s no good,” Paul says, this time pressing two fingers on the back of the dog’s neck.

“Something to bear in mind the next time you give that dog a big old smooch on the lips,” says Todd Lawson, with whom Paul is walking.

Lawson, like many in Leyden, is hard to place occupationally, or socioeconomically. He is loosely but not profitably related to various local big shots, politicians, ministers, and the owners of riverfront estates, but whatever local pedigree he may claim, none of it is of much material use. Right now, Lawson has five jobs, which altogether generate enough income to support his modest, solitary life, including spending the coldest part of the New York winter in Mexico, which might strike some as a luxury for a man who is often in arrears on his rent, but the urge to head south for the winter is a trait Lawson has inherited from his flush forebears. The original makers of the family’s fortune were industrious, driven men, but there followed generations of idlers, ending with Lawson’s father, Harley, who worked two days a week at a brokerage off Maiden Lane managing to lose so much money that his family was grateful he didn’t work full-time.

Idleness is not an option for Todd. Part of his income comes from Marlowe College, whose tennis team he coaches. He also works at a horse farm on the edge of Leyden, where he gives riding lessons. He makes two hundred dollars a month touring visitors through one of the most spectacular of the river estates, a Victorian monstrosity painted black and gray, whose exterior has been used by the makers of several horror films, and whose interior, full of dark wood and clashing wallpapers and overall sense of foreboding, leaves most visitors feeling quite content not to have been born into nineteenth-century wealth. He also makes deliveries for Of the Manor, his brother’s antiques store, and he has yet another source of occasional income, which is choosing the wines for three local restaurants owned by a woman named Indigo Blue, who is drawn to Lawson but reluctant to get involved with him, and for whom keeping him around as a part-time employee is an ideal solution.

Paul and Lawson are walking on posted land. They come to a small cluster of fallen hemlocks and then to a couple of large granite boulders, with open seams of glistening mica running through them. Lawson has picked up a long, bare branch and is using it as a walking stick.

“It’s as tall as you,” Paul says.

“You know,” says Lawson, “Daniel Boone was about an inch taller than his gun and it weighed almost ten pounds, plus the buffalo horn full of powder and a bag full of shot. It must have really gotten old after a while, carrying all that. I think that’s why he was so fond of buffalo jerky and johnnycakes. They weighed next to nothing and he was always looking to lessen his load.”

It is their habit, Paul’s and Lawson’s, to speak of Daniel Boone when they meet for their walks in the woods. They have been conducting this informal seminar for over a year, but today Paul is finding it difficult to enter into the spirit of it. Waking this morning and remembering he was going to see Lawson, he felt, and still feels, that here is a chance for him to spend time with someone he can show his worst side, or if not the whole freak show, with all the human monsters in their unkempt cages, then at least he can momentarily pull the curtain to one side, giving Todd a glimpse. No, he does not think he will ever tell Todd about what happened in those Westchester woods, but there might be words he can say that will relieve the silent fever.

They hear a distant rustling. Shep lifts his head, tenses, and Lawson whirls toward the sound, holding his walking stick like a rifle.

“Deer,” Paul says.

“Boone was a good shot, but you had to be,” Lawson says. “If you missed it took almost a minute to get your musket ready for a second shot. And by that time it was often too late.”

Paul stops, listens to the invisible birds cawing and squawking in the treetops. These are the hardy ones, willing to brave the oncoming winter. “It’s so beautiful here,” Paul says, in a whisper. “Hey, by the way, do you ever check out Martingham State Park, down near Tarrytown?”

Either the question doesn’t interest Lawson, or he hasn’t heard it. “Let’s sit,” he says, fishing a cigarette out of his denim jacket. He has an olive complexion, long black hair; he looks like he might be part American Indian. Yet for all his vigorous looks, it is always Lawson who needs to rest when they walk together. His body has accumulated the many mishaps he has endured in the course of making a living. The horse barn has taken its toll, and so has moving furniture—the weight of some of those pieces squeezes the life out of him. Last year he got his pant cuff snagged in a tractor’s PTO and for months after that he dragged his right leg around like a useless thirty pounds of meat. That’s finally healed, but he is always nursing something, always banged up, and he’s not sure but he may be dependent on painkillers.

The men sit on the boulder and the dog sits on the ground with his back to them, looking out through the woods, at the dim world beyond, divided into strips by the intersection of countless trees.

“Back in the day,” Lawson says, “this is where the preachers told everyone you had to go to find God. No Jesus in the parlor, that’s what they said.”

“I’ll tell that one to Kate,” Paul says.

“So,” Lawson says, leaning back on his elbows, stretching out his legs. “How are things at the place?”

Paul has noticed that Lawson doesn’t ever call where Paul lives his home. Or house. He will say the place, even your place, he will say crib, pad, domicile, abode, residence, residencia, he has called it a tent, he will even go so far as to refer to it as your corner of the zip code. But he evades ever calling it Paul’s home, and this can have only one meaning: Lawson does not believe that Paul belongs in Kate’s house. Does he think Paul is somehow too good to allow himself to be installed in a position that might call into question his independence? Does he worry that Paul has become one of those men who manage to saw and hammer their way into a period of cohabitation with the lady of the house, a period that, at least in Windsor County, is always short-lived and always ends with the bourgeois lady coming to her bourgeois senses and the carpenter out on his proletarian ear? Or is it that Todd Lawson believes Paul Phillips is not worthy of that house? Is there in Lawson’s view something incongruous about Paul’s inhabiting those prim and proper rooms, and that to see him there is to witness a display that is inherently absurd, upsetting, and distasteful, like a chimp in a tux?

“Since when did you start smoking?” Paul asks.

“A while ago,” Lawson says. “You want one? They’re chemical-free.” He exhales a long trail of smoke, the same color as the autumn air. “So things are okay?” Lawson asks.

Paul is silent for a moment, seeing his chance to say something, and trying to gauge what his life would be like were he to actually tell his secret. When he feels as though the silence cannot be extended further, he says, “Kate’s annoyed with me, I think.”

“You think?” Lawson says. “That’s the problem right there. You can’t be guessing what she feels, you’ve got to know.”

“I brought this dog into our life, and I didn’t exactly have the green light on that one.”

“You just walked in with it?” Lawson’s tone conveys that he is impressed.

Paul senses another opening, a place where he can imply more of the truth. It is like being lost in the darkest heart of the woods and seeing a flash of light that suggests a way out. But for now he remains in darkness.

“That’s a whole other story,” Paul says. “But Shep’s a stray.”

“Well not anymore he isn’t,” Lawson says, with a laugh. Lawson snaps his fingers, beckoning the dog to come. Shep turns toward the sound but doesn’t move.

“He’s actually sort of practical,” Paul says. “You haven’t done anything for him so he doesn’t figure to owe you anything.”

Lawson shrugs. “I can relate,” he says. He pats Paul’s knee and looks at him curiously. “You look sort of tired.”

“Up late,” says Paul. “Three o’clock in the morning, not good.”

Lawson smiles. “Maybe that’s what we should be talking about, my friend. What would a fine hardworking man such as yourself be doing up and around at three in the morning? Why would you abandon the bed of your lovely consort? Why would you expose yourself to the demons who rule the earth at that ungodly time?” Lawson wets his fingertips with saliva and pinches out his cigarette, drops the twisted butt of it into his jacket’s pocket.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” Paul says, looking away. Shep has seen or heard or picked up the scent of something—not enough to bring him to his feet, but his spine straightens, his ears go back, and he raises his muzzle.

“Anything you feel like putting out there?” Todd asks, and when Paul shakes his head Lawson looks somewhat relieved. He gets off the boulder, and Paul readies himself to resume walking, too. They walk beneath an old spruce. Lawson lifts the lowest bough so he can pass under it, and lifts it a little higher as Paul passes under, followed by Shep.

“All right, here’s the Todd Lawson diagnostic test for good relationships. Do you guys still laugh together? I mean, is it still fun?”

What would be funny
, Paul thinks,
is if I right now just said, “Hey I killed a guy a couple of weeks ago.”
But instead he says, “No problems there.”

“Well, if you guys are still laughing. And I’m assuming the other more unmentionable things are all copacetic.”

“Very much so,” says Paul.

“Well then,” says Todd.

Paul is quite sure that this is as far as the inquiry will go. Women have told him that among female friends all sorts of sexual confidences are exchanged, often quite graphically, but in Paul’s experience this is not the case with men. Men protect the details of their intimate lives like poker players holding their cards close, and for very similar reasons, too—they either want to give the impression of holding aces or they want to be able to quietly fold without showing their hand. Knowledge is power and men don’t want to give it away.

“Well if you’re still laughing, and the night life is still cooking, who knows? This one might be a keeper.”

“My keeping Kate isn’t really the issue,” Paul says. “I’m more worried about her keeping me.”

“You? A fine strapping young specimen such as yourself?”

“When was the last time you hit someone?” Paul asks. “I mean really fucking whacked them in anger?”

“Oh man, I have no idea,” Lawson says. “Years, many years. Not since I was a kid.” He rubs the stubble on his chin with his palm. “You didn’t hit her, did you?” Paul shakes his head. “Then what? The dog? The kid?”

“Nothing like that,” Paul says. “Just thinking, that’s all. There’s something inside of me that scares the shit out of me.”

“Is that all?” Lawson says. He puts his arm over Paul’s shoulders. “Welcome to the world. And, by the way, welcome to America. I was just last night reading this story by D. H. Lawrence where he says the typical American is private, independent, and sort of a killer, in his heart.” Lawson delivers a thump to his chest, as if to correct an irregularity. “I’ll give you the book sometime, if you want.”

Paul shoves his hands into his pants pockets. His hands feel suddenly cold, stiff. Fallen leaves cover the ground in gold, yellow, brown, and orange, and make walking slippery and difficult, though not for Shep, whose tongue is lolling out the side of his mouth and whose eyes sparkle, as though remembering some droll incident from his past. The woods are filled with birds who are staying put for the long winter—woodpeckers and blue jays, cardinals and chickadees. A hefty crow lights upon the tip of a nearby spruce, and sits there swaying back and forth like a black star on top of a Christmas tree. The temperature seems to be dropping, but there is a sudden presence of light coming from the west, as the sinking sun is making the last ten degrees of its journey toward the horizon free of the cloud cover. Traces of brilliant orange and red sky show through the spaces between the trees. The light, the light. Yet what Paul is thinking is:
Every step I take I go deeper into the darkness
.