The Man in the Woods (4 page)

Helen’s happiness had faded altogether by this time. Meekly she followed Pinky up the stairs toward her locker. Pinky marched on ahead like a soldier, muttering about how much it would cost to remake the plate and about how much time and paper was involved in reprinting the hall passes.

“Okay,” he said when they reached the door of Miss Podell’s classroom. “Which one is it?”

All the lockers looked alike in the vast, empty hallway. Helen took a deep breath and pointed. “This one,” she said.

Pinky bent down and put his ear to the lock. He twirled the dial. It opened.

“Oh, thank you,” said Helen. She looked into the locker. It contained only a pair of boy’s gym shorts. “I think it’s the locker next to this one,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut.

Pinky stooped again. His face was scarlet with anger. “Boy,” he said, “there are certain types of people in this world. Know-it-all types. Always pointing the finger at somebody else. Always finding piddling little mistakes. But when it comes to their own mistakes, watch out! Help me, help me! It’s not
my
fault. Now, is this the right locker, or do you want me to open all of them?”

With relief Helen removed her own books, lunch, and binder.

“Know-it-all types can’t think their way out of a paper bag,” said Pinky.

Unfortunately it appeared that Pinky was headed for the same bus as Helen. They walked in silence on opposite sides of the hall. They sat in silence on the nearly empty bus, he in the front seat and she way in the back. In her imagination Helen began dreaming up what she wanted to say to Pinky.
There are people in this world
, she decided she would say,
who blame everything on everyone else.
That didn’t sound nearly dramatic enough.
Men have been responsible for all the wars in history
, she began again. The bus lurched to a stop. Pinky swung himself out the door.
Whereas if women were in charge of things, there would be no
—Suddenly Helen realized this was her stop too. She couldn’t very well stay on the bus—Aunt Stella would be beside herself with worry right now. She was probably reporting Helen to the police as a missing person this very minute. Helen got off, books stacked unevenly in her sweating arms and the Hummel figurine bumping heavily against her side in her pocketbook. She walked ten paces behind Pinky. Aunt Stella was going to call the Board of Ed to change Helen’s bus route, as she didn’t like Helen’s being dropped off on a highway ten minutes away from home. Helen hoped Aunt Stella would succeed. She didn’t look forward to walking home with Pinky every day.

She filled her lungs with air. “You male chauvinist pig!” she yelled. “You probably can’t even spell your own name!” But at that exact moment a truck passed them, scattering gravel onto the shoulder of the road. Its noise drowned out her words but not a sudden crash of splintering glass.

The truck vanished down the highway, but a car that had been just behind it skidded and spun in a complete circle fifty feet ahead of them. There was a scream that went on and on. Helen and Pinky dropped their books and ran toward the car. A little girl of about four was wailing piteously.

Time suddenly became an elastic substance. Helen found her eyes riveted to the broken windshield glass. It had shattered into bits like dollhouse-size ice cubes all over the car and roadway. She brushed some of it off the little girl’s dress. She saw the reddish iron rock on the front seat. It looked like the piece of iron ore in the Riches of Our Earth display in the Museum of Science.

Was it an hour that she was hypnotized by the winking glass and the rock or just a few seconds? Pinky was examining the woman in the driver’s seat. Helen held the little girl and tried to comfort her. Her breath came in short gasps, the way she imagined it would on top of a high mountain, and yet she felt too that everything was happening underwater. She noticed herself sinking to her knees while a voice both inside her head and miles away outside yelled, “What kind of person are you? Get ahold of yourself, you silly jerk, and help these people!” She was too dizzy to obey until she realized it was Pinky’s voice. He was shaking her shoulder and shouting in her ear.

“Damn it!” he said. “Don’t be such a stupid gutless
girl
!”

The car seat came into focus again. The woman was draped across it. Pure, healthy anger washed over Helen. She placed the little girl in the back seat, making sure there was no glass there. The blood from the woman’s wound was turning black against the upholstery, soaking in.

Pinky tore his shirt into strips. “Help me,” he yelled, “you airhead!”

There were two shopping bags of groceries that had spilled onto the pavement. Helen took a roll of paper towels, ripped off a bunch, dipped them in a handy container of milk, and cleaned the woman’s face and some arm wounds. The little girl in the back seat kept trying to tumble over to her mother. Her hair was matted, her face full of tears and snot, and she continued to scream hysterically. Helen held the child off with one hand and tucked Pinky’s shirt bandages snug and tight with the other hand.

“That’s practically a tourniquet. I’m going to loosen it,” said Pinky.

“Don’t touch it,” said Helen. “You want her to bleed to death?”

“You want her to lose an arm?” asked Pinky.

“It’s an artery!” Helen insisted. “It’s pumping. Don’t make it looser. You have to stop arterial bleeding with a tight bandage.”

“Artery, my eye!” said Pinky. “You cut off the blood supply, she’ll lose an arm. It’s a vein. It’s superficial.”

“I took first aid with Sister de Angelis, who spent five years in Africa!” said Helen. “And she told us—”

“Yeah?” Pinky broke in. “I had four years of first aid in the Boy Scouts of America, and I know what I’m talking about.”

In a quieter moment Helen would have admitted that her knowledge of first aid was sketchy to say the least. All she could really recall was Sister de Angelis’s treatment for fire-ant bites. “The bleeding’s stopped, Pinky. Leave the bandage alone!” she said between gritted teeth. “You touch that bandage, and the woman will die.”

“I’m not going to die,” whispered the woman. Pinky and Helen both stared at the yellow-white face under the bloody dark hair. The woman was struggling to sit up. Pinky strode into the middle of the highway. He scanned it, looking up and down for a car, but the highway was as empty as a desert. “
Somebody come!
” he yelled in desperation after a few minutes.

Helen spotted the house, partially hidden by trees up on the side of the hill. She guessed it was occupied, as for a moment she saw someone standing outside it. No cars came. “Help!” Helen yelled up to the house. “Call the police! Get an ambulance!”

“Somebody there?” asked Pinky.

“Up the hill,” said Helen, pointing to the house. “They just went in to call. Help is on the way,” she assured the woman. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Pinky yelled. “The gas tank might blow up any minute. I can smell it.”

The woman could walk, a little unsteadily. Pinky helped her, letting her lean on him. Helen carried the child up the hill.

“You should never have used milk to clean those wounds,” said Pinky. “Milk’s full of bacteria.”

Fear ripped through Helen’s being. Her hands began to shake and her mouth dried up. Bacteria! What had Sister de Angelis said about bacteria? Africa was full of hundreds of kinds. Sister de Angelis had never made a move in those five years without a canteen of purified drinking water, because of bacteria, and another full of alcohol, for bacteria also. Sister had passed around the classroom an old tin of vile-smelling antibacterial ointment good for fire-ant bites. Helen wished Pinky would step in a nest of fire ants right that minute.

The little girl sobbed with a jagged regularity that would not wind down.

Pinky tried the front door of the house. It was locked. He rapped sharply on it, yelling for someone to come. When no one did, he leaned the woman up against Helen, like a broom, and jimmied open a window. “Thought you said someone was here,” he snorted angrily.

The woman slid down and sat on the front steps of the house. Helen still held the fighting, tearful child. “But there was someone here,” she said to no one in particular. “There
was
.” The little girl kicked against her hip. “Nice little girl,” said Helen. Helen did not like children very much. “Here,” she continued. “Nice apple! See the nice apple?” She picked the least wormy crab apple she could reach from the low-hanging branch of an apple tree. It was the tree where she was sure she’d seen the person standing. The child grabbed the apple and took a bite. Immediately she spat it out and began to howl again. A rake and a roll of chicken wire leaned against the trunk of the tree.
I guess that was what I saw
, Helen said to herself sadly.
And it looked like a person. Just like a mirage in the desert.

The little girl threw the sour apple angrily to the ground. Two feet away from it was another apple. It too had a bite taken out of it, freshly, because the edges were not yet brown.

Pinky opened the front door of the house from the inside. He bent and lifted the woman to her feet. Gently he led her inside to a sofa. The little girl’s screams echoed through the quiet house like a squash ball madly bouncing off the walls of an indoor court, gaining momentum. Then they stopped, as if an alarm had been turned off, when Helen laid her gently next to her mother. The woman focused on the child’s face, seemed satisfied, and with her free hand began searching through her child’s hair.

“The cops are coming,” said Pinky. “I just talked to them. Take ’em ten minutes to get a squad car out here. They said to give the lady some brandy if I can find any.”

Helen stroked the woman’s injured arm distractedly and assured her that her groceries didn’t matter a bit. She gazed out the window beside her. The distant wild scrub oak became scrub pine and then real woods far beyond on the hillside. In the middle distance a field of rye grass and goldenrod undulated tranquilly, blithely denying the violence of the last few minutes. Helen was on the point of asking Pinky whether they’d get into trouble for breaking and entering a house when she saw someone moving between two faraway trees.

Pinky came back from the kitchen with a Dixie cup of strong-smelling liquor.

Helen jumped to her feet. “There’s somebody out there going up the hill into the woods!” she said and ran out the door.

Pinky could only yell after her, “Wait a minute! Maybe it’s the guy who threw the rock at the car!”

The running was easy. She jumped over hummocks of grass and low ditches like a rabbit. She reached the spot where she’d seen the person and decided she would have a better chance of catching up to him if she headed straight for where she guessed he was going rather than trying to follow the path, so she cut around the scrub pines directly into the deeper woods. It occurred to her then that he had not been running at all but was walking very deliberately.

Raggedy branches were scattered all over the ground around her. Every one of her footfalls sounded to Helen like a starting pistol. Rough bark and vines caught at her hair, and the trees themselves seemed to have come alive with noise.

Her body heaved with the effort of the uphill running. Stinging scratches from the rough bark and nettle bushes burned her arms and legs and face. A particularly nasty hooked branch snarled her hair, and she stopped to free it. Then she heard someone coming up the hill just behind her.

She tried to calm her panic and think sensibly.
I can run off to the side
, she thought suddenly.
But if I have a chance to see him ...

Helen found an overturned stump with a hundred dead roots in the air, like so many desperately reaching claws. She lay down beneath it and dug herself into the soft humus and pine needles. She listened as he came closer, walking up the grassy deer run just a few feet away.
I wish I’d run away
, she thought. It was too late now to go anywhere. She pressed her mother’s picture, which hung in a silver locket around her throat, with a trembling hand.
Mother, Mother. Please be with me. God help me
, she prayed.
Don’t let him find me. I only did this because that stupid Pinky Levy called me a gutless girl.
She dug herself deeper into the earth beneath the stump. The footsteps were seconds away. Far down on the highway the sirens of the police car began to wail followed by the howling Klaxon of an ambulance. At that moment he passed the stump where she lay hidden. He was much too close to her, just inches away, for her to see anything of him. The cuff of a pair of chinos, a white sweat sock with a burr stuck on it, an old white Nike sneaker with the
e
in
Nike
worn off. There was a spring to his step. When he’d gone a dozen strides farther up the hill, she raised her head and for a tick of a second saw only the back of someone so obscured by the rippling leaves of the ash trees, she knew she would never be able to describe him to anyone. She kept her eyes on the last bit of his white T-shirt, and then he seemed to vanish into a high rock covered with poison ivy and nettles up ahead.

Helen backed out of her hiding place as soundlessly and slickly as a snake uncoiling. She ran faster down the hill than she had ever known she had the power to do.

She did not stop until she’d reached the center of the field of rye grass, where she sat down heavily. Her throat had closed, and she thought she’d never be able to breathe again.
He didn’t see me
, she said to herself over and over.
He didn’t see me. Or did he?
Had he hidden himself and watched, smiling, from behind the leaves of a tree?

And why would he be smiling? The answer to this would not come, but she was quite sure of it all the same. A stitch ached excruciatingly in her side. She held it, unable to get up again until it went away. She had picked up more scratches and bruises in her tumbling, headlong race down the hill. Finally Helen got to her feet and tried to make the best of her appearance. She tried to picture what little she’d seen of him. There was nothing to picture. Everything about him was as ordinary as the hundreds of people who had sat next to her on park benches or in buses and whom she’d never noticed or remembered.
He couldn’t have seen me
, she told herself again.