The Man in the Woods (6 page)

This part of Helen’s inheritance had not yet shown itself.

“Now, tell me,” he said, kissing her on the forehead, “what’s all this I hear about you tailing some bloody hell-kite up a hill into the woods?”

“I wanted to see who it was, Dad. If he’s the one who’s been throwing rocks at cars, the Punk Rock Thrower, I could have identified him. I could have—”

“You wanted to catch him, didn’t you?” asked her father, smiling.

“Well, you should have seen the poor little girl and her mom. They were nearly killed.”

“And so could you have been. A slip of a girl like you up in the woods with a psychopath twice your size.” Her father held her close. “Promise never to do such a thing again?”

“Okay, Dad.”

“You’re all I have in the world. Remember that, Sweet Pea,” he said.

“You’ve got me!” Aunt Stella snapped from the kitchen. Helen’s father bent to pick a yellowed leaf off one of his geraniums in the window. “And I don’t know what I’d do without you, Stella!” he called into the kitchen.

Aunt Stella answered him with “Dinner!”

Helen and her father walked arm in arm to the table. Her father said grace, and as they began slicing up Aunt Stella’s rock-hard macaroni and cheese with steak knives, he winked and congratulated Helen on her new job at the
Whaler
. “Stella tells me you have to draw a picture for an ad, is it?”

“A Hummel figurine,” said Helen. She got up and took the box out of her pocketbook. “Oh,
no
,” she said. “It’s chipped. The policemen must have banged it when they piled all our stuff on the edge of the highway. What am I going to do? It costs fifty dollars.”

Helen’s father picked up the figurine and examined it. The chip was right on the staff the little boy was holding. “Ugly thing,” he said, putting it down in disgust. “Ordinarily you’d have to pay for it yourself, but this was a good cause, babe. Stella, can you pick her up one just like it?”

“Please, Aunt Stella,” Helen begged. “Barry de Wolf will kill me if he sees it’s been broken.”

“Who is Barry de Wolf?” asked Aunt Stella.

“Some senior,” said Helen, “on the
Whaler
. He’s the business manager, I think. His name’s right under Jerry Rosen’s on the masthead. Jerry’s the editor, and he’ll probably fire me from my new job. And then there’s Beverly Boone. She’s another senior. If she sees I’ve messed up on my first day, she won’t ever let me help her with the paste-up. I don’t have fifty dollars, Aunt Stella.” Actually Helen did have forty-eight dollars. It was stashed away in the back of her closet. She was saving up until she had sixty dollars in hand, and then she intended to go out and have her hair straightened.

“Well,” said Aunt Stella with an agreeable sigh, “it would be unwise to disappoint the people on the newspaper. They sound very nice, by the way. Young people with a future ahead of them. Unlike that weedy creature you brought in today with the dirty fingernails. He’ll never amount to a hill of beans.”

“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.

B
Y 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.”