The Man in the Woods (7 page)

Helen took the newspaper article from last Wednesday’s
Post-Dispatch
out of her wallet.
DRUG-CRAZED ROCK THROWER TRACKED BY CLEVER COPS
was the headline. “Maniac with Bad Aim Sought to Loot Jewelry Trucks” was the sub-headline. Helen read the whole thing over for the twentieth time.

New Bedford police ended a two-month search and a two-month siege of terror for local residents with the arrest Tuesday night of Duane “Stubby” Atlas of 42 Dock Street. Police sources have suspected for some time that there was a pattern to the rock throwing. Their suspicions proved correct when they arrested a heroin addict and son of local mobster Chet Atlas. Atlas was aiming his rocks at the UPS delivery trucks that routinely carry merchandise for Perry and Crowe’s huge mail order business. According to police sources he was hoping to cause an accident and loot the trucks of their jewelry and money. A spokesman for Perry and Crowe expressed horror at the incidents and informed this paper that all valuables, jewelry and cash, are shipped at irregular intervals in Brinks armored vans. “All this madman could hope to do was take human life and smash up a little china and glass,” said the spokesman.

Atlas has been charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and possession of heroin. His last victims, a mother and child from Dartmouth, were slightly injured Tuesday afternoon when Atlas hit their car instead of the UPS truck in front of them. Two local teenagers, Olaf Levy, 15, of Seafarer Way, and Mary Helen Curragh, 14, of Prospect Avenue, New Bedford, will be awarded good citizenship certificates by the Chamber of Commerce for giving first aid to the victims.

“Olaf Levy!” said Helen.

“Yeah, well,” said Pinky, “I was named after my mom’s father. Anyway, look who’s talking,
Mary
.”

Helen sighed. “Named after you know who,” she said.

“What a record that Atlas guy had,” said Pinky as they watched the football teams doing vigorous push-ups on the field. “Heard it over the radio. Petty larceny, possession of a knife, purse snatching, vandalism, drugs. Since he’s been eight years old, that guy’s been making trouble. They ought to drop him over Siberia at ten thousand feet.”

Helen frowned. “I wonder,” she said.

“You wonder what?”

“Oh, nothing.” She tossed her head as if to rid herself of a thought too large to think. “I hope they got the right guy.”

“Are you kidding?” Pinky asked. “They got Atlas dead to rights! He was a crazy doped-up weirdo with a record a mile long. Can you just imagine what he’d have done to you if he’d found out you were following him up through the woods? Gives me the shakes just to think about it.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Helen.

“Right? Right about what?”

“It must have been Stubby after all that I followed. It had to be. Anybody else would have helped us.”

“So why should you think it wasn’t him?”

“Just ... the whistling. It didn’t sound like him. ‘The Happy Wanderer’ doesn’t sound like a song that a person like Stubby would know.”

“Eh!” said Pinky. “He could have heard it on the Musak.”

“Well, I hope they put him in jail for fifty years,” said Helen, her eyes on one of the football players who was jogging in place. She sketched the player with quick, sure lines, fascinated by the straining, powerful muscles under the endless layers of tape, pads, and out-sized plastic devices stuck under the shoulders of his shirt. The cheerleaders, bright-eyed and squeaky clean, leaping in their heavy white sweaters with red
N.B.
’s, urged the crowd to “Gimme an
N
! Gimme an
E
!” As she drew, Helen yelled back to them with Pinky and the rest of the crowd.

At half time the Fall River band worked its way out of the opposite side of the grandstand playing “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.” They formed a strange pattern at midfield which Helen could not identify until the PA microphone announced it was a diamond and the theme for the half-time entertainment was precious stones.

“You want a hot dog?” Pinky asked.

“Yes, sure,” said Helen, and she followed him over the benches, down a set of granite steps, and into the darkness of the stadium’s interior. “Your first football game?” Pinky asked.

“Yup,” said Helen.

“Like it?”

“I do,” she answered. “I didn’t think I would. I hate it on television, and I only came to draw the booster tags, but it’s fun!” Helen did not say
I wouldn’t like it nearly so much if you weren’t here with me.
She only thought that. They had reached the very back of the crowd that stood in the lines for the hot-dog concession. Pigeons and swallows nested high up in the secret hollows of the stone rafters. Every voice echoed to twice its volume in the cool darkness of the enormous granite arches.

“Wait here,” shouted Pinky, and he began squeezing between people, working his way to the counter. Helen could see his cowlick bobbing up and down as he got closer to the front. Being with a boy at a football game had always been something she imagined happened to other people, like free trips to Hawaii. It was something that pretty, popular, normal girls did.

The crowds converged thickly at the tunnels which led back to the grandstand. Helen felt Pinky’s hand close tightly around hers in the chilly gloom, three pushing girls going in different directions between herself and Pinky. It really didn’t count as holding her hand of course. He was just trying to guide her through the crowd, and there was nothing romantic in both of them holding dripping hot dogs away from the bumping bodies. Still, she felt a peculiar lightness and happiness inside. She didn’t want him to let go of her hand. Then she heard it.

Not far behind them someone was whistling, and her heart, or whatever it was in the middle of her that a minute before had felt like the inside of a star, now flopped over and turned to ice. Sweat beaded her whole body. Silvery, perfectly modulated notes, again like the tremulo of a flute, drifted over the clot of people chattering and pushing around her. Her hand slipped out of Pinky’s, and she stood pinned until the crowd moved again. Pinned as she had been under the stump in the woods, listening to the same tune and the same whistler with her pulse rattling like a freight train and her mouth as dry as sand.

Pinky managed to grab her arm and pull her up the stairs to the daylight. “Listen!” she whispered. “Do you hear it? Do you hear it?”

“Hear what? What’s the matter?”

“Listen!”

The whistling had gone off another way now, was lost somewhere in the vast inner ring of the stadium, but it could still be heard. Then it stopped.

Pinky scratched his ear. “Yes, I heard it,” he said, “but it could have been anybody. Anybody could whistle that song.”

“No. No. It was the same person. I’ve never in my life heard anyone whistle like that, Pinky. I want to find out who it was.”

The kickoff for the second half sailed through the air. The press of people forced them down the steps and back into their seats. Pinky began wolfing down his hot dog. Helen held hers in her lap, as if it had turned to stone. “I can’t eat,” she said. “I’m too scared.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” asked Pinky. “You can’t go prowling around the stadium waiting for somebody to start whistling.”

“First of all,” said Helen, “do you believe me?”

“Believe you?” he asked, evening out the mustard on his hot dog with one finger and wiping it on the underside of his jeans.

“Do you believe me that it’s the same guy I heard in the woods?”

“I guess so. I mean, you looked like a ghost, and you told me about it right away. It’s the same song for sure. You sang it to me. But what of it? Maybe it’s the same guy. But maybe the cops were right. It was probably the Indian the policeman mentioned or a jogger, and he whistles nicely, and he’s here at the game today. What of it?”

Helen’s eyes followed the football players as they ran up and down the field, tumbling in heaps over one another. She had no recognition of what they were doing. “The Indian, a jogger, anyone else would have helped us out, Pinky. The only person who would have walked away from that accident is the guy who threw the rock. Stubby’s in jail. The rock thrower is here at this game.”

Pinky crumpled his hot-dog wrapper and dropped it between his feet. “Holy Christmas night,” he said.

The only reminder of Tuesday’s accident left on the highway was a swath of tiny ice-cube bits of broken glass. Helen coaxed some of it into a mound with her toe and squinted up the hill toward the woods.

“It’ll be dark soon,” said Pinky. “Are you sure you want to go up there? Just to find a locket?”

Wood asters, butterfly weed, and cornflowers, blue as the afternoon sky, danced innocently in the fallow light. Beyond the field were the scrub pines, their branches always half rotten and covered with hard lichen. As the hill rose, so did the height of the trees, until they became just a mass of faraway blackness, hiding ferns and rabbits, moss and mushrooms, like an endless attic filled with trinkets. And secrets.

“My mother’s up there,” said Helen. “I know it sounds silly. But I’ve always had that locket right up against me, ever since she died, and I look at it, at the picture, every night before I go to sleep. I know it’s just a picture, but it’s the only one of her I really love, and there’s no negative. I don’t want to ... leave her up there all alone in those woods.”

“Doesn’t sound silly,” said Pinky, and he jammed his hands in his pockets and led the way up the hill.

The woods were full of calling birds and twanging insects. She retraced her steps through the prickly scrub oaks and pines with their half rotting rough-barked timbers, which scratched like carpenters’ rasps, but no silver locket gleamed from a branch or from the weed-covered ground. They found the stump, and Helen poked through the soft black earth under it. Again no locket. There was a rustling, suddenly, in the bushes near a stream up the hill where she’d lost sight of the whistler.

They saw a man, and he saw them. Helen jumped. Then she realized this old limping man was nothing like the person she had followed.

In his hand was a white plastic milk jug. He had apparently been collecting water from the stream. He was quite old, and many inches over six feet tall, with a face as wizened in wrinkles as a walnut shell. He limped a few steps toward them and then stood staring.

“We didn’t mean to bother you,” said Helen as cheerfully as she could.

“I heard ja coming,” said the old man. “What are you looking for?”

“Just a lost silver locket,” said Helen.

“How’d you lose a silver locket up here?” he asked suspiciously. He set his jug down, knelt on one knee, and clasped the other with enormous brown, veiny hands. “Nothing up here. ’Cept the water.”

“Water?” asked Pinky.

“Good for the blood,” said the old man. “Town water’s no good. Full of chemicals. I drink this here for my rheumatism. Bad knee.” He wiped some pine needles off the wet bottom of his milk jug, sniffed, and went on. “So I told you how come I’m here. You tell me how come you lost a piece of jewelry a half mile from the highway.”

“It’s a long story,” said Helen.

“Got more time than money,” said the old man.

So Helen told him—with Pinky adding a few flourishes to her story—of the accident and the chase up the hill.

“Cops didn’t like your story?” he asked when she’d gotten to the part about the policeman in the house.

“They wouldn’t even listen,” said Helen.

“Cops!” The old man laughed gently. “I stay away from ’em. They find me, they’ll nip me off into one of those nursing homes in town.”

“Not against your will, they couldn’t,” said Helen stoutly.

The old man laughed again. “I’m an Indian,” he said. “Wampanoag from the islands. Cops don’t like Indians. I live on public land. Against the law. I work a bit. Different jobs. I got a nice little place to live in, but nobody knows where it is. I don’t bother the cops, and the cops don’t bother me. I saw one of the rocks go flying out and hit the fender of a truck. Maybe two months back. Never told the cops. Truck kept right on going. Never made the papers.”

“But the rock could have killed someone,” said Helen.

“Lots of things kill people,” said the Indian with a caved-in smile. Helen guessed he had no teeth. “Course, if I’d been up here Tuesday like you and seen the accident and all, that would have been different. Least I’d have put a tourniquet on the lady. You’re brave kids. Good hearts, helping the lady and the kid. Stupid to chase that guy, though.” He shook his head in wonderment. “You never know. You should stay out of these woods, kids. Stay out,” he repeated in a sad voice with a crooked finger raised like a schoolteacher’s.

“I think we’ll go home now,” said Helen. A north wind had begun rustling through a stand of immense junipers beyond where they stood. Clouds blew over the sun, chilling her further. She wished she’d brought a sweater.

“You the young fellow who owns that cracked-up old motorbike I see hiding in the shed down there?” asked the Indian.

“How did you know about that?” said Pinky.

“I know everything and I see everything in these woods,” was the chuckling answer. “If I spot that locket of yours, miss, I’ll drop it in one of the saddlebags on the bike.” He struggled to his feet and, slipping an index finger through the handle of his water jug, turned to walk away. “Don’t you tell no cops you’ve been talking to me,” he said. “Don’t want them up here finding me, putting me in a rest home to die.”

“I promise,” said Helen.

The Indian smiled and limped slowly into the brush, blending with it, as quietly as a cat.

Neither Pinky nor Helen spoke until they had reached Pinky’s hidden bike and had ridden it almost to the edge of Prospect Avenue. Pinky stopped the bike. “Good-bye,” he said. “I have to get home. Saturday nights I have to take the desk of the motel. We get over twenty people and my mother has to run back and forth to the rooms to cover complaints—kids’ cribs, extra pillows—you name it. We’re not exactly a Holiday Inn. See you tomorrow. Remember, we gotta hit the books for the history test Monday.”

“About one?” asked Helen. “After church?” She got off the motorbike and snapped shut the flaps of a saddlebag that had been rubbing uncomfortably against her leg. The snap reminded her of something. It was bronze, with the insignia of the old German Army, an eagle. She fretted over it a moment. It was something like ... like what? Like the eagle on the necklace that Stubby had been twirling around and Mr. Casey had snatched away from him, accusing him ... “Pinky,” said Helen.