The Witch of the Wood (6 page)

“How do you break free then?” he said. “What’s the formula?”

“The sin of the womb. A revisitation to the pattern of the original crime. An escape from the grip of the root is not an escape after all. It is a rebirth, and it has got to be breech.”

She started breathing heavily, as if talking about it brought on nausea.

“But going through feet first is torture to us. We are not bats! If we have one innate weakness, it is that we are terrified of being upside down. And an exit backward through the grain is long and laborious. It’s like fighting one’s deepest phobia, and prolonging the battle for what would feel like eternity. Picture someone afraid of water, heights, and darkness being hung from a rope out of a helicopter by the feet and flown over a stormy sea at midnight. Then imagine asking that person to write scholarly prose or do calculus during the process. That is what this is like, Rudy. I tried to go through backward, tried to stand on my head and push with my palms, but I lost my nerve and balked. Just after breaking ground-surface I brought my feet back down, just to feel the bottom, just for a moment for reassurance, and then came the snow from three nights ago. A heavy ice formed in the top of my maple prison and weighed it down, splitting it right at the base. I am both trapped and exposed now, spell partially broken, touching my toes and touching your world, able for a brief moment to work the old magic as I did with you last evening. But I’m dying, Rudy, and the April Orr projection took everything in my power to maintain.” She pleaded then. “I’m upside down, tied by my feet to the helicopter, and trying to do calculus.”

“What can I do?”

“You have a choice. You can drive away and leave me to die, or you can approach me in my prison-house, as you did last evening. You can have me again, Rudy, but for my life to have meaning, for my revenge to be realized, it has to be of your own free will.”

“My . . . what? I don’t understand.”

“Look at me, Rudy. See what I really am.”

He looked.

What he saw was not of this world. She was a skeleton with bright white skin stretched across like Saran Wrap, eyes black and bulbous, lips blood red. She was beautiful in a most alien fashion and horrific, and while part of his mind was that child writhing and screaming, the intellectual in him was raising his fountain pen above his head in victory. Of course. She was a shape-shifter, and he was viewing the blank slate.

Then she changed, merged, shifted, and transformed into April Orr. She leaned toward him and lifted her hand to stroke his cheek, the pain and wanting set deep in her eyes.

“Make love to me again, Rudy, and I’ll give you the world. And when you question what you believe forms the foundation of your ethics, please remember two important issues. First, think of your world as the mass graveyard it already is, the prison-labyrinth with the decorative cover, highlighted by the shadows of all my sisters who have affixed their dark ghosts to the structures of your thoroughfares. And second, just consider this simple idea. Were you happy, Rudy? Ever?”

She was gone.

Rudy was still in his car, all dizziness ceased. He opened the door, got out, and made his way across the glen to the broken tree, and there at the crack, between stretched barking connecting the two halves, he saw it.

There in the wood was April Orr’s pussy, waist level where he’d had her last night, except she hadn’t been holding any banister. Inside the trunk she must have been touching her toes, mostly buried in there, just her vertex exposed to this part of the world. Trembling, Rudy reached forward with his fingers, touching her.

There was a moaning that came from the earth and she materialized, walls forming around them, and a roaring fire in the hearth keeping them warm. She was beautiful and she was naked, arched the way he liked her, looking back at him over her shoulder with an expression of slight indignation.

And right before Rudy entered her, she whispered,

“Do you know what a male of my species would be, Rudy? A beautiful, terrifying demon. A destroyer of men, faithful only to the ones who created him. You saw his ‘preview’ last night as the boy on the stairs. Do you have the courage to make him real?”

Rudy fit himself into her, pumped hard, and exploded. When he pulled out, the cold wind blasted all around him, and he fell backward, cutting his bare ass on the hard ice formed on the dirt beneath him. A yard or so above him, the vagina in the tree trunk then bloomed and swelled, bloody feet working their way from between the bloated folds. Rudy stood and drew up his pants. He then grabbed the small feet as gently as he could and helped ease the child out into the world, accompanied by a symphony of sucking sounds, a masterpiece of blood, bone, flesh, and gelatin.

The boy cried out into the wind, and he had the face of the child Rudy had seen last night, crystalline eyes, like a doll or marionette ready to steal the world’s breath and blacken the remains.

There was a last cry from inside the wood, and a shadow burst from the opening, rising fast, catching on the wind, flitting and filtering between the branches and flying off in the direction of the sun.

Rudy Barnes cuddled the wailing child.

He considered his ethics and weighed them against his relative happiness.

Then he made his way quickly out of the forest, this new bloody treasure nestled safe in his arms.

Wolfie aged quickly. Even straight out of the womb, he had the strength of a toddler, lying wet and warm in the folds of the black coat zipped around him, tiny hands and arms wrapped around his father’s neck, feet digging and pushing against Rudy’s stomach if he began to lose purchase.

Sunlight stabbed through the windshield and Rudy forced himself to drive slow as molasses, afraid of being pulled over with no car seat, no towels, no baby bag, no blankets. Looked like a kidnapping right out of the birthing room, and the fluids were smeared all over him, past the collar and neck area. When they’d first got in the car and situated, Wolfie had reached up and felt Rudy’s face, like a blind child getting to know the contours. Rudy had told him in a flat, informative tone that this was inappropriate, and the child had immediately stopped. As if he’d understood. At first, Rudy thought it was a coincidence, but when he tested the theory, gently commanding the boy to put his arms around his neck so he wouldn’t slide down into the jacket-papoose where he couldn’t see him, Wolfie did it.

Super-being. Strong as all hell. Wired for language in a manner that clearly defied all we knew about cognitive growth or psychology. A destroyer of men.

But really?

Rudy look down for a moment, straining his eyes, forcing a reddish tinge at the rim of his vision. Wolfie was looking straight up at him, round face, crystalline eyes. The lids lowered in a slow blink, a doll’s trick, and then came back open. Cold gems, but there was trust in them.

He’s beautiful,
Rudy thought, immediately feeling weird about it, looking back to the road, making a turn onto Lovell Avenue. The words that had just flashed into his mind didn’t fit him, not even a little bit. Though he’d always believed in love fundamentally . . . almost like one adopting some religious faith for the sake of insurance, he’d only really felt it in flashes. In reality, he’d spent most of his adult life alone, at least metaphorically, stumbling for years through a passionless marriage, concluding that what we all shared most was the
dream
of some idealized concept and the denial of our collective isolation. Then, of course, what was not real, we’d invent, and that’s where Rudy checked out of this particular hotel. He’d always been uncomfortable with sentiment and sensitivity, finding them constructed and overplayed in the media not only through the more obvious, formulaic Oprah episodes and reality television shows, but in what was considered “real news,” the given reporter asking a victim how he or she “felt” at the moment (as if the one interviewed wasn’t aware of the microphone, the viewing audience, the YouTube possibilities, or potential book deal) or worse, asking another reporter what the “public perception” was concerning some hotbed issue that stirred the emotions (as if a poll were taken and they had actually come to Rudy’s house to cap off the vote). Feelings had become too easy to “study,” and Rudy despised the mass production of it all, as if the world was supposed to masturbate all together on three or something.

It angered Rudy, actually, and he turned left on King Avenue, screeching the tires a bit. It wasn’t just the fabrication of the melodramatic that bothered him so, but more the misplacement of it. We paid attention in class because the teacher was hot, we liked someone’s music because of the tattoo, we voted for a candidate because of his honey voice. And the words that had floated through his mind,
He’s beautiful,
were not his words but those of his mother, he suddenly realized. They had invited her over for one of the championship games between the Sixers and Lakers back in 2001, and she had busied herself sewing a hem throughout the affair, blue lips pursed as if they’d been tightened by drawstrings, sitting on the most comfortable chair they’d angled for her so she’d get the best view of the TV she wasn’t watching. There had been a steal and a run the wrong way down the hardwood, and Rudy had wanted the room to join him in his bitter Philadelphian’s disappointment as another one went down the toilet. Mother had looked up, fixed her watery gaze on the curly-haired Laker who’d just burned us (Rick Fox it was), and said, “My . . . he’s beautiful.”

Rudy had just turned thirty-seven, but it somehow triggered a teenager’s rage he’d bit back down and promptly and conveniently forgotten.

Until now. And the question was, why had his mother’s words suddenly resurfaced, laying themselves delicately over his own, like a soft molestation?

He looked down at Wolfie, he who was staring back with those shock-blue eyes. Rudy laughed, and it sounded creepy and awkward. An “ah-ha” moment. A cold one.

Of course. Wolfie could manipulate your sentiment or lack of it, pick your poison.

The world didn’t have a chance.

Rudy backed into his parking space and sat there for a moment, slightly hunched down. He had to be careful, especially on the short trip across the lot to stairway. It should have been isolated back here, like a ghost town mid-morning on a Friday, everyone at work where they belonged, but Rudy had picked this rental for the view beyond the cross street like everyone else in the building; walking trail, peaceful reservoir, rising stand of dark pines in the background. And the parking lot was a sudden flurry of activity, almost like one of those bad thrillers where all the clichés passed by all at once, minding their business while the serial killer watched them through his tinted windows and the eyeholes cut from the burlap he’d stretched over his head and tied around his neck with a cord. Every time Rudy thought the coast might be clear, there was another pop-in from the side or across the way—three ladies power-walking by with their ear buds, visors, and designer shades, a stocky college kid in a blue Alaskan parka heading to the bus stop with his backpack and laptop, an elderly couple shuffling past with sneakers big as clown shoes, the perky stay-at-home dad with the balloon-tire baby carriage he jogged behind, the black body spandex making him look like a faggot no matter how liberal you thought you’d become.

Someone knocked on the passenger side window, hard.

Rudy jumped and banged his knees on the bottom of the steering wheel.

“Jesus!” he said out loud.

It was a head on an angle, Sam Finkelstein, his neighbor from 2B. Sam was a strange guy, sort of gently intrusive: when it snowed he walked the parking lot putting everyone’s windshield wipers up. He had an oblong “Munster” head and eyes that sagged at the edges, giving the impression that he was a bit slow, but Rudy knew that he wasn’t. Just odd, different standards, like one of those ladies with a hundred cats, or the kind of guy who thought it was a big score when the elementary school threw out their old computers and he got to scour the dumpster.

“What you got there?” Sam said, all muffled and displaced outside the closed window. He tilted his head the other way and squinted. “That a baby there?” He was pointing now, tapping the pad of his index finger on the glass.

Rudy felt Wolfie twist a bit, turning his head so he could look at the man in the window. When their eyes met there was a jolt, and the three of them were suddenly connected in some odd psychic triangle that only Sam was utterly unaware of. And for a moment Rudy knew things, private things about his neighbor he never would have guessed in a million years.

Sam shaved his legs because he had itch compulsion, and the hair against the inside of his trousers could literally incapacitate him for hours. He’d had bloody noses since he was in junior high school, and the Vaseline’d Q-tips and Swiss humidifiers only helped marginally. He’d never been married, but he’d been engaged, he’d tried for a doctorate in psychology but couldn’t finish the dissertation, he was presently unemployed but remained hopeful.

He was also addicted to Internet pornography, and every day that he swore he would stop became another instance where he rationalized that his hard drive was so loaded with smut that one more surf wasn’t going to make too much difference.

He liked costumes: French maids, Indian squaws, cowgirls in jean shorts, schoolgirls in plaid skirts.

And nurses.

Old school nurses. He was in love with the image emotionally and sexually, hopelessly drawn to the mother-sister type seemingly unaware of her own severe beauty and playing you with the contradiction. There was another jolt, this one zinging Rudy right through the bottom of the scrotum, and the image delivered here was an older one, black-and-white film run too fast all jumpy with age lines and little burn bubbles running through it: Sam’s deep, dark past, visiting his Cleveland cousins as a boy of twelve and meeting his second Aunt Esther who told them stories about Israel, all of them sitting cross-legged on the floor before the sofa, the one with the odd flower patterns and ancient vinyl slipcovers, and she sat there above them—an exotic jangle of earrings and bracelets and dark glass-bead necklaces, with her tight black skirt riding up over those pretty bare knees, and when she re-crossed her legs there was that sweet red mark left on one of them, and she’d seen Sammy looking and straightened uncomfortably. She’d tucked her hair behind her ear, pinched her long nose between her thumb and index finger for a moment, and then gone upstairs, returning soon with a bit of an alteration in her attire, her legs now covered in white panty hose. And even though the supple skin was no longer catching the glow of the overhead light, the sculpted form of those calves was undeniable, and she was his
relative,
far from perfect with her hawklike features and the mole under her left eye, her skinny smile and nervous laugh, but those
legs . . .
and he knew he was naughty, and little Sammy wanted to rub his penis so badly that he thought he was going to die.