Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “All right,” he says, “I’ll show you.” He carries her back to the truck. Shep has come to the window. He has lifted his snout to the little crack of opening Paul has left, and his tail is going around and around. His eyes bulge, but he has stopped drooling.

  Ruby’s first response is to shrink back. “No, no, it’s okay,” Paul says. “He’s friendly.”

  “Whose dog is that?” Ruby asks.

  “It’s a lost dog, is what it is,” Paul says. “I found him and I thought this good old dog needs himself a home.”

  Ruby, still in Paul’s arms, leans forward, takes a closer look at Shep, who seems to understand that this is some sort of audition and has pressed his nose through the crack in the window. His nostrils expand and contract. “Where’d you find him?” Ruby asks.

  Paul has already rehearsed the answer to any question that anyone is likely to ask about this dog. The commission of his crime may have been completely spontaneous, but the aftermath is already full of intricacy and cunning. “I met a trucker at a rest stop, the one your mom likes to stop at when we go to the city, and he came up to me and he said he found a dog in North Carolina and he was going to bring him home but when he talked to his wife she said if he came home with a dog she would be really really mad at him.”

  “Why?” Ruby asks.

  “Not everyone likes dogs.”

  Ruby nods, taking in this sad fact of life. “Do we get to keep him?” she asks, her voice vigilant.

  “I don’t know. I want to talk it over with your mom. A dog’s a lot of work. It might not be the best idea. But I wanted you two guys to meet.”

  Ruby wriggles free of him. Once on the ground, she opens the truck and Shep, used to bounding out of a front seat not quite so high as this one, hesitates for a moment, panting and gathering his courage. Finally, he lowers his head, raises his rump, and jumps out of the truck. He seems interested in neither Ruby nor Paul; rather it is the gravel that commands his attention, and he sniffs at it greedily, snorting, his mahogany cheeks puffing out, his tail revving faster and faster. He half-lifts his leg and marks his spot. Welcome home, Paul thinks.

  “Can I pet him?” Ruby asks.

  “Why don’t you put out your hand and see if he comes over and gives it a sniff.” Ruby does as she is told and Shep, seeing her hand, makes his peculiar, mincing gait over to her, sniffs her fingertips. Ruby’s lips stretch, her eyes widen, she looks like a kid on a roller coaster.

  “You see?” Paul says. “He’s getting to know you.”

  Kate emerges from the house, buttoning her heavy coat and looking at them curiously. “I thought I saw a dog,” she says. She’s still fifty feet away, and she is silhouetted before the steady deep yellow lights of the house, but Paul is sure he can see her smiling. “Did you really bring a dog for us?” Kate asks.

  Shep’s tongue shyly engages Ruby’s hand. “He likes me!” she cries. The sudden sound of her delight makes the dog cower, as if he is going to be beaten.

  “What the hell happened to your truck?” Kate asks.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Four days after his death, a picture of William Robert Claff runs in the weekly Tarrytown newspaper. When he first sees it, Frank Mazzerelli doesn’t realize the man pictured is someone he knows, but when he happens to glance at the picture again while having a solitary meal and hoping to occupy his mind with something other than stale thoughts about the past, it becomes clear to Mazzerelli that this is a picture of his tenant, the man he knows as Alfred Krane. The question is: what ought he to do about it? Having contact with local law enforcement is just about the last thing he wants.

  Frank Mazzerelli is a former Yonkers police officer whose entire career in the YPD was shadowed by the fear that one day his secret and infrequent homosexual love life would become public knowledge. In his thirty years on the job, no one with whom he worked ever asked him why he wasn’t married or at least with a girlfriend, but Frank did not fail to note that no one ever offered to fix him up, either. His last day at work, at the obligatory retirement party at Bennigan’s, after all the tepid toasts and forced joviality from people whom after all these years he felt he barely knew, custom dictated that Frank himself make a toast, preferably one that mixed nostalgia and hard kidding. To his horror, Frank teared up in the middle of it, though he decided later the sentiment was not about saying good-bye to any of the faces in that room but an expression of sheer relief, such as he had felt only once before in his entire life, when he’d been shot at by two teenage bank robbers he was pursuing from a Washington Mutual branch to the southbound Sprain Parkway.

  Frank’s retirement plan originally had been to move west and buy income properties, maybe in California, or possibly even Hawaii, where his sister and his nephews lived. But somehow he ended up just a few miles from Yonkers, in Tarrytown, because in the end it made sense to him to do business in a place he knew. Muscular, olive-skinned, his salt-and-pepper hair cut Caesar-style, with a taciturn manner and sharp, unfriendly eyes, Mazzerelli now owns two apartment buildings, one with four units, the other with six residential units plus retail space at street level, all of which combine with his YPD pension to make for a comfortable retirement. He’s scrupulous in the upkeep of his property. His tenants find him fair if not friendly, and they appreciate the clean hallways, the ample heat and hot water, the shoveled sidewalks, the monthly pest control—the fact is, he loves his property—and the renters know not to be late with the rent. Mazzerelli’s motto is The first of the month means the first of the month, and he has been known to park his black hand-waxed Infiniti across the street from one or the other of his buildings and to eat his lunch slouched behind the steering wheel.

  When prospective tenants called looking to rent, Frank met them at the Fonz’s Corner, a diner out on South Broadway, where he used to eat occasionally when he was on the job. It is a red-and-silver place, a bastion of manufactured nostalgia for the American 1950s. The benches in the booths look like the backseats of old Impalas and the tables are grooved in bright aluminum. Frank would always be a few minutes early and he’d sit with a view of the parking area, so he could get a look at the applicant’s car and the way he walked, which Frank believed told him more than any payroll stub or copy of last year’s tax returns. After a brief interview they’d get into Frank’s car and drive over to the apartment and as they cruised the streets of Tarrytown Frank allowed his left pant leg to hike up just enough so the new tenant could get a peek at the Glock he carried in a black nylon ankle holster. Two things Frank needed to keep his operation clean and trouble-free: a month’s security paid in advance and giving tenants a glimpse of that gun.

  Alfred Krane/Will Claff was late for that first meeting at Fonz’s Corner, and when he finally walked in Frank realized he had seen Krane/Claff ten minutes before, pacing the parking lot and then getting back into his white Honda, the behavior, surely, of a man on the lookout for enemies. And there was another thing that Frank had seen as a red flag: Claff came to the meeting looking like he’d spent the night in a doorway. His jacket was rumpled, he needed a shave, his hair was mussed, his fingernails were filthy. His tie seemed to have a ladybug tie tack, but it turned out to be an actual ladybug, and when Frank pointed it out Claff crushed it between his thumb and forefinger and flicked the husk to the floor. But Frank was sitting on two empty apartments at the time and was inclined to say yes. On the ride over to the apartment, when Frank hiked up his Dockers and let Claff see the piece, Claff did something none of the other tenants had dared—he mentioned it.

  “I would fucking love to have a gun like that,” he’d said, pointing down at Frank’s left foot.

  “You have any guns?” Frank asked him quickly.

  Claff shook his head.

  “I would need to know that,” Frank said. “I would need you to be very honest with me about that, right up front.”

  “I never owned a gun, Mr. Landlord,” Claff said. “I’m a very good boy.” He made a small, surrendering smile, which Frank un
derstood to mean You got me now, but one day maybe it’ll be my turn. Frank didn’t begrudge it; most men kept a tally sheet.

  The photo in the Tarrytown weekly was taken off Claff’s driver’s license, which the cops found stuck between the driver’s seat and the center console in his car, in the west lot of Martingham State Park. Even with the driver’s license the cops couldn’t be sure about the dead man’s name. The wallet held a blue-and-white card showing a teddy bear holding a toothbrush reminding Alfred Krane about an upcoming dentist appointment in Sleepy Hollow, an Exxon credit card belonging to a Henry Lloyd, a library card from Evanston, Illinois, with the name Ivan Kline on it, a customer-reward card from The Running Emporium also bearing the name Ivan Kline. They found a business card from a place called Happy Valley Massage, with no address and no phone number, and another card from Elkins Park Gourmet, with a Philadelphia number. The police ran the dead man’s prints through the system and got no hits, and the state of California seemed to have lost track of William Claff; the last address Motor Vehicles had for him was in an apartment complex that burned to the ground three years ago.

  When Frank Mazzerelli sees the picture of Claff in the local paper, his first impulse is to turn the page. He does not wish to have anything to do with the police, the local police, the state police, any police. He has an aversion to cops that would rival that of a career criminal. He is also on guard about having 2C involved in a possible homicide—just having police in there will delay renting it out again. But, finally, something so simple, corny, and dumb as good citizenship changes his mind and he decides to step forward.

  Before going to the precinct, Mazzerelli goes to Will’s apartment and lets himself in. It is not his first time entering a dead man’s apartment, but here there is no scatter of mail on the floor, no accumulation of newspapers, no flies droning around a plate of rotting food, no throbbing red light on the answering machine indicating dozens of missed calls.

  Frank stands in the front room for a few more moments; there is a quality to the silence, a heaviness, a completeness that feels fatal. He notices the front window is open a few inches. A spray of wet snow is coming into the apartment, flying this way and that like sparks off a grinder. Frank closes the window and walks into the bedroom, opens the closet. There are few things hanging there, and fifty empty hangers, as if in anticipation of better days ahead. The bed is unmade, there are socks on the floor, a bottle of Armani hand lotion on the bedside table, a stale smell in the air. And then the kitchen: fridge filled with water bottles, vitamins, a cooked chicken in its plastic dome. Next to the refrigerator is a bag of dog food, showing a picture of a golden retriever running through tall grass toward a perfect family of four.

  That little cocksucker, Frank thinks. He had a dog. I could fucking kill him myself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ruby has once again attempted to get the dog to sleep in her bedroom. Though she normally is reluctant to close her door at night, now she shuts it tight, hoping to frustrate the dog’s ability to escape. Nevertheless, Shep comes walking down the twenty-step staircase. By day he is full of energy, but at night his steps are cautious, mincing.

  “Uh-oh, look who’s here,” Kate says, as the dog makes his way into the living room, where Paul is crouched in front of the fireplace, jabbing at a couple of hissing locust logs with the fireplace poker in a way that to Kate always seems random and a little angry, but which is generally effective. Sure enough, the flames open into full bloom and the smoke, which had been curling out over the edge of the hearth, is now rushing up the flue and out the chimney.

  “Hello there buddy,” he says. Instead of rising from his crouch, Paul sits down on the hooked rug in front of the hearth, and Shep, his head bowed in an elaborate show of deference, comes to Paul’s side.

  “How did you ever exist before you found this dog?” Kate asks.

  She has brought a pot of tea and a plate of sliced apples out to the living room. There is an air of discomfort and irony when Kate performs domestic duties. “I forgot sugar,” she says.

  “Just as well,” says Paul. “The apples are sweet.” He scrambles to his feet, picks up a thin, nearly translucent apple slice, and holds it up to the firelight. “You cut these so beautifully.”

  Kate looks at him oddly. “You compliment me about the weirdest little things. You tell me how neat my purse is. You’re really reaching, trying to come up with something.”

  Paul continues to inspect the apple. “Beautifully cut, one cut and one cut only. Am I right? No hesitation.”

  “Yes, I’m really quite amazing,” Kate says. “You really lucked out with me.” She hands him the tea in a black-and-gold mug bearing the title of her book, just one of the promotional items her publisher and bookstores have made on her book’s behalf—T-shirts, water glasses, a vase, a pious silk bookmark, a scarf, posters announcing her appearance at various bookstores, churches, art centers, and colleges, a monogrammed briefcase, pens, pencils, a cell phone holder—she even has a wristwatch, a gift from her publisher, with a picture of Kate on its face, the hour and the minute hands sometimes protruding from the sides of her nose like cat whiskers. She treats all these small souvenirs of success as if they were part of a joke, yet none of them are discarded. She can’t help it.

  She sees that Paul’s eyes have settled on the mug. She shrugs, makes a comical face, and then grimaces. “How do you make tea again?” she says, laughing, putting the mug on the mantelpiece. She is wearing jeans, a turtleneck, and a knit cardigan. She plunges her hand into the sweater’s pocket. She occasionally finds a couple of stray candies in her pockets. Since stopping drinking, she craves sweets—in fact, all of her tastes and desires have become more vivid, and more urgent: salt, laughter, sex. She finds two foil-wrapped chocolates: and some people say there is no God!

  “I feel a little like we’re losing touch with each other,” she says. She sits on the sofa and pats the cushion next to her, beckoning Paul. He continues to fuss with the dog. “What did your insurance guy say about your truck?” Kate asks.

  “I don’t know,” Paul says.

  Kate considers this for a moment. It makes absolutely no sense to her—she knows he has auto insurance, and she knows his insurance agent, who is her insurance agent as well, speaks clearly and in English, and she also knows that no repairs have yet been made on Paul’s banged-up truck, nor has he seen a doctor about his array of bangs and bruises. She counsels herself: let it pass.

  “How can you not know?” she asks. “Did you even call?”

  “I’m just going to take care of it myself,” Paul says. “It was my fault anyhow.”

  It sounds simple enough, but the mode of living and making decisions at the core of Paul’s statement is finally so at odds with Kate’s way of being in the world that, despite reminding herself again that here is a perfect example of something she can just as well let alone, something that does not need her participation or commentary, she finds herself saying, “But that’s what insurance is for, honey. Why would you make that kind of decision? I don’t get it.”

  Paul takes a breath; even under better circumstances, it is often difficult for him to order his thoughts when it is time to present them. Even when he can bring his thoughts forward he has trouble sequencing them—he often sounds like a child to himself, interrupting himself with salient details he forgot to put in, and further interrupting himself with so many parenthetical thoughts that the implied parentheses burst open like soaking-wet paper sacks. The greater pity of it is that he knows what it is like to imagine himself eloquent, and to imagine his opinions and memories flowing out like a song as he spins out an anecdote about his youthful travels and travails, or about the extreme alpha-males he meets in the course of his work, but these songs remain unsung, buried and entombed beneath an avalanche of you-knows and nervous laughs. He can be articulate with children, with fellow carpenters, and with strangers. Kate is a different story altogether. As much as he loves her and feels confident in her feelings
for him, he sometimes finds himself tongue-tied and stammering around her, and sometimes when he does say what he means to his voice is soft, flat, and bears, without his intention, a pattern of discouragement, in the way that parasites beneath the bark of a tree will create swirling designs in the wood.

  Kate senses there is a reason Paul has not called the insurance agent about the truck. Her best guess is that he long ago forgot to pay his premium, or maybe he absentmindedly allowed his registration to lapse, and now would rather pay for the repairs himself or leave the truck as it is than face the consequences of his loosey-goosey lifestyle. It’s fine with her. There are enough punctual people in the world, enough bankers, and enough computer programmers—the people who might be escorting everyone to the apocalypse when their machines fail to recognize the end of the twentieth century at the end of next month.

  No, Kate does not need for Paul to pay keener attention to worldly affairs, and she surely does not need for him to be more clever about money. She is making plenty of money now, and, really, in his own way, Paul seems to always find time for his high-end clients. Yes, every job takes much, much longer than he originally anticipates, but, in the end, he is always handsomely paid. What Kate needs from Paul is what Paul already supplies: his honesty, his beauty, his tenderness toward Ruby, and the passionate attention he pays to her.

  She joins him on the floor, nuzzles closer, and gently but insistently pulls him down, so they are both lying in front of the fireplace, with the dozing dog between them and the flames. As she kisses his nose, his closed eyes, she thinks, Who cares about insurance? And then: Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if we were on the same policy?

  “Hey,” she says. “You know what? We should get married.”

  She sees what she hopes is merely surprise on his face. “You’re making me a little nervous,” she says.