Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “What’s going on?” he asks her, without a trace of sleep in his voice.

  “I think we should get rid of your computer.”

  “Now?”

  She nods.

  “I need it for work. I’m getting wood from all over the world.”

  “I’ll get you another one. Everyone’s asleep. It’s a perfect time.”

  “I was asleep, too,” Paul says.

  “Who’s to say the police haven’t been monitoring who goes to certain Internet sites? You keep on asking the Internet to give you information about the thing. And it’s all on your hard drive.”

  “I’ve erased what’s on the hard drive.”

  “It’s all still retrievable.”

  “But that’s not going to happen,” Paul pleads.

  “Why should we take any chances?”

  Not many minutes later, after a whispered back-and-forth, which would have gone on for much longer, and may even have had a different conclusion had not Kate begun to cry, they are in Paul’s truck heading to Route 2B (or not 2B, as Kate so often calls it), which winds out to the landfill. Kate holds Paul’s computer on her lap, watching as the moon-bright frozen trees and snow-covered roofs of the new millennium flow past.

  “What if Ruby wakes up?”

  “We’ll be home in ten minutes,” Kate says.

  “That’s really not so,” says Paul.

  “Okay,” she says, “fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. I don’t care. Shep will keep an eye on her.”

  Paul sees the greenish iridescent flash of an animal’s eyes on the side of the road a few yards in front, and slows, waiting for whatever creature it is to make its move. A house cat, white and brown, with a bushy tail and shaggy ears, clambers over a snowbank and races across the road.

  Paul watches the cat streaking across a long expanse of frozen lawn, making its way toward the pale yellow porch light of the house of Magda Tunis, who had appeared at the party on snowshoes, wrapped in homespun scarves, her long, graying hair brittle with frost, full of her upbeat New Age wisdom: she was in the camp that was quite sure Y2K was going to be earthshaking, though hers was not so much a doomsday scenario as a wrenching but ultimately liberating transformation, and when the new millennium began and no one sprouted a third eye and no wave of overwhelming love swept over the guests and, after the pranking teenagers pulled the breaker switch and dunked the house into a bracing moment of darkness, the lamps continued to glow, the stereo continued to play, and the furnace continued to chug, Magda strapped on her snowshoes, rewrapped herself in scarves, put a few crackers in the pockets of her ski parka, and left.

  “Sometimes the things we want to stay the same change real quick,” Paul says, “and the other stuff we wish would disappear just sort of hangs out forever.” He winces. He has never felt self-conscious about speaking, but with Kate he often struggles for words. She is never at a loss for a word, sometimes it seems as if she practices what she is going to say before she says it, maybe saying it to herself, or saying it out loud in front of a mirror. He doesn’t mind. It’s sort of wonderful, basically. It’s making her famous.

  It’s so wonderful to be with a man who doesn’t want to compete with me, she once said, and her face showed immediate regret and the wish to not have said that. But it was fine with him. The idea of competing with her, or begrudging her her success, her following, her large and increasingly frequent paydays was so alien to him that nothing she could say about it would register with him. He would never in a thousand years read as many books as she has, and it would never occur to him to browse the Oxford English Dictionary as a way of relaxing, as he has seen her do with his own eyes.

  “Go on,” Kate says. “Tell me what you were going to say.”

  “It’s nothing,” Paul answers. “I don’t even know.”

  In fact, he was going to recount a long story about his time in Alaska, of returning to a camp on Barter Island and finding a little pool of twenty-weight motor oil in the snow, six months after Ed Bluemink, for whom Paul was working, had accidentally spilled it. But Paul is unsure of the story and what it might illustrate—things hang around for a lot longer than you think?

  “Here we are,” he says instead, gesturing with his chin as they approach the Leyden Landfill. The days and the hours of operation are posted on a red-and-white sign hammered onto a ten-foot locust pole; the headlights of Paul’s truck brush across the letters. Paul stops his truck a foot or two in front of the thick chain that droops across the landfill, a frostbitten, stubborn smile. A few snowflakes dance in the tunnels of light his headlights carve into the darkness.

  “This is nuts,” Paul says, registering it.

  “Just do it for me,” Kate says. “Indulge me.”

  Paul shifts the truck into park, pulls on the emergency brake; this way he can keep the engine running so he’ll have someplace warm to return to and the headlights can light the way. He reaches for the laptop. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he says.

  “Oh no, no, I’ll come with you.” Kate half-turns away from him, shielding the computer.

  “I don’t really see you as a landfill type of person,” Paul says, hoping to cajole her into some sort of compliance, though he has never succeeded in doing so in the past.

  “This is my idea,” Kate says. “And I don’t want to sit all by myself in this truck in the middle of the night.”

  “Maybe we should just go home,” Paul says.

  “No, let’s get rid of this thing,” Kate says. “We have to, Paul. You left footprints in those woods, tire tracks, everything. And what if something else happens?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But something. Something to bring them to you. Maybe just to question you. Why would you want to have a computer that they can look at and find out that you’ve been trying to get information about that guy? Why would we leave a loose end when we both know full well that it’s there? It’s what the generals call contingency planning.”

  “Well, we’re not generals,” Paul says, “and the stuff you plan for isn’t always what happens. Look at how everyone was going on about Y2K, and here we are.” He gestures at the vast and placid sky, with its scatter of indifferent stars.

  “Let’s just get this done. Ruby’s home all by herself.”

  They step over the chain and make their way along the snow-packed path to the landfill, with the headlights of the idling truck at their backs and the lit snow fluttering around them like a frenzy of moths. On either side are drooping hemlocks, their boughs heavy with winter. The access road to the landfill is pristine, without tire tracks or footprints, and in an unspoken bit of caution they drag their feet through the snow, hoping to make their prints illegible. Paul relieves Kate of the computer and she links her arm through his. With her free hand she reaches into her parka pocket and pulls out a flashlight.

  “You think of everything,” Paul says.

  “I hope so.”

  The flashlight bores a hole through a darkness made tumultuous by snow, and they make their way to the edge of the landfill, a three-acre pit covered with snow and dirt. “This is just for the garbage,” Paul says. “The one back there is for appliances and household items. We may as well do this right.”

  They pick their way along the edge of the first landfill and approach the second, smaller pit. Here the refuse is uncovered. Kate points the beam of her flashlight down at the tangle of refrigerators, lamps, washing machines, rotisseries, toasters, space heaters, snow shovels, and easy chairs. If there are other computers down there, none are visible as Kate sweeps the light over the tangle of junk. “Okay, here goes,” Paul says, and is about to throw his computer down into the pit when Kate stops him.

  “Not like that. We should break it.”

  He doesn’t see why, but it will take more effort and time to argue the point than to do as she suggests. He places the laptop onto the ground. “I am so sorry,” he says to her.

  “It’s okay,” she says.

 
“No, it’s not. I did a terrible thing and every day is a little bit fucked and I’ve pulled you into it.”

  “I want to be where you are,” Kate says.

  “I’m in the darkness,” he says.

  “I know. Me, too.”

  He pulls her close and kisses her. It is as hungry as a first kiss and as solemn as a kiss good-bye. He is kissing every part of her, her happiness and unhappiness, everything that has ever happened to her, he is kissing the day she was born and the day she will die. It is almost unbearable.

  Off to the side, whoever has plowed back here has left a long slur of dirty snow, into which are embedded stones and rocks. Paul dislodges a rock about the size of a soccer ball with his ungloved hands and straddles the computer with the rock held over his head. “Maybe step back,” he says to Kate, and she does what he asks her to, and it strikes him with all the chaos of conflicting cardinal emotions that the two of them have never before been so deeply in the wrong together and never have they been so close.

  He throws the rock down, and it bangs against the hard blue plastic shell of the computer, and to both of their surprise the machine withstands the blow. The plastic cracks but the machine is intact. The blow’s energy has fueled the once stationary machine and it spins to the left and begins to slide toward the open pit of the landfill. “Kate,” Paul says, and she quickly moves her feet to intercept the laptop and to keep it from flipping end over end into the jumble below. He retrieves it, carries it a safe distance from the pit, and smashes the rock down on it again. This time the destruction is successful. In a primal crouch, Paul hovers over the splintered machine, pulls it further apart, throwing one piece after another into the landfill.

  “All right?” Paul says. Kate nods.

  There is a strain to her breathing.

  “I’m going to tell you something,” Paul says. “That time in the woods? I keep on thinking or remembering or maybe just imagining that I wasn’t alone.”

  She stands closer to him. “I’m not surprised,” she says, finding her voice.

  “You’re not?” he asks.

  “No,” she says. “Because there was someone there that day, and he’s with us right now, too, in this stinking landfill on the first day of the Second Millennium.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean,” Kate says. “Jesus. God. Whatever you want to call the divine beauty of the universe.”

  “Is that why nobody’s caught me? Is that why this whole thing seems to be going away on its own?”

  “Don’t joke,” she says, and then she realizes he’s not. He’s not joking, he’s not teasing, he’s not what-if-ing. He means it. And in a spasm of spiritual panic she wishes she had never brought it up. It’s one thing to tell someone they are your angel, but it’s something else to see that person suddenly begin flapping their arms as if expecting to fly.

  PART II

  Where is the next one coming from?

  —JOHN HIATT

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Could it really be that simple? Could a human being be removed from the ranks of the living with little or no fuss, and no consequences? What about his house? What about his belongings? Was there no one out there to come forward and say, Where’s my husband, where is my father, where is my lover, where is the man who worked for me, where is the guy at the next desk, where is my buddy I went to the track with every July, or played cards with, or jogged with, where is that grumpy bastard with the good-looking brown dog, where is my tenant, where is my next-door neighbor? Was no one curious? Was no one making a stink? Wasn’t there anyone wanting an answer? Could a man really be plucked from the body of life like a little splinter and just blow away and leave no trace of himself?

  But he has left a trace—in Paul. Here he is, carrying a black garbage bag into which he has already placed some broken Coors bottles, an empty bleach container, three crumpled cigarette packs, and a waterlogged paperback edition of Bonjour Tristesse, with his animal companion trotting a few feet in front of him. He’s walking Shep and cleaning the country road of the winter’s debris that spring has exposed, hoping to remove the toxins in his bloodstream through the dialysis of good deeds.

  Once a week, Paul goes to the Windsor County SPCA, where he joins the other volunteers who get the dogs out of their cages for a couple of hours. Once a month, he goes to Northern Windsor Hospital and gives plasma, and once a month to the Red Cross and donates blood, and if there is some ridiculous, intrusive law against doing both in the same month he has so far gotten away with it. He feels no loss of vigor, and the various technicians who tap into his veins treat him with good cheer and a soft touch. The hospital gives him fifty dollars for his plasma. He cashes the check immediately and like his sister on her postal rounds he drives the winding road through a nearby mobile-home park, putting ten-dollar bills in random mailboxes. It makes him light-headed to do so.

  There are a half dozen elderly people he looks in on. Cal Bowen lives a half mile south of Kate’s house and Paul shovels his walkway, and now and again calls on him, usually with a couple of ripe pears or some soft cheese, chosen to complement the dark red wine Cal likes to pour. Cal lives simply but he was once an oenophile and has a cellar filled with old French Bordeaux, and no one to drink them with.

  After every snowfall, Paul is sure to stop by and shovel out Margaret Hurley and Dorothy Freeman, both frail and getting apprehensive about strangers, whose little steep cottage is not too far from Bowen’s house. They make him ginger tea and honey when he is finished and Margaret, the more outgoing of the two women, invariably says, Boy oh boy you really like that tea, as if Paul’s showing up is his way of getting a free cup of tea.

  To the south of Kate’s house lives John Lucy, who until a couple of years ago taught philosophy at nearby Marlowe College and who seems to have gone mad (shaved head, eyeliner). Dr. Lucy, though only fifty-seven, is easily overwhelmed by the details of running his life, and he has come to count on Paul to shore up gutters, repair leaks, and to keep the vermin out of his kitchen by filling in holes in the foundation of his house, whose rapid disintegration seems to mirror Lucy’s own.

  Farther away, just a mile from the center of Leyden, Bill Veldhuis, the farmer from whom Paul has been getting chicken and duck eggs for the past ten years, is practically crippled from arthritis, and Paul is part of a loosely organized team, consisting mainly of Veldhuis’s grandchildren, who make sure that the bossy, scarlet-knuckled old man has what he needs, that there is food in the refrigerator, clean clothes.

  When he can, Paul tries to help Liza Moots, a woman he met through Kate—no one mentions it, but Paul assumes that Liza and Kate attend AA meetings together. Liza lives in a four-room apartment over what had once been Forrestal’s Soda Shop, and which is now Impulsively Yours, a sundries shop whose name was meant to describe, or perhaps conjure, the spending habits of the rich newcomers. Liza is not a newcomer, and she just manages to support herself and her two young children through a sort of Rube Gold-berg economic arrangement in which reading astrological charts, housecleaning, pottery making, and wedding photography combine to create an engine that keeps her hovering just an inch above the poverty line. Paul visits her once a week and, upon her request, brings Shep with him because Liza is terrified of dogs and despairs over passing this fear on to her daughters. Her fear of dogs also prevents her from riding her bicycle around Windsor County, and has forced her to quit two of her most lucrative housekeeping jobs, one because of a Rottweiler and the other because of a Jack Russell. Paul has been keeping Shep on a leash while he visits Liza, sometimes staying for an hour while he plays with Maria and Florencia and Shep snoozes peacefully, lashed to a radiator pipe. In the past couple of weeks, Liza has gathered the courage to approach Shep and pat him gravely on top of his head, and Shep, seemingly aware of the momentousness of the occasion, has thumped his tail against the wide-plank oak floor and, with his chin resting on his forepaws, looked mildly up at Liza through the tops of his eyes.

/>   Kate hasn’t mentioned that Paul’s concentration on good works has cut his workweek in half. Money is, in fact, not an issue. Prays Well continues to attract readers, and her radio program’s initial syndication has grown from twenty-five “markets” to ninety-eight.

  To make up for the decrease in work hours Paul has increased his fees and also the markup on materials. Not entirely to his surprise, this has perversely generated an increased demand for his services, and so the bookkeeping on his charity would have to conclude that it’s not only good for the soul but also beneficial to the purse. Paul has been making things out of wood for wealthy clients for over ten years, and this is the first time he has raised the prices on his labor. Over time, the price of materials has risen and he has passed these increases along to his customers, but what Paul himself needs to live on has remained essentially unchanged, and until now it has not really occurred to him that he ought to be putting money aside or making investments or owning property. Even this sudden increase in his prices has left his income essentially undisturbed. He makes about sixty thousand dollars a year, though if he worked faster and ran his business more efficiently he could triple that amount, but money is not important to him. In fact, he has always felt a certain disdain for it, seeing it as an enemy of freedom, and believing that those people who say they need money in order to be free are merely taking the society’s bait. And everyone knows money won’t get you into heaven.

  Paul and Shep come to a rise in the road and the chimney of Kate’s house comes into distant view, emerging from the sea of green like a periscope. Paul stops, shifts the burden of his trash bag from the left shoulder to the right, and reaches down to scratch Shep’s head. The day has turned hot, and the trees, still in their delicate spring foliage, look dazed and exhausted, as if it were already mid-August. The industrious, untiring drone of insects is in the air. On the west side of the road, a thirty-acre field and a jumble of slate, sash, and stucco that was once a house, and on the east side a swath of woods gone wild, a thick, boggy tangle of stunted pine, gnarled locust, dying maple, and swirls of thornbushes, as forbidding as barbed wire.