Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  The New York studio is Heartland’s most recent acquisition and it reflects their origins as a regional, cost-conscious company, whose officers make modest salaries and live in a style more befitting dentists or high school principals than media executives. The furnishings were purchased en masse from the previous tenants and the spectral outlines of the various framed bits of memorabilia are still on the dingy walls. A Black Crowes promotional sticker still adheres to Studio 1’s glass wall, and Studio 2, despite innumerable cleanings, still holds the skunky aroma of marijuana.

  The very best thing about the studio is its vintage microphones, big, tarnished things the size of hair dryers, which have been painstakingly cared for over the years, the way some watches or sports cars can find mechanical immortality in the hands of certain devotees. Radio luminaries from Winchell to Cousin Brucie have used these microphones and a few Heartland techies are in a constant archival flutter over the old mics. Kate, who knows as little about audio technology as she does about Thai kickboxing, is herself surprised by the quality of the sound that comes out of this studio. Hearing the reproduction of her voice, as filtered through the diaphragm and back plate of those old Neumann omnidirectionals and further honeyed by the wizards working the mixing board, has caused in Kate the auditory version of Narcissus’s experience at the side of the pond. She has been turned from a kazoo into clarinet; God bless the Christian nerds and their refurbished toys.

  In Studio 2, someone has splurged on a new swivel chair, this one with a high back that makes Kate feel more secure than the old one, which seemed ready to tip at any moment. The chief engineer, Tony Smithson, comes in, bringing her a couple of bottles of water, though in the months she has been broadcasting from this studio she has yet to open one of them. Tony is thin and English, with dark, furry legs that are almost fully exposed—he is wearing either bicycling shorts or a bathing suit.

  Tony’s assistant, Alison Kadar, is on the other side of the glass, leaning over the mixing board. With its little blinking transistors and rows of switches, the board looks like a perfect little town viewed from the window of an airplane. Alison wears a linty blue cardigan over a white blouse that has been scorched by an iron. Her hair looks as if she has cut it herself after a furious fallout with her family.

  The intro to Kate’s hour is the same every week and was taped a few months back by a famously devout young actor. His kind of piety gives Kate the creeps and she thinks it’s bad for Christianity in general and quite possibly personally annoying to Jesus, consisting, as it does, of a rather rabid championing of traditional family structures that seems disapproving of how Kate herself has lived and continues to live.

  “And now,” the actor is concluding, “unscripted and unedited, Kate Ellis and Prays Well with Others.”

  It’s actually untrue—if she flubs a word or goes blank, she can always have another go at it—and Kate cannot hear that intro without wondering why her hour has to begin with a moronic little fib.

  Tony, standing now next to Alison, points through the glass to Kate.

  Oh, do I ever need a faith lift, Kate begins.

  Oh, right, I forgot to say hello. Hello from the mentally ill me. On my way down here from my home in the country, I was thinking about the broadcasters who went crazy right on the air. There’s Howard Beale, the great Peter Finch character in Network, the guy screaming “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” But there are plenty of real-life episodes of people flipping out on the air and I finally understood it while I was driving the hundred or so miles from my house to here. By the way, I want to urge all of you to write Heartland and urge them please to buy some furniture and hire a decorator because I swear these studios look like the Dallas Book Depository.

  I understood the breaking point the Howard Beales of the world reach, because even on a show like this one, which is about as far as you can be from so-called hard news, you are always dealing with people in the great Out There—which is how the people with microphones think of the rest of the world without microphones. And the thing about you all—and you sure don’t need me to tell you this—is that your lives are hard, and full of suffering, and full of shame, even the so-called fortunate ones among you. That’s why you’re listening, right? That’s why you’re not off somewhere eating ambrosia and laughing your heads off and doing little victory dances. You have come to understand that your lives are essentially unmanageable without God. You’re not looking for God because you feel like doing him a favor; you’re looking for him because you need him to do something for you. You need him to give you courage, and patience, and to help you love one another. And you don’t just need it a little, you need it a lot, and let’s face it, you need it pretty much right away.

  Kate stops for a moment. She feels suddenly and unnervingly surprised to be sitting in this studio. What has she just said? What is she meant to say next? There is a band of numbness around the top of her head, her hands cold and wet, her heart swelling to the bursting point, and then her own confusion flies past her like a frantic flutter of birds, a whoosh and then silence. She moves her lips and inches closer to the microphone, drops her voice a half octave.

  You know, when you get sober and you feel Jesus there with you every step of the way, it’s like you two have been in a war. You’ve been in a fox-hole together and someone threw a hand grenade in—life is full of these grenades, sometimes it’s a person and sometimes it’s just a feeling, like jealousy or loneliness, and sometimes it’s the smell of wine—and Jesus fell on top of the grenade and absorbed the blast with his own body, and you’re alive, you’re actually alive and unharmed, and you say to him, What can I do, how can I ever repay you? And you know Jesus, he’s like the Godfather, he sort of scratches his chin and says, Well one day I may come to you and ask you to do something for me. And you figure uh-oh, now what have I gotten myself into, and sure enough the very next day the Godfather Jesus says, Hey remember when I fell on that hand grenade and stopped you from getting blown to pieces? And remember wondering if you could ever repay me? And now you’re really scared and your mind—which, as you know, is NOT your best feature, it’s actually worse than your thighs—your mind is coming up with a lot of very upsetting scenarios, some of them from the Old Testament, some of them from the six o’clock news—and then he tells you what he would like you to do to repay the debt—and you know what he wants? He wants you to treat the people around you with love, and make life on earth a little bit better. He wants you to plant a tree or feed a hungry child, or you can visit someone in the hospital, you can hang out with a lonely person and treat that person with kindness and respect, even if that lonely person happens to be y-o-u.

  Kate stops. Her throat is not dry, nor is she confused. She is not tired. But the thing she reaches for—her next sentence—is not there, and its absence is immense. It’s like walking into a familiar room and realizing, without precisely knowing why, that intruders have been here and you’ve been robbed.

  Kate feels the icy drip of sweat on her spine. Just to have something to do beyond experiencing her own bewilderment, she opens a bottle of water and takes a small, steadying sip from it. She glances down at the sheet of paper on which the few notes she has brought with her opaquely swim. “Give me a couple of seconds, Tony,” she murmurs.

  Tony is at the console, wearing an enormous pair of earphones.

  “You take your time, love, and when you’re ready we can take it from…” He looks back at Alison, who gives him the line. “That y-o-u thing,” Tony says.

  Once, nearly five years ago, sitting on a bridge chair in the cinder-block fluorescent-lit basement of a Methodist church in Leyden, and trying to think of what humanist generalization she could plug in to stand for her Higher Power, Kate had cast her thoughts this way and that, wondering if her writing was her higher power, or if it was Ruby. And then one of the AA people, a girl named Joy W., gone now, maybe drinking again, maybe off to California to zigzag after her dream of becoming a recordin
g star, had her guitar with her, and she had this sneaky way of performing, which was to pretend she was just strumming and humming privately, and the rest of the room was simply overhearing her. Joy, the pain in the ass, sang “I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to the World,” in a lovely, clear, kind voice, and the song itself, so simple and so plaintive, forced Kate to look away. And there it was, a simple wooden cross on the basement’s wall, and really out of no impulse more elevated than curiosity, and even with a degree of irony and self-mocking, Kate thought the words Thank you Jesus, and she whispered them aloud and felt, actually and unmistakably felt a presence. This sensation of being entered, filled, radiantly occupied did not make her feel larger but instead made her feel smaller, practically dismantled past the point of self-recognition, and so it was no wonder that like millions before her, she wept. For the cross, for the words to that old church song, for the Father and for the Son, for the suffering, for the sacrifice, for the love, she wept because she was no longer alone, she wept because she knew she was going to stop drinking, she wept because she was—she could barely say this word, even to herself—she was saved.

  And now it is gone, just as suddenly as those feelings came they have disappeared.

  They are gone.

  It is gone.

  Gone.

  I once could see and now I’m blind / I once was found and now I’m lost…

  She has five or ten more seconds to decide what she is going to do about it. The Man who has escorted her to the prom has ditched her in the middle of a dance and she is just swaying on her own now, keeping time to the inaudible music, trying to pretend that everything is as it was. There are no tears in her eyes and none seem to be on their way—conversion is convulsive, but reversion is strictly stiff upper lip.

  She has a momentary notion simply to stand up, give T&A, as she sometimes thinks of them, a little valedictory salute, bidding them and the entire Christian nation a fond farewell. Not only the Christian nation—but adios to the Jews, the Hindus, and the Muslims, and to all the New Agers with their brains like banana bread, and anyone else out there who likes to pretend that there is some overarching shape and meaning to life on earth, benign or otherwise, that there is someone to turn to in times of trouble and someone to honor with our gratitude, that we are not now and forever on our own, making it up as we go along.

  When Kate went from being a garden-variety liberal agnostic to someone who wanted to tell the world about Jesus, one of the things she worried about was her old friends and the people with whom she worked laughing at her. Now, as this great love seems to have burst like a soap bubble, leaving only a barely detectable filminess in its wake, her concern is just as worldly: how will she make a living wage?

  “All set, Kate?” Tony’s voice, booming as it is over the speakers, nevertheless holds within it a tremor of uncertainty. And without another moment’s contemplation, Kate not only nods but gives him a double thumbs-up, as if the cool box of Studio 2 were a module inside of which she is about to be launched into space. Too much is on the line. She has mouths to feed, a mortgage to pay. And who knows? Faith, like some errant demon lover, might decide to come back as suddenly as it departed. In the meanwhile, the show must go on.

  Kate is in the back of Sonny’s car and her phone rings from the muffling depths of her pocketbook. Chewing gum, lipstick, compact, keys, notebook, wallet, coin from her second anniversary, and, finally, the phone. “Hello?” she says.

  “Mom!”

  “Ruby, what’s going on?”

  “Mom, come home, please.”

  “I’m in the car right now. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Paul’s sister.” She says something after that but it is buried beneath an avalanche of sobs.

  “Ruby, please. Take a breath. Okay? Can you do that?”

  Sonny recklessly passes a station wagon and starts to drive faster.

  Ruby takes a deep breath; something in the back of her throat creaks like a door.

  “Tell me what happened, baby. Can you do that? Tell me—Paul’s sister.”

  “I gave her the cross,” Ruby says. “The most beautiful cross.”

  “I know you did.”

  “A car hit her, Mom.”

  “Hit her? A car hit her?”

  “When she was putting the mail.”

  “Did she get hit, or did her car get hit?”

  “She was IN her car, Mom!”

  “Okay, baby, please, please try to stay calm. Can you put Paul on the phone for me?”

  “He’s not here. He’s going to the hospital.”

  “You’re alone?” Annoyance whirrs within Kate.

  “Hello? Kate?” It’s Evangeline’s voice now at the other end of the line. Apparently, Ruby has just handed the phone over to her. “Paul just left for Northern Windsor Hospital. Annabelle’s car got hit while she was making her deliveries. And I’m here, I’m staying with Ruby.”

  “Is Annabelle…”

  “She’s alive. We don’t know how bad, but it looks like she’s going to make it. Cheryl called her brother. He’s at Mount Sinai in New York but he’s getting in touch with the doctors up here, so we’re sort of waiting on that.”

  This makes very little sense to Kate, though she has noticed that people in Leyden feel better when they can personalize their experiences with the outside world, feeling that knowing somebody’s name, or knowing somebody who knows somebody else, will somehow guarantee them better treatment, whether it’s at the bank or the post office or the farmer’s market or the emergency room. If anyone thinks that any good will come from having someone’s brother call the ER—a brother who is basically a med student—Kate doesn’t know why she begrudges them their little networking fantasy, but she does, she can’t help herself: she does. And the irritation generalizes itself to instantly include all the other people in Leyden who refer to the bank tellers by name, who bring something from Buttercrust Bakery and insist on saying The poppy seed muffins were baked by Charles, who say their morning eggs come from Bill’s farm, and that George, who turns out to be a UPS driver, delivered their new lamp with a dent in the shade. Everything so fucking personal.

  Kate takes a deep breath; she is aware of her soul’s sudden sourness. Where is the grace, the pity, where is the warmth? They have all fled, along with God…Were they all just the tail tied to the kite that was her faith, and now that the string has snapped, have they all disappeared into the wild blue?

  “Um…Kate?” Evangeline’s voice is low, confidential. “I’m out on the patio. Ruby keeps on talking about how she gave Annabelle her cross and it was supposed to be good luck.”

  Kate hears Ruby’s voice calling for Evangeline in the background.

  “I’m out here,” she calls back.

  “Evangeline?” Ruby shrieks. It is the voice of a terrified child in a universe where nothing is guaranteed and nothing can stop bad things from happening, not prayers, not candles, not sermons, not holy water, not songs, nor dances, not crosses.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Sergeant Lee Tarwater stands in front of Jerry Caltagirone, wringing his long white hands as he speaks. Caltagirone used to think Tarwater was a very worried man, maybe too worried to be police, until he learned Tarwater had eczema and was rubbing lotion into his skin. “We got two people up front,” Tarwater says, “father-daughter, and they want to talk to someone about that homicide in Martingham last November. That’s you, right?”

  And with no more preparation than that, a nice break in the case, which might seem like luck to some but Caltagirone believes you make your own luck when you are police, you make it by working the case, stirring the pot until stuff starts to surface.

  Tarwater comes back from the front with the father and daughter in tow. They are both on the small side and Tarwater looms over them. He dumps them on Caltagirone, but not before giving the daughter a look-over, bottom to top, and back to bottom. She’s sixteen years old and she may as well be holding a sign that says I AM HERE AGAINST MY WIL
L. She’s maybe five feet tall, tan, dark hair, skinny enough to race at Belmont, with a stubborn expression that Caltagirone knows is mainly bluff—if she really knew how to get her own way she wouldn’t be here. Her father is dressed to look rich, which Caltagirone is willing to grant him. He’s not much taller than his daughter, but with a D and a G on his sunglasses, a sporty little sweater, and a Rolex. His name is Alan Slouka and her name is Marmont.

  Caltagirone gets them a couple of chairs and the father looks at the daughter, telling her with his eyes that he wants her to speak up. She looks right back at him; she might be afraid of some things, but her father isn’t one of them. “All right,” Slouka says, “I’ll start the ball rolling. My daughter here—I’m single-parenting—”

  “Right,” Marmont says.

  “Well, I am,” he says. “You may not like it, but I am. Anyhow, Marmont and I moved to Purchase a little over two years ago, and, without my being aware of it, Marmont developed an attachment to one of the young men who work on our property.”

  Caltagirone shifts his weight on his new ergonomic chair, paid for by himself, with a thickly padded back and inflatable lumbar support. “And this is about the homicide last November,” he says, raising his pneumatic contour coccyx-cut seat an inch or two. He’s already so much larger than the Sloukas, he figures he may as well go all the way.

  “Yes, it is,” the father says. He looks at his daughter. “You want me to go on?”

  “You like telling it,” she says.

  “No,” he says, the anger coming up through his voice, “I like telling the truth. In fact, I am addicted to telling the truth.” Turning to Caltagirone, he smiles, shrugs. “My daughter and this individual were in the park”—he says the word park as if it were the moral equivalent of a by-the-hour motel—“and they were hiding, and…” He takes a breath. “Let’s say they were not in their Sunday best, when they saw a man being attacked.”