Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “She’s probably thinking about sodas,” Paul says.

  “Well wouldn’t that be covered in the no-sweets rule?”

  “Some people give their kids diet colas.”

  “That wouldn’t be covered in the no-additives rule?”

  “I feel sorry for anyone who has to argue with you.”

  “You mean you feel sorry for yourself?”

  “No, I don’t have to argue with you. I just sit back and amaze.”

  “I know I’m a pain in the ass,” Kate says. “But at least I…” She is about to say at least I never killed anyone. But the joke is impossible, insane, cruel, and she chooses instead the awkwardness and perhaps even the obviousness of a sudden silence.

  “I think Dr. Montgomery’s doing a pretty good job,” Paul says. “I’m not much for therapy and all that, but you have to admit Ruby seems a little happier.”

  “She does, she really does. Maybe we can take Montgomery to Mykonos with us. Can I have the last…” She counts the remaining slices of apple on the platter. “Eleven slices of apple?”

  “Take eight.”

  As Kate picks up the vinegar-flecked apples, the sound of an auto closes in on the house.

  “Remember when this place was sort of tucked away and cozy?” Kate asks.

  “I do.”

  “When people come to see us in Mykonos they’ll be in little sailboats and by the time they’ve got them all tied up and they’ve shivered their timbers and hoisted up their hoisters we’ll be halfway up the stony little goat path behind our house, and when they come in all they’ll find are two abandoned little cups of espresso and an unmade bed.” Kate has slid out of her chair and goes to the window in a sideways fashion, hoping not to be seen. A van with something written on the side—she sees the word elkins and that’s all Kate can make out—has pulled in front of the house. The van has Pennsylvania plates.

  “Here’s the good news,” she says to Paul. “It’s not Joyce Drazen wanting me to help her get Nina into the Sorbonne.”

  Whoever is in the van is slow to get out. Kate can vaguely make out a woman’s silhouette behind the wheel, but she seems motionless. Paul places his glass of lemonade onto the kitchen table and it thunks against the wood, a sound that will resonate in his memory for years, the sound that marks the ending of one part of his life and the beginning of another.

  At last, the van’s door opens, and a woman slowly emerges, looking so bony and light that a decent pair of wings might make her airborne. Her pixie-cut hair is russet, the color the leaves will be next month. She is wearing skinny blue jeans and a yellow cotton sweater, and she is holding something in her hand, a photograph.

  “I’ll get it,” Paul says, when they hear the knocks at the door, four knocks in four/four time, largo. “You can go upstairs, or just stay here.”

  “Under the table might be nice. I haven’t been under a table since my old Pinot Grigio days.”

  “I’ll meet you there after I send whoever this is away.”

  In the foyer, Paul glances up at the ceiling—a little crack has presented itself in the plaster. Another thing he probably won’t be able to get to…He opens the door and because this door doesn’t have a screen he and the visitor stand with barely three feet between them. She looks extremely nervous. Her breathing is rapid and shallow; her eyes are so glassy that for a moment Paul wonders if she’s blind.

  “Hey,” he says. “I don’t want to be a bad guy here, but we’re not really into people just dropping by. I see you’ve come a long way, and I hate to do this to you, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” He lowers his eyes, not wanting to intimidate this woman with direct eye contact, and he sees a few flakes of white plaster on the floor, and then he looks up at the ceiling and sees that the crack is a bit worse than the last time he looked.

  “My name is Dinah Maloney,” the woman says, “and I think you have my dog.” She holds up the photograph; it shows her and Shep at what looks like a birthday party in a wainscoted parlor, with a white marble hearth and a Persian rug. She has one hand on young Shep’s shoulder as she leans over a blazing birthday cake; they are both wearing orange-and-silver party hats. “I’ve got hundreds of pictures of Woody, but I brought this one because it’s both of us together,” Dinah says.

  “Oh my God,” Paul says, before it occurs to him that right now it might be better to say nothing at all. But it cannot be unsaid.

  No longer able to resist his instinct to follow Paul, or perhaps hearing Dinah Maloney’s voice, Shep has come to the entrance foyer, preceded by the click of his claws against the wooden floors.

  “Woody!” Dinah cries. Her face contorts as if she is in pain and she drops the photograph, which does not fall to the ground right away but is suspended in midair for a moment, drifting left and right, like a boat rocking in a lagoon. “Woody, Woody, I knew it.”

  Shep stops in his tracks, still some ten feet away. He cocks his head, repositioning his ears to hear the woman’s half-familiar and half-forgotten voice. A moment before, his mouth was open and his tongue was out, giving him an insouciant appearance; now he draws his tongue back and his mouth is shut.

  “Come on,” Paul says to Shep, “let’s go out.” And then, to Dinah, “We can talk out here.”

  But Dinah has fallen to her knees and her arms are outstretched. “Woody, Woody,” she calls. Slowly, the dog approaches her, his tail making its helicopter spin at an ever-quickening rate. He takes a couple more tentative steps toward Dinah, until finally her fingers can touch him. Since coming home and finding he had been stolen, Dinah has posted thousands of Lost Dog notices on lampposts and bulletin boards, farther and farther from her home. She has put notices in the newspapers, called innumerable animal rescue organizations, pounds, and veterinarians. She has offered such a handsome reward that she has had to deal with dozens of false leads. She has gotten calls from people who have spotted stray poodles and beagles; even a one-eyed disoriented cat was enough to trigger a call from one slurring, gravel-voiced fortune hunter. Every failure had the perverse power of increasing desire and mocking hope, until the longing for her dog became almost unendurable, and the undying hope of ever finding him began to seem like madness.

  Yet here he is! And when she buries her fingers in his brown, red, and black fur, the touch transmits joy from her fingertips to her mind, to her heart, to every receptor of sensation in her body, and though no one who knows Dinah has ever described her as overly emotional, she is full of heedless passion, moaning, crooning, and weeping, and though she is in some ways quite out of her mind right now, this is a moment she will never forget, a moment she will always say is the happiest of her life.

  Kate, having heard the cries, comes to the door and sees Dinah with her face buried in the thick, variegated fur on the back of Shep’s neck.

  “Oh hi,” Dinah says.

  “Are you all right?” Kate asks. At this moment, her guess is this is somehow AA-related and she needs to help this person.

  “We’re okay out here, Kate,” Paul says. “It’ll be a few minutes.”

  “But…”

  “Please,” Paul says. His voice is as startling as a slammed door; she has never heard such insistence and irritation in it before. The nerve! It’s a revelation of the wrong sort. He glares at her until she retreats.

  “That was Kate Ellis,” Dinah says. “I saw her on Becky Adachi. Becky and I went to school together. And I never miss her show—unless I’m doing a brunch. I have a small catering company. And so there I was”—she struggles to her feet, using the dog to find her balance—“watching the show and there he was.”

  Paul has made a gesture to help her to her feet but thinks better of it. With his hand half-extended, he introduces himself instead. “I’m Paul Phillips.”

  Her hand is cold to the touch and seems almost without weight. Her breath smells of recently drunk coffee. There is a faint dusting of powdered sugar on the fly of her jeans. “Hello, Paul. May I ask you how is it you have my
dog?”

  “What makes you so sure this is your dog?”

  “Are you going to try and tell me Woody’s your dog?”

  “I’m saying that Shep’s been here for a while and before that I don’t know where he was.”

  “How long has he been living here?”

  “Since November,” Paul says, and wishes he had said October, or August—anything but the truth. But the truth shall set you free. Yes, he thinks, the truth: but tell it to God, not to some woman who appears out of nowhere.

  “How did he get here?” Dinah asks.

  Paul breathes in and exhales, letting the air out with reluctance, as if turning the page in a book whose ending he doesn’t want to know. “Let’s walk,” he says. “We can go to my workshop and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  They walk side by side, with the dog between them, laboriously trotting along, looking at neither of them. His attentions are on the low, suspenseful buzzing of a bee that is nearby—a few weeks ago he was stung in his hindquarters and since then he has been vigilant about flying pests.

  “He seems to be dragging his back leg,” Dinah says.

  “He has Lyme disease. He’s getting better though.”

  “Lyme disease?”

  “The deer bring it in. The ticks that feed on them carry it. The deer don’t ever get Lyme but they spread it around.”

  “I saw so many deer driving up here. They’re so graceful. I always thought deer were good.”

  “Nothing’s good,” Paul says, opening the door for her. Shep steps over the threshold. But rather than trot over to his dog bed, with its plaid covering thoroughly furred in long hairs and snowy tufts of undercoat, he stands next to Dinah. He looks up at her and his tail is rotating with ever-increasing enthusiasm.

  “Oh Woody, I was starting to give up hope.”

  Paul cannot help himself. “Come here, Shep,” he says, and he puts his hand at his side, even going so far as to hold his fingers in a way that suggests he is holding a tidbit. Shep steps closer to Paul and touches his fingers with his nose, but without the energy he would normally expend if he truly believed there was a treat in Paul’s hand, and it is all Paul can do to not grab Shep’s collar and keep him close.

  There are a couple of chairs on the far end of the workshop, near where most of the old windows are stored, and Paul with a gesture invites Dinah to sit with him there. With every step they make toward the chairs, the dog gravitates an inch or two closer to Dinah, though when they are seated he curls up directly in front of Paul.

  “He’s really not on top of his game,” Dinah says. “Have you been feeding him commercial dog food?”

  “It’s the antibiotics,” Paul says. “He does pretty well for himself, believe me.”

  “You’re not going to give me a hard time about this, are you?”

  “No, I don’t want to give you any trouble. I just don’t know how to tell if this is really your dog. There are a lot of dogs who look like Shep.”

  “I think you can tell. He obviously is excited to see me.”

  “You seem more excited than him.”

  “I wish I had chipped him,” Dinah says.

  “You mean with a microchip? Oh, I’d never do that to an animal.”

  “He was stolen from me. Last October. I’ve been looking for him ever since.” Her eyes fill with tears and she lowers them; as she composes herself, she notices the powdered sugar in her lap and brushes it off.

  As casually as he can, Paul asks, “Who stole him?” Just being this close to learning more about the man whose life he ended overwhelms Paul. His heart leaps within him.

  “I met this man. I was walking with Woody and…it’s really hard to explain, mostly because I’ve never done anything like that before. And obviously I never will again. We ended up together for a really short time until I sort of snapped out of it and came to my senses. I told him it was over and he seemed fine with it. A little later I had to go to a job and when I got back my place was trashed and Woody was gone. I blamed myself. I don’t know what I was doing. I guess I just didn’t want to be there while he packed his little bag and got out. Big mistake.”

  “Where is he now?” Paul asks.

  “He’s here. And you know it.”

  “No, sorry. I mean the guy who stole your dog.”

  Dinah narrows her eyes, and for a moment she seems to move in slow motion. “Why do you ask?” she finally says.

  “Some guy steals your dog? What sort of guy? I mean what was he like?”

  “You seem very curious about him,” Dinah says. “His name was Robert. Bob,” she adds, with a shudder, as if even this common bit of nicknaming was an intimacy she would rather forget.

  “Bob,” Paul says. He feels himself sinking. He places his hands on his knees, sits straighter.

  “There was something sort of sweet about him,” Dinah says. “I have to remind myself of that, because it all ended so horribly. But there was something about him, some lost little boy quality…” She sees the look of dismay on Paul’s face, and stops right there.

  “I just love this dog, to tell you the truth,” Paul says, though even to say the word truth further undoes him.

  “And you found Woody how?” She folds one leg over the other, crosses her arms, like tightly folding the flaps of a cardboard box.

  Tell her, Paul thinks. You saved her dog’s life. She’ll thank you. But he remains silent.

  “I guess you know someone killed Robert,” Dinah says. “Actually, Robert wasn’t really his name. He never told me anything but lies. I was really stupid. His name was William?” The interrogative lilt, the raised eyebrows.

  “How would I know that?” Paul says. He wonders if his voice is barely audible, or if it just seems so because blood is pounding in his ears.

  “The police called me. A week after the fact. They found one of my business cards with his stuff. They knew I didn’t have anything to do with it and I couldn’t help him, this detective from Tarrytown. It was so strange, I mean really. I had a friend who died in a plane crash, but this was worse, even though by the time I heard about it I sort of hated him. But you haven’t told me—how’d you find Woody?” She lowers her voice. “Or maybe you don’t remember.”

  “I remember, of course I remember.”

  She looks at him.

  “I found him running along the side of the Taconic Parkway,” Paul says.

  There’s a knock at the door, and after a brief moment’s hesitation Kate lets herself in. “Is everything okay here?” she says to Paul. “I thought you were coming right back.”

  “Hey, Kate,” he says, “this is Dinah Maloney. From Philadelphia. Shep’s her dog.”

  Kate’s face whitens, as if with one catastrophic contraction of the heart every drop of blood has drained from it. “Oh,” she manages to say, reaching back for the door. “I’ll be in the house.”

  As soon as Kate closes the door, Dinah uncrosses her legs, unfolds her arms. “I really need to be going,” she says. “I’ve got a long drive and I’d like to get back home before it’s the middle of the night.”

  “It feels like the middle of the night right now,” Paul says.

  “I know it must. You’re probably very attached to him.”

  “Very.”

  “That’s Woody for you.”

  “It’s hard to talk about,” Paul says. He looks down at the dog; it’s impossible to imagine losing him.

  “I hope you’re not angry,” Dinah says. When she gets out of her chair, Woody struggles to stand, too. He seems committed to following her.

  “He’s really hurting with this Lyme thing,” Dinah says.

  “He’s already getting better. I’ll give you the rest of his pills.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  But Paul makes no move to get up. He stares at the floor, with his hands on his knees.

  “Do you want a moment alone, to say good-bye?” Dinah asks.

  Paul shakes his head. “What am I going to do? Cry on him? He
won’t know what’s going on.”

  Dinah purses her lips and nods her head. The dog is sitting next to her now and she is scratching the top of his head with one finger.

  “I really should be going.”

  “I’ll get those pills for you,” Paul says.

  “Great. I’ll just wait outside.”

  As Paul walks toward the door, he gives Shep a final ear-tug. “Bye Shep,” he says, his voice breaking.

  He notices that Dinah has sidestepped a few extra feet away from him, giving him a wide berth.

  Kate finds Paul in the kitchen, crying openly and looking in the cabinet over the sink for Shep’s antibiotics, even though they are on the windowsill. There are bottles of aspirin, Advil, vitamin C and other supplements, and in his frustration he swats them all away, sending some deeper into the cabinet and sweeping others into the sink.

  “She saw him on TV?” Kate asks.

  Paul nods. He is holding on to the sink now with both hands because his legs feel useless.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m giving her his pills. I’ll give her the rest of his food, too. She’s driving back to Philadelphia and when five o’clock comes around he’ll wonder where his food is.”

  “Paul…”

  “Food, safety, and comfort. It’s what he thinks about.”

  “The pills are on the windowsill,” Kate says, but Paul hears only half of what she’s said. His attentions are seized by the sound of running and when he looks out the old glass of the window he sees Dinah, wavy and prismatically tinted by the mouth-blown glass, racing for the Elkins Park Gourmet van with Shep at her side. She opens the door for him and he clumsily clambers in and then, with one panicked glance toward the house, she runs to the driver’s side.

  “Hey,” Paul manages to shout, but she certainly can’t hear him—her van starts with a roar—and even if she did she wouldn’t stop. She throws the car into gear and swerves around Paul’s truck, Kate’s car, with gravel spitting out from her spinning wheels. And Paul, still holding on to the sink, cranes his neck and follows the van’s flight with his eyes for as long as he can, wondering if he will perhaps see Shep turning back toward the house for one last farewell glance.