The Spirit Wood

by Robert Masello

  “You son of a bitch, get out of my way!” Byron shouted at Fifi. “Peter, tell her to stop!”

  “Fifi—” And he followed it with something short and forceful in Greek. Fifi remained on guard.

  “Peter—make them stop!” Mrs. Constantine was standing behind her chair, gripping the back.

  Fritz suddenly released the Frisbee, and Diogenes lurched backwards. Fritz pounced on him, just missing the neck but fastening his jaws on the furry clump of shoulder. Dodger fell to one side, the Frisbee rolling away; he struggled to right himself. To shake loose. But Fritz was too strong.

  Byron threw one horrified look at Peter—wasn't he going to intervene, for God's sake? Then he aimed a kick at Fifi, blocking his path, that the dog was able to dodge. “Bastard!” He tried to get around her, but she pranced back and forth like a defensive linesman, snapping at his hands and legs. He kicked again, and this time the dog caught hold of his trousers, yanking so viciously with her teeth that the fabric split straight up to the knee.

  “Peter! Stop this! Stop it, Peter!” His mother was screaming now, cowering behind her lawn chair, her hands clutching at the front of her blouse. “Make it stop, Peter! Stop it right now!”

  Fritz had pinned Dodger to the ground, and every time the retriever moved to free himself, he bit more fiercely into him, and shook him as if in warning. Meg couldn't stand it; with Fifi fending off Byron, she grabbed her collapsible chair and bolted around behind them. Fritz saw her coming out of the corner of his eye, but he was reluctant to let go of the supine and whimpering Diogenes; it was only when she'd rushed toward him, with the chair extended like a battering ram, that he let go of Dodger. Meg glimpsed a patch of bloody yellow fur. Then the mastiff leapt up at her, bashing the chair back into her chest, sending her reeling. The aluminum frame twisted in her hands. The dog rebounded, ready to lunge again. Meg tried to shield herself with the flimsy chair.

  Peter, at last awakening to the danger, intervened, barking out orders to Fritz, who held off, and to Fifi, who drew back, though warily, from Byron. Pointing with the flute to the ground behind him, he ordered the dogs to come. They stood their ground for another few seconds, like warriors surveying the battlefield and comfirming their victory. Then, when Peter had repeated the order, they trotted behind him and sat, composed, on their haunches. Byron knelt down beside Dodger, stroking his shivering head.

  “Stay still,” he was saying. “Don't try to move yet, Dodger. Just stay still.”

  Meg went to Dodger, too, crouching down just as she felt her own legs about to buckle. Peter stood alone, awkwardly, one foot resting on top of the other. Neither Meg nor Byron would look at him. Which was just as well. But his mother, dropping back, pale and shaken, into her own chair, wouldn't take her eyes off him. And that did bother him. She had no right to be looking at him that way . . . looking at him as if he'd done something terribly wrong. He was as sorry as anyone for what had just happened—he could already imagine all kinds of repercussions from it—but that he should be blamed for it seemed absurd. It wasn't his fault that Dodger had acted up—Byron should have kept a hold on him. And who had put a stop to it all? Who had saved the day, for Christ's sake?

  “I'll put the dogs in the kennel,” he said, threading his way between Meg's abandoned lawn chair and the wounded Diogenes. It was nearly dark now, and as the black mastiffs bounded around and then ahead of him, toward Nikos's cottage, he almost lost sight of them in the vast shadows of the house. He could feel his mother's gaze following him. Prodding at his back. Reproaching him.

  And he tasted fury, as distinctly as wine, welling up inexorably inside him.

  Twenty-seven

  THE VET WASN'T terribly curious; he gave Diogenes the necessary shots, shaved and stitched the wound, and gave Byron an antiseptic salve to apply to it twice a day. Meg drove them back to Arcadia, with Dodger, still half-drugged, laid across Byron's lap in the back seat.

  As soon as Dodger had curled up on his familiar blue bath mat in the corner of the kitchen, Meg washed her hands at the sink and said, “Now I think it's time to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”

  “What are you going to do?” Byron asked.

  “I'm going to go and find Nikos and tell him those damned dogs of his have got to be kept under lock and key from now on.”

  Byron looked dubious. “You think he'll listen?”

  “He's going to have to.”

  Byron laughed with pleasure and pride at Meg's determination. “God, you're wasted out here. You ought to be storming the barricades somewhere.” He slapped his hands together. “Well, let's go to it, then. You don't think I'd let you undertake a mission like this without reinforcements, do you?”

  Meg should have known Byron wouldn't let her go alone—just she knew that Peter, whom she would once have trusted with her life, wouldn't go at all. She wished she could have left this in Peter's hands, but that sort of thing wasn't possible anymore.

  Outside, it was another hot and sunny day, like so many had been that summer. But with a heavy stillness in the air, a sense of suspension that she'd come to associate with Arcadia. Approaching Nikos's cottage, she heard at first the sound of a flute and then a percussive jangling—a tambourine.

  “A jam session?” Byron asked, raising his eyebrows.

  The mastiffs must have picked up their scent or heard them coming, because there was an explosion of barking. As Meg and Byron came up the path to Nikos's door, they could hear the dogs rattling the chain fence of their kennel.

  “Come in.” Leah was already holding open the screen door for them. She held a tambourine by her side.

  Peter was seated at the table, his flute in his hands, flanked by Nikos and Angelos. Byron ducked as a strand of the hanging herbs brushed across the top of his head. The room was dim and cool. Meg felt as if she'd entered a cave.

  “I didn't expect to find you here,” she said to Peter.

  Peter, looking as if he hadn't expected to be found, lowered the flute still farther. Nikos, smacking the table with the palm of his hand, said, “Welcome—sit down with us.” Angelos, taking his cue, slowly lifted his bulk from his chair and went to lean against the kitchen sink. Leah scurried about, putting glasses beside the straw-covered wine bottle on the table.

  “We're not staying,” Meg said. “We only came to make sure that what happened yesterday doesn't happen again.”

  Nikos grunted, so at least he knew what she was talking about.

  “Fritz and Fifi are going to have to stay locked in their kennel.”

  “Not possible,” Nikos said, pouring out wine into their glasses. “It is too small. They must be allowed to run.”

  “They can run in there.”

  “They must protect Arcadia, too.”

  “From what?” Meg asked.

  “I wasn't aware we were under attack,” Byron said.

  Peter gave his friend a long, level stare. “We've got trespassers,” he said. “Somebody, probably kids from town, cut a hole through the fence the other night. They were here, on the grounds.” He said it as if a holy shrine had been desecrated.

  Was it true, Meg wondered, or just a convenient lie? She could never tell with Peter anymore. “Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you're right. What if some teenagers did sneak in? Do you want Fritz and Fifi catching up with them and mauling them the way they did Dodger? Is that what you want?”

  “They wouldn't do that,” Peter replied.

  “No? How come?”

  “Because they know better.”

  Meg was speechless—they'd attacked Dodger, and that was with someone there to control them.

  “Please,” Nikos interjected, pushing the wineglasses toward them.

  “No, thank you,” Byron said. Meg didn't move either. Nikos shrugged.

  “Unless there's something else you think we should discuss . . . ,” said Peter, purposely trailing off.

  “That's it, I guess,” Meg replied brusquely. Why even now did she expect hi
m, and desperately want him, to get up from his chair and leave the cottage with them? When would she realize she couldn't count on him anymore?

  “I'm sure you two can find something to occupy your afternoon,” Peter said, suggestively, as a parting shot.

  It went straight to Meg's heart, just as he must have intended it to. And yet strangely enough, she thought she saw a look of pain and remorse starting up in his own dark eyes, as if he were sorry he'd said it at all, and sorrier still that there might be some unacknowledged truth to it. Meg felt as if she'd glimpsed, behind a scrim, Peter as he used to be, struggling like a drowning man to reach the surface again, and breathe. But as quickly as that look had come, it was swallowed up, while Nikos reclaimed the brimming glasses that had been poured for her and Byron. “Let me show you something,” he then said, taking the flute from Peter's hands and playing, as Meg and Byron passed through the verdant front yard, a trilling, and subtly derisive, snatch of ancient melody.

  Twenty-eight

  NO ONE HAD told her these other people would be there. Peter had merely said the Caswells wanted to meet her; Mrs. Constantine hadn't expected to find herself at a busy little party, with herself as the main attraction. But that's what had happened.

  Lazaroff she had met, and not liked, once before, when she'd accompanied Meg into town. The Simons and Plettners she'd only heard about. They were all very cordial, asking her how she liked Passet Bay and, of course, Arcadia, offering to refresh her drink, or suggesting she try a sliver of the St. André cheese. But more than once she had noticed herself observed from a corner of the room; more than once she'd felt that an innocuous question—how long she planned to stay, or whether she'd noticed how tanned and healthy Peter looked—wasn't quite so innocuous as it seemed. There was a bit too much curiosity about her—and that, she thought, must have had something to do with her father. These people may have known him far better than they pretended.

  “How about it?” Jack was saying to Peter. “Why don't you trade in that jalopy of yours for something a little more upscale? No need to masquerade as an impoverished grad student anymore.”

  “I didn't know it was so conspicuous,” Peter said with an embarrassed smile. Mrs. Constantine could see that her son, for whatever reason, was cowed by this man.

  “In a town this small, everything's conspicuous.”

  “Don't let him rag you,” Joan Caswell intervened.

  “Jack owns five hundred shares of Audi and he's just trying to boost the stock.”

  “A thousand shares,” Jack corrected, “but who's counting.” Then, redirecting the conversation to Mrs. Constantine, he asked, “Don't you agree, Ellen? Carpe diem and all that—if you've got it, flaunt it?” He posed it as a question, but of course it wasn't.

  Mrs. Constantine mumbled something about Peter's never caring very much about material things or about making an impression, for that matter. “Even as a boy, he was content with very little. His imagination always supplied him with whatever else he needed.”

  “Jesus, what I'd give for an imagination like that,” Al Plettner said, laughing and smoothing his sparse red hair. His wife handed him another cracker.

  Meg and Byron were in another corner of the room, near the fireplace. Anita Simon was running on to them about the auction; Mrs. Constantine could hear an occasional reference to the nature preserve.

  “Yeah, what do you think about that?” Jack said, having overheard some of it himself. “It looks like we might be able to get a letter from a junior branch of the Army Corps of Engineers stating there'd be measurable damage to the bay ecology if any more housing or construction were allowed on those wetland areas.” He took a long, hard swallow from his glass. “Now that, I think, would cinch it.”

  “But we haven't got it yet,” Anita cautioned. “We're still going to need every penny raised by the auction this year.”

  “Oh, definitely,” Jack assented.

  “Did I mention that I drove by there early this morning,” Lazaroff chimed in, “on my way home from Ginny's?” Ginny, Mrs. Constantine presumed, was his girlfriend—though she wondered how happy the girl would be to have their private schedule publicized. “There were egrets all over the place. And I nearly ran over a turtle the size of a hubcap. I'd say the animal kingdom has already made its own plans for the place.”

  Everyone seemed pleased with the way things were going so far. Jack said the nature preserve was just what Passet Bay needed; a refuge, he declared, “for all the wildlife, with purer instincts and more noble natures than human beings ever had or will have.”

  “Please,” Stan Simon groaned. “Spare me one of the nature sermons. Let's drink,” he said, raising his glass, “to property values. Long may they rise!”

  But Jack appeared to take offense at the insinuation that there was no more than that behind it. Maybe he just didn't want it suggested in front of the Constantine faction, whose estate, after all, was being used for the auction. With seeming sincerity, he launched into a peroration on the virtues of the primitive and untamed. Mrs. Constantine suspected he'd had too much to drink.

  “You know, with all due respect to nuclear reactors and garbage disposals, the progress of man is a lot of crap. Jacob Bronowski and Channel 13 are full of it. It took us thousands, millions, of years, to get to what? The state we're in? We're ruled today, as much as we ever were, by the reptile core, the nugget of brain that makes us as cruel as crocodiles, and just as slimy. And you know what the answer is to that? You know what we should be doing about it?”

  “Brain surgery?” Lazaroff suggested in the awkward pause.

  “Brain cultivation,” Jack replied. “Brain development. You can't get rid of that stem. The thing to do is to develop it, to give it free rein. It's primitive, yes, but it doesn't have to be malignant. It's raw, but it doesn't have to be ruthless. Inside every one of us there's an animal—a natural, ungovernable, impulsive animal—that takes us back, pardon the cliché, to the dawn of time . . . when we drank from streams and slept on the ground.”

  “With your back?” Joan interjected, a little embarrassed and trying to deflect him.

  “My back is fucked up from sitting in an office for thirty years. Keep that in mind, Peter, when you're making your own plans.”

  Peter, suddenly made the focus of Jack's speech, was caught off guard. “I'll write standing up from now on,” he said. Instinctively, while mulling over what Jack had said—and where, he wondered, had all of that come from?—he gravitated toward Byron. Meg was sitting with his mother now.

  “Any news from Omaha?” he asked. He swirled the liquor in his glass nervously.

  “Semester begins on the eighth,” Byron replied. “I've been thinking of moving out there a little sooner than I'd planned. To get acclimated and all that.”

  “When do you think you'll leave?”

  “Depends on the housing question. The last time I called the only thing the university could offer me was an apartment in an off-campus house with a strict ‘no pets’ policy.”

  Peter appeared to be thinking it over. “Maybe you could put Dodger into a kennel for a couple of weeks, until something else opened up.”

  “I suppose,” said Byron, knowing that he never would. And knowing that Peter knew it, too.

  “Not that you're not welcome to stay at Arcadia for as long as you like. Meg and I have really enjoyed having you out here.”

  Byron did not fail to notice how quickly the conversation had fallen into the past tense.

  “Of course, with my mother in the house now, too, I can understand you're wanting to recover your privacy and get established in a place of your own.”

  “Yes,” Byron said, unable to resist adding, “that nonstop reggae music of hers is beginning to get to me.” If Peter wanted him gone, it wasn't for Byron's own good. It was to secure the run of Arcadia for himself—and Nikos, and the dogs. As far as Byron was concerned, that was fine; the sooner he got to Omaha, the sooner he'd have Dodger out of danger and a place of his own
to which he could implore Meg to come. There didn't seem to be a whole lot more he could accomplish by staying—he'd given up on trying to figure his old friend out.

  Mrs. Constantine had risen from her seat on the sofa; Meg was saying good-night to Joan. The other guests appeared to be lingering on. It was only when Joan flicked on the outside lights to the driveway that Byron realized that Peter wasn't coming with them. Jack was standing behind him as Peter tossed Byron the car keys.

  “I'm going to play a little billiards here,” he said. “Be back in a couple of hours.”

  “I'll be sure he gets home safe and sound,” Jack said.

  “Just remember to leave the front gates unlocked. Pull them closed, but don't let the lock catch.”

  Twenty-nine

  HE FELT AS if someone had lightly pummeled him all over his body. His arms were sore; his legs seemed weighted with lead. He was so very, very tired, so very deeply immersed in sleep. It made him angry that something was disturbing him, shaking him harder and harder, that someone was saying something to him from what seemed a very great distance. He tried to turn his head away from the sound, but it wouldn't go away. It gradually grew louder; it was his name. Peter, the voice was saying. Peter. It was so hard to make that long and slippery ascent, to open his eyes.

  When he did, he saw, first, a blank and limitless wall of gray. The sky. There was a sun, beating vainly, dimly, far behind the curtain of clouds. Meg was leaning toward him on the other side; he was outdoors, on the balcony, asleep on one of the lawn chairs. His legs were up, resting on the stone balustrade. His neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head.

  “Peter,” she was saying, “are you all right?” She was wearing her blue flannel robe; her hair had not been brushed.

  His mouth was dry, and it hurt when he swallowed.