Man in The Woods (27 page)

Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin’ for to carry me home
.

Ah, good, that’s doing it. He hears Eric Clapton’s voice singing the words along with him, a beautiful duet, with the guitar lines wrapping them both in bright silver. And he can feel his urine, silver, too, rising like mercury in a thermometer.
What women don’t understand about men
, Butler thinks,
is how often we defy gravity. We must go up up in a world where everything is pushing down
.

Swinglowsweetchariotcomin’ fortocarrymehome
.

Fucking Clapton, man. That guitar. Even messed up he was God.

Butler moves stealthily, ever closer, until the slit of his penis is three inches from Tori’s sleeping face, with its worried brow and hawk nose. He picks up the beer, takes another swig, and then looks up at the low ceiling, blue and wavy as water.
I looked over Jordan and what did I see? A band of angels coming after me
.

Thomas spreads his arms. Beer pours out of the bottle’s open mouth, fizzing and hissing onto the carpet. His legs tremble and he thinks for a moment he will fall to his knees. He hears voices. Something is happening. When you walk to the border of life, things occur. You have entered a secret place.

“What’s going on?” Tori asks, lifting herself up on her elbows. Her eyes are creases. She kicks the covers a little to one side, to free one bare foot. “What are you doing?”

Butler staggers to the window, zipping himself up. A black-and-white from the LAPD has pulled in front of the house. An old lady he’s never noticed before is standing in her bathrobe on her front porch, waiting to see what will happen. The mailman has been stopped by one of the cops, and he is nodding agreeably and stepping back and then completely turning around.

The cop who turned the letter carrier around is joined by another cop, even younger. In their contoured britches and gleaming knee-high boots—or were they in plain clothes?
Coming for to carry me home
. Butler will never quite be able to keep this life-saving moment clear in his own mind, this fucked-up miracle, this fully armed band of angels sent for him and him alone. The two cops have a few words with each other and one of them points to Butler’s house and the other one rests the heel of his left hand on the butt of his revolver and they make their way to Butler’s front door.

Now that they have a positive ID on him they can proceed with placing him under arrest for the murder of William Claff, in the town of Tarrytown, New York.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Usually the dreams Paul remembers are the morning dreams, the often nonsensical neural narratives he creates to keep himself asleep. This morning, with Kate already out of bed and Shep trying to bark a squirrel down from a tree, he is dreaming that Annabelle is telling him that they are going to dig up their father so that he may be buried next to their mother’s grave in Kent. As he objects to this plan, Shep’s barking becomes more insistent, pulling Paul halfway out of sleep, and when he returns to his dream he is walking behind his sister as they mount the steps to their father’s First Avenue apartment and Paul is saying to Annabelle, “He’s still here?” but she does not answer.
My sister has a nice ass
, he dreamthinks and then they are on the third floor where droopy, bedraggled-looking people are milling about the landing in undershirts, smoking cigarettes, drinking strong-smelling coffee. “Are you here to see your father?” one of them asks, a skinny, unshaved guy, with something ingratiating and evil about him. Paul follows Annabelle inside but she’s no longer there and as he walks through the rooms in his father’s apartment there are paintings lined up on the floor, leaning against the walls, and he hears some dog barking, a dog he cannot see, and he stops and looks for Annabelle and now she’s back in the dream but as a younger self, maybe twenty years old, and he says to her, “He’s still here?” to which she answers with such intensity that she is practically
hissing
at him, “He’s always here,” at which point Paul awakens, and lies quietly on his back in the warm bed, surprised to find that his heart is squirming with anxiety and that he is near tears.

He slides out of bed and goes to the window. The sky is pale blue, the sun already scorching.
Thank you Father for another day.
He says the words tentatively to himself, and feels shaken by them. Kate, in jeans and a sleeveless shirt, uses a leash to lead Shep away from the tree and the squirrel and into the house—she still doesn’t feel confident enough to take him by the collar.

She notices Paul at the window; her face lights at the sight of him and she calls up, “Sorry, I couldn’t stop him from barking. Are you going to watch that thing with me?” Shep noses against her hand, trying to eat the biscuit he has been following, and the touch of his wet nose startles Kate. She makes a little yelp and then laughs nervously.

“I’ll be right there.”

A television program called
First Thing Sunday Morning
is interested in taping a segment about Kate and the ongoing phenomenon of her book.
First Thing
is not a religious show, but Rebecca Adachi, the show’s cohost, a woman in her late twenties, a cancer survivor and the daughter of a man who went to prison after a well-publicized trial for embezzlement, has read
Prays Well with Others
at least three times, listens every week to Kate’s broadcast, and has attended a couple of Kate’s events in New York, and getting
First Thing
’s producers and the network to agree to air a piece about Kate is as exciting to Rebecca as it was to book Maxwell, who was riding his hit song “Fortunate.” It came close to not working out. The publicist at Kate’s book publisher and the publicist for Heartland Radio, having struck an uneasy alliance, had almost convinced two of the producers at
60 Minutes
to do a piece about Kate and her book, and it was only at the last minute when someone at CBS decided that a segment about a forty-one-year-old recently sober convert to Christianity might not have a broad enough appeal for
60 Minutes
that Kate’s publicists began casting around for other venues, at which point Adachi personally stepped in, quickly vaulting over the publisher and the radio station and contacting Kate herself, which was surprisingly easy to do.

Kate hasn’t ever seen Rebecca Adachi’s show—Paul’s presence in the house makes turning on the television feel odd and embarrassing; if he finds her watching it he will stop and look at the set as if it were a crack in the wall that needs to be repaired. However, people at Heartland Radio and at Kate’s publishing house assure her that Adachi is a friendly, decent reporter and that her show will be both a dignified and highly effective showcase for Kate and her book.

The program plays at nine a.m. and Kate and Paul bring their coffee and bowls of melon to the front of the house and watch it while they have breakfast. The show is a mix of hard news, sports, weather, and human interest stories, and in its second half-hour, two segments with something spiritually encouraging in them. Today, the first story, reported by Adachi’s cohost, is about the men in presidential candidate George W. Bush’s Texas prayer group, and the second, reported by Adachi herself, is about a woman in St. Louis who lost her son in a construction accident and now prepares bag lunches for about a hundred schoolchildren in her economically distressed neighborhood.

“What do you think of her?” Kate asks Paul, pointing to the TV set with her spoon.

“What do
you
think of her?” Paul asks.

“She looks about twelve,” Kate says.

“What difference does that make?”

“Only a man could say that.”

Paul leans forward. “Hey, you know what? I was sitting next to her once. At one of your events. In the city. She was sitting right next to me. She had a tote bag from CBS and she was taking notes.”

He’s not sure why, but recognizing Adachi fills Paul with happiness. Anything that connects one thing to another is a source of reassurance to him. Maybe Adachi was fated to ask Kate on her show. And if that is the case there is something in the universe—something ineffable, a force, an intelligence,
something
—that makes sense of us, that sees us, that knows us, that punishes and rewards us, or that at the very least and in some way, shape, or fashion cares.

When Rebecca Adachi looked over at Paul in that church on the Upper West Side last November, the night before Paul’s path crossed with the man in the woods, he was struck by how much she looked like Mary Jones, a woman he worked for five years ago, who was also half-Japanese, and seeing her now on TV it seems all the more uncanny. Both Rebecca and Mary have a gamine quality, boyish but delicate, as well as a swimmer’s haircut and a taste for large jewelry in somewhat the cubist style. They both have a kindergarten-teacher sweetness, a sort of encouraging brightness that doesn’t always seem quite real.

Mary Jones, a young, well-provided-for widow, had hired Paul to make a display case in her apartment on Gramercy Park, in which she planned to show her small collection of Joseph Cornell boxes. One evening she hired a car to take them both to Queens, to Utopia Parkway, where Cornell had lived with such ravishing sorrow with his mother and his disabled brother and where he had scavenged for the knobs and spools and assorted junk that constituted his art. The old frame house was nowhere to be found, but looking for it drew Paul and Mary Jones closer and that night they became lovers. How long had it lasted? Certainly for the duration of the project, and, it seems to him, for a couple of months after. Now, thinking of Mary as he watches Adachi talking to the Lunch Bag Lady, he finds he cannot remember their relationship coming to an end. When had it happened? Where was the break point? He remembers the sharp, flowery smell of her perfume, the flatness of her ass, the extraordinary ivory color of her skin, the natural Mohawk of her secret hair. He remembers her voice, her cough of mysterious origins, her distrust of doctors. But why had they stopped seeing each other? He can think of nothing, no quarrel, no moment. But he can remember the beginning, he can recall it in exquisite detail: looking together at the houses on Utopia, salmon-colored brick on the ground floor, white vinyl (where there used to be white wood) on top, each with a bath mat’s worth of lawn in front, and then there were the people on the street: Indians, Koreans, recently immigrated Jews.

Adachi is asking the Lunch Bag Lady how much money she spends every week on preparing lunches for the children in her community, and the Lunch Bag Lady says, “Gee, Rebecca, the money comes from all over, people hear about us and want to be involved. Maybe they’ve had to miss a meal or two themselves, one time or another. Or maybe they’re just looking for a way of saying thank-you to the Heavenly Father.”

Paul’s eyes fill with tears, and he clears his throat, lowers his head, but not before Kate has noticed.

“What’s wrong?” she asks him.

“That’s what I want,” he says.

“Lunch in a brown paper bag?”

“A heavenly father. A father to talk to. A father who sees me.”

“Really?” Her smile is tentative.

“Yes. Someone to look up to.”

“Most fathers are pretty run-of-the-mill,” Kate says.

“Mine lives in Santa Barbara,” Ruby says.

They look up, surprised to see her. Her nights have not been as tumultuous as before, but nevertheless she has continued to sleep late, until this morning, and she now stands before them in her underwear, with beads of perspiration in her hair and her bangs plastered to her forehead, holding a bowl overflowing with cereal. Shep, who has been uninterested in the honeydew melon and coffee, is brought to his feet by the scent of Cheerios.

“Hey there,” Kate says.

“Hi there,” answers Ruby. “What are you guys watching?”

“Ho there,” Kate says.

“This lady wants your mom to be on her TV show,” Paul says. He slides away from Kate on the sofa to make room for Ruby.

Ruby moves with extreme caution, as if once a floor had collapsed beneath her feet and forever compromised her faith in the durability of the physical world. Even at her slow pace, she has sloshed some Cheerios onto the floor, and Shep laps them up quickly.

“Thank you, Sheppy,” she says, placing the bowl on the table and climbing between Paul and Kate. Mosquitoes have had their way with her; her bare legs are a mass of red stars in a milky way of white scratch marks.

“Look at you,” Kate cries. “You’ve been eaten alive.”

“I don’t care,” Ruby says. “Bites are funny. That we’re food?” Ruby reaches for her cereal bowl and rests it in her lap and begins to eat.

The sound of an approaching car—the shudder of an engine, the nervous chewing sound of tires over gravel—captures Ruby’s attention. She places her cereal bowl on the floor—Shep is eating it before Paul or Kate can stop him—and runs to the window to look out. “It’s Evangeline,” Ruby announces.

Kate looks at Paul questioningly and he shrugs.

“But it’s Sunday,” Kate persists.

“She’s going to the shop,” Ruby says.

“You’ve turned her into a workaholic,” Kate says. “She never stops.”

“She likes her job,” Paul says.

“Now she sees me,” Ruby says, waving to Evangeline. “And now she’s coming to the house!”

Kate has a notion to tell Ruby to get some clothes on, but decides she has another year or two before lessons in bodily shame need to begin. Ruby, however, is stung by a dart of modesty and hurries up the stairs. A different sort of modesty compels Kate to turn off the TV—there seems something spongy and unclean about watching television in the morning, or watching it at all in front of anyone except your most intimate companion.

“Do you think I ought to let this person do a segment about me?” Kate asks, picking up the remote and speaking quickly to encourage a fast answer.

“She seems okay to me,” says Paul.

The answer is so casual and ill-considered it strikes Kate as cavalier, almost contemptuous, and she feels herself falling through some internal emptiness she hadn’t before realized was there, a sudden aloneness that makes her gasp. Instead of turning the set off, she mutes the sound, and a moment later Evangeline is knocking at the door and Kate calls for her to come in.

“I brought you that coffee you like,” Evangeline says to Paul. Her exuberance and good cheer grace her with an aura of overflowing good health. She looks as if she is restraining herself from doing cartwheels across the room. Glancing uneasily at Kate, she adds, “There’s actually enough for two. In fact this is triple-roasted Ethiopian and if you drink it all you probably won’t close your eyes until Tuesday.” She crouches down, placing the black-and-silver thermal cup on the table, and then pets Shep, stroking his ears. Shep moans affectionately.

“His energy seems down,” Evangeline says.

“I was thinking that, too,” says Paul.

“You think he might have a little Lyme disease?”

“Oh fuck,” says Paul. “That’s all we need.”

“He seems fine to me,” Kate offers.

“He’s sort of gimpy, don’t you think?” Paul says.

“He seems like his old self,” says Kate. “We don’t even know how old he is. Or what his medical past has been.”

“I can’t let anything happen to this dog,” Paul says, and then, hearing himself, he adds, “Or any of us.”

“His energies are definitely a little on the down side,” Evangeline says, rising up again. “And you’ve got all those deer out there, each one of them infected with Lyme.”

She watches the TV for a moment as the Lunch Bag Lady, her long, creased face a portrait of sorrow and contemplation, bows her head in a church. “Wow,” Evangeline says, “I think I’d never get anything done if I had a TV. I could never turn it off.”

“Oh it’s not that difficult to turn off,” Kate says.

“This show wants Kate to be on it,” Paul says.

“Really? That’s awesome,” Evangeline says.

“Hey Evangeline,” Ruby calls from upstairs. “Do you want to see what I got?”

“Okay,” Evangeline calls back. “I’ll be right up.” Then she asks, in a whisper, “How’s she doing?”

Kate doesn’t think that Evangeline is in a position to be whispering inquiries about Ruby, but she answers nevertheless. “Actually, she seems great.”

“Terrific. I’ll run up there, and then I’m going to go out to the shop and work on dovetailing those mahogany drawers. God, let’s keep away from mahogany.”

“I know,” Paul says. “It can be stubborn. But that’s sort of what I love about it, too.”

“Too stubborn for me,” says Evangeline. “Pine’s more my speed, you don’t need to seduce it or force it.”