The Man in the Woods Read online

“Hear what? What’s the matter?”

  “Listen!”

  The whistling had gone off another way now, was lost somewhere in the vast inner ring of the stadium, but it could still be heard. Then it stopped.

  Pinky scratched his ear. “Yes, I heard it,” he said, “but it could have been anybody. Anybody could whistle that song.”

  “No. No. It was the same person. I’ve never in my life heard anyone whistle like that, Pinky. I want to find out who it was.”

  The kickoff for the second half sailed through the air. The press of people forced them down the steps and back into their seats. Pinky began wolfing down his hot dog. Helen held hers in her lap, as if it had turned to stone. “I can’t eat,” she said. “I’m too scared.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” asked Pinky. “You can’t go prowling around the stadium waiting for somebody to start whistling.”

  “First of all,” said Helen, “do you believe me?”

  “Believe you?” he asked, evening out the mustard on his hot dog with one finger and wiping it on the underside of his jeans.

  “Do you believe me that it’s the same guy I heard in the woods?”

  “I guess so. I mean, you looked like a ghost, and you told me about it right away. It’s the same song for sure. You sang it to me. But what of it? Maybe it’s the same guy. But maybe the cops were right. It was probably the Indian the policeman mentioned or a jogger, and he whistles nicely, and he’s here at the game today. What of it?”

  Helen’s eyes followed the football players as they ran up and down the field, tumbling in heaps over one another. She had no recognition of what they were doing. “The Indian, a jogger, anyone else would have helped us out, Pinky. The only person who would have walked away from that accident is the guy who threw the rock. Stubby’s in jail. The rock thrower is here at this game.”

  Pinky crumpled his hot-dog wrapper and dropped it between his feet. “Holy Christmas night,” he said.

  The only reminder of Tuesday’s accident left on the highway was a swath of tiny ice-cube bits of broken glass. Helen coaxed some of it into a mound with her toe and squinted up the hill toward the woods.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” said Pinky. “Are you sure you want to go up there? Just to find a locket?”

  Wood asters, butterfly weed, and cornflowers, blue as the afternoon sky, danced innocently in the fallow light. Beyond the field were the scrub pines, their branches always half rotten and covered with hard lichen. As the hill rose, so did the height of the trees, until they became just a mass of faraway blackness, hiding ferns and rabbits, moss and mushrooms, like an endless attic filled with trinkets. And secrets.

  “My mother’s up there,” said Helen. “I know it sounds silly. But I’ve always had that locket right up against me, ever since she died, and I look at it, at the picture, every night before I go to sleep. I know it’s just a picture, but it’s the only one of her I really love, and there’s no negative. I don’t want to … leave her up there all alone in those woods.”

  “Doesn’t sound silly,” said Pinky, and he jammed his hands in his pockets and led the way up the hill.

  The woods were full of calling birds and twanging insects. She retraced her steps through the prickly scrub oaks and pines with their half rotting rough-barked timbers, which scratched like carpenters’ rasps, but no silver locket gleamed from a branch or from the weed-covered ground. They found the stump, and Helen poked through the soft black earth under it. Again no locket. There was a rustling, suddenly, in the bushes near a stream up the hill where she’d lost sight of the whistler.

  They saw a man, and he saw them. Helen jumped. Then she realized this old limping man was nothing like the person she had followed.

  In his hand was a white plastic milk jug. He had apparently been collecting water from the stream. He was quite old, and many inches over six feet tall, with a face as wizened in wrinkles as a walnut shell. He limped a few steps toward them and then stood staring.

  “We didn’t mean to bother you,” said Helen as cheerfully as she could.

  “I heard ja coming,” said the old man. “What are you looking for?”

  “Just a lost silver locket,” said Helen.

  “How’d you lose a silver locket up here?” he asked suspiciously. He set his jug down, knelt on one knee, and clasped the other with enormous brown, veiny hands. “Nothing up here. ’Cept the water.”

  “Water?” asked Pinky.

  “Good for the blood,” said the old man. “Town water’s no good. Full of chemicals. I drink this here for my rheumatism. Bad knee.” He wiped some pine needles off the wet bottom of his milk jug, sniffed, and went on. “So I told you how come I’m here. You tell me how come you lost a piece of jewelry a half mile from the highway.”

  “It’s a long story,” said Helen.

  “Got more time than money,” said the old man.

  So Helen told him—with Pinky adding a few flourishes to her story—of the accident and the chase up the hill.

  “Cops didn’t like your story?” he asked when she’d gotten to the part about the policeman in the house.

  “They wouldn’t even listen,” said Helen.

  “Cops!” The old man laughed gently. “I stay away from ’em. They find me, they’ll nip me off into one of those nursing homes in town.”

  “Not against your will, they couldn’t,” said Helen stoutly.

  The old man laughed again. “I’m an Indian,” he said. “Wampanoag from the islands. Cops don’t like Indians. I live on public land. Against the law. I work a bit. Different jobs. I got a nice little place to live in, but nobody knows where it is. I don’t bother the cops, and the cops don’t bother me. I saw one of the rocks go flying out and hit the fender of a truck. Maybe two months back. Never told the cops. Truck kept right on going. Never made the papers.”

  “But the rock could have killed someone,” said Helen.

  “Lots of things kill people,” said the Indian with a caved-in smile. Helen guessed he had no teeth. “Course, if I’d been up here Tuesday like you and seen the accident and all, that would have been different. Least I’d have put a tourniquet on the lady. You’re brave kids. Good hearts, helping the lady and the kid. Stupid to chase that guy, though.” He shook his head in wonderment. “You never know. You should stay out of these woods, kids. Stay out,” he repeated in a sad voice with a crooked finger raised like a schoolteacher’s.

  “I think we’ll go home now,” said Helen. A north wind had begun rustling through a stand of immense junipers beyond where they stood. Clouds blew over the sun, chilling her further. She wished she’d brought a sweater.

  “You the young fellow who owns that cracked-up old motorbike I see hiding in the shed down there?” asked the Indian.

  “How did you know about that?” said Pinky.

  “I know everything and I see everything in these woods,” was the chuckling answer. “If I spot that locket of yours, miss, I’ll drop it in one of the saddlebags on the bike.” He struggled to his feet and, slipping an index finger through the handle of his water jug, turned to walk away. “Don’t you tell no cops you’ve been talking to me,” he said. “Don’t want them up here finding me, putting me in a rest home to die.”

  “I promise,” said Helen.

  The Indian smiled and limped slowly into the brush, blending with it, as quietly as a cat.

  Neither Pinky nor Helen spoke until they had reached Pinky’s hidden bike and had ridden it almost to the edge of Prospect Avenue. Pinky stopped the bike. “Good-bye,” he said. “I have to get home. Saturday nights I have to take the desk of the motel. We get over twenty people and my mother has to run back and forth to the rooms to cover complaints—kids’ cribs, extra pillows—you name it. We’re not exactly a Holiday Inn. See you tomorrow. Remember, we gotta hit the books for the history test Monday.”

  “About one?” asked Helen. “After church?” She got off the motorbike and snapped shut the flaps of a saddlebag that had been rubbing unco
mfortably against her leg. The snap reminded her of something. It was bronze, with the insignia of the old German Army, an eagle. She fretted over it a moment. It was something like … like what? Like the eagle on the necklace that Stubby had been twirling around and Mr. Casey had snatched away from him, accusing him … “Pinky,” said Helen.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Tuesday afternoon I saw Stubby for just a minute or two in Mr. Casey’s office. Mr. Casey was yelling at him for stealing a necklace from a Perry and Crowe truck. I heard Mr. Casey say loud and clear that Stubby had a summer job loading trucks for Perry and Crowe.”

  Pinky picked a long shaft of barley grass and sucked on it between his two front teeth.

  “Well, I knew Stubby a little from back in St. Theresa’s. He wasn’t stupid. If he had a job loading UPS trucks, he’d know what he was loading in the trucks, wouldn’t he? If he was trying to support his drug habit by stealing jewelry or money, he’d have tried to rob the store instead. He certainly wouldn’t waste his time throwing rocks at UPS vans carrying knickknacks. What’s he going to do? Cause an accident, run out on the highway, and make off with a pair of Lenox teacups? And sell ’em for dope on a street corner? He had to know what went into the trucks. He worked there.”

  Pinky chewed the grass stem to bits and threw it away.

  “Pinky, I heard him, and it wasn’t Stubby. I saw him, and it wasn’t Stubby. Stubby walks like an ape. Whoever this was walks gracefully. And now the police are saying Stubby was out there trying to loot jewelry trucks. That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe it. Do you?”

  Pinky sucked a new piece of grass. Very slowly, his eyes never leaving Helen’s, he shook his head.

  “Pinky,” said Helen. “No matter what the cops say, I’ve seen another part of this crime, haven’t I?”

  Chapter 5

  AFTER CHURCH AUNT STELLA, who had been working on it for most of the morning, still could not come up with a good reason for Helen not to help Pinky with his history homework. “Doing homework is something you do with a friend, not a boy,” she insisted.

  “But Pinky is a friend,” Helen insisted also.

  Aunt Stella agreed at last to allow this to happen if it was to be “just this once.” “According to Martha Malone,” she said, “he’s a good boy. He helps his mother out at that motel she owns.” Aunt Stella pronounced the word motel as if she meant gambling den. “Martha also says he’s been held back a year in school.”

  “Only one year,” said Helen. “That doesn’t matter much.”

  “It may not matter now, Helen,” Aunt Stella warned, “but it will matter later. Martha says he’s a poor student. You never know when there’s some minimal brain damage. Those things are carried on from generation to generation.”

  “Aunt Stella, please,” said Helen. “I’m not getting married to him. I’m just doing some homework with him.”

  Aunt Stella sighed. “Just so you don’t think of him as someone with a future ahead of him,” she answered.

  Even though Aunt Stella was completely prepared for Pinky’s arrival, she trilled, “Somebody here to see you!” up the stairs to Helen’s room when Pinky arrived.

  They sat in the overstuffed wrought-iron lounges on the screen porch. For twenty minutes Helen read Pinky her notes about the Battle of Saratoga. Once again Pinky had slicked back his hair with water. His cowlick was just beginning to come to life on the back of his head. Several times he looked nervously in the direction of the kitchen, where Aunt Stella was making pleasant humming noises with an appliance.

  “What’s she cooking in there?” Pinky asked when they’d finished studying.

  “Don’t ask,” said Helen. “Pinky, we have to go back to the police.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No way. They weren’t interested before. They won’t be interested now. No way.”

  “Pinky, please listen.”

  “No.”

  “Will you at least listen?”

  “I’ll listen, but—”

  “Just hear me out. First of all, I’m going to write a story for the Whaler. I’m going to write about everything. The accident. Chasing the guy through the woods. And I’m going to end the story on one big fat question. How come Stubby was trying to rob UPS trucks when he had to know all Perry and Crowe’s valuables were shipped in Brinks vans? I’m going to get a gold medal for my story, Pinky, but I have to find out whatever more I can from the cops.”

  “Number one,” Pinky began, “the cops will absolutely not listen. Number two, Jerry Rosen will never in a hundred years even print your story. The stories that win the prizes are always about looking for fossils in Springfield Quarry or … or teaching handicapped kids. The stories are judged by a bunch of teachers, and that’s the kind of thing teachers like. Not crime stories. No way you’re going to get that gold medal.”

  “Pinky, nobody’s ever tried a story like this before, I’ll bet a million bucks. But I’m going to try, and I’m going to win it. You wait. The Punk Rock Thrower’s been terrorizing drivers for two months. It’s been all over the local papers and TV. If I can show that maybe the cops arrested the wrong guy, not only will it be in the Whaler, it’ll be in the Post-Dispatch too. Pinky, it’ll be a real story, not just some boring thing about bird-watching. It’s a one hundred percent cinch.”

  “No freshman’s ever won the gold medal,” said Pinky.

  “That’s going to change,” Helen answered.

  Pinky picked up a loose bit of mortar and stuck it back between two pieces of slate on the floor of the porch. “I hate cops,” he said.

  “I want to see their files,” said Helen. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to go marching in telling them they were wrong. I just want to see their files and ask them why they arrested Stubby. Will you come?”

  Pinky didn’t answer this. He was busy with his bits of mortar.

  “Pinky, do you think that in the twentieth century, in Massachusetts, U.S.A., the cops should arrest the wrong guy?”

  Pinky did answer this, after a long wait. “All right,” he said miserably, “but don’t expect anything from the cops. They wouldn’t tell us if the atom bomb fell.”

  “Believe me,” said Helen, “Aunt Stella will be a lot tougher than the cops.”

  “The police station!” said Aunt Stella when they went into the kitchen to tell her they were going. Her hands were covered with gray, sticky dough. “Why on earth do you want to go to the police station?”

  “It’s my story for the Whaler, Aunt Stella.”

  “I thought you were an artist, not a writer.”

  “Aunt Stella, we won’t be long, I promise.”

  “We? First you and now him?”

  “Pinky’s helping me, Aunt Stella.”

  Aunt Stella shook the dough off her fingers into a bowl with a violent gesture. “I thought you were helping him,” she said.

  “We finished the homework. What harm could come to us at the police station?”

  “I was just making you some nice crullers,” said Aunt Stella.

  “We’ll be home in time to eat them hot out of the oven,” Helen answered as reassuringly as she could.

  “I don’t know what your father would say. He’ll be back from the store in an hour.”

  “Daddy’d be proud of me, Aunt Stella. He liked the idea of the story. Just think. Me a lowly freshman winning a gold medal for the first time in the history of the Whaler!”

  “You have your father’s silver Irish tongue, that’s what you have,” said Aunt Stella.

  “Aunt Stella, you’re as Irish as Daddy.”

  “Yes, and most of my Irish rubbed off on my poor Yankee husband, who drank himself to death, God rest his soul. I’m an American citizen, thank you very much.” Helen held in what her father always said when Aunt Stella denied her Irishness: She can take an oath, change her name, and sign a piece of paper, he had told Helen many times when Aunt Stella was out of earshot, but she’ll never change her cooking
, her temper, or her religion, and they’re as Irish as Paddy’s pig, so there. “Please, Aunt Stella,” Helen begged.

  “I don’t know what your poor dead mother would think,” Aunt Stella began but Pinky cut in, “I’ll take care of her,” he said.

  “You!” said Aunt Stella. “She’s got twice your brains even if she’s half your size!”

  When they’d gotten a few paces down the sidewalk, Helen stopped. “Pinky, I’m so sorry about what she said. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Eh!” Pinky answered her airily. “Don’t worry about it. Relatives are relatives. My relatives think I’m stupid too. They can’t believe I got kept back a year in an American school. If I went to school in Norway, they tell me, I’d have to learn three languages and differential calculus by seventh grade. They always tell me if I ate more fish like they do up in Norway, I’d get straight A’s. Eat fish, be smart, and live to a hundred. That’s what my Aunt Sonja tells me every time she comes over.”

  “Do they live to a hundred?”

  “Nah,” said Pinky. “They freeze to death first.”

  Helen began to laugh.

  “What are you laughing at?” Pinky asked, laughing himself.

  “Just grownups. I hope when I’m a grownup, my brain won’t turn to solid rock like theirs.”

  Pinky stopped walking abruptly. Helen turned around and waited for him to say something. He looked suddenly embarrassed. Clumsily he touched Helen on the shoulder. “Cops are grownups with rock-hard ideas too,” he said, “but I’m with you on this thing about the rock thrower. We’ll do it together.”

  Chief Ryser was a big man, with enormous broad shoulders, a bull-like neck, and tiny, shiny little shoes. His smile twitched boyishly, and he seemed immensely pleased with himself and his spacious office. When Helen showed him her Whaler button, he was even more delighted and told them, “I’m an old Whaler man myself! Class of ’43. Sports photographer. Had a bum knee so I couldn’t play football. Now, what can I do for you nice folks?”

  “We’re doing an article, sir, for the Whaler,” Helen began. “It’s on the fine work of the New Bedford police.” She swallowed hard knowing she wasn’t off to a very convincing start. “This is Mr. Pinky Levy, who is helping me.”