The Man in the Woods (11 page)

“Pinky,” said Helen, “call him a cub scout but not a girl scout. That’s a male chauvinist pig remark.”

“I don’t understand,” said Pinky.

“And you never will,” said Helen.

It took Pinky most of an hour to clean up his press, but he let Helen help him without once warning her not to get her fingers caught in the rollers.

As Pinky let Helen off his motorbike at the very end of Prospect Avenue, Helen, who had been trying to think of a good insult all the way home, said, “Men have been responsible for all the wars in history. If women ruled the world, there’d be peace.”

“Yeah?” said Pinky. “What about What’s-her-name in England? And that Dragon Lady in India? And the one from Israel who died? With the frizzy hair.”

“You leave Golda Meir’s hair alone!” said Helen. She waved to Pinky, who sped off. Walking the rest of the way to the house, she mulled over this brand-new idea. It had never occurred to her that in the history of the world anyone with frizzy hair had ever done anything successful.

She decided that afternoon she would write a letter to Jenny Calhoun, who also suffered from frizzy hair but had a sympathetic mother who styled it nicely. She would tell Jenny this amazing fact about Golda Meir. It meant there was hope for both of them.

“Hi, Aunt Stella!” Helen yelled, dropping her books on the hall table.

No answer.

“Aunt Stella? Aunt Stella, what’s wrong?” Aunt Stella was sitting on the button-plush settee. Her teacup rattled in her saucer as she put it down.

“What
is
it, Aunt Stella?”

Aunt Stella indicated something on the coffee table between a toby jug and a bisque ballerina. “I’ve called your father, and he’s coming home right away,” said Aunt Stella. “What is the meaning of this, Helen?”

On the table was an ordinary gray plastic tape cassette. Strung through one of the spool holes was a piece of twine, and strung on that was her silver locket.

“Go ahead, open the locket,” said Aunt Stella.

Helen opened it. Inside was the photograph of her mother all right, but the eyes had been pierced out with a needle. The eye sockets were blood-red. Her mother’s smile was ghostly, grotesque. Helen closed the locket immediately. She felt very unsteady.

“Play the tape,” instructed Aunt Stella.

“Did you play it yet?” asked Helen.

“Well, of course I did. The minute I saw that envelope lying under the mail slot.”

Helen picked up the envelope. Only her name was on it. She ran her finger over the letters. They were slightly raised, like printing on a wedding invitation.

“It makes no sense at all,” said Aunt Stella. “The only thing on the tape is part of a Christmas song.”

Helen slid the cassette onto the spools of her tape recorder. There was a short period during which only the steady hum of the tape going around could be heard. Then very clearly the whistling began. This time there was nothing light or musical about it. Each note was perfectly clipped as if he wanted her to sing along, which it was impossible not to do, since the words came into her head as surely as the order of the alphabet. The whistling was low and certain and slow, as if to make sure she would understand:

He sees you when you’re sleeping,

He knows when you’re awake,

He knows if you’ve been bad or good,

So be good for goodness sake.

Oh! you better watch out....

After only five lines, the whistling stopped and there was only a dead hum on the tape.

Long after her father had come home, gone to the police station with the tape, locket, and envelope, and come back home again, Helen sat in his lap, the side of her face resting on his softly breathing chest, her arms clasped around his back, under his arms. The back of his shirt was damp. It was a hot night. There was nothing left to say. He had answered all her questions, with slight variations, but generally the same way each time. It was a school prank. Things like this happened every day of the week, according to Chief Ryser. He had hundreds of threatening notes and phone calls to deal with every year. Almost every one came from some half-crazy coward with a grudge of some kind. Even Ryser’s son had gotten a few threatening notes in the mail. It turned out someone in his class thought the boy had ratted on him for cheating on a math test.

“Dad, the eyes! Mother’s eyes were bloody red!”

“And I told you before, there was just a bit of red backing paper behind the photograph. That’s all.”

“But, Dad, before there was no red backing paper. I swear! The photograph popped out of the locket last summer—the summer before anyway. There was no backing paper of any kind. Beside that, if it was just a piece of paper behind the photograph, why didn’t the pin or needle—or whatever he used to poke her eyes out—why didn’t that pierce
both
pieces of paper at the same time? Why? Why did he leave just the eye sockets looking bloody red and not make holes in the backing paper? Why?”

“How can anyone figure out a thing like that?” her father said. “Now everything’s going to be all right.”

He went on to tell her what a hectic, nuisance-filled evening poor Chief Ryser was having. While they’d been talking in the police station parking lot, all kinds of minor disasters had been reported within her father’s earshot over Ryser’s CB radio. Helen knew how it had gone—with the two men, probably rocking back and forth on their heels, hands in pockets, assuring each other that this was just kid’s stuff. Ryser probably talked about football. Most men did. And her dear father probably mentioned a few local toxic waste dumps in passing. That or what he always called “the lost tribe of Israel,” his beloved, stumbling Boston Red Sox.

Helen removed her arms from around him.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

She looked up at him. With his smile, his sea-blue eyes, and his lovely head of hair, he receded from her like a comet heading for a remote star, although his arms, strong and warm, held her close.

“Yes, I feel okay, Dad,” said Helen. This was a lie.

After supper Aunt Stella left for her weekly bridge game with many warnings about locking windows and doors. Taking a whistle out of her purse, she told Helen to blow it as hard as she could into the receiver should an obscene phone caller ring up, in order at least to get him in the eardrum.

As the house was stuffy, Helen’s father opened all the windows and doors the minute Aunt Stella’s car pulled out of the driveway. The Red Sox and Yankees were playing in a critical series. When the television went on, Helen was able to call Pinky without being overheard. Pinky promised to be at her house in ten minutes. He told her to have the envelope ready for him.

“What are you going to do with it?” Helen asked.

“Take it to my Uncle Max, the printer. All he said he needed was an original.”

“Pinky,” said Helen, “you know what this means?”

“What?”

“It means we’re ... we’re getting into this deeper. If we trace his printing press through your Uncle Max, it means we’re following him.”

“He’s following you, isn’t he?” asked Pinky abruptly and hung up.

Helen tried to take some pleasure in the thought that Pinky cared and wanted to protect her, but she could not. She went down to the kitchen and got two bottles of Coke from the icebox and, quietly opening the front door, over the chatter of the television in the den, she placed them in the milk-bottle box. She was not going to lie. She was not going to sneak out of the house, and she was not, for one minute, going to miss Uncle Max.

“Dad, please,” she asked again and again, “just for a soda.”

“No!” said her father as many times, not taking his gaze off the baseball players. “Silver dollars on my eyes before I let you leave this house.”

Helen waited. Twenty-five minutes passed before Pinky came. She let him in without a word, her finger pressed to her lips.

“Hello, sir,” said Pinky in his best West Point cadet voice.

Helen’s father gave him a dark look with a kernel of humor in back of it. “Trying to butter me up like a piece of toast?” he asked, suppressing the twinkle in his eyes.

For fifteen minutes Pinky and Helen’s father shouted and groaned over the game in progress. After the Red Sox had scored three runs, Pinky asked if it would be all right to take Helen out for a soda.

“You know about the locket and everything?” asked her father, reaching deep into a cracker box.

“Yes, sir, but please don’t worry.”

Her father brushed some cracker crumbs off his lap onto the rug. “You
are
Sam Levy’s son, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes, well, he was my father until he died.” Helen could feel Pinky’s mind zooming around. “I mean, he’s still my father. Yes.”

Helen’s father smiled. “Sam was a good man,” he said. “Wish I’d had time to know him better. You can go. But I’m warning you. Be back before Stella at ten-forty-five, or she’ll put all three of our heads in the food processor.”

Pinky straddled his motorbike, balancing on the seat while he examined the envelope and the locket and played the tape three times over on the recorder.

Helen sat on the ground beside the motorcycle. When Pinky took off the earphones, she asked, “Does it scare you?”

“It scares me,” said Pinky. “God, that song ... I always hated that song when I was a little tiny kid. I used to lie in bed even in July and think about being watched all the way from the North Pole. It never bothered me that God was looking straight down from heaven and seeing everything. What bothered me was thinking Santa Claus had eyesight that followed the curve of the earth and.... You look pale.”

Helen tried to rub some color into her cheeks. She opened both Cokes and tried to get the words to the song out of her head. They would not go. “I don’t understand,” she said at last. “I
didn’t
write that article.”

“Whoever it is thinks you know too much, all the same,” said Pinky. “Your name was in the paper with your address. Maybe he saw you in the woods. You’ve been talking about writing this article to just about everybody. Someone you talked to could have told someone else. The word got out anyway. Maybe you ought to go home. Let me go to Uncle Max. Nobody’s after me.”

“Yet,” said Helen.

“Yet,” Pinky agreed.

Helen took the locket back from Pinky. Her father had promised he would find another nice picture of her mother for it. Well, she didn’t want another nice picture. He had poked out her mother’s eyes, and maybe he had it in mind to poke out hers. He would wait for her, in her imagination, now, in the shadow of every tree and wall. He would sit unseen at movie theaters, stand hidden on streets, watching her. He would follow her home and stare at her, faceless, through the windows of her house while she ate and slept.

“Like hell I’ll go home, Pinky,” she said.

The bumpy, mosquito-ridden trip to Dartmouth dragged like a bad year. Uncle Max made it worthwhile.

“Max Levy,” he said, extending an ink-stained hand to Helen and pumping hers happily. He explained that he was Pinky’s only relative who was not blond and good-looking. Uncle Max’s hair was almost gone, his glasses smudged, and his smile as beatific as a child’s.

His basement workshop ran the whole length and breadth of his house and was filled with small presses, parts of presses, complete and incomplete fonts made of metal and wood, parts of typewriters, and stacks of books. He showed Helen his collection of hundred-year-old wooden type fonts, rescued, he said, from a warehouse about to be torn down in Taunton. He spoke of them as if they’d been children rescued from a fire.

Uncle Max made them each a glass of ice tea with fresh mint leaves and poured himself a crystal goblet of Riesling from a half bottle he kept in a small under-the-counter refrigerator. Then he switched on a brilliant light over his work table, pulled on a pair of surgeon’s gloves, and examined the envelope and the copy of the tip-off note. He looked at them this way and that and then placed them under a giant desk magnifier that was bolted to the edge of the table. Several times he ran his fingers over the type on the envelope, and once he measured the lines with a ruler marked not in inches but in some other measurement Helen did not know. He murmured little bits of things to himself and hummed, the whole time, parts of the national anthem. “Too bad this is all you’ve got,” he said. “Still....

He put the envelope and the note down and began consulting his books. He went from one to the next, frowning and looking in indexes and going back over the same pages again and again. “Funny,” he said more to himself than to Pinky and Helen. “Impossible really. But then.... If this came from the Smithsonian in Washington, I wouldn’t have any trouble at all. I just find it hard to believe.”

“What, Uncle Max?” asked Pinky, breaking his impatient silence. “What is it?”

“It’s a Thurber,” said Uncle Max. “No question. Look here.” He positioned the magnifier so that Pinky and Helen could both see through it. He pointed with a pair of tweezers. “Do you see that every character, that means letter,” he added for Helen’s benefit, “every character has a tiny little ridge or line underneath it? See that?”

“I see it,” said Pinky. “It isn’t inked, but it’s there. It shows up like a shadow on the Xerox copy.”

“Okay,” said Uncle Max. He folded his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. “When you set type, what’s the first thing you do before you ink and print?”

“You lock it in, of course,” said Pinky.

“Right,” said Uncle Max, and for Helen’s understanding he explained again, making a little drawing as he did. “See?” he said. “When you set a line of type, each piece, each letter, is attached to a heavy block, metal or wood. You make a line with your words, and then you slip a bar over the top and under the bottom of the line. It’s called locking it in. That keeps everything straight, and the pieces of type don’t slide around. Now, these little ridges on your envelope and note here are uneven. If this envelope, say, had been done on a printing press, it would have been locked in and the little ridges would be even, but they aren’t even.” Uncle Max looked at Pinky. “You said on the telephone the police think it was done on a cheap toy set?”