Man in The Woods by Scott Spencer Page A

of the parking area, unbuckles his jeans, squats. A momentary ecstasy of relief, vile, burning, stinking relief. He closes his eyes, holds his breath, creating an inner silence in which the spatter of his sickness sounds thunderous against the brittle forest floor. Still in a crouch, he staggers forward. He loses his balance, falls to his knees.
    Oh God, God, God , he whispers, and the word brings him up short. He shakes his head, as if to dispel it. He grabs a handful of leaves, makes an effort to clean himself, and then, still half-undressed, still on his knees, he kicks leaves, twigs, dirt, and stones on the foulness, and shuffles back to the truck but does not get in. His mind whirs uselessly, an engine that will not turn over.
    He will find the proper authorities in Tarrytown, nearby; small towns are laid out with a predictable plan and he will have no trouble finding the police station. Or he can call them from the first house he sees. He can explain and direct them to this spot. Or he can ride with them, sit in the backseat, and explain while they drive. Whatever happens, he should probably contact a lawyer—though the only lawyer he knows is the man who used to live with Kate. Or no, there’s Gilbert Silverman, a lawyer Paul worked for last year. Loft. Chambers Street. Bedroom ruined by leaking skylight. But Silverman’s practice was taken up with artists and gallery owners. A man lying dead in a park outside of Tarrytown would not be in his area of expertise.
    I’m not even innocent. I won’t even be able to say it was self-defense, because I was never in danger. I did it. I’m going to be arrested .
    But what difference does the possibility of arrest make next to the overriding fact that a man’s life has just ended? A man is dead, a heart has stopped, a future has been canceled. A wife. Children. Friends. All of the pleasures of love, sky, music, touch, food, wine have just been taken away forever. A man is dead, no more able to share in the glories of the earth than if he had never been born. Paul clutches his head.
    It is so difficult to think. This much he knows: his life is a coin that has been flipped and now against the darkening sky it turns over and over.
    From the morass, there rises a question: How can this be happening? And he wishes suddenly, fervently, that there was a God looking on, with his eye on the sparrow and everything else, knowing what we did, what we meant, what we did not mean, what was deliberate, what was accidental, what was so perplexing and mixed you couldn’t with any confidence say what was what.
    What if he’s wrong? What if that man is alive? What if it’s not as bad as it seemed—so many things turn out that way.
    Back down the path, the man lies where Paul left him. The night seems to be hurrying in; already half the trees are invisible and, as Paul approaches the man, his legs are missing, eaten by the darkness. The dog, still tethered, is busying himself with a stick, chewing on it diligently, every now and then shaking it back and forth as he would a small animal whose neck he wishes to snap.
    In the failing light, Paul scours the ground for something he might have dropped. Hurry, hurry , he thinks, but he doesn’t know if he means hurry and get help, or hurry and make sure you haven’t left something here that can connect you to this place. As he walks in a circle that encompasses where he had been sitting and where the man first appeared, Paul wonders if he ought also to be kicking dirt over his own footprints. But he realizes that he would never be able to remove his every footprint; best to let them take their place with the dozens of other footprints.
    It isn’t as if feet are on file somewhere. Ditto his fingerprints, and his DNA. Paul in the day-to-day pursuit of his duties and pleasures generally has an agreeable sense of invisibility as he swims through the vast American sea. As far as the state is concerned he may as well be unborn.
    During his sixth