Man in The Woods by Scott Spencer Page B

time around the circumference of the circle he had drawn in his mind, something catches Paul’s attention. The watch Kate gave him on his birthday is on the picnic table. The catastrophic potential of leaving it behind is so vast it almost buckles his knees. With terror and relief, he snatches up the watch and slips it back onto his wrist, and as he does, something suddenly settles within him: he is not a criminal. A court of law would certainly find him guilty of manslaughter and sentence him to prison. How stiff a sentence does the charge carry? Three? Seven? More?
    But no matter how many months or years Paul spends in prison, the man on the forest floor will not be any less dead.
    The dog continues to chew at the stick. “You going to be all right here?” Paul asks the dog, but the animal gives no sign of having heard him, any more than he reacts to the fact that his former master is dead on the ground. If the dog had been motivated to, he could have reached Will’s body, but he seems to know that whatever use this man had once been is now a thing of the past. Paul feels the stir-rings of panic. He needs to leave. Yet he stands for an extra moment, looking at the dog, this living witness to the thing that has happened.
    What do they do with a dog found with a corpse? What if they kill him? It would be asking for trouble to take the dog with him. But what if they put him in a shelter? A middle-aged brown dog with a stick in his mouth. Who would want him? What if by the man dying, the dog dies, too?
    “All right,” Paul says. “You come with me.”
    But where? Where will I take him? He approaches the dog slowly, remembering that mistreated dogs often turn mean. When he is close, the dog grips the stick tighter in his jaws and shakes his head back and forth. It seems his primary concern is to keep that stick away from Paul.
    “The stick’s yours,” Paul says, touching the dog behind the ear, ready to jerk his hand away if the dog makes a sudden move. In fact he is ready to leave the dog right where he is if need be. But the dog doesn’t mind being touched. He drops the stick and licks the back of Paul’s hand, a quick lilac flash, a deep yet cryptic intimacy.
    “Oh dog,” Paul says, his voice quavering. He unties the black nylon leash. As soon as he is freed, the dog scrambles to his feet, ready to get on to whatever is next. Paul picks up the end of the leash and the dog picks up his stick.
    The trees are black against the slate-gray sky, tied together by a band of orange that runs like a skein of silk along the horizon.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Paul drives north toward home, checking the stability of his teeth with the tip of his tongue. The truck’s headlights are askew. They illuminate the edges of the road but barely touch the center, leaving the middle of Route 100 in darkness. He has taken local roads for the entire drive, adding at least an hour to the journey. He drives slowly, intently looking for a deer, or a turkey, or even a possum that might come darting out into harm’s way.
    The brown dog sitting next to him, whom Paul has already named Shep, is salivating anxiously and shedding fur at a prodigious rate. The dog is clearly falling apart, but he is trying to keep his dignity. He is like a minor character in a Mafia movie who knows he is being taken for a ride from which he is never going to return, but who has for so long subscribed to the code that ordains his very undoing that it is beneath him, or beyond him, to protest.
    Is anybody looking? Paul wonders. He looks up at the rearview mirror and sees only his eyes.

    Kate sits in the studio Paul has made for her. He has put in wise old windows that seem to increase and enrich every bit of available light, and even the darkness seems to have a luster as it presses against the wavy glass. Above her is a ceiling fan, salvaged from a plantation-style house in Biloxi, and near her desk is a blue enamel woodstove from Finland, brand-new. The floors are pale