Gone to the Woods Read online

  “I’m stuck,” the boy said in case the soldier had not noticed.

  “At least nobody is shooting at you.”

  “Is that what happened to you? You were in a hole and somebody shot you?”

  He didn’t answer the question. “Do you want help?”

  The boy nodded and held up his hands.

  The wounded soldier leaned forward, twisting sideways to clear his awkward plaster cast, and used his good arm to grab the boy’s hands and jerk him out of the toilet. He turned away politely while the boy cleaned himself up with wads of toilet paper, hoping he would not stink of urine or worse, and pulled up his pants.

  “Do you want help?” the boy asked as it occurred to him that the soldier’s arm might be as problematic in this small space as his own size had been to him. He wondered, too, if this was what it meant to be a grown man, helping another man out of tricky situations.

  He shook his head. “I’ve had plenty of practice now.” He waved the boy out of the toilet and the boy went back to his seat. The soldier did not come out for a long time, and the boy worried that maybe he did need help after all. But finally he emerged and gave a small nod to the boy as he moved to the end of the car, where he sat down next to a woman, his arm jutting into the aisle. They began talking in low voices and the boy could not hear what they said, but he looked very serious and she pointed once to his arm and then looked out the window, as if she were mad at him. Embarrassed at watching something so private, the boy turned away.

  It was late in the day—nearly dark—and he settled back, not quite lying down, and probably would have slept except that the train stopped at every little set of buildings, shacks, really, that seemed to be in the center of countless small farms stretching on either side of the train tracks. The train did not stop long at any of the stations, but, at each one, a number of people left the train—usually soldiers, both wounded and not—and other people came on, usually older women carrying dented galvanized-metal farm buckets filled with food they handed out to people on the train. One of the women gave the boy two hard-boiled eggs and a huge sandwich made with great chunks of meat on thick-cut homemade bread slathered with salted lard that tasted like butter, enough food to make two meals for a small person. She also gave him a pint jar of warm milk rich with cream, so sweet it must have had honey or sugar in it. He ate part of the sandwich and drank some milk, before screwing the lid back on the jar and wrapping what was left of the sandwich in some newspaper from the seat in front of him. Then he tucked the leftovers in the corner of the seat next to him, propped up so the milk wouldn’t fall over, leaned back, closed his eyes, and was instantly asleep.

  Even with the stop-and-go slow progress, the gentle motion of the train lulled him into a deep, dreamless sleep. When he finally awakened, he was lying down, curled up on the seat, and had, again, been covered with a thick wool blanket as he slept.

  The wounded man from the bathroom and the lady had left the train at one of the stops he had slept through, and he was nearly the only passenger in the car. He ate some more of the sandwich, drank his milk, picked the shell off one of the hard-boiled eggs, putting the pieces in an ashtray on the seat arm, and gulped that down before he turned back to the window and rested his head against the glass.

  Although full and sleepy, he slept fitfully, dreaming of his father sitting on a train with his cheeks tinted pink, as they were in the photo—the only way he had seen him—even though all of the other soldiers were pale and wan. As the train moved north, darkness came slowly, a gray wash of diminishing light, as it always did in far northern areas. The country changed dramatically as the cleared farmland, with rolling gentle hills and tailor-cut bands of hardwoods between groomed and manicured fields, fell away, replaced by thick forest.

  He awakened to full morning light and saw the trees growing so thick and wild they seemed to crowd themselves against the railroad right of way, so packed together and dense it looked impossible to even push a hand into them. And green—as green as the color crayon in the box one of his mother’s friends from the bars had given him, trying to impress the boy’s mother.

  If anything, the train went even slower than it had in the southern part of the state, often stopping seemingly in the middle of nowhere. He would peer through the windows to spot a tiny shack or cabin along the tracks. There were many small lakes scattered throughout the running forest, and every now and then, the train would stop near a dock where one or two boats were parked, waiting to pick up departing passengers.

  He awakened hungry and ate the second hard-boiled egg and another bite of the remains of the meat-lard sandwich he had kept. He had to use the bathroom again, but he proudly solved his prior dilemma with the too-big potty by going for arc altitude.

  Back in his seat, he returned to watching the forest slide by. He saw several deer in the clear grass by the tracks, and maybe a gray fox or a scrawny wild dog, and who knows how many rabbits and, once, where the tracks crossed over a small stream, a black bear. The train was moving slowly and the bear didn’t seem bothered, but stood on its hind legs to watch it pass. The boy thought the bear looked at him, into his eyes—or so it seemed—and appeared so natural and so much like a person that he wondered if the bear had a name. And if he did, what it would be.

  Carl, he thought. He was named Carl, because the bear reminded the boy—with his rounded shoulders and brown eyes—of a man who lived in the apartment next to them in Chicago who was named Carl whose breath always smelled like raw whiskey but who was always nice to the boy even when he accidentally kicked over his milk bottle by the door when he was running down the hall.

  Carl. And because he—the man—had been nice to the boy even though his breath always smelled like raw whiskey, the boy thought the bear named Carl might also be nice, and he started then to like the woods, which were home for Carl the bear. In some way seeing the bear made him see the other things in more detail. It was not just a forest, it was trees and grass and lakes and lily pads, and even though he was on the train and viewing the woods through the windows as they moved, he became part of them, or more accurately, they came into him, the woods grew into him.

  He wanted to be in it. He knew nothing of the forest except for some painted pictures in books about fairy lands where small people lived sitting under mushrooms. And yet he believed, no, knew, that it was the right place for him. Because he could see—not just the forest—but each tree, and he wanted to touch each leaf and pine needle, feel the grass on his feet and legs as he walked barefoot. He needed to hear-see-smell-touch it all. The woods would be where he wanted to live and that certainty made him smile. And although he had been a little homesick, missing his mother and the bars and the men who bought him Coca-Cola and fried chicken and candy while he sang in his uniform, all of that seemed to disappear once he saw and knew and longed for the woods and grass and lakes.

  He leaned back in the seat with his head sideways, happy to watch the trees slip by the window. But bone-tired as he was from the journey, his eyes closed, opened, closed finally and once again he napped until the conductor came to find him and picked up his cardboard suitcase.

  He blinked, looking out the window—still daylight, the middle of the afternoon—and the conductor held out his hand to help the boy stand.

  “This is where you get off,” he said. “There will be somebody waiting for you.”

  The boy was a little groggy, but the conductor took him by the hand and he followed clumsily after him to the end of the car, out on the small platform and down slick metal steps—far enough apart that he had to be helped down—and onto an embankment made of earth and logs. On the other side of this dirt and timber structure, away from the tracks, stood a small shack made of rough-sawn pine and on that was a plank sign painted bright yellow with numbers and letters: CAMP 43.

  “You go stand by the hut away from the tracks and wait like a good little boy.” With that, the conductor waved to somebody leaning out of the locomotive side-windows at the front
of the train. Then he climbed the steps, and with the hissing of released brakes, the train slowly started to move, picking up a little speed, before disappearing around a gentle curve into the distant forest.

  Leaving the boy alone, in the middle of the woods.

  But when he turned away from the tracks toward the little shack, he could see the end of a rutted trail through the woods. A small junk truck was parked—deserted, he thought—at the place where the woods cleared.

  He didn’t see anyone and he thought—even having lived in the city with thousands of cars and trucks, all old because no new vehicles were being manufactured as a result of war rationing—that he had never seen a vehicle so decrepit. He assumed it was an abandoned, ancient wreck left to rot. It must have been some sort of old-fashioned car, but the original body had been hacked, turned into something like a small truck with a wooden box-like structure on the rear. Old burlap bags and garbage were tossed among rusty pieces of metal that stuck out at odd angles from the truck bed. Where there should have been a windshield, he saw a four-pane house window, tied on with what appeared to be clothesline rope. To cap it all off, the narrow wooden-spoke wheels were wrapped in faded rubber strip bandages.

  The entire vehicle seemed to be made of rust held together by spots of faded black paint.

  Suddenly, he felt intensely alone and desperately lonely. There was nothing around him but forest and the shack and the tracks fading into the distance. He was about to sit down on his little cardboard case and start crying when an old man staggered out of the thick brush to the side of the truck, pulling up a pair of heavily patched bib overalls.

  The Second World War had drastically affected every single aspect of life. Due to severe rationing, many kinds of basic food—sugar, flour, meat, and almost all vegetables—were virtually nonexistent for the civilian market. Rubber was no longer available for tires and tubes; gasoline could only be purchased in very small quantities and only on certain days with restrictive rationing coupons.

  The biggest fundamental change in American life was most evident by the absence of young men, mainly lost temporarily to active military service or permanently to the ultimate sacrifice. Women, and men too old for military service, were all who were left at home, so it was common to see old men working—driving cabs, collecting trash, and bringing ice (this was before many people had electric refrigeration and used literal iceboxes).

  But the boy had never seen a man this old. He was bent almost double in an advanced stoop, his arms hanging at his sides, swinging ape-like as he shuffled toward the vehicle from the woods. He hadn’t shaved in what must have been years, and his beard looked to have been chopped away with a sharp knife or dull scissors. The front of his chin—the boy could see this even from where he stood—was stained from spitting and dribbling tobacco juice.

  He spit now, a great brown dollop, wiped his chin haphazardly with his sleeve and, seeing the boy, waved an arm hook-like to motion the boy to come across the tracks to him.

  The boy didn’t move. He wasn’t exactly terrified—he had seen scarier, dirtier people in the city—but his legs didn’t seem to work.

  The old man waved again.

  And still the boy couldn’t move.

  “You’re Gary.” Not a question but a statement, and it came out as a raspy, gurgling croak.

  The boy nodded.

  “You’re Gary,” he said again and then, “I’m here for you.”

  He spoke with a heavy Scandinavian accent, and mixed with the odd sound of his voice and the gurgling of spit, the words were nearly unrecognizable.

  “From the second sister,” he croaked. “I’m to take you to her.”

  Spit.

  “Eunice was the first, Edith the second.”

  Spit.

  Eunice. The boy’s mother’s name. Something familiar.

  “I’m to take you to Edith. Come and get you in the truck.”

  He knew he had an aunt named Edith. Although he had never heard her called anything but Edy, it was close enough to kick-start the boy into motion. He lugged his little box to the truck and pushed it over the wooden side into the back.

  The car-truck had neither doors nor a back seat. The boy went around to the passenger side and climbed up on what passed for a front seat. There was no padding, just bare wire springs with a single layer of filthy gunny sacking for a cover. He could see through a bottom pane of glass on the makeshift windshield. There was no door to close, just a vast open space, and nothing to hang on to except the bare wire in the seat. He didn’t think the truck would—or could—run so he wasn’t really worried about falling out.

  The old man came to the driver’s side of the truck, stood there wheezing and spitting, then looked at the boy.

  “I’m Orvis. People on the route call me Orvis. So you can call me Orvis. They’re far from here, Sig and Edith, too far to walk, and no telephone centrals up here, not even party lines for rubbernecking, so they didn’t know when you were coming.” In all the time the boy knew him, this was the longest string of words he ever heard Orvis say. “They told me to check on the route every day, and get you when you come.”

  “What’s a route?”

  “Mail. I deliver the mail to the farms on my route. Used to be the Pederson boy’s route, but he’s gone to the war, and I took it until he gets back. Used to have a horse and wagon and a sleigh in the winter. But the horse got colic and died, so now I use my old truck.”

  While he was talking, he leaned in and clicked a big switch on the dashboard, then adjusted two levers that were on opposite sides of the steering column just under the wheel.

  “She starts hard when she’s been sitting a time.” With that, he moved to the front of the truck where the boy had noticed a crank sticking out of a hole in the frame beneath the radiator. Orvis put one hand on top of the front end of the car, reached down with the other, grabbed the crank, and gave it a hard jerk.

  Nothing. The truck sat silent.

  He swore and cranked again. Again, nothing happened. He swore once more, louder this time, although the boy didn’t know the words—he thought later, looking back, they were Norwegian—but he could tell from Orvis’s expression that they were curses. Detailed curses. Vile curses.

  “The throttle!” Orvis yelled, splattering the window with tobacco-stained spit and phlegm. “The lever on the wheel pipe! Give her some more throttle, now! Push the lever up a few notches.”

  At this moment, three things became evident to the boy. One, Orvis was—almost literally—frothing at the mouth as he swore at the crank. Two, the boy was afraid to the point of being terrified by someone who could be so insanely enraged over a car.

  And three, there were two levers. Not just one.

  The boy didn’t dare ask him which of the levers was the throttle. Thought, if one lever is good, two should be better, so he reached over and slammed both levers to the top.

  One lever was indeed the throttle.

  By pushing it up, he sent more gas to the engine. By jamming it to the top, he sent a lot more gas to the engine. Way more than was needed to make it start or even run. Decidedly much more than it was safe to do. Enough to make the engine into a barely contained potential bomb.

  The other lever was to adjust the timing of the spark that was sent to ignite the gas when it arrived in the engine.

  Which meant that two levers were not necessarily better. Indeed, two levers were completely wrong when jammed wide-open.

  Which the boy had done.

  If the timing of the spark is adjusted correctly when the crank turns the engine over at the precisely correct instant, the spark will ignite the gas fumes and the engine will run properly in the direction it was cranked, moving the hand crank smoothly and safely and gently clear of the hand of the person making the effort.

  And if the spark is only slightly out of timing, the motor simply won’t start at all and nothing happens, which is what Orvis had faced when he tried to crank start the car.

  But … />
  But if the engine is flooded with explosive gas and fumes, as it was now, and the timing of the spark is hugely incorrect, say from jamming the timing lever upward, as it also was, then the engine will fire at the completely wrong split second, when the pistons are in the very worst position. The motor will not start and, indeed, an explosion on top of the pistons as the gas blows will force the engine to run impossibly, powerfully, and horribly backward.

  Which it cannot do.

  And much, most, of the explosive energy will be transmitted back down into the crank, forcing it to rotate wildly in a reverse motion with all of the slamming force of the engine into the hand, arm, and body of the person trying to turn the crank and start the engine.

  The boy initially heard a sound—a whummphh! that shook the whole truck—followed by a large, deafening crack, like an enormous gun detonating. Then a shaft of fire shot out of the vents on the side of the hood. A cloud of heated smoke-gas spewed from the engine compartment, rising into a hot gray mushroom, and through this cloud, Orvis was airborne, flying through the smoke with an outpouring of Norwegian obscenities.

  It turned out that the kickback on the crank handle had caught him stiff-armed so that the force lifted his whole body and threw him through the air off to the side into the weeds and brush, where he did not land gracefully.

  His body looked like a pile of dirty, smoking rags with legs sticking out of it, and the boy thought, If he isn’t dead he’s going to kill me. He didn’t know what had just happened, but he knew it was his fault. Because it was always the kid’s fault.

  For a long time the pile of smoking rags didn’t move. But at last it quivered, shook a bit, and slowly—very slowly—rose to a sitting position and became an old man again. Then, folding from front to back, he rolled over onto his hands and knees and, without rising, crawled, clawing at the soil, up from the brush and dirt. When he reached the truck, he pulled himself to a stooped-standing position, all the while staring at the boy sitting on the other side of the front seat.