"Lee-TheGreenMan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lee Rand B)

RAND B. LEE

THE GREEN MAN

When Jeffrey Andrew Russell needed to escape his mother, he hid in the old black
Buick on the edge of the far pasture, where the woods began. The Buick had small
dark windows and doors as heavy as coffin lids. Long ago, the family had ridden
around in it, but before Jeffrey was seven someone had left it to sag into the
soft Connecticut green. The Buick's name was Vi, because its upholstery was
gray-violet. His family named all their cars, the way some people name their
boats, or their children. Except when he needed somewhere to hide, he avoided
the Buick, in part because dreaded spiders had come to live in the glove
compartment, but also because he had always thought of Vi as a sort of person
and now she was dead, which made him feel sad and desirous of showing respect.

On the summer day the Green Man appeared to him for the first time, it was very
hot in the car. In deference to the spiders, he crouched in the rotting back
seat, making himself small, breathing shallowly and softly, listening for the
sound of his father's car horn in the driveway, which would signal that it was
safe to go back into the house. In a corner of the windshield, a spindly-legged
yellow jacket mumbled to itself. Outside, the cicadas practiced their scales.
The path through the pasture, which was overgrown with black raspberry and
thistle, remained empty, but this was not to be trusted. He fought to stay awake
and alert.

The heat was palpable. He began to nod and drowse, jerking upright at imagined
sounds of movement, then drowsing and nodding again. Having drowsed once too
often, he woke in a panic from a deep sizzling sleep to find Vi darkened with
the slant of late day. Cautiously he opened the door, go out, and stood up
directly under the gaze of a tall, broad-shouldered figure standing not ten feet
away in the forest fringe.

His first panicked thought was, Mom!, but almost instantly he realized that it
was not his mother: it was a very dirty, very hairy bearded man. His hair was
black, and it grew all over him: long and matted on his head, a tangle of beard
hanging below the big nipples of his broad furry chest, his penis and testicles
dangling pale between the dark-pelted columns of his legs. Late light spilling
through the birches cast a green glow over his shoulders and belly. His eyes
were holes of shadow. Jeffrey stared, not daring to twitch, but in the end he
had to, and the instant he did, the green man was gone, without a rustle of
brush.

Jeffrey blinked, moved forward into the forest fringe, and listened, the way he
listened at the door of his bedroom for his mother's footstep on the landing.
"Hello?" he said, in what his mother would have called a stage whisper. "I know
you're there." He listened some more. The woods were like lungs breathing in and
out. Jeffrey had always steered clear of the woods. He was afraid of the snakes
which sunned themselves on the summer trails, and he had heard somewhere that
there were old bear traps under the loam that could take your off a the ankle
before you knew what was happening. He was still standing there, undecided, when
he heard a car toot twice across the meadow.

He returned to the house with careful haste by the front door facing the street,
which only he and the Jehovah's Witnesses ever used. The mountain laure growing
to one side was out of flower by now, its tiny white sticky maroon-banded grails
of blossom withered and fallen to the sterile acid loam. From the foyer, he
ascended the staircase which led to the landing separating his bedroom from his
parents'. He could hear the clatter of dishes from the kitchen which meant that
his mother was preparing dinner. The clatter did not sound particularly quick or
harsh; he relaxed a bit. This meant she was not too angry at him for running
away from her. The television gabbled from the living room: the war in Vietnam,
as usual; Jeffrey's father, catching a few minutes of the early news before
dinner.

Jeffrey went into his bedroom with the Star Trek models suspended by wires from
the ceiling and lay on the blue corduroy cover of his bed. He thought of the
green man and felt excited in a way he could not name. The man had felt wild to
him, somehow, much wilder than the raccoons who thudded every night from the
pine tree onto the roof. Jeffrey had seen a wild deer once. It had jumped into
his father's headlights when they were coming home from the movies in New
Milford. His father had cursed and slammed on the brakes. The deer had just
stood there, and then it had vanished, with no more sound than a goldfish makes
in the goldfish bowl. But the green man had seemed wilder even than this.

When his father called him to come down for dinner, he descended to the kitchen
by the second staircase on the other end of the house. His mother was putting
the finishing touches to a platter of cold roast beef and sliced tomatoes, her
broad back turned to him. His father was not there. He felt a moment of panic.
She had thick hair the color of field-mouse fur. She always claimed she had eyes
in the back of her head, and once again she demonstrated the reasonableness of
this: the moment he entered the room she said in a quick rich quiet voice,
"Honey, Mama was just funning; she would never hurt you, you know that." She did
not pause in her work and she did not turn to look at him. He took his seat at
the kitchen table, thinking of the green man's invisible eyes.

At dinner under the kitchen fan, Jeffrey's father announced his intention to go
on a lecture tour. "Scott thinks it's the ideal way to promote the new book," he
said. Scott was their agent in New York. Jeffrey's father wore a gray beard
nothing like the green man's beard, and he was so fat he had no waist, only a
belt across the middle of his bulge, like Humpty-Dumpty. He mopped his brow with
his napkin every few minutes.

"That's a marvelous idea," said Jeffrey's mother. Her yellow shift clung to her
in the heat, showing the outline of her big breasts and her slender waist. She
put a slice of cold roast beef on Jeffrey's plate, next to his salad. "There you
are, love," she said, smiling at him, as though nothing whatever had happened.

"Thank you," Jeffrey said.

"Thank you whom?" growled his mother, doing her Captain Hook face.

"Thank you, Mom."

"That's better. Give Mama a kiss," she said. She pursed her lips. He screwed up
his face and sacrificed it to her. She took his chin in her hand and mashed her
mouth against his. She smelled like tobacco, cows, and wine. She released him
with a satisfied smack of her lips. "Umm, gum," she said. Dropping his gaze to
his plate, he noted with alarm the Italian salad dressing running into his meat.
"When would you be leaving?" his mother said to his father.

"Around January first," said Jeffrey's father, forking roast beef.

"Can I come with you?" Jeffrey asked.

"May I come with you," said his mother.

"May I come with you?" Jeffrey asked.

His father scowled. "No, son. You've got school. This meat is a little well
done, Rae."

"I'm so sorry," Jeffrey's mother replied smoothly. She had been about to
transfer a slice of beef from the platter to her plate. Inspecting it, she
lifted it into the air and held it out to her husband instead. "Here, Simon.
This is as rare as can be."

Jeffrey's father proffered his plate. "What are you going to have?"

"Why, there's enough here to feed the Russian army," said Jeffrey's mother. She
took another piece of meat from the serving platter.

"For God's sake, Rae, that's an end piece. There's no red in it at all."

"It's perfectly delicious," said Jeffrey's mother with finality. She cut a piece
of dry brown meat, chewed it, then took a sip from her third glass of white
Gallo. Jeffrey watched his father watch her wrap her big fingers around the
glass, raise it, tilt it, suck up the pale liquid into her full, sensual mouth.

Jeffrey's mother had been a radio actress in Hollywood in the Thirties, known
for her dramatic voice. She had met Jeffrey's father on the set of a show where
he was one of the head writers. Hanging in the upstairs dressing room was a
picture of her as she had looked then, a black-and-white studio still. In the
photograph, her hair was shoulder-length and gently waved. Her chin rested on
white-gloved hands. Around her neck twined a choker of big round ceramic beads.
She gazed straight out at the photographer, fearless and subtly challenging.
Jeffrey thought it was the most beautiful picture he had ever seen.

They ate in silence for a while. Then his mother stood up and poured herself
another glass of wine from the counter. Jeffrey drank some milk. His father said
to him, "Don't fill your belly up with milk. You haven't touched your salad."
Jeffrey searched his salad for something without much dressing on it. He settled
on three cherry tomatoes. He ate them slowly, one at a time, clamping down on
them hard with his teeth so they exploded into wet sweetness, like little bombs.
Sitting again, his mother took a few more bites of meat, then put her fork and
knife in "finished" position. She lit a Camel cigarette, blowing smoke up toward
the ceiling. "Is that all you're going to eat?" Jeffrey's father asked her.

She looked over her men. Her eyes twinkled. "I am so full I could not pull
a-no-ther blade of grass, baa, baa," she replied.

Every day after that Jeffrey looked for the green man. Sometimes he thought he
saw him out of the corners of his eyes, but when he turned, there was never
anything there. When his father took him shopping in New Milford, the next big
town over, Jeffrey scanned the clusters of hippies on the Green. His father
said, "If they'd bathe occasionally people would take them more seriously." None
of them looked like the green man. As trees flashed by on their homeward drive,
groves of slim trunks misted green, Jeffrey searched their dappled depths for
signs of dark thigh and hairy shoulder, but they were just trees.

One evening, remembering the stories his mother had told him about leaving food
for the Little People, Jeffrey spirited a chicken leg and a cup of milk out of
the fridge and left them on the hood of the Buick. The next morning, the chicken
leg was gone and the cup was overturned in the grass. Encouraged, he tried the
experiment again, but abandoned it after he stole out one night with a
flashlight and surprised a raccoon mother and her babies consuming the
offerings. He stayed on the alert, and more than once spent the day in the far
pasture, hoping that the green man would appear, but he did not.

One night Jeffrey's parents had a big fight. It was a Friday. They went out to
dinner and came home after Jeffrey was in bed. Jeffrey was glad when they went
out to dinner, though he could not have explained why; it made him feel safe,
the way it made him feel safe on the rare occasions when he walked into the
kitchen and found them standing by the sink kissing. Lying in bed, he thought
about the green man while the old house creaked around him in the dark. The
house had been built in 1792. There was a huge stone fireplace downstairs with a
Dutch oven built into it, and there was an attic full of cobwebs and old steamer
trunks. The driveway gravel had garnets in it; you could pick them up like
rubies and hold them to the light. The first spring after his parents had moved
to the house, only white flowers had come up in the front gardens. His mother
had pulled them all out because, she said, they reminded her of funerals. She
had replaced them with color: slashing red tulips, like her lipstick; foaming
beds of yellow, purple, blue, wine, rose, and brown irises; geysers of pink
phlox which she complained always ran to magenta after a few years.

When he was very little she had given him a little bed of his own to plant, out
near the well-house off the driveway. He had liked pansies, with their foolish
gold and black faces; bachelor's buttons, particularly the dark reddish-purple
kind; and four o'clocks, which opened only in the late afternoon and always
amazed him because they had flowers of different colors on the same bush. His
mother said to him, "You have a green thumb." She always took care of the
flowers but gave him the credit. When he got older, he helped her weed among the
corn and tomatoes. She told him wonderful stories, about Wol the owl and Eeyore
the donkey and a green garter snake that had visited her one summer in the
garden they had had before they had moved to this place, when he was still in
the baby carriage. "He came right up and sat in my lap," she told him. "He would
go away when the sun went down and be back the next day." After a while he got
tired of gardening and she eventually stopped asking him to help her.

He fell asleep and was awakened by the car crunching on the driveway. Doors
opened and slammed shut. He heard raised voices, his mother's loud and
contemptuous, his father's loud and defensive. A long while passed before the
voices stopped, then another long while during which he heard his father's heavy
ascension of the stairs, his bathroom garglings and flushings, and finally
silence. He lay in the dark, alert. His chest and stomach felt heavy.

He thought, quite suddenly, of a day when he was four and his parents had taken
him down to the lake with some of their grown-up city friends. There were
water-lilies in the lake, which was very shallow, and perch, and a dam at one
end which the water slid over in slow glassy sheets every spring thaw. That day
the dam had been dry. The visitors had stood on the concrete in their New York
clothes, chatting and puffing on cigarettes, admiring the scenery. Forgotten,
Jeffrey had squatted at the edge of the dam and looked out over the water. He
had been able to see his reflection in the surface of the lake, darkened and
ripply; then, as his eyes had adjusted to the play of light and shadow on the
water, he had found he could look through his reflection and see the bottom of
the lakebed.

Up on the dam the air was full of chattering voices and an odd tension. Down in
the water it was still and calm, lake-weed hanging immobile, each pebble
distinct. A yearning had swept over him, a yearning to be part of that
tranquility, to sink down deep into it; he had found himself falling forward
toward his reflection. His father had caught him and pulled him back with an
oath of concern. They had made much of his near-mishap, which had pleased him.
But now, lying in the dark, he remembered the stillness at the bottom of the
lake and longed for it again.

He had just begun to doze off for a second time when he heard his bedroom door
opening. Yellow hallway light jabbed his eyes. He smelled his mother's cigarette
and her Blue Grass cologne. He closed his eyes and lay still, his heart
pounding. The cigarette and cologne smells increased. He felt her breathing
above the bed. "Baby," she said. She touched his hair. He thought of the lake
and sank down, down.

The next morning, his parents would only talk to one another in monosyllables,
and his father took the car into New Milford to have breakfast there. Jeffrey
sat at the big kitchen table with his mother. Her cigarette burned in an
ashtray. She looked tired, and drank several cups of fragrant black coffee while
he ate the buttered waffles she had made him. "Are they good, baby?" she asked
him. He nodded. After a silence, she took a drag on her Camel and added, "Your
father's being a bastard." When he glanced up at her face, she blew smoke,
blinked rapidly and smiled. "Well, enough of that nonsense." She patted his
small hand with her big ugly one. "You're my precious baby. Finish your
breakfast; Mama's got chores to do."

She drained her coffee, got up from the table, and started sweeping the floor.
By the time he had eaten the last of his waffle and deposited his dishes in the
sink, she was on her hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum with a brush. He
went upstairs to his room, got out the Science Officer tunic his mother had made
for him and the Spock ears his father had bought for him, put them on, grabbed a
phaser, and went downstairs again. His mother was still scrubbing the kitchen
floor. Her cigarette was in her mouth. He left the house by the mountain laurel
door and made for the vegetable garden.

The garden was south of the far pasture where he had hidden in the Buick and
seen the green man for the first time. His mother had had one of the young
neighbor farmers till up the ground for her, and she had planted tomatoes,
potatoes, carrots, squash, beans, sweet peppers, cucumbers for pickles, dill for
pickles (she made them herself in a big tub in a nook off the kitchen next to
the dishwasher), glads, which he thought really looked glad with their bright
colors, and sweet corn. He crawled through the sweet corn, trying to circle
around the party of Klingons who had devastated the Federation outpost. The soft
manured earth gave under his knees and hands, rich as chocolate cake. Though the
day was already sweltering the ground was still wet under the corn.

The Klingons were proving difficult to evade. They had spread out in a wide scan
of the area, searching for him. Jeffrey changed direction and headed at top
speed toward the old asparagus patch, which marked the eastern edge of the
tilled ground. Beyond it lay meadow, then a near arm of the same woods which
bordered the far pasture a quarter mile away. Jeffrey reasoned that if he could
make it to the meadow, he would be out of the Klingons' phaser range, and the
Enterprise could beam him up before the Klingons knew what was happening. In the
heat, his Spock ears felt heavy. The asparagus, long gone to plume, waved before
him. He broke from the garden and made a dash for the cover of a clump of black
raspberry.

The green man was standing in the meadow halfway between the forest edge and
Jeffrey's raspberry clump. He looked exactly as Jeffrey remembered him: naked as
night, hairy, powerful. He raised his left arm, muscle-bunched, in greeting palm
held flat and upright. For a moment Jeffrey thought he was going to open the two
middle fingers, the way Mr. Spook did. Then the green man dropped his arm and
began moving slowly toward the woods. At the fringe, he stopped and looked over
his hairy shoulder at Jeffrey, waiting smiling a white smile like the Pepsodent
man, though Jeffrey knew the green man probably did not brush regularly after
every meal. The smile hit Jeffrey like a baseball in the face, but in a good
way. It was a smile for him alone, like Mr. Halloran's smile at school when he
got an "E" on his spelling test. But before he could move or say something, the
green man had turned again and melted into the trees.

This time Jeffrey ran right up to the woods and a few steps in. "Come back," he
said. He took a few more steps. Sweet green sunlight dappled his Science Officer
tunic. It was cool in the shade. He looked carefully around and could see no
tracks the green man might have left. "Hello?" he said again, raising his voice.
Some birds thrashed and dropped and rose, chittering. In the distance,
tree-trunks leaned, half-fallen, in heavy slants. There was moss on them. He
took another few steps forward. No trap snapped around his ankle, but the green
man did not reappear.

At breakfast a week later, when his parents were eating at the same table again
but still not talking much, Jeffrey said to his father's newspaper, "I saw a man
in the woods."

"Christ almighty!" his father exclaimed, lowering the paper. He had dripped
yellow egg yolk down his rotund plaid front. "I can't wear a clean shirt for
five minutes!"

"Oh, Simon; it's nothing." Jeffrey's mother put down her coffee cup, stood up,
went to the counter, picked up a washcloth, rinsed it under the tap, walked back
to the table, and began wiping off her husband. Impatiently he took the cloth
from her and wiped himself. She said, "Jeffrey Andrew Russell, did you go into
those woods by yourself?"

"No, Mama. I just went to the edge."

"Jeffrey?" She turned her all-knowing undeceivable gaze upon him. "Are you sure
you're not fibbing to Mama?"

"That's all I did, Mama. I just saw him on the edge." He shut his mouth. He had
almost added, Of the far pasture.

His father put the washcloth aside. "Did he have a gun?"

"No." Jeffrey had been warned many times that hunters were always creeping on to
the property and shooting animals illegally, another reason why he was forbidden
to go into the woods alone, because hunters could think you were a deer and
shoot you before they knew you were a boy.

"What did he look like?"

"Simon," said Jeffrey's mother, "you don't have to grill him that way."

"Will you please let me talk to the boy?"

"The boy?" Her tone was amused. Jeffrey shrank. "I believe your son has a name."
She lit a cigarette and blew smoke elaborately. Jeffrey's father turned red.

"I am simply endeavoring to determine the facts of the matter, Rae," he snapped.

Jeffrey's mother shook her head and smiled to herself. To Jeffrey she said,
"What did the man look like, darling?"

"Like one of those hippies on the Green in New Milford," Jeffrey said. "He
didn't have any clothes on." His parents stiffened in unison and exchanged
meaningful looks.

His father said to his mother over his head, "Those damn kids. I'd better call
Harley Marsden." Harley Marsden was the town constable.

"Oh, Simon, they don't mean any harm."

Jeffrey's father pushed his chair back violently. Jeffrey shut his eyes. He
heard the swinging door from the kitchen to the foyer open and shut; heavy
steps; the telephone being dialed. His mother said to him, "I never want you
going near those woods again. Not without Mama. Do you understand, Jeffrey?"

"Yes." He heard his father's grim voice talking into the receiver, but he could
not hear the words clearly.

"Yes, whom?"

"Yes, Mother." He opened his eyes again and gave her a reassuring look. He was
shocked to see tears on her cheeks. She looked away from him, blinking and took
another drag on her cigarette. Guilt doused him like cold rain water off a fir
branch. "I'm sorry, Mama. I won't do it again."

"Of course you won't, darling," she said. She gave him a brave smile and patted
his arm. "Mama loves you, that's all. She loves you more than tongue can tell.
She wouldn't want anything to happen to her precious Jeffie."

"He didn't do anything," Jeffrey whispered. She shushed him and stroked his arm,
then his hair. His father shoved through the swinging door.

"Harley said he'd bring Rob over to look around," said Mr. Russell. "Those damn
kids! I spend a fortune on 'No Trespassing' signs and I might as well be putting
out a welcome mat." To Jeffrey he said, "When did this happen?"

"Last Saturday," Jeffrey said. His mother stood silently and turned to the
dishes in the kitchen sink.

"Did you hear any shots from the woods that afternoon?"

"No." Clink went the dishes.

"Did he do anything or say anything to you?"

"No." Suddenly, he was afraid, not for himself, but for the green man.

"Do you think you could show Mr. Marsden where you saw the man?"

"Yes," he said. Later that day Harley and Rob, his beefy blond deputy, arrived.
Jeffrey led them and his father to the far pasture where Vi was. Forbidden to
accompany them, he watched the three tramp off into the woods, like two bowling
pins taking a bowling ball on a hike. They came back in three hours, Jeffrey's
father puffing and the two policemen shaking their heads. They had found the
dead remains of a campfire and something else, something odd in a tree which
they would not talk about in front of Jeffrey.

His mother put him to bed early after a dinner of thick ham sandwiches and
chocolate chip cookies, which she had spent all day making, sheet after sheet of
them, perfect and gleaming and fragrant. He lay upstairs in his bedroom, trying
to translate the adult drones from the kitchen into language. He thought, He'll
never come back now. I'll never see him again. He felt a great desolation.

Nothing happened for many days. School came, a new grade with all his old
friends. He almost forgot the green man in his joy over the crackly and perfumed
new books and the wonderful stacks of empty lined writing paper. He got E's in
Spelling and Arithmetic and Reading, and he had a part in the Thanksgiving
pageant, a pilgrim with a big round white cardboard collar. Hard frost killed
all the flowers in the garden. Men came with a truck to fill the oil-burning
furnace in the cellar. One night he woke up while it was still dark and saw snow
drifting down like feathers through the porch light.

He got out of bed, padded to his bedroom window, and looked out. He had on his
slip-slops, but his feet were still cold. At first he could only think of
Christmas: snow meant Christmas was coming. He loved Christmas. He watched as
the snow buried the back yard, the swing set, his mother's dead roses, the dark
eaves of the Little House where his father's forbidden study was. He thought of
the cow and the horse asleep in the barn. The cow slept lying down, but the
horse slept standing up. His mother had told him that. He thought of snow
falling over the silent woods. He wondered if the green man was still out there,
somewhere. He must have gone back to his commune, he thought. But what if he
didn't! What if he didn't have a commune to go back to!

He felt a pang like the pang he felt when his mother looked sad and lonely. He
got back into bed and pulled the quilt up to his neck. He fell asleep and
dreamed he was wading through a river of hot dry green cornstalks while his
mother shouted to him from the kitchen door to come back, come back, come back.
The next morning was Saturday. He rose early to smothered blank brightness. He
got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen. His mother was at the counter
with her red and green Christmas apron on, Fanny, Farmer Cookbook open, peering
down her bifocals with flour and sugar in sacks around her. He said to her, "May
I go out and play?"

"Don't I get a kiss first?" He went over to her and let her mash him again. Her
lips tasted like vanilla extract. She smiled at him, her world, her joy, her
own. "You put on your boots and your hood," she commanded him. "And your
snow-pants."

"Yes, Mama," he said.

"And your gloves."

"I will." He smiled back at her and went out of the kitchen and into the
hallway. In the hall he sat on the bottom of the stairs near the telephone stand
and pulled on his red snow-pants, then his red rubber boots. They were hard to
get on, but he did it. From the long coat-rack he took down his stuffed coat
with the hood. He put it on and buttoned it up. He waddled back into the
kitchen. His mother turned hurriedly from the spice cupboard to the sink and
opened the tap. He watched her wash out a glass and put it on the drainboard.
She turned smiling to him. "You look as snug as a bug in a rug," she said. "Are
you going to make snow angels?"

"Yes," he said. After a moment he said, "Bye," and went outside into the snow.

It was a completely different world at once. The morning sun was bright and the
morning sky was cloudless blue. The back yard stretched away, a flat unbroken
expanse of dazzling white. He walked away from the house and onto the
snow-covered lawn, leaving tracks with his red boots. He climbed the slick
ladder of the jungle gym, paused at the top to wave at his mother, who was
watching him through the kitchen door, then shot down the slide on his rump. He
landed in a heap of snow and laughed. The metal of the slide gleamed clean
behind him. He stood up, batted at his snow-pants with his gloves; snow powdered
the air and went up his nose. He slid down the slide three more times, then
wandered on through the yard, taking his time lest she be watching still, past
his father's Little House, until he came to the lilac hedge with its hard brown
sleeping buds. He walked through the opening in the hedge and out of sight of
the kitchen door.

He began to run. It was awkward, in his leggings and boots; he slid a little and
fell down once. There was no snow under the pine trees at the back of the Little
House. He paused there on the needles to catch his breath. His father was
already hard at work, typing. Smoke trickled from the Little House chimney.
Jeffrey looked up at the brown-lit windows. Inside, he knew, there were walls
and walls of books, and silence like the calm at the bottom of the lake. He
hurried on.

He passed the cow barn and the horse stall and the ghostly rhubarb patch. He
passed the corral, which in spring and summer was calf-deep manure. Even now, in
places, the snow had melted into hoof-prints. On the far side of the corral, a
low fieldstone wall marked the edge of the far pasture, but he did not head that
way. He walked to the edge of what had been the vegetable garden. Snow had
softened its hard lumps and ridges. Here and there grasses raised white plumes
into the cold air, their undersides pale brown. There were no more cornstalks;
his mother had them tilled under every fall. He stepped forward into the frozen
furrows.

His head was buzzing, as though there were bees in his hair. This is where the
tomatoes were, he thought. This is where the potatoes were. He had played
one-potato, two-potato with his brother, who was in Vietnam. He came to the edge
of the garden and the asparagus trench. A few old stiff spiny stalks still
remained, dotted with dessicated red berries. His mother had always said never
to eat anything without asking her first; it might be poisonous. He picked one
of the asparagus berries and put it in his mouth. It tasted bitter, so he spit
it out.

He crossed the asparagus trench and entered the meadow. The white trees of the
woods lay waiting for him on the other side. The Klingons did not fire upon him.
He passed the snowy hump of a black raspberry bush, and another. When he was
close enough to see the green man's eyes, he stopped.

They were dark and fierce and full of love. They made him want to chase cows
with a stick, to shout his name in church. The man was holding out his furred
hand. Jeffrey thought of his mother's smell of tobacco and wine in the dark, of
her mouth mashing his, of her precise knife-cuts at the kitchen counter. He
thought of his fat father asking, "What are you going to have, Rae?" at the
kitchen table, as though it was food she needed. He thought of Vi rotting in
silence while wasps knocked themselves stupid against the windshield. He looked
into the green man's eyes and said, "Could you please show me where the raccoons
go when they go away and you don't see them?" The man nodded, very seriously.
Jeffrey reached up and took his hand, and together the two of them turned and
walked into the forest.




RAND B. LEE

THE GREEN MAN

When Jeffrey Andrew Russell needed to escape his mother, he hid in the old black
Buick on the edge of the far pasture, where the woods began. The Buick had small
dark windows and doors as heavy as coffin lids. Long ago, the family had ridden
around in it, but before Jeffrey was seven someone had left it to sag into the
soft Connecticut green. The Buick's name was Vi, because its upholstery was
gray-violet. His family named all their cars, the way some people name their
boats, or their children. Except when he needed somewhere to hide, he avoided
the Buick, in part because dreaded spiders had come to live in the glove
compartment, but also because he had always thought of Vi as a sort of person
and now she was dead, which made him feel sad and desirous of showing respect.

On the summer day the Green Man appeared to him for the first time, it was very
hot in the car. In deference to the spiders, he crouched in the rotting back
seat, making himself small, breathing shallowly and softly, listening for the
sound of his father's car horn in the driveway, which would signal that it was
safe to go back into the house. In a corner of the windshield, a spindly-legged
yellow jacket mumbled to itself. Outside, the cicadas practiced their scales.
The path through the pasture, which was overgrown with black raspberry and
thistle, remained empty, but this was not to be trusted. He fought to stay awake
and alert.

The heat was palpable. He began to nod and drowse, jerking upright at imagined
sounds of movement, then drowsing and nodding again. Having drowsed once too
often, he woke in a panic from a deep sizzling sleep to find Vi darkened with
the slant of late day. Cautiously he opened the door, go out, and stood up
directly under the gaze of a tall, broad-shouldered figure standing not ten feet
away in the forest fringe.

His first panicked thought was, Mom!, but almost instantly he realized that it
was not his mother: it was a very dirty, very hairy bearded man. His hair was
black, and it grew all over him: long and matted on his head, a tangle of beard
hanging below the big nipples of his broad furry chest, his penis and testicles
dangling pale between the dark-pelted columns of his legs. Late light spilling
through the birches cast a green glow over his shoulders and belly. His eyes
were holes of shadow. Jeffrey stared, not daring to twitch, but in the end he
had to, and the instant he did, the green man was gone, without a rustle of
brush.

Jeffrey blinked, moved forward into the forest fringe, and listened, the way he
listened at the door of his bedroom for his mother's footstep on the landing.
"Hello?" he said, in what his mother would have called a stage whisper. "I know
you're there." He listened some more. The woods were like lungs breathing in and
out. Jeffrey had always steered clear of the woods. He was afraid of the snakes
which sunned themselves on the summer trails, and he had heard somewhere that
there were old bear traps under the loam that could take your off a the ankle
before you knew what was happening. He was still standing there, undecided, when
he heard a car toot twice across the meadow.

He returned to the house with careful haste by the front door facing the street,
which only he and the Jehovah's Witnesses ever used. The mountain laure growing
to one side was out of flower by now, its tiny white sticky maroon-banded grails
of blossom withered and fallen to the sterile acid loam. From the foyer, he
ascended the staircase which led to the landing separating his bedroom from his
parents'. He could hear the clatter of dishes from the kitchen which meant that
his mother was preparing dinner. The clatter did not sound particularly quick or
harsh; he relaxed a bit. This meant she was not too angry at him for running
away from her. The television gabbled from the living room: the war in Vietnam,
as usual; Jeffrey's father, catching a few minutes of the early news before
dinner.

Jeffrey went into his bedroom with the Star Trek models suspended by wires from
the ceiling and lay on the blue corduroy cover of his bed. He thought of the
green man and felt excited in a way he could not name. The man had felt wild to
him, somehow, much wilder than the raccoons who thudded every night from the
pine tree onto the roof. Jeffrey had seen a wild deer once. It had jumped into
his father's headlights when they were coming home from the movies in New
Milford. His father had cursed and slammed on the brakes. The deer had just
stood there, and then it had vanished, with no more sound than a goldfish makes
in the goldfish bowl. But the green man had seemed wilder even than this.

When his father called him to come down for dinner, he descended to the kitchen
by the second staircase on the other end of the house. His mother was putting
the finishing touches to a platter of cold roast beef and sliced tomatoes, her
broad back turned to him. His father was not there. He felt a moment of panic.
She had thick hair the color of field-mouse fur. She always claimed she had eyes
in the back of her head, and once again she demonstrated the reasonableness of
this: the moment he entered the room she said in a quick rich quiet voice,
"Honey, Mama was just funning; she would never hurt you, you know that." She did
not pause in her work and she did not turn to look at him. He took his seat at
the kitchen table, thinking of the green man's invisible eyes.

At dinner under the kitchen fan, Jeffrey's father announced his intention to go
on a lecture tour. "Scott thinks it's the ideal way to promote the new book," he
said. Scott was their agent in New York. Jeffrey's father wore a gray beard
nothing like the green man's beard, and he was so fat he had no waist, only a
belt across the middle of his bulge, like Humpty-Dumpty. He mopped his brow with
his napkin every few minutes.

"That's a marvelous idea," said Jeffrey's mother. Her yellow shift clung to her
in the heat, showing the outline of her big breasts and her slender waist. She
put a slice of cold roast beef on Jeffrey's plate, next to his salad. "There you
are, love," she said, smiling at him, as though nothing whatever had happened.

"Thank you," Jeffrey said.

"Thank you whom?" growled his mother, doing her Captain Hook face.

"Thank you, Mom."

"That's better. Give Mama a kiss," she said. She pursed her lips. He screwed up
his face and sacrificed it to her. She took his chin in her hand and mashed her
mouth against his. She smelled like tobacco, cows, and wine. She released him
with a satisfied smack of her lips. "Umm, gum," she said. Dropping his gaze to
his plate, he noted with alarm the Italian salad dressing running into his meat.
"When would you be leaving?" his mother said to his father.

"Around January first," said Jeffrey's father, forking roast beef.

"Can I come with you?" Jeffrey asked.

"May I come with you," said his mother.

"May I come with you?" Jeffrey asked.

His father scowled. "No, son. You've got school. This meat is a little well
done, Rae."

"I'm so sorry," Jeffrey's mother replied smoothly. She had been about to
transfer a slice of beef from the platter to her plate. Inspecting it, she
lifted it into the air and held it out to her husband instead. "Here, Simon.
This is as rare as can be."

Jeffrey's father proffered his plate. "What are you going to have?"

"Why, there's enough here to feed the Russian army," said Jeffrey's mother. She
took another piece of meat from the serving platter.

"For God's sake, Rae, that's an end piece. There's no red in it at all."

"It's perfectly delicious," said Jeffrey's mother with finality. She cut a piece
of dry brown meat, chewed it, then took a sip from her third glass of white
Gallo. Jeffrey watched his father watch her wrap her big fingers around the
glass, raise it, tilt it, suck up the pale liquid into her full, sensual mouth.

Jeffrey's mother had been a radio actress in Hollywood in the Thirties, known
for her dramatic voice. She had met Jeffrey's father on the set of a show where
he was one of the head writers. Hanging in the upstairs dressing room was a
picture of her as she had looked then, a black-and-white studio still. In the
photograph, her hair was shoulder-length and gently waved. Her chin rested on
white-gloved hands. Around her neck twined a choker of big round ceramic beads.
She gazed straight out at the photographer, fearless and subtly challenging.
Jeffrey thought it was the most beautiful picture he had ever seen.

They ate in silence for a while. Then his mother stood up and poured herself
another glass of wine from the counter. Jeffrey drank some milk. His father said
to him, "Don't fill your belly up with milk. You haven't touched your salad."
Jeffrey searched his salad for something without much dressing on it. He settled
on three cherry tomatoes. He ate them slowly, one at a time, clamping down on
them hard with his teeth so they exploded into wet sweetness, like little bombs.
Sitting again, his mother took a few more bites of meat, then put her fork and
knife in "finished" position. She lit a Camel cigarette, blowing smoke up toward
the ceiling. "Is that all you're going to eat?" Jeffrey's father asked her.

She looked over her men. Her eyes twinkled. "I am so full I could not pull
a-no-ther blade of grass, baa, baa," she replied.

Every day after that Jeffrey looked for the green man. Sometimes he thought he
saw him out of the corners of his eyes, but when he turned, there was never
anything there. When his father took him shopping in New Milford, the next big
town over, Jeffrey scanned the clusters of hippies on the Green. His father
said, "If they'd bathe occasionally people would take them more seriously." None
of them looked like the green man. As trees flashed by on their homeward drive,
groves of slim trunks misted green, Jeffrey searched their dappled depths for
signs of dark thigh and hairy shoulder, but they were just trees.

One evening, remembering the stories his mother had told him about leaving food
for the Little People, Jeffrey spirited a chicken leg and a cup of milk out of
the fridge and left them on the hood of the Buick. The next morning, the chicken
leg was gone and the cup was overturned in the grass. Encouraged, he tried the
experiment again, but abandoned it after he stole out one night with a
flashlight and surprised a raccoon mother and her babies consuming the
offerings. He stayed on the alert, and more than once spent the day in the far
pasture, hoping that the green man would appear, but he did not.

One night Jeffrey's parents had a big fight. It was a Friday. They went out to
dinner and came home after Jeffrey was in bed. Jeffrey was glad when they went
out to dinner, though he could not have explained why; it made him feel safe,
the way it made him feel safe on the rare occasions when he walked into the
kitchen and found them standing by the sink kissing. Lying in bed, he thought
about the green man while the old house creaked around him in the dark. The
house had been built in 1792. There was a huge stone fireplace downstairs with a
Dutch oven built into it, and there was an attic full of cobwebs and old steamer
trunks. The driveway gravel had garnets in it; you could pick them up like
rubies and hold them to the light. The first spring after his parents had moved
to the house, only white flowers had come up in the front gardens. His mother
had pulled them all out because, she said, they reminded her of funerals. She
had replaced them with color: slashing red tulips, like her lipstick; foaming
beds of yellow, purple, blue, wine, rose, and brown irises; geysers of pink
phlox which she complained always ran to magenta after a few years.

When he was very little she had given him a little bed of his own to plant, out
near the well-house off the driveway. He had liked pansies, with their foolish
gold and black faces; bachelor's buttons, particularly the dark reddish-purple
kind; and four o'clocks, which opened only in the late afternoon and always
amazed him because they had flowers of different colors on the same bush. His
mother said to him, "You have a green thumb." She always took care of the
flowers but gave him the credit. When he got older, he helped her weed among the
corn and tomatoes. She told him wonderful stories, about Wol the owl and Eeyore
the donkey and a green garter snake that had visited her one summer in the
garden they had had before they had moved to this place, when he was still in
the baby carriage. "He came right up and sat in my lap," she told him. "He would
go away when the sun went down and be back the next day." After a while he got
tired of gardening and she eventually stopped asking him to help her.

He fell asleep and was awakened by the car crunching on the driveway. Doors
opened and slammed shut. He heard raised voices, his mother's loud and
contemptuous, his father's loud and defensive. A long while passed before the
voices stopped, then another long while during which he heard his father's heavy
ascension of the stairs, his bathroom garglings and flushings, and finally
silence. He lay in the dark, alert. His chest and stomach felt heavy.

He thought, quite suddenly, of a day when he was four and his parents had taken
him down to the lake with some of their grown-up city friends. There were
water-lilies in the lake, which was very shallow, and perch, and a dam at one
end which the water slid over in slow glassy sheets every spring thaw. That day
the dam had been dry. The visitors had stood on the concrete in their New York
clothes, chatting and puffing on cigarettes, admiring the scenery. Forgotten,
Jeffrey had squatted at the edge of the dam and looked out over the water. He
had been able to see his reflection in the surface of the lake, darkened and
ripply; then, as his eyes had adjusted to the play of light and shadow on the
water, he had found he could look through his reflection and see the bottom of
the lakebed.

Up on the dam the air was full of chattering voices and an odd tension. Down in
the water it was still and calm, lake-weed hanging immobile, each pebble
distinct. A yearning had swept over him, a yearning to be part of that
tranquility, to sink down deep into it; he had found himself falling forward
toward his reflection. His father had caught him and pulled him back with an
oath of concern. They had made much of his near-mishap, which had pleased him.
But now, lying in the dark, he remembered the stillness at the bottom of the
lake and longed for it again.

He had just begun to doze off for a second time when he heard his bedroom door
opening. Yellow hallway light jabbed his eyes. He smelled his mother's cigarette
and her Blue Grass cologne. He closed his eyes and lay still, his heart
pounding. The cigarette and cologne smells increased. He felt her breathing
above the bed. "Baby," she said. She touched his hair. He thought of the lake
and sank down, down.

The next morning, his parents would only talk to one another in monosyllables,
and his father took the car into New Milford to have breakfast there. Jeffrey
sat at the big kitchen table with his mother. Her cigarette burned in an
ashtray. She looked tired, and drank several cups of fragrant black coffee while
he ate the buttered waffles she had made him. "Are they good, baby?" she asked
him. He nodded. After a silence, she took a drag on her Camel and added, "Your
father's being a bastard." When he glanced up at her face, she blew smoke,
blinked rapidly and smiled. "Well, enough of that nonsense." She patted his
small hand with her big ugly one. "You're my precious baby. Finish your
breakfast; Mama's got chores to do."

She drained her coffee, got up from the table, and started sweeping the floor.
By the time he had eaten the last of his waffle and deposited his dishes in the
sink, she was on her hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum with a brush. He
went upstairs to his room, got out the Science Officer tunic his mother had made
for him and the Spock ears his father had bought for him, put them on, grabbed a
phaser, and went downstairs again. His mother was still scrubbing the kitchen
floor. Her cigarette was in her mouth. He left the house by the mountain laurel
door and made for the vegetable garden.

The garden was south of the far pasture where he had hidden in the Buick and
seen the green man for the first time. His mother had had one of the young
neighbor farmers till up the ground for her, and she had planted tomatoes,
potatoes, carrots, squash, beans, sweet peppers, cucumbers for pickles, dill for
pickles (she made them herself in a big tub in a nook off the kitchen next to
the dishwasher), glads, which he thought really looked glad with their bright
colors, and sweet corn. He crawled through the sweet corn, trying to circle
around the party of Klingons who had devastated the Federation outpost. The soft
manured earth gave under his knees and hands, rich as chocolate cake. Though the
day was already sweltering the ground was still wet under the corn.

The Klingons were proving difficult to evade. They had spread out in a wide scan
of the area, searching for him. Jeffrey changed direction and headed at top
speed toward the old asparagus patch, which marked the eastern edge of the
tilled ground. Beyond it lay meadow, then a near arm of the same woods which
bordered the far pasture a quarter mile away. Jeffrey reasoned that if he could
make it to the meadow, he would be out of the Klingons' phaser range, and the
Enterprise could beam him up before the Klingons knew what was happening. In the
heat, his Spock ears felt heavy. The asparagus, long gone to plume, waved before
him. He broke from the garden and made a dash for the cover of a clump of black
raspberry.

The green man was standing in the meadow halfway between the forest edge and
Jeffrey's raspberry clump. He looked exactly as Jeffrey remembered him: naked as
night, hairy, powerful. He raised his left arm, muscle-bunched, in greeting palm
held flat and upright. For a moment Jeffrey thought he was going to open the two
middle fingers, the way Mr. Spook did. Then the green man dropped his arm and
began moving slowly toward the woods. At the fringe, he stopped and looked over
his hairy shoulder at Jeffrey, waiting smiling a white smile like the Pepsodent
man, though Jeffrey knew the green man probably did not brush regularly after
every meal. The smile hit Jeffrey like a baseball in the face, but in a good
way. It was a smile for him alone, like Mr. Halloran's smile at school when he
got an "E" on his spelling test. But before he could move or say something, the
green man had turned again and melted into the trees.

This time Jeffrey ran right up to the woods and a few steps in. "Come back," he
said. He took a few more steps. Sweet green sunlight dappled his Science Officer
tunic. It was cool in the shade. He looked carefully around and could see no
tracks the green man might have left. "Hello?" he said again, raising his voice.
Some birds thrashed and dropped and rose, chittering. In the distance,
tree-trunks leaned, half-fallen, in heavy slants. There was moss on them. He
took another few steps forward. No trap snapped around his ankle, but the green
man did not reappear.

At breakfast a week later, when his parents were eating at the same table again
but still not talking much, Jeffrey said to his father's newspaper, "I saw a man
in the woods."

"Christ almighty!" his father exclaimed, lowering the paper. He had dripped
yellow egg yolk down his rotund plaid front. "I can't wear a clean shirt for
five minutes!"

"Oh, Simon; it's nothing." Jeffrey's mother put down her coffee cup, stood up,
went to the counter, picked up a washcloth, rinsed it under the tap, walked back
to the table, and began wiping off her husband. Impatiently he took the cloth
from her and wiped himself. She said, "Jeffrey Andrew Russell, did you go into
those woods by yourself?"

"No, Mama. I just went to the edge."

"Jeffrey?" She turned her all-knowing undeceivable gaze upon him. "Are you sure
you're not fibbing to Mama?"

"That's all I did, Mama. I just saw him on the edge." He shut his mouth. He had
almost added, Of the far pasture.

His father put the washcloth aside. "Did he have a gun?"

"No." Jeffrey had been warned many times that hunters were always creeping on to
the property and shooting animals illegally, another reason why he was forbidden
to go into the woods alone, because hunters could think you were a deer and
shoot you before they knew you were a boy.

"What did he look like?"

"Simon," said Jeffrey's mother, "you don't have to grill him that way."

"Will you please let me talk to the boy?"

"The boy?" Her tone was amused. Jeffrey shrank. "I believe your son has a name."
She lit a cigarette and blew smoke elaborately. Jeffrey's father turned red.

"I am simply endeavoring to determine the facts of the matter, Rae," he snapped.

Jeffrey's mother shook her head and smiled to herself. To Jeffrey she said,
"What did the man look like, darling?"

"Like one of those hippies on the Green in New Milford," Jeffrey said. "He
didn't have any clothes on." His parents stiffened in unison and exchanged
meaningful looks.

His father said to his mother over his head, "Those damn kids. I'd better call
Harley Marsden." Harley Marsden was the town constable.

"Oh, Simon, they don't mean any harm."

Jeffrey's father pushed his chair back violently. Jeffrey shut his eyes. He
heard the swinging door from the kitchen to the foyer open and shut; heavy
steps; the telephone being dialed. His mother said to him, "I never want you
going near those woods again. Not without Mama. Do you understand, Jeffrey?"

"Yes." He heard his father's grim voice talking into the receiver, but he could
not hear the words clearly.

"Yes, whom?"

"Yes, Mother." He opened his eyes again and gave her a reassuring look. He was
shocked to see tears on her cheeks. She looked away from him, blinking and took
another drag on her cigarette. Guilt doused him like cold rain water off a fir
branch. "I'm sorry, Mama. I won't do it again."

"Of course you won't, darling," she said. She gave him a brave smile and patted
his arm. "Mama loves you, that's all. She loves you more than tongue can tell.
She wouldn't want anything to happen to her precious Jeffie."

"He didn't do anything," Jeffrey whispered. She shushed him and stroked his arm,
then his hair. His father shoved through the swinging door.

"Harley said he'd bring Rob over to look around," said Mr. Russell. "Those damn
kids! I spend a fortune on 'No Trespassing' signs and I might as well be putting
out a welcome mat." To Jeffrey he said, "When did this happen?"

"Last Saturday," Jeffrey said. His mother stood silently and turned to the
dishes in the kitchen sink.

"Did you hear any shots from the woods that afternoon?"

"No." Clink went the dishes.

"Did he do anything or say anything to you?"

"No." Suddenly, he was afraid, not for himself, but for the green man.

"Do you think you could show Mr. Marsden where you saw the man?"

"Yes," he said. Later that day Harley and Rob, his beefy blond deputy, arrived.
Jeffrey led them and his father to the far pasture where Vi was. Forbidden to
accompany them, he watched the three tramp off into the woods, like two bowling
pins taking a bowling ball on a hike. They came back in three hours, Jeffrey's
father puffing and the two policemen shaking their heads. They had found the
dead remains of a campfire and something else, something odd in a tree which
they would not talk about in front of Jeffrey.

His mother put him to bed early after a dinner of thick ham sandwiches and
chocolate chip cookies, which she had spent all day making, sheet after sheet of
them, perfect and gleaming and fragrant. He lay upstairs in his bedroom, trying
to translate the adult drones from the kitchen into language. He thought, He'll
never come back now. I'll never see him again. He felt a great desolation.

Nothing happened for many days. School came, a new grade with all his old
friends. He almost forgot the green man in his joy over the crackly and perfumed
new books and the wonderful stacks of empty lined writing paper. He got E's in
Spelling and Arithmetic and Reading, and he had a part in the Thanksgiving
pageant, a pilgrim with a big round white cardboard collar. Hard frost killed
all the flowers in the garden. Men came with a truck to fill the oil-burning
furnace in the cellar. One night he woke up while it was still dark and saw snow
drifting down like feathers through the porch light.

He got out of bed, padded to his bedroom window, and looked out. He had on his
slip-slops, but his feet were still cold. At first he could only think of
Christmas: snow meant Christmas was coming. He loved Christmas. He watched as
the snow buried the back yard, the swing set, his mother's dead roses, the dark
eaves of the Little House where his father's forbidden study was. He thought of
the cow and the horse asleep in the barn. The cow slept lying down, but the
horse slept standing up. His mother had told him that. He thought of snow
falling over the silent woods. He wondered if the green man was still out there,
somewhere. He must have gone back to his commune, he thought. But what if he
didn't! What if he didn't have a commune to go back to!

He felt a pang like the pang he felt when his mother looked sad and lonely. He
got back into bed and pulled the quilt up to his neck. He fell asleep and
dreamed he was wading through a river of hot dry green cornstalks while his
mother shouted to him from the kitchen door to come back, come back, come back.
The next morning was Saturday. He rose early to smothered blank brightness. He
got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen. His mother was at the counter
with her red and green Christmas apron on, Fanny, Farmer Cookbook open, peering
down her bifocals with flour and sugar in sacks around her. He said to her, "May
I go out and play?"

"Don't I get a kiss first?" He went over to her and let her mash him again. Her
lips tasted like vanilla extract. She smiled at him, her world, her joy, her
own. "You put on your boots and your hood," she commanded him. "And your
snow-pants."

"Yes, Mama," he said.

"And your gloves."

"I will." He smiled back at her and went out of the kitchen and into the
hallway. In the hall he sat on the bottom of the stairs near the telephone stand
and pulled on his red snow-pants, then his red rubber boots. They were hard to
get on, but he did it. From the long coat-rack he took down his stuffed coat
with the hood. He put it on and buttoned it up. He waddled back into the
kitchen. His mother turned hurriedly from the spice cupboard to the sink and
opened the tap. He watched her wash out a glass and put it on the drainboard.
She turned smiling to him. "You look as snug as a bug in a rug," she said. "Are
you going to make snow angels?"

"Yes," he said. After a moment he said, "Bye," and went outside into the snow.

It was a completely different world at once. The morning sun was bright and the
morning sky was cloudless blue. The back yard stretched away, a flat unbroken
expanse of dazzling white. He walked away from the house and onto the
snow-covered lawn, leaving tracks with his red boots. He climbed the slick
ladder of the jungle gym, paused at the top to wave at his mother, who was
watching him through the kitchen door, then shot down the slide on his rump. He
landed in a heap of snow and laughed. The metal of the slide gleamed clean
behind him. He stood up, batted at his snow-pants with his gloves; snow powdered
the air and went up his nose. He slid down the slide three more times, then
wandered on through the yard, taking his time lest she be watching still, past
his father's Little House, until he came to the lilac hedge with its hard brown
sleeping buds. He walked through the opening in the hedge and out of sight of
the kitchen door.

He began to run. It was awkward, in his leggings and boots; he slid a little and
fell down once. There was no snow under the pine trees at the back of the Little
House. He paused there on the needles to catch his breath. His father was
already hard at work, typing. Smoke trickled from the Little House chimney.
Jeffrey looked up at the brown-lit windows. Inside, he knew, there were walls
and walls of books, and silence like the calm at the bottom of the lake. He
hurried on.

He passed the cow barn and the horse stall and the ghostly rhubarb patch. He
passed the corral, which in spring and summer was calf-deep manure. Even now, in
places, the snow had melted into hoof-prints. On the far side of the corral, a
low fieldstone wall marked the edge of the far pasture, but he did not head that
way. He walked to the edge of what had been the vegetable garden. Snow had
softened its hard lumps and ridges. Here and there grasses raised white plumes
into the cold air, their undersides pale brown. There were no more cornstalks;
his mother had them tilled under every fall. He stepped forward into the frozen
furrows.

His head was buzzing, as though there were bees in his hair. This is where the
tomatoes were, he thought. This is where the potatoes were. He had played
one-potato, two-potato with his brother, who was in Vietnam. He came to the edge
of the garden and the asparagus trench. A few old stiff spiny stalks still
remained, dotted with dessicated red berries. His mother had always said never
to eat anything without asking her first; it might be poisonous. He picked one
of the asparagus berries and put it in his mouth. It tasted bitter, so he spit
it out.

He crossed the asparagus trench and entered the meadow. The white trees of the
woods lay waiting for him on the other side. The Klingons did not fire upon him.
He passed the snowy hump of a black raspberry bush, and another. When he was
close enough to see the green man's eyes, he stopped.

They were dark and fierce and full of love. They made him want to chase cows
with a stick, to shout his name in church. The man was holding out his furred
hand. Jeffrey thought of his mother's smell of tobacco and wine in the dark, of
her mouth mashing his, of her precise knife-cuts at the kitchen counter. He
thought of his fat father asking, "What are you going to have, Rae?" at the
kitchen table, as though it was food she needed. He thought of Vi rotting in
silence while wasps knocked themselves stupid against the windshield. He looked
into the green man's eyes and said, "Could you please show me where the raccoons
go when they go away and you don't see them?" The man nodded, very seriously.
Jeffrey reached up and took his hand, and together the two of them turned and
walked into the forest.