Leviathan (23 page)

Once he entered the woods, however, he became distracted. Instead of looking at the leaves and migrating birds, he started thinking about his book. Passages he had written earlier that day came rushing back to him, and before he was conscious of what he was doing, he was already composing new sentences in his head, mapping out the work he wanted to do the next morning. He kept
on walking, thrashing through the dead leaves and thorny underbrush, talking out loud to himself, chanting the words of his book, paying no attention to where he was. He could have gone on like that for hours, he said, but at a certain point he noticed that he was having trouble seeing. The sun had already set, and because of the thickness of the woods, night was fast coming on. He looked around him, hoping to get his bearings, but nothing was familiar, and he realized that he had never been in this place before. Feeling like an idiot, he turned around and started running in the direction he had come from. He had just a few minutes before everything disappeared, and he knew he would never make it. He had no flashlight, no matches, no food in his pockets. Sleeping outdoors promised to be an unpleasant experience, but he couldn’t think of any alternative. He sat down on a tree stump and started to laugh. He found himself ridiculous, he said, a comic figure of the first rank. Then night fell in earnest, and he couldn’t see a thing. He waited for a moon to appear, but the sky clouded over instead. He laughed again. He wasn’t going to give the matter another thought, he decided. He was safe where he was, and freezing his ass off for one night wasn’t going to kill him. So he did what he could to make himself comfortable. He stretched out on the ground, he covered himself haphazardly with some leaves and twigs, and tried to think about his book. Before long, he even managed to fall asleep.

He woke up at dawn, bone-cold and shivering, his clothes wet with dew. The situation didn’t seem so funny anymore. He was in a foul temper, and his muscles ached. He was hungry and disheveled, and the only thing he wanted was to get out of there and find his way home. He took what he thought was the same path he had taken the previous evening, but after he had walked for close to an hour, he began to suspect that he was on the wrong path. He considered turning around and heading back to the place where he had started,
but he wasn’t sure he would be able to find it again—and even if he did, it was doubtful that he would recognize it. The sky was gloomy that morning, with dense swarms of clouds blocking the sun. Sachs had never been much of a woodsman, and without a compass to orient his position, he couldn’t tell if he was traveling east or west or north or south. On the other hand, it wasn’t as though he were trapped in a primeval forest. The woods were bound to end sooner or later, and it hardly mattered which direction he followed, just as long as he walked in a straight line. Once he made it to an open road, he would knock on the door of the first house he saw. With any luck, the people inside would be able to tell him where he was.

It took a long time before any of that happened. Since he had no watch, he never knew exactly how long, but he guessed somewhere between three and four hours. He was thoroughly disgusted by then, and he cursed his stupidity over the last miles with a growing sense of rage. Once he came to the end of the woods, however, his dark mood lifted, and he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He was on a narrow dirt road, and even if he didn’t know where he was, even if there wasn’t a single house in sight, he could comfort himself with the thought that the worst of it was over. He walked for ten or fifteen more minutes, making bets with himself about how far he had strayed from home. If it was under five miles, he would spend fifty dollars on a present for Sonia. If it was over five but under ten, he would spend a hundred dollars. Over ten would be two hundred. Over fifteen would be three hundred, over twenty would be four hundred, and so on. As he was showering these imaginary gifts on his goddaughter (stuffed panda bears, dollhouses, ponies), he heard a car rumbling in the distance behind him. He stopped and waited for it to approach. It turned out to be a red pickup truck, speeding along at a good clip. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Sachs stuck up his hand to get the driver’s attention. The truck barreled past him, but
before Sachs could turn around again, it slammed to a halt. He heard a clamor of flying pebbles, dust rose everywhere, and then a voice was calling out to him, asking if he needed a lift.

The driver was a young man in his early twenties. Sachs sized him up as a local kid, a road mender or plumber’s assistant, maybe, and though he didn’t feel much inclined to talk at first, the boy turned out to be so friendly and ingratiating that he soon fell into a conversation with him. There was a metal Softball bat lying on the floor in front of Sachs’s seat, and when the kid put his foot on the accelerator to get the truck going again, the bat lurched up and hit Sachs in the ankle. That was the opener, so to speak, and once the kid had apologized for the inconvenience, he introduced himself as Dwight (Dwight McMartin, as Sachs later learned) and they started in on a discussion about softball. Dwight told him that he played on a team sponsored by the volunteer fire department in Newfane. The regular season had ended last week, and the first game of the playoffs was scheduled to be played that evening—”if the weather holds,” he added several times, “if the weather holds and the rain don’t fall.” Dwight was the first baseman, the cleanup hitter, and number two in the league in homeruns, a bulky gulumph in the mold of Moose Skowron. Sachs said he’d try to make it down to the field to watch, and Dwight answered in all seriousness that it was bound to be worth it, that it was sure to be a terrific game. Sachs couldn’t help smiling. He was rumpled and unshaven, there were brambles and leaf particles stuck in his clothes, and his nose was running like a spigot. He probably looked like a hobo, he thought, and yet Dwight didn’t press him with personal questions. He didn’t ask him why he had been walking on that deserted road, he didn’t ask him where he lived, he didn’t even bother to ask his name. He could have been a simpleton, Sachs realized, or maybe he was just a
nice guy, but one way or the other, it was hard not to appreciate that discretion. All of a sudden, Sachs wished that he hadn’t kept so much to himself over the past months. He should have gone out and mingled with his neighbors a bit more; he should have made an effort to learn something about the people around him. Almost as an ethical point, he told himself that he mustn’t forget the softball game that night. It would do him some good, he thought, give him something to think about other than his book. If he had some people to talk to, maybe he wouldn’t be so apt to get lost the next time he went walking in the woods.

When Dwight told him where they were, Sachs was appalled by how far he had drifted off course. He had evidently walked over the hill and down the other side, landing two towns to the east of where he lived. He had covered only ten miles on foot, but the return distance by car was well over thirty. For no particular reason, he decided to spill the whole business to Dwight. Out of gratitude, perhaps, or simply because he found it amusing now. Maybe the kid would tell it to his buddies on the softball team, and they’d all have a good laugh at his expense. Sachs didn’t care. It was an exemplary tale, a classic moron joke, and he didn’t mind being the butt of his own folly. The city slicker plays Daniel Boone in the Vermont woods, and look what happens to him, fellas. But once he began to talk about his misadventures, Dwight responded with unexpected compassion. The same thing had happened to him once, he told Sachs, and it hadn’t been a bit of fun. He’d only been eleven or twelve at the time, and he’d been scared shitless, crouching behind a tree the whole night waiting for a bear to attack him. Sachs couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that Dwight was inventing this story to make him feel a little less miserable. In any case, the kid didn’t laugh at him. In fact, once he’d heard what Sachs had to say, he even offered to
drive him home. He was running late as it was, he said, but a few more minutes wouldn’t make any difference, and Christ, if he were in Sachs’s shoes, he’d expect someone to do the same for him.

They were traveling along a paved road at that point, but Dwight said he knew a shortcut to Sachs’s house. It meant turning around and backtracking for a couple of miles, but once he worked out the arithmetic in his head, he decided it made sense to change course. So he slammed on the brakes, did a U-turn in the middle of the road, and headed back in the other direction. The shortcut turned out to be the narrowest of dirt trails, a bumpy, one-lane sliver of ground that cut through a dark, tree-clogged patch of woods. Not many people knew about it, Dwight said, but if he wasn’t mistaken it would lead them to a somewhat wider dirt road and that second road would spit them out on the county highway about four miles from Sachs’s house. Dwight probably knew what he was talking about, but he never got a chance to demonstrate the correctness of his theory. Less than a mile after they started down the first dirt road, they ran into something unexpected. And before they could move around it, their journey came to an end.

It all happened very quickly. Sachs experienced it as a churning in the gut, a spinning in the head, a rush of fear in the veins. He was so exhausted, he told me, and so little time elapsed from beginning to end, that he could never quite absorb it as real—not even in retrospect, not even when he sat down to tell me about it two years later.’ One moment, they were tooling along through the woods, he said, and the next moment they had stopped. A man was standing up ahead of them on the road, leaning against the trunk of a white Toyota and smoking a cigarette. He looked to be in his late thirties: a tallish, slender man dressed in a flannel work shirt and loose khaki pants. The only other thing Sachs noticed was that he had a beard—not unlike the one he used to wear himself, but darker. Thinking
the man must be having car trouble, Dwight climbed out of the truck and walked toward him, asking if he needed help. Sachs couldn’t hear the man’s response, but the tone sounded angry, unnecessarily hostile somehow, and as he continued to watch them through the windshield, he was surprised when the man answered Dwight’s next question with something even more vicious: fuck off, or get the fuck away from me, words to that effect. That was when the adrenaline started pumping through him, Sachs said, and he instinctively reached for the metal bat on the floor. Dwight was too good-natured to take the hint, however. He kept on walking toward the man, shrugging off the insult as if it didn’t matter, repeating that he only wanted to help. The man backed away in agitation, and then he ran around to the front of the car, opened the door on the passenger’s side, and reached for something in the glove compartment. When he straightened up and turned toward Dwight again, there was a gun in his hand. He fired it once. The big kid howled and clutched his stomach, and then the man fired again. The kid howled a second time and started staggering up the road, moaning and weeping in pain. The man turned to follow him with his eyes, and Sachs jumped out of the truck, holding the bat in his right hand. He didn’t even think, he told me. He rushed up behind the man just as the third shot went off, got a good grip on the handle of the bat, and swung for all he was worth. He aimed for the man’s head—hoping to split his skull in two, hoping to kill him, hoping to empty his brains all over the ground. The bat landed with horrific force, smashing into a spot just behind the man’s right ear. Sachs heard the thud of impact, the cracking of cartilage and bone, and then the man dropped. He just fell down dead in the middle of the road, and everything went quiet.

Sachs ran over to Dwight, but when he bent down to examine the kid’s body, he saw that the third shot had killed him. The bullet
had gone straight into the back of his head, and his cranium was shattered. Sachs had lost his chance. It was all a matter of timing, and he had been too slow. If he had managed to get to the man a split-second earlier, that last shot would have missed, and instead of looking down at a corpse, he would have been bandaging Dwight’s wounds, doing everything he could to save his life. A moment after he thought this thought, Sachs felt his own body start to tremble. He sat down on the road, put his head between his knees, and struggled not to throw up. Time passed. He felt the air blowing through his clothes; he heard a blue jay squawking in the woods; he shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he picked up a handful of loose dirt from the road and crushed it against his face. He put the dirt in his mouth and chewed it, letting the grit scrape against his teeth, feeling the pebbles against his tongue. He chewed until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he vent over and spat the mess out, groaning like a sick, demented animal.

If Dwight had lived, he said, the whole story would have been different. The idea of running away never would have occurred to him, and once that first step had been eliminated, none of the things that followed from it would have happened. But standing out there alone in the woods, Sachs suddenly fell into a deep, unbridled panic. Two men were dead, and the idea of going to the state troopers seemed unimaginable to him. He had already served time in prison. He was a convicted felon, and without any witnesses to corroborate his story, no one was going to believe a word he said. It was all too bizarre, too implausible. He wasn’t thinking too clearly, of course, but whatever thoughts he had were centered entirely on himself. He couldn’t do anything for Dwight, but at least he could save his own skin, and in his panic the only solution that came to him was to get the hell away from there.

He knew the police would figure out that a third man had been
present. It would be obvious that Dwight and the stranger hadn’t killed each other, since a man with three bullets in his body would scarcely have the strength to bludgeon someone to death, and even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to walk twenty feet down the road after he had done it, least of all with one of those bullets lodged in his skull. Sachs also knew that he was bound to leave some traces behind him. No matter how assiduously he cleaned up after himself, a competent forensic team would have no trouble unearthing something to work with: a footprint, a strand of hair, a microscopic fragment. But none of that would make any difference. As long as he managed to remove his fingerprints from the truck, as long as he remembered to take the bat with him, there wouldn’t be anything to identify him as the missing man. That was the crucial point. He had to make sure that the missing man could have been anyone. Once he did that, he would be home free.