Read Online The Man in the Woods by Rosemary Wells - Free Book Online

injured Tuesday afternoon when Atlas hit their car instead of the UPS truck in front of them. Two local teenagers, Olaf Levy, 15, of Seafarer Way, and Mary Helen Curragh, 14, of Prospect Avenue, New Bedford, will be awarded good citizenship certificates by the Chamber of Commerce for giving first aid to the victims.
    “Olaf Levy!” said Helen.
    “Yeah, well,” said Pinky, “I was named after my mom’s father. Anyway, look who’s talking, Mary .”
    Helen sighed. “Named after you know who,” she said.
    “What a record that Atlas guy had,” said Pinky as they watched the football teams doing vigorous push-ups on the field. “Heard it over the radio. Petty larceny, possession of a knife, purse snatching, vandalism, drugs. Since he’s been eight years old, that guy’s been making trouble. They ought to drop him over Siberia at ten thousand feet.”
    Helen frowned. “I wonder,” she said.
    “You wonder what?”
    “Oh, nothing.” She tossed her head as if to rid herself of a thought too large to think. “I hope they got the right guy.”
    “Are you kidding?” Pinky asked. “They got Atlas dead to rights! He was a crazy doped-up weirdo with a record a mile long. Can you just imagine what he’d have done to you if he’d found out you were following him up through the woods? Gives me the shakes just to think about it.”
    “I guess you’re right,” said Helen.
    “Right? Right about what?”
    “It must have been Stubby after all that I followed. It had to be. Anybody else would have helped us.”
    “So why should you think it wasn’t him?”
    “Just ... the whistling. It didn’t sound like him. ‘The Happy Wanderer’ doesn’t sound like a song that a person like Stubby would know.”
    “Eh!” said Pinky. “He could have heard it on the Musak.”
    “Well, I hope they put him in jail for fifty years,” said Helen, her eyes on one of the football players who was jogging in place. She sketched the player with quick, sure lines, fascinated by the straining, powerful muscles under the endless layers of tape, pads, and out-sized plastic devices stuck under the shoulders of his shirt. The cheerleaders, bright-eyed and squeaky clean, leaping in their heavy white sweaters with red N.B. ’s, urged the crowd to “Gimme an N ! Gimme an E !” As she drew, Helen yelled back to them with Pinky and the rest of the crowd.
    At half time the Fall River band worked its way out of the opposite side of the grandstand playing “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.” They formed a strange pattern at midfield which Helen could not identify until the PA microphone announced it was a diamond and the theme for the half-time entertainment was precious stones.
    “You want a hot dog?” Pinky asked.
    “Yes, sure,” said Helen, and she followed him over the benches, down a set of granite steps, and into the darkness of the stadium’s interior. “Your first football game?” Pinky asked.
    “Yup,” said Helen.
    “Like it?”
    “I do,” she answered. “I didn’t think I would. I hate it on television, and I only came to draw the booster tags, but it’s fun!” Helen did not say I wouldn’t like it nearly so much if you weren’t here with me. She only thought that. They had reached the very back of the crowd that stood in the lines for the hot-dog concession. Pigeons and swallows nested high up in the secret hollows of the stone rafters. Every voice echoed to twice its volume in the cool darkness of the enormous granite arches.
    “Wait here,” shouted Pinky, and he began squeezing between people, working his way to the counter. Helen could see his cowlick bobbing up and down as he got closer to the front. Being with a boy at a football game had always been something she imagined happened to other people, like free trips to Hawaii. It was something that pretty, popular, normal girls did.
    The crowds converged thickly at the tunnels which led back to the grandstand. Helen felt Pinky’s hand close tightly around hers