Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  Last night, Gil told him how important it was to keep hunting, to keep the forest in check. It struck Martin as paranoia or cabin fever, maybe a townie playing it up for a city slicker new to the woods, and he assumes this new warning is more of the same, the imagination of an old man who’s lived alone on the edge of the woods for too long.

  Still, he can’t complain about his new neighbor. When Martin first came to inspect the site, he spotted the single house across the road looking as if it had been there forever, part of the landscape almost, and he anticipated a long, expensive struggle to get his development built. He expected the old-timer to hold out until the price became painful, and to recoup his loss by building additional houses on that side of the street. But before he’d had a chance to approach him, Martin was shocked in a town meeting as Gil spoke up in favor of the construction proposal and told the selectmen he’d be glad to have neighbors. That as long as there would still be room for him to go hunting—only sometimes, because he’s retired, he reminded the crowd, drawing laughs all over the room—then he wouldn’t mind the new houses. And once Gil had spoken, opposition dried up and the permits came through. The town could use some new revenue, it was argued—a bigger tax base was good for them all, so long as they didn’t get pressured for sidewalks and services that might have a place in the city but never out here.

  Martin has imagined, already, what his buyers will say about the sound of Gil’s guns in the woods near their homes. For most of them this forest will be an overgrown city park—a safe space to send their children to play. They’ll hang salt licks in their yards and will watch from the windows as deer approach for a taste. They will shoot them with smartphones rather than rifles or bows. He hopes Gil has thought through what the number of houses, and the types of people most likely to buy them, could mean for town politics. That it won’t erupt into big problems later. Those sidewalks are practically paving themselves even now, and the streetlights sure to be demanded in time may as well sprout from the ground.

  These changes are always a trade-off. If enough trees are cleared, your kind make hunting illegal because the shots come too close to your homes, but if too much of the forest comes down those of us living in it might as well have been shot anyway. It isn’t much of a choice.

  It’s not that I’m against hunting. I survive on it myself. But there are no tools to keep my hands—or paws—clean, and I don’t have any walls to mount trophies on. There’s no one to tell me I can kill this but not that, to draw lines too fine to be seen. Eat or be eaten is a nice theory, but it would be easier to swallow if the balance were between tooth and claw rather than bullet and bone. Some of the shapes I’ve worn at one time or another were slain by your bullets while I was in them, and though it didn’t kill me, the experience isn’t one I recommend.

  Still, there are advantages to wearing a body that takes you along when it dies. There are times I wish I could walk out of this forest and there have been times I tried, but I always end up where I began. There can’t be much I’ve missed in the world, there can’t be much that hasn’t passed through these woods at one time or another, but I get curious from time to time. And the more men like Martin clear this ground for their homes and the homes of others like them, the more often I find myself on the edge of the forest when I’m standing in places once at its heart. I’ve been through this before, the forest creeping back and forth at its edges. It’s the history of this place, that’s this land’s nature, but it happens so much faster these days and there’s no time to adjust. There’s no time to reshape our lives—and never mind our stories—before the next changes come. There may not be enough forest left for me to stay here much longer, whether I want to or not.

  I’ve watched your power lines stretch down mountainsides and carve treeless gullies through forests. First single wires, then three and four side-by-side, then those skeleton pylons veined with black cables that hum and crackle so loudly I can’t hear the world where they run overhead. We learned to avoid them, to plan our routes—when we could—to cross under those wires as rarely as possible, then the air filled with a hum that doesn’t need wires and we hear it wherever we are, filling the forest the way only dreams did when your signals still needed to follow straight lines and avoidable wires. It’s hard not to wonder what’s at the other end of those wires, and it’s harder now not to ask where those signals come from. They’ve made the world seem so much bigger, even as the forest tightens around us.

  2

  AT THE EDGE OF THE FOREST, MARTIN SPIES A LONG ORANGE body slipping through shaggy green grass. It’s the first fox of his life so he gasps, and the animal stops short at the sound and turns yellow eyes toward the man. Martin takes a step forward then waits a few seconds before taking another, but the fox—perhaps late heading home after a night spent in town, running riot in trash cans and amongst the buffets left beneath picnic tables—bolts for the scrub and Martin watches a white brush of tail vanish into the woods.

  The rain has increased from soft mist into hard, stinging drops, but the change has been gradual and he only notices now that he’s still for a moment. He wants to follow the fox; it’s a strange urge, hardly conscious, the way a tongue needs to test a loose tooth, and before he thinks about what he’s doing his feet carry him into the woods. The wet mud of the building site gives way to the crackle of leaves, and cleared ground is overtaken by trees. The forest thickens around him as smoothly as waves swallow shores and glaciers retreat to leave valleys behind, and he pauses just once, to crouch when a glistening white shard of china catches his eye in the mud. It’s part of a plate, not enough to make out the whole pattern but there’s a gilded rim and a design of bell-shaped pink blossoms—they’re twinflowers, but he doesn’t know that—and he can make out only the opening “1” of the date on the back. 19? 18? These fragments look old, but they’ve been in the ground, scoured by stones and soil for who knows how long. They could be ancient or they could have fallen at a picnic in this forest last week, for all Martin knows. So after inspecting them for a moment he rises out of his crouch and hurries in the direction he thinks the fox went, though now the animal is out of his sight.

  The sticky heat and muffled sound remind him of lying in bed when he was eight years old and living in one of many cramped apartments he shared with his mother. He listened to adult voices growing louder in the next room as she fought with the man they were living with then—the one he remembers as only a walrus mustache—and Martin knew that in the morning they would move somewhere else the way they always did after that kind of fight. Despite the dead, city heat in his room, he pulled the bedclothes up over his head until the voices were almost drowned out. Soon he was dripping with sweat so he peeled off his pajamas and pushed them out of the bed, and then pulled the rattling box fan from the window into the tent of his blankets and sheets. Naked and clammy in that mechanical breeze, he sang to himself through the blades of the fan and pretended he was a musical robot instead of a boy beneath a pile of blankets.

  Eventually he fell asleep, and when he woke up the fan was back in the window and his mother had already packed his few things. His small suitcase of clothes stood on the floor with his baseball glove perched upon it. The incomplete series of wilderness adventure books one of his mother’s earlier boyfriends had bought him at a flea market—the one with the green van, perhaps, or the one who got great baseball tickets?—were stacked to one side of the bag. The rising dough scent of his mother hung in the room like an echo and Martin couldn’t tell how long ago she’d been there.

  Now sweat collects in his armpits as he picks his way through dense trees, and without stopping, without breaking the motion of walking, Martin peels off his jacket and ties its sleeves at his waist. A cool breeze wraps itself around his body and he is suddenly cold, shivering and prickled with gooseflesh. He smells what he thinks is himself before placing it as part of the forest, the rich, rotten smell of wet dirt and crushed leaves.

  He thought the clearing back at his t
railer was quiet, but the woods are quieter still despite the crunch of his steps. He listens for rain on the canopy but it isn’t there, and the absence of birdsong is audible—a cliché, a bit of nonsense, but a description no less true for that.

  He’s driven on by a restless desire in his legs and an impulse to follow. Never mind that the fox has slipped out of sight, some mysterious certainty of the creature’s path pulls him behind it. Martin walks through what little remains of the morning, past a rusted old car so deep and so long in the forest a tree has grown up through its hood and pushed the engine apart. Fallen brown leaves lay all over what remains of the car, about the same shade as its rust. Years of wind and weather have piled dirt and branches against its doors, filled its wheel wells with mud and debris and—though Martin can’t see all of this—a crowded nest of squirrels in the trunk and a flattened patch of ground on the far side of the car where a deer bedded down for the night to get out of the wind. The machine has become so much a part of the forest he has to slow down and look twice to be sure it is hiding in there at all.

  He rests against a downed log, blanketed with bright green moss and half-rotted. On its side it is nearly as high as his waist, and younger trees have taken root in its surface, a row of them extending the length of the trunk. Mushrooms and ferns crowd its shadows and the moist, dark soil made rich as the tree comes apart, and though Martin can’t see them, not yet, beetles scurry and worms curve under the log, in the earth—in the dark, loamy world this fallen tree brings to life. A nurse log, I’ve heard your kind call these, but out here in the woods we just call them lives. New lives emerging where old ones are lost, a space cut in the canopy so young trees might grow toward the sky—layers upon layers, time upon time.

  Martin walks into the long afternoon until at last he reaches a crumbling wall of gray stones rising out of the brush. The wall becomes better preserved the longer he walks beside it, as if being raised while he watches. Near the top of a hill it seems to be whole, its stones woven tightly and not torn asunder—as other walls Martin’s spotted have been—by tree roots pushed under and through over the long course of years.

  Then it ends against the foundation of a burnt house, two feet of blackened stone half-buried in leaves. Nothing remains of the timbers the foundation must have at one time supported. There’s a gap in the wall that was once a door, and Martin steps through to the single large room of the house. At one end a hearth stretches from corner to corner with a broad, soot-darkened fireplace in its center. A cast-iron arm still hangs on a hinge, withered by years of rust, a scarred kettle dangling from its hooked end. It strikes him as strange that the kettle and arm should still be here at all rather than rusted away into nothing, but Martin doesn’t know much—nothing, really—about how quickly decay comes in the forest, and he knows little of rust, so he assumes the metal knows what it’s doing. He’s a man who puts buildings up and he’s never paid very much mind to how they come down.

  Exhausted once he stops moving, he first leans against the stones of the foundation then sinks to the thick carpet of leaves piled inside its walls. Shivering, he unties the jacket from his waist and pulls it on over his head. As he catches his breath, he wishes he’d taken a bottle or two of water from the plastic-wrapped case back in his trailer. A lump of thirst clogs his throat and swallowing makes it larger.

  It’s dim in the shell of the house, with the thick shade of trees overhead. Martin wishes he’d brought his phone, or worn his watch, and had some way of knowing what time it is; even if he knew how to read the hour from the sun, it wouldn’t be much help out here in the trees. He walked for hours, but it only feels like a long time now that he’s stopped—the day passed in a blur of rising and falling, valleys and hills, back and forth strokes of fox tail—when he could spot it—decisive as the hand of a clock, and finally this abandoned stone house. His calves quiver with cramps and he raises filthy pant legs to knead the sore muscles beneath. He has no idea where he is, either in relation to his trailer or to the town, and for a second he feels as if he’s been led, as if something—the fox?—wanted to show him this house and drove his legs forward as metal is urged onto a magnet, but the idea evaporates quickly, replaced by the feeling he’s foolish.

  Still, there is something familiar; the ruin resonates. Its calm isolation echoes the house Martin imagines when he pictures the home he might have. This quiet is what he looks for when he paces through empty houses before their owners move in, listening to floorboards he’s the only one walking, inhaling the sterile smell of a never-used shower. He thinks of empty houses as souls awaiting their birth, and life lingers in this burnt-out shell long after its walls came down. It still feels like occupied space.

  One of his mother’s boyfriends—the one with the dog—had three bedrooms and several acres and they stayed with him for a few months. It’s the only actual house Martin has ever lived in, and the first night he lay awake feeling thin as a ghost, behind walls so thick he couldn’t hear the rest of the rooms. The night was so dark on the other side of his window he waited for it to burst through the glass and swallow him whole.

  Later he grew used to the silence, when his mother and her boyfriend went away for a week and left him alone with the dog, a Finnish Spitz named Aino. Sitting on the front steps of the house with Aino beside him, her spiral tail flicking the air as she napped, Martin knew there was traffic a mile away but he couldn’t hear cars or see dust rising over the road. He spoke to the dog a few times that first day, but by the time his mother returned Martin marveled at how quiet he had become and how far time could stretch in a comfortable place. When that boyfriend was gone, after Martin’s mother had steered the two of them away from his house and into their next short-term home, it was Aino he missed, and these three decades later he’s promised himself that once he moves in, once one of these new homes is his, a dog will move into it, too.

  The bones of this house bring him back to that limitless week, to having a house to himself and not trying to fill the whole space. He’s built lofts that swallowed three stories of high-rise buildings, and mansions that could swallow those lofts. He began by carrying boards and sacks of cement when he was in high school, then moved up to hammering nails and framing walls. In time he came to handle the materials and tools less often himself—it wasn’t long, really, before his employers recognized his talents for construction were in paper rather than wood, that his aptitude wasn’t with saw blades but schemes—and spent his time arranging for larger and larger spaces to be walled in. Architects delivered the first two dimensions, the shapes and the lines of a house, then it was left up to Martin to turn those lines into boxes large enough to contain the lives that would happen inside.

  Until this development here in the woods, he spent most of his time in his car, on the phone, driving from one job to another to make sure the people he paid to hang sheetrock and plaster ceilings were doing things how he wanted them done. Long before giving up an apartment so high in the city he couldn’t hear any sound from below, in favor of his trailer amongst the trees, he raised a towering beach house for a man who lived all alone. Before the owner moved in Martin paced through the house with all its wide windows closed but the sound of the surf outside filling the halls. As he followed his echo across each hollow story, his heart sank into his legs and dragged behind him across the waxed floors. He’d made something dead, and it would stay dead no matter how many antiques and empty bedrooms it held. However grand the parties it hosted and rare the wine. He decided to build something different, more than a shell for one lonely soul; he decided to build a whole neighborhood and to stay long enough to see someone move in, to see himself become part of the lives to be lived in the houses he’d made.

  He told his partner about the houses he wanted to build in these woods and was bombarded with the practical questions that he himself, for once, wasn’t willing to ask. He and his partner only started working together because it made sense, not because they were friends or even knew each other awa
y from the shared job sites they’d been on for years. Even now, five years later, they’re still partners on the letterhead only—Martin knows his partner is married but has never met the man’s wife; the partner knows Martin has never been married but not whether he wants to be. So what Martin does with his money, whether he risks all he has on a cluster of houses in some far away town without even a mall or decent restaurant to its name, what business is that of his business partner?

  Martin announced he’d be living on-site for the duration of his pet project, and his partner asked why he couldn’t stay in the city, rely on a foreman the way they usually do and make the occasional visit. But Martin said no, not this time, he would come to the woods. He would see this project from start to finish. He didn’t mention his need to keep these houses from becoming more square feet of death, and his partner agreed to oversee the rest of their projects as long as Martin kept in touch on the phone and came to the office when there was something to sign. Their machines make the distance much shorter, or should, but Martin’s phone has been unreliable on its best days. This forest needs a new cell tower, by Martin’s measure, the way it needed stone walls before. And a bigger, better power grid to handle all those new houses and their new machines, because already the lights flicker in his trailer and he knows there are blackouts at night because the clock on his microwave is so often timeless and flashing when he wakes up.

  On the ground inside the foundation, now that he isn’t moving, Martin’s hunger becomes so acidic it makes him feel sick and he fights the twitch in his throat that always comes before he throws up. With his back against the cold stones, he closes his eyes and breathes deeply, willing his stomach down.

  Wind rushes through trees overhead. Blood thunders behind his ears. As he waits for his legs to stop aching enough to start walking, he tries to imagine a path that will lead him out of the woods but it’s hard to retrace a route he wasn’t paying attention to the first time. After a few minutes his spent body drifts into sleep.