by Steve Himmer
He hasn’t any idea what time it is, or how long it will be until his employees arrive at the construction site to start work. He only knows it’s early enough for the angle of sun to be low, curling between narrow trunks instead of raining down through the leaves, but late enough for light to have risen over the mountains to reach into these woods.
On shaky limbs, Martin lifts himself onto his hands and knees. The motion makes him keenly aware of the soreness his body has already begun taking for granted, his body’s new normal for now, and he pauses in that position a long time before forcing himself to move on.
At last he rises and balances with one hand on the foundation wall. His stomach grumbles and growls, filling his mouth with rotten air, as hot and dry coming out as the bear’s breath was going in. He steps through what once was a door and staggers into the woods, then turns in slow circles as he considers all the directions he has to choose from. Which way to walk, which way did he come, which way is it back to the road? He knows the rising sun is in the east, so the stone wall heads away to the south, but neither of those details is helpful because he’s not sure where he is in relation to where he began.
He wishes for the straight lines of overhead wires, something he knew he could follow and where it could lead. He wishes he’d brought his phone with its online maps and GPS; even the robotic voice that reads him directions would be a comfort right now. But he knows the phone would be a useless black lump—he can’t connect when he’s in town, or on the wide open space of the building site at the edge of the woods, so he’d never get a signal out here.
Not the kind he’s after, at least. Not the kind of signal that might make his phone work. The forest is full of the signals of stories and dreams, humming and buzzing and bouncing off trees, passed from one head to another, though never along the straight trajectories of power lines. They’re a wireless mesh for a wireless world, and that’s why they’re becoming so tangled these days with your own buzz and hum, the dreams of a bear warped by and also warping a phone call about what? About dinner or money or nothing at all, when it pushes its way through the woods but doesn’t get through. So Martin has taken to leaving his phone in the car, after years in which the device was rarely out of his pocket or hand, because all those other voices spilling out of the trees mean he has to drive around town until he finds a spot where his phone can connect.
His stomach turns over again. He’s so hungry his knees actually shake, which he thought only happened in cartoons, so he pulls his leather belt tighter in hopes that other cartoon truth will hold, too. Then he walks, not beside the stone wall he followed to get here but toward the sun, stumbling along on what may or may not be a trail.
He walks with one hand up under his shirt, its palm spread over the gouges made by the bear’s claws. Gently he tests the cuts with his fingers and they don’t feel deep—they’re painful, they’re bleeding, but as much as he winces at the attempt he can’t push a fingertip in very far. Already the blood seems to be slowing. The pain in his muscles and bones is far worse than the cuts. His chest is darkening purple, and even the ordinary expansion of each breath he draws strains against his sore ribs.
He steels himself for a long walk on an empty stomach and, even worse, without water, now that his tongue is too thick for his mouth.
How long will it be before anyone sets out to find him, or even realizes he’s gone? The crew should arrive on the site around eight o’clock, and they might notice if he doesn’t emerge from his trailer. But they might think he’s off to the city on business if they don’t spot his car parked across the street beside Gil’s, or they might think he’s working inside. The crew he’s hired know what to do, they’ve got their orders and they’ve got a good leade in Alison to make sure it gets done, so there’s no reason they’d need him this morning. Perhaps the trailer door he left open will invite someone to look; perhaps Alison will poke her head through with something to tell him and see he isn’t there and that will be enough to draw her concern.
He can already tell the day will be hot. He’s sweating first thing in the morning, still sticky from yesterday’s walk, and gnats swarm the back of his neck. The mosquitoes go on biting in these first hours after sunrise, getting in their last nips before they retire for the day, and though he feels every jab, he’s too tired to smack them away.
Something Gil told him over beers on the porch floats up through the murk of his mind. Martin missed most of the story, because by this point in the evening his neighbor’s insistence they match each other drink for drink had him hanging onto the sides of his chair. Gil had been talking about the war, his war, the way he has several times since Martin began spending long nights on the porch over drinks. It’s embarrassing, but he doesn’t know which war Gil was actually in; he must have missed that in the first story or else it was never revealed, and now it’s too late to ask. The details always seem interchangeable from one place to another, Korea or Vietnam or even Europe, and without knowing how old his neighbor actually is, he can’t even guess. There was a swamp in the story, and soldiers holding painfully still while black flies and mosquitoes and other insects nobody could name chewed their skin. He thinks they were waiting to spring an ambush, but isn’t sure if that’s what Gil actually said or if his memory is filling in blanks. Gil’s point in telling the story hadn’t been clear—was he trying to say something about being steadfast, refusing to bend despite bodily pain, or was it just that the world can be dangerous in miniature, too? So often Gil’s war stories come so late at night, or else so deep in the very small hours of morning after a long night of drink, that something never quite comes across.
Martin has only been walking for a short time when he sees several thin, flat stones standing over the brush at the side of his makeshift trail. He draws closer, and discovers a small plateau, squared into a short drop-off on three sides but approachable up a shallow slope on the other. And he finds that those stones aren’t just any stones but tombstones laid out in five rows. The stones nearest the slope are worn smooth, whatever names or dates they once held wiped away, but each following row seems slightly newer though no more legible than the first, except for the final row on which the words are at least visible where moss has grown into the etched shapes of the letters, whatever those letters might be.
On another morning, a morning on which he hadn’t been attacked by a bear, he might stop and study these stones. He might spend more time thinking about how they’ve come to be here, deep in the forest—as far as he knows—and far from any road. He might make a connection between these grave markers, these generations of death and stories erased along with their names, and the abandoned home he discovered. He might ask how the oldest stones came to be at the front, and where the next generation of dead might have gone.
But today, on this morning, an overgrown cemetery lost in the woods is one more strange thing on a very strange day, and wonder is no match for pain, so Martin urges himself to keep walking in the direction he thinks will lead home.
Before long the canopy thins and the trees spread apart. The ground levels off and the trail becomes more apparent, then all at once he breaks through the edge of the forest and finds himself back on the site. It’s the opposite end of the clearing from where he entered the woods, behind his trailer and close to the road. He still doesn’t know the hour but is glad to see the trucks and tools lying idle the way he left them, glad there’s no one to see him emerge in this state, stumbling toward the road. The black band of asphalt is several inches higher than the muddy ground beside it, as if pavement came as an afterthought to this part of the world and was only laid down a few hours ago.
All that walking to go in a circle—he might never have entered the forest at all, if not for the proof bleeding under what’s left of his shirt. The wounds across his bruised chest have begun to scab with a crust that is sticky against his fingertips. Martin walks toward his car, toward his GPS-equipped phone already waiting in its dashboard mount, and he hopes it will fin
d enough bandwidth to guide him to the nearest emergency room. He hopes because he doesn’t yet realize the purest signal of his whole life has just been received, transmitting the first true story he’s ever been told.
4
AS MARTIN STUMBLES TOWARD HIS CAR GIL CALLS FROM THE porch, “What’s got you out and about so early?”
Martin looks up at his neighbor’s wrinkled red face looming over the railing. He doesn’t answer the greeting, too shocked at this first real proof he remains in the world of the living despite the attack, as if the remembered weight on his chest pins his tongue, too.
Martin wobbles on his feet and falls to his knees near the far edge of the road, and Gil rushes to wrap an arm around his shoulders and help him sit on the lowest of the porch’s three steps. He squints at the torn fabric and dried blood on the younger man’s chest and asks, “The hell happened to you?”
Martin stretches his legs across dry, brown grass and his body falls back onto the steps. He breathes, nothing else, for a long time.
“A bear,” he answers at last. The word sounds absurd, meaningless—the idea he was attacked by a bear doesn’t seem possible now that he’s back among humans. It’s as absurd as the notion that announcing the name of his attacker will describe what actually happened.
Gil raises an eyebrow. “A bear did this?” He pulls apart the torn flaps of the jacket, exposing the cuts, and exhales with a sharp whistle. “Christ, it was a bear. Where?”
Martin doesn’t say more as Gil probes the cuts with rough, steady fingers, spreading the gashes open enough for them to start bleeding again, but slightly. “Not too deep,” he says. “You’re lucky. Bear could’ve killed you if he’d wanted to. But we’ll have you patched up in no time.”
Before Martin can ask where the hospital is, Gil has rushed into the house and left him staring at the plank ceiling over the porch, struggling to keep his eyes open. He hadn’t been thinking about the cuts, overshadowed as they were by the bruises and aches, but now that they’re open again they sting worse than before. Gil’s ministrations have broken the first layers of scabbing, and with each rise and fall of Martin’s chest the remaining crust pulls at fine hairs near the wounds.
Gil returns with a rusty red box marked with a white cross, a bowl of hot water, and bottle of supermarket-brand whiskey. Martin smells him coming before he appears, the burnt meat and cigarettes of an old man who has lived alone for a long time. He doesn’t know if Gil has ever been married, if he has grown children in town or someplace else or if he has any family at all. All he knows is that this is the house Gil grew up in and he’s alone in it now, rambling through its rooms and alcoves and barn by himself. He tries to imagine his neighbor, stubborn and strange as he is, sharing a space with anyone else, and he struggles to see it.
“Show me that scrape. Take your shirt off.”
Martin sits up. “Shouldn’t we go to the hospital?”
“No need. I’ve dressed worse than this in the woods. Besides, Marty, those cuts’re ugly, not deep. They’ll look better when we get ‘em cleaned up.”
Martin lifts his jacket and shirt together, but when he tries to drag them over his head he winces and groans from the pain in his shoulders and back. He has to let the other man pull them the rest of the way. When the bruises are uncovered Gil asks, “Hell, what’d he do, stand on you?”
“Pretty much.” Martin tries to force a small laugh but the pain is too much.
“You look like a damn eggplant. Lemme check your ribs.” Gil feels up one side of Martin’s chest then down the other with firm but reassuring pressure. He seems to know what he’s doing. After repeating the procedure on Martin’s back, he says, “Nothing broken, you lucky bastard. Claws’d gone deeper you’d be in trouble. Wouldn’t have made it back here, never mind a hospital. That bear had weighed more, he would’ve crushed your lungs. Or your heart. But he wasn’t lookin’ to kill you, so you’ll be okay.”
“I really think I need a doctor. What if it’s infected?”
Gil steadies Martin’s body with a tight grip on one shoulder as he peers at the wounds from close up. “You don’t need a doctor.”
“But . . .”
“Hey,” Gil snaps, “how many bear attacks have you seen? How many claw wounds have you dressed? ‘Cause I’ve seen a few and I’m saying you don’t need to go anywhere.”
Shocked by the sudden insistence, by the change in Gil’s voice, Martin closes his eyes as damp, early air prickles his bare chest and arms. It feels colder on the exposed cuts than anywhere else, as if the wind is creeping inside his body through those crevasses, brushing against tender parts of himself that hide under his skin and away from the elements.
“Right. So let me take care of this.”
Martin knows a hospital is where you go when you’re injured, for car accidents and burns and attacks by a bear. He knows, though he’s never made use of the knowledge in a life of good health and near misses. But he doesn’t have the energy to argue right now and lying across the steps of Gil’s porch is the most comfortable place he’s ever been as far as he remembers right now, so he’s easily dissuaded from getting up.
Gil unscrews the cap from the whiskey and holds out the bottle. “Drink.”
“Not yet . . . maybe water?”
“Drink. It’ll calm you down. Dull the pain.” Gil presses the lip of the bottle against Martin’s mouth until he gives in and takes a sip. The whiskey burns in his throat and empty stomach, and he thinks he’ll throw up again.
“There. That wasn’t so bad.” Gil takes the whiskey back and draws a long drink himself. He wipes his mouth with the back of one hand and sets down the bottle, leaving it open. “I’ve seen fellas get bullets pulled out with nothing more than a drink, so it’ll do for your scratches.”
He slides drugstore glasses from a shirt pocket and fits them onto his red, swollen nose. A wad of grayed tape where the rubber pads should be balances them on the bridge. Gil leans close to Martin, his face almost touching the parallel cuts, and says, “Well.”
He opens the first aid kit and pulls out a brown plastic bottle of strong-smelling soap, then cleans the cuts with a hot cloth. His scrubbing is so vigorous that pain flares across Martin’s bruised body and he fights an urge to cry out. Gil washes and rinses the wounds several times before drying them at last with a second white towel. Then he fishes a creased metal tube of unlabeled ointment out of the box.
“You’ll live,” he says. “I’ve had worse in the kitchen.”
Martin doesn’t believe this, but the rasp of calloused fingertips over his skin is comforting in a strange way. His mind flashes to an afternoon spent with his mother’s father when he was young, not long before his grandfather died. Martin had been in kindergarten, or it was earlier, maybe, but he remembers riding high on a shoulder as they walked down the street. The thin white hair on his grandfather’s head was combed across the chapped, red scalp below. Gil has his grandfather’s eyebrows, snowdrifts piled in wind.
“What happened?” Gil asks as he squeezes some ointment onto a cotton swab with a long wooden stem. “Where’d you run into a bear?”
“I don’t . . . in the woods, there was an old house. A foundation. Somewhere that way.” Martin waves his arm in the vague direction of where he emerged from the woods. He feels the strain of even that minor movement in every one of his ribs.
“The Pelletier homestead. Your land used to be theirs.”
Martin winces as Gil digs the head of the swab into his chest.
“Hang in there. You want those cuts to be clean. What were you doing out there so early, anyway?”
Martin says he got lost on his walk and slept in the foundation, and Gil laughs. “I’ll make a hunter of you yet—already tangling with bears and sleeping rough. And you call yourself a city boy.”
Gil drops the swab on the porch and rattles his fingers in the first aid kit. “Saw your door open last night. Figured you were hot in that sardine can and wanted the breeze. Wondered why you d
idn’t come over.” His hand emerges with a thick roll of gauze bound by a red elastic, and a small pair of surgical scissors.
“Shouldn’t I get stitches?” Martin asks as Gil unrolls the bandage.
“Never sew a claw wound. Traps the germs in the cut and you’ll get an infection. You want to get some air in it. Anyway, I told you, they aren’t deep.” He spools gauze across the slashes on Martin’s chest, then around his back and across them again.
“Why is that house in the woods, anyway?”
“Pelletiers had a farm there, long before my time. Used to be clear ground but the woods’ve grown back since they pulled out. Lots of folks gave up harvesting rocks for mill jobs back then. All those stone walls in the woods used to be around pastures. Folks talk about the woods getting smaller, but that’s not the case here. It’s been growing back since before I was born.”
The cold steel of scissors against Martin’s chest makes him twitch. Gil clamps a hand on his shoulder and tells him, “Hold still.” Gauze sticks to the reopened wounds, and dark red lines with yellow edges well up through each white strip. Gil wraps until he’s covered all five cuts and gone over them tightly a couple of times.
I remember the family Gil’s talking about, the Pelletiers, and so many families the same—they came here and pulled pastures from under the forest, and laid their stone walls around them. Their pigs broke loose constantly, fattening themselves on acorns and beech same as the dogs of today’s town gorge themselves on the birds that fall bloody and burnt beneath the high power lines. But those families, those settlers, were never quite settled. They were always talking about where they’d come from, Ireland and England and sometimes Quebec, or they talked about where they were going, where the ground might be softer, the soil more rich. Neither one sounded real to me, only the wishful thoughts of homesick farmers suspended between one dream and another. The dreams of an animal too long in hibernation.