Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  The men park in the mud along the edge of the road, and Alison walks toward them, leaving Martin behind by the trailer. He watches as she speaks and gestures to the crew, giving instructions or telling a story, but he can’t make out what she’s saying over the chaos of further arrivals.

  A shiny silver food truck parks on the soft shoulder, and its wall swings open in a burst of white steam. The crew crowds around to buy coffee, cigarettes, and pastries with no particular flavor. Construction on this scale doesn’t take place in these parts too often, so there isn’t much need for such a truck, but when one of the local farmers heard Martin’s plans in town meeting he took out a loan and bought it. He’s hoping this development will lead to more building in the near future, and his glistening steel gamble will pay for itself the way his farm hasn’t in so many years, the way his ancestors supplemented their farming with maple syrup and logging and furs, the way some of his neighbors craft handmade authentic antiques in their barns after dark and the way their grandfathers did, too.

  The men mill around in the mud, smoking over foam cups of coffee. They greet Martin with nods and grunts and the occasional word, polite but impersonal. He tells the first few good morning, then tilts his head to the rest, suddenly exhausted and struggling to keep his eyes open. He was flush with adrenaline when he walked out of the woods but he’s coming down fast and all of his aches are turning to throbs and his clarity is becoming a cloud. The cuts sting again, Gil’s ointment and whiskey both wearing off, and he absentmindedly holds the buttons of his shirt away from his chest as if it’s the pressure of the fabric causing him pain. The skin he kept dry in the shower didn’t get washed, and now that the rest of his body is clean the itching in that area has grown even worse.

  He feels every bruise as a weight on his body, as a tightness under his ribs, and he stretches his arms up behind his head to expand his lungs and relieve the pressure. He doesn’t feel like himself; he’s aware of muscles he doesn’t recall being aware of before, only noticing them now because they’re so sore. His head swirls with the flotsam and jetsam of exhaustion, images and phrases rising to the surface of his mind without order or purpose, as if they aren’t coming from Martin at all but are bubbling up from somewhere else.

  His struggle may sound familiar, his mind and his body at odds for control. That’s probably about how you’re feeling right now in your borrowed coyote, pestering you with its canine urges and heightened senses. Wearing a new body is always a change. It takes time to get the sense of your shape.

  A long time ago, before even the oldest tree rings in this forest had formed and the great-grandparents of today’s oldest trunks hadn’t grown, I had no shape at all. I hadn’t yet learned I could take one as I drifted across the still unseeded ground.

  Drifted isn’t quite right—that sounds as if I was moving and I never moved, I never came and never went, because without a body to limit my range I was everywhere in these woods all at once. I occupied no space so I wasn’t limited by the size I took up in the world. I watched the first saplings grow, and the first humming insects rattle their wings before lifting off into the air, and I wondered how it must feel to be one of them. So I squeezed myself into the hard-shelled shape of a beetle and suddenly the world became smaller. After knowing everything there was to know in these woods, the grand scope of time and the intricacies of how each life and death fit together with every other from one year to the next, I became a finite, miniscule part. And I was shocked at how complicated the world can appear from that angle—I’d expected the opposite, that the confines of a limited life would be boring, constrictive, but the forest was as rich through the eyes of a beetle as it had ever been when I could see the whole world at once.

  I didn’t stay in that first insect body for long; the compression of my consciousness was too shocking. But over time, across what you might measure out in millennia, I became more adept. I wasn’t as startled by how the world shifted from species to species. I grew used to having a body, any body, and it’s been ages now since I spent very much time in the shapelessness of myself.

  I knew, before, what all the animals and trees in these woods were thinking, but I knew it the way you know the sky is up there and the ground is down here; I took all those momentary lives and flickering thoughts for granted, but when I put myself into that beetle—and the oak trees and foxes that followed—each individual life in the forest became a story I needed to know. And I needed to know each of them in their own voice. I’ve had a long time to listen to the stories of creatures you may not know ever existed. And that collection is the closest thing I have to a tale of my own—all those borrowed shapes and borrowed stories, one after the other, lives piled upon lives, almost add up to a shape that is mine.

  6

  MARTIN MET ALISON OVER BREAKFAST, AT CLAUDIA’S CAFÉ near the town square. It was a few months ago, when he was in town to grease some permits through the appropriate hands and take another walk over the site before tying up any loose ends in the city and moving into his trailer. More urgently, he’d just learned the man hired to be his foreman, on the recommendation of a contractor he’d worked with before, would now be in jail for the next couple of years. He had to find someone else as soon as he could because there wasn’t much time before tree felling was set to begin.

  He had passed by Claudia’s without stopping on previous visits, in his car and on foot as he crossed the square, but this time he went in. He took the corner booth by the windows, its table still sticky with residue from an earlier diner, and he spread sheets of construction plans over a strawberry smudge while awaiting his order of eggs Benedict, hold the Canadian bacon. Despite his aversion to eating meat, Martin has never given up eggs; it’s a slippery boundary he’s drawn for himself, but one he observes as if it were fixed.

  Before his meal arrived at the table, he daydreamed about the future homes of his development, how he would landscape the yards with Japanese maples and single mimosas where acres of oak, ash, and birch currently stood. He made notes in the margins of the bright white plans unrolled on the table before him. Then a woman with graying blonde hair, spiked as the stubble of a cornfield in winter, warm in that same cold way, sat down across the table from him. She looked to be about his own age, in her late thirties, and her tanned face was weathered in a way she wore well.

  “Hello?” he asked, jarred from his stroll through imaginary houses and across unseeded lawns.

  “You’re building on Fisher Trail,” she said, and there wasn’t any hint of it being a question.

  He confirmed that yes, he was planning to build there, and he rolled the top edge of the plans toward himself with the fingertips of both hands.

  “Scott Robbins was going to be your foreman. And now he can’t.”

  Martin leaned back against the vinyl cushion of his seat and slid the sheets of paper toward himself. “I guess word went around fast.”

  “It’s a small town. Have you got a new foreman yet?” The window to her right flared with the changing angle of the sun coming over the hills, and she squinted the eye on that side so Martin thought of a pirate.

  “No . . . well, no.”

  She introduced herself as Alison Evans, and reached a ropy forearm across the sticky table and said she wanted to run his project for him. Her hand hung between them for a second before Martin took it and felt its rough calluses against the smooth skin of his own palm, unsure if that handshake was an introduction or an agreement or both. They sat without speaking, Martin pinned in his seat by her insistent, expectant blue eyes.

  Before he had answered her question, Claudia—the restaurant’s only waitress—brought his plate over and set it down at the far edge of the table where it wasn’t on top of the plans. Two hazy poached eggs swam in a bright sea of Hollandaise sauce, and he could see the reflected motion of the ceiling fan in its yellow surface.

  He made a common mistake that morning, assuming Claudia the waitress is the woman the café is named for. It’s a coinciden
ce, or at least a fluke: the owner’s name is Bruce Barlow, the brick house of a man in a dainty white apron perpetually hunched over the grill in the kitchen. The original Claudia had been his grandmother, and the establishment’s founder, so when Claudia the waitress applied for the job, he thought it was too good to pass up.

  Claudia the waitress smiled so her glasses rose high on her red face. “Hittin’ him up for a job already, Alison?”

  “Do what I have to.”

  “That’s the truth. How’s your boy?”

  “Excited for his birthday.”

  “What’s he now, nine?”

  “Ten.”

  Claudia turned back to Martin and asked, “Get you anything else, hon? Ketchup?”

  “No, thank you, I’m fine.” He rolled the plans and slipped a rubber band over the end before standing them against the back of his seat. Claudia went on to the next table and Martin pulled his plate close. He salted his eggs without tasting them.

  “So?” Alison asked. Her elbows stood on the table, and her hands wound together above the speckled pink surface. “What’ll I need to do to get this job?”

  Martin looked up as he lifted the first bite of egg and English muffin into his mouth. He chewed as slowly as he could, an excuse to think before giving an answer. He noticed Alison’s fingers without a ring or a line where one had been lately, and thought of the son his waitress had mentioned. “Are you . . . have you got experience?” he asked.

  “Much as anyone around here. More than Scott Robbins.” She smiled, and her face grew in all directions. “And I don’t drink as much, either, so I won’t be going to jail.”

  “Look, I’m not from here. But you probably know that. So I need someone who knows the area, someone who can get a crew together and keep them on target. Someone they’ll listen to.”

  “I’ve worked with everyone around here you’ll need for your houses.” She leaned closer, eyes tight, and the way her arms angled into each other on the table as if wrestling themselves, or waiting for Martin’s own hand to enter the fray.

  “I’ve never had a woman in charge before.”

  “Hell, I’ve never been in charge before. But it’s like I said: I’ve worked with everyone, and I’ve been on every job in three towns for years. I figure it’s time. I’m licensed. I’ve had a license for years, for whenever the chance came to use it.” She knotted her fingers more tightly then relaxed them a bit. “My son’s getting older.”

  “Don’t take it the wrong way, but do you think it’ll be a problem? You being a woman, you know, running the crew?” Even as he asked he knew it was naive—the unwavering stare of Alison’s eyes was enough to tell him she could keep anybody in line.

  “Ask around. I won’t have any trouble.”

  Martin did ask, and her reputation was solid—well-liked, local, from an old family, and she’d learned the building trade from her father who’d raised many of the more recent homes in this town and some others nearby. Later, after Alison had already begun working for him, Martin learned from Gil about an incident three summers ago in a bar one town over, a place called The Antlers. A welder drinking with some of his friends suggested a little too loudly that Alison give up construction and bake him some cookies instead. He lost three teeth and Alison gained a grudging respect, overwriting whatever stories might have been told about her with one of her own.

  He still doesn’t know much more about her than that, as often as he’s tried to engage in the small talk at which neither of them is adept. He knows her son, Jake, Jr., is the biggest thing in her life, but he doesn’t know where or who Jake, Sr. is. He knows she’s getting work done for him, has the ground cleared for digging almost on schedule, and that the rain delays can’t be blamed on her. And he knows that apart from Gil she’s the person in town he’s talked to the most.

  Now Martin watches from the steps of his trailer as Alison sets the crew to work for the day, preparing to dig the first foundations. She moves among the men the way Gil walked in Martin’s dream, pushing the world out of her way without trying. He watches her stir sugar into a foam cup beside the quilted steel wall of the food truck, lit up orange with sun coming over the forest, then he ducks back into his trailer and pulls the door closed. He rolls a tall stool to the drafting table-cum-dining room at one end of the trailer and hunches over plans held flat by a square of tape at each corner. With an index finger he traces the lines of the first house they’re going to build, on the lot where ground is about to be broken. Then he pulls another tight tube of paper from the rack on his wall and spreads it over the first.

  It’s a map of the area around the site, the town and the roads and the woods, at a larger scale than the house plans. He’s been using this to think about where a cell tower might best be placed, to serve the houses of his development and the rest of the town; he’d thought near the highest point of the forest would make sense, but he’s waiting for the specialists he’s hired to figure it out. Not that they’ll make sense of it, either, because whatever tools they haul into these woods, whatever measurements are made and tests taken won’t tell them it’s more than radio waves and electricity that run through the trees. The stories and voices and dreams carry signals as strong as any antennae might bring so they’re all erasing and overriding each other so nothing gets through any more.

  Nothing but me, and the story I’m telling.

  Martin’s map shows the irregular shape he has cleared from the forest and the sure, straight lines of foundations to come. It shows the road there is now, between his land and Gil’s, and it shows the road and branching driveways he’ll pave to the door of each house. It even shows where, at the edge of the road, the draftsman assumed Martin would want a sign to announce the development’s name, but there isn’t going to be any sign. And there won’t be a name for these houses, either, apart from the names of each family in them. He doesn’t want to make more of them being new than he must, as if they grew from this ground over time same as the trees and the ad hoc architecture of Gil’s own family home on the other side of the road.

  Martin follows lines with his finger as he tries to determine where he entered the woods yesterday. He thought the ridge he followed led north but on paper it arcs in a west to east frown. There’s no trace on the page of the stone wall he followed or the foundation where he spent the night. Yesterday, he trusted this map: it showed him the forest, the work site, the town, but after his night in the woods, after the fox and the bear and the blood, the map shows so little and seems so ordinary.

  He estimates—guesses, really—where he came out of the forest this morning based on how he remembers approaching the road. He pencils in the box of his trailer to help, as rectangular as the foundations are shown but the lines have less weight in lead rather than ink, drawn in by his hand and not by a machine. Then he works backward, thinking of where the sun was as he walked away from the attack, how the land rose and fell, and he decides where the foundation must be then sketches it, too. Then the stone wall, which is more speculation than measurement, as he tries to reconstruct his route through yesterday’s long afternoon all the way back to where he entered the woods from the site.

  He marks, more or less (and it is mostly less), where he might have found the fragments of china, and where he thinks the rusted car was. He’s not sure why these things matter, if they’re only his overtired mind latching on, but it seems important right now to mark these things down, so in the foundation he thickens one wall where the fireplace is and marks an X where the bear attack came.

  An X, and he thinks of crossed bones, of how much worse it could have been, and the tiredness that ebbed as he manically mapped comes washing back over his body.

  Martin yawns over the paper; his night of restless, uncomfortable sleep and rude awakening at the claws of a bear are catching up with him at last. He yawns again, and a tiny birdcall of a moan leaks from his lungs as his bandaged chest expands against the edge of the desk. He folds his arms on top of the paper, letting the unt
aped top sheet curl at the edges until it bumps into him on each side, then he lowers his head to the cradle of an elbow and in seconds he is asleep, mouth open and drooling onto the map.

  Outside the trailer the crew goes on working, checking and re-checking measured marks on the ground and waiting for the excavator operator to arrive on the site. Alison unrolls a sheet of plans identical to the ones on Martin’s desk across the hood of her car, and pins it flat with both hands. Her eyes trace the lines that will grow into walls and double-glazed windows meant to keep the forest at bay—to stand fast between the bodies inside these eventual houses and the bodies we’re wearing right now.

  Let’s move before the digging begins—those yellow machines will be roaring and rumbling and shaking the ground before long, and as long as I’ve been watching the behavior of humans your machines still make me nervous. We’ll stake out a space beneath Martin’s trailer from which we can see without being seen.

  I can see you growing more comfortable in that borrowed body. You don’t seem to be battling your legs when we walk. You may yet find yourself rolling in clover or going nose-deep in mud, giving in to the urges that come with your form, and there’s no reason to fight it. No reason you shouldn’t enjoy this respite from your own shape—it won’t last very long, in the grand scheme of it all, and when you’ve gone back to looking more like yourself you might cling to the vague memory of being a coyote as if it was only a dream you once had, a dream like the one Martin is having right now.

  7

  HIS BODY DOESN’T FEEL LIKE HIS OWN.

  It doesn’t move when he says to, not right away: the brain tells the left leg to lift for a step and it happens a split-second later, an actor out of synch with his lines. There’s too long a delay between command and response for him to feel in control.