by Steve Himmer
10
MARTIN SITS ATOP THE TALL CHAIR IN FRONT OF HIS DRAFTING table and rolls it back and forth with his feet. He’s eating a bowl of miso soup made from paste and drinking a bottle of water, thinking about the dead mountain lion he helped hang on a chain in Gil’s barn, slouched like an old overcoat on a rack. He went home when Gil parted the first bright red meat from skin and bone, when the animal stopped looking so much like itself.
The cat’s face comes back to him now, the white triangle of its chest clouding red in the seconds after Gil’s shot. Its eyes swelling wide and its lower jaw slack. His mind floods with the choreography of the animal’s death, the way its shoulders slumped forward and how the body pitched to one side. The lower jaw struck the ground hard enough for Martin to hear the rattle of teeth. A long, pink tongue hung out one side of the mouth, a sharp tooth driven up through it by the weight of the body’s collapse. Dark blood spilled over the cat’s lower lip and ran down its jowl in twin streams.
The cat goes on rising and falling in Martin’s head, a short, silent film in a loop. He closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose, and tries to drive the image away. He doesn’t know when he began pinching the bridge of his nose, or how long he’s relied on the gesture. It doesn’t feel familiar, but perhaps he’s been doing it all his life and has only noticed now.
As he slurps the last strains of soup from his mug, his tongue catches on the rough point of a tooth and he tastes the rusty flavor of his own blood. He’s sure the jagged tip wasn’t there yesterday, or even this morning, and he pictures the miniature landscape of his mouth, the tiny ridges and gorges on top of a molar, a microcosmic mirror of the hills around his new home. He had a cavity a couple years back that seemed able to swallow the tip of his tongue, but when the dentist held up the extracted wisdom tooth between two bloody fingers the hole was little more than a pinprick.
He runs a finger over the sharpened tooth, still slippery with soup. Though the mysterious dimensions inside his mouth make it hard to be sure, this canine feels higher than its complement in the opposite jaw. Perhaps it broke off without his being aware, leaving an isolated point like a tower and the illusion of increased height.
There’s a show about dung beetles wrapping up on TV, and then one begins about birds—Arctic terns and their long, homeward treks, from pole to pole twice a year. The narrator calmly announces through the crackle of lousy reception how many birds die every season for the sake of getting back to where they began.
Martin spreads his map across the drafting table again, and works out where he and Gil went on their drive to Elmer’s. The house isn’t there, only a side road that looks on paper to end at no place, so he sketches it in complete with power lines and notations about the damage to the bedroom inside and backdoor. He guesses at the path they took through Elmer’s yard, and adds hash marks to show the cornfield with a darkened swathe where he and Gil crossed it. The map shows the woods but not the clearing, so he draws in a rough circle and labels where the cat fell, where Gil fired his gun. He goes back to the cornfield to indicate where they found the first tuft of fur, then scans across the page to his own building site, and marks the clean white paper that stands in for brown, muddy ground to show where they dug up the bones.
With these new annotations and the others he’s added, the clean sky of his map has grown clouded as pencil marks begin crowding the bolder black lines of printer’s ink. The ink still dominates, Martin’s plans still shine through, but the space is becoming a squeeze.
Evening has fallen quickly outside, sneaking up as it does in these last days of summer, and fireflies speckle the air. Martin steps to the trailer’s collapsible stairs with a steaming mug of tea in his hand. The air is quiet and cool with the calm of a storm approaching; he hears thunder on the other side of the hills long before swathes of deep purple appear over their peaks. He sits on the top step and sips tea until the first raindrops fall, pinging the metal roof of his home and churning a tempest in his mug as the deluge picks up. The fireflies are gone now to wherever they go in the rain, and with the moon blanketed in thick, smoky clouds the only light is what slips through the blinds of his window and across the wet ground in thin strips.
He sits as the rain comes down harder, soaking his hair and tracing the lines of his face. Razor-blade lightning slices the sky, and Martin counts Mississippis before thunderclaps rattle the frame of his trailer and shake the stairs under his feet. He counts ten before the first boom, and he tries to remember if that means the storm is ten miles off or if each second counted represents half a mile and the storm is twice as close. He’s still trying to decide when the next jag splits the dark, and thunder comes six seconds after.
He’d like to know why Mississippi: is it only the length of the word, or a chant learned from people missing that state? The prayers of stranded travelers reminding themselves between flash and boom what they had to live for and where they had to return, a prayer adopted by the rest of the country for reasons lost to history’s swirl. Should we all find our own prayer for living, our own lightning counter, and what would his be if we did?
Each bolt bursts the trees into green silhouette, long enough for him to register the rippling of leaves, the shaking of branches and white towers of birch at the edge of the woods. He wonders where animals go when it storms, and pictures the bear huddled inside the fireplace as he was, ducked out of the rain. What does a bear make of thunder and lightning? Is it the end of the world every time a storm comes? Or does instinct assure them that this, too, will pass and they’ll be back to routine by the morning?
Aino, the dog he spent that still week with, always ran to a particular closet at the first boom of thunder and curled in a deep corner until the whole storm had passed. She found a quiet spot to wait out the storm the way homeowners are advised to huddle in their cellars when a tornado comes.
Emptied of tea and set on the step beside him, his chipped enamel mug refills quickly with rain. He knows he could go into the trailer, stay dry, but the pounding on the roof is so much worse than wet taps on his face—the metallic echo inside is a headache waiting to happen—so he stays where he is on the steps. It only takes a few minutes for dark streams of water to streak across his building site and down the soft slope to the road. Raindrops bounce off the bulldozer’s roof, a rush of eruptions on its yellow steel surface, and the teacup churns beside Martin.
He tries again to measure the distance between himself and the storm, opting for half-mile increments, but the thunder arrives before he gets to one, so close overhead it shakes the bones in his body. The echo bounces back and forth through the valley for several long seconds, so loud he imagines it might go on for years, that the town could get used to the permanent reverberation of a long-ago storm, even become a tourist destination for its strange, ceaseless sound the way some places offer spots in the road where cars seem to be rolling uphill. But soon the rumbling echo dies down, making room for the next thunderclap.
He hardly notices wet clothes plastered to him, his T-shirt transparent in places and his bare feet half-buried in mud at the foot of the stairs. He’s lost track of time, of how long he’s been sitting outside, and now the storm seems to be slowing. Rain tapers off until it leaves only a shower light enough for the burnt odor of ozone to rise through the air. Lightning flashes move into the distance on the other side of the trailer and far past the site, and the time between flash and bang increases with every set. The moon pokes its head out from under cloud blankets, a pale thumbnail over the hills, and fireflies emerge from their shelters to flit through the trees and gossip about the storm they’ve just seen. To speak in a language washed clean the way only thunder and lightning can do, the exhausted words taking on bright new life when faced with something so everyday, but so hard to explain all the same.
Now that the world is quiet again, Martin finds himself thinking of Alison, of his botched attempts to talk to her about something other than work. He wants to tell someone what happened w
ith Gil, about Elmer’s wrecked home and the dead mountain lion, and Alison is the first person who comes to mind. She’s the only person he has had a real conversation with since he arrived, apart from his neighbor, and even those have been about the construction more often than anything else.
Buoyed by the reemergence of bugs and bats, and the many soft noises of nighttime, by the miniature spring that blossoms at the end of each summer storm, Martin forgets where he is and slips his phone from his pocket. There’s a signal, for once, perhaps the air is electric after the storm and the whole world has become his antenna, so he scrolls to and dials Alison’s number. Three rings come and go and by the fourth ring he’s back in junior high school with his friends, daring each other to call girls they know vaguely from class but with nothing to say if and when those girls answer—summoning the nerve to pick up the phone was the thing, to make the connection, reach out—the conversation merely incidental.
It’s late. She might be asleep, or she might be reaching for the phone in the dark and pulling it to her head on a pillow. There’s a faint chirp on the line that could be someone saying hello; Martin opens his mouth but his phone beeps three times to signal its lost connection, then falls silent as every call made from his trailer has done.
Embarrassed, he stands on the bottom step and stretches his back, and he feels—or thinks he feels—the whole of his foundationless home shift on the softened muddy ground with his weight. Then he climbs back inside and peels off wet clothes that have become claustrophobic and cloying now that the deluge has stopped, and he slings them over the side of the shower before sliding his sore body into its bed, where he falls asleep too quickly to feel himself drifting off.
11
HIS DREAM SELF IS BACK IN THE WOODS, BACK BEHIND GIL on the trail toward the clearing where they ran into the lion. He follows the hunter’s broad back and orange cap ever deeper into the bush, ducking and weaving through branches and vines. He opens his mouth to say something, to ask some urgent question, but what comes isn’t his voice: it’s a soft growl, a rattle in the back of his throat, and rather than answer Gil turns with the gun held out before him, his eyes flicking over the trees.
Martin hasn’t been seen. He’s following at a distance, carving his own path through the scrub, parallel to the trail.
After swinging the rifle back and forth a few times, Gil adjusts his hat and keeps walking, and Martin draws even off to one side. He doesn’t know why he’s trailing the hunter but the urge is too strong to resist; his legs drive themselves, on footsteps softer and surer than if he was in control.
At last Gil enters the clearing and discovers the tattered green sleeve of the shirt as he did in waking life a few hours before. Martin moves in a circle around the old man, close to the edge of the trees but unseen, creeping sideways and close to the ground. His body feels dense, coiled, and another growl rolls unbidden up the back of his throat.
Gil starts at the sound, balancing himself on one knee with the rifle aimed at the trees, zeroing in on the source. The top button of his black-and-white checkered jacket is open, and Martin eyes the pale triangle of flesh between the collar of Gil’s shirt and his red, ruddy chin—the stubble-specked stretch of his throat where it floats a few inches over the gun.
In the shadowed forest Gil’s neck is a beacon, a lighthouse at sea, and the desire to pounce quivers in Martin’s feet as he rocks forward and back on the ground. He crouches, legs tight, arms digging for traction in the packed earth. His body shuffles sideways, still coiled, until the gun is aimed where he was and not where he is and Gil’s throat pools like milk against an emerald backdrop of leaves. Martin swings his full weight to his heels then hurls forward so it lifts him into the air. His familiar yet foreign body erupts into the clearing.
He and Gil move in slow motion—the short flight from the bushes into the light, the gun barrel swinging around. The world is frozen with him in mid-air, and Martin hears the scuttle of beetles under the brush and the rustle of bird feathers high overhead. His ears pick up twelve distinct tones in the wind, a complexity he’s never noticed before, and he smells what Gil had for dinner, his soap, the cigarettes that cling to his fingers and the unopened package in his shirt pocket. The urine trail of a sick opossum passed through the clearing hours before.
He hangs in the air a long time, sorting the forest into finer and finer detail, his head buzzing with the conversations of bees and the worries of bats and the desperation of a young vole caught in the shadow of a circling hawk. And Gil crouches before him, rifle swung halfway around, his pulse resounding in Martin’s newly-sensitive ears.
In his dreams I can make Martin more than he is. I can lead him to do more than he expects of himself. His body feels bigger, more powerful, and he’s willing to use it in ways he wouldn’t dream of in waking life. Where would he summon the strength to attack anyone the way he’s dreamt of pouncing on Gil? If he could be that powerful in his own life, if he could drag that strength out into daylight instead of shaking it from his head when he wakes, he could take command of his world the way he wishes he would.
Not that opportunity is any guarantee of success. Look at how little Elmer Tully accomplished when I finally gave him the chance to escape he’d always longed for.
Martin isn’t yet ready for what he’s been offered. Even in a dream he fears his own strength, and wills himself awake before sinking his teeth into the old hunter’s neck. His body runs with sweat and the sheets have been kicked to the floor. The trailer is dark in the minutes before dawn, until his eyes adjust to the world rippling around him. Nothing looks as solid as it did a few hours before. He’s been jerked from sleep so abruptly his body feels unfamiliar—the way it felt in his dream. Heavier, somehow, the same shape with more mass.
He drags himself out of bed and into the shower. His chest and sides are still stained with bruises, but when he peels off the grayed bandages the cuts look almost inconsequential. They’re five thin, parallel lines, capped by ridges of red and yellow scabs, and hardly seem the result of such a dangerous encounter. He expected more obvious damage from an animal’s claws—infections and swelling and scars—but these are no worse to his eye than slices from a sheet of clean paper. If not for the more visible evidence of his dark bruises, and the pain in his ribs each time he stretches or twists, his body might hardly know it was attacked. He’s glad now that Gil talked him out of finding a doctor, because the lasting injury hardly seems worth the awkward explanations he could have been asked to repeat to one professional after another. Like this town and its residents, the longer Martin is left to his own explanations, the longer he’s cut off from any outside opinion, the easier it becomes to rely on a localized sense of how the world works.
That the cuts from the bear aren’t any worse is surprising, but he’s willing to believe it’s a fluke; perhaps the bear deemed him unappetizing. He’s more concerned with the dreams he’s been having and how they’re following him into waking life. It takes longer and longer each time he wakes to sort out what’s happening here, happening now, from what went on while he slept. Sometimes, when he’s not paying attention, it’s easy to think of the bear that attacked him and the mountain lion Gil shot as vivid dream fragments rather than concrete events.
After a shower and fresh bandages, Martin examines his sharp tooth in the mirror. It doesn’t look broken, so maybe the sharpness was there all along and only seems more pronounced now that he’s noticed, or there could be a cut on his tongue making it more sensitive to the edge of the tooth.
With untied boots flapping their laces, he walks outside to his car. He needs to restock his groceries in town, and he needs to make a few calls, but he’s going to start by having breakfast with the morning crowd at Claudia’s, if only to hear the sound of other voices after so many hours spent by himself.
12
THE SUN ARCHES ORANGE OVER THE HILLS AS MARTIN DRIVES into town. The high grass between the road and woods glistens with last night’s rain. He doesn’t se
e another car for the first couple miles, until at last a truck slides by in the other direction as he rolls up to the grassy town square. Near the peaked bandstand where teenagers smoke and the occasional vagabond curls up for the night, twin iron cannons point to the east and the west, aimed up into the mountains. Outside Claudia’s, two-toned pickups and sedans gnawed by rust—cars old enough to still be made of metal—crowd the small parking lot. Martin recognizes Alison’s SUV and pulls in beside it.
There’s a lull in conversation when he enters the restaurant, whether because of him or one of those passing silences that slide through a crowded place every so often. The world seems sharp this morning: every sound more distinct, every aroma more nuanced, and the busy dining room overwhelms him for the first seconds after he enters. The sudden quiet may have been his senses skipping a beat.
All of the stools along the counter are taken and there isn’t a booth to be had, so he stands with his heel propping the door open, close to turning around and going home to find something else for his breakfast. There’s a rhythm beneath the dining room chaos, the scrape of forks against plates and glass syrup carafes sliding back and forth on slick tables; the patter of heavy boots worn on feet made jittery by too much coffee too fast. The pop of a plastic jam packet seems louder than all the room’s conversations, and Martin feels his dream senses still with him, hearing and smelling more than he can take in.
“Mr. Blaskett,” Alison calls from a booth in the corner where she sits with a straw-haired boy who’s all angles and bones. “We’ve got room for you.” She seems to be smiling, but it’s hard to be sure through the smoky haze of the diner.