Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  Martin nearly stood up from his chair when the man ended his conversation and set down the phone. He nearly crossed the width of two tables between them and approached the body hunched over a fan of papers covering the Chinese zodiac placemat beneath. When the man sighed Martin recognized the intonations—a subordinate not taking care of a project, or a contact giving him a hard time; something not getting done the way it needs to be done and the realization you’ll have to step up and take care of it yourself, assume the awkward position of being the hard guy. He heard the man’s sigh as a wish to have no one above or below him, no one else to rely on or relying on you.

  It was the sigh that kept him from standing. It was the sigh that would not let him speak. He knew, in that soft rush of breath and the brief droop of the eyes that came with it, that this man had no need for a son whether he’d ever had one or not. No need for another life laying claim to his own, another voice to make him nervous about using his own. He understood the stranger so well that he knew the disruption his question would cause. He knew that the slight, absurd chance this man could be his father, the slim possibility that a random diner in a Chinese restaurant could somehow be related to him, wasn’t enough to destroy the man’s careful routines and the delicate scaffolding he had no doubt constructed around all sides of his life.

  Who was he to overwrite this anonymous man’s lifelong story?

  Martin’s maybe-father set his phone down on top of the papers, hoisted the last bites of lunch to his lips with careful chopsticks, and dropped a single large bill at the side of his plate. He packed his papers into a briefcase and checked his watch, dabbed his mouth with a napkin then folded it on top of the table. He squinted as he walked outside into the sun and turned left. Martin watched him cross three full-length windows between the restaurant’s door and the edge of the building, a tall, bulging body half-hidden by Chinese characters painted backwards on glass.

  Then the man melted into the city, into the millions of men who might be Martin’s father, any number of whom might have wondered what became of that woman they slept with once or perhaps a few times, the willowy blonde with the S-shaped scar on the ridge of one eye. They may have wondered where the scar came from, or recalled an explanation she’d given—a game of tag and a branch that hung low, not looking where she was going—or she might not have crossed their minds ever again.

  He doubted it had ever occurred to his father, or to any of them, that she might have a son and they might, too. That their child, now grown, sat over cold soup in an emptied-out restaurant, lingering late at his lunch, wondering what they wondered about, all those men he didn’t know. All those men who are his father.

  He gave up the search for good after slurping down that bowl of cold soup, after watching a man he didn’t know talk on the phone and walk away. The disruption to both of their lives, had his father been found, seemed too great to surmount, too much to reconcile, and somehow a betrayal of his mother’s wishes.

  If she’d wanted him to know, she would have told him.

  She would have filled in his whole birth certificate, or listed a name on his Emergency Contact cards when he was in school. Instead she left those spaces and so many others blank all his life, and those blank spaces left room for him to build the life he has made. Because that’s the nature of spaces—they need to be filled. If a niche is created something learns how it’s best occupied. There were larger bears once, in these woods—grizzlies alongside the smaller black bears like the one Martin met—and he’s lucky for that. But the smaller bears devoured the forest more easily, fed more widely and quickly and efficiently until their larger cousins moved on. And now those black bears, like so many others who live in these woods, have found the niches and cracks in the town—the dumpster always overflowing with food, the gardens so easily raided. The dead air of conversation waiting to be rent by a bark or a howl, and the lives so easily entered and bent.

  Gil’s third sausage is still on the grill, crusted with char, and when one round end finally bursts it sprays hot juice onto Martin’s arm. “Shit!” he cries out, leaping up and waving his arm, then he collects himself and fishes a can of beer from the pool of melted ice in the cooler between his chair and Gil’s as if that’s all he’d stood for in the first place. He holds the cold can against his burnt arm, and when he looks over to see why his neighbor hasn’t said anything in response to all that, he discovers the old man is asleep. Gil’s head has drooped forward, his eyes are closed, and the tiny orange nub of a cigarette pokes from between his chapped lips. He’s snoring, but only softly, more softly than Martin would have imagined.

  He reaches toward Gil’s face and tries to pull away the cigarette. But the ember is too short to get a grip on without burning his fingers or pinching Gil’s lip, and when he tries the old man’s mouth opens with a loud snort and the ember falls to the porch. Martin grinds it into the boards with the toe of his shoe, and then opens the beer that’s been cooling his arm and drinks most of it in one go.

  A few minutes later, after extinguishing the gas flames of the grill and leaving Gil asleep on the porch, he crosses the street and soon falls asleep in his own bed, with the window at the back of the trailer open between him and us. His dream self feels our hot breath slipping in through the screen from our panting snouts and dry tongues. His dream self knows where we are, what we are, but doesn’t tell his bound, slumbering body as he wanders into the woods once again.

  14

  IT TAKES A FEW STEPS TO GET USED TO THE WAY HIS OWN body moves. He bumps against trees with his shoulders and trips on oversized feet before deciding to move on all fours. The motion is instantly natural. Peepers sing his way through the forest, fireflies light a path, and he knows without knowing what everything is and where everyone’s going and what they will do when they arrive. All the creatures and plants of the forest are doing what they know to do, and this strange Martin is moving among them.

  When he pushes at the ground there’s a thunder he’s never known, a power that swells to his shoulders and shivers his hips. He feels that he could, if he wanted to, punch his hands into the ground and fell every tree in the forest with the rumbling vibration of that impact. He lets his body gain speed as it rolls through the woods. The surer he becomes of these unknown legs the faster he lets them run, the longer the strides they may take. Smaller shadows and shapes scuttle out of his way. Squirrels dash up trees, birds hide their heads under wings, even crickets fall quiet as he passes.

  As quiet as they become, stone still as they hold, he knows where each one of them is. He smells every junco and chipmunk and fox, every lichen and fern and touch-me-not bursting up through dead leaves on his trail. His nose knows the difference between a skunk cabbage half-furled and one a single day past its prime, between a stump claimed by a wolf and one marked by a mere family dog.

  His breathing gets heavy and hot and he hangs his mouth open so his tongue rolls out to swing in the air as he runs. A breeze rills the ridge of his back, and seized by an urge he can’t explain or control he drops to one side in a patch of soft brush, rolls onto his shoulders and writhes so the ends of his body sway over green velvet leaves and overnight dew soaks into his skin.

  Then he’s up again and he’s rumbling, plowing into saplings because he knows that he can, that they’ll give but not break as they bend to his will and his weight.

  It’s miles and hours of running until the trees thin, until he stands on a ledge where the moon hangs mere feet from his face. He sits on his haunches and roars, but his is an inexperienced, unconfident roar that is more of a moan. And though they are not wont to do so, not without the influence of the strange, daylight dreams that I’ve woken them from, Martin’s call—the wild sound of this version of him—is answered by other animals on other ledges, atop other hills in this forest.

  Buoyed by these answers he wasn’t expecting, by these nocturnal harmonies to his low tone, he fills his lungs to near-bursting and lets the roar swirl up his throat once again,
his song spiraling into the air so much surer this time, so much louder, a voice that knows what it’s saying and knows it is being heard.

  Then his body is off down the ridge, running again toward the lights of back porches and the high fences of yards. Toward spotlights shining up from the grass of the square, casting their beams at the black iron cannons and the vacant flagpole that rises between them, its empty line clanging and echoing across the dark town. Toward the neon flickering Closed in the window of Claudia’s Café where a few hours from now the town will ingest its eggs and digest its morning news.

  And they will have news to digest.

  He slides past white picket fences and stone walls without mortar, past night-blooming flowers that fill his nose with their scent and beehives abuzz with soft sleeping songs that hum from the trees where they hang.

  This body, this Martin, climbs over a fence—only posts, only rails, no barrier to a body like his—and into a yard, a long rectangle rolling away from a house where all windows are dark. A child-sized bicycle lies on its side beneath the back porch. A blue vinyl swimming pool mourns summer already, collapsed and deflated in a patch of dead grass with a visible tear. Beneath a striped crossbar a single swing sways with its chains creaking, and the rest of the world holds its breath. There’s no reason the swing should be moving, no wind in the air and the weight of no body upon it, no reason for such a cinematic cliché except that this is Martin’s dream and sometimes clichés are how he sees the world.

  He lies down in the grass now, tired. His chest heaves and his tongue stretches to its limit out the side of his mouth, a dowsing rod searching for water. He lies in the dark with mosquitoes and flies colonizing his back, with dew soaking his legs, until a fine orange thread is pulled through the sky where night is so loosely sewn to the ground. The seam starts to fray, the backdrop shows through, and a round edge of sun appears over the hills to the east.

  A light comes on in the house, a window is suddenly flooded, and a shadow hardly shows as it crosses the low edge of the sill. Then bare, padding feet—too quiet for Martin’s usual hearing but thunder in tonight’s ears—make their creeping way down the stairs and through the kitchen where bed-sweaty skin squeaks on linoleum in need of wax. The glass door slides open a few steps above on the porch, sheer white curtains are pushed to one side, and the shape of a man—only smaller—stands in silhouette between the house and the yard, between asleep and a dream or the town and the woods or whatever you would like these two poles to be. This yard is the border between them.

  A Martin of sorts, an out-of-sorts body, crouches close to the grass where moisture melts into air. He lingers on the ground near the swing that sways empty and waits for the body in the house to come closer. Its scent has already reached him, and the rising heat of its furless shape already coils up his nose, stirring a new kind of hunger from deep within.

  15

  HE WAKES SLOWLY THIS MORNING, AND IN HIS HALF-SLEEP feels the tickle of warmth like a fly so he swats at the sun on his face. The smack brings him into the world and the first thing he knows is how sore he is, then how clammy and sticky with sweat. A sheet tangles his ankles and it takes his fingers to free them.

  The small window above his bed is cranked open, and a spider has laced a fresh web across the gap of the frame and its extended glass. A brown bead of a body huddles at the web’s center, eight long legs tucked under itself like some innocent flotsam caught on the wind. She’ll wait all day for something else to get stuck, then her legs will unfurl and she’ll cross the strands of her web as if they are air. All she needs is something edible to spring the trap.

  Martin knows something has happened since he went to sleep. He’s awoken aware the world is different somehow, that it isn’t good, and he lingers in bed for as long as he can to avoid finding out where this feeling of dread has come from. But quickly the sardine can of his trailer is too hot to bear, the air-conditioning off so he could sleep in a breeze that came with the night. So he switches off the alarm before it has sounded and he takes a shower, gets dressed, and brings a bowl of cereal to the front steps on bare feet.

  The hills look the same as the previous morning. The mud hasn’t changed, and the building site hasn’t grown its trees back or filled in the holes to be homes. Gil’s house is still on the other side of the road, across pavement cratered with potholes still unpatched so long past the spring thaw.

  Gil waves from his porch, still sitting where he fell asleep. Martin crosses the street with his bowl of breakfast in hand. The old man rocks in his chair, wearing the same grease-stained pants and heavy brown boots, the same thin white T-shirt over coppery arms. His lap holds a paper plate piled with sausage and eggs, and the grill is fired up again with the metal sheet sizzling upon it. Martin can’t tell if Gil has moved from the chair at all since last night, or only reached out as far as the food and the fire he keeps close at hand.

  They sit on the porch eating breakfast, and watch the occasional car. “Got that cat into the deep freeze,” Gil says. “Never tried mountain lion before. Pretty good, though.”

  Martin nods over his bowl with a mouth full of cereal and milk. He slurps and Gil snaps into his sausage. A skinny gray squirrel skitters headfirst down a porch column flaked with paint. Its tail curls and waves while it searches for food and assesses the threat of these men.

  “Git,” Gil grunts through his breakfast, and the squirrel turns mid-climb to vanish over the eave and back onto the roof. Martin follows the footsteps by ear as it rushes up the slope of the porch then jumps to the low-hanging branch of an oak. An acorn shakes loose, thumps onto the shingles and rolls over the gutter down into the overgrown yard.

  “Oughta mow that,” Gil says, the same way he did two days ago, and two days before that. Martin’s never had a yard he was responsible for mowing himself, but he thinks Gil’s grass can go a bit longer before it looks too bad.

  He still feels uneasy, convinced something is wrong, but the longer he sits over his cereal talking to Gil, the more that ill feeling fades. Until a few minutes later when the howl of a siren comes over the trees between the house and the road into town, quickly followed by the sheriff’s car pulling up. The siren winds down but the blue lights keep flashing.

  “Gil,” the sheriff pants, out of breath over his gut as if he’s been running instead of driving a car. The other words are swallowed by his gasps but the point of the message is clear and Gil is already standing.

  He scoops a flannel shirt from the floor by his chair and pulls it onto his arms. “What happened, Lindon?”

  The sheriff’s breath is coming back to him now as Martin and Gil walk down the steps to the yard. “A kid’s gone missing in town.” He pauses, closes his eyes and his chest swells with a deep breath. “Followed some fucking animal.”

  “Who?” Martin asks, but his question is lost as Gil asks what kind of animal it was.

  “Don’t know. It’s Jake Hasper’s son, right out of his own goddamn yard.” The name doesn’t mean much to Martin at first. Jake, Jr. must have his father’s surname instead of Alison’s, at least to the sheriff, and a lump swells in his throat. He pictures Alison’s son alone in the woods, that skinny body from breakfast mauled by a bear or something else, and he hopes the boy is just wandering scared. It seems a benevolent wish for a child to simply be lost in the woods, under these circumstances, after all Martin has seen in recent days.

  Gil’s bent down in the grass tying his shoe but he stops and looks up. “You don’t know what the animal was?”

  “No, but whatever it was, he followed it.” Martin almost asks how they know, but holds his tongue, remembering every other exchange—or lack thereof—he’s had with the sheriff. “We’re gettin’ a search party up on the square. Want a ride?”

  “I’ll come in my truck. Gun’s in it already.”

  Martin crosses the street to get his boots from the trailer, then comes back to climb into the cab beside Gil without being asked. Without being told. His boots and s
ocks are still in his hands as the old truck grinds to life and careens out of the yard to the road, the three-tiered gun rack rattling against the window behind his head. He hopes that this search will be more successful than the last one, and won’t require guns—he hopes the boy will be found without incident, and without blood.

  Gil’s shirt is open and flapping, the flannel so faded it looks inside out. “Son of a bitch,” he mumbles while holding a pack of cigarettes up to his mouth, letting the truck and the road shake one loose at the top. It’s all either of them says while they ride.

  Martin is more surprised to not be surprised by news of the boy’s disappearance than he is by the news itself. It’s almost dejà vu but more real, more certain, as if he already knew this had happened. He can’t remember the dream he woke from clearly enough to know how close it was to waking life, but the confirmation of his earlier, ambiguous dread and the strange, violent events of recent days are enough to make him afraid for the boy, and for his mother, too. Without the attack by a bear and without Elmer gone missing—and without his strange dreams—Jake wandering off would be scary, but with all that’s been going on it could be much worse.

  Gil takes both hands off the wheel for a second. One holds the cellophaned packet of cigarettes and the other stabs at the broken plastic knob of the lighter until it sinks into the dashboard. It’s not long enough for anything to go wrong, but in the time while no one is driving Martin thinks he can feel the truck slipping toward the edge of the road. The lighter pops out of the dashboard and Gil reaches for it without looking. The orange glow reflects on his face, and when the hot metal coils connect with his cigarette, the cab fills with the scent of it burning. Smoke swirls up Martin’s nose, and he feels a sneeze coming, but stifles it for a reason he can’t explain as Gil stares ahead at the road.