by Steve Himmer
Martin leans down to pull on his socks and boots. He props one foot at a time on the plastic woodgrain of the dashboard while tying the braided brown laces, and he’s pulling the second knot tight as they roar into town, into the jumble of cars and rusty trucks crowding the street on all four sides of the square.
Their concern is impressive, even to me, but Alison is growing too close to Martin. There’s too much potential between them, too much chance she might change his story and undo all I’ve done. That’s why her son had to be taken—it’s not punishment, just pragmatism. A necessary step if I’m going to get Martin where he needs to go. Where I need him to be. And the boy was so easily led, far more than his mother would be. As easily as Martin was, because they both want so badly to trust in the world around them, to believe it is open to them and they are a part of this place. The boy wanted a pet, a companion, and I gave him one in my way. His lonely desire left him open.
I’ve had young of my own—not in this body, but others—so I’m not wholly callous to Alison’s pain. There have been times I kept the same shape for so long that it began to feel like my own. I grew older. I gained and lost weight and hurt myself in ways that left lingering pain and changed how that body moved. I’ve laid eggs and sired fawns and have walked through the night with my every sense tuned toward protecting a passel of hairless, blind opossum joeys clutching my back. I know what it is to be part of something, and then alone, because in the end my young always died, and were gone—even if they lived a full life—while I used up one more shape and went back to drifting through these woods disembodied.
But this isn’t Alison’s story, and it isn’t her son’s, so I couldn’t leave them in the way. I couldn’t let them make Martin whole, which I’m sure you could see was where things were headed. They’ve stumbled into the story, but to no greater extent than the millions of bees killed by phone calls crowding the air, by selfish signals laden with meaningless gossip and chatter yet able to push whole colonies off course to die, are part of those conversations. Sometimes that’s the price of a story worth telling: other lives, other colonies, torn at the seams.
Saying so wouldn’t surprise these men wielding rifles and crowding the cannons on the grass of the square, hollering to be heard above one another and shaking their guns overhead. The scene is absurd but no less dark for it, and it puts Martin in mind of old movies and their torchlit mobs armed with pitchforks pursuing some creature or another across empty fields, less concerned about finding the right monster than willing to settle for any villain at all so as long as there’s something to chase. Looking around at all the guns and angry faces, he isn’t sure the weapons are meant to shoot anything or a convenient way to fill idle hands with iron-clad courage. His own hands feel conspicuously empty and useless, so he shoves them deep into his pockets. He recognizes several members of his construction crew among the crowd, some with rifles and some without.
Alison sits in the long shadow of one black cannon barrel, dry-eyed but dazed, surrounded by Claudia and a number of women he doesn’t know. She looks up for a second in the direction of his gaze, and he forces a smile that he hopes will look caring, not cheery, but she looks down again without any change in her expression. He isn’t sure she’s noticed he’s there, or if he should expect her to under the circumstances.
Sheriff Lindon stands at the center of things, raising his palms to the crowd as he urges, “Calm down, everybody, calm the hell down. We’ve got to get organized here.”
Martin tries to convince himself all this tension is premature, that the boy is simply lost in some part of the woods he’s been walking through and playing in all his life. That he followed a neighborhood dog, a familiar playmate, and will be back before long or will be found a few feet into the forest, safe and sound with some funny story. The worst of it will be missing his breakfast, maybe teasing about getting lost in his own woods. Martin wants to believe that, but he can’t—not because Elmer is already missing, or because of the bear that attacked him and the dread feeling he woke with this morning, but because he knows in his bones and his soul something really is wrong. It’s unscientific, an unfounded hunch; he couldn’t take it to the sheriff or to Gil to be offered as proof any more than he could his strange dreams, still he knows the way he knew by scent those two bodies—our bodies—had been in his bed.
“Terrible,” says a stooped, white-haired woman on Martin’s left. “Just awful.” She’s in what he takes for a robe, sky-blue fabric printed with puckered, darker-blue flowers, and fuzzy, heelless slippers to match. Either she rushed out before getting dressed, or she dresses this way.
“Do you know how it happened?” Martin asks as the growing crowd surges behind him, pushing a knee or a hip into his back and throwing his body off-balance.
The old woman looks into his face with clouded, watery eyes. She’s hunched so far over her neck is almost parallel to the ground, her back a high hump, so her head twists rather than rises to meet his eyes. “He was playing on his swing set. Very early.”
Martin remembers the swing in his dream, how his dream self crouched in the grass and was ready to spring. He feels sick but wills his stomach down.
“What is wrong with boys?” The old woman sniffs, congested or on the verge of tears. “Why don’t you know better?” Her voice drops lower the longer she speaks, until he can make out only the occasional word of her mutter, something to do with staying inside.
Dozens of voices rise and fall in murmuring swells that are almost a rhythm, and Sheriff Lindon stands before the crowd with his hands in the air, offering what are meant to be calming words.
“We need to shoot the son of a bitch,” someone hollers. Martin can’t locate the speaker.
“Who?” someone else asks.
“No one’s shooting anything,” Lindon yells. “There’s nothing to shoot so shut up and listen, now. All you.”
The old woman at Martin’s side says in little more than a whisper, “It’s always happened this way.”
“What has?” Martin asks.
“Folks gone into the woods. Same way when I was a girl. We’d got the tractor, then, and could work more acres than we did with mules. So Pop and the other men expanded their farms, cut back the trees, and we could grow enough extra corn for me to have a new dress for school in the fall. He sold all that extra timber and Ma got a pearl necklace—real pearls!—that first Christmas, and I think Pop beamed bigger than her.”
She keeps talking, but as far as Martin can tell it isn’t about the disappearance of Alison’s son anymore, or about anything else he can follow. He wants to prod her back onto the track of whatever point she was making, but a loud engine roars and car doors slam, cutting the old woman off. Martin picks Gil out near the front of the crowd, arms crossed on his chest and his shirt buttoned now. Lindon stands high on the wheel of one cannon with Alison below him on the ground, and Gil looms beside her with his mouth closed and his eyes on the assembly. The sheriff urges everyone to calm down as he tries to organize groups for a search, but the angry voices grow louder.
At last, Gil climbs onto the other wheel of the cannon, across the barrel from Lindon, and holds up a hand. The voices settle, a little, with the novelty of a new speaker, and Gil talks to them. He doesn’t seem to be raising his voice but his words boom over the square.
“Now then,” he says, as if he’s beginning any old conversation.
Martin watches the rifles and the hands holding them up pause in the air, and all those eyes turn toward his neighbor. He asks himself, for the first time, what it is about Gil—he isn’t the sheriff, he isn’t in charge, but people defer to him. He’s done it himself ever since he arrived. He saw it in town meeting and he’s seeing it now, the way whatever Gil says, whatever direction he gives, supersedes every other as if there no other way things might go.
“Good boy, Gil Rose,” says the old woman. “The old families know how things are.”
Martin asks what she means, but gets no answer. He isn’t
sure she’s heard but he doesn’t ask again.
Gil has the crowd quieted now, and they wait while he jabs a cigarette into his mouth. He lights it then slides both hands into his pockets, and the crowd stays calm through it all, waiting for him to speak.
“What we’ll do,” he says, “is split up. Boy’s gone missing near his house, so we’ll start there. Fred and all you head west from the yard. Leslie and you all from the sawmill go east. Lindon’s boys are checking the houses nearby. I’m going north toward the ridge.”
The crowd pulls apart into clusters of men and guns moving toward cars and trucks around the edge of the square.
“Hold on, now,” Gil says. “I hear he was following something.” He looks down toward Alison who gives a slight nod. Gil reaches down a hand and helps her onto her feet, and asks her to tell everyone what she saw. Her voice is steadier than he anticipates; she looks worried, terrified, and of course she would be, but she sounds in control. She sounds strong.
“I didn’t see much, so I don’t know how much I can help. Just Jake in the yard, looking at this fox we’ve been seeing lately.” Martin’s nausea comes back in force at that revelation, as she goes on. “It came up to him and before I could get out there to chase it off he’d gone along behind it. I got into the woods quick, but . . . I don’t know . . . they were faster, somehow.” She’s engaged in a visible battle to keep from breaking up now, struggling in front of all these people who expect her to come apart and probably feel she has the right to. That she should. “I guess I don’t know what else to tell you. Thank you all for . . . for . . .”
Gil lowers her back to sitting with an arm on her shoulders. “Alright, you heard her,” he says. “Boy’s in the woods. I’m betting he hasn’t gone far. I don’t want to waste any more time here, but don’t you all get worked up and start blasting away out there. Woods’re gonna be full of folks. Be smart, now.”
There are sounds of assent as he steps down from the cannon and the sheriff goes back to talking. Lindon explains the state police are in touch, and are sending a team. The women in the crowd move toward Alison, surround her with comforting hands, and Martin wishes he could be near her, too, but the men are going in other directions. The division of labor strikes him as almost a kind of resignation, as if the town’s women know their time is better spent comforting the mother, the one they can help, rather than searching for the boy who is lost. He lingers at the back of the group around Gil until other men begin moving off and he can step closer. Lindon spreads a map over the curve of one cannon and Gil trace routes through the woods with his fingers. Martin leans in to see what they’re seeing.
“Figure we’ll find him around here,” Gil says as he swipes a bent knuckle across a line of low hills behind the neighborhood where Alison lives. “Probably taking a nap.”
“You don’t think he’ll be hurt?” Martin asks, over their shoulders, and the other men turn, only now seeing he’s there.
“Why would he be hurt?” asks the sheriff.
“He . . . well, if something took him . . .”
“What do you mean ‘took him’?” the sheriff growls. “You heard her, the boy’s followed a goddamn fox.” He looks away, but mutters, “Took him, for fuck’s sake.”
Gil says, “Not everyone bumps into a bear when they take a walk.” Martin feels his face flush and looks down. Lindon laughs, and so do the other men, a darker laugh than he’s heard from these same men talking over the counter in Claudia’s.
Martin doesn’t say anything else as the map is discussed and, in time, folded up. The last men hurry to their vehicles, rev the engines and roll away from the square. Women shuffle in groups toward their own cars and follow the men down the road with Alison somewhere among them. Martin trails Gil to his truck and climbs into the passenger side where a primer-gray door stands out like a storm cloud against the forest-green cab. He rides silently, wanting to press the issue of first Elmer missing, now Alison’s son. He wants to tell Gil about the dreams he’s been having and about the fox he saw on the edge of the woods, but he doesn’t know where to start—there isn’t any one part of his story that would make more sense than the rest, so he doesn’t know how he could tell it without sounding crazy right from the first word.
A long line of vehicles snakes through town, heading east toward the turnoff for Alison’s road, and there are already dozens of people parked and piling out of their cars, tightening laces and pulling on caps, lifting their rifles from rear windshield racks and backseats.
There’s an energy welling up in this town, and in these woods. It’s the charge of aimless fury and helpless rage. Rifles are growing heavier in those calloused hands the longer they wait without something to shoot. Someone to blame for their loss, someone who isn’t part of their world, caught crossing borders along which they’re unwelcome.
They’re flailing against their own loss of control, against the world slipping out of their grip, and we can’t fault them for that. Everything fights when it’s cornered, from beetles to bears. So we’ll need to follow them carefully, keep our distance from all those guns, because getting shot isn’t part of my plans and those men and their guns have grown ravenous. They’ve found an outlet the way their dogs do every night, sneaking away from backyards for the forest, returning raptured and bloody by breakfast, no questions asked because no one wants to know where they’ve been.
16
THE SHERIFF WAITS BESIDE HIS CRUISER AT THE SIDE OF the road, and Gil pulls in behind him to park. A split-rail fence runs between the pavement and a yard Martin recognizes, swing set and all. Faced with the actual site, his hazy dream becomes clearer and his stomach more ill. He looks up from the yard at the house it belongs to, Alison’s house. The porch is where he knows it will be and five steps lead up to it the way he remembers. Above them is the window he watched a small shadow walk past.
Gil swings himself over the fence in one fluid motion. Sheriff Lindon walks around and lets himself in through a gate but Martin lifts one leg over the top rail, and then balances himself with both hands on the head of a post as he hoists the other foot into Alison’s yard.
Gil kneels by the swing set, running his fingers through grass thin enough for dirt to show through at the foot of an orange- and yellow-striped pole. “See here,” he says, and both Martin and Lindon lean down as if he’s talking to them. They nearly bump heads, and Lindon squints out at Martin from under the shadow of his dark blue baseball cap. Martin stands and takes a step back as the sheriff bends over the ground where Gil’s pointing.
“Here’s your fox prints,” Gil says and the sheriff makes a noise that might be agreement. Gil slides the palm of one hand back and forth in the grass, slowly and close to the ground. “Little one, too.”
Martin steps closer to look at the prints, but the sheriff stands and holds the crossbar of the swing set with one hand, blocking Martin’s approach with his back. “Follow those tracks, we’ll find the boy,” Lindon says.
“I figure.” Gil stands up from the ground, brushing dirt and grass from the knees of his pants. “Let’s get along, then.”
He and the sheriff walk toward the fence, and Martin crouches to find the footprints for himself. He sweeps the grass the way he watched Gil do it, but doesn’t see anything resembling a paw in the dark soil around the stripes of the pole. The grass has been recently mown, because there are short, broken blades all over the ground, and the agitation of his sweeping hands stirs up the smell. Whatever the other men saw on this ground remains hidden from him.
“Coming, Marty?” Gil calls from the other side of the fence, and they move toward the road where other searchers stand in groups, waiting to enter the woods.
They pace their way through the trees, spread in a line with a few yards from one person to another so they can always see the next searcher. Gil beats the bushes to Martin’s right and there’s an unfamiliar young woman on his left, pushing branches and thorny switches aside with a ski pole as she walks, a thick braid of brown h
air swinging behind her.
Every face is firmly set, even Gil’s, as if they’re expecting the worst, however casually Gil and the sheriff dismissed his concerns, and how calmly they spoke of the fox prints leading them to the boy. As if they know more than they’re telling, something he’s felt more and more from his neighbor. But, he admits to himself, I know more than I’m telling, too.
He thinks of Alison, pictures her out in these woods, one of the dozens of voices he hears calling, “Jake,” and, “Hello,” and, “Come on out, son.” Or she might be inside somewhere, waiting, too terrified even to look. If he had managed to run away for real when he was a child, if he had remained sitting on that bench in a broken-down park or wandered off even farther, would his mother have knocked aside trash barrels and light posts to find him, plowed her way through the neighborhood calling his name? Or would she have waited while the sirens and shouting grew louder and darkness fell, figuring he’d come back in time to pack for their next move?
His mind is far away, his eyes set on the past instead of the forest around him, until he trips on a loose stone and comes down hard on his face. Pushing himself up with both hands on the wet, spongy ground, he hears the woman searching beside him ask if he’s alright, then Gil says, “Careful, Marty, look where you’re going,” from the other direction. There’s blood trickling from his nose and he feels his lip swelling into a bruise to match those on his chest. He gets to his feet, keeps walking with a handkerchief pressed to his face, and the bleeding stops before long.
The line of bodies weaves through the woods. There isn’t much conversation, but the calls of the search drift between trees on the wind. It’s hot beneath the canopy, humid where the ground they move over is wet and sometimes swampy. Streaks of sunlight slip down from above as thin branches crackle with a sound nearly the same as all those feet crunching over dead leaves and downed sticks, or paper balled in a fist.