by Steve Himmer
Whistles blow but don’t mean anything, just a scrap of the wrong T-shirt discovered or an old sneaker. They’re always remnants of some earlier passage, perhaps other children lost on other days, taken by other animals or by their own kind or clothes gladly shed when they were out at play, and none of them point toward the disappearance at hand. Each time a whistle is blown the curtain of searchers stops short, closes in on itself around whomever the sound has come from, and breath is held until someone determines how long the object turned up has been in the woods. Usually it’s a long time, and Martin wonders if whoever lost this sneaker, this shirt, is grown now, moved on, or if their family is still looking somewhere for a body that fits into these clothes that should have been outgrown and forgotten years back.
During that long week he spent alone with Aino, he tried to teach the dog how hide-and-seek works but the overeager canine couldn’t catch on. She always followed him to hide instead of waiting to search, or lay grinning behind his legs when Martin finished counting and opened his eyes. He gave up on hide-and-seek, so instead they just walked. A deep, muddy ditch marked the boundary of his host’s property, but he slid down one sloppy, wet side and scrambled up the other with the help of a low-hanging branch. Aino barked once or twice as if stuck in the bottom, then switchbacked her way up the slope to where Martin waited on top.
On the other side of the ditch, farther into that landscape than he’d walked before, he found a sneaker in the shade of a tree. It was a blue canvas high-top the same as his own, the same red star and white background printed on the inside ankle, but his own star was bright, still shiny, while this one was rubbed almost away. From the toe to the laces the lost shoe had been torn or chewed on by something, and a creeping green vine had grown through a hole in the toe and woven itself into the eyelets and laces, tying the whole shoe to the ground. He stooped to inspect it, not touching, while Aino squatted to mark the territory on which it was found. He held his foot over the sneaker, comparing its size to his own, and the shoe on the ground was an inch or two longer, meant for a foot bigger than his.
For years he has wondered not how the shoe came to be lost in the woods—that’s easy enough to imagine—but how it came to be by itself. It makes sense to lose shoes in a pair: you go swimming and don’t put them back on. Or they’re tied to the frame of your backpack while hiking, waiting to be worn in camp; the knot slips, they fall off, and it’s miles until you notice they’re gone. But a single shoe suggests something else, something darker or dangerous. It suggests something has happened to prevent the shoe being worn.
The searchers walk through what remains of the morning, into a section of forest where tree cover is thin. When Martin crossed the cold asphalt to sit on Gil’s porch, the sun had barely risen over the trees. Now it burns straight overhead, following the back of each person’s neck as if on a pole attached to their shoulders. He’s left the bowl from his breakfast sitting beside Gil’s rocking chair and it’s still half-full of milk. At least, it was until some squirrel or raccoon surely gulped down the rest. He imagines the squirrels from Gil’s yard trying to drag his bowl up their tree, and smiles despite his serious mission.
Mixed in with the footsteps and calls of Jake’s name are the occasional squawks of walkie-talkies, one search party checking in with another to ask if they’ve had any success. Every quarter-hour or so Martin listens to Gil tell Lindon or one of his men no, we haven’t found a sign of the boy, we’re away from the neighborhood and deep in the woods.
In the early afternoon they come to a road that runs parallel to the foot of the hills. On the shoulder are a couple of vans and folding tables stacked with sandwiches and hot coffee and bottles of water bound together in sixes. Searchers in twos and in threes and sometimes alone sit by the side of the road, dangling bare feet down the slope they’ve come up while sweaty boots and socks dry beside them. Very few people are speaking, only the women giving out sandwiches and listing what kinds of meat and condiments they contain, and the sheriff and his deputies mutter over a map with a few other men, drawing out the afternoon’s proposed routes in red pen.
Martin looks around the group for Alison but can’t find her. She would be involved in the search; his earlier doubt seems absurd. She’s not a person who could sit quietly, he tells himself, letting others look for her lost son. She’ll be doing whatever she can.
He tells himself he’s done the right thing by withholding his dreams and the story of his own walk in the woods, that the appearance of two foxes on the edge of the forest at two different times doesn’t mean anything more than the presence of two birds in the sky. He assures himself speaking up would only cause more confusion rather than help anyone find the boy, and would only make him look crazy or stupid or worse.
He sits on the bumper of the town’s one ambulance, and sunlit chrome warms the backs of his legs through his pants. He wishes he was wearing shorts, that he’d taken the time to find some before setting out in the cool morning, but then looks at the legs of some people who did, scratched by brambles and streaked with dry blood, and decides he’d rather be hot.
Of all the sandwiches stacked on aluminum trays and provided for the search party, the nearest Martin can come to a vegetarian option is a layer of turkey thinner than all those around it—perhaps it was the last sandwich made, when ingredients were running out. He peels apart two slices of spongy white bread painted yellow with mustard and pinches off the poultry between finger and thumb. An eager brown Labrador sees what he’s doing and waddles over, then sits so its tail slides back and forth on the ground as it wags. Martin tosses the turkey in an arc toward the dog’s nose, where it disappears with a gulp and the slapping of gums and nothing the least bit like chewing. Sated, the dog turns tail on his spent benefactor and moves away to where other people are eating.
From his perch on the bumper Martin listens to the crowd, following several conversations at once. They’re all about the boy’s disappearance, of course, and the search party’s lack of success. The old woman he stood beside on the square—no longer in her dressing gown—stoops behind a card table and takes charge of a dented silver percolator. She’s speaking to a much younger woman who pulls cling film from plates of brownies and Rice Krispie squares.
“Just because no one’s saying it doesn’t mean we don’t know,” the old woman says, voice as wrinkled and loose as the skin on her throat.
“Oh, Ma, come on. Don’t start about that again.” The daughter rolls her eyes and gazes over her mother’s head as she speaks. “That won’t help anything.”
“Can’t be helped. That’s the point. Scratch takes him and he’s not coming back. That’s how he does.”
The daughter flaps a hand in the air, urging her mother’s voice down, and looks around at the crowd as she does. Then she hisses in what seems to be meant as a whisper, “Ma! Shut up! Don’t talk that way. She could hear you!” Martin looks for Alison, but again doesn’t spot her in the crowd.
The old woman huffs, and her shaking hands bang the percolator back and forth on the table as she tries to secure the lid. “Someone’s got to face facts. We all know what’s going on.”
“For the last time, Ma, enough. I’m not a kid anymore. You can stop making up stories. These woods are enough on their own. And I hope you don’t go on this way in front of the kids when they spend the night. They don’t need bad dreams.”
The mother snorts, and mutters something Martin can’t hear.
A few minutes later, when he throws his paper plate into a gray plastic barrel lashed to the same silver food truck that’s been coming his work site each morning, mother and daughter stand together pouring coffee and offering dessert, the argument over and gone. But Martin, moving through the assembly of faces sometimes familiar but almost all without names, picks up whispers of “Scratch,” as if his passing draws the word out.
They invoke my name so easily but in such soft tones, unwilling to acknowledge what they’re all thinking. They want to give a name to
the cruelty I’ve caused, because that’s easier than accepting the arbitrary loss of a child or an unintended disaster. As long as there’s me to believe in, to blame, atrocities are marginally more gentle to bear.
And it is cruel to secret a child away, I admit, but no more so than the rifles and poisons and traps that cost so many other creatures their young. None of it’s random. None of it’s chance. There’s always the intention of killing, whether you target a specific body or are willing to settle for whichever becomes your victim. You don’t set a trap or spin a web without knowing what the outcome will be. A trap and a web and a rifle all count on one thing. My reasons aren’t any worse than the greedy desire for a wolf’s head on a wall, or the skin of a bear on a floor.
And besides all of that, the boy isn’t dead and won’t be anytime soon. Not by my intention, at least—I didn’t plan for Elmer’s death, either. So let’s put that to one side of the story, and keep up with what the townsfolk are doing.
After lunch the searchers keep searching, but their lines are less rigid, their fanning-out folding in. Martin walks closer to Gil, close enough for them to talk as they move through the trees. Gil pushes branches and brambles aside with the barrel and butt of his gun while Martin fends them off with his hands as much as he can.
“Do you think we’re going to find him?” he asks.
“He’ll turn up. Probably found some shelter. Waiting for us. If he’s a smart kid . . .”
“I think he is.”
“If he’s smart, he’ll sit still. Won’t walk around. More you move when folks’re trying to find you, the longer it’s going to take. Gotta stay in one place. Keep calm and wait for who’s coming to come.”
“But if something was leading him . . . if he was following something, couldn’t he go a lot farther?”
It’s a hot day, and Gil’s cheeks are flushed. His eyes squint as he looks ahead, deeper into the forest. “Don’t get carried away, Marty,” he says, his voice raspy and tired. “He’s not gonna follow once he knows he’s lost. Besides, a fox wouldn’t let him follow that long. No animal would.”
“What if the fox . . . well, wanted to be followed?”
Gil turns his face toward Martin but keeps walking forward. His eyes are pinched and cold. “The hell are you talking about?”
“Nothing.” Martin hangs his head while he speaks, avoiding Gil’s eyes as long as they remain fixed on his face. “It’s just . . . a lot of strange things have been happening, haven’t they? The bear that attacked me, Elmer missing, now Jake?”
“How do you know what’s strange?” Gil’s voice is flat but gruff, as if he’s daring Martin to say something.
“I don’t, I guess, but . . .”
“But what?” Gil lets a spent cigarette drop from his mouth to the trail and grinds it into the mud. It’s still smoking when he pops another one into his mouth.
Martin takes a gulp, and asks, “What if it’s Scratch?”
Gil doesn’t answer as he knocks a branch aside and moves forward. But after a moment he says without looking at Martin, “Keep your eyes on the woods instead of making things up, now, huh?”
Martin kicks at the ground, his blushing face lowered. He tries to remember his dream, to replay it in his head, but the ending won’t come. He sees himself lurking in the backyard, by the swing set, watching the dark windows upstairs. Then the boy pads down to the kitchen, drinks some orange juice from the carton, and comes out through the sliding glass door to the porch. Did the boy in his dream see a man crouched in the grass, and if so, did he recognize him?
Martin tells himself it was only a dream, that any real boy in any real place would scream at a naked man in his yard. Of course he would. That if any of what he saw in his head had been real, if it had any connection beyond coincidence to what’s happening now, he would have known to tell his story. There would be some clearer sign than the coincidence of foxes and a few unusual dreams.
The image of his body crouched in the grass doesn’t feel right to Martin—in the dream he didn’t feel like himself, he didn’t feel human at all. And suddenly he can feel the heaviness of his dream body and the thundering run of its legs. The long, echoing note he sang from the top of a cliff and all the answering voices.
All these details returning make him feel better. When he recalled only the bones of the dream, that he watched the boy enter the yard, it felt so close to the truth Martin worried he might be somehow to blame, even if he couldn’t remember doing anything to the boy. Now that he recalls himself not being human and the other impossible details of the dream, the part of his mind afraid he’d done something, afraid he was somehow involved in all this, is assuaged and the coincidence of his vision feels further away from real life. It doesn’t make enough sense anymore to be believed.
But he still can’t reclaim the end of his dream. Did the boy come down off the porch and sit on the swing? Did he go back inside? Martin thinks he awoke before the moment reached its conclusion but isn’t sure.
They walk without speaking for hours, only calling out the boy’s name and gathering around infrequently blown whistles. In time the search party approaches a bluff, a high, flat rock face they won’t be able to climb without ropes and that Jake couldn’t have scaled by himself. As they step into its long afternoon shadow, Gil’s radio crackles.
“What?” he hollers into it, then listens. “Dawes Bluff. No, we’re just getting here.”
All Martin can make out of the other speaker is static, squawks rising and falling in pitch. Gil talks a few seconds longer then turns the radio off and speaks so the straggling searchers all hear. The party gathers around him. A map is spread out on the ground and held at the corners with stones. Martin takes in the faces of the search party, sweaty and streaked, stained with dark sap and speckled with scraps of leaf, all of them tired and heavy with worry.
“Talked to Lindon,” Gil tells the group. “They aren’t doing any better than we are. It’ll take us ‘til dark to get outta the woods, so we’re gonna head west here. Come out to Pine Street and someone’ll pick us up there, get you all back to your cars.”
A murmur rolls through the crowd, the sighs of bodies allowed to relax despite their worried minds, and the popping of shoulders burdened with worry and failure.
“What about the boy?” someone asks. “He’ll be all alone.”
“We aren’t gonna find him in the dark,” Gil insists. “Don’t have the gear for it. I’m not big on leaving him either, but we can’t find what we can’t see. Staties’ll be looking tonight. We’ll head out again at first light if we have to. Let’s hope we don’t. But we’ll all need rest to keep at it. Get tired and we’ll get lost ourselves.”
The voices aren’t happy, they don’t like his answer, but the bodies know Gil is right and start moving west along the granite face of the bluff. They walk in a clump now, their straight line abandoned. Occasional pleas to the lost boy still ring through the trees until after a few miles even that calling has stopped, and the empty space left by their voices is filled by the chatter of birds and the rattle of leaves and the soft squish of heavy boots on moist ground.
The sky is purple when they emerge from the woods to a row of waiting cars. Their headlights are on, washed over trees still lit by the last trace of sun, and the effect is a double shadow on everything, a world with its edges in motion. The cars aren’t rescue vehicles, but mini-vans and hatchbacks and an avocado green station wagon with wood-veneer panels held on by duct tape. The drivers are townspeople who weren’t out combing the woods and volunteered to pick up those who were.
Gil tells Martin he’ll meet him down at the truck, that he’s going to wait for the sheriff so they can look over the map, and that he should get another ride down the mountain.
Martin watches the face of a woman Alison pointed out once in Claudia’s as the town’s fourth grade teacher. She waits by the open door of her cranberry van. The thick lenses of her glasses exaggerate the moist eyes behind them so her face shimmer
s with twin liquid pools. Her mouth is set in a quivering line.
There’s more coffee, in tall silver urns with brown pumping tops that stand on the hood of one car, and though they’re sweaty and hot each person leaving the woods fills a foam cup and drinks it black. They stand on the road’s shoulder for a few minutes, or lean against the sides of idling cars, waiting for the group to assemble. Then everyone piles into one car or another without speaking. No one pays any attention to who they ride with, or where they are going; away from the woods is enough. They duck through whichever door’s closest and roll down the mountain toward town, to cars and trucks of their own still parked on Alison’s street and toward the beds where they won’t fall asleep easily no matter how tired they are.
Martin gets into the green station wagon and his clammy T-shirt adheres to the vinyl seatback. He can’t find a seatbelt to buckle so gives up looking and clutches a handle at the top of the door as they rattle along, bouncing up and down over a wheel with dead shocks. He cracks his elbow against the armrest three times, and twice jostles the woman beside him, but her eyes are closed and she doesn’t look up. Her body is there in the car but her mind is elsewhere, still out in the woods second-guessing how hard she searched, afraid she could have done more. And also afraid there was nothing she could do that would matter.
17
AT THE BASE OF THE MOUNTAIN WHERE SEARCHING BEGAN, at the edge of a dark neighborhood, Martin waits by Gil’s truck. He watches other cars pull away, their taillights shrinking into the dark, and it isn’t long before he’s alone. There are still a few cars standing by empty, so he assumes another group of searchers is on its way down the mountain and his neighbor will be among them.
On the other side of the fence around Alison’s yard, the swing hangs from its frame, a dead pendulum in a clock no one wound. In the dark, the orange and yellow stripes of the swing set blur into a uniform shade of dull grey.