Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  Martin climbs into the bed of the truck to wait. He’s noticed before the tailgate is always lowered, and now he discovers the hinges are rusted and stuck in place; it’s been a long time since the gate could swing shut. He stretches his body across the ridged steel of the bed with his head at the open end, raised slightly by the tailgate’s low angle. He yawns and looks up to find the stars as clear as he’s ever seen them, emerging in ones and twos as the evening grows darker. Right now, after sunset but before night really falls, before the moon gets higher, there’s no other light source to wash the stars out and the blurred streak of the Milky Way and a pink dot he suspects is a planet are vivid far off.

  He knows how to find the main constellations, Orion and the twins and both dippers, and he knows there’s a bear around the larger one though he can’t quite pin down its shape. His guesses at the North Star are often right. But his stargazing is all stories and shapes, not a navigational tool. He couldn’t follow their map unless the sky realigned in a long blinking arrow with his name sparkling bright in the center. It’s something he’s always wanted to learn—not where the stars are, but where they tell him to go—and stretched in the bed of Gil’s truck he promises himself once again that he will.

  He picks out a single red star and knows from a staticky mention by a TV weatherman the night before it’s Antares. As August trails into September, he said, the star becomes bright and hangs at the scorpion’s heart, but Martin can’t find the shape of the body or even its claws.

  After walking all day, his legs cramped up as soon as his body fell still, first in the car and now in the back of the truck. He bends one knee at a time to his chest, trying to limber them up, and his joints and vertebrae crackle and pop their complaints. He unlaces his boots and pulls them off, letting them drop with a clang at his side, then rolls two sweaty socks down past his toes. Steam rises from his feet and their skin prickles as it dries in the cool evening air. His ankles are webbed with pink creases where his socks bunched up in his boots, and he rubs them smooth with both hands.

  An airplane passes high overhead, visible as a row of blinking red lights and the shadowy line of a wing. All those people up and out of the world, some on their way and some going home. Planes overhead still make him feel the way he did as a boy waiting for his mother in the long hours of night—apprehensive but eager, excited for the arrival but holding his breath until it actually happens, in case something goes wrong in the final seconds of the approach.

  His vision is hemmed in by the walls of the bed, and he stares into the sky while sinking toward sleep. Suddenly, there are noises near the truck—the swishing of footsteps through grass, the rattle of fence rails when the weight of a body leans on them. He holds his breath, his first instinct to hide, then wills himself upright to find out what he hears but still can’t convince his body to move. There’s a long exhalation followed by a sad sniffle, and the fearful moment is broken—the sounds are distinctly human, and distinctly distressed.

  He rises into a sitting position, startling Alison where she leans on the fence. She gasps a loud, “Oh,” and takes a step backward into her yard. “Martin,” she sighs, coming forward again. “I didn’t see you.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” He stands and stretches in the back of the truck, and for a moment he towers over the road and the yard and over Alison, too, leaning her arms on the fence, wrapped in a brown afghan despite the day’s warmth lingering beneath the cool breeze. Then Martin steps from the broken tailgate to the ground and is no taller than the rest of the world. His bare feet and cramped legs protest their sudden call into action, his knees quiver, so he reaches for the head of a fence post to balance himself.

  Nearer now, he sees the shine of her tears and the dark shadows under her eyes. He hazards a weak smile but it isn’t returned, and she pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders. Across the backyard, in Alison’s house, Martin sees some of the women from town washing dishes and drinking tea. The whisper of their conversation and the clatter of plates come to him through open windows.

  He stands in front of Alison but on the other side of the fence. “Are you okay?” he asks, because he needs to say something and it’s all he can find. “I mean . . . as much as . . .”

  “God,” Alison says without looking up, and it’s more a plea than an answer. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m tired or hungry or angry or . . . one minute I can’t believe all of this is happening. The next, I want to go back out there and keep looking. He’s alone, and hungry. Cold. What do I do? I should be out there right now, I should . . .”

  Martin struggles for an answer to offer but finds none to give.

  “I’m tired of people in my house. I’m tired of . . . help.” Her face looks worn out, her body a scarecrow that only keeps standing because it is held up by the fence. She seems shorter than she did the day before, seems to take up less space in the world. All of a sudden she looks right into Martin’s face with her hands crossed on her chest and holding together the ends of the blanket.

  “Where is he?” she asks. “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know.” The words feel useless as stones in his mouth. He heard her description of what happened this morning, but asks again in case he can glean more details, discover something about the strange junction of his dream and events. Something that somehow escaped the notice of Gil and the sheriff and all the other men who know this world, these woods, so much better.

  Alison closes her eyes. From inside the house, through the window, comes a loud rattling of plates. “It was so early,” she says. “He never gets up before me. I heard him in the hallway and thought he was going to the bathroom. I didn’t think anything of it.” She wipes her eye with a corner of the blanket, and then pulls it tighter around her body. “I didn’t even hear him go downstairs before the backdoor slid open. So I went to the window.”

  She pauses, overtaken by crying, and Martin’s arm jerks toward her but settles instead on the rough wood of a rail.

  “He was in the yard, on the swing, and I started to open the window to call down to him. There was a fox. I mean, I think there was, but the whole thing felt like I was dreaming, like it wasn’t real except . . .” Her words trail off into sobs, and she covers her face with the blanket.

  Martin’s legs still ache from standing up, and he flexes the muscles in his sore thighs. When he releases the tension the shakes are gone for a few seconds.

  “The fucking thing was just sitting there, by the swing set, and Jake was talking to it. I ran downstairs, to the back door and out on the porch so I could chase it off, but when I got there . . . when I got outside I watched him follow it into the woods.” She reaches out from under the afghan and points toward the dark edge of the woods. “Right there, into that hole.”

  Martin looks, but the shadows all look the same to him and he can’t pick out the entrance she’s pointing at.

  “I ran after them, into the woods, and I was shouting, but . . . I didn’t see them at all. Nothing. Where did he go? How did he just . . . vanish? How does that happen?”

  “Does he know the woods? I mean, does he know his way around, what to do, that sort of thing?”

  Alison sniffs, and pushes on each of her closed eyelids with the tips of her thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know. Yes, I guess, he’s been to camp, and Cub Scouts, but . . . I don’t know.”

  She wraps her hands around the top rail of the fence and shakes it. “I should have put up a stockade fence, something solid,” she says in almost a snarl. “Instead of this goddamn thing.” She rattles the rail in its sockets, and the posts at either end of that section sway back and forth. The fence seems to be new, relatively, though already weathered, and at first Martin thinks he should stop her before she knocks it down. But it might be what she needs to do. “What good is a fence that can’t stop animals from coming in? Isn’t that why we have the damn things?”

  He lays his own hands back on the rail as Alison shakes it and the
wood scrapes against his palms. Her mouth curls and quivers as tears slide from her eyes not in individual drops but in small, steady streams; she’s been holding them in and now they’re all coming at once. Finally the length of wood in her hands pulls out of one post and clatters against the lower rail as it falls. The other end stays in its socket, and the beam lies at an angle between them, sloping up from the ground.

  “Fuck,” Alison says, and kicks the downed rail with a heavy brown boot so its high end comes loose, too, and the whole beam tumbles into the grass.

  They stand on opposite sides of the collapsed fence without speaking. Without the top rail running between them, there’s nowhere for Martin to lay his hands and they hover useless before him. He wants to hold her, to offer some comfort, but he looks through the window at the kitchen full of women and hesitates. What comfort could she need from him with all of these people already providing whatever they can? People she’s known all her life, not an outsider with whom she has only an unrealized vision of houses in common.

  But she steps forward against what remains of the fence, then leans across it against him. She’s nearly as tall as he is, so he rises onto the balls of his feet until her wet eyes reach his shoulder. Her tears spill onto his neck, dampening the collar of his T-shirt, and he wraps his arms around her with the blanket between their bodies. He lays his hands lightly upon her, not pressing, not holding, just there.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and he feels the movement of her lips on his skin as she speaks, a tingle straight down his spine.

  “No,” he says, “it’s okay. Don’t be sorry.” She says more, but he can’t hear the words, only feel them. It’s been a long time since he has held or been held by a woman, since his last girlfriend got tired of waiting for him to move in or propose or break up or something and finally gave up on waiting. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, especially with the angle of contact between their bodies made awkward by the bottom rail of the fence against their legs.

  They stand holding each other in the dark, Alison’s arms crossed over her chest and clutching the blanket against herself, and Martin’s hands high on her back. Lightning bugs flicker around them and peepers sing to the fiddling of crickets. Conversation goes on in the kitchen but the clatter of dishwashing has stopped and the voices sound far away now. Overhead, bats circle the peak of a pine tree, darting in and out of the crown. Their squeaking chatter is no more or less clear than the words from inside.

  “Here you are,” a loud voice says behind Martin. He drops his hands from Alison’s back and steps back from the fence as she moves away in the other direction. Turning, he finds Gil on the road, across the hood of the truck. “Been waiting long?”

  “Not really.” His face feels hot and he looks at his bare feet on the gravel shoulder between pavement and grass.

  “How y’holdin’ up, hon?”

  Alison pulls the afghan tighter before she answers. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “He’s alright. Probably made himself a lean-to somewhere, having a campout.”

  “Guess I’ll go in now. G’night, Gil. Thanks.” She looks at Martin, and he’s sure her eyes are asking him something. He looks for some excuse to stay with her, to send Gil home alone, until she says, “Thanks, Martin,” and turns.

  He watches as she climbs the steps to her porch and enters through the sliding glass door, then the women inside converge on her and she disappears from his view. A few seconds later the curtains are drawn in the house.

  Gil smokes and leans on the truck. Martin yawns. He has no idea what time it is now but he hasn’t eaten since the mustard sandwich he shared with a dog. His stomach growls and cramps on cue, as if it’s been waiting for him to notice.

  “Well,” Gil says quietly, “let’s get on home. Another long day tomorrow. Longer maybe.”

  “Why longer?”

  “We’ll have to walk rougher terrain. Look farther out. If the boy wasn’t close to home, he could be anywhere.” Gil finishes his cigarette and flicks the stump into the road. “Longer it takes, more chance something happened.”

  “I thought you said . . .”

  “Well, what am I gonna tell her? Not much hope we’ll find your son, good night? Don’t think about it now, Marty—save it until we’re looking or you’ll keep yourself awake. Get it in your head. You don’t want that. Believe me.”

  They lift themselves into the truck, and Martin peeks through the window at the back of the cab to make sure his boots and socks are still there. They pull away from Alison’s house without speaking, but a minute or two later Gil fills Martin in on the day’s fruitless search and what other groups walking other parts of the forest reported.

  As they pass Elmer’s driveway, Martin leans his head through the window into the breeze but can’t see the house set way back on the hill. A mailbox stands next to the road, a rectangular tube of corrugated tin sheet Elmer must have made for himself. Newspapers and bills and catalogues selling things nobody needs hang out both ends. If the mail doesn’t get picked up soon, there won’t be room for any more, but it won’t make any difference to Elmer.

  “Do people go missing around here a lot?” Martin asks.

  Gil turns his head a couple of degrees so the smoldering nub of his cigarette points across the bench seat at Martin. “No more than anyplace.” Then he seems to understand what he’s really being asked, and adds, “It’s a coincidence, Marty. Don’t make anything of it.”

  The cigarette has no filter, and Gil has let it burn down so far it’s almost an internal glow sneaking out of his mouth, an ember inside his body. How he can smoke them so close to the end without burning himself is beyond Martin. His own throat is scratchy from shouting all day and breathing the particles and pollens that swirl through the woods, and he strains his neck muscles to clear it with a wet, rattling growl.

  “Couldn’t it be something else? More than coincidental?” he asks, shocked by his own unintended directness and the implied challenge in the tone of his voice.

  Gil turns away from their conversation and spits the end of his cigarette out the window into the night. In the side mirror Martin watches it collide with the ground. It explodes in the road behind them, a tiny display of orange fireworks as they roll on.

  “What? What do you think’s going on? ‘Cause it’s nothing. Elmer’s a drunk, Marty. He gets lost all the time. It’s nothing.”

  Martin watches a string of gray lumps get larger ahead of the truck. A raccoon edges along the side of the road and four smaller versions follow behind, struggling to maintain a straight line as they sniff each weedy white flower and discarded cigarette butt planted in the soil of the soft shoulder. They remind Martin of pictures he’s seen of war refugees leaving their homes, endless trails of peasants in shabby brown and gray clothes following one another to the next town, and when they’re inevitably driven from that one, too, on to the town after that. The mother raccoon stops every few steps to check on her young, keep them moving, get them wherever they’re going before the bright light of morning gives them away.

  “What about Jake?”

  Gil sighs, a slow-motion cough. “I don’t know what to tell you. You seem hell-bent on seeing something that’s not there. Kids get lost in the woods. They’re kids, they wander. Weren’t you ever a boy? Didn’t you play in the woods? And yeah, sometimes they run away.” He pats around on the truck’s deep, dark dashboard until he finds a half-empty package of cigarettes. He shakes one loose and stabs at the lighter.

  “But he was following a fox . . .”

  “Hell, Marty, we’ve been through this. A fox won’t let himself be followed. It’s nothing.”

  “What if it wasn’t a normal fox? What if . . .”

  “What you asking me? What do you want me to say, damn it?”

  Martin pulls at a patch of peeling green vinyl where it hangs from the dashboard, exposing yellow foam underneath. “I followed a fox, too. Sort of. That’s how I got lost the other day.”

  Gil lau
ghs, and his laughter gets harder and louder until he starts coughing and pounds his chest a few times with a fist. The lighter pops out of the dashboard and he draws it to his mouth, the blazing coils of wire reflected on the skin of Gil’s face. “Hell, you may think you followed a fox, but I’ll bet you the fox didn’t think so.”

  “But you said yourself the animals have been acting strange. What if they want to be followed? What if it was trying to lead me somewhere? And Jake, too?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, fine. Maybe you saw a fox. Maybe you followed it a little. But I don’t think it picked up a ten-year-old boy and carried him off. Yeah, I said animals were coming up closer to houses. Not that foxes’re kidnapping folks. Shit. They’re rifling garbage cans, Marty. Scaring cats and old ladies. Damn it.”

  “People were talking about Scratch when we were searching. Saying . . . saying that this is what he does, taking people away from their homes.”

  Gil sighs and stares straight ahead at the road. “Look, Marty, it’s late. I know you’re worn out because you’re talking nonsense. Things you don’t understand and they’ve got you worked up. So we’ll get home, get some shuteye. Find the boy in the morning and he’ll tell us what all happened. No sense jawing about it when we’re both tired.”

  “But do you think there’s something going on? Whether it’s this Scratch or . . . something else? You’re the one who told me about him, and everybody else seems to believe it.”

  “Damn it, I said let it go. I told you a story. I didn’t think you were fool enough to believe it. I was trying to take your attention off what I was doing to those cuts on your chest. It was a fucking distraction. That’s all. Now drop it. I’m tired. So are you.”

  Martin is sure that Gil’s avoiding something, pretending to know less than he does. But his neighbor’s anger is piqued enough he doesn’t push, and lets the rest of the ride go by without speaking. He thinks of the conversation he overheard in the woods, the daughter’s insistence that Scratch isn’t real and the mother equally sure that he is. Martin has never been prone to believing in things he can’t see but this town and its forest are testing his lack of faith—there’s too much he can’t explain, even Gil’s angry reluctance to ask what could be going on.