Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  I could tell Martin what he’s found, if he knew to ask. People here believe something’s out in the woods, they believe that something is me, but no one wants to admit they believe it. Same as Martin, their sense of how the world works, their faith in what they think they know, has been tested by what happens here so many times they’ve gotten used to it all whether they meant to or not. But that doesn’t make it any easier for them to explain, to each other or to an outsider. For so long they’ve grown up with the stories, one generation after another hearing the same half-humorous threats from tired parents to children refusing to sleep, they can’t not believe anymore. The stories are so much a part of this place it makes no difference, to them, whether or not I’m actually here. It’s like Gil told Martin—I’m a convenient distraction.

  And he doesn’t know how right he is, or how often he’s the same thing for me.

  Martin is jostled from his thoughts when the truck bumps over the rocky lip of the road at the edge of Gil’s yard. Before the headlights cut out with the engine, he sees the white curve of his cereal bowl perched on the porch, a tin camping spoon projecting over its rim.

  “You riding with me in the morning?” Gil asks, and Martin nods as he swings the door open and steps out of the truck. “Be out here about five. Get in the woods for first light.”

  “I hope the police find him before that,” Martin says. “I hope they already have.”

  “Well, I hope so, too. But those boys aren’t from here. They don’t know our woods.”

  Martin isn’t sure why this matters, and almost mentions that a town full of people who do know these woods couldn’t find the boy so far, either, but he holds his tongue. Then Gil says good night and climbs out of the truck. They separate and head to their homes, or the closest things they have to them. Martin watches from his front steps as a light comes on and goes out on the first floor of Gil’s house, then another flares behind the curtains upstairs. He lets himself into the trailer, home to the same pile of socks he left on the carpet this morning, the same glass of water standing alone on the counter. He peels off his shirt, damp and ripe, and steps out of his pants in the door to the bathroom. His boots, he remembers, are still in the truck, but he can get them when they leave in the morning. It’s only a few hours away.

  He stands in the shower without moving, leaning against the wall of blue and green speckled plastic. He lets the water slide down his back, a brown eddy whirling around his feet over the holes of the drain. The bruises on his chest and sides have lightened in shade from the eggplant of a few days ago. The pain around his ribs is less, too, but they’re still sore enough to feel each drop of water as it lands on his skin. He imagines Alison’s son somewhere in the woods, huddled in the shade of a tree, knees to his chest and arms wrapped around them, crying himself to sleep or, long cried out, rocking back and forth in primordial comfort.

  The steam makes him tired, and his eyelids hang half-closed in a blink that has stalled. He collapses onto the tangle of bedclothes without drying off, without getting dressed, and a cool breeze through the slats of the window runs icy fingers up and down his wet body.

  He isn’t quite sleeping but it’s the most restful state he has reached in days and in nights. He lies with his eyes open wide and his body melting beneath him, spilling into the mattress. He’s more relaxed than he’s been for so long. He’s awake but feels deep in a dream, his muscles fully replenished. He stares at the ceiling, the textured plastic panels and bolted seams over his bed, but sees something else altogether.

  He sees the forest, the woods he walked out of a short time ago, and the long shadows of trees drawn out by moonlight. He’s in the forest and in his bed at the same time, but somehow he’s knows that it isn’t a dream and it isn’t a memory, either. His eyes zip between trees, dodge around boulders and through bramble twists, and he knows that he’s seeing things as they are right this moment. He forgets that his body exists, that he’s sore and tired and lying in bed, as he slides through the woods with the fluid grace of thin air.

  And he knows where the boy is now, too. He can see the thick oak with exposed roots on its downhill side, forming a shelter into which Jake has huddled. He’s in pajama pants exactly as Alison described them, printed with a parade of lassoing cowboys marching up and down each of his legs. Both of his arms are pulled in through the short sleeves of his shirt and they cross his chest under the fabric, bulging over his ribs. He’s murmuring something, telling himself a joke or a story or song, distracting himself, but his eyes are shut tight and his feet are muddy and bare and every muscle is clenched in his body.

  Even without his ears and their body, this projection of Martin can hear the boy’s stomach growl.

  He knows where this tree is and he knows how to get there and the knowledge feels so natural he doesn’t ask where it comes from. It’s as basic as telling apart red and green, or knowing a hand from a foot, and it seems foolish now that he ever thought two trees looked the same, that they were all more or less identical.

  Immediately he’s out of the bed, pulling on the clothes he’s just taken off, and is out the door on the way to his car. Then he turns and goes back to the trailer, pulls three plastic bottles of water from their shrink-wrapped cardboard case because the boy is bound to be thirsty. He shoves a handful of energy bars into his pocket and pulls the blanket from his bed before leaving the trailer again and making sure that the door is closed fast behind him.

  He drops the blanket, food, and water into the passenger seat of his car then goes for his boots. The night is especially dark and he moves slowly, afraid that Gil will be on his porch, maybe even awake. He creeps onto the pavement strip of the street, eyes peeled, and though the moon is covered by clouds, and there aren’t any lights on in the house or hanging over the road, he can still see. Not daylight, but enough to know the porch is vacant for once, enough to pick his way through the grass without tripping on any rocks or low stumps. The chorus of crickets and peepers goes quiet in waves as he passes and starts up again once he’s gone by.

  As he approaches the bed of the truck, he hears the whir of a fan in Gil’s window and the faint groan of snores filtered through the hum of the blades. He considers waking his neighbor, asking him to join this second search, but he imagines what he’ll be told—to go back to bed, get some sleep. And how could he convince Gil to help without claiming to have had a vision of where the boy is? Who would believe him?

  Martin decides, in the end, it’s easier to go by himself and explain how he found the boy later when he has proof he was right, or to keep all of this quiet if he turns out to be chasing geese. He sits on the lowered gate of the truck and pulls on his socks and his boots, already moistened by dew and night mist. Then he rolls onto the road with his headlights out, and leaves them that way until he’s far enough from Gil’s house they won’t shine through the dark windows.

  18

  THE DREAMS ARE BECOMING AS REAL AS HIS WAKING HOURS, the woods as familiar as the streets and houses and paperwork jungles Martin has navigated for years. It doesn’t feel new to him so much as it is waking up, a rediscovery of something or someone he already knows but hasn’t seen for some time. Like an adult climbing onto a bike for the first time since learning to drive, or a father slipping on an old baseball glove familiar as skin before he plays catch with his son.

  He drives through the dark until he reaches the shores of the lake once again. His strange hours of waking and sleeping have knocked his sense of time out of balance, and he can’t determine with any certainty whether it was one day ago, or two, or even three since he last sat here. He parks his car beside the picnic table and looks across the onyx sheet of the water. The moon is so low, so close to the surface, that its yellow trail of light has the look of a ladder he could climb all the way to the source.

  He tightens the laces of his boots then rummages in the trunk of his car until he finds a faded red backpack. He stuffs in the blanket, the water, and the energy bars. As he walks away
from the car it chimes twice to tell him it’s locked itself, and as strange as the sound was earlier, on the site, it’s stranger still here—the artificial voice of a bird in a place where real birds are asleep overhead. Strange enough for those real birds to go on sleeping, none of them waking to answer the car’s robot call.

  A moment later Martin plunges into the forest where it thickens at the edge of the lake. He’s farther from Alison’s neighborhood than the search party roamed during the day, beyond the cliff where they stopped and a few miles deeper into the woods. No one imagined the boy could have wandered this far, up sheer faces and down steeper slopes, mile after mile, hours of walking. Those who were expected to know, Gil among them, assumed he would stop when the going got rough, would try to turn back or sit down where he was and stay put, but now Martin knows better. He remembers how far he wandered on his own trek, driven by the desire in his legs long after the fox that sparked his motion had fled. Jake could be anywhere, however far it might seem, and if his own experience is any indication the boy has no idea which direction he came from or how to retrace his steps. No more idea than Martin has at this moment that he is being led once again, and will be as easily lost as he was the first time.

  His feet soon burn with blisters from a long day spent walking, and the straps of his pack cut into his shoulders right through his thin fleece pullover. He would prefer to be wearing his weatherproof jacket, but it lies in the building site’s dumpster, shredded by claws and caked with blood, not much good for keeping rain out.

  He trundles through the woods, energized despite his earlier exertion: his lungs seem bigger, strides longer, and he plows through low-hanging branches and the gripping tendrils of briars without stopping, only ducking his head sometimes to protect his eyes. Martin is coming to know his way through these woods, to know what to watch out for and what to ignore, to know what the real dangers are and, relatively, how few exist. Mosquitoes are so much more common than bears, and there are ten million gnats in the world for every lion or wolf.

  The moon can’t break through the tree canopy, but his eyes have adjusted and the trail seems as clear as if it were day. It’s not a wide path, one made by deer instead of by humans, but it meets his needs at the moment and in the back of his mind where the vision still hangs, he sees the whole lay of the trail to where the boy waits. He sees the thick tree trunk and wedge of mud walled in by roots where Jake curls in a ball, and he tightens the straps of his pack without stopping, stretches his stride now that he’s limber, and sings a low song to himself in the back of his throat.

  As he walks he thinks about Alison, waiting at home for word of her son, as exhausted as he is from searching all day plus the extra exertion of worry, of woe, of believing all this is her fault even if she understands that it isn’t. The strain of being the lost child’s parent. He tries to imagine himself in those shoes—of having a son, of having him lost—and for the first time in his life he feels close to getting it right. That he almost knows, as much as he can, how Alison feels. That he can empathize with her loss, and the need to have her son found.

  He wants to worry that much, to be so concerned about someone else it hurts. He returns to the house in his head as he walks, the one he daydreams about, and rearranges the furniture for the ten-thousandth time, clears out his office upstairs to make it a room for a child, moves his desk and his papers to the small den on the first floor instead. He moves all his clothes to one side of the walk-in closet he has imagined, and leaves the other side free for someone else. He takes down half the wall hangings to make space for another aesthetic, a taste that isn’t his own, and he buys four extra place settings to stack in the kitchen cabinets.

  Then he walks through the house, through his daydream here in the dark, and three times he trips: over a chair he wouldn’t have chosen, and toy trucks parked on the stairs. Over a cat that shrieks and dashes under the couch when he steps on its tail, and it’s this that is most unexpected because Martin is a dog person. He isn’t allergic to cats, he doesn’t mind them so much, but he wouldn’t bring one into the house if left to himself.

  Is that what it is, he wonders, to share a home? Tripping over things you didn’t know you owned, and compromising on pets you don’t want? Being surprised in your own space? Tracing and retracing his steps from kitchen to porch, from attic to basement to den, he finds that the furniture in his head won’t stay still. The house he has imagined so fully, the space he has mapped to such fine detail, is changing with each step he takes and has gone beyond his control and he doesn’t mind.

  He smiles as he walks through the dark forest, pulling the backpack straps away from his chest to let fresh air swirl beneath, to dry his clothes where sweat has already soaked them, again. What has been missing from his visions of home, from his floor plans in their minute measurements, is some other will to share his house with, other bodies and minds to keep him on his toes. To move chairs where he might trip over them and leave toys where he might break his neck, and to keep him from paying all his attention to his own life. He understands now what Gil meant about shining shoes. As many times as he’s imagined sharing his house with other people, they’ve never before appeared in his dreams—they were always in some other room that he couldn’t find, leaving no sense of their lives in the objects filling the home.

  He thinks of the families who will buy his houses, all of the people who will be his neighbors and their individual lives tangled together the way noises swirl in this forest. All coming and going each with their own intentions as the deer and coyotes and caterpillars do in the woods, and he can hardly wait for construction to finish, for those parents and children and pets to arrive so he can tie his own life together with theirs and the life of the town that sleeps on the edge of the woods.

  Lost in his thoughts, Martin trips over something in the path with a clang. He swings face-first toward the ground but breaks the fall with his palms so he’s suspended over the trail on all fours, hands and feet flat and head tilted up on his neck as he looks ahead. He rights himself, and looks down to see a thick, rusty chain stretched across his trail. It’s been there long enough for vines to wind through it, tying it to the ground, and it snakes from the scrub on one side to the scrub on the other.

  He keeps walking, thinking again of Alison’s son, who the boy longs for, alone in the dark—his mother who’s waiting, or the father who isn’t around? Who does the boy imagine reaching him first, making the rescue? Whose arms does he rush into again and again while he waits to be found?

  The forest is full of bright eyes: sparkling spots between the shadows of trees, dashes of yellow in all that black and dark green. The ground on either side of the trail is thick with crickets, trilling up and the down the rasped ridges of their legs in conversation with one another.

  “I’m a cricket, I’m here.”

  “I’m a cricket, too, and I’m here.”

  Martin walks through the dark, watched by the eyes of the woods. Sleeping birds whistle and chirp overhead, the round balls of their tufted bodies perched on branches with their heads tucked under their wings. Bats swoop and circle over the ceiling of leaves, picking mosquitoes out of the air. Louder sounds echo from farther off, the howls of coyotes and the singing of wolves that always comes from some other direction, those packs of low, sleek gray bodies left to their own part of the forest while the rest of us stay off their path, out of their teeth and away from their claws.

  They aren’t as succinct as the crickets, those wolves, but they don’t waste words or time, either. They’d as soon kill me as hear the end of this story, and even though I would lose this body without losing myself, it’s an experience I’d rather avoid. So I stay out of their way when I’m wearing a shape that is no match for theirs.

  Martin was amazed, in his dream, when I allowed him to overhear the forest’s full dialogue, but it’s not always worth knowing what’s being said around you. Crickets aren’t much to understand unless you’re a cricket yourself; you’re b
etter off letting them fade into background, letting what passes—for them—as conversation lapse into generic night sound.

  Sometimes I still listen in; sometimes I take the shape of a cricket and join their orchestra in all its fiddling, but never for long, a few days or weeks, until I tire of the same notes again and again. I think Martin would know what I mean, if I told him. I think he’d find being a cricket as mundane as I do. There are better animals he could become. More interesting voices to understand, voices with something to say.

  Simplicity doesn’t make the cricket any less vital than the largest of bears or the deepest of fish. It doesn’t make them dumb bugs. Crickets have perfected their language; they can tell all the story they need to tell with a few notes, a few strokes of a leg, nothing wasted. Everything one cricket needs to know of another—have you found food, do you want to mate—can be carried in those quick tones.

  Maybe the rest of us are, over time, learning to tell our stories with the efficiency of a cricket, learning how to not mince our words or our growls and to harness the spasmodic motions of bodies that so often leave room for doubt and confusion and violence. I could have told you this tale as a cricket, but I suspect you would have been less keen to listen.

  Or I might have worn the long shape of a wolf, but your kind are still as afraid of the wolf as most others are. Even when other animals lose their ability to plant fear in your hearts, when the howl of coyotes or the rumbling of bears makes your heart flutter with the nostalgia of ignorance, and you feel yourself drawn back to nature—as if you have ever been able to leave—the call-and-response of a pack in the hills sends you scampering back to your cars, onto the roads, out of the mountains toward home where you lock double-paned windows and pull down heavy shades and turn up the lights as bright as you can. Is there anything else left in the forest as frightening as wolves?