by Steve Himmer
Sky-blue berries cling to the underside of a branch and he almost plucks a few off, nearly drops them into his mouth, but his mind talks his hand out of it: he’s hungry, he’s dazed, but he isn’t that desperate yet. Or that stupid—he doesn’t know food from poison out here, and he’s still conscious enough to recall that.
There’s no hint of a path, no suggestion of the route Jake or whatever is leading him traveled, not even a guarantee what Martin thought was a trail ever was: as far as he knows, there was a missed turn or an unnoticed sign miles ago and now each step leads him farther away from the boy. He can’t even go back the way he’s come, because he isn’t sure where that is. His feet, still bare, feel tender but more awake than the rest of his body.
The scrub grows thicker and the morning more humid as low leaves trap rising heat. He enters a shadowy copse, a stand of tight trees with no spaces for sunlight to wriggle through. It’s so dark his eyes need to adjust but he walks on without giving them time.
His nostrils fill with the sharp tang of wet fur and an animal body. He moves cautiously, trying to remain alert in the shadowy copse, afraid of what could be moving beside or behind or even above him. Then he trips over something, comes down hard but never reaches the ground. The impact buries his face in a thick blanket of fur, wrapping him in the smells of rancid meat and old clothes. Martin rears back. He rolls onto his knees with his palms splayed over the lukewarm lump he has fallen on top of, and when his eyes become used to the almost-dark he can tell, he can see, that the mound of fur and fat before him is the body of a dead bear. Its fur is dark brown, almost black, with streaks that catch light like molasses.
The animal faces away from him, and he has landed on its upturned side. The forelimb he can see, the one not pinned under the body, drapes over the head, claws dangling beside a round ear and almost scraping the ground. The bear’s legs scissors across the ground.
He pulls his hands away, skittering backward, and lands on his haunches in the mud. His body tells him to run, to get up and drop the pack and rush away down the trail—what there is of one—but his mind reassures him the bear’s body is dead.
It must be fairly fresh, because where his fingers find flesh under the fur it’s still warm as rising bread dough and almost as soft. And it doesn’t smell yet, at least not of death. It’s the same smell as before, the same as the last bear, the smell of hot meat and wet dog.
He can’t resist trying to roll the bear over, to look at it more closely, but the bulk is too much to move on his own. So he leans forward, pressing his stomach and legs to the corpse, balancing with his hands deep in the fur as he cranes his body over the mound of dead bear to look at the front where already beetles and flies and worms have arrived, where microbes and time are at work, breaking down the bear’s stories into so many small tales of their own.
One ear is chewed up, the fleshy rim mangled, and its long snout hangs open so the tongue drags in mud. The brown-orange eye facing up toward him is fogged like breathed-upon glass, and he’s half-tempted to wipe it with the tip of his finger.
He leans farther, trying to see the whole face, then loses his balance when his head gets too low, when his reach pulls his feet away from the ground and his body tilts over the fulcrum of the bear’s side. He tumbles onto the ground in a curl against the corpse, his face touching the bear’s cold leather nose, his warm breath spiraling into its airless mouth, and Martin is paralyzed with the bear’s dead, cloudy eyes locked on his own.
Stunned, he lies on the ground, staring into the calm face of the creature before him. In time he feels something sticky and wet on his hands and his chest and looks down to finds them glistening red, smeared with cool, thickened blood. He stands, and wipes his fingers on the scraps of cloth he took from the porcupine, staining his palms and the remnants of Jake’s pajamas the same crimson that clouds the front of his shirt. Grunting in frustration he pours water from the last bottle over his arms and rubs them hard against each other, but the blood has already set. He only manages to spread it around; he only makes himself look like he’s been trying to wash blood from his hands.
He looks down at the bear and sees a dark, oily stripe running the length of its side, a ribbon of blood under the fur. Martin shoves the stained fabric shreds into his pocket, and tries in vain to clean his hands on the back of his pants.
It was a fall onto a jagged stump that did the bear in, and a dream about walking in a particular spot. It wasn’t anything to do with this bear, not personally, but I needed a bear-shaped hole in the world and this bear had to do.
The smell of the bear has grown sharper, filling the air under these trees, and with a grimace Martin smells it also coming from him. The bear’s death is all over his body, his skin draped in its scent.
Suddenly he wants to keep moving, to get away from this place, and he pulls the pack high on his shoulders and continues in the direction he had been headed before the bear blocked his path. Flies crowd his hands and his chest while he walks, alighting on spots of blood as they dry. At first Martin swishes the insects away as he walks, but in time he gets used to that, too, and stops noticing the feathery fan of their feet. As blood congeals on his chest it pastes the fabric of his shirt to the skin underneath. His cuts don’t hurt very much anymore, but the sweat running into them under their bandages still itches and stings.
He hurries away from the bear’s body, out of the shadowy copse and into the pale, dappled light filtering down from above. Before long he hears voices, not the insomniac chatter in the back of his mind but actual voices, drifting to him through the trees. Buoyed, he moves toward them, pushing branches and brambles aside, taking long strides and heavy steps. The stabbing pebbles and twigs beneath his bare feet keep him awake. He’s out of breath, wheezing in rasps that growl up from his lungs, but he keeps moving. Soon the sounds come into focus, the voices speak actual words, and he spies flashes of safety orange through the browns and greens of the forest.
He bursts through a thicket and stops, facing a line of men holding rifles and the sheriff with a black radio in his hand. The search party gapes, a squared off firing squad with Martin before them.
“Where the hell have you been?” Lindon barks. One of his deputies whispers something to the bald, bearded man beside him and both of them frown, shaking their heads.
“I got lost,” Martin says. He feels as unprotected in his bare feet and sore body as he would appearing naked before all these strangers.
One side of the sheriff’s face tightens as he asks, “When? Gil said he couldn’t find you this morning.” Lindon scans Martin’s body, looking over his blood-stained shirt and muddy jeans, the dirty, uncovered feet and two pairs of shoes—one big and one small—dangling from the sides of his pack. The T-shirt and scraps of red-clouded cowboy-print fabric poking over the top of his pocket.
“What’s that in your pocket, son?” the sheriff asks. He leans toward Martin from the waist, feet planted firmly below his round gut.
Martin reaches down to tuck the scraps of clothing in deeper, away out of sight, but checks himself. “I found it,” he says. “I think it was Jake’s.”
The search party shuffles, a wave moving through them in the form of stamping feet and shifting weight, rifles changing hands and baseball cap bills adjusted. The deputy rolls a long-ashed cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other and aims dark, beady eyes at Martin.
The birds have stopped singing and the woods have been hushed, but it’s only due to a large group of men being there rather than a response to the tension of this human moment. The birds don’t care what these intruders are talking about, they only want them to leave.
“Gorman,” the sheriff snarls over his shoulder without taking an eye off of Martin. “Call in and confirm that description. Find out what the Hasper boy was wearing.”
The deputy pulls a radio from a clip on his belt and tells it something, then waits while it squawks in response. “Cowboy pajamas and a red T-shirt, sheriff,” he repe
ats.
“That’s what I thought.” Lindon lowers a hand to his belt. “Lemme see those.” He steps toward Martin, reaching with one hand, and the mob surges forward behind him as if they’re tied to his legs.
Martin slides the ruined clothes from his pocket, imagines them a magic show scarf stretching on for miles while everyone waits for the end to emerge. But they pull free right away, and he drops them into the sheriff’s waiting palm, bronzed with tree-sap.
The sheriff holds them up to the light. “Where’d you find these, now?”
Martin tells Lindon about the tree but not the vision, that he found a porcupine tangled up in the clothes, about the body of the dead bear and falling in its blood at the side of the trail. He tells the whole story of his night in the woods and the morning so far, and as he recounts all that’s happened he struggles to have it make sense. He can see in the face of the sheriff and his posse that the harder he tries to explain, the more skeptical they all become. The more he tries to shape his account into something coherent, the more ridiculous it sounds even to him.
“All that’s well and good,” Lindon says, eyeing the bear’s blood on Martin’s chest, “but what the fuck were you doing out here? Middle of the night. By yourself.”
“I . . . I couldn’t sleep, and, ah . . . thought I’d keep looking.”
“In the dark?”
“I don’t know, it didn’t seem to be such a bad idea until I got lost.” The search party erupts out of its silence, and the pitying laughter of men fills the forest before a sideways look from the sheriff brings back the quiet.
“How’d you’d get here?”
“I drove. Not here, I mean, my car’s at the lake.”
The sheriff’s eyes widen, and he turns to his deputy. Martin watches the faintest of nods back and forth between the two men. “Long way from the lake, Mr . . .”
“Blaskett. Martin Blaskett.”
“Right, right. Martin Blaskett. The builder.” Behind him, the men are in motion, splitting into two streams and moving around Lindon’s flanks as if they’re merely a group of friends walking, out for a stroll, as if all of them decided to set into motion at the same moment out of pure chance. Martin takes an unintended step backward in the direction from which he arrived.
“Whoa,” the sheriff says, “don’t get jumpy. We’re just talking here.”
It’s a bad police drama, the kind of ridiculous story that pours through open windows at night: the sheriff’s assurances and the false calm in the forest, the smiling men surrounding him and waiting to pounce. Martin feels as if he’s been scripted and needs to turn and run from these men, get back into the brush as fast as he can so the sheriff and the others can chase him down. That it’s his role. He pictures himself on the run through the woods, stopping to pick off one man at a time, a shadowy beast. Already his muscles are itching for flight and pursuit, his body surging with an energy he shouldn’t have after the past two days of exertion and a long, sleepless night on his feet.
He feels the way he has in his dreams, bigger and stronger than when he’s awake, so close now to sleep that his mind might be playing tricks. The sheriff moves closer and Martin’s arms tense and his fingers curl in on themselves as if they are claws. His body urges his mind to set it in motion, to take to the trees, but he stays where he is. As convincing as his body can be, his mind is so tired it would rather let Martin rest here in danger than keep him running on fumes. He stops after that one backward step and the hands poised to strike relax at his sides.
The sheriff comes closer with one hand held up in front of his body as if to offer himself protection. His other hand rests on the radio clipped to his belt, a cowboy walking into a showdown. “We’re just talking,” he says again as he moves toward Martin.
“About what?”
“What you saw, what you found . . . nobody’s suggesting anything.” The sheriff’s voice is meant to be reassuring, but Martin isn’t convinced: he knows what the men before him are thinking, knows he should have left the clothes where he found them and buried his own after he leaned into the blood of the bear. Better to be discovered a naked man in the woods, to be branded a freak, than to emerge from the forest looking like a kidnapper or something worse.
“Let’s be calm here,” says Lindon and he lays a hand on Martin’s arm. His voice is soothing, professional. It isn’t the sheriff’s normal voice, it isn’t how he talks to his friends. It’s a tone he puts on to talk criminals down, to talk jumpers off buildings, or it would be if there were any buildings high enough to jump off in town.
Then the men crowd around, and the sheriff’s hand on his arm is a vice, and the other one clamps his opposite wrist. Martin is twisted and turned on his feet, his arms bent behind him and strained at the shoulders. He groans, and one of the men he doesn’t know barks at him to shut up. He’s handcuffed, pushed to his knees in the mud and one of the men steps on his pale, naked toes with the heavy sole of a boot. Martin feels something break, hears that same something crack, and grimaces without making a sound.
“Take it easy, boys,” Lindon tells the impromptu posse. “I meant what I said about talking.”
The men mill around, muttering to one another and smoking. Their pinched, angry eyes are all cast on Martin who looks up at them from the ground. He hears “killer” and “pervert” and worse, can see rifles itch at the hands that hold them. A voice behind him tells someone else, “Told you there weren’t no fuckin’ Scratch. Motherfucker’s the only monster out here.”
Without looking up from the leaves on the ground Martin says, “I told you, I didn’t see Jake. I just found his clothes.”
“And that’s what we’re going to talk about,” the sheriff says. “Where?”
“At the foot of a tree.”
The men snort and laugh. “That isn’t much help, son.”
“No, I mean a really big tree, the biggest I’ve seen. There aren’t any others around it.”
“Back that way?” The sheriff waves an arm toward the woods in the direction from which Martin came.
“Right. A few miles.”
“You’re gonna have to lead us back there, Mr. Blaskett.”
“I can’t . . . I got lost, I don’t know how to get back.”
“You’re going to try.” The sheriff stands up, speaking into his radio, but he steps away with his back toward Martin and his words are muffled then mute. Martin glances sideways at the men glaring down. His legs and back ache from kneeling, from walking and being so tired. He’s still wearing his pack, and the weight pulls on his shoulders, urging him to collapse.
He wants to sleep, wants to fall on his side and curl up on the ground and when he wakes all these men will be gone, he’ll be in his trailer stretched out on his bed and Gil will be knocking to wake him so they can return to the search for Alison’s son with the rest of the people from town.
The sheriff steps close to Martin, the radio still in his hand. “So you got lost,” he says, as if there had been no pause in the interrogation.
“Yes. I don’t know how to get back to the tree.”
“But you’re parked at the lake? You started out there, and went into the woods?”
“Right.”
Lindon repeats all this to his radio, instructs someone to check on the car. Then he tells the deputy and a man in a blue flannel shirt cut off at the sleeves to take Martin back to the station, put him in a cell until he, the sheriff, can arrive. “And leave him alone,” he warns them. “I mean it.”
The deputy and the now-deputized stranger grumble assent, then lift Martin’s slumped body between them, pulling on one shoulder each so as he rises his arms pull hard in their sockets. He grunts, and the man on his left laughs. He has a blue eagle tattooed on his bicep, clutching arrows dripping with blood, but the tattoo is old and the arrowheads may simply be blurry.
Martin is dragged between the two men with his hands chained behind him, on the far side of his pack so his arms are overextended. First they cramp, th
en go numb, and after a few minutes in that position he only feels his hands at all as an itchy tingle. He is convinced these men are going to kill him, that they will haul him back to the station and beat him to death or maybe not even wait until they arrive—they may stop at the side of the trail and hurl him off a cliff, or batter his head with a rock. Or torture him until he gives up the confession they want to hear, whether or not it is the real story.
As he stumbles along between them, his chest tightens the same way that it did while he waited alone in the dark of the burned-out foundation, the way it did when he was a boy afraid of the world beyond his black window. He watches the woods for a chance to escape, some muddy patch he could use to knock his guards off-balance and run, some slope he could shoulder them down. A stage for the kind of grand gesture he’s seen on TV. But nothing presents itself, no chances emerge, and he’s dragged all the way to the road, bent into the back of a cruiser, and carted to town sitting sideways because his pack pushes him away from the seat.
He expects a lynch mob to be burning him in effigy on the town square with pitchforks and torches waving over their heads. He expects Alison to be standing in front of the crowd, her face streaked with tears and eyes black with rage, waiting for any opening to kill him herself. He expects a vat of hot tar and a pile of feathers, or a gallows hastily erected on the town green. But there is none of that when he arrives, no angry crowd and no straw man on fire—nothing to indicate the town knows he exists. The green is empty except for its cannons, the bandstand hollow and still. There aren’t even any cars parked outside Claudia’s because everyone is in the woods, or if not in the woods yet on their way there after getting this news from the sheriff.
Deputy Gorman parks in front of the station, and pulls Martin from the back seat by tugging the chain between his wrists. His shoulders lift in their sockets and burn. The other man pushes him from behind, shoving the backpack until the prisoner is inside the building where at last they unbuckle the straps to avoid removing the cuffs.