Scrapper

by Matt Bell

  He kicked through a plaster wall and after he withdrew his foot he found the remains of a squirrel nestled against the studs. Tiny skull, tiny feet, all the clamber long ago gone out of it. He cradled the bones, walked slowly toward the back of the house, the bouncing screen door he’d left open. Halfway there he caught himself in the last arc of a busted mirror. What was he doing here. What jumble of bones and the past was in his hands. What was he doing and why.

  Outside another house, he found a broken window, cleared the glass to grant access to the interior. The house’s first floor skewed back a couple of decades, gave off a story of wood paneling and thick carpet, avocado appliances. The furniture was mostly gone except for a sagged couch propped against the front wall of the living room, its seats facing in, and in another room he found a busted dresser, missing its drawers. He thought it was possible to underestimate how many people had lived in each room, the distance between the ideal and the necessary. Kelly had grown up in his own bedroom but his father had shared his with two brothers. His grandfather had been born in a one-room house, home to nine brothers and two parents, the ghosts of three miscarriages and a stillborn daughter. Theirs was a family of men, no women except the ones they were born to or married. And of all the men in this family it was only Kelly who had never married, never bred.

  He worked within the zone during the day where he could and at night where he couldn’t. In the deep dark of unlit streets there was less chance of being disturbed but the need for light gave away his position. He wore a headlamp strapped around his forehead but the light meant others could see him moving. Sometimes he thought he saw shapes swarming outside the windows. If he heard a voice call out in the darkness, then he paused where he was. If he heard two voices he shut off his headlamp and let the darkness reshape his pupils. He didn’t have much imagination left but what imagination he had he thought he could do without.

  After the fire, the ringing he heard in his ears never went fully away, but it got worse when he did too much, worked too hard, pushed himself inhuman. Sometimes in the dark he stood still and listened to it sing.

  He didn’t carry a weapon, didn’t keep one in his truck. If he bought a gun he would always know where it was and one day he would use it. But often there was a tool in his hands, a hammer perhaps, and even if his hands were all he had it didn’t mean they couldn’t be used to defend himself, to fight back, to hurt in turn.

  At the hospice shop the newest clothes went the fastest. He pledged anew his old loyalties to the state’s teams, showed his allegiance with t-shirts in team colors. He thought he’d kept up while he was away but if he recognized a name on the back of a shirt maybe the player had been retired for years. The oldest shirts were three for a dollar fifty and if one fit he bought all three.

  If he had to buy his soap at the hospice shop he worried it was the soap of the dead. Some weeks he could afford better but he’d traveled to the city with a new frugalness and he was determined not to chase it away. He walked the shop, wondered whose life the photo frames had contained. He wasn’t ever in a hurry. He had to hustle to do enough work but it hardly took his whole week. He thought he would like reading a book inscribed with someone else’s marginalia but when he got the book home he found he didn’t need the voices of more ghosts. That was already what reading was.

  This was his year of diminishment. Less was all there was. Even where there were people left there wasn’t any of the commerce people needed to make good. He bought his cereal in the same place he bought his beer and the two choices were flakes with sugar, flakes without. There was hardly anything fresh on the shelves anywhere. At best a bowl of apples next to the cash register, a couple bananas under the cigarettes, beside the lotto tickets.

  He didn’t believe in luck but he believed in bananas.

  A new twelve-pound sledgehammer was forty dollars, replacement handles fourteen. A pipe cutter cost twenty dollars, tinner snips thirteen. A heavy cable cutter might run one hundred ninety. He could make any purchase worth it but he had to be sure. He was never sure. The locking toolbox for the truck had cost three hundred dollars but his tools were safer there than in his apartment. His truck became his most necessary possession: an all-new chassis the better year he’d made the purchase, a multidisplacement V-8 under the hood. Live axles for maximum longevity and durability. Inboard dash navigation, maps swinging with the sweep of overhead satellites. An anxiety of attractive credit terms, secured with a down payment of wages earned and a loan guaranteed by the promise of more paychecks which had not come.

  He bought a lamp, a folding table, a pair of unmatched chairs. His bedroom was small, his bathroom smaller. There were just the two rooms. There was more room than he needed. He bought dishes and utensils and a glass and a mug, took them home to the kitchenette barely hidden behind a thin wall. He had to listen to the refrigerator cycle while he tried to sleep. The apartment sat on the first floor of a converted motel, with other apartments on both sides, behind and above. During the day he had to listen to two children crisscross the floor above him for hours. As if running were so novel an activity they might never quit. At night he heard the laughter of loud men, the anger of shrill women, the frustrations of both sexes. A cheap apartment meant living in a cloud of your neighbors, their sounds and smells, the obscene evidence of their activities. He had to turn the television up at least as loud as his neighbors or he couldn’t understand the shows. Often the nightly news became a lesson in lip-reading but he watched until he’d seen both the weather and the blonde reporter, smart in her pantsuits.

  The floor was the only quiet surface and so sometimes he lay down upon the scratchy wear of the carpet to put one ear and then the other to the ground. Trying to hear how hearing nothing sounded.

  The city was bisected by a freeway reaching from north to south, eighteen hundred miles running head to heel across the country. There weren’t any mountains in this part of the state but there were mountains on this road, farther off in either direction. The road knew the ocean. It knew the greatness of the lakes. The road could take Kelly to Canada or the Deep South or the Atlantic coast. The road could take him home, to a small town two hours north, named for a tree sharing its name with a poison.

  Last he’d heard everyone he knew there was still around, except his parents and the other assorted dead. The last time he visited was for his mother’s funeral. All the faces in the church were so old but they were mostly the same faces he’d grown up among. The swishing movements of suit and skirt, of standing and kneeling and standing and sitting in a half-empty church. He’d seen his mother lowered into the ground but hadn’t watched the ground close. The woman he’d been with had wanted to see where he grew up but he’d asked her not to come. They weren’t married but they lived together, owned a house down south. There wasn’t anything to be ashamed of but he didn’t want to answer any questions. He didn’t plan on ever going back again so better to tell his aunts and uncles he was alone.

  He had some cousins there, a few lost friends. There wasn’t any juice left. If he went to them it wouldn’t be as their relation but as the stranger he’d become. If there was one thing he needed the zone to teach him it was how to be alone again. Unquestioned and uncharged.

  When he awoke disoriented in the strobing dark of the apartment he opened the phone’s map to watch the satellites locate him exactly. First a series of shrinking circles, then a blue light pulsing atop the city. The hated screen, so brightly assuring. This is where I am, he would whisper. This is what I am doing. It was so clean a fact. If the noise in his building or the ringing in his ears wouldn’t let him sleep he lay on his mattress, watched documentaries on the television. There he rediscovered the life on other continents, the wilder world beyond raccoons and squirrels and whitetail deer, the ordinary menagerie of the midwestern states. On-screen, elephants mourned their dead and buried the bones, an alligator waited in a pit of drought and mud for thirst to make the meat stupid.
A dung beetle pushed a ball of shit across a desert. You did what you had to do. You organized your life, moved every action into categories and compartments of time and type and task, you looked at your life and you knew who you were: this was worldview, ideology, what you had of either, who you were, who you’d been. Today he was this person, speaking these words, concerned only with this narrow sliver of experience, whatever could be had within the confines of the zone.

  There had once been a magnificence to these streets and the evidence of those times was still there, in the zone, in edifices to ideas that had not endured. On many days Kelly saw the endurance of the beautiful, the way the slow degradation of acid rain and other weather could make the zone more lovely, not less. He entered churches where painted crosses faded from the walls, where wind howled some days through stolen stained glass, while on other days birds flitted between the iron braces left behind. The braces waiting for the theft. The pews remaining but the organ pipes long gone. Dust and smatter everywhere, a city’s silt fallen, unswept, a manifestation, the refuse of long-ago prayers. The birds, nesting in the rafters. American gods, American temples, all the evidence anyone needed to indict the temporariness of American belief.

  He walked shredded schools lacking students but not piles of serviceable desks, ran his hands along the spines of books left behind, the previous fictions of history. Stories no one wanted to steal. Bottles of printer’s ink lined glassless windowsills, glowed in shafts of sunlight, colored vacant offices blue and red and black and superblue. Locker rooms lay unlocked, the locker doors removed, the opened walls spilling onto gym floors made of century-dead trees, the wax scuffed with shoes and time, tagged with layers of spray paint.

  He wandered the rows of emptied houses and overgrown yards, roamed grassy blocks beneath bare-socketed streetlights. In every structure he entered he found some objects trashed and some he could sell and also some rare and better and less-valuable objects, objects abandoned by accident, chance’s castaways. Soon he lifted some new bauble from nearly every site, folded a broken-spined paperback into his pocket, ripped a single pencil-marred Ave Maria from a hymnal, pocketed a child toy’s heavy as lead, a bent-tined fork kicked behind a counter. He brought home some objects he planned to use and some he wanted to look at and in his apartment he chose a cupboard meant for dishes to store these more-useless thefts, an exhibit of his travels in the zone, of what relics had called out in the places he’d been, the bleak houses of the blackout city.

  Kelly thought the world wasn’t full of special objects, only plain ones. Nothing was assembled special, nothing and no one, but the plainest objects could be supercharged by attention, made nuclear by suggestion. He could pick up the same object in two different houses and in one sense a completely different thrumming. What he wanted was anything loved. When he couldn’t remember anymore where he had taken something from, then he threw it out. Making emotion last wasn’t the objects’ first power but it was the power he wanted most. Anything he took from someone else’s life wouldn’t work forever but if he kept acquiring more maybe the feelings might remain, transferred across the overlap.

  The fall sun shining on the waving grass, the hardy scrub of trees spreading across vacancies. Everywhere he took something he tried to leave something else behind. The unexpected juxtaposition of nature and ruin. Metal for memories, memories for metal. There was so much he wanted gone. There was such a sprawling untenanted city in which to dump it. And in the falling streets he discovered the great perseverance of the people who remained. Their faces shined in the light wherever he saw them, on porches or in driveways, outside liquor stores and bars. He wasn’t their neighbor but he saw their beauty. They looked crazy with grief. The great glory of their sadness. The way it would last and last. He needed to eat and there wasn’t any work but what was he taking from these people. Nothing, he told himself, they had not already lost.

  To leave the edge of the zone for its center was to abandon the present for the future and wherever Kelly went he thought he might be the last person to see these sights. Others would come with bulldozers and excavators—or else with arson and theft—but they wouldn’t see how he saw, moving carefully through these rooms and hallways, staring out these windows, marveling at the way you could see the lit skyline of the inhabited city from the endless dusk of its unlit neighborhoods. There were still some progressions in play but he saw how the zone had moved beyond time. Or at least outside of the time marked by digital clocks, smartphone calendars. Inside the zone events moved along paths solar, lunar, seasonal; new geological epochs marked by strata of waste, eras identifiable by the brand names left inside cupboards, by the industrial design of unpowered appliances. A preview of what the world would look like during its coming decline. Kelly pretended he carried the last human gaze door-to-door, window to window, exploring the first outpost of a culture pushed past repair. It could be destroyed but could it be fixed? All the better futures might not arrive. He didn’t think his was the final generation, but perhaps the last might already be born.

  What did this mean for him, for the good man he had tried and failed to be?

  In some houses he found handwritten notes. He found one taped to the cracked plaster across from the house’s front door: we’re leaving in the morning. And then the date the last inhabitants left, not so long ago. In the back of a child’s closet he found a scrawl of crayon reading i’ll be back for you, written to the house, to whatever the child thought a house was. Sometimes there was an animal living there still. The animal was always a cat. What did these cats eat? Where did they sleep and piss and shit? Sometimes it wasn’t hard to see. The skeletons of mice. Shit in one corner of a room, the smell of piss everywhere.

  The cat following Kelly from room to room, rubbing its body against his boots.

  Names everywhere. On the houses. In the asphalt. Carved into trees, fences, doors.

  i love you house, one note read.

  i built this house with my hands, said another.

  goodbye.

  i’m sorry.

  we had to leave but this was home.

  2

  KELLY SCRIBBLED HIS FIRST NAME on a name tag, adhered it to his shirt pocket, took a seat on the unoccupied side of the circle of chairs. The group’s facilitator crossed the church basement, offered her hand. She was all trunk, her middle dwarfing her limbs, had a small mole sprouted from the sensitive skin beneath her lip, a tiny flaw in a good face. She called Kelly by his name, asked if he wanted to share.

  No, he said. He wanted to listen.

  She nodded, patted his hand, released him. When the sharing began the others repeated the past, made it present again. The simultaneity of error and accident, of grief and loss. A red-haired woman had lost her husband in a car crash. A beautiful teenager lost her best friend in a drive-by shooting. The automobile had made the city great but look how much it took in return. The night stretched long. A house fire, a drowning, all the cancers and their medieval treatments. Whenever there were suicides no one ever mentioned the methods. There was a parade of misery described but much of it sounded familiar, stories whose ends could be known by their beginnings. Kelly’s face twisted and he didn’t know how to make it stop. How long had the others been coming. How many times had they come together to share their stories, in these words. There was change pushing forth from their faces but he could see how deep the past had carved them. He didn’t know how to escape the constraints of the past either but maybe he’d come to the group to find out.

  If Kelly had shared he would have said that he was afraid, that what he wanted was a way to end his fear.

  For a long time, he might have said, he had at least succeeded in feeling it less.

  Love meant letting his vigilance down but his vigilance had served him better. He had slipped only once.

  As the others talked Kelly remembered the hardness of his father. How big the man’s face had been, all jowls and grinding
jaws, the father chewing side to side like a ruminant. Those square teeth against pot roast, carrots, root vegetables. Biscuits from a can. The way the man’s joints popped when he walked, how he cracked his knuckles at the table and during the news and after, his father’s limbering of his body for food, information, fucking. The way he shook his shoulders loose when he stood from the table, when he exited the bedroom pale and spindle legged and splendid in his underwear. His father the wrestling coach, Kelly his best student, a state champion like his father before him. In those boyish days Kelly had loved the father with an intensity never again felt, loved the way the man strode the earth grimed with work, his bones shining through his skin as he sat silent before the glowing television, his voice rarely eloquent except in the darkest hour of night, when sometimes he came into Kelly’s room, as some stranger Kelly would have to pretend was not still there when they awoke.

  Wrestling in high school had led to wrestling in college but he hadn’t lasted. With others it was a knee or a shoulder but his injury had been some failure of will, an inability to show up. A deep lethargy had come over him once out of his father’s home, out from under his father’s coaching. He’d started sleeping long and late, ten or twelve hours a night. In classes he’d dozed and dreamed and at practice he’d refused to work his hardest, turning in the slowest laps, the laziest reps and calisthenics, shying away from the contact of position drills, mock rounds.

  Takedown, reversal, escape, takedown, breakdown, fall: a basic plot that could be complicated by a clever strategy, some technical achievement. He stopped shooting on the legs, stopped working toward the pin. A flinching from the fight. Three rounds passed, three minutes then two minutes then two more. During matches he got cited for stalling, a refusal to engage. If he started on top the other boy would explode unchecked to his feet. Kelly tried to keep his distance but it was after he was taken down his real talents emerged. There were only a few ways to escape: the stand-up, the switch, the sit-out, the roll. He didn’t engage but he didn’t give up either. He could be taken down and turned on his back but he was hard to pin, grew more stubborn the closer he got to defeat. Maybe he wouldn’t try to win but he couldn’t stomach losing.