Scrapper

by Matt Bell

  She pressed her body against Kelly’s, slurred through the pills until she slept with her feet in his lap, her bad leg twitching against the couch, scraping sweatpants over rough fabric. A series of the smallest gestures followed: one man, one woman, sleeping together on a couch in a rented apartment. When Kelly awoke the nightly news was flooding the screen with the day’s events, the political pronouncements and product releases. The president appeared again in his favorite hallway, a West Wing locale saved for announcing the deaths of enemies of the state, the upheld constitutionality of his laws. He claimed to have ended wars from this arrangement of white columns and gold light and red carpet, spoke his prepared speeches with his preacher’s cadence, allowed his hands the few acceptable motions of the American president: the fist-with-pointing-thumb, the chopping hand, the open clutch. Kelly thought the president was speaking directly to him, another of the president’s gifts. His undeniable charisma. Always his own people were beyond reproach, always the president had to believe in our exceptionalism.

  In another story an iceberg sloughed off an ice shelf and fell into the sea. Competing viewpoints were offered but all Kelly believed in was human agency. As a child he had tried to imagine the state as it might have been before it was settled, still forested everywhere, the old growth dense and dark and endless with mystery and megafauna and tribal law. Later he’d watched a documentary that claimed the indigenous peoples decimated the trees so thoroughly they removed enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cause an ice age. There was no end to the great harm men could do to the world, the unwitting cost of dominion. So far, every time the doomsday clock went off it got reset, but who knew how long such luck would hold. Sometimes when Kelly watched the president speak he thought the man could hear the dread clock ticking.

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON THE CRUISERS parked their cars in rows, idled engines in a show of chrome, combustion, exhaust. The girl with the limp knew the makes and models and approximate years, had the arcana of automobiles down. There was talk of other men but she said her interests were hers, didn’t rely on outside influences. Kelly poked his head under raised hoods, searched out the parts he could name. He had never changed his own oil, didn’t necessarily know what the bottom of his truck looked like. He knew the word carburetor but that was another knowledge passing from the earth. There were questions he might have asked if he didn’t hate to open up his ignorance to others.

  Everything mechanical sounded better in her voice. The way she said 1955 Chevy, 1964 Dodge. A throaty appreciation, an audible desire.

  They surveyed the majesty of hood ornaments, the leaping jaguar, the Pentastar, the impala, the three-pointed star, the Spirit of Ecstasy, the cormorant. A Greek goddess, the archer, the Plymouth ship, the greyhound. An array of rockets evoking a future destined never to come, the face of a chief forced to roam taken lands at new speeds, a golden-winged Cadillac beauty the reminder of a past no one believed. In others cars they saw well-maintained seats, leather made of real animals, preserved to perfection fifty years after the skinned beasts were dust. They peered through windows, examined dashes crowded with dials and meters, buttons and knobs, analog extravagance. They saw a record player in a Dodge Polara and he asked when the car had been built. She didn’t know but she touched his arm, the gesture better than any answer. Before 1930 there were no radios in automobiles, she said, and so what did people listen to when they drove? The sounds of the road, the engine, each other.

  She pointed and said, A 1947 Packard Clipper, a car red like all these cars were red. He walked around the vehicle, kneeled before its skinny grille, considered its endangered curves. He no longer thought about the fire at the plant every day. You couldn’t escape the past but he hoped you could choose what to restore, what to keep gleaming. This was the progress Kelly had seen, not the replacing of the old city with the new but the building of smarter exits and bypasses.

  It wasn’t the cost of the object history wanted preserved, only the object. And this was the week a scrapper died inside a closed hospital, cutting steel beams, buried beneath a collapsing roof. This was the week a scrapper was shot by a private security guard inside a tenantless apartment building. This was the week a scrapper dropped an acetylene torch from atop a ladder, cutting the hose between the tank and the torch, igniting the insulation falling out of the ceiling. This was the week a scrapper climbed a power pole to cut through the dead wire and found the wire fully charged. When the fire trucks arrived the men had to wait, hoses in hand, until the utility company could turn off the power. By then the scrapper was fused to the pole and the firemen had to cut down the top half to take him away.

  This life Kelly was living. How long did he expect it to last.

  What are you thinking, the girl asked.

  He looked up, shook his head, thought her name, said it aloud: Jackie. Sometimes it was so easy to say it.

  Later they lay beside each other in her bed, hands touching, legs intertwined, and into the silent dark she said she didn’t like to talk about her past either but she couldn’t put off the future forever. She asked if he knew what he was getting into. Her limp wouldn’t be the last thing. Already there were attacks where she struggled to breathe, where her vision blurred and she lost sensation in her fingers and toes. Involuntary systems got confused, voluntary ones unresponsive. Once she’d shit herself at work. She was older than he was and she wasn’t going to live forever.

  He shushed her, said it didn’t matter. He said, Okay. He said, Tell me everything. Tell me what will happen and I’ll tell you if I can handle it.

  She said physical activity could make it worse. She had to be careful not to overheat herself or else it would cause an attack. No matter what she did there would be attacks and there would be relapses and after every attack she would be worse than she was before. There was no going back. The disease was progressive, untreatable, incurable. The doctors believed they knew how to slow it down but a delay was the best they could hope for.

  Some patients smoked pot. Some self-infected themselves with hookworm to train their immune systems to fight. It was all guesswork. She took her pills and lived her life.

  He nodded, slid closer, made a move.

  No, she said. First tell me how much of this you want.

  We’re together, he said. And not because of this. If we come to an end this won’t be why.

  3

  THE MORNING OF THE FIRST snow, Kelly drove an unexplored length of the zone, coasting the truck slowly from driveway to driveway, assessing doors left open, windows missing, porches collapsed by the removal of their metal supports. Some of the houses had been scrapped already but he knew he would find one more recently closed, with boards in the windows and an intact door. A space empty but not yet shredded. The zone sprawled beneath the falling snow, cast its imperfection wider than he could accept, but eventually he chose a house—two floors, blue paint on the siding, gray boards over the windows, a yellow door, surrounded on both sides by vacant lots, with only a burnt shell standing watch across the street—then went to the door and knocked, yelled greetings loaded with question marks.

  He waited, yelled again.

  He raised his hood, returned to the truck for a pry bar. He moved out of the front yard and along the side of the house, the brown grass crunching beneath the snow. Beside the blue house was a metal gate in a chain-link fence but the gate wasn’t latched. At the first window he pulled back the covering board, found the glass gone. He peeked in, searched for furniture, a television or a radio. Instead stained carpet, signs of water damage, a kitchen with no dirty dishes but an intact gas range, a sink and faucet he could wrench from the countertops.

  He lifted himself through the window. Leading away from the kitchen was a staircase to the second floor and also a basement door, closed and latched with a padlock. He’d cut the lock later, after the other work was done. Upstairs the bedrooms were small, sloped to fit beneath the peaked roof, but
there was enough room to swing a sledge. Back downstairs he opened the front door—the door not even locked, but he hadn’t thought to check before climbing in the window—then crossed the snowy yard to the truck for the rest of his tools. Already his first footprints were buried beneath the accumulation and afterward he wouldn’t be able to convince himself there had been others, no matter how insistently he was asked.

  In the master bedroom he flicked the light switch to check the power, then aimed above the outlets and swung. He took what other scrappers might have left behind. With a screwdriver he removed each metal junction box from the bedroom, then in the bathroom he cut free the old copper plumbing from under the sink and inside the walls. He smoked and watched the snowfall through a bedroom window, the world hushed wet under its weight. In the South he’d forgotten the feeling of a house in winter, the unexpected nostalgia of watching the world disappear under snowfall. He put his forehead to the cool glass, watched the stillness fill the pane.

  Downstairs he dismantled the kitchen, disconnected the stove from the wall, cut the steel sink from the counter. He worked quietly in what he thought was the wintry hush of the house but later he would be told about the amateur soundproofing in the basement, about the mattresses nailed to the walls, about the eggshell foam pressed between the basement rafters.

  The soundproofing meant the boy screaming in the basement wasn’t screaming for Kelly but for anyone. There would be talk of providence but what was providence but a fancy word for luck? If the upstairs of the blue house had been plumbed with PVC Kelly might not have gone down into the basement. But then copper in the bathroom, but then the copper price.

  It wasn’t until he cut the padlock’s loop and opened the basement door that he heard the boy’s voice, the boy’s hoarse cry for help rising out of the dark.

  As soon as Kelly heard the boy’s voice the moment split, and in the aftermath of that cry Kelly thought he lived both possibilities in simultaneous sequence: there was an empty basement or else there was a basement with a boy in a bed and it seemed to Kelly he had gone into both rooms. Kelly thought if he had fled and left the boy there and disappeared into the night he might never have had to think about it again, couldn’t be held responsible for everything that followed. Instead he had acted and now there would be no knowing where this action would stop.

  Kelly climbed downward, descending the shaft of light falling through the basement door. His clothes clung to the nervous damp of his skin as he stepped off the stairs toward the bed at the back of the low room, toward the boy restrained there, all skin and skinny bones, naked beneath a pile of blankets and howling in the black basement air.

  One by one each element of the scene came into focus, the room’s angles resolving out of the darkness, each shape alien in the moment, the experience too unexpected for sense: the humidity under the earth, the musky heat of trapped breath and sweat, piss in a bucket; the smell of burrow or warren, then the filth of the mattress as Kelly slid to his knees beside the bed, his headlamp unable to light the whole scene; the boy atop the stained and stinking sheets, confusing in his nudity, half hidden by the pile of covers, a nest of slick sleeping bags and rougher fabrics partially kicked off the bed, and beside the pile of blankets a folding metal chair.

  The boy’s screaming stopped as soon as Kelly lit his features but Kelly knew the boy couldn’t see him through the glare. He shut off the headlamp, removed the glow between them, let their eyes readjust to the dimmer light. He leaned closer, close enough to hear the boy’s rasping breath, to smell his captivity, to touch the boy’s hand. To try to bring the boy out of abstraction into the sensible world.

  Kelly’s body was moving as if disconnected from thought but if he could retouch the connections he would begin to speak. He tried to say his name, pointed to himself, failed to speak the word. He shook his head, reached down for the boy. The boy flinched from Kelly’s touch but Kelly took him in his arms anyway, gathered him against his chest and lifted quick—and then the boy crying out in pain as Kelly jerked him against the metal cuffs shackling the boy’s feet to the bed, hidden beneath the bunched blankets.

  The sound of the boy’s voice, naming his hurt into the black air: this was not the incomprehensible idea of a boy abducted but the presence of such a boy, real enough. And how had Kelly come to hold him, to smell the boy’s sweat, then the sudden stink of his own, their thickening musk of fear? Because what if he had not left the South. If he had been able to find work instead of resorting to scrapping. If there had not been the fire in the plant so that afterward he worked alone. If he had not met the girl with the limp. If she had not been working today. If she hadn’t had another attack the night before, keeping him from drinking so much he couldn’t scrap. Providence or luck, it didn’t matter. He told himself he believed only in the grimness of the world, the great loneliness of the vacuum without end to come. You could be good but what did it buy you. You could be good and it meant more precisely because it bought you nothing.

  Kelly cursed, lowered the boy back on the bed, felt the boy’s heat linger on his chest like a stain. He touched the place where the boy had been, felt the thump of his heart pounding beneath the same skin, listened to their bodies huffing in the dark as he relit the narrow beam of the headlamp, its light scattering the boy’s features into nonsense.

  I have to go back upstairs, Kelly said. I’ll be right back.

  No, the boy whispered, his voice swallowed by the muted room. Please.

  Kelly quickly removed his coat and wrapped it around the boy to cover the boy’s nakedness, then moved toward the stairs as fast as he could, trying to outdistance the increasing volume of the boy’s cries. But there was no way of freeing the boy without his saw, no way of getting the saw without leaving the boy. The basement door opened into the kitchen and in every direction Kelly saw the destruction he’d brought, the walls gutted, the counters opened, the stove dragged free from the wall, waiting for the handcart. The day was ending fast, the light fading as Kelly moved across the dirty tile, looking for his backpack, the hacksaw inside.

  Outside the opened window the wet whisper of snow fell, quieting the world beyond the house’s walls while inside the air was charged and waiting. When Kelly turned back to the basement he saw the door was closed, the boy and the boy’s sound trapped again. It was a habit to close a door when he left a room but this time it was a cruelty too. Back downstairs Kelly found the boy sitting with his bare knees curled into his naked chest, all of his body cloaked under Kelly’s coat. Kelly raised the saw so the boy could see what it was, what Kelly intended. I’m here to help you, Kelly said, or thought he did, the boy was nodding, or Kelly thought the boy was, but after he switched the headlamp on again he couldn’t see the whole boy anymore, only the boy in parts. The boy’s terrified face. The boy’s clammy chest. The boy’s clenched hands and curled toes. He ran the beam along the boy’s dirty bony legs, inspected the cuffs, the bruised skin below.

  Kelly put a hand on the boy’s ankle and they both recoiled at the surprise. Hold still, Kelly said. He lifted the chain in one hand and the saw in the other and as he cut he had to turn his face away from the boy’s rising voice, speaking again its awesome need.

  The boy was heavier than Kelly expected, a dead weight of dangling limbs. He asked the boy to hold on and the boy said nothing, did less. When Kelly looked down at the boy he saw the boy wasn’t looking at anything. Out of the low room, up the stairs, into the dirty kitchen. All the noise the boy had made in the basement was gone, replaced by something more ragged, a threatened hissing. The front door was close to the truck but the back door was closer to where they stood and more than anything else Kelly wanted out of the blue house, out into the fresh snow and the safety of the truck, its almost escape.

  Other scenarios emerged. Other uses for the basement, what might happen to Kelly if they were caught here. What might happen to the boy for trying to escape if he were caught too. Outside the
wind was louder than Kelly had expected and the thick wet snow would bury his newest footprints but there wouldn’t be any hiding what he’d done. Kelly carried the boy around the house to the truck, adjusted the boy’s weight across his shoulder so he could dig in his pocket for the keys. The boy was shoeless and Kelly couldn’t put him down. The boy was limp and shoeless in his arms but Kelly thought if he put the boy down the boy might run.

  At the truck Kelly lowered the boy into the passenger seat, then stripped off his own flannel shirt. Kelly’s arms were bare to the falling snow but he wasn’t cold as he helped the boy stick his arms into the shirt, its fabric long enough to cover most of the boy’s nakedness. He bundled the boy back into the coat too but the truck was freezing and the boy’s legs were bare and Kelly wasn’t sure the boy’s shivering would stop no matter how warm he made the cab.

  Kelly walked around to the driver’s side, opened the door. Without climbing inside he reached under the steering wheel, put the keys in the ignition, started the engine. He punched the rear defrost, cranked the heat, hesitated.