Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  There’s a twitch in his knee and he jerks his eyes open, but the world doesn’t get any lighter. He rubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth to scrape off the sour taste of sleep. It’s so dark he can’t see his own hand in front of his face, an expression he has, until now, always assumed hyperbolic. His legs aren’t as sore as they were, or they’re still asleep, and his stomach has given up thoughts of eating and seems satisfied to gnaw on itself. After waiting a few seconds for his eyes to adjust he accepts that they won’t, that while he slept in this hollowed-out house night has fallen around him.

  He wasn’t afraid when he was simply lost, but waking in the dark brings his childhood fear rushing back and he curls his body against itself. Every leaf brushed by wind, each acorn or pine cone falling beyond the low walls, is some horrible beast closing in; each second he waits in the dark brings whatever moves through the woods closer to where he sits exposed. He pictures the forest floor seething with snakes and with rats, and the larger bodies of panthers and foxes out there somewhere, too. As much as his mind assures him that these visions are drawn more from movies than the truth of this place, the fear won’t be shaken off.

  And he isn’t entirely wrong because here we are.

  Wind hisses and dips into the foundation. Where his clothes remain damp Martin shivers, and he zips the jacket up to his neck. Something is walking on the other side of the wall. Something shuffles through crackling scrub and creeps closer to where he huddles. It walks a slow circle around the stone square, and Martin follows the path with his ears. The footsteps are light but steady, punctuated with the occasional snuffle or snort, and he wonders if the animal knows he is there. He listens as it comes closer to where he thinks the door is.

  Wherever he sleeps, in hotels and apartments and even the trailer he occupies now, Martin pushes his bed as tightly into a corner as he can wedge it. The more sides on which he’s protected by walls, the more soundly he sleeps. Waking up with no roof overhead and only the stumps of lost walls at his sides has sent him into a panic that feels both familiar and long forgotten. It’s primal, an instinct, and he feels his way along the foundation until he finds the higher stones of the hearth. At last his forehead strikes the rusty remains of the kettle on its hook with a loud, rolling clang. The pain in his head isn’t as bad as the silence that follows the sound—everything in the forest has stopped what it’s doing, everything knows just where he is now. With his fingers on the top edge of the opening so he won’t bump his head again, Martin slides backward into the mouth of the fireplace. It’s high enough for him to crouch with his legs pulled to his chest and his forehead bent close to his knees. He’s still exposed to the forest, but only in one direction.

  It’s warmer out of the wind, but not by much. He hunches with his eyes open but there’s nothing to see: no fireflies, no fire, no yellow, glistening eyes. He strains his ears for the footsteps, but either the creature was chased off by the sound of the kettle or his own breathing echoes so loudly in the hearth that he can’t hear the animal moving.

  Home from college once, on a rare visit, Martin finally asked his mother why they had moved so many times. “I wanted to find a place that felt right,” she told him. They were in the cramped kitchen of her apartment—hers alone, for the first time since he had been born—and though there was hardly room for the two of them to work together they were rolling out dough for some foreign pastry she’d learned to make from a man who had come and gone without meeting her son. As she answered his question, Martin’s mother looked up from her rolling pin, and he noticed that flour had settled into the creases and lines of her face. It made her look so much older than she actually was, every wrinkle made bright, and the white streaks in her hair looked as if they’d been floured, too.

  He asked, as he had before with other words, “Did it feel like the right place with my father?” His mother dusted her hands over the dough, rubbing one against the other so a white cloud rose then drifted down, and said she needed to look at the recipe to find out what to do next.

  But don’t mistake all that for Martin’s story. It’s where he comes from but not what he’s worth. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking origins are more important than outcomes, that a beginning determines the lifetime ahead, but I’ve lived long enough to know that how a life starts only matters so long as it does; it’s the ending you need to aim for. Don’t miss out on a meal for today while you’re remembering what you once ate. No mouse was ever spared by an owl because it grew up in an unhappy hole.

  He watches the dark before the fireplace until his eyelids grow heavy, and though the wind doesn’t find him at the back of the hearth it swells inside the foundation as the sea swells in a shell, and the sound returns him to sleep despite anxious fears. The forest rustles and stirs with comings and goings on four legs and six legs and eight, and in the treetops sleeping birds twitter as bats squeak and wheel, aloft and prowling for insects. An opossum inches along a branch overhead, its eyes wide and bright, then scuttles away on silent feet.

  There’s no reason for us to wait here while he sleeps, so let’s weave our way through the woods to his trailer where the door still stands open. It isn’t as far away as he thinks; if he only knew how close he is to his home, that his wandering has traced a circular path almost back to where he began, then he might get there before us and claim the bed for himself. He could have followed the wall—lines so deliberately drawn always lead somewhere, whether it’s stone walls or wires or roads. They aren’t as meandering as stories and echoes—or dreams—shaped and reshaped and veering in all directions. Passed from teller to teller and place to place, as arbitrary as those new humming waves in these woods or the seeds that cling to fur and sock alike to plant themselves in new fields.

  Martin could follow that wall, but in his mind he’s lost in the forest so his body believes. Which is all the better for us—we may be wearing these nocturnal shapes, but we’ve been following Martin all day and I suspect you’re as tired as that borrowed body. So we’ll creep to his trailer, climb into his bed, and make his life our own for a while.

  3

  THE SQUARE SHOULDERS OF GIL’S BLACK-AND-WHITE CHECKERED jacket plow through scrub pines near the top of a mountain. The hunter charges ahead without ducking low branches, without shoving saplings aside. It’s as if he expects the forest to step out of his way and the forest seems to oblige. Martin hurries behind, dodging those branches as they whip back into place from Gil’s passing. Again and again his clothes snare on brambles and twigs and he has to stop, pluck them free, and rush to catch up.

  It’s a dream, of course it’s a dream, and what else would it be? Dreams bring you closer to the world the rest of us live in than anything else, and in this dream Gil has three rifles slung on his back and a fourth in hand at his side. The arsenal seems excessive to Martin, but as if Gil is reading his thoughts he calls back, “Different calibers, Marty. Never know what you’ll run into or what size hole it’ll need.”

  “What are we hunting for?”

  “You tell me. It’s your dream.” Gil laughs, and adjusts the cap on his head, a fixture in waking life and dreams, too. There are smudged fingerprints all over the brim where he’s gripped it over the years, as there are on the real thing.

  A hawk circles above them without moving its wings, and Martin tries to watch as he walks. With his eyes on the bird, he stumbles over a half-buried point of dark granite.

  “Look where you’re going there, Marty,” Gil scolds without turning around.

  Martin apologizes though he’s not sure he needs to, then walks with his eyes on the trail for a mile or so. But when he looks up again there are more hawks, seven or eight of them now, hard to count as their paths cross and re-cross, wheeling in spirals high overhead.

  “Have you noticed those hawks, Gil?” he asks.

  “Don’t mind ‘em. They’re after smaller meals than you.”

  Each time Martin squints up at the silver haze of the sky, the group of hawk
s—Flock? he tries to remember, or is it a murder, like crows?—has swung lower, and now he can see individual feathers in the dense mail of their chests. “They’re flying pretty low,” he says, but gets no reply.

  Gil steams forward as the scrub thickens on either side of the trail. The forest still avoids him even as more and more branches strike Martin’s chest, arms, and face. The back of Gil’s neck is creased as an old leather boot and as wide as the head it supports.

  Martin hurries, trying not to look up, trying to keep up with Gil, and all of a sudden there’s a stabbing pain in his foot.

  “Ow!” he hollers. “Shit!” Gil doesn’t turn. For some reason Martin is barefoot, the boots and socks he’s sure he was wearing a few steps ago gone, and a long, crimson thorn has punctured his sole. Cursing, he leans against the trunk of a tree. He plucks out the thorn and a bead of blood blooms. He wants to rest, to let the cut scab, but already he’s losing sight of Gil out ahead so he walks, wincing with each tentative step.

  It all seems familiar, he thinks, like he’s been here before, though Martin isn’t quite sure what “here” means. It might be the woods, or the moment, or perhaps the dream because it, too, is familiar—tidier than his usual dreams, too tightly tied to his life, because I’ve tied it there.

  “Probably not,” answers Gil, listening in again on Martin’s head. Suddenly the checkered shoulders are still and Gil swings the gun up from his hip to level it at something ahead. The three barrels still slung on his back rattle together with the inertia of stopping.

  “What is it?” Martin asks, stepping close behind his neighbor, who grunts, or maybe growls, in reply. Martin looks up the trail but doesn’t see anything. Gil’s hands are steady, liver-spotted stone on the gun.

  Then a loud crack echoes out of the woods and movement catches Martin’s eye on his left. He turns toward the trees and shouts, “Gil, over there!”

  The green curtain shakes as a tall, dark shape passes behind thin trunks. Gil sets the rifle butt against his shoulder and squints along the barrel into the woods as Martin holds his breath, waiting.

  “Scratch,” Gil says, without looking away from the gun.

  “Scratch what?”

  The hunter hisses at him to be quiet.

  There’s another loud crack in the shadows, then a long shaft of pine with needles and branches still hanging from it hurtles through the air toward the men. Gil roars and squeezes a round off at nothing before the trunk crashes into his chest and knocks him down.

  “Gil!” Martin shouts, but the other man doesn’t answer. He’s pinned beneath the log and isn’t moving. His eyes are closed and the gun has been knocked from his hands. The other three weapons are trapped by the trunk and his body.

  Martin turns toward the trees, not sure what to do, and the figure he saw in the shadows comes charging out of the woods. He barely sees the bottle-green eyes and the curve of white teeth before he pivots and runs up the trail the way he and Gil came. Each step on rough ground slashes his feet, but Martin runs as fast as he can without looking back.

  The hawks are circling so low now that when they pass overhead the air displaced by their wings is as loud as a river.

  A cramp burns in his side but he runs on, afraid the heat on his back is his pursuer’s breath. He’s sure the snarl behind him is getting louder the longer he runs, but he doesn’t hear the thundering steps he expects there to be if he is being chased.

  Then he trips on a tree root curving up from the ground, and his face and his chest slam hard against the packed earth of the trail. A strong hand—a strong paw—grips his arm and slings his body over, and Martin is face to face with a bear. Its lips are peeled back from pink gums, and its tongue squirms in the enormous dark space of its mouth as it roars. A sticky drop of saliva plops between Martin’s eyes and he squeezes them closed, turning his head and puckering his face as he waits to be killed.

  The bear isn’t as big as he would have expected.

  Then pain jerks him awake and he’s stretched on his back in the burnt-out foundation. He’s been dragged feet-first from his fireplace bed by a bear, a real bear, and now it rises to its full height and crashes down hard with its paws on his chest.

  Martin lets out a sound that would be a yell if he could gather enough air to make one. His attempt to draw breath expands his chest enough to increase the pressure and weight of the paws.

  The bear leans across his body so its hot belly swings against his thighs. The pressure on his ribs is immense, and pushes the last gasps from his lungs. His hands spring to his defense without being asked, wrapping themselves as far as they can around the bear’s legs above each of the paws, wrenches too small for the job. He pushes and pulls, struggling to move the thick legs, but they will not be budged. The pressure on his chest doesn’t increase but it doesn’t lighten up, either, and Martin wheezes and rasps, his struggle for breath made all the worse by his panic.

  He feels the bear’s gaze on his face along with its hot breath, but he fights the urge to look. Some old memory, from a book he read as a child or some rerun he saw on TV, insists that the worst thing to do in a situation like this is to look a bear in the eyes. As if a situation like this happens often enough for there to be a wealth of advice.

  He feels five sharp points of pain, and when he lowers his eyes without moving his head he sees that the claws of one paw have punctured the jacket, the T-shirt, his skin. The details of the holes are strangely acute, each frayed thread on his jacket individual and distinct and each curved claw glazed with its own unique pattern of cracks and chips. The other paw still presses his ribs.

  Martin studies the claws for a long time, a moment so slow he starts to think he has already died and his spirit has drifted away from his body, that he’s watching all this from somewhere beyond himself. His head swims and he becomes dizzy despite lying flat on the ground. The treetops bordering his field of vision sway like the waves of a rough, green sea he is sinking under.

  Then the bear grunts, and without increasing the weight on Martin’s chest it leans closer, filling his eyes with its body. Black fur streaked with copper surrounds him, and the bear smells of old meat and wet dog. Its cold black nose sniffs a circle around his head. He tries to lie still but can’t stop his body from shaking. The bear snorts beside his face and the air is so hot he feels it deep in his ear.

  This is it, Martin thinks. This is the way I die.

  No sooner does the thought cross his mind than the bear moves, draws its paws away from his body in a swift, sweeping motion that tears five bloody tracks through two layers of cloth and the skin underneath.

  Now he does scream, loudly and at a high pitch. He sustains the harsh note until the bear rears up then slams a forefoot to the dirt beside each of his ears, shaking the scream from his throat. The back of his head bounces against the ground with the force of the impact.

  The bear turns murky eyes onto Martin’s blue ones, and that hot breath makes him gag. He tries to stop his body from shaking, afraid it makes him look appetizing the way a lively fly lures a fish. He tries to look away from that wild gaze, the orange and yellow and brown of a fire, but the flame holds his eyes.

  Then at last the bear’s body relaxes and the creature steps forward. It slides across Martin’s body so its hot, heavy fat slaps his face as it passes. The chaff and dust of dirty fur fill his nose, and he fights back a strong urge to sneeze. When the whole broad, black body has passed over his face, the bright light of morning rushes into his eyes and the sneeze bursts out before he can stop it.

  The bear rises onto hind legs and climbs over the wall of the house. There’s a thud from outside the foundation, then Martin listens as his attacker lumbers away. He hears the thumps of the animal’s first few steps before the forest falls quiet again and there is only the pounding of his own pulse.

  Then birdsong sneaks back in, leaves rustle, trunks creak and boughs crack. The world carries on as if none of that happened. As if it was no more than a dream or a story
.

  The cuts in his chest sting and burn. His head pounds. His peripheral vision is laced with black worms, from dehydration, or the rush of breath back into his vacant lungs, or a combination of both. Martin lies on the ground with his eyes closed, fighting to suppress his sick stomach, then gives up and rolls onto his side to spill a yellow stew on the ground. Again and again he retches, each spasm lighting a fire on his chest, and his body goes on heaving after nothing more emerges from his empty gut.

  For a long time he lies still on his side, upright as the stone walls around him. The chills that follow vomiting come quickly as his bloodless face tingles and stings. Cool ground-level air makes his eyes water. When the retching subsides, his nostrils clog, and they whistle as he breathes through them.

  He waits in resigned expectation for the bear to return. Having convinced himself he was seconds away from his death, that the beast’s intent was to kill him, the heavy mantle of that resignation is hard to shake off even after his attacker is gone, phantom pain from a lost limb. His chest aches from the torn skin on the surface all the way down to his heaving lungs. Gingerly, Martin feels his way up one side of his ribcage and down the other, as if he would know a broken bone when he found it. The pain stretches from top to bottom and side to side, but apart from the center-left of his chest where the claws broke the skin—where the pain is different, if no more intense—there isn’t any one spot that hurts more or less than the rest. Under the circumstances, he takes that as a good sign.

  The bear does not come back, and in time Martin’s breathing returns to something near normal as the pain in his chest and back becomes familiar enough he can once again feel the more mundane aches of hunger and thirst. And a different kind of pain, too: the awareness that had he died here, had his body been left by the bear or dragged off to be eaten—if that’s what bears do—it would have been a long time before anyone in the world outside these woods knew what had happened to him. A very long time. That gloomy thought buoys Martin up, in its way, and fills him with a desire to get to his feet and find a route out of the forest. To get himself back to his trailer and his unbuilt homes, where he will see and be seen by other people.