Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  He glances down at himself and finds his body unchanged except that his wounds and their bandages—and his clothes—are all gone. He lifts his hands to his face and they look the same as they always do yet he knows they aren’t his, that this isn’t him, not exactly.

  His legs decide to run and he crashes along behind them, through branches and brambles and brush. He feels his skin scratching but without the pain he knows should be there.

  This strange other Martin thunders along, leaping fallen trees in his path and knocking saplings aside with stiff arms. He rumbles and runs, out of breath but not slowing, his body leading his mind.

  He’s filled with a strange sense of power. This body is stronger than his; it takes up more space in the world despite being the same size exactly.

  Some tickling memory at the back of his mind reminds him he took his clothes off, left them somewhere, that he won’t ever need them again.

  And he runs.

  And he rumbles.

  In this body not quite his own he bursts into a clearing, a pool of swaying sunlit grass ringed by pine trees as slim and as straight as tall needles. At the center of the clearing a patch of brown shows through the green, a ragged dirt circle flattened and worn smooth by feet.

  He approaches slowly, swinging his eyes from side to side, hunched close to the ground.

  As he nears the dirt circle, another naked man slides out of the woods on the opposite side of the clearing. He’s older but more muscled than Martin, and his wrinkled body is peeling and red from the sun. His face is familiar but Martin can’t make sense of why.

  A breeze cuts through the forest and a thick mane of white hair billows around the stranger’s head.

  Without a word or a nod to each other the two men move into the ring, walking sideways in circles, wrestlers sizing up their opponent. They circle and spin, around and around past the point where each of them started and past it again.

  The older man sniffs and he snarls, squinting at Martin with dark, beady eyes. In fast, fluid motion he drops to all fours and tears for the trees in a blur of beige skin.

  For a second his body stretches with those first quadruped steps, growing longer and leaner as he speeds up. As he runs his shape loses all definition and his edges ripple like fur on a fast-moving cat.

  Then he’s gone, away into the trees, and Martin is Martin again, standing in a circle of dirt in a clearing somewhere deep in the woods, naked and lost, awash in a wave of curious guilt.

  He backs away from the exposed space of the clearing, out of the sunlight and into the forest. A metallic thump echoes from the far distance and he covers himself with his hands as much as he can. The sound and its echo come again, and again, then the thump isn’t out in the woods anymore, and neither is Martin, and he sits up from his desk with a start as someone bangs on the door of the trailer.

  “Mr. Blaskett,” Alison calls through the thin wall. “Mr. Blaskett, are you in there?”

  “Hang on,” he calls back. “I’m coming.” He rubs his eyes and wipes a crust of drool from his cheek before he opens the door.

  “What is it?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”

  Alison hangs her hat from one hand and runs the other through her silver-laced hair. One side of her mouth curls into a shallow frown. “We found something,” she says. “In the first hole.”

  “Found what?”

  “Bones, Mr. Blaskett. We just started digging, and the ground’s full of bones.”

  The curtain of his dream hangs between his mind and the world, and as he steps down from the trailer and walks to where the crew began digging, his body feels out of sorts, still asleep or not paying attention to him.

  He walks to where the dump truck stands by and the excavator is idle. There’s a single long trench scraped through the edge of the marked off rectangle where the machine took its first stroke, and Martin stands at the top of the hole and peers into the ground. Thin white roots trail like veins through dark mud, and the stumps and shafts of brown bones stab the air in all directions. Long bones and short ones, intact bones and shattered nubs. Skulls with empty eyes peering up at the workers. A tangle of tibias and femurs and ribs and the roots around them a big ball of twine woven tight.

  “What the fuck,” Martin says to no one in particular.

  “No shit,” answers the dump truck driver, his tough pose betrayed by the shake of his cigarette.

  “Are they . . .,” Martin begins, but he doesn’t finish the question.

  “Human?” Alison asks.

  Some of the crew stand over the hole inspecting the bones, but most of them have wandered off toward the road and are smoking or sitting on piles of equipment, on their plastic lunch coolers or the hoods of their trucks. They mumble to each other and sometimes look Martin’s way with a tip of the head or a frown. A man with a long red beard, whose name Martin doesn’t know because Alison hired most of the crew, stands up and gestures with two chopping hands to the others. Whatever point he’s making with such insistence can’t be understood across the distance, but his voice gets louder and louder as Martin makes out “we all know what,” and “bullshit,” but the other men turn their faces away and go back to their mumbles.

  “Anyone?” Martin asks. “Are they?”

  “How can you tell?” asks the driver.

  “I don’t know. I’ll need to talk to someone.”

  “Should we dig somewhere else?” Alison asks.

  “No, let’s wait while we figure this out.”

  Martin returns to his trailer, scratching his head. It’s not the bones that confuse him—bones turn up all the time, it’s part of digging, it’s part of the passage of time and the laying of ground—but the number of them in one place. Maybe he’s building over a graveyard—another small cemetery like the one he found in the woods—and wasn’t told when he put in his bid on the land. He thinks back to what Gil said about Scratch and his bones and wonders if this is one of the spots where hunters pay to be spooked before doubting they pay to dig holes.

  He sits on the steps of the trailer and takes out his phone, scrolling through a long list of numbers until he finds the one for town hall. He isn’t sure who he needs to talk to about this, to find out whether or not he can keep digging, but he figures local bureaucracy is the place to begin. As his phone dials, Martin crosses his mental fingers in hopes this won’t mean more delays, and that the bones won’t turn out to be sacred and tribal or an archaeological treasure of one kind or another. He hopes they’re plain old dead animals or people of no interest to anyone else.

  When his phone bleats in his ear, he remembers the poor coverage here on the site and hangs up almost relieved—he’s made an effort to enter the proper channels and has failed through no fault of his own. He can always call someone later, when he’s in town. In the meantime, however, he doesn’t know any better what to do with the bones.

  He starts back toward Alison and the few men still clustered around the top of the hole, speaking in a murmur of voices broken by occasional laughter. Their heads dip low in front of their bodies, and all Martin can see are their backs and hunched shoulders. It reminds him of the graveside crowd at a funeral and he’s struck that the connection is more apt than he meant it to be.

  He looks toward the road and sees Gil kneeling down on his porch. He’s at work on some project but Martin can’t make out what it is from this distance. “Gil,” he says out loud, to himself, but his voice carries and some of the crew turn his way. If anyone will know what kind of bones his men have uncovered, it’s Gil; he’ll know whether work can go on, or will have to shut down while some state agency sorts it all out or shuts down construction without sorting anything out, which is equally likely. He hasn’t pegged Gil as someone particularly concerned with protocol and bureaucracy, so expects he’s got a better chance of staying on schedule if he asks his neighbor to have a look before calling anyone else. Before asking someone official.

  As he crosses the road, he can see Gil is painting a chair
that stands upside-down over newspaper sheets. The creamy white of raw wood still shows on the sections that haven’t been slathered in red.

  “How’s your chest?” he asks as Martin approaches.

  “Okay. Stings a little.” He ascends the three steps to the porch, and doesn’t mention that the brief climb makes every inch of his body ache.

  “Stinging’s not bad, considering. What are you all looking at over there? Lotta fellas getting paid to stand around.”

  Martin sighs. “We started digging and the ground’s full of bones.”

  Gil raises his eyes and lowers the paintbrush. “What sort of bones?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me. Most of them are so broken up and worn down they could even be pieces of wood.”

  “Lemme get a look.” Gil lays his brush across the open top of the paint can so it drips red onto the paper below, then he rises from his crouch beside the chair. Martin leads him across the street to where most of the crew greet him by name, and the rest ask each other in whispers who this guy is and why he’s here and they mostly get shushed. The crowd parts at the top of the hole, spreading to either side so Gil can get close.

  “Hey, Gil,” Alison says. “How you been?”

  “These boys listenin’ to you? Need me to set ‘em all straight?”

  “Nah, they’re fine.” She looks over her shoulder at the crew, most of whom are looking away or talking to one another.

  “Let’s get a look,” Gil says, then pokes a cigarette into his mouth. He lights it and looks into the ground without speaking for a long time. A barrel-chested crow lands on the cab of the nearby excavator, and hops from one foot to the other then back to the first before settling down to watch the humans and their strange fascination.

  “Lotta bones,” Gil says at last. “Saw a village like this once. Bombs shook all their skeletons out of the ground. Old bones mixed up with new ones, all those people running away.”

  He falls quiet again, and his eyes are far off as he smokes. Martin waits for him to speak, and the longer he waits the more uncomfortable the moment becomes, the further away Gil seems to be. Alison scuffs the toe of one boot in the dirt at the lip of the hole. Martin tries to form a question in his mouth, but all he gets is an ambiguous hum. The men in the crew have begun wandering off, out toward the road where they started the day, smoking and drinking coffee from insulated bottles.

  “But you aren’t digging in a graveyard.” Gil kneels, and leans far forward over his knees to peer into the trench. “Hell, Marty. That’s all animals, and not even big ones. See, you’ve got a skunk’s skull, and a deer leg there, couple of sheep. Haven’t been sheep around here since I was a kid. These’re old bones.”

  He smokes and scratches his head through his cap. “That’s only the ones on top. Can’t tell what’s at the bottom but no reason to suppose it’s anything different.”

  “That’s a relief,” says Alison. “Thought I was in a horror movie for a minute there.”

  Martin crouches close to the hole and inspects the jumble of brown and white bones. “But why are they all in one place?”

  “I told you, Pelletiers had a big farm out here. Cows, sheep . . . pigs, I suppose. Could be from their slaughtering. Could be there was a mud pit they all fell into over time.” He smokes, and then smiles as he adds, “Or maybe it’s Scratch’s dinner bones.” Gil raises his arms over his head and screws up his face, booming out a monstrous groan in Alison’s direction. He takes a stiff-legged stiff step toward her, but the sound catches in his throat and sets him coughing, bent double over the hole so he drops his cigarette onto the bones.

  “Shit,” he says when the coughing has passed, then lights a fresh cigarette, and again Martin imagines a closet, a room, filled with his un-opened cartons.

  “I’ll get the crew back to work,” Alison says. As she walks away she slides a finger into each corner of her mouth and whistles.

  “Think I need to call the police about this?” Martin asks Gil.

  “Hell, Marty, you bother Sheriff Lindon with this and he’ll throw you in jail for wasting his time. Besides, it’s Monday morning, and look at this weather. He’ll be fishing ’til lunch.”

  A few minutes later, Gil has returned to his porch and to painting his chair. Alison has the crew back at work expanding the hole, and the rectangle of the development’s first foundation has begun to take shape. The first bites of the excavator’s rust-tartared teeth crack the bones where they lie, then each successive stroke disperses them in smaller and smaller fragments throughout the soil of the lot, breaking up like an echo until there are few pieces large enough to be recognized as anything that once was alive. At least not without climbing down from the yellow machines and looking more closely, which no one is willing to do.

  The rest of the workday goes by without much excitement, men, woman, and machines all doing what they’re expected to do, and staying more or less on schedule despite the morning’s setback. Martin spends most of the day inside his trailer, fighting a strong urge to sleep as he fills out forms and makes a list of supplies to order the next time he’s in range of a signal.

  Eventually Alison calls through the open door of the trailer that she’ll be leaving, and Martin steps outside to watch the crew disperse in their varied directions. Alison gathers her tools and hoists them into the back of her car, then tosses her hardhat onto the seat. For a moment she leans against the closed door, looking into the mountains or waiting for something, and Martin tries to think of a reason to keep her from leaving—some issue they need to discuss, some labor problem, but there aren’t any because she does a good job. He considers simply asking if she’d like to get something to eat, to sit over a beer and talk for a while, but before he can cross the mud to within speaking range she is inside her truck and waving as she drives off. Then he’s alone with the idle bulldozer and dump truck, their engines rattling as they cool off, and he remembers there isn’t any real food in his trailer to offer.

  8

  LATER, MARTIN CROSSES THE STREET TO THANK GIL FOR HIS help and ends up as he so often has lately, drinking beer in a rickety cane chair that seems to belong at a dining room table instead of outside on a porch. He watches his neighbor cooking cheese sandwiches on a sheet of blackened metal set over the gas flame of his grill.

  “Tomato?” Gil asks.

  Martin nods, then rests his crossed ankles on the rail of the porch the way he’s seen Gil do. But the older man is a few inches taller, or else his chair is, because the angle of Martin’s legs is too steep to be comfortable as the blood rushes away from his feet.

  Gil hands over a steaming sandwich on a camp plate with chipped red enamel. “Another beer?” he asks, then opens one and hands it over before getting an answer. Martin hurries to drain what’s left in the can he’s already holding. If he was in his trailer, his options would be limited to instant noodles or soup from a powder, so grilled cheese and beer is at least a step up.

  Two large crows hop through the high grass of Gil’s yard near the road, pecking at bugs in the dirt. One threads too close to the other and the larger bird shrieks a warning until the interloper moves off its turf.

  “Thought about your bones,” Gil says. “Figure there must’ve been a sinkhole there once. Animals fell in over the years and got stuck.”

  “I’m glad they were just animals. Still pretty creepy, though.”

  “Bones aren’t so bad. Especially without any meat on ‘em. The fresh ones get your neck hairs up. They take getting used to.” Gil drains most of his beer in a single long slurp. “People are harder to take.” He crunches the can in his fist so the top and bottom rims curl together, then pitches it toward a brown paper bag standing open at the end of the porch. The can misses the bag, bouncing under the railing and down to the yard.

  “I’ve only ever seen them at funerals,” Martin replies. “Bodies, I mean, not bones.” He thinks of his mother stretched in her coffin almost ten years ago, with too much rouge on her s
unken cheeks and pink powder filling hollows honed by disease. He arranged a funeral in the city she’d spent most of her life swirling around, from one home to another, at an upscale parlor near the furnished rooms he was living in then. But when it came time to bury her he couldn’t decide on a place and she hadn’t left any instructions. So he had her cremated after the service and spilled her ashes at the side of a bridge where they’d fished sometimes when he was young.

  His mother had always been drawn to rivers. She’d always been happiest when she had a view of one from her windows; it’s something she told Martin later, when he was grown, but when he looked back at all their homes together over the years he could see she was right.

  “The water never stops moving,” she’d said once when they were fishing, legs dangling over the river. “It runs down the mountains and past all the farms and right through the city before it gets to the ocean. It only stays in one place when we catch a fish and pull him out of the water to keep.”

  Martin watched a fish he’d caught flopping beside him on the hot cement of the bridge, skittering a wet tail against his thin hip. What kind was it, he wonders now, but all he remembers is its upturned eye spread wide with what he took to be panic, though he later learned fish can’t close their eyes. “I think this one wants to keep swimming,” he told his mother, and she laughed and let him toss the fish back.

  “We’ll find something else for supper,” she said. “We’ll let that one keep moving. It’s nice to be able to change your plans when you want to, isn’t it Martin?” She leaned way over the side of the bridge to drop the fish, and as it fell she said, “Okay, fish, there’s your second chance. What are you going to do with it? Which way will you swim now?”

  Gil says, “You get used to bones,” but he doesn’t seem to be speaking to Martin as much as himself. “Bones are dead. The stuff between is what spooks you.”

  “Between what?”

  “Well.” Gil finishes his beer, and this can finds the open mouth of the bag easily. He pulls yet another drink from the cooler of melted ice by his chair, pops it open, and drains most of the can before speaking again. “Say you shoot a buck, and you think it’s a clean shot. But when you get close it’s kicking and moaning.”