Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  No more than he knows where this trail he’s on leads.

  As they cross the bare earth of the clearing, something green appears in the dirt. Gil crouches, balancing his rifle across one knee, and lifts a swatch of cloth from the ground. He runs the fingertips of one hand through the dirt. “Claw prints here, too. Looks to me our cat tore up some of Elmer’s clothes in the house and dragged ‘em outside.” He crumples the cloth in his hand and shoves it into a pocket. He looks back in the direction of the house, now out of sight, and adds, “Must’ve hung onto this bit a while.”

  Martin almost points out how wholly Gil seems to have accepted the presence of an animal he denied a short time ago, but the satisfaction of saying so is outweighed by the shock of Gil’s earlier reaction. So he stands speechless above his crouched neighbor, scanning the trees and the clearing, trying to reconstruct his dream. He remembers running through the woods, feeling like some kind of animal, and ending up in this place. He met something here, a man who didn’t move like a man, and wasn’t he wearing green clothes, or was he wearing nothing at all? Martin knows something ran into the trees on the other side of the dirt, and he pictures it sleek and leonine, but he would, now, wouldn’t he? After the dream I seeded this with? With the mountain lion so much on his mind?

  His dream—my dream—came to him only a few hours ago but has already faded, and the harder Martin pushes to remember the more distant it seems. Its signal has decayed over time, and he’s so tired after his night without decent sleep, his body is so sore and battered, that it’s hard to draw distinctions between what took place in his dreams and what really happened. It’s hard for him know what’s only fantasy spun and believed by his tired, fraying mind—his earlier, unlikely suggestion of a mountain lion dragging a man away into the woods.

  Something moves in the trees, behind the curtain, and both men look up. “Did you hear . . .,” Martin asks, but is shushed by Gil’s upraised hand. A soundless shape slides through the brush, yellow and long, fading in and out of the dry grass and leaves.

  Gil lowers one knee to the ground for support and raises the rifle butt to his shoulder. Martin takes an involuntary step backward, toward the path on which they arrived, away from Gil’s gun and away from the shape in the shadows.

  The mountain lion melts out of the scrub and into the clearing, head swinging back and forth on its shoulders with each liquid step. Its body is a vast stretch of ribs slung between thick, broad-pawed legs, and under the block of its head a triangle of tufted white fur slopes down its chest. The cat is only a few yards away, moving in slowly, and Martin is shocked by how casual its approach seems to be. Despite the weapon pointed right at it, the animal walks as if it’s approaching a friend, like the gun is aimed somewhere else. It hasn’t even bared teeth, but for all Martin knows about mountain lions, baring teeth isn’t something they do. It’s larger, but doesn’t look any more threatening than the house cats that wander up to Martin’s trailer from the town’s houses and farms, waiting for milk from his cereal bowl.

  There’s a crack, then its echo, and a thin wisp of smoke twists away from the black tip of Gil’s gun. At the sound of the shot, birds erupt into the air from the woods all around and for a second, before they disperse, the beat of their wings is a frantic heartbeat filling the world.

  A red flower blooms on the white field of the animal’s chest, and the cat crumples. Martin remembers a toy he had once, a tiny wooden man made of segmented parts held together by elastic string; when a button was pushed under his feet the elastic went loose and his body piled up on itself the way the cat’s has.

  Martin’s stomach turns. His mouth falls open but he can’t say a word. He’s not sure why Gil had to shoot, and his mind replays what happened only a second ago, trying to find some threat of attack, some reason the cat should be killed. He holds his tongue and waits for Gil’s explanation as his mouth fills with the acidic taste of the lump in his throat.

  The cat, dying on the ground before them, has a look in its wet yellow eyes as if this was the last thing it ever expected. Maybe this is what Gil meant about animals forgetting their fear of mankind, their fear of getting shot. Maybe this cat has been reminded.

  Gil doesn’t offer the explanation Martin awaits. He’s over the cat with a knife, jerking its head one way then the other, checking its pulse and its eyes, saying, “Give me a hand.” Martin approaches, and the dead lion’s fur ripples in a light wind through the trees. It’s a false sign of life, though he half-expects the motion of the coat to slide into the legs, for the paws to stretch out and the tail to rise before the animal climbs to its feet. But the lion is very much dead.

  “Hold him upright,” Gil says, pushing the hind legs toward Martin, who grips them because he doesn’t know what else to do. Then Gil’s knife is in the cat’s groin, dissembling it, the blade’s motion as smooth as a zipper. Whether it’s real or imagination or nausea, Martin feels the heat of the animal’s exposed organs rising from the cut belly onto his face and it’s all he can do not to vomit on the back of Gil’s head and into the mountain lion’s guts. He’s holding the legs, but he’s looking away.

  “Quit jerking,” snaps Gil, moving in quick, controlled, masterful motions, and already the lion is open, its hips would fall flat if Martin let go. Martin looks away into the trees, he tries not to notice the anus and intestines Gil hurls to one side, he tries not to see as Gil unzips the rest of the cat and reaches up under the ribs to pull down the whole bundle of organs, as he stretches them away from the body. But he can’t ignore it when the hunter commands, “Need you to make a cut, Marty. Right here.”

  So he kneels, lightheaded, overcome by the blood and the heat and sound of the shot that still echoes, at least in his head. Gil’s holding the knife in a hand that is also holding the organs, so Martin must reach toward the kidneys, the stomach, the heart to take the knife from his neighbor. Even brushing them with the back of his fingers makes his own stomach lurch, but he manages, somehow, to receive the blade and to slice through a white membrane that tries as hard as it can to hold onto these organs, these parts of its body, along the inside of the stomach.

  Then Gil says, “Underneath, Marty. Cut the gut sack free underneath.” And Martin’s arm—or an arm that is his but at a distance, another body he’s watching, amazed and aghast—is in the cat’s ribcage and slicing through sinews and arteries and connective tissues, then Gil has the whole bundle of organs and drops them to one side with a sickening wet plop.

  What’s left of the cat is a cavern—more empty, more missing, than Martin could ever imagine a warm body being. The carcass is pooled with blood, and Martin, this strange other Martin, helps Gil roll it over and pour that blood into the dirt.

  Gil says, “Not bad, Marty. Not bad,” and the firm pat on his shoulder brings Martin back to himself, worrying but not wanting to know how much blood and who knows what else of the lion Gil’s touch left on his shirt. “Now let’s get him on out of here.” He looks around for a second, at what remains of the cat and at Martin, before saying, “We could drag him but I’d have to get back to the truck for a rope. Hell, we can haul him. Between the two of us.”

  Beside them, the abandoned organs are already bustling and buzzing with flies, no time wasted on mourning. Lives overlap, devouring each other, a river of time flowing through that one bloody moment.

  Gil beckons for Martin to crouch, then lifts the hind-end of the corpse onto his shoulder so the legs hang down his back. Then Gil hoists the head and the chest so they rest on his own back and shoulders. When they stand, even the beast’s gutted weight nearly brings Martin onto his knees—the body is so lean and looks so light, collapsed at the sides where they’ve hollowed it out, still it’s all he can do to stay upright beneath it. He shifts the load to make it steady, and the heavy paws knuckle across his lower back. Then Gil starts down the trail, leaving the clearing in the same order they came, but now with the long, bloody weight of a dead mountain lion between them.

  The
taut body rubs Martin’s cheek as he walks, and its short bristled fur scratches against his own stubble. The bowels and bladder clenched then relaxed when the bullet entered the heart, leaving a steaming, acrid pool in the clearing, and although the anus and bladder were cast aside with the rest of the innards, now the bouncing motion of walking dislodges the last clinging drops so they spill down Martin’s back and onto the trail at his feet while the incision—if that clinical word isn’t too much for the great, long cut down this cat—still bleeds into the air between his own body and Gil’s, and drips onto the ground. The burning smell of the fluids and the heat of the body churn his stomach, and he fights to keep the bile down, all the way back to Elmer’s farm.

  It’s nearly dark when they reach the crumbling house. The sheriff is gone and the broken door has been sealed with a board and some nails. There’s a note tacked to the board and Gil walks up to read it with the mountain lion still on his shoulder. Martin stands below at the foot of the steps, and the steep angle of the cat’s body increases its weight on his back, almost buckling him as he waits for Gil to descend. With its head on Gil’s shoulder and hind legs hanging down Martin’s back, the lion looks as if it is leaping into the air, pouncing toward something inside the house.

  “Lindon figures this the way we do,” Gil reports. “Elmer’ll turn up in a couple of days, nothing to show but a headache.”

  Martin nods to acknowledge Gil’s words, but keeps his mouth closed for fear of what might come out.

  He’s out of his depth in all this. Beyond all he’s imagined. But he was the moment he came to the woods, and a few minutes later they’re back in the truck, the big cat stretched behind them and bouncing in the bed with each bump of the road. Martin rolls his window all the way down and watches the forest scroll by. He opens his mouth wide and holds his head out so the wind washes away the bad taste.

  Gil and the sheriff and other people in town seem so at ease with these strange events—people gone missing, and mountain lions; a hole in the ground full of bones. They’re used to this place, and all of this seems strange to him, Martin assures himself, only because he isn’t.

  He’s only half right. It is easier for the locals to accept strange events because they have someone to blame. They have me, and I have a name people around here can remember. As long as there’s Scratch to attach these things to, and there has been forever, it’s remarkable how much more willing they are to make sense of some things they probably shouldn’t.

  Gil and the sheriff and so many others are willing to believe this place is strange, that these woods are haunted—the way they would put it—by a restless spirit in the shape of a bear. More willing than they would be to consider the danger in this forest might be their own kind. It’s a comfort, of sorts, to relax in the grip of something bigger and older and more powerful than themselves. They put up with this place so long as they aren’t asked how it might involve them, how Elmer’s disappearance or Martin’s attack might be more than arbitrary. As long as it stays familiar—strange things may happen, but that’s what they’ve come to expect—it’s easier to endure what they’ve taken for granted as the ordinary fabric of local life.

  Martin is more willing to notice that things aren’t as simple as the locals want them to be. He notices, at least, that some things are strange. That’s why he’s useful to me. That’s his appeal: he’s more easily bent. But even he—right now, anyway—would have trouble believing the cat his neighbor killed and which he, Martin, hauled out of the woods on his own aching shoulder was, until a short time ago, Elmer Tully himself. This morning, Elmer found himself tangled in the sheets of his bed in an unfamiliar body with no idea he had ever been anything else but a cat, a cat trapped in the cage of a house from which he escaped. But when he saw Gil in the woods, some lingering dream in his animal mind marked the man as familiar, and he approached before animal instinct could override the attraction.

  Unlikely, perhaps? Impossible? No more so than invisible stories that fly through the air.

  Had he left behind those human attachments, Elmer Tully—or the cat he became—would have survived long enough to make his way into the woods. I had hopes he would, when I transformed him, even when I first coaxed the mountain lion into crossing his path a few days ago to set these events into motion. But there’s only so much I can do. Sometimes a body is born to die.

  9

  WHEN MARTIN WAS TEN, HE AND HIS MOTHER WERE LIVING in an apartment that was actually theirs instead of space shared with a man. Across the street from their building was a park once inviting and green, but by the time Martin moved there the monkey bars had been bent down by restless teenagers grown up with nothing better to do than hang in the night. What little grass remained on the ground had been burnt by the sun and the sour fumes of traffic, or trampled by feet hurrying home through the dangerous dark.

  Martin’s mother was never home; she’d never been home, he was used to it, but now they had their own home and she was still never there. His ten-year-old head couldn’t make sense of that: finally having her own place to be but not being there. So he decided to make his own home, somewhere else, by himself or with a family who let him run on their grass and sleep in their beds and take a long time to finish his dinner because he was so busy talking to everyone else at the table. He packed clean underwear and socks into his backpack, put on brand new jeans with bright orange stitching, and made as many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as he could fit in his lunchbox while leaving room for a thermos of cranberry juice.

  He locked the door to the apartment, picked his way down the crumbling, crooked stairs to the street, and looked both ways into traffic before crossing to the edge of the park. In the dead, dusty square Martin weighed all his options. There were six streets he could choose from, on all sides of the park, and he couldn’t decide which way to go. He sat on the concrete support of what had been a bench, its wooden slats broken off to be burnt on one cold night or another, and he looked up and across the street at the apartment he’d left behind.

  The sky was turning the blue-black of iron but there was still enough light to see into his room, to see it in shadow. On the shelf over what had been his bed for the past several months he saw model cars lined up in a row, and the baseball trophy he’d won in another town the summer before. He saw the bottom corner of his World Series poster and the cap his mother’s last boyfriend had given him the first time they met, still hanging on the post of the bed where he’d left it.

  He wished he’d brought the hat. That boyfriend had promised to take Martin to his parents’ farm for the summer but was gone before they ever went. Perhaps he should go back into the apartment to get it.

  For a long time he sat on the bench, until he couldn’t see through the window at all, until skeletal older boys emerged from their lairs to hang from the bent monkey bars with their knees scraping the ground. Martin ate two of his sandwiches and watched the aerials on top of buildings sway back and forth in a breeze so high he couldn’t feel it down in the park.

  He sat until he saw his mother weaving her way down the street on the arm of a man he didn’t know. Then he ran back into their building, ahead of her so she wouldn’t see, and he was doing his homework at their gray-flecked kitchen table when he heard her key in the lock and both her own laugh and a deeper one behind it outside the door.

  It isn’t as easy to run away from a life as Martin thought it would be. There are voices commanding us to remain in the places we come from, calling us back when we leave, even if we clamp our ears tight to the sides of our heads and pretend not to hear. Or do what it is each animal does when it doesn’t want to listen, when it doesn’t want to be called. None seem to work very well, though: the places and bodies we run from can’t always follow, but their voices always echo across the distance we’ve stretched between them and us, growing louder and louder until they find our unwilling ears. It’s hard to leave spaces empty; they want to be filled with something to take the place of what’s gone.
Something is always displaced, the coyote whose body you’re wearing now or the mountain lion I replaced with Elmer Tully. If the life ousted in favor of something or someone else isn’t given a new shape of its own, the wills of the new and the old battle for control of the body—the way yours is telling you to sleep and to howl and to run. You’ll only need that body for a short time, so it shouldn’t matter, but if you tried to keep it forever the conflicting desires would drive both you and that body mad.

  It was no easier for Martin to leave an empty space in the life he had made with his mother; it was too hard to picture one of them without the other, at least until he became older. First when he went to college, then for the ladder he’s climbed to reach his current life, and at last to his trailer out here in the woods where the ground is full of broken old bones and mountain lions look surprised when you shoot them. He moved miles and miles away from that ruined park in the city, but never filled that empty space with anything else, so it’s no wonder he hasn’t quite left it behind. It’s no wonder the loudest voice in his life calls him to return to a place that doesn’t and couldn’t exist, that he’s pushed by an unquestioned instinct to build it—or try to—the same as that bear he ran into is pushed toward hibernation each winter. Martin’s not so different from any of us, suspended between where we come from and where we imagine we do, between a vague future and uncomfortable present and the safety of a past we can return to again and again because it never quite happened at all.

  He’ll build his houses based on some dream, some wild desire, as people have done here for centuries and as rabbits have burrowed, bears denned, and squirrels nested since long before that. But there’s always a fox waiting outside your hole or a wind waiting to pull down your nest or another life to overwrite yours, to fill the space you’ve made for yourself.