by Steve Himmer
His stomach feels rotten, furious about the introduction of meat, and not just any meat but a few greasy bites of fatty bacon. It churns and grumbles its displeasure to be sure Martin knows.
He yawns, suddenly tired, and leans forward with his elbows propped on his knees. He’s been sleeping more than usual lately, straight through the night instead of the insomniac hours he’s used to, but however much sleep he gets he’s still tired, still feels as if he could nap the whole day and only wake every few hours to eat. His dreams have been so active, so engrossing, they’ve left him worn out. He hasn’t actually been sleepwalking, but it feels as if body, mind, and muscles alike have taken part in those dreams and emerged restless and frayed.
A loon swoops across the water and skips a few feet before diving. Martin waits for it to surface, counting seconds inside his head, and it’s a full minute before he relocates the bird, now close to the shore where he sits, its black head bobbing over the water so the white stripe on its neck comes and goes. It wails, and the reedy call rises and falls then echoes back and forth on the lake. He isn’t sure if the loon really stayed underwater that long or it took him a while to notice once it came up.
The bird hoots once more before its next dive, and he doesn’t see it again after that.
It’s cold near the water, in the shade, so he pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt and tucks his hands inside the front pocket. Leaning over his knees, he watches the mist, and a few minutes later he is asleep sitting up.
His sleep is anxious and he doesn’t dream.
An hour or so later some teenagers grind up the track to the lake on their bikes, and the noise of their approach wakes him. They’re as uncomfortable finding Martin there as he is to see them, and anonymous, half-comprehensible greetings are mumbled before he goes back to his car and rumbles away in the ruts of the road.
He drives around town after leaving the lake, past the elementary school with its windows wide open to flush out the stale air trapped all summer. There are stacks of desks and chairs on the grass in front of the school, and through the broad front door Martin sees a man buffing the floors, in preparation for the start of the term in a few days. He drives by barns with their roofs bowed as the sweep of a ship, and every other board in their sides pulled out or swung open, depending on the design. Long leaves hang from the rafters inside, whispering and rattling in wind that runs through the walls, and Martin hears their rustling chatter even inside his car.
He had a cactus, once, in a pot on his windowsill, but over time it turned brown and its skin shriveled. He asked gardeners he knew for advice, and they assured him it was doing fine, merely in a cold weather phase, but Martin remained unconvinced—he wasn’t sure they knew any more about keeping a cactus alive then he did. When he could no longer deny the cactus was dead, that he had killed an unkillable plant, he wrapped it in heavy black plastic and threw it away. Beyond that one failed attempt, his experience of plants has been only in passing, whether through windows or on a walk; he has always been more concerned with the produce than with the plants themselves.
There are children everywhere after he passes the barns, hanging from trees in front yards and crowding the infield of a baseball diamond next to a church. They’re squeezing the last hours out of their summer, up early and already at play. Maybe these children already know Elmer Tully is missing, or about the mountain lion Gil shot; perhaps they, like their parents, are so much a part of this place that these things can be taken for granted.
He can’t stop thinking about how wide the cat’s eyes were as it fell. He has played and replayed in his head the seconds of the shooting and still can’t locate the menace Gil must have seen. He assumes it was there, though, because if he could sleep through a bear creeping up, why would he notice another threat coming? If Gil hadn’t been there, he might have watched the lion until it attacked, until he was dead, still convinced the big cat meant no harm.
At some point while Martin is lost in his head, the town’s meandering roads turn him around and he crosses back through the center. Two blond boys in matching red T-shirts—the uniform of a summer camp that ended last week—straddle the iron barrel of one of the cannons. They kick their heels in and out, cowboys spurring their steeds, and somehow their tan, skinny legs stand the heat of dark metal that must have been soaking up hot August sun all morning long.
When he pulls onto the strip of dry mud between the road and his trailer, several new foundations—the unpaved holes for them, at least—gape from the ground. Some of the crew turn at the sound of Martin’s arrival, and one of them waves, then they all go back to their work. He scans the site for Alison, but she’s invisible somewhere.
In the driver’s seat he leans forward, arms crossed on top of the wheel, and he pictures the houses where they will rise: two flanking the entry to the development, on either side of where he sits now, with the new road he’s mapped winding between. Their front porches will face the street at an angle, not quite parallel to Gil’s house but near enough for the residents of those first homes to wave to the old man on his porch as they sit on theirs.
For months now—in the city all winter as he pored over plans, and during these weeks as he’s watched trees fall and grades leveled—Martin has imagined the first house on the map as his own. Whether he decides to keep that one or chooses another, in his daydreams that first house has already been framed and wired and plumbed, painted and papered and tested with every possible arrangement of furniture he doesn’t yet have. The house in his head is the closest he’s come to possessing a home of his own, the most time he’s ever spent laying one out and holding samples of color next to each other on unpainted walls, even if it has all been a daydream.
From the front seat of his car he walks his mind’s eye through brand new rooms full of brand new things: carpets with the creases of packaging still pressed into their nap and silverware in a matched set, not a single piece scarred yet from getting stuck in a garbage disposal or caught in the pull of an opening drawer. He walks through the house without turning on lights, aware without thinking of which board will creak, when to step left around an end table and when he’s reached the last stair in a flight. He reaches into an enormous refrigerator to pull out a beer without looking and pops its cap on an antique metal opener bolted onto the wall.
The opener, advertising an obscure Mexican beer he’s never been able to find in a store, is the only part of his imaginary house that is already real. At the moment it’s wrapped in newspaper and packed in a box, waiting for a wall where it can finally hang. He’s been hauling it around unused for a long time, and more than any other tangible thing, mounting that bottle opener on his kitchen wall is what Martin looks forward to doing once these houses are built. Once his own is.
In his daydream, in the house he envisions, the back door slides open without a sound, firm but not tight in its frame, so well-crafted the door doesn’t stick and doesn’t need to be jiggled the way every sliding door in every house in the world does after the first use or two. He steps outside onto the porch and it’s evening now in his head, the sun a red glow on the mountains and trees, and he sits in the kind of Adirondack chair he’s always wanted, a chair with three identical mates arranged around it. He imagines himself in his chair as the last drops of daylight soak into dark hills and fireflies speckle the air, though the day beyond his windshield is bright and hot.
The road is quiet now in the real world, but in his daydream of evening it’s busy with cars moving to and from houses he’s made, coming home from jobs in the city with headlights shining. He pictures Gil across the street, drinking a beer of his own, in his own chair and on his own porch, the two of them moving almost in tandem. The red ember of Gil’s cigarette bobs up and down in front of his face, and an electric-blue bug zapper crackles on a pole above Martin’s yard.
The clatter of the excavator’s shovel against the bed of the dump truck jerks Martin out of his daydream and back to the inside of his car, humid and hot now
he’s turned off the engine and the air conditioner with it. In daylight, back in the world as it is, he stares through the windshield at the hole in the ground where his house doesn’t yet stand, his present and future at once under glass.
13
AT THE END OF THE DAY’S WORK, WHILE THE CREW FINISH their cigarettes and make plans to meet at one bar or another, Martin walks away up the slope of the site to inspect the empty spaces that will be his houses in time. The walls of each rectangular hole are laced with the same thin, gray roots he saw tangled with bones yesterday, and he thinks of blood vessels, of bodies, and the pink striations of muscle he saw beneath the mountain lion’s skin as Gil peeled it away. Martin didn’t watch much of the process, but it was enough to stick in his head.
From atop of the hill that crowns the clearing he looks back toward his trailer and the crew preparing to leave. He sees Alison in conversation with the dump truck driver; her tall, lanky body beside his squat, rounded one resembles a large number ten. She waves her hand through the air, fingers pointed toward Martin or maybe the hole he’s standing beside, and the driver nods his head at whatever she’s saying. Those gestures, those flicks of her fingers, are a language he can’t enter into, not from this distance, any more than he’s been able over the years to translate the subtle gestures a crane operator is directed with from the ground. He runs these sites and these projects, on paper, but on the ground—in the hands of his crews—he doesn’t speak the language of work. As the first few engines rattle to life and cars and trucks begin moving away, Martin walks down the slope toward the road.
“Alison,” he calls while approaching her truck, though she doesn’t seem in a hurry to leave. She smiles, and Martin waits until he’s closer before saying anything else. “Things are coming along, then. Digging’s going well. How’s the crew working out?”
“They’re fine. No problems.”
He nods, frustrated with small talk when he really wants to tell Alison so much more, about his plans for making a home and about the dreams he’s been having. He’d like someone else to know of these things, to make them more real, and hers is the most sympathetic ear he’s found here. The one he most wants to listen.
“Should be done digging this week,” she tells him.
With the workers departed, with the ground cleared, starlings descend onto the building site. Their speckled black bodies, dozens of them, crowd the churned ground in a battle for whatever seeds and scraps have been overturned and whatever crumbs may have been dropped by the crew.
“Martin,” she says, “listen. This morning, when we were talking. You asked about the stories, about . . . you know, Scratch, and all that. Look. I don’t know if I believe them or not. Maybe I do. Most people do. Or . . . well, people say they do and I guess the difference between believing something and saying you believe it isn’t so much. Say it enough times and you’ll believe whether you mean to or not, right? If you say you believe something long enough you’re bound to act on it sooner or later.”
He watches her eyes, glancing from side to side at the forest around them.
“They make me nervous. I didn’t say that before. Sometimes I think about moving so I won’t have to hear those stories again. So my son won’t grow up listening to them. That sounds stupid, right? It’s a nice town, and I like it here. Jake likes it here, it’s his home. I guess anyplace’ll have it’s own stories and I’ll get sick of hearing those, too.”
Three of the largest starlings alight on the roof of Martin’s trailer, all trying to claim the same few square inches instead of dispersing across the broad space.
“Anyway,” she says, standing up straight and stepping back, out of the moment. “I just thought I’d mention that so, you know…so you knew about it. Guess I’ll go now.” Before Martin can say more than goodbye, she’s in her car and backing across the mud toward the pavement. He’s still waving as the glint of her windshield slips around a bend in the road and vanishes behind some trees. He looks toward Gil’s porch, but for once the old man isn’t there—perhaps he’s in the barn, or off in his yard, or maybe he actually does spend some time in his house—so Martin climbs the three steps to his trailer.
He turns toward his map, pencilling in his trip to the lake and some of the sights he saw on his drive around town that he hadn’t spotted and annotated before.
Later, after a dinner of tuna forked right from the can, he stands outside his trailer to watch evening fall. A few birds sing their somnambulant songs in nearby trees and fireflies are just showing their faces when a hollered greeting from Gil breaks the quiet. At his neighbor’s insistence, at his shouts from the edge where the road meets the site, Martin crosses to Gil’s porch where a can of beer has already been opened for him.
“Lotta digging today,” Gil says.
“It’s coming along.”
“Those houses’ll be up before it turns cold. I’ll get neighbors for Christmas.” With bare fingers Gil turns three sausages on the blackened rack of his grill, and Martin doesn’t ask if it is mountain lion. The same hand holds a cigarette, and fine flakes of gray ash settle onto the sausages and float in the hot updraft from the gas flame below.
“It won’t be quite that soon.”
“Be nice, though, kids around at Christmas. Get ‘em over here singing me carols. Bringing me cookies. Awful nice.”
“There’s a long way to go before anybody moves in.”
Gil plucks a sausage off of the heat. “Hungry?” Martin shakes his head no. “Suit yourself. Don’t know what you’re missing.” The meat is gone in two rapid bites, and Gil washes it down with the better part of a beer. “Made these myself. Venison.” Martin sighs in his head, sips his own drink, and listens to the sizzle and pop of sausage casings and the boiling juices inside them.
“Why no kids, Marty? Young guy like you.” Martin is getting used to his neighbor’s rapid shifts in conversation, and the strange turns they frequently take, but this one catches him off-guard and beer slips down the wrong pipe. He chokes, and Gil delivers a hard thump to his back.
When he’s recovered, Martin says, “No reason, I guess, aside from the obvious. Maybe someday.” He takes a drink. “What about you?”
“I used to shine my boots three times a day, even when it wore out the leather. We were gettin’ shelled, or crawling in mud, or sitting around the base for weeks at a damn time and every chance I’d shine my boots. Pay attention to the little shit, Marty. Control what you can. Takes your mind off the rest.”
Gil drains his can and tosses it over his shoulder into the dark, then opens another before going on.
“You have kids, it’s like that. Keeps you busy. Spend all your time shining boots or paying bills, patching scraped knees, whatever you like. Y’know what you’re doing. You have a place to be.” He lights a fresh cigarette from the one that’s burned down to his lips, and makes a sound that might be a cough or a self-conscious dismissal of what he’s just said.
Martin watches as the skin of one burnt sausage splits in a smooth seam along its whole length, and clear, bubbling juices spill out of the fissure. Gil grabs it and it’s gone before he seems to be chewing, perhaps faster than his mouth could know it should burn. In front of the porch and over the yard, bats screech and wheel as they pluck insects from the air and avoid each other by fragments of inches. And Martin still doesn’t know if Gil has kids of his own.
Once, only once, he tried finding his father. He called the hospital where he was born, but they told him if the birth certificate had a blank space there was nothing they could do to fill it in after the fact. He called his mother’s sister, an aunt he has never met, on the west coast where she moved long before he was born.
“No,” she told him, “I never knew. We were out of touch long before that.”
They talked about his mother, about her last days and the funeral her sister couldn’t attend—it was so far, so expensive, they hadn’t spoken for so many years—and about Martin’s business of building homes. When
the conversation dried up between them, their awkward fumbling of hasty excuses overran one another and Martin hung up the phone before he began asking questions he didn’t want answers to. Why his mother was thrown from the family, and why he’d never met any of them. Whether or not he looked like anyone else in their bloodline or if he’d gotten to be all he is from his father.
For a few months he wondered at each masculine face in the street that looked older than his, each man in a boiler suit or a tuxedo, driving a luxury car or wheeling a shopping cart full of cans on the side of the road. He wondered if he’d come from there, or from there, or from there.
Only once did he let himself think he’d come close, in a Chinese restaurant down the street from his office. He watched a man with white hair stretched thin as cirrus clouds speaking softly into a cell phone at a table for one, and there was something familiar in how his voice hesitated, the way he paused before every sentence. He sounded the way Martin sounds in his own head—as if he is only speaking because something needs to be said, not because he knows what it is.
The voice made him set down his spoon and sit over his soup until it grew cold, listening. The man, his maybe-father, had a round belly as if something was hiding under his shirt and his legs spread wide at the sides of his chair because they couldn’t quite come together in front. The thick fingers of one hand marched back and forth on the glass tabletop, and those holding the phone to his ear marched the same way on its black plastic shell.
Martin knew he was watching himself. Not that this man, older and fatter and with far less hair, reminded him of what he saw in the mirror—it was something much more than that. The man in the Chinese restaurant moved when Martin knew he would move, looked from one side of the room to the other above his open mouth before speaking into the phone the way he expected him to. He understood what the fat man was doing, what he was going to do, as if he’d been watching the movements of this swollen body for all his life.
