Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  There’s me, I suppose. There’s still me.

  Martin arrives on a ridge overlooking a valley, and knows the boy is below. The moon is straight above now, trapping his shadow beneath his own feet. A long way off in the forest he sees the flicker and flash of lights in the trees, too big to be insects and too bright to be eyes. They move like headlights on a road full of curves but there are no roads down there. It must be the state police, still out searching, swinging their flashlights through the forest and talking on radios he’s too far off to hear.

  He hoists his pack higher, cinches it with a jerk on each strap, and descends with his feet turned out. Something darts into the scrub as he nears the foot of the hill, long and orange and maybe a fox, getting out of the way of his coming.

  The woods in the valley are thicker than on the ridge above, and damp with dew. Martin rests for a moment at the foot of the slope, taking deep breaths and stretching his back. He stands still long enough for the crickets he quieted with his arrival to start telling their stories again, re-tuning their legs and picking up where they left off.

  He knows, without worrying how, that he’s nearing the tree, and the boy who leans into its bark for some kind of comfort. From his vision in bed he recognizes the rock that he’s passing and a spot where the drooped branch of an ash arches over the trail. Buoyed, he hastens his step and hurries toward the boy’s rescue.

  Then the tree is in sight, a tall oak with its first branches high from the ground, one of the oldest trees in this forest. Old enough for generation after generation of seedlings to have burst through the thin glaze of topsoil and grown their first inches only to smother and starve without light in the looming shade of their source. The ground at the base of the trunk has been given over to bushes and brambles and other plants that make due with a thin trickle of sunlight and suck leftover moisture from damp mud too shallow for thirstier roots.

  Martin sees the trunk now, but the base is still obscured by the scrub. He breaks into a run, his pack swinging and dragging the damp fabric of his shirt back and forth against his shoulder blades. “Jake,” he calls as he approaches, then he calls out again. He bursts through the brush between the trail and the tree, the thin sails of root visible now, buttresses between the trunk and the ground, and the notch where Alison’s son should be huddled.

  Was huddled.

  And where he was there is only a pair of small sneakers. Around them is only the scuttled, scarred soil where the boy sat for so long, the marks of his shoes so smeared in the mud that no individual footprints can be picked out, only the swirling tread pattern stamped all over itself.

  “Where . . . ?” Martin asks the bustling woods, or the tree, or the abandoned sneakers before him. He collapses to the ground in the crook of the roots, and mud soaks the knees of his pants. He was so certain the boy would be here, in the spot he occupied in the vision, that supposing otherwise never once crossed his mind. And now that it has, it’s brought in so much more doubt along with it.

  “Jake?” he asks the dark and again he gets no reply.

  Martin pulls the shoes into his lap, scuttles backward against the bark of the tree so the hard walls of root squeeze at his sides, tilts his head to the trunk and closes his eyes. He draws long, chest-swelling breaths with his mouth open wide, and listens to the night birds who chat overhead as if gossiping about his failure.

  Something skittles and skitters on the other side of the tree and he sends his legs the command to leap up but his body ignores him, or tries to obey but it can’t, relaxed in the wedge of the roots and tired again now that he’s still.

  A porcupine shuffles into his field of vision, circling the trunk of the oak. A bright red T-shirt clings to the animal’s body, collar around its spiny abdomen, dragging across the ground behind it. The porcupine is struggling to free itself from the shirt, rolling and clawing and grunting. It can only move forward, through the collar, because earlier attempts to back out of the shirt have snarled the fabric in bristling quills. The animal waddles closer, so intent on its efforts that it seems oblivious to Martin’s presence. Its stubby tail bobs up and down and its quills roll. As it approaches his feet, Martin reaches with jittery fingers and grips the tail of the shirt. He extends his arm as far as he can and leans his face away, because he’s never been told a porcupine cannot, in fact, launch its quills. At last the animal heaves through the shirt, the force of its effort causing it to tumble when the grip of the collar is released. It stands as if dazed before Martin.

  The logo printed in white on the fabric is the one kids in town have been wearing for weeks, the marker of the summer camp they all went to, Jake, Jr. included.

  “How did you get . . .” Martin begins, but stops because he’s addressing a porcupine, which only wiggles a pink triangle nose and stares with its navy bean eyes. Then he notices a smaller scrap of fabric stuck on a hind claw, and as he reaches toward it he’s almost sure that the porcupine swivels, lifts its hind end and lets him pull the remnant away. Holding the cloth in front of his face, Martin makes out small cotton cowboys on small cotton horses, and a lariat cut off at the edge of the scrap.

  “How did you get that?” he asks, and the porcupine turns toward him but doesn’t respond. Then the strangest idea slides into Martin’s head, the kind of idea he would have rejected a few days before but now, with all he’s seen in these woods, makes as much sense as anything else.

  “Jake?” he asks, leaning forward, but if he expects a reaction it doesn’t come as the porcupine scratches its neck with gray claws. Then he feels stupid for asking, for indulging the notion at all. Boys who become porcupines, animals wearing cowboy pajamas—he shakes his head and laughs at himself, willing to believe but only so far.

  Martin hunches against the rough bark at his back, knees pulled close to his chest and skin cooling fast as the sweat he worked up on his hike dries away. The porcupine stands between mud-covered boots, looking up with its head cocked to one side the way Martin has only seen a dog do in the past. Then it yawns, eyes squeezed tight, and a long strand of pink tongue rolls around its mouth. It turns, quills heaving at its sides as hips roll underneath, then shuffles into the brush. A few crackles and the rustling of leaves from the scrub, then it’s gone.

  He draws his phone from its pouch on his pack, just in case, and for once it has a strong signal—deep in the woods, under these trees, its indicator is as full, even fuller, than it has been since he came to these woods. Who to call? He has his partner far off and all his suppliers, strangers he speaks to in numbers and checks. He has the number for the town clerk in an office still closed for several more hours, and he could try 911 but isn’t sure that service exists in such a small town. There’s Alison, right at the top of the list in his phone, but what could he say? I almost found your son but I failed, I was no help to you and now I need you to help me? The person he’d like to call, the person who would know what to do, he has no number for. He hasn’t needed it, with Gil’s house right across the street from his trailer, almost always in sight and within a shout’s reach.

  He remembers, then, that police departments are always or often the same, an area code and exchange then 1212, and he doesn’t know if that’s the case but it’s worth a try. What area code, though, and what exchange? His own phone is ungrounded, tied by its numbers to the store where he bought it but not where he lives. There’s a code for this place but he doesn’t know it, so he copies the first digits of the number for town hall and hopes that will work.

  But when he finally dials, his phone, so deep in a signal it hums and gets hot in his hand, can’t connect. He tries, and he tries, dialing and dialing and dialing again, there’s only that hum. A hum that isn’t the signal he’s after but a signal that’s older and stronger and overwrites whatever weak stream might still make its way to his phone. All this forest’s stories, its voices and rattles and roars, cracking and splashing and croaks, memories and dreams . . . all that converged on this tree, this great mast in the depth of the
woods where they’re oldest. Think of it as an antenna, if it helps, but not one that was raised in an afternoon by a gang of men with a crane; this spot is where signals converge because it’s been here the longest. Because it has listened the most.

  His phone is receiving a signal, but not one he knows how to hear. He doesn’t know yet how to listen. If he was willing to believe a boy could give way to a porcupine, or a man to a mountain lion, he might be more at ease. If he could take seriously things its so much easier for him—and for you, too, I expect—to dismiss. Or he might be more afraid. It’s hard to say, sometimes, how any mind will react to discovering more things are possible in the world than it knew. He would certainly know his search is over—he set out to find the lost boy and the boy has been found, though not in quite the same state. Martin is free to turn around now, walk back to the lake and his car and drive to his trailer for some well-earned sleep. But he doesn’t know all of that. He thinks the boy is still missing, that these scraps of cloth are his best clues, and he should keep on with his search of the woods. That he needs to move deeper into the forest, farther away from any place he knows, if he’s going to find out what happened to Alison’s son.

  19

  MARTIN SITS WITH THE PAIR OF SMALL SHOES IN HIS LAP, and runs his fingers over the laces as if reading Braille. He drinks a bottle of water before hoisting himself to his feet. Exhausted after two long walks in the woods without sleep, standing up is enough to send the blood rushing away from his head so he steadies himself with a hand on the trunk. He eats one of the energy bars, stuffing the foil wrapper deep into the pack where it won’t blow away, then leaves his shelter between the high roots of this tree.

  There are toadstools, or mushrooms—he can’t tell the difference—growing in the deep chasms formed by those roots. Moss reaches from one side of each root up and over the other, woven with vines, and fine white flowers with feathering petals peek out of the shade. This ring of earth is a landscape all its own, grown up with the tree as its heart and its mind, deciding in its own passive way which stories linger and which are erased. For decades this giant has shaded out some lives to make space for others, a whole drama scripted by time in which the actors appear to stand still.

  But Martin doesn’t see any of that as he looks away from this tree and into another, where several feet overhead a maple spile extends from a trunk, rusted and forgotten and raised out of reach by the passage of time.

  The birds are waking above him, and their chatter grows lively. The first orange streaks pick their way through the treetops, splashing bleach spots of light on the dark ground. Then a thick shaft of sunlight pierces the canopy and dozens of starlings and grackles and finches and wrens begin shrieking and squawking and carrying on as if they’ve picked up where they left off last night, as if sleep was a lull in a long conversation. Martin hurries away, out from under the noise, as a headache takes shape in the back of his skull, aroused by the din of the birds and his exhaustion and the frustration of knowing where the boy was but arriving to find him gone.

  He circles the edge of the clearing made by the tree’s shade, searching for a break in the scrub that might be a trail. If the boy isn’t here, Martin reasons, and if his shoes and his clothes have been left behind, then he must not have left by his own power.

  There’s a spot in the brush where stalks are bent back and leaves are pressed into the mud as if something heavy passed over. It doesn’t look wide enough or damaged enough to have been a person, or even a large animal, and he has no way of knowing if it’s a fresh trail or days old or older than that. But it is the only lead he’s discovered, so with Jake’s shoes dangling from a carabiner clipped to his pack, and the red T-shirt and scrap of pajamas in hand, he follows whatever it was that forged this trail. Before long he gets hot, and ties his fleece top to the pack, too.

  The sun is up and Martin is sweating, jittery and strung out the way he gets without sleep. When he’s been awake this long the semi-conscious rattle at the back of his head comes to the fore and the muttered ramblings his brain cycles through all the time without telling him become as loud and insistent as the birds in the trees. He can hardly think straight for all the snippets of songs and repeated words and jumbled images crowding his mind.

  After the obvious gap near the tree there isn’t much of a trail. He spots the occasional broken twig or bent sapling, or a branch that perhaps caught on something to pull it in the awkward direction it’s facing. Martin takes these as clues, as signs of some passage. The sweaty fabric of his shirt bunches up, sticks to his chest, and when the folds work their way under the straps he feels the heat of blisters beginning to rise.

  His feet are sore, too, cramped in his boots for all of the previous day and most of the night. The ground here is fairly soft, and mostly free of sharp stones and sticks, and though it may be a result of his tired state and muddled thinking, Martin decides to walk barefoot until his feet have cooled off and his socks have dried out.

  He lashes his boots to the pack next to the much smaller sneakers, and weaves the wet socks through their laces. His naked feet notice each tiny pebble and the edge of each leaf, every shift from dry ground to wet, and the shock of moving from the sauna of shoes to the cool breeze of bare skin prickles him with gooseflesh. He’s more careful about placing each step, and it’s a while before he stops feeling squeamish about wet, black mud, but soon he’s moving along as fast as before and the new realm of sensations entering his body has woken him up. He’s amazed at the comfort of walking this way—his feet feel expanded to their full size, though they never knew they’d been compressed.

  A mile or two away from the tree, heading into the sun, the trail trickles away without a trace. There are bald spots on trees with fur pinched in the bark where deer have left each other rubbings, and the shredding and gouging of bears, but they aren’t signs Martin knows how to read. He finds moss on a trunk and remembers that—supposedly—it always points north, but even if that’s a truth it’s a useless one at the moment because he’s following a boy, not a compass. He kneels in the mud, head sideways and parallel to the ground. He’s looking for footprints and he finds them, dozens of impressions in all directions, hooves and claws and his own naked feet. He picks out the swing of a snake and can tell right away a raccoon went by with a bad leg—it must be his tired mind playing tricks, calling up knowledge he imagines he has, or unconscious trivia about tracking he picked up from TV or a poster of animal prints on some classroom wall years ago. He even sees the steps of a pair of coyotes creeping under the scrub to a secluded spot.

  But none of those prints point toward Jake, and now he isn’t even sure how to get back to the tree or retrace his steps to the lake and his car, so he presses on into the brush, hoping another sign will appear to keep him on track.

  He’s annoyed with himself for getting lost again, and this time he has no excuse: he thought he could find the boy, that he could be a hero and win the town’s praise and Alison would be grateful. But he doesn’t have Gil’s tracking skills, he doesn’t have a history in the woods—not a good one, at least—so what the hell he was thinking to wander alone off into the forest in the dark dead of the night.

  The search party will end up searching for him, once they know he’s missing—he didn’t appear to meet Gil this morning, but his boots are gone as is his car so it won’t appear anything’s wrong until someone visits the lake, and even that might not raise an alarm. He imagines Gil waiting by the side of the road, then pounding on the door of the trailer before driving away on his own to rejoin the search, grumbling about selfish, irresponsible city people. Or, perhaps, relieved Martin is gone with all of his naive questions. In retrospect, he wishes he’d woken Gil before leaving in pursuit of his vision, come up with some way of convincing the hunter to come along without trying to explain why he was going, but Martin can’t think of any way he might have claimed to know where the boy was without sounding guilty or crazy or both. He can’t imagine why Gil would have come
along rather than tell him to go get some sleep, and wake up making sense in the morning.

  He walks on with bare feet, his breathing heavy and stomach growling, and the forest gets louder around him as the birds and the squirrels and the black lines of marching ants all emerge to begin their own days.

  The forest in morning wants to be watched, all singing and squirming and cacophony. It’s a performance. Birds spread their wings for a stretch and a song as downy rabbits emerge from hollow trunks to sniff the air with pink noses, begging for someone to coo. The forest in morning is a child showing off.

  In the dark or the near-dark of evening, there’s no one to be impressed, no sentimental sense of rebirth or of everything made new again. It’s not new, it’s old, as old as the forest itself: every evening for millions of years the woods have awoken, owls and opossums emerged from their lairs, and the nighttime world set to its business. Morning wants you to look, it demands your attention, but evening doesn’t care if you’re there. Morning only offers a story because it knows someone’s listening. Evening talks to itself.

  But Martin plods blind through this performance as overzealous birdsongs give him a headache and he passes unfurling ferns, oblivious to their reemergence. He has more on his mind than flora and fauna. He stumbles along, feet too tired for working together and each going its own direction, his drive to move forward battling the weight of his pack. The smells of the forest are coming awake, the hot, sticky rot rising off the ground and the aromas of so many night-sleeping flowers piled up all at once they’ve become a mud of perfumes. He keeps his body going with a second energy bar but it does nothing to fill his stomach, gnawing at itself and releasing an occasional growl.