Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  He is fingerprinted and searched and shoved so hard into a cell he falls on the floor, cracking his jaw on the steel frame of a cot as he drops. Gorman slams the door closed and the other man snarls, “Now shut the fuck up in there, sicko.” They’re the first words either man has spoken to Martin since leaving the woods, held until each of them was safe on his respective side of the bars.

  Martin is deep in the world of men now, locked in a cell without windows so he can’t see the sky or the ground. He doesn’t know which direction it is to the sun or how long he’s been sprawled on the floor. Every organ and inch of his body aches, each muscle is burning and cramped so he couldn’t stand up if he wanted to. Which he doesn’t, right now, because his empty, starved stomach has been gnawing itself into pulp and if he moves he will surely vomit.

  He imagines himself to be somewhere else, wandering the woods of his mind and feeling the wind instead of staring at the gray walls of his cell. Instead of reading the desperate graffiti of other confined men and women, so panicked for voices apart from their own they invented them on the walls of the jail, scratched out their stories with fingernails. And this cell is only a stopover, the kind of place you get stuck for a short time before getting stuck somewhere else for a far longer time.

  Martin may claw the walls later; he may scratch his own story into the concrete if and when he opens his eyes. But for now he is sinking into the floor, into his mind, and despite himself and his terror he is actually falling asleep. He’s so tired he can’t resist and why should he try: dreams are the only place he can escape to, the only place he can be his real self for a while.

  And that self, that dream Martin, is outside the cell and outside the building, standing on the town square. He eyes the brick walls of the police station on the other side of the road, a large box with a small box inside it, a small box with his waking self buried inside. Then the Martin who is free turns away.

  This Martin is the one who had a vision last night, the one who rolls through the woods, a force too strong to be stopped. Something as primal and wild as a bear, a Martin who doesn’t worry whether or not he belongs, because he belongs wherever he goes. This is the Martin we have been waiting for.

  20

  THE MASS OF HIS BODY HAS CHANGED, ITS CENTER OF GRAVITY shifted, and it takes a few steps to adjust—his belly pulls toward the ground until he learns to push himself forward rather than up, to walk on all four of his limbs. Martin walks in wet grass and sniffs out last night’s events as he crosses the square: the knotted scent trails of three dogs at play, and the comings and goings of raccoons and cats in the small hours of morning. The drunk man who couldn’t get home before relieving himself on the wheel of one cannon, leaving a sloppy stream of his scent. Faint nocturnal footsteps still dent the lawn, but bent blades are springing back into shape as the sun comes over the hills and dries them of dew.

  The town is too quiet, too still, as if all the people are gone: no one notices this new Martin crossing the street in an animal stance, a naked man crouching low as he lumbers past the front door of the bank, by the dumpster behind the market and along the library’s front walk. No one shouts or screams as he slips unseen into trees beside the elementary school, or follows his new body on its way out of town, into the forest and hills, where it pauses to lap streams of water and pluck berries from branches with nearly prehensile lips.

  Then at once the forest around him is gone, a curtain pulled on his dream.

  “Up, Blaskett, wake up!” the sheriff is yelling while banging his nightstick across the bars of the cell. “I’m talking to you!”

  Martin rolls into a sitting position before his sore legs can complain, and he blinks against the fluorescent light overhead.

  “We’re going to talk,” the sheriff says, no longer in his talking-down voice. It’s no-nonsense now. “You’re going to tell me where the boy is.”

  “But I don’t know,” Martin answers without lifting himself or his eyes from the floor.

  “You might after we’ve talked.” Lindon unlocks the door to the cell and swings it wide with a rusty squeak from the hinges. He sits on the edge of the bed with his feet spread wide on the floor and one heavy black boot on either side of Martin’s body. “Now. Tell me again what you were doing out in the woods.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Martin stutters, “so I thought I’d keep looking.”

  “Why there?”

  “I don’t know, it . . .” He trails off as he considers telling the sheriff about his vision, about how he knew where the boy would be—or had been, as it turned out. Then he decides against sharing the source of his knowledge and says, “I know Jake likes the lake so I thought he might go there.”

  “His mother didn’t say anything about that. Him liking the lake.”

  “He said at breakfast, he said . . .,” but Martin can’t remember what the boy said, if he said anything, and he feels the meat of his lie coming off of its bones.

  “Said what?” Lindon asks, lighting a thin brown cigar from a match. Smoke fills Martin’s nostrils, sticky and earthy and warm. He sits without giving an answer, staring at the sheriff’s shiny black boots. Either he’s put on a fresh pair since coming back to the station or else they were cleaned after leaving the woods.

  “Said what?” the sheriff repeats, louder now, angry, as he shakes out the match only inches away from his prisoner’s face.

  “Nothing. He didn’t say anything.” Martin’s stomach sinks into his legs then keeps going all the way to the floor. He closes his eyes, willing himself back to the dreams that, although troubling, have become more of a comfort than this waking world. In one breath of the sheriff’s cigar smoke he abandons his hopes of getting out of all this, resigning himself to prison, or worse.

  Lindon leans forward from the side of the bed. His cigar weaves through the air and leaves ribbons of smoke where it travels.

  “Listen son. Here’s the deal. You tell me whatever you know. Everything you know. You’re in deep shit, I won’t lie to you, but you tell me where the boy is and we might work something out.” He makes his request with no intonation, his voice as flat as the fluorescent light that falls into the cell. “If you know where he is you should tell me.”

  Martin hangs his head and stares at the painted gray concrete of the floor, speckled and scuffed by the boots of other jailed men and women, other lives locked in this cage for a day or a night or a week, people who sat until they sobered up and went home or were hauled somewhere else, bigger jails, smaller cells, and some of them probably still behind bars. Some must have gone free after a few hours in here, but others perhaps should have and didn’t.

  “Let me ask you something, Blaskett. Don’t bullshit me. Did you see anything . . . strange last night in the woods?”

  Martin looks through smoke at the sheriff’s pocked face. The lawman’s eyes are intent, open wide and awaiting an answer. He can’t tell if the sheriff is actually asking what he seems to be. Lindon seems to expect the sort of strange story Martin has been so reluctant to tell him, the kind of story that involves having visions.

  “Strange how?”

  “Something, ah . . .,” the sheriff scratches the shadow of beard on his chin, and looks around at the walls. “Anybody out there, in the woods? You know, anything . . . animals or something. Anything that didn’t make sense. Sometimes stuff happens out there. I hear things.”

  “Scratch?”

  The sheriff stands at the sound of the name as if he’s received an electric shock. “Now don’t . . . I . . . we don’t need to get so specific.” His voice becomes angry, thickens to a phlegmatic snarl. “Just tell me did you see anything.”

  Martin almost mentions the monster that chased him and crushed Gil with a log, or admits seeing himself as a creature stalking Gil and Jake, Jr. both. Even that he was led to the tree and the clothes by a vision. Lindon seems to be asking for this kind of strange explanation, he seems to expect it, but Martin isn’t sure if the sheriff can be trusted. The i
nvitation could be a trap.

  “No,” he answers at last. “I didn’t see anything.”

  Lindon sighs and turns away from his prisoner, still on the floor. “Okay then.” He exits the cell without looking at Martin, fiddling with his cigar as he leaves, but the back of his neck and the rims of his ears are flushed red. He slams the door hard before walking away, leaving the echo of iron.

  Martin rolls backward to stretch himself across the cool concrete floor. He closes his eyes, tries to make sense of whether or not the sheriff really believes Scratch is out there, if he believes in the stories Gil has refuted so sternly. But after he thinks about it a bit, he decides that Lindon couldn’t believe in the stories. If he did, if he really believed a monster had taken Jake, Jr., then he would have already let Martin go. Unless there’s a reason for keeping a prisoner he knows to be innocent.

  Outside the cell, down the hall in a part of the station Martin can’t see, he hears an argument between several male voices. One insists they should get back to the woods, make the suspect lead the search for the boy. Lead them to where he found the clothes. Another says they’ve found his car, they’re retracing his steps, the state police know where to look now and they’ll find the boy for sure. Says it’s better to wait here, out of the woods, instead of giving Martin a chance to escape. Instead of spending another day in the wild.

  Then a more familiar voice enters the conversation, booming over the others to tell them, “You all know he didn’t do shit. Let the man go, for Christ’s sake.”

  Martin sits up, shocked by how relieved he is at Gil’s arrival, how his stomach pulls away from the floor at the sound of someone he knows and to hear that someone speaking in his defense.

  “Now, Gil,” says the sheriff, “let’s not jump to conclusions. He was in the woods, and he had the boy’s clothes.”

  “Well,” Gil says but doesn’t go on, and the whole station falls quiet, from the front door to Martin’s cell, everyone waiting for him to finish the thought. Gil must already know how they found him, about the explanation the police don’t believe—the tree and the bear, and stumbling onto the clothes. He hopes Gil suspects something else, but doubts it’s anything close to the truth.

  “I’m telling you, Gil,” Lindon says, “it doesn’t look good.”

  A moment ago the sheriff seemed eager for an otherworldly explanation for all of this. Now he seems just as eager to pin it on Martin, and to convince Gil of his guilt, too. He imagines Gil rubbing the back of his neck as he thinks, sliding a cigarette into his mouth. And he’s right, because he hears the scratch of a match before the smells of sulfur and smoke drift into his cell. His senses seem keener than normal, but it may be the hallucinatory effect of going so long without any real food or sleep.

  “Lindon, do you think he did it?” Gil asks.

  There’s a pause, an audible shuffling of feet, and Martin leans close to the bars, as close to the conversation as he can get. There’s a balloon being blown up in his throat, and if there wasn’t he might yell, shout his own innocence down the corridor of the station.

  “No,” the sheriff says at last, and other voices mutter and mumble. “Shut up,” Lindon barks, then answers a question Martin can’t hear. “It’s a hunch. I don’t know. How much do you know about this guy, Gil? Do we even know why he’s really here, if he’s been in trouble before? Hell, it’s not like he’s building those houses himself.”

  “No,” Gil replies and the balloon in Martin’s throat bursts. He leans his forehead into the space between two of the bars, a cold metal rod at each of his temples, and lays a palm on the back of his neck.

  “But I don’t want things getting out of control,” Gil says. “We all need to keep calm here and figure out what really happened to that boy. We don’t need this kind of trouble on top of all that.” Martin doesn’t know what trouble could be worse than what’s already happened—for himself, but also for Alison and her son.

  “Damn it, Lindon. He told you there was a bear. That he got its blood on him, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, there was a damn bear. Few miles down trail from his car. That city boy left tracks as wide as the bear’s. I followed him all the way from the lake, first to a big oak where he sat around, then to where he met you. And there was a dead bear, bloody. I think our boy tried rolling it over. For some goddamn reason.”

  Other voices speak, but they’re too low or too far away for Martin to follow. Gil says, “Wasn’t any blood on the trail until I got to the bear. Then he dripped it the rest of the way. Don’t know what the hell he was doing, but that blood didn’t come from the boy.”

  “So where is he?” asks Lindon.

  “I don’t know, but we need to keep looking. Must’ve been where the clothes were, so we oughta get Marty back out there to help.”

  “I don’t want him out there,” Lindon insists. “If he did it, he isn’t going to tell us. If he didn’t, folks won’t care and someone’s liable to take a shot at him. I don’t need a search party turning into a lynch mob. Besides, he said he was lost. You already found the place easier than he could.”

  There’s a pause, and Martin holds back his next breath. The bars at his temples feel tighter and squeeze the sides of his head.

  “We’ll leave him here. In the cell. At least we’ll know where he is.” There are murmurs of agreement, and Gil’s reluctant assent, before the voices move away and a door clangs shut. A chair scrapes on the floor as someone sits down. A newspaper shakes open.

  Martin leans away from the bars, and then scuttles across the floor on his hands and the backs of his legs. He rests his shoulders against the edge of the bed and closes his eyes over the dull ache behind them. His breathing is raspy and strained, overtired, and the stench of himself is as strong as it’s ever been, meaty and sharp, almost acrid—his own stale sweat, but also the smell of the bear and its blood and the forest. Every inch of his body is dirty and sore, even the muscles he calls on to close his eyes.

  His broken toe throbs, but the rest of his digits and limbs hurt almost as much. His jaw aches, and even his tongue is scraped and sore. The bandages wrapping his chest are dirty and damp, and the cuts are so close to healed he can’t need them any longer, but Martin doesn’t want to remove them because his ribs ache so badly he’d rather not touch them at all. His whole body is out of sorts, sluggish, his head filled with the unintelligible voices of his exhaustion and hunger. The porcupine and the bear and the vision last night all seem so far away, as if they happened to somebody else, somebody other than Martin.

  In his mind he returns to a familiar story, himself in his house with his tables and chairs. But half of the bedrooms are empty, the closets all bare. The spaces he’d imagined Alison and Jake, Jr. filling around him have been cleaned out. His mind seems unwilling to imagine a future for them together, or the boy having a future at all, or that Alison will even speak to him again after this. He tries to rebuild the house bit by bit, to walk through the rooms and put it in order, but each time he sees himself turning the knob and swinging open the door the walls fade away and he’s left adrift on the muddy sea of the site.

  Somewhere in the police station, down the hall, a phone rings three times then stops. It sounds like his phone, but the ring tone isn’t uncommon so he can’t be sure.

  His stomach growls, rumbling and low, and he tries to quell his hunger by picturing the bloodiest, rawest slabs of meat he can imagine, something that will turn his stomach away, put him off food for a while, but he’s so starved the idea of a dripping cheeseburger, a barely-seared steak that still practically moos, actually makes his mouth water.

  He lies back and dreams of meat, so exhausted that raw, carnal urges override his normal desires.

  In the box of his cell he thinks about leaving, and envisions grand schemes for escape, because he hasn’t been locked up very long. That’s the thing about boxes: once you’ve been in one long enough you can’t picture being outside, you can’t imagine what’s
beyond the walls of your cage, and will go out of your way to stay in a trap so familiar it seems to be safe.

  He stretches his arms up over his head and pops his back twice. He spreads his mouth wide in a roar of a yawn, smacks his lips, blinks his eyes, and then frowns as the reality of the situation weighs on his mind. The hours pass as indistinctly as the gray concrete of the cell’s walls, and he has no way of knowing what time it is except the fluorescent tube in the ceiling hasn’t yet been turned off for the night, assuming it will be.

  Sometimes tired voices drift down the hall, and he hears the occasional squeak of the station’s front door, someone coming or going. He stands at the front of the cell with his fingers wrapped around cold, rusty bars, and cranes his neck in hopes he can see down the hall. But the angle of the walls is too sharp, and all he can see is more of the same shade of gray.

  There’s a conversation in the front room, but he can’t make out what the voices are saying. Before long, heavy footsteps approach. It’s Gil, rubbing his eyes as he walks, orange cap hanging askew to one side.

  “Did they find anything, Gil?” Martin asks, and the older man frowns at his eager voice.

  “Marty. Listen. I’m going to get you out of here. Folks aren’t too happy about it.”

  Everything Martin’s been waiting to tell someone comes bubbling out all at once. “I didn’t do anything,” he pleads. “I just . . . I found the clothes, but . . .,” the porcupine shuffles into his mind, but he ignores it. “That’s all, I found the clothes by the big tree, but Jake wasn’t there. Really, I . . .”

  Gil sighs. “I believe, you, Marty,” in a tone that is less than convincing. “I think Lindon does, too. That’s not the point. He’ll let you go, but you might be safer staying in there.” Martin slumps against the bars. Gil may believe he did not take Alison’s son, but has doubts about something else, and Martin feels that doubt, that disappointment, deep in his belly.