by Steve Himmer
“I can’t stay here. I want to go home.”
“We can do that. Hang on a few minutes. Let me tell the sheriff.” He shuffles away from the cell, his body more bent than Martin has noticed before, feet moving more slowly across the worn cement floor and turning the corner at the end of the hallway. For the first time he looks like the old man he is. Martin strains his ears to listen from the front of the cell, but the conversation isn’t drifting his way. Whatever is said stays between Gil and the sheriff.
Soon Gil comes back to the cell with the sheriff beside him. Lindon unlocks the door without a word, and swings it wide to let Martin out. The three of them walk down the hall to the front room where desks cluster on either side of a narrow aisle and a woman with wiry gray hair and thick glasses waits for a phone to ring.
Martin braces for an angry mob in the street, torches and pitchforks and demands for his hanging or burning or both. He steels himself to the knowledge that Alison will be right outside, at the foot of the stairs from the station down to the sidewalk, and she’ll give him a look that says more than any words she might choose. A look to confirm that his daydream of a house with room for more than one person, of a person who might want to fill up that space along with him, is foolish and stupid and a waste of his time, that her son is missing and he is the reason and his dream is not going to happen.
Gil’s told him the town is upset. Word spread quickly he was to blame and the correction has been slower to travel. People want someone to have stolen the child—they want a reason why Jake is missing and they want that reason to walk on two feet, in shoes, and to wear pants it puts on one evil leg at a time.
Gil opens the station door and late sunlight flares through the hole. Martin squints, his eyes unused to the sun, and looks away at the tile floor of the lobby. Then he walks into the late afternoon with his eyes still averted, braced for the impact of the first stone.
But no one is there. No mob in the street, no impromptu gallows thrown up on the square between the bandstand and the cannons. The supermarket manager who waved from her office is crossing the street toward the station and though she looks up she doesn’t greet Martin this time. A mousy brown dog cocks its leg on a mailbox and casts an eye toward the two men without breaking its stream. The dog shakes its head and walks away.
It’s worse this way, Martin thinks, to be so worthless and low no one even shows up to make sure I know it. To not even be worth the trouble of hating.
“Truck’s around the corner,” Gil says, letting the police station door swing closed on its own.
21
THE RIDE HOME IS QUIET. IT WOULD BE SILENT IF NOT FOR bumps in the road and children shouting and the kind of dogs that will bark at a truck rolling past as soon as they’d howl at a skunk or at their own tail or shadow, more concerned with the attack than the target.
But today Martin makes everything personal, each dog that bares its teeth at his passing and each stone that kicks up from the road and pings off the truck; all of it is directed at him. This town, these streets and these houses and dogs, are all telling him to move on, pull up stakes, track the rest of the construction of his houses by phone—if he’ll even be allowed to complete their construction—and get out of here as soon as he can. He’ll find a new foreman, someone from out of town, because he assumes Alison will be unwilling to work for him now, that an absolution from Gil or the sheriff won’t carry much weight with the missing boy’s mother. He’ll follow his development’s progress from an office far away in the city he’s come from or some other he doesn’t yet know. He’d prefer not to go back to the city, he’d prefer to stay here, but doesn’t see much of a choice. He could find another place as nice as this one, perhaps, but there’s no reason things would go better for him there if he did.
He doesn’t feel welcome here now. He no longer feels as if this place wants him, but he’s more wrong about that than he has been about anything else—this place wants him to be here more than he can imagine. Or, more precisely, I do. I know where Martin will fit in exactly, a space he was born to occupy. And now that he’s given up on his domestic desires, on his daydreams about Alison and her son and a house they might share, he is untied from the world of humans around him and as available to me as he will ever be.
I’m not punishing him for anything. I’m not doing all this to be cruel. On the contrary, I’m helping Martin become what he wants—what he needs—to become. I’m offering him a place to belong to, which is the one thing he’s wanted for so very long.
And if there’s something in it for me, too, then so be it—I never claimed to be altruistic. Would you expect me to be willing to sacrifice Alison’s child, to turn her son into a porcupine and leave him to wander the woods, and not have my own stakes in this story? I’ll get what I want when Martin gets what he needs—we’re bound together, he and I are, whether he knows it or not.
He was given back his phone when he left the station, along with his backpack and boots, and now tries to check his messages more to avoid speaking to Gil than because he cares what they have to say or is confident he’ll be able to hear them at all. His partner has called again, and again after that; he sounds panicked, he pleads for Martin to call him, to come back to the city, their problems have only increased and projects are in jeopardy. There’s little left and they’ll need to act fast to salvage whatever they can. But the details are vague, rendered less real by the static and inconsistent connection, or it seems that way to Martin because it all feels so far, far away. So abstract and intangible after these recent hours of sore muscles and blood.
This isn’t my doing, this other collapse, these bigger turns in the world. It isn’t part of my story and I didn’t expect it to be part of Martin’s, but I won’t pass it up, either. Everything is always in motion, everything turns, and if you wait long enough—and time is what I have the most of—it turns your way as often as not. Each severed tie leaves fewer strands in his web, until there’s only one path he can take. And that’s the one I’ve put him on.
When Gil’s truck rattles to a stop at the edge of the site, Martin sees that the muddy ground is pale and cracked. Fine lines fissure the surface in all directions the way he imagines a desert might look, but his trailer is right where he left it, the bulldozer and dump truck still where they were parked such a long time ago and not so long at all, either. Nothing has moved except him. There’s no sign of any work having occurred in his absence while his employees were out combing the woods with everyone else.
He looks at the lot nearest the road where his imagined house stood, in its way, a short time ago, over a hole full of ground up animal bones. He digs into his mind but can’t make a single wall rise from that dead patch of ground. The view from the back porch and all the furniture he’d selected and the wide oak floors it stood on have become an expanse of cracked mud, as pale and unproductive as his own bare skin.
At last he asks about Alison’s son, if the search has been successful, and Gil tells him the state police and most of the town are still looking, but after this long it doesn’t look good.
“Gil,” Martin says, with a lump in his throat, “I need to tell you about something.”
Gil’s mouth tightens and his eyes go dark. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. Nothing, but . . .” Martin takes a deep breath. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
Gil’s body relaxes. “You want to tell me about dreams? Christ, Marty, you scared me. For a second I thought I was wrong about you. I thought you’d hurt the kid.”
“I’ve been having strange dreams, about the woods. About being an animal. And I had a dream about Jake, kind of, after we came back from searching. That’s why I went out to find him. I thought I knew where he was.”
“Hell, you went off in the woods in the middle of the night because of a dream? Thought you had more sense than that.”
“I know, but I also had a dream before Jake was gone. About him going missing. I think I had something to do with it.�
��
Gil exhales a sticky cloud of cigarette smoke, and it darkens the windshield in front of Martin. The spaces of the site in front of the truck vanish behind the stain.
“They’re dreams, Marty. Nothing to do with what happened. I have dreams all the time, doesn’t make me a real astronaut. I dream I got blown up in the war, but I didn’t. I dream my house is on fire and my legs get chewed off and, shit, seventy-four bikini models show up at my door on my birthday. None of that’s worth a goddamn. You didn’t do a thing to that boy by your dreaming.”
“But I think there’s more to it. I think . . .”
“I were you, I’d stay close to home. Folks aren’t too thrilled at you being released. And don’t go talking about these dreams of yours, neither. Let things be. Don’t get stupid. Don’t try to make it all better because you won’t.”
Martin opens his mouth to say something, to insist again on his own innocence, but he can’t come up with the words.
“You know I don’t buy it, but still. Safer for you that way.” He lifts Martin’s confiscated backpack from the floor of the truck and holds it out at arm’s length.
Martin takes the bag and holds it away from his body. He climbs down from the seat and slams the door against its tight hinges, then the truck rattles forward a few feet before turning into Gil’s yard. Martin turns and walks up the gentle slope of the site and it feels steep to his sore, tired legs. He hears the thunk of a truck door behind him as he climbs the collapsible steps to his home. Then he seals himself into the hot, cramped space of his trailer.
Everything is the way he left it—the boxes of water bottles stacked by the door and the wheeled stool rolled away from the desk. The map still spread across his work table and weighed at the corners with a can full of pencils, a gray tape dispenser, and two round stones that almost match.
Before he’s done anything else, he is driven to his chair and that map and he’s marking it with all that’s happened: he marks Alison’s house and where her son went missing, and he marks the search party assembling on the town square and walking into the woods, then where they had lunch and kept searching. He works out, more or less, where they finally came out of the woods yesterday then where he left his car at the lake. Martin draws his own trail through the forest, the chain he tripped over and then the tree, where the porcupine was and the copse and the bear. The sheriff and his posse and finally the jail, and when he draws the dark, heavy walls of that cells he bears down so hard his pencil goes right through the paper and scratches the table itself.
When he’s done with all that, when his frantic sketching and scribbling have stopped, the map is so marked up it’s become hard to read. So many new lines and so many smudges where his fingers and the side of his hand have dragged graphite around. He tried so hard to get it all down that none of it makes any sense.
Martin undresses in the middle of the room, bumping into furniture and walls that seem closer, somehow, as he flails his way down to bare skin. He peels off his rank T-shirt and socks, then the bear blood-stained jeans and gray underwear dyed a deep rust where it soaked through.
It’s as if he hasn’t seen his own body in days. The heaviness he noticed earlier has become more pronounced, a thickness in his thighs and torso. He feels clumsy, bumping into things while he undresses, and the space of the trailer seems more claustrophobic than ever; he stubs his toes and cracks his elbows and hips on doorknobs and walls. He shrugs it all off to being tired, to being worn out, and after a hot, steaming soak with his eyes closed and a few shots to the head from the nozzle, the wall, the shelf that holds shampoo and soap, he collapses in bed with his body still dripping.
His legs hang off the edge of the mattress, dirty toenails grazing the floor. He tosses and turns for a few minutes, struggling to make himself rest, arguing with his own body about a comfortable position in which to sleep, but before long he has melted away.
This time, he doesn’t dream. He sleeps, and he murmurs and growls into the thick foam of his pillow, but through the whole night not one single vision creeps into his head. He gives himself over completely, leaves mind and body all to themselves to do what they will.
He’s given up on himself, or at least on this place and the possibility of belonging to it, and that’s exactly where I’ve been trying to lead him. Driven away from the league of his kind until he’s no more at home in the world made by men than he was last night in the woods. He’s a dropped signal and belongs nowhere, now, except in his own dreams; it’s the only place he can be himself. He’s so tired that he’s longing for nothing but sleep, a rest so long that by the time he wakes up his world will have righted itself—all the suspicion and all his own feelings of guilt, the lost child and his thwarted hopes about the boy’s mother, will have washed away. He wants, more than anything else, to have his questions answered—he wants to know once and for all how he fits into this world where he has tried to make a home for himself. Or, better yet, he wants to not ask those old questions of his any longer.
But hours have slipped by while we’ve watched him sleep, and already his body is stirring. We don’t want him to see us here at his window with our claws scratching again at his screen. Duck down. Lie low. Hide the shine of your eyes and we’ll leave what is coming to come. We’ll see what answers he’s found to those gnawing questions that will no longer keep him awake.
22
ITCHY SUN FALLS THROUGH THE SLATS OF THE WINDOW AND across his face, and he mumbles and twitches his nose. He rolls over, still sleeping, with a groan that builds from his belly. His body shifts to one side and suddenly tumbles, spilling him to the floor with a thump that rattles the cabinets. One leg of the bed has broken, tipping the mattress, and his blankets and pillows are piled in a heap where the collapsed corner rests on the floor. His body sprawls tangled among them.
The impact snaps him awake and he growls some kind of reply, swings an angry arm out and when it connects with the wall it hits hard enough to shake the whole trailer. Where he strikes the flimsy faux-wood paneling, his claws leave jagged stab wounds in the surface. Then those same claws reach back to their body, toward the long snout, and scratch at the glistening black nose where it still itches from tickling sun.
He stretches, and folds of orange-streaked fur over late-summer fat shake in shimmering ripples. He pushes the blankets away with stretching legs, and where they cling to his claws the bedclothes rip and tear. He sits up, and the motion throws him off-balance as if he expected his center of gravity to be somewhere else, the shift of his weight to be different. The bulk of his shape tilts forward and he nearly topples onto his face, but a heavy paw pressed to the floor blocks his fall. The paw flexes and relaxes, expands and retracts on the floor, and its claws pluck at synthetic threads in the tight weave of carpet.
The bear stands on all four of his legs. He dips forward, raising his hind end into the air and releasing a satisfied groan. Then he shakes his head so a long string of drool slings across the floor and the wall of the room. He lumbers the length of the trailer with stiff, unsure steps. The bear walks like he hasn’t walked in a while, and is regaining his feel for the motion.
He sniffs the coarse carpet, and the thin wood veneer of the walls. He pushes his nose into a basket of trash on the floor of the bathroom, and spills crumpled tissues and gauze all over the floor. His snout emerges with the bright white backing of an adhesive bandage stuck to it, and the bear crosses his eyes to inspect it before shaking the small scrap of paper away. Then he bats the wicker basket with a broad paw and it bounces off a wall to land in the shower. The bear snorts, and moves toward the tiny sink and stove of the kitchenette. He spatters packets of miso soup paste and dry rice with the moisture of loud, wet sniffs, and tears open a paper canister of oatmeal so it spills all over the floor, but there’s nothing the bear wants to eat in Martin’s collection of food. He passes by what has passed for a kitchen with less interest than he gives to the carpet and its years of accumulated scents and forgotten spills from on
e temporary resident after another.
Martin’s television stands on a rickety stool in front of a folding chair, and when the bear swings his body between them the chair gets in the way of his back legs. With a grumble and a growl he shakes the chair loose, toppling the stool, and the television crashes to the floor. The bear rears up and away from the sound, but when no other boom comes he moves closer, first sniffing then shoving the black plastic cube. With one forepaw he pins the TV to the floor as the other thumps at its side—not very hard, not out of rage, but as an investigation of the strange object.
When the plastic casing cracks and begins to collapse, the bear pulls his paws away and steps back, snorts again, and abandons the broken appliance. He moves to the drafting table and sniffs along the edge of its surface. The stones that pin down the building site’s plans are knocked to the floor by his nose. The bear stands halfway up, leaning on the white plane of the table with the upper half of his body, and its thin legs collapse under his weight. He topples a tin can full of pencils, and they roll one by one off the edge. His breath trills the large sheets of paper, one end now unweighted, and this seems to interest the bear—again and again he blows on the pages, and watches them ripple and flap.
He backs his upper body off of the table and lowers himself to the floor, dragging claws across the black lines of ink and gray pencil notes of the map, shredding the building site and the town and the forest at once. There’s a thin draft through the frame of the door, and the bear presses his nose to the seam and breathes deep. His claws scrabble and scrape at the smooth fiberglass, and against the round aluminum knob. He roars, and rears up to scratch at the door with both forepaws, and though he leaves gouges the door latch holds fast. The bear tilts his full weight against it, forepaws pressed flat and his body bouncing against them.
Hinges and springs groan and strain, and the whole trailer leans. For a second it seems the door’s going to hold and the trailer will topple, spill onto its side in the mud with the door pinned to the ground. Then the latch gives with a crack and the door swings open so the bear, still leaning on it, falls toward the ground with a snort.
