Читать книгу Scratch - Steve Himmer - Страница 11

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THE SQUARE SHOULDERS OF GIL’S BLACK-AND-WHITE CHECKERED jacket plow through scrub pines near the top of a mountain. The hunter charges ahead without ducking low branches, without shoving saplings aside. It’s as if he expects the forest to step out of his way and the forest seems to oblige. Martin hurries behind, dodging those branches as they whip back into place from Gil’s passing. Again and again his clothes snare on brambles and twigs and he has to stop, pluck them free, and rush to catch up.

It’s a dream, of course it’s a dream, and what else would it be? Dreams bring you closer to the world the rest of us live in than anything else, and in this dream Gil has three rifles slung on his back and a fourth in hand at his side. The arsenal seems excessive to Martin, but as if Gil is reading his thoughts he calls back, “Different calibers, Marty. Never know what you’ll run into or what size hole it’ll need.”

“What are we hunting for?”

“You tell me. It’s your dream.” Gil laughs, and adjusts the cap on his head, a fixture in waking life and dreams, too. There are smudged fingerprints all over the brim where he’s gripped it over the years, as there are on the real thing.

A hawk circles above them without moving its wings, and Martin tries to watch as he walks. With his eyes on the bird, he stumbles over a half-buried point of dark granite.

“Look where you’re going there, Marty,” Gil scolds without turning around.

Martin apologizes though he’s not sure he needs to, then walks with his eyes on the trail for a mile or so. But when he looks up again there are more hawks, seven or eight of them now, hard to count as their paths cross and re-cross, wheeling in spirals high overhead.

“Have you noticed those hawks, Gil?” he asks.

“Don’t mind ‘em. They’re after smaller meals than you.”

Each time Martin squints up at the silver haze of the sky, the group of hawks—Flock? he tries to remember, or is it a murder, like crows?—has swung lower, and now he can see individual feathers in the dense mail of their chests. “They’re flying pretty low,” he says, but gets no reply.

Gil steams forward as the scrub thickens on either side of the trail. The forest still avoids him even as more and more branches strike Martin’s chest, arms, and face. The back of Gil’s neck is creased as an old leather boot and as wide as the head it supports.

Martin hurries, trying not to look up, trying to keep up with Gil, and all of a sudden there’s a stabbing pain in his foot.

“Ow!” he hollers. “Shit!” Gil doesn’t turn. For some reason Martin is barefoot, the boots and socks he’s sure he was wearing a few steps ago gone, and a long, crimson thorn has punctured his sole. Cursing, he leans against the trunk of a tree. He plucks out the thorn and a bead of blood blooms. He wants to rest, to let the cut scab, but already he’s losing sight of Gil out ahead so he walks, wincing with each tentative step.

It all seems familiar, he thinks, like he’s been here before, though Martin isn’t quite sure what “here” means. It might be the woods, or the moment, or perhaps the dream because it, too, is familiar—tidier than his usual dreams, too tightly tied to his life, because I’ve tied it there.

“Probably not,” answers Gil, listening in again on Martin’s head. Suddenly the checkered shoulders are still and Gil swings the gun up from his hip to level it at something ahead. The three barrels still slung on his back rattle together with the inertia of stopping.

“What is it?” Martin asks, stepping close behind his neighbor, who grunts, or maybe growls, in reply. Martin looks up the trail but doesn’t see anything. Gil’s hands are steady, liver-spotted stone on the gun.

Then a loud crack echoes out of the woods and movement catches Martin’s eye on his left. He turns toward the trees and shouts, “Gil, over there!”

The green curtain shakes as a tall, dark shape passes behind thin trunks. Gil sets the rifle butt against his shoulder and squints along the barrel into the woods as Martin holds his breath, waiting.

“Scratch,” Gil says, without looking away from the gun.

“Scratch what?”

The hunter hisses at him to be quiet.

There’s another loud crack in the shadows, then a long shaft of pine with needles and branches still hanging from it hurtles through the air toward the men. Gil roars and squeezes a round off at nothing before the trunk crashes into his chest and knocks him down.

“Gil!” Martin shouts, but the other man doesn’t answer. He’s pinned beneath the log and isn’t moving. His eyes are closed and the gun has been knocked from his hands. The other three weapons are trapped by the trunk and his body.

Martin turns toward the trees, not sure what to do, and the figure he saw in the shadows comes charging out of the woods. He barely sees the bottle-green eyes and the curve of white teeth before he pivots and runs up the trail the way he and Gil came. Each step on rough ground slashes his feet, but Martin runs as fast as he can without looking back.

The hawks are circling so low now that when they pass overhead the air displaced by their wings is as loud as a river.

A cramp burns in his side but he runs on, afraid the heat on his back is his pursuer’s breath. He’s sure the snarl behind him is getting louder the longer he runs, but he doesn’t hear the thundering steps he expects there to be if he is being chased.

Then he trips on a tree root curving up from the ground, and his face and his chest slam hard against the packed earth of the trail. A strong hand—a strong paw—grips his arm and slings his body over, and Martin is face to face with a bear. Its lips are peeled back from pink gums, and its tongue squirms in the enormous dark space of its mouth as it roars. A sticky drop of saliva plops between Martin’s eyes and he squeezes them closed, turning his head and puckering his face as he waits to be killed.

The bear isn’t as big as he would have expected.

Then pain jerks him awake and he’s stretched on his back in the burnt-out foundation. He’s been dragged feet-first from his fireplace bed by a bear, a real bear, and now it rises to its full height and crashes down hard with its paws on his chest.

Martin lets out a sound that would be a yell if he could gather enough air to make one. His attempt to draw breath expands his chest enough to increase the pressure and weight of the paws.

The bear leans across his body so its hot belly swings against his thighs. The pressure on his ribs is immense, and pushes the last gasps from his lungs. His hands spring to his defense without being asked, wrapping themselves as far as they can around the bear’s legs above each of the paws, wrenches too small for the job. He pushes and pulls, struggling to move the thick legs, but they will not be budged. The pressure on his chest doesn’t increase but it doesn’t lighten up, either, and Martin wheezes and rasps, his struggle for breath made all the worse by his panic.

He feels the bear’s gaze on his face along with its hot breath, but he fights the urge to look. Some old memory, from a book he read as a child or some rerun he saw on TV, insists that the worst thing to do in a situation like this is to look a bear in the eyes. As if a situation like this happens often enough for there to be a wealth of advice.

He feels five sharp points of pain, and when he lowers his eyes without moving his head he sees that the claws of one paw have punctured the jacket, the T-shirt, his skin. The details of the holes are strangely acute, each frayed thread on his jacket individual and distinct and each curved claw glazed with its own unique pattern of cracks and chips. The other paw still presses his ribs.

Martin studies the claws for a long time, a moment so slow he starts to think he has already died and his spirit has drifted away from his body, that he’s watching all this from somewhere beyond himself. His head swims and he becomes dizzy despite lying flat on the ground. The treetops bordering his field of vision sway like the waves of a rough, green sea he is sinking under.

Then the bear grunts, and without increasing the weight on Martin’s chest it leans closer, filling his eyes with its body. Black fur streaked with copper surrounds him, and the bear smells of old meat and wet dog. Its cold black nose sniffs a circle around his head. He tries to lie still but can’t stop his body from shaking. The bear snorts beside his face and the air is so hot he feels it deep in his ear.

This is it, Martin thinks. This is the way I die.

No sooner does the thought cross his mind than the bear moves, draws its paws away from his body in a swift, sweeping motion that tears five bloody tracks through two layers of cloth and the skin underneath.

Now he does scream, loudly and at a high pitch. He sustains the harsh note until the bear rears up then slams a forefoot to the dirt beside each of his ears, shaking the scream from his throat. The back of his head bounces against the ground with the force of the impact.

The bear turns murky eyes onto Martin’s blue ones, and that hot breath makes him gag. He tries to stop his body from shaking, afraid it makes him look appetizing the way a lively fly lures a fish. He tries to look away from that wild gaze, the orange and yellow and brown of a fire, but the flame holds his eyes.

Then at last the bear’s body relaxes and the creature steps forward. It slides across Martin’s body so its hot, heavy fat slaps his face as it passes. The chaff and dust of dirty fur fill his nose, and he fights back a strong urge to sneeze. When the whole broad, black body has passed over his face, the bright light of morning rushes into his eyes and the sneeze bursts out before he can stop it.

The bear rises onto hind legs and climbs over the wall of the house. There’s a thud from outside the foundation, then Martin listens as his attacker lumbers away. He hears the thumps of the animal’s first few steps before the forest falls quiet again and there is only the pounding of his own pulse.

Then birdsong sneaks back in, leaves rustle, trunks creak and boughs crack. The world carries on as if none of that happened. As if it was no more than a dream or a story.

The cuts in his chest sting and burn. His head pounds. His peripheral vision is laced with black worms, from dehydration, or the rush of breath back into his vacant lungs, or a combination of both. Martin lies on the ground with his eyes closed, fighting to suppress his sick stomach, then gives up and rolls onto his side to spill a yellow stew on the ground. Again and again he retches, each spasm lighting a fire on his chest, and his body goes on heaving after nothing more emerges from his empty gut.

For a long time he lies still on his side, upright as the stone walls around him. The chills that follow vomiting come quickly as his bloodless face tingles and stings. Cool ground-level air makes his eyes water. When the retching subsides, his nostrils clog, and they whistle as he breathes through them.

He waits in resigned expectation for the bear to return. Having convinced himself he was seconds away from his death, that the beast’s intent was to kill him, the heavy mantle of that resignation is hard to shake off even after his attacker is gone, phantom pain from a lost limb. His chest aches from the torn skin on the surface all the way down to his heaving lungs. Gingerly, Martin feels his way up one side of his ribcage and down the other, as if he would know a broken bone when he found it. The pain stretches from top to bottom and side to side, but apart from the center-left of his chest where the claws broke the skin—where the pain is different, if no more intense—there isn’t any one spot that hurts more or less than the rest. Under the circumstances, he takes that as a good sign.

The bear does not come back, and in time Martin’s breathing returns to something near normal as the pain in his chest and back becomes familiar enough he can once again feel the more mundane aches of hunger and thirst. And a different kind of pain, too: the awareness that had he died here, had his body been left by the bear or dragged off to be eaten—if that’s what bears do—it would have been a long time before anyone in the world outside these woods knew what had happened to him. A very long time. That gloomy thought buoys Martin up, in its way, and fills him with a desire to get to his feet and find a route out of the forest. To get himself back to his trailer and his unbuilt homes, where he will see and be seen by other people.

He hasn’t any idea what time it is, or how long it will be until his employees arrive at the construction site to start work. He only knows it’s early enough for the angle of sun to be low, curling between narrow trunks instead of raining down through the leaves, but late enough for light to have risen over the mountains to reach into these woods.

On shaky limbs, Martin lifts himself onto his hands and knees. The motion makes him keenly aware of the soreness his body has already begun taking for granted, his body’s new normal for now, and he pauses in that position a long time before forcing himself to move on.

At last he rises and balances with one hand on the foundation wall. His stomach grumbles and growls, filling his mouth with rotten air, as hot and dry coming out as the bear’s breath was going in. He steps through what once was a door and staggers into the woods, then turns in slow circles as he considers all the directions he has to choose from. Which way to walk, which way did he come, which way is it back to the road? He knows the rising sun is in the east, so the stone wall heads away to the south, but neither of those details is helpful because he’s not sure where he is in relation to where he began.

He wishes for the straight lines of overhead wires, something he knew he could follow and where it could lead. He wishes he’d brought his phone with its online maps and GPS; even the robotic voice that reads him directions would be a comfort right now. But he knows the phone would be a useless black lump—he can’t connect when he’s in town, or on the wide open space of the building site at the edge of the woods, so he’d never get a signal out here.

Not the kind he’s after, at least. Not the kind of signal that might make his phone work. The forest is full of the signals of stories and dreams, humming and buzzing and bouncing off trees, passed from one head to another, though never along the straight trajectories of power lines. They’re a wireless mesh for a wireless world, and that’s why they’re becoming so tangled these days with your own buzz and hum, the dreams of a bear warped by and also warping a phone call about what? About dinner or money or nothing at all, when it pushes its way through the woods but doesn’t get through. So Martin has taken to leaving his phone in the car, after years in which the device was rarely out of his pocket or hand, because all those other voices spilling out of the trees mean he has to drive around town until he finds a spot where his phone can connect.

His stomach turns over again. He’s so hungry his knees actually shake, which he thought only happened in cartoons, so he pulls his leather belt tighter in hopes that other cartoon truth will hold, too. Then he walks, not beside the stone wall he followed to get here but toward the sun, stumbling along on what may or may not be a trail.

He walks with one hand up under his shirt, its palm spread over the gouges made by the bear’s claws. Gently he tests the cuts with his fingers and they don’t feel deep—they’re painful, they’re bleeding, but as much as he winces at the attempt he can’t push a fingertip in very far. Already the blood seems to be slowing. The pain in his muscles and bones is far worse than the cuts. His chest is darkening purple, and even the ordinary expansion of each breath he draws strains against his sore ribs.

He steels himself for a long walk on an empty stomach and, even worse, without water, now that his tongue is too thick for his mouth.

How long will it be before anyone sets out to find him, or even realizes he’s gone? The crew should arrive on the site around eight o’clock, and they might notice if he doesn’t emerge from his trailer. But they might think he’s off to the city on business if they don’t spot his car parked across the street beside Gil’s, or they might think he’s working inside. The crew he’s hired know what to do, they’ve got their orders and they’ve got a good leade in Alison to make sure it gets done, so there’s no reason they’d need him this morning. Perhaps the trailer door he left open will invite someone to look; perhaps Alison will poke her head through with something to tell him and see he isn’t there and that will be enough to draw her concern.

He can already tell the day will be hot. He’s sweating first thing in the morning, still sticky from yesterday’s walk, and gnats swarm the back of his neck. The mosquitoes go on biting in these first hours after sunrise, getting in their last nips before they retire for the day, and though he feels every jab, he’s too tired to smack them away.

Something Gil told him over beers on the porch floats up through the murk of his mind. Martin missed most of the story, because by this point in the evening his neighbor’s insistence they match each other drink for drink had him hanging onto the sides of his chair. Gil had been talking about the war, his war, the way he has several times since Martin began spending long nights on the porch over drinks. It’s embarrassing, but he doesn’t know which war Gil was actually in; he must have missed that in the first story or else it was never revealed, and now it’s too late to ask. The details always seem interchangeable from one place to another, Korea or Vietnam or even Europe, and without knowing how old his neighbor actually is, he can’t even guess. There was a swamp in the story, and soldiers holding painfully still while black flies and mosquitoes and other insects nobody could name chewed their skin. He thinks they were waiting to spring an ambush, but isn’t sure if that’s what Gil actually said or if his memory is filling in blanks. Gil’s point in telling the story hadn’t been clear—was he trying to say something about being steadfast, refusing to bend despite bodily pain, or was it just that the world can be dangerous in miniature, too? So often Gil’s war stories come so late at night, or else so deep in the very small hours of morning after a long night of drink, that something never quite comes across.

Martin has only been walking for a short time when he sees several thin, flat stones standing over the brush at the side of his makeshift trail. He draws closer, and discovers a small plateau, squared into a short drop-off on three sides but approachable up a shallow slope on the other. And he finds that those stones aren’t just any stones but tombstones laid out in five rows. The stones nearest the slope are worn smooth, whatever names or dates they once held wiped away, but each following row seems slightly newer though no more legible than the first, except for the final row on which the words are at least visible where moss has grown into the etched shapes of the letters, whatever those letters might be.

On another morning, a morning on which he hadn’t been attacked by a bear, he might stop and study these stones. He might spend more time thinking about how they’ve come to be here, deep in the forest—as far as he knows—and far from any road. He might make a connection between these grave markers, these generations of death and stories erased along with their names, and the abandoned home he discovered. He might ask how the oldest stones came to be at the front, and where the next generation of dead might have gone.

But today, on this morning, an overgrown cemetery lost in the woods is one more strange thing on a very strange day, and wonder is no match for pain, so Martin urges himself to keep walking in the direction he thinks will lead home.

Before long the canopy thins and the trees spread apart. The ground levels off and the trail becomes more apparent, then all at once he breaks through the edge of the forest and finds himself back on the site. It’s the opposite end of the clearing from where he entered the woods, behind his trailer and close to the road. He still doesn’t know the hour but is glad to see the trucks and tools lying idle the way he left them, glad there’s no one to see him emerge in this state, stumbling toward the road. The black band of asphalt is several inches higher than the muddy ground beside it, as if pavement came as an afterthought to this part of the world and was only laid down a few hours ago.

All that walking to go in a circle—he might never have entered the forest at all, if not for the proof bleeding under what’s left of his shirt. The wounds across his bruised chest have begun to scab with a crust that is sticky against his fingertips. Martin walks toward his car, toward his GPS-equipped phone already waiting in its dashboard mount, and he hopes it will find enough bandwidth to guide him to the nearest emergency room. He hopes because he doesn’t yet realize the purest signal of his whole life has just been received, transmitting the first true story he’s ever been told.