Читать книгу Scratch - Steve Himmer - Страница 12

4

AS MARTIN STUMBLES TOWARD HIS CAR GIL CALLS FROM THE porch, “What’s got you out and about so early?”

Martin looks up at his neighbor’s wrinkled red face looming over the railing. He doesn’t answer the greeting, too shocked at this first real proof he remains in the world of the living despite the attack, as if the remembered weight on his chest pins his tongue, too.

Martin wobbles on his feet and falls to his knees near the far edge of the road, and Gil rushes to wrap an arm around his shoulders and help him sit on the lowest of the porch’s three steps. He squints at the torn fabric and dried blood on the younger man’s chest and asks, “The hell happened to you?”

Martin stretches his legs across dry, brown grass and his body falls back onto the steps. He breathes, nothing else, for a long time.

“A bear,” he answers at last. The word sounds absurd, meaningless—the idea he was attacked by a bear doesn’t seem possible now that he’s back among humans. It’s as absurd as the notion that announcing the name of his attacker will describe what actually happened.

Gil raises an eyebrow. “A bear did this?” He pulls apart the torn flaps of the jacket, exposing the cuts, and exhales with a sharp whistle. “Christ, it was a bear. Where?”

Martin doesn’t say more as Gil probes the cuts with rough, steady fingers, spreading the gashes open enough for them to start bleeding again, but slightly. “Not too deep,” he says. “You’re lucky. Bear could’ve killed you if he’d wanted to. But we’ll have you patched up in no time.”

Before Martin can ask where the hospital is, Gil has rushed into the house and left him staring at the plank ceiling over the porch, struggling to keep his eyes open. He hadn’t been thinking about the cuts, overshadowed as they were by the bruises and aches, but now that they’re open again they sting worse than before. Gil’s ministrations have broken the first layers of scabbing, and with each rise and fall of Martin’s chest the remaining crust pulls at fine hairs near the wounds.

Gil returns with a rusty red box marked with a white cross, a bowl of hot water, and bottle of supermarket-brand whiskey. Martin smells him coming before he appears, the burnt meat and cigarettes of an old man who has lived alone for a long time. He doesn’t know if Gil has ever been married, if he has grown children in town or someplace else or if he has any family at all. All he knows is that this is the house Gil grew up in and he’s alone in it now, rambling through its rooms and alcoves and barn by himself. He tries to imagine his neighbor, stubborn and strange as he is, sharing a space with anyone else, and he struggles to see it.

“Show me that scrape. Take your shirt off.”

Martin sits up. “Shouldn’t we go to the hospital?”

“No need. I’ve dressed worse than this in the woods. Besides, Marty, those cuts’re ugly, not deep. They’ll look better when we get ‘em cleaned up.”

Martin lifts his jacket and shirt together, but when he tries to drag them over his head he winces and groans from the pain in his shoulders and back. He has to let the other man pull them the rest of the way. When the bruises are uncovered Gil asks, “Hell, what’d he do, stand on you?”

“Pretty much.” Martin tries to force a small laugh but the pain is too much.

“You look like a damn eggplant. Lemme check your ribs.” Gil feels up one side of Martin’s chest then down the other with firm but reassuring pressure. He seems to know what he’s doing. After repeating the procedure on Martin’s back, he says, “Nothing broken, you lucky bastard. Claws’d gone deeper you’d be in trouble. Wouldn’t have made it back here, never mind a hospital. That bear had weighed more, he would’ve crushed your lungs. Or your heart. But he wasn’t lookin’ to kill you, so you’ll be okay.”

“I really think I need a doctor. What if it’s infected?”

Gil steadies Martin’s body with a tight grip on one shoulder as he peers at the wounds from close up. “You don’t need a doctor.”

“But . . .”

“Hey,” Gil snaps, “how many bear attacks have you seen? How many claw wounds have you dressed? ‘Cause I’ve seen a few and I’m saying you don’t need to go anywhere.”

Shocked by the sudden insistence, by the change in Gil’s voice, Martin closes his eyes as damp, early air prickles his bare chest and arms. It feels colder on the exposed cuts than anywhere else, as if the wind is creeping inside his body through those crevasses, brushing against tender parts of himself that hide under his skin and away from the elements.

“Right. So let me take care of this.”

Martin knows a hospital is where you go when you’re injured, for car accidents and burns and attacks by a bear. He knows, though he’s never made use of the knowledge in a life of good health and near misses. But he doesn’t have the energy to argue right now and lying across the steps of Gil’s porch is the most comfortable place he’s ever been as far as he remembers right now, so he’s easily dissuaded from getting up.

Gil unscrews the cap from the whiskey and holds out the bottle. “Drink.”

“Not yet . . . maybe water?”

“Drink. It’ll calm you down. Dull the pain.” Gil presses the lip of the bottle against Martin’s mouth until he gives in and takes a sip. The whiskey burns in his throat and empty stomach, and he thinks he’ll throw up again.

“There. That wasn’t so bad.” Gil takes the whiskey back and draws a long drink himself. He wipes his mouth with the back of one hand and sets down the bottle, leaving it open. “I’ve seen fellas get bullets pulled out with nothing more than a drink, so it’ll do for your scratches.”

He slides drugstore glasses from a shirt pocket and fits them onto his red, swollen nose. A wad of grayed tape where the rubber pads should be balances them on the bridge. Gil leans close to Martin, his face almost touching the parallel cuts, and says, “Well.”

He opens the first aid kit and pulls out a brown plastic bottle of strong-smelling soap, then cleans the cuts with a hot cloth. His scrubbing is so vigorous that pain flares across Martin’s bruised body and he fights an urge to cry out. Gil washes and rinses the wounds several times before drying them at last with a second white towel. Then he fishes a creased metal tube of unlabeled ointment out of the box.

“You’ll live,” he says. “I’ve had worse in the kitchen.”

Martin doesn’t believe this, but the rasp of calloused fingertips over his skin is comforting in a strange way. His mind flashes to an afternoon spent with his mother’s father when he was young, not long before his grandfather died. Martin had been in kindergarten, or it was earlier, maybe, but he remembers riding high on a shoulder as they walked down the street. The thin white hair on his grandfather’s head was combed across the chapped, red scalp below. Gil has his grandfather’s eyebrows, snowdrifts piled in wind.

“What happened?” Gil asks as he squeezes some ointment onto a cotton swab with a long wooden stem. “Where’d you run into a bear?”

“I don’t . . . in the woods, there was an old house. A foundation. Somewhere that way.” Martin waves his arm in the vague direction of where he emerged from the woods. He feels the strain of even that minor movement in every one of his ribs.

“The Pelletier homestead. Your land used to be theirs.”

Martin winces as Gil digs the head of the swab into his chest.

“Hang in there. You want those cuts to be clean. What were you doing out there so early, anyway?”

Martin says he got lost on his walk and slept in the foundation, and Gil laughs. “I’ll make a hunter of you yet—already tangling with bears and sleeping rough. And you call yourself a city boy.”

Gil drops the swab on the porch and rattles his fingers in the first aid kit. “Saw your door open last night. Figured you were hot in that sardine can and wanted the breeze. Wondered why you didn’t come over.” His hand emerges with a thick roll of gauze bound by a red elastic, and a small pair of surgical scissors.

“Shouldn’t I get stitches?” Martin asks as Gil unrolls the bandage.

“Never sew a claw wound. Traps the germs in the cut and you’ll get an infection. You want to get some air in it. Anyway, I told you, they aren’t deep.” He spools gauze across the slashes on Martin’s chest, then around his back and across them again.

“Why is that house in the woods, anyway?”

“Pelletiers had a farm there, long before my time. Used to be clear ground but the woods’ve grown back since they pulled out. Lots of folks gave up harvesting rocks for mill jobs back then. All those stone walls in the woods used to be around pastures. Folks talk about the woods getting smaller, but that’s not the case here. It’s been growing back since before I was born.”

The cold steel of scissors against Martin’s chest makes him twitch. Gil clamps a hand on his shoulder and tells him, “Hold still.” Gauze sticks to the reopened wounds, and dark red lines with yellow edges well up through each white strip. Gil wraps until he’s covered all five cuts and gone over them tightly a couple of times.

I remember the family Gil’s talking about, the Pelletiers, and so many families the same—they came here and pulled pastures from under the forest, and laid their stone walls around them. Their pigs broke loose constantly, fattening themselves on acorns and beech same as the dogs of today’s town gorge themselves on the birds that fall bloody and burnt beneath the high power lines. But those families, those settlers, were never quite settled. They were always talking about where they’d come from, Ireland and England and sometimes Quebec, or they talked about where they were going, where the ground might be softer, the soil more rich. Neither one sounded real to me, only the wishful thoughts of homesick farmers suspended between one dream and another. The dreams of an animal too long in hibernation.

“Wish I was surprised you met a bear so close to the road. They used to stay pretty deep in the woods. Used to know they aren’t living in Yellowstone and nobody’s going to feed them. Been showing more of themselves. Getting into trashcans downtown.”

He tests the tension of the bandages with a finger before repacking his tools in the box. “Guess they’ve decided the Pelletier place has been abandoned long enough. It’s part of the forest again. Bear’s probably pissed you were sleeping in his house, Goldilocks. You ruined his morning.”

“But the bear attacked me.”

“What’d y’do, sneak up on him? Spook him?”

“No, nothing! I was sleeping in the fireplace, and it pulled me out. It jumped right on me.”

“You sure that’s how it happened?” Gil’s eyes are tight, he’s trying to get the story to focus. Martin nods.

“Damn.” Gil stands, then pulls off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose so the bulbous tip glows an even rosier shade of red. “Damn,” he says again.

Martin looks up with curious eyes, but remains seated on the edge of the porch. “What? Why does it matter?” He reaches for his ruined shirt but in such rough shape it’s not worth putting on, so he pulls what’s left of his jacket over bare skin. Raising his arms into the sleeves strains his wounds and his ribs, but he tries not to let it show on his face. The holes torn by the bear flap over his chest, revealing the blood-streaked gauze underneath.

“Well, if the bear attacked without being provoked, could be he’s sick. Or felt threatened. Maybe you were too close to her cubs or . . . was it a male or a female?”

“I don’t know. How do you tell?”

“Do I need to explain it? You really do need to spend more time with that Evans girl.”

Martin looks away, his face warm. “Can you tell from the mouth? Or the teeth?”

“Male’s bigger, but any bear’d look big on top of you, I suppose.” Gil pulls a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his green pants. “Used to be bears knew enough to avoid trouble, which is more than I can say for some folks.” His expression lets Martin know some folks is him. “Now we’re not supposed to shoot ‘em unless they’re a threat. They learned to be afraid of us, now they’re learning they don’t have to be. I told you, animals’re getting strange around here. Showing up where they never did.”

“Like a mountain lion?”

Gil gives Martin a look, as insulted as it is annoyed. “Mountain lions don’t live around here.”

“But Elmer said . . .”

“Elmer sees all kinds of things. Hell, he might’ve seen a big cat, but it’d just be passing through. A ranger found some markings a while ago, but no sign of ‘em staying. No, I don’t mean mountain lions. I mean bears in a dumpster. Went to buy tires a few weeks ago and there were sparrows waiting outside the door. They aren’t big enough to set off the door’s electric eye but they live in the rafters. Strange stuff. Who taught birds about automatic doors, Marty? You tell me that.”

Whatever ointment Gil put on the swab, it seems to be easing the sting in Martin’s chest, or else it’s the whiskey. He reaches for the bottle and takes a long drink.

“Of course, could be it wasn’t a bear you saw at all.” Gil smirks on the side of his mouth that isn’t holding a cigarette. “Coulda been Scratch. You were in his neck of the woods, after all.”

The name is familiar somehow—Martin tries to remember where he’s heard it before, but the answer won’t come. “Who’s Scratch?”

“The bearman of the north woods?” Gil laughs, then drops the stump of his cigarette onto the porch and grinds it out with a bare, calloused heel. He slips another cigarette into his mouth but doesn’t light it, then reaches for his coffee cup from the porch railing and sips. He pulls a face and mutters about it being cold then pours in some of the whiskey before drinking again.

“Scratch is nothing but an old legend from the Indians around here. The story’s lasted longer than they did. Supposed to be a bear that was cursed, maybe a man that was cursed. I’ve heard it both ways. Whichever it is wanders the woods stuck in a body that won’t die or get old.”

“People believe that?”

“Doesn’t matter. Scratch has been blamed for so much that he’s real enough. Indians said he stole their babies. Settlers blamed him for stealing women, sheep, whatever went missing. Grabs ‘em, eats ‘em, and tosses the bones in his pile. Loggers used to say he snuck into camp at night to rust up their saw blades and grind down their gears.”

“He has a pile of bones?”

“Who doesn’t? Every so often folks find a gnawed sheep’s leg or a dog that crawled off to die. Tear ass into town hollering they’ve found Scratch’s bones.” He takes a sip of his coffee. “Made a good story for me to tell the weekend warriors, anyway. Take ‘em hunting and give ‘em their money’s worth in scares, too. All part of the package. Used to have a couple of caves I kept stocked with bones.”

“Have you seen him?” Martin asks, then tries to backtrack with, “Do you believe it?” instead, but the hunter is already talking.

“Me?” Gil grins and pulls a plastic lighter out of his pocket. It takes three scrapes of the wheel for it to catch, then he ignites the cigarette that hangs from his lip. “Not so far as I know. Seen plenty of bears, but I can’t say any of ‘em was Scratch. Besides, the Indians thought he could change shape, look like a bird or a wolf, whatever he wanted.”

He pulls on his cigarette so the end flares. It occurs to Martin that as much as Gil smokes, he never seems to run out of cigarettes. He imagines a closet full of unopened cartons stashed somewhere in the house.

“Maybe I have seen him,” Gil says. “Who knows? Older folks in town—even older than me, if you can imagine—say they have, out in the woods, a bear that walks funny. Staggers like he can’t find his legs. Or got caught in a trap.”

A pair of gray squirrels approach the foot of the stairs, a few feet away from the men. “Will you look at that,” Gil says. “Even the squirrels are getting brave.” He stands and waves his arms with a bark, scaring the squirrels off into the yard.

Scratch isn’t a bad thing to be called. I’ve had other names, in other languages I don’t hear in these woods anymore, but this one’s as good as any other. I’ve been here longer than I’ve had a name, and I was nameless for a far longer time than I wasn’t. But it’s always scared people more when they have a word for the thing they’re afraid of, so the names have stuck to this place.

They never get the details right, though, what I do and how I do it. Never the why of it all. I didn’t begin as one of your own who was cursed—I was in these woods without form before the first warm-blooded body appeared. I was here before your kind arrived, before any kind arrived, because you needed me here to become what you are. You needed a reason to raise up the walls you hoped would keep me out, and to invent the electric lights and alarms that allow you to sleep through the night. Without me to spur your inventions, what would your kind have become? What would your languages be without the need to give your fear names?

Martin doesn’t know me yet, not exactly, but he’s come across me in his dreams during these recent nights. He knows that since he came to these woods, to the hole in the forest where his trailer stands, his dreams have carried over into waking life more often—and more completely—than ever before. Dreams led him into the woods on his walk, and dreams led the bear to his fireplace bed. Dreams are where I have the most reach, the most power. It’s hard to touch waking lives, in those hours you’re convinced you understand more of the world. But the more your kind come to insist things beyond what you know to be real cannot be, the more willing your dream selves become to believe. The more eager they are to listen, and to remember the other things you used to know.

I pushed Martin toward the bear and the bear toward Martin until their paths crossed. So much depends upon their meeting that it couldn’t be left to chance. I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen when they came together—I can set events into motion, not control how they occur—but so far it’s worked out. Martin is on the path I was pushing him toward. The bear let him live, but went back to the woods, and his confidence in knowing how the world works has been shaken enough for my needs.