Читать книгу Scratch - Steve Himmer - Страница 13

5

BACK IN HIS TRAILER, MARTIN WRAPS A LAYER OF CLING film around the bandages on his chest before squeezing into the small plastic shell of the shower. He doesn’t want to get the gauze or the wounds wet, but his body is sticky with dried sweat and dirt, pungent from yesterday’s walk and a night in the woods.

The water arrives cold, and he stands back as far as he can until it warms up. Then the spray is too hot, and where his skin is bruised it feels even hotter. It rattles against the plastic over his wounds the way rain does on the trailer’s thin windows.

He faces the spray with his forehead against the wall as hot water rolls down the back of his neck and his shoulders, uncoiling muscles one at a time, until his body feels like his body again. He nods off in the steam for a second, then wakes with a jerk as a few trickles creep under the top edge of his plastic wrap and make their way toward the gauze, so he presses the film tighter against his skin.

If it weren’t for the bandages and bruises all over his body, he might think the bear had been an uncomfortable dream. That he spent last night the same as any other, sleeping in his own bed, while his imagination wandered the woods. Even though it has only been a couple of hours since he left the forest, and less than a day since he set out on his walk, it seems a lifetime ago. He’s stung by the shame of getting lost, but it’s more the vicarious embarrassment of watching someone else make mistakes than something that happened to him.

As he winces his way through getting dressed in the main room of the trailer, Martin notices strands of brown fur scattered over his bed. The long shape of a body stretches out on his blankets, and one of his pillows looks kneaded. He lays his hand in the egg-shaped dent on his mattress, annoyed now that he left the door open. The sheets seem warm; either they’re reflecting the heat of his hand or else whatever slept there last night hasn’t been gone very long.

He leans close to the sheets and breathes in the smell of his guest. He’s shocked at how much it smells like the bear, the bear’s breath, but also by the full picture the scent plants in his mind—a flickering image of not one but two creatures curled on his bed. He recoils from the unexpected acuity of his own senses. When the shock has subsided, Martin remembers he hasn’t eaten in nearly a day, with nothing but Gil’s whiskey to drink, and takes comfort in dismissing that sensory overreaction as a result of his deprivations—his imagination running away with the smell, turning it into more than it is. He looks around the trailer, red-faced, as if there might be someone watching.

He doesn’t know how nearly he missed us, slipping out before he slipped in. Or that we haven’t gone far, watching through the window from under the bushes as the day becomes brighter and the final droplets of last night’s dew burn away.

It isn’t Martin we’re hiding from, though. It’s one thing to be spotted by him, as at sea in the woods as he would be at sea, but another to be seen by the men who will build his houses for him, men who have lived near these woods their whole lives. Men who hang guns in their trucks and pull them down as casually as one cigarette follows another into their mouths. Like Gil, they are less patient with the novelty of animals coming up close. None of them would have been lured so easily as Martin was by the tail of a fox. They could be led, too, each in his own way, but Martin is the man for my story.

He lifts his steel watch from a shelf by the bed, and as he buckles it onto his wrist his fingers find the sharp burr to blame for that hole in the sleeve of a jacket ruined now altogether. He’s shocked that despite his already full morning, despite being tired enough for the day to be over, it is only a few minutes past seven o’clock. He opens both kitchenette cabinets and the tiny white fridge tucked into the wall, looking for something to eat. But his stomach has been empty for so many hours it threatens to reject any offer of food, so he plugs in the electric kettle and decides to make do with instant coffee from crystals, and a spoonful of powdered creamer.

When his phone, retrieved from the car, rings with the electronic chirp of a bird underwater, Martin splashes hot coffee all over his hand. He barely avoids dropping the mug and, cursing, sets it down on the counter. The phone rings again, and he walks to the end of the trailer where it rattles and dances across the surface of his drafting table. As he shakes the burnt hand to lessen the pain, he answers the phone with the other.

The connection is crackling and weak, far from the nearest cell tower with tall hills between, and though it’s good for what he usually gets in the trailer he may as well be speaking into a tin can on the end of a string. The number on the screen tells him it’s his partner calling from their office back in the city. They speak every couple of days to touch base, but a signal is so hard to come by they communicate mostly by voicemail, always a few hours out of step with each other. He’s hardly on the phone at all these days, a change from his usual routine of calling suppliers, subcontractors, and building inspectors, sucking up daily to bureaucrats and their factotums.

At first the difficulty of keeping in touch made him feel isolated, as if these woods were an unmapped desert island and everything worth being a part of was happening on the other side of the ocean. But lately he’s felt the opposite, after settling a bit into his trailer home. Some mornings he has awoken concerned with what might be happening in this small town instead of the city he left behind. His first days here he spent constantly driving closer to town where his phone’s signal is stronger, but now he waits to be called and it takes him hours sometimes, the best part of a day, to move to a place from which he can call back.

He doesn’t even bother saying hello before setting the phone down again; his partner on the other end of the line won’t be able to hear Martin’s voice any better than Martin hears his. He’ll check the message and leave one of his own when he comes within range of a signal.

As he sips his coffee, a car rattles off the road onto the rough ground of the site. He spreads the slats of the plastic blinds in his window so he can see through, and watches Alison Evans’ battered red SUV pull toward his trailer. He’s never worked with a forewoman before—he’s never even met a woman who wanted to be one—but so far Alison is working out well, keeping the project on track, as far she’s able. The biggest delays have come from the weather, though after watching her work Martin wouldn’t be surprised to see her whip the elements into line, too.

She climbs from her car with a scarred yellow hardhat, and walks toward the trailer with the graceful lope of a cowgirl. Her hair is spiky and short, blonde laced with gray, and she reminds Martin of female characters he’s seen in science fiction movies, blasting through alien hordes with oversized guns in their arms. He sets down his coffee cup and steps out of the trailer to meet her.

“Good morning,” he says.

She nods. “Mr. Blaskett.”

“Alison. Please. Just call me Martin.”

“I forgot.” She smiles, brightening her face so Martin pictures ice struck by sunlight and the thin web of wrinkles beside each of her eyes expanding cracks in its surface.

“Good weekend?” He crosses his arms across his chest but the stance feels both unfriendly and painful so he slides his hands into back pockets. That position is uncomfortable, too, it feels like a pose, so he lets his hands hang at his sides with nothing to do.

“Not bad,” she says. “Brought Jake, Jr. up to the lake. Painted the bathroom. Nothing special.” She doesn’t ask about his own weekend, but looks at him as if she’s waiting to hear.

“I went for a hike yesterday, out that way.” He points toward where he entered the woods, and hopes he looks like he knows where he’s pointing. Martin doesn’t mention how easily he became lost in the forest. He tries to sound casual as he adds, “I ran into a bear.”

“Yeah?” Alison leans closer.

“It attacked me, actually.” He traces a finger through the air in front of his chest. “I’ve got cuts here, and bruises all over my ribs.” Martin grabs the front of his shirt, as if he’s going to lift it and show her the bruises, then suddenly stops, embarrassed. He’s afraid his attempt at nonchalance has come across as lunacy, or macho bragging.

“Oh my God! Are you okay?”

“Gil thinks so.”

“Lucky it didn’t kill you,” she says. “Bear attack, that’s something.”

The sound of approaching engines grows louder, and they turn toward the road at the edge of the site.

“Not a lot of folks get attacked by a bear. And live, I mean. Lots of folks get attacked.”

“Really?”

“Maybe you should go to the hospital.”

“I thought so, too, but Gil patched me up. He said the cuts aren’t deep.” Gil’s explanations made sense at the time, but now, as he repeats them out loud, Martin begins second-guessing how easily he was persuaded.

“Well, he would know.”

He’s about to ask Alison about her son or some other part of her life beyond this project, anything to turn the conversation away from himself and to find out more about her. But the half-formed question on the tip of his tongue is interrupted by the rumble of vehicles bumping onto the shoulder between the site and the road.

Members of the crew begin arriving in heavy trucks with doors that don’t match. The bulldozer operator rumbles up on the motorcycle he assembled himself from spare parts, or so Martin has heard. The crew is still small at the moment, just enough men run an excavator, a bulldozer, and a dump truck; this is their first day on the site, replacing the tree crew who finished on Friday.

The men park in the mud along the edge of the road, and Alison walks toward them, leaving Martin behind by the trailer. He watches as she speaks and gestures to the crew, giving instructions or telling a story, but he can’t make out what she’s saying over the chaos of further arrivals.

A shiny silver food truck parks on the soft shoulder, and its wall swings open in a burst of white steam. The crew crowds around to buy coffee, cigarettes, and pastries with no particular flavor. Construction on this scale doesn’t take place in these parts too often, so there isn’t much need for such a truck, but when one of the local farmers heard Martin’s plans in town meeting he took out a loan and bought it. He’s hoping this development will lead to more building in the near future, and his glistening steel gamble will pay for itself the way his farm hasn’t in so many years, the way his ancestors supplemented their farming with maple syrup and logging and furs, the way some of his neighbors craft handmade authentic antiques in their barns after dark and the way their grandfathers did, too.

The men mill around in the mud, smoking over foam cups of coffee. They greet Martin with nods and grunts and the occasional word, polite but impersonal. He tells the first few good morning, then tilts his head to the rest, suddenly exhausted and struggling to keep his eyes open. He was flush with adrenaline when he walked out of the woods but he’s coming down fast and all of his aches are turning to throbs and his clarity is becoming a cloud. The cuts sting again, Gil’s ointment and whiskey both wearing off, and he absentmindedly holds the buttons of his shirt away from his chest as if it’s the pressure of the fabric causing him pain. The skin he kept dry in the shower didn’t get washed, and now that the rest of his body is clean the itching in that area has grown even worse.

He feels every bruise as a weight on his body, as a tightness under his ribs, and he stretches his arms up behind his head to expand his lungs and relieve the pressure. He doesn’t feel like himself; he’s aware of muscles he doesn’t recall being aware of before, only noticing them now because they’re so sore. His head swirls with the flotsam and jetsam of exhaustion, images and phrases rising to the surface of his mind without order or purpose, as if they aren’t coming from Martin at all but are bubbling up from somewhere else.

His struggle may sound familiar, his mind and his body at odds for control. That’s probably about how you’re feeling right now in your borrowed coyote, pestering you with its canine urges and heightened senses. Wearing a new body is always a change. It takes time to get the sense of your shape.

A long time ago, before even the oldest tree rings in this forest had formed and the great-grandparents of today’s oldest trunks hadn’t grown, I had no shape at all. I hadn’t yet learned I could take one as I drifted across the still unseeded ground.

Drifted isn’t quite right—that sounds as if I was moving and I never moved, I never came and never went, because without a body to limit my range I was everywhere in these woods all at once. I occupied no space so I wasn’t limited by the size I took up in the world. I watched the first saplings grow, and the first humming insects rattle their wings before lifting off into the air, and I wondered how it must feel to be one of them. So I squeezed myself into the hard-shelled shape of a beetle and suddenly the world became smaller. After knowing everything there was to know in these woods, the grand scope of time and the intricacies of how each life and death fit together with every other from one year to the next, I became a finite, miniscule part. And I was shocked at how complicated the world can appear from that angle—I’d expected the opposite, that the confines of a limited life would be boring, constrictive, but the forest was as rich through the eyes of a beetle as it had ever been when I could see the whole world at once.

I didn’t stay in that first insect body for long; the compression of my consciousness was too shocking. But over time, across what you might measure out in millennia, I became more adept. I wasn’t as startled by how the world shifted from species to species. I grew used to having a body, any body, and it’s been ages now since I spent very much time in the shapelessness of myself.

I knew, before, what all the animals and trees in these woods were thinking, but I knew it the way you know the sky is up there and the ground is down here; I took all those momentary lives and flickering thoughts for granted, but when I put myself into that beetle—and the oak trees and foxes that followed—each individual life in the forest became a story I needed to know. And I needed to know each of them in their own voice. I’ve had a long time to listen to the stories of creatures you may not know ever existed. And that collection is the closest thing I have to a tale of my own—all those borrowed shapes and borrowed stories, one after the other, lives piled upon lives, almost add up to a shape that is mine.