Scratch. Steve Himmer
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.
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