Scratch. Steve Himmer
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