Scratch Read online

  He lingers at the door for a moment, eyes on a row of broad flannel backs hunched over plates at the counter, then weaves his way through the room. He steps aside to let Claudia rush past with a tray on her shoulder, eyeglasses on a chain around her neck and swinging to one side from the speed. Then Martin sits down across the table from Alison and the boy he assumes is her son.

  “Morning,” she says over a half-eaten pile of pancakes. “This is Jake, Jr. Say good morning to Mr. Blaskett.”

  The boy greets Martin without looking up from his bowl of green milk and a few remaining cereal shapes, stripped of their color and bloated beyond whatever forms they once had.

  “Morning. Thanks for sharing your table.” He greets the boy, says it’s nice to meet him, but the shaggy blond head remains down as Jake, Jr. pushes cereal around in his bowl with a spoon. Martin pulls a laminated menu from its perch between a napkin dispenser and a bottle of ketchup. “And Alison, I mean it, call me Martin.”

  “Right. Sorry.” She steers a forkful of pancake pieces through the last streaks of syrup on her plate then guides the glazed hunk to her mouth. Jake, Jr. swirls a finger in his milk and lumps of soggy cereal rafts ride the whirlpool.

  Claudia comes to the table and pours Martin’s coffee. When he orders she asks, “Eggs Benedict again? It can’t be so good without the meat. Maybe you should try something else.” In the end she talks him into an omelet.

  “Went to Elmer Tully’s yesterday,” Alison says when Claudia has gone, and it takes Martin a moment to realize she’s referring to him, not herself.

  “Oh, yeah. I went along with Gil.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know, really. Something knocked down the back door, and the house was a mess.” Martin looks toward her son, to gauge his reaction, but he’s absorbed in sailing his cereal shapes and doesn’t seem to be listening. “No sign of Elmer, though.”

  “He’ll turn up.” Alison pours so much sugar into her coffee that it makes Martin’s teeth hurt just watching. “He always does.”

  “We did, uh, run into a mountain lion. It may have been in his house.”

  “You saw a mountain lion?” the boy asks, interested now. “Where?” His eyes are wide and the spoon freezes in his hand, still half-submerged in milk.

  “In the woods,” Martin tells him.

  “Where did it go?”

  Martin pauses, unsure how to explain that Gil shot the cat without upsetting the boy.

  “Mr. Rose killed it, honey,” Alison answers without looking up from her coffee, already aware of what happened somehow. “It was too close to the houses.”

  “Oh,” Jake says, as casually as if he’s been told that today is Tuesday, or some equally dull piece of news. He goes back to his bowl. A few seconds later he lifts his head and says, “I saw a fox. At the swing set. He was so cool, he wanted to play.”

  “Jake . . .”

  “He did, Mom! He came right up and sniffed me.” The boy turns to Martin and says with a conspiratorial tone, “I wanted to keep him, but Mom said no. She always says no.”

  “Okay, Jake. That’s enough.”

  He turns back to his mother. “It’s true! You won’t let me have a dog, or a fox, or anything.” He sits up tall in the booth, and crosses his arms over his chest. He turns his face to the window but one eye is still on his mother, on her reflection, and measuring her reaction. “It’s not fair,” Jake complains, but the passion of his performance has already faded.

  Martin remembers begging his own mother to buy him a dog and her constant reply that they moved too often and it was too hard to find apartments where they could have pets.

  Alison leans close to her son’s ear and tells him to calm down. Then he pretends to be looking at something very important in the gray flecks of the tabletop. She turns to Martin and says, “Jake thinks a dog will take care of itself.”

  “No, I’ll take care of it! I like animals. And they like me.”

  “We’ll see,” she tells the boy as Claudia delivers Martin’s breakfast, sliding the plate onto the table beside him before he sees her coming.

  “Anything else with that? Ketchup? A steak?”

  “No, thanks,” he answers, but she refills his coffee anyway, not counting that as anything else. The omelet is the thickest he’s ever seen. He doesn’t know how many eggs have gone into it and decides he’s better off for it.

  Alison’s lifts her mug for Claudia to refill it, and Martin sees the fine blonde hairs on her wrist and the muscles running under the rolled up sleeve of her shirt. As the waitress starts moving away he blurts out, “And an order of bacon.” Claudia and Alison are almost as shocked as he is himself.

  “Well, if you say so, hon.” Claudia rushes off before he has time to change his mind.

  “I thought you didn’t eat meat,” Alison says.

  “You don’t?” Jake asks. “Why not?”

  “I don’t,” Martin tells them, scratching the back of his neck. “I just . . . all of a sudden I want bacon. I don’t know why. I haven’t had any in years.”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Everyone likes bacon!”

  “Okay, now,” his mother cuts in. “Stop playing with your cereal and finish it, honey.”

  Martin digs into his eggs, forking a too-big bite to his mouth with a long string of cheese still tying it to the plate. Jake picks up a blue crayon from the table and colors in a line drawing of the café on his placemat while his mother looks out the wide window toward the cannons on the town square and the forest and hills farther on.

  Claudia arrives with the bacon, a tall pile of dark, fatty strips on a white plate, and now that it’s come Martin can’t imagine getting it into his stomach. Alison, her son, and Claudia all watch as he reaches for the first piece. Feeling obligated, he crushes it into his mouth. The bacon is both greasy and crunchy; one end is burnt and the other feels nearly raw, but he chews and swallows and pretends it is just what he wants.

  “Now, that’s not so bad, is it?” Claudia says. “I knew I’d get through to you if you ate here a few times.” She laughs, and then heads toward the kitchen. Martin gestures to the high pile of bacon, urging Alison and Jake to help themselves. The boy grabs three strips in one hand, and eats them out of his fist.

  “Jake,” Alison scolds.

  “It’s okay, he can have it.” Martin finishes his omelet, ignoring the bacon, listening to the topics of conversations around him—Elmer’s disappearance, the week’s prospects for rain, and an article about squirrels attacking picnickers in some city park. Someone tells a story about a lost tourist who swerved to avoid a skunk in the road and found his SUV with its nose in a ditch. “I hauled him out, sure,” a voice says behind Martin, “but I made him pay me upfront. Suppose I owe the skunk a cut, if I can find him.” Laughter wells up in the room. Already his stomach feels heavy and sour, his mouth crusted with the charred powder of the burnt bacon.

  The skunk story reminds someone else of yesterday’s news, of a farmer a couple towns over with a herd of buffalo—“Bison,” another diner corrects—who claimed last week one of his head was killed by coyotes. “Investigators say he’s full of shit,” the storyteller announces. “Say he made it up for the insurance.”

  “They would say that, wouldn’t they?” another voice asks. “It’s better than getting the whole state in a coyote panic.”

  And someone else has another story, about a bear locking itself in a car, and there’s one about new robot deer to catch hunters who shoot out of season, and there are wolves and snakeheads and a whole ark of animal stories one after the another, each more absurd than the last and no less true for it.

  “Mom, are you done?” Jake asks, pushing his bowl of milk toward Martin’s side of the table.

  “Not yet.”

  “Can I go outside?”

  “Don’t go far. I’ll be out soon.”

  The boy climbs over his mother and runs to the door. He
looks both ways before crossing the street to the square—a city habit out of place in a town with no traffic—and sprinting toward the bandstand where some other boys his size already kneel on the ground in a ring.

  Alison sighs behind her coffee cup. Martin watches the web of fine lines around each of her eyes, the way they compress and relax as she drinks.

  “He’s a nice kid.”

  Alison smiles. “He’s a handful, but I’ll keep him. You don’t have any kids?”

  “Uh, no, I . . . no. I’ve never been married.”

  “Neither have I.” Martin looks for a way he might walk back that misstep, but she goes on before he finds it. “Jake’s father was . . . he wasn’t the marrying kind. Left before Jake was born.”

  Martin pushes yellow clouds of cooled egg around his plate, and eyes the last strip of bacon the boy didn’t eat. “Does Jake still see him?”

  “Not for years. Sees his grandparents, though. They’re an old family, the Haspers. Lived in town since forever until they went south last winter.” She turns to look out the window, toward her son as he swings from the eaves of the bandstand with his lanky friends. The boys work their way around the roof, legs swinging a couple of feet off the ground. “If his father has been back since leaving, no one told me.” She shakes her head, and looks at Martin as if she hadn’t known she was talking out loud. “Listen to me. Shit. You don’t care about this.”

  “I don’t mind. I had a . . . my father wasn’t around, either.”

  Alison slurps the last of her coffee, then sighs. “You gonna stay here?”

  “Oh . . . I’m almost done. Hang on.”

  “No, here. In town. I heard you were going to stay.”

  Martin looks away. Did Gil tell her? he wonders, Are there rumors around? He wraps both hands around his mug though it’s long cold by now. “I think so. I like it. I might keep one of the houses we’re building.”

  “It’s not a bad place. Most folks’re decent enough. Gets a bit . . . I don’t know, far away at times. A long trip from anywhere else.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Hell, that’s it, isn’t it? I don’t even know. Probably nowhere. It’s nice to think I might, though. Sometimes. Move near the ocean. Someplace different. That’s why I don’t get him a dog, you know. I keep thinking we might want to move. Not that telling him so would go better than saying no to a dog.”

  “Can I ask you something?” He isn’t sure what Alison expects to hear, but her face looks panicked, at least tense, before she takes control of it and nods. “What happened to Elmer . . . does that happen a lot?”

  “Elmer missing? That happens all the time.”

  “But the mountain lion, and his house? Is that . . . I don’t know, normal?”

  Alison’s eyes dart around the room before she gives an answer. “People tell stories. My dad did. I don’t know what’s normal, now, but things do happen. Elmer. You and that bear. No one’s willing to say so, but yeah, there’re strange things.”

  “Like Scratch.”

  Alison leans back, away from him. “Heard about that, huh?”

  “Gil told me.” He waits for her to say something else, but when it doesn’t come he asks, “Do you believe it?”

  She sighs, and scratches the side of her neck. “Is it that simple? I’ve always heard the stories. From my parents, my grandparents. Everyone.”

  “But do you believe it? Does Jake?”

  “Well, it’s fun for him, isn’t it? A local monster. It doesn’t mean anything. But the older I get . . .” Martin leans closer, attentive, awaiting the rest of her sentence. At last she says, “I’m not sure I want him to hear it any more. If it’s good for him.”

  “Why?”

  She’s about to answer but a loud burst of laughter comes from the men at the counter and she looks away. She shuffles in her seat the way she might if a chill followed someone through the diner’s door in another season. Then her son is at the end of their table on the other side of the window, palms pressed flat and blowing his cheeks wide on the glass.

  “Cut it out,” Alison scolds while tapping the window, but she’s laughing, too. She checks her watch and says, “I’d better get him dropped off so I’m not late for work.” She smiles, and adds, “Boss is a stickler.”

  “I’ll be back to the site later on, Alison. I’m going to make a few calls and take care of some things. Keep digging and if anything comes up I won’t be too long.” He says all that, as if they need him on the site. As if she doesn’t already know what to do whether or not he’s there at all and his part of the work extends beyond signing his name and giving out checks now that the permits and plans are in place.

  “Right. See you later, then.”

  “Bye.”

  Through the fog the boy left on the glass, Martin watches them climb into her car and roll off. Then he sits by himself in the corner with his back to the room. Conversations taper behind him and trucks pull away from the lot. On the other side of the square, he watches the bank manager swing the door open and prop it wide with a brick. The Open sign lights up in the market.

  He can’t help wondering what impression he made on Alison’s son, and how he’ll be remembered. As his mother’s boss, a strange man in town, a vegetarian who gives away bacon? Or if he even registered in the boy’s world at all. Perhaps he’ll be no more distinct in a few days or weeks than the men Martin was introduced to by his own mother. She never called them by name after they’d gone, only “that last one,” or “the one with the dog,” or “your father.” So that’s what they’ve become for Martin all this time later—a job or a house or a car, some identifying detail that keeps one fragment of memory apart from the others.

  If Jake, thirty years from now, is still in this town he might drive past those houses where the woods used to be and remember the man who built them. The man who paid his mother to build them, more like. Or they might be his mother’s houses, to him.

  The last drops of coffee are cold in his mug, and yellow streaks of egg have congealed on his plate by the time he stands and leaves a ten on the table next to a bill for six dollars and the lone strip of unwanted bacon. He stretches his back in the dining room’s aisle; two vertebrae pop and his ribs flare. As he leaves the restaurant, the few remaining diners follow him with their eyes.

  He leaves his car in the parking lot and walks across the grass to the market. Pushing his half-sized cart up and down half-sized aisles, he lifts the occasional box of dry cereal or cans of tuna fish shrink-wrapped in stacks of four. The store’s stock is limited by its size but the vegetables are always fresh, most of it local, so the bulk of his shopping is green. His tofu and soup mix are specially ordered.

  The market has only been open for a few minutes, and there are no other shoppers this early, only a teenaged cashier snapping his gum behind a car magazine and the middle-aged manager in her office. When Martin passes her open door between the chill of the dairy case and the lights of the bread aisle, she looks up from her desk with a wave and he waves back without knowing her name.

  He buys a large plastic bag of lentils, as loose as water in his hands when he lifts them off the shelf. Then some toothpaste and dish soap before heading toward the cashier, who has already rung through a box of food labeled with Martin’s name and kept on a shelf reserved for special requests.

  When his shopping is finished the sun is barely into the sky and the grass of the square is still wet enough to soak through his shoes after a few steps. He’s not in the mood to go back to his trailer quite yet, and he trusts Alison has things under control on the site. In the car he dials his voicemail, and when the robotic voice announces how many messages await his attention he sighs and almost hangs up without listening to any of them. But he does listen, and hears his partner urging Martin to call, to come down to the city—the financing has fallen through on some other project, one Martin hasn’t been so involved with and, though it’s unlike him, can’t recall the salient details of. But his partner
’s urgency is clear enough. His concern. So Martin calls back, gets his voicemail and says he’ll try again later, says they’ll get things worked out, but he’s relieved the conversation won’t happen quite yet.

  It’s inevitable and has been for some time—the economy has crumbled, houses and offices and apartments are empty all over, so there’s no reason they wouldn’t be touched. No way their own projects would slip through unscathed. But these houses and this project are separate. Secure. He’ll still need to sell them, they’ll need to be filled, but the rest of the company—the rest of the world—could come and go and these houses of his would be safe.

  There’s nothing in his groceries that will suffer from staying out of the cold a little while longer, so he drives away from the square in the opposite direction from which he arrived. After bouncing over the train tracks on the outskirts of town, he turns uphill onto the deeply rutted dirt road that goes to the lake.

  It’s a long, bumpy climb through the woods. The wheels of his low sedan bounce in and out of the trenches left by the wheels of other cars and heavier trucks and he goes slowly. Struggling to hold the steering wheel straight against the will of the road makes his arms tired, at first, and then numb. Beads of sweat bloom on his neck and forehead by the time he reaches the water, and his armpits feel damp beneath his sweatshirt.

  There’s an almost-round patch of dirt at the edge of the lake, bordered by picnic tables and black iron grills set in cement. He sits on one of the tables nearest the water. Most of the lake’s surface is still in shadow, overcast by high trees on the banks and by the peaks of the hills beyond them. Mist rises off the water and the green surface shakes in smooth, windblown wrinkles.

  Tall pines encircle the lake, ramping upward into the hills on all sides, and Martin can almost see the path of the glacier’s retreat that left all this behind. He thinks of the bodies that have been in this water, the footprints that have crossed the lake’s shore—indigenes and trappers and fishermen; children and spiders and bears. Men like him, no more than a speck on a mote of the world. And for a second—one of those strange, blown-up seconds somehow infinite and fleeting at once—Martin knows what time is. He can feel it. He understands something he could never wrench into words, then the second is gone and the knowledge gone with it, so he’s left with the residual nostalgia of knowing he knew, knowing something made sense, but once more unable to pin down quite what.