Scratch. Steve Himmer
Читать онлайн книгу.
bones of this house bring him back to that limitless week, to having a house to himself and not trying to fill the whole space. He’s built lofts that swallowed three stories of high-rise buildings, and mansions that could swallow those lofts. He began by carrying boards and sacks of cement when he was in high school, then moved up to hammering nails and framing walls. In time he came to handle the materials and tools less often himself—it wasn’t long, really, before his employers recognized his talents for construction were in paper rather than wood, that his aptitude wasn’t with saw blades but schemes—and spent his time arranging for larger and larger spaces to be walled in. Architects delivered the first two dimensions, the shapes and the lines of a house, then it was left up to Martin to turn those lines into boxes large enough to contain the lives that would happen inside.
Until this development here in the woods, he spent most of his time in his car, on the phone, driving from one job to another to make sure the people he paid to hang sheetrock and plaster ceilings were doing things how he wanted them done. Long before giving up an apartment so high in the city he couldn’t hear any sound from below, in favor of his trailer amongst the trees, he raised a towering beach house for a man who lived all alone. Before the owner moved in Martin paced through the house with all its wide windows closed but the sound of the surf outside filling the halls. As he followed his echo across each hollow story, his heart sank into his legs and dragged behind him across the waxed floors. He’d made something dead, and it would stay dead no matter how many antiques and empty bedrooms it held. However grand the parties it hosted and rare the wine. He decided to build something different, more than a shell for one lonely soul; he decided to build a whole neighborhood and to stay long enough to see someone move in, to see himself become part of the lives to be lived in the houses he’d made.
He told his partner about the houses he wanted to build in these woods and was bombarded with the practical questions that he himself, for once, wasn’t willing to ask. He and his partner only started working together because it made sense, not because they were friends or even knew each other away from the shared job sites they’d been on for years. Even now, five years later, they’re still partners on the letterhead only—Martin knows his partner is married but has never met the man’s wife; the partner knows Martin has never been married but not whether he wants to be. So what Martin does with his money, whether he risks all he has on a cluster of houses in some far away town without even a mall or decent restaurant to its name, what business is that of his business partner?
Martin announced he’d be living on-site for the duration of his pet project, and his partner asked why he couldn’t stay in the city, rely on a foreman the way they usually do and make the occasional visit. But Martin said no, not this time, he would come to the woods. He would see this project from start to finish. He didn’t mention his need to keep these houses from becoming more square feet of death, and his partner agreed to oversee the rest of their projects as long as Martin kept in touch on the phone and came to the office when there was something to sign. Their machines make the distance much shorter, or should, but Martin’s phone has been unreliable on its best days. This forest needs a new cell tower, by Martin’s measure, the way it needed stone walls before. And a bigger, better power grid to handle all those new houses and their new machines, because already the lights flicker in his trailer and he knows there are blackouts at night because the clock on his microwave is so often timeless and flashing when he wakes up.
On the ground inside the foundation, now that he isn’t moving, Martin’s hunger becomes so acidic it makes him feel sick and he fights the twitch in his throat that always comes before he throws up. With his back against the cold stones, he closes his eyes and breathes deeply, willing his stomach down.
Wind rushes through trees overhead. Blood thunders behind his ears. As he waits for his legs to stop aching enough to start walking, he tries to imagine a path that will lead him out of the woods but it’s hard to retrace a route he wasn’t paying attention to the first time. After a few minutes his spent body drifts into sleep.
There’s a twitch in his knee and he jerks his eyes open, but the world doesn’t get any lighter. He rubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth to scrape off the sour taste of sleep. It’s so dark he can’t see his own hand in front of his face, an expression he has, until now, always assumed hyperbolic. His legs aren’t as sore as they were, or they’re still asleep, and his stomach has given up thoughts of eating and seems satisfied to gnaw on itself. After waiting a few seconds for his eyes to adjust he accepts that they won’t, that while he slept in this hollowed-out house night has fallen around him.
He wasn’t afraid when he was simply lost, but waking in the dark brings his childhood fear rushing back and he curls his body against itself. Every leaf brushed by wind, each acorn or pine cone falling beyond the low walls, is some horrible beast closing in; each second he waits in the dark brings whatever moves through the woods closer to where he sits exposed. He pictures the forest floor seething with snakes and with rats, and the larger bodies of panthers and foxes out there somewhere, too. As much as his mind assures him that these visions are drawn more from movies than the truth of this place, the fear won’t be shaken off.
And he isn’t entirely wrong because here we are.
Wind hisses and dips into the foundation. Where his clothes remain damp Martin shivers, and he zips the jacket up to his neck. Something is walking on the other side of the wall. Something shuffles through crackling scrub and creeps closer to where he huddles. It walks a slow circle around the stone square, and Martin follows the path with his ears. The footsteps are light but steady, punctuated with the occasional snuffle or snort, and he wonders if the animal knows he is there. He listens as it comes closer to where he thinks the door is.
Wherever he sleeps, in hotels and apartments and even the trailer he occupies now, Martin pushes his bed as tightly into a corner as he can wedge it. The more sides on which he’s protected by walls, the more soundly he sleeps. Waking up with no roof overhead and only the stumps of lost walls at his sides has sent him into a panic that feels both familiar and long forgotten. It’s primal, an instinct, and he feels his way along the foundation until he finds the higher stones of the hearth. At last his forehead strikes the rusty remains of the kettle on its hook with a loud, rolling clang. The pain in his head isn’t as bad as the silence that follows the sound—everything in the forest has stopped what it’s doing, everything knows just where he is now. With his fingers on the top edge of the opening so he won’t bump his head again, Martin slides backward into the mouth of the fireplace. It’s high enough for him to crouch with his legs pulled to his chest and his forehead bent close to his knees. He’s still exposed to the forest, but only in one direction.
It’s warmer out of the wind, but not by much. He hunches with his eyes open but there’s nothing to see: no fireflies, no fire, no yellow, glistening eyes. He strains his ears for the footsteps, but either the creature was chased off by the sound of the kettle or his own breathing echoes so loudly in the hearth that he can’t hear the animal moving.
Home from college once, on a rare visit, Martin finally asked his mother why they had moved so many times. “I wanted to find a place that felt right,” she told him. They were in the cramped kitchen of her apartment—hers alone, for the first time since he had been born—and though there was hardly room for the two of them to work together they were rolling out dough for some foreign pastry she’d learned to make from a man who had come and gone without meeting her son. As she answered his question, Martin’s mother looked up from her rolling pin, and he noticed that flour had settled into the creases and lines of her face. It made her look so much older than she actually was, every wrinkle made bright, and the white streaks in her hair looked as if they’d been floured, too.
He asked, as he had before with other words, “Did it feel like the right place with my father?” His mother dusted her hands over the dough, rubbing one against the other so a white cloud rose then drifted down, and said she needed to look at the recipe to find out what to do next.
But don’t mistake all that for Martin’s story. It’s where he comes from but not what he’s worth. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking origins are more important than outcomes, that a beginning determines the lifetime ahead, but I’ve lived long enough to know that how a life starts only