Old Man Scratch Read online

  “What is wrong with that man?” she said.

  “Stay up here,” I told her. “I’ll talk to him.” Brave words, when all I really wanted to do was hide under the bed and wait for him to go away.

  I started down the stairs, having to hold onto the rail because my knees were knocking pretty good. “You be careful, Johnny Gregson!” I heard Melinda call down after me. I don’t know what she was expecting. Perhaps she thought we would square off in the garden like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. By the time I reached the hallway, he was pounding on the door so hard I saw it leaping in its frame. Tiny clouds of plaster dust puffed from a crack in the wall.

  “Open up, peckerwood!” Scratch shouted. I moved toward the door and noticed that, as he hammered and yelled, the pictures on the hallway walls trembled. “I know you’re in there, goddamnit! I saw you gettin’ a little look-see from your bedroom window …”

  I don’t own a gun—never been a hunting man, but right then I wished to fine Jesus that I had one; I would have felt a sight better about opening the front door if I could have shoved two barrels’ worth of Winchester up Scratch Clayton’s nostrils.

  “Open this goddamn door!”

  “Hold your horses, old man.”

  I moved as fast as I could, wanting to open the door before Scratch knocked it clean off its hinges. One of the pictures jumped off the wall, hit the floor, and the glass shattered in its frame. That was when I started to get mad. It was Melinda’s favourite picture—a birthday present from our daughter—and I knew that, when she saw that it had been broken, a little piece of her heart would break, too. I couldn’t handle that. Maybe Scratch didn’t think I was much of a man (I’m not interested in power mowers or car engines, and I didn’t take a bullet during the war), but when it comes to protecting kith and kin, all those atavistic chemicals come bubbling to the surface. I’m a seventy-one-year-old man with varicose veins and a prostate the size of a Cadillac, but hurt my loved ones and I make like Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

  “Open up, pencil-dick, or by God I’ll¾”

  I turned the lock and opened the door, a deep colour rising from the collar of my shirt. My heart was running like a child, my hands were shaking, and I felt my patience scatter like leaves in the wind. I was hell-bent on shouting the son of a bitch down and sending him back to his miserable corner of the world, but within a second of the door being open, Scratch was standing in the hallway with his huge hand circling my throat. He threw me to the wall so hard that I cracked my head, and I faded for a few seconds, the way your radio signal can fade when you drive through a tunnel.

  “You got a problem with me, Gregson?” He was foaming at the mouth. Literally foaming. The saliva had gathered at the corners like soap suds, and spilled onto his chin in two bubbling lines.

  “Can’t … breathe … son of a …”

  “You wanna mess with me, huh? Wanna go at it, Johnny?”

  “Bastard …”

  “Think you can fuck with me, city boy?”

  “Goddamn …”

  I tried to pry his fingers from my throat, but they were locked tight and hard as steel. I could only breathe in burning little sips and the pain in my chest—from my heart or my lungs, probably both—was like drowning. I felt myself fading again, and just when I thought I was going down, Scratch let go of my throat and grabbed my shirt instead. I pulled in grateful, thirsty breaths. The world drifted back to me, all too slowly. Scratch’s face was less than three inches from mine. His eyes were brimstone, and when he spoke he punctuated his words by poking me hard in the chest. I smelled old food on his breath, and heard the black stumps of his teeth click-clacking like castanets.

  “I shit on you,” he snarled. The following morning there would be a minefield of nickel-sized bruises across my chest from his solid finger jabs. “You come down here with your big city attitude and think you can change the way things are—the way things have always been. Well, here’s a newsflash, Johnny-Boy: it ain’t gonna happen. Not now. Not ever.”

  “Been here six years,” I spluttered. “I’ve got a right to¾”

  “You ain’t gotta right to shit!” Scratch spat, poking and click-clacking. “Goddamn dickweed. Six years is a piss in the ocean. I’ve been breathing this country air since the day I was born, and if I want to run my mower at the crack of dawn, you better believe that I will run my mower at the crack of dawn. And nothing you say or do will¾”

  “Get your dirty hands off him, Hill Clayton.”

  It was Melinda. She had crept downstairs and was standing less than five yards from where Scratch had pinned me to the wall. We looked at her, my heart dropping in my chest as if it had turned to lead. I didn’t want her involved—didn’t want her getting hurt. She looked frail … scared, but beautiful. Her precious lips were a pale line drawn across her face. Her eyes were steady, her shoulders square. She never flinched, not even when Scratch pointed at her.

  “Put a lid on it, missy,” he growled. A thick glob of drool swung from the bottom of his chin, like a frosted Christmas ornament. “You may have married a man too sweet to show you the back of his hand, but I graduated from a tougher school. I’ll put you through the wall, I swear to God.”

  I fought and twisted, wanting to break him in half. Scratch kept me at arm’s length, undaunted by my sudden excitement.

  “You don’t scare me,” Melinda said. Her voice was cool, supporting her words, but I knew that she was scared; I could feel her heart fluttering like a trapped bird. “Let go of my husband and get the hell out of my house.”

  The tension fell out of his arm and I pulled away from him. I dropped to my knees like a man who has been punched in the belly.

  “You’re a goddamn disgrace, Johnny,” Scratch said.

  “Get out of here,” Melinda said. “I won’t tell you again.”

  “And what are you gonna do, missy?” he rumbled. I wondered if his larynx consisted of a box of small stones that vibrated when he talked. “Gonna give me a whupping? Gonna show me who’s boss?”

  Melinda said nothing; words were futile (silence will always be stronger than ignorance). She stood firmly—small in stature, endless in beauty—until Scratch sneered and backed away. I lowered my face into my hands and started to cry, not because I was a goddamn disgrace, and not because Scratch had gotten the better of me. I cried because Melinda was hurting. She didn’t show it, but I knew. She was hurting bad, and I couldn’t stop the tears from falling.

  “I shit on you,” Scratch said for the second time, then shuffled down the hallway. He paused before leaving, scratching his ass and growling over one shoulder: “Stay out of my affairs. Mind me now … next time I won’t be so courteous.”

  Then he was gone, leaving the front door open but slamming the screen so hard that a cloud of dust lifted from the front step, obscuring his departure … like the devil disappearing in a puff of smoke.

  Melinda came to my side and wrapped her arms around me. She gave me her pain. I gave her my tears.

  “What are we going to do, John?” she whispered. Her face was like velvet. Her trembling reminded me of how fragile she was. I guess I’d always thought of her as someone celestial, or, like a newborn child, too pure to know suffering. I held her close, I touched her hair, and we fell into each other’s pain like an act of intimacy.

  I don’t run like I used to. My engine used to roar with life, but now it only sighs. My bodywork used to gleam, but now it rattles when I move. I was quite a machine, back in the day … quick and sleek, powerful. Start me up and I would purr, baby. These days I’m all-hell to turn over, and you have to get me warm before I go anywhere. My parts are overworked. I burn oil and blow gas. Not exactly your showroom model.

  My regular maintenance is taken care of by Dr. Fox in Mathias, about ten klicks the other side of Hallow Falls. I make this journey all too often these days, partly because I’m lonely (I miss Melinda, my body misses her), but mainly because of what happened to Scratch Clayton—what I did to him, and how it
hurt my mind and body.

  I saw Doc Fox the day after Scratch shook my foundations. I was in a bad way, trembling and dizzy. My blood pressure was at one-seventy-five over one-ten, and I thought I was going to blow a gasket. The Doc checked me over, prescribed a calmative and a dose of ACE inhibitors three or four notches stronger than my regular prescription. He also asked about the nickel-sized bruises on my chest, and I told him the reason they were there. Then I cried again (I imagined Scratch beside me, click-clacking and rumbling: You’re a goddamn disgrace, Johnny). I asked if there was some kind of medication—a soporific that guaranteed eight hours a night, maybe the kind of knockout drug they give large animals before transporting them on long journeys. The Doc assured me that there were such drugs, but that he was reluctant to prescribe them alongside my existing medication.

  “There are alternatives to drugs,” he said. “Have you considered earplugs?”

  I dabbed my face with a Kleenex, managing to smile and frown at the same time. “Earplugs? That’d be like trying to sleep with someone’s fingers jammed in your ears.”

  Doc Fox laughed, which made me feel better about myself. “It’s a suggestion, John. You may also want to consider a white noise generator, or even soundproofing.”

  “Drugs are easier,” I said. “But I’ll consider the alternatives, if things don’t get better.”

  Well, things didn’t get better, and after another week of waking up to the discordant farting of Scratch’s lawnmower, we tried earplugs. They were comfortable—not at all like sleeping with fingers jammed in your ears—but Melinda didn’t like them because she was afraid she wouldn’t hear the smoke alarm if it started howling at three in the morning (her cousin had died in a house fire after a squirrel had found a way into the attic and chewed some wires. After this, Melinda had insisted on smoke alarms for every room in the house). I didn’t like them because I couldn’t hear what I call the comfort sounds: Melinda’s breathing; the sweet, mewling sighs she made from the edge of her dreams; the creak of the bed springs as she moved. Also—and here’s the real poke up the ass—while not hearing the sounds we might want or need to hear, we’d still be woken by Scratch’s lawnmower. How’s that for a trick of fortune? Maybe we were expecting to hear it, a psychological precursor, like dreaming that the alarm clock will go off seconds before it does. Maybe we were mentally tuned to that particular sound wave and would hear it no matter how much polyurethane foam we crammed in our ears. Doc Fox told me that we hear with our brains, not our ears, and that even with our ear canals blocked we can pick up sound because it vibrates through the bones in our skull. Whatever the reason, the earplugs didn’t work. I tossed them in the trash, and we were back at square one.

  We tried other alternatives. We spent a week in the basement (it took two hours and cost me six bucks in the swear jar to move the bed down there), but it was cold and damp and we still heard Scratch’s mower rumbling through the pink light of dawn. Billy Quinn came over and surveyed a grubby patch of land that neighbours us on the other side. Billy is a good drinker, but a better builder, and I thought I could buy that land and have Billy build a little crib on it.

  “It’ll be our quiet space,” I said to Billy. “We’ll soundproof it like an F.B.I. interrogation room.”

  “Nice idea, Johnny, but it’s not going to happen.” Billy shook his head and took a warmer from the mickey he carries in his back pocket. “Dat’s fenny land. Good for nut’n.”

  “Funny land?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Fenny—wit’ an E: swampy, marshy, boggy. What am I, a fucking t’saurus now? Jaysus!”

  We bought a white noise generator, which is supposed to lull you into the arms of Morpheus by creating a calming “rushing air” sound, while at the same time disguising unwanted noise. Great in theory, but when you hit your golden years you tend to regard any new-fangled device with a measure of skepticism. Melinda and I didn’t like—no, didn’t trust—the machine; there were too many buttons for something so simple. Melinda would make helpless little pokes at it, trying to get the damn thing to shut up. I think she was afraid it would take off and fly around the bedroom, maybe shoot its death-ray at her if she went at it with the broom. I didn’t like the way it whirred; it was like trying to sleep in a goddamn wind tunnel. Worst of all, it stole my good dreams. Whenever we had it running, my sleep was full of a bleak, mechanical pressure, like a thundercloud made of nuts and bolts. My dreams would drone. They would clang.

  Regardless of effort and device, our neighbour always woke us. First light, every morning. Guaranteed.

  “I’m at a loss, sweetheart,” I conceded, staring wide-eyed at our bedroom ceiling. “I don’t know what to do. I just¾”

  She touched my hand beneath the covers, and I knew that I didn’t have to say anything. I felt her lips on the lobe of my ear, and her breath on my face.

  “Hush up, old man.”

  “I’m hushed,” I sighed, but I was thinking—hoping—that God would intervene on my behalf. Hell, if I prayed hard enough, Scratch might be struck by a massive coronary or brain embolism. All that graft—all that work at five in the A.M.—taking its toll and knocking him dead in his dirty old boots.

  Melinda kissed my cheek and I pulled her close, both of us blissfully unaware of the lump that had formed in her stomach, and that she had less than three months to live. As I took comfort in her heartbeat, I realized that a solution was beyond me. After all the ideas and invention, we were sitting in the lap of the Gods. It would all come down to fate. But here’s the thing about that particular four-letter-word: it doesn’t necessarily side with fairness. Fate doesn’t follow a rulebook, and it doesn’t understand justice. Fate isn’t a fairy tale, and we didn’t live happily ever after. Anything but.

  Fate played its hand: it took Melinda from me.

  Then I played mine: I took Scratch.

  That mean old bastard wasn’t right about many things, but he was right when he said that six years is a piss in the ocean. I’m not the first old fart to say that, the older you get, the more Papa Time gets his wheels rolling. The last twenty years are stacked in my mind like flat-packed boxes, while the years before that—particularly the years of my youth—are like huge storage crates, so full of memory you’d need a forklift truck to move them. I won’t belabour the point. You know what I’m trying to say.

  Six years in this house. Scratch’s woebegone neighbour. Just a spit of time, my friends. That being said, I’m surprised I didn’t register the peculiarity with the roadkill sooner than I did. I would simply pull on my gloves, hike down the driveway, and drag the dead animal to the side of the road. I would think no more of it. Then the next day, or the day after, I would do it again, dropping the corpse in the same spot every time.

  A dead coyote drew my attention to the fact that something was wrong. Very wrong.

  I remember the exact date—August 9th—because it was the day Melinda took ill. The coyote had been struck so hard that its body was twisted in the middle, the way you might twist a piece of cloth to wring the wetness out of it. There was no blood, just that three hundred and sixty-degree kink that separated the front legs from the back. I stooped—grunting and farting, the way I always do when I stoop—and grabbed its front legs and the thick part of its tail.

  “I guess that pesky Road Runner got you good this time, my friend,” I said, and dragged it to the spot where I had dragged hundreds of dead animals before it. I shook off my gloves and went inside. It may have been on my mind to tell Melinda about the coyote (not the way it had died, she didn’t need to hear that), but when I saw her—when I saw her pain, her illness—everything dropped from my mind. I think even my mind dropped from my mind. That probably doesn’t make any sense, but that’s exactly how I felt.

  I’ll spare you the details of the next twenty-four hours. Suffice it to say that, with the exception of Melinda’s funeral six weeks later, it was the toughest day of my life. I got home from the hospital at seven A.M. the next morning.
The passenger seat was empty. I remember looking at it on the drive home (seems I looked at that empty seat more than I looked at the road), thinking to myself that I’d better get used to seeing empty seats—to not seeing Melinda when I expected to. That’s not an easy concept to work through an old fella’s mind, not when he’s been used to things a certain way for over fifty years. I got out of my car. I fell to my knees. I cried.

  I felt twisted. My head and my feet were facing the right way, but I felt twisted in the middle, like the coyote I had dragged from my driveway. I wiped tears from my eyes and got to my feet. I had to see the unfortunate animal again. I needed to correlate my pain with something physical, something I could touch.

  But here’s where the strangeness comes in: the coyote had gone. My mind struggled for a moment, trying to remember when I had found the animal. I was sure it had been the day before, but with all that had happened … hell, it could have been as long as a week ago. A coyote can be picked to the bones by the crows in less than a week.

  “It was yesterday,” I said, and I was sure of it. Yesterday—that terrible day—was etched in my mind in deep, savage grooves. “Yesterday,” I said again, and then thought: And where are the pickings? If a pack of crows, or another coyote, had come snacking, they would surely have left something behind. Bones or teeth or bits of fur. There was nothing.

  Something had dragged it away. Something hungry.

  It occurred to me then—for the first time, and that’s what comes of getting old—that of all the dead animals I had scraped from my driveway in the last six years, I had never seen one … deteriorate. They just disappeared. Even the deer—the one I had spent an hour dragging to the side of the road—was gone the next morning. No bones. No fur.

  No pickings, I thought, and then said, “I’ll be damned.”

  I would dwell on the mystery in more detail later, but at that point I was too tired to think. I shuffled back up the driveway, desperately forlorn, and fell into bed. I didn’t sleep. I could only lay there with my eyes closed and my exhausted body spread into an awkward shape, maybe trying to edge into that empty place beside me.