Matt Bell - Scrapper

Understanding required argument. The scrapper thought the sound of fists was one place they might start their speech. His hands already aching. His theologies had grown muddled but he said he believed even a single crime could charge you. Everything was equal, every action and word that crossed over from intent to occurrence. The scrapper needed to transfer the fear from one body to the other. He put bruised fists to use, he moved through the tools. He kicked the chair, then righted it again, its frame heavy with the target’s taped weight. Perhaps there were deep rituals in the world but he was making this one up as he went. The sound from behind the tape turned his stomach but didn’t unturn his hand. He wondered at the words, trapped inside the other’s mouth, tasting of the tack of tape. The lungs full of beggared screams, unable to push them out. He heard his own voice speaking but he struggled after the words. There was a certain lack of comprehension he had grown accustomed to but how quickly this encounter had moved beyond any previous threshold.

Are you a boy or are you a man, Kelly heard the salvor ask. Because if he was a boy, then what different crime was this. Age was not enough. Age was hardly fair.

What if something horrible happened to you. What if some years later you passed it on. How long did your guilt indict you. What was the lasting effect of having been younger, of having been unhappy, of having been made mean and dumb in your unhappy youth.

Kelly knew he wasn’t different. One day someone might come for him too. An angry child grown stubborn and brave or else a champion sent on the child’s behalf. But first anything to protect his boy. Not his by birth or his by the law. His by the saving. His by the carrying up out of the earth. His by the taking , the better but not dissimilar version of this act.

The other had taken a boy and watched him. Now Kelly had taken a brother and hurt him.

It was a cheap escape to already render the act in the past tense. He rejoined his thinking to the present: He was hurting the brother, between some times of not hurting him. How far could he go and remain Kelly. How much farther could he go as the salvor. How he could go much farther by giving in to the scrapper. How he thought the scrapper could go all the way.

Beneath the lights Kelly watched the glassy eyes, the fading consciousness. There was blood trickling from the tape around the mouth and how long had it been there.

Kelly shut off the lights, removed the mask. He went into the far corner of the room and spit up into the dust. He took off his coat, the heavy flannel beneath, left the orange jersey sweat slicked against his skin. The low room wasn’t warm but his body was. When he returned to the front of the chair the target was awake, choked against the tape, his eyes wide and panicked. The target knew where he was again. Who he was with.

The man in the red slicker. Kelly’s father, his grandfather, himself. He could change roles with the brother and there would be no diminishment of what happened next, no matter who was in the chair.

A voice spoke, asked a question. Another spoke next, answered.

Because you hurt my boy.

The sudden appearance of the possessive. My girl, my woman, my boys, all my children I couldn’t risk. My parents, wasted and devoured. Myself, who had made nothing lasting and good. A person who couldn’t even speak the names of the people he loved. Who once prayed for the shapes instead of the persons within. Who saw the faces falling through his prayers and could not give them the names to lift them back up.

His father: Kelly remembered his face but not like he used to. The vague sheen of some last memory fading. It would have taken a picture to bring back the color of his father’s eyes but Kelly could still remember how it felt to hold his father’s gaze.

The scrapper remembered nothing. The man of action was a house of empty rooms, a city of empty houses, a nation of emptying cities. Dirt from end to end, from black to black. A dead land where there was nothing left to feel, no one to tell you how you had stopped trying. A place where you could do no wrong because you could do no right.

It wasn’t a place you found but a place you could make.

The salvor was not afraid of the dark or the deep but they were not his first elements. He was meant to descend, to take what was valuable, to return to the surface without harm. Past this point in the taking there was almost nothing the salvor could do. There was no redemption in suffering, no correction in violence. Just diminishment and death. A bad thing happened and then another bad thing and another and another until you broke.

Kelly removed the tape and the target began to speak. Kelly wasn’t confused by who was in the low room but still it took some time to recognize the soft voice. He had spoken to the brother only once before. The brother had been an idea more than a person but now here he was, his personhood everywhere, leaking in the low room. All the titles merely symbols for what had a better name. Estranging did not mean to make someone a stranger but Kelly did not know another word. Whatever he did next would be the final act of his friendship with the boy. He could hurt the target worse. He could let the brother go. The action was close to complete but nothing was yet irrevocable. To have free will was to be both good and evil. To have free will was to choose, moment by moment, one or the other.

The salvor interceded, spoke for the last time. Kelly heard the words, voiced them into the low room. To the brother he said, What if you could become a good man. What if there is good you might do still, what if there is a good man who could be salvaged, someone better inside you who could be brought back into the light. What if the longest story is the story that bends toward the gravity of the good.

Kelly said, What if the greater crime isn’t what we’ve done but that in trying to end it I stop some better you coming after?

But what if I let you go, he said, and you hurt the boy again?

With the tape removed the brother could at last speak in his defense. The brother’s voice was strained by a panic Kelly couldn’t bear to hear. He paced the dark stretch of room before the chair, clenching and unclenching his fists as the brother claimed unexpectedly familiar grievances: What if it wasn’t the mother’s house the brother had moved away from but the father’s. What if the boy and the brother had the same father Kelly had. What if their mother was his same mother, a kind woman but a woman who would say nothing, do nothing. Who accompliced herself by looking the other way.

The brother kept talking, faster now, less intelligible. There were more words coming but Kelly wanted to already be past them. He howled, grasped for the table, missed and crashed into it instead. The solvable unsolved arrived again, taunting. The table shuddered, scattered whatever little remained. The clatter of tools, the sound of wood and metal impacting concrete, the zone’s most common refrain. He hadn’t known what he was looking for until he came back up with the pistol. He couldn’t see the safety in the dark but he thought he could work it by touch. Even after the brother stopped speaking Kelly could hear him breathing, could hear all the small involuntary movements of his body. Kelly took a few steps back, waited for his blood to slow. He wanted to see what was behind the blackness, wanted to hear whatever was at the bottom of the sound, the new confusion echoing in the dark.

When nothing was louder than the ringing in his ears, then Kelly raised the pistol, lifting its heavy weight against the drag of the black air. Each time he fired the blast lit the room, light and dark interchanging so fast that all Kelly saw was a staccato sort of nothing. In the blindness that followed he put the pistol to his own chin, found the trigger. Nothing. Nothing and the smell of gunpowder. He put the pistol in his pocket. He took the pistol out of his pocket and placed it on the ground. There were new smells in the air and it was harder to hear with the ringing louder than ever. He stepped forward, moved toward where he thought the chair was, toward the body in the chair. With his hands outstretched he found the body gasping, speaking in syllables Kelly couldn’t understand, a tongue of one. He put his hands on the body, searching for the wound. When the body recoiled unharmed, shaking in its seat — all breath and voice, all blood and muscle moving beneath clammy skin, strong jumping flesh draped beneath the red hood — then Kelly stepped back disbelieving, fled the brother’s barking pleas until he tripped over some fallen object, its length sprawling him across the floor, smacking his face against the concrete.