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  “I did not. I never said such a thing to your mother. Not once. Not ever.”

  “Not to her. You said it about her. After she left. You said, ‘If I could get my hands around that damn bitch’s neck, I’d kill her.’ That’s what you said to Uncle Frome. And Uncle Frome said, ‘Now, now, that’s no way to speak.’ And you said, ‘That damn bitch. I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her for what she did!’”

  The boy finished his exclamation and then buried his face into his dog’s body, the bravery stripped from his face, his deepest secrets dredged and discovered.

  Greg, too, felt ruined. He wanted to put his arms around his son, console him and explain why, why, he’d said such horrible things, but the dog had risen and stood between them, and Greg worried that if he came too close to her, he would take her up in his arms and swing her sideways against the wall and smash her head open, spatter her brains against the wainscoting.

  So instead he said, “I was angry. Very angry with her. For what she did. For leaving us. For leaving you. I was angry because it wasn’t fair to you, Eli, what she did.”

  “She loved me,” Eli said, crying freely now. The dog went closer to him and nosed the boy in the arm, as though to say, Yes, as though to say, Hate your father, as I do. “She loved me; I know it.”

  That may be so, Greg thought, she loved you, but she didn’t love you enough. That was the thing. Anyone could love. Anyone could say they loved their husband or child or wife or dog. They could be out in public and behave with perfect respectability, so that people would say, as was often said of his wife, What a wonderful person. What a wonderful mother. What a wonderful, calm, loving woman. Anyone could perform such an act. But to actually love, to love enough to commit to unhappiness, that was real love. When his wife would say to him, I wish we could travel, Greg; I wish we could go dancing; I wish we could drink beer until we black out and then do nothing tomorrow but vomit and fuck and then drink some more, Greg would frown. Yes, he wanted those things. They sounded like good fun. But they had a child now, he would say, a responsibility, and they owed it to Eli to be constant, reliable parents. Agnes would listen raptly with what Greg assumed was the pure, quiet understanding of love but with what he realized now was sheer bafflement at the depth of his own affection.

  “It’s so easy for you,” she’d told him once, “to love and not grow bitter. It’s hard for me, Greg. I’m just not good at it. The more I love, the more bitter I become.”

  “But you do love Eli?” Greg had pressed, worried.

  “Oh, yes. I love him. Of course I do.”

  And Greg’s worry had immediately deflated; he had decided that she was simply tired.

  So many mothers were. So very tired. So very fed up with the young children they watched day in and day out. He understood it all in a way that most husbands did not. She would say that to him, even—You’re very understanding, Greg—but she would say it with a sorrowful tone, as though she wished he would beat her, or tongue-lash her, or choke her during sex, as she had once read about in a dirty book she’d found at a friend’s house. When she’d told him of the latter discovery, Greg had ignored it. He had not taken her seriously when she’d mentioned the choking, had not accepted the tacit invitation suggested there, but maybe he should have taken it very seriously indeed. Maybe a little roughhousing would have gone a long way.

  Did it matter, though? No. Probably not. In the end, she didn’t love them enough. She didn’t love Greg and she didn’t love Eli. Not enough. That was what had really shocked him. That her love for Greg had an ending point was not surprising. Such was the way with wives and husbands. But the love for her own son? A mother’s love was supposed to be unfathomable, like an ocean without a floor—reaching, spiraling into nowhere, into infinity—but her love had stopped before it even began.

  What if she had seen Eli in the aftermath, when he had screamed and sobbed for her return, when he had been unable to sleep at night because he ached to hear her voice, ached to embrace her soft body in its worn nightgown and darned socks? When he had asked his father, over and over: Will she return? When? Where is she? Did she send a letter? Did she phone yet? If she had seen these things, heard these things, Greg wondered, would she have returned? Or would it have only made her more cocksure that her abandonment had been the right idea all along?

  The right idea, Greg surmised. Yes, doubtlessly. She was always cocksure. She would not return. The more they wanted her to return, the less likely the possibility.

  “So why,” Greg said to the dog now, who sat nosing his son’s weeping, supine form on the rotting couch, “why are you here now?”

  The dog ignored him, as did the boy. Greg rose and took his son up into his arms and carried him to bed. The boy hadn’t eaten dinner, but he was clearly spent from his refreshed woe. Greg was almost grateful when Mother entered. She moved into the room’s farthest corner and sat on her haunches, raising her long chin high. She waited patiently for Greg to leave. When he did, he heard her trot across the floor and climb onto the bed, too. No doubt she felt safest with the boy. That made sense. Greg wanted to take a club to her head.

  Greg went to the kitchen to eat leftover bread and gravy, which he reheated on the stove. He sat at the little table in the kitchen—more of a stool than a table, really—and noisily sopped up the food with a spoon. Then he sat there for a good several minutes, thinking of little and enjoying the silence. He considered rising and taking up the papers in the living room, but the idea of moving even one inch exhausted him, and so he merely tucked his chin down and fell asleep there, sitting up, as he did sometimes, his plate so clean before him that his last thought was that he could go swimming in it and how refreshing it would be to swim into the milk-white ceramic, like pushing through the supple, supportive fabric of the moon.

  And then, with a sharp cry, he awoke. The room had darkened, the single bulb had burned out over his head, but the moonlight pushed through the window, illuminating the kitchen in a deathly bluish gray. Perhaps because of his earlier reverie, Greg worried for a moment that the world had flooded, that they were underwater. But as quickly as this notion appeared, it dissolved. Greg then noticed the black form of an animal in the doorway, an animal that gazed at him with wet, affectionate eyes. Mother.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked her.

  She floated to him, stood at his feet.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Greg warned her.

  Her eyes never left his.

  He stood, his knees wobbling, remembering how Agnes would come to him every now and again, with this same wet, desperate look, this same longing for love. How grateful he would be in those moments, how immediately forgiving of all of her prior coldness and cruelty, and he would lift her and take her with him into the bedroom and strip her down and be with her, inside her, around her, and she on top of him and beneath him, and then in front of him, like a dog.

  That was the worst thought, when it came to him, like a dog. The animal gazed up at him with that same question in its eyes. It mocked his loneliness.

  “Leave me be.”

  He scooted the dog out of the way with his foot.

  He made sure to lock the bedroom door behind him.

  That was the thing he remembered later: that he had locked the door, that he had checked the lock, made sure it was fast. So how was it that he awoke, hours later, the dog sitting right beside him on the bed, staring down into his face with a terrible silent urgency, an expression that immediately panicked and excited him?

  He trembled as he rose and pulled on his robe. He lifted the animal into his arms and felt her go gratefully slack. What he wanted to do, what he wished more than anything to do, was lie down with her, wrap his arms around her, burrow his head into her stinking dog flesh, and weep. Instead, he went outdoors, marching for the woods, stopping once before the rusted spade, awkwardly packaging Mother beneath one arm so that he could take up the spade in his free hand. He continued this way, through the sparse sn
ow, for several minutes. It was as if she knew what he would do. She remained where he set her down, waiting. The earth was cold, difficult to puncture, but he strained and heaved, more convinced with each thrust. It was better this way. Better for them all. She would be gone, and he would sleep, and, later, he and Eli would drive to town for a new dog. There would be some sort of necessary lie about the dog’s disappearance (carried off by raccoons or coyotes, he thought, stolen by some stranger driving a beige truck, merely gone, just gone, something the boy already knew all about).

  This last thought occurred to him as he began to shovel dirt over the dog’s head. Mother shook the dirt off and looked up at him from the recesses of the deep hole. He shoveled more dirt down onto her. He was crying now, telling himself, No, no, don’t do this. Even if she is the ghost, even if she is. He stopped digging, thinking of Eli. He could not bury Mother alive, after all.

  How Greg sobbed then. How lost he was! All of his life had tunneled toward this one dark hole in the woods. If he buried this dog, he would never rise from it. It would be the final descent of his soul. The dog gazed up at him calmly.

  “You damn-it-all heartless bitch,” Greg said, and wormed onto his belly, reaching for the animal.

  How far down had he dug this hole? He was amazed at its depth. It seemed implausible that he could have dug down this far in such a short amount of time, straight through the frozen earth. He could not reach the dog. His fingers scrabbled at her ears. “Up on your hind legs, damn you,” he said, but the dog lay down on the dirt with her head on her paws.

  “Tomorrow, then,” he said. He was bone-weary. He had never felt so tired. He rose, groaning, and made for the house.

  Tomorrow, Greg decided numbly as he walked, he would form a phony search party with his son, and they would come across the hole together, and he would make a big show of returning to the house for a ladder, and Eli would regard him as a hero, and all would be well.

  And, he resolved: Mother would live with them again, unmolested this time. Greg slouched back toward the house, dragging the spade behind him. His shoulders and spine throbbed. He would treat her right, better than ever, and maybe the ghost would recede and the animal would come forth, or some such bullshit. Greg didn’t know. But he wouldn’t harm another hair on her head, not when Eli’s feelings were at stake. He went to bed feeling a bit of hope, and also a bit of gratitude that Mother was nowhere near the house. For the first time since her arrival, he slept dreamlessly.

  The next morning began as Greg had expected: Eli rising, Eli calling for Mother, Eli arriving at his bedside, tearstained, to beg for his help in finding her.

  “Sure, buddy,” Greg said, and nearly screamed as he sat up, the soreness in his back splitting open like the maw of a volcano. “Sure. Let’s go a-lookin’.”

  They pulled on their coats and boots and went outside. Greg noticed the tracks in the earth from where he had plodded, to and fro, the night before, and he watched his son’s face for any sign of recognition, but Eli looked only side to side, every now and again throwing back his head and baying, “Mother! Moooooother!” It was a heartbreaking caterwaul, and Greg knew Mother was not the sort of dog to bark in response. She would remain silent in that deep hole, waiting for them. Always, it seemed, she was waiting.

  Eli reached the hole first and stood at its lip for a moment, looking back at his father in delight and then saying very loudly, “Wow!”

  So he’s found her, Greg thought, and heaved a sigh of acceptance.

  Then, to Greg’s shock and alarm, Eli picked up a giant rock and hurled it as hard as he could into the darkness. Greg cried out, “Don’t,” baffled that his son would attack his dog in such violent fashion, but when he arrived at the mouth of the hole he saw that there was no dog visible. There was nothing visible at all. No dirt floor, even. Nothing but an endless blackness. The hole receded into the earth and kept receding, down and down, like a well that had been opened and abandoned.

  “This can’t be right,” he mumbled.

  Eli hoisted a fallen tree branch and flung it like a javelin into the hole. They listened to the dull thud of its impact on the dirt walls, waiting for some sound of a watery or rocky bottom, but there was nothing, just eventual silence. Greg backed away from the hole and urged his son to do the same.

  “But,” Eli said, rising hesitantly from an uprooted tree stump that he was attempting to roll toward the opening, “this will be so great.”

  Greg looked around him: Perhaps he was at the wrong hole—but how could that be? He knew these woods so well. He had followed his well-worn pathway here; he could still make out his fresher tracks from the night before; everything—everything—suggested that he had been here only a few hours prior, that he had dug this bottomless pit himself.

  “Eli,” he said. “Move away. Move back now. Come here.”

  The boy sobered, his grin fading. A sound issued from the hole—a long, womanly wail.

  Part animal, surely, but also human.

  What pain it bellowed! What heartache!

  “Mother,” Eli cried. He fell to his knees, crawling to the opening, peering into the face of its irretrievable, unfathomable blackness. “Mommy!”

  Greg lunged. There was nothing left in him but love for his son, nothing but horror at the potential loss of him.

  He grabbed the boy’s collar.

  He pulled.

  1955

  S’CWENE’Y’TI

  Eli Roebuck, twenty years old, sat in a crowded bar in downtown Seattle, nursing his drink and wondering if he was the only person at his table who was a virgin.

  He had agreed to this blind date only because he was deeply taken with the date’s organizer, a long-throated nursing student named Bethesda Green.

  Beth raised her eyebrows at him. Whaddaya think?

  Eli nodded politely. The blind date, Gladys Johnson, was one of Beth’s two roommates. She was admittedly good-looking. She had lustrous dark hair, good clothes, perfect posture, and a thin, painted mouth. She sat calmly next to Eli, smoking cigarette after cigarette with her elegant chin lifted high over a plate of raw oysters, which she never touched.

  “I like your bracelet,” Eli told her.

  She lowered her cigarette and squared her handsome chest at him. “My bangle, you mean? How dear of you to notice it. Thank you.” The bangle on her wrist flashed as she smoked. “A gift from an old beau. James was his name. Cardinal James. Named for a bird. Poor Cardinal. A silly boy I hardly cared for at all. Goodness, he loved me. Died in a car wreck. The poor thing. Tragic.”

  She returned to her cigarette, and Eli, flummoxed, fumbled for a response. Beth rushed in to save him with her clear, confident laugh.

  “Gloomy Gladys we call her,” Beth said. “You can always trust Gladys to bring our heads out of the clouds. Isn’t that so, Gladys?”

  “He’s not my first beau to have died,” Gladys said.

  Beth’s date, Glen, cleared his throat. Here it comes, thought Eli irritably. Glen had an obnoxious habit of clearing his throat before he spoke.

  “We’re all mortal, after all,” Glen said. He waved down a passing waiter and ordered another round of champagne cocktails.

  “I couldn’t possibly have another,” Beth said when the waiter reappeared, but she accepted the cocktail handed to her and then drew her chair closer to Glen.

  Glen opened one long, hulking arm, and Beth settled into it with a happy little smile.

  Lucky bastard, Eli thought. Glen was a good enough guy, a fellow medical student en route to becoming a successful surgeon, but Eli wouldn’t mind punching him in his gargoyle-shaped Adam’s apple. How had this big-armed boob landed a knockout girl like Beth? The throat-clearing was bad enough, but then there was also the unmistakable smell of formaldehyde, from Glen’s extracurricular work assisting the city undertaker. They weren’t sound reasons to hate him, Eli knew, but didn’t they at least render him unattractive? Maddeningly, Beth adored Glen. It was as though the sound of bubbling phlegm r
ang like silver tongues in her ears. It was as though the smell of formaldehyde reminded her of sex and not of death.

  Women were a mystery to Eli. He had his mother to blame for that. His mother, who had chosen that hairy beast over his good-hearted father; how could he not regard women with distrust and wonder? He hardly remembered her now, anyway. Her memory surfaced only as an emotional scapegoat. Up she would rise, faceless, limbless, a specter with side-parted auburn hair and a strong flowery perfume. She wavered guiltily before him and he told her, Your fault, Mother. But you loved me. I know you loved me, and then she would dip up and down like a candle flame. Once, in a dream, he’d had sex with her, penetrating her flesh as if it were a fine gauze, and he’d woken up wet and sweating and ashamed.

  So far, women had done nothing but humiliate him. Eli wanted to humiliate one of them in return, in the dark, in the nude, but in a kind, equitable way, batting the humiliation back and forth like a pink-nosed shuttlecock.

  He squirmed in his chair, struggling for something to say. “Just say anything at all,” Beth had advised him earlier, teasing him for his quiet nature. “Say whatever silly thing comes into your head. Women don’t care what you say, so long as you say it with confidence.”

  He forced himself to speak now, however woodenly.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he said, “getting a good drunk on tonight.”

  Beth sat up and regarded him, bright-eyed, interested.

  So, Eli mused sourly, it’s true.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he continued, with more confidence, “getting so drunk that I swim in the Sound.”

  “There we go!” said Beth proudly.

  Glen cleared his throat. “I think I’ll join you, my good man.”

  “Funny,” Gladys said, “that’s precisely what Jim said before he died.”

  * * *

  AFTER DINNER AND drinks, the four of them ambled downhill to the Pike Place Market. Somehow both women clung to Glen’s arms as they walked. Eli walked slowly behind them, hands in his jacket pockets, hat low over his brow, pretending to be at ease. The perfume of the girls floated back to him, laced with the smell of formaldehyde. From the back, he noticed Gladys’s good legs, plump and strong in their sheer black stockings. Her dress, too, was of a finer quality than Beth’s. It was a stiff, flattering lavender, while Beth wore a floppy, homely plaid. Both women wore similar coats and hats, which Beth had told him they’d purchased together during a recent shopping trip.