The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac Page 4

  “She has the most luscious taste,” Beth had told him a few days before. “I ask her advice on everything fashion-wise. You two are just going to eat each other up!”

  They had not fallen passionately in love, but dining with her wasn’t half bad. In fact, midway through the meal, when Beth disappeared, taking her summery smile and lovely arms with her to the bathroom, Eli had realized that Gladys was very attractive. She was like a plainer, quieter moon, being drowned out by the noise and fire of the sun. When the sun set—when it left for the bathroom, say, to powder its nose—then the moon glowed quite beautifully. Maybe even more beautifully?

  “Look at that man over there,” Gladys had said conspiratorially, setting down her forkful of shrimp and touching Eli lightly on the wrist. “Look at how wide his shoulders are. I’ll bet he plays football.”

  Eli had leaned into her, not really caring about the man’s shoulders but thrumming slightly from the fingers that had grazed his skin. He suddenly imagined himself in bed with her, beneath her, his face covered with her glossy black hair.

  “What do you think?” Gladys asked him.

  “What?”

  “About his shoulders? Aren’t they very large? Very masculine?”

  It occurred to him that she was trying to make him jealous. He lifted up his napkin and smiled into it. He was flattered.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, returning the napkin to his lap. “Quite masculine.”

  Glen, listening to them from his side of the table, cleared his throat. “I know that man. His name is Scott. I’ve seen him swimming at Alki Beach. You wouldn’t believe this, Gladys, but shirtless he’s very fat.”

  “No!” Gladys exclaimed. “You lie!”

  “Those shoulders,” Glen said, “are pink and mottled, like two raw ham hocks. He’s a fatty, Gladys. Don’t trust a man’s beauty until you see him in the nude.”

  Eli considered his own small frame, his nearly hairless pallor. Glen laughed.

  “I’m kidding, sweetheart,” he said to Gladys, and leaned forward, snapping up her empty glass and shaking it in the air. A waiter rushed forward to retrieve it. “Really, Scott’s an absolute god naked. I’ve nearly wept from his beauty. Truly.”

  Gladys turned to Eli. “I don’t like big shoulders, fat or no,” she said. “I mean, a man can have them, surely, but I don’t think they mean he’s got any real intelligence in his head.”

  “You know what they say about big shoulders,” Glen joked, more to himself than to them.

  “Now,” Gladys said, “glasses are something else. Glasses indicate a reader, a man who is learned. Glasses tell a girl, Here is a man who enjoys a good, thick book. No, it’s certain. I much prefer glasses to shoulders. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Roebuck?”

  She still insisted on calling him Mr. Roebuck, despite his protests. She was a formal girl. Eli couldn’t help but admire her attempt at elegance.

  Elegant or not, she was flirting with him. Eli adjusted his own spectacles on his nose and gave her a wink. Not in character for him at all, but she received the wink with a slow flutter of her own lashes, and he thought, My God, she’s the one, isn’t she? He was going to sleep with her. He could feel it in his bones. Surely a girl like this would divulge some good secrets in bed. He would be sure to keep his glasses on for the performance.

  But right at that moment Beth returned, beaming.

  “What’d I miss? What are you grinning about over there? You look like two jack-o’-lanterns. Plotting against me, I see.”

  Just like that, the sun rose, washing out the moon. A bit breathlessly, Eli watched Beth move. Glen was equally captivated, leaping to his feet and pulling out Beth’s chair. Glen planted a lingering kiss on her flushed cheek. Beth pulled away with a flirty swat. She was lightly disheveled, winsome, and athletic. Eli’s throat tightened. His confidence with Gladys shifted. He would never be the sort of man to attract a girl like Beth. And when there was a Beth in the world, why would anyone wish to be with a Gladys?

  Next to him, Gladys re-crossed her ankles. If she noticed his love for her friend, she was unmoved. Her expression remained the same: sharp, observant, her mouth a wry red slash, her face as smooth as limestone, her hair perfect, not a black strand out of place, her posture remarkable. She reminded him of a fine white Roman statue.

  And why, Eli had asked himself, would you love a statue, when you could love a living, breathing, vivid woman like Beth?

  But now, walking behind the two young women, he did not take such a bleak view. In the broad grim light, bright if clouded over, it was clear that Gladys was the looker of the two. Gladys was the sort of woman destined for great things. He could see her running her own art gallery or posing, unsmiling, for the cover of a famous magazine. Beth, on the other hand, was destined only to nurture. She would be a beloved housewife, a doting mother. She had once confided to Eli that she had only entered nursing school to meet a wealthy, handsome husband. Nothing wrong with that, Eli had said. Gladys, however, had moved to Seattle from rural Washington with a more ambitious agenda: to escape her potato-farming parents and her dull sisters. She wanted excitement and recognition for her great beauty and intelligence. Beth drew up now, removing her arm from Glen’s, to come and walk with Eli.

  “Isn’t she lovely?” she whispered.

  He relished the arm she slipped through his own. He pressed it to his ribs.

  “Yes,” he said. “She’s a looker.”

  “She was a beauty queen at a rodeo, you know,” Beth continued eagerly. “Several times over, I think. You should ask her about it. It’s a riot. She describes it as standing in manure with a tin tiara on her head.” Beth laughed, shaking her pretty curls. “Gladys knee-deep in cow manure! Unholy image! I can’t picture it at all!”

  Eli, however, pictured it perfectly. It explained her feigned regality. She loathed her homeland. She gleamed like a polished onyx knife among those dull gray denizens. She thought every day about how to get out and how to never return; it was similar to how he believed sex would deliver him from the memory of his mother. Sinking into another woman, releasing the old ghost.

  The market came into view with its cluttered awnings, its coursing crowds. A picket line of machinists stood somberly in the human traffic, holding signs about the aircraft plant. Seagulls pitched and plummeted overhead, driven crazy by the smells of fish and fried bread.

  “Get back to work, you lazy bums,” Glen shouted at the machinists, and they glared back at him mutely. “Union goons, the lot of you.”

  “Oh, leave ’em be,” Beth chided. “They’re true blue.” To Eli she said, “My brother’s a machinist, you know. Boeing is a bear. All these men want is seniority protection and a ten-cent raise.”

  “Fucking unions,” Glen said loudly, turning back to them, “ruining this country.”

  “Saving it is more like it,” Beth muttered, more to herself than to anyone else, but Eli heard her.

  Glen put his arm around her waist and drew her away from Eli’s side. “What’s that, doll?”

  Beth’s face unclouded and she tossed her shoulders. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Isn’t it a wonderful evening? Aren’t we having a splendid time?”

  Beth’s destiny, Eli saw sadly, was to succumb to a man in just this way. It struck him as weak and unfair.

  Gladys walked next to him now. They pushed past the machinists. Eli took her elbow and guided her forward. He met the eye of one machinist and, thinking of Beth, smiled. The man noticed and nodded in return.

  “Poor things,” Gladys said to him. “They’ll lose their jobs. It won’t be worth it in the end.”

  “Even so,” Eli said, “it’s good to stand for something.”

  “My father stood for many things,” Gladys said. “He became a drunk.”

  Eli thought of his own father, ill now, nearing death. He received a letter every few weeks, asking him to come home. There was not much time left to him, Eli knew, but it didn’t matter. Eli did not want to return. He did not want to see his
father in that bed, curling the sheet between his skeletal fingers. He did not want to see the woods, where his favorite dogs were buried, and maybe where his mother was dead, too.

  “It’s not a bad thing, to have opinions,” Eli said.

  “Every man has an opinion,” Gladys countered calmly, “but a true man acts rather than speaks.”

  Eli rolled his eyes. A true man. How quaint. Gladys was a bit of a bore, wasn’t she? Beth would never make such silly generalizations; Gladys was a phony. Eli suddenly felt that he hated Gladys and her carefully arranged perfection. She was too much like him.

  And then, as if to prove him wrong, Gladys stumbled. Not just stumbled but fell, sprawling, to the cement. Eli momentarily glimpsed her complicated black underpinnings in the spectacular explosion of fabric, and his heart lurched. He rushed to help her to her feet, and she rose, sputtering, near tears, as shocked with her gracelessness as he was.

  “The sidewalks here,” she complained, shaking. “The gulls.”

  There had been no gulls near them, but Eli wrapped an arm around her waist, leading her onward, feeling protective of her and irrationally mighty.

  “You are very beautiful,” he said to her, thinking not of her girdle or her stockings but of her face.

  She grew shy, or feigned shyness well. The shaking almost immediately stopped.

  “You are a gentleman, sir,” she said, but she gave his hand a squeeze that was as far from formal as the cow pastures in which she had been raised.

  She wanted to be a good person, Eli thought, but she was not. No woman was. No man was, for that matter.

  They walked under the awnings of the market, listening to the caterwauling of the fishmongers, smelling the fatty, metallic scent of sea life. Beth looked over her shoulder at them and smiled approvingly, noting their new closeness. She would gloat about her matchmaking abilities for years. Eli’s crush on Beth would never diminish, not even when she died in her late forties—quite suddenly—of meningitis, leaving her many children motherless but aware of how lucky they’d been to have her in the first place.

  For now, all four of the party—Eli, Gladys, Beth, and Glen—were healthy and well. They were capable of anything: love and sex, hatred and ruin. They had oceanic lives ahead of them, or so they believed.

  A table off to the side of a florist’s booth caught Eli’s attention. He was still holding his date’s waist as he pushed closer to it.

  A man sat in a chair beside the table, his deft hands whittling a small piece of wood. On the table were a dozen or so wooden figurines. The handwritten sign before him read: DALE BIRD, FAMOUS WHITTLER OF THE SPOKAN TRIBE.

  Eli stared down at the figurines, incredulous. He released Gladys almost roughly.

  “May I?” he asked the man, his hands hovering over the largest of the figurines, and the man shrugged.

  Eli picked up the figure. It was heavier and denser than it looked, almost as if it were petrified.

  “What is it?” Gladys asked, sounding amused. “A monster?”

  The man shook his head impatiently. “S’cwene’y’ti,” he said. “Tall Man of Burnt Hair.”

  “Sounds like a monster to me,” Gladys said.

  Eli hardly heard her. He ran his fingers over the hulking shoulders of the figurine. He caressed the face, jagged with the impression of hair.

  It was Mr. Krantz.

  Mr. Krantz, with his matted fur, his small eyes, his colossal figure.

  Eli remembered the smell of burnt hair. With it, his mother’s floral perfume. He stroked the figure’s wide flat feet.

  “How much is this?” he demanded.

  The man stopped whittling and considered him. “Ah. You’ve seen him. S’cwene’y’ti.”

  “How much for this?” Eli repeated, and the man, amused, shrugged again.

  “Ten dollars,” he said.

  Eli fumbled in his pocket for a bill.

  “Oh, come now,” Gladys protested. “You’re being rooked.”

  Eli brought out a five-dollar bill. He showed it to the man, and the man shook his head.

  Eli began to argue with him.

  “Ten dollars,” the man said firmly. “Ten.”

  Eli looked at Gladys desperately. With her drawn white face and black hair, she seemed out of place in the colorful market. She belonged in a fairy tale, Eli felt. The one his father had read to him as a boy, the one about the huntsman who ripped out the heart of a deer. Yes, he thought. Snow White.

  “You really need this ugly statue?” Gladys said to him.

  “I need it,” he said firmly.

  She gave in, reaching into the pocket of her fine lavender dress. “Here,” she told the man, careful to hold the bill so that there was no chance of grazing the man’s fingers. “There’s your other five, redskin.”

  Eli was grateful. The man took the figure from Eli to wrap it in brown paper. He handed the package back to Eli.

  “They are not monsters,” he said. “They are men.”

  Eli said that, yes, he knew this.

  “They are sentenced by God to wander in doom,” the man continued. “He is to be heard but never seen. A vagabond. Only the very gifted can see.”

  Eli wanted to hear more. Gladys tugged at his hand. “What else can you tell me?” Eli said.

  “S’cwene’y’ti raped my neighbor’s favorite horse.”

  “Please,” Eli said to the man, and with his hand acknowledged Gladys, who had gasped in disgust and now looked as though she might be sick.

  The man grinned at Eli; he had meant to offend her with the lewd joke.

  Eli thanked the man stiffly and returned his arm to Gladys’s curvy waist.

  “I could just faint,” Gladys said. Her head rolled onto his shoulder and he pointed his nose over her hairline, inhaling the scent of jasmine and rose. He remembered his mother’s smell. You women, he thought, his eyes closing. Why must you always kill me with your smell?

  “Are you okay?” Eli murmured into her hair. “I’m sorry if he shocked you.”

  “That old redskin was ripped. They’re always ripped. We had loads of them in Omak, you know. Loads and loads. I know all about those people.”

  “He’s a talented whittler.”

  Gladys scoffed. “Wasting his talent on those little monsters. Why, you should have bought one of the sparrows. They were sweet.” Then, more weakly, “Can we stop for a moment?”

  They stopped and Gladys lolled against him, her whole body. He pushed his hand into the small of her back for support and felt her torso jump in response. She met him, her legs surrounding one of his legs. She lifted her face to him. They kissed. It was lusty and deep.

  Eli forgot about the figurine in his hand. He forgot about Mr. Krantz, about his mother. He muttered into Gladys’s lips, words he hardly understood himself, and she muttered back, chewing on him, creating a new language.

  “Take me home,” she finally said. “Take me home with you.”

  She had set her sights on him, Eli realized, and she would have him. There had never been any doubt in her mind about it. She was a woman who always got exactly what she wanted.

  He took up her hand and they threaded their way to the street. Beth and Glen stood together at the stairwell to the pier, watching them. Beth raised a hand, beckoning to them, but Eli didn’t feel like acknowledging her. She wasn’t nearly so attractive now, hair and clothes ruffled by the wind. He told himself that he’d won the better prize.

  “Your place,” Gladys said again. “You, me, and your little monster.”

  “You and me,” Eli corrected, and he tucked the package deep within his coat pocket and forgot about it until the next morning.

  1959

  THE FUNNEL, THE HOURGLASS, THE WINDOW

  Gladys, flush-cheeked, pregnant-bellied, her hair freshly washed, tiptoed through the garden to where her husband stood watching the trees.

  “The starlings,” Eli said. “They’re flocking.”

  Gladys looked up, angling a pale, bejeweled wris
t to shield her eyes. She wore costly jewelry, rings and bracelets and necklaces that clattered musically when she moved. It was her one demand of her husband, to provide her with the very best. His own taste being fastidious, he was proud to accommodate her. They cultivated an appearance of greatness. When they went out to dinner together at the club or met for lunch at the plaza, people admired them. The good doctor. The good doctor’s wife.

  For the most part, Gladys was satisfied with their life. Eli’s chosen field, podiatry, was very successful. She would have preferred that he become a cardiologist or neurologist or surgeon, but Eli had always been fascinated by feet and by footprints, and so she had allowed him to choose his specialty with only mild complaint. And good thing! His practice was booming. Their banker fell over himself when Gladys entered his branch, rushing forward to take up her hand. The Roebucks owned a fashionable home filled with furniture that inspired the envy of their handsome friends. Every week, Eli visited a buyer at the department store, a storklike woman who advised him on all women’s finery. The stork was impeccable if unnecessary, but he seemed to like the formality of it and always sought her out for advice.

  Gladys looked forward to Fridays, when her husband arrived with a box or two under his arm. He never forgot, never came home empty-handed. Gladys unwrapped the packages slowly, deliberately. Her face betrayed no excitement. The quickest way to lose a man, Gladys believed, was to show him too much gratitude. So she expertly raised her face to him and received his kiss and said tonelessly, “Thank you, dear,” whether or not the purchase had pleased her.

  The only thing missing from this charmed life, Gladys felt, was a child. She had already lost two—one in the first trimester and one born dead. She had named the stillborn Jonathan after her loving if ignorant father. Jonathan’s birth and death had nearly killed Gladys, first from the grueling labor and then from the grief.