The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac Read online

  Her husband waited for her in the foyer. He helped her off with her coat and peppered her with questions, which she answered politely enough. He asked if she wanted anything.

  “Only to be left alone, dear,” she replied. “It was a nice day but busy. Now I’d like a nap.”

  “Can I take your hat?” he asked, and his tone struck her as sinister.

  She covered the cap protectively with her hands.

  “Gladys,” he continued, “you don’t want to nap in your hat, do you?”

  “I won’t have you bossing me around, Eli. This cap will leave my head when I am good and dead.”

  The doctor argued that he meant no offense.

  Amelia flounced in from another room, wearing a pretty dress. In another lifetime, a lifetime before the patchwork cap, Gladys would have helped make her daughter more stylish. She would have folded her arms over her chest and considered the girl with a critical eye. She would have advised Amelia on shoes and jewelry, on the correct ribbons and coiffure for her hair. She would have pinned the dress there, and here, to better flatter the girl’s plump figure. She would have urged Amelia to pull back her shoulders, to look elegant, poised. And Amelia, expecting this, would have told her, half sarcastically, half gratefully, “Thank you, Mother dear.”

  But now Gladys took no notice of her, only saying in a tired tone, “Hello, Amelia.”

  “Hiya,” Amelia said. She twirled. “For picture day on Monday. Do you like it?”

  “It looks well enough, dear.”

  Eli overrode his wife’s indifference. “How beautiful you are, Amelia!”

  Amelia, unaccustomed to receiving glowing reports from her father, and even more unaccustomed to her mother’s lack of criticism, silently looked from parent to parent before saying, “Well, I hate it! It makes me look fat! I won’t wear anything to picture day! I won’t go at all!” And she stomped off, her irritation punctuated by the rifle-shot slam of her bedroom door.

  With their daughter gone, Eli said to his wife, “Have I told you, Gladys, how lovely you look today?”

  Gladys yawned. “Yes, Eli,” she said. “You told me this morning, at breakfast. And now, really, I’m beat. I’m going upstairs for a nap.”

  She moved away from him, and he said, “But, Gladys.”

  He did not follow her this time, and she was glad for it. She was tired of having to shut the door in his sad little face. She did, however, shut the door in Pookums’s sad little face. The smallest of the dogs—the only dog she actually liked and pampered—received no attention from her now and was nonplussed by her disinterest. (He whined outside her door before giving up and taking out his wrath on a jade plant settled near the mudroom.)

  It was true: Gladys was very tired. She sat before her vanity, scrubbing off her makeup and taking off her jewelry. She did not feel as lightweight and carefree as she had been of late. She thought of the surreptitious tentacle sneaking out of the darkness of the shop’s back room. In her imaginings, it would continue to snake around the doorway—multiple doorways—until it finally wrapped around her ankle and dragged her away, no doubt into a drooling bloody mouth. She glanced anxiously at the closet door, afraid the tentacle sat inside, ready to split the wood in half, hell-bent on its pursuit of her.

  “No matter,” she said. Her hands were very busy, flying here and there as though of their own accord, wiping her face clean, applying hand cream to her dry elbows, tugging off her earrings. “I need to rest. I’m just anxious, and for good reason, because I’m so tired.”

  And so she stopped fussing at the mirror and rose from her vanity. She rolled onto the bed and fell asleep quickly. At the threshold of her dreams, she noted that the top of her head felt odd, as though it had blistered beneath the hot blade of an iron. It was not a painful sensation. If anything, the resplendent heat sped her into sleep more swiftly.

  Then she was awake, sitting up, heart hammering. Something was wrong. It was not just the dream she was having, in which she had the short furry arms of a raccoon, but also that her confidence—the confidence that she had worn so mightily these past few weeks—had vanished. In its place was a restless, damaged version of her hatless self. She reached up to touch the patchwork cap, expecting it would restore her poise, but her hand grazed something else, something leathery and bumpy and oozing. She cried out in pain. Her fingers came away covered in pus and blood.

  And then she saw it. Sitting on her vanity, curled up there like an ugly dead cat, was the patchwork cap. In her exhaustion, in her distraction, she had removed it along with her makeup and earrings, forgetting, for once, to leave it soundly in place.

  Gladys did not blame herself or her pathetic human nature. She blamed the shopkeeper and her family. She ran from the house with a shawl tied over her head, waving Eli away when he tried to get in the car and accompany her. She drove downtown, parked haphazardly, and stormed down to Odds and Ends with the stinking cap clutched in her hand. The doors were locked. She pressed her face up to the glass. The entire shop was empty except for the giggling feather duster, which lay on the floor as though drained of its powers. Gladys took a step back and noticed a little handwritten sign posted above the mailbox. It read, Closed forever due to the economy. Our sincerest apologies. Gladys shrieked, and a few of the children walking with their parents in the street shook with terror. Her shawl had come free, and the children stared at her oozing burnt head. An ugly lizard witch, these children would call her, and she would appear in their nightmares for years following.

  Later, after her return from the institution, Gladys would roll down the window of her car and toss the patchwork cap into an alfalfa field. (It would be picked up by an alfalfa farmer during the next harvest. He would wash the cap twice and then give it to his awkward daughter, who formed a bizarre attachment to it that the rest of the family struggled in vain to accept.)

  But this all came later.

  Right now, on the street in front of Odds and Ends, Gladys removed her scarf and tried to reaffix the cap to her head. She tried and failed. It hurt to even graze her skin. Her scalp was raw and blistered. She returned to the car and opened her hand mirror. All of the prettiness she had gained, all of the color and flush to her cheeks, was gone. She was sagging and greenish and sickly. A round circle was punched into the top of her head, a hairless and fleshless red beacon. Her beautiful black tresses—her best quality—had melted away.

  Gladys returned home and took to her room, bellowing in pain and wretchedness. Amelia and Eli rushed to her bedside.

  She looked up into her husband’s face, afraid of what she might find.

  His eyes were filled with concern. But it was not the concern she wanted. He pitied her not as a woman he loved but as a sick person he had been put in charge of, simply because there was no one else in the world who would care for her now. He sat with her and took her hand into his own and made shushing noises. He told her all would be okay. Amelia stood in the corner, wild-eyed, looking from parent to parent with a panic-stricken expression that made Gladys hotly angry with the girl.

  He won’t leave me, she told herself, moaning on the bed. He wouldn’t dare.

  Not a moment later, Eli dropped her hand and went to the phone to call for help. Doctors arrived, colleagues of his who owed him favors, a burn specialist, a head shrinker. They whispered about the hospital on the lake, Eastern State Hospital. Their wives had come with them, and Gladys could hear them outside the door, clattering about on their heels, chattering excitedly. Eli entrusted Gladys to the doctors’ care. Before he vanished, he reassured them that he’d be back to assist with her removal to ESH. Gladys begged him to stay, but he explained that he could not.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ll only be in the way here today. The doctors will examine you. The women will take turns sitting with you. What you need to do now is rest.”

  And so he left her alone with the doctors and their wives, the dogs, faithful Pookums, and their daughter, Amelia, who eventually grew bored with
her mother’s moans and disturbances and went to her father’s den to play “secretary” with his letter knife and envelopes.

  Gladys fell in and out of a wretched slumber. In the torture chamber of her dreams, her husband’s monsters were more beautiful than she had ever allowed. They made better wives, better mothers.

  Better women!

  They were all so very grand and regal and kind.

  1972

  THE STUDY HABITS OF DEDICATED CREATURES

  Here came the little man, picking his way up the deer trail: fussy, measured, painstaking. Waiting for him, hidden in the thicket, Mr. Krantz grunted softly to himself. This was now his favorite part of the day. He delighted in the man’s arrival; he admired his bright-red spectacles and delicate skull. How funny this studious little man was! How out of place he looked here in the forest!

  These were the remote north woods, the timberlands of the Inland Northwest. There were hiking trails a mile or so east, scarcely used. The forest was dense with undergrowth, shuttered with soaring ponderosas, lodgepoles, and white pines. Mr. Krantz could go months—whole seasons, even—without seeing a person here other than his own wife, but now the little man arrived almost daily. He fingered leaves, spooned up samples of dirt, examined the smallest fragments of marred bark. He came for several weeks in a row, through the wet spring and into the dry heat of summer. What was he looking for? Sleet and rain never deterred him.

  Mr. Krantz scratched at a tick behind his right ear and then plucked it loose and flung it away. The man looked familiar. More so, he smelled familiar, but Mr. Krantz could not place the smell.

  As much as Mr. Krantz enjoyed watching the little man, he wasn’t going to march out and start a conversation. He wasn’t going to ask, Can I help you? He wasn’t going to squat next to him and squint at leaves all day, not if the leaves weren’t edible, not if they weren’t covered in fat tasty bugs. Mr. Krantz was not a conversationalist. He rarely spoke, not even to his own wife. But he liked this man, whoever he was, and he continued to watch him, day by day, as the man returned again and again.

  With the exception of Agnes, Mr. Krantz had no friends. He had always lived in these woods, isolated from the towns and people of the Idaho Panhandle. His father had been a simple-minded man, ugly, with black teeth that pained him until he howled. He was hit by a train and killed when Mr. Krantz was quite young. His mother—towering, rank-smelling, and hairy, with craggy shoulders and cheekbones—raised him to be wild. The only words of English she could muster were the name of his late father, Mr. Krantz. When old enough, Mr. Krantz accepted the name for himself. It fit him well, he thought. It was dignified.

  Like his mother, and so very unlike his dad, Mr. Krantz was enormous, muscular, hirsute. He was also, like his mother, a hunter and a thief. He preferred to hunt and gather in the dense woods, away from the stink of civilization, but now and again he would descend to town to steal a chicken or a loaf of bread. In the dead of night, he lifted articles from backyards, patios, unlocked garages or shops: clothing, a crate of oranges, sometimes a larger item like a wagon or a picnic table. He moved silently, with precision, his senses battered by sights and sounds and smells of a world he did not understand: vibrating televisions; drunken conversations; unchanged diapers; spilled gasoline. What animals these people were! He liked to watch them from afar, to see how oddly they moved and behaved. He could smell their laziness like he could smell pine sap. He could smell sulfuric anxieties and honey love. He would return home to his wife and gaze on her. Was she happy here in the woods with him, living with him in their little shack? Wasn’t it better than being crammed into one of those cement boxes, surrounded by unnatural stench and buzzing neon lights? Yes, she assured him.

  Mr. Krantz spent most days sleeping or wandering the forest. He fished in the creek and ate thimbleberries and huckleberries and mushrooms and bugs. If he felt like it, he washed himself in Lost Creek. If not, he just lay in the sunshine next to the creek’s unspooling, glimmering thread. In the winter he slept almost constantly, dreaming deeply, rising only to relieve himself and eat tiny servings of whatever food his wife offered to him. His dreams in the winter were of mountain lions, of hunters with loaded rifles, of predators who chased him and murdered him, much as his mother had been murdered. But then spring would come and those deep dreams would leave him, and he would sleep less soundly.

  It was a mostly peaceful existence, except that Mr. Krantz suffered from unpredictable murderous rages. When a rage struck him, he needed to kill something. Not just kill it, but consume it. Lift it in the air and shred it limb by limb and feast on the bloody remains. Usually he found a deer or an elk, but once he had killed a person. A chubby hunter, lost in the woods, bumbling along the deer trail with bow and arrow slung on his back, squinting at an expensive compass. Mr. Krantz appeared on the trail in front of him, loping westward, and then rose to his full stature while the man shrieked and fumbled for his bow. Mr. Krantz pounced, taking hold of the man’s padded shoulders and shaking him, then slamming the screaming jaw closed and deftly snapping his neck. The hunter dropped. He poked at the hunter’s dead form with his hairy foot, turning him over before the feast began. He always looked into his victim’s face before eating him; it was a proper thing to do. But when he studied the hunter’s face, his appetite dulled. Despite the lack of resemblance, he was reminded of his father.

  He ate him, but the taste was off, like meat beginning to turn.

  After, Mr. Krantz sat on the forest floor, filled with self-loathing and regret. Blood matted his hairy chest; the raw red meat tasted like silver on his tongue. If he could, he would reach down his throat and stitch the man back together again, a patchwork nightmare of his prior self. Depressed and disappointed, he sank into the glacial creek bed and lay there until the cold made his powerful jaw ache. He moaned, and the trees above him shook. The birds went silent.

  What of Agnes? Would he kill her next?

  Agnes, calm and fearless, would never flinch. But he worried for her. After destroying the hunter, he could hardly imagine looking her in the eye. He reluctantly returned to the shack. Seeing him wet and shivering, Agnes ordered him into the bed and brought him warm blankets. The creek had mostly washed him clean, but she sponged off the caked blood around his mouth. She never questioned what had happened. She accepted his barbarity as part of her chosen life.

  The days passed. Sooner rather than later, washed clean, purified by an all-berry diet, groomed and lean again, Mr. Krantz emerged from his depression, but with an expanded anticipation of his next murderous urge, a dense velveteen swath of worry that hung like a black curtain behind the beauty and lightness of all things. He feared when it would draw open again, but he knew better than to expect change. It was part of him, this dark nature. It was the most certain part of him, more certain than his bones.

  The fussy little man did not have such a nature. Was this the difference between them, then? Intellect versus emotion? Brain versus brawn?

  He studied the little man carefully.

  The little man studied the forest.

  Inevitably, Mr. Krantz worried that these urges would affect the one-sided relationship he shared with the little man. He wished him no harm. He even wanted to help him, if he could.

  He felt genuine affection for the man. He liked how gentle he was with the leaves when he overturned them, or how motionless he became when studying a bit of trampled mud. Most persons thumped about the forest violently, talking loudly or just walking loudly, disturbing the wildlife, but this man was downright reverent. He had none of the silly paraphernalia that the other persons carried: no expensive backpack, no ornate hiking boots. Anything he brought with him had a true purpose. Sometimes he carried a small, sharp instrument or a clear glass vial, and other times he would shake open a plastic bag and, with gloved hands, drop a stick or stone or leaf into it. He wore a brightly colored bow tie and clean leather shoes. Now and then he lunched in the forest, eating from a brown paper sack that held a banana an
d a foul-smelling sandwich, likely assembled from a can. Agnes liked these foods, too, although Mr. Krantz could hardly stomach their processed aroma. He wondered if the man ate red meat.

  Even when lunching, the man worked. He scrawled notes into a small black composition book that, when not in use, rested in his shirt’s breast pocket. When he finished writing something particularly satisfying, he said, faintly, “Yes.”

  The man loved the forest, Mr. Krantz felt. He was at peace here.

  So when the urges arose, Mr. Krantz smothered them. He took a walk, or ate berries, or dove into Lost Creek’s deepest swimming hole. It calmed him. Mr. Krantz killed nothing—not even a deer or a rodent—for a long time.

  His stomach, protesting, rumbled.

  “You might try a good steak,” Agnes suggested one evening, noting her husband’s peaked color.

  He made a face.

  “I’ll make it very rare,” she told him. “I’ll make it exactly how you like it.”

  She understood and accepted him for who he was. He was a hunter by nature. A hunter and a gatherer both, but it was difficult to do one and not the other. There was bound to be some withdrawal.

  “I could throw it up in the air for you,” she joked. “A moving target.”

  He tried to laugh. She was an easy woman to please, and that was a good thing. He admired her, appreciated how little she demanded of him. She was like him now more than ever: She wanted to be left alone. She was getting older and stringier. She winced with pain during sex. She shortened her daily walks, citing her bad knees. Mr. Krantz was older than she was, but he was “better preserved,” as she said. There were other women in other places, he knew, younger women with fake fingernails and breasts like hot-air balloons. He spied on them as they teetered, drunk, outside the Rathdrum taverns, talking in shrill voices and smoking cigarettes. He enjoyed watching them from the dark trees.