The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (10 page)

“He's better,” Gladys said. “Thank you. I was a skeptic, I admit, but he seems vastly improved.”

And he was vastly improved. Over the last few weeks, he had fallen in love with her again. He even stayed home from two cryptozoological conferences in the hopes of regaining her affections. He had stopped spending the night elsewhere. He even told her he was considering a full recommitment to podiatry, if it would please her. It pleased her, almost, but Gladys could not bring herself to respond to his entreaties. It was far too much fun to have him chasing after her. Bouquets of roses arrived daily, gem-studded gifts. He was wooing her again. And the more indifference she showed him, the more ardency he poured forth.

It was unintentional on her part, as Gladys felt little to nothing for him, not even when she tried. He was an odd, bespectacled little man. Fastidious and ambitious in his work, but so very tedious and silly! She was tired of him. If she never laid eyes on him again, then all the merrier.

She was relieved to no longer feel afraid of his lack of love, of his imminent failure. She no longer felt that if he flushed his career down the toilet, so she, too, would go. She and Amelia would be just fine.

Or at least she, Gladys, would be.

She lacked emotion for Amelia, too. All of her affection was given, instead, to her image in the mirror, to the image of the patchwork cap. How amazing it looked! As though it had sprouted from her skull, a thing born of her. It was a better, more loving daughter than Amelia; it was more helpful, more attentive, and more present. She loved the cap. She hardly even liked Amelia.

Amelia, for her part, didn't seem to care either way.

“And how is business?” Gladys asked the shopkeeper now.

The woman hitched up her long skirt to climb a stepladder. She was retrieving some books from an upper shelf.

“Business is booming, thank you. We made our first sale just a few weeks ago. The sale of your cap, in fact. Gramma was so pleased when we finally sold an item, she squirted ink everywhere.”

“Your first sale?” Gladys asked, confused. “I'm not sure I…” But then she trailed off.

By drawing up her long skirt, the shopkeeper had unwittingly revealed her bare legs. She wore simple white ankle-high boots and no hose. Gladys squinted, unable at first to make sense of what she saw. The shopkeeper's legs were pocked and yellow, like rotting stalks of wheat. The knees were all askew; her legs bent backward like the legs of an ostrich. Gladys, disbelieving, rubbed at her eyes. Surely she was imagining things.

No. It was true. The shopkeeper had long, terrible bird legs. No wonder she walked so strangely, up and down, up and down, like an oil pump stabbing the earth. Gladys felt an immense pity for the woman, and then an intense fear. The shopkeeper glared down at her.

“Would you like a closer look?” the woman said angrily.

“Oh, I'm very sorry,” Gladys said, flushing. Then, sympathetically, she went on: “What do they call your condition? Is it a form of rickets? My grandma had rickets. She was quite deformed.”

The shopkeeper's anger receded. She finished selecting the books and then descended the ladder, allowing her skirt to fall again to her heels.

“There is no name for the condition,” she told Gladys, arranging the books into an empty box. “My grandmother has a form of it. As does my mother. It affects us all differently.” Seeing Gladys's withdrawn face, she added carefully, “None of us suffer. There is no pain. It is how our Maker formed us.”

“You mentioned your grandmother earlier,” Gladys remarked, although she could not remember what exactly had been said. “Did she pass long ago?”

“Pass?” The shopkeeper laughed, showing her sharp white teeth, small and clean like a baby's. “What a thought! No, she's alive and well. She lives here, with my mother. With me.” She motioned to a door at the back of the shop.

That even this ancient woman's mother could be alive was a shock, but to think of her grandmother thriving made Gladys grimace.
She thinks I'm a fool.
Gladys, irritated, gazed around the shop for a new topic. It looked very different today.

“So many boxes! Are you packing up?”

“Yes. There's quite a lot we have no need for.”

“And where will you take them?”

“To the lake.”

“We've always wanted a lake cabin, Eli and I, but there's no time for it. He's always so busy with his patients.”

“We'll drown them in the lake. Each item. One by one.”

Gladys, surprised, said, “Even the little yellow bird?”

The shopkeeper slowly blinked, the lids sliding like a latch over the wide circles of her eyes. Like two perfect coins in shape, and as silver as nickels. Gladys suddenly wanted nothing more than to leave the shop.

“Well,” she said, turning to the door. “Thank you again for the patchwork cap. I do love it. I really need to get going. I hope you enjoy your trip to the lake.”

“But don't you want to meet my mother? My grandmother?” The shopkeeper looked over her shoulder at the door to the back room. It gave a harsh shudder, as though someone had flung a heavy body against it.

Gladys, terrified, shook her head.

The door creaked open an inch. A tentacle wrapped around the door's exterior. The next moment it was gone.

“I've got to go,” she said. “Amelia will be home from school at any moment. Tell your family thank you. And goodbye.”

She sailed past the open boxes sitting on the shop's floor, practically falling out into the bright street, relieved to be among the traffic and the people, who cruised by and gave her an amused look, as though she had materialized from nowhere. Gladys glanced over at the shop and saw the shopkeeper standing at the window, gazing at her with a dark smile. Gladys straightened and shook herself and smoothed her jacket against her waist. She waved at the shopkeeper, embarrassed now for her rushed departure, and was glad when the shopkeeper returned her wave in a friendly manner. Gladys returned home feeling as if her outing had been, overall, a pleasant one.

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.