The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (12 page)

“How lovely,” the woman said. “What a lovely name for a creek.”

“I brought wine,” the doctor said, and the woman broke into applause.

Mr. Krantz had concealed himself behind a line of jagged rock, in a thicket of bridal wreath that obstructed the view of the forest. Despite his great heft, it took very little for him to remain hidden. He, even more than the doctor, knew how to be motionless; even his chest remained still as he breathed. The woman gazed off in the opposite direction, and Mr. Krantz, watching her profile as she bent over her notebook, saw for the first time that she was pretty. Much prettier, he thought, sitting than standing. Standing, she seemed about to collapse at any moment. But now he could see why the doctor was so enamored of her. The sun sluiced through the tree limbs and dappled her legs, and she smiled up into it as though giving thanks. He tried to smile, too, but all that came out was a lopsided snarl. He touched his lips with his hands and tried to drag the mouth upward, but he could only bare his teeth in a sinister grin. The muscles just weren't there. His elbow collided with a branch from the effort, and the white blossoms trembled.

The woman turned then, startled by the movement in the brush. He froze, looking like a wide, fuzzy tree trunk, a brown chunk of earth. The woman brought her hand up to a blossom and cupped it.

“What is this?” she asked no one. “Lilac?”

He almost sighed. She was a sweet if ignorant woman. She returned to her poetry. After several more minutes of scribbling, she gave a satisfied hoot. She leaned back and wrapped her hands around one leg, then lifted the notebook to her face. She recited what must have been her most recent creation.

It was called “My Lover Walks.” It was about the doctor and his studiousness, about how he was married and how his wife was crazy and cruel. It was overwrought and florid, too emotional, Mr. Krantz felt, and too (if he could use one of the new phrases he had picked up from her)
semi-autobiographical.
It was as though she had indiscriminately vomited out her thoughts onto the page. He was embarrassed for her. At the same time, he wished the evil wife would join them in the forest, too, so that he could lift her into the air and snap off her limbs one by one. He would enjoy feeding on her wicked flesh. Because then the doctor would be happy and so would this young woman, and all would be well. And perhaps they would do something nice for him, like bring him wine and food. And he would invite his wife, and the four of them would go to Lost Creek and enjoy a nice picnic in the dirt. After all his long years in solitude, Mr. Krantz would welcome a cheerful luncheon with friends. Perhaps he could write a poem of his own, and he could share it with them while they were digesting the meal. Although it would likely contain a few shrieks and fist jabs, the poem would greatly please the young woman. She was, after all, a sensitive sort, the kind who appreciated a sincere effort. She would see his burgeoning talent and wish to cultivate it.

He crouched back on his haunches, ruminating. A millipede uncoiled itself from the dirt. He snatched it up between forefinger and thumb and tossed it into his mouth. As he chewed, he watched the small shoulders of the woman bend and unfurl. She continued to write and speak aloud the words and stare off into the trees. Writing was clearly not the wretched, arduous task that she had earlier said it was. No, she seemed to flit along in it like a butterfly, brainlessly, not taking it seriously at all. When they became great friends, Mr. Krantz decided, he would try to coax her toward a darker outlook. It would give gravity to her words.

It occurred to Mr. Krantz that he was an artistic being.
Most solitary creatures are,
he mused.

The doctor emerged from some dimmer corner of the forest. He had a mad look on his face, a look of exultation. He was not one to skip, but he practically did so, bounding up to where the woman sat on her wide, short stone.

“Vanessa,” he said. “You must see this. You must come. Now.”

She held up a finger to him without raising her head. Then, smiling, she tucked her pen into the notebook's spiral and shut it and set it aside, next to one of the tawny stalks of her legs, which she now crossed in a gesture of transition. It was a flirty game she was playing, a game of feigned unavailability.

“I want to share a poem with you,” she said.

The doctor was turning red with impatience and ardor. He was practically stomping on the earth. “Vanessa, please,” he said. “I'll show you. Come with me. Now.”

The woman (
Vanessa,
Mr. Krantz noted, a name that sounded like the hiss of a snake) pouted. “We always do what you want to do. The famous doctor. The famous cryptozoologist. God forbid anyone listen to me. God forbid anyone listen to a very short poem.” She rolled to her feet and stood tall and thin and awkward before the doctor. The movement jostled the silk scarf tied loosely at her throat. “I'm just asking you to listen to a few meaningful words. It's so difficult for people these days to listen. They're like zombies now, I swear, sitting there like morons in front of their televisions.”

The doctor's brow furrowed. He tugged at his bow tie. For the first time, he perspired, the sweat rolling off his ears and down onto the normally perfect collar of his white dress shirt. Mr. Krantz had never seen the doctor perspire before.

“That's unfair,” the doctor said. “I don't watch television. I wouldn't own one even if I had the choice.”

“Ah, but your wife does own one,” Vanessa said. “Your wife has two large, expensive televisions. I could live inside one of those televisions. I could sit in it and eat crackers and just blink at all of the pretty lights.”

“You'd be like my little fish,” the doctor replied. “Trapped in your little box.”

Mr. Krantz smelled the woman's pure anger coursing from her scalp to her shoulders. It sent out a shock wave of acrid heat. Mr. Krantz wondered if he should kill the woman now, before she killed the doctor.

But in the next second she was laughing.
“Glub glub,”
she said. “That's me.” She put her palms next to her cheeks and spread them wide like gills.
“Glub glub.”

The doctor, clearly relieved, put an arm around her waist and drew her close. He kissed her ear.

“If I could leave her today,” he said, “you know I would.”

The doctor breathed in the woman's artificial-strawberry scent and seemed to enjoy it. Mr. Krantz thought of the woman outside the bar, the woman whose pee smelled like beer and chemicals.

“Lead me onward,” Vanessa said dramatically, tossing her hair. “Only no more mention of the wife. The vile wretched wife. And no more mention of the daughter, either, the poor thing. Only us. Only us.”

“Only us,” the doctor agreed joyfully, leading her up the narrow deer trail. “Only us and your poems and our Sasquatch.”

She whooped in delight.

Mr. Krantz sat upright. What had he said? “Sasquatch,” he'd said. Why had he said that?

“Our Sasquatch.”

The term was familiar. When he'd seen the hunter, for example. “Fuck me!” the man had shouted. “A goddamn Sasquatch!”

He'd heard other names, as well. When his own mother was shot by a different hunter, the hunter had cried, “I bagged Bigfoot, man!” but had begun to shriek incoherently when she peeled herself from the earth, stomach gushing blood, and barreled toward him, fists blazing.

Mr. Krantz had listened to those exclamations and smelled the mingling fear and fascination in the words.

No,
he wanted to tell them,
I'm human, like you.

I'm the same as you, only bigger, stronger, quieter, lonelier, scarier.

I am you, intensified.

It dawned on Mr. Krantz: The doctor was looking for a monster.

He is looking for me.

*   *   *

S
O THIS WAS
why the doctor scoured the forest floor. This was why he collected broken branches and torn leaves. This was why he'd been returning, again and again, to this same square room of forest, this wilderness that Mr. Krantz inhabited with his life-hardened wife. It was not a coincidence.

Beneath all of his rich brown hair, giant goose pimples rose.

I haven't been watching him,
he thought.

He's been watching me.

Stunned, he crept noiselessly through the forest, occasionally swinging up into a tree to get a better view. He followed the love-struck couple to where the item of the doctor's excitement resided. For a moment, the item was hidden from view by the long bare legs of the woman, by the immaculate pressed khakis of the man. But then one of them moved aside and Mr. Krantz saw what it was that the doctor referenced.

It was shit.

It was Mr. Krantz's very own shit, lying there like a dead turtle for everyone to see.

The woman clamped a hand over her mouth, turning rather green at the sight, or maybe at the smell. For it was true that it smelled pungently. He had built a small lean-to outhouse for his wife next to their tiny cabin, but he never used it. He preferred to shit in the woods. He liked to share the smell with the forest and all of its creatures. It was a smell that said,
I am here. I am here and, yes, smell how powerful I am! Only a thing as big and powerful as me would deposit such a smelly shit here! I am amazing!

But he saw Vanessa react, disgusted, and he saw the funny way the doctor poked and prodded at it, and Mr. Krantz blanched.

He was ashamed.

He'd felt regret before, loads of regret, great steaming heaps of regret. Especially over the rages he had succumbed to, regret for his baser animal instincts.

But never shame. Shame had been unnecessary and useless here in the guts of the boscage. But now it riddled him. It made him quake.

Vanessa shrank away and giggled nervously. Wasn't she a poet? Wasn't she supposed to take even the smallest article of nature seriously? Wasn't she supposed to be jotting this down with some reverence?

Mr. Krantz understood that everyone—every living animal—shat. That these two shat. This small fastidious man and this gawky radiant woman. Although he could not recall the doctor shitting here. He was too neat for it, not unlike Agnes. So where did he go? Did he hike all the way back to the campground, find his car, drive home, and then sit gasping with relief over his pristine toilet? And the woman, did she poop like a deer? Little pebbles,
plunk plunk plunk,
falling in fast succession like hail? He wanted to wipe their faces in it, humiliate them as he had been humiliated.

God, the shame of it. So this was what separated him now from these gorgeous, clumsy persons. He saw that they were studying him, studying even the most simple, crude details of his diurnal existence. He was a thing to be looked down on, a thing to be discussed in a vast lecture hall. A thing to revere and fear, but not a thing to befriend or love or even hate. A two-dimensional being, at best. Mr. Krantz had always been a creature of solitude, but his loneliness, his otherness, was now unbearable. His entire life had been flowing toward this moment, when two lovers pointed and laughed at his shit pile.

He could kill them. Easily. They were caught off guard, completely defenseless. Red rage billowed up before him like a storm. He smelled their sweating, ignorant stench, noted their soft, thrumming throats, their tender white wrists. What joy it would give him to bash their heads together, to watch their gray skulls collapse into each other like two old hornets' nests. He would taste the man's cleanliness and the woman's rich youth, and then he would bathe in Lost Creek and be whole again. This time, no regrets.

But when he began to move toward them, a large monarch butterfly floated across his line of vision, and the movement distracted him for a moment and made him take a step backward, and what happened to be directly behind him was an enormous, rusted metal spring trap, a trap that had been there for so long that it shared the color of the leaves and surrounding shrubs, covered as it had been with the forest's detritus. The teeth sank like a bear's fangs into the flesh of his heel and ankle. The Sasquatch bent back his head and gave an earthshaking cry. He saw nothing in the bright light of his pain, but when he surfaced from the blindness of it, he observed the tree canopy encircling a coin of sky, a sky so red that he could see the blood dripping from it, and then he fell into blackness again.

 

1974

 

 

LIVING LARGE IN THE ELECTRIC CITY

You can't call it stealing if you take it from family.

This is what I tell Marion when we crest the hill to Grand Coulee. The air conditioner is broken and my palms sweat on the steering wheel. All four windows are down. The wind is loud and we're shouting just to talk. The earth is dry and cracked, but the lake below glows cool and blue. It's long and solid and shaped like an ear. It widens and shimmers as we plunge downhill.

We're borrowing, Marion agrees. Stealing is for assholes.

The hood of our car is sleek and shiny, the hood of a black Jaguar. I took Eli's newest, best car on purpose, but I would have changed my mind if I'd known about the air conditioner. It's hot as hell in central Washington. Marion has been moaning about the heat since Davenport. He says being hot makes him cranky.

Jesus Christ, Amelia, he shouts. It's the fucking desert here. Did we cross into northern Chile? Are we in the Atacama? Where are the goddamn trees? Where are the fucking camels? Pull up to that lake, honey. Let's dunk.

Marion knows about places like Chile and the Atacama because he's been around the world with his dad, an ex–naval pilot who now flies private jets. How the two of them wound up in Lilac City is a funny story. That's what Marion says. I don't know if it's funny or not. From what I gather, it's because of a woman his dad fell in love with, the wife of an air force pilot stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base. Marion says it's a funny story because the ending is tragic. He says tragedy makes things funnier.