The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (2 page)

One day his father brought home a new phonograph, and Eli watched in amused disbelief as his parents threaded their limbs together and waltzed haphazardly across the living room floor, bumping into the table and chairs and sofa, laughing and singing. But that was a long time ago, a year or more. There had been little contact between his parents since, aside from the sad comments they made about each other to Eli. Things like,
He's no fun
and
She wants fancy things.

You're wrong,
Eli wanted to say but didn't.
He's fun! She doesn't care for fancy things at all!
Eli wished they would say nice things about each other. He wished, right now, that they would speak to each other with the same easy tone his mother used with Mr. Krantz.

Mr. Krantz had noticed his burst fly and fumbled with the button hopelessly. He gave Eli an embarrassed shrug. Eli put up one finger and then went racing into his parents' bedroom. He plucked from the bureau the longest belt he could find and returned to Mr. Krantz, presenting it with a triumphant flourish.

Mr. Krantz smiled at Eli with his broad ape mouth. He held the belt to his chest for a moment and then wrapped it tautly about his waist. He had to force a new hole through the leather to fasten it, but it worked well enough, and Eli felt proud of himself. He was an excellent host. Mr. Krantz spun in a circle for Eli and grinned. Eli applauded.

It was funny to see his dad's slick, oiled belt encircling the filthy fabric of Mr. Krantz's suit. It looked as though Mr. Krantz had rolled in the mud on his way to their house. Where, Eli wondered, did Mr. Krantz buy his clothes? He looked silly in clothes. He kept pulling at the sleeves and elbows and legs, obviously uncomfortable. And those wide flat feet! Eli's gaze kept falling to them. He wished he could touch them. They would be hot against his fingers, furry and powerful and new.

Eli's mom returned to the living room, holding the good silver tray perpendicular to her chest. It bore a pile of lovely golden biscuits. Eli's mouth watered. In their hurry to prepare for Mr. Krantz, they had forgotten about Eli's breakfast. He went to grab a biscuit, but his mother shifted the tray away from him.

“These are for Mr. Krantz,” she said sharply.

“I only want
one
,” Eli insisted, and then flushed, embarrassed by his own rudeness.

Mr. Krantz stopped his piano-playing and his funny little dance and approached the tray. He drooled onto his dirty lapel.

“These are for Mr.
Krantz,
” she said again. She placed the tray down on the coffee table with an inviting smile at her guest and took an athletic step backward, perhaps anticipating what Mr. Krantz would do next.

He lunged, batting the tray's steaming baked goods with those monstrous yellow and purple hands of his, scattering many of the biscuits onto the floor but managing to shovel several of them into his mouth at once. How he ate! They must have been very hot, Eli guessed, listening to Mr. Krantz's loud, staccato whimpering, but how tasty they must have been, too, for he moaned happily, licking his lips with a long, menacing tongue. Eli watched sadly as Mr. Krantz devoured every morsel; he even crouched doglike on the floor and lapped up the fallen soldiers. Eli looked up at Agnes, sure that she would disapprove of Mr. Krantz's barbaric behavior, but she only gazed at her guest affectionately, as one might gaze at a favorite pet or, Eli realized, with a sudden maturity that had so far always eluded him, an adored sweetheart. This was not the look of a woman disgusted. She was transported, elevated. She was maniacally content.

“I have a piano lesson in an hour,” Eli said loudly.

Agnes waved him aside. By then his dad would be home, she said, and he could walk Eli to his lesson.

Eli frowned. “But you
always
take me.”

His voice was so whiny. The voice of a much smaller boy. He hated himself for it, and then he hated his mom for it, and then, very briefly, he hated Mr. Krantz.

But Mr. Krantz was back on his feet now, swiping at his chest and arms, releasing small crumbs so that they drifted snowlike onto the Oriental carpet. Eli waited for him to drop back down into a crouch and lick up every last tiny remnant, but Mr. Krantz withheld himself, staring longingly at the crumbs but seeming to remember that he was a guest, or maybe simply feeling that his immense hunger had, however temporarily, been satisfied. He looked up at Eli's face, his expression apologetic now. He gestured at the empty tray.

“It's okay, Mr. Krantz,” Eli lied. “I'm not hungry, anyway.”

Mr. Krantz ruffled Eli's hair and then lifted his gaze to the face of the woman watching him. Eli's mom had grown very still, standing before Mr. Krantz like a blossomed flower, her face open and shining. Seeing her, Mr. Krantz's eyes gleamed with a new hunger. Crazily so. Eli, uncomfortable, reached for his mother's skirt and tugged.

She dropped to his side. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his face.

“Oh, my baby,” she said to him. “How I'll miss you.”

“Miss me? My piano lesson is only an hour. I'll be home for stew.”

His mother blinked at him heavily, as if she were fighting sleep, and then she drew him fast to her breast. She smelled of Palmolive and cake batter. Eli would never forget the warmth of her smell.

“I do love you,” she said. “Never doubt it, sweetheart.”

Eli wavered, confused. She went to the closet and retrieved a packed suitcase. She groaned lifting it, and Mr. Krantz came forward to take it from her.

“Mr. Krantz,” she said bravely, straightening and extending her hand. “I'm ready.”

Mr. Krantz swallowed up her hand with his free one. They went out the door together, the woman lean and pale and barely breathing, the other hairy and dark and panting like a dog in heat. Like Mr. Krantz, Agnes was barefoot. Their feet pressed into the mud of the yard, winding toward the forest. Large prints, small prints; monstrous feet, dainty feet; heaviness, freedom.

His mother did not turn toward him again, but Mr. Krantz turned as he reached the small line of stones parting Washington State from Idaho. The guest sorrowed for him, Eli could see. It was Mr. Krantz's attempt at an apology.

Eli panicked.

“Come back,” Eli called after them. “You can't leave!”

Mr. Krantz put an enormous hand on the small of Agnes's back. She lowered her head. They hastened into the woods together, extinguished by the trees.

Eli hated Mr. Krantz then. He was not a man at all but an animal. Like an animal, he took what he wanted, regardless of who suffered for it. He was just the same as a bear or a cougar or any other woodland predator.

But, then, what did that make Eli's mother? Who was she?

Woman. Mom. Animal. Wife.

Maybe just nothing,
Eli thought.
Maybe she wants to be nothing.
And he wished he could make her nothing, too.

He considered following them. The sun slanted down and baked the footprints into place. He thought of his dad. He returned to the house, the door smacking shut behind him. The room smelled of biscuits, of simmering stew. Eli sat on the sofa and folded his hands in his lap. He furrowed his tiny brow.

He would wait for his dad. He would go to his piano lesson.

Most important, he would think up a better story than the one he had just witnessed.

His dad was a practical man.

He would not believe a word of it.

 

1945

 

 

THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

Eli was only ten years old when Greg Roebuck, the boy's hardworking father, found the family dog struck dead by a car.

The dog's name was Hermit. He had been the perfect companion for Greg's lonely son. Frost stitched the body to the side of the road. Greg pried it free, the wind stinging his eyes. He carried the body back to the house.

He went to wash his hands in the sink, thinking only of his son. He dreaded Eli's reaction. The boy had already lost his mother. And now this. What sort of unmoored life would Eli live if his childhood proved only a steady parade of loss?

When Eli arrived from school, Greg met him on the dirt road that led to the house. The fields were heavy and frozen and stank of manure. Greg, tongue-tied, motioned grimly:
Follow me
. The boy tensed. It began to snow. They entered the house together. Eli did not drop his rucksack to the ground or remove his coat.

In the kitchen, Greg mumbled an apology. He had covered Hermit's body with an old blue quilt, and he whipped it aside now as though unveiling a prize.
You asshole
, Greg chided himself.
Slowly, now. Slowly!

He had rested the dog on the table, and he chided himself for that, too, given his son's already timid appetite.

Greg could not bring himself to look Eli in the face; he heard only the great intake of breath, the fumbling of his boy's fingers over Hermit's body, and then a series of brief, staccato questions delivered almost professionally:
When? Where? Who did this? How long was he there? Did it hurt him? Is he gone forever? Can we save him? Why is there so little blood? This doesn't even really look like Hermit, does it?

The questions droned on, weird and touching, and Greg offered few answers. He reached out like a blind man and randomly patted his son's shoulders, wondering if this offered any comfort at all or if it only registered faintly to the boy, like raindrops, maybe, or like tears.

Greg had felt similarly useless when Agnes left. Like Hermit, she was gone, both disappearances untimely and permanent.

The boy was crying now, his questions finished for the time being, his little heart accepting in throbbing registers the fullness of its wreckage.

“Whatever you want for dinner tonight,” Greg said. “Muffins. Candies. Root beer.”

Eli could not respond, could only turn and run from the room, to his bedroom, to his bed. Greg heard the small mattress receive him with a groan. Uncertain of what to say or how to proceed, Greg went to the door and listened to Eli's earnest, desperate prayers.

“God,” the boy pleaded, “I'll do anything. Please bring Hermit back. This is a dream. Say it's a bad dream. Wake me up, God. Wake me up. Wake me up! Please, God, wake me up.”

Greg stood quietly in the hallway, rooted to the floor by the deep strands of his son's woe; he was strengthened somehow by the purity of these strands, their unfathomable depth and beauty. How pierced the earth was, too, how altered. Around their tiny woodland home, the air seemed to shimmer and thicken. The new world, Greg saw, was a place of great love and great loss.

Eli whispered himself into a fitful sleep and later, much later, emerged. Greg had removed the dog's carcass to the woodpile outside. He sat now with the newspaper on his lap, the newly washed surface of the kitchen table gleaming like the belly of a fish.

“I want to bury him,” Eli said.

“It's done,” Greg lied, wanting to save the boy the pain of the activity, the horrible labor involved. “He's already buried.”

Eli began to cry. “Then we'll dig him up. I want to see him again. I want to clip some of his fur. I want to bury him. Me.”

He sobbed, utterly broken.

It was not uncommon for Greg to scold himself for being a poor father, but now, too, he was a liar.

“Eli. Don't fret. He's there. He's right there. I just thought—well, it doesn't matter what I thought. Anyway. If you want to bury him, then that's what we'll do.”

Relief crossed the boy's face, a look that was so close to joy that Greg felt unburdened.
Yes,
he thought.
This is a good activity for a boy and a dad to do together. Bury the family dog. And tomorrow
—a Saturday, the only day this week that Greg didn't work—
we'll go to town together to choose a new dog.

And they did.

*   *   *

T
HE NEW DOG
had no name for nearly a full week, but then, out of the blue, Eli began calling her Mother.

Greg disliked the dog. He had disliked Hermit, too, in the beginning. He didn't like dogs, generally speaking. He liked animals with a purpose: horses, cows, pigs; animals to pull, milk, eat. He had brought Hermit home not long after Agnes's departure, at the suggestion of a friend, to make their motherless, wifeless household appear less lonely. It was a strategy that had, to Greg's relief, worked. Eli became happier, dedicating himself again to his schoolwork, so long as the dog remained by his side, Hermit's tail slapping out a friendly beat on the battered wood floor. Eli's grades improved, his friendships improved, his relationship with his father improved. And, either out of a feeling of gratefulness or just because Hermit was such a good-hearted dog, Greg, too, began to love the animal. Not the way he loved Eli. But just enough. The three of them made a respectable family.

But the new dog was strange. She was a mutt, part Welsh terrier, part some-other-breed-he-couldn't-remember, a breed that, the breeder told him, had delicate bones. She was shaggy like a terrier, with a terrier's round wet nose, a nose that shocked Greg when she pressed it like a soggy sponge into his hand or bare leg, a thankfully infrequent behavior. But he definitely did think of the word
delicate
when he saw her—she
was
delicate, not doglike at all but graceful, careful, like a long-limbed bird. Hermit had been overeager, sliding across the floorboards when Eli came home, racing frantically and clumsily around corners, but the new dog literally stepped, that cold black nose in the air, like some well-trained Spanish show horse, from one corner of the house to another, lifting each foot off the floor with a gait suitable for dressage, as though disgusted by Greg's housekeeping. When she wasn't traipsing about the house like an elegant snob, she sat dolefully in the corner, staring out the window, or she turned those black shining eyes on Greg. Regarding him, she seemed unimpressed.