The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (23 page)

She floated through the house uncomfortably. None of the lights were on, and she wanted them to be on, but she felt that if she ignited them, something horrible would be illuminated, some ghost or monster, and so she left the world extinguished. Outside, the dogs howled. Eventually, after much shrieking, after much laughter and chasing, they'd been collected and returned to the kennels, but the wrong kennels, Ginger knew, although Amelia didn't seem to care. Ginger had felt terrified about her parents' reaction. They would come home and see the dogs in the wrong cages and the beer cans on the lawn and they would know that Amelia and Ginger had not followed orders, and they would be so very upset, and Ginger was on the verge of tears as she had explained this in earnest to her older sister.

“So what?” Amelia had said.

Ginger started. It had never before occurred to her to upset her parents just for the sake of upsetting them.

“Well,” Ginger stammered. “Well, for one, they won't have you babysit me again.”

“Geesh,” Amelia said, rolling her eyes. “Bummer.”

Ginger's shoulders drooped. John, seeing this, hurried to say, “Ouch. Harsh, Roebuck.”

Amelia made a face, annoyed, but then gave her sister a pitying look. “Not because I don't like being with you, Kumquat. Just because”—she stopped here, struggling, looking up into the air as though surfacing from a deep river—“because they never ask me. Plus, you know, I'm busy now with school, most of the time, anyway. So it doesn't matter. It's no big deal.”

John seemed to approve of this answer. He squeezed Amelia's shoulder, and she, in turn, caught his hand and kissed it.

So they
are
together,
Ginger had thought. She was relieved that it was the one and not the other. They were lying on the lawn, relaxing after their frantic corralling of the animals. Amelia and John sat very close, but Rudolph was not far away—he lolled on his stomach quietly near the hydrangea, knotting one strand of grass at a time into tiny silken green loops. He seemed to have forgotten about them all. Ginger sat crossed-legged near her sister. She wished the boys would go away.

“I suppose we should go in,” Amelia said, standing and stretching, catlike. The boys began to rise, too, as though sewn to her limbs like large shadows. Ginger, however, remained seated.

“I thought we would be alone tonight,” Ginger said.

Amelia laughed. “Come inside. I'll give you some pop.”

“It should be you and me.”

“You wish, Kumquat,” Rudolph said. His voice was sad, even if his grin was not. “I wished that, too.”

“Huh,” Amelia said, striding toward the house. “The crickets are whining.”

The crickets
were
whining, but Ginger knew that wasn't what Amelia meant. She rose, reluctantly, and followed the older people into the house. Amelia handed her a pop bottle—her mom's diet pop, something her mom never let her drink—and also gave her the remote.

“You're in charge of this television,” Amelia had instructed. “Don't leave its side.”

And for much of the evening, she hadn't. But now where were they?

Ginger floated through the house, silently, fearfully. She didn't recognize this place. It was another planet unto itself, a sinister home in a parallel world. She stopped in front of the door to her room and considered entering. She could turn on her rainbow night-light and snuggle with her stuffed unicorn, Charlie. She considered going to sleep. When she woke up in the morning, her parents would be there. Her mother would come in to lower the blinds and shut the window, to keep the room from growing too bright. Barefoot, wearing only her loose cotton nightgown, she would stop by Ginger's bed, bend over, and kiss her. She would smell of perfume and coffee: sweet and bitter. The sun would be up. The light would burn away all of the strange corners and shadows. It was so very tempting to just go inside and lie down in her sheets and hold Charlie and sleep until everything was normal again.

Strange sounds came from her parents' bedroom.

What are they doing in there? Ginger wondered. They shouldn't be in there.

She went to her parents' door and pushed it open. She meant to go in and tell her sister, firmly this time,
You need to leave this room. This is not your room.
But when she entered, she was too confused. All three of them—her sister, John, and Rudolph—lay in the big brass bed. They were wrestling with one another, grunting and groaning, but also kissing and fondling. And Amelia was happy—happier than Ginger had ever seen her—squealing and giggling and thrashing while Rudolph chewed on her neck and John touched her legs. Ginger stood very still, watching this lewd horizontal dance. She lost her nerve. She could say nothing at all. And she thought how very angry Amelia would be if she did speak now, if she did say something. She wanted to back out of the room but was afraid that any movement would give her away.

And then Amelia sat up, her hair flying, her shirt pushed up, showing her lacy white bra. Her jeans, Ginger saw, were unbuttoned.

“GET OUT.”

Ginger gave a little cry of fright and obeyed. She left the room; she fled down the stairs; she ran to the kennels. Panting, she eased the dogs out one by one. She restored them to the proper cages. She picked up the beer cans and the empty beer case and hid them all at the bottom of the giant trash barrel, beneath the more innocuous garbage sacks. She made sure everything was as it had once been. When she finished, she was so very tired that walking felt more like oozing. She returned to the house. She rinsed her glass in the sink and deposited the empty pop bottle in the trash bin. She went up the stairs. Her parents' bedroom was dead silent. In the sinister hallway, its white doorway seemed to vibrate with disease and taint. She hurried into her room. She shed her clothes, put on her pajamas. For a long, painful moment, she wished that she could brush her teeth, but it was too late now, her bravery had ended, and there was no returning to the outside of things. She poured herself into her bed. Safe now beneath the pastel covers, covers she'd chosen with her mother while on a shopping expedition at the Bon Marché, Ginger closed her eyes.

Mommy
, she thought.
Come home
.

A knock came on her door, lightly. Amelia's voice, quiet, curious, then insistent, and then, perhaps believing her to be asleep, receding.

Mommy,
Ginger thought again, shutting her eyes very tightly, filled with a worry that her mother would never return. She pictured a car wreck, her parents' tangled, ruined bodies.
Oh, no,
she thought, and she hugged Charlie tighter to her chest and prayed.

And then, suddenly, her mother was there, drawing the covers back from her face so that she could kiss Ginger's cheek. Ginger was half asleep, her mind throbbing, uncertain.

“You're home,” Ginger murmured, closing her eyes again.

She had been dreaming about a baby born without a head or limbs, just a torso from which a million agitated eyes sprouted.

Her mother murmured, “Did you and Charlie have a nice time?”

“Oh, yes,” Ginger said.

“Good, sweetie,” her mom said. “The house looks great. We'll have to ask Amelia to come back again.” She leaned over and kissed Ginger once more, and then the stuffed unicorn, too. “Night night, Ginger. Night night, Charlie.”

“Okay,” Ginger said, “good night.”

But just as her mom began to rise, Ginger grabbed for her hand and clutched it so fiercely that Vanessa, rattled, cried:

“Ginger! Let go! You're hurting me!”

 

1990

 

 

STORYBOOK

Eli was stressed. For the last several weeks he had worked as one of the five parent chaperones for the Comstock High Purple Days' Float Committee. It was unusual for him to volunteer for such an event. The parade was the next day, and while Ginger gushed to her mom about how cool the float was going to be, Eli was anxious to finish. He practically yanked Ginger out of the house, gripping her coat sleeve.

“Let's hurry,” he said. “There's not a lot of time.”

Ginger followed him out to the car. “Gosh, Dad, don't worry. It's going to look great.”

“I know,” Eli said. “We'll see.”

Eli did not speak again as he drove. Ginger chattered at him from the passenger seat, telling him random, unimportant things about her classmates. While Ginger spoke, Eli considered the work he had to complete: attaching the bear hide, rigging the wiring, standing the damn thing up on the float, hiding the speakers. The electrician would be there the following morning. Everything had to be ready to go.

He had assumed this would all be a cakewalk, but now he found himself more obsessed with the float than he was about Mr. Krantz's whereabouts.

When Eli and Ginger arrived, they found the floor of the Meekses' barn freshly littered with purple crepe paper, poultry netting, and metallic fringe. The lowboy trailer sat groaning beneath the clumsy bodies of some dozen teenagers. It was messily adorned and rocking slightly from the activity.

“Where'd they move him?” he asked his daughter, and she motioned toward a dim corner where a girl squatted with a paintbrush, slathering glue onto a large papier-mâché figure.

“Oh, no,” Eli said, but Ginger had already left his side to join her friends on the lowboy trailer, taking up a plum-colored garland and arranging it around her neck. She greeted her friends enthusiastically. She was in her element here, popular among dorks. Eli was proud of her in a distant, appreciative sort of way.

Eli approached the girl with the paintbrush and stood over her with his hands on his hips.

“Hiya, Dr. Roebuck,” the girl said, looking up. “How's it looking?”

“Like a bear with mange. His legs are all wrong.”

“Really? I redid them like you said. Exactly. I swear.” She rose to her feet and considered the thing with solemnity.

“You put them on backward,” Eli said, pointing. “See? His knees buckle the wrong way.”

“Doesn't he look tubular, though?” she said. Eli could not remember her name. Carol? Karen? Kathryn? “He's really scary.”

Eli grabbed ahold of a papier-mâché leg and tore it from the torso. His hands came away smeared with glue.

“Hey!” the girl protested.

“Realign them,” Eli said. “I'll help you.”

Eli had already wasted an entire month on this project, but there was no way he was allowing a less-than-perfect replica of Mr. Krantz to float down the streets of Lilac City. This was his chance to share a realistic Sasquatch with the entire Inland Empire. It was, he felt, an enormous responsibility.

Comstock High had recently chosen the Sasquatch as its new mascot, in part due to Ginger's influence on the mascot steering committee. Ever since the coronation, Eli had winced at the cute renderings of the creature. While Ginger thought she was honoring her father's cause, Eli was silently offended by the presence of the doe-eyed, weak-shouldered, smiling monster who now adorned all school stationery, sweatshirts, and signage. The cuddly beast paid no homage to Mr. Krantz. It was a mockery.

And this purple nightmare of a float was the icing on the cake. Mauve foam balls hung from its broad front like blood-filled testicles.

But he would fix it. The Sasquatch would fix it. High school mediocrity be damned.

“The knees will bend the correct way,” Eli said loudly, “or not at all.”

Carol/Karen/Kathryn applauded enthusiastically.

Ginger looked over at him now and waved. He forced himself to smile, to wave back at her, and then he leaned over and dismantled the other leg.

Carol/Karen/Kathryn made a sad sound in her throat, but then she was ready to work. Eli took up the task from the opposite side, monitoring the accuracy of the reattachment as they progressed. Every now and again he caught a glimpse of another Purple Days chaperone drinking a pop or laughing with a student and he thought,
You ingrate. Have you no purpose?

Ginger, for her part, had been elated when Eli volunteered as Purple Days Chaperone #5. He was normally too busy to get involved with school activities. Unlike other dads, he'd never been an assistant coach or a classroom helper or an escort for a dance. He had other, more pressing concerns to address: the smooth operation of his nonprofit, SNaRL, which he'd founded and funded entirely by himself; the setting of traps and cameras in dense forests as close by as Riverside State Park and as far away as Snoqualmie Pass and the Olympics; retrieving and carefully scanning said traps and cameras; the research of purported sightings throughout the Northwest; the calculation and disbursement of funds received; the chemical analysis of purported evidence; the grueling editing process for his first book,
The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac,
which Vanessa had ghostwritten (this, in itself, had been a difficult process—she had a tendency to write too floridly, so brutal editing was a necessity). Sometimes he went a week or two without seeing Ginger at all. He made every effort to at least arrive home in time to say good night but frequently failed. He was very busy. And, frankly, he liked it that way.

But for this—a citywide festival showcasing a mascot that embodied his life's work—Eli cleared his schedule. He planned on making sure that an anatomically correct version of Mr. Krantz rode the Purple Days float alongside this year's Comstock High Purple Days princess. The creature would be robotic, its movements on the float realistic and powerful. He hoped to educate all of Lilac City, to give them reason to respect, admire, and possibly even fear the presence of Sasquatch in their region. It was an added pleasure, too, to see how happy it made Ginger.

It was not, however, going according to plan.

Backward knees were just part of the problem.

The students meant well, Eli granted, but they had no respect for anatomical verisimilitude. They were more interested in flirting with one another, in reciting ribald jokes, in goofing around. They followed directions halfheartedly, expressing interest but growing insipid the moment he turned his back. The Comstock princess, a pretty if whiny senior named Lindsay Meeks, was a particular thorn in Eli's side. She worried that such a huge structure would overpower her. She worried that one of the papier-mâché arms would fall off and brain her. She worried that it would appear to the crowd as if she were getting humped from behind. She worried about everything.