The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (32 page)

“God, can't you even talk to me? I mean, I know he's great and all, but how do you handle it?”

Agnes considered the question. “I wasn't lonely,” she said finally. “Or maybe I had already been lonely. For me, it was exciting and adventurous. There had been a big void in my life, and Mr. Krantz entered and filled it.”

“Ha,” the new wife giggled crassly. “Yes, he's certainly gifted at filling holes.”

Agnes ignored her and said, “I was made for this life. You, though, I'm not sure. You're too”—she wanted to say
normal,
or
ditzy
maybe, but instead she said—“glamorous.”

As expected, the new wife took this as a compliment. Clearly not one to absorb a compliment without immediately doling out one in return, the new wife rushed to say, “I bet you were beautiful. Just beautiful. When you were younger.”

Agnes was stiff and sore. She thought of the pamphlets about facilities for the elderly that Mr. Donald had forced on her. She had buried them outside, beside the creek, and had marked their burial with an old gray brick. The facilities were large buildings with faux-feather beds and unlimited toilet paper. Against her will, Agnes found herself salivating at the thought of the hot foods they would serve—soft oatmeal with raisins, maybe, or fried chicken.
Fuck me,
she thought, drooling,
fried chicken!

What would it be like to say hello to the other old people bobbing through the high-vaulted hallways? It wouldn't be so bad, that life. She would be the eccentric one, the odd one out. But, then, when had she not been? The only place she'd ever fit in was here, in Mr. Krantz's shack.

She thought of the recent zoophilia meeting, the suggestion of finding Eli and becoming a part of his life. Would he care for her now, as she had once cared for him?

Mr. Donald said she had nothing to lose, and she supposed this was right. She decided, sitting there with the new wife, that she would march up to Eli and open her arms and say,
Hate me or love me, I've returned. I've returned, like it or not.

Mr. Krantz entered then, bellowing his greeting. He patted Agnes chastely on the head before scooping up the new wife and nuzzling her neck. Agnes lowered her chin and went out into the icy forest. Even from outside the pine walls of the shack, Agnes could hear the moaning and shouting that ensued. She went to the creek bed and followed its slow stream upward, toward the mountain. The sounds receded behind her, until she could hear only the gurgle of the creek, the wind sweeping through the canopy overhead, the creaking icicles. She startled a family of deer and watched them, dazed, as they crashed like lightning into the underbrush and then disappeared vaporously, like a wish.

She was alone again. Only now there was no grace in it.

She turned around, passed by the shack (now silent), and moved along the well-worn deer paths, all the way to the bus stop. She waited for an hour and then boarded the bus for Lilac City. She walked to the Unitarian church and sought out the man, the zoophilia group leader.

“I wish to speak with my son,” she told him. She was unsure of where to begin. She did not trust this man, but he was more man than she was, more akin to her son. “Can you help me?”

He could, he said. Anything, he added, to help her overcome her bestial cravings, to get her away, finally, from Mr. Krantz.

She did not correct him. She listened.

“Meet him at his place of work,” Mr. Donald instructed. “Not at his home. Things are too personal at home.”

It seemed like wise advice.

“Do you know where he works?” the man asked her.

“Well, I'm not sure. He's famous for studying Sasquatch.”

“Fitting,” Mr. Donald said. “Clearly, your poor choices affected him.”

That was too simple, Agnes thought, but she did not argue. She had once believed that Eli's search was all about finding her, but now she sensed it was something more damning: It was more about destroying her new life, destroying Mr. Krantz. There was rage there. It had nothing to do with love.

The man sat down at his computer and typed. He clicked the mouse. Agnes watched him, unsettled. She had never used a computer. She feared that the brightness of the screen would melt her face off, so she stayed as far away from it as possible.

The man hooted softly and then wrote something down on a piece of paper. “Jackpot,” he gloated.

It just so happened that Dr. Eli Roebuck was taking part in a zoological conference that very afternoon. He would speak at one-thirty at the convention center downtown. Mr. Donald could not believe their good fortune.

“God's will!” he exclaimed. “God himself is urging you forward!”

Mr. Donald even offered to drive her in his little yellow car to the nearest parking lot, and Agnes gratefully accepted.

He left her off at the parking lot with a friendly chuck on a shoulder, a fresh Ziploc bag filled with coins for bus fare, and an annoying, go-get-'em smile. Agnes stumbled along the frozen stone pathway, feet aching in her shabby shoes, still wearing Mr. Krantz's hat and the same warm clothes from the ZSG donation box. She was keenly aware of how out of place she was amid the bustling crowds, but no one took notice of her. She arrived just as the doctor was finishing up his lecture. The entire expanse of the room was filled wall-to-wall with people, stinking of cheap perfume. She saw her son at the front of the room, shaking hands and smiling with members of the audience.

Off to the side of the stage, nestled on a velvet pillow atop a wood podium, was a foot.

God,
Agnes thought, horrified. The bones were polished and sharp and long, both human and not human.
Whose foot is that?

Then she realized: It was her husband's foot. Agnes recoiled. So, she thought. Her son had almost killed Mr. Krantz, after all.

Her husband had changed so much since the loss of that foot. He had become restless, impractical. He had become obsessed with the young drunk women of Rathdrum. He had begun, although he would never admit it, to despise her.

A crowd had gathered around Eli, around the foot, admiring both, it seemed. He looked intelligent and self-satisfied before them, well dressed as usual, sharp-eyed. He looked like Greg, and she even felt affection for her first husband then, that hardworking man who had foolishly devoted himself to their unlikely marriage.

It didn't matter whose fault it was. Living in the woods had taught Agnes this much: Fault was useless, as useless as apology. Life spiraled out from life, and death, too. It was random, it was constant. It was faultless and unapologetic and real.

She didn't have to forgive him, because there was no such thing as forgiveness. So he didn't need to forgive her, either.

Agnes waited for the crowd to disperse before she approached Eli. It took nearly an hour for him to finish signing books. Then he was alone, dismantling the items on the stage.

It was now or never.

She urged herself toward him.

“Hello,” she said, touching him lightly on the elbow.

He was wrapping a cord about his elbow and hand, and he continued wrapping it as he turned to face her.

It was the moment of truth, the moment when Agnes would know, for certain, what would become of her.

Her little boy faced her, no longer a little boy but now a little man, very stressed, very bothered. He wore large, round red glasses that dwarfed his blue eyes (so beautiful, those eyes, like two perfect agates! She had nearly forgotten their color and intensity). His hair, almost gone now, had lost the sum total of its youthful blond luster; its thin remnants were dirty brown, streaked with gray.

He had aged since their last meeting.

But still—
oh, yes
—this was her little boy. The same apple-shaped shoulders, the same skinny frame, those same large, tender ears, that same open, curious expression that seemed both shocked and pleased.

Pleased? Was he pleased to see her?

She opened her arms to him.

He recoiled. No. No, then, he was not pleased.

“Eli,” she said. “Eli, hello.”

“Yes?” he said.

“Yes,” she repeated. “Eli, it's good to see you again.”

Eli glanced down at his watch, then up, and she felt that his expression was generous, affectionate even. “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I hope so.”

He looked down at the floor and noticed her worn shoes—slippers, really—and then his eyes lifted and fastened curiously onto her face. He peered into it, at a total loss.

Then he said, and she would never forget it for the rest of her life, “Do I know you?”

Her smile faded.

Do I know you?

It was a strange question. Agnes understood its basic meaning, but it was so very loaded. God, he didn't recognize her! Had she changed so much in the last two decades? She wanted to explain to him,
I'm your mother,
but suddenly she wasn't sure that she wanted to be his mother. Had she ever wanted to be his mother? What would happen to her if she accepted the role now?

“No,” she said. “No. I don't suppose you do.”

“Did the newspaper send you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “No, I'm not with the paper.”

“Ah. Well. They had said they might send someone. Although they weren't sure. They were busy, they said.” Eli wiped at his face. “My career. What a shithole.”

“You seem popular enough,” Agnes said. “There were hundreds of people here when I arrived.”

“Popular. Well. Yes.” He looked around the room, at the scattered chairs and deflated balloons and remaining merchandise. “Yes. I suppose so. But I've never found him.”

“You found part of him,” she said, and gestured to the foot.

He smiled at the foot, waved his hand at it. “Oh, the real one was incinerated. I only had a single bone from it, anyway. That's just a replica.”

“Well,” she said, “could have fooled me. Looks like the real thing.”

It helped her somehow to know the foot was a fake. She felt suddenly that she was a fake, too, and that this man in front of her was a fake. If they were all fakes, then none of this was worth crying over.

“So. How can I help you? Are you a fan?”

She was silent for a moment, staring at him searchingly.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am a huge fan.”

He reached forward and took her hand into his own and squeezed it. “One moment,” he said, and went over to a cardboard box sitting on the merch table. When he came back, he held a small wooden skull in his hand—a dog's toy, really—a fake Sasquatch's head. A joke of a thing. She noticed that he had signed it with a permanent marker, a careful, fussy penmanship that spanned the entire cranium.

He pressed it into her hand. “Here you are,” he said. “It's one of the few I have left. Good thing you came when you did.”

“Yes,” she said. “Good thing. Thank you.”

“Ah,” he said. He motioned to two women entering the wide room. “Here are my daughters. They'll help me clean up this mess.” He turned back to her. “What was your name?”

“Agnes,” she said.

He took up her hand again and shook it firmly. “Agnes,” he repeated. Then, matter-of-factly, without a thread of affection or vitriol, he added, “That was my mother's name.”

Was.

He smiled at Agnes politely until she moved aside, and the figures from the hallway approached, one short and dark and plain and the other light and tall and muscular. Her granddaughters. She smiled at them and lingered for a moment, giving everyone more time to recognize her, but their faces remained blank. They spoke to her robotically, polite and inhuman. Like androids, maybe. Naked gesticulating apes. It didn't matter, then, who was related and who was not. It made her ache for Mr. Krantz.

She hurried for the exit.

The trio thought she couldn't hear them, but her hearing was still sharp, and the sound was amplified in the cavernous room. She could hear every word.

The taller daughter said to her dad, “Do you know that old bird? She's a weird one.”

The shorter woman added, “She looks crazy.”

Agnes opened the door, trying to flee before she heard what Eli said next, his tone no longer phony and polite but sincere, admonishing.

“She's nobody,” he said. “And dangerous. Stay as far away from her as possible.”

Agnes was outside now, safe from their words, but she put her palms up against her ears, anyway, as if to keep them warm.

*   *   *

T
HE SHACK WAS
empty when she returned. It reeked of cooked vegetables and Mr. Krantz's ripe body odor, but it was as hollow as an old gourd.

A small piece of paper was left for her, with an address written on it: an apartment in Lilac City. Somehow the new wife had convinced Mr. Krantz to move with her there, no doubt funded by her wealthy parents.

Come visit!
the new wife had written, dotting the
i
's with hearts.
We'd love to host you!

Agnes sat on the new rug. They hadn't taken it with them. She stared at the note for a long time before taking up a pen and scrawling her own words across the top. She folded the note carefully and put it into the pocket of an old housedress. She would hold on to the note for almost two more years, fingering the thinning sheet of paper every morning and every night at Gertrude Elms until she received a pink, lacy announcement one cold January morning that Mr. Krantz and the new wife were expecting a baby.

This was when she took the Gertrude Elms shuttle to the post office to buy an envelope and a stamp, when she finally mailed the faded apartment address to her son.

It was more an act of closure, Agnes told herself, than an act of revenge.

*   *   *

A
T HER LAST
meeting with the Zoophilia Support Group, just before she moved into Gertrude Elms, Agnes reported that she had decided not to seek out her son, after all.