The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (5 page)

He squirmed in his chair, struggling for something to say. “Just say anything at all,” Beth had advised him earlier, teasing him for his quiet nature. “Say whatever silly thing comes into your head. Women don't care what you say, so long as you say it with confidence.”

He forced himself to speak now, however woodenly.

“I wouldn't mind,” he said, “getting a good drunk on tonight.”

Beth sat up and regarded him, bright-eyed, interested.

So,
Eli mused sourly,
it's true.

“I wouldn't mind,” he continued, with more confidence, “getting so drunk that I swim in the Sound.”

“There we go!” said Beth proudly.

Glen cleared his throat. “I think I'll join you, my good man.”

“Funny,” Gladys said, “that's precisely what Jim said before he died.”

*   *   *

A
FTER DINNER AND
drinks, the four of them ambled downhill to the Pike Place Market. Somehow both women clung to Glen's arms as they walked. Eli walked slowly behind them, hands in his jacket pockets, hat low over his brow, pretending to be at ease. The perfume of the girls floated back to him, laced with the smell of formaldehyde. From the back, he noticed Gladys's good legs, plump and strong in their sheer black stockings. Her dress, too, was of a finer quality than Beth's. It was a stiff, flattering lavender, while Beth wore a floppy, homely plaid. Both women wore similar coats and hats, which Beth had told him they'd purchased together during a recent shopping trip.

“She has the most luscious taste,” Beth had told him a few days before. “I ask her advice on everything fashion-wise. You two are just going to eat each other up!”

They had not fallen passionately in love, but dining with her wasn't half bad. In fact, midway through the meal, when Beth disappeared, taking her summery smile and lovely arms with her to the bathroom, Eli had realized that Gladys was very attractive. She was like a plainer, quieter moon, being drowned out by the noise and fire of the sun. When the sun set—when it left for the bathroom, say, to powder its nose—then the moon glowed quite beautifully. Maybe even more beautifully?

“Look at that man over there,” Gladys had said conspiratorially, setting down her forkful of shrimp and touching Eli lightly on the wrist. “Look at how wide his shoulders are. I'll bet he plays football.”

Eli had leaned into her, not really caring about the man's shoulders but thrumming slightly from the fingers that had grazed his skin. He suddenly imagined himself in bed with her, beneath her, his face covered with her glossy black hair.

“What do you think?” Gladys asked him.

“What?”

“About his shoulders? Aren't they very large? Very masculine?”

It occurred to him that she was trying to make him jealous. He lifted up his napkin and smiled into it. He was flattered.

“Oh, yes,” he said, returning the napkin to his lap. “Quite masculine.”

Glen, listening to them from his side of the table, cleared his throat. “I know that man. His name is Scott. I've seen him swimming at Alki Beach. You wouldn't believe this, Gladys, but shirtless he's very fat.”

“No!” Gladys exclaimed. “You lie!”

“Those shoulders,” Glen said, “are pink and mottled, like two raw ham hocks. He's a fatty, Gladys. Don't trust a man's beauty until you see him in the nude.”

Eli considered his own small frame, his nearly hairless pallor. Glen laughed.

“I'm kidding, sweetheart,” he said to Gladys, and leaned forward, snapping up her empty glass and shaking it in the air. A waiter rushed forward to retrieve it. “Really, Scott's an absolute god naked. I've nearly wept from his beauty. Truly.”

Gladys turned to Eli. “I don't like big shoulders, fat or no,” she said. “I mean, a man can have them, surely, but I don't think they mean he's got any real intelligence in his head.”

“You know what they say about big shoulders,” Glen joked, more to himself than to them.

“Now,” Gladys said, “glasses are something else. Glasses indicate a
reader,
a man who is
learned
. Glasses tell a girl,
Here is a man who enjoys a good, thick book.
No, it's certain. I much prefer glasses to shoulders. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Roebuck?”

She still insisted on calling him Mr. Roebuck, despite his protests. She was a formal girl. Eli couldn't help but admire her attempt at elegance.

Elegant or not, she was flirting with him. Eli adjusted his own spectacles on his nose and gave her a wink. Not in character for him at all, but she received the wink with a slow flutter of her own lashes, and he thought,
My God, she's the one, isn't she?
He was going to sleep with her. He could feel it in his bones. Surely a girl like this would divulge some good secrets in bed. He would be sure to keep his glasses on for the performance.

But right at that moment Beth returned, beaming.

“What'd I miss? What are you grinning about over there? You look like two jack-o'-lanterns. Plotting against me, I see.”

Just like that, the sun rose, washing out the moon. A bit breathlessly, Eli watched Beth move. Glen was equally captivated, leaping to his feet and pulling out Beth's chair. Glen planted a lingering kiss on her flushed cheek. Beth pulled away with a flirty swat. She was lightly disheveled, winsome, and athletic. Eli's throat tightened. His confidence with Gladys shifted. He would never be the sort of man to attract a girl like Beth. And when there was a Beth in the world, why would anyone wish to be with a Gladys?

Next to him, Gladys re-crossed her ankles. If she noticed his love for her friend, she was unmoved. Her expression remained the same: sharp, observant, her mouth a wry red slash, her face as smooth as limestone, her hair perfect, not a black strand out of place, her posture remarkable. She reminded him of a fine white Roman statue.

And why, Eli had asked himself, would you love a statue, when you could love a living, breathing, vivid woman like Beth?

But now, walking behind the two young women, he did not take such a bleak view. In the broad grim light, bright if clouded over, it was clear that Gladys was the looker of the two. Gladys was the sort of woman destined for great things. He could see her running her own art gallery or posing, unsmiling, for the cover of a famous magazine. Beth, on the other hand, was destined only to nurture. She would be a beloved housewife, a doting mother. She had once confided to Eli that she had only entered nursing school to meet a wealthy, handsome husband. Nothing wrong with that, Eli had said. Gladys, however, had moved to Seattle from rural Washington with a more ambitious agenda: to escape her potato-farming parents and her dull sisters. She wanted excitement and recognition for her great beauty and intelligence. Beth drew up now, removing her arm from Glen's, to come and walk with Eli.

“Isn't she lovely?” she whispered.

He relished the arm she slipped through his own. He pressed it to his ribs.

“Yes,” he said. “She's a looker.”

“She was a beauty queen at a rodeo, you know,” Beth continued eagerly. “Several times over, I think. You should ask her about it. It's a riot. She describes it as standing in manure with a tin tiara on her head.” Beth laughed, shaking her pretty curls. “Gladys knee-deep in cow manure! Unholy image! I can't picture it at all!”

Eli, however, pictured it perfectly. It explained her feigned regality. She loathed her homeland. She gleamed like a polished onyx knife among those dull gray denizens. She thought every day about how to get out and how to never return; it was similar to how he believed sex would deliver him from the memory of his mother. Sinking into another woman, releasing the old ghost.

The market came into view with its cluttered awnings, its coursing crowds. A picket line of machinists stood somberly in the human traffic, holding signs about the aircraft plant. Seagulls pitched and plummeted overhead, driven crazy by the smells of fish and fried bread.

“Get back to work, you lazy bums,” Glen shouted at the machinists, and they glared back at him mutely. “Union goons, the lot of you.”

“Oh, leave 'em be,” Beth chided. “They're true blue.” To Eli she said, “My brother's a machinist, you know. Boeing is a bear. All these men want is seniority protection and a ten-cent raise.”

“Fucking unions,” Glen said loudly, turning back to them, “ruining this country.”

“Saving it is more like it,” Beth muttered, more to herself than to anyone else, but Eli heard her.

Glen put his arm around her waist and drew her away from Eli's side. “What's that, doll?”

Beth's face unclouded and she tossed her shoulders. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Isn't it a wonderful evening? Aren't we having a splendid time?”

Beth's destiny, Eli saw sadly, was to succumb to a man in just this way. It struck him as weak and unfair.

Gladys walked next to him now. They pushed past the machinists. Eli took her elbow and guided her forward. He met the eye of one machinist and, thinking of Beth, smiled. The man noticed and nodded in return.

“Poor things,” Gladys said to him. “They'll lose their jobs. It won't be worth it in the end.”

“Even so,” Eli said, “it's good to stand for something.”

“My father stood for many things,” Gladys said. “He became a drunk.”

Eli thought of his own father, ill now, nearing death. He received a letter every few weeks, asking him to come home. There was not much time left to him, Eli knew, but it didn't matter. Eli did not want to return. He did not want to see his father in that bed, curling the sheet between his skeletal fingers. He did not want to see the woods, where his favorite dogs were buried, and maybe where his mother was dead, too.

“It's not a bad thing, to have opinions,” Eli said.

“Every man has an opinion,” Gladys countered calmly, “but a true man
acts
rather than speaks.”

Eli rolled his eyes.
A true man.
How quaint. Gladys was a bit of a bore, wasn't she? Beth would never make such silly generalizations; Gladys was a phony. Eli suddenly felt that he hated Gladys and her carefully arranged perfection. She was too much like him.

And then, as if to prove him wrong, Gladys stumbled. Not just stumbled but fell, sprawling, to the cement. Eli momentarily glimpsed her complicated black underpinnings in the spectacular explosion of fabric, and his heart lurched. He rushed to help her to her feet, and she rose, sputtering, near tears, as shocked with her gracelessness as he was.

“The sidewalks here,” she complained, shaking. “The gulls.”

There had been no gulls near them, but Eli wrapped an arm around her waist, leading her onward, feeling protective of her and irrationally mighty.

“You are very beautiful,” he said to her, thinking not of her girdle or her stockings but of her face.

She grew shy, or feigned shyness well. The shaking almost immediately stopped.

“You are a gentleman, sir,” she said, but she gave his hand a squeeze that was as far from formal as the cow pastures in which she had been raised.

She wanted to be a good person, Eli thought, but she was not. No woman was. No man was, for that matter.

They walked under the awnings of the market, listening to the caterwauling of the fishmongers, smelling the fatty, metallic scent of sea life. Beth looked over her shoulder at them and smiled approvingly, noting their new closeness. She would gloat about her matchmaking abilities for years. Eli's crush on Beth would never diminish, not even when she died in her late forties—quite suddenly—of meningitis, leaving her many children motherless but aware of how lucky they'd been to have her in the first place.

For now, all four of the party—Eli, Gladys, Beth, and Glen—were healthy and well. They were capable of anything: love and sex, hatred and ruin. They had oceanic lives ahead of them, or so they believed.

A table off to the side of a florist's booth caught Eli's attention. He was still holding his date's waist as he pushed closer to it.

A man sat in a chair beside the table, his deft hands whittling a small piece of wood. On the table were a dozen or so wooden figurines. The handwritten sign before him read:
DALE BIRD, FAMOUS WHITTLER OF THE SPOKAN TRIBE
.

Eli stared down at the figurines, incredulous. He released Gladys almost roughly.

“May I?” he asked the man, his hands hovering over the largest of the figurines, and the man shrugged.

Eli picked up the figure. It was heavier and denser than it looked, almost as if it were petrified.

“What is it?” Gladys asked, sounding amused. “A monster?”

The man shook his head impatiently. “S'cwene'y'ti,” he said. “Tall Man of Burnt Hair.”

“Sounds like a monster to me,” Gladys said.

Eli hardly heard her. He ran his fingers over the hulking shoulders of the figurine. He caressed the face, jagged with the impression of hair.

It was Mr. Krantz.

Mr. Krantz, with his matted fur, his small eyes, his colossal figure.

Eli remembered the smell of burnt hair. With it, his mother's floral perfume. He stroked the figure's wide flat feet.

“How much is this?” he demanded.

The man stopped whittling and considered him. “Ah. You've seen him. S'cwene'y'ti.”

“How much for this?” Eli repeated, and the man, amused, shrugged again.

“Ten dollars,” he said.

Eli fumbled in his pocket for a bill.

“Oh, come now,” Gladys protested. “You're being rooked.”

Eli brought out a five-dollar bill. He showed it to the man, and the man shook his head.

Eli began to argue with him.

“Ten dollars,” the man said firmly. “Ten.”

Eli looked at Gladys desperately. With her drawn white face and black hair, she seemed out of place in the colorful market. She belonged in a fairy tale, Eli felt. The one his father had read to him as a boy, the one about the huntsman who ripped out the heart of a deer.
Yes,
he thought.
Snow White.