The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (6 page)

“You really need this ugly statue?” Gladys said to him.

“I need it,” he said firmly.

She gave in, reaching into the pocket of her fine lavender dress. “Here,” she told the man, careful to hold the bill so that there was no chance of grazing the man's fingers. “There's your other five, redskin.”

Eli was grateful. The man took the figure from Eli to wrap it in brown paper. He handed the package back to Eli.

“They are not monsters,” he said. “They are men.”

Eli said that, yes, he knew this.

“They are sentenced by God to wander in doom,” the man continued. “He is to be heard but never seen. A vagabond. Only the very gifted can see.”

Eli wanted to hear more. Gladys tugged at his hand. “What else can you tell me?” Eli said.

“S'cwene'y'ti raped my neighbor's favorite horse.”

“Please,” Eli said to the man, and with his hand acknowledged Gladys, who had gasped in disgust and now looked as though she might be sick.

The man grinned at Eli; he had meant to offend her with the lewd joke.

Eli thanked the man stiffly and returned his arm to Gladys's curvy waist.

“I could just faint,” Gladys said. Her head rolled onto his shoulder and he pointed his nose over her hairline, inhaling the scent of jasmine and rose. He remembered his mother's smell.
You women,
he thought, his eyes closing.
Why must you always kill me with your smell?

“Are you okay?” Eli murmured into her hair. “I'm sorry if he shocked you.”

“That old redskin was ripped. They're always ripped. We had loads of them in Omak, you know. Loads and loads. I know all about those people.”

“He's a talented whittler.”

Gladys scoffed. “Wasting his talent on those little monsters. Why, you should have bought one of the sparrows. They were sweet.” Then, more weakly, “Can we stop for a moment?”

They stopped and Gladys lolled against him, her whole body. He pushed his hand into the small of her back for support and felt her torso jump in response. She met him, her legs surrounding one of his legs. She lifted her face to him. They kissed. It was lusty and deep.

Eli forgot about the figurine in his hand. He forgot about Mr. Krantz, about his mother. He muttered into Gladys's lips, words he hardly understood himself, and she muttered back, chewing on him, creating a new language.

“Take me home,” she finally said. “Take me home with you.”

She had set her sights on him, Eli realized, and she would have him. There had never been any doubt in her mind about it. She was a woman who always got exactly what she wanted.

He took up her hand and they threaded their way to the street. Beth and Glen stood together at the stairwell to the pier, watching them. Beth raised a hand, beckoning to them, but Eli didn't feel like acknowledging her. She wasn't nearly so attractive now, hair and clothes ruffled by the wind. He told himself that he'd won the better prize.

“Your place,” Gladys said again. “You, me, and your little monster.”

“You and me,” Eli corrected, and he tucked the package deep within his coat pocket and forgot about it until the next morning.

 

1959

 

 

THE FUNNEL, THE HOURGLASS, THE WINDOW

Gladys, flush-cheeked, pregnant-bellied, her hair freshly washed, tiptoed through the garden to where her husband stood watching the trees.

“The starlings,” Eli said. “They're flocking.”

Gladys looked up, angling a pale, bejeweled wrist to shield her eyes. She wore costly jewelry, rings and bracelets and necklaces that clattered musically when she moved. It was her one demand of her husband, to provide her with the very best. His own taste being fastidious, he was proud to accommodate her. They cultivated an appearance of greatness. When they went out to dinner together at the club or met for lunch at the plaza, people admired them.
The good doctor. The good doctor's wife.

For the most part, Gladys was satisfied with their life. Eli's chosen field, podiatry, was very successful. She would have preferred that he become a cardiologist or neurologist or surgeon, but Eli had always been fascinated by feet and by footprints, and so she had allowed him to choose his specialty with only mild complaint. And good thing! His practice was booming. Their banker fell over himself when Gladys entered his branch, rushing forward to take up her hand. The Roebucks owned a fashionable home filled with furniture that inspired the envy of their handsome friends. Every week, Eli visited a buyer at the department store, a storklike woman who advised him on all women's finery. The stork was impeccable if unnecessary, but he seemed to like the formality of it and always sought her out for advice.

Gladys looked forward to Fridays, when her husband arrived with a box or two under his arm. He never forgot, never came home empty-handed. Gladys unwrapped the packages slowly, deliberately. Her face betrayed no excitement. The quickest way to lose a man, Gladys believed, was to show him too much gratitude. So she expertly raised her face to him and received his kiss and said tonelessly, “Thank you, dear,” whether or not the purchase had pleased her.

The only thing missing from this charmed life, Gladys felt, was a child. She had already lost two—one in the first trimester and one born dead. She had named the stillborn Jonathan after her loving if ignorant father. Jonathan's birth and death had nearly killed Gladys, first from the grueling labor and then from the grief.

Instead of dying, she briefly lost her mind. Organ music played in her ears, a relentless, cheerful waltz that made her want to rise and dance until she dropped dead. Voices chattered at her. She fielded their remarks with a measured patience.

What an intelligent, refined person you are, Mrs. Dr. Roebuck
.

“Oh, my darlings,” she would reply. “How very kind of you to say so.”

Teach us, please, how to be as elegant as you are.

“You are too kind. My poor darlings. How marvelous of you to notice.”

Eli, sitting stiffly at her bedside, had once heard this and asked her, “Gladys, what are you saying? Who are you talking to?”

His voice had shattered the waltz, the voices shrieking in alarm and then gone. Gladys had seen her bedridden, disheveled image in Eli's broad red spectacles. It all came crashing down on her again.

“Leave me alone,” she had moaned.

She had remained inconsolable until they mercifully drugged her to sleep.

Finally, inevitably, as the hormones and the drugs sloughed off, Gladys stabilized. Her mental health—always fragile, always a little shaky—was mostly restored.

The doctor declared her barren, and Gladys begrudgingly accepted this as the truth. She told herself she didn't want children, anyway, dirty, disgusting creatures that they were, and she refused to go to a friend's house unless their children were safely away at school or with a nanny. She lived in this frozen state for nearly two years following Jonathan's death, congratulating herself for being a modern woman, but the sight of a stroller on Main Street unsettled her and she averted her eyes from the baby even if it was a friend's child.

Rarely, only when Eli begged, she undressed for her marital duty and opened her legs to him, staring up at the ceiling while he grunted and stabbed.
Silly, perverted men,
she thought. Men would enjoy anything, as long as it was soft and wet and willing. At least her husband wasn't as bad as some.

He did annoy her sometimes, with his foot fetishes and his monster-tracking. His obsession with the outdoors, with hiking and camping and watching the trees and the sky, was incomprehensible to her. She enjoyed the smell of a rose or the vision of a pink sunset, just like any woman. But she far preferred the city and its tidy, cheerful shops to the dirt and shadow of the woods.

Still, he provided for her and loved her, and she was grateful. And now she had so much more to be grateful for: To everyone's surprise, she was pregnant. Even better, she was far along in the pregnancy, past the point of even Jonathan's stillbirth. She feared for the baby's life, but the doctors told her: All is well. Relax, think positively, drink orange juice. If possible, avoid cigarettes and alcohol and especially coffee. The baby would be “just nifty.” When the doctor had said the word
nifty,
Gladys had stiffened, but Eli had reached over and put a hand protectively on her back, and she knew that this gesture meant,
No matter, I'm here for you; I will always be here for you, and all will be well.

So when her husband called to her to come outside and join him, Gladys went willingly. It was ten-thirty in the morning. She had been polishing the silver at the dining room table, watching him with a droll expression, wondering what had captured his interest.

Birds, apparently.

Tedious, Gladys thought, but she looked up, anyway.

And, admittedly, it was spectacular. Starlings were filthy little birds individually, Gladys thought, but as a collective unit they were magical.

Hundreds—thousands?—of starlings thickened the sky, forming a dark funnel one moment, twisting into an hourglass the next. They swelled and fell like a black wave or like an impending pestilence. Watching them was spellbinding. It was as though they had tethered her painlessly through the chest and would soon tug her airborne.

Gladys murmured her appreciation. She rested a palm on her belly and felt the baby surge, as though it, too, were bound to the flock. Eli stepped closer to her, never taking his eyes from the sky. He kissed her distractedly on the side of the head. Then he removed his glasses with their heavy lenses and began to polish them on his shirt.

The starlings rose and fell, rose and fell. They reassembled themselves into a new shape. Gladys's brow furrowed. It was as though they were spelling a word. She squinted. Yes, she thought. Yes, they were spelling a word.

She read the black letters in the sky.

DOOM.

The starlings fell apart, the word dissolving.
How silly of me
, Gladys thought. The flock sharply returned to itself, hanging in the blue as though nailed to it:

DOOM.

Gladys shoved her knuckles into her eye sockets. There, too, on the backs of her eyelids, were the starlings, white this time in a black sky.

DOOM.

Gladys cried out. She began to shake.

“What's the matter?” Eli asked her.

“The baby,” she sobbed. “The baby is going to die. Not again, Eli. Oh, no, not again!”

He put a hand on her belly. It roiled under his palm. His eyebrows shot up.

“Gladys,” he told her. “You're in labor.”

“Doom,” she bawled. “We're doomed. The baby. Us. We're all doomed.”

Eli struggled with her into the house and then to the carport. Her bag was packed, ready, sitting in the foyer closet alongside their boots and shoes, and she managed in her terrible state to remind him to fetch it. He obeyed with a professional calm that irritated her. They drove to the hospital. Gladys bore her contractions silently now, but the tears fell in droves.

The baby, Gladys was sure, was dead inside her. Lost.
You dumb doomed baby.
She could feel its death plowing through her, soaring toward her heart in one dark twisting line. The starlings were inside her now.

In the sterile little room, the nurse gave her an enema. Gladys wept from the humiliation. They drugged her. She fell into a dreamless sleep.

When she awoke, the baby was placed in her arms, not only alive but lovely, a perfectly defiant little being. Its eyes were lucid, skeptical, even, and it stared at her haughtily, as though it already saw her weakness.

“But how can this be?” she asked.

The nurse brought her a mug of ice chips. “As strong as a bear cub, this little girl. Born last night near midnight.”

Gladys, speechless, cupped the baby's soft pink head with one palm. The baby mewled and then shut her scowling eyes as though to sleep.

“She wanted out, I tell you,” the nurse said cheerfully. “Would you like some broth?”

Gladys thought again of the starlings.

“Where is my husband?”

“At home, maybe? Sleeping one off? I'm sure he had a drink or two after the good news.”

Gladys had her baby now. She was exhausted, relieved, too tired for elation. She leaned back against the pillows and shut her eyes.

“I'll take her back to the nursery so you can rest,” the nurse said.

In Gladys's mind's eye, the starlings unfurled. They were regrouping.

“No,” Gladys said. “Leave her here. Just for a bit. Just for a moment.”

But then the baby's bright bruised eyes reopened. She began to cry. It was a small cry, but it bothered Gladys. It occurred to her that she had no idea how to take care of a baby. She had babysat children, her little sisters, but that was years ago, and she had always hated it. She didn't remember how to feed a baby or bathe her or change her diaper. She wasn't even sure how to kiss her or how to comfortably hold her. Even now, reclining with the baby on her chest, she felt as useless and rigid as a slab of petrified wood.

Was this all that motherhood was? Perpetual, mutating fear? A fear that blackened first this perspective and then shifted and obscured another?

“I've changed my mind,” Gladys said as the nurse turned to leave. “I'm tired, after all. Take her. Take her now, please.”

The nurse obediently retrieved the baby, scooping her up and kissing her almost roughly on the cheek. The baby's cries softened as the nurse bore her into the hallway.

Gladys listened to the cries fade. She'd feel better after some sleep, she told herself, but her heart, made of a thousand black wings, was flinging about in her chest, and she feared what she would see in her dreams.

She fought to stay awake. She was fingering the pages of a ladies' magazine when her husband ambled into the room. She could see that he was happy.