The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (18 page)

They walked together to the Jaguar, the old man following them, speaking to them in a low, foul voice.

Marion opened Amelia's door for her before moving to the driver's seat. Their swimsuits were wet and uncomfortable against the fine leather. Marion, for the first time in his adult life, was stupid with nerves. They had left some items scattered on the beach, but to go back for them now seemed ridiculous. The old man followed Amelia and babbled at her incoherently through the open window. Despite the intense heat, despite the broken air conditioner, Amelia rolled up the window in his face.

Marion feared the man would get into the Jaguar, maybe crawl in and drape himself across their laps. Instead, he touched Amelia's window and looked at her for a long moment. He was still leaning there, staring at the spot where her face had been, when Marion drove away.

“What the fuck was that?” Marion asked.

“Pull over,” Amelia said, clawing at the door latch.

“What the fuck, Amelia? Who the fuck was that?”

“Pull the car over, Marion. I'm freaking out. Something's wrong.”

“You're goddamn right something's wrong. There's a shitload of water in here. And no towel. We left our towels back there. My fucking backpack with the weed in it. Not to mention twenty bucks.”

There was a loud slurping sound. Marion assumed it was Amelia's wet jeans shorts sticking against the leather seats.

“Pull over,” Amelia shrieked.

Marion pulled the Jaguar tightly against the narrow shoulder of the byway. Amelia opened the door and tumbled to the ground, falling hard onto her knees. “Marion,” she cried from the side of the road. “Get out. There's something in there. I saw it. A monster. A lake monster. Get out. Come with me.”

She's hysterical,
Marion thought uneasily.
She's totally lost it.
Cars honked and sped by them. They could die out here on this narrow road.

Marion loved Amelia, but he wasn't going to play her childish games.

Not out here, not like this.

“Get in the car, kid,” Marion said smoothly. “We'll be in Leavenworth by three. We'll be in the fucking mountains.”

“Marion,” Amelia said desperately, her voice cracking. “Come with me. We'll take a bus. We'll go back home.”

“You've had too much sun, girlie. You're talking crazy.”

“Please,” Amelia sobbed. “Not the car.”

God, Marion thought. Was he going to have to get out and drag her back into the Jaguar? Drag her by her hair, like a caveman? Passing cars slowed, the people in them gaping. Surely a cop car would follow. Marion did not want to be picked up for statutory rape, for kidnapping.

Fucking Christ, what had he been thinking? He was such a creep. He could have punched himself in the face for his own stupidity. He deserved all of this.

“I want to go home,” Amelia wept. “Please. Please. I want to go home.”

She was a child now, a tall, sunlit child, screaming by the side of the road. There was nothing mature or impressive about her. She was just some spoiled kid and the fun had run out. Marion felt cheated.

“You little bitch,” he said. “You little spoiled rotten bitch. Go die on the side of the road. See if I care.” He leaned across the passenger seat and slammed her door shut. Then he peeled out, grimly satisfied to see her coated with the Jaguar's kicked-up dust.

He flew along the side of the lake, cursing angrily. He pressed his foot down on the pedal. He knew that in a few minutes he would give up and turn around and go back to her. This made him grind the gears more vigorously.

He was cresting a scenic road overlooking the water when the slurping sound came back.

Lake monster,
he laughed.

Then it happened again and he knit his brow.

It was coming from the glove box. Without slowing down, with one hand on the wheel, he reached over and snapped the box open.

An enormous dark fish—mouth like a suction cup, opaque eyes—flung itself from the interior of the glove box. It was mostly dead and flopping. Marion screamed and swerved from the byway.

He was still screaming when some calmer part of his brain told him,
It's not a lake monster, asshole: It's a walleye. An enormous dead walleye, crammed by that goofy old fucker into your glove box.

He had caught walleyes with his grandfather in a similar lake, back in the days before he became a pervert, before he became a creep. His grandfather, he remembered, was a bit of a creep himself, if not a pure asshole like Marion's dad. But no one was a creep out there on the water, not when they were fishing walleyes in the early fall. In those instances, they were just an old man and a boy; they were simple fishermen. Marion was a decent kid. Not an amazing kid, but also not a creep. What would it take, he wondered, to get back to some better, simpler life? A life where he owned a small rowboat? Where he fished on the weekends? Maybe where he had a grandson all his own?

But it was too late now.

He was an adult, jobless and floundering. His grandfather was dead. His father cared little about what he did.

You're a loser,
his father would say as he opened his wallet.
Always have been. It's the Latin in you. Your goddamn mother. Well, might as well have a good time.

What if he spoke back to his dad? Called him a racist piece of shit? Called him a rich useless asshole?

But it was too late now.

Marion was a sex addict and a statutory rapist and now a kidnapper. He had stolen a car. He had stolen this teenage girl and then abandoned her on the side of a dangerous road.

Too late.

The Jaguar had already crashed through the guardrail and plunged nose-first with great velocity into the lake. Water poured in through the open windows, pushing at him with powerful hands, the palms thick and cold, the palms of his dad.

Stay down. Stay right where you are.

It would be so easy to give up, Marion thought, almost like giving in to a generous kindness.

You were heading nowhere special, anyway.

He sank.

At the bottom of the lake, the walleyes converged. They came to him with their somber faces, their opaque eyes. They regarded him balefully in the murk. Marion's own face changed, drawing in on itself, rapidly aging. Detached as he now was from his body, oxygen-deprived, near insanity, Marion saw his own face: It was not the youthful handsome face of his recent years. It was the face of the old man in Electric City, the old man who was also a creep. Marion saw all of this and was thrilled. He felt he was dancing with all of the lost possibilities. He danced and twirled.

The walleyes gathered in the water patiently, waiting with their endless dull hunger for Marion to stop thrashing.

 

1978

 

 

SNARE TRAP

It was September, dry and warm, when Eli returned to Lost Creek. It had been a few years since his last visit. He was returning for abandoned equipment—a sonar piece of crap that had never really worked but that he wanted back, regardless, simply because he was trying to make a fresh go of things. The sonar detector was missing, but, fumbling through the underbrush, Eli uncovered a different treasure nearby.

It was a bone. A foot bone. Long and lean. To Eli's trained eye, it was clearly a metatarsus.

It was caught in a rusted snare trap, pierced by a sharp metal tooth. It had been here for some time; the bone was ivory but filthy and almost, in the sunlight, yellow. There was no flesh and no other bone—all evidence had been stripped bare, chewed up, dispersed, or consumed by natural elements. All that remained was this long, lone bone.

Even from above, squinting down at the thing, Eli could see that it was not the metatarsus of a typical woodland mammal. It was, at first glance, human. But it was far too large, too fat, to belong to a normal man.

Eli's heart raced.

He knew exactly whose bone this was.

It belonged to Mr. Krantz.

*   *   *

E
LI REMEMBERED
K
RANTZ'S
feet very clearly; he recalled perfectly the impressions they'd made in the dirt outside his home, when Mr. Krantz had fled with Agnes. Eli's obsession with the footprints, so monstrous beside the dainty footprints of his mother, had led him down pathways geographical, emotional, professional; they led him into the woods, into loneliness, into podiatry and beyond. In the days following Agnes's disappearance, Eli had stood in the yard, staring down into those mismatched tracks. His father had stood with him, incredulous, grief-stricken, faking cheerfulness for the sake of his young son. At first, Greg liked to insist that she'd left against her will, dragged into the woods by her tormentor or even carried, but they both saw the willing path she'd left in the dirt. Soon a rain came, bringing with it thunder and lightning and erasure. The prints were gone. Greg could pretend whatever he liked now, but Eli had memorized the feet. Their imprints would be on the backs of his eyelids forever, flashing in neon pinks and purples and reds and yellows, whenever he closed his eyes.

Eli was a cautious man. Despite his desire to bend down and touch the foot bone, even sniff it, embrace it, he held back. He'd need to suffer through long days of testing to prove that the bone was not from a deformed bear or a giant human or an escaped zoo animal. Then would come the abstract, the scientific paper, the rejections at various scientific magazines, the inevitable jeering response of the scientific community. No matter how careful he was, how thorough, he would be thwarted by nonbelievers, so it was of utmost importance not to get too ahead of himself.

But, look! The metatarsus was flat and sleek, despite its hairline fracture from the snare trap. It was clearly the bone of a flat-footed, flat-sauntering apelike creature. Humans walked more on their toes, creating a metatarsus that was more crushed, punished, by the force of gravity. Not so with this bone!

Not that he needed proof.

This was Mr. Krantz's foot bone. Of that, Eli was sure.

The problem now was to prove it to the world.

Eli fingered the foothold snare, turning it over delicately, careful not to disturb the bone. Grass and moss clung to both the metatarsus and the trap. He considered depressing the levers to release the foot bone into his hands but then decided it might be best to take the entire specimen with him.

He lingered for several minutes, wondering.

It was Sunday, he remembered, and the SNaRL office was closed for the weekend. He had founded SNaRL—the Sasquatch National Research Lab—around the time when he married Vanessa, and it was one of the best moves he'd made as a cryptozoologist. It had become a thoroughfare for news of sightings and rumors regarding not only Sasquatch but a host of other Northwest beasts: the Pend Oreille Paddler, a man-sized tick outside Cle Elum, a three-headed Chinook in the Columbia (the latter was written off as an environmental disturbance caused by the nearby Hanford Site). Its focus remained on Sasquatch, however, and Eli refused to receive any information, no matter how promising, without forcing it through his gauntlet of serious scientific process. While this limited the availability of useful data, it also bolstered Eli's reputation in the academic community. Despite his unconventional interests, he was a dedicated, respected researcher. The office was mostly peopled by interns from Lilac City's community colleges, who signed on with SNaRL for a semester or two to fulfill credit requirements. Some of them were smart, ambitious kids, but a lot of them were lazy shits. Eli enjoyed giving them a challenging workload, and a few of them whined or quit. Eli wanted these naïve students to realize that he was not performing circus acts here. He was engaged in hard science. He hoped that each of them would leave with their belief system shaken to its core. Tomorrow, for example, he would school them on the rigors of scientific analysis.

Eli touched the bone gingerly. He wondered if he should stay the night here, sleep with the bone, make sure that it didn't up and hop away.

And then, shaking his head, he decided to release it, to protect it in the lab. He depressed the levers. The trap groaned but held its grip. It was rusted shut. There was no choice but to take the entire snare trap with him, lest he disturb its precious cargo.

Cradling the large trap and its fragile contents in his hands, he hiked back through the forest to his car and then drove to the closest gas station.

He stood at a pay phone for a moment, fingering the coins in his pocket, and then phoned Vanessa.

If his wife was excited for him, it was tempered by what he assumed was her usual mother-hen concern.

“So,” he said. “I'll be at the lab tonight. I want to prepare the metatarsus for testing. It's going to be a long day tomorrow.”

Vanessa was silent.

“What?” Eli asked. “What is it?”

She reminded him of Ginger's piano recital. Had he forgotten?

“No,” he said.

She waited.

“Okay. Yes. I forgot.”

And, by the way (Vanessa reminded him), he had promised Ginger that even if bombs fell and blew up the church, even if it rained fire and brimstone, he would still be there,
ON TIME, DADDY
, to watch her and other tone-deaf preschoolers plunk away on the keys as the world burned around them.

Christ,
he thought.

Yes.

He had promised.

Ginger was an earnest, dramatic little creature. Every emotional pinprick was like being attacked with a chain saw. After he had missed her tumbling routine the month before, she had sobbed on and off for a week, all the while saying in a sweet little voice that broke Eli's heart, “I know you didn't mean to miss it, Daddy. I know. I don't know why I'm so sad,” and then she would cry afresh.

Eli's other daughter had never been so sensitive. In fact, Amelia was insensitive. Why was it children were always the exact opposite of their siblings? What sort of chaos or balance did that explain about the world?