The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (30 page)

She held their large toddler—their older girl—against her chest. Blythe was fast asleep, her plump mouth hanging open, her legs swinging freely. Ginger widened her eyes at Cort in greeting and whispered something he couldn't quite make out, and he smiled and lifted his beer to her as though in solidarity. She disappeared into the hallway and then into Blythe's room, and Cort could hear his wife settling the child into her bed, the springs shifting, Ginger's soft voice clucking, the slow removal of the toddler's shoes. Not a moment later his wife returned to him, wiping at her forehead, holding the shoes in her opposite hand.

“I could not get her down today,” she groaned. “I finally had to just drive around. You know how she is. Fights it tooth and nail.”

He made a small sound of sympathy in his throat.

She eyed him sleepily for a moment and then said, “I think I'll have a beer, too.”

He leapt to his feet to accommodate her. It had been several months since they had enjoyed a beer together. It almost made him forget his rage. But as he snapped the cap off with the bottle opener, his frustration returned. How could she leave their baby alone in the house? Was the door even locked when he returned? No, it hadn't been. He was sure of it. Something was wrong with Ginger, to abandon the girl like that. Postpartum depression, malcontent, whatever. But it was not good parenting. That much was obvious.

He peeked out the back window to make sure his daughter was okay. She was there, considering with intense concentration one of her little fists. She seemed perfectly happy to be outdoors. The fresh air was no doubt doing wonders for her. Regardless, he knew he should hurry his little lesson along. Babies were content for only a few minutes at a time before they overturned a new grievance.

He returned to the living room to find his wife collapsed on the recliner, a forearm thrown over her eyes. She accepted the beer from him with an almost-happy grunt.

“God, I hope she keeps sleeping.”

“Where is she?” he said casually. “Where's Roo?”

“I left her in her crib.” She stopped here, taking a long pull of her beer. Then she said, “I know I shouldn't have done it, Cort. I know. It was horrible of me. I won't do it again. The whole time I was driving, I worried about what she might be doing, but I just had to take care of Blythe first. I just had to. And I started to take the baby with me, but then she would be awake, and I would be, I don't know, more flustered. My energy lately, Cort. My mind. I don't know. Something's not working.”

Your heart,
he wanted to say.
Your heart is not working.
To leave her there alone like that:
How could you?

Still, he did sorrow for her, his wife. He pitied her. She was exhausted, he saw. She was a wildly emotional person. He liked it about her, in fact, but it meant that she was prone to irrationality, to terrible mood swings, to paranoia. Clearly, this had been a deeply irrational moment. Dangerous. He wandered over to the window again and checked on Ruby. She was still there, straight-lipped, alert. Content enough. The eagle was still there, too. He thought of showing the eagle to his wife, but then surely she would see their daughter, and the lesson would be spoiled.

“Should we check on Ruby?” he said.

“Go ahead,” his wife said. “She'll cry if she needs us.”

He sat back down on the couch. He was growing anxious. Much longer and Ruby might grow cold.

“Tell me about the hospital,” Ginger said. “More assholes? More d-bags?”

He told her, quickly, that nothing much had happened, that the day had been, overall, a pleasant if busy affair, and that he was really just happy to be home.

“I'm happy, too.” Ginger smiled. “I feel like it's the first time we've been able to just talk to each other. Without the kids, I mean.” She looked around herself, as if gazing at new surroundings. “Isn't it nice?”

It was nice, but he was becoming anxious, so he avoided a verbal response.

It was as if Ginger knew, as if she were toying with him.

How was it that she always managed to win their battles? How was it that she always, despite everything, triumphed?

But then she said, rising suddenly, her maternal instincts flaring, “Ruby doesn't usually sleep this long.” She went toward the hallway and disappeared into the infant's quiet green room.

Cort held his breath, waiting. What would she do when she saw that the child was missing? Walk into the room, pale and speechless? Sprint for the phone to call 911? What would happen? He feared and desired it equally. It suddenly occurred to him that she might immediately accuse him. Her wrath would fall on him and the lesson would be for naught. If that happened, he decided, he'd play dumb for a few moments, feigning panic himself.

She returned then, unsmiling. “She's fine,” she said. “She's glorious. What a good baby. Sleeping away.”

She collapsed back onto the recliner, threw her forearm over her eyes again, and sighed contentedly, drawing her beer up to her lips.

Cort stood and began nervously pacing. He wanted to check the nursery, too, to see what it was that Ginger had seen, but he dared not. He remained with her in the living room. He sidled up alongside the window and looked outside. There was Ruby, still on her swaddle blanket in the grass, beginning, he could see, to flail about and whine.

Had Ginger seen the child on her way into the house? Maybe she had peered over the gate and noticed her lying on the grass, deciding then and there to boomerang Cort's lesson back to him? Maybe there was a bear or a pillow or a blanket in the crib that looked like a sleeping baby's form? Or did she see a corner of the baby's blanket from Ruby's bedroom window, realizing immediately what Cort had done? Cort wanted to ask, wanted to yell, really, to scream at his wife, and it occurred to him that he had wanted to scream and to yell at her for days now and that he finally had found a good reason to do so.

His eyes lifted from his daughter to the telephone pole. The eagle was gone.

And then the eagle was there again, falling, diving murderously toward the open yard. Cort moved to the back door, filled with an intense concern. He had just stepped onto the stairs when the eagle nearly struck him with her wide black wings. She drew the infant in with her ugly ancient talons and, with some difficulty, lifted her into the air, swaddle blanket and all.

Cort shrieked, leaping for the child. The eagle danced in midair, finding it difficult to rise with her heavy purchase.

“My baby!” Cort yelled. “My little girl!”

Ginger joined him, still grasping her beer. She seemed neither worried nor startled by the episode but only watched the scene unfold with a sort of mute resolve, as if she had expected it all along.
This, too,
she seemed to be thinking,
this, too, is my fault.
Why had he tried to blame her, when she already blamed herself for so much? Cort hated himself for it, and he focused his hatred on the eagle.

He grabbed the baby's chubby legs, bloody now, and he pulled against the eagle with all of his might.

The eagle flapped her wings. The baby wailed. The eagle turned her big head toward Cort and pecked at his fingers.

“I'm not letting go, you fucker,” he cried.

“Don't,” Ginger said. She came forward and put her thumbs in the eagle's eyes. “Don't let go. Whatever you do, Cort, keep fighting.”

She could have been talking about anything. The baby. His career. Their marriage. Her voice was calm and clear.

Cort obeyed his wife. He fought. He had never fought so hard for anything in his whole life. He was determined, just this once, to win.

 

2004

 

 

THE GLUE FACTORIES

“Some of you are required to be here,” the man at the podium said. “Some of you are here voluntarily. Whoever you are, why ever you're here, welcome. Showing up is the first step. So I congratulate you. We welcome you with open arms to our little ZSG family.”

The man applauded himself loudly. A few women lifted their palms and clapped them mechanically together, like toy monkeys. A large chalkboard behind the man was filled with his name:
MR. DONALD.

Mr. Donald—flushed, narrow-faced, heavily eyebrowed—continued, “We're the Zoophilia Support Group's first women-only Inland Empire chapter, and no doubt some of you have come from as far as Banff or Missoula to seek help. To all of you: Welcome! This is a safe place. We're all here to help one another. We're here to stop loving beasts. We're here to begin loving ourselves!”

The women sat in their metal chairs, arranged in various postures of disquietude. The chairs were in a lopsided semicircle so that everyone faced the creaking black podium. Mr. Donald spoke directly into the microphone, although there was no clear need for amplification. The room was small and smelled of burnt toast. It was the dead of winter, and the air flowing from the vents was scalding hot.

“Can you say it with me?” the man said.
“Stop loving beasts! Start loving myself!”

Half of the women responded in kind. Half of them did not.

Introductions began, moving clockwise. Some of the women wept as they spoke. Many of them spoke hesitantly, softly, so that everyone had to lean in, cupping their ears, to hear the exact confession.

There was Morgan, who repeatedly used her cat to massage her loins.

There was Hilary, who made love to her horse, not just once but over and over again, until her husband discovered them and threatened to send them both to the glue factories.

Next to Hilary sat Flannery, plump and bashful, who had married her dog in a stunning lakeside ceremony, an event that had horrified her parents to no end. Flannery was pregnant. She was unsure of what to do with the impending litter.

And then there was Agnes Krantz: the lone nonagenarian; wrinkled and slim; wearing a small wooden ring on her thumb, which she twirled nervously as she spoke.

“I'm not sure I'm in the right place,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “I don't know if I belong here.”

The women stared at her blankly.

“But I need a change,” she said. Speaking was difficult. She was unused to addressing anyone but her husband. The words fell from her mouth like dull filthy rocks. “I can't go to my son. My son wouldn't understand.”

Oh, yes,
the faces watching her said.
Oh, yes.
The sons especially. The sons especially did not understand.

“My husband is a man, you see, but my son would call him a woodland ape. He studies these things, I've learned. My son would skin my husband alive. He would use chemicals to melt the flesh from the bones and then hang them in a glass box at the university.”

The women had stopped nodding along with her. They glanced at one another, alarmed.

“But I love him. My husband. Truly I do.” She rested her sore, arthritic wrists on her knees. She was wearing her husband's old top hat. She wore clothes that she had fished out of the ZSG charity box: an oversize hunting jacket (so wonderfully warm!), a man's white tank top, a slightly scuffed pair of jeans. The new clothes felt strange on her, luxurious. It made her realize how sick she was of her old sweaters and dresses—the ones she'd had for years and years, stolen from backyard clotheslines in Rathdrum—which she washed once a week in the creek. “I love him so much,” she continued. “I gave up everything for him, even my son. And he repaid me by being the best husband a woman could imagine.”

Mr. Donald—their group leader—touched his bow tie. He regarded her with firm but encouraging eyes. He leaned into the microphone. “And what happened to this ‘man-beast' for which you sacrificed everything?”

Mr. Donald's voice was loud, hollow. He asked as though he already knew the answer, which he did.

The day before, Mr. Donald had come across Agnes in the forest. She had been walking toward the swimming hole, wearing enormous boots and a giant sweater and not much else. She was carrying a load of laundry. He had been coming back from the creek himself, dressed warmly against the winter weather, whistling a sunny tune. He wiped a hand off on his pants before offering it to her. He noted that she was living like an animal, and he encouraged her to attend a meeting.
There is a better life,
he had told her,
an easier life. A Christian life,
he said. Agnes normally would have spit in his eye, but with the way things had turned recently, she was curious. She accepted his business card and the crude map he drew for her. She kept the meeting a secret from Mr. Krantz—not that he would have judged her. There were no restrictions in their relationship, except for those that she gave herself.

Agnes looked away from Mr. Donald now, away from all of them, out the window, toward the distant woods. “He has a new wife,” she said. “A young wife. A silly thing. Pretty and naïve. Not that I can blame him. Compared with me, he's hardly aged. He's still beautiful, you see. He's still strong. And look at me. Look at how I am now.”

She spread open her hunting jacket and opened her arms to them. Even that was an effort. Her arms shook. The flesh dripped from her throat and eyes. She was spotted, gray and brown, like an owl. The women regarded her sadly. She closed her arms, pulled on the hunting jacket, shivered despite the room's oppressive heat.

“So I came here, I guess. For a change.”

“We're here to help you,” Mr. Donald said. “We love you and support you. We want you to start loving yourself.”

He clapped thunderously into the microphone, and the bedraggled women around Agnes eventually joined in, applauding shyly. Then, with an apologetic smile and a tap of his watch face, the man shifted his gaze to the woman seated to Agnes's left. Her name was Wanda. She had an unnatural interest in her pet ferret, who, she said affectionately, was named Carl.