The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (37 page)

It was the ghost of his young self. There was no doubt.

*   *   *

V
ANESSA NOTICED THE
missing Winchester on her return from the grocery store and asked him where it had gone. It had sat sentry for days in the utility room, and he could tell that its presence—and now its absence—made her jumpy.

Vanessa did not believe that she was a pushy woman, but she was the pushiest Eli had ever met, however tacitly. His first wife had been pushy, too, although not as clever. Vanessa was excellent at playing dumb. Gladys would never have allowed herself to try; she would rather seem crazy than incompetent.

“Oh,” he said. “I've put it away. I won't be needing it for a while, I don't think.”

“Hmm,” Vanessa said with forced insouciance. “I thought I'd make steaks for dinner.”

This, then, was his reward. She was already cracking open the red wine. It was a pleasant dinner, and Eli was momentarily cheered.

But the next morning, stepping onto the front porch to smoke his cigar, he put his fingers against the railing and carefully studied the sloppy pencil scrawl of his dead father.

The Harms 9710 palouse hwy comeby anytime.

He didn't even tell Vanessa. He just left: stubbed out his cigar on the top cement step and left it there in the way that she hated (
Use the coffee can, Eli! That's what I put it there for!
), got in his car, drove away. She had been rambling at dinner about Ginger, about her recently finalized divorce from Cort, about their sweet grandchildren. She was delighted with the prospect of Ginger moving back in with them. She argued for it daily. He had listened to Vanessa halfheartedly, pleasantly buzzing from the wine.
Sure,
he had said,
she can move in here. The kids, too. Sure. Why not? Might be a good thing—the noise, the chaos, the energized voices. Might be just the thing they need.

He had asked Vanessa about her poetry. “Written anything lately?” he had asked.

She had frowned into her wineglass. “Well, no,” she'd replied. “I've been so busy.”

With what? What did they busy themselves with nowadays? What, after all of these years, was there left to do?

It seemed as if every day she came home with some large purchase from some distant store—never anything for herself but something for the house, or some new pants for him, or a present for the grandchildren, or a bag of exotic groceries, most of which ended up in the trash.

It was as though there were some large hole behind the house that she hoped to fill with acres of newly purchased crap.

We need this,
she would say.
I need to go get that for us. They need this. You need this.

But she never said,
I need.
And especially not
I want.
Wanting would be too unimportant.

The two of us are pathetic,
Eli thought as he turned onto the winding gray ribbon of the Palouse Highway. They wanted major responsibilities, ways to be involved, but they were at the age where nothing further was expected of them. No doubt this was why Vanessa was practically begging Ginger to come and stay with them for a while, why she begged to babysit the grandkids. This was why he was firing rifle shots into the forest. Just to have an impact. Positive or negative. Inspire or destroy.

“You asshole,” he muttered, and he was not talking to himself—he was talking, as he frequently did, to Mr. Krantz, that elusive, selfish piece of shit. He spoke to him the way an angry zealot speaks to God, desperately and bitterly.
Why have you forsaken me,
he might have said. It was a similar powerlessness.

He had been on the verge of proving his existence nearly a dozen times over, but the evidence would recede from him like a wave, and the reality of it would turn to water in his hands and drip away as cold useless possibility.

His wife indicated that she understood; she felt the same way about her poetry.
So elusive,
she would say,
just like your Sasquatch.

She tried to relate to him in this manner, but it did not, for him, compute.

He poured himself into his work. She simply avoided it.

There was, he felt, no contest.

*   *   *

T
HE
H
ARMS LIVED
in a small pale-yellow home that had once been white but was now stained an unhealthy urine color from persistent wind and dust. It sat at the top of a tall bare butte, displaying an impressive view of the rolling Palouse farmland. It was winter now, the ugly season, when all of the bright colors had been drained from the world, but still Eli admired the icy brown earth, the white-laced sky. It was cold but snowless. The air was dry and sharp and smelled of cow shit.

An old lonely mare stood behind a beat-up fence. She was as brown and ice-streaked as the field on which she stood. Eli drew close and attempted to rub the furry plate between her ears, but she tossed her head and breathed heavily through her nostrils, and he sensed her disdain. He left her alone and went to the front porch.

The boy came to the door and Eli sucked in a breath. He stared at this vision of his younger self. Little Eli stared back at him with a wry mouth, as though he had been expecting Grown Eli's visit.

He pulled open the screen door and said, “What're you doing, mister? Better get inside. Don't let out the heat.”

Eli withdrew his hat and entered, and Little Eli politely asked if he'd like to sit down.

“I'd forgotten how nice I was,” Eli said to the boy. “I forgot all about that.”

The boy smiled patiently and accepted the doctor's hat and went to hang it on the coatrack.

It was not Eli's exact childhood home—he had grown up near Stateline, some twenty miles away—but the similarities between the two were striking. The furniture was spare and masculine, the windows small but washed. The smell of burning wood and soap permeated the air, a smell so familiar that Eli wanted to lie down and press his nose into the cold wooden floorboards. The only warmth in the room—a thick, gathering blanket of it—pushed at him from the wide-bellied woodstove in the corner. Through a small charred window in the stove's belly, he could see the logs burning, cheerful amber twigs cracking and snapping. He thought of the color of his mother's hair, of Amelia's hair.

The boy returned to the dark-green couch and sat at its opposite end, his posture perfectly erect, his little fingers entwined on his lap. A dog padded into the room from what must have been the kitchen, and the boy lit up at the sight of him. Forgetting himself, he collapsed onto his knees and wrapped his arms around the animal's neck.

“I always loved dogs, didn't I?” Eli said.

The boy, smiling, patting the dog's head, said, “Me, too.” He kissed the wrinkled folds of flesh on the dog's forehead. “This is Lethe.”

“Lethe?” Eli said. “Like the river?”

“Like the dog,” the boy said.

Loud sounds rang from the tail of the house, someone stomping the earth from their boots. A man emerged from the kitchen. The boy's father. Eli rose to his feet and offered his hand.

“Mr. Harm,” he said.
Hello, Dad.

“Hello again,” the man replied, declining the hand, holding up his soiled fingers for inspection. “I was killing a chicken. I apologize for my clothes.”

A wide random pathway of blood ran across his fingers and coat.

He continued, “I was distracted and did a poor job.”

“I'm pleased to hear people still do that,” Eli said. He felt silly as he said it. He sounded like a visitor to a foreign country, appreciating the native's exotic behaviors. He worried about being offensive. “I mean, I did that, as a boy. I would help you—my dad, that is—I would help my dad kill our chickens. I hated it, but I did it.”

“My son hates it, too,” Mr. Harm said. “Still, he has to learn. Important to know where your food comes from, I say.”

“Yes,” Eli agreed. He looked at the boy, playing on the floor with his dog, and his eyes watered. “He's a beautiful boy,” he said, and Mr. Harm glowed with pride.

“He is. And smart. Smarter than me. Kid could do anything one day. Be a lawyer. Be a doctor. He'll go places, this guy.”

If Little Eli heard them, he hid it well, but Eli knew that he was drinking in every word, letting it settle into his bones, where it would sit until his last days, as warm and subtle as the woodstove's final embers. It would propel him to do those things, to enroll in university classes, to study hard, to become a doctor. It would become a nearly impossible place from which to rebel.

“It's hard for a boy,” Eli said. “Hard for him because he's sensitive. But you're doing right by him. All a boy needs is his father, if the father's a good one. One day he won't even remember his mom.”

“Is that right, now?”

“Oh, yes,” Eli said.

“I always felt the opposite. A boy needs his mother. We men are … what's the word? Super—oh, good grief. I'm blanking on it.”

“Superfluous,” Eli said.

“Yes, that's it. We're beside the point. Yes. That's it exactly. Beside the point. That's what we are.”

“You're doing a bang-up job,” Eli insisted. If only someone had been there when he was a boy, to reassure his aching, uncertain father. “The boy is happy. Anyone can see that. You're all he needs, I'm sure of it.”

A look of confusion again crossed Mr. Harm's face, and he opened his mouth as though to speak, but he grew distracted by the sound of a car door slamming. Eli wondered who in the world would be coming to
their
door way out here in the Palouse on a weekday morning, but then the door burst open to reveal a slender, plain woman with auburn hair, stamping the ice from her sensible shoes. She held a heavy grocery sack against her hip.

“Hello,” she said to Eli. “How are you?” Then, turning to Mr. Harm, “The car is bursting. I overspent! I almost had to rent a trailer!” She laughed.

Mr. Harm hurried outside to assist her. Little Eli rose, too, but his father encouraged him to remain and entertain their guest. The boy returned with a little droop to his shoulders. Clearly it was a bit of a chore to speak to this older gentleman, who meant well, certainly, but who seemed to lean in a little too much, to speak with too much emotion, and to spit on his face unwittingly.

The boy, ever polite, smiled.

“That's not our mother?” Eli asked, his own smile having faded.

The boy crouched again beside his dog, rubbing at the animal's long, soft ears. He didn't respond to the question.

“Is that our mother?” Eli rephrased, and the boy nodded. The way he nodded indicated that he liked their mother—loved her—very, very much.

“Listen to me,” Eli said, sliding with some difficulty onto the floor near the boy. “Listen to me. You love her and you don't expect it, but the bad day will come. She will leave you. She will leave you one day soon, and it will be too late. Don't let anyone in the house. No one. No strangers. Just the three of you, you see. Just the three of you, and you will—”

“What are you doing?” asked Mr. Harm.

The mother stood behind him, alarmed. Their arms were loaded with groceries.

Eli's hands were on the boy's shoulders, shaking him lightly. He pulled away, looking to his younger self for help, but the boy only jumped away from him, speeding over to his mother and burying his face into the thighs of her jeans.

She put a hand in his hair. “It's all right,” she said to him, but she eyed Eli angrily.

Eli rose with great difficulty, his bones old and unwilling. He pardoned himself and walked outside. The man followed him, menacing now. He had set down his groceries and gripped Eli's rifle.

“I'm not sure what's wrong with you, old man,” he said. “You've been acting awfully funny. Don't think I'll give you back your gun, after all.”

Eli was seventy-one years old. He would soon be dead. He didn't know this outright, but he sensed it. He was dizzy, panting. There seemed to be flies buzzing at the periphery of his vision, a ridiculous sensation to experience in the middle of a bleak winter's day.

“Gonna keep your gun,” the man said again. It was pointed at the ground, but it may as well have been pointed at Eli's heart. “For everyone's sake.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “All right.”

“It's my gun, anyway,” the man said, and Eli acknowledged this as the truth.

He got into his car and drove away, and he had no idea where he was going other than that it was south.

*   *   *

I
T WAS SNOWING
when Eli pulled into the avenues of the University of Idaho.

He did not have his rifle, as he had originally planned, but he had his fists. He would wound Eugene Ferm one way or another.

The professor was in his office, grading papers during his office hours. He was a huge, barrel-chested man with gentle eyes and skin the deep rich brown of those who live on the Indian Ocean. The size of him, the gentleness, surprised Eli, and at first he was speechless as he passed through the doorframe. He wavered slightly, and Eugene Ferm reluctantly pulled his gaze away from his work.

With his soft, precise accent, Ferm said, “Yes? May I help you?”

Regaining his composure, Eli introduced himself.

“Ah!” Ferm exclaimed, leaping to his feet and pumping Dr. Roebuck's hand. “The man himself! Of course I recognize you! What a delight to finally meet you. I've been very drawn to your work, as I'm sure you know. You've done amazing things for Sasquatch, have you not? Come, come, I've something to show you.”

Eli was confused. “What?”

He had expected many things: tears, blood, invective, but not this.

“Come! I beg of you! My dear friend! I must show you something.”

Eli followed Ferm, dazed. The larger man stomped like an elephant down the narrow hallway, every now and again looking over his shoulder to grin happily at his companion.