West of Here (22 page)

Curtis tossed the issue aside without returning it to its protective sleeve. He drained his Silver Bullet in one long gulp and squashed the aluminum can like the Hulk, tossing it in the general direction of the wastebasket. He thought about reaching for the pencil and pad but reached for the Krylon instead.

WITH THE STOP-AND-GO
traffic on Front Street, it was nearly six thirty by the time Rita got home from work. Finding the door locked, she fished in her purse for the key. The tendinitis in her wrist was throbbing. Forty tons of Alaskan chum in three days and still two days left in the week. Then what? A double at Gertie’s on Saturday and maybe a hot bath and a frozen pizza on Sunday. But what was she complaining about? Money was money. With enough overtime,
she could buy Curtis a car by the end of summer, so he could drive to school senior year, even get a job, if he wanted one. Maybe then, he wouldn’t be so isolated, maybe then he’d make some friends. Barring unforeseen expenses (the Monte Carlo), Rita could clear an extra four hundred bucks this month and the same next month, hopefully. She saw a red ’92 Accord for fifteen hundred out in front of Murray Motors.

Setting her handbag down on the kitchen table, Rita liberated her hair from a ponytail and shook it out in long black waves. There was a day when she might have combed it out. Instead, she opened the refrigerator and snatched a Coors Light, lingering in the sickly light to contemplate the rest of the fridge’s contents. She should’ve stopped at Albertson’s. Popping her Silver Bullet, she sat at the kitchen table, fished her Merit Ultra Lights out of her bag, and sparked one up, exhaling a thin blue cloud into the kitchen.

She didn’t see Curtis’s book bag lying around anywhere. The bedroom was conspicuously quiet. The front door had been locked. Most likely, he was out wandering again. Yesterday, on her way home between shifts, Rita had passed him walking along the ditch on South Ennis with his head down. When she slowed down to offer him a ride home, he’d refused. When she offered to turn the car around, and drive to KFC for takeout, he’d even refused that. And in an act that struck Rita as aloof rather than defiant, he hadn’t even tried to hide his cigarette. After three and a half years, he still hadn’t forgiven her for Dan. How differently things might have turned out if she hadn’t chased Dan off that night. She would’ve never got the phone call. They’d probably live in a house, a real house, like the old one on South Tenth, something that didn’t creak and groan under the weight of each step, something without monstrous green carpet, something with two bedrooms and decent water pressure. But most important, she’d still have Curtis. She lost both of them the night Dan screeched out of the driveway for the last time. Randy could never replace him, and she knew it. But at least Randy had helped them keep the house, if nothing else. For a while. When he got busted, they had little choice but to relocate without his income. Rita had been telling herself for
thirteen months that the move was only temporary, maybe as short as three months, depending on parole. Then they’d get a place, maybe not the old place on South Tenth, but a bigger place, somewhere closer to the river, off the rez.

IT BEGAN ON
the mattress with a slow shudder; once, twice, as the icy fumes ran up Curtis’s nostrils, past his eye sockets, to his brain stem. Inky black ghosts converged from all corners, swimming figure eights in his peripheral vision, and the only sound was a slow bleating from the center of the earth. Behind the veil, an orange glow pulsed like the heart of a dying sun, beckoning him, as the ghosts swam playful circles around its glow. And soon Curtis forgot he was in his room, on a mattress, trapped in an imperfect time line. Soon he forgot that he was anyone at all, but only some
thing,
something slipping, slipping, falling, forgetting.

The forgetting ended when the canister slipped from his grasp and thumped on the carpet. Soon came successive raps on the locked door. A voice, his mother’s voice, reached him through the fog.

“Curtis? Are you in there?”

The world was still a thousand pinpricks under Curtis’s scalp, as he wiped away the moist halo around his mouth and rolled over on his shoulder, facing the wall.

“Go away,” he heard himself saying.

JUNE
2006

Having been forced to work the line in place of Timmon for the remainder of the first shift, Krig smelled even more like fish than usual when he took his customary stool at the Bushwhacker for happy hour. By his third Kilt Lifter, the general irritability that had marked the end of his workday had been replaced by a very specific and very acute self-contempt. How had he managed to offend Tillman? How did he always manage to offend, alienate, repulse, or suffocate? Even as a starter on varsity, Krig had found himself an outsider, and never for lack of effort. Familiar to all, loved by nobody. It didn’t seem to matter how much towel slapping and dick waving he engaged in during the week any more than it seemed to matter that he shot a league-leading 68 percent from the field. Come Friday night, Krig often found himself alone in the parking lot of Payless or the ferry terminal, nursing a Mickey’s Big Mouth in the front seat of his primer-riddled Camaro, listening to Jethro Tull. And not because he had tragic acne, or he was insecure, or he lacked social currency, but because he was bad with what his guidance counselor called boundaries. And wasn’t he still making the same mistakes? Still jumping the gun? Still trying too hard?

The fact that such a concept as trying too hard even existed was troubling to Krig. Did he shoot 88 percent from the stripe senior year because he tried too hard all those nights in the driveway shooting free throws blindfolded? Did he find that little extra spring in his hops come the fourth quarter because he tried too hard to condition himself? Why should a guy like Jared Thornburgh, who didn’t try at all, walk into a job as general manager? Why did the Thornburghs of the world succeed as if it were their birthright while the Krigs should
be forced to endure years of loyal service, pulling guts and slitting necks? Talk about boundaries. Jealous? Just pissed off. Okay, jealous. Of course he was jealous! Why should Thornburgh have a smokin’ wife like Janis while Krig dabbled in online dating? And even in that arena he proved to be an abject failure. Boundaries. On paper he looked great: production manager of the largest (okay,
only
) commercial seafood processor on the peninsula, respected member of the amateur cryptozoological community, athletic build (aside from a little paunch), nice car, good conversationalist, fun (loves happy hour, classic rock, car camping), seeks SWF who enjoys same … seeks SWF with varied interests … seeks SWF … seeks anyone, really.

“You ready for another, Dave?” It was Molly. The mud shark. The only person in Port Bonita to address him as anything but Krigstadt or Krig, because she was an outsider, a transplant from Aberdeen, and Krig liked that. Molly, meanwhile, had given Krig little indication that she liked anything about him, not even his 40 percent tips. Ever since he started talking his Bigfoot bullshit the second night she worked there. Beyond a nod of recognition each night as he took his stool at the bar, Molly exuded an air of indifference, tinged with the slightest scent of annoyance.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“Does the pope shit in the woods?” said Krig.

“Uh. No, Dave. Last I checked he didn’t. Kilt Lifter?”

“Yeah.”

Fucking boundaries. But, really, what did he expect? As far as Krig knew, no woman in the history of the world had ever looked into a guy’s eyes and said, “You had me at Bigfoot.” But wasn’t that the foot he always got off on? As soon as he was nervous in a social situation, didn’t he start yapping about Bigfoot and other cryptozoological anomalies? Chupacabra. The Minnesota Iceman. Why couldn’t he just shut up about it? Why was he so convinced Bigfoot existed in the first place? Really, what had he heard that night? Could he really say? Could all the follow-up investigations in the world really change
that? When had he taken that leap of faith? Long before the events of May 6 on the upper Elwha, that’s for sure, long before even the class C sighting out in Joyce back in ’99. He’d gone looking for that one, too. Just like Roger Patterson. Who’s to say he didn’t see and hear exactly what he wanted to?

Report 1017 (class B)

Follow-up Investigation by SFRO investigator Greg Beamer

I met the witness six days after he filed the original sighting report. Initially, Mr. Krigstadt was too frightened to return to the scene of his encounter above the Thornburgh Dam. After some persuasion, Mr. Krigstadt finally consented to accompany me to the spot, where we scanned the area for tracks. We found nothing conclusive. However, it is worth noting that our search was conducted following two days of heavy rainfall. There were a number of broken tree limbs in the surrounding area at heights of six to ten feet, and one possible hair sample, which has been sent along with the scat sample to Dr. Kurtz for analysis. Mr. Krigstadt is, in my estimation, a credible witness. He has a good knowledge of Sasquatch behavioral patterns and utilizes a scientific epistemology. But what I found most convincing was Mr. Krigstadt’s very palpable uneasiness about returning to the scene of the sighting. I’ve seen this fear and felt it myself. Mr. Krigstadt was more than willing to cooperate with the follow-up investigation and even volunteered to transport the samples to Dr. Kurtz in person. Both samples came back inconclusive.

Verdict: Inconclusive

JUNE
2006

What Krig had not told Greg Beamer as they walked the upper Elwha above the dam that dewy morning in May was that he had endured night terrors for the past five days: feverish, twitching, adrenaline-addled ordeals, the likes of which he’d never known. In an effort to ward off the visitations, Krig began sleeping on the sofa, fully clothed with the lights on, medicating with even larger than normal quantities of beer and weed and falling asleep in the glow of the television to the innocuous fare of Nickelodeon. But it was no use; even
SpongeBob
was no match. So vivid and terrifying were these dreams that Krig had actually begun to question whether his experiences on the upper Elwha might have been a dream. Further investigation had yielded nothing. Even the poop was inconclusive. Perhaps Krig had dozed off that night on the trail. The possibility even occurred to Krig that he had not gone upriver that night, at all. But then clearly he had awakened on the Crooked Thumb trail clutching a Louisville Slugger, clearly he had humped all that gear back to the dam in three trips, clearly he had received a parking infraction.

There was, of course, another possibility. Once, several years prior, following a fruitless Singles Night at the Seven Cedars Casino, during the course of which Krig had nearly fractured a woman’s fifth metatarsal on the dance floor, doing the Sprinkler to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Krig had met an old Indian at the bar afterward. The guy must have been two hundred years old. He couldn’t have been an inch over five three. His face looked like melting wax. He had little skin tags all around his eyes.

“Meriwether Lewis Charles,” he said, pushing his empty coffee cup aside. “Around here, they call me Running Elk. Or Lew. Don’t order the decaf. It sucks.”

He had the voice of a much younger man; secure, unwavering. Even his carriage was that of a younger man. He sat straight in his stool. He was a sharp dressed little guy, too; white suit, white shirt, white tie. His gray ponytail was secured with a decorative leather band.

“I saw you dancing,” he said, staring impassively straight ahead. “You move like an elk.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of a klutz,” said Krig. “I tend to get into other people’s space. You know, boundaries.”

“An elk is graceful,” Meriwether observed. “Your step is springy. The fat woman was in your way. Bah! Women are always in the way. What do you call that dance?”

“The Sprinkler.”

“Mm.”

The old fellow went back to staring impassively straight ahead, fingering the rim of his coffee cup.

“Buy you a drink?” Krig asked.

“I’ll have a Pepsi-Cola. Not the diet kind. The diet kind sucks. I find that it leaves an astringent taste in my mouth.”

At some point during their conversation, Krig finally got around to asking Meriwether Charles the Bigfoot question. Meriwether smiled knowingly. “I know of the Sasquatch.”

“And?”

Meriwether sipped his Pepsi, and stared straight ahead. “He comes in times of crisis.”

“You mean because he’s scared, or threatened, or … ?”

“No. To his host. When his host is in crisis.”

“His host?”

“Whoever he visits. That is his host. And the only one who can see him. But many have seen him. My grandfather Abraham Lincoln Charles was visited by Sasquatch when he led Mather up the Elwha in 1889. That’s when my grandfather gave up the white man’s ways, by degrees, anyway.”

“Nobody else saw him?”

“How could they?”

Though Krig didn’t buy the spirit-form hypothesis, he did buy the
old Indian some fried calamari right before the kitchen closed. To accept Meriwether Charles’s conception of Bigfoot as a spirit form, Krig decided, was to ignore the large body of evidence: the Patterson footage, the Memorial Day footage, the Skookum Cast. One could neither photograph a spirit nor cast its image in plaster. In the end, it was the concrete evidence that had persuaded Krig that Bigfoot existed. And yet still he was persuading himself regularly as to the veracity of his own claims. Did he really know what a bear sounded like? Wasn’t it possible that a cat could have made those sounds? An elk herd? Would Krig really know what an elk herd sounded like moving through the forest in the dead of night? Maybe not. But Krig still wasn’t willing to buy the spirit-form hypothesis. Besides, who was in crisis? Not Krig. Sure, he was a little, what? — stuck, maybe? Okay, maybe a little stuck. Same town, same job, same barstool. But so what? He loved Port Bonita. What was out there that was any better than this? You had the mountains, the river, the strait, the fresh air. You had history.