The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (21 page)

Eli's face fell. He still trusted her, she realized with some amusement, the way a young boy trusts his mother. Even after all she had done to him, all she had not done for him. She felt a sharp triumph at this.

She took advantage of his trust and hurried on to say, “Your car. You should go. Your family? Surely you have a family?” She gestured at the terrible sky. “They might be stranded somewhere. They need you.”

She winced as she said it. It was silly to chide him for possibly abandoning his family in a time of need. She braced herself for a stock answer.
I needed you
, she expected.
How could you? Why did you leave me all of those long years ago?

But Eli, always so resolute, said nothing of the sort. He had never been one to whine.

“If you see him,” he told her, “please call me.”

He handed her a business card.
Dr. Eli Roebuck
, it read,
Cryptozoology. Podiatry. 509-905-3660.
His address was written there, too.

“Eli,” she began, uncertain of what to say but stumbling toward some sort of apology, however banal, “If I don't see you again—”

“If you see him,” he said firmly, “please call.”

I won't,
she thought, but Eli was already charging down the pathway, toward his car, the smoke rising with each step, swirling up and around his shoulders as if he were a demon himself.

*   *   *

E
LI MERGED ONTO
Highway 41 and crawled south to the interstate. He could hardly see ten feet in front of the car. The world was nothing but ash and smoke and gray fog. It was noon, as dark as midnight. Darker.

He pulled over at a gas station and waited in a long line to use the pay phone.

Ginger answered, gasping. “Volcano, Daddy!” She screamed it so loudly that it hurt his ear. She was beyond elated. “Aunt Helen's blown up!”

So that's all it is,
Eli thought. He felt relieved. “Give the phone to Mom, Ginger,” he said.

Ginger passed the phone to Vanessa. “Thank God. Eli. Where are you? Come home now.”

“I'm near Post Falls. I'm on my way.”

“Mount Saint Helens blew,” she said. “Please hurry. I'm worried for you.” She waited for a moment and then added, “They're closing the interstate.”

He cursed.

“Can you make it back?”

Eli thought of his morning in the forest, of his discovery of his own mother living like a wild woman in the woods. The Super 8 camera sat in his car. He would show Vanessa the footage of his mother later. Otherwise, how would she believe it? It seemed he would have to prove her existence with as much painstaking diligence as proving his Sasquatch. It was as though he could not quite prove it all to himself.

“I'll make it back,” he said. “One way or another.”

“We love you.”

Eli began to respond, but a man waiting behind him cursed and said, “Come on, buddy. We've all got wives to call.”

Eli mumbled his goodbye and hung up.

“There you go,” he said to the man, moving aside.

“It's the end of the world,” the man said. “Eat shit.”

Eli hurried to his car, frowning. When he got inside, he brushed the ash from his head and shoulders and coughed at the bulging brume. His eyes watered. It hurt to breathe.

“Screw you, asshole,” Eli muttered to his steering wheel.

He wished he could have said it to the man's face.

He wished he could have said it to Agnes.

And yet, as he drove, he wondered about her. Where would she go in the woods? Would she cower under a tree somewhere? Her hair had been wet, like an old water nymph. He pictured a cave behind a waterfall. Likely, though, she lived in Rathdrum, mooching off the government, eating canned peaches and growing older and thinner by the day.

She was still an imposing figure, taller than most women, broader-shouldered, he reflected. How much he had grown since he last saw her! So much so that it seemed as if she'd dramatically shrunk.

Life had not treated her well, he thought. He wondered if she thought the same thing about him.

After all of these years, assuming Agnes was dead.

All of these years, not assuming anything at all.

He knew where she was now, and it struck Eli as more of an absence than her previous absence.

Red demon eyes—brake lights—snapped open in front of him, and Eli pumped the brakes with a shout. Visibility waned. Eli kept his eyes to the side of the road, just barely making out the white line, and he crept along beside it, blinking frantically when it flickered and vanished and then, sweetly, reappeared.

*   *   *

A
GNES, BACK IN
her little cabin, listened to the nothing outside.

Her husband had been there, waiting for her, when she returned. He had been relieved to see her, had gestured for her to sit and eat, had stroked her hair as she chewed her food. Now he slept in the patched recliner, his mouth hanging open, his large purple and yellow hands draped over his bare genitals. His good leg was up on the recliner footrest, his crutch resting against the floor.

Agnes stood at the window, listening. There was no sound. The nothingness expanded and grew.

The next morning, when she awoke, Agnes tiptoed out of the cabin, curious, and saw the tiny squiggling paths of insects that had fallen, struggled, and then died in the soft gray ash. These little deaths were everywhere.

In their place was born a queer soundlessness: no wind through the trees, no birdsong, no bugs buzzing by, no distant traffic from the highway or the interstate.

Agnes wandered farther through the moonscape, the silence stuffing her ears. Her husband, stooped over his breakfast, lifted his head and called for her to return.

She didn't return, not yet. She remained rooted to the preternatural quiet.

It was possible to believe then: No one else was left. The world was emptied of all life. It was just the two of them. The only survivors. What remained was yours and yours alone.

*   *   *

E
LI WAS FORCED
to leave the interstate and navigate dark back roads, but he did, eventually, make it home. After dinner, after discussions of the volcano and its aftermath, he unpacked his camera and saw that the ash had sifted into everything, into his shoelaces and his watch face and the gears of his car, and he knew immediately that the film, like much of what the volcano touched, was destroyed. Even the trustworthy blue sedan would refuse to start up the next day.

“Something major happened,” he told Vanessa, fingering the ruined camera.

“It sure did,” she said, meaning the mountain. “I'm going to write a poem about it. It's so inspiring.”

“I saw my mother today,” he said.

Vanessa fingered her lower lip. “That's a good line,” she said. “I should write that down.”

“In the woods,” he added, and Vanessa picked up a pen and wrote that down, too.

He suddenly wanted to be alone. It was not his wife's misunderstanding that floored him, but his own.

He had often wondered: If he found his mother, would all of his other searching end? Wasn't Agnes what he had been looking for all along? He had suspected that his search for Krantz was, beneath it all, a search for Agnes.

The day had shown him how simple an answer that was; it was simple and wrong.

So maybe the best answer was this: that no matter whom he found—Agnes, Mr. Krantz, a three-headed alien magician—he was still stuck with his past. It was unchangeable. There was no panacea for those memories. Even if his mother had run forth, thrown her arms about his neck, cried into his chest, and begged his forgiveness, his younger self was still frozen in time, heartbroken.

He left his wife to pen her poem on the divan and went into the living room. Ginger was there, asleep in front of the television. The news was on, showing images of Mount Saint Helens' ashfall across Washington State. It was a monumental event, but all Eli could think about was that he had failed somehow.

He poured himself a drink. The house was quiet. He went to the window and peered out into the darkness and wondered if his mother was doing the same, having a drink, peering out into the impermanent midnight, thinking of her son. He wondered if her loneliness followed her everywhere, as his did.

Or maybe she lay dead on the forest floor now, suffocated by ash.

He could have saved her. She was an old woman. My God, he marveled, she looked so much like Amelia. He had not remembered her face correctly at all.

Why had he left her out there, without even offering her a ride, without accompanying her home?

But maybe he was being too hard on himself.

Maybe she was a ghost.

Or, more likely, he'd imagined her entire existence, Eli told himself. Krantz existed, certainly, but not Agnes. She was the greatest figment of his imagination, his life's creative work. It could have been any old hag out in the forest today. He had no proof, no reason to believe she was alive out there at all.

These thoughts comforted him.

A reporter on the news program began to list the names of people missing or killed by the lava flow. Eli went and sat beside Ginger's knees and listened. There was an octogenarian who refused to leave his lodge in the woods. He wanted to die right there where he'd always lived, and so he did.

Eli thought about the man and his lodge. He imagined the roar of the explosion, the interminable wait. Would the man just sit patiently in his chair, maybe shuffling an old deck of cards, or would he go and stand and face the mountain? Would he pace back and forth on his porch, only to begin to suffer regret as hot mud filled his shoes? Was he stubborn or silly or idealistic or noble or all of it or none?

What would I do?
Eli wondered, safe and sound in his comfortable home, with his kindly daughter stirring lazily beside him on the couch.
What would I do with that last hot, excruciating minute? Would I think of Mr. Krantz?

God, would I?

Would I still care?

 

1982

 

 

RELEASE THE DOGS

“I'm not surprised, is all,” Ginger's mom said.

Ginger's dad checked his watch, then rested his light, warm palm on Ginger's head.

“It doesn't bother me,” her mom continued, “because it's not my event. If it were my event, I would have called that Katie girl. The one your intern recommended. She's reliable. I'm not going to bring up what happened the last time. I promise I won't bring it up.”

Ginger's dad dragged in a deep breath and held it.

“I won't. I'm sorry. You're right. I won't bring it up.” Her mom fell silent. The hand on top of Ginger's head relaxed.

The only sound now was the hum of the refrigerator, a new refrigerator with nice Shaker paneling. It was the nicest refrigerator in the whole store, her mom had said. Nicer than anything she'd ever bought in her whole life. Ginger liked the refrigerator just fine. It matched the cupboards. That, Ginger supposed, was a good thing. She liked things to match. For example, her socks. Or the pink bauble in her hair and her pink sneakers. She also liked to try on her mom's lipstick, to wear the same color her mother wore. That, too, was matching.

Ginger's lips were bare now. Her mom's were outlined in red and filled in with a lighter shade of red; her short hair was teased into a flattering shrub. She was very tall; she towered over both Ginger and her smaller-framed father. She wore a black dress, and her nude shoulders were sharp and shining from recent sunbaths.

“You look so pretty, Mom,” Ginger said.

Her mom came forward and embraced her, giving her a wet kiss on the cheek. “Oh,” she laughed. “My lipstick.”

She went to the counter to get a wet cloth and returned to scrub Ginger's face. Ginger closed her eyes and inhaled her mom's warm perfume. It smelled sweet and metallic, like flowers and melted gold. It gave her a headache.

“Is that Amelia?” Ginger asked, seeing someone slow down before the driveway.

But then the vehicle accelerated and disappeared.

Her mom sighed. “Look how excited she is, Eli. I hope, for her sake, that Amelia shows up.”

They waited next to the window for what felt to Ginger like a long time. They lived on the very outskirts of Lilac City, where the suburbs met the hillsides of Palouse country. Her mom wanted character, her father wanted land, so they bought an old farmhouse on a ten-acre plot and began slowly remodeling it. Ginger loved where they lived and loved staring out the windows at the pasture and animals and trees, but right now the only thing she wanted was for Amelia to arrive.

Her mother waited with her for a bit, but then threw up her arms dramatically and left the bedroom, and Ginger heard the television snap on in the den. Her father had already tuned out, but he remained nearby, collapsed in a chair with a book that he was very intently reading. Ginger asked him what the book was about. He shrugged. “Sasquatch,” he said. And that was all. Ginger turned back to the window, fretfully tugging at her bangs.

But then a maroon car pulled slowly around the street corner, disappearing for a moment behind a grove of lilacs. It drew past the neighbor's large lawn and then slowed, kindly, Ginger felt, before their driveway. The driver nosed the car onto the gravel and then stopped abruptly, as though unwilling to drive the rest of the way. A passenger door popped open and out stepped Ginger's sister.

Amelia was in college now at the local university (and had been for “too long,” according to Ginger's mom). She had recently returned to live with her own mom, just for the summer. Amelia had lost her license after what Ginger's mom called “another troubling incident.” Ginger waved frantically at Amelia, grinning. She tried to get a look at Amelia's mom. Gladys had once been married to their dad, but now their dad loved Ginger's mom instead. Ginger had met Amelia's mom once. She'd been invited over to Gladys's house for a birthday party for Amelia. Her mother had warned her that Gladys was a very cruel person, but Gladys had not been cruel in the least. When Amelia and her older friends ditched Ginger to play games in the backyard, Gladys invited Ginger to watch television and handed her a bag of rock candies. She had chatted amiably with Ginger as they watched a cartoon and mentioned several times how pretty Ginger's mom was.