The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (38 page)

“What a good day this is turning out to be,” Ferm said. His voice was contrary to his stature: lilting, light.

Eli walked uncertainly behind him. He did not want to trust this man, but it was hard not to, so friendly was he, so effusive.

“You're a great hero to our society,” Ferm gushed. “As a young man, I followed your career rather enviously. Ah, here we are.”

They had reached a doorway. Ferm opened the door and plunged into a stairwell's black narrow maw, igniting a light with a blind flick of his hand as he did so. Eli followed swiftly, with half a thought to push Ferm down the stairs.

The stairwell was gray and yellow and musty, its stairs short and uneven.

“What you said about the stride characteristics was spot-on,” Ferm said. “You know, the whole Patterson-Gimlin video thing, about the size of her gluteal muscles. It was so illuminating, Eli, and it explained so very much.” He laughed. “Her butt! That's what's so great. How do the kids say it nowadays? ‘Baby got back'? 'Cause she does! She most certainly does!”

At the bottom of the staircase, Ferm pulled out an enormous set of keys and thrust one of them into a lonely door. He pushed on the door with one shoulder, the wood having been painted sloppily so that it stuck.

With a grunt, Ferm disappeared inside, then reappeared to bark at Eli, “Get in here, sir! Please, I mean.”

He ignited another panel of lights.

Inside was a small, shallow room, no doubt meant as a janitorial closet, but it had been refurbished into a cryptozoological museum, filled with fur and bone samples and foot molds, all labeled meticulously with laminated name tags and arranged carefully behind locked glass cabinets.

Eli took a deep breath of air. It was dust-free. The room smelled of Lysol.

“It's amazing,” Eli admitted. He had his own samples, his own foot molds, but they were packed away into cardboard boxes in the SNaRL basement, no use to anyone any longer. SNaRL itself was almost purely an Internet presence now, and not one he really had an investment in any longer; it was mostly run by unpaid college interns and middle-aged hobbyists. It was self-propelled by online interest and ads but not nearly as factual as it had once been.

Eugene Ferm stood there with his stupid grin, his knuckles resting on his hips. He was like a monarch surveying his kingdom.

“Had to beg the university for this space. Totally unused. They wanted to give it to some biologist for cereal storage. Cereals! Hilarious. Not that I can sneer at anyone's passions. I mean, we scholars must be understanding if we expect others to understand us.”

“Us?” Dr. Roebuck said, and his sharp tone made Eugene Ferm's mouth thicken.

“Oh, I see. I wondered why you came. You're not upset about the interview, are you?” Ferm looked disappointed, and Eli felt a little guilty. “I thought you'd come to help me. Or maybe to ask for my help.” Seeing Eli stiffen, Ferm raised one hand and hurried on: “Again, I only mean this respectfully. I know you've been at this a lot longer than I have been. I'm a pragmatist. So I fully understand that in another thirty years, I might very well want the Sasquatch dead myself.”

“It's the only way.”

“Do you know,” Ferm said casually, “that the Nazis justified their actions by telling themselves that their victims were not human? Are you telling me, as a serious scientist, that you don't believe Sasquatch possibly shares many characteristics with man?”

Eli stared into his own foggy reflection in a glass case, rattled.

“And what if this is the last of the species? What then? You kill it to prove it does not exist? It's preposterous!” Ferm waited only a moment before continuing, with a friendly laugh, “No. I don't think you believe this. You wouldn't really pull the trigger on our woodland friend, not unless you shoot it in the back. You haven't thought through any of this, not really.”

“You don't know me. You don't know my history with him.”

“My poor man. Taking things personally is not our job.” He had an arresting way of speaking that was brutally honest but not at all judgmental; he was completely devoid of subterfuge, made completely of logic. “I think you're so dead set on proving, you forget that there is just as much power in
dis
proving.”

Eli straightened his small shoulders and frowned up at Ferm. “So that's what you're doing? Disproving?”

“Oh, no. I'm only saying, you put too much pressure on yourself. If you look at it more scientifically, less personally, if you put as much stock in
not
finding Sasquatch as you do in
finding
Sasquatch, then you'll be much happier with your results.”

Eli looked around the room. The venom had been sucked out of him. He was a shell now, all used up. “So,” he said. “You wanted to show me all this? All of this non-evidence?”

“This.” Dr. Ferm steered Eli to a glass case near the doorway. The laminated name tag said
HELLO MY NAME IS
in orange print, followed by painstakingly neat handwriting, in permanent marker:
UMATILLA NATIONAL FOREST; WALLA WALLA #58: 35 CM (13.75 in) LONG AND 13 CM (5.12 in) WIDE.
It referred to a giant plaster cast of a footprint that Ferm, after unlocking the glass with a tiny key from his enormous key chain, handed to Dr. Roebuck.

It was beautiful. It had been months—years even—since Eli had enjoyed the feel of a dense, irrefutable plaster cast in his hands. He ran his fingers along the intricate dermal ridges, the wide, inhuman toe gouges. It was too perfect to have been faked.

“I'm finishing up a paper on the functional morphology here,” Ferm said, and for the first time Dr. Roebuck heard pride and excitement in his tone. “It's the most gorgeous print I've yet seen.”

But Eli had seen better prints. He, too, had experienced the glow and excitement, but it had transpired long years ago, when he had been this man's age, late forties, early fifties. That time in life when you sense you are an old man but you are wrong, because actual old age is so very unknowable, so far more difficult, so far more taxing and terrible than you could ever have imagined—prostate cancer, for example, or an inability to truly stand up straight anymore, due to dissolving disks in your back, and pills, endless pills, so that you have to spend precious time organizing and swallowing them. Eli suddenly wanted to warn Eugene Ferm about all of this, but all he could think of to say was:

“Don't grow old.”

And he did say it, murmured it, really, and Eugene Ferm nodded as though he understood, but he did not.

Regardless, Eli suddenly loved this large, doe-eyed dork of a scientist before him. He wrapped an arm around the larger man and squeezed feebly. As he expected, Eugene Ferm happily returned the gesture.

Eli, pulling away, handed back the mold.

“It's magnificent,” he said. “Thank you for sharing it with me. And, please, when your paper is finished, mail it to me. I'd love to see it.”

Ferm grinned, beside himself. Nothing would come of Ferm's paper, Eli knew. It would be rejected at all of the major scientific journals. Foot molds were lovely, but they were useless scientifically. Ferm believed he had stumbled on something major, but he would soon learn that it wasn't enough.

Eli felt that he had seen two ghosts of his past now: the child and Ferm. They were both dazzled by the hope that would ultimately blind them, as he had once been. Eli was through warning them. Let them learn. Let them suffer.

Eugene Ferm locked the mold back into its pristine case, this perfect example of why people didn't just believe but
ached
for it, and then the two men journeyed up the dark staircase together and out into the light-bright world, where, Eli felt, no one knew or believed anything worthwhile at all.

*   *   *

B
EFORE DRIVING HOME,
Eli turned onto the long gravel road that led to the Harms' home. He was at peace now. He glided up the gravel driveway and turned off the car and thought about what he would say if Mr. Harm met him with the Winchester.

But the dad did not meet him there.

Little Eli did.

The boy sat on the front porch with Eli's rifle on his lap.

Eli approached the porch with his hands up, as if to prove he meant the boy no harm.

“My dad said to shoot you if you came back,” the boy called out to him.

“Your dad is a fair man,” Eli said. “He really does know best.”

The boy raised the rifle and aimed it at Eli, but Eli advanced, anyway. Little Eli wouldn't shoot. He was too full of hope and love and youth. He was too far away from being emptied out and desperate and mean. Eli could remember how it felt, that purity. He could almost feel it again.

He strode right up to the boy and opened his hands to him. The boy lowered the rifle, seemed to consider for a long moment what would be best, and then rested the rifle in Eli's outstretched palms.

The dog, Lethe, wrinkled her nose up at Eli and growled.

“Do you remember what I told you earlier?” Eli said to the boy. “What I told you about your mom?”

The boy's eyes were tearing up from the cold wind.

“She loves someone else more than she loves you,” Eli said.

He did not mean this to hurt the child, only to prepare him.

Then Eli turned and crunched across the snow to his car.

*   *   *

I
T WAS NEAR
evening now, and Eli sat with his dogs on his cold front porch. A small truck rumbled along the road, kicking up pearly snow dust. It reminded Eli of that day long ago, when Mount Saint Helens exploded, and he'd come across his mother in the woods.

It was time to let all of that go: his mother, Mr. Krantz, Ferm, the ghost of his boyhood self. His experiences over the last two days demonstrated this. He had his daughters to think of, his wife. He had neglected them all for far too many years. He could feel in his bones that he didn't have much time left. His eldest daughter needed proof of his love, his youngest daughter needed reassurance of her goodness, his wife—what did Vanessa need, exactly? Well, he would find out and give it to her. He was glad to be free of the rest of it. It had distracted him for too long.

The truck motored closer. Eli rose to his feet unsteadily, half-expecting to see the ghost of his dad again, but the truck was a white postal truck, and inside was the sprightly, energetic postman.

“Dr. Roebuck?” the man shouted, stopping his vehicle and stepping onto the ice.

The dogs swarmed around him, and the postman put out his hand hesitantly.

“They won't hurt you,” Eli said, raising a gloved hand. “They're friendly.”

“Yes, well. Cold evening to be outside.”

“It is,” Eli said, but he didn't offer an explanation.

“Rain or shine, as they say.” The postman opened his pack and fingered some envelopes. “Here you are.”

Eli accepted the mail and glanced through it.

“Blizzard coming,” the postman said, and turned for his vehicle. “Looking forward to my wife's lamb stew.”

He waved and Eli told him goodbye. Then, almost comically, the postman slipped dangerously on the ice and managed to catch himself on the hood of his car. Laughing, he turned back to Eli.

“I'm a bit embarrassed.”

“We're only human,” Eli said.

“Some of us,” the postman said, petting one of Eli's dogs on the head.

“Some of us,” Eli repeated.

“Well, good night.”

“'Night.”

Eli went inside, the dogs pushing at his knees, and stood in the foyer studying the envelopes.

“Anything good?” Vanessa asked, coming in from the kitchen.

“Junk, mostly,” Eli said.

He held a white envelope up to his face, scrawled with unfamiliar writing, and then slit it open.

He read the first line aloud,
“He's here,”
and then went silent.

“Who's where?” Vanessa asked, but she was looking at the other envelopes, tuning out.

Eli looked up, first at Vanessa and then at the door. He thought of the Winchester, still in the trunk of his car.

Mr. Krantz, the letter said, was alive and well and living in an apartment in downtown Lilac City.

It was a marvelous coincidence, Eli thought. The simple math of it was, to Eli, an amazing thing:

Rifle
+
whereabouts
=
dead Mr. Krantz

“I thought we'd have a nice dinner tonight,” Vanessa was saying, “and some of that Washington Riesling. Let's drink too much of it. Then we can light up the fireplace and make popcorn and watch the film I rented.
North by Northwest.
Hitchcock! I know you're sick of Hitchcock, but I love Cary Grant. He's such an uptight funny prig. Doesn't that sound romantic—”

“I'll be right back,” Eli said loudly, woodenly, and then he went out into the night, slamming the door behind him, leaving his wife standing there in her pajamas, struck speechless, with the worthless envelopes still clutched in her hands.

*   *   *

E
LI WAS WEARY
by the time he arrived at Mr. Krantz's fancy apartment. The door was unlocked and he limped inside, wheezing. He found Mr. Krantz immediately, in the kitchen, naked but for a large white bathrobe, which looked funny, closed with an old leather belt.

Much of Mr. Krantz's hair had been shaved from his body, making him almost unrecognizable, except for his enormousness, his heft, and his primitive face. He leaned against the bright steel of the oven. On one foot he wore a prosthetic metal-and-silicone limb.

He noticed Eli but seemed unconcerned, only continued to chew slowly on a piece of raw meat.

As tired as he was, almost clumsy with fatigue, Eli managed to bring his father's Winchester to his shoulder. He took steady aim at Mr. Krantz's heart. Mr. Krantz brought the meat away from his face and sniffed the air. Eli fingered the trigger guard and pulled.