The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (39 page)

In his excitement, Eli had not braced himself for the kickback. It threw him against the wall. When he caught his bearings, he saw an unharmed Mr. Krantz leaping at him, wolflike, the robe coming apart, the muscles of his bare chest rippling, his wide cruel mouth open and snarling. For having only one real foot, the beast was impossibly fast. Eli yelled, lunging to one side, and Mr. Krantz smashed into the wall with a howl.

Kill him,
Eli thought desperately,
kill him now. Finally. Kill him.

Where was the rifle? Where had it gone? His giant red spectacles had been knocked across the kitchen floor. He groped for them frantically. He could feel nothing but the apartment's cold broad tiles. The dark blur of Mr. Krantz's enormous figure loomed before him. The beast was panting something to himself, over and over again, and it almost sounded like human language. Eli could smell the animal's foul tang.

It sounded like,
I know you, I know you, I know you.
And then the sound changed, and Eli strained again to hear.

“Wait, now,” Eli said. “Wait, now. I need my glasses. At least get them for me. At least let me see you up close, just one more time, before you kill me.”

And he realized, this was what Mr. Krantz had been saying:
Kill you, kill you now. Finally. Kill you.

“And I was going to kill
you,
” Eli said, propping himself up against the wall. He put a hand over his stomach and laughed painfully. “And I was going to kill you! Mr. Krantz. The famous Mr. Krantz! You stole Agnes from me. My own mother!”

The creature's panting had slowed. His mantra had stopped. His dark huge figure swayed this way, then that. Eli braced himself for the impact, tried to be brave. His left arm had grown numb.

Mr. Krantz leaned toward him.

The earth changed. The nebulae shifted, the kitchen's features sharpened. Mr. Krantz had reapplied the glasses to Eli's face.

His vision restored, Eli looked right into the eyes of his monster.

God,
he marveled.
He hasn't changed! His eyes!

Those eyes were like two dark, emotionless tunnels winding back into Eli's childhood. He followed them as far back as he could and then winced in pain.

“Thank you,” Eli tried to say, but it came out ragged.

He was gasping for breath now. He was certain Mr. Krantz had stabbed him somewhere, but he could not pinpoint the location.

Eli's vision blurred again. He sagged toward the floor, and the glasses dropped off his nose.

The empty feeling in his arm expanded. He felt shot through, as though by a bullet.
He's killed me,
Eli thought,
he shot me with my father's own gun,
but Mr. Krantz had done no such thing.

Eli was having a heart attack. It was nothing like the tiny heart attack he'd experienced in his early sixties. This was the massive one. This one was fatal. He lay on the floor, clutching his arm to his chest, bleary-eyed, openmouthed.

Mr. Krantz loomed over him with his gloomy wide mouth, his empty eyes, his large, apelike brow. The mean, ugly face lowered, closer and then closer.
Finish me quickly,
Eli thought. Mr. Krantz brought his round heavy mouth to Eli's mouth with incredible force.

Eli faintly registered a woman on a phone somewhere, shrieking for an ambulance. “He's dying! A man is dying! Come now! Hurry!”

He's killed me,
Eli thought dimly.
He's suffocated me.

Then, feeling the wide mouth withdraw, feeling those powerful fists slamming onto his chest, he gathered that Mr. Krantz was trying to save his life.

What had happened? Only a moment earlier, Mr. Krantz had wanted him dead. Their rage had been mutual.

The mouth returned, covering his own. His vision had gone black, but Eli remained tenuously connected to the conscious world. He felt Krantz's putrid breath move into his lungs. The gray fetid smoke of him wafted into Eli's legs and feet.

Consumed! Eli was giddy with it. His body bucked and jerked. It floated upward, toward the apartment's chimney flue. He was going now.

The world left him, but not before he uncovered his last mortal thought. It was winter, and he flew through the night like a sleek missile.

I didn't even say goodbye to him,
he thought.
Imagine! All those years and I never said goodbye!

 

GHOST STORY

VANESSA

Two weeks after Eli's death, Vanessa listened to her step-daughter tell a room of mourners that her father was haunting her.

Someone asked, “Does he wear a white sheet?”

Amelia shook her head, perhaps missing the joke.

“He looks the same,” she said casually. “Gloomier. He's wearing his old bathrobe, the robe he used to wear when he was married to my mom. He's just slightly more visible than a fart.”

Vanessa winced. They were sitting in the den, reluctantly entertaining the latest round of well-wishers, who had brought Vanessa a lasagna and, inexplicably, an entire uncooked turkey. One of them giggled at the word
fart,
but the rest of the group sat in horrified silence, glancing meaningfully at Vanessa and then looking away.
She was always difficult,
these glances said,
and we're sorry for you
.

Vanessa had, at one time, appreciated these looks. Now they annoyed her.

What Vanessa felt toward her stepdaughter was not shame or anger.

It was envy.

She had a dozen pressing questions for Amelia:
Where? When? Is he here now? Can you see him? Can you touch him? How did he come to you? Why, oh, why, has he not come to me?

Instead, tongue-tied, she turned for support to Ginger, who said thoughtfully, “I suppose we could barbecue it. There would be lots of leftover meat for sandwiches.”

At first, feeling sick, Vanessa thought she meant Eli's corpse. Then, realizing, she stuttered, “Oh, yes. The turkey. Sure. We'll barbecue it.”

“At this very moment,” Amelia said, absently toying with her attractive white-gold watch, a wedding gift from her mother, “he's gesturing toward all of you. He's jumping up and down and yelling at the top of his lungs. He's waving! He's trying to say hello.”

The crowd waited, holding its breath. A sweet if slightly dotty old woman who had, in her more lucid years, babysat Ginger, lifted her hand and waved hesitantly in return.

Vanessa's eyes roamed the room wildly. Where was he? She saw nothing; she felt nothing. She inhaled and caught no scent of him.
Eli,
she blazed,
Eli, where are you?

“But what he really wants,” Amelia said, “is my forgiveness.”

Vanessa sat back against the couch, ruined. It was a profound moment, a moment of truth. A onetime colleague of Eli's cleared her throat in disgust. But Vanessa thought,
It's true. That is precisely what Eli would want: Amelia's forgiveness. Now of all times. Yes.

He had never really sought it before his death. He was always downright carefree about it, in fact.

“There's nothing more I can do,” he would say. “She'll either forgive me or she won't.”

Vanessa had once fallen on her knees before him, begging him to give Amelia what she wanted, which she imagined was the most tearful sort of apology, an outpouring of his darkest guilt, a dramatic showcase of regret and woe for her difficult childhood. She hoped that it would put an end to the girl's wrath.

Eli had refused, as resolute as ever. “I don't regret a thing. I did nothing wrong, other than fall in love with you. Do you really think an apology would matter? The only thing I'm sorry about is marrying Gladys in the first place.”

Unfortunately, he relayed this last sentiment to Amelia one evening after drinking too much vodka. Vanessa had cringed, watching Amelia (then a young woman, attending community college and piecing her life back together), whose expression had collapsed and then tightened.

“Well,” Amelia had retorted hotly. “That would be the perfect solution, wouldn't it? Then I wouldn't be here at all. You could have your perfect threesome, and I'd be dead. Never even born.” And Eli hadn't risen to stop her when Amelia sped from the house, seething.

“You're only making things worse,” Vanessa had told him. “You're only making things worse for
me
.”

How silly she was to involve herself with a married man! She should have known that his first marriage would plague her for their entire relationship and beyond, but her reservations about him were so stupid and naïve, revolving around his quirkiness instead of around the fact that he already had a family of his own. Christ, he was married! It had seemed so cosmopolitan then, so liberated. Marriage was an insipid institution, she had always felt. And she thought this now, too, sitting here with all of these people, who felt sorry for her because she had lost her husband, but not because she had lost her best friend, the only person who truly understood her and forgave her, the only person, other than Ginger, who she truly understood and forgave, too.

I should get dinner ready for him,
Vanessa thought automatically. Then, pitying herself:
No. All of that's over now.

She would never get used to this.

Amelia turned to her half sister then and said, bored, “I hate barbecued turkey. All the carcinogens. Might as well spray a can of aerosol down your throat.”

The guests stood to leave, one by one. Vanessa tried to bid them farewell as gracefully as possible, but her mouth had gone dry. She felt relieved and exhausted when the last of their cheerful set departed.

“I can't see anyone else today,” she finally said to Ginger. “I need to lie down.”

The daughters watched her walk up the stairs. She looked back at them, her hand falling on the balustrade. Ginger's face was a soft pink balloon of concern; Amelia's face was a hard angular viper pit.

“We'll leave tomorrow,” Amelia said sharply to Vanessa's heels. “We'll stay with Gladys tomorrow night. She's grieving, too, in her own way.”

“Okay,” Vanessa said, wanting to argue, wanting to beg her to stay a week, a month, a lifetime, lest she take Eli's ghost along with her.

“I'm surprised Eli hasn't haunted
her,
” Amelia said. “If anyone needs to forgive him, it's Gladys.”

Oh, bullshit,
Vanessa thought. Gladys was a shitty person. She had done horrible things to Amelia and to Eli both. Nothing was beneath Gladys: self-immolation, slashing tires, wicked lies. She would do anything to make Eli and Vanessa unhappy, even if it meant her own daughter's discomfort. She deserved little kindness and was lucky enough to have Amelia's loyalty.

“It will be good for you to see her,” Vanessa said. “Send her my regards.”

“I won't,” Amelia replied.

Vanessa nodded. She knew Amelia didn't mean this to be cruel. If Amelia passed along Vanessa's tidings, well meaning or not, she would be excoriated.

Alone now in the room she had shared for more than thirty years with Eli, Vanessa curled into his pillow and sobbed. It still smelled of him. When she was able to calm down, she asked the pillow, “Why are you haunting
Amelia
? Why
Amelia
? Haunt me instead. Haunt
me.
Isn't there something you need from me, even now?” She smacked the pillow with her hand.

After Eli's death, she had considered asking Amelia and Jim to stay at home, rather than with them. The couple had their own house in Lilac City, after all, and Vanessa didn't need the extra help. She had assumed that Amelia would be more than willing to comply. But Amelia insisted, and Ginger would have balked if she'd been denied—she always balked whenever Vanessa disagreed with Amelia. They had a complicated relationship, these two half sisters, one filled with jealousy and rancor and, somehow, admiration and love.

Ginger had such a good heart. Ginger, who was always apologizing for her parents' poor behavior: past infidelities, present-day drunkenness, perceived insensitivities. Ginger was a saint.

Amelia, too, was here out of good intentions. She was here because she wanted to support Vanessa and because, in her own twisted way, she loved her father. Her presence, however, pained Vanessa, as it always had; she could not look at Amelia without thinking of her life's greatest transgressions, could not speak to her without wanting to defend her most deleterious self. She tried to gloss over all of this with fake chatter and ill-timed compliments, a kill-'em-with-kindness routine that made Amelia's mistrust all the greater, but it was so much more comfortable for Vanessa than playing the part of the evil stepmother. She hadn't meant to hurt anyone. She hadn't. Why must she always feel the need to defend herself? Why did Amelia refuse to see her as anything but the venomous spider, the gold digger, the other woman? Why didn't Amelia accept that Vanessa simply loved Eli, that all she had ever done wrong was to love a married man?

Once upon a time, Vanessa felt that she, too, had a good heart. This was (she now knew) an estimable lie. Her love for her husband, her love for Ginger had nothing to do with goodness. Loving was about need and fear and commitment and survival. She would die for Eli and Ginger if need be, would eat their pain in order for them to remain painless, would cut off her legs for them to remain upright, would do anything in her power to protect them both—kill, maim, steal, lie, destroy—but these urges blossomed not from some tender soul-soil of goodness, like gentle beanstalks winding skyward, but rather lurched from a more primordial earth, tangled within her teeth and guts and bones, monstrous and dark and thorny, utterly powerful. There was no room for goodness there, no matter what others might say, no matter how many greeting cards she collected from Ginger exalting her generosity and affection.