The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (7 page)

“Camille's a doll,” Eli said. “Well done, Gladys.”

For a moment, Gladys was confused. Then she remembered: Camille. Her grandmother's name. Also the name of her horse when she was a girl, that broad-rumped brown mare with the white star on her chest. The animal had been slow and patient, allowing Gladys to drape her in old tablecloths and braid her mane and tail. Gladys had always wanted a daughter named Camille, she'd told Eli, but the name sounded wrong now, fit for a different age and place. Camille was the name of a dead woman and a dead horse. How could she name her daughter after such things?

Better the name of a missing person, someone lost but maybe, one day, found.

“Amelia,” she said.

Eli hesitated for a moment. “Okay, then.”

She could tell he wasn't crazy about the name. Gladys didn't care.

“Amelia Grace,” she continued.

Eli perched on the edge of her bed and patted her knee with a touch more friendly than intimate. He wore a dapper suit and a crisp bow tie. He was dressed to see patients.

“You're not going in today, are you?” Gladys pressed.

“No. Maybe. What would you like me to do?”

Gladys turned and looked out the window, her tone flat. “Do what you must.”

Outside, the white pines shook lightly in a fine summer breeze. The day was so clear it felt ominous. There was nothing for that bright sky to do but blacken and wound.

The bed creaked. Eli was leaving. He kissed her head and bade her goodbye. “I'll come by tonight,” he said at the door. “Rest well.”

Theirs was a good marriage, Gladys reminded herself. But she suddenly wished she had a view of the parking lot. She wanted to see him get into his car. She wanted to see which way he turned, if he chose the scenic route by the river or the more direct route through town. To the left or to the right. She guessed to the left. She would like to be sure, if only to regain a little confidence.

She rested her head against the pillows and put aside her magazine. Sleep still frightened her. Regardless, it came.

Hours later, the room dark and cool, Gladys awoke. She did not feel well, only light-headed and weak. At the window were tiny strips of bright, glimmering light through the darkness, like holes punched into a sheet. For a moment she thought the drapes had been pulled. They were ravaged, moth-eaten. Gladys wrinkled her nose, disgusted. How could a hospital hang such shabby fabric?

But then the window moved. It moved like a living being. Light flickered, darkness fell away. There were no drapes, no torn fabric. The window had been covered not with curtains but with living things.

Birds.

Light split into the room and Gladys heard the starlings chattering evilly as they soared past, some of them in their excitement striking the window, drilling into it as if they meant to come inside and race down her throat.

Gladys screamed. The nurses came and clutched at her, securing her arms.

“Calm yourself,” the prettier nurse hissed. “Calm yourself, Mrs. Dr. Roebuck.”

Gladys shrieked and kicked. She wanted to see the baby. She wanted to walk. Her bladder was full of piss and blood, and she released it; the bed grew warm and sticky. They had wrapped her breasts, but they, too, flowed with milk. The room smelled wet and fecund, like a diseased swamp.

“You
people,
” Gladys said hatefully to the nurses, her fear flowing to liquid anger. “You
peons
. Let go. Where is my daughter? Let go of me! What's happened to my Amelia?”

The nurses eyeballed each other like frightened horses. Gladys stopped thrashing and took a deep breath. The prettier nurse, noting Gladys's cooperation, nodded at her colleague, and the other released an arm and walked quickly out of the room. The prettier nurse released her grip, too, and stroked Gladys's shoulder soothingly, but Gladys could hear in her voice a thick dislike.

The other nurse returned with Amelia. She tried to hand her to Gladys, but Gladys demurred.

“No,” she said. “I don't want to hold her. Just to see her. To make sure she's all right.”

The baby was well, satisfied from a recent bottle and sleepy from the trials of being born. She kept her little eyes fastened tightly shut, as though refusing to look at her mother. Gladys pestered the nurses with questions about every wrinkle and discoloration and coo, but the nurses were steadfast: The baby was well; there was nothing wrong with her; she was perfect. Redness, bruising, gurgling—all of that was to be expected. Gladys half-listened, eyes and fingers roving wildly over the baby, seeking imperfections. The nurse holding the baby grew tired of supporting the child at such an awkward angle and asked Gladys again if she wanted to hold the baby herself.

“No,” Gladys said. “No, I'm fine. Please. Just. Take care of her. My Amelia. Take care of her, please.”

The ugly nurse straightened, bringing the baby against her shoulder, and clucked reassuringly. She was the kinder of the nurses, filled with pity. She was dowdy, fat, and a little too pale, but at least she was kind.

The other nurse—slim, pretty, skeptical—said she would ring for a doctor. She glared at Gladys with little concern, only rancor.

Gladys supplicated the kinder nurse. “The birds, you see. They're scaring me. The way they gathered at the window. Like an army. An evil army. You see?”

“You need to sleep,” the pretty nurse said. “Sleep will help with the mania, with the hormones…”

Gladys knit her brow. Why wouldn't this woman go away?

“… and,” the pretty nurse continued, “a tranquilizer. You'll need another tranquilizer. I'll ring the doctor straightaway.”

“Young lady,” Gladys said, “I would like to see the head nurse, please. This is an outrage.”

The pretty woman raised her chin. “I'm the head nurse, Mrs. Dr. Roebuck.”

“Then you should be fired. I'll see to it that you are.”

The kind nurse looked as if she was about to cry.

“Take the baby back to the nursery,” the pretty nurse said, and the kind nurse obeyed quickly.

“Childbirth,” the nurse said pedantically to Gladys, “can be very trying. A woman under duress may see things or hear things, but they aren't really there. A woman under duress—”

“I will see to it that you're demoted immediately,” Gladys interrupted. “I'm a powerful woman. A doctor's wife.”

“A podiatrist's wife,” the nurse corrected.

Gladys hated her weak limbs then. In a better state, she would have leapt from the bed and smacked this pretty little brunette chicken senseless.

“Get me the doctor,” Gladys ordered. “Right now.”

The woman bowed her head with fake reverence, turned sharply, and hurried out of the room, her white shoes squeaking miserably against the floor.

I'll teach this rude young woman a lesson,
Gladys thought. Having such a task at hand made her feel better. It gave her control.

And sure enough, as promised, Gladys worked on the woman's demotion throughout her week's stay in the hospital. She was kept on as a nurse but was forced into the night shift. Gladys took pleasure in bettering things and saw to it that the kind fat nurse took up the vacated position, despite the hospital's reluctance regarding her leadership skills.

The key to being powerful, Gladys knew, was telling people you were powerful. Eli stood at her side, lips pressed, as she ranted and raved to anyone who would listen. She leaned on them all, wronged, tearful, until they had no choice but to give in to her.

When it was time to return home, Gladys was glad for it. She left with a feeling of triumph. She had her daughter now. The pretty nurse had received her just deserts. The black starlings had dispersed. Perhaps she had imagined them after all? She could hold Amelia now, almost confidently. The baby regarded her with a hesitant trust, snuggling into her but starting at the smallest movement or sound.

I love you
, Gladys thought but did not say. She didn't want to jinx things. She didn't want to spoil the girl too much.
I love you and we will be all right.

On the day Eli drove Gladys home from the hospital, the starlings had gathered in the front yard. They blanketed the grass like a shifting black sea. Gladys clutched the baby close to her, shrinking back against the passenger seat, holding her breath.

“These damn birds,” Eli said. “I've never seen anything like it.”

I have,
Gladys thought.

The baby jumped against her. The birds, too, jumped, rising into the sky as the wheels bore down on them, flocking with a panic that alerted Gladys to a changing of the tides. She was in charge now. Doom was hers alone to gift. Only one starling remained, frantically beating its wounded wing against the edge of the lawn in a futile attempt to follow its sisters heavenward.

With one arm supporting the baby, Gladys reached across Eli to the steering wheel.

Her husband released his own tight grip and allowed Gladys to draw them toward what briefness remained of that dark fluttering life.

 

1970

 

 

THE PATCHWORK CAP

It was a dreary Wednesday in early October when Eli informed Gladys that he planned to give up his flourishing podiatry practice and pursue, full-time, the region's elusive Sasquatch.

The good doctor was down on one knee as he spoke. He held her hand with both of his, as though proposing to her, and she stared obliquely into his face from where she sat in her ebony Windsor chair.

“Sasquatch,” Gladys parroted. “I see.”

She was taken aback by his passion. Eli was an exact man, precise to the point of agony, never a movement or word wasted; he was the sort of man who wore his glasses during sex. Now, to Gladys's astonishment, his eyes watered with emotion. He clasped her hand and then her legs, his palms hot and dry. He reminded her of their dogs, sitting by the tableside, begging for scraps. His tone was both a plea and a firm declaration.

Oh, if she were not such a down-to-earth woman, Gladys thought, she would toss herself at his feet and pound the floor with her fists!

The doctor kept his hands on her, as though worried about this possibility.

Gladys struggled to summon the correct tone. Her surprise had melted away, and in its place sat a stout and ugly rumination.

How could you do this to me?
she wondered, but she couldn't say it aloud. It was too self-pitying.

It's my own fault,
she thought instead.
I've let your fancies go too far. It's time to put my foot down.

For as long as Gladys had known Eli, he had obsessed over the local legends of what she referred to as “his monsters” (a term that Eli disapproved of; “
Hominids,
Gladys,” he corrected hotly. “They are great apes, more man than beast”). It did not escape Gladys's notice that he became a podiatrist due to his keen interest in arboreal footprints. On the only forest walk she'd ever taken with him, during their short engagement, he had brought her to a small clearing and showed her one of his “findings,” as he called them. “The finding” was a long, oval impression in the dried mud. It certainly looked like a foot, if you squinted at it correctly, but Gladys was embarrassed by his certainty.

“Well,” she'd said. “Very interesting.”

He had beamed. He had driven her all the way from Lilac City to this dry, sparse forest outside Rathdrum, to tell her about his childhood. She had listened to him dully. She questioned her rationality in marrying someone with such a wild imagination. But he'd already set up his podiatry practice in Lilac City, and they'd purchased a handsome house, and he'd given her an enormous diamond ring that she enjoyed showing around. He seemed perched on the edge of success, and it was the sort of success that Gladys wanted. Besides, she'd reasoned to herself, aren't all men strange? Don't all men have disagreeable hobbies? Some men frequented seedy bars and flirted with loose women. Some men drank too much and beat their wives. At least, for all of his strangeness, Eli was a loyal husband and prodigious provider.

And so it was a conscious—and erroneous, she saw now—decision to accept and even encourage his interests. It was a boyhood hobby, nothing more. She pretended to find it endearing when he returned from the library late in the evenings with a few Xeroxed articles from the
Seattle P-I,
from
The Wenatchee World
or
The Lilac City Monitor,
mentioning in some small way a random (purported) sighting. Twice a year he left town to camp in the Selkirks, to spend a week combing the densely treed hillsides for evidence. He even made molds from these footprints, a few of which sat hidden away in his den (she would not permit them in the dining or living room), chunky monoliths that Gladys dusted once a week with a resolute wifely cheerfulness. It was nonsense, but she allowed it, mainly because he kept it to himself and for the most part didn't bring it up at dinner parties or bridge games.

When he did bring it up, it was keenly embarrassing. For a time he became obsessed with the Patterson-Gimlin film, which he called
Patt-Gim.
They had watched the interview on late-night television. Eli had grown so agitated during the interview that he spilled his Tom Collins all over the new tan club chair. Gladys had gotten down on all fours to scrub the fabric clear of lemon and sugar, but Eli remained on his feet, staring at the television with a look of complete madness. The next night, at a dinner party with one of his partners, he brought up
Patt-Gim
and spoke passionately about it for a few minutes, all while his colleagues and their wives smiled into their drinks. One of the wives caught Gladys's eye and grimaced pityingly. Gladys was beside herself with anger and frustration. Rattled, concerned, she berated Eli on the way home for his puerile behavior.