The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (27 page)

Vanessa patted his hand, cupped the other around her mouth. She shouted so he could hear, “Looks great, hon!”

Eli was proud. All of Lilac City, it seemed, was admiring his Sasquatch. It was anatomically correct, posturally perfect. It was bipedal hominid perfection.

Then, alarmingly, the float shuddered as though it had rolled over a pothole. There was a shrieking groan, and the Sasquatch's arms shot straight up into the air.

“Oh, shit,” Eli said.

“Meow,” said the Sasquatch.

The crowd fell silent for a moment, listening.

“Meow,” the Sasquatch said again, its arms shooting straight above its head, unnaturally straight.

Lindsay Meeks playfully waved at the crowd. She was faking it, pretending it was intentional.
Good girl,
Eli thought, but he wished she would turn and give the Sasquatch a good whack to reset its broken machinery. The crowd laughed and waved back at her.

The float crawled forward again. The Sasquatch's giant raised fists were heading straight toward a low-hanging power line.

Eli rose uncertainly from his chair. Gary, too, had moved forward, still clutching Ginger's hand.

“It's been doing this on and off throughout the parade,” Gary told Eli. “He'll probably lower his hands soon.” Then, consolingly, he added, “He's pretty badass when he's not meowing.”

“Stop the float,” Eli said, concerned.

The fists approached the power line.

“Stop the float,” Eli called out loudly now, yelling this insensibly at Lindsay Meeks, as if she controlled the thing. She heard his sharp cry but, above the sounds of the float and the crowd, didn't seem to make out what he was saying. Nonetheless, she looked up. She saw what was about to happen and gave a bloodcurdling scream.

The Sasquatch's fists connected with the power line and then swooped down, tearing the line loose and sending sparks flying. The entire crowd seemed to suck in its breath, and when it exhaled, the Sasquatch burst into flames.

“Meow,” said the Sasquatch, engulfed. Its arms shot skyward again.

Lindsay Meeks frantically unbuckled herself from the stand. The heat from the burning Sasquatch must have been unbearable. The float had come to a stop and the driver was lurching out of the truck cab, his eyes two white, fear-stamped circles. Lindsay stumbled forward, trailing smoke and flames as she moved. The entire purple train of her gown had ignited.

“The princess is on fire!” someone screamed.

Lindsay was running in circles, panicking, trying to shuck off her dress.

The crowd, too, was panicking, people pushing at one another, fleeing in droves. Sirens pierced the air. A fire truck honked its horn repeatedly at the parade participants, forcing them to the side. The Sasquatch was demonically braying and meowing, no more than a large, dissolving shadow in the flames. The street smelled of burning glue and scorched paper. Someone hurtled from the crowd and threw himself on Lindsay Meeks, rolling with her on the ground, tearing at her dress. The tall kid, Eli saw. Gary. A moment later, Lindsay was safe elsewhere, half naked but alive, eyes streaked with mascara, her two oddly matched parents crying with her off to the side, Gary keeping a hand protectively on her back. Ginger stared at them with a look of defeat on her face, but Eli's defeat was too enormous to register her own.

Those parents,
Eli thought,
don't even like each other. They've stayed together, though, for the sake of those daughters.

He looked at Amelia then and saw that she, too, was watching the Meeks family, perhaps thinking of Eli and of Gladys. He thought he could sense what Amelia was thinking as she eyed Lindsay Meeks:
Of course you would turn out well. Of course you would, if you had that.

Eli looked away.

The float itself was now entirely aflame. The conflagration spiraled into the heavens like a hero's funeral pyre. Vanessa and Amelia and Jim and even Ginger were all pulling on Eli, telling him to run, to go, but he could only stand there, watching, feeling that it was not just the Sasquatch model but his entire career going up in smoke.

This would be the first of his darker days, when he would begin to seriously doubt that he would ever find Mr. Krantz.

The firemen and policemen were putting out the fire now, smoke billowing, and Eli finally allowed himself to be led away. He followed his family to the parking lot, too stunned to speak with them about what had transpired. When Vanessa offered to drive him home, he refused.

“I'll drive myself,” he said. She put the back of her hand on his forehead, as if testing for a fever. He pulled away. “I'm fine. I'll drive. I don't want to leave my car downtown.”

“I'll go with him, Mom,” Ginger said. Eli didn't want the company, but he was too upset to argue, so he said nothing, merely opened the passenger door for Ginger and waited while she climbed inside.

“We'll come over, too,” Amelia called to him from her own car.

“Okay,” he said.

“See you all there,” Vanessa said, and her cheerfulness, Eli sensed, grated on them all.

On the ride home, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, Ginger giggled.

“What is it?” Eli asked.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

Drawing her knees to her chest, Ginger propped her feet—encased in grubby sneakers—on the dashboard, something Eli typically hated but that he chose to tolerate this evening. “It's just … she was like the actress in
King Kong
—”

“Who?” Eli said. “Fay Wray?”

“Lindsay Meeks! Yes! Like Fay Wray! All like,
Ah! Help me! Help! Save me from the giant ape!
”

She flailed her hands around in imitation and then snorted and laughed.

“Ginger,” he said. “Isn't she your friend?”

Ginger wiped at her eyes, both crying and laughing now. “And King Kong was like,
Ah! I'm on fire! Meow! Belching fire! Ack! Roar! Arms up! Meow!
”

She fell silent now, laughing so hard that no sound came from her, and for a moment he was concerned that she was about to pass out. But then she lifted her face and put her head back, gasping for breath, her face gone glossy with the purest happiness, so very happy and free, as only children can be. How young she still was, his littlest daughter, not a woman at all but just very young and very innocent, so very different from how Amelia had been at age seventeen.

There was a short window in life where she would be able to feel this way. It would close soon, surely. Eli wanted her to get a grip on herself.

“Ginger,” he said, taking hold of one of her knees. “Ginger.”

She shook with laughter. She erupted with it.

“Ginger,” he said, trying not to yell. “She was your friend. Remember? You said she was nice.”

Ginger sobered up, regarded him in confusion. “So what? I'm just laughing. Not at her. Just, you know, at the situation.”

“This was her night,” he said, “her big night, when the whole city admired her, and it was ruined. Set on fire, Ginger. Up in flames. Literally.”

Ginger's lips quivered. She was trying not to laugh—trying—but the mention of the fire was too much for her. She crouched over her legs again and muffled the sound of her laugh with her arms, but it was no use; she couldn't hide it from him.

“It was her big night, Ginger, the night when all of Lilac City gathered to see…” And he trailed off here.

He was being a hypocrite, and he felt his hypocrisy keenly, and he was embarrassed about it and made all the more hungry by it.

Gary was now Lindsay's hero. Ginger couldn't compete with Lindsay Meeks, not now, not ever.
So let her have her laugh,
Eli thought.
At least she's not laughing at me.

Ginger, meanwhile, continued to buckle and shake, stopping for whole minutes at a time before remembering some other hilarious detail and convulsing with laughter again. Eli ignored her. He saw himself as all of Lilac City no doubt saw him tonight: laughable, misguided. He thought of Mr. Krantz. He felt bested.

Eli took a hand from the steering wheel and wiped at his face. Ginger finally managed to calm down. For this, Eli was grateful.

They were home. Eli turned off the car's ignition and regarded the house for a long moment. There was no point, he told himself, in feeling such self-pity. Tomorrow morning, he thought, there will be a fresh pot of coffee and a thousand things to do at the office. He would engross himself again in his work. This was a great comfort.

Thus bolstered, he followed Ginger inside.

Amelia and Jim sat together on the living room couch, speaking in low voices with Vanessa. Eli greeted them and apologized. He was tired, he said, and he was going to bed.

He noticed the hurt on Amelia's face, the confusion on Jim's. Vanessa's face was a mask of anger and pity. And then there was Ginger, making excuses for him to everyone, as always.

“It's not like he doesn't want to see you,” Ginger told her sister as Eli climbed the stairs. “He's tired. He worked really hard, you know? On his monster? His hominid, I mean? And the foot bone! It's nothing but ashes now. So it's a bummer. We can have dinner together, though. Maybe he'll come down later. I'm so glad to see you!”

But as Eli washed his hands at the sink and changed into his pajamas, he heard the unmistakable sounds of Amelia and Jim leaving the house, of Amelia and Jim's heated conversation in the driveway, of their car backing away and speeding from the neighborhood. Following came the predictable sounds of Vanessa finishing dinner, smashing dishes around, angry with him as she passive-aggressively cleaned. She wouldn't come to bed for hours, Eli knew, but would stay up, drinking wine and watching the popular television shows that she would later berate as artless.

And where would Ginger be? Talking on her phone? Thinking of the tall boy from the float committee? Or would she be scribbling the day's disappointments into her diary?

It didn't matter. Eli let it all go. He was fantastic at letting it all go. It was beyond him. He lay in bed, throbbing. He closed his eyes. At the threshold of the dreamworld, Mr. Krantz loomed before him, not made of paper this time but of flesh, and when the fire reached him, he could not be saved.

In his sleep, Eli screamed with delight.

 

1994

 

 

PEOPLE OF THE STREET

It was Ginger's sixth week in Spain. The panic attacks had ended. Now it was just the slow wretched acceptance of being away from Cort for another four months. On this sixth weekend, she called him from the Plaza Pelícano's public telephone. She used a phone card purchased from the nearby tobacco shop, a phone card that required she type in a twenty-digit number, her impatience swelling as her fingers trembled over the keys. What a relief when Cort actually came to the phone; what a relief that he was, unlike last week, waiting for her call. She listened to him talk, the phone pressed to her ear with such force that his voice gouged like a drill into her skull. She stared stupidly out at the world, ignoring the stray dogs glaring at her from beneath the tattered awnings, ignoring the children, many of them familiar to her now, tearing parentless around the plaza, stopping at her side to tease her and laugh at her: “
Americana, Americana, ¿con quién habla?
” Cort said he was glad to hear from her, and Ginger closed her eyes. He told her about nothing in particular: his microbiology professor's tendency to pick, mid-lecture, at the seat of his pants; his roommate's annoying habit of redistributing the unwashed dishes to Cort's bed (“What a dickwad!” Cort exclaimed, incredulous. “I pulled back the sheets and there was a rotting plate of lasagna. Such a cocksucker!”); the hangover he'd battled all morning, a hangover that made him miss having her around. At this moment, one of the glaring stray dogs deposited a slick wormlike turd near her feet. Ginger forced herself to laugh. Cort needed her, she reminded herself. He wouldn't leave her. He had just said, in so many words, that she bettered his life.

“So how's the rain in Spain?” he asked buoyantly.

“Not so much rain,” she said. She winced at her voice's breathiness, at its high, tremulous lilt. She sounded girlish and sentimental, even to herself. “Just one day of it, really. I saw two mopeds crash. All the wet oil in the streets. So there are a lot of accidents.”

“Cool,” he said. “Anyone mangled?”

“This lady's leg was pretty effed up. Moped trapped her underneath. But she was okay.”

“Bogue.”

“Yeah. Totally.” She waited a moment. “Have you been getting my letters?”

“The letters! Oh! Yes! They're awesome! Thank you!” His tone changed. “Although the fellas think it's funny. I mean, you send me one every day. Sometimes more than one. And don't get me wrong. I love it. It's like Christmas, kinda, when I get back from class and here are all of these letters and postcards waiting for me. It's cool, right? But, you know, they think it's weird.” He exhaled loudly. “Not that I care what they think.”

She swallowed with difficulty. “I really liked the letter you sent me. Your description of the river was beautiful. You're such a good writer.”

“Yeah? Thanks. I was super inspired. Sorry I haven't sent you more. Been busy. Real busy. It's weird, you know, because I feel guilty for not writing more. Especially after how much you send me. But I think of you a lot. I really do, Ginger. I hope you know that.”

Later, Ginger slowly walked toward the river, taking her time, watching her feet in their delicate espadrilles, avoiding the dog crap, ignoring the hissing, the catcalls. An old man rubbed his fingers together under her nose and put the fingers in his mouth as though tasting her. She scowled and drew her head down, parting her shoulder blades. She threaded her way from plaza to plaza until she reached the Guadalquivir, where her friends sat at a table littered with empty glasses, the sugary husks of recently drained
tintos de verano
. They were all—all six of them—the daughters of the wealthy. Like Ginger. Ginger told everyone her father was a doctor, too, a podiatrist, even though he'd given up his podiatry practice years ago. Sometimes when she visited a hospital and smelled the sterilizing chemicals and watched the orderly staff, she mourned her dad's chosen career. It was embarrassing, really. In high school, Ginger had considered becoming a cryptozoologist, too. It sounded like fun back then. Chasing beasts! But, like most things her parents did, it no longer made sense to her. She wanted to be an artist. A famous painter or writer. Maybe a musician, although she didn't know how to play an instrument and she couldn't much sing.