Working for Bigfoot (10 page)

I parked at the spot indicated on the map and hiked a good mile and a half into the hills, taking a heavy backpack with me. I found a pleasant spot to set up camp. The mid-October weather was crisp, but I had a good sleeping bag and would be comfortable as long as it didn’t start raining. I dug a fire pit and ringed it in stones, built a modest fire out of fallen limbs, and laid out my sleeping bag on a foam camp pad. By the time it got dark, I was well into preparing the dinner I’d brought with me. The scent of foil-wrapped potatoes baking in coals blended with that of the steaks I had spitted and roasting over the fire.

Can I cook a camp meal or what?

Bigfoot showed up half an hour after sunset.

One minute, I was alone. The next, he simply stepped out into view. He was huge. Not huge like a big person, but huge like a horse, with that same sense of raw animal power and mass. He was nine feet tall at least and probably tipped the scales at well over six hundred pounds. His powerful, wide-shouldered body was covered in long, dark brown hair. Even though he stood in plain sight in my firelight, I could barely see the buckskin bag he had slung over one shoulder and across his chest, the hair was so long.

“Strength of a River in His Shoulders,” I said. “You’re welcome at my fire.”

“Wizard Dresden,” River Shoulders rumbled. “It is good to see you.” He took a couple of long steps and hunkered down opposite the fire from me. “Man. That smells good.”

“Darn right it does,” I said. I proceeded with the preparations in companionable silence while River Shoulders stared thoughtfully at the fire. I’d set up my camp this way for a reason—it made me the host and River Shoulders my guest. It meant I was obliged to provide food and drink, and he was obliged to behave with decorum. Guest-and-host relationships are damned near laws of physics in the supernatural world: They almost never get violated, and when they do, it’s a big deal. Both of us felt a lot more comfortable around one another this way.

Okay. Maybe it did a wee bit more to make me feel comfortable than it did River Shoulders, but he was a repeat customer, I liked him, and I figured he probably didn’t get treated to a decent steak all that often.

We ate the meal in an almost ritualistic silence, too, other than River making some appreciative noises as he chewed. I popped open a couple of bottles of McAnnally’s Pale, my favorite brew by a veritable genius of hops, back in Chicago. River liked it so much that he gave me an inquisitive glance when his bottle was empty. So I emptied mine and produced two more.

After that, I filled a pipe with expensive tobacco, lit it, took a few puffs, and passed it to him. He nodded and took it. We smoked and finished our beers. By then, the fire had died down to glowing embers.

“Thank you for coming,” River Shoulders rumbled. “Again, I come to seek your help on behalf of my son.”

“Third time you’ve come to me,” I said.

“Yes.” He rummaged in his pouch and produced a small, heavy object. He flicked it to me. I caught it and squinted at it in the dim light. It was a gold nugget about as big as a Ping-Pong ball. I nodded and tossed it back to him. River Shoulders’s brows lowered into a frown.

You have to understand. A frown on a mug like his looked indistinguishable from scowling fury. It turned his eyes into shadowed caves with nothing but a faint gleam showing from far back in them. It made his jaw muscles bunch and swell into knots the size of tennis balls on the sides of his face.

“You will not help him,” the Bigfoot said.

I snorted. “
You’re
the one who isn’t helping him, big guy.”

“I am,” he said. “I am hiring you.”

“You’re his
father
,” I said quietly. “And he doesn’t even know your name. He’s a good kid. He deserves more than that. He deserves the truth.”

He shook his head slowly. “Look at me. Would he even accept my help?”

“You aren’t going to know unless you try it,” I said. “And I never said I wouldn’t help him.”

At that, River Shoulders frowned a little more.

I curbed an instinct to edge away from him.

“Then what do you want in exchange for your services?” he asked.

“I help the kid,” I said. “You meet the kid. That’s the payment. That’s the deal.”

“You do not know what you are asking,” he said.

“With respect, River Shoulders, this is not a negotiation. If you want my help, I just told you how to get it.”

He became very still at that. I got the impression that maybe people didn’t often use tactics like that when they dealt with him.

When he spoke, his voice was a quiet, distant rumble. “You have no right to ask this.”

“Yeah, um. I’m a wizard. I meddle. It’s what we do.”

“Manifestly true.” He turned his head slightly away. “You do not know how much you ask.”

“I know that kid deserves more than you’ve given him.”

“I have seen to his protection. To his education. That is what fathers do.”

“Sure,” I said. “But you weren’t ever
there.
And that
matters.
”

Absolute silence fell for a couple of minutes.

“Look,” I said gently. “Take it from a guy who knows. Growing up without a dad is terrifying. You’re the only father he’s ever going to have. You can go hire Superman to look out for Irwin if you want to, and he’d still be the wrong guy—because he isn’t you.”

River toyed with the empty bottle, rolling it across his enormous fingers like a regular guy might have done with a pencil.

“Do you want me on this?” I asked him. “No hard feelings if you don’t.”

River looked up at me again and nodded slowly. “I know that if you agree to help him, you will do so. I will pay your price.”

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about Irwin’s problem.”

“What’d he say?” Officer Dean asked.

“He said the kid was at the University of Oklahoma for school,” I said. “River’d had a bad dream and knew that the kid’s life was in danger.”

The cop grunted. “So…Bigfoot is a psychic?”

“Think about it. No one ever gets a good picture of one, much less a clean shot,” I said. “Despite all the expeditions and TV shows and whatnot. River’s people have got more going for them than being huge and strong. My guess is that they’re smarter than humans. Maybe a lot smarter. My guess is they know magic of some kind, too.”

“Jesus,” Officer Dean said. “You really believe all this, don’t you.”

“I want to believe,” I said. “And I told you that you wouldn’t.”

Dean grunted. Then he said, “Usually they’re too drunk to make sense when I get a story like this. Keep going.”

I got to Norman, Oklahoma, a bit before noon the next morning. It was a Wednesday, which was a blessing. In the Midwest, if you show up to a college town on a weekend, you risk running into a football game. In my experience, that resulted in universal problems with traffic, available hotel rooms, and drunken football hooligans.

Or wait:
Soccer
is the one with hooligans. Drunken American football fans are just…drunks, I guess.

River had provided me with a small dossier he’d had prepared, which included a copy of his kid’s class schedule. I parked my car in an open spot on the street not too far from campus and ambled on over. I got some looks: I sort of stand out in a crowd. I’m a lot closer to seven feet tall than six, which might be one reason why River Shoulders liked to hire me—I look a lot less tiny than other humans, to him. Add in the big black leather duster and the scar on my face, and I looked like the kind of guy you’d want to avoid in dark alleys.

The university campus was as confusing as all of them are, with buildings that had constantly evolved into and out of multiple roles over the years. They were all named after people I doubt any of the students had ever heard of, or cared about, and there seemed to be no organizational logic at all at work there. It was a pretty enough campus, I supposed. Lots of redbrick and brownstone buildings. Lots of architectural doohickeys on many of the buildings, in a kind of quasi-classical Greek style. The ivy that was growing up many of the walls seemed a little too cultivated and obvious for my taste. Then again, I had exactly the same amount of regard for the Ivy League as I did for the Big 12. The grass was an odd color, like maybe someone had sprayed it with a blue-green dye or something, though I had no idea what kind of delusional creep would do something so pointless.

And, of course, there were students—a whole lot of kids, all of them with things to do and places to be. I could have wandered around all day, but I thought I’d save myself the headache of attempting to apply logic to a university campus and stopped a few times to ask for directions. Irwin Pounder, River Shoulders’s son, had a physics course at noon, so I picked up a notebook and a couple of pens at the university bookstore and ambled on into the large classroom. It was a perfect disguise. The notebook was college-ruled.

I sat near the back, where I could see both doors into the room, and waited. Bigfoot Irwin was going to stand out in the crowd almost as badly as I did. The kid was huge. River had shown me a photo that he kept in his medicine bag, carefully laminated to protect it from the elements. Irwin’s mom could have been a second-string linebacker for the Bears. Carol Pounder was a formidable woman, and over six feet tall. But her boy was a head taller than she already, and still had the awkward, too-lean look of someone who wasn’t finished growing. His shoulders had come in, though, and it looked like he might have had to turn sideways to walk through doors.

I waited and waited, watching both doors, until the professor arrived, and the class started. Irwin never arrived. I was going to leave, but it actually turned out to be kind of interesting. The professor was a lunatic but a really entertaining one. The guy drank liquid nitrogen, right there in front of everybody, and blew it out his nose in this huge jet of vapor. I applauded along with everyone else, and before I knew it, the lecture was over. I might even have learned something.

Okay.

Maybe there were
some
redeeming qualities to a college education.

I went to Irwin’s next class, which was a freshman biology course, in another huge classroom.

No Irwin.

He wasn’t at his four o’clock math class, either, and I emerged from it bored and cranky. None of Irwin’s other teachers held a candle to Dr. Indestructo.

Huh.

Time for plan B.

River’s dossier said that Irwin was playing football for OU. He’d made the team as a walk-on, and River had been as proud as any father would be about the athletic prowess of his son. So I ambled on over to the Sooners’ practice field, where the team was warming up with a run.

Even among the football players, Irwin stood out. He was half a head taller than any of them, at least my own height. He looked gangly and thin beside the fellows around him, even with the shoulder pads on, but I recognized his face. I’d last seen him when he was about fourteen. Though his rather homely features had changed a bit, they seemed stronger, and more defined. There was no mistaking his dark, intelligent eyes.

I stuck my hands in the pockets of my old leather duster and waited, watching the field. I’d found the kid, and, absent any particular danger, I was in no particular hurry. There was no sense in charging into the middle of Irwin’s football practice and his life and disrupting everything. I’m just not that kind of guy.

Okay, well.

I try not to be.

“Seems to keep happening, though, doesn’t it,” I said to myself. “You show up on somebody’s radar, and things go to DEFCON 1 a few minutes later.”

“I’m sorry?” said a young woman’s voice.