The Spirit

by Thomas Page

  “Come on,” the Indian coaxed. The smile grew wider.

  “Oh hell.” Helder took the glass because the waiters were watching. He should learn to keep his mouth shut.

  The main lounge, onto which Helder’s office opened, was approximately forty feet across. On the opposite wall was a fireplace of black Cascade lava. The floor was scattered with throw rugs, chairs, coffee tables, and sofas. The east wall was glass, opening onto the sun deck, where most of the guests were standing around, drinks in hand, brightly colored sweaters festooning their bodies. The west wall housed the reception desk, stuffed, antlered animal heads, and Charles Russell prints. Tucked into the corner was the Grizzly Bar, guarded by an enormous stuffed bear with his paws clutching an esthetically gnarled branch.

  The last mile. Helder slouched across the floor to the fireplace, his evident dejection attracting the attention of the guests, who began filing in from the sun deck. When he reached the fireplace, he turned and faced the Indian, who remained at the office door, fitting an arrow to his bow.

  Helder felt the fire heating his backside. Those were awfully crooked arrows. They were really twigs with some kind of dipshit pigeon feathers to stabilize them.

  “Get it up higher,” the Indian commanded.

  Holding the glass upright by the base, Helder raised it so high that his coat buttons popped. If the arrow went through his eye, he’d fall backward, still conscious, and burn to death in the fire. If he were lucky, it might just drill a kneecap. He would be crippled but alive. Being shot in the stomach would be enormously annoying, and he would probably have to have liquid food the rest of his life.

  The waiters formed a human cage around the Indian in case he tried to break away after the murder. All the guests were indoors, watching the unfolding drama. They should not drink at this altitude, Helder thought; there was at least ten cardiacs among them.

  With three small movements, the Indian raised the bow, drew back the arrow, and let go.

  Jesus! Aim!

  One girl’s scream underscored the collective gasp from the crowd. Helder heard the arrow thunk deep into the pine over his head. Severed from its slender stem, the goblet bounced onto his head and crashed into gleaming splinters on the floor. The musical impact was drowned out by the convulsive pandemonium of applause, shouts, and whistles from the guests. When Helder finally looked up at the glass base and stem, the arrow was still vibrating in the wood.

  “Ladies and—” Helder squeaked. He cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen! If I may—please—have—your attention!” The last word was a scream, which dulled the roar and angered the Indian’s dog. “Colby Lodge is pleased to announce its amateur, intermediate, and advanced archery courses, which will be held beginning tomorrow in the fields by the snowmobile shed . . .” The guests ignored him. Their voices rose back to high levels, drowning out his praise for the archery equipment in the souvenir shop.

  In the office, he shut the door, silencing the noise of the guests to a muffled roar. He dropped his smile. He was an employer now. He sat at his desk and pulled out an employee form. “A hundred dollars a week. That’s not much, but the lodging is free and so is the food long as you don’t eat us alive. Besides, you didn’t want any money in the first place. Okay with you?”

  The Indian considered, then nodded impassively.

  “Set it up any way you want. You’ll work from noon to five in the afternoon. Mondays are off. Still okay?”

  The Indian nodded again. Impatiently.

  “Now that dog. He stays outside. You can feed him leftovers, but I don’t want him running loose in here. Ah!”

  The door opened and shut, letting in a fragment of laughter from the lounge as well as a slight girl with dusty blond hair drawn back with a ribbon, a loose sweater, a granny dress, and clear gray eyes.

  “This is Martha Lucas. She runs the gift shop. She’s the nearest thing we have to an authority on Indian . . . culture.” Most Indians did not give a damn about such things. But this fellow was not typical of anybody. “Martha, this is . . . Good question. What’s your name, anyway?”

  The Indian’s face flickered. He hesitated. “Moon. John Moon.”

  “Martha, Mr. Moon is going to be with us for at least a month, running an archery course.”

  Martha stood to one side, her eyes on Moon’s leather bag. “Marvelous. Where are you from, Mr. Moon?”

  “Stevensville, Montana.”

  Helder filled out the form. “I’ll need some identification, Mr. Moon.”

  Moon dug out a wallet and hard leather case with a brass clasp and handed them to Helder. “All my stuff’s in there.”

  Helder opened the billfold and found a Social Security card in the name of John Moon. There were no other papers and just a few crumpled dollar bills. “Don’t you have a driver’s license or anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What’s this?” Helder picked up the leather case and opened the clasp. The interior was lined with wrinkled velvet, on which was folded a red-­white-­and-­blue ribbon with a medal showing a gleaming eagle.

  While Helder stared at it, the silence could have crushed a ball bearing. Astonishment carved some character lines deep in his smooth face. “Is this for real, Moon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Martha, look at this. You’ll never see another one again.”

  She had heard of the Congressional Medal of Honor and seen pictures of it draped around the necks of men ranging from lean Viking warriors to tubby middle-­aged pensioners. Knowing nothing else but her first impressions about Moon, she thought it appropriate. Appropriate—that was the word.

  “And he carries it around like a wooden nickel.” Helder handed the case back to Moon, who dropped it into his medicine bundle.

  “Vietnam, Mr. Moon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, Mr. Moon. No contract, just a handshake, right? Let’s give it a whack for a month and see how it works out. Feel like a bite to eat?”

  Mention of food drove everything out of the Indian’s mind. His face lit up. “Yeah, I sure would.”

  “George will throw a sandwich together in the kitchen for you. Tell Jane at the reception desk you’re in the fourth bungalow. She’ll probably shift you around according to business.”

  Moon gathered his bow and arrows together. He and the dog left Helder’s office like twin shadows.

  Martha sat on Helder’s sofa and tucked her legs under her dress. They spoke in low voices, as if Moon were listening at the door.

  “I’d like to find out about that medal,” Helder mused. “There’s a record in the Defense Department somewhere.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “You’ve got me. He said he was camping. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was running from something. I guess we’ll know when he starts stealing us blind.”

  “You’re taking a big chance.”

  “So what? He’s the best archer I ever saw. You’ve got to take chances in life.”

  “If he’s from Stevensville, he’s probably a Flathead,” Martha said, her eyes on the door.

  “What’s a flathead? I never heard of a flathead.”

  “They’re really Salish, or that’s what they called themselves. They were confused with a coastal tribe that flattened babies’ heads with boards.”

  Helder envisioned white settlers being scalped and burned at the stake. Martha smiled.

  “Interesting tribe. They never killed a white man. In fact, they protected them from Joseph and the Nez Perces, who were headed for Canada. They continued helping whites right up to when their land was taken from them.”

  “Why?”

  “The Flatheads were philosophers of a sort. They invited Catholic missionaries from St. Louis to teach them the faith, which is kind of a twist. Missionaries usually invite themselves. They did it out of curiosity. A
t the same time, they were so skilled in war that neither Joseph nor the Blackfeet liked to tangle with them. They were very religious,” she mused, looking back at the door. “Did you notice that handbag he wore?”

  “The thing on his belt?”

  “That’s right. Either I’m crazy or that’s a real medicine bundle. A sort of a fetish bag. The Indians believed in a personal spirit who brought them luck and everything. The spirit usually left a talisman like a rabbit foot that you’d carry in a bag like that.”

  Helder brought his pen point down on the desk. “It smelled.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Like garbage. I was going to ask him to take it off. You can’t get close to him.” Helder doodled circles on the paper. He wanted things to be nice and uncomplicated for Colby’s first winter. Martha was a sweet girl but a bit too intense for his tastes. “So he’s a religious fanatic. Lots of people are. Jesus was.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I was just thinking out loud,” she said, getting up.

  “Come on out and see the ski show. You can hear my melodious voice hitting every mountain in the hemisphere.”

  “I saw the first one. By the way, what did you think of Lester’s Bigfoot?”

  “Lester’s what?”

  “It was on the radio. Lester says he saw a Bigfoot on his way home tonight. Right down there past the bridge.”

  “Tonight!” Helder screeched. The boss was always the last to know. Lester was a nose-­picking dishwasher whom Helder had always thought pretty advanced for a cretin.

  “Lester even claimed the thing threw rocks at him.”

  Helder was disinclined to believe that Lester could tell a Bigfoot from an empty sock. Bigfoot added another angle to the glittering array in his imagination. The wilderness equivalent of a haunted house. He wrote out notes for a Bigfoot hunt. Only the strong of heart need apply. He finished with a notation about discreetly stocking condoms in case girls on the Bigfoot hunt became so frightened that a strong, manly, protective arm was not diversion enough. Helder giggled at his wicked thoughts, and wondered if somewhere in that land development in the sky Daddy was not chortling with him.

  “Kimberly? It’s Jason!”

  “Mr. Jason! I’ve been on pins and needles ever since talking to you. What’s been happening? Where are you?”

  “I’m in a hospital in the State of Washington.”

  “Again?”

  “Yeah. You’re not going to believe this. He threw a rattler at me.”

  Jason had been taken to the Ranger station two nights ago and then transferred to this ward, where a multitude of antibiotics was added to the antivenin. Bruises covered his body, more from the snake venom than the fight in the river. He was so full of needle holes that he leaked. A tight bandage constricted his arm where the snakebite was. He had successfully evaded the questions about where he was that night and what he was doing.

  “I’d rather you didn’t tell anybody about it.” Jason could see his company’s stock dropping into the basement. CANADA BIGFOOT HUNTER IN HOSPITAL AGAIN.

  “That makes sense,” Kimberly said.

  “Listen, I found out some stuff on the Flatheads.”

  “Oh? Shoot.”

  “They had a very rich culture, all of it oral. And over half their stories are about giants. Giants! How about that? Giant tree men, giants living in the Flathead lake, giant everything. The story is Coyote killed them all off and turned them into black boulders. I guess he missed one, what?”

  Jason filed away that bit of information. “Listen, I got a pretty good look at the thing.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Well, it had a very peculiar face.”

  “Uh-­huh.”

  “The skin was lighter-­colored than the rest of it, and the hair was different, longer, with a widow’s peak—”

  “A what?”

  “Widow’s peak. A V in the middle of the forehead. Pointing down. And it had this narrow protuberant nose. The eyes were set deep. Now get this. You know how apes have this heavy eyebrow ridge over their eyes?”

  “Oh yes. It’s a shield of bone. The eyes are set well behind it.”

  “Well, he had two of these eyebrow ridges. And if the light was right they kind of looked like . . .” Jason gulped. “Horns.”

  The director of the Kansas Primate Center did not laugh out loud. His scratching pen was audible over the phone. “Anything else?”

  What else do you need! “That’s about it. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it?”

  “Let me ask you this. Did it have a chin?”

  Kimberly had hit it. A chin! Even more than the horns, that fragile, aristocratic, pointed chin was the single feature that transformed a simple gorilla in Jason’s mind into something else. “Why?”

  “And what about buttocks? Large protuberant buttocks? Oh, never mind. We know he walks upright, don’t we? Buttocks anchor the back muscles. I believe you said he even runs upright?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can identify your Sasquatch, Mr. Jason. Are you ready for this?”

  Jason took a sip of water. “I’m ready for anything.”

  “The chin is what really does it. There’s only one primate that has that feature. Homo sapiens, Mr. Jason. Your beast is a human of some kind. He’s not an ape at all.”

  As Jason’s equilibrium tilted, water spilled from his glass to the bed. He did not know whether to feel anger or disappointment. The face crowded back on him, that wicked, leering demon face curtained by shaggy hair . . .

  Kimberly was still talking. “It’s been growing on me ever since you said it was a headhunter. Neanderthal man was a headhunter, Mr. Jason. During an excavation in Italy they uncovered a skull cult in a sort of altar made by Neanderthals. They found a skull propped on a little stick. Now you’re saying he’s intelligent enough to throw a rattler at you to defend himself. Doesn’t that sound pretty human to you?”

  Impossible!

  Jason furiously waved away a nurse who looked in, concerned about his white face and shaking hand. “A human being!” he grated into the phone. “Kimberly, he’s seven feet tall! He eats bark! He’s covered head to foot in hair and his arms reach to his knees! What the hell, do you think I’m crazy or something?”

  “Certainly not, Mr. Jason. I fully realize it raises more questions than it answers. But a man is what it is, a man of some kind.”

  “What kind, Kimberly?”

  “Remember what I said about genetic deformities?”

  “Yes!”

  “It sounds like this thing is deformed all right. Only I’m wondering if it’s a deformed human instead of a deformed ape. Giantism is a well-­known glandular disorder, and so is excessive body hair. And when you think about it, seven feet isn’t all that tall. Basketball players reach that height all the time. So that might leave us not only with a human but a modern one, some poor, retarded wretch who escaped from an institution somewhere and has been running around the woods.”

  “Kimberly, he weighs a good eight hundred pounds! He’s got to be smart enough to fuel all that weight!” Jason roared. “A human that messed up wouldn’t survive an hour in the woods.”

  Kimberly was silent for a moment. A heavy professorial silence, during which Jason could almost hear him clambering through dusty mental detritus of his past learning.

  “Well, Mr. Jason, that leaves us with Paranthropus or some other predecessor of Homo sapiens. I don’t know. It doesn’t fit any fossil I’ve ever heard of in the human line, but we have only scratched the surface of that study anyway. It does sound to me like it’s deformed. And if he has a chin, he’s a Homo sapiens. Period. I’m sorry, Mr. Jason, but that’s the bottom line.”

  A man.

  Some pitiful rejected soul wandering through the wilderness? Or an ancient manlike thing, part of a whole species, a primordial
shape that walked the mists of prehistory, whose face stamped terror on man’s memory for ages to come. He was a headhunter. He threw stones. Even his prints were manlike.

  A prehistoric human would be a find indeed, something bigger than a dumb gorilla. A living relic of human evolution, an ape man. Or a man ape.

  Did the Indian sense this somehow? Was it just curiosity like Jason’s that kept the Indian on the thing’s trail for hundreds of miles? Was there some kind of bond between them, some mutual—there was no other word for it—friendship? It would explain why the Indian had conked Jason with his rifle. The Indian had seemed to be protecting it.

  “Protecting it,” Jason muttered, looking out the window. That was exactly what the Indian was doing; that was why he had attacked Frank Stone at the trailer park, too.

  That his quarry was deformed was inescapable, Jason realized. Man or ape, the head did not fit the body. Well, he would figure that out when the time came. More than ever the central enigma of the thing filled Jason’s head, to the bursting point. He ate, slept, and drank that creature. Every moment in the hospital room, snakebite or not, meant the thing was getting away from him.

  The nurse at the reception desk was astonished to see him walk down the hall fully dressed. “Mr. Jason, where do you think you’re going!”

  “I’m checking out, thank you.” Jason unsteadily filled out a check for a thousand dollars. “That should cover expenses, time, ambulance service, plus contributions to a new wing or whatever you want, plus any mental anguish caused by my temper.”

  “You cannot leave until the doctor’s seen you.”

  “I am leaving now, madam.”

  “You need at least four days of rest—”

  “I never felt better in my life. I need fresh air and sunshine.” Jason tore out the check and handed it to her. He sniffed his hand, realizing he still smelled of disinfectant.

  “Mr. Jason . . .”

  “No, madam.”

  “At least let someone change your bandage.”

  In a rack in the reception room were copies of a local newspaper called the Garrison Tribune. As a nurse angrily wrapped a new bandage around his forearm, Jason opened the paper to the second page and felt adrenaline rush through him.