Roanoke Ridge

by J. J. Dupuis

  Ted’s different this time out. He’s quiet now, unsure. Saad is still Saad, bringing up the rear, weighed down with the curiosity of a tourist. He can’t help it, maybe he doesn’t even realize when he pauses at the base of a Pacific silver fir or leans over a bearberry bush, known locally as a kinnikinnick. We hear what sounds like a cry, and Saad is shocked awake. It sounds like a child, but I recognize the sound. So does Ted.

  “Nuthatch,” I say.

  After an hour and a half on foot, we come to the first of the three abandoned mines I want to search. From the trail the mine is invisible, like something out of a fairy tale — we would’ve passed it if Ted’s GPS hadn’t pinged to alert us that we’d arrived. Because the Pacific Northwest’s winters differ from those of most of the continent, even in the early spring there is a lot of green between the pine trees and the moss that grows on every rock and rotting log. We have to peel back this veil to find the mine, and even then, we don’t see its gaping mouth until we are less than ten feet from it.

  The adit of the mine is tucked between two walls of solid rock. A dead stump sits on top, its dry and lifeless roots hanging down over the entrance. The timber that once acted as a lintel for the adit has fallen down on one side, creating a diagonal barrier. One expects to see a spider’s web sealing the gaps on either side of the timber, but the whole area is clear.

  The three of us approach it more like a SWAT team now. The wik-wik-wik of a pileated woodpecker echoes through the forest and startles us all. There’s a tension in us that just wasn’t there before. Ted surveys the area around the mine before we get close. And this time, Saad insists on clearing the entrance of any immediate danger before I crawl inside. He shines his light into the black mouth of the mine before stepping aside. “Maybe I should go in,” he says.

  “I can do it,” Ted says.

  “I know you can, but I will, if you two don’t mind,” I say.

  Ted had brought two mining helmets from the ranger station. He hands one to me now. I turn the headlamp on and then fasten the strap under my chin, before approaching the entrance. Gently, I push the fallen timber to the side. It gives a bit, so I lean in close to move it. That’s when I see some burlap fibres on the edge of the wood, as well as blades of dry grass.

  “Check this out,” I say, pointing to the fibres.

  Inside, invertebrates scurry out of my headlamp’s glow. The opening of the mine is dry, the timber beams show few signs of rot. There are no tracks for minecarts, but two ruts are visible in the dirt. It looks like the miners used a wheelbarrow to cart ore out. Just like the mine from yesterday, the floor and walls look like they were swept out with a broom.

  I snap and place some glow sticks in the walls — cracks in the strata provide the perfect crevices — and the mine slowly begins to fill with an amber aura. Ted comes in behind me. Saad remains outside, sticking tightly to the rock wall next to the adit, and I feel better knowing we have the entrance covered.

  “According to our records, this mine’s been here close to a hundred years,” Ted says.

  Large spiders look down on us from the ceiling, their backs covered in eyes.

  “That’s disgusting,” I say, as the beam from my headlamp falls upon a particularly large, particularly ugly orange spider with long, crablike legs more than two inches across.

  “Trogloraptor,” Ted says. “It means ‘cave robber.’ This species was only named in 2012. I’ve never seen one before in person. Oregon is home to over five hundred species of spiders.”

  “Usually I’m not grossed out by spiders, but that one is …”

  “Butt-ugly, I know.”

  It starts moving along the ceiling, not liking the attention it’s receiving, or all the light, and I have an impulse to flatten it, to kill it just for making me uncomfortable. Behaviour my dad wouldn’t stand for.

  Deeper in, the rock walls are cool and damp, though the floor of the mine remains dry, made up of a fine sand, almost like ash that has been ground under a boot. Ted and I walk slowly, taking small steps with extreme care. It makes our journey feel longer. As the tunnel curves around jagged rock edges, we lose the light flowing through the adit. The spiders disappear. All the invertebrates are gone now. There is nothing living at the back of the mine except Ted and I. It feels like we’re lost.

  “Are you guys okay?” Saad yells, his voice sounding as if he’s speaking through a tube.

  “A-okay,” Ted says.

  We come to the end of the tunnel. It’s a wall of solid rock, a coolness radiating from it like an open refrigerator. The dirt on the floor here has been disturbed, as if someone had set up a sleeping bag and spent the night.

  “See that?” I say.

  “Looks like we had a camper,” Ted says. “This is the last place you’d stay if you wanted to be found.”

  Kneeling down, I shine my flashlight against the rocks to the left of the disturbed sand. There’s an oil slick on the wall, a paint-like smear that resembles Chinese calligraphy. I take a latex glove out of my pocket, put it on, and wipe the smear. My latex-wrapped fingertips are red under the beam of my flashlight.

  “Blood,” I say. “Fresh blood.” I shine the flashlight around the rest of the cave. “There’s more.”

  In the opposite corner, a grey igneous rock sparkles when I shine my light on it. The ash-like sand has been swept up against it, carefully, to hide that it has been moved. I stick my fingers between the rock and the wall and pry it away. In a pit behind the rock I find some wrappers for a gauze pack, medical tape, and a small bottle of rubbing alcohol. Using my knife to move the refuse around, I also find an MRE wrapper. Chicken teriyaki.

  “What is it?” Ted asks.

  “The absolute last thing I wanted to find,” I say.

  FIFTEEN

  Patterson said he felt the search for Bigfoot is drawing to a close. “We know enough about Bigfoot’s habit and habitats that we should be able to soon lure one into a position where we can capture it,” Patterson declared.

  — Oregon Journal, March 11, 1969

  I’M DREAMING I’M ON A FERRY CROSSING A rough sea, saltwater spraying over the sides of the boat, when Saad nudges me awake from the driver’s seat.

  We’re parked in the parking lot of the Golden Eagle Motel. The whole place is empty now. Everybody else has already made their way to the centre of town for the Bigfoot Parade. The floats are gathered at the empty lot just north of here, forming a line and slowly turning onto the highway.

  Saad points out the window. A Bigfoot is creeping around the side of the motel, before taking a big step up onto the porch. Its reddish-brown fur turns a shade darker beneath the awning and stands in stark contrast to the white-painted boards that make up the outer wall. This is not the creature from Andrew’s sketch. When it looks around, Saad and I sit low in our seats, concealed by the dirty windshield. The creature skulks over to the door of Barbara Sorel’s room, reaching under the white T-shirt it’s wearing to produce a key. It quickly disappears inside.

  Thankfully, Barbara is not there. She is where she’s been the last three days — sitting anxiously in the ranger station, awaiting word about her husband. Seeing a hairy ape-man walk into her motel room would be a devastating blow to her already-fragile heart.

  “This is going to hurt her badly,” Saad says. “There may be no coming back from it.”

  “I know,” I say. “Why did it have to be me?”

  “It could only be you,” Saad says.

  Minutes later the Bigfoot exits the motel, pulling the door closed and locking it. One thing is clear, as Bigfoot walks past the motel room doors and the humming Pepsi machine: it’s missing the trademark arm swing made famous in Frame 352 of the PG film. In fact, its left arm isn’t moving at all, just hanging by its side like an empty sleeve.

  “He had to come back sooner or later,” I say. “Now is the best time.”

  The Sasquatch walks to the end of the motel driveway. Saad and I get out of our rental car and follow on foot. I wear a
baseball cap and sunglasses. It should be enough of a disguise. I look like everybody else waiting to watch the parade.

  It’s a beautiful day for the festival — the hottest April day in Roanoke Valley history, beating the previous record, set in 1962, by seven degrees. Spectators approach the road in T-shirts and shorts. The sheriff’s department has closed off one lane of traffic with orange road pylons. More and more, a crowd gathers, pressing in on the asphalt that begins to cook in the sun.

  A father and his two sons stand near the gravel shoulder of the highway, staring up the road that winds around outcrops of rocks and windblown pine trees, waiting for the parade to start. One of the little boys turns and sees the Sasquatch, leans back into the safety of his father’s legs. The father says something to the Sasquatch, who stops and poses with the son while the father takes a picture with his phone. After, as Sasquatch backs away, it bangs into a telephone pole and claps its hand over its shoulder. Its apelike face, moulded into permanent shock and disgust, turns and looks at the pole as though it hurt it on purpose.

  Before turning around again, the eyeholes beneath its pronounced brow ridge sweep over me and lock in on my face. Does it recognize me? I behave casually. I don’t slow down. Saad follows my cue, acting as though we are tourists.

  The first vehicles in the parade turn around the bend. Horns honk and pale arms wave in the golden sun. First up are two deputies on motorcycles, acting like a presidential motorcade. In the convertible behind them, Miss Bigfoot 2016 sits up on the back seat, a bouquet of flowers in one arm, a sash across her shoulder.

  The Bigfoot is walking a little faster now. It looks agitated. Is it the injury? Or is there a clock counting down that I don’t know about? It glances over its shoulder again, the corner of its rubber scowl visible over tufts of fake fur. The Sasquatch looks straight ahead, the mountains off in the distance. Then it bolts.

  For the first time in my life, I see a wounded Sasquatch running straight into a crowd of people holding cotton candy. It has a head start, but it’s hurt, cradling its left arm. Saad is behind me, trying to capture the whole thing on his cellphone camera. I know, I just know that the video will be one long blur and I may as well be chasing Santa Claus. It’ll never hold up, definitely not in a court of law. Saad breathes heavily, his feet slapping on the concrete. I feel better knowing he’s here.

  The air is hot and thick with the smell of burgers and hot dogs cooking on a half-dozen barbecues. The Sasquatch turns a corner and almost knocks over a little boy with a snow cone in one hand and his mother’s hand in the other. I gain on the furry ape-man as it runs right across the main street, between floats and into a curious crowd. I run in front of an old black convertible with a trio of silver-haired women from the Ladies’ Auxiliary who are throwing packets of candy into the crowd. Behind the wheel is a fat old guy with dark Elvis-style sunglasses. He honks at me, but I keep running.

  There is only one place the Bigfoot could be going, the one place where it could park a car between the motel and the mountain that wouldn’t be swallowed up by the parade. It runs behind the drugstore, down a side street that slopes down into a parking lot. There’s no question of primate locomotion here, bipedalism versus brachiation versus quadrapedalism. It’s just running, running for its life. It’s opened up its wound — I can see the blood soaking into the Pace Hardware Store T-shirt overtop the red-brown fur. The Sasquatch runs between parked cars and fiddles around its waistline like it’s trying to find car keys.

  “Stop!” I yell.

  It’s a beautiful day; a wall of evergreen trees rises up behind the Sasquatch, just across the river. This whole town is like paradise, nestled among mountains and river valleys.

  Behind the Sasquatch is a short concrete wall built at the edge of the parking lot, then the steep drop to the Klamath River, the midday sun glinting off the peaks of the water. Most apes aren’t very good swimmers; they aren’t very buoyant, and this one is badly injured. The only way out is the road. Saad catches up to me, out of breath, and we stand together in the mouth of the driveway. There’s no driving out of here without driving through us. Even the legendary Sasquatch isn’t stupid enough to commit vehicular manslaughter in broad daylight, hundreds of witnesses fifty feet away. Or at least I hope it isn’t.

  “Professor,” I say. “Please.”

  Ted pulls up in his truck, parking it across the driveway, forming a backstop.

  The Sasquatch cradles his wounded arm, bulging out from under his costume, and leans against an old rust-bottomed Caprice, looking at something off in the distance. He’s tired, he’s wounded, and he’s old.

  When I was younger, Professor Sorel’s obsessive tendencies, his eccentricities, his desire to take on all of academia, seemed noble and romantic. Young adults trying to navigate the adult world often seem to conflate mental illness and genius. We love the little guy fighting against the establishment. But now I’m starting to see the cracks in the foundation.

  “I’ve been a real fool,” he says, pulling the mask off with his good hand.

  “Happens to the best of us,” I say.

  The sheriff comes running around the pharmacy with one hand on his holster and the other one pressing his hat to his head. The tough Sam-Elliot demeanour that he presented all this time is replaced with the body language of Don Knotts. His age is showing, his frailty. I can see why he is so afraid of being replaced.

  “It was an accident,” Professor Sorel says. “I want you to know that, I need you to know that.”

  He drops the mask, which pancakes on the chewed-up concrete of the parking lot.

  “I know that,” I tell him.

  “Barb is gonna be ticked off,” he says.

  The sheriff approaches Professor Sorel slowly, as though he’s a wounded animal, and tries to cuff him. As I thought, and as Sheriff Watkins learns the hard way, the left arm is an empty sleeve. Watkins then leads Professor Sorel over to the ambulance that has pulled up, where Moira waits to look at his wounded arm.

  Professor Sorrel looks at me again, this time with only a passing recognition, as he is walked by the lawman. There is no rage, no look of incredulity or betrayal. His brown eyes are sad; his head hangs like that of a dog that chewed up its master’s slippers.

  “That is not the Bigfoot I saw in the woods,” Ted says through his open window.

  “I know. What you saw was Professor Sorel in a ghillie suit.”

  Ted tilts his head back, rolling his eyes. “Of course.”

  “How did you know where to find us?” I ask.

  “Turns out running through the middle of a parade causes a scene,” Ted says, smiling.

  “What’s a ghillie suit?” Saad asks.

  “It’s a wearable camouflage worn by hunters or snipers. It’s often made of army fatigues with a burlap mesh overtop and leaves and grass woven into it. Ghillie suits are actually called yowie suits in Australia, due to their resemblance to the fabled ape-man of the outback. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what gave Professor Sorel the idea.”

  “Why was he hiding?” Saad asks.

  I don’t know how to answer him, until I remember the story of one of the first real squatchers. A Swiss-Canadian man named René Dahinden lost his wife and children through his relentless quest for Bigfoot — not to mention over forty years of his life. And he still never found the creature. Maybe Professor Sorel saw that his time was running out. Maybe he launched a Hail Mary, in the one place he was sure Bigfoot could be found.

  “He hid so that we would look for him,” I finally say. “And so we’d bring in a hundred volunteers and search and rescue helicopters with infrared cameras.”

  “To make up for the drones he was unable to afford,” Saad says. “More people to potentially spot Bigfoot.”

  Ted asks, “What do you think happened to Rick Driver?”

  “Rick Driver found out where my father’s footage was shot. My guess is he, too, was curious whether a Sasquatch lived up on that mountain. Oddly enough, many h
oaxers are themselves true believers. But his being around got in the professor’s way, so the professor tried driving him off — doing so in accordance to the Sasquatch legend.”

  “By throwing rocks at him,” Saad says.

  “Yes, like the Ape Canyon incident.”

  Ted wipes the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, then looks off at the water of the Klamath. “So a man died over a stupid prank? All to prove that an ape lives in the woods of Oregon.”

  “After realizing Driver was dead, Professor Sorel kept up the act, even calling back to those squatchers on the mountain. Everyone started to believe. Even you, Ted.”

  “I —”

  “You saw what you were expecting to see. All the hype, the hysteria, it got to you. It got to a lot of people. There’s no shame in that. Happens all the time.”

  Ted looks at me and smiles, then turns to Saad.

  “Don’t look at me,” Saad says. “I grew up in a household where djinn were real and Gog and Magog were real monsters constantly chewing their way out of a mountain. I’m in no position to judge you.”

  They exchange a nod. A bromance is budding between them.

  Professor Sorel sits on the bumper of the ambulance, its open doors like a pair of butterfly wings, as Barbara Sorel is escorted through the gawking crowd by the female deputy whose name I still don’t know. She walks like she has no control over her own body without the deputy guiding her. Barbara’s eyes glisten as they sweep over the gathering crowd then stare blankly at her husband. Professor Sorel doesn’t look at her, or over at me anymore, not once. Instead he seems to count the cracks in the cement, tracing their paths with his eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Saad asks me.

  “To be honest, I have no idea what I’m feeling,” I say. “If I’m feeling anything at all.”

  I want to go to Barbara, to hold her and console her. She needs a friend. But, what if she blames me for getting her husband arrested?