Going Sasquatch

by Jess Whitecroft

  I remember needing to say something. Something that would make me sound like a normal person, and not a weirdo who couldn’t stop staring at his ass, so I think I mumbled something complimentary about the house.

  “It’s old,” Chase had said, as he led the way to a large kitchen. A pierced bronze lampshade hung low over a tiled kitchen island, casting complicated shadows on the walls and ceiling. “The legend goes that Harry Houdini’s widow used to hold séances here. Every Halloween – on the anniversary of his death – she’d bust out the candles, call her friends, join hands around the table and try and get in touch with Harry.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Those old Hollywood types were really nuts.”

  He’d laughed and nodded to the protein jar on the island. “And us new Hollywood types aren’t? All this to look good on camera?”

  “Well, you look great,” I’d said. I remember that clearly because that was right before the moment that I kept playing back over and over in my head. The moment that – if I was reading it all wrong, and I probably was – said I was completely nuts. It was just a throwaway compliment, but it was the way he looked at me when I said it. Not at me, but into me, and in that moment I swear he somehow saw how much I wanted him. And when he saw it? He got this look in his eyes, this deep green hunger, and my head was full of the things that could happen next.

  Two strides across that kitchen. That was all it would have took to finally find out what his mouth tasted like. Two strides and that ass would have been in my hands. Two strides and I was thinking how easily it would have been to tear those pajama pants open across his butt. I could already feel the tension of the fabric in my hands, feel his moan of lust and surprise erupt against my open lips as the cloth tore.

  Only that’s not what happened next.

  Instead there was a splashing sound from outside, where I could see the swimming pool glowing blue in the dark. I glimpsed somebody getting out of the water and then she walked in, like a brunette version of Ursula Andress in Dr. No. She wore a white bikini and that’s when I knew I was crazy, because there was no way two people that beautiful and that half-naked weren’t banging one another.

  I think her name was Alicia. That part I don’t really remember because I was too busy mumbling excuses to leave, about how they probably had a big evening planned and I didn’t want to bother them. Also making a mental note to check into psychiatric care sometime soon, because wow, I was clearly projecting like an IMAX.

  That moment had never stopped haunting me, and now, outside his house, it came back to me again.

  The good news was that I wasn’t nuts. The bad news is that I was impressively fucking stupid. There had been something in the way he looked at me that night, but it wasn’t lust. I saw it now, as I replayed the moment in my head. Loneliness. He’d invited me in because he was crawling out of his skin with the need to talk to someone who didn’t have an agenda, didn’t want something from him. It was a familiar enough look in Hollywood, but my brains had been too far into my balls for me to notice.

  The silent house took on a new and sinister turn. So many ways to burn out in this place. My heart beat faster as I approached the door. It was empty. I knew that, but this was what you did. You walked up, knocked on the door and prayed they were okay. There was no answer.

  I looked up the hillside towards the house above, a big white Bauhaus belonging to a successful screenwriter who was one of the reasons why nobody could escape teenage vampires some ten years ago. I vaguely remembered Chase telling me she was kind of weird, which was kind of a redundant comment about someone who regularly buttered her muffin to glittery undead high schoolers. Probably not someone I wanted to ask about his whereabouts.

  Okay, so it was time for the kind of thing that was very, very illegal in this here state of California, but my intentions were pure, I swear. I just wanted to make sure that things hadn’t gone all Sunset Boulevard in the backyard pool.

  The back gate was unlocked. My heart leapt higher in my throat. Oh, this was not good. This was heading into Sharon Tate territory and I didn’t like it one bit.

  I went down the side alley of the house, and saw – with mounting relief – that the big wrought iron gate to the patio was padlocked. Beyond, the swimming pool was as flat and clear as a sheet of blue glass. Even the pool filter was off.

  So maybe he was out of town. That was always a possibility, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that look in his eyes, the one I’d so stupidly misinterpreted. It spoke of secret sadnesses, secret pill habits, of being found face down with the telephone in your hand because you couldn’t remember how many Nembutal you’d washed down with champagne. No, I had to get in somehow, just to be sure.

  I followed the line of the boundary fence up the hill, behind the back yard. The windows of his house were empty, giving nothing back. The doors were closed, the shades drawn down. I was just about to turn back when I saw – clear as goddamn day – a window open. It was one of those bathroom windows, the small ones that open upwards, with frosted glass. But I saw it. I saw it open and I saw a hand behind it. Water trickled somewhere and I breathed easy for maybe the first time since I got here. Someone was home.

  Instead of doubling back on myself, I decided to keep going around the boundary fence, figuring I’d eventually pop out on the road at the opposite side of the house to the one where I’d entered. Only that was a mistake, because the place was increasingly overgrown. So overgrown that I didn’t see the ditch.

  I landed badly, rolling my ankle painfully, so that all I could do for a moment was sit there in the undergrowth, absorbed in my own pain. My dad would have fucking loved this. Him, the rugged outdoorsman, me, the gym bunny who taught people to cultivate the same kind of muscle as myself, the kind that was for show, not for cutting wood, tramping across forests and killing game. Here I was, foxed by a simple ditch, and probably sitting with my ass in a pile of poison oak.

  “Fuck,” I said, and wobbled to my feet. There was an old wire fence above me, about the only thing I could see to reach for that looked as though it might be stable.

  So I reached for it, and that’s when I knew I’d made an even bigger mistake.

  2

  It was dark when I woke up.

  I was cold and damp, and I felt like a four hundred pound gorilla had picked me up and attempted to tear my right arm from its socket. There was something wet in the bottom of the ditch, and it had soaked through my pants. When I tried to move, everything hurt. My joints, my bones, my muscles. Even the roots of my hair ached. My teeth felt like they’d jangle in their sockets and poked nervously at them with my tongue to make sure they were all still there.

  Groaning, I got to my feet, only to set off a security light that lit me up like that poor prick in the old X-Files pilot. Any minute now, I thought, the leaves are going to start swirling and the little gray men are gonna swing by and take me up to Probetown.

  Only they didn’t. I was left there blinking in the sudden, awful light. And as my eyes adjusted and I looked up at the fence I saw where I must have pulled away the undergrowth next to the wire, revealing a sign.

  DANGER, it said. ELECTRIC FENCE.

  Well. That explained the unconsciousness, and also put a grim complexion on the reasons why my pants were damp. I had a nasty feeling I’d peed myself when I got zapped.

  I glanced over at the house, my poor fried brain struggling to remember why I was even here in the first place. Something about Chase Morrow’s ass and Satan. No, not Satan – Lord. The Lorde. Oh God, Angie Lorde. She’d threatened to destroy my business, seemingly for no other reason than she was pissed off, and there had been something with a French bulldog. And vomit. Lots of vomit.

  Short version, I was having a terrible day.

  About thirty minutes later, after a nervous drive during which I had to try to remember whether I could even drive at all – not an easy feat after you’ve had several thousand volts up your ass – I checked into the nearest ER and managed to tell the
m I’d been electrocuted.

  I must have been a mess, because I got the works – heart, brain, lungs, they looked over the lot. Eventually they said I seemed fine but to call immediately if I had any further dizziness or if I suddenly found that I had difficulty speaking. Good times.

  I drove home even more nervously than I’d arrived. Nothing like the fear of a stroke to keep you wide-awake and muttering tongue twisters all the way home. (How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?) When I finally hit the sheets around three am I just had time to think “Must call Ivy,” but even then I’m not sure I didn’t fall asleep in the middle of that sentence.

  It was early afternoon when I woke up. I’d slept through numerous phone calls, and my entire body ached from head to toe, like I’d run a marathon. My feet didn’t feel too steady on the floor and when I tried to stand my knees screamed at me. I remember shuffling to the kitchen, bent half double and with every joint on fire, and thinking that at least I had advance knowledge of what it was going to feel like when I was in my late eighties. Assuming I stayed away from enough electric fences to get there, that is.

  When I caught sight of myself in a mirror I was surprised. Not sure what I was expecting – perhaps a version of myself so fried that he looked like he’d been carved out of beef jerky – but I looked relatively normal. Sure, the whites of my eyes were so pink that by contrast the blue of my eyes looked practically neon, and there was a new strange crispiness to my already coarse thicket of black Irish hair. I blinked a couple of times, impressed to find I still had eyelashes, and opened my mouth to make sure my teeth were still firmly wedged in their sockets. So far so good.

  How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

  Parched, I drank several glasses of water, clutching the edge of the kitchen sink for support. Outside the yard looked dazzlingly bright, the bougainvilleas so like explosions of color that I imagined the squeals of July fireworks as I blinked at them. The pool was dry and empty. Beyond, the cabana nestled in one of those thickets of deep undergrowth that freaked me out, because after all these years I still couldn’t look at them without thinking Bigfoot was going to jump out at me.

  And yesterday I’d walked fearlessly into one such patch and look where that had got me. Maybe I should have listened to my childhood sasquatchphobia.

  Sasquatch. The word skittered around the inside of my head like a pinball, but it didn’t connect with anything, beside a vague memory that I’d heard it recently and it meant something important.

  That was when I saw it.

  Like my childhood nightmares had come back to haunt me, I saw something moving in the trees beside the cabana. Something big.

  I’d had just about enough by this point. I’d been yelled at, puked on, zapped full of electricity and I wasn’t even sure why any more. And now there was a bear in my backyard.

  I grabbed a large pan and a metal meat hammer and flung open the kitchen door. Standing at the top of the steps I banged the hammer on the skillet and screamed at the top of my lungs, which felt so good that once I stopped to take a breath I decided to just keep right on going. Fuck it. I deserved this. I’d earned the right to scream.

  The bushes rustled. And then out stepped something that definitely wasn’t a bear.

  It was Chase Morrow.

  I stopped in the middle of a scream. In that instant it all flooded back into my deep-fried brain. Angie Lorde talking about Chase ‘going sasquatch’ and disappearing, me going up to the house to look for him, all on account of the inappropriate boner I had for the guy.

  “Are you okay?” he said, looking at me like I was insane. Which I guess was reasonable. I slowly lowered the meat hammer.

  “Yeah,” I said, making my way down the steps to the yard, every muscle still on fire. “Yeah, I’m fine. You fucking asshole.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about this, I can explain, I can–”

  “–can you, Chase? Can you? Because I just got several thousand volts blasted through my ass because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Your fence,” I said, dropping the skillet at his feet with a loud clang. God, he still looked hot, even though he had no business looking hot right now. Not when I was this mad at him. “At your house. It’s electrified and I didn’t see the sign because you didn’t keep up to date on your landscaping.”

  He still seemed confused for a second, but then something obviously clicked in there. “Oh shit,” he said. “My neighbor.”

  “What?”

  “She’s been working on a new screenplay,” said Chase, like he was talking to someone who cared what Miss Twihard had been up to lately. “About the Tate/La-Bianca murders. And she read the Bugliosi book, you know?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, well. Vincent Bugliosi. He was the lead prosecutor on the Manson case. Wrote a book about it.”

  “Good for him,” I said. “I peed myself in public. Did I mention that part yet?”

  Chase winced. “I’m so sorry. It’s her fence. This whole Manson project has made her really paranoid.”

  “Oh,” I said. He’d taken the wind out of my sails somewhat. “So she’s the one I should sue?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Well, that clears one thing up. Next item. What the fuck are you doing lurking in my backyard?”

  He had to think about this one. That much was clear. “Can we go indoors?” he said.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  I waved him towards the steps. The ass ascended ahead of me. It didn’t matter how pissed off I was right now, I couldn’t stay mad at that ass.

  “Coffee,” I said, as we entered the kitchen. “I’m not doing anything else today until I’ve had my coffee. You want some?”

  “Yeah, that would be great. Thank you.”

  “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable.”

  So, here we were. It was coming back to me now. Angie Lorde screeching like a Nazgul and me getting worried and thinking that Chase had Heath Ledgered himself up in his place on Laurel. I know he’d had injuries, and I knew Hollywood was crawling with a bazillion Doctor Feelgoods who would prescribe just about anything to someone with the right bank balance. Fentanyl. Propofol. There was a lot of that rotten shit about. Just ask Michael Jackson.

  But no. Unless I was hallucinating – and I wasn’t ruling that out – Chase Morrow was alive and, if not exactly well, then at least in one piece.

  He looked tired. He was sporting a couple of day’s growth of stubble and there were dark half circles under his green eyes, but he was still about ten times more attractive than the average person on their best day. ‘Ruggedly disheveled’ was about as close to looking like shit as he ever got, what with those cheekbones and thick, soft eyebrows.

  It was weird having him here, as weird as having morning coffee with Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, and it took me a moment to realize why. Sure, I spent most of my working life hanging out with movie stars, but I’d never had one in my home before. We always worked together in the gym downstairs, not up here. When I’d bought this place I’d been very clear in my mind about drawing a line between where my apartment ended and my workplace began, the better to keep my sanity intact.

  Only I’d crossed that line now. I’d done that yesterday when I went up to the hills to check on him, and I knew why. Because it was Chase. Because he was beautiful and because I was an idiot who still wanted what I couldn’t have.

  “So,” I said, pouring out two cups of Colombian roast. “Let’s try this again, shall we? What were you doing in my pool cabana?”

  “Hiding,” he said, without taking a beat. It was so easy that I was taken aback.

  “Hiding? Why?”

  He took a careful sip of hot coffee. “A lot of reasons,” he said. “One of them being that my house keeps getting lit up like a Christmas tree every time a raccoon or something triggers my neighbor’s security lights.” His hand trembled as he set down the mug. “I guess I’m a little stressed
.”

  “Stressed. Okay. Do we have to go through the electric fence thing again?”

  “Okay, you win,” he said, with a flash of testiness I’d never seen before. “Your day was worse than mine. Happy?” He held his hands wrapped tightly around the mug, even though I knew the china had to be scalding. “What were you doing at my place anyway?”

  “Your agent called me.”

  Chase paled. “Oh God.”

  “Nobody had seen you for days, she said. She was worried about you.”

  “Nice of her,” he said, breathing erratically. “I’m worried about me, too.”

  He took his hands from the mug and fumbled under one wrist, as if searching for his pulse.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  He looked at me like he’d been waiting for someone to ask that since forever. “I don’t know,” he said, starting to gasp. “I’ve been having these weird…flutters. Can you check? I think it might be arrhythmia.” He swayed a little on the barstool. “Oh God.”

  Luckily I was trained in CPR, and – because clients are goddamn liars about their medical history – I knew what heart problems looked like. And they didn’t look like this. No, this was more of a brain malfunction.

  “It’s okay,” I said, putting a hand on his back. “I got you.”

  “I’m going dizzy. I think I need to lie down.”