Going Sasquatch
Page 6
How did that old poem go? They fuck you up, your mom and dad…
I spent the afternoon catching up on some exercise. Didn’t trust myself to join Chase in the hot tub, especially since that tiny red Speedo had made a reappearance. Tonight I was supposed to pretend that I was married to him. And his ass. I didn’t know much about acting, but I was pretty sure what my appropriate expression should be: smug as all hell.
Eventually it was time to head out. He took a shower and came out barefoot in a pair of jeans, the ends of his hair still damp. He’d been very quiet all afternoon. Process, I guessed.
“Okay,” he said, pulling on a white t-shirt, ruffling his hair all over again. “So, my name is James tonight. And you’re Sean.”
“I actually am.”
“I know that, but I already said you were, so we’ll just go with it. We met on a sasquatch forum and we’re–”
“–weird. Yeah.”
Chase gave me a reproachful look. “We’re not weird.”
“Sorry to burst your bubble, but we’re definitely weird. You were the one who busted out the whole sasquatch forum can of worms, and there’s no getting away from it; people who devote that much time to Bigfoot are unusual.”
“So we have a weird hobby.”
“We came on honeymoon to look for Bigfoot. Embrace the weird, Chase. It’s your only hope of getting out of this without getting busted.”
He rolled his eyes. “Thanks for the vote of confidence in my acting abilities.”
“You’re welcome. How long ago was this, anyway? Our fateful meeting on r/bigfootporn or whatever?”
“Now you’re getting it,” he said. “Three years. We came up from Albuquerque where you run a gym and I paint landscapes.”
“So you’re the trophy spouse in this scenario?”
“Duh,” he said, and stepped closer.
He reached out for me like he’d rehearsed it a million times in his head. I knew that because I’d done the same myself. He looked down as he fumbled with the buttons of my shirt. “Can I just…?” he said, and met my eyes. “You were looking a little buttoned up.”
I made some vague noise of assent. His eyes had gold flecks on the green. We were so close I swear I saw my breath stir the tips of his eyelashes. “Is this okay?” he asked. “Because we’re going to have to touch one another. Casually. Like we do it all the time.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking directly at his lips. They were soft and pink and parted. “I think I can manage that.”
“Okay,” he said, smoothing down the front of my shirt. “I’ll try not to get into your personal space too much.”
He was trying to be businesslike, but I saw his gaze flick to my mouth. I saw his throat work as he swallowed. Every single one of my heartbeats felt like the body-shaking pound of a big timpani drum. He met my eyes again, the tip of his tongue darting out to touch his top lip. Like he couldn’t help himself any more. Like we were finally going to…
The phone rang. Ivy’s ring. Fuck.
Chase caught his breath and politely turned away.
I picked up the phone. “What?”
Ivy sniffed down the line at me. “Uh, rude.”
“Sorry,” I said, trying to shake off the sudden crushing disappointment. “What’s up?”
“Pool guy,” said Ivy. “He wants to come by tomorrow. Get started on your calcium deposits.”
“Shit. Yeah, I forgot about that.”
I’d forgotten about a lot of things, it seemed. That’s what happened when you listened to your dick instead of your brain. And clearly I wasn’t about to get laid, because Chase had disappeared into the bathroom without so much as a backward glance.
“Well, I’m going to have to be here to let him in,” said Ivy.
“No, sure. You’ll get overtime to make up the hours, I promise.”
“I can work on the books while he’s here.”
I heard water running in the bathroom. What the hell just happened? Was he acting or was that the real thing? I had no way of knowing.
“Do you have any idea when you’ll be back?” she asked.
“Uh no,” I said, and said the first thing that came into my head. Blame redwood fatigue, sasquatch fever, log-cabin frenzy or any other form of NorCal derangement. It was the only thing I could think of at the time. “I didn’t want to say anything, but I got a bit of a family emergency up here.”
“Shit,” said Ivy, who knew I was from up near Eureka. “Your mom?”
“No. Dad. He’s…he’s okay. Well, he’s not okay, but he’s not dying. He’s just a little…scrambled in the brain right now.” Okay, so not totally a lie. People had called my old man a lot of things over the years, but sane and steady headed was not one of them.
“Oh, the poor thing. My grandmother had a stroke a couple of years ago–”
“–yeah, I remember you saying–”
Was it really lying if I just let her believe that? If there was a hell I was going there.
“–the rehab is amazing these days,” she said. “And the occupational therapy. Do you know she did her first full size jigsaw the other day? First one since it happened. Five hundred piece. And it was a hard one, too. A view of Mount Fuji. Whole lot of cherry blossoms.”
“That’s great.”
“Well, you take care,” she said. “And just…take it day by day, okay?”
“Yeah.” I wished she would stop being nice to me. It made me want to blurt out the truth. I’d never been a particularly convincing liar, and now I was about to go and lie my ass off at a cocktail party. “Were there any other calls for me?”
“Oh,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Angie Lorde called.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. She’s kind of shitting bricks. This Chase Morrow thing–”
“–is her problem,” I said. “I got my own to think about right now.”
“Absolutely. I’ll put her off. You look after yourself, and your dad. Okay?”
“Yeah.” Oh, I was a monster. And Angie Lorde was going to wreck me when I got back to Hollywood, but fuck it. Maybe I wouldn’t go back to Hollywood. Maybe I’d just stay up here where I belonged and open a goddamn Sasquatch Conspiracy Museum or something. The Bluff Creek Hoax – The Whole Gory Story. “Listen, I gotta go.”
I hung up and stood there, wondering how big and how messy the ‘Chase Morrow thing’ had already gotten. Not quite Police-Chasing-A-White-Bronco level messy, I figured. Nobody was dead, after all. Or maybe they were. Maybe I’d been so dick-struck that I’d failed to ask myself why Chase was so keen to get out of LA. Or why he’d been lurking in my pool cabana. Maybe he’d killed someone. Maybe I’d wandered north into a strange gay Hitchcock movie where I spent half of it lusting feverishly after the stone cold blond and the other half freaking out because it turned that the blond was even colder than the surface of Neptune and had been calmly lying to me about the body decomposing on his bathroom floor.
Fuck.
I remembered something just then. Nothing clear. Just a vague feeling of unease that had come over me shortly before all of my other feelings gave way to the unforgettable sensation of being zapped by a poorly maintained electric fence.
Chase stepped out of the bathroom. “Everything okay?” he said.
Nope. Just lying to my employees, damning myself to the darkest pits of hell by dragging my parents into this, and casually wondering if you might have actually murdered someone.
“Fine,” I said. “Everything’s great. Come on, James. Let’s go get hammered.”
I guess he was in no mood to talk about what had maybe almost happened before the phone rang, because he was quiet on the way down the hillside. I could hardly stand it, so I had to say something.
“So,” I asked. “What happened with your process?”
“Gigantopithecus,” he said. “Bering Strait land bridge. Could have come here from Asia. Known to the Salish and other neighboring tribes as Sasquatch.”
; “You were researching sasquatch?”
“I thought it was a smart move if I was going to be playing a sasquatch hunter,” he said, as we approached the terrace. I could smell barbecue and glimpsed candles through the trees. Chase held out his hand to me and I took it. We walked down the last few steps hand in hand.
The first person I saw was clearly Charlotte’s mom. She introduced herself as Linda, her husband Ted. There was a serious looking couple from Portland – Melody and Tyrone – and Charlotte herself, who was threading raw chicken onto skewers by the barbecue.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “Excuse my chicken hands. How’s the cabin?”
“It’s glorious,” said ‘James’. “We can’t thank you enough.”
“It’s no trouble,” said Linda, coming over. “I hear you’re a native, Sean?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Grew up near Eureka. Humboldt County.”
“And you were staying down at the Lodge?”
She tried to look appropriately impartial as she said that, but she didn’t quite pull it off. The Sasquatch Lodge had one hell of a reputation, it seemed. “Yes,” I said. “But don’t worry. We deloused ourselves.”
“Hosed ourselves down,” said Chase. “Really, I felt like I needed a Silkwood shower after that place.”
“Well, hopefully this will turn into a memorable honeymoon for you guys,” said Linda. “For the right reasons.”
“I will definitely drink to that,” I said, as Ted came by with the famous Hurricanes.
Normal, Chase had said. Just wanted to feel like a normal person. Maybe it was just the Hurricanes, but after a couple of drinks I did start to feel normal. Not a word I would usually have associated with pretending to be a sasquatch hunter who was pretending to be married to an incognito movie star, but it’s like they say – a body can get used to anything. And honestly? I was pretty pleased with my whole performance. I nonchalantly called Chase ‘Honey’ as I handed him a refill, and I didn’t even flinch when he – in the middle of a conversation with Tyrone - let his hand linger on the small of my back, hooking his thumb into the back of my jeans like we’d been together half a dozen years.
We all settled on the seating area, near the tables where the citronella candles kept the worst of the bugs away. The sun was beginning to set and it was turning chilly. Chase pressed his thigh against mine, our knees touching. “It’s so gorgeous up here,” he said, for the hundredth time that night. “The light is just so…”
“You brought your paints?” asked Ted.
“No. I usually work from photographs, but it really is something. It’s almost Provençal. The same sort of golden softness.”
It was like an invitation, and I couldn’t resist. I let my fingers roam over the blond hair on the back of his wrist. Because I could. Given license to touch him, the hardest part was not touching him. “We won’t have a lot of time for painting anyway,” I said, letting my fingers explore the underside of his wrist. He stiffened a little at my touch and gave me a look that could have been yes or no, but I was in no shape to find out. I was full of rum and golden softness and all I wanted to do was take him to bed, spread his thighs and eat his upturned ass like a ripe peach.
“Obviously,” he said. “We’ll be out in the forest a lot.”
“Obviously,” I said. Chase and I, in the forest. Up against a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Our dicks in each other’s hands, his body bared from nipples to knees, the forest light dappled on his bare skin and his mouth panting into mine. “Sasquatch require patience.”
“Or huge amounts of weed,” said Charlotte.
Linda glared. “Charlie!”
“What? I’m just saying. Don’t you think it’s kind of a coincidence that the weed capital of Northern California also happens to be Bigfoot country?”
Chase laughed. “Well, it was Bigfoot country long before it was weed country,” he said.
“Sure. But it wasn’t always Bigfoot country either. That just happened in what – the Sixties?”
“1967,” said Chase. “The Patterson-Gimlin film.”
“No, it was before the film,” I said. “The alleged Wallace hoax was like 1958 or something. That was when they started finding footprints. As soon as people came up here with backhoes and bulldozers and started building roads, that’s when the encounters started.”
“White people encounters,” said Melody.
“Well, yeah,” I said.
“The Native Americans had countless stories of wildman encounters,” said Chase, who was finally getting to put his research to work. His thigh was warm against mine. “The word ‘Sasquatch’ comes from the Salish, I believe.”
“British Columbia,” I said. “And they were by no means the only First Nations peoples to tell stories about the ape people in the woods.”
“Totally,” said Chase, barely concealing his surprise. I was stepping on his toes, but I couldn’t help myself. This was deep-seated childhood damage coming out, all at once.
“The Tsimshian, the Yokuts, the Kootenai,” I said. “All of these peoples and more have stories about Sasquatch. The Northern Paiutes up in Oregon – in their mythology Sasquatch is as significant a figure as Coyote, the trickster. They made art of them, long before anyone on the North American continent had supposedly ever seen an ape.”
“It’s thought Gigantopithecus could have come over from Asia across the Bering Strait,” said Chase, flailing a little now. He sounded rehearsed.
“But there’s no fossil record, surely?” said Ted.
“Well, no,” I said. “But if you study the folklore and the art you have to wonder: is there some kind of Bigfoot fire causing all the sasquatch-shaped smoke around here? There’s obviously something going on, even if it’s just in the minds of the population.”
Chase nodded. “What Jung called the collective unconscious.” Oh, he was good. He hadn’t let me knock him completely off balance, even though I’d sprung this on him.
“That’s it,” I said. “It’s been part of North American culture long before we ever showed up. Back in 1958 there was a reporter named Betty Allen, investigating the alleged Ray Wallace hoax, and she spoke to some of the locals, including the Hoopa and Yurok peoples, and she got to this one old guy and he just rolled his eyes over the whole thing. He was like ‘Oh, white people got around to that, huh?’, as if to say that they were into it before it was mainstream.”
Charlotte laughed. “Sasquatch hipsters. I love it.”
“This has been going on for a long time,” I said. “It’s not just something that sprung up out of a hoax in 1958. Or even a hoax in 1967.”
Chase leapt on the familiar date. “Wait, you think the Patterson-Gimlin film is a hoax?” he said.
“Baby, you can practically see the zipper.”
Melody, who wasn’t as serious as she looked, let out a gasp. “Wait,” she said. “You guys got married before you knew how you both felt about the Patterson-Gimlin film?” She sucked in air through her teeth. “Yikes.”
“I can roll with it,” said Chase, giving me the sideeye. “Unless he doubts the credibility of the Skookum Cast. Then we’re talking grounds for a divorce.” Everyone laughed, although I doubt they got the reference. That was some esoteric Bigfoot shit right there.
Chase shivered next to me, and I put my arm around him. “We should get going,” he said. “I should have brought a jacket.”
“Go on up,” said Linda. “The path’s not too well lit anyway. Go on and up and enjoy that gorgeous sunset.”
“We will. Thank you,” said Chase, like he was thanking her for the sun itself.
We said our goodbyes and headed up the path, hand in hand. “Skookum Cast?” I said, just out of earshot. “You did your homework.”
“So did you, apparently,” he said. “For someone who doesn’t believe in Bigfoot you sure as hell seem to know a lot about them.”
“Sorry. Was I blowing up your spot?”
“A little,” he said, and tugged at my hand. “Oh, look.”
We went to take a look. Through the trees I could make out the terrace below, and I thought I saw Linda glance up. “They can see us from here,” I said.
Chase moved closer, so that we stood hip to hip, looking out over the railing. The sky was streaked pink and gold and blue, blazing over the pointed pines and – in the far distance – the receding forest slopes and the blue horizon. The light was the color of honey, all golden softness. His hand rested on the railing next to mine, and once more I felt the irresistible pull of it. I’d held his hand half the evening, but that was for show. I kept flashing back to that moment where I’d let my fingers stray all over his wrist. And even though I’d had permission to do so, it had felt illicit and delicious.
I shifted half an inch closer and touched the back of his hand, tracing the lines of the tendons, lingering over the bumps of his knuckles. He drew in an audible breath, but he didn’t take his hand away. I didn’t dare look him in the eye. Not yet. My whole being seemed to have concentrated in the tips of my fingers. I curled them, lightly scratching his skin with the ends of my nails, and felt him shiver.
He didn’t tell me to stop.
My heart felt like a loudspeaker as I dipped my fingers over the side of his wrist, craving the softness of the skin below. It was the strangest feeling, after all the filthy things I’d dreamed about doing to him, but this shy dance of hands and fingers had set me on fire. I could have swooned like a Victorian girl as I felt the thin skin on the backs of my fingers, the beds of my nails. I rubbed them gently back and forth over the place where his heart beat. The skin was so fine there that it felt indecent, like I’d stripped him raw in the middle of the party. I turned my hand palm upwards and – finally – felt the fragile silk of his inner wrist under my fingertips.