The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac

by Sharma Shields

  Here was the little shack in the woods, once her happy home.

  Here, inside the shack, was the new wife, sitting in the dingy recliner, looking balefully at her fingernails. She glanced up at Agnes. She’d been crying.

  “I need a manicure,” she moaned. “I’d kill for just a nail file.”

  Her hair was growing out but was still shorn in a shaggy, fashionable bob. She wore sparkling silver ballet flats and a pretty navy sweater. Agnes thought she should tell the new wife about the color navy. Don’t wear it in the summer. It attracts mosquitoes and black flies. But summer was a long ways from now. Let her be.

  Agnes came forward and touched the girl’s shoulder. She wordlessly handed her a rock. When the new wife stared at it, nonplussed, Agnes took the rock back and drew it across her fingernails.

  The new wife followed suit, taking up the rock and filing her nails with it. Her face brightened. “Thank you,” she said.

  Agnes noticed then that the new wife’s wooden thumb ring lay on the side table, recently removed.

  “I said thank you,” the new wife repeated. She was not annoyed, Agnes saw, but desperate.

  Agnes felt sorry for the new wife, but she avoided, as much as possible, speaking to her. She was only trying to help the new wife grow accustomed to their silence.

  “Will you cook dinner?” the new wife asked her. “Should I?”

  “You will,” Agnes responded shortly, and then went to lie down on her narrow bed and rest.

  * * *

  BACK IN THE semicircle, sitting stiffly in her simple metal chair, Agnes told the group that she both loathed and admired the new wife.

  “She’s nothing like me,” Agnes said. She worked at the wooden ring on her thumb as she spoke. “She wants to talk—all the time—and she misses city life. She spent all night filing her toenails. She can hardly boil water. She buses to Lilac City to buy toilet paper and new shoes—shoes with heels that look pretty but are worthless in the forest.” She stopped here, took a breath. “The point is, I don’t understand her. I never went back. Not for toilet paper, and not even to visit my son. My own son, for crissakes, who I loved more than anyone in the world—even more than myself—until I met my husband.”

  “Maybe that’s why you stayed away,” Mr. Donald suggested. He stood at the podium again, but he looked tired, sort of slumping over it as if he might collapse onto the floor. Agnes could smell alcohol on his breath. She thought he might be hungover. She wondered, pitying him, if he wasn’t depressed, like the rest of them.

  Why was there a man overseeing their women-only meeting? Why did leaders always need to be men?

  “I don’t understand,” Agnes said.

  “Maybe you stayed away because seeing your son would wound you? Make you question your choices?”

  Agnes shook her head. “No. I stayed away because I wanted to stay away. Motherhood didn’t suit me.”

  “Motherhood suits all women,” the man said. He lifted a pen and jotted something down on a clipboard that lay before him on the podium. “I think we’re reaching the heart of your suffering here. You abandoned your son, your duty to him, and now you find yourself alone. Tell me: When was the last time you saw your son?”

  “I saw him,” she said, “a few years ago.”

  “When?”

  “The volcano,” she said. “When the volcano blew.”

  Mr. Donald laughed. “Mount Saint Helens? That was twenty-four years ago!”

  Twenty-four years! In the forest, time was both mercurial and phlegmatic. God, how old did that make her now? How old did that make Eli?

  “If I may ask another question,” Mr. Donald said. He said it so low, so dramatically, that she almost couldn’t hear him. “Was he happy to see you?”

  Agnes wasn’t sure, really, but Eli hadn’t screamed at her or pushed her away or anything like that.

  “And would he be happy to hear from you now?”

  The simplicity of this question was like a kick in the face. She sat up straighter, swallowing hard. Does he know the answer? Does he think he would know the answer to this, if I don’t know the answer? She felt a moment’s anger toward this man, then an insipid jealousy.

  “Yes,” she said. What she meant was: Yes, of course you would ask that, you stupid man.

  The man did not take it that way. “Yes,” he said. “He would be elated. Which is why you should reach out to him. Family is salvation, Mrs. Krantz.”

  Agnes felt hope then. It was inexpressible and discomfiting.

  Flannery, the woman pregnant via her dog, put her hands on her belly and gave a happy little sound, halfway between a sob and a laugh. She was, like the other tortured souls in the room, touched. It also gave her hope, Agnes saw, the assumption that the love between a child and his mother never dies. Flannery must have hoped the same for her dog babies, that they would stand at her bedside as she grew old, that they would all love one another unconditionally, no matter what.

  Agnes did not want to dash the pregnant woman’s hope. She smiled and touched the woman’s knee and said sincerely, “I’ve always loved him. That’s the thing. You always love them. Even when you don’t.”

  She wished she could say that the reverse were true, that children always loved their parents, no matter how horrible the parenting, but she could not.

  It takes a certain sort of woman to leave her young child for a new husband, for a whole new life, and Agnes was that exceptional sort of person. She had assumed, upon leaving: Once a mother, always a mother. The truth, however, was not so simple. Out of sight, out of mind was more like it. But it was true that even after long stretches of not thinking about Eli at all, he would return to her, rising up from the dry soil of her heart like a noxious weed. And then, just as certainly, the weed would be plucked up or would wilt, the soil smooth and unmarred again, usually for long stretches of time.

  Mr. Donald moved on to Flannery. “And when is the due date?” he said, his tone serious.

  “It’s hard to say,” she said shyly. “We’re not certain. You know, because of the species.”

  “And you’ve heard,” he said, “that we’ll help with the adoptions.”

  “Yes, I’ve been told.”

  Agnes wondered if Flannery had had an ultrasound, something that hadn’t been around when she was pregnant with Eli. She’d heard the other women asking about it, and thought it sounded eerie and wonderful to peer into one’s own darkest space.

  “I’m wondering,” the woman said meekly, “if I can keep at least one?”

  Mr. Donald’s smile flickered but his voice remained upbeat. “What an excellent question. I’ll speak to you privately about this. Let’s think about what would be best for the babies, and for you.”

  The pregnant woman looked quickly over at Agnes, as though begging for help.

  Agnes thought carefully before she spoke, about Eli, about Mr. Krantz.

  “He’s probably right, you know,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow, despite her best intentions. “It will be easier on you to just give them away.”

  “Well, it’s only a notion,” Mr. Donald added. “A point of entry.” He narrowed his eyes at the women in a way that was supposed to denote respect but was really, Agnes felt, quite insulting.

  Agnes, annoyed with Mr. Donald, said loudly to Flannery, “What, exactly, do you want? It’s your choice.”

  Flannery stuttered for a moment and then fell silent.

  “Now, now,” Mr. Donald said. “Let’s not make this about choice. That’s too easy. Sometimes we don’t know what’s good for us. Our emotions get in the way. Sometimes we must have faith and trust in others.”

  Agnes reached over and grasped Flannery’s hand. She squeezed Flannery’s swollen fingers with as much force as she could muster, the arthritis shooting painfully up her own arm as she did. She was trying to communicate, Have strength. It’s not his life. It’s your own.

  “Now,” Mr. Donald said. “Let’s talk about our emotions. We women are emotional
creatures. Let’s talk about our emotions today. Let’s explore!”

  Agnes grimaced. As if emotions just sat there, static and obvious, like unchanging monoliths, perfectly defined.

  Agnes knew: Emotions were like the moss on the forest floor, trampled, fluid, hidden.

  Try to put your finger right on the moss, and its form spreads and changes.

  “Let’s begin with you, Agnes,” Mr. Donald said.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m annoyed.”

  The room laughed, and Agnes was happy to see that Mr. Donald seemed worried.

  * * *

  IN THE SHACK, Agnes and the new wife awaited the arrival of their husband.

  The new wife flitted from one task to another, all things that Agnes had never done: pouring coffee, plucking her eyebrows, reading magazines that she’d brought from the local library.

  Eventually she heaved a large sigh, cocked an eyebrow at Agnes, and asked her, “How can you stand it?”

  Agnes was lying on the woven gray rug Mr. Krantz had stolen to celebrate his union with the new wife. She liked to put her face against the rug and smell its newness, so foreign to this familiar room. She uncurled her limbs and stretched and turned toward the new wife, confused.

  “I mean,” the new wife said, “how can you just sit there, doing nothing all day?”

  “I’m not doing nothing.”

  “You’ve been lying there, dozing. Resting. I don’t know. I can’t stand it.” The new wife plucked a small silver tube from her pocket. She opened it and applied a fresh coat of lipstick to her already-sanguine lips. “You know what he needs? A television set. I think he’d like a big flat-screen TV, right there.” She put up her hands in a frame and looked through them, picturing the television against the shack wall. “I mean, we’d need a generator. But he could get one of those easily enough.”

  Agnes almost smiled.

  “I know you’re old, but are you sick?” the new wife asked, genuinely concerned.

  Agnes shook her head.

  “God, can’t you even talk to me? I mean, I know he’s great and all, but how do you handle it?”

  Agnes considered the question. “I wasn’t lonely,” she said finally. “Or maybe I had already been lonely. For me, it was exciting and adventurous. There had been a big void in my life, and Mr. Krantz entered and filled it.”

  “Ha,” the new wife giggled crassly. “Yes, he’s certainly gifted at filling holes.”

  Agnes ignored her and said, “I was made for this life. You, though, I’m not sure. You’re too”—she wanted to say normal, or ditzy maybe, but instead she said—“glamorous.”

  As expected, the new wife took this as a compliment. Clearly not one to absorb a compliment without immediately doling out one in return, the new wife rushed to say, “I bet you were beautiful. Just beautiful. When you were younger.”

  Agnes was stiff and sore. She thought of the pamphlets about facilities for the elderly that Mr. Donald had forced on her. She had buried them outside, beside the creek, and had marked their burial with an old gray brick. The facilities were large buildings with faux-feather beds and unlimited toilet paper. Against her will, Agnes found herself salivating at the thought of the hot foods they would serve—soft oatmeal with raisins, maybe, or fried chicken. Fuck me, she thought, drooling, fried chicken!

  What would it be like to say hello to the other old people bobbing through the high-vaulted hallways? It wouldn’t be so bad, that life. She would be the eccentric one, the odd one out. But, then, when had she not been? The only place she’d ever fit in was here, in Mr. Krantz’s shack.

  She thought of the recent zoophilia meeting, the suggestion of finding Eli and becoming a part of his life. Would he care for her now, as she had once cared for him?

  Mr. Donald said she had nothing to lose, and she supposed this was right. She decided, sitting there with the new wife, that she would march up to Eli and open her arms and say, Hate me or love me, I’ve returned. I’ve returned, like it or not.

  Mr. Krantz entered then, bellowing his greeting. He patted Agnes chastely on the head before scooping up the new wife and nuzzling her neck. Agnes lowered her chin and went out into the icy forest. Even from outside the pine walls of the shack, Agnes could hear the moaning and shouting that ensued. She went to the creek bed and followed its slow stream upward, toward the mountain. The sounds receded behind her, until she could hear only the gurgle of the creek, the wind sweeping through the canopy overhead, the creaking icicles. She startled a family of deer and watched them, dazed, as they crashed like lightning into the underbrush and then disappeared vaporously, like a wish.

  She was alone again. Only now there was no grace in it.

  She turned around, passed by the shack (now silent), and moved along the well-worn deer paths, all the way to the bus stop. She waited for an hour and then boarded the bus for Lilac City. She walked to the Unitarian church and sought out the man, the zoophilia group leader.

  “I wish to speak with my son,” she told him. She was unsure of where to begin. She did not trust this man, but he was more man than she was, more akin to her son. “Can you help me?”

  He could, he said. Anything, he added, to help her overcome her bestial cravings, to get her away, finally, from Mr. Krantz.

  She did not correct him. She listened.

  “Meet him at his place of work,” Mr. Donald instructed. “Not at his home. Things are too personal at home.”

  It seemed like wise advice.

  “Do you know where he works?” the man asked her.

  “Well, I’m not sure. He’s famous for studying Sasquatch.”

  “Fitting,” Mr. Donald said. “Clearly, your poor choices affected him.”

  That was too simple, Agnes thought, but she did not argue. She had once believed that Eli’s search was all about finding her, but now she sensed it was something more damning: It was more about destroying her new life, destroying Mr. Krantz. There was rage there. It had nothing to do with love.

  The man sat down at his computer and typed. He clicked the mouse. Agnes watched him, unsettled. She had never used a computer. She feared that the brightness of the screen would melt her face off, so she stayed as far away from it as possible.

  The man hooted softly and then wrote something down on a piece of paper. “Jackpot,” he gloated.

  It just so happened that Dr. Eli Roebuck was taking part in a zoological conference that very afternoon. He would speak at one-thirty at the convention center downtown. Mr. Donald could not believe their good fortune.

  “God’s will!” he exclaimed. “God himself is urging you forward!”

  Mr. Donald even offered to drive her in his little yellow car to the nearest parking lot, and Agnes gratefully accepted.

  He left her off at the parking lot with a friendly chuck on a shoulder, a fresh Ziploc bag filled with coins for bus fare, and an annoying, go-get-’em smile. Agnes stumbled along the frozen stone pathway, feet aching in her shabby shoes, still wearing Mr. Krantz’s hat and the same warm clothes from the ZSG donation box. She was keenly aware of how out of place she was amid the bustling crowds, but no one took notice of her. She arrived just as the doctor was finishing up his lecture. The entire expanse of the room was filled wall-to-wall with people, stinking of cheap perfume. She saw her son at the front of the room, shaking hands and smiling with members of the audience.

  Off to the side of the stage, nestled on a velvet pillow atop a wood podium, was a foot.

  God, Agnes thought, horrified. The bones were polished and sharp and long, both human and not human. Whose foot is that?

  Then she realized: It was her husband’s foot. Agnes recoiled. So, she thought. Her son had almost killed Mr. Krantz, after all.

  Her husband had changed so much since the loss of that foot. He had become restless, impractical. He had become obsessed with the young drunk women of Rathdrum. He had begun, although he would never admit it, to despise her.

  A crowd had gathered around Eli, around t
he foot, admiring both, it seemed. He looked intelligent and self-satisfied before them, well dressed as usual, sharp-eyed. He looked like Greg, and she even felt affection for her first husband then, that hardworking man who had foolishly devoted himself to their unlikely marriage.

  It didn’t matter whose fault it was. Living in the woods had taught Agnes this much: Fault was useless, as useless as apology. Life spiraled out from life, and death, too. It was random, it was constant. It was faultless and unapologetic and real.

  She didn’t have to forgive him, because there was no such thing as forgiveness. So he didn’t need to forgive her, either.

  Agnes waited for the crowd to disperse before she approached Eli. It took nearly an hour for him to finish signing books. Then he was alone, dismantling the items on the stage.

  It was now or never.

  She urged herself toward him.

  “Hello,” she said, touching him lightly on the elbow.

  He was wrapping a cord about his elbow and hand, and he continued wrapping it as he turned to face her.

  It was the moment of truth, the moment when Agnes would know, for certain, what would become of her.

  Her little boy faced her, no longer a little boy but now a little man, very stressed, very bothered. He wore large, round red glasses that dwarfed his blue eyes (so beautiful, those eyes, like two perfect agates! She had nearly forgotten their color and intensity). His hair, almost gone now, had lost the sum total of its youthful blond luster; its thin remnants were dirty brown, streaked with gray.

  He had aged since their last meeting.

  But still—oh, yes—this was her little boy. The same apple-shaped shoulders, the same skinny frame, those same large, tender ears, that same open, curious expression that seemed both shocked and pleased.

  Pleased? Was he pleased to see her?