“For God’s sake, it’s just bears,” Audrey’s mother said. She was spritzing the bar counter with Lysol and pushing it around in circles with a rag. “Every other damn time something got into your garbage it was bears. Why’s it Bigfoot all of a sudden?”
Audrey’s mother was of the opinion that every single Black Rock Monster sighting that was not a bald-faced hoax could be chalked up to someone whose vision was too bad, too fleeting, or too warped by hope, fear, or imagination mistaking a bear for the Black Rock Monster. It would make much more sense to assume it was bears (garden-variety American black bears) who were pawing through people’s garbage at night—wouldn’t it? Bears were real, documented creatures absolutely beyond a shadow of doubt proven to exist, and they did indeed inhabit this area—in fact, anyone in this town who had lived here long enough had probably seen them once or twice.
Audrey had a very clear memory of the first time she saw a bear. It was an early memory. She had been in preschool. She’d attended a Montessori school in a converted residential house run by blissed-out hippie ladies. Of course she’d only come to think of them that way when she got older, and continued to know the same ladies as their long, braided hair frizzled and grayed. (One of these women now worked part-time in a shop on the main drag that sold polished rocks to tourists when ski season was on.) A black bear had wandered into town and climbed a tree in the front yard of the house. The children were all pointing and shrieking behind the picket fence that corralled in the playground until the grownups herded them inside and locked the doors, and then the children pointed and shrieked from behind the windows. The grownups called the sheriff, who was prepared for such problems and arrived with a rifle that shot tranquilizer darts, and was soon joined by several park rangers, who held a blue-nylon parachute beneath the bear to break his fall. The sheriff shot the bear with a tranquilizer dart as the children pointed and shrieked. The bear gradually melted out of the tree as if he had become an enormous glob of molasses. He drooped and tumbled headfirst from the branches and bounced on the parachute. The park rangers wrapped up the sedated bear and took him to the nearby Arapaho National Forest, where they released him back into the wild. It was one of Audrey’s earliest memories. Her recollection of the event was a mixture of what she actually remembered and what she’d been told. She thought she remembered the sight of the bear falling from the tree, but she might have only been remembering the image she had pictured when Jim, who’d had a better view of it, had described it to her. Jim had been about fifteen then, and their mother had sent him to pick up Audrey from the day-care place and walk her home. Jim had arrived in time to watch the sheriff shoot the bear, was standing watching from across the street when it happened. She’d held his hand when they walked home together afterward—that day, and every other that he’d picked her up—and while she did not remember the bear so clearly, she remembered very clearly the walk home, remembered their talking excitedly about the bear falling from the tree into the parachute the whole walk, and possibly for days afterward.
Memories like these made Audrey even sadder for Jim now. Jim had since become the only major source of discord in the family. He was a one-man constant, consistent exploder of everyone’s stability and happiness—both of his own and his family’s. Her oldest brother, Liam, was thirteen years her senior, and a lawyer now in Seattle, living life and making money: He rarely visited and rarely called—a remote figure, missed, but not to be worried about. Liam had been more or less out of the picture ever since he’d gone away to college, twelve years ago, when Audrey was five—the same year of the black bear’s vaguely remembered sleepy tumble from the tree. Jim, however, was constantly in the picture. Much more so than anyone, including Jim, wanted him to be. Something had crawled up inside Jim’s soul and warped him—hung weights on him that prevented him from getting off the ground, from even leaving Black Rock for very long. He was a daisy chain of problems. He’d crawled through what college he could, dropping out and reenrolling again and again, eventually dropping out for good. Then a succession of hourly wage jobs that always ended in his being fired. Drugs, blackouts, arrests, perennial financial problems. Pathetic moneymaking ventures that often involved “buddies” in Austin or Portland. He was back in Black Rock now after another disastrously unsuccessful attempt at starting an independent adult life for himself in Denver. Semihomeless, he alternated among crashing on his childhood friend’s couch across town, the futon in their parents’ unfinished basement (their father, in a passive-aggressive rage at a son seemingly incapable of growing up, had converted his old bedroom into a gratuitous home office), and the vacant rooms of the hotel when there were vacancies, which there usually were in the off-season. This last thing Audrey’s mother hated most—especially when he let himself in late at night and grabbed one of the keys off the wall behind the front desk. If he had been a guest, she might have sent him a fine in the mail. He was sloppy, had never learned to cover his tracks. You could tell he’d been there if the sheets were gross, peppered in little black hairs, a yellowish sweat ring on the pillow where his drunken head had been. Cigarette reek lingering in the air. A family friend had lately given him a part-time job at a Sunoco station—which Audrey found more embarrassing and depressing than if he weren’t working at all. Beneath the twenty-six-year-old man in a yellow-and-blue Sunoco uniform, the man with a scraggly beard and unwashed, greasy hair, smelling always of smoke, either sullen-silent, or, when pressed, ready to blather about whatever lamebrained conspiracy theory he was currently obsessed with, Audrey saw the sweet and fundamentally good guy who had held her hand and walked her home from her Montessori school, talking with her excitedly about the bear that had fallen from the tree.
Audrey was worried at how relieved she felt that Jim was not among that fall’s surge of local crazies who claimed to have seen the Black Rock Monster. She was worried because the acuteness of her relief meant that if Jim had claimed to have seen him, it wouldn’t have surprised her. And people who see Bigfoot, see ghosts, have paranormal experiences, get abducted by aliens, so on and so forth, Audrey generally regarded as: losers.
But, no: He wasn’t among them, thank God. Their mother would have gone catatonic with humiliation had he been. Duncan Hodges had been the first to “see” “him” that year, thus confirming Audrey’s prejudice about the kind of people who report sightings of cryptids: losers. Duncan had been in the same year in school as Jim. He worked in a ski shop and in the summers sometimes busked on a street corner with a didgeridoo. Ratty white-guy dreadlocks tied up in a blue bandanna, always had the look of someone who wandered in ten minutes late and isn’t sure if he’s in the right room. Jim and Duncan had a friendship, like many friendships between people who have grown up together in a small town, that accordioned in and out of closeness as years passed. There had been a while in high school when the two’d been thick as thieves; both of them had been suspended when they got caught setting fire to a pile of Funyuns behind the tennis courts. Lately they seemed to have been hanging out again more since Jim had moved back from Denver. Duncan claimed he saw the Black Rock Monster while hiking on Rattlesnake Gulch Trail, a few miles west of town. The trail winds alongside the gulch and up to a bluff on the side of Sugarloaf Mountain, where the ruins of the Tabor Hotel are: one of those bizarre nineteenth-century ideas, to build a luxury hotel on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. It burned down in the twenties, and all that’s left is the foundation and the chimneys. That’s where Duncan claimed to have seen it. He told everyone that it was probably because he had been hiking barefoot, to “truly feel the earth beneath his feet,” or something: That is, he didn’t scare it away because he wasn’t making much noise.
“I think they have really good hearing?” Duncan theorized into the clown-nose-red foam microphone cover held in front of his face by a woman from 9 News who might have been praying that nothing important would happen during the two hours it would take to drive back to Denver. Duncan’s finger f
iddled sissily with one of his blond dreadlocks. “I mean, like, I bet most people, you know, have, like, shoes on, and they hear you when you come and they, like, you know, run away real quick.”
Duncan said he saw the creature “sunning himself” on the flat stone floor of the ruins of the hotel. He said he stood still and watched it for about five minutes. He approached, and when he was maybe thirty feet away, the creature seemed to take notice of him. It jumped to its feet and ran, as Duncan said, “like real quick,” into the woods. His description of the creature was essentially consistent with those of the Black Rock Monster already on record: between six and eight feet tall; very long, gangly arms; dark-brown fur; a high, sloped forehead.
That was in mid-September, when their part of the country may be at its most beautiful. From where Duncan Hodges had or had not been standing when he did or did not see the creature that was or was not the Black Rock Monster, he would have also seen—and this is certain—much of Black Rock Valley and the town of Black Rock itself resting in the bottom of its enormous bowl of granite. He would have seen the unsightly tracks of cleared mountainside where the ski runs were; the motionless ski lifts with creaky gondola boxes dangling from the cables like rows of orderly, evenly spaced fruit on vines; and the aspen groves above the town, which are at their most breathtaking in early fall—their leaves turn all at once to a buttery-golden yellow, and when the wind blows through them great sinuous ripples of color follow each other patiently across the mountainside. Audrey’s father had told her more than once that an aspen grove is the largest living organism on the earth, because the roots all connect beneath. A single aspen is not a tree; it is a small component of a vast system. That’s why their leaves all turn at exactly the same time. You see? Audrey believed there was already enough mystery and wonder in the visible world right beneath our feet without the need for mythical monsters sunning themselves on the ruins of old hotels, supposedly seen by her brother’s friend, that scuzzy stoner who sometimes sat on a milk crate next to the ice-cream store and played his didgeridoo in front of a hat.
The second sighting that fall was even more vague but perhaps slightly more credible, as it was corroborated by two people. (Though Audrey doubted that assumption as well. She didn’t trust two people any more than one. Three, maybe. She knew about shared psychosis, conversion disorder, folie à deux, contagious hallucinations.) Jason Henly and Kate Pletl, who had graduated from Black Rock High two years before, claimed to have seen the creature moving in the woods behind the Safeway that employed them both. It was around twilight, they said, about six thirty at night. They were taking the garbage and recycling out to the Dumpsters in back of the building, which abuts the edge of a spruce-fir forest. They said they saw something, about maybe forty paces into the forest, stand up from a sitting position and then flit between the trees and disappear. They watched it for about half a minute before losing sight of it, they said. Something large, brown, and definitely alive. They thought it might be a person at first, they said, because it appeared to be striding on two legs, but then they saw that it was much too tall to be a person.
“Except maybe Shaquille O’Neal,” Jason joked to the reporter who wrote the three inches of column about it in the Daily Prospector (9 News didn’t bother sending a van up for this one). Audrey had read that over breakfast and thought: Jason, it is, in fact, much, much more likely that Shaquille O’Neal, who is proven to exist, was for some reason hiding in the woods behind the Safeway than that the Black Rock Monster was. Jason and Kate weren’t quite as dumb as Duncan, though—they admitted they weren’t exactly sure what they’d seen; the light outside had been dim. And the guy from the Prospector hadn’t known to probe them about this, but everyone under thirty in Black Rock knew that everyone who worked at that Safeway was high all the fucking time (how else could they stand it?), and everyone who had ever worked at that Safeway furthermore knew that “taking out the trash”—a task easily accomplished by one employee—was code for sneaking behind the building to smoke a bowl. That was in early October.
A flurry of unsubstantiated and unreported sightings followed, which many of the adults remained unaware of, as they all happened inside the social underbelly of Black Rock High School. Suddenly everyone at school had seen the Black Rock Monster—on camping trips, while fly-fishing with mothers and fathers, in backyards, in backcountry, in back of the Pizza Hut, in the woods back behind where the Kmart used to be, from the backs of cars parked by the edge of the lake, and so on, and so on.
These sightings were not credible, and Audrey chose not to report on them.
Audrey was the editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Black Rock High Husky Howler (the school’s mascot was the Husky). The newspaper’s sponsor, Mrs. Bond-Simmons, thought it would be cute or something for her to write a story on the Black Rock Monster—“For the Halloween issue!” she twittered—and at first, Audrey refused outright. That was exactly the sort of softball puff piece that Audrey loathed, was embarrassed by every time something like it appeared in the Howler, thinking it cheapened the prestige of the publication, made it harder to take seriously.
Of all Audrey’s desires—the desire to get out of Black Rock, the desire to be in the “real world,” the desire to be a “real” journalist, the desire to find truth and the desire to say it, the desire to perhaps find love, the desire to as soon as possible be an adult with a career, a bank account, and a yearlong lease on an apartment in a big city, the desire that her brother Jim improve himself and begin at last to lead a better life—what among them belly-growled the loudest, the hungriest, was the desire to be taken seriously.
The third sighting officially reported that year did or did not happen on October 17, the first day of deer-hunting season, a Sunday. The weather had warned of a possible early snowstorm that day, but it had produced only a soft, white sky that lightly powdered the fallen leaves in the morning like a dusting of confectioner’s sugar. It was early in the morning—an unusual time for a sighting. (They usually happened toward the evening.) The unlikely seer of the beast was Bob Mecoy, a native Black Rocker who ran a business painting houses and doing other manual odd jobs in the summer, and in the winter did HVAC repair and coached the wrestling team. Audrey didn’t know him well, but had always thought of him as a fairly no-nonsense guy. As in: not likely to engage in nonsense. The Black Rock Monster was: nonsense. Bob was also an avid outdoorsman, hunter, and fisher—one of his many side hustles was selling elk jerky he’d killed and cured himself out of the back of his truck in the parking lot of the B&F Super Foods. Thus it was that he was already out tromping around in the woods at the crack of dawn on the first day of deer season. His description of the monster differed somewhat from those Duncan Hodges, Jason Henly, and Kate Pletl had given. They had all described an intensely musky odor, even from far away. Bob Mecoy did not report any distinctive smell that he could detect, and he clarified repeatedly that he had no idea what it was he saw—only that he had never seen it before. He said whatever it was walked upright on two legs, and moved more or less like a human being. It was tall, but again, not taller than a very tall man. It was hairy, or furry, all over, and he didn’t get a clear glimpse of its face.
“Not hairy, no,” he said to the same reporter from the Prospector who had interviewed Jason and Kate. He said its fur was not dark brown but a light brownish gray. “More like, uh, shaggy. Like a great big old sheepdog had started walking on his hind legs.”
Bob told the reporter that he had been so close to it that he could have had a clear shot at it.
The reporter asked him why he didn’t shoot it.
“This is deer season,” Bob said. “It wasn’t a deer.”
Audrey met Bill Burns shortly after the Bob Mecoy sighting. Had she known the reason for his being in town she might have written him off as a crackpot right away. She had been doing calculus homework with pencil and TI-83 calculator at one of the tables in the bar on the bottom floor of
the hotel. Her mother was behind the counter, and there was no one else in the room. It was a weeknight. There was no music on. As with the rest of the hotel, almost everything in the bar was made of wood. The counter was an irregular span of pine log planed lengthwise and glazed thick with finish, and those tessellated elk-antler lighting fixtures dangled above the bar, casting spiky netted shadows around the room. The hotel bar had a warm, dark-honeyed glow to it. Her mother was watching the PBS MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and Audrey, from her table in the corner of the room, was half paying attention to it between calculus problems, each one like an irritating little knot of hair she’d been tasked to disentangle. The man who had checked into the hotel earlier in the afternoon came downstairs, sat at the bar, and ordered a beer, which he sipped slowly while watching the news in silence with Audrey’s mother, sucking foam from his mustache between sips. Jim Lehrer was talking about Slobodan Milošević meeting with representatives of the other belligerents in Bosnia for an American-led diplomatic conference in Dayton, Ohio. Audrey herself had checked the man at the bar into the hotel that afternoon—her mother had asked her to work the front desk for a few hours after school. It still being the off-season, there were very few guests. The Pronghorn Lodge still handled its booking the old-fashioned way, with a physical log-in book and all, and the wall behind the counter was still a Masonite pegboard with rows and columns of metal hooks with keys hanging from them. This was how Audrey knew the man’s name was William Burns, and that he lived in Bainbridge Island, Washington. He was a soft-featured man who looked to be maybe in his fifties or early sixties, balding with white-gray hair and a sandy-colored, mostly gray beard—thickset and potbellied, but not quite fat. He wore jeans, hiking boots, a bland blue Oxford shirt and unfashionable eyeglasses whose frames had clearly been chosen for function over form. Audrey felt certain he was somebody’s dad, possibly a young grandfather.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 9