In years that followed, Audrey would come into journalism as it was cartwheeling through a radical transformation the old guard feared was death. Local newspapers across the country folded one after another like lights on a map flickering weakly and winking out between ever-wider gaps of darkness as the old giants struggled to hold on. Words were migrating from paper to screen, and the eyes of the people followed them there, into the flatness, into the untouchable, into the intangible, into the soft, clear, glowing light. Sometimes, when Audrey found herself in an open-plan office on the thirty-seventh floor of the Condé Nast Building, thirty-six years old with a punishing rent to pay, student loans in deferment, and twenty tabs open on her browser, her eyes moving from laptop to smartphone to iPad, Twitter pinging away with information and misinformation high and low scatterblasting across the earth, she would remember the old world of scissors, glue, pencils, tape, ink, paper, and mechanical machines—and miss it. Audrey had probably been one of the last children in history to learn to type in a softly whirring room full of electric typewriters, with her eyes locked on a skittery metal ball of letters and symbols, hands hidden beneath a sheet of paper taped to the front of the IBM Selectric, typing
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy gray dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy gray dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy gray dog.
—again, and again, and again.
There was no one behind the front desk of the hotel when Audrey came home from school in the afternoon. She descended the two wide steps onto the sunken floor of the bar, expecting to find her mother behind the counter, but she wasn’t there either. The whole building was empty and absolutely quiet, except for two customers: She saw Bill Burns bent over one of the tables pushed against the wall in the corner of the room, talking with Duncan Hodges. The bar was not open yet; her mother must have served them anyway as a favor. From this evidence Audrey guessed she was probably in the kitchen. Audrey dumped her backpack on a barstool, squeezed her coat off, and sat on the one beside it. She spread her calculus before her on the lacquered pine counter and began working. The word “homework” to her would always evoke math homework specifically—something about the repetition and grinding futility of it, how drearily unchanged the world looks after an x has been solved for. She happened to be good at math, but it bored her nevertheless. She was good enough at it that she could figure out the problems with her mind on other things, as if she were knitting or assembling a jigsaw puzzle, which freed her ears for eavesdropping.
“How tall, would you say?” she heard Bill saying.
“Like, at least seven feet? Maybe more?”
“Would you say it had a pronounced supraorbital ridge?”
“What?”
“This thing.” His finger tapped something on the table. “See? The browridge above the eyes.”
“Oh, yeah. I don’t know. I guess so?”
She stole enough backward glances at them to see that Bill Burns had a coffee cup in front of him; Duncan, a glass of beer. Bill, between every question he put to the inarticulate Duncan Hodges, scribbled notes onto a legal pad, and beside this was a tape recorder with its red recording light on. He also had a lot of other documents—folders, photo prints, drawings, things like that—spread out around him on the table.
Audrey could hear her mother’s voice behind the kitchen doors, those swinging doors with porthole windows, and another voice. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she knew whatever conversation her mother was having was one she didn’t want to have in earshot of the public.
“How about a skull crest? Like a gorilla?”
“Um—”
“Most primates don’t have them, but gorillas do. They have conical heads with a pointed crest running vertically along the middle of the skull.” Pointing, drawing a line up the middle of his own head with his finger. “Like this.”
“Um—I don’t know.”
“How about arm-to-leg ratio?”
“What?”
Audrey smirked to herself listening to them—listening to a smart person who was socially stupid enough to not know how to talk to a stupid person. Bill might as well have been trying to interview a six-year-old child about the US military involvement with the conflict in Bosnia.
The shouting in the kitchen rose in volume. She could now hear the unmistakable timbre of her brother’s voice. The shouting reached the peak of a crescendo and abruptly stopped—and then there was a brusque march of sullen stomping.
The kitchen doors whacked open and Jim walked through them. He stopped when he saw Audrey sitting there. He looked awful. Jim had always been a tall, handsome guy, but he’d let himself go to pot in the last few years. Or maybe the drugs and booze had only visibly caught up with him in the last few years. He was only twenty-six. He looked rotten, puffy and bloated. He had sallow, ashen skin, a gruesome paunch, and a fat face, but was skinny everywhere else. His beard looked like bits of lint that had been clumsily glued onto his cheeks, and there were saggy, dark pouches under his eyes; the eyes themselves were murky, florid with blood. He even smelled bad—sweaty, unclean, his clothes mildewy, as if they’d been wadded on a bathroom floor for days before he put them on.
“Hey yo whatup?” he said to her, without pauses. “What you up to, Tiny?”
Audrey could not remember exactly when Jim started calling her “Tiny.” It had begun when she was a small child and he was a teenager, but the appellation was still true: At five foot one and ninety-eight pounds, Audrey was not a great occupier of physical space in this world.
She pointed at the papers in front of her.
“Calculus homework.”
Uninvited, he snatched up the textbook spread open on the counter. He read from it, slowly, as if he had to put his finger on each letter to pronounce it:
Differentiate y = (1 – 4x + 7x5)30
Actually, out loud, as far as he got was “Differentiate y equals—” and then he gave up.
He whistled appreciatively.
“Shit, dog, this shit is unreal. I don’t know how you can make heads or tails of this shit, Tiny.”
“It’s not that hard. Give me my book back.”
When, when, and how did he acquire all this idiotic, affected ghetto slang? Their parents didn’t talk like that. Liam, their ghost brother, the brother who appeared only at Christmas and sometimes Thanksgiving to introduce a new beautiful girlfriend, who studied law at Northwestern and made six figures a year—he didn’t talk like that. Why?
Jim handed her back the textbook.
Their mother emerged from the kitchen doors. Audrey could tell at once they’d been having a bad fight—a fight that was probably still unresolved. Jim’s fights with their mother were like trench battles in World War I: violent, destructive catastrophes of no consequence. He shouted and raged at her, and usually wound up saying something appallingly horrible to her. And she never cried—their mother was not a woman who cried easily or frequently. She only shouted and raged back. Had there been a time when Audrey’s sympathy for her brother was strong? She had sided with their mother in these fights for so long it was hard to remember if she had ever not. She still had some sympathy for Jim, but her sympathy was battle weary and weak in her heart.
Jim’s cinnamon-brown eyes were stern with useless and unrighteous rage, and his breaths whistled audibly through his nostrils. Their mother’s jaw was clenched. She did not say anything to Audrey—no hello, no how was school today. She was lockjawed and blinkered with anger. Her face was flushed too. She had rosacea that came and went: Her nose and jowly cheeks boiled with broken blood vessels in the wintertime, or when she was angry, or, in this case, both.
Everything about Jim was off-kilter somehow. He walked with a strange, loping, duck-footed gait, stomping every step, like a sleepwalker. His gaze didn’t quite fix on yours when he looked at yo
u, unfocused and always drifting slightly away, coming back, drifting away.
“Get out,” said their mother. “Leave. I have customers.”
Mr. Burns and Duncan Hodges looked up at them from their inane interview.
“Yo, Jim!” Duncan called from the table. “’Sup?”
Jim zipped up the puffy red coat he’d worn every winter for years, which was now grubby with black smudges, and lope-stomped over to their table, fist-bumped Duncan, and lope-stomped out, fishing around in the coat and sticking a cigarette in his face on his way to the door.
“He lost his job,” Audrey’s mother said when he had gone. “He shot his mouth off at his boss again and got himself fired from the goddamn gas station. He came here asking for money.”
“Did you give him any?”
“Hell, no.”
Whenever Jim’s net worth hit perfect zero, which was often, or whenever he sank into meaningless debt with a credit card, he first asked their parents for a loan. If they said no, then he’d call Liam and hit him up for a thousand dollars, which Liam would usually give him out of misguided brotherly fidelity, even though he knew there was no way in hell Jim would be able to pay him back. And Jim would somehow plow through that money in a week or two—paying off delinquent parking tickets that had trebled themselves in late fees, things like that. Or he would just drink his way through it. Apparently he had been fired from the Sunoco station weeks ago, but had only told their mother about it today. It was amazing to Audrey how much Jim took and how little he gave: He was a karmic vortex, a black hole that resources fell into, from which nothing ever came out.
When Duncan had left, Audrey joined Bill at his table, and asked him if she could write a personal-interest feature article about him for the school newspaper.
Of course, he was delighted.
“Would you like to come on a ride-along?”
A “ride-along”—as if he were a cop. She found that funny. He was a little boy of an old man, who seemed more naive than even boys her own age—but then again, she knew that adolescent boys’ greatest fear is being seen as naive; it’s the time when they harden their hearts and sharpen their fangs. Bill had none of that. He had never grown up.
A few days passed. Audrey ate breakfast with her parents every morning before school—bagels, coffee, and frozen concentrate orange juice over the newspapers (her parents subscribed to the Daily Prospector and the Rocky Mountain News)—and these were several days of dark moods at breakfast. Her parents were at a loss over Jim. There was no disagreement between the two of them about him: Both were of the opinion that they had given him far too many fish for far too many days, and he was so resistant to learning to fish that starvation was the only way left to teach him. But even though they were in agreement, they were still at a loss. Jim poisoned the air between her parents, made them sullen and snappy with each other.
Audrey’s days as usual fell one against the other in exact repetition like clicking mechanical parts, the spokes of a sprocket: a hallway lined with metal lockers opening and banging shut, the buzzer, the board, the boredom—and, eventually, at the end of each day, the newsroom, where she began outlining her profile feature about Bill Burns, summertime baboon expert, autumnal Bigfoot hunter.
Every evening Bill Burns came back to the hotel, empty-handed, disappointed but not dissuaded. His jeans and hiking boots would be mud spattered from all his romping around off-trail in the woods. He would come in stamping on the mat—bundled up like someone who lives in a place without serious winters, who has overshot the danger and overdressed—gradually unraveling himself out of hood, hat, scarf, gloves, coat as he made his way across the amber-hued woody interior of the lobby and down the three wooden steps to the bar, where he would order a cheeseburger and a beer, eat his dinner while studying his field notes, and then repair upstairs. He would wake before dawn to go out again into the woods. This was because he believed the Sasquatch was primarily a crepuscular animal: most active around dusk and dawn.
Audrey scribbled that down in her yellow spiral flip-top steno pad. She was sitting in the passenger seat of Bill Burns’s van, which rollicked and juddered over the washboard ruts in the narrow dirt road they were driving on. They were on their way to the Brainard Lake Wilderness Area, because Walt Elkins, Audrey’s now-retired high-school science teacher, had told Bill in an interview that he might have witnessed the Black Rock Monster there about five years before.
“Plus, major bodies of water are always good places to look.”
She scribbled that down too.
“Always? How can you say that if you’ve never actually seen one?”
The TV had warned that there would be a storm front moving in later that night.
“Supposed to snow all night and all day tomorrow,” her father had said, back from the grocery store with canned chili, crackers and Spam, jugs of bottled water.
It amused Audrey the way people fell back into talking about the weather in terms of what it was “supposed to” do. As if the weatherman were a secular prophet to be believed but only with a grain of salt, and “the weather” a remnant of pagan providence.
“Supposed to be a big storm tonight. First of the season.”
“I know. I heard we’re supposed to get eighteen inches.”
“Boy howdy.”
And if the weather didn’t do what it was supposed to do, it was the weather’s fault, not the forecaster’s. To Audrey’s father, a grownup Boy Scout who still winced if he saw an American flag graze the ground, being underprepared for a bad storm was a moral failing—an ants-and-the-grasshopper, Protestant-work-ethic kind of thing—but to wind up overprepared for a storm much lighter than predicted was mildly embarrassing. People put faith in forecasters cautiously here.
The first “real,” “butt-kickin’,” “serious-business” (these were all her father’s words) snowstorm of the winter meant at least two things.
One was that they must do what all people who live above a certain latitude must do before a blizzard, all the requisite battening down of hatches: See that the fuel in the tank wasn’t low and firewood was plenty, the pantries were full, candles and propane lanterns ready in case the power went out, enough bottled water to last for days.
The other, that it was good for business. The citizens of Black Rock regarded a snowstorm the way a sailor regards a good gust of wind going in the right direction, the way a farmer regards rain: a boon for business that comes from the sky, those primeval fortunes of nature for which we first made the old gods to pray to. Soon the skiers would come in holiday colors. Soon the out-of-state plates would fill the parking lots, waiters and waitresses would see their tip earnings quintuple, and for the first time in the season Audrey’s mother would switch on the NO part of the NO VACANCY neon sign underneath the rustic wooden sign for the Pronghorn Lodge.
It was nearing sundown: The light was getting golden, the sky had begun to redden in the east. Bill’s van was a battered dust-brown Ford Econoline that he had taken all the backseats out of. It was his mobile Bigfoot-hunting station. There was a twin mattress in the back and a battery-powered space heater, and a lot of camping equipment. Two hunting rifles rested in a metal gun rack screwed to one side of the back of the van. The vehicle put her in mind of a wagon in a gypsy caravan or something, or a traveling circus, pioneers headed west: a cramped, serviceable space for a nomad accustomed to scrappy shelter, made to be lived in while necessary—pots and pans dangling from hooks, a propane lantern—a rattletrap kitchen/bedroom where everything clattered and knocked together when it was rollicking over a rough road, as it was doing then.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 11