“You have beautiful sunsets here,” said Bill.
“I guess so,” said Audrey. Never having lived anywhere else, Colorado’s sunsets to her were not an issue for regional comparison and evaluation. The sky at that moment was feathered in striated pink clouds, goldflamed at the edges by a sun that had gone already behind the mountains, and the rest of the sky was turning purple.
“Look,” said Audrey. “You can see bats.”
She pointed up, out. Bats flitted above the road in the gloaming, creatures halfway between birds and shadows.
“That’s weird,” Audrey said. “They’re usually hibernating by now. ”
“Bats are not true hibernators,” said Bill. “If it’s warm, they’ll come out even if it’s late in the year.”
It was warm—the weather had been getting colder day by day, but today had been warm—it was still warm, even as the sun was going down. Audrey knew this was a sign of a very big storm.
“I heard a story,” said Bill, “can’t remember where, so I can’t vouchsafe it, about a spelunker who got stuck in a cave-in. He had his leg trapped under a pile of rocks.”
“I’ve heard about that. He cut off his own leg with a pocketknife.”
“No, that’s another story. This one has to do with—well, OK—the guy was wearing a red sweater. And pretty soon, the people who lived near the cave started noticing bats with red strings tied around their little feet. Somehow he was catching bats and tying threads from his sweater to the bats. And the people figured out what it meant, and went to the cave, and he was rescued.”
Audrey, sitting in the roomy leather passenger seat beside him, had not been jotting any of this down, but by the end of the anecdote she felt she ought to have been—that somehow, this silly story about a trapped spelunker scapturing bats by hand and tying strings to their feet was relevant to Bill’s pursuit of the monster.
Audrey was first, foremost, an adventurer—journalism to her was an excuse to explore the world, in order to render it. Poetry didn’t interest her much—it always sat still on the page in her eyes, looking opaque and pointless, and she frankly didn’t much care for fiction, either. Other people’s imaginations she found ponderously uninteresting compared to the real world. Often, into her adulthood, when she saw a movie “based on a true story,” she would get curious about it and do a little research, and always find a story far more complicated and interesting than what the movie had depicted. Human imagination seemed to distort, simplify, and dumb down everything it touched. In the years that would come, Audrey would sit in a lot of passenger seats scribbling into her little yellow steno pads—in Afghanistan, in Venezuela, in Burma, in Cuba, and countless times all over America. She had a knack for listening. Her trick, which she developed as a teenager, was to keep herself out of it: No matter who she was talking with, whether or not she silently believed her interviewee to be a lunatic, a narcissist, a criminal, or an idiot, he or she always believed Audrey was on their side. She sat there without a note of judgment, armed with curiosity, asking questions, and taking notes.
They parked in the gravel parking lot of the Brainard Lake Wilderness Area. There was one other car parked there, a white minivan. It looked ominous.
“They’re probably campers,” said Audrey.
“I hope they’re prepared,” said Bill. “I heard it’s supposed to snow tonight.”
Car doors slammed, their boots crunched on the gravel, bats dipped and flitted in the purpling air over their heads. A wall of clouds was moving fast across the sky from northwest to southeast: The clouds were rolling visibly, expanding and unfurling like white paint in water. The storm was moving in.
Bill hitched on a small camouflage backpack. He had binoculars and a clunky, ridiculous pair of night-vision goggles around his neck. He went into the back of the van and came out with one of the rifles.
“You’re not going to shoot him, are you?”
Audrey caught herself sounding ridiculous: Who was “him”? In truth, she’d only been a little shocked to see Bill holding the gun.
“This gun shoots tranquilizer darts. If it happens that we get close enough to a Sasquatch, I would try to hit him with a tranquilizer so I can examine him more closely, take photographs, and hopefully tag him.”
There was nothing about the gun suggesting to Audrey that it might not be a lethal hunting rifle that shot ordinary, lethal bullets. The barrel was long and slender, with a mounted scope and laser sighting, and the gun was as black, complicated, and evil looking as these machines had always looked and always would to Audrey, and, despite that, she thought him charmingly deluded. She liked Bill Burns, considered him a very sweet, nice man—round bellied and almost white bearded, he could have played Santa Claus—and it was incongruous to see such a sinister-looking thing in his hands. The juxtaposition was comical, but it wasn’t funny.
He showed her one of the tranquilizer darts: It was a long, thin plastic tube—a hypodermic needle with a puff of fuzzy red stuff on the end of it.
“That’s the tailpiece,” said Bill, flicking at it. “It stabilizes the dart during flight, like the feathers of an arrow.”
They walked together in the woods for about an hour. Audrey crept along beside him in silence as he crept through the woods, sweeping them with his tranquilizer gun. All the trees that were going to shed their leaves had shed them by now, and these dead leaves crunched brittlely under their feet. They were walking aimlessly, it seemed to Audrey.
Once, they heard movement—something rustling in the leaves somewhere off to their left. He swiftly pointed his gun in the direction of the sound. The jittery red dot of the gun’s laser was a tiny, gleaming pinprick of human invention in an otherwise natural environment: No light so bright and so red could possibly exist in nature, and its presence here looked jarring—ugly and sinister even to Audrey, who was no romantic.
The sound had been made by a small group of deer.
They moved very slowly. They spoke only when necessary, and only in whispers.
They searched for the Black Rock Monster.
All the while Audrey was feeling two conflicting feelings.
The first? Absurdity: She was humoring a lunatic. Trooping around in these empty woods with Bill felt to her exactly as if she were playing a game of make-believe with a much younger child whom she loved and wanted to make happy. One of her little cousins. Let’s search for the monster! Look! Over there! I think I see him! Do you see him? But whenever she had been in such situations, she had always felt a tacit understanding between her and even a very young child that what they were doing was imaginary—that they did not actually entertain any real hope of seeing the monster. But this man was an adult, decades older than her, a good decade or so at least older than her own parents, an adult with a PhD no less, a scientist, who had credentials and many published papers, who’d held a distinguished chair at a public research university. And here he was, chasing after fairies with a butterfly net. How could she be feeling this way with a man like him? Now that he wasn’t just sitting in the hotel bar blithering about the Bering Land Bridge and Gigantopithecus, now that he was stomping around in dark, empty woods with a loaded tranquilizer rifle in serious hopes of spotting and anesthetizing Bigfoot, she was more incredulous than she would have been if her little cousins had told her they’d seen a unicorn. She would be more inclined to believe them—or at least believe that they believed themselves. Believing, belief: These were not good words to Audrey.
The second feeling, then, in conflict with the first, was a blobby, ineffable tingling sensation in her stomach, and it was not unpleasant. No—it was a good feeling. It was a feeling she had felt maybe only a dozen times in her life. Once, she had felt it (to her horror, now) in church. She had felt it with that same Sunday-school teacher, whom she had challenged with her first skeptical inquiry, who had been the first person to tell her that “absence of evidence is not evide
nce of absence.” She remembered feeling it in that room—it almost looked like a nursery, but with colorful wraparound wallpaper of watercolor paintings depicting Bible stories: Noah’s Ark, Daniel in the lions’ den, advancing through the Old Testament into the New, and ending with Jesus on the Olive Mount, surrounded by children and fluffy, trembly-eyed lambs. She had been a child. She had liked the colorful wallpaper. She’d liked Mrs. James’s honeyed voice, and she liked Bible-story time. She liked the stories. They charmed and haunted her at the same time. And she would remember feeling that feeling for the first time in her life in that colorful, ugly, low-ceilinged room in the basement of Bethany First Baptist Church. If Audrey were pressed to describe it she would have said: It feels like when you sit weird on your leg and it goes to sleep, and then you suddenly stand up, and at first, for a moment, the feeling of all the blood rushing back into your leg is painful, but then there’s the tingling feeling, the pins and needles in reverse. It was one of the most pleasurable physical sensations she had ever felt (she did not think she had ever had an orgasm; childish sensations like these were what she had to offer up for comparison now). Well, it feels like that, she would have said, but in your stomach, and the rest of your body relaxes too—untenses, feels pleasantly chilled and calm. Your breath becomes shorter, you feel almost dizzy, but not in a bad way. Anyway. It was a feeling so personal, so privately and inwardly felt, that she did not feel like she had ever been able to describe it adequately to anyone.
And, well: She felt it that night. They did not find the Black Rock Monster, or Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, or Brother Who Comes Back Before the Next Very Big Winter, but that spiny physical feeling did not go away, even after Bill gave up for the night and decided it was time to turn back. It was full dark now. Bill shouldered his tranquilizer rifle and clicked on the Maglite he slipped from its loop in his belt—no longer concerned with a low profile, he walked in an ordinary crunch-crunch-crunch across the mushy forest floor. The sky was a uniform gray and the moon had risen, but wasn’t visible: It was a pale, milky blur behind the clouds, a flashlight under a sheet.
She noticed, in relief, that he had a good sense of direction—a good thing, as Audrey had essentially put her faith in it. He had seemed confident that he knew where they were going—plus he was much older than she was, an adult, an old man even, who had been doing this a long time and was uncontestably still alive. And, sure enough, soon the Econoline in the parking lot became visible through the trees. When they returned, the other car that had been in the parking lot, the white minivan, was no longer there.
While driving them back into town on Route 9, Bill seemed to have convinced himself that Colorado was out of the Sasquatch’s range, actually. He was a man who said the word “actually” often.
“It is entirely possible,” he speculated, “that a very small breeding population does exist here, but typically they prefer wetter, more temperate climates. The vast majority of the Sasquatch are almost certainly concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, most of them in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, the Idaho panhandle.”
He went on awhile in this way, helpfully, Audrey scribbling down usable quotes again, hoping that her scrawly handwriting written in the dark in a moving vehicle would be legible later. Bill, in his monologue, was distracted enough that it was Audrey who glanced up from her steno pad at the road in front of them and screamed. Bill reawakened from within himself in an instant, and stopped the car. He did not slam on the brakes. He pulled the van to a halt as quickly as he could without letting the tires squeal. There was something standing in the road.
The headlights of the van harshly illuminated the cones of the tall fir trees beside the road and threw their long, high shadows against each other. Below the trees, there was something standing in the road. They were right behind a sharp blind curve around the side of the mountain: To their right was a vertical wall of dynamited rock, and to their left was a metal guardrail, and below that probably a steep grade and dense forest. The thing was standing at the edge of the curve, in the left lane of the road. It looked like it was made of shag carpeting. It was hard even to tell what color it was with the headlights on it. Its shadow stretched up into the trees. It did not appear to have a face, or its face was completely obscured under long, shaggy hair. It stood upright. It stood still. It was shaped roughly like a human being. It moved slightly. It swayed. For a very long time, all they could do was sit in the van, parked with engine idling in the right lane of the narrow mountain road, staring at it, unmoving and silent as it was. Did it have arms and legs? It was hard to say. It only looked like a vaguely contoured column of long, pale fur, or grass, or hay.
Bill whispered: “Shit!”
Audrey saw an instant later why: Another light was gathering on the sides of the trees. There was another car approaching the curve from the opposite direction. The other light brightened and grew, and all in a moment the shaggy column of hair became a body, with arms and legs. The thing walked—or sort of shambled, with long arms swinging at its sides—over to the guardrail in a few steps, climbed over it easily, off the road, descended into the woods, and was gone. The next instant, the other car swung around the curve, momentarily blinding them with its high beams, and blasted past them, its driver apparently oblivious, leaving behind it only the van’s headlights shining onto the trees, onto nothing.
Bill moved faster than Audrey would have thought the old, fat man capable of moving. He unbuckled his seat belt, scrambled into the back, snatched the tranquilizer gun from the rack, and was out of the van via the side door, not stopping to shut it, running across the road while snapping on his silly slime-green night-vision goggles. He scurried over the guardrail and into the woods, looking like a hamster: frantic, uncoordinated.
Audrey hadn’t even unbuckled her seat belt. The van’s engine was still on. For a moment she just sat there, wondering if he wanted her to wait for him in the car. He probably didn’t want anything of her. He wasn’t thinking of her at all. She reached over to the driver’s side of the dashboard and sank in the button that turned the hazard lights on. She got out of the van and shivered: The temperature had dropped by at least ten degrees since they’d left Brainard Lake. A snowflake glittered in the headlights as it fluttered to the tarmac, on which it landed and instantly disappeared.
It was a bright night, the sky pale and swollen with the snow it was preparing to shed. The blinking hazard lights added a pulsing orange glow to the night. Audrey crossed the road and climbed with a little difficulty (she was short) over the guardrail. The grade below the road was so steep she nearly fell, twigs and pebbles skittering and raining beneath her feet as she stumbleslid down the embankment.
The woods were dark and silent. She walked a few steps into the forest. She could not see Bill. Or anything. Her eyes gradually adjusted to the dark. The light from the headlights of the van parked above and behind her cast hard yellow light on the tops of the fir trees.
When her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she saw a tiny, shivering pinprick of piercing red light. She watched it swim through the trees, flashing in and out of visibility. It jumped and slashed from one place to another. It was the only thing she could concentrate her vision on that would not move and transform away from her.
She did not know how long she stumbled, groping from one tree trunk to the next, in the darkness. Ten minutes? More? Impossible to say. Time stretched, dilated.
And she saw it again. The thing that had been standing in the road. It moved between the trunks of the trees. It was pale, ashen gray. Or maybe light brown. It did not look much different from the stuff of the surrounding forest. It was a person, walking out there, perhaps fifty feet away from her. She heard the crunching of its footsteps on the leaves and pine needles.
The shining red prick of light found it. Among the few flakes of snow that had begun to fall, she saw the perfect mathematical line of its beam slicing through the dark. She heard a popping sound—a
swift, sharp crack, a bolt of compressed air released. Somewhere far off to her left, Bill turned on his flashlight. A hard cone of yellowy white beamed through the forest. He shakily trained his flashlight on the thing. The light bounced and jittered with Bill’s footsteps as he approached it. Not far ahead, through the trees, Audrey could see the needle with the red tuft on the end of it sticking out of the thing’s side. The thing stopped, yanked it out, and held it to its face, looking at it with eyes obscured behind wild, shaggy fur. The thing threw it on the ground and began to run. With the beam of the flashlight aimed at his back, the carpet-man ran, crashing blindly through the brush, waving his arms in front of him. He looked as if he were run ning away from a beehive he’d just thrown a rock at. He was slowing down before her eyes. Occasional snowflakes twinkled in the beam of hard artificial light. The man-thing ran as if the air around him were thickening: slower and slower—until he was not running but staggering, reaching out and groping his way from one tree to the next, flailing his arms out in front of him for temporary purchase between every step. Bill was close behind him with the flashlight. Audrey recognized the man-thing’s walk. She knew who he was. He lurched forward, tripped, and fell.
Audrey called his name: “Jim!”
Audrey and Bill both ran through the woods toward the fallen body of what Bill still must have believed might be the first anesthetized specimen of “the Sasquatch,” and what Audrey already knew to be her brother. Bill, who had been chasing him, reached him first.
When Audrey reached him, Bill was cursing to himself.
“It’s some guy in a ghillie suit,” said Bill.
Audrey said: “It’s my brother.”
And so it was. Her older brother’s painfully stupid face peered out on top of a strange suit made of what looked like tattered fabric, string, and dry grass. He was conscious, but barely so. His eyes were slits. He was writhing on the ground, moaning.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 12