Big Hairy Deal

by Steve Vernon

  Dad-not-Dad was rumbling to himself now, like he was gargling boulders in the back of his throat.

  “That other guy’s name was Warren,” I said. “And he was good to me too – even though I was a bit of a jerk to him.”

  “I’ll be sure to look him up the next time I’m on Facebook,” Dad-not-Dad said.

  He was trying to make a comeback – trying to tell a joke and maybe get back to telling his own story and getting back up on top of this situation but I wasn’t going to give him the chance.

  I kept telling my story like it was the very last story that I would tell on this good earth.

  “He was good to me, too,” I repeated. “He taught me how to throw a football and how to do mathematics and how to run like the wind.”

  I could see Warren now, standing there in thin mid-air, hovering behind Dad-not-Dad. I don’t know if he was some sort of a spirit come back or if he was just becoming a story himself or if I was just imagining the whole situation – but I did not let that keep me from keeping on telling.

  “You keep on telling that story if you want to,” Dad-not-Dad said. “But the truth is you have been living with the Se’skwetew for too long now. This Warren-thing means nothing and you ought to know that. You are better off living with the memory of me.”

  “Your memory is important to me, Dad,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t have more than one memory and more than one story. My memory of my Dad as being my hero hasn’t changed and the fact that he really was nothing more than a fellow who couldn’t figure out how to stick around long enough to actually get to his son hasn’t changed and the fact that Warren is trying his very best to be there for me and my Mom doesn’t change either.”

  “So what has changed?” Dad-not-Dad asked.

  “What has changed,” I said. “is the fact that I have finally figured out just WHO you really are.”

  “Who?” Dad-not-Dad asked.

  “No,” I said. “You are not an owl. That is not the kind of bird that you are at all, is it? And you sure as shooting aren’t my Dad.”

  “Then who am I?” Not-Dad asked the space about two or three inches above my hairline on account of he suddenly could not look me in the eye.

  Now, it was my turn to smile.

  “Come on out,” I said. “You are not fooling anyone anymore.”

  My smile widened into a big old grin.

  “Come on out, Raven,” I said.

  Chapter Thirty Nine – A Long Midnight Feather Duster

  The smile was the very first thing that slid off of Not-Dad’s face.

  Actually the smile kind of peeled off just a little bit at a time, like a Band-Aid that had been stuck onto somebody’s too-wet skin. The smile slid down Not-Dad’s chin and then it slid off into mid-air and then hung there about halfway to the ground and then I realized that that smile was nothing more than the scrap of a dried-up willow leaf and then it drifted down to the dirt.

  The next thing that fell off was Not-Dad’s eyes, sliding down his smoky grey cheekbone like a pair of see-through snails. They blinked at me in mid-air and then fell to the dirt like a pair of insincere tear drops. I almost chuckled when I realized that the jet black pupils of his eyes had been nothing more than a couple of sun-dried blackberries.

  I watched as that great orange beak slowly pushed out from the plane of his face and his lips peeled back from that beak like a pair of freshly-skinned river eels. I watched as dirty black feathers poked out from his skin and I could smell something that reeked a little like old cheese and sour milk. I saw his arms spread back like they were being pulled by a hidden master puppeteer and a pair of shiny long black wings grew out from his shoulders and his elbows and his fingertips like he was wearing a long feathery midnight shadow.

  Then his shoes melted away and the blue of his faded denim jeans washed out into pale winter sky tones before fading into nothing as a pair of mean and angry raven legs and talons pushed out from his hipbones to take their place.

  “You have got a pair of good eyes,” Raven said to me. “I wonder if I ought to beak them out of your head and see just what they really would taste like.”

  Now I had faced way too many bullies in my life to let a big old overgrown mynah bird put the scare into me – even if he was actually scaring me half to death.

  I wasn’t going to let him know.

  “I would not recommend that,” I said. “You would probably choke on them. I have got a pretty hard old stare and it gets worse when I am looking at crows.”

  “I am a Raven,” Dad-not-Dad said.

  “I know who you are,” I said. “I made you up out of wishful thinking and now I am no longer afraid of you and I am no longer afraid to stand here on my own two feet and I reckon that you might as well just blow away like the smoke from a birthday candle. I have outgrown you and I no longer have any kind use for the story you keep trying to tell me.”

  “That’s all that you have left,” Raven said. “Is nothing but old boring stories.”

  “That’s fine by me,” I said. “I’ll stick with my stories.”

  “The truth is better than that,” Raven said. “only I can tell you the truth.”

  I thought about that.

  There was an awful lot about this whole situation that I did not understand.

  I knew that Dad had been real and I knew that he had married Mom and I knew that he and Mom had done whatever parents do to make children and they had made me. But then I knew that Dad had spent every minute after that trying to stay away from me and my Mom.

  I don’t know if he was the Raven or if the Raven was just trying to pretend that I was the son of a Raven.

  I don’t really if I ever know.

  I just know that being with Mom makes me happy and Warren makes Mom happy which makes me even happier and three kinds of happy adds up to an awful lot of goodness and if I live to be a hundred and three it won’t really matter if I ever find out the truth of what the Raven really was trying to tell me.

  “The truth is cold,” I told him. “I’ll stick with my stories every time. A good story is like a good campfire. It keeps you warm at night and it teaches you how to dream and there are way too many facts in this world already. I’d rather dream awhile and let the facts take care of themselves.”

  “You don’t know the truth of it,” Raven said.

  “I know most of it,” I said. “And what I don’t know I can always guess at and if my guessing is wrong – well, I can live with that too. A fellow doesn’t need to know everything there is to know. Mostly all that is worth believing in are the things that are mostly unbelievable.”

  “What kind things are those?” Raven asked.

  “Things like love and peace and happiness and the way that happy endings seem to happen when you most figure that they won’t,” I said. “All of those rules that people tell us – well those aren’t anything more than stories and stories are sometimes the most important truth of all.”

  Raven just sneered at me.

  “Suit your own self,” Raven said.

  Then he spread his wings wide open – so wide that if the sun hadn’t been going like it was I was pretty certain that he could have blocked out the sun with one single shrug – and then, just as he was about to take wing the Ghost of Sam Steele reached out from the shadows of the Labrador wilderness and caught that Raven by the scruff of its black feathered neck.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” the Ghost of Sam Steele said. “In fact I would most sincerely prefer it if you would stay that way.”

  Raven cracked his wings backwards, throwing the Ghost of Sam Steele down into the dirt. Then he kicked some of that dirt into Sam Steele’s eyes and then he laughed a mean little laugh and spread his wings again and was just taking flight when Nanna Bijou – the Sleeping Giant of Thunder Bay – now wide awake and bigger than ten mountains all rolled into one – swatted Raven like a Labrador black fly, flattening that Trickster God
down into something that looked a steamrollered pancake shadow.

  “Anything you say or do can and will be held against you,” the Ghost of Sam Steele went on. “Assuming you actually live to survive your apprehension.”

  A bird flew overhead and dropped something sticky and white upon Raven’s forehead, just to add insult to injury.

  I could hear the thin crackling sounds of raw electric guitars, jackhammers, bagpipes and three guys yelling MISUNDERSTOOD-NUMBER-TWENTY-THREE, MISUNDERSTOOD-NUMBER-TWENTY-THREE, MISUNDERSTOOD-NUMBER-TWENTY-THREE bleeding out from the poorly fitted headphones that I had given Nanna Bijou.

  He was still wearing them, playing them as loudly as he could, and grinning so hard I swear he might have inadvertently broken a couple of his own teeth.

  Raven looked up at that big old Mountain God and he rolled his eyes so loudly I swore that I could hear them rattling like a cup full of dice.

  And then all of a sudden Old Shuck was standing on top of Raven – with all of his great purple Death Dog weight pressed upon Raven’s shoulder bones with all of Old Shuck’s great purple Death Dog weight.

  “You have the right to an attorney,” the Ghost of Sam Steele finished up. “And you have the right to a box full of Band-Aids and it looks to me like you might actually need them.”

  And looking down at Raven I am pretty sure that he did.

  Chapter Forty – The Long Arm of the Storyteller

  “That great big purple dog came and he fetched me here,” the Ghost of Sam Steele explained. “He showed up in my office and he took me by the arm and he dragged me – which felt awfully peculiar. I didn’t think that anything on earth could drag a ghost like that.”

  “I guess Death Dogs can do that sort of thing if they want to,” I said as I leaned over and casually skritched the back of Old Shuck’s ears. “As surprising as that might seem.”

  “You want to talk about surprising,” Sam Steele’s Ghost went on. “You should have been there when that big purple mutt hauled old Stony Britches down from off of his perch. “

  I tried to picture Old Shuck hauling Nann Bijou from off of his Thunder Bay roost. As big as Old Shuck was he still stood about as tall as a good-sized chipmunk standing next to that big old Sleeping Mountain.

  I looked at Old Shuck leaning happily against me, his big old purple tongue hanging out like a big fat rubber superhero cape left out on the clothesline in the rain.

  I guess Old Shuck’s bite was a WHOLE lot worse than his bark was.

  “I let him get away with it,” Nanna Bijou said. “I could have stopped him if I had honestly wanted to.”

  “Sure you could have,” the Ghost of Sam Steele said sarcastically. “And if that big purple death mutt could talk I fully expect that he would tell you just how truly grateful he was for your show of sportsmanlike mercy.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” Nanna Bijou pointed out. “It is me who has actually apprehended our prisoner – unless you really expect me to believe that you were covering him while lying flat on your back.”

  Raven wasn’t saying anything.

  He was just lying there in Nanna Bijou’s mighty stone grip – not moving so much as a single inch. He might as well have been a shadow of a rock, cast upon another rock for all of the movement he was doing.

  “So is he my Dad?” I asked.

  “He is one of them,” Bigfoot said. “He isn’t the one that really counts but he did marry your Mother and he did go off and leave her to raise you alone.”

  “So why did he ever even bother marrying my Mom if he didn’t really want to stick around?” I asked.

  Bigfoot shrugged.

  “Well,” Bigfoot said, with a shrug. “It might be that he had a plan. He is the original Trickster, after all. Remember, all of that energy that you were investing in believing in his myth fed him an awful lot of power.”

  “So you’re saying that because I believed in him it made him stronger?” I said. “Is that what this was all about?”

  I was gob-smacked by the thought.

  He was my Dad, after all.

  “So he was evil,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t say evil,” Bigfoot answered. “It might be that he wasn’t really thinking about personal gain at all. It might be that he had told your Mother a love story so very strong that he began to believe in it himself. It might be the thought of actually committing to any one person that way scared him off.”

  I looked at Raven.

  At my Dad.

  He didn’t even seem to see me.

  All I could see were those eyes of his – just as cold and as black and implacable as a pair of tumbled stones fished out of a roaring northern river.

  It was like he didn’t even care.

  “So what will happen to him?” I asked.

  “We have a place in the mountains for him,” Bigfoot explained.

  “Like a jail?”

  “Like a place where he can think about what he has done.”

  “Will that cure him?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him to cure,” Bigfoot said. “You can’t cure a Trickster of being tricky any more than you can cure the wind from blowing.”

  “That doesn’t seem like it will do much good at all.”

  “Well it won’t hurt,” Bigfoot said. “As a matter of fact I don’t even think we will be able to keep him for all that long.”

  “He has a really good lawyer?” I asked, thinking of all of those law stories that I had seen on television.

  Bigfoot just laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Thinking that Raven needs a lawyer is what’s so funny,” Bigfoot explained. “That old bird knows more tricks than a thousand years of law school could ever teach. In fact, I am pretty sure that Raven actually INVENTED lawyers in the first place. It just seems like something that he would do.”

  I thought about that.

  “No,” Bigfoot went on. “I expect that he is already figuring some way of escaping. I’m surprised we’ve held him for as long as we have managed to.”

  That made me mad.

  “So he gets away with it?” I said.

  “He gets away with what?” Bigfoot asked.

  “He gets away with hurting me and my Mom,” I said. “He gets away with hurting Warren and hurting you and hurting everybody that I know.”

  Bigfoot just shook his head.

  “You can’t cure a hurtful nature unless it is your own nature to begin with,” Bigfoot said. “Besides that he didn’t kill you, did he?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You grew up, didn’t you?”

  “I’m working on that,” I said. “At seventeen I figure that I’ve got a little time left yet.”

  “Not more than a blink of eye when you are a part of a story,” Bigfoot said. “How many sentences does it take to say that a man was born and lived and died?”

  I thought about that.

  “But I’m not a story,” I said. “I am a real living person.”

  “Sure you are,” Bigfoot agreed. “But we are all stories from cradle to the grave and it is up to us to tell our stories in the very best way that we can. That’s what Raven gave you – when it comes down to it. He gave you a whole lot of story to tell.”

  I thought about that too.

  “So what story are you going to tell?” Bigfoot asked.

  I smiled at that.

  I had figured things out.

  I sat down beside the Warren cocoon and I grinned at it.

  I could picture Warren standing there beside me with his big gorky Adam’s apple frog-swallowing with happiness.

  “Let me tell you about my stepdad,” I said. “His name was Warren Teller and I am going to tell it to you.”

  I touched the cocoon and I felt something stir.

  The End

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Steve Vernon is a storyteller. The man was born with
a campfire burning at his feet. The word “boring” does not exist in this man’s vocabulary – unless he’s maybe talking about termites or ice augers.

  That’s all that Steve Vernon will say about himself – on account of Steve Vernon abso-freaking HATES talking about himself in the third person.

  But I’ll tell you what.

  If you LIKED the book that you just read drop me a Tweet on Twitter – @StephenVernon – and yes, old farts like me ACTUALLY do know how to twitter – and let me know how you liked the book – and I’d be truly grateful.

  If you feel strongly enough to write a review, that’s fine too. Reviews are ALWAYS appreciated – but I know that not all of you folks are into writing big long funky old reviews – so just shout the book out just any way that you can – because I can use ALL the help I can get.

  Also By Steve Vernon

  PUBLISHED BY NIMBUS PUBLISHING

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  Halifax Haunts: Exploring the Cities Spookiest Spaces

  Maritime Monsters: A Field Guide

  Sinking Deeper – Or, My Questionable (Possibly Heroic) Decision to Invent a Sea Monster

  The Lunenburg Werewolf and Other Stories of the Supernatural

  Maritime Murder: Deadly Crimes from the Buried Past

  PUBLISHED INDEPENDENTLY

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  Big Hairy Deal

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  Long Horn, Big Shaggy: A Tale of Wild West Terror and Reanimated Buffalo

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