We went seriously into anvil shooting after that.
A month after I dropped out of UO, I traded in my Camaro for one of those tricked-out jacked-up Chevy pickups. In its bed are fifty pounds of gunpowder sealed in a big plastic bucket, The Iron Moth, and some crumpled beer cans that rattle and clink when knocked around by the wind.
This fine June evening—that twilight time when the air begins to blur—Barney and I are cruising up and down the strip, listening to the radio, honking the horn and yelling, “Hubba, hubba!” at all the pretty girls strolling around in peach tank-tops.
It’s something to do.
My memory of Cairo and Cairo itself stand in such bizarre contrast I sometimes wonder if I spent my childhood in some computer simulation. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t altogether hate what has happened here. There is a sort of boomtown feel to the place that excites me. People flock here from all over—from Portland and San Francisco and LA—as if there is gold to be found. They are drawn to the skiing, the mountain-biking, the golf, the pure air, the big pines, all of them hungry for the same thing I am hungry for: the possibility of a better life.
This is what chugs through my mind when driving along Highway 126, halfway through town, halfway listening to Barney sing some Enrique Iglesias song around his cigarette. One-twenty-six is the road that rises up and over the Cascades, to Salem, our capital. Sometimes, rather than hanging a left onto my driveway with the weeds growing through the concrete, I imagine mashing the accelerator, continuing west.
A new life exists in that direction, along the road that ends at the capitol building—its dome capped by a golden pioneer, dressed in buckskin, carrying a rifle, shining brilliantly, a beacon of the West. A road can get a guy someplace.
We drive past Aubrey Butte—a golf-course community—past the revitalized downtown with its bistros and art galleries and sandblasted bricks, past the new civic center where Shania Twain will play next week, past the new interstate under construction, past the new fast-food joints, past the American Heritage Trailer Park, the suffering section of our manic depressive town—and then we turn around and do it all over again.
At the United Methodist Church, people throw rice at these happy smiling newlyweds, while across the street in the Moccasin Hollow Graveyard four guys in black suits carry a coffin toward a hole in the ground followed by a herd of mourners. Everything is mixed up.
Take for instance the really real locals, the beer-bellied anti-intellectuals who wear seed caps or NASCAR caps, their jaws humped out with dip, while the lentil-eating Californians creep along in their boat shoes and platinum dye-jobs, making out they are pretty by the way they walk, spending money just because they get tired of carrying it around.
Truth be told, these rich guys are the ones who ought to be wearing NASCAR. NASCAR says it all—upholstering yourself with brand names, feeling special only because some other boob is playing catch-up in the rearview mirror.
I roll down the window and fill the truck with a dry hot wind. I breathe the animal smells of bacon and barbecue mixed with sage and dust and perfume and when I exhale, it is with the sense of knowing my place and knowing it doesn’t feel quite right, somehow.
I work at Big R.
Whatever you need, Big R’s got it—as their jingle goes—feed and tackle, knives, Justin boots and Stetson hats, lawn equipment, power tools, gas and charcoal grills, hunting blinds, decoy ducks. Most important of all, we are a class-C vending area, which means my gunpowder needs are well served by the 30 percent employee discount.
Today I am selling fishing licenses to fathers and sons who wear dorky khaki vests with many compartments. I ask will today be the day? Are they going to catch the big one? They say, “You got that right!”
I am leaning against the counter, my chin in my hand, daydreaming my way into this job my cousin called about the other day—a twenty-five-thousand-dollar job on a Portland construction crew he is contracting—when I hear a voice say, “Augustus? Right?”
Nobody has called me that in a long time—not for years—and it takes a moment for the fog to clear, for the name to register and the speaker to materialize. Standing nearby, wearing a toothpaste-white polo shirt that matches her smile, is none other than Kelly Jones.
I nearly fall over.
I say, “Kelly!” For a second I stand there with my arms sort of half-raised—I don’t know what to do with them—then I stick my hand out for a shake she receives. “Kelly,” I say again and pump her tiny hand, so warm and thin-boned, like a bird seized from the air. “My!”
Her smile grows a little wider. “I guess you remember me then?”
“Of course I remember you, Kelly.” I let her hand go and she wipes it on her skirt and I grow suddenly self-conscious. Am I sweaty? Did I wash my hands after I went to the can?
I move around the counter with all the grace of a bulldozer, wanting to be closer to her, and she takes several steps back. I realize what I must look like to her, like something out of Animal Planet. In scale with my gorillalike body, she might be a banana, a banana I am genuinely starved for.
There is a friendly silence between us. Like an idiot I nod my head and wait for something, anything, to come to mind. “Kelly,” I say again, and then, before I can stop myself, I punch her in the shoulder and say, “Kelly Jones! How about that?”
She keeps smiling but I can see the humor fading from her face as she holds the place where I punched her and says, “Ow.”
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry.” I laugh wretchedly and shrug and shake my head. “Guess I don’t know my own strength.”
“No, I guess not.”
I catch a whiff of her perfume—apricots and honey—and recognize it as the same she wore in high school. How good it feels to have her inside my lungs again.
She says, “What are you up to these days?”
“Not much.” I make a broad gesture with my hand that indicates the store. “Working, you know. Same old. I’ve got a little blacksmith operation I’ve been running on the side.” This is not entirely untrue. “Life is good.” This is not entirely true.
She says, “Is that where you got your scar?” and I say, “Huh? Scar?”
Back in the day she met my small talk with the smallest talk you can have. “Yes,” for instance, and “No.” Mainly “No,” such as when I asked her to slow-dance at Homecoming. In all our life, I suppose we have exchanged maybe fifty words, which is why I am somewhere between “Thank God!” and “Oh, shit!” when suddenly confronted with all her friendly chatter.
“Your scar?” She points at my forearm, where the tissue is all mooshy and discolored like Play-Doh. “Did you get that from blacksmithing? It’s pretty nasty.”
“Oh, that?” I touch it, remembering.
“That’s from foolishness.”
One day, senior year of high school, I was in shop when a sudden storm of hail made the world as white as winter. This was April or May and I remember watching Kelly through the window when she ran outside with her girlfriends—all of them wearing their shorts and T-shirts—packing the hail into balls and throwing them, rolling around on the ground, laughing, while the sun came from behind the clouds and brought the world back into spring again. Everything steamed and she looked to me like some sort of desert oasis, too good to be real.
At the time I was using a circular saw to cut a cheeseboard for my mother. The blade hit a knot, I slipped, and my skin opened as easy as a zipper.
“How about let’s forget about me,” I say. “How are you?”
Her eyes do a shifty thing. “Honestly, things aren’t so good.” For a moment she appears to be swallowing needles—then her face brightens. “But I’m glad to be home.”
Like an idiot I say the same thing my grandmother said to me when I returned from UO: “It’s always nice to come home.”
Barney and I have spoken earnestly of opening a shop called Traditional Ironworks. We would specialize in foundering horses and corrective shoeing and once our reputation spread
from the ranches of Oregon, we imagine getting called to Texas and to Montana and maybe we would even travel as far as the sheikdoms of the Middle East. Imagine it! Flying in a private twin-engine plane, from horse to horse!
But if we are anything, we are dreamers.
For now, we work out of my single-car garage. Sometimes we cold-call the ranches, hunting for clients, but mostly our orders come from family and friends who feel sorry for us.
Ever since I ran into Kelly I cannot stop gritting my teeth, cracking my neck, throwing pretend punches at imaginary villains. I feel like I used to feel game-time, when I settled into a three-point stance and stared eye-to-eye with some rhinoceros, ready to skin my knuckles against his teeth, my blood lava-hot.
I find an outlet at the forge, pumping the bellows, spitting on the coals for the sexed-up steam noise. “It’s always nice to come home,” I say and slap my forehead and say over and over again, “It’s always nice to come home.” It seems like the stupidest thing in the world to say. “Jesus.”
When the coals are good and hot I climb up in the pickup bed and drag The Iron Moth toward the tailgate. The other night was unkind to her. I rub a palm across her damaged horn—blunted, its tip slightly cracked—and right then Barney pulls into the driveway in a sperm-colored Lincoln. He toots the horn and kicks open the door and says, “Que pasa, Big Boy?”
“Give me a hand with this thing, will you?”
Together we hustle The Iron Moth over to the forge and I apply heat to The Iron Moth until her horn glows a bright orange. We forge out the blemishes using a sledge and rounding hammer, then polish it with the Scotch Brite disc, scrubbing until I can see my face in the metal. Gradually my desire lessens. No better antidote than sweat. I stare into the red nowhere of the coals, wanting so badly.
“Guess what I heard today?” Barney says, “I heard Kelly Jones got a divorce and is back in Cairo. Can you believe that, man? Kelly Jones and her jelly cones.” He shakes his body like a hula girl
I pick up the sledgehammer and sling it to my shoulder. “Is that right?” My voice pretends only a vague interest. “Hmm.”
“You used to like her, no? Back in high school?”
“I don’t really recall,” I say. “High school was a long time ago.”
That night I dream of shoving my intestines full of black powder, lighting a match, so I might rise like an anvil, orange fire snapping from my ass, my body rocketing so high the blue sky would fade into stars, all the way to the moon. To the moon!
When I wake I feel as though I have fallen from a great height. I lie in bed for a long time and in the soft morning light, I feel Kelly, somewhere nearby, a reminder of everything I always wanted but never achieved.
I buy flowers. I buy chocolates. I go to JC Penney with the intention of buying a suit. The salesman—who is not from around here and who smells like he just rubbed himself with a Cosmopolitan magazine—takes one look at my Carhartt jacket and blue jeans and says, “Well.”
“Well?” I say, “Well, what?”
Think of a puny yellow hamster and you have this salesman. He says, “May I ask what’s the occasion?”
“Who says there’s an occasion? Christ, can’t a guy just buy a suit?”
“Right,” he says and clucks his tongue three times, studying me. “You’ll probably want to try the Big and Tall store. We don’t carry your size. You won’t fit into anything.”
The moon is full, coloring the neighborhood. It makes the houses look brighter, more vibrant than they really are, and it makes my skin look as gray and bleak as a cadaver’s.
I am wearing a collared shirt and a clip-on tie and khaki pants—all brand-new, all bought from the Big and Tall—and I am hunkered down behind the bushes in front of Kelly Jones’s parents’ house. Not because I am some sort of pervert, but because Barney’s Lincoln is parked out front and I want to know what the hell is going on.
The kitchen window is an orange square of light. Inside it Barney and Kelly drink from bottles of beer. I don’t know what to think. Seeing them together, touching, their mouths moving, I am too stunned for thought.
Like the slick scum-sucking son of a bitch that he is, Barney reaches over and tucks her hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering there a second, just long enough so her smell, her apricot smell, no doubt clings to him. She smiles and he says something and her smile erupts into a laugh.
I want to swallow gasoline and belch fire.
I drive west on Highway 126, toward the Cascades, toward Portland, the road disappearing beneath my tires like a jerked rug. I have the radio going at top volume. On the honky-tonk station a fiddler saws a song that reminds me of the mournful music of coyotes. The speedometer reads ninety and the engine roars and my blood fizzes.
Cars and semis emerge from the darkness, zipping along the eastbound lanes. When their headlights spotlight me, I study my reflection in the rearview mirror and see a weird gray face dappled with the shadows of splattered dead bugs.
This desperate momentum doesn’t last long.
The Cascades rise before me like a fence that I climb and climb until I reach the saddle between Jefferson and the North Sister, right before the highway descends into the alpine forests that will eventually give way to the blue water and green grass of the Willamette Valley.
Here I feel what an anvil must feel when it pauses at the peak of its ascent—a tug, a realization that I cannot in fact fly. And I can only wonder, how great will the crater be when I come back down to meet the earth?
My boot eases off the accelerator and I park along the shoulder and click on my hazards. An anemic yellow flashes and flashes, brightening the black highway. A road-killed raccoon seems to grin at me, like: if only you had the balls.
Eventually I swing a U-turn and downshift my way back through the trees and the darkness, toward the welcoming lights of Cairo.
Midnight, and I am alone, standing on top of Sphinx Butte, sipping a Budweiser, wearing my old letterman jacket. It still fits beautifully. All of Cairo sprawls beneath me, its streetlamps and windows lit up and surrounding patches of blackness. And I remember how I was once happy there, in a place that is no longer mine.
I fire a match and spark the fuse and step away. When the explosion comes, my ears pop, my hair stirs, and the two-horned missile, The Iron Moth, rises into a black sky flecked with throbbing stars, where I momentarily lose her.
I take a thoughtful pull of beer and somehow see my life in the anvil’s flight. You grow up and up and up until you are there, as high as you can go, with no place to go, except down. And the greater the explosion, the more awesome and upsetting the journey, the further you have to fall.
Somewhere above me the anvil has begun its descent—somewhere up there among the circuits of stars whose collective glow reminds me of nothing so much as a phantom net that is falling, that I will never escape.
Bigfooting
For Ron Carlson
I have been searching for years. I have seen the footprints, the rough reddish hair, the plum-sized piece of poop. I have heard his sad sweet cries rising from deep in the woods. Bigfoot exists. Believe me, believe it, and know that I am this close to proving it.
All I need is a body.
My wife of three years, Heidi, is beginning to believe. At first she was all yeah right. We would argue six days to Sunday. Then I showed her the poop. She has since changed her tune.
We keep the poop wrapped in an old towel, shoved deep in the closet, way back on the top shelf, among my sweaters, like a gun, or jewelry.
Sometimes Heidi comes searching with me. We camouflage our faces with green and black paint. We wear military fatigues and strap high-power rifles to our backs. Fifty paces apart, we stalk the Yale Reservoir in Southern Washington, the Mt. Hood Wilderness just outside Portland, at dawn and at twilight—his most active hours—paying close attention to the moon phases and weather patterns.
There is a science to it.
I make Heidi wear a whistle in case she sees a
nything, in case she’s in trouble. She calls me crazy. Says I need to chill out. But all the same, I know she is thankful for the whistle. Sometimes she blows it by accident, when a coyote leaps over a log or when a deer slips between the trees. And sometimes she blows it just to test me, to see how fast I can run.
Theory: I believe he is a leftover caveman.
I am a big fish in a small pond of people. If something happens, I get the call. I get news of about a dozen sightings a month, all up and down the Cascade Mountains. His latest haunt is the Deschutes National Forest, near Sisters, where huckleberry patches go bare, where chicken and sheep go missing, where folks report opening their fridge and finding it not as well stocked as they remembered, sans Budweiser, sans milk and butter, and missing from their spice rack, paprika and cumin, garlic salt, black pepper.
He has been busy.
The other night an enormous creature, bigger than a bear, shambled across the freeway, caught before the headlights of a bus full of screaming band kids, their headlights making him golden-eyed, wild, mythic, a monster, and before he hurried into the forest, back to his secret camp, he raised a broad black hand to shield his face or wave them away.
Your standard fuzzy photograph.
There is a CD called The Sounds of Sasquatch. It contains a recording of what is supposedly a Bigfoot call, along with the spelling and pronunciation and suspected meaning of over four hundred Bigfoot vocalizations.
“Yum-à-kwa” is how he says hello.
“Yum-a-kwa,” Heidi says.
“More oomph to the A,” I say and pretend not to notice her rolling her eyes.
“Yum-à-kwa,” she says.
“Better,” I say.
You should hear this CD, the Bigfoot call in particular. It is bossy and wild, saturated with bass, unfurling like some black and terrible worm. Pretty much how you’d expect a leftover caveman to sound: spooky.
We play the CD at full blast, with the windows down, when rocketing along logging roads all over the Pacific Northwest. I know he can hear us, and that it is only a matter of time.
The Language of Elk Page 5