What would you have done had you been in my boots that night? Trample on through that turf and attempt rescue? Perhaps return to camp and implement one of the satellite phones to dial assistance, park ranger or Smokey the Bear? Maybe curse the asinine impulses that landed you in such a jam? I did indeed return to camp after half an hour of searching for it, and I sat vigil at Romp’s ample fire till daybreak with a Beretta nine-millimeter pistol in my hand, petrified that the stinky shag who had made a meal of Romp would soon come to eat me too. I thought about venturing to find the disturbed patch of forest Romp and Bigfoot had used as a wrestling ring; perhaps clues would be had there, sprays of blood on the leaves, a chomped-off ear from one or the other. But dread had parked itself in my guts—too far from home, Gillian no closer to my loins—and I said, “Charlie, take a drive now. Leave this madness. Seek the calm of Buddha or some Zen derivative. Monsters, guns, and men named Romp cause allergic reactions.”
Yes, I wanted to estrange myself from all the thunder that sits in the sternum and turns, turns. And I’m here to tell you that that’s exactly what Charles Homar decided to do: I abandoned all Romp’s gear to the things of the woods and drove away in that beastly SUV toward a Shangri-la I knew not where. I felt mildly yellow for leaving Romp, and shuddered at the thought of telling Friend I had done so, but a person has minimal powers on this earth we’ve made. What could I have done? I no doubt would have ended up a man-sandwich just like Romp, and my aspirations said nay to that.
Behind the wheel, some indistinct vestige of data long locked inside my headache leaked to the fore, as if on cue: A woman I had once dated and nearly went aboom for, French-kissed the crevices of, pre-Gillian—the very woman I had attempted to tell Friend about—had relocated just outside Seattle the last time I checked, just she and her poodle named Pow. Sandy McDougal: divorced, yes, and infertile, too, but a masterpiece of pith with much wisdom to bestow upon an avant-gardist like me. Maybe I would find a computer and start punching keys, present myself on her porch with a bundle of sunflowers and hair combed to the side.
Would she welcome Charles Homar, a mental klutz badly in need of a path and a map? Would she bake me a casserole and tell me I’m an okay human, despite some proof to the contrary? Think about it. Would you?
5. LEGEND HAS IT
HERE’S WHERE MY life story goes haywire and more than a tad willy-nilly (as if): I had a heart harassed, self-esteem booby-trapped and tripped-over, and was much in need of sugar kisses from a certain double-X chromosome there in the Seattle area. So I hightailed it from those ancient woods in Romp’s SUV and crept down to the suburbs where I knew Sandy McDougal had set up shop. Never mind that it took me days—days!—to emerge from that greenery, making turns left and right and back again with no regard for circumference and the radii therein, polygons and vertices and whatnot. No matter: I quite enjoyed the scenery and snail’s pace, stopping at parks and rest areas to nap in the spacious cargo hold of the SUV, tapping out “Sasquatch Love Song” because I had another installment due and, my editor insisted, Luciferian fans who were hoping I’d fail. Some fans. If I wanted the swag directly deposited into my checking as per our contract, then I’d deliver the manuscript on time, and this I did, trying not to remember my fugitive-cum-castaway status and the fact that I was on the wrong side of the continent if not the law. Trying to get an Internet signal out in those boondocks was like trying to find a truesome Christian on a coed campus.
About Sandy: In addition to needing moderate doses of female attention—any slob in my situation would—my craven self needed counsel, a break from commotion. Sandy happened to be a psychotherapist with advanced degrees in Freudian this and that, knew the alchemy of a moon-man called Jung, had published papers in journals with names like Cognitive Continental Transubstantiation. People, I was a frantic insect now at an impasse, my Sasquatch plan botched. If I was going to get Gillian back—I guessed she was still in New Zealand reveling in the spotlight—and calm the clamor beneath my breast, I required the acumen of this gal who once said I was cute, my day-old whiskers western in a Wyatt Earp way.
It took me almost a week to find her—precious time gone astray—me holed up in a motel that put one in mind of the acedia monks suffer from, an Internet signal so lame only a Luddite could love it. With technology supplied by those eggheads at Apple I finally located Sandy M. in just a matter of hours after arriving at an upstanding county library not far from the motel, the well-funded sort that attracts the unemployed and otherwise unambitious. At the doors to the library, some bookworm on welfare recognized me from color photos someone had put on the Web. The forty-year-old Seattle native—a squinting nonathlete in glasses who was also, no doubt, loyal to his mother and the pies she baked him—provided me with the much-needed directions to Sandy’s homestead, just twenty minutes east of where I was then standing.
“So, Charles,” he said into the sun, “your Gillian found the giant squid in the cool waters near the pole. Her life’s passion. When will you be reunited? I’m waiting for that part of the adventure.”
“Stranger, you and me both. Right now I am in want of pleasure and a pause from all things giant squid and Gillian. I am withered and just a cha-cha away from wasted, so if you don’t mind, step aside and watch me go.”
“I read this week’s story!” he yelled after me. “How could you have abandoned Romp? That Bigfoot ate him!”
Over my shoulder I showed him a middle finger as I fiddled with the beeping handheld thingie that was supposed to unlock the SUV. I ended up squirming in through the back hatch when the other doors refused—refused!—to open. Some passing teenage joker in a hemp getup said to me, “SUVs kill the environment, pal,” to which I replied, “Despots rule the earth, donkey, so write that down and remember it.”
Now…the most prudent part of me declared that before delivering myself to Sandy’s doorstep, I needed to bathe and perhaps dress in threads that were not stained with the rank loam I had rolled through on the Bigfoot expedition just a week earlier. I trekked behind the motel, through unsightly weeds and scrub, to a ghastly Walmart nevertheless looking majestic in the midday sun blaze. The heat was everywhere and outrageous; I longed for an arctic blizzard to chill me into submission and acceptance. Instead, I had the summer and the way it makes a man lonesome and tender. That clothing I planned to purchase had been wrought by orphans in Malaysia; but I needed new duds and could not afford to mime a person with choice or leisure. I also bought a tube of sticky gump to plaster back my hair in a way that might suggest Clark Gable, and a five-dollar cologne in a plastic bottle that smelled of turpentine or birth fluid. The loinclothéd guy on the box seemed to swear by it.
Understand: in addition to needing Sandy’s guidance, I was feeling just a smidgen sexy-like, and this I welcomed as a respite from the fangéd melancholy that had been chortling at me since Gillian had packed up and said bye-bye. I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there. Yes, I was a schmuck who entertained himself on Bigfoot expeditions and went in search of long-lost gals who lived in foreign time zones. Fine. Since prison I had acquired a fear of sitting still, as if I might fossilize, the only remnant of me those stony bones speaking to anthropologists, far into the molten future, who would hold me for just a minute before deeming me unworthy of study. I had to keep moving, partially useless though the movement was. Think of those austere Spartans marching off to die at Thermopylae. My DNA and other vital strands chanted Go! I figured Sandy McDougal would appreciate my verve and perhaps compliment me, which, truth be known, was all I required at this point: a female compliment. Every man is a walking mouth after milk.
As I strutted before my motel room mirror that day—freshly scrubbed, clothed anew, sporting a suntan the Aztecs would envy—I said aloud, “Charlie, be a gentleman and quote Catholics frequently, perhaps Chesterton or, better yet, Newman”—two British clowns I had perused in college—“but above all stand erect and declare your distance from baboons.” With that I sallied from t
he motel, directions in hand, and did not think of poor Romp devoured by Sasquatch, only of my Gillian in the multiple arms of another organism and the possibility—pray—that we would be reunited before my seed stopped swimming.
Amped up though I was, with deeds to do, I still possessed sound enough mind to know that landing unannounced on the doorstep of a dame unspoken to in several years was not altogether orthodox behavior, and that my spontaneity might be met with flying spittle or else out-and-out indifference. Or perhaps fisticuffs with a new beau not pleased by another man’s assignment, or by another man’s…fill in the blank. Imagine my delight then when finally I found Sandy’s quaint suburban Cape—after several lefts and rights down very wrong roads, and several moments of wanting to turn around, abandon my plan as I had abandoned Romp—and she greeted me like I was a delivery boy and she badly in want of what I had—hugs, kisses almost on the lips. For several minutes there on her front porch I explained and she listened: Gillian and the giant squid, our ruined nuptials, my being in Seattle, Romp and Bigfoot in the wilderness, my blood moving liquidly through each limb and digit, and the counsel I had come seeking.
“I read that you were in jail,” she said.
“Oh, that. Yes, well.”
“You tried to kill Gillian and the giant squid hunter she fell in love with? Murder with a rifle? I mean, Charlie, really.”
“Sandy,” I said, “I wasn’t going to admit all that. But seeing as how you read that installment—well, then, yes, it’s true. I’ve become an ex-con. And must you say fell in love with? We don’t know that for certain.”
“Sorry. But you shouldn’t write up your memoirs for that magazine if you don’t want anyone to know, Charlie. I’ve been reading your pieces. You have comma trouble, I think. Plus your syntax is so…I don’t know…unkind.”
I was simply glad, at this juncture, that Sandy M. didn’t mention the time I drove down to Virginia and attempted to kill Marvin Gluck. Perhaps she had missed that one.
“Sandy,” I said, “I need leadership and perhaps arsenic. I have come to you because I have no one else. The mistakes I have made are legion. Please help.”
Sandy had neither added unwanted pounds nor altered hairstyles; she looked remarkably as she did the last I saw her several years earlier in the ice of Connecticut. Those tight auburn locks still curled down to her shoulders; and her eyes, well—one was still stuck to the wall, like Sartre. No mind: her skin and figure (bosom and buttocks both), good girl’s Unitarian voice, and the multiple gigabytes of psychoanalytical data packed up beneath her hat—they compensated for that indolent eye. It felt exhilarating to be that close to her again, as if my soggy will had been dried out and reanimated. The dinnertime sun behind us was about to begin its drop.
“You look really great, Sandy.”
“Oh, thanks, Charlie,” and she blushed a bit, glanced away. “You’re still handsome. I can’t believe you’re really here.”
“I’m here, all right. I’ve been…well, you’ve read where I’ve been.”
“I thought about you all the time, you know. And I was worried sometimes. You seemed so…out of control. That wasn’t how I remembered you when we were dating.”
I kept looking at my shoes and the bricks beneath them, half afraid that I would start a humiliating weep.
“I needed to talk to someone who knows me.”
“I’ll help you if I can. But listen, Charlie, right now I have supper inside and someone you must meet. Follow me.”
Someone? I must meet? Hmm? But what of my diagram for Gillian’s immediate retrieval, and maybe some one-on-one sultry cuddling to jump-start my man-parts? As she led me inside by the wrist I glanced left and noticed that indeed there sat parked in her driveway a testosteroned pickup truck that had recently slogged through some gluish mud. Lord. There was still time to turn around, maybe knock on the wooden door of a monastery, make my persistent state of broke and babeless look deliberate.
Supper was no more than a bucket of chicken and some side dishes from KFC—unromantic, not to mention acid on arteries—and the someone who needed my meeting was—I’m not lying—a Filipino UFO scholar so dwarfish he looked as if he had just climbed out of a test tube. I had no time to take in the house’s interior—the décor, the clean or filth of it—but I did have time to put this together: after Sandy introduced Casey Gonzales as the preeminent UFO scholar in all of the Philippines—never mind that being the preeminent anything in the Philippines is nothing to light up over a ballpark—I understood that Sandy’s hazel summer dress, clanking bracelets, and crystal pendants were the mystical sort that hippies and weirdos everywhere call their own. Could it be? So this was how she had altered, then: not in weight or hairdo, but in her affiliation with the Great Pyramid of Giza and the various spins of Orion. Please tell me she did not forsake her hefty intellections in favor of hocus-pocus and awful clothes. The air conditioner in the house droned so well I felt the drips of sweat freezing to my forehead.
“Casey,” I fibbed, “a pleasure to meet you. I as well once spotted a flying saucer, but this came from scorned Mrs. Millbury next door, throwing all the dishes out the window. That woman drank obscene quantities of bourbon. Plus took pills.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, releasing my handshake with those doll’s fingers. “Charles Homar, the chronicler and memoirist. You are slimmer than your photo. Malnourished, maybe.”
His voice had no evidence of Filipino in it but was, rather, part homosexual, part Houston. He squinted my way as if I were dawn and he newly awakened. His T-shirt and shorts were a matching set made for grade-school boys: they showed a smiling pudgy race car with VROOM printed beneath it.
Sandy said, “Casey is here tracking the recent phenomenon.”
We were all seated at this point around the dining room table, the center of which contained a disorganized display of plastic gizmos and other bubble-gum-machine junk, including those green urchin aliens with the exaggeratedly Asian eyes, the kind you’ve seen twenty-six times too many via the X-filing travails of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (who was played by actress Gillian Anderson. Coincidence?). The bookshelf behind Sandy stood as an affront to the cranial capacity of the averagely educated, all those fluorescent spines published by places called Nebula Press and ET Books and Shock Editions, on subjects such as Atlantis and Easter Island and, for the love of God, vampires—and this from a woman with the gall to criticize the punctuation and word order of my prose.
With a mouthful of chicken leg—and listening to the hope fizz from my intestines because I saw that Sandy was goo-goo on pop culture conspiracies—I said, “And what, strange people, would that phenomenon be?”
“The Seattle Lights,” he said.
“The Seattle Lights,” she said.
And I said, “The Seattle Lights. We’re many miles outside of Seattle.”
“Well, you know,” she said, “the Suburban Seattle Lights doesn’t sound as nifty.”
Nifty. Right. What had become of the girl-genius who could quote Sigmund in guttural German?
Casey said, “How could you not know of this miraculous event? You a man of reportage.”
“Casey,” I said, “I report only from the shady corners of a continent called My Heart. Sandy, I’ll take those mashed potatoes. Furthermore, science fiction and the supernatural interest me not at all. I am one who’s thumbed through The Principia and some pages of Kepler. You cannot impress me.”
“Are you not a Christian? I believe I read so.”
“Honestly, friend, I am having second thoughts about all that. Besides, I don’t see your point.”
“The perpetual mystery,” he said, making circles with his cauterized arms. “The awe. The awesome. The larger-than-thou.”
“I still don’t follow, little fella. Sandy, I’ll have that pepper. And, okay, I hunted Bigfoot last week, but every man is entitled to a lapse. Flying saucers are not up there.”
“Sandy begs to differ,” he said. “Don’t you, Sandy, my dear?”
“Charlie,” she said, “I’ve been visited.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“Oh, I have.”
“Oh, she has.”
“By whom?” I asked.
“That,” and she pointed.
I looked up to the spot where her finger aimed. “The ceiling fan?”
“The Seattle Lights.”
“Sandy is an abductee,” Casey told me. “The most convincing case I have ever documented in the Philippines or America. A case that would put to shame the scholarship and theories of Mr. Budd Hopkins.”
“I know a Hopkins, one Gerard Manley: Victorian poet, Jesuit priest, probable man-lover, wrote of a place called Heaven-Haven, plus cliffs of fall frightful. I wonder if they’re related.”
“I doubt it,” he said. “You didn’t seem to hear us: Sandy is an abductee.”
“No, she isn’t,” I said. “She might be lonely and—forgive me, Sandy—newly stupid beyond all measure, but she isn’t being abducted. By the way—didn’t you once have a poodle named Pow?”
This nearly opened up the floodgates. She said, “Pow has been taken, Charlie. Taken.”
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