by Thomas Page
She hesitated.
“Go on. I won’t kill you.”
She slipped in and sat as far from him as the front seat would allow. He punched on the radio, and they caught a weatherman cheerfully predicting catastrophe: “. . . low-pressure front moving down from Canada . . . snow flurries in Vancouver . . . This is breaking a few records, folks.” Jason reached for the dial.
“No, listen a minute,” said Martha.
In plain English, a storm was whiplashing down the spine of the Cascades, a storm of such proportions that the parts broken off by the mountains were blizzarding cyclones with a potent fury all their own. Jack Helder was going to get his slopes tested with real snow sometime this weekend.
Jason stopped at the Silver River bridge. He got out of the car, leaving Martha inside, and walked it from one end to the other, peering down at the water below.
He had not spoken on the way up. In a way she was grateful that he had not invited her into his thoughts. She tried to sort out her thoughts about Raymond Jason. He could be classed as forceful, organized, tenacious, and altogether admirable. Except that she sensed something missing from him, a little chasm in his character, a lack of something necessary to complete his personality as originally designed. The chasm had to be filled in somehow. With rage. Or habitual isometrics.
Or with a spirit. That was it! She caught her breath. Raymond Jason was a carbon copy of John Moon. Two jungle creatures, two acolytes on a thousand-mile pilgrimage in pursuit of God only knew what. Carry it one step further and Jason would be just as schizoid as John Moon.
He was leaning over the bridge, looking down to where the supports were sunk into rock. White water foamed through the gorge and down a terrace of rocks.
“I wish I knew what Lester’s Bigfoot was doing down around here,” said Jason, climbing back into the car. “It can’t be fish. There isn’t a calm spot on the river for miles. And there isn’t much game in the woods.” His anger was completely dissipated.
“Why didn’t you tell Drake about John Moon?”
“Because he’d have shipped him off to Canada. I think Moon’s innocent, essentially. I don’t think he really knew what he was doing when he shot down that copter.”
“He’s still wanted, though.”
“Yes,” Jason admitted, a small vein swelling in his temple.
“A lawyer would get him off.”
“No, they’d jail him, lawyer or not.”
She watched the lodge grow bigger as the car began the final climb up the road. “That’s not it. You’re afraid of losing the Bigfoot.”
Jason glanced at her and tightened his hands on the wheel. “I misjudged you. I thought you had a thing for Indians. I thought you’d be in favor of keeping him out of trouble.”
“It’s me I’m worried about now. If Drake finds out Moon is a felon, you’ve made me an accessory.”
“He won’t find out. Not from me, anyway.”
“And I don’t see why you need Moon any more anyway. You know where they live. It’s just a matter of time now.”
“It needs Moon,” Jason said stubbornly. “It needs the food he sends.”
“Oh bull,” she said bluntly. “It got along fine without him all its life. Besides, it’s still got the food in the mine.”
“It’s a psychological dependence, don’t you see?” Jason flared. “The food’s just part of it. Moon’s protecting it.”
“You figured all that out just by watching a dog run off with a sack?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose they’re gone, Raymond?” Her voice was gentler, sympathetic, not angry.
He dropped her off in the lot without answering that. After she left he just sat, hands on the wheel, staring fiercely at the lodge.
They’re still in the valley, he thought over and over. If they were gone, Moon would be, too. He could convince himself of that if he tried hard enough.
9
For several minutes Jack Helder watched John Moon stand at the edge of the woods, whistling into them as though there were something in there to hear him. He had spent the morning trying to think up tactful ways to fire the Indian. Moon’s war and medical record had shaken him up badly. He imagined the Indian turning on the guests as though they were Viet Cong.
Hesitantly Helder walked toward him. The Indian was covered with leaves and twigs. “Mr. Moon?” he said in a voice laced with steel.
The Indian looked slowly back at him. Helder’s courage shrank. “Yes, sir.”
“Unless my watch is fast, you should be at the archery range now.”
“They’re eating lunch, Mr. Helder. I told them I’d be ready in an hour.”
“I’m a little confused, Moon. Why aren’t you ready?”
“’Cause I can’t find my dog.”
Among Moon’s weird talents was an ability to make Helder feel like an oaf. As if Moon was sane and everybody else in the world was crazy. “Where did he go?”
Moon answered sweetly, “If I knew that, Mr. Helder, I’d know where to find him.”
“You don’t need your dog to shoot bows and arrows.”
“I need him. He didn’t come back last night.”
“Moon, I like dogs as much as anybody. But it’s not a question of when we’re ready for guests at Colby, it’s a question of when they’re ready for us. And they’re ready now. I want you back at the range. Your dog can find his own way home.”
Moon stirred a pebble with his shoe. “He ain’t really my dog, when you come down to it. I should have remembered that.” He was obviously talking to himself, not Helder.
Helder chose to ignore it. “And look at your clothes! They were brand-new yesterday. What happened?”
“Nothing. I slept in the woods last night.”
Moon turned on his heel and walked toward the archery range. Helder decided he’d wait until he had help before firing Moon. Get a couple of brawny kitchen waiters, in case his temper went off.
Jack Helder mopped his head with a white handkerchief. He turned to see two Ranger trucks ascending the Oharaville road. Drake was in the lead one, next to another man. The second truck carried several sawhorses with blinker lights. They drove fast, leaving a thin trail of dust behind them.
Now what!
On the smooth ground before the mine entrance, the Rangers pounded in DANGER SINKHOLES signs and bounded the area with a wire fence. Drake sat in the truck, listening to the staticky blare of walkie-talkie voices. Wallace, Jones, and Taylor, who had been filled in on the whole bizarre story, were in the mine, and they were nervous as cats.
They found the food. Jones expostulated over the walkie-talkie, “Jesus, boss, he was right about that. There must be a ton of the stuff. And bones, too! It’s full of bones!”
Drake paused while eating his sandwich. Score one for Raymond Jason. A breath of wind creaked a board in Oharaville, and he looked back at it. “Okay. Look for prints. And be careful.”
They checked out the other junction and found that it branched off into ancillary shafts not noted on the charts. It was not a dead end after all. In one of the shafts Wallace found a second neat pile of bones next to a rockfall which blocked off the tunnel. It took them an hour to go carefully through the remaining tunnels. All were blocked.
At five o’clock they filed out, blinking at the sunlight, slimy up to their knees with mud. They had marked off the shafts on paper, which was crumpled by their nervous fingers. Jones wound up his rope and said, “A thousand feet is as far as you can go in there in any tunnel. The one with the leaves and stuff is the closest to an open one.” He popped a ring tab off a can of beer and took three heavy gulps.
“Any prints?” asked Drake.
They all shook their heads.
“So it could have been anything. It could have been people.”
They shifted weight from
one foot to the other. Then Jones said, “If you ask me, those shafts were blocked off deliberately. Those rockfalls fill them up completely.”
Taylor chimed in, “And I bet they’re keeping meat in there and smoking it.”
The other two groaned. Drake said, “What’s he talking about?”
“Taylor says he smelled smoke inside,” said Wallace. “We didn’t smell anything.”
“They’d put it in one of the higher shafts,” said Taylor stubbornly. “So the smoke would escape through the tunnels. That way nobody would notice like they would if it came out of one hole.”
Wallace squashed his empty beer can in his hand. “It’s just nuts, if you ask me. Man or beast, it’s so dark in there you’d go blind in an hour. The only thing that can see in there is a bat.”
Which had occurred to Drake. Nocturnal or not, human or not, nobody could live forever in the mine in total darkness. Were it not for the vegetation, that would have been grounds for dismissing Jason’s story. “What about the bones?”
“Just bones. Nothing.” Jones did not elaborate, which meant that Jameson’s bones were not in the pile. For that small grace, Wallace was grateful. “Them bones, them bones, them dry bones . . .” Jones beat time with his knees, trying to discharge his tension.
“Boss, all that vegetation is sea-level stuff. Whoever did it has been foraging all over the county.”
Drake said, “Well, I’d like to know how they got it in there without leaving prints.”
“It was packed in from the other side. Had to be. Which means . . .”
“Yeah,” Drake retorted. “I know what it means.” It meant there had to be another entrance to the mine somewhere on the mountain. He looked at the useless charts. He had asked the state bureau for more recent ones after Jason and Martha left that morning. Which meant they should be here between now and Judgment Day, depending on how good secretaries were at rummaging through filing cabinets.
Somebody must have seen them! To Drake it was simply inconceivable that they could have been up here unnoticed all these years. Well, what would a Bigfoot look like from a distance anyway? A man in a fur coat. Maybe they’d been seen all along and no one had realized it. Living up here without leaving trails even, not even a speck of shit, not anything!
Drake stood up, stashing his chart in the truck. “I think we better start combing these mountains before the charts get here. I think we better find out where the food is coming from and how they got it in. We’ll look for stripped bushes and trees and holes where seeds were dug up and everything like that. Jason said they may have left in the past couple of days. If we find any sign they’re still here we mount a hunt of some kind. I don’t want anybody talking about this—not even to your wives—and I don’t want anybody running after them at night, okay?”
“Why don’t we close the lodge down now?”
Which Drake could have done with no trouble, but it was not quite as easy as that. Much as he disliked Colby Lodge, jobs were scarce in Garrison. Augusta County was what is euphemistically called a depressed area, and that was why Helder had been allowed to build in the first place. Drake would not like being responsible for driving Helder out of business on the basis of Raymond Jason’s story, especially if the Bigfoot were gone already. “We can always do that. Let’s give it a couple of more days first and see where we’re at when the storm gets here.”
They were blocking the road with sawhorses when Helder’s Cadillac drove up. Usually the sight of the huge machine bouncing over back roads like a yacht in a bird-bath amused Drake. Today he did not smile at anything.
“Hello, Drake,” Jack Helder said pleasantly.
“Afternoon, Mr. Helder,” Drake answered with equal pleasantness. “You just saved me a trip to your lodge. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to stop your overnight camping trips.”
“Might I ask why?”
Drake expectorated a thin stream of saliva between his two front teeth. “Little bear problem. Some folks spotted grizzlies up at the town. So we’re closing off the road.”
“Oh.” Helder thought it over. Yes. Okay. Grizzlies. “Funny, it’s the first I’ve heard about it. In fact, I haven’t heard about bears since . . .” Helder’s stomach rotated, and his hands made an involuntary movement to his mouth. He was the one who had found Walter Jameson that morning, lying on the fresh sand, his blood soaking a patch the size of a blanket. A man without a head. Helder had never seen anything like that in his life. “Where did you say they were?”
“Up at Oharaville. They live in the mine. We figure they’re about ready to hibernate, so they’ll be sleepy and pretty impatient with folks.”
Helder’s father had once built some substandard houses. Someone had opened a shower door which fell apart in a shatter of thousands of deadly pieces. Even though there were no injuries, the lawsuit was horrendous. He shuddered at the consequences of having one of his guests mauled by a grizzly bear.
Drake said, “You wouldn’t have seen anything poking around your garbage or anything like that, would you?”
“No. Not since summer. In fact, there don’t seem to be many animals of any kind this fall. Is it always like this?”
In the years Drake had been at the Augusta station, he had wondered about the scarcity of wildlife around Colby. Maybe he had his explanation now. Maybe not.
“Helder, I don’t want any of your people up here. If they hear about bears wandering around, they’re likely to come and feed them. Once you start feeding grizzlies, you never get rid of them.”
“But there’s a storm coming. Surely they wouldn’t be out now.”
“Grizzlies are funny animals. It depends whether they’re hungry or not. If you feed them, they’re likely to follow you around like little puppy dogs.”
At that image, Helder’s stomach rotated in the other direction. Bears coming into the kitchen, bears on the sun deck, bears in the lounge, and Christ! bears sniffing around the heated bungalows at night while the guests slept.
“Right. Bears. Okay. I’ll post the lodge and everything. Thanks for telling me.”
As they finished putting up the roadblock, Drake watched the sun sink, casting deep, pointed shadows over Colby’s cliffs. Outlined with trees, its features blackened into silhouette, it resembled a gigantic head overlooking the valley.
10
Beginning tonight, Lester Cole was getting an extra day off. Combined with the weekend, that gave him three days in which to attend the funeral of his cousin Murphy, who had driven his motorcycle into a moving van night before last. After the accident, Helder had inquired solicitously if there was anything he could do to help. Lester considered hitting him for two or three hundred dollars, then blowing the country altogether. But he had read somewhere that if you’re going to pull a swindle, pull a really big one. Big enough to get far away and have a lot of money left over.
He had almost blown this whole Bigfoot business. The sudden thrill of fame had impelled him to shoot off his mouth to everybody before realizing he was going about it the wrong way. He had realized this blunder while scraping lettuce from a plate. Now everybody was hunting the beast. It was his. After all, he had seen it first and could do whatever he wanted with it. Like prospectors when they found gold and staked a claim. There was some law about that. Lester was sure there was a law for him, too. He hated all those people with time to hunt while he dipped his hands in pork fat.
He had tried to correct his mistake as best he could. He told everybody now that he had made it up, hoping to drive all those hunters back into their homes, leaving him clear. It had worked, too. Everybody knew Lester was a liar, except that goddamned flatlander with an arm bandage. Lester hated people like Jason, who pushed around the Lester Coles of the world and had it made. It was not fair how he had tried to pump the truth out of Lester. He had been about to hit him. Lester wished he had.
It woul
d be too bad if that flatlander got in Lester’s way. Got in his way, that is, down there in the valley while Lester had his gun. Just the two of them. Had his gun and the drop on him. Don’t push Lester around. Lester gets even. Later.
He banged a lot of crockery around that day. Everybody thought he was upset about his cousin Murphy. Lester never liked his cousin Murphy. Murphy was a wiseass. Helder had looked pityingly on as he dropped a glass and said, “You can go home now, Lester. We’ll see you Tuesday.”
Lester wore denims and a sweater to keep the night chill at bay. He drove down to the valley and passed the van on the bridge, on its way to the lodge. Delbert, the driver, waved at him from the driver’s seat, but Lester did not wave back. He did not like Delbert. He hoped Delbert never found out how much he hated him, because Delbert was six feet tall and could make tossed salad out of him. Unless him and Delbert found themselves in the valley at night and Lester had the gun and the drop on him. Usually he was nice to Delbert, because of Delbert’s size.
The stretch of road through the trees where Lester had seen the Bigfoot always gave him the heebies. These woods were not like your regular scraggly mountain trees. These woods were so tight they leaned clean over the road, breaking moonlight up into clutching fingers and teeth. Somebody once said on a late-night TV show that people were afraid of the full moon because thousands of years ago the earth was covered with different types of humans who came out then. These humans lived in the woods with saber-toothed tigers and snakes and dinosaurs and mastodons, and got along great with them because they all ate the same thing: other humans. This guy had said there were wars between these humans and the real humans. That was where all that stuff about giants in the Bible and Greece and Scandinavia came from.
Lester pulled his pickup off the road onto the grassy entrance of the logging trail where he had seen the thing. He cut off his engine. Lester figured the thing came out only late at night. Really late. That was why nobody had found it. Lester had come home late that night only because he needed the overtime to pay off Harry for the poker game.
