Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

About her Bigfoot sighting, Rose learned that such creatures were routinely spotted in all of the southeastern states—although the orthodox scientific authorities of course denied their existence—and the animals were commonly referred to as skunk apes, because of the broad white or silver vertical stripe on their backs and their notoriously disagreeable odor. Southern skunk apes were generally known to be smaller, but meaner, than their Pacific Northwest counterparts. Rose gathered all this information from the Internet, from a Web site posted by a group calling itself the Cryptozoological Study Association (CSA), which was devoted to documenting the existence of heretofore undiscovered primates south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Studying these reports gave Rose something to think about besides Fieldin, at whom she unexpectedly found herself violently angry. Late at night—when she just wanted to kill Fieldin, and was stymied by the fact that he was already dead—she gratefully followed the CSA links to cryptozoological Web sites all over the world. (The Norwegian site had particularly stunning photographs of fjords, although she couldn’t understand the text; the Albanian Web site had pictures of naked women smoking cigarettes.) When she gave the CSA a thousand dollars of Fieldin’s money, she received an effusive thank-you letter, spattered with exclamation marks, naming her an honorary cryptozoologist.

  Most days, she thought that the skunk ape she’d seen in the orchard had been a gentle being, sent by a benevolent god to lead Fieldin to the other side, but some days she couldn’t help thinking that its mission had been more malign, perhaps even evil. Either way, it seemed obvious to her that, for whatever reason, that particular skunk ape, on that particular night, had come for Fieldin.

  Southern cryptozoologists were divided between the small but harshly vocal faction who thought that in order to convincingly document the existence of an undiscovered species of primate a specimen would have to be killed and the larger but less combative contingent who insisted that the shy, gentle creatures must be protected at all costs. Rose weighed in on the debate by hastily e-mailing a somewhat—she realized later—histrionic letter to the editor of the Argus, the local paper, imploring area hunters to let the skunk apes of the North Carolina mountains live in peace. The only noticeable effect that her letter seemed to have on the community, however, was to lead carloads of drunken teenagers to pull into her yard at all hours, beat on their chests, and make monkey noises. She couldn’t decide if the kid wearing a gorilla mask who peered in her kitchen window one night was made more frightening, or less, by his fluorescent-orange University of Tennessee sweatshirt. Despite the awful nature of Wayne Lee Cowan’s crime—and Rose had never heard anybody, not even the other Cowans, suggest that Wayne Lee hadn’t blown up that abortion clinic—she found herself feeling a little grateful to him for absorbing, with his continued conspicuous absence, much of the scrutiny and derision that might otherwise have been aimed at her.

  Within days of Wayne Lee’s disappearance, more than two hundred state and federal agents had descended on Argyle, followed by a caravan of TV trucks whose drivers thought nothing of taking up three parking spaces at once. The cops rented every motel room in a two-county area and made it virtually impossible to get a table at the Waffle House. An unusually quiet black helicopter circled the mountains day and night, and dangling on the end of a cable extended from its belly was some top-secret doodad of electronic equipment shaped like an upside-down mushroom. Because the sheer number of agents stomping or slinking through the woods made deer hunting a pointless exercise and growing marijuana even more hazardous than usual, and because a large percentage of the agents seemed to possess neither a baseline level of politeness nor a modicum of respect for personal property rights, the FBI soon lost favor with a significant portion of the local population—most of whose Scotch-Irish ancestors had moved to the mountains to escape some type of authority in the first place. Following the detention—by a SWAT team whose members wore ninja masks—of seven-year-old Brian Lee McInerny for aiming a laser pointer at the helicopter, stickers bearing the legend “Run, Wayne Lee, Run!” appeared on telephone poles and stop signs all over town. Not even the million-dollar reward the government offered for information leading to Cowan’s arrest noticeably softened public sentiment.

  But as time passed, and Wayne Lee Cowan remained at large, the television people and the majority of the cops left Argyle for what they probably considered civilization. Eventually even the remaining skeleton crew of FBI agents decamped as well. Interest in Wayne Lee didn’t ratchet up again until the fifth anniversary of the bombing approached. Rose hadn’t spoken to anyone in the FBI for over four years when she was visited by D’Abruzzio, the new Special Agent in Charge.

  His first name was Richard, but shortly after his arrival he had made the mistake of telling one of the old guys in front of the barbershop to call him Dick. Now he went by D’Abruzzio only, or, when he was pissed off, Special Agent in Charge D’Abruzzio. Rose had noticed him in the Waffle House and found herself sneaking looks at him. He had the knobby biceps of a man who lifted weights for his health and not for his appearance, and he unself-consciously sported the type of virile, dark, vaguely ethnic mustache that most Southern men either wouldn’t or couldn’t grow.

  Late one fall afternoon, D’Abruzzio materialized on her front porch, tapping gently at the screen door; he must have parked somewhere away from her house, an act she found both smart and considerate. They sat at the edge of the orchard, drinking hot spiced cider, while the air cooled around them and the hollows blackened as the shadows pushed the sunlight farther and farther up the side of the mountain. Rose told D’Abruzzio what she and Fieldin had told the other agent: that although Wayne Lee had worked for them, she couldn’t honestly say that she knew him, or anything about him.

  D’Abruzzio nodded and looked away. He seemed to be thinking about something else. “I read your letter,” he said.

  Rose felt her cheeks go hot. “Oh, my,” she said. “Why on earth are you reading such old newspapers?”

  “I like to know where I am,” D’Abruzzio said.

  Good answer, Rose thought. “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked.

  D’Abruzzio pursed his lips and stared toward the mountain. “No,” he said finally. “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you believe in Bigfoot?”

  “No comment,” he said.

  “What’s that thing that looks like a mushroom that hangs underneath the black helicopter?”

  D’Abruzzio smiled at her. “What black helicopter?”

  She blushed again. “You know what black helicopter. The one you brought back with you that doesn’t make any noise.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That black helicopter. Well, that thing hanging underneath it that looks like a mushroom? I can’t tell you what that is.”

  “I see,” Rose said. “A secret. But, hypothetically speaking, could such a thing be used to find a skunk ape? Or, if such a thing was looking for something else and accidentally found a skunk ape, would you be able to tell anybody?”

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” D’Abruzzio said. “I’ll tell you if I see a skunk ape, if you tell me if you see Wayne Lee Cowan.”

  Rose wondered where D’Abruzzio had parked his car, and if anyone had seen it. “Okay,” she said finally. “You’ve got a deal.”

  D’Abruzzio stood up and stretched. “App Mountain,” he said. “Do you know where the name comes from?”

  “I always assumed it was short for ‘Appalachian.’”

  “I wonder,” D’Abruzzio said. “Maybe the guy who named it just didn’t know how to spell ‘Ape.’”

  Rose stopped at the foot of Plutina’s driveway and stared sadly at her neighbor’s house. It was tucked far back up the hollow on a knob its builder must have deemed too rocky to plant. A single light burned in the living room, and a thin gauze of wood smoke hung immobile above the kitchen chimney in the still, dusky air. Charlie had died two months earlier, and Rose knew from personal experience that Plutina was just now crossing over into what would be t
he darkest days of her widowhood. The officious stream of Sunday-school classes and bereavement committees bearing casseroles and Jell-O molds would begin to dry up, if it hadn’t already, and the other visitors would return to their normal pattern of stopping by only when it suited them, if they came at all. Rose collected Plutina’s mail from the box and started up the long driveway. Without Charlie and Plutina, she thought, the jagged wind that had swept down the mountain that first winter would have blown her God knows where.

  Plutina opened the front door and blinked up at Rose through the screen. Her eyes, magnified as always by her glasses, looked even bigger, though everything else about her seemed to have grown smaller in the last two months.

  “Well, Rose,” she said. “You might as well come on in.”

  In the living room she perched in the middle of the couch, her feet barely brushing the floor, while Rose settled uncomfortably into Charlie’s recliner. Its cloth upholstery reeked so strongly of cigars that it might as well have been haunted. Above Plutina, Fieldin’s mournful Cherokee marched toward one of the mysterious pyramids he had dropped over and over again, without explanation, into Oklahoma.

  “Did that FBI man go back to town?” Plutina asked.

  Rose grinned. “How did you know he was over at my place?”

  “He ain’t as smart as he thinks he is, that’s how. None of ’em are.”

  “He wanted to know what I knew about Wayne Lee.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him I didn’t know anything.”

  “Good,” Plutina said sharply. “That’s the right answer.”

  “I didn’t ask him to come to my house,” Rose said.

  “I know you didn’t ask him, but he ain’t doing you any favors by coming, either. You ought to tell him that.”

  “I doubt anybody saw him.”

  “I saw him, and I’m half blind.”

  “Did he talk to you?”

  “Not today.”

  “Do you think Wayne Lee’s still alive?” Rose asked.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Plutina said. “I’m just sad it’ll be turning off cold again before long. I always hate to think about that boy living out on that mountain in the wintertime.” Her shoulders started to shake. She reached into the pocket of her sweater and pulled out a well-used tissue, which she dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “I just hope Charlie’s warm.”

  “Oh, honey,” Rose said. “Don’t cry.”

  “His feet are bad to get cold. I used to heat him up a pan of water before we went to bed.”

  “I’m sure Charlie’s feet are fine.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Plutina said.

  “You just miss Charlie, that’s all. It’ll get better.”

  “I don’t want it to get better. I want it to get over. I’ve been living up in this valley a long time.”

  Rose opened her mouth and waited, but no wise words of consolation spilled out.

  “I wasn’t but sixteen years old when Charlie brought me up in here,” Plutina said. “Took me away from my people, but that’s the way it’s always been when a girl gets married. You know about that. My people are all dead now anyway. We come from over in Weald. My daddy was a town man. He could read good and always knew what time it was. He worked on the railroad.”

  “Weald,” Rose said.

  “Me and Charlie never could have babies. Did you know that?”

  Rose shook her head.

  “I had one, but it was born dead.”

  “Plutina, I’m sorry.”

  “After the doctor left, Charlie took it in an old sheet and buried it up on the mountain somewhere. That’s the way people did things back then, but it don’t seem right to me when I think about it now. All these years I’ve thought that baby must be wandering around up there, looking for somebody to take care of it. Charlie never even told me where it was. I couldn’t go find it if I needed to.” She took off her glasses and fished another tissue out of her pocket.

  “Well, I’m sure Charlie didn’t mean anything by it,” Rose said.

  Plutina glared up at Rose, her eyes a concentrated blue, smaller and harder than Rose had ever seen them. “You don’t know what Charlie meant.”

  Rose stood reflexively. In the foreground of Fieldin’s painting, a young Cherokee woman looked at her beseechingly, as if begging her to do something. Rose pointed at the painting. “You’re right,” she said. “I never understood what Fieldin meant, either. That pyramid.”

  Plutina blew her nose loudly, but didn’t look over her shoulder. “It’s a religious picture,” she said. “The people are being led into bondage.”

  Late that night, Rose stood at her bedroom mirror and absentmindedly brushed her hair. Fieldin had been dead for years, and she had resolved some time ago not to cry about him anymore. Enough was enough, after all; he hadn’t been that nice. But Plutina’s spot-on interpretation of his work had simply broken her heart. Of course his Cherokee paintings had been religious pictures. She had just been too literal-minded and, later, too lost in her own work—her popular, sentimental, representational watercolors—to figure it out. And Fieldin had been too gracious or arrogant or both to explain it to her, or to anyone else. She could not imagine how lonely he must have felt, driving home from some small-town crafts fair, the car packed with the same canvases he’d set off with that morning. He’d tried, for years and years, to say something he felt was important, and she, of all people, had never even heard the story he was trying to tell, much less understood it. She had never for a minute known who he was. If she had only been able to piece the clues together, perhaps she could have helped him. Fieldin had told her that his only memory of Vienna was of sitting in a sidewalk café and watching a small cyclone of dead leaves swirl down the street. He had thought they were birds.

  “Oh, damn it, Fieldin,” she said. “Why didn’t you just say something?”

  Rose looked past her shoulder in the mirror to the reflection of the bed they had shared, and willed Fieldin to appear in it. He didn’t show, of course—that, at least, was just like him—and the Fieldin she wound up imagining had that awful oxygen tube stuck in his nose. She closed her eyes and listened, but he had stopped breathing all over again. She dropped her brush onto the dresser and walked quickly through the house to the back door, where she cupped her hands against the cool glass of the window and gazed out at the orchard. The light was warm, golden—the gentle light of the approaching harvest moon—but the old trees, stooped again with a harvest of hard, bitter heirloom apples that nobody wanted, looked exhausted by the weight they carried. She found herself staring intently, for no reason she could think of, at the narrow lane of grass between two trees at the far end of the orchard, where it began to slope upward toward the mountain. As she stared, a bulky dark figure stepped out from behind one of the trees and crossed the lane, turning its head toward the house in the instant it took to step across.

  Afraid that the creature would hear her open the back door, Rose ran through the house on tiptoe, stopping briefly at the hat rack in the hallway, where she jerked out of her bag the small digital camera she carried with her in case she saw something she wanted to paint. She gently opened the front door and ran down the steps and around the side of the house. She crossed the backyard, keeping the nearest tree between her and the spot where she’d seen the figure, and when she reached the orchard she ran up the lane as quickly and quietly as possible. The skunk ape had come for Fieldin, she thought, and now Fieldin had sent it back. She would take a picture of it and post it on the Internet. She would be a world-famous cryptozoologist. She would get the entire mountain declared a skunk-ape preserve. She would be the goddamn Jane Goodall of skunk-ape studies.

  She stopped on the downhill side of the tree behind which the figure had disappeared, her thrashing heart wildly alive in her chest, the dewy grass cold on her feet. She peered into the maze of apple-laden limbs and through a narrow opening saw in silhouette the figure’s bl
ack shoulder and great, shaggy head. It stood absolutely still. She could just detect a musky, unpleasant, urine-tinged odor. Maybe, she thought for the first time, she would have to go with it. Maybe when the skunk ape came you just had to go. She would follow it up the mountain. She would find Fieldin and kiss him on the mouth and say, Fieldin, you dead bastard. Your paintings, I get them now. I’m sorry. She would be a ghost, if she had to. She would walk the darkest hollows on the coldest nights, singing Scotch-Irish lullabies to Plutina’s lost baby. She and Charlie would plant gardens in the forest for the deer to eat. She would paint pictures of the children who lived in Argyle, and leave them tacked to the trees in their yards. And, occasionally, just for fun, she would scare the hell out of teenage boys wearing UT sweatshirts.

  Through the tree, she made out the almost inaudible sound of breathing, shallow and fast like her own. The poor thing was as excited and scared as she was. In the distance she heard the muffled, percussive whup whup whup whup of D’Abruzzio’s black helicopter. Too late, Special Agent in Charge, you with your beautiful mustache. She was ready now. It was time to go to the other side. She wanted to know everything. She looked down, plotting her next step, and on the ground saw a small pile of apples, stacked neatly in a pyramid, waiting to be borne away.

  Have You Seen the

  Stolen Girl?

  JESSE JAMES, WHILE hiding from the law in Nashville in 1875, had lived for a time at the address where Mrs. Virgil Wilson’s house now stood. For years, Mrs. Wilson delighted in telling trick-or-treaters about the outlaw, but then one Halloween she noticed that the trick-or-treaters did not seem to know—or care—who Jesse James was. They also wore costumes that she didn’t recognize and that had to be explained to her—mass murderers, dead stock-car racers, characters from movies she’d never heard of, teenage singers seemingly remarkable only for their sluttiness—and she realized that she had somehow become the crazy old lady whose tedious stories you had to endure in order to get the disappointing candy that such crazy old ladies invariably offered. For how many years, she asked herself, had she been boring children with her tales of Jesse James, and for how many years had they been laughing at her as they walked away? Every Halloween since then, Mrs. Wilson had sat in her kitchen in the dark, listening to the radio at low volume and pretending she wasn’t home.