by Steve Vernon
Nothing.
“He can’t be dead,” I repeated. “He’s practically mythical.”
I said that last word loudly – hoping that Bigfoot would open his eyes and look up at me and maybe dryly say something about how I must be three hundred and eighteen kinds of stupid for even daring to call him mythical – only he didn’t budge.
He did not say anything at all.
I didn’t know what to think. I was struck dumb and stupid, all at once – and then Bigfoot groaned softly.
It was one of the most wonderful sounds I had ever heard.
“I knew it,” I said. “Bigfoots can’t die.”
“Not hardly,” Bigfoot weakly mumbled. “Not yet, anyway.”
He still didn’t sound very healthy but I was grasping at straws and happy at the feel of hay between my fingertips.
“I just KNEW it.” I said. “I knew that you couldn’t be dead.”
I know just how absolutely gorky that sounded – but remember – I had just skydived about two billion light years out of a pink mystical Winnebago – wrapped in the raven-feathered skin of a mystical trickster Coyote.
Things like that will wear on a fellow.
“Of course I’m not dead,” Bigfoot said. “Stories never die. They’re just retold in a different kind of a way.”
It was at that point that The Prophet crashed down into the Labrador terrain at a speed of about a billion miles a minute.
Now let me tell you – Labrador is a very rough piece of territory.
It is just about the size of the state of Nevada – or slightly bigger than the nation of Japan – and over twice as large as the entire United Kingdom – covering over one hundred and fifty thousand square miles of thinly soiled rocky terrain.
It is a country of green and gray and white. Green in the summer, fat and full of boreal forests, peaty swamps and sprawling lush meadow land – but in the winter the whole thing ices up and the entire landscape snoozes beneath a blanket of thick white snow.
“Green or white,” Bigfoot had told me earlier. “You just can’t escape the grey of the underlying rock structure. There are more geological deposits in this patch of landscape than you could shake a truckload of nuclear geologists at.”
That is a whole lot of rock.
The big mystical pink Winnebago had crashed down upon the long curving ridge of a glacial esker – which is what my geography teacher would have called that long winding snake-like ridge of granite and glacially-paved gravel.
The sides of the mystic Winnebago crushed in as it impacted upon that hard unyielding granite. The windows shattered and I heard the Prophet screaming in agony. One of the wheel tires had flown off like the world’s ugliest UFO. I saw that wheel tire Frisbee-ing across the skyline to smash into the branches of a stunted cedar.
I could hear the sound of children yelling stories.
I could hear the crackle of pages being turned and crumpled and thrown into a barrel of burning oil.
I could hear the firecracker rattle of electrons and ions working together – and could hear the sound of my stepdad Warren telling me one more story – but there were no flames.
The Prophet was a mystical travel home and did not require gasoline – but that did not make the impact and destruction any less terrifying to see this close up.
“We’ve got company,” Coyote said.
I turned back around just in time to see an army of tiny gray figures rising up out of the tall yellowed Labrador grass.
The figures were tiny and ugly and they were all carrying very nasty looking spears. They had formed a protective circle about Bigfoot’s big body. I wasn’t sure if they were guarding him or if they were just trying to keep me and Coyote away from him.
Bigfoot groaned again.
“Now we’re in for it,” Coyote said. “This is not good.”
I wanted to run and charge right through those mean-looking tiny men – spears or not – but Coyote grabbed me by the shoulder and held me back.
“Mannegishi,” Coyote said to the little men, holding his paw-hands out to show he meant no harm. “We come in peace.”
Peaceful or not, the Mannegishi – whatever that meant – did not seem to be in the mood for any sort of an amicable negotiation.
The tallest of the Mannegishi – who was maybe about four feet tall and twice as skinny – gestured with his spear and Coyote started walking in the direction that the Mannegishi intended him to go.
As for me I just kept staring back at the wreckage of the Winnebago.
I saw a heavy black rain cloud in the distance, sort of drifting through the otherwise bright blue sky.
It was kind of funny. I had seen a rain cloud the very first time I met The Prophet. He’d been hiding inside of it – but as far as I could tell that cloud I was looking at now wasn’t anything more than a plain old rain cloud and all that it most likely signified was that we were most likely going to get wet fairly soon.
That is, if we ACTUALLY survived the Mannegishi – not to mention the Raven.
Still, I could not escape the feeling that the rain cloud was actually trying to tell me something in some kind of secret smoke-signal cloud language.
I expect that the only real story that cloud was trying to tell me was “You might want to think about buying yourself an umbrella and a big old raincoat” – but to me that little black cloud looked a little bit too much like a raven in flight.
I didn’t care.
Not one bit at all.
The Prophet was dead.
Bigfoot was almost dead.
Warren was most likely dead.
My Dad was definitely dead.
It all boiled down to one single undeniable truth.
The Raven had won.
How bad could things get from where they were at?
I felt like I was in the middle of one of those forever-long nightmares that you sometimes get – those ones in which you are falling and every time it seems that you are going to hit the bottom a trapdoor opens and you keep on falling.
But I was pretty sure that I had hit rock bottom, two or three trapdoors ago.
In fact, right about now I figured I would have to look straight up past the crow cloud to even see rock bottom – and I might even need a couple of Hubbell Space Telescopes to see it with.
And then – at that point in which I figured that I could no longer fall any further than I had – something worse happened.
A figure stepped up from behind a hill.
It was a man.
I could not see his face from this far away.
I watched the unknown man walking towards me with that slow and steady lope as if he had walking towards me for all of his life.
Something about the way that he walked looked awfully scarily familiar to me.
“Hi Adam,” the figure said to me. “It has been a very long time since we both really got the chance to talk.”
I knew that voice.
I opened my mouth.
Then I closed my mouth back up again.
So far as I could tell no words fell out between that opening and closing.
“It’s good to see you again,” the figure said. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?”
Open.
Close.
One more time.
Still nothing falling out.
“You don’t have anything to say to me at all?” the figure asked me.
It was my Dad, of course.
My real Dad.
Dead – and back again.
I guess it’s true what Coyote told me.
I guess, deep down, that I always knew it was as true as true could ever grow.
Stories never die.
Chapter Twenty Nine – All of the Peanut Butter Sandwiches in the World
So just think on how this would hit you – if you were me and I was somebody else sitting at home watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie while
you were going through all of this commotion. You have to understand that all I REALLY had to go on was mostly the stories that my Mother had sort of told me along the way and PARTLY the stories that she didn’t ever get around to telling me and I guess maybe I made up the rest of it from a few old photographs and a couple of half-remembered memories that might have been nothing more than daydreams and a bit of wishful thinking.
I had fully believed that my Dad was dead – killed outside of a little Afghanistan village by a homemade exploding baby carriage.
Heck, I had even watched the whole thing happen – thanks to the dream vision freak-out that the Raven and the Sleeping Giant had sent me on.
And now here he was walking towards me just as big as life – my very own Dad – now standing there and staring at me and smiling that half-crooked grin of his that I remembered from all of those pictures that my Mom had shown me.
“Dad?” I said.
I knew it had to be some kind of a trick – but the part of me that had never ever wanted to let go of this man’s memory just didn’t want to let go of the crazy impossible notion that he might actually still be alive.
“Why don’t you hush up now, would you?” my real Dad said, pointing directly at Coyote – who promptly closed his mouth tight. In fact, if Coyote’s mouth had been an open door it had just got slammed shut, all by itself.
I looked at Coyote in disbelief.
He just stood there, those two raven feathers still sticking out of his mouth with a look of perpetual stupid frozen upon his big fuzzy dog-like features. He might as well have been stuffed with sawdust for all of the talking that he was suddenly not doing.
I didn’t think that ANYTHING would shut him up.
“Hi, Adam,” my real Dad said to me, holding his arms open wide for a hug. “How about a hug for the old man?”
A part of me wanted to run just about as fast as my feet could carry me and throw myself directly into that wide open hug he was offering me – but another part of me – the part that was thinking how much that hug looked like a freshly-set bear trap – wanted to run twice as fast in the other direction.
“You’re dead,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
Dad just laughed and shook his head in a kind of a television-dad style – like he had been rehearsing that head-shake in front of the bathroom mirror all week long.
No, this wasn’t my Dad.
This was not my Dad at all.
It could not be.
“Do I look dead?” he asked me.
I looked at Bigfoot.
He was still moaning a little.
He looked dead.
“What about my friend?” I asked, pointing at Bigfoot.
“The Mannegishi will take care of him,” the thing that looked like my Dad said. “You don’t have to worry about anything at all.”
And then he said something to the Mannegishi in that language of theirs that sounded a little bit like the cawing of crows, wind moving through the autumn-dead leaves and about fifty-eight thousand empty pop bottles crashing onto a shout of frozen concrete.
“That’s fine,” Coyote said.
And then my Dad pointed at Coyote.
“They’ll take care of him too.”
“That’s just fine,” Coyote repeated in a voice as flat as a steam-rollered shadow.
I saw at least a dozen of the Mannegishi spread out and surround Coyote. There was more of that crow-caw glass-shouting.
“I sure wish I knew what they were saying,” I said out loud. “I’d feel a whole lot more comfortable about what is going on.”
“Oh I can fix that,” Dad said.
Then he caught me by both of my shoulders and looked me straight in the eye like he was about to have a long and intense conversation with me about something that I did not want to talk about. Then he opened up his mouth and words began to fall out like a sudden summer downpour. It was almost like he was speed-shouting into my brain. I could see his mouth moving only it was like a movie where someone had sped the camera up and I saw flashes of understanding going off inside of me like the rattle of fireworks and then all a sudden I knew how to speak Mannegishi.
It was that fast.
All at once I could understand the crow-cawing bottle-breaking words of the Mannegishi and I kind of had the feeling that they were laughing and joking at me and Bigfoot and Coyote – like a group of schoolyard bullies getting set to play one of the meanest tricks in high school history on some poor misguided dweeb.
Namely, me.
“Your mother never really told you all that much about me did she?” Dad asked.
“I thought she had told me nearly everything there was to know,” I replied. I wasn’t sure if I was talking in English or Mannegishi or both at the same time – but Dad seemed to understand me all right as he crooked about one-third of a grin in my direction – like he was saving some of it back for later on.
“Not hardly,” he said. “Not by a long old shot – but I will definitely tell you about it in just a little while.”
That wasn’t good enough for me.
“Why not just tell it to me now?” I asked.
“Now THAT is a story that will take some sneaking up on,” Dad explained. “I’m not nearly half as good at the telling of things as some people are.”
Do you know that I would swear that he was staring straight at the Warren-cocoon when he said that? Besides – I still wasn’t satisfied that everything had been properly taken care of. I looked over at the wreckage of what used to be The Prophet.
“What about him?” I asked, nodding at The Prophet.
I was more than a little surprised to realize that I was speaking in Mannegishi when I said that and I guess my surprise must have tickled some of the Mannegishi warriors because it brought on another onslaught of laughing and giggling.
“They’re laughing at your terrible accent,” Dad said. “The way you speak Mannegishi – I have to admit, it is pretty funny.”
I have an accent?
“But what about HIM?” I repeated, raising my voice and trying to correct my accent – although I wasn’t sure what was wrong with it in the first place.
Dad’s eyes went wide and he sort of half-smiled at my question like he thought I was kidding him or something.
“Him? You mean the Winnebago?” Dad asked. “Son, that vehicle has been totaled. Even you have got to see that. There are just some things that aren’t worth saving. We’ll just have to walk from here on out – unless you happen to have a pet Smart Car hidden somewhere in your Batman backpack.”
My friend – The Prophet – was dead.
Dad said it like someone might tell you that you had just lost a dime through a hole in your pocket.
He said it like it wasn’t all that big of a deal.
He said it like he didn’t really care.
“But that’s my friend,” I said.
This time Dad laughed right out loud and that one-third of a grin snapped open like a sprung switchblade.
“So your best friend is a big pink motor home?” Dad said. “Do you get a lot of mileage out of that relationship?”
Oh yes, I supposed you have noticed that I had begun using the “D-word” again.
See – as many as times as I kept saying to myself that this guy WAS my Dad or this guy WASN’T my Dad my mind kept on flip-flopping like a Band-Aid that would not stay stuck down fast.
“And don’t forget Warren,” I said. “Is he going to be okay too?”
“Warren who?” Dad asked.
Okay.
So now what do I say?
Do I tell this guy who looks so much like what I imagine my real Dad would look like that the Mom that he might actually have married had went and married another man while he was dead in Afghanistan – or maybe not dead?
Dead Dad.
Dad not Dead.
You are dead. You are not my Dad anymore. Some other dude is now my stepdad.
It was getting awfully confusing for me. There were WAY too many D-words going on in this whole conversation for my liking.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” was all I could come up with.
“It’ll most likely come to you,” Dad replied.
I nodded like I wasn’t exactly sure of what he was telling me.
“Look,” Dead-Dad said to me. “There’s not much we can do right now – standing here in the middle of this wilderness. Why don’t you come home with me?”
“To Afghanistan?” I asked.
I know how stupid that sounded – but you try and come up with something sensible to say the next time that YOUR Dad comes back from the dead.
Dad just shook his head and smiled the very same smile that he had smiled from off of the photograph on the fireplace mantle back home.
“No,” Dad said. “Not Afghanistan. I live right here in the woods of Labrador. And don’t ask me why. There is WAY too much to explain right now. Just understand that I’ve been living with the Mannegishi for a very long time now and you can come and stay at my place and once we’ve had a good solid meal I’ll explain the whole story to you.”
Great.
Just what I needed.
One more story.
“Is that okay with you son?”
Hearing that last word said by the only man that I ever wanted to hear it from was all that I really needed to change my mind.
“Sure Dad,” I said.
And then I hugged him.
Whether it was a dream, a story or an outright lie – I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity – not for all of the peanut butter sandwiches and Kool-Aid in the whole wide world.
I was that happy.
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” I said. “Dad, I’ve got so many things to tell you.”
Which was right about when Old Shuck galloped up from out of the woods. He took one look at my Dad – and that big purple Death Dog began to growl.
Loudly.
Chapter Thirty – You Better Quit Kicking My Dog Around
Old Shuck continued to growl.
GRRRRRRRRR...
I could see one thing very clearly.
Old Shuck did NOT like this new Dad – not one single bit.
“Is that your dog?” back-from-the-dead Dad asked me.
