by Steve Vernon
“Well what about the thread Dad sewed your mouth up shut with?” I asked.
“I tricked him,” Coyote said.
“How did you trick him?”
Coyote grinned.
He had two pieces of rope in his hands that he tied together in a knot and then pulled them apart as if the knot had never been tied.
“It’s all in how you hold your mouth,” Coyote said. “Any magician will tell you that.”
Which didn’t tell me much at all – and truthfully I could not remember the last time a magician had talked to me – but I guess magicians weren’t talkative by nature, especially when it came to revealing their best tricks.
“So what do we do now?” I asked. “Bigfoot is dead and The Prophet is dead and Old Shuck has run off and we’re on our own – and no offence but I really don’t think that you are good for much of anything at all right now.”
“No offence taken,” Coyote replied. “I know my own limitations.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” I pointed out. “What do we do now?”
“How about a story?” Coyote asked. “It is always a good time for that sort of thing.”
A story?
Was he trying to kid me?
That freaking did it.
“We’re in the middle of a mess like this and you want to stop everything and tell me a story?” I said. “You’ve got to be ten kinds of ten-kind- stupid to think that I am in any sort of a mood for listening to another boring dumb old story.”
“Well, the truth is I’m kind of telling stories so I really wasn’t planning on telling you one. What I was figuring was how about if you tell me one?” Coyote asked. “Would you be in the mood for that?”
Wait a minute.
He wanted ME to tell HIM a story?
“What sort of a story would I be able to tell?” I asked him. “All I know is school and video games and maybe a movie or two. I could tell you about the Terminator – the dude comes back to the past from the future to fight a cyborg and save the world until the next sequel? That’s a pretty good one, I guess.”
Coyote smiled.
“Well, that wasn’t that bad of a story for a first attempt – but how about you try telling me a Bigfoot story?” Coyote asked. “Why don’t you try telling me about the way that you first met Bigfoot?”
“Why?” I asked. “You were there in the first place.”
“Sure,” Coyote said. “But I was pretty busy falling off of that magic cloud and sky-diving down onto a rampaging Spirit Bear in a show of manly courage and fortitude to take much note of what you and Bigfoot were actually up to.”
I didn’t really remember that much courage and fortitude but I didn’t have the heart to tell Coyote’s story any differently than he had told it to me in the first place.
“Yeah,” I said. “But you were there!”
“Is your mouth stuck on repeat?” Coyote asked. “Telling stories is a way to help remember how you got there in the first place. If you tell it right it might even give us some sort of a clue as to how we can get out of this mess.”
That didn’t make much sense to me at all but nothing had made much sense since that Spirit Bear first climbed out of the birch tree he was hiding inside of.
“All right,” I said. “But you had better not interrupt me.”
So I started telling my story.
“The first time I saw the Cape Breton Bigfoot he was running straight down the side of a mountain coming right straight at me – and then he spread his arms wide and then he flew – or at least that’s what it looked like to me.”
I closed my eyes.
It was a little like quiet magic.
All of a sudden I could see the whole story playing out like a movie in the back of my brain , just like it was happening all over again.
So I started to smile, just a little.
“Halfway through mid-charge the Cape Breton Bigfoot tripped his big left foot right over a teetered-up rock,” I went on. “Then he flipped over and stuck that same big left foot up into the air behind himself in the wrong direction and pointed his nose straight down towards the dirt and sort of cart wheeled face-first straight down the side of the mountain.”
And then I full-out grinned – and for just a half of a half of half of second I felt happy as if all the bad stuff that had been going on was nothing more than a dream in a country that I had never ever been to.
“I’m not saying that it was pretty,”
“Tell it faster,” a voice interrupted from somewhere down at my feet. “It’s starting to grow on me.”
I looked down at where the voice had come from and my jaw dropped two or three times before rolling into the corner of the cave.
I’m STILL not saying that it was pretty.
Chapter Thirty Four – Stories Never Truly Die
“What are you waiting for,” the voice at my feet asked. “Don’t tell me that you have already forgotten how to tell my story?”
It was Bigfoot that was talking to me.
Now if this was some kind of a horror zombie monster movie it probably wouldn’t have bothered me one little bit but there is something more than just a little bit disturbing about having a Sasquatch’s decapitated head talking at you like you ought to know better.
I stammered a little.
I’m not sure I made any kind of sense.
“What the, holy, oh my, what the, golly,” was about how it came out along with a half-a-dozen startled grunts and at least one dry spit take.
“I keep telling you things and you just don’t listen,” one-ninth-of-a-Bigfoot said to me. “I get the feeling that you are either totally stupid, half-deaf or maybe you just don’t quite understand the workings of the Queen’s own English.”
“But you’re dead,” I finally spat out. “I saw you die.”
“I’m not dead,” one-ninth-of-a-Bigfoot said. “I’m a story. Stories don’t really die – not the way that people die – not so long as other people remember to tell them out loud.”
“But he pulled your head off,” I said. “I saw it happen.”
“Sure he pulled my head off,” one-ninth-or-maybe-even-one-tenth-(because-math-was-never-my-strong-point)-of-a-Bigfoot said. “But that isn’t really all there is to me. All that my head and body are is nothing more than a wrapping for the whole entire story of me. My memories and my legends and the things that I have done and the things that people THINK I’ve done – that’s the real meat of me. That’s where I live and breathe. Decapitation doesn’t do a thing to somebody built like I am.”
I chewed on that concept for just a little bit.
As theories go it was pretty hard to swallow.
“So if I tell your story out loud you are going to grow back?” I asked. “Belly, arms, legs, feet and all?”
“If you tell it well enough,” one-ninth-or-tenth-or-maybe-even-one-sixteenth-of-a-Bigfoot replied. “You were starting well enough at the beginning. I could feel the spark burning behind your words but then you got all bogged down in disbelief and wonder and worrying about a simple little thing like a Sasquatch head re-growing itself and you went and forgot just which way were going.”
I chewed on that notion as well, slowly thinking his words over.
“I think I got it,” I said, not really sure but figuring that if I said I got it often enough then maybe I could full myself into figuring out just what he was talking about.
And then – because I couldn’t figure out what else I ought to do – I just started back into telling that first story and I told just as strong and as true as I could manage to. I told it straight out and I added a little bit along the way. In my story Coyote didn’t just fall off of a cloud. In my story he came para-gliding on a great red and orange and sunrise colored para-glider with bells and whistles and big red fire horns and a couple of shotgun laser gun turrets mounted on each of the para-glider wings.
I took a glance at Co
yote but he didn’t seem to be listening at all. He was just staring vaguely into space, like he was dreaming.
I tell you, he was missing himself one heck of a story.
Hey – you go ahead and try sitting in a dark raven cave in Labrador with nothing but a severed Sasquatch head and a stitched-up-lip Coyote to keep you company and see if YOUR imagination doesn’t run a little wild on you.
The funny thing was, as I continued to tell my story I could see that Bigfoot was slowly beginning to grow. First I could see his neck growing out of his severed head like the root of a big fat old dandelion.
“That’s the thing about telling stories,” Bigfoot said.
I could see his great big yellow funky-smelling Sasquatch teeth grinning up at me about as bright as a full-sized set of freshly-Colgated light bulbs.
“After a while,” Coyote said. “They begin to grow on you.”
“A little like mildew,” Bigfoot said. “Or maybe even like creeping mold.”
“Or a bad case of the measles,” Coyote added.
And son of a gun, after a while, those stories did just that.
They grew and they grew.
And so did Bigfoot.
Chapter Thirty Five – Out of the Cave and into the Light
By the time I had finished telling the story of how I had first met Bigfoot and Coyote, Bigfoot had grown himself a brand new body and the stumps of his legs and arms.
Now mind you they did not exactly LOOK like legs and arms. They looked more like those stubby little eyes that grow on a potato if you leave it for too long in the cupboard, until it begins to sprout.
“Just keep on talking,” Bigfoot encouraged. “Keep on telling.”
I kept thinking about all of those stories that my stepdad Warren had tried to tell me and I kept wishing that I had actually listened to a few of them – but I kept on telling my stories just as hard as I could manage to.
I told about how Bigfoot had managed to single-handedly capture and granny knot the mighty Great Lake Dragons. I told how he had subdued Nanna Bijou and had compelled him to tell Bigfoot just exactly how we could track down Raven. I told how Bigfoot had managed to take Old Shuck down in two out of three falls without a bit of help from either myself, The Prophet, or Coyote.
Oh sure, I was exaggerating in places and I was outright lying in other places but none of the lying and exaggerating really mattered at all – because when it came right down to it I was doing just exactly what every storyteller in the world has ever done before me.
I was stretching the truth and making it shine just a little bit brighter.
Embellishing, some folks would call it.
Others might say I was falsifying data.
Some might even call it lying.
Why not?
Stephen King gets paid ALL kinds of money to make stuff up like this.
So do some politicians that I have heard some grown-ups I know talking about.
I had always hated English class – ESPECIALLY The creative writing part of it. Back then I had always thought that writing and telling stories was stupid and dumb and boring – but now I could see there was a real point behind it and not only that – but it was really kind of fun.
Why shouldn’t I try and make use of my flexible rubber imagination and my ability to make things up to help myself and to help my friends and to help me get the heck out of this funky old raven cave?
So I kept on telling my homemade Bigfoot story right on up to this point that you are hearing right now – and then, when I had run out of road to run on I started to make stories up. I told Bigfoot a story of how he had beaten King Kong himself in an arm wrestling match, thanks to a little trick that Coyote had pulled off involving a feather duster, some sneezing powder, a banana and a rubber chicken.
Then I told how Bigfoot had created the Northern Lights using nothing but a slide projector, some colored cellophane and a half a dozen tins of paint that he had peeled from off of an abandoned church in the wrong end of a British Columbia ghost town directly after he had finished beating up all of the ghost town’s ghosts.
I was halfway through a story involving Bigfoot, Ogopogo, Superman and Hulk Hogan – and I really wasn’t sure just where I was going to go with a cast as varied as that one – when Bigfoot stood back on up. He looked a little wobbly and some parts of his arms and legs still seemed to be growing and I wasn’t really certain if I had got the color right in his fur – but he stood up just the same.
“It’s really good to see you,” I said. “I was afraid that you were going to quit while you were a head.”
“It’s good to see you,” Bigfoot replied. “But I knew that you would come through for me in a pinch.”
“You never doubted did you?” I said. “After all, I am a storyteller.”
I was thinking of Warren when I said that.
I was thinking about all of the stories that he had told me in the few years that I had known him. I was thinking about how much of himself he put into those stories and how much of those stories he had kept trying to put into my thinking.
And all I could do for him was to turn away and make fun of him and do my very best not to listen.
How stupid could I have ever been?
I made a promise to myself – there in the heart of the Labrador Cave of Tears – that I was going to get that Warren cocoon back from Raven and I was going to sit down and tell Warren’s stories back to him to show him that I had been listening all along. I was going to tell stories to that Warren cocoon until the cows came home and gave milk and then jumped into a meat grinder and made hamburgers out of themselves.
It was a promise.
It was a promise that I swore that I was going to keep.
“So how do we get out of here?” I asked Bigfoot. “I’ve got some deep meaningful Raven payback to grab hold of.”
“You’re starting to really dislike that bird fellow, aren’t you?” Coyote asked me.
“Dislike is a kind of a strong word to use,” I said. “Let’s just say that I intend to pluck him and put him into a pot full of noodles and then I will sing Hank Snow songs to him while he boils himself down into a bowl full of raven noodle soup.”
I had to grin at that.
As death threats go, it was pretty awesomely colorful.
“You tell a lot of good stories, kid,” Bigfoot said. “Now let me tell you how I am going to escape out of this cave.”
“I hope it isn’t going to be a long story,” I said. “Because I am feeling just a little bit impatient right about now.”
“It will be a real short story,” Bigfoot said, drawing his big right fist about six inches behind his big hairy right ear.
“It will start about here,” Bigfoot said. “About seven inches behind my right ear.”
“I could have sworn it was six inches,” I said.
“Don’t bother me with details or mathematics,” Bigfoot corrected. “My story starts here and it ends right about HERE!”
He leaned forward into a beautiful right cross that hit the closed-up mouth of the Raven’s Cave of Tears like a half a dozen nuclear missiles rolled into one.
“POW!!!” Bigfoot, Coyote and me shouted in unison – and there were not enough exclamation marks in the entire universe to punctuationally demonstrate the power and the impact of Bigfoot’s big right hand.
The mouth of the Raven’s Cave of Tears opened up and barfed out boulders and stones and pebbles and bat poop and cave beetles and them funky little lizards that sometimes crawl on the walls of a cave.
We stepped out into the daylight, blinking and squinting from the glare of the sudden sunshine and the dust that Bigfoot’s thunderous thump had stirred up.
He put his big hand against my chest.
“Hold on a minute,” Bigfoot said. “I need to make me a long-distance call.”
Then Bigfoot took three slow deliberate steps forward.
I watched as his eyes glaz
ed over as if he was trying to squint hard into some sort of middle-distance sandstorm , trying hard to focus on something that wasn’t really there.
Then Bigfoot leaned back and he opened his mouth wide enough to swallow a medium sized steam roller. Then he took a great big deep breath and then he yelled about as loud of a yell as was humanly possible for a nine foot tall Sasquatch.
“RAVEN!!!”
The earth shook a little.
And then Bigfoot shouted again.
“COME HERE!!!!”
I saw a few trees lean just a tiny bit away from the shout.
And then he shouted a third time.
“I WANT YOU, NOW!!!!!”
The clouds shook a little in the sky.
I am pretty sure I actually might have heard a dozen or so black bears faint just a little, somewhere about three miles west of the Quebec/Ontario border line.
The sky clouded over.
It was almost as if I had blinked and while I was in mid-blink and wondering somebody had stolen that bright blue Labrador sky and then had replaced it with the promise of a thunderstorm, it had happened that fast.
I felt a slow chill creep down my backbone, winding up about halfway down my left little toe.
I blinked for real.
Somewhere in the middle of my mid-blink my Dad appeared.
Dad-not-Dad.
Chapter Thirty Six – Triple Somersaults All Over The Place
It was like something out of one of those old John Wayne movies.
Dad-not-Dad stood at one side of the clearing and Bigfoot stood at the other.
“I thought that I had seen the last of you,” Dad-not-Dad said to Bigfoot. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead by now?”
“Not hardly,” Bigfoot said.
Dad-not-Dad shook his head.
“That’s the problem with things nowadays,” Dad-not-Dad said. “Time was, you’d decapitate a fellow and he would have the common decency to STAY decapitated.”
“That’s your story,” Bigfoot said. “That’s not my story.”
Dad-not-Dad turned his head and let his gaze fall on me.
I felt a chill run through me like I had gargled ice cold glacier water in the middle of a March blizzard.
