Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet Page 8

Lester and Eliza were on bait detail.

  Eliza was doing the lion’s share of the work, her sleeves rolled up and her hair tied back like Rosie the Riveter, as she slopped out the buckets from the back of the camper. Even splattered in Salisbury’s godawful bait concoction she still managed to look defiantly pretty. And surely the porn biz couldn’t fling anything worse at her than this goop. She seemed to be enjoying the adventure; compared to relieving randy mongoloids, or gyrating topless at The Henhouse, it must’ve been a refreshing change of scene.

  Lester was taking to the task with far less enthusiasm. He could barely manage to prise the lids from the buckets and pass them to Eliza before the stench of the bait overwhelmed him and he started heaving. In half-assed emulation of Salisbury, he’d adorned the crown of his Bigelow Baboons cap with the bear’s teeth—its milk teeth, I noted, with another pang of shame.

  I called out cheerily, “How’re you getting on back there, Lester?” Then I gave the loudspeaker a good long blast of the skunk ape’s mating call to drown out the sound of him cursing me.

  But the novelty of driving, less so Lester’s discomfort, soon wore off.

  By midday, the scorching sun had turned the camper into a sweatbox on wheels. There was no escaping the stifling stench of the bait. The fetid fumes fogged the windshield; dirty brown pearls of condensation jeweled the roof of the camper, dripping down over my head like a Chinese water torture.

  Worse than that, I had no idea where the hell we were.

  Before setting off that morning, I’d removed Salisbury’s map of the Bigelow Sticks from the wall above his camping bed, and placed it on the passenger seat to guide me. But as Salisbury barked directions to me from his rooftop hunting deck, seemingly at random, it soon became apparent we were completely and hopelessly lost.

  I patted down my pockets, searching for my cellphone. When I couldn’t find it, I recalled Walt waving to me as the camper left The Henhouse.

  I’d thought he was saying: Fare-thee-well. Turns out it was: Don’t forget your cellphone. I called back to Eliza. “You bring your cellphone?” I knew better than to ask Lester.

  Still slopping out the bait buckets, Eliza glanced back at me and blew a stray strand of hair from her eyes. “Who you calling, Mr. Levine?”

  Not wanting to panic them, I said: “Just figured to let Walt know where we are.”

  Or vice versa.

  And if we really were lost, Walt would need time to muster a search party.

  Eliza fished her cellphone from the pocket of her cut-offs and thumbed it on.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “No signal?”

  “Nope,” she said. “All five bars—”

  Then the camper hit a bump on the trail, the phone slipped through her greasy fingers and landed with a plop in an open bait bucket, submerging beneath the sludge. Eliza shouted, “Shitfire!”

  I muttered, “That’s just great …” Then I hit the brakes.

  “Levine!” Salisbury barked, as the Minnie Winnie lurched to a stop. “Why are we stopping, man?”

  Lester and Eliza took the opportunity for some fresh air. Lester staggered from the camper and away down the trail, dropped to his knees in the trailside brush and began puking violently. Eliza rubbed his back like she was burping a baby.

  “That’s it, get it all up,” she encouraged him, pat-pat-pat.

  I climbed from the camper and looked up at Salisbury on the roof.

  “Enough’s enough,” I told him, “we’re just going ‘round in circles here.”

  Salisbury gave a snort of contempt. “Kills one bear cub, the man thinks he’s a skunk aper … No one said this would be easy, Levine. I warned you as much before we set off.”

  “Exactly how long do you plan on staying out here for?”

  “As long as it takes,” Salisbury said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I said. “Eliza and me have jobs to get back to.”

  “Hey—” Lester said, defensively: “I got shit to do too, you know.”

  Salisbury said, “The three of you are welcome to walk back to town.”

  “Well, we might at that,” I said, “except none of us knows where the hell we are.”

  Salisbury grinned. “Maybe you could ask the skunk ape for directions? You start walking now, I reckon you might just run into him around nightfall.”

  I looked at Eliza and Lester. “I’ve had enough. You guys coming?”

  “What about Ned, Mr. Levine?” Eliza said.

  But I reckon she was thinking about her acting career, too.

  “Once we get back to town,” I said, “I’ll go see Randy-Ray myself. We’ll figure something out—”

  Lester wiped the bile off his chin and said, “I ain’t walking nowhere with that thing out there.”

  “I thought you wanted to go home?”

  “I did—I do—hell, I didn’t even wanna come to start with! But Jimmy’s got the big gun, Reggie. No hard feelings.”

  Salisbury gave a throaty chuckle. “Well,” he said, “looks like you’ll be walking home alone, Levine.”

  “One more night,” I said, glaring at him, “one more night and then we’re heading back to town.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  Not until I started turning away.

  “Might’ve known you’d be the type to tuck tail and run …”

  I turned back around. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Salisbury climbed down from the roof of the camper. We butted chests like boxers at the weigh-in. “It means you’re a quitter, Levine. The first sign of adversity and you fold like a lawn chair. Inside and outside the boxing ring.”

  It seemed like everything in my life always came back to Boar Hog Brannon.

  “I lost that fight fair and square,” I said.

  “The measure of a man’s not in how he loses, it’s in how he handles defeat.”

  “How ‘bout I kick your ass and we’ll see how you handle it?”

  Eliza wedged herself between us and said, “Stop it! Both of you!”

  Then Lester said, “Hey …”

  He was holding up what looked like a baseball.

  Then I realized what it was, and shuddered.

  Reading my expression, Salisbury said, “Mean something to you?”

  It was a plastic doll’s head, the eyes black and cigarette-scorched.

  The last time I’d seen it, it was hanging on a necklace worn by Baby Doll as she and the rest of her Motorcycle Club kicked the crap out of me.

  “Where’d you find that?”

  “Right here where I was puking,” Lester said, with unmistakable pride. He wiped some upchuck off the doll’s head onto his shirt, like he was polishing an apple to give to teacher.

  A search of the area revealed a mess of tire tracks.

  I’m no Injun tracker, but I didn’t need to be to recognize the tracks as belonging to motorbikes. Five different treads, five different bikes, one of them fitted with a sidecar.

  “What would those Damn Dirty Apes be doing way out here?” Eliza asked me.

  “Whatever it was,” I said, “it looks like they ran into some trouble.”

  “Couldn’t have happened to a bigger bunch of assholes,” Lester said.

  I wasn’t exactly cut up about it, either.

  “Where’re the bodies? The bikes?” Eliza said.

  “Over here …” Salisbury said.

  He was crouching on his haunches by the trailside, staring gravely at a great mound of foul-smelling scat. On either side of the dung heap was a monstrous bare footprint, where the creature must have squatted to empty its bowels. They were a perfect-match for the footprint we’d found at the spot where Ned was abducted. Salisbury glanced at me challengingly. “You’re the expert all of a sudden. Care to explain this?”

  I shrugged sheepishly. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

  Lester was staring in horror at the big pile of shit. “My God … Is that—is that those Damn Dirty Apes? Is that all that’s left
of ‘em?”

  Salisbury prodded his pinkie into the shit like he was testing the temperature of a pie, flicked his tongue across his scat-smeared finger, his face crinkled in revulsion and then he spat in the dirt and said, “Fresh.” He glanced at me and then gestured to the shit, letting me know I was welcome to taste it for myself.

  “I believe you,” I assured him.

  Salisbury stood up and scanned the woods choking the trail.

  “You think it’s out there?” Eliza said.

  Salisbury said, “Oh, it’s out there alright.”

  “Maybe Reggie’s right,” Lester said. “Maybe we ought to head back to—”

  But Salisbury cut him off: “We camp here tonight.”

  13.

  That night, the tension between Salisbury and me crackled like the logs on the campfire. Glaring at each other over the flames, Salisbury whittled a branch with his kukri knife, and I ate my beans supper with little enthusiasm and farted with even less. Lester took out his harmonica and tried raising our spirits, but he only seemed to know the one song, and the harp’s mournful wail only added to the grim atmosphere, and so he put it away and just opened another can of Keystone.

  I brooded over what Salisbury had said; that I was a quitter. Last night, when the bear charged me, before I realized what it was, my life had flashed before my eyes—and it was like watching a loop of interminably dull CCTV footage of any old night at The Henhouse. There I was: Slumped at my regular spot at the slab with a bottle of Coors and The Ring magazine, occasionally rising from my stool to check an ID, turf out a drunk, fetch another beer, or take a piss, mostly the last two. Maybe Salisbury was right; maybe I had set my sights a little low since losing the Brannon fight? Not that I planned on admitting as much to him.

  I watched as he whittled the branch with his knife, carving the wood into a vaguely simian shape that looked like the sinister fetish doll of a skunk ape-worshipping savage. “You really hate them …” I said. “Don’t you?”

  He looked at me sharply. Then tossed his simian carving into the fire, watching as it crackled and burned in the flames, belching fiery ash up into the night sky.

  “Hate, Levine? That’s all a skunk ape knows. All they deserve … Hate.”

  “What happened?”

  Salisbury didn’t answer at first; I didn’t think he’d answer at all.

  Then he told us.

  * * *

  My father, Robert Salisbury, ‘Bob’ to his friends, plain old ‘Pop’ to me, was a good man—some might say a great man—but a man of mercurial temperament.

  When he lost his job at the camping goods store, where he had worked all his life, he was devastated. At home, sequestering himself in his basement den, Pop shunned all human contact, taking his meals on trays that my mother left outside the locked door, and refusing my pleas for us to play catch in the yard. Mother assured me that Pop would soon reemerge from his funk. He always did, she said. Sure enough, she was right.

  Three months later, one dead of night, Pop awoke us in a state of great excitement. Rousted from our beds, we assembled in the living room for an urgent family meeting where Pop told us his plans. Much to Mother’s astonishment, he had sold our home and all our worldly possessions, any creature comforts he deemed superfluous to our new lives. The family station wagon had been traded for the used pickup truck sitting gassed and ready to go in the drive. Still wearing our bedclothes, Pop herded us out to the truck, and off we drove into the night. Not wishing to spoil the surprise, Pop refused to speak a word to us, ignoring our many questions and turning up the radio when Mother began to badger him.

  After driving through the night, we finally reached an acreage of stinking swampland in the Florida Everglades where stood—or rather sagged—a ramshackle cabin. Ushering us inside the creaking, cobwebbed hovel, Pop welcomed us to our new home. Mother wept what Pop assured me were tears of joy. We were standing—Pop said—in what would soon become the world-famous “Salisbury Skunk Ape Sanctuary,” where visitors from across the globe would flock to observe these remarkable hominids in their natural habitat. And leave their tourist dollars at the café and gift store, he added, smiling slyly at Mother to assuage her concerns. He’d clearly given this a great deal of thought. We were going to be rich.

  Pop’s enthusiasm was infectious. I could hardly wait to get started and see my first skunk ape. Pop was appalled to discover we had not been taught about them in school biology class, and vowed to write an outraged letter to the education authorities. I had many questions for him; so too did Mother, though her questions were less about skunk apes, than the lives we’d left behind and our future prospects. She lured him away to a closed room, where I heard her sobbing and pleading with him—then a fierce slap—followed by Pop’s stern reassurances that he knew what was in the best interests of the family.

  Despite her initial misgivings, to Mother’s credit she pitched in and tried to make the most of it. We spruced the place up for the tourists, making repairs where required, which was most everywhere. Pop painted a SALISBURY SKUNK APE SANCTUARY sign to display outside. Mother stocked the gift store with pretty handicrafts. Pop and I built an enclosure—akin to a batting cage—in which to house our first skunk ape. And then we set about capturing one.

  Every night, Pop and I would roam the swamp with tranquilizer rifles— and real guns, just in case Pop had underestimated the dosage required to incapacitate a skunk ape, and the animal charged us.

  And every morning at dawn we would return empty-handed.

  When the sanctuary finally opened to the public, we had still yet to capture our star attraction, and it quickly became clear that visitors would not be satisfied with an empty cage and Pop’s assurances that skunk apes dwelled in the wetlands. We needed a skunk ape; our very livelihoods depended on it.

  Pop and I began stalking the swamp day and night, and yet the damnable creatures continued to elude us. We caught shadowy glimpses of them, found their tracks, smelled them all around us, of course, and endured their mocking catcalls … But always at a distance, always out of rifle range. It was as if they were tormenting us—for as well as devious animal cunning, every skunk ape has a cruel callous mean streak at its heart.

  Our failure to capture a skunk ape slowly wore down my father. Within a year his enthusiasm for the sanctuary deserted him as suddenly as it had arrived. He stopped bathing, allowed his hair and beard to grow long and wild, and would spend long lonely hours brooding inside the cage we had built for the skunk apes. Mother tried desperately to raise his spirits. She begged him to see a doctor. When that failed to elicit a response, she threatened to take me to stay with my grandparents. But to no avail. Pop was beyond help, communicating only in guttural grunts and growls. The skunk apes had broken the poor soul.

  It was left to me to restore order and salvage our beleaguered family. Using every bit of skunk apeing guile my father had taught me, I began hunting the swamp alone. They were out there, of that I was certain. As I stalked the wetlands—their foul stench choking the air—I often sensed their creeping presence slyly shadowing my movements, dogging my footsteps …

  But when I turned I saw nothing but shadows.

  Then one evening, returning home for supper after yet another day’s fruitless hunting, I had my first close encounter with a skunk ape. The creature was crouching behind the cabin with a bloody branch clutched like a club in its hand. Mother’s lifeless body lay sprawled at its feet. Her skull had been shattered like a melon. My cry of horror alerted the beast. Its head snapped up. Baleful red eyes glared at me through the filthy matted hair masking its face. It bellowed and flailed the bloody club above its head. I raised my rifle and fired. I had long ago given up using the tranquilizer rifle. The shot tore through the creature’s chest. The club slid from its grip. The beast crumpled to the ground. Rifle raised, I warily approached, and with the toe of my boot I rolled the creature onto its back. When I saw what I had done, I screamed.

  As I fell to my knees beside my
poor mother and father, weeping over their lifeless bodies, an infernal chorus of bestial howls arose from the wetlands.

  They were laughing; the devil’s skunk apes were laughing at me in their malicious triumph. Screaming back at them, screaming myself hoarse, I fired my rifle blindly into the woods, and when the chamber clicked empty, I cursed them. Two days later, a travelling salesman discovered me, still cursing and dry-firing my rifle, as the bodies of my parents lay stiff and gathered flies at my feet.

  In the years that followed, I sensed it was in my best interests to cooperate with the doctors at the psychiatric hospital. I agreed with them that yes, of course there weren’t any such thing as skunk apes; that my father—a very sick man, they told me—had transferred his delusions onto me, an impressionable young boy. In time, satisfied with my progress, the hospital released me.

  But I knew the truth. I’d never forgotten the demonic cacophony of the skunk apes laughing at me and mine, and I vowed, upon the graves of my parents, that one day I would have my revenge, and wipe the hateful smiles from their faces.

  * * *

  “Ever since then,” Salisbury said, “I’ve been hunting skunk apes, investigating every sighting—from the Florida Everglades, the wilds of North Carolina, the Louisiana swamps … and now here in the Bigelow Sticks.

  “And as God is my witness, we shall see who has the last laugh.”

  A pinecone popped in the campfire, startling me back to my senses.

  Salisbury had finished his tale, or said as much as he was going to.

  I was troubled by what he’d told us.

  As delicately as possible, I said: “Salisbury—in all the years you’ve been out there hunting them—have you ever actually seen a skunk ape?”

  Firelight blazed in his eyes, twin visions of hell.

  “No,” he said. “And I’ll never rest till I do.”

  And with that, Jameson T. Salisbury: Skunk Ape Hunter hauled himself to his feet, propped his elephant gun on his shoulder, said: “Now get some sleep, we’ve got a big day ahead of us,” and then he strode away into the night, the darkness embracing him like an old friend.