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I felt my jaw drop open. In fact I was fairly certain that my entire lower jaw bone had fallen off of my face and hit the ground and bounced about two or three times. After which I made a bah-bah-bah sound like a sheep with a serious case of jelly-mouth stutter.
“Bah-bah-bah-bigfoots don’t talk,” I stammered out.
“In the first place it’s Bigfeet or Sasquatch - not Bigfoots,” Bigfoot said. “Or do those weird plastic wires sticking out of your ears make it that hard for you to hear?”
“Bigfeet isn’t very proper, grammatically speaking,” the Coyote pointed out.
“Who asked you?” Bigfoot retorted. “And don’t you be bringing your grandmother into this particular discussion.”
“I said grammar,” the Coyote snapped back. “Not grandmother.”
“Actually, the word that you said was grammatically, not grandmother.” Bigfoot said, following it up with a big wise-guy yellow-toothed grin. “Maybe I ought to check your ears to see if any of those weird plastic wires are growing out of them.”
Weird plastic wires?
By now I had totally forgotten that I was still wearing my i-pod wire earplugs – which didn’t help any attempt at inter-species communication much.
“What are you listening to anyway?” Bigfoot asked, rudely yanking out one of my earplugs with one big hairy hand.
Bigfoot jammed the earplug into one of his big hairy ears. My grandfather used to have hairy ears, but this guy had an entire South American rain forest sprouting behind and within each of his ears. He listened to the sound of the Screaming Sea Monkeys for a moment and then made a face like he had just dry-swallowed a whole mouthful of unbuttered broccoli.
“What is this horrible noise?” he asked. “Don’t you have any Johnny Cash tunes?”
Johnny Cash?
“No Merle Haggard? No Jim Reeves? No Hank Snow?” Bigfoot went on. “Don’t you even have any freaking Willy Nelson?”
Willy freaking Nelson?
I guess a fellow can learn something new every day.
I had just now learned that the Cape Breton Bigfoot – mythological or not - had absolutely no taste in any kind of music.
“You can’t be real,” I told him. “I must have fallen and bumped my head. I must be hallucinating this whole thing. I am going to wake up in a hospital bed and maybe some pretty nurse will bring me some vanilla ice cream in a bowl.”
Bigfoot just looked at me with a sort of how-stupid-can-you-get sort of expression on his big hairy face.
“You are still hung up on that whole mythology foolishness, aren’t you?” Bigfoot asked. “You keep thinking this isn’t real, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“Let me tell you a little bit about mythology,” Bigfoot said.
I moved my head up and down in what I thought looked something like a nod. I mean – who was I to argue with a nine foot tall Sasquatch?
“If you look that word mythical up in a dictionary you are going to read that a myth is nothing more than a traditional or invented or legendary story that usually concerns some being or hero or event – with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation – especially one that is concerned with deities or demigods and that explains some practice, rite or phenomenon of nature – such as WHERE DOES THUNDER COME FROM?” Bigfoot explained. “Do you got it?”
I nodded.
“That is a nice definition,” the Coyote said. “Did you practice that much?”
“Every morning in front of the bathroom mirror,” Bigfoot said. “It pays to be ready. There’s just no telling when SOMEBODY is going to ask you a very stupid question.”
I just kept on nodding hoping that I would wake up soon.
I think my neck muscles might have seized up on over-nod.
“Did you ever hear anybody tell a story called Butterhead?” Bigfoot asked me.
I shook my head no. It felt strangely good to me after all of that nodding.
“Let me tell it to you, then,” Bigfoot said – and then before I could nod or shake my head he started in on telling it.
“This boy was visiting his Auntie and she gave him a piece of cake to take on home to his Momma. So he took that piece of cake in his fist and he carried it on home and by the time he got home the cake was fist-squeezed down to nothing but a handful of crumbs.”
Coyote laughed at that.
“That isn’t no way to carry cake, the boy’s Momma told him. The next time your Auntie gives you some to carry home you ought to wrap it up in some clean leaves and carry it home under your hat.”
“Hadn’t he ever heard of a cake box?” I asked.
“Isn’t the point,” Bigfoot said – and then he got back to telling. “Come the next week Auntie gave the boy a pound of fresh, sweet butter to take home for his Momma and he wrapped that butter in some clean leaves and carried it on home under his hat but by the time he got on home the butter had melted and run down the boy’s forehead, nose and chin.”
“I hate it when that happens,” Coyote added.
“That isn’t no way to carry butter, the boy’s Momma said. The next time your Auntie gives you some butter to carry home you ought to cool it in a clear flowing stream before you go trying to carry it.”
A part of me wanted to ask Bigfoot just how he figured you could soak a pound of butter in a cool running stream and another part of me wanted to ask just what this story had to do with anything at all but he kept on talking and telling way too fast for me to get so much as a thought wedged in around his storytelling.
“Come the next week Auntie gave the boy a cat to take to his Momma, who was trouble with rats, so the boy took the cat on down to the stream and tried cooling it but that didn’t work out too well and by the time the boy got home he was all scratched and tore up and his Momma laughed at him and said that the next time his Auntie gave him something to carry he ought to tie a little string around its neck and let it walk on home.”
“Yeah,” Coyote said, with a twist of a grin. “Just picture trying to walk a cat with a string. That’d work out really well.”
“Come the next week Auntie gave the boy a loaf of bread to carry on home to his Momma to eat so he tied a piece of string to the loaf of bread and he dragged it on home and by the time he got home it wasn’t fit for a cat to eat and his Momma just shook her head in disgust and said that she wasn’t going to waste her time giving him any more sort of advice but that she had left six fat mincemeat pies cooling on the back steps and the boy ought to be careful about stepping in those pies so the boy walked on out back and he stepped in the middle of EACH of those six fat mincemeat pies one after another, just like his Momma had told him to.”
“So what does that have to do with anything at all?” I finally had to ask.
“It’s a story,” Bigfoot said. “Which is another word for a myth. Boys are ALWAYS not listening and not thinking and goofing things up and that’s all that the story is about – the way that it is easy for a boy or anybody at all to get the wrong idea from not listening and thinking hard enough.”
I still could not get it and I told Bigfoot so.
“Just try and think of it this way,” Bigfoot said, returning his attention to me. “A myth is nothing more than a lie that someone tells you when you are too young or too stupid to really know the difference.”
I gave him one more nod.
“Usually, we can lay the blame squarely on the parents,” Bigfoot went on, kneeling down beside what was left of Warren. “So is this your Dad?”
I wasn’t going to let that pass.
“He’s not my Dad,” I said. “He’s just my stepdad.”
“Does that mean I can step on him?” Bigfoot asked. “I washed my feet last week and I even used soap on one of them.”
I thought about that.
“No,” I said. “It just means that he married my Mom after my real Dad had to go.”
“So why did your real Dad have to go when he had to go?” Bigfoot asked.
I thought about that too.
The truth of it was Dad and Mom had gone off in completely different directions a l-o-n-g time before the baby carriage bomb had ever gone off.
That’s all that Mom ever said about it – she just told me that her and Dad had both gone in different ways – like a good Boy Scout compass or maybe even a GPS or a good map would have kept the two of them together.
Now I am seventeen years old and I know fully well what the word d-i-v-o-r-c-e means – only Mom never ever used that word. As far as she was concerned she and Dad had just gone their separate ways – like he’d lost his way and just wandered off.
“I’m not sure, I guess,” I said to Bigfoot. “All I know is that Warren took Mom to a dance and step on her foot so hard that he fractured it.”
It was true.
Mom had to wear a cast for six weeks after. Warren spent the whole time at our house bringing her cups of tea and cooking her meals and cleaning the house and apologizing. It darned near drove me crazy listening to him go on about how sorry he was.
Worse yet, the only thing the man knew how to cook were grilled cheese sandwiches.
I don’t think that I can ever stare another slice of processed cheese in the face if I live to be a thousand years old.
“You’re not actually sure about that, then?” Bigfoot asked. “Are you?”
“I was awfully young when it happened,” I explained. “But I always figured that it was my Mom’s idea.”
“But you don’t really know for sure.”
I did not.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said. “My real Dad is dead now.”
“You’re sure about that too, are you?” Bigfoot asked.
I wasn’t exactly certain what he meant by that – whether he meant that I wasn’t sure about it not mattering, or if I wasn’t sure about why Mom and Dad had divorced in their own separate ways – or if he had meant something completely entirely different.
But I would remember that question for some time to come.
“Ah well. Stepdad or Dad, it’s all the same difference to me,” Bigfoot said, tearing what was left of Warren’s windbreaker from off of his chili-con-carne chest. “He still looks to be hurt pretty bad right now. Stepping on him MIGHT actually be an improvement.”
“Pretty bad?” I repeated slowly. “Warren?”
I didn’t know what to do or say. Here was my stepdad, the guy I supposedly hated, with his chest torn up so badly that it looked like he was wearing a bowl of chili-con-carne for a shirt. I ought to be Christmas-Day-happy but for some reason I couldn’t seem to muddle past surprise algebra pop-quiz-glum.
Bigfoot leaned down close enough to breathe on Warren’s wounds.
All I could see was a whole mouth full of teeth.
Oh my god.
He was going to eat my stepdad right there in front of me.
“Do you have any moss?” Bigfoot asked.
“Moss?”
I wondered if he needed the moss to make himself a salad to go along with all of this people-meat – which got me to thinking about the way that Mom was always after me and Warren eating salad with our meals. She always said that salad was good for our cholesterol – so maybe Cape Breton Bigfeet worried about their cholesterol levels.
“What are you, an echo chamber?” Bigfoot asked, reaching over and yanking some moss from the foot of a nearby tree. “You know, MOSS – the green stuff that grows on trees. Why don’t you see if you can find some moss and maybe some cobwebs in that alder thicket. There ought to be some dew glinting on the cobwebs this time of the morning. Just look for the shimmer and you’ll be fine.”
I got up and ran to the alders he was pointing at. It happened to be the very same alder bush thicket that rain cloud that the coyote had jumped off of had landed in.
I could see the alder bushes just fine.
I could even see the shimmer that Bigfoot told me I’d see.
What I couldn’t see was just why I was doing exactly what Bigfoot told me to do – except that maybe doing anything felt better than me doing nothing at all.
So I ran into the alders.
Now – for those of you who don’t know quite what an alder is I can tell you that an alder is basically a sort of a weed tree. An alder will sprout pretty anywhere it wants to and just as soon as it sprouts up it begins to spread into big old thickets that will fill in the gaps where the trees left off and they’ll choke out the younger trees. They’re not really much good for anything but getting in the way of things.
I ran into those alders and I hit that alder thicket like it was a solid brick wall.
I’m telling you it hurt – and it did not make one single bit of sense.
I mean, all that I could see in front of me was just sticks and branches but I flattened out against it like somebody had parked a nine-mile-high planet-wide car in the middle of that alder thicket and I had run smack flat dab against the car door.
I fell flat on my back and when I looked up Bigfoot and the Coyote were both standing over me and laughing. Bigfoot was carrying what was left of Warren in his arms like he was nothing more than a little baby.
“That’ll teach you to call me mythical,” Bigfoot said, with a low rumbling chuckle that would have drowned out any avalanche you care to name.
I just lay there and groaned a little while the earth continued to spin in both directions at once.
And then the mystic pink Winnebago showed up.
Right out of thin blue air.