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Did you ever hear a story that you told yourself you would never forget?
Did you ever swear that you were going to remember something only you didn’t?
Did you ever set out to commit every single detail of something you had heard into the lockbox of your memory – only to find out that your lockbox had rusted shut a long time ago and you had already lost the key to the lockbox an d besides - your mother had already thrown that lockbox last Saturday in a fit of sudden Spring cleaning.
That was how my whole life suddenly seemed.
Everything that I thought I knew about my Dad had somehow turned into a full-blown lie.
He wasn’t a hero.
He hadn’t died in Afghanistan.
He didn’t even like dogs.
Besides all of that, he had clearly demonstrated a very bad habit of pulling heads off of dropkicked and speared-to-death Sasquatches.
I closed my eyes and did my very best to push past all of the stories that I had told myself about my Dad.
It was hard.
It was a little like fighting fog.
I had been telling myself those stories for so many years they were all I really had to believe in, but maybe they were nothing more than lies I had been telling myself.
What did I really remember about my Dad?
Not that much, come to think of it.
Dad was always somewhere else.
I looked down at that Bigfoot head that was still lying in the dirt beside me just exactly where Dad’s pet Mannegishi had dragged and dropped it.
I was chained to the side of the cage that Coyote was locked inside. I don’t really know where the Mannegishi had found a cage like that out here in the wilderness. Maybe they had made it out of magic. Maybe they had found it in a jailhouse yard sale.
I don’t know.
I tried not to stare at Bigfoot’s head.
The flies were buzzing around that rotting head-meat like they were telling themselves long bedtime stories about fat and grease and garbage and decaying Sasquatch heads.
I’m not saying that it was pretty.
The daylight slipped away like sand running out of a broken hourglass. Darkness tucked in over the land and I closed my eyes and thought about sleep.
“No,” a voice said. “Don’t look away.”
It was Warren’s voice.
“Don’t you EVER dare look away again,” Warren’s voice said. “You keep your eyes wide open and you will live to tell.”
I looked down in the direction that the voice was coming from.
I knew what I was going to see before I even saw it.
It was Bigfoot who was talking but it was my Stepdad Warren’s voice that was coming from out of Bigfoot’s talking mouth. Worse yet, I could see Warren’s beady little eyes staring out from Bigfoot’s big shaggy eyeholes.
“Whatever happens,” Bigfoot/Warren went on. “Don’t you ever dare to look away again, not even for a minute. Remember, life is like a movie with no reruns ever. You don’t want to blink. You don’t want to miss a single shining moment of it.”
“I’m not blinking,” I said sincerely. “My eyes are stuck wide open.”
It was fear that was keeping my eyes open – but I guess that was good enough for Bigfoot/Warren.
“Good,” Bigfoot/Warren said. “Keep them that way.”
“So are you really actually dead?” I asked. “That would definitely be an important thing for me to know in this particular situation.”
“Well that’s a whole other story,” Bigfoot/Warren replied. “But I think that by now you really ought to know that stories never die so long as people remember to tell them.”
“That’s still not an answer,” I said.
“You’re looking at me,” Bigfoot/Warren said. “And I am talking to you. Is there really anything else that you need to know?”
I blinked my eyes.
I guess I shouldn’t have blinked because all of a sudden I was just looking at a dead severed Sasquatch head.
I guess I shouldn’t have blinked.
“Is there anything else you need to know?” a voice from behind me asked.
I looked around, startled.
It was Coyote who was talking to me.
“What happened to that thread that was sticking your mouth together?” I asked. “And what about those raven feathers that were keeping you all cheerful and dumb?”
“Those raven feathers weren’t really keeping me cheerful and dumb on account of they were nothing more than a couple of crow feathers I grabbed out of a passing murder of crows,” Coyote explained. “Besides that, you ought to have figured out by now that I am dumb by nature and I absolutely HATE cheerful with a passion.”
“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.