Monkey Beach (38 page)

God, I’m rude, I thought. I didn’t even thank him for the ride home. “Do you want some coffee?”

He must have said yes because we went into the kitchen and he made coffee. He stayed, then left. Aunt Trudy and Josh came back, but went upstairs.

Someone honked outside, and I picked up my plastic grocery bag and went to the window. It was Frank’s car so I went outside. He raised an eyebrow at my bag but put it in the trunk without saying anything. Karaoke was asleep in the backseat, her hair sticking out from under a blanket. Frank asked if I wanted breakfast and I said I wasn’t hungry. We drove and came into Williams Lake. Frank looked tired so I said we should stop and have something to eat. He said there was a twenty-four-hour place that had just opened up. The place had a ruffled, country kitchen-type decor. A group of noisy truckers was sitting in the back, where the smoking section was. Frank settled into a table by the window. “Do you still see ghosts?”

I sat opposite him. “Yeah. Sometimes. When I’m sober. Did you see something?”

He nodded. “Pooch. I saw Pooch.”

“The day he shot himself?”

He nodded again.

“That’s a death sending,” I said. “It’s nothing to worry about. He probably just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Mm-hmm,” Frank said, obviously only half-listening, distressed. “I saw that. He said … he …”

“Hey, hey, hey,” I said when he started to hyperventilate. “You don’t even have to tell me, okay?”

He nodded.

“You know,” I said, to change the subject, “I like the chocolate ones with sprinkles.”

“What?” he said, looking alarmed.

“Donuts. Do you want one?”

“Yeah. I like those ones too. I was in prison once.”

“What for?”

“Small stuff. Nothing major. Just a B & E. Failure to appear. Disturbing the peace.”

“Disturbing the peace?”

“Got into a fight with a drinking buddy. We broke some windows.” Frank leaned forward. In a hushed voice, he said, “Listen …” He stopped again. He seemed to want to say something important, but I wasn’t up to any big revelations.

“I’m going to get you a donut.”

When I came back, he was smoking and a woman at the table next to us pointed to the no-smoking sign so he butted it out.

“I can take over now,” I said. “I’ll get us to Prince George.”

He frowned, then looked outside to the car. “I dunno. My car’s a standard.”

“That’s okay. Pooch taught me.”

He broke his donut into pieces and dunked it. “Everyone always said, that Frank, he’s never going to amount to anything. Guess they were right.” He examined his fingernails. “I always wanted to ask you out. But I figured you deserved better. Then you went out with Pooch.”

“He was a good guy,” I said.

“To Pooch,” he said, raising his coffee cup.

“To Pooch,” I said.

I drove us to Prince George. We woke Karaoke up for dinner. When we got back in the car, she promptly fell asleep again. Frank said he was ready to take over, but halfway to Smithers, he started to drift and I said I was fine. The sun was getting low. I turned the headlights on. The road had started to curve and the hills were getting steeper so I slowed down. A squall hit, and the wipers squealed against the glass. As I was driving around a curve, a man came out of the bushes and crossed the road ten metres ahead of me. As I slammed on the brakes, he paused in the headlights, his head turning sharply in surprise, then he broke into a jog and disappeared into the trees. The memory of him is imprinted on my brain—the dark brown fur on his back, the lighter fur on his chest, the long hairy arms, the sharply tilted forehead and the row of pointed teeth he flashed at me when he snarled.

Frank woke when I opened the car door and the lights inside went on. He came out and stood beside me as I peered into the trees, listening to the bushes snap as the sasquatch made his getaway.

“What’s wrong?” Frank muttered, rubbing his eyes.

For a moment, I considered sharing my b’gwus sighting with him. But then I decided that I didn’t want to sound cracked. “I saw a moose. Almost hit it.”

“Oh,” he said before he went back into the car, dropped his head against the seat and closed his eyes.

I got soaked standing in the rain. I stood there until I couldn’t hear the bushes breaking. The highway was dark and silent. As I drove away, I felt deeply
comforted knowing that magical things were still living in the world.

The shore is a brown sliver between the vast expanse of choppy ocean and the patchwork green of untouched forest. Mountains slope into the water, where the waves foam against the barnacle- and seaweed-encrusted rocks. A bear—a hazy, dark brown figure in the distance down the shore—paws at the seaweed. It raises its head, stands on its hind legs, and for a moment, as it swivels around and does a rambling, awkward walk into the woods, it looks human.

“Lisa.” They call to me from the trees. “Lisa.”

My arm hurts from holding the throttle. Haven’t been out on the water for weeks. I still have six or seven hours of riding ahead of me before I hit Namu. I want to stay here on Monkey Beach. Some places are full of power, you can feel it, like a warmth, a tingle. No sasquatches are wandering around the beach today, chased by ambitious, camera-happy boys. Just an otter lounging in the kelp bobbing in the surf and the things in the trees, which may or may not be my imagination.

“Lisa,” the first voice whispers. “We can help you.”

The tide is going down and my speedboat is halfway out of the water. I should hurry, if I want to get to Namu before dark. As I walk across the beach, my feet
crunch against the shells. Cockles are a favourite food of B’gwus, the wild man of the woods. He uses sticks to dig cockles out of the sand. Clams are his second favourite food. Monkey Beach is popular with B’gwus because it has so many cockles and clams. In clams, the sexes are usually separate, but cockles are hermaphrodites. Clams and cockles spawn at different times of the year. At this moment, the cockles are spawning. The eggs and sperm are squirted into the water, making it cloudy. Baby clams and cockles are called larvae. They swim around until they get big enough to drop to the bottom and grow shells. Muscles attached to the shells open and close the clams and cockles to let in food or to let out the foot to burrow. Clams have black tongues because a long time ago the world was on fire and the clams tried to put it out by spitting.

B’gwus is famous because of his wide range of homes. In some places, he’s called Bigfoot. In other places, he’s Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman, or Sasquatch. To most people, he is the equivalent of the Loch Ness monster, something silly to bring the tourists in. His image is even used to sell beer, and he is portrayed as a laid-back kind of guy, lounging on mountaintops in patio chairs, cracking open a frosty one.

B’gwus is the focus of countless papers, debates and conferences. His Web site is at www.sasquatch.com. Grainy pictures, embarrassed witnesses and the muddy impressions of very large feet keep B’gwus on the front page of tabloids and the cover of books which are dismissed as the results of overactive imaginations or imbibing too much alcohol or ingesting funky mushrooms.

Most sightings of this shy creature are of single males, but B’gwus is part of a larger social complex, complete with its own clans, stories and wars. There are rumours that they killed themselves off, fighting over some unfathomable cause. Other reports say they starved to death near the turn of the century, after a decade of horrific winters. A variation of this rumour says that they were infected with TB and smallpox, but managed to survive by leaving the victims to die in the woods. They are no longer sighted, no longer make dashes into villages to carry off women and children, because they avoid disease-ridden humans.

At night, very late and in remote parts of British Columbia, if you listen long enough, you sometimes hear him. His howl is not like a wolf’s and not like a human’s, but is something in between. It rings and echoes off the mountains, and you can convince yourself it is a wolf or maybe a pack of inebriated teenagers 4×4ing it up some logging road, but if your body reacts by tensing, if your skin tightens into goose bumps, your instincts are warning you that he is still around.

I shake my muscles out then pull my jacket close. I grab my bail and start shoveling the bilge out of the bottom of my speedboat. The wild man has been spotted several times digging in the sand of Monkey Beach. Some people claimed he was a bear, but I doubt that the bears around here need clams and cockles when the salmon are so much easier to get at.

I sat between Frank and Karaoke during Pooch’s funeral, not looking to see if Mom and Dad had come. Frank drove us to the graveyard. We stayed at the back of the crowd and didn’t talk to anyone. After the service,
we went back to Frank’s apartment. While some old Van Halen tunes played on the radio, we sat around not saying anything.

“Did he say anything to you guys?” Frank said.

I shook my head. “Not to me. But we didn’t talk much.”

“We all know why he did it,” Karaoke said.

“Shut up,” Frank said. “Just shut up.”

“Yes, let’s not talk about it. Josh didn’t—”

“Shut. Up.”

They were both quiet. Frank started telling me about his new satellite dish.

A cousin knocked on the door around midnight and invited us to a party. Frank said he wasn’t interested, but Karaoke said she was good to go. We went to an apartment that turned out to be two apartments down from where Uncle Mick stayed when he was in Kitimat. I shivered. Karaoke knocked on the door and then opened it and let us in. Half the people were rank, and the other half were getting there. I breathed in all the familiar smells, then stopped cold at the sight of Cheese and a girl in the corner, sharing a Silent Sam forty-ouncer.

Cheese, pissed out of his gourd, saw me and said, “Freaky’s here! Talking to fucking ghosts. Right! You’re so fucking special.”

“Ease off, Cheese,” Karaoke said as he sang the theme song to
Ghostbusters
. She gave me an apologetic look. “He’s tanked. Won’t remember this in the morning, will you, Cheese? Come on, help me get him to the car.”

The girl on his arm said, “He’s with me.”

“I’m his cousin. You want a ride home too?”

“I’m going where Cheese goes.”

“Fine. You want to meet his parents now? Hmm? Didn’t think so,” she said as the other girl glowered at her.

“You’re such a freak,” Cheese muttered. “You’re super-freaky.”

“I’ll …” Karaoke paused, her eyes caught by something behind me. I turned in time to see Jimmy come through the front door. He’d grown his hair so that it was shoulder length and I guessed chlorine in the pool had highlighted parts of his hair to light brown. He wore jeans, a blue T-shirt and a brown leather jacket. I didn’t recognize any of the guys he was with because they weren’t from his swim team. I ducked behind Cheese before my brother could spot me, and was trying to figure out a way to leave inconspicuously when Cheese started shouting for more beer and Jimmy looked towards us. His eyes met Karaoke’s. His smile was instantaneous, warm and shy. She breathed in hard, then ducked her head and said to Cheese, “You think you can walk by yourself to the car?”

“Screw you,” he said, pushing her away. “I am having a gooooood time!”

I thought, this apartment was exactly like Mick’s, there’d be a back door out of the kitchen. I turned to leave but found Jimmy standing in front of me.

“Where the hell have you been?” he said.

“Here and there,” I said.

“That’s all you have to say? You’ve been gone for—”

“All right, all right. I’m inconsiderate. Good to see you, too. Karaoke’s over there.”

He put down the beers he was carrying on a side table and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Are you going home? They’d really like to see you.”

“Jeez, you’ve gotten tall. How’s swimming?”

He flinched. “I quit.”

“You quit?”

“Yeah. I quit.”

Cheese and another guy started pounding each other in the living room. Karaoke threw her hands in the air and stomped away. Jimmy watched her go. I couldn’t imagine him out of the water.