“Okay guy. I’ve got a story idea to challenge your twisted mind. Bigfoot. I’m really into Bigfoot documentaries. I want you to do a story about Bigfoot, and to really throw a curve in there I want him to be a millionaire!”
-Gene
Darrin “Sasquey” Erikson, last of his kind, and scion of the Yankee Cup Company, stood over the grave of his father—his adopted human father that's is. He was accompanied in his grief by Jose, the Mexican landscaper, Miss Emory the cook, and Mister Miller, his father's personal attorney.
Jose was laying turf over the grave as Darrin leaned on his shovel.
Miss Emory was crying silently, sobbing so hard that her shoulders heaved.
Mister Miller reached up and put his hands on his shoulder and said, "We should return to my office."
Miss Emory sobbed harder and Jose looked up from his loving work and said,
"I got this Sasquey. Poppy is going to be tucked in good."
He walked away slowly, matching his long strides so that Mister Miller could keep pace. He looked within and back over a long uneventful life. There was the stoning of the men in their cabin that he engaged in with—"Oh dear, I cannot recall, buy it was great fun."
Mister Miller spoke with a note of compassion, laced with some irritation, "Reminiscing about stoning the miner again, in their cabin with Quill and Hoop?"
"Yes, thank you. My memory has been failing me."
"Do you think it could have something to do with all of the pot you smoke?"
"It' shouldn't. Pot reduces short term memory not long term recollections."
"And so it does, among humans. You're showing your age. A hundred and forty is just a guess. Your biological parents didn't tell you how old you were."
"They didn't believe in that. They were traditionalists."
"Of course, with their suicide, we have precious little of their traditions to guide us in ascertaining the best course—"
"Oh, so you're blaming them, blaming the victims? They died of despair because of what the white man was doing. We had gotten along fine with the First Ones."
They had now come to the door of Mister Miler's office on the Yankee Cup Company side of the estate where all of the business was done. He had never been permitted on the business side during the week when employees would be about. He did, however, study them through his binoculars and telescope, had done so since he reached adolescence a half century ago. How many times had he wondered what it must be like to be an ignorant human with a care only for making their living in these matter-of-fact ways. Of late there had been fewer employees, and less still were the visitors.
He held the door for Mister Miller and then followed him in and took a seat on the floor against the wall, which creaked, for Mister Miller had always been particular about the longevity and condition of his furniture.
Mister Miller cleared his little throat in his unpleasant way and opened a slim book, a book over 100 years old, from which his predecessors had read to Darrin upon the passing of his first adopted father, Henry Anders Erikson, and his son Carl Errin Erikson. Henry had saved Darrin from bear hunters in 1904, and had drawn up this adoption pledge, so to speak. The fact that he could not recall the words within pained Darrin to no end. his mind was falling. The crafts he had learned from Bill Coyote, who had come visiting all through his childhood, and the stories preserved from the other First Nation visitors who had been invited as representatives to speak with the last of the creatures that had been sacred to their ancestors now haunted him—did not even seem like solid recollections, but dreams, dreams streaked now with tears.
Mister Miller's voice droned on in its croaking way, "Having attained fluency in English under my tutelage, I Henry Anders Erikson do recognize Darrin as my son and heir. The proceeds of the Yankee Cup Company shall be devoted to the maintenance of this refuge and his care."
As Mister Miller droned on Darrin could not help but feel pity for his three human fathers, who had all lived, essentially in service to him, adopting their sons from that Manhattan orphanage, except, that was, for Joe Anderson, who he had just buried. This hurt the most as he and Joe had been bot father and son, but the best of friends.
He could barely stand to hear any more of the litany of arrangements originally penned for his own well-being over 1000 years ago, before he ever knew what a year was, back when he still felt and thought in terms of the seasons. Darrin reached into his fanny pack and retrieved the fifth of Petron from among the case Jose brought home on Tuesday, and knocked it back. The numbing bliss washed over him as the warm blood of the agave plant washed down into his belly and drove the sorrow in his mind deeper into his being.
Mister Miller was reading angrily now, snapping about something called "rehab" and something else called a "twelve-step-program" and going on to close the book with a huff and snark, "Yankee Cup Company is in receivership, Mister Erikson, and the estate, as the corporate headquarters is on the auction block. We are broke Darrin! Are you listening to me, son?"
Thinking warm thoughts of Brit, the redneck handyman who passed a few years ago and had been Darrin's best buddy, he raised one hand, balled all of the fingers except for the middle on up, and belched, "Fuck you pencil neck—you're fired."
Sleep fell over him like Pop Henry's bison hide blanket as the door slammed and the bottle of Petron hit the hardwood floor with a dull thud.
"Sasquey, Sasquey, wake the fuck up Bro!"
"What, Jose? what is going on?"
"Bro, that fаggot Miller is calling in the geek squad—turned my ass in to INS and has a bunch of History Channel freaks with fucked up hair and electronic bullchit searching the place. They're headed over here. They even have some weirdass bitch with tweezers plucking your hairs out of your recliner in Poppy's screening room. Come on, Bro, get your big ass in gear. I've got the truck out back."
Darrin sprang up from the floor, smashed his head on the ceiling, which caved in around his shoulder with a shower of drywall dust and then followed Jose as the wiry little Mexican—about the body mass of Darrin's leg—led him through the company office, out into the record room, and through the long unused stockroom, final to emerge from a rusty-hinged door before Mister Miller's Hummer.
Darrin then stopped and Jose flew off the ground and swung back around as Darrin held his little hand tightly.
"Jose, where is mister Miller. And why didn't he have the History Channel geeks come get me from his office?"
Jose blurted, "Faggot's a traitorous somebody, Bro. I beat his ass when he paid me off 'cause I knew, Bro. He took Miss Emory away in her car—mutherfucker is repoing her shit after he dropped her off at the bus station—got pissed about the ass beating and said he was gonna sick the INS on me. I was grabbing our shit and then I see all of these geeks and freaks. You need to see this shit. Come on man."
Jose tugged pathetically at Darrin's hand and he let himself be led around to the corner of the business wing. Jose had been truthful. People with investigative gear and white lab coats were crawling all over the place. there were two film crews.
Poppy had never let Darrin watch TV, neither had Grandpoppy. they did watch DVDs and before that VHS tapes of documentaries and select movies. Recently Jose had talked poppy into letting them watch the History Channel and the Discovery Channel on Shark Week. So Darrin knew he was looking at the real deal when he saw the film crews and the crypto-zoologists. Despite his raging hangover he had to suppress a chuckle when he noticed the long haired ape guy and the dreamy professor that actually believed a bunch of Darrin's were running around out there. These humans had no idea as to the symbiosis between the First Nation visionaries and the Sasquatch—had no idea that Darrin was half human. Of course someone would find out after they cut him up on a dissection table!
"Come on, Bro, we gotta roll!"
Jose was pulling him—almost—toward the Hummer. Darrin followed gingerly and they loaded in. Ashe sat hunched in the passenger seat set his seat back to recline and then
the large hooded yellow raincoat over him that had been his outerwear when walking the margins of the property where he might have been scene by neighbors.
"Thanks for the raincoat, Jose."
"No problem, Bro. Just lay back and watch some TV. Look at this shit here, what Miller had goin' for himself, taking all of Poppy's money on the sly."
Darrin looked up at the small TV monitor in the ceiling of the truck and saw a bunch of small men running around kicking ball. "Here you go, Bro, the World Cup. Watch this while Jose gets your big hairy ass clear of this geek shit."
They rolled off the property with no problems and Jose began speeding down the winding road through the deep woods as Darrin viewed the pointless video of the ball kicking. Finally he had had enough. "Jose, can you find something else. This is mind draining."
"You fuckin' Americans don' know what's good, Bro—here you go, some American shit for you—tennis!"
Darrin was momentarily puzzled by the activity, and the noticed that e was viewing tall blonde woman and a, a—goddess, a wonderful creature of nature! The women were taking turns attacking a small ball with a snow show-shaped club, and, "Oh, Baby!" Darrin groaned, feeling a yearning in his groin that he had not felt since he watched King Kong with Grandpoppy as a young one.
"Jose, who is that—who is she?"
Jose looked at the monitor and sorted dismissively, "Good God bro, that big-ass scary bitch! That's Serena Williams—you like that, Bro?"
"Where is this happening? Where are they attacking the yellow ball?"
"Oh, those rich fаggots do that gay shit in New York. My cousin sweeps the parking lot."
"Take me to New York."
"Are you stupid, Bro? They'll see you. The gig will be up. Look, I got these friends down in Mexico—cousins really. They got they own army, will be able to protect you. In fact, we meetin' them halfway—Oh My God, Bro, what the hell did you shit or die!"
"Sorry about that Jose. That's my seminal glands juicing up. It's a more complex process for us, and hasn't happened to me for sixty, seventy years. After Faye Wray I never thought I'd fall in love again."
Jose was vomiting on the dash board and ran the Hummer into the bank. When he did so a body flew up onto the gear box, and it was Mister Miller, with his throat slit and his tongue pulled down through the hole. Jose, wiping the vomit from his chin, and Darrin, shedding a tear of anger as his mating musk-filled the truck, both looked at Jose's obvious murder victim, looked at each other, and acted with desperation. Jose reached for the butt of a hand gun that had slid out from under the driver's seat when they lurched to a stop. He was little and quick and Darrin was old and slow. But Darrin was motivated by a deep primal urge and a rare rage that had never come over him in the past.
He would have thought that Jose's head would have remained in one piece as he punched it, but it broke apart like the time he dropped his watermelon on the patio in 1972.
Darrin Erikson sat amongst a cockpit of horror, his two remaining friends dead, one at his own hand.
Before he could be overcome by grief he heard the sweet feminine grunt of the beauty named Serena attacking the yellow ball. The seep of love was upon him. The scent that used to attract First Nation Women from days away when they got the call to join with Mother Earth, oozed from him in waves of chemical urge. The scent that had once guided First Nation visionaries to their dreaming place and their tryst with a sasquatch female informed the world around him. The bears, if there were any, would shun his path. And, as he tossed the rag doll figures from the truck window, and put the thing back in drive, Darrin Erikson knew that there was only one path for him, to New York, straight through Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
The Hummer picked up speed as he drove down toward Lake Michigan, and with every beautiful grunt of a stricken yellow ball, and a glance up at the dainty desire of his dreamtime, Darrin's huge heart beat that much swifter.
"Oh, Serena Baby, please spend the night in New York. It's our sacred place you know!"
