Cryptozoology
Kathleen McNamara
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Fiction
Illustration by Magnus van der Marel
My spine is hooked on an invisible line, and every few minutes I feel a sharp yank on the barb.
"Yanked by what?" says Josh, rolling tobacco muck between his gums.
"A cloud-dwelling fisherman. Or Earth's magnetic fields. Or my ex-wife's voodoo dolls. Take your pick."
He suggests sciatica. It's July in North Pole, Alaska: the time of year when the sun winds a tight circle above us, tracing a halo. We're stationed in Fairbanks, and Josh and I run errands before softball on base. We've seen three foxes this morning, hunting along the highway. Josh swears it's good luck: "No way we'll lose to the medics." He pounds his fist into the mitt. I want to agree, but I'm distracted. When we reach the post office, I almost crash my truck into a metal candy cane welded to the ground by the entrance sign.
"Son of a bitch." Josh braces himself against the dashboard, whistling. Spits brown sludge into a Styrofoam cup wedged between his thighs. "Don't kill me yet. Give the terrorists a shot." He's grinning: a joke.
Inside, our crush Swayzee works the counter. We bet she can't be older than twenty-three—Josh's age. She's got hair like ropes of spaghetti always caught at the side of her mouth. She asks everyone who isn't there to buy stamps if they want to buy stamps: manager's orders. Now I've got five books of them stashed next to the dishwasher.
We watch her kick a plastic crate toward the new guy in a delivery uniform. "All of these are addressed to Santa," she says. "We get like a hundred every morning. Then another hundred in the afternoon. Old man likes reading them." The old man is a member of the city council who changed his legal name to Kris Kringle. He runs Santa Claus House and dresses in a red suit year-round—sitting in his Santa throne among thousands of miniature Santas, and train sets, and elf statues, and frosted plastic trees glistening with tinsel, all slapped with price tags. Makes a killing whenever the tourists pull in.
"Next." A ringing in my ear makes it hard to hear, and Josh nudges me toward Swayzee, lovesick goon-smile plastered to his face. She pops her gum and looks us up and down as if to say she has ten thousand better ways to spend her time. Reminds me of my ex-wife, Brenda, who I loved the way all the country songs said I should. I give Swayzee the notice I found in my mailbox—insufficient postage—and she comes back with a care package from my mother in Oregon. Mom started sending them when I was still a kid, just landed in Afghanistan, and never stopped. Said she did it so I wouldn't forget what we were fighting for. First time she sent one, I wrote her a thank-you note: "It's good to know I'm fighting for Girl Scout cookies, sunscreen, beef jerky, and handheld video games."
"No," she responded, "you're fighting for freedom." For a while I liked the sound of that. We both knew the real reason I enlisted: I enlisted because on my eighteenth birthday, I purchased a Ford Mustang with a seventeen-and-a-half-percent interest rate. I grew up on welfare with four brothers and one parent in a house with a cement floor. I needed the signing bonus.
"Can I interest you in a book of stamps?"
Josh raises his hand like a schoolkid, frog-eyes glazed with longing. "Me. I'll take one."
Swayzee talks into her computer screen: "One customer transaction at a time." I pay the difference, and Josh buys the stamps, lingering at the counter even though she's looking past him.
"Bye, Swayzee." Josh waves.
"Next."
*
We stop for lunch at the Dream Palace. It's against Army rules, but I'm Josh's CO, and we figure an afternoon show can't be as raunchy as late night. Josh convinces me: "Everyone knows they have the best fried chicken."
I park in back, where the American flag airbrushed on my tailgate won't be recognizable from the street, and where moose lope through the mud like they're curious about the girls inside.
Inside, they're blasting Journey's greatest hits while Goldie Rush climbs a pole, burlesque tassels on her nipples. She's a nice girl; she'll give you half a free lap dance if you show her your military ID. Says it's her patriotic duty. Second half is twenty bucks. A redhead named Diamond greets us at the velvet-curtained entrance.
"You two again?" Diamond has pre-emphysema voice. After her third kid, she retired from the stage and started waiting tables. She holds out menus and points us to our seats, but when I pull out a chair to sit down, I'm frozen. In my back, I feel pain like walls cracking. A claw has crawled up my spine: seizing bone, ligament, muscle.
"What's wrong?" I can read Diamond's moving lips, but I can't hear her. All I can hear is shrieking tinnitus, sharp enough to mute "Don't Stop Believing". Then it's gone, and so is she. Josh leans forward in his chair, slides me a menu. I sit down carefully.
"I know a chiropractor you can see. Went there myself. And sent Goldie to him once, when she threw out her back. Look at her now." He nods toward stage. Goldie has a gold-dusted leg wrapped around the pole. She spins upside down, hair dangling to the floor. Her face turns plum with blood and gravity. "And she's in heels." He grins, like he's the one invented strippers.
At the softball game, when I throw from third to first, it feels like my arms are toy arms. My spine is a joke-spine, coiling from dirt, attached like a wire spring. The ball clunks into their dugout. The batter advances to second. "Son of a bitch," screams Josh, chucking his glove in the air. We lose 6–4.
*
That weekend, I follow Josh's directions until I reach the end of a dirt road. I leave my truck and set out on foot. Blooms of spotty red mushrooms have sprouted from summer moss, and I walk through clusters of aspen until I find a clearing. Josh said the guy worked miracles on his back after he flipped his car: "He popped shit back there I didn't know I had." My back needs miracles too.
I expect more than what I find: an RV propped on cement blocks in knee-high grass, HOCKAM CHIROPRACTIC painted on the siding. You can hear the rush of the Tanana through the woods.
"There's something wrong with my back," I say when Hockam answers the door. He's got a wind-caked face: features like knots on tree bark. "I can't turn my head to the right." I demonstrate my limited mobility. "When I try, I hear a loud ringing in my left ear."
He rubs his palms together, motions for me to get on his table, then starts testing pressure points. "How's this?" he says, "Or this?" I tell him fine, no problem. I can handle it. He turns me on my side, and I focus on the wood-paneled wall above his desk. He's got an oversized POW MIA decal next to an embroidered patch that says, "Vietnam Veteran Agent Orange Victims" over the outline of a copter raining toxic clouds. Surrounding it are photographs of a young man at various stages of growing up: a mule ride; a Little League portrait; pimpled at the prom with a date and a yellow rose in his lapel.
"That's my son," says Hockam, rolling me onto my gut. "Best damn shortstop in Alaska." I tell him we could use his son on base.
"We have slow-pitch softball in the summer. Yesterday, we lost to the medics. Not a good look for those of us who have been in combat." He grunts. Silence unnerves me, so I tell him that since I got promoted to Sergeant First Class, I don't have to live on base, and I moved out to that fishing lake over by Santa Claus House. When I want to scream, he instructs me to imagine pain as a white flame melting to liquid between my vertebrae.
"Some knot. What'd you do to yourself?" But I can think of too many answers. Perhaps I did it to myself during months of humping gear through Kunar Province and then digging trenches for the outpost in the Valley of Death. Or maybe it was from hauling stones and timber we bought from locals who didn't want to be seen talking to us, so we could build walls that were supposed to keep destruction out but invited it instead. Or it could have happened sometime during those endless nights when the bleating of any lost Korengal goat had me reaching for the M16 and pointing at the shadowy lines of the Abas Ghar ridge, guided by moonlight reflecting off the river.
"It's probably from working out," I say. "Lifting weights." But I doubt it. I hate exercise.
"You know a Bigfoot lives at that lake of yours."
"I did three tours," I say. I'm not sure I heard him right. "Afghanistan and Iraq."
"Whatever you want to call her: the Yeti, Sasquatch, gigantopithecus. When I was a kid in Arizona, we called them Mogollon Monsters. It's all the same species. They're very advanced beings."
"Is that so?" I don't want to laugh at a man who has his hands on my neck. Some of the nerve endings back there are fried, and at moments when I know I should feel pain, instead it comes to me mushy and dull, like I'm made of omelets packed in plastic.
"I've been here ten years, and I've seen her three times. She's blonde." I assume he means blond fur but he says that Bigfoots have hair, not fur, same as us. I hear a sound in my spine like kelp being ripped apart. When I sit up, my blood feels carbonated. "Read this," he says, handing me the North Star Gazette. A photo of an enormous footprint dominates the front page. "Spotted her picking through trash outside the old mining hotel last week. Ran off before they could get a picture. You can hear her sometimes in these woods. Screams like a twenty-foot woman getting branded with a hot iron."
"No kidding." I nod and smile. "You were in Vietnam?" I ask, but he doesn't answer, except to say the session costs fifty bucks. I pay him.
*
That night, I wake up every time the dog stirs. The ringing in my left ear crescendos then subsides, and when I fall into a half-sleep, Blu's tail between my feet, I dream about bodies. I walk the streets of a city that is Kabul and Fallujah and Fairbanks, one block leading to another. Everywhere I go, I see meat hanging on hooks outside storefronts, slabs of meat woven together like quilts and then laid out to dry on the sidewalk. In the dream, I cough and pull vertebrae out of my throat. One after another they appear, like I am a magician performing a trick with a rainbow scarf, except there is no audience. The bones belong to different species of vertebrates: one is an elk Josh and I shot last fall; another belongs to Red, our family husky who choked on a golf ball when I was nine and playing catch with him; two others are the remains of young Afghan sisters who died when an IED exploded outside their home, collapsing its stone walls. The bones fit together like a puzzle, and before long, I am wearing this skeleton lei around my neck, roaming the street in uniform. I pass the Dream Palace, and Mai Thai Restaurant, and sometimes the stores are not stores, but piles of rubble, with blankets of neatly trimmed meat covering destroyed brick, like every broken room is a child, and someone has tucked them into sleep.
When I turn a corner, I find a deli. Inside, our softball team sits at a table, eating sandwiches. Josh says we're about to head back into Korengal and need energy because we have to carry all the ruins in the city to the mountains and use shattered concrete and fragments of meat to rebuild our outpost, and even though none of the guys on the softball team were with me out there with the Second Platoon, it makes sense in the dream, I think, because I feel that same unslakable thirst I remember from that time in my life, and because I can hear that electricity I felt in Korengal whenever I had to run five hundred yards from where the trees ended to our firebase, my feet jumping bullets like popcorn. Josh offers me a sandwich, and I take it. It's raw and cold, and it bleeds in my mouth, and I notice then that I'm not the only one. All of us stand around as blood drips from our mouths. Someone jokes that we are vampires. When I examine the sandwich closer, I can see that between bread, slathered in mayonnaise, is a beating heart, pumping blood from severed arteries, its juice dripping down my arm. I ask Josh what we're eating.
"We caught a Bigfoot," he says, with a red smile. "Bigfoot is the most tender meat you'll ever find in your life." He has a toothpick and stabs at blonde hairs between his teeth. Then someone who is supposed to be our CO appears from behind the deli counter in a bloody butcher's apron, wiping a cleaver on his knee. His face is hidden behind a surgical mask.
"In war," he says, surveying his room, "it's very difficult to say who's responsible."
We nod, holding up our sandwiches like pints of beer. "Hear, hear," we say, digging in.
*
At the dugout on base, I tell Josh about Hockam's Bigfoot. "That's the craziest shit I ever heard," he says, practicing his swing. Josh is twitchy. No fat on him. Joined the Army three years ago, and they still haven't sent him overseas. "I've had enough of these drone strikes." He flexes the bat in his arm. "Just wait till they unleash us. How many CKs you got again?" I don't want to answer. Instead, I rub my head to remind him that before the war, I had hair. Then I take the bat. At the plate, I try to rip the ball when it comes toward me, but I miss. Aluminum slams my back, and I fall into dirt, feeling pain so alive that it seems to have a sound only dogs can hear, clanging the skeleton of an instrument in need of tuning.
"I'm fine," I say, but for a while I can't move, except to taste chalk lines between my teeth.
When I finally flip over, a sergeant major who's been watching the game stands over me.
"We can't have you like this." His voice is familiar. He's the CO from the dream, the butcher who's in charge but not responsible. "Help me get Sullivan to his feet," he calls, and then I'm surrounded by the arms and legs of the US Army, men who call themselves my brothers, lifting me higher and higher until I'm upright and can pretend to walk.
"You're fine, Sullivan," he says. "But I'm ordering you to Bassett." It's the hospital on base. He's got a bat in hand, reflecting the sunlight. It looks like the cleaver from the dream.
"In war," I say, as clouds spin, "it's very difficult to say who's responsible."
"Somebody drive him there," yells the commander.
*
The x-ray film shows families of tumors clumped around my spine like lupine buds. "Your chiropractor may have popped one," says the doctor.
"He's not my chiropractor. I only went to him once."
"It looks like you have about two dozen in there. Could be neurofibromas. Or could be metastasized. Tell me about your other symptoms." As grim reapers go, he's remarkably cheerful. "We should probably look at the rest of your body." I start to talk, but the room is fading in and out, and my voice sounds like the voice of someone on television, a rerun of a sitcom, the volume turned down, and when he says he's sending me to a radiologist for a CT biopsy, I nod and say thanks, even though color has evaporated from the room. He starts looking in my eyes and ears with a scope, sometimes saying "huh" in a way that worries me. After a while, he asks if he needs to arrange a ride home for me, but I tell him I have Josh. Josh is sitting in the waiting room hunched over the glossy pages of Military Spouse.
"How'd it go?"
"I'm dying," I say, and he laughs.
"In the mood for fried chicken and the afternoon show? Goldie's on." I tell him I need sleep. Somehow, in the commotion of my public failure, my shirt ripped, so I go to my office to change, but all I have in there are combat uniforms—desert, forest, night. The angles of the room seem off: the ceiling's too low, and it's tilted. I put on desert. Once-rectangular windows are now trapezoidal. I order Josh to let me drive myself home, and he goes back to his cup of tobacco sludge. In the truck, I watch yellow stripes wobble and shift on asphalt, floating. I end up at Santa Claus House. I want to sit on Santa's lap, but he's a thin Santa, and I'm not thin. Plus I'm in uniform now, with my name sewn to my chest, and a bus of tourists has just arrived, and people are lining up to meet him. I walk between plastic evergreen limbs that fill the store: branches loaded with fruit-shaped glitter bombs and epileptic lights. On a shelf next to a nativity of cats—three wise cats offering gold, frankincense, and purr—and an animatronic Rudolph, I find a Christmas Collectible™ diorama of a baseball diamond, the tableau of a game underway. Santa's fielding both teams. He's pitching; he's at bat; he's stealing third; he's selling peanuts; he's trying to catch a fly ball in center. Elves cheer in the stands. It's too heavy to hang on a tree, too small to sit in the yard, but I'm suddenly overcome by the feeling that all will be right in the world once it's sitting over my fireplace—that it will be like the first Noel, when angels sang, or that Frosty the Snowman will spring to life, or that it will make it true that a fat man like me could fly across the world in one night on magic reindeer, spewing gifts like comet dust.
But when I go up to the counter to pay, I have to wait behind the tourists. It's Swayzee standing at the register. At first, I wonder if I'm hallucinating, but no, it's her, straw-blonde hair caught at her lip, boredom in her eyes. "You work at the post office," I say, when it's my turn. She looks up, and I can tell she doesn't recognize me, or if she does, she doesn't care.
"Uncle Sam says you gotta make a living." She's eying the uniform, smirking. "Thirty-six fifty." While I pay, a tourist taps me on the shoulder and asks for a photograph. I smile for the camera. He gives me two thumbs up.
"Thank you for your service," he says, in labored English, shaking my hand. He goes back to his family, showing them the picture, and they laugh about something in a language I don't recognize. Swayzee wraps the baseball game in tissue paper, hands me a bag that says SANTA CLAUS HOUSE. "Merry Christmas," she says.
"It's July." Already the magic seems broken.
She rolls her eyes. "You're the one came in here."
*
After the biopsy, I don't hear from the doctor for three days, and I assume then that I'm going to die at thirty-three. I don't know what I'm going to say to my mother. When I call her, she asks me if I like the care package she sent. I say yes but it's still sitting on the kitchen counter, unopened.
"I sent those sour candies you always used to ask for when you were deployed," she says. "You still like them?"
"Those were for the kids," I tell her. "Local kids." She sounds disappointed, so I add that yes, I still like them. Light in the room dims, then brightens, then dims again, and I have to sit down. Now that I know I have tumors, I feel them at every movement. They chafe when I reach to turn on a lamp; they cut like gear teeth when Blu tugs his leash. What I thought was a spider bite that wouldn't heal behind my knee now seems to vibrate when I walk.
"You don't sound so good," says Mom. "Are you sure everything's okay?" Blu is barking at a squirrel outside, and the walls around me have a pulse, so I tell her I'll talk to her later. Then, because I can't tell my mother the truth, I call Brenda, except I never get to the part where I'm dying because Brenda has a new husband now, and she says she's sorry but she doesn't want to talk because she doesn't know who I am inside since I refuse to tell her what I did over in Afghanistan to earn that Bronze Star while she sat at home waiting for me and watching the war on television. I tell her I'm sorry too.
"For what?" she asks, expecting more.
*
When the doctor calls and tells me to stop by his office, I'm there in an hour. I've been rewriting my will, crossing out every mention of Brenda, so ready to give up that I almost don't hear him say the tumors are benign. "We've concluded you've got neurofibromatosis," he says. "Your case is actually rather mild. The ringing in your ears? Those are acoustic neuromas. We should remove them to prevent permanent hearing loss, though you should expect them to return. Tumors are also what's disrupting your vision. It's a genetic disorder. It'll probably worsen as you age."
I guess I'm relieved. Then I'm not relieved. "And Sullivan," says the doctor, "I don't recommend looking at pictures of neurofibromatosis online. Like I said, your case is mild."
"Thanks, doc," I say, but when I'm home, the first thing I do is turn on my computer. What I see are images of people whose insides seem to be pushing out of their bodies, trying to escape.
I call him. His secretary or someone says he's not available, but I wait. Finally, he answers. "You didn't tell me I have 'Elephant-Man Disease'."
"Well that's not the word we use," he says, catching a laugh. "No one's going to sell you to the circus—you're a war hero." He clears his throat. "Anyway, technically your neurofibromatosis is a different type than the Elephant Man's."
It doesn't reassure me.
Between the diagnosis and the surgery, I forget to count time. Instead, I count moments of pressure, when it seems like all sensation in my body is compressed into a single point for a prolonged moment, and all the feeling I've ever witnessed in life is collected in me and piercing my consciousness through one disc in my spine. When I have the surgery, doctors remove every tumor they can find. Afterward, my hearing works, and the world is no longer floating or misshapen. I'm fine again, except that the area on my neck that seems made of scrambled eggs has expanded, the lifeless flesh marching south.
I miss the softball championships while I recover. When I'm back at work, summer and fall have ended, the sun has left the northern hemisphere, and each day is so short, it rotates from dawn to dead of night, blanketed in snow. Doctors tell me I'm doing well, but when I can't sleep, I find myself sitting on the freezing porch with Blu, watching auroras and following the grace of shadows as they slip through moonlight. In those moments, when I hear the wind howl in complete sentences, I think of Hockam. Ice cracks on the fishing pond, and I'm sure it's her, reaching through aspen with her tree-branch arms, her enormous blonde hands coaxing me closer and closer, until I want to slip under the frozen surface, into the ink of her glacial home, and become one in the chorus of monsters. But then Blu is behind me, nipping my ankles, and I wake to find that I have been sleep-walking in a sub-zero forest: foot-numb, frosted, brought back to consciousness by a dog. The shadow is a moose, nosing for food, its enormous wooden frame lumbering through the snow. It bellows as if to say, there you are: man in hiding.
*
When spring arrives, an unusual heat comes with it, and layers of permafrost begin to melt. Someone finds mastodon tusks that have been frozen in ice for a hundred thousand years. I'm devising a war game for the unit, pretending north Bolivians are fighting south Bolivians over water. Then Josh gets transferred to Texas. I hear he's deploying to Syria, and I'm lonely, and one day I go to the post office trying to work up enough nerve to ask Swayzee on a date, but she's not there. Instead, in the newspaper vending box in the lobby, I see the front-page story of the North Star Gazette: a teenager walking home at night, hit by a car—dead. They run his prom photo, his baseball stats. I recognize the yellow rose.
"We had him cremated," says Hockam, when I knock on the door of his RV and find him unraveled and gray as a dishrag. I don't know why I'm visiting. I barely know him, but I can't stop myself. "We scattered his ashes in the Tanana and watched him float downstream." Hockam has newspapers and fast food wrappers and smashed cereal boxes stacked up inside his RV. His chiropractic table is strewn with dirty clothes. "And at that very moment," he says, "that blonde Bigfoot emerged from the trees, very solemn-like. She sang a magnificent song for him. It didn't have words, just sounds. Ethereal sounds." He slumps onto his table. "I know you don't believe me," he says, crying into his mouth. "But other people saw it too."
I pat him on the back. I'm not good with feelings, but I tell him I understand what grief can do to a person. Then I tell him how, in Afghanistan, we used to carry sour candy in our packs, to give to children when we showed up at their homes to question their fathers. Two sisters in the Korengal village used to fight over the green ones, so I always made sure I had a handful when we arrived at their house, and while we pressed their father for intel, the girls stood with their mother by the hearth, pointing and giggling at each other's green mouths. After we gave them candy, those girls weren't afraid of us anymore. "That meant a lot to me," I tell him. "To be seen as human. To be trusted."
"What's that got to do with anything?" asks Hockam. He's sitting on a pile of used towels. I don't know the answer. It's just a story Brenda liked, probably because I never told her the ending.
*
A few weeks later, I drive toward the Arctic Circle with Blu, fishing tackle loaded in the truck bed. But my ear starts buzzing again, and the check engine light flashes red. The steering wheel locks; I can't figure what's wrong, so I get towed back to base. My truck is a specialty model, and the mechanics tell me the parts must be shipped from Detroit. In the meantime, the Army gives me a Humvee to use. I don't much like the way it rattles when it turns, like its bones are loose, but I bring it home and park it in the driveway. That night, rinsing dishes, I watch from the kitchen sink as rain slows down outside the window.
You probably won't believe me, and I don't blame you, but what I'm about to tell you is true. I'm loading the dishwasher, and I see a hairless animal crawl out from under the hood of the Humvee. He's ten inches tall, walks like a human, and looks right at me, holding a rusty screw in his jellyfish hand. He has pointy ears, a wrinkled elfin brow, and a blue vein popping from his forehead. The look on his face says he's been messing with shit in there—you're right, the bones are loose, his eyes say. I don't know any other word to call him but gremlin. He grins: a yellow, triangulated smile, mouth crowded with disease. Blu watches through the sliding glass door, his ears back, his teeth bare. I'm not crazy. The creature walks toward us.
"In war," I want to say, as he gets closer, a wave rising in my throat, "it's very difficult to know who's responsible." But he's staring at me, holding the screw in his amphibian hand, tap, tap, tapping the glass.
"Excuse me." His voice is the voice of a salesman of Bibles or dictionaries, like a recruitment officer reassuring the mother of a teenage boy who still has hair that all is well at boot camp, like a manager at a car dealership who sees a young man looking at a Ford Mustang and says she's a beauty, don't you think?, offering his hand to shake. "Did you lose something?" He drops the screw on the porch.
I'm fiddling with the lock on the door. When I slide it open, he's gone. I wonder then where the little monster came from: if he was a virus picked up on base, or if he was a gift from the Taliban that had shipped overseas undetected, or if, somehow, he had once been part of me, until he crawled up my spine like a ladder, out of my throat while I slept, like a ribbon of magic scarves, eager to infect the world.
One day it was a stone house, and the girls loved green candy. The next day: a child's elbow under rubble, another string of bones you are supposed to wear like a trophy. You have your weapon over your shoulder, candy in your pocket, the assurance of American dollars in the bank. Your mother says they wrote your name in the paper when you got the Bronze Star. You get letters from your childhood mailman, your dentist, your third-grade teacher: Thank you for your service. It's what you say when the rest is unspeakable.
There you are, whispers the night, the gremlin, the Bigfoot of a midnight sun: we've found the man in hiding.
This story originally appeared in The Carolina Quarterly and was included in Southern Lights: 75 Years of the Carolina Quarterly from the University of North Carolina Press (2023). Read an interview with the author.
