The Spirit

The spirit dropped the vegetables and blundered down the alley into laundry lines full of sheets. He had torn his way nearly to the woods when a door opened and a man in a bathrobe emblazoned advanced institute of sex, CLASS OF 69 came out with a shotgun.

The Indian dashed down the slope.

The man saw the giant and paused, then raised his rifle to his shoulder. The Indian chopped him in the neck with the edge of his hand. He saw the man’s stunned face before he crumpled up like a sack of potatoes.

The Indian grabbed, too late, for the rifle. It went off close to his face, the concussion dazzling and deafening him, the barrel burning his fingers.

More lights came on. Several women screamed, and doors flew open. The Indian’s dog added its sharp yelps to the other dogs’ as it chased the spirit into the woods.

The Indian heard a rising chorus of voices as he sprinted past the trailers to the road. His feet slapped the hard asphalt with a pain that surprised him. His feet had adjusted to soft earth, not concrete.

He was clear of the trailer park before turning into the woods again. Pandemonium, shouts, screams, conflicting directions—“He’s in the trees!” “Hell no, he hit the woods!” “No, I saw him on the road!”—added their uproar to the colliding bodies and flashlight beams. The Indian heard one more shot and a woman sobbing as the cottonwoods swallowed him up. The dog was waiting for him.

The Indian figured they had run three miles, following the spirit’s stench, which hung in the air like vapor, when they burst into an apple orchard—so suddenly that he slipped on a piece of rotting fruit and went sprawling.

Gasping for breath, he climbed to his feet. He looked at the trees. Branches were stripped of fruit. He looked at the dog. It yipped and danced around him.

The spirit whistled from the other end of the orchard. The Indian heard branches rustle as apples were pulled from them. After his breathing stabilized, the Indian said to the dog, trotting off in response to the whistle, “Go on!” He grabbed an apple and threw it against a tree.

Shocked at the Indian’s tone, the dog ignored a second whistle. The Indian stood up and, forgetting he wore only moccasins, kicked a tree and jumped in pain. “Go ahead! Let the scumbag take care of himself! Fuck him!” The Indian’s voice rose to dangerously audible levels. “You know what’s wrong with him? He’s stupid! I didn’t believe it till now. He is! His brains are in his belly. My name! He don’t know my name, he’s so stupid he don’t even know his own name! I been feeding him, following him, taking care of him, and I still don’t know what he wants or what he’s doing!”

The Indian slumped to the ground again and dug, meaninglessly, furiously, at the earth with an arrow. Words continued sluicing out in a venomous despair that made the dog cringe.

“All he thinks about is food! I’m sick of this shit!”

Tail down, the dog snuggled up to the Indian’s foot. That did it. The dog’s bootlicking affection, its favor-­currying streak, was the final insult. The flaming emotional force of the spirit quest was dissipated now. The Indian closed his eyes and reached for some noble memory, but all he saw was that man in the stupid bathrobe and the spirit tangled in laundry. The bond was broken, its snapped ends frayed by exhaustion, frustration, and garden fertilizer.

“I’m going home. Get away from me.”

It was so abrupt a severing of this peculiar friendship that the dog whimpered around in circles, unable to actually leave. The Indian finally threw an apple at it, which sent the animal scampering down between the apple trees.

The Indian lay down and closed his eyes. He had just torn a bloody hole in his psyche. There was no pain. That would come later, when the numbness wore off. He would digest his despair piece by piece, lest the whole sudden weight of it overwhelm him. He would wake in the morning, go to the road, and hitchhike, rejoin the human race and this puzzling world.

After all, his memory was already a tattered garment. One more rip in it would make no difference. But he did not know what would happen now. His grandfather shook his head sorrowfully at him. He was more faded than ever, more shrouded behind darkness than the Indian had ever remembered.

Maybe the Indian would just dry up under the pitiless light reserved by the sun for the lost and useless, his skin and bones rendered into food for plants.

Ten hours after a humorous news dispatch reported that a twelve-­foot-­tall, fire-­breathing ape had attacked the Happy Hunting Ground Trailer Park, Raymond Jason arrived in a rented car. He had spent the summer running down a dozen sightings that had panned out into nothing. He was always a day late at least, and the spontaneous trips, as well as his mounting frustration, were disrupting his life.