She held my hand and wept, not for injustice, but something rawer and more essential: the fact of pain, the fact of adversity, the fact of cruelty.
She gave me the great gift once more: mercy, the power, pieta. It flowed into me like a great electric jolt. I felt the rays of the blue sun zap me awake.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillI smell him. I taste him. There is a martial art to his presence. I await him. I marvel at his approach. I can do nothing but wane before him, giving over all ambition, all thought of power or concept of victory. I am a doomed bigfoot. No bigfoot. No man. I am doomed.
My half-brother approaches and the duty is a mere token by now. I have fled so far in lieu of it. I have run past my own horizons to not oblige it. I am a stubborn miscreant.
He brings me what amounts to a strip of jerky, all life removed. It is a thing like a shriveled mummy. A thing with no impact or power. A thing to fall to dust through the fingers. No fear remains of that great terror I fled. All fury has flown.
And yet the smell of him, the taste of him on the wind. I am reminded of myself as I was and what is facade crumbles away and what remains has no name.
I heap the ashes on my head, the final injustice, the great and merciless shame. I wallow and break apart and will not be made whole.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillI caught it on the wind before I heard it. I read it from the bird scatter, from the cloud glare. I could feel the steady rhythm of its advance as if I’d been running from it all along.
Something I had fled but still followed in an endless circuit. Something I hid from in gorges and tongues, in strange buds, in electricity.
One day I had nearly forgotten. The next I was only too sure the sky would quake with tantrums. A storm collected all disorders unto itself. The storm of what was wrong advanced and grew. The forest drooped before it.
It was my half brother hunting me down with a child’s backpack on his shoulder, a meat bag long gone sour with rot and decay. A wretched thing he must carry until…
I feel him approaching. I am the last place he would look, in the trailer with this woman, her blue sun shining over me. I could live here and never go back to anything, just forget it all and start again as a man entwined with a woman.
He is coming before the wind, before the hush, before the calm.
And the storm will come with him.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillThere is just the story of this conversation, the story of me telling the story of him telling the story of me forever until everything is the shape we share. I want to scream until I understand.
Cornsilk and daisies.
A bee over sand.
The smell of green onions on a breeze.
The trees clattering in complaint.
A buck, stooped to tear mushrooms, stands in the hard balance of his horns.
There was something else I was leaving behind once.
I am just my own now.
It is in my story that an otter came to rule the great lake, came to merge himself with all things, came to choose what was the finest. He was a creature of great discernment.
All I know is my descent.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillWaking dreams of what might be, haunt me now. Thresholds of knowing close behind me. I have a new kind of question: “If.” How can I answer?
I know nothing. The future is a tangled mat of hair the present keeps combing. I am constantly crashing into other trajectories. Everything has grown elegantly confused. My mind reaches toward the possibilities too aggressively for me to know where to place my next foot. I sit here for lack of reason.
I walked until I found him. His light on the hill beckoned me. I sat down and would not rise again. I lay on the tracks and moaned with heartache. I hadn’t strategies for anything. Lie still or clench up, rollover, run. I needed to be saved and he saved me.
He spit on me till I slowly recovered myself. He provoked me to attention and then we started talking. It seems like we have never stopped talking.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillI walked away. I was sleepwalking. I walked outside as if I might be right back and then I walked down to the creek as if I might be fetching water and walked on to the railroad tracks and down to the shed and further along until the night came and I was just walking without thinking, blocking any thought or intention.
I wanted something sure to rise up and tell me how to proceed. I had no idea what could resolve it. My brain was useless before this next thing, this human feeling I felt flare up as if I could burst into flames and eject the great force of life that strained in my chest.
I had to race away or die at once, the great urge to offer myself entirely in service to her. If I could survive the flames coming from my chest and my head, if I could dampen all thoughts and burn off the fuel through my feet, then I needn’t ask to be with her anywhere she chose, serving her in any way.
I will not dream she might return these attentions. I can’t take it. If she loved me in turn and we held this great ball of lightning between us, I would explode. I was not made to take this. Whatever lymph humans use to store this juice, whatever wires channel it through the system, whatever clog, whatever reserve, I lack it all.
I am like a length of branch stepped into a fire to burn right through the middle and fall in two halves.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the Hill“Don’t let my peeing scare you none, ma’am.”
She was looking at me in the mirror. I say such stupid things. She had a little mirror. I’d always somehow managed to not notice mirrors. I had no use for them. I didn’t even realize that they were used for anything but decoration. There she was, touching her lips with her fingers in the small round frame. Her eyes were seeing me peeing, reflected in the mirror.
This would have been a useful thing for me to decipher early on, all these optical proceedings. I was contemplating this when I saw my mother’s face suddenly appear in the small round frame.
My mother. Somehow my mother in the circle of sky she held before her. Somehow then it became me and it was as if I was inside my mother in the mirror. It was as if I was dreaming my own astonishment there in the depths of my mother in the mirror. I couldn’t reason it out, but something essential was coming plain.
I saw my own eyes staring back at themselves and I saw the glow of life around me. Whatever I drank of the world, I drank of myself there in the mirror. I was frozen. A predicament. I thought I might be trapped to stare forever at my reflection until I turned to stone.
But she closed the mirror.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillThe sun lit the dust through the gouge in the roof. Little convections behind her head. Her face in shadow. Little jewels of blue light from her ears, trace the walls into the depth of shadows, quiver with life and blind me where I lie bleeding, considering.
She bandaged my head with her torn pantyhose. It was heaven to lie there in the beam of sunlight. She lifted my arm and helped me stand as the clouds creased the light and left it dim again.
I looked around. Everything had come loose from its piles. I picked up the table and carried it outside. I heaved it on the roof where it covered the gash neatly. I pushed all the metal back into its seams best I could. I stuffed the rest with moss. By the time the rain began, it was finished. So far, just a few drops inside.
I can’t sit still any longer. I put a roof over my own head. I need the rain on me. I need my face wet once more.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillWhen she woke up, I fed her what I had fed the electric man while I had him tied up. It was a sort of paste made from beetles and lightning bugs. I chewed the life from them and then spat the rest in my hands and crushed it. Men are always cooking their food, so I made a fire. The smell of it brought her outside. She said it tasted like hamburger.
She crouched against the trailer hitch and watched me.
I climbed an old oak.
She watched me climb.
I swung out onto an overhanging branch and moved hand over hand until I was over her.
I hung there until she lost interest and stared off somewhere else. Then I jumped down on the roof of the trailer.
I should have known it wouldn’t hold me. The metal tore a long seam and I fell straight through and crashed down on the table which broke as well. I laid awhile as the trailer stopped rocking.
Dazed,
everything spinning.
I don’t know how long it took, but in that time she had run off and returned again.
When I opened my eyes, she was standing over me, rubbing a damp cloth over my head.
It appears I fell on my head. A bump like a morel pulses even still.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the Hill