Short Story: My Father and the Ape

I went out there to indulge my father. And that was all. He’d been obsessed for many years, by that point, with the legend of Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t that unusual, I guess. Many old men—especially old hunters—who have spent their fair share of time in the woods, get swept up in the hysteria. His interest was seeded as an unusual hobby, then an obscure personality trait, before growing into full-fledged obsession.

He had read the books. He had watched the shows. And he’d been talking for years–threatening might be the better word–about going out there some day. Going out to one of the locations from these shows (“one of the good ones” he’d say, “not one of the ones with those crackpots”) and seeing if he could finally come face-to-face with the great beast.

Great beast.  It sounded like the Devil. He talked about it like God. He had been talking about that trip, that theoretical trip, since I was at least ten. The Bigfoot Hunt. When the cancer set in, I knew what he wanted and I knew I had to say yes. I thought I owed him this, this obscure reason for why we could never really be connected. It was our last chance. For me to hear his theories, nod, and take them in.

We would go out into the wilderness, finally, as father and son, just as he had always talked about. And we would hunt his great beast.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I never, never expected that we would actually find it.

My father’s name, for the record, is Joe Hamlin and mine is Greg. He had been a soldier in Vietnam. It’s hard to tell people that. It was the start of a very different time, beginning the era where announcing that you were a soldier was not met with universal respect, but, if you were lucky, with sympathy. Usually, when you say you made it out of Vietnam just fine, people would nod and leave you in peace, respectfully keeping all of their actual thoughts on the matter locked inside. When he said it hadn’t had an effect on him, they would say that they were sure it had. War took a different toll on everybody.

And then he would talk about Bigfoot. Not usually around people he had never met before, but sometimes he would.

The area he had selected for the great hunt to take place was one he had had his eye on for some time. “It’s a hotspot,” he would always say. “The activity comes out of there could make your shit weak.”

“Sure, Dad,” I would say.

“The big guy loves that area.”

Big guy. My God, he’d say it as if the mythical ape was nothing more than an old friend. I guess that was true, in its own way. The only friend my father had left was his Great Beast.

I’ll admit, though, he did his homework. His “hotspot” as he called it, was in the Northern woods of Ohio, of all places. But when we got there, he knew exactly where to go, as if he’d been walking these woods his whole life. He told me to help him set up the tent, and I finally asked the question now that we were there that had been on my mind the whole time. “Why Ohio? I thought Bigfoot was supposed to wander the Northwest Territories or something.”

“I know, I know. That’s the question everybody gets. Why here? I’m sure the old son of a bitch is out there, in the Territories. But not like he is here. Here’s the deer.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “What?”

“The deer,” he said again, sitting down on a large mossy rock. I finished on the last rod of the tent and then sat down beside him. “The Ohio woods are full of deer,” he said. “And the Bigfoot can’t get enough of them. They’ll eat deer all day and night.”

I nodded. In the weird context of his hunter’s role-playing game, it made a kind of sense.

We stayed there and talked for some time, the way we rarely did as father and son. The way we hadn’t talked in a very long time. We talked about Mom. We talked about childhood. We talked about Bigfoot.

“Here’s what you have to look out for,” he said. His voice grew softer the darker it got. “The first thing you’ll notice is the smell. All the guys, the real mountain man guys who’s story you can trust, they all say you smell his stink long before you ever see him. Then you hear him.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like growling? Howling?”

He laughed. “If you’re lucky!” Then, seeing the look in my eye, he calmed himself and got up to grab another beer from the cooler and a can of beans to put on the fire for supper. “Sometimes, yes, you’ll hear the old bastard let out a yell. Sort of a whooping sound. Deep. But loud as all Hell. At least that’s what they say.” He swallowed half a can of beer by the time he sat back down. “But usually it’s a banging. The fuckers grab some sticks, maybe even antlers off the head of a fresh deer kill, and they bang them against the sides of trees. It’s a territorial thing.”

I nodded, I let him go on, and I wondered how long it would take those beans to cook.

We ate and talked a little more and then nature called and my father politely excused himself from the campfire. “Got to go release the beast,” he said. “Take care of the campfire while I’m gone.”

He left. I poked at the fire and finished off the can of beans, then sat there for a few minutes and I thought about a lot of things, because that’s what you do when you find yourself alone in the woods.

And then I smelled it.

Just as the wind began to pick up, I smelled the smell.

Damp. Heavy. Rotting. It was the foulest thing I have ever smelled in my life, and I couldn’t escape it. Couldn’t run from it. And God, did I want to. Just run somewhere where that terrible, awful smell couldn’t find me. It was overpowering. I told myself that I was letting my imagination run away from me, and that was all. Some animal, rotting deep within the woods, his stench carrying on the back of the wind.

(They all say you smell his stink long before you ever see him)

That was all. It wouldn’t do me any good to think about it. Here I was sitting alone around the campfire and scaring myself silly. And not even with ghost stories, but stories of the Great American Ape. The Missing Link. The Great Beast. Whatever you wanted to call it, it didn’t make it any less ridiculous.

I got up, leaving the fire, to grab my jacket from the tent. It was getting very dark very quick and the night was dropping rapidly as it did. I made sure to be back at the fire before my father got back. We hadn’t gone camping in years, not since I was a kid. Even still, whatever the circumstances, it didn’t matter. We were camping again and I wanted to impress him. He’d be happy to see me back at the fire, tending it, when he came back.

If he came back.

My neck went cold. My whole body went cold. This was ridiculous. I was just scaring myself and it wouldn’t help anything. Of course he would come back. He had to come back. There was nothing out there. He would come back.

But not for very much longer, would he?

Like it or not, I couldn’t change the facts. And the fact was that while I was sitting out in the dark spooking myself and thinking about Bigfoot, there was a truth I was not thinking about that I could not escape.

Truth was, Bigfoot or no, the reason we were out here now–the only reason we would ever even come out here together–was because my father had cancer. Deep in his lungs. Black and poisoned and hateful. Not the kind of cancer you could fight for very long. Not the kind you could beat.

A snapping of twigs and, startled, I jumped back from out of my own head and into the reality of the Ohio wilderness. It was Dad. He didn’t notice my little jump, thank God. From the look in his eye, he didn’t seem to notice too much of anything. It was a distant look. He got them from time to time these days. I didn’t pry. He probably had a lot on his mind. It must have been starting to dawn on him, now that we were actually here, that he was not going to come face-to-face with his ape. He was just going to camp with his son, then go home, begin his treatment which he would sustain for however long, and then he was going to die.

It was the truth. Dad may not have always wanted to look at it, but he knew the truth when he saw it. I knew he had to be thinking about it. And that was enough for me.

It was important–and I can’t really explain why–to know that he did know what reality was and that he did know how to deal with things. I guess your parents never stop being your role models, as much as you grow up on your own and as much as you’d like them to. No matter what, you always expect them to know how to handle things, and it’s always alarming when you find out that they can’t.

Maybe I wasn’t out here to indulge my father, maybe it was the opposite. Being out here together, talking and connecting again, finding nothing within these woods, maybe that would lead him to find his life again. His responsibilities. This trip could turn him into a dad again, for the last time before he would get no more chances.

It was selfish, I knew, but I didn’t care. It was what I wanted, but I believed it was what he needed and I would like to think that still mattered more to me.

I didn’t say anything to him about the smell when he sat back down by the fire. Truth was, I had almost forgotten it until I saw him walk out of the trees. It had been the husk of some dead animal within the woods, nothing more. Not worth mentioning. Besides, I didn’t want him to let his imagination run wild. I didn’t want to get his hopes up.

“Pass me another beer, will you?”

I did. Glances at my watch as I handed it over to him. “It’s getting late,” I said, hinting as subtly as I could that maybe we should call it a night. “There’s not a lot more we can do here.”

He nodded sullenly. So many times he had said that in all probability we would find nothing when we finally went out on our hunt, that the most we could ever hope to find was evidence. Yet here he was like a pouting child now that we hadn’t met the beast on the first night. We finished off the food, he finished off the beer, and then we put out the fire. My only concern going off to bed was a sudden fear that he would die suddenly in the night. That he would die and I would be alone with him miles away from anywhere. I put it to the back of my mind and once it was there, I slept soundly.

It was still dark when I woke up. Dad was not sleeping on the cot beside me. I remembered when I was a child and we went camping, I would always wake up to him cooking breakfast. Maybe that was where he had gone. Maybe now, as an adult, I could help him cook it. Once I was able to force myself off of the cot, I stepped out into the icy early morning air.

The fire had not yet been started. There was nothing cooking. That was fine, though. It was early yet. He had probably gotten up to go to the bathroom. Nonetheless, I decided to wait for him. He had problems and I wanted to keep an eye on him. Make sure he got back safely. But God it was cold. Within minutes I couldn’t even feel my fingertips anymore. I wasn’t sure how long I’d just be able to sit out there, waiting. Eventually the cold won out. I returned to sleep.

When I woke again it was almost noon. He was not in the tent, so I stepped outside. He was not in the campsite either. I grabbed a map (his instinctual navigation skills had never been passed down to me) and headed off into the forest to see where he had gone. As I walked, I imagined what I would find. Each thought was worse and worse. My father slumped over on the ground beside a rotting tree, his glazed-over eyes rolled back into his head.

His dead tongue flat and limp in his mouth.

It made me sick to think about these things, but the fact of the matter was that my dying father had been missing for hours. I couldn’t stop assuming the worst. I walked into the trees and somehow I knew–I just knew–that he was dead. But after I searched for a couple of hours and I still couldn’t find him, I began to wonder darker things. Dad had not always been an exactly well-adjusted man but he was not the sort of man to just go off and die in the woods alone. To just disappear. Not when I was with him, at least.

Had something else happened to him? Was there someone else out here? Tracking my way down the path away from the camp, I had seen no sign of a struggle. My father might have been dying of cancer, but he was a fighter nonetheless. No one could have gotten the drop on him without him putting up a fight. Not unless they were much, much bigger than him. He was not a small man, either, so the very thought sent a shiver creeping down my back.

What if it was the beast?

God help me, what if it was his ape? The rational part of my brain had already begun to laugh, telling me that I too would be laughing that I had even entertained the thought for a moment when Dad and I had caught back up together.

I looked down at the map again and a new fear spread through me. Very deep and very real: I had no idea where the fuck I was. No idea at all. I was nearing a cliff face that only seemed to drop down into more woods, things I had never seen once on the drive up. There was no way I would be able to find my way back. Not with only this map, and especially not with my navigation skills.

My father had spent years trying to teach me these very skills, all through my youth, and I ignored him. And now there was a very real possibility that I could die out here. Out here on the edge of a cliff, in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere. He and I would die together and I didn’t even know where he was.

I tried to shake the thoughts off. I must have left some sort of trace coming up here; whatever footsteps I had left would be enough to follow back. Damn it, if we had started a fire this wouldn’t be so hard. I would be able to smell the smoke and I would just be able to follow that back, but of course then I would have had to deal with a raging fire in the Northern Ohio woods on my way out. Maybe this was better. But this… this loneliness, this searing worry for a man who was already on his last leg… this didn’t feel better than anything.

I began to think that maybe he had taken the path around, doubled back to the campsite when I had gone out looking. But that thought was shut down immediately when I heard the noise.

One loud, echoing crack.

It was so loud that at first I thought it was a gunshot. A few seconds of reverberation, and then it came again. I felt a deep swell of relief. It was a loud cracking, like something banging against a tree. It had to be Dad. He must have gotten back to the campfire, not seeing anyone, and gone out to take a look, just like I had. He was making a lot of noise, probably for me to follow. I started running back in the direction of the noise, when I remembered.

(The fuckers grab some sticks, maybe even antlers off the head of a fresh deer kill, and they bang them against the sides of trees. It’s a territorial thing.)

No. Whatever this was, that wasn’t it. That was. Not. It. My father was out here and that was all and there was no such thing as Bigfoot, goddamn it. Yes, he believed it but the more I thought about it the more I thought that had less and less to do with the beast itself than I had ever realized.

With the war and then the divorce, Dad’s life had gotten far out of his control. He needed something to chase. This legend, I guess, had provided that. It was something he could hunt, something he could track, something that he could project all of his problems on to. But soon he drowned in the problems. They overtook him and they ate him up. His life shattered apart when the cancer set in and all he had left was his ape. That was the reason behind my father’s belief. That.

It had nothing to do with Bigfoot.

Because it didn’t exist.

The smell came on suddenly and it came on strong. So strong that I could barely remember having ever smelled anything else. It was monstrous. So much worse than last night, so much stronger. Closer. It was everywhere. I was beginning to doubt now, and I hated that. Hated myself for even so much as considering it. Even when he had forced it down my throat as a kid, I did not believe. I would not believe. Not now and not ever.

The howl came from directly behind me and I started to run as fast as I could. There wasn’t a long way to go in front of me. If I took a dive over that cliff I sure as hell wouldn’t be climbing back out.

But there were a few rocks I could climb over and those, hopefully, would point me back in the direction of the camp. I hoped. Truthfully, I had no idea where the camp was. But if I kept running back, I could find it. I had to. Large, heavy footsteps pounded behind me. Thumping and cracking against the forest floor. I didn’t turn around to look; I couldn’t. It sounded almost like a bear. Had to be. But it sounded so much bigger.

It was growling, whatever it was.

Don’t you look you son of a bitch. Your father didn’t believe it, not really, and neither do you. There’s nothing out here but animals and death and cancer.

And a camp. Somewhere out here, a camp. I just had to beat whatever was chasing me to the truck, then I could drive on out. I would be safe. If my father was out here, he was dead. And if he wasn’t, he would be dead soon enough. I didn’t stop to question the thought or guilt myself. I didn’t stop at all.

I just kept running. Through the woods, through the trees. Every muscle in my body was burning, but that didn’t stop me. But when I paused, only for half a second without even actually coming to a stop, I suddenly realized there were no more sounds coming from behind me. No stomping footsteps. No howl. Maybe I had imagined the whole thing. Please, God, I thought, please let me have imagined the whole thing.

Please let me just be crazy.

Deep down, I knew it wasn’t true. Whatever was chasing me, it was real and it was still out there. I knew for several reasons, all of which I could feel stirring around in my gut, but only one reason mattered: the smell. Wherever the thing had gone to, I could still smell it.

So I kept moving forward for a few feet. Whatever tripped me came on sudden and I let out a shriek. I covered my mouth with my hand quickly, cursing myself, but whatever was hunting me had already heard. I was sure of that. I hit the ground hard, narrowly avoiding smashing my face on a rock. Lucky.

I started to pick myself up and slowly began to realize that the bottom of my pants were damp. It hadn’t rained the whole time we’d been up here. I had no idea what it could have been. My eyes seemed to take forever to look down and even when I saw it I couldn’t comprehend it right away.

The first thing I noticed was the blood staining the bottom of my pants. The second thing I saw was my father’s severed arm slumped over in the dirt in a position that looked so strange and alien, a way I’d never seen an arm hang naturally. It looked like a dead snake, but pallid white and wrapped in the shredded, bloodstained flannel of its sleeve.

Despite all my effort to keep quiet, I let out a rising scream. It built and built the more I struggled to control it. Then the sound shifted, ever so slightly, getting no quieter. My scream mixed with a booming, whooping sound. It came from directly behind me. So close I could see it out of the corner of my eye. Unable to keep my eyes fixated on my father’s arm, I turned and looked.

And I saw exactly what I had expected to see. Exactly what I had prayed (nearly all my life) that I would never, ever see. There in front of me stood the great ape. My eyes went first to the feet (well-deserved namesakes just as big as everyone says) and then worked their way up. The stink seemed to ooze off of every hair on the thing, so bad that it burned my eyes, but that didn’t stop me from looking.

The Bigfoot (God help me, but that was what it was) was covered in thick, dark fur. What I could see of the skin beneath it was dark and raw. It was dry and leathery and cracking, wet only in the places where it seemed rot had already begun to set in. The skin looked as if it had been patched together from a thousand old, dead men who had never washed a day in their lives. It took me forever just to work my way up the beast to look it in the face. Its lips curled back in a sneer and the almost wolf-like canines were yellowed and decayed. Deep within two dark pits in the cracked leather sea of its face, were its beady, red eyes.

I screamed again.

For a moment, it almost looked like its sneer became a smile.

My whole body seemed to shake, but I was remained stiff. I begged myself to run but even then I would not move. This was the thing Dad had spent the better part of his life searching for, only to have it find him first. This was not a missing link. This was not the Great American Ape or an animal lost to history. This was a monster.

This was the thing that killed my father. And now it was about to kill me.

The Bigfoot took one large stride forward and was suddenly so close I could feel its dark, dry fur scraping against my face.

Finally, I turned to run. The thing grunted and walked after me. It didn’t run. It seemed to already know full well that it would catch me. It was only a matter of time. I knew it too, but it didn’t stop me from sprinting. I couldn’t be far from the campsite, though. I couldn’t be. My father wouldn’t have strayed too far and Jesus—I don’t think the beast strayed too far from the campsite either. Not from the moment we arrived.

If I could reach the truck, I would live. It was as simple as that. The truck meant I would get out of here and be on the road back to civilization, and anything less than that meant I would be looking as terrible as what I’d seen of my father’s severed arm and what I could only speculate as to the rest of him.

I was snapped out of my rambling, and my fears, and everything else when I saw the hint of blue tent through the trees up ahead. It was still a way to run yet, but the campsite was in eyesight and that changed everything. I had a direction to move in. I had a destination. I had a goal. The fabled campsite. I had searched and searched, not once expecting to find it and finding it nonetheless. Dad’s hunt had led to him being torn limb from limb. Years of service to the gods of obsession, and this was how he’d been repaid.

I prayed they would be kinder to me.

And somehow they seemed to be. I did not doubt my survival now that camp was in sight and getting closer. I did not doubt it until I broke through the trees, saw the truck, and felt the great, wrinkled hand tighten around the back of my neck.

##

I awoke (hours? Days?) later and my whole body was still in pain. The camp was untouched and I was alive. It took me a few minutes to remember everything that had happened and when I did I prayed it had all been a dream. It hadn’t. I knew that, but it only hurt to think about it so I got in the truck and drove back the way I came. I left everything in the camp behind. None of it had belonged to me. The man it had belonged to was in pieces scattered throughout the forest

(don’t think about that)

and all of it meant nothing to me now. All I could think about–once I was safely out of the forest–was how and why I’d been allowed to live. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Three years have passed and I’ve never been able to come up with a concrete answer. Maybe it wanted me to stay afraid of it, to build the tension, so that one night when I least expected it, it could come back for me. That’s what I think sometimes in the middle of the night. But maybe the truth is a little different. I think maybe the monster had never been hunting me. My father had been hunting it for half his life, and I think it was so strong on him–that obsession–that the creature could smell it.

Even when he was dying, Dad never wanted to appear weak and perhaps (as ridiculous as it seems) maybe the creature did feel threatened by him. This was a being that had kept its existence hidden from civilizations for hundreds of years, at least. It only did that by being extremely careful. Being smart. By not taking any risks. This was, I think, why it killed him. I understand it. Obviously I do not forgive the thing and I hate it for that and I wish to hell it did not exist, but it does. God help me, it really does.

But Dad’s death was something I had prepared for, even if it had not come in the way I had expected. And because of that I have not thought about it probably half as much as I should. The thing that has really been on my mind all this time has been my own life. I think it ties in, though. The creature knew I was not hunting it, and it knew I was no threat to it of any kind. So it let me live. Maybe sometimes it really is as simple as that. I think I believe that. I hope so.

Because sometimes I still lie awake at night and wonder. Sometimes I think it’s still out there, waiting just for me. And sometimes I go to sleep and I get that sinking feeling in my gut and hope to hell I won’t wake up to the smell. That powerful, terrible smell that you could not escape no matter how hard you tried, and all I can do is wait. You smell his stink long before you ever see him, that’s what they say. So I wait for the smell and I listen for the banging.

It’s a territorial thing.