Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (read e book TXT) 📗

Bent over the pool table, she muffs another easy shot, the two-ball straight in line for a corner pocket. All the time, she's saying, “Have you heard of the French Gandillon family?” Saying, “In 1584, the entire family was burned at the stake . . .”

This girl, Mandy Somebody, she's around campus for the past couple months, since Christmas break maybe. Short skirts and boots with pointed heels sharp as a pencil. Not any sort of clothes a girl could even buy around here. At first, she hung around the anthro office mostly. In “World Peoples 101,” she was the graduate TA, and it's there her staring routine really started. Then she's hanging around the English department, asking about the prelaw program. Every day, she's there. Every day, she says hello. Still, always spying. Her eyes snapping pictures. Jotting down notes.

Being: Mandy Somebody, Secret Agent.

Major eye contact goes on through all winter term, and this week she says, “You want to get a bite?” Her treat. Still, even with hamburgers, the Christmas lights, and beer, this is no date.

Now, scratching on the six-ball, she says, “I'm a better anthropologist than I am a pool player.” Chalking her cue, she says, “Do you know the word varulf? How about a man named Gil Trudeau? He was the guide to General Lafayette during the American Revolution?” Still grinding that little blue chalk cube on the tip of her cue, Mandy Somebody says, “Or have you heard the French term loup-garou?”

All the time, her eyes, watching. Measuring. Looking for some answer. A reaction.

It's the anthropology part of her that wants to meet and go out. She moved here from New York City, all that way just to meet guys from the Chewlah Reservation. Yeah, it's racist, she says. “But it's good racist. I just think Chewlah guys are hot . . .”

Over hamburgers, Mandy Somebody leans forward, both elbows on the table, one hand cupped to hold her chin, her other hand fingering an invisible design on the greasy tabletop. She says guys from the Chewlah tribe do all look alike.

“Chewlah men all have a big dick and balls for their face,” she says.

What she means is, Chewlah men have square chins that stick a little too far out. They have cleft chins so deep it could be two balls in a sack. Chewlah guys always need a shave, even right after they shave.

That constant dark shadow, Mandy Somebody calls it “Five-Minute Shadow.”

Guys from the Chewlah Reservation, they only have one eyebrow, a bush of black thatch, thick as a stand of pubic hair on the bridge of their nose, then trailing away to almost reach their ears on either side.

Between this clump of black curls and their bristly sack of low-hanging chin, there's that Chewlah nose. One long swell of tube, flopped down the middle of their face. A nose so thick and half hard, the fat head of it hides their mouth. A Chewlah nose hangs so long it overlaps their nutsack chin, just a bit.

“Those eyebrows hide their eyes,” Mandy says. “The nose hides the mouth.”

When you meet a guy from the Chewlah tribe, all you see at first is pubic hair, a big half-hard dick hanging down, and the two balls hanging a little behind it.

“Like Nicolas Cage,” she says, “but more so. Like a dick and balls.”

She eats a French fry and says, “That's how to tell if any guy's good-looking.”

The table is gritty with the salt she's dumped on her French fries. She pays for everything with a color of American Express card the bartender has never seen before. Titanium or uranium.

It's her dissertation that brought her out here. You can only bear to build a case like this, in Manhattan, in the middle of all those anthropology graduate students, giggling, you can only tolerate that so long before your advisers start coaching you to do some fieldwork. In her field, cryptozoology. The study of extinct or legendary animals, like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, vampires, the Surrey Puma, Mothman, the Jersey Devil. Animals that might or might not exist. It was her adviser's idea she should come here, to visit the Chewlah Reservation, to study the culture and do a little forensic legwork. To build the case for her thesis.

Her eyes jumping up and down, looking for a reaction, some confirmation.

“God,” she says, tongue out, fake-gagging, “does that make me come across like some wannabe Margaret Mead?”

Her original plan was to live on the Chewlah Reservation. She'd rent a house or something. Her mom and dad are both doctors and want her to follow her dream, not turn out the way they have, no matter how much it costs them. Even talking about herself, Mandy Somebody asked questions. Talking about her parents, she says, “Why don't they change careers? Is that sad or what?”

Her every sentence ending with that question mark.

Her eyes, blue or gray, then silver eyes, still always watching. Her teeth take a bite of her hamburger, even though by now it must be cold. Like eating something dead.

She says, “That girl who died . . .”

Then, “What do you think happened?”

Her dissertation is about how the same giant mysterious creatures occur in all regions around the world. Those giants they call Seeahtiks in the Cascade Mountains around Seattle. They're called Almas in Europe. Yetis in Asia. In California, they're the Oh-mah-ah. In Canada, Sasquatch. In Scotland, Fear Liath More, the famous “Gray Men” that roam the mountain Ben Macdhui. In Tibet, the giants are Metoh-kangmi, or Abominable Snowmen.

All of those just different names for hairy giants that wander through the forest, the mountains, sometimes glimpsed by hikers or loggers, sometimes photographed, but never captured.

A cross-cultural phenomenon, she calls it. She says, “I hate the generic term: Bigfoot.”

All of these different legends grew up in isolation, but they all describe towering, hairy monsters that stink to high heaven. The monsters are shy, but attack if