My Father’s Map
Sort Story by JD CLAPP
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It is not down in any map; true places never are.
—Herman Melville
It was hotter than hell in Oakland, CA, the day before Halloween. Mrs. Johnson, the round woman living above my father’s bar, dabbed sweat from her ample brow while fiddling with the air conditioning unit. Like the rest of the old building, the AC worked just enough for the landlord to ignore it. When it failed to fire up, Mrs. Johnson reared back her meaty hand and gave it a hard smack. Rather than the whir of the fan, she heard a loud metallic clank. It took her a beat to process the sickening thud, followed by screams below.
My father had been rolling a dolly loaded with cases of Coors from his truck toward the bar when he tripped on his shoelace. He saved the beer by catching himself on the wall next to the door… right underneath Mrs. Johnson’s air conditioner. As he tied his shoe, his last thought probably was, “These damn laces are going to kill me.”
That was 1970. I was six years old and remember little about my dad other than him being kind, working all the time, and taking frequent trips to the mountains to hunt or flyfish. I do remember begging to go with him the next time. As a child, he was the only man in my life.
After the accident, my mom took over at the bar, and I didn’t see her much. My Aunt Kate watched me most nights. Then one night, when I was 13, two men came into the bar to collect money from a bar regular they called Slick Reggie. Slick Reggie ended up shooting both men. He didn’t mean to kill my mom. Aunt Kate raised me after that. That bar made me an orphan, just not in the way bars typically make kids orphans.
Despite all the tragedy, Aunt Kate was good to me, and I did alright for myself. I finished high school. I was the first person in my family to get a college degree. Now, I have a good job working down at the Port. Like my old man, I even have a few friends who I flyfish with regularly in the Sierras.
I also have a son, Ethan, but his mother left me when he was a toddler. When she left, she told me she loved me, but she didn’t like me anymore. She said I had grown bored and lacked ambition. She remarried a hedge-fund guy with a BMW.
Ethan is 15 now. He is a big, sullen kid. Until recently, we saw each other every other weekend and on holidays. He is into kid things—monsters and horror movies and shooting games. I believed he liked video games more than me. I often thought I should try harder to bond with him, but until the map showed up, I didn’t know how.
Things changed one Saturday when I took Ethan to visit his great Aunt Kate. Ethan liked that she always had candy and slyly slipped him twenty bucks when he visited.
“I found a few things that belonged to your father. You really should have them,” Aunt Kate said.
“That’s great. I really don’t have anything that belonged to him,” I said.
“There are a couple of fly rods in those aluminum tubes, his old tackle bag, a couple of gun cases with guns in them, and a box of photos. I’m not sure if the guns are loaded, so be careful!”
“Ethan, come help me load this stuff into the car,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. I was annoyed but realized I had done little to inculcate a work ethic in the boy. Maybe I did lack ambition. I was about to admonish him, but Ethan lit up when he saw the gun cases.
“Guns?! Cool! Can we go shoot them?” he asked.
A strange thing happened then. I felt a sense of urgency that I hadn’t experienced before. I felt some distant switch flip that lit a path to my father. I simultaneously wanted to know my father and my son. In retrospect, that should have been a natural thing. I guess, for me, it was buried under a crushed air conditioner for all these years.
“Sure, but we need to take some lessons. We can do it together.”
Ethan beamed.
Aunt Kate smiled at me; she sensed the change in the boy and set the hook.
“You know,” she said to Ethan, “Your grandfather was a great shot. He hunted all the time up in the mountains near Lake Shasta. He shot a deer every year and even a couple of black bears. There are hunting photos in the box.”
“Cool! Dad, you should hunt instead of doing those boring backpacking trips!” Ethan exclaimed.
That night, I looked through the box. There were numerous photos of my dad with trophy deer, landscape shots of beautiful mountains, and a bunch of photos of guys in deer camps. He looked happy. They all did.
It was the first time in my adult life I even considered why people hunted. I wasn’t opposed to the idea. Most of the fly-fishing I did was catch and release, but I ate fish. I ate meat too. Now I had a couple of rifles, maybe even a reason to hunt, but no clue where to start.
My father’s journal recorded the dates and places he hunted or fished, the weather, who he was with, what he saw or shot, and the occasional note like, “lots of rattlesnakes in the area.”
In a large envelope, I found a neatly folded old forest service map. Three red ink circles were drawn on the map next to a trail outlined in red marker. Next to the first circle, my father had scrawled, “deer shot here.” Next to the second circle, a strange note appeared: “Deer found dead. Creature attacked us. Shot and killed it here.”
“What the hell?” I said aloud.
The last circle surrounded a waterfall on the map. The note next to it read, “Head and piece of hide in game bag stuffed into a small rock opening (3’ cave), north side of falls, where the water hits the pool. Twenty feet back from waterline. Six large stones cover the opening. Bullet casings jammed between rocks.”
I showed Ethan the map.
“Cool! Grandpa killed some creature and hid it out there! Maybe a dog man…No! That is bigfoot country. He killed a bigfoot! What a badass!” Ethan exclaimed.
“Well, I’m not sure about that. Maybe he was playing a joke,” I replied.
By the next morning, Ethan was begging me to take him to find what my father had buried.
“That is a long, hard hike, and we would have to backpack. You would need to get in shape by doing weekend hikes with me,” I told him.
Amazingly he agreed. I told him if we both kept up with the training, we would go in the fall. I gave Ethan the task of looking online to find a range where we could learn to shoot. I started researching hunting.
We grew closer as we prepared for the adventure. We hiked weekly. We found a shooting range, took lessons, and got proficient with the rifle. We even took a hunter safety class. Ethan was getting interested in the outdoors, enjoying my company, and spending less time playing video games. Likewise, I enjoyed being with Ethan and getting interested in my father’s life and, surprisingly, hunting.
Before we set off, I went to visit Aunt Kate to see if she knew anything about the map.
“Do you remember anything about my dad shooting a creature or him hiding a hide and skull?” I asked.
“I forgot about that,” she said, laughing.
“I know it sounds crazy, but…”
“Well, the last time your father went hunting, before his accident, he came back very excited. He told your mom and I this crazy story. He said he and his hunting buddy shot a nice deer, but it ran off, and they had to track it. They found it, and somebody started throwing rocks at them. They thought it was another hunter, but when they yelled at the guy to stop throwing rocks, they heard a roar.
“That would scare you,” I offered.
“No joke! But here’s the crazy part… He claimed a bigfoot came running at them with a rock in its hand. He said they both fired warning shots, but it kept coming, so they shot it and killed it. He looked scared when he told the story.”
“So, you believed him?” I asked.
“We both did. Your mom said she knew when he was lying…”
“What else did he tell you?” I asked.
“Well, they got scared killing a bigfoot might be illegal, but they thought they might get rich if it wasn’t, so they took part of its hide and head and buried it as proof. They planned to see if it was illegal and if not, they were going to go get it and give it to the newspaper…then he was killed two weeks later.”
“Wow. That is a story! Did his partner go back for it?” I asked.
“No idea…”
In late September, Ethan and I hiked into the mountains. Although we had hunting licenses, the area my father had marked on the map had long been closed to hunting. The difficult hike challenged us both, and we realized my old man must have been a tough badass. To my delight, Ethan never complained.
Ethan spent the hike telling me about Bigfoot. The boy had watched everything he could find online. He even took a bus to the library to check out a few books. He became obsessively fascinated with the entire story.
As we hiked, it struck me funny that an old map, tied to a crazy story about my long-dead father killing a bigfoot, brought three hopelessly disconnected generations of my family together. What a gift, I thought.
On our second day, we found the almost dried-up waterfall. We looked all day but never found the little cave, or a Bigfoot skull, or a hide. We camped there, and as we talked about my father and future trips we hoped to take together; we heard a knocking sound in the woods that night. Ethan swore it was a tell-tale sign a Bigfoot was nearby.
“These things take time, dad. We might need to come back here several times before we see one,” Ethan said over oatmeal the next morning.
On our last night, next to the fire, Ethan pulled out the envelop with the map.
“Dad, there is something in a piece of wax paper stuck in here,” Ethan said.
He blew into the envelop to open it fully and fished out the wax paper which had fused itself to the sides of the envelop over the years. Ethan opened the small, folded square, and a lock of thick black hair fell out.
“It’s Bigfoot hair!” Ethan excitedly said.
“Can we get it tested for DNA?” he continued.
I answered, “We can try, son. We can always try.”
JD Clapp is based in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 101Words, Micro Fiction Mondays Magazine, Free Flash Fiction, Trickster Literary Journal, Wrong Turn Literary, Scribes Micro, and Sporting Classics Magazine.