The Myth of Wile E

Bigfootaphobia

All this rain had gotten me kind of worried about Toothless Bob, who lived in a pallet fort behind the filling station, down the road a-ways. I figured maybe I should bring him my shower curtain. What did I really need with a shower curtain, when you came right down to it? I could take baths. Some people weren't even so lucky as to have a tub. Or a roof.

Toothless Bob was a "professional procurer of live bait," which is to say, he collected night crawlers for the filling station. He was not entirely toothless—he had a pretty nice set of dentures he claimed to have found at the dump. Nor was he really named Bob. (If you asked him his name he would say, "Call me 'Bob,'" while making finger quotes.) I suspected his real name was Siegfried, because . . . I don't know, he just looked like a Siegfried. He was stocky, with a wild blond beard, and he always wore suspenders, even when he sometimes forgot to wear actual pants over his long johns. He wouldn't tell anyone his real name because "They" were after him. No one knew who "They" were, but I'd venture a guess that "Their" shoe size was somewhere in the neighborhood of 22EEE.

See, according to intel from the hermit community, Bob used to be a bona fide mountain man, logging his own log cabin and fishing for his own fish and shining his own moonshine. But he'd had to give it all up and move into a pallet fort behind the filling station, because he'd become paranoid of Bigfoot. I mean, seriously Bigfootaphobic.

After a few mishaps in the woods (treacherous icicles plunging from his doorway, close calls with falling trees, that sort of thing), Bob became certain that a cabal of Bigfeet—there were four of them, according to Bob, though one of them was a "Bigfoot Little Person" of no more than six-foot-three—were out to get him. Yes, everybody knew this was wanton scapegoating on Bob's part; for one thing, why would the Bigfeet have it in for Bob? They were not known to be aggressive, never mind exist. And for another thing, we were hundreds, maybe thousands of miles from the closest Bigfoot territory. Plus, again, the not existing.

I brought Bob the shower curtain and we draped it over the top pallet. In turn, Bob offered me a couple bear claws. He had a whole bag of them.

"Spoilage," he explained.

"How's that?" I said.

"Spoilage. From the filling station. Every couple-a days Bubba comes back here, throws out this stuff. Bear claws, donuts . . . whattaya call 'em, keister rolls? . . . all this stuff. 'Spoilage,' Bubba says. 'Gotta get rid of it, it's the law.' Hell of a thing."

"Crazy," I said.

Bob and I got to chatting, and I inquired after his live bait business. He shook his head sadly. "Too much rain," he said. "A little's good—brings up the worms. Too much rain, you get drowned worms. Live bait don't sell so good when it's dead."

Bob wanted to know if things were any better in my line of work. I wasn't sure if he meant the poetry business or the bottle-gathering business. Either way, I told him things could always be worse.

"Well," said Toothless Bob, "you know, if you ever get real low, the thing to do is sell your blood."

"My blood?" I said.

"Not all of it," Bob clarified. "Just the part you aren't using."

"How do I know which part I'm not using?"

"The blood bank people know."

"Hmm."

"Somehow, they know."

"And where would I find them, these blood bankers?" I asked, picturing some very well-dressed vampires.

Bob told me of a place I could go in West-Westfield and I was quite surprised by how much money he said they would pay me. My surplus blood was apparently worth quite a bit more than my poetry. It seemed like this could be the answer to all my tax problems, and I said so.

Then Bob told me that the three buses it required to get there and back would pretty much eat up all the blood money.

"I don't mind walking," I said.

"Well you can't walk, not home anyways, because it's eighteen miles and you're gonna pass out from not enough blood."

"OK. Hitchhike, then."

"See, that won't do either. Not home anyways, on account of the prison in West-Westfield. There's signs all over the place telling folks not to pick up hitchhikers, and they don't."

"Oh," I said.

We sat for a minute, munching on bear claws, and stared at the rain.

"Guess there's no use going, then," I said.

"If you say so." Bob seemed surprised. "I go all the time."

"But . . . why?"

"Why? Oh . . . well, it's like . . . the nurses are real nice. They talk to you all gentle, like. They ask if you're comfortable. 'Are you cold, dear?' 'You need a blanket?' 'Did you have breakfast, dear?' And all that. They give you a cookie. A real cookie too, like yea big. Not too crunchy, not too chewy. They ask, 'Do you want oatmeal raisin, dear, or chocolate chip?' If you can't decide, sometimes they'll give you both. Ingrid, she's there on Wednesdays, she'll always give you both. Then they give you some apple juice and they tell you to rest a bit if you need to. 'You just take a little nap, dear.' Cookies and apple juice and naptime. All the best parts of kindergarten."

"I see what you mean," I said.