In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,77
cracks it open to a hail of protest from Tim.
Rob whispers that the man who stole Tim’s beer is “Nearly Normal” Norman Brown, the infamous pot-smoking, opium-eating curator of the Ocean Falls junk museum. “Norm used to date Janice Joplin,” Rob adds. “He once cooked and ate a wolf someone had shot.”
Bartender Bob leans in. “So I hear you’re a journalist and that you worked in the Middle East.”
Before I can reply, Tim, who has overheard Bob, swivels in his chair to face us. “He’s a terrorist, don’t you know.”
Tim’s words are spoken in such a way that they run perfectly down the middle between seriousness and humor.
“Actually, he’s a writer,” Rob jabs back.
Tim grins. “And he knows everything about an AK-47 you’d ever want to know!” The whole saloon explodes in laughter.
Bartender Bob taps me on the shoulder and points toward one of the people sitting at Tim’s table, a heavyset man with an enormous beer belly. “That guy over there in the baseball hat is Barrie. He spent some time in the Middle East. Hey, Barrie!” Bob shouts to the man, “maybe you and John here have crossed paths.”
I ask Barrie where he’s been in the Mideast and what took him there.
“Oil work,” he says. “I been all over. You name it: Baw-rain. Koo-wait. Eee-rak. Doo-bye. Saw-dee. And Aboo Dabee.”
Rob lights up a smoke. “John here’s looking for the Sasquatch.”
“If you wanna see a Sasquatch around here, have a few more of those beers and take a walk thataway,” Tim says, pointing to the door.
More laughter greets the rabble-rouser’s comments.
Bartender Bob takes a sip of his cocktail. “You’re not going to get much information in here,” he tells me.
“I haven’t heard any reports so far.”
“Well, remember there’s only a few dozen residents here. The average age is like sixty. Nobody goes into the bush. And everyone’s in bed by nine p.m. If there are Sasquatches, people here aren’t likely to see them.”
“Makes sense. But there’s no older reports, either, as far as I can tell.”
Bob shrugs his shoulders. “I wish I could help you.” He then goes quiet, deliberating for a moment. “Come to think of it, I did see something odd not that long ago. It happened about a year ago. There’s a couple of small lakes near town. We call them Twin Lakes. I was out for a long walk one day and reached the farther of the two. When I got there, I found footprints on the beach. Two sets of them—humanlike.”
“How big?”
“Well, that’s the thing. They were small. Smaller than mine. Kid-size. But they were strange. Funny looking. Splayed toes. Human—but not, somehow.”
I quickly try to remember whether I’ve told Rob, or anyone else, of the small tracks I came across in Bella Bella. I realize I haven’t.
“What’s the matter?” Bob says, noticing my reaction.
“Nothing,” I say, trying to disguise my surprise. “Could it have been kids playing at the lake?”
“Doubt it. This place is deep in the bush. No one goes out there. There’s few, if any, kids in town. Almost all the boaters who stop here are retired. And the tracks came right out of the bush at one end of the beach and walked along the sand into more tree cover. There weren’t any other footprints alongside them. Totally random.”
“How does one get to Twin Lakes?”
“Just follow the logging road out of town. You’ll need a four-by-four. Or you could walk, but it’s a distance. The road keeps going all the way to a place called Shack Bay, in Roscoe Inlet.”
Roscoe. I’m thrown off by how close the inlet is to Ocean Falls. But then I remember that shortcuts abound in the Great Bear—like secret doors in a labyrinth. If you could trudge through valleys and over the mountains in any direction you’d find yourself in another inlet, watershed, or region considered distant if you were to travel by boat.
“They built the road just before Ocean Falls closed,” Bob goes on. “When everyone realized how polluted the area had become. They were going to relocate the town to Roscoe.”
Shack Bay is near where Mary Brown and her group of young campers say they encountered a Sasquatch—the one that had crawled under their cabin. The connections continue to pile up.
Bob sees the wheels turning in my head. He reaches down and brings up another Lucky Lager, placing it beside me with a wry smile.
“You’re lucky today is my birthday,” he says. “I’m almost never this talkative.”