milkshake.
About fifteen feet separated the bungalows, and there were no shrubs in
this narrow sward. The headlights would have revealed the critter if it
was here, but it was gone.
This vanishment didn’t give Bobby second thoughts. Instead, he pressed
harder on the accelerator.
We rocketed into the backyard in time to see our own private Sasquatch
as it sprang across a picket fence and disappeared into the next
property, once more revealing no more of itself than a fleeting glimpse
of its hirsute buttocks.
Bobby wasn’t any more intimidated by the line of spindly wooden pickets
than he had been by the hedgerow. Speeding toward it, he laughed and
said, “Skeggin’, ” meaning having big-time fun, which most likely comes
from skeg, the name for the rudder like fin on the underside of a
surfboard, which allows you to steer and do cool maneuvers.
Although Bobby is laid back and tranquility-loving, ranking as high in
the annals of slackerhood as Saddam Hussein ranks in the Insane Dictator
Hall of Fame, he’s another dude altogether, a huge macking tsunami, once
he’s committed himself to a line of action. He will sit on a beach for
hours, studying wave conditions, looking for sets that will push him to
and maybe past his personal threshold, oblivious even to the passing
contents of bun-floss bikinis, so focused and patient that he makes one
of those Easter Island stone heads seem positively jittery, but when he
sees what he needs and paddles his board out to the lineup, he doesn’t
wallow there like a buoy, he becomes a true raging slash master, ripping
the waves, domesticating even the hugest thunder crushers, going for it
so totally that if any shark mistook him for chum, he’d flip it upside
down and ride it like a longboard.
“Skeggin’, my ass, ” I said as we hit the fence.
Weathered white pickets exploded over the hood of the Jeep, rattled
across the windshield, clattered against the roll bar, and I was sure
that one of them would ricochet at precisely the right angle to skewer
one of my eyes and make brain shish kebab, but that didn’t happen.
Then we were crossing the rear lawn of the house that faced out on the
next street in the grid.
The yard we had left behind was smooth, but this one was full of troughs
and mounds and chuckholes, over which we rollicked with such exuberance
that I had to clamp one hand on my cap to keep it from flying off.
In spite of the serious risk of biting all the way through my tongue if
we suddenly bottomed out too hard, I said, in a stutter worthy of Porky
Pig, “You see it? ”
“On it! ” he assured me, though the headlights were arcing up and down
so radically with the wildly bucking Jeep that I didn’t believe he could
see anything smaller than the house around which he was steering us.
I’d switched off the spotlight, because I wasn’t illuminating anything
except my knees and various galactic nebulae, and if I threw up in my
lap, I didn’t care to scrutinize the mess under a high beam.
The terrain between bungalows was as rugged as the backyard, and the
ground in front of the house proved to be no better. If someone hadn’t
been burying dead cows on this property, then the gophers must be as big
as Holsteins.
We rocked to a halt before reaching the street. There were no hedgerows
to hide behind, and the trunks of the Indian laurels weren’t thick
enough to entirely conceal a bulimic super model, let alone Sasquatch.
I switched on the spotlight and swept it left and right along the
street. Deserted.
“I thought you were on it, ” I said.
“Was.”
“Now? ”
“Not.”
“So? ”
“New plan, ” he said.
“I’m waiting.”
“You’re the planning dude, ” Bobby said, shifting the Jeep into park.
Another weird screamlike fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, the dying
wail of a cat, and the sob of a terrified child all woven together and
re-created on a malfunctioning synthesizer by a musician whacked on
crystal methbrought us out of our seats, not merely because it was eerie