Longspur Peak

by Jeffrey Dupuis

From the first few seconds of meeting Dean Cain, I couldn’t stop referring to him as “Dean Cain,” never just “Dean” or “Mr. Cain.” It was not as though he had saved my life, but he had done me what you might call a “solid.” However, things could have turned out significantly worse, had I not met Dean Cain, but a mountain lion or a grizzly bear instead.

Elise had left me by the roadside, prey for the midsummer mosquitoes, and I had no choice but to walk down the mountain alone and hope for someone else to be driving down the secluded road, fraught with switchbacks and crisscrossing wildlife. It turned out asking for a divorce was more difficult than I had envisioned, even with the ticking clock of Magda’s pregnancy hanging over the whole thing. I thought that spending the day in the mountains, near Longspur Peak, away from the life Elise and I had built together, might make the whole thing easier. However, Elise spent the night prior baking, preparing a picnic, and the whole day was too pleasant to mention the D-word.

Only on the way home, when we stopped at the roadside so I could answer the call of nature, did Elise pick up my phone and find something objectionable. Although she may have been in an agreeable mood, Elise was the type of person who could ferret out a secret, even if she suspected nothing. It was a trait I profoundly disliked about her. With my iPhone in her hand, I could see her expression through the window grow more and more distressed as I walked back to the car. I couldn’t be sure what upset her, e-mails maybe, or the sonogram Magda sent of our unborn child.

“You are such a fucking, fucking asshole!” she screamed.

Tears filled her eyes and she was still screaming as she drove away, fishtailing onto the shoulder as the road curved, the tires kicking up gravel.

“You shouldn’t drive when you’re so emotional,” I called after her. “You could get into an accident.”

I honestly cannot remember ever crying. Perhaps I’m a sociopath or maybe I’m somewhere on the autistic spectrum—I don’t understand those conditions and I’ve never been diagnosed. I just tend not to feel much of anything and, as far as Elise went, I just couldn’t pretend anymore. My father used to tell me when I was a boy that our heart was encased in the ribcage to keep our feelings locked up. I know as an adult that that theory is not biologically sound, and if it were true, giant squids must be littering the sea floor with melancholy.

My first visit to Longspur Peak was when I was twelve and I went hunting with my father. We waited among the moss-covered rocks and old-growth trees at the edge of a clearing for what seemed like hours. Dad didn’t “hunt” deer, he found their food source and waited for them to come to him. We finally saw a ten-point buck emerge on the other side of the clearing. Dad aimed the rifle, lining the buck up in his sights, then, without a word, lowered the barrel and handed the gun to me. I raised the butt of the gun to my shoulder and took aim, the wood and steel rifle feeling heavy like an Olympic barbell. Then I took the shot. The bullet tore through the sternum of the buck and it bounded off amongst the trees.

“Jesus Christ, Pete,” was all Dad said and we jogged into the bush, following the trail of syrupy droplets.

We found the buck lying on his side, appearing to have an asthma attack. It struggled for air and never succeeded. I chambered another bullet but Dad took the gun away from me.

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

He handed me a knife with a wooden handle and tarnished blade, something that looked like it had last seen action in the trenches of World War One.

“Cut the carotid artery,” he said. “Like this.”

He used the back of the blade and traced a line down the side of his neck.

Dad stood over me as I sunk down onto the animal, the knife in my right hand, my left hand over top, steadying the blade. Some blood spurt out at first, coating the back of my trembling hand in thick warmth, then the stream flowed slowly down the buck’s neck.

“There’s a good man,” said. “A man clears up his mistakes.”

When it was done Dad put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it tenderly.

“In Islam, they do that to goats every year,” he said.

For the remainder of my childhood, I thought Islam was a place.

The winding road leading toward the city was the one thing that hadn’t really changed since I was a boy. There wasn’t much of a shoulder, so when I heard a car tearing down the mountain road I moved almost into the trees and waited with my thumb outstretched. A silver coupe sped by, screeching to a halt twenty feet down the road from where I was, laying down two lines of black rubber.

“You’re Dean Cain,” I said to the driver, who leaned across the car to open the passenger door.

“Yep.”

“What are you doing in the middle of nowhere, Canada?”

We took off down the road. Dean Cain had the windows down and cool air ripped through the car, flies rain dropping on the windshield.

“I’m doing a movie up in the mountains,” he said.

He gave me the synopsis as though it was printed on the back cover of a DVD. When copper miners in the Pacific Northwest accidentally awaken the legendary Sasquatch, it’s up to small town sheriff Hardee Wallace (Dean Cain) to put a stop to the monstrous, bloodthirsty rampage.
“I don’t know any radio stations,” Dean Cain said, pointing toward the dash. “Put on something rockin’, I wanna get in the zone, you know…”

The classic rock station was the only one that came in clearly. We caught the tail end of Don’t Fear the Reaper, then a paid political announcement came on. It was an election year and the party in power filled the airwaves with attack ads. How do the Liberals plan to balance the budget? By raising taxes. Higher taxes kill jobs.

“I doubt they can cite any economic research papers to support that claim,” I said to Dean Cain.
“It’s just common sense. High taxes kill jobs and the middle class.”

“You can’t have a middle class without public education, infrastructure and social services,” I said. “Taxes are what pay for those.”
  
“Are you a communist?” Dean Cain asked me as the car screeched to a halt.

“No, I’m not a communist,” I told Dean Cain. “I’m more like what you Americans would consider a New Deal Democrat.”

“Try a No Deal Democrat. Your free ride’s over. Get out of my car.”

I could see then that I wasn’t dealing with raised-in-Smallville-by-the-salt-of-the-earth Dean Cain. This was more the entitled, beginning-of-Future Sport Dean Cain, or maybe even the intolerant to the developmentally challenged, surfer-from-Life-Goes-On Dean Cain. He had pulled over so close to the edge of the road that I stepped out and fell about three feet into a gully. As soon as I closed the door, he sped away and I could hear Panama blasting from the car’s speakers.

The rays of the waning sun stuck to what looked like a string of gems, a tiny constellation of sparkles at the base of an old, stone mile marker. I could see that it was broken glass. The marker itself was marred with streaks of green paint. A crow stood upon the moss-covered milestone, looking down at the glittering glass, seeing value where humans see only damaged goods.
 
The lift Dean Cain had given me shaved an hour off my journey and I could walk to the nearest town before nightfall. Magda would call and maybe Elise would answer. I imagined all the horrible things they’d say to each other or about me, as I walked back to civilization.

I didn’t seen Dean Cain’s face again until a howling winter night, at home, watching the Sy-Fy Network as bare branches tapped my window. Dean Cain was starring in Sasquatch Rampage, which concluded with a copper mine filled with sasquatches and dynamite, and Dean Cain firing a flare gun into the TNT, saying “Bigfoot…meet big bang.”
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Elise wanted nothing more from me other than the severing of all ties, which was considerate of her, since I’d need what money I had for my impending child support payments. She later married a tow truck driver and moved up near Longspur Peak and they lived happily among the local Sasquatch population, making well-mannered baby after well-mannered baby.