For Sale: Common Sense—Enquire Within
Of the limited number of subjects he thought about often, Keanu and his twin’s first names weren’t among them. Not anymore. When they were younger, he would roll with the teasing while his brother usually fought it out. But now, with college behind them and limited career opportunities for theater majors, what he thought about most often was the batsquatch.
“It’s a monster out there in Washington State,” he said to his brother across the table. “You know that mountain that blew up out there, back in the ’80s? It, like, set this thing free or made it angry or something. Pulled it out of hibernation.”
His brother waved him off. “Listen, I got another one. ‘For sale: Communist Manifesto. Never red.’”
Inspired by their visit to the Ernest Hemingway House, Kiefer had spent most of their time in Key West inventing variants of the author’s alleged flash fiction about unworn baby shoes. Never mind that the guide had told them it couldn’t have been, as that story began circulating when Hemingway was only seven years old. Kiefer liked the myth of it anyway.
They were drinking at a Key West saloon on Greene Street. The day was humid, but the bar was cool. A slow fan turned overhead. They sat close to the tree that grew up through the bar’s center and through the roof, and Kiefer stared almost longingly at the various dollar bills attached to the tree and the ceiling, all signed by patrons. Useless to a pauper—or a thief. Keanu knew what his brother was brooding over.
“Yeah, okay, I admit I was wrong about Boorman,” he said. “But I’m not wrong about the batsquatch.”
“Batsquatch.” Kiefer sat up straighter on his stool and glared at Keanu. “Batsquatch. Are you making this up? Because you know what that sounds like? That sounds like Batman’s bowel movement. No joke this time.”
Keanu grimaced. “C’mon, man. Don’t be like this. I can make it up to you.”
“I think you did make it up.” Kiefer licked salt off his lips. “Boorman was very real. And you seemed certain you could get him to tell us where he’d hidden all that money. You said it’d be on like Revlon.”
“I know. I know what I said.” Keanu had already conceded—many times—that it hadn’t occurred to him that the Feds might be tailing Daryl Boorman to see if he’d lead them to the cash he’d walked out of three separate Atlantic West Bank locations with, all three on the same day.
The agents knew he was the robber, but they didn’t have the evidence to bust him, at least not yet. So, when the story made national news, right down to Boorman’s resumption of his nonchalant routines even after he’d been IDed, Keanu saw a chance to come out from Wichita and pick up some of that money themselves.
What if he gets suspicious? Kiefer had asked. What if he knows we’re following him?
No, no. Cops follow people, Keanu had answered. Do we look like cops? We’ll tell him that we’re writers who want to write a book about him. He’s the new D. B. Cooper. We’re going to make him famous for all the right reasons. Once he hears that, he’ll be all in.
But it had not gone that way.
***
Daryl Boorman hangs out in three different bars scattered across Key West, but his favorite, according to news reports, is Sea’s Breeze Bar and Grill. They’ve even named a table after him, the story goes. When their American Airlines flight lands at Key West International, Kiefer promptly points out that the airport is far smaller than even Wichita’s Eisenhower Airport.“It’s a Fisher-Price Little People airport,” he says. “Everybody here should be walking around with their arms out for a hug.” Keanu ignores this. He had gone over his notes on Daryl Boorman with his brother on the plane, but he goes over them again now because Kiefer was looking through a Florida guidebook when he explained it before. They’ve already pitched the book to Random House. The D. B. Cooper angle and how Boorman will be a folk hero—sticking it to the man, up with the workers, all that crap. They’re in a taxi when Kiefer suddenly says he wants to see Ernest Hemingway’s house and the six-toed cats that he read live there. “Then will you pay attention?” Keanu asks. “You already have my complete and undivided attention,” Kiefer says. “But first, I’d like to pay attention to those six-toed cats.”
***
Keanu said, “Listen, do you remember Aria Wright? Went to school with us?”
Kiefer was being uncooperative. “Nope.”
“Sure you do. You used to call her ‘Airhead.’”
“Alright. What about her?”
“Well, she told me about this batsquatch thing. Said she was going out west to map it. Like, track it down. I asked her what made her think it was real, and she got all quiet and said she just knew. She knew somebody who’d tracked it before. She even had a bat attractant spray in one hand and a whistle bat repellent whistle in the other. She was the real thing herself.”
Kiefer said, “Where was I when you and Aria Wright were whispering Grimm’s fairy tales to each other? Oh, right, doing your homework so you’d pass history.”
“Let me show you something else. Somebody even got a picture of it.” Keanu held his phone out to his brother, who squinted across the table at the screen. Said picture was fuzzy at best, fraudulent at worst, a vague outline of a man-like creature with wide wings like a membrane. Or fabric. “Keeping Tabs Weekly paid two thousand bucks for it.”
“Boorman got away with two hundred eighty thousand,” Kiefer said, leaning back. “So, now we’re going to chase two K? That’s not even a tip.”
“Well, we’re not just going to take a picture of it.” Keanu grinned until his brother looked up, his upper lip raised and one eye squinted in suspicion. “We’re going to catch it. And then we’re going to take bids from every zoo in America.”
Kiefer grinned back. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. I say Cincinnati. They have the best big cat selection in the country.”
“We’re selling a one-of-a-kind bat.”
“Right, I misspoke. Cincinnati—they have the best big bat selection.”
Keanu laughed. “Well, okay, then.”
They tipped their glasses to each other.
“So, whatever became of Airhead?” Kiefer asked.
***
After the Hemingway distraction, Keanu finds Kiefer attentive at last—until the first flash fiction attempt. “Rich robber fooled; brothers hit jackpot,” Kiefer says, counting the words on his fingers. “That’s six,” he says. Keanu says, “Yeah, but it’s not a story.” They argue for a bit, then Keanu shows Kiefer the IDs he had crafted to identify them as journalists for the Wichita Eagle. “We put these on the table, and we look legit,” Keanu says. Kiefer looks suspicious. “Why not the New York Times or the Washington Post? Those are names. He’ll know those. The Eagle is small potatoes.” Keanu says, “Because that’s too obvious. Too easy to check. Too big. The Eagle is legit enough that he could check it out online, but it’s small enough that nobody would say they worked there unless they actually did work there.” Kiefer sees his point but says, “I hope no one is pissed at us for using them when we get home.”
***
They were just about out of money—and were entirely out of patience—by the time they reached Portland, Oregon, rented a Jeep, bought a couple of sleeping bags and a small tent, and then hit a box hardware store for what Keanu described as “the necessities”: earplugs, sunglasses, a couple of flashlights, a large net, nylon rope, zip ties, gloves, and the largest fleece hood that the store had.
As the clerk scanned their order, Kiefer said in a low voice, “Why don’t you ask if they have chloroform? I don’t think this looks suspicious enough.”
That first night, they slept in a hotel about halfway to the mountain—a cheap hotel but one with a clear view of Mount St. Helens, its peak caved in and partially snow-covered. The sun was going down, and the mountain looked more like a painting than a true landscape.
“Man, Kansas doesn’t prepare you to see something like that fill your horizon,” Kiefer said from the room’s patio. “Bob Ross should’ve painted this.”
Lowering his voice to a gentle baritone and gesturing at the mountain, Keanu said, “And we’ll add a happy little batsquatch right here.”
Kiefer snorted. “It may not be that happy to see us.”
In the morning, the phone rang while Keanu was in the shower. Kiefer answered it, spoke for a minute, and then let himself into the bathroom.
“Going down to the front desk,” he said. “Amazon just delivered. Our bat attractant spray and body wash is here. Stay in the shower—I’ll bring it back, and you can drench yourself in it.”
Daryl Boorman sees them enter the Sea’s Breeze Bar and Grill, and they don’t get a chance to pitch their fake biography idea or flash their fake journalist IDs. He’s a big man, four hundred pounds, with a bald head that makes him look like the massive wrestler-turned-actor Tor Johnson from old Ed Wood movies. But he moves with a nimbleness that catches both of them off guard. One second, he’s seated on a stool at a sizable table shaped like a barrel; the next, he’s in motion. “Damn. He’s uglier than you,” Kiefer says, but by then, Boorman is halfway out the bar’s emergency exit, so Keanu leads them after him, shouting over the alarm that they’re not cops, they’re not cops. They’ve already started to fail, but they don’t know it yet.
***
By late afternoon, they were nine miles in and off the trail, regretting coming in sneakers and grousing about how little fluid was actually in the spray bottle, when the forest around them fell silent.
For a time, they’d passed the telltale signs of Mount St. Helens’ eruption: trees snapped close to their bases, the wood a bleached, dead white; other trunks bent at awkward angles, pointing down the slope where the lava had flowed; long stretches of rock with only hints of green life even after all these years. Eventually, however, they veered from those reminders of destruction and into thicker growth and eventually into actual woods. Every so often, they would stop, and Keanu would spray a tree’s bark with the bat attractant.
When the birds went silent, he reached out and stopped Kiefer. They both listened.
“It’s like when the power goes off in the house,” Keanu breathed. “You never hear it that quiet.”
Kiefer scanned left and right, looked over his shoulder, and then reached up to turn his brother’s chin to face behind them. “We’re being followed.”
The thing that looked down on them from the limb above was feral and tall, even when hunched over and gripping furrows in the bough with its clawed hands. Its face was squashed as if molded of malleable clay that had been beaten with a mallet. Both pointed ears atop its head twitched in their direction as the brothers stopped short. Its jaw gnawed up and down as if it were chewing, and just as Keanu raised his phone to take a photo, it spread its leathery wings so wide that the sun, setting through the trees behind it, disappeared from sight. The creature’s facial features vanished in the new shadows, but its eyes appeared with a red glow.
“That,” Kiefer said, “is the ugliest thing I’ve seen since Boorman.”
It screeched and fell backward off the branch.
“Holy shit,” Keanu said, dropping his phone to cover his ears. Kiefer snarled an obscenity and bowed his head, tilting one ear toward the ground, as the batsquatch slammed down through the firs, branches rippling in a wave and cracking to mark the creature’s descent. The smashing then retreated from them. It shrieked a second time, and both of them held their breath until the sound was gone.
Kiefer finally broke the welcome silence. “I bet that’s what the elevator to hell sounds like all the way down.”
“Well, we need to take steps to avoid that elevator.” Keanu grinned and picked up his phone. “I got one mediocre shot. We can do better. Come on. Our royalty check is getting away.”
***
They don’t catch up to Boorman for three blocks, just as he reaches the end of Simonton Street, a couple of yards from the shore. The lights on Sunset Key are visible out there across the water, but it’s dark where he finally stops. Boorman’s short-sleeve Hawaiian shirt is stuck to him with sweat. His face and the top of his bald head are slick; they glisten in what little light reaches him here. Keanu and Kiefer are both caught off guard and out of breath—Boorman is the fattest track star ever, Kiefer will say later. “We’re…not…cops,” Keanu gasps for the hundredth time since this chase began. “We’re writers, Mr. Boorman. We…we want to tell…your story.” That’s when Daryl Boorman, clearly hearing their disclaimer for the first time, reacts. He doesn’t wait for the D. B. Cooper pitch that Keanu has ready. He’s no longer interested in getting away from them. Instead, he draws an eight-inch-long knife from seemingly nowhere. “Whoa,” Kiefer says. They both turn to run as Boorman charges them. They are outgunned—or “out-knived,” as Keanu will say later.
***
It fell on them just over a hundred yards past the point where they first encountered it. Its wingspan encompassed both of them easily, though Keanu was fast enough to scramble out from under it before it began to pull them in. Kiefer wasn’t as lucky.
“Get it off me,” he yelled. One of his arms was pinned by the batsquatch’s feet, but with the other, he punched it repeatedly in its torso. The creature snarled, turning its head toward Keanu as if Kiefer’s fate were sealed.
“It’s no good to us dead,” Keanu shouted. He slammed his back against a tree and pulled his backpack off, fumbling with the straps. “Don’t kill it.”
“What? Did you just say not to kill it? With what, my good looks?” Kiefer jabbed his knees upward, driving the batsquatch at an angle a few inches away from him. “Are you gonna do anything?”
“Hang on.” Keanu pulled the net from his backpack and shook it out before him like a sheet. “Don’t let it get away.”
As if recognizing their intent, the batsquatch cocked its head and triumphantly screeched again. This time, however, they were ready—along the creature’s trail, they’d fished out the earplugs they’d bought at the hardware store. The piercing shriek was now dulled to a tolerable squeal. Kiefer shoved again, and the batsquatch lashed out at him in return. He groaned and cursed with startling color. When he swung at its face, the batsquatch suddenly abandoned him and took to the air.
“I got it,” Keanu said and threw the net. It fell short, and the creature continued up to land on a limb well out of reach. It turned toward them, hissed, and dropped again, soaring deeper into the forest.
“No, I don’t got it,” Keanu said, reeling the net in again.
“Nice. Get ready now,” Kiefer said. He climbed to his feet, dusting himself off. “We don’t have time for you to unpack while it’s ripping my face off. Come on—I can still see it.”
Keanu fell in next to his brother. “You kiss our mother with that mouth?”
***
Boorman is a cheetah in a lion’s body. Keanu and Kiefer split up, so he has to choose one of them, but he overtakes Keanu before they’ve even gone a block. They both go down in the street, face-first and sprawling, Keanu twisting to get on his back so he can see where the knife is. Boorman doesn’t look so good. His face is an ashen gray, and his breathing is erratic. He seems to have lost the knife—one hand is holding Keanu down, but the other is splayed open on his chest. “Mr. Boorman,” Keanu says, “are you all right?” Then someone grabs Boorman by the shoulders and pulls him away. As Keanu gets to his feet again, he says, “Your timing is excellent, bro—” but it’s not Kiefer. It’s two men with badges and handcuffs. One of them is telling Boorman about his right to have this or to not say that, and the other one is talking a mile a minute about aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and intent and second-degree something and felonious something else. Kiefer joins them, and the second man pauses long enough to ask for IDs and to tell them they shouldn’t leave town. Boorman starts wailing and coughing and saying he needs a doctor, and the first man asks him where the money from the robberies is. The two men, the cops, pay no more attention to Keanu and Kiefer. Kiefer helps Keanu up and says, “Hemingway would have described this as ‘Bank robber’s arrest robs brothers of hope.’” Keanu, distracted watching them handcuff Boorman, holds up fingers and says, “Seven words. It’s too long.”
***
It didn’t attack them again, but it also didn’t take flight and escape them. Instead, the batsquatch flew ahead in hundred-yard bursts, and each time, Keanu and Kiefer closed on it again. They were ready now—Keanu had the net set to cast, and Kiefer had the coil of nylon rope slung over his shoulder. But the creature never let them get close enough to use either one. It was full-on night by the time they decided to stop. They were both hungry and cold, and Kiefer’s mood had turned foul. He shone his flashlight around; the space beyond the illuminated trees looked unreal and almost fake, as if it were painted, a backdrop.
“It’s gonna walk us off a cliff,” he said. “Man-Bat’s just playing with us.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember that comic book.” Keanu was out of breath. “Okay. Let’s go down this hill here and maybe camp for the night. We can figure out a better plan in the morning.”
“We don’t know anything about camping, not a thing. So, I already have a better plan. We go home. We get some money together and go back to Florida and look for Boorman’s money again. Why do people in the Pacific Northwest think this hiking crap is fun? Next time I hike, I want it to be in Towne East Square mall, and I—”
The hill was, in fact, the rim of a more extensive ravine, and they slid down rocks and loose soil to the bottom, Kiefer swearing under his breath. His flashlight beam jerked and twitched skyward like a concert’s light show before it went off.
Keanu kept his balance, but when he skidded to a stop at last, reaching out in the darkness for his brother, he could hear shuffling all around him. He fumbled for his own flashlight.
The eyes of the batsquatch, less than three feet in front of him, glowed an ugly, angry red when the light hit them.
“It’s right here,” Kiefer whisper-hissed.
Keanu held his light steady as the batsquatch flexed its wings and took an aggressive step toward him. Its lower jaw dropped open to reveal fangs. “I know. I’m looking right at it.”
“No, it’s over here.” Kiefer muttered a swear word. “One of them is, anyway.”
As the brothers waved their flashlights around them, all five of the batsquatches surrounding them crept closer.
***
They’re waiting for their flight to Portland, Oregon, to board when the local news reports that Daryl Boorman, suspected of daylight holdups of three Atlantic West Bank locations, has died while in custody. Keanu stands in front of the monitor with his arms crossed, watching. They’re interviewing a detective—Keanu recognizes him as the one who told them not to leave town—and then a bartender who practically cries when he tells how Sea’s Breeze Bar and Grill loved Boorman, even named a table after him, the Daryl Barrel, and then a teller at one of the banks who says the robber wore a mask, but she knows it was him because how many robbers are built like a sumo wrestler? Keanu turns to Kiefer and says, “They let that go on the air. It’s racist and body-shaming.” Kiefer says, “Brothers go to sleep broke, wake up woke.” He counts his fingers and then makes a disgusted, dismissive noise. They board. And when they’re airborne, twenty minutes later, Keanu’s eyes go wide and he turns to his brother. “Dammit, I think I know where he hid the money.”
***
“Dammit, I thought there was just the one,” Keanu grunted as he scrambled up the ravine behind Kiefer. Something darted above them in the darkness, claws scraping the length of his backpack. “I didn’t know there was a colony.”
Kiefer kicked dirt back at him. “‘Colony.’ I’m gonna beat your brains out if we get out of this, Poindexter.”
When they reached the top, they joined hands so they wouldn’t lose each other in the black woods. But there was no way to discern one direction from another, so they simply ran. Their flashlight beams crisscrossed erratically. The creatures stayed close but just out of reach, nearly invisible in the night.
“Here.” Kiefer pulled Keanu next to him, putting their backs to a sizable tree. “Take this.”
He shoved a thick branch into his brother’s hands, then hefted one himself, holding it like a baseball bat, his flashlight on the ground pointed skyward. A shape flashed by overhead.
“I got another one,” Kiefer said.
Keanu jabbed at something that passed too close. The batsquatch screeched and fled. “Go ahead.”
“Butch Cassidy’s ending, bats instead of Bolivians.”
“That’s seven words. You’re not getting any better at this.”
They stood in silence for a long while, heads cocked, listening to the creatures that sometimes tested their reach, sometimes landing at an unknown distance before hopping into range of the flashlights. They shrieked, answering each other, diving forward to grapple for the brothers’ makeshift weapons, only to retreat after a few seconds.
Keanu said, “Even if we can hold them off, we’re gonna get tired. We can’t keep this up.”
“I see something out there,” Kiefer said. “Over that way. Do you see it?”
A campfire. Keanu squinted, but he couldn’t see the people, couldn’t tell how many there were. “I do. But if we could get there, we’d be putting someone else in danger.”
“Yes. Someone else who might have guns.”
“That’s a very good point.” Keanu grabbed Kiefer’s hand and ran.
***
“As soon as we get to Portland, we should turn around and go back to Key West,” Kiefer says, staring out the plane’s window. “Twelve more hours on a plane. You couldn’t think of the barrel an hour ago?” Keanu says, “The manager would have had to help him, but it makes perfect sense. If Daryl’s Barrel table is hollow—but look, we aren’t going to have enough money to fly back. I say we give the batsquatch thing a shot. Aria Wright was a smart woman. I believe she knew what she was talking about when she said it was a real creature.” Kiefer looks at his brother, smirks, and says, “And when this turns out to be nothing? What then?” Keanu smiles back and says, “I guess then we call Mom and Dad and ask them to send us some money so we can go home.” They are silent for a long time, and finally Kiefer sighs and says, “So, you never did tell me what Airhead Wright is up to these days.”
***
They almost made it to the campfire.
When a batsquatch from above planted both of its claws in Keanu’s back and shoved, he went down. He let go of Kiefer’s hand, but his brother stopped and dropped down next to him, rolling over and swinging at the batsquatch until it retreated. Keanu groaned and got up on his hands and knees.
“You know what I was thinking?” he said. “How awesome would it be if that fire was Aria Wright, magically waiting for us out here.”
Kiefer snorted. “With her bat repellent.”
“Yes. She said it was a whistle.” Keanu cocked his head to face his brother. “I’m sorry. This is all on me. I got us killed.”
“Not yet,” Kiefer grunted, looking away and out at the night. “Save your apology for after it actually happens.”
“Okay. Okay then. Tell me another one.”
A series of screeches echoed back and forth around them, rising and falling, getting closer with each response. Kiefer swallowed and finally looked at Keanu. “They tried. They failed. The end.”
Keanu smiled. “Six words. And brevity. Hemingway would approve.”
A new sound, shrill and ominous, rang out in the pitch blackness, and they braced themselves for the attack.
***
It had been a long day, and the mountain that was so warm in the sunlight became shockingly cold in the moonlight. Aria Wright decided she’d leave the campfire burning overnight—she intended to get an early start anyway. The last six days of trying to map Bigfoot had convinced her that the lumbering missing link was a morning person. He had led her all over Mount St. Helens, and though the chase had been exhilarating, there were still other creatures she wanted to map. The Pacific Northwest was a treasure trove, and she was eager to get downstate to Medford—new Shmoos had been seen there in the last month. These were new to her, too. More for the mapping.
She was just starting to think about calling it a night when she heard the racket in the trees above and the angry, combative shrieking. She listened; it seemed to be coming closer. And that, she decided, was not going to happen. She was done with the batsquatch—after mapping it, she had decided it was not one of her favorites. Hostile, confrontational, and generally unpleasant. Besides, it was horrid. Really horrid. Especially compared to Bigfoot. She had her priorities now.
She unzipped the small flight bag in her tent, found the whistle she’d brought with her if she was going to be on the mountain, and turned toward the commotion in the dark woods. When she blew it as hard as she could—a shrill, ominous sound—the reaction was immediate. The batsquatches—it sounded as if there were more than she even knew existed—squealed and screeched defiantly even as they fled. She blew it a second time just to be sure, smiling as she climbed into her tent and put it away again. It was a good feeling, knowing what you were doing—and annoying batsquatches.
When she emerged, two figures staggered toward her from the darkness.
She still had plenty of time to choose a weapon—and she had a broad range available to her, no fooling—but then she caught sight of their faces, worn and exhausted. They were scratched and bloodied, dressed more for a walk around a gymnasium than an overnight hike on a mountainside, and the surprise in their eyes surely matched her own.
“Well, hello there, Keanu,” she said. She cocked an eyebrow at his brother; he’d never been especially kind to her, as she recalled. “Kiefer.”
They all stood frozen for an awkward length of time, the night silent now, before Keanu turned to Kiefer and high-fived him. Grinning, they both sank to the ground by her fire, groaning as they did.
“Aria,” Keanu said, “we are so, so glad to see you. Were you expecting us?”
“Are you kidding? Why would I be expecting you?”
“Please, just say you were. It would make both of us feel a lot better. After what we just went through.”
She squatted down across the fire from them and smiled. “This should be quite the story.”
To Keanu, Kiefer said, “That was six words.”
