- CHAPTER 1: Chief Bigfoot - © 2.15.2007

Bigfoot was a big man with a dark, ruffled complexion.  His oversized body was attached to an unusually large head with eyes bulging out from what might have been a sharply angled face.  What most people remembered though, was that Bigfoot always wore a menacing half-smile that no one really knew what to make of.

Bigfoot’s goals in life revolved around three things – money, land, and ancestry – and the rights or means to control all three.  He had many various triangles circling around him at all times -- girls and their sugar daddy advisors, sometimes working together to be his most treasured possession.  To be his possession was their chance at possessing his attention, and with attention, there was a chance to gain his confidence and control his actions. No one was jealous of his love or affection. Just his money.

Bigfoot’s rise to the top of his tribe came at the expense of several mysterious occurrences that bothered the tribal elders.  Coincidences were not overlooked by his Harapaho culture, especially those that unfolded before their very eyes.  The Harapaho were one of the most visually astute tribes remaining in the world today.  Scientists who studied this culture observed that some members of the tribe could see things much like the way owls could see clearly in the night.

There was one time in San Francisco when a crime scene analyst happened to be with his Harapaho friend when they went to a crime scene involving a dead mother.  The luminal, which detects blood marks when sprayed on any hard surface and having the lights turned off, was almost unnecessary with this friend.  He could see the hidden blood patterns with or without the luminal, but when the luminal was sprayed, he could see it more clearly without the lights turned off.  It was a one-time observation that baffled the whole CSI team at the time, but the case they were investigating took a heavy toll in time and reconstruction of clues, that they all but soon forgot about this strange phenomenon.

The first strange occurrence involving Bigfoot, was the way he earned his name in the first place.  Bigfoot had grown up as Rusty Blackbone in the tribal outposts of Shawnee, Oklahoma.  It was in 1989, while he was unemployed after he finished high school, that Rusty began to rob homes to make ends meet.  One night, he was in the middle of stealing a large television set from an old home he knew would be empty, when the sound of a bobcat hissing near the house startled him.   The house Rusty had targeted for taking that night was at the edge of a large cattle farm on a desolate gravel road called Oak Knoll Drive.  It wasn’t unusual for wild animals to come hunting for loose meat scraps every now and then, but the timing of this bobcat’s interference was unexpected and unwelcome.  The bobcat’s noise caused the dog Rusty tied up with duct tape to spring back to life.  To the German Shepard the noise was all too familiar and he sensed another wild adversary intruding into his lonely domain.

The dog began to wiggle and growl after smelling the bobcat’s scent.  Rusty realized the Shepard or the bobcat would have to be silenced.  As that thought was making way for another, Rusty made a foolish mistake which would travel with him for the rest of his life.  The excruciating pain of the large wooden television set landing on his left foot was far beyond the pain he remembered from falling off his horse earlier that week.  Of course he was knocked completely unconscious then, and didn’t remember much about the fall at all.  But this time, the corner of the large wooden box landed exactly on the base of his large left toe, shattering it into three broken pieces under his thick calloused skin. Instantly blood gushed out of his broken foot to remind him of his mediocre lifestyle as a burglar.

The owner of this house, Old Man McKinney as he was known, was an eccentric man Rusty knew almost all his life.  He had been invited over to this lonely abode at the end of Oak Knoll Drive many times, for barbeques when the old man had family visiting for celebrations and anniversaries.  Rusty even helped the old man with yard work when he was in high school. That was when the seeds were planted in Rusty’s mind that he would have to come back to this house under different terms and conditions at a future date.  He knew this grandpa didn’t have much longer to live, and all the luxuries he had seen in this old man’s house -- all the memorabilia and fancy furniture, with the old black and white photos and mementos placed near them -- would be... meaningless... if... a tornado were to hit his home one day.  As tornados were only matters of time and atmospheric vicissitudes that were routine in the eastern part of Oklahoma, Rusty felt obligated to remove some of the valuable equipment from this old man’s house before the next storm could just as easily do the same.  Then all these possessions would just go to waste by nature’s fury, Rusty reasoned. With this logic, Rusty decided he should help move the electronics out of this ill-fated house while the old man was away for his daughter’s funeral, which is when the elders predicted the next big tornado.  That was that. It was his duty to take possession of McKinney ’s electronics, and the night to do that was tonight.

When the television set landed on the floor, its heavy mass combined with gravity broke all the bones that were in its way, three of them being the endpoint of Rusty’s foot.  To add insult to injury, the TV set disengaged its most important components, the channel dial and the cathode ray tube that weighed almost 30 pounds.

“Damn it! Akomasha Ayahuasca!”

Rusty was thinking about getting out of this home invasion business altogether.  The broken toe would slow him down and make him unemployable for weeks, maybe even longer.  He liked to work with a crew, but now he would be seen as the weakest link in their housecleaning to pawn shop circuit. He had to keep this accident a secret from his cronies.  Then the dog began barking louder, which made his pain throb like his bones were being reshattered with each gasp of air.

The funeral for McKinney’s daughter was to take place tomorrow in Tulsa. Rusty heard through the grapevine that the poor girl had died in a sailing accident while vacationing in the Bahamas, and McKinney was devastated from the news of his only daughter’s death.  This knowledge gave Rusty some time to clean up his messy toe caused by the unexpected distraction from the bobcat. He could still hear it hissing although it seemed like it was fifty yards away.

Rusty wondered what he should do since this long-awaited opportunity was already getting off on the wrong foot.  He was nineteen years old and life would be dismal on the reservation if he came back with three broken bones and no bounty to make up for the embarrassment.  He began to look for ice.

The freezer inside the kitchen was packed full of meats and frozen vegetables, probably from the last harvest season, since this was only February.  Digging through the frozen zip-lock bags, Rusty settled on a rock hard assortment of green and orange vegetables, kind of like the ones in the venison stew his mother had made for him when she was still alive.  The heartwarming memory was eclipsed by the sound of a heavy American car driving up this desolate road and stopping about a hundred yards in front of the picket fence separating Old Man McKinney’s land from the larger cattle ranch his neighbor boasted.   Nobody drove around after 10:00 PM in Oklahoma unless they were drunk or were in the middle of an emergency.  Everybody knew this, especially Rusty who drove many miles in the darkest of nights to scope out his next home invasion prospects.

When the car engine quieted to a V-6 idle, Rusty inched his way to the basement, where he knew there was a peep hole he could take advantage of.  The car outside was just sitting there, its headlights on, and two shadowy figures walking around the grassy knoll.  One of them lit up a cigarette, which the wind blew straight into the house. It was a smell Rusty knew very well.  Those were the cowboy’s brand, favored by most white men in this neck of the woods.

The men in the car were dressed incongruously with the weather and each other.  One was wearing a sweatshirt and the other a long overcoat, the kind you see cowboys from the Tombstone era wearing on television.  Not many people wore this in real life, no matter what the weather conditions were since they were the established mark of an outlaw or a corrupt sheriff’s deputy trying to meet out justice.  While Rusty wondered what these two oddballs were doing out here in the middle of the night, he wanted badly to have a cigarette himself.  The pain was becoming routine, but walking anywhere was almost a major setback.

Rusty fumbled in his pocket to find the pack of Camels he always reached for when there was a change of scenery or sound.  Usually he reached for smokes to act like he was doing something important, such as pondering deep thoughts, when in fact, the motion of lighting and smoking cigarettes were in and of themselves a distraction to deep thinking.  It was the very nature of shifting images and mental mirages that cigarette smoke created a barrier to deep memory.  He must have dropped his pack somewhere for it was nowhere within his reach or sight.  These were the moments that try men’s souls, he thought.  He remembered reading something like this in his high school history class, but why was he thinking this now?  The pain in his foot suddenly became unbearable.

It wasn’t clear to Rusty why these two strange men appeared in the middle of the night to interrupt his long-awaited moment of reign inside this old man’s home.  He had been waiting for this night as long while three moons came and went, and uninvited guests were not welcome in his game plan.  He double-checked to make sure his Smith & Wesson .44 caliber was in his blue jean jacket pocket.  With this reassurance, Rusty stumbled back from the peephole to look for a towel as the blood was getting all over the floor, creating a bigger mess.  It was hard moving with one foot working and the other being dead weight, but the pain and gravity of the situation took over from its inconvenience.

“Who are these scavengers?” Rusty wondered as he opened the meat freezer at the far end of the basement.  Fortunately this freezer was old and industrial, so there wasn't even a light bulb that turned on with the open door.

Feeling around the large ice blocks, Rusty could sense this little meat locker was used for preserving large game the old man hunted.  Ducks, deer, bison, and fish filled the freezer from top to bottom. Nothing here was of use to him, except for a small rectangular object which seemed like it was wedged in the bottom left corner.  It was a briefcase made of solid metal, unlike anything he’d ever felt or seen.  What was this briefcase doing in a meat freezer?

The thought was interrupted by the sound of the car engine getting louder.  A beam of light panned the basement window, which made Rusty wonder if the car was actually turning around.  Could these be some distant relatives who have the wrong address for the funeral?  Maybe they were undercover police officers here because of an alert neighbor?  No, these nervous thoughts were total shots in the dark as far as Rusty’s better sense could reason.  For anyone to drive out here to see Old Man McKinney was unheard of even on a bright summer day, and this was a Thursday night with snow falling down hard.

Rusty lifted the suitcase out of the ice box and carefully set it on the floor.  The handle was frozen in its native position at rest. Whatever was in this suitcase must be valuable he thought.

Continued...