FOOTNOTE: A STORY OF THE CREATION AND LEGACY OF THE WESTERN MYTHOLOGICAL BEAST by Jill Logan

Dinky[1] studied the taxidermed squirrel atop Cowboy’s dresser, perched there in a little felt vest and hat, with a glass eye on one side of his head and the other eye sewn shut, leaving Dinky to wonder where the missing eye had gone and to make up stories about how the squirrel had lost it in some American war.
“How’s your mama?” Cowboy asked, easing forward in his nursing home bed and adjusting the pillow beneath his head.
“She ain’t been in here today?” said Dinky.
“Nope. They just sent me that female hippopotamus and that fellow who can’t speak English. Chico’s his name. Him, I like. Her, I’d like to run off a cliff and then spit over the edge.” Cowboy glanced toward the hall and whispered, “Shut the door.”
Dinky snuck past Mr. Pesto, a lump in the next bed, and closed the heavy door that looked just like all of the other heavy doors up and down the nursing home hallway. Then he stuffed a rolled white towel underneath it, cracked the window, and helped Cowboy to light his cigarette with a silver Zippo inscribed with EH for Ernie Henry.
“And how’s your dad?” Cowboy asked, his lips puckering around the Marlboro until they resembled the underside of a mushroom.
Dinky played with the lighter, flicking up the flame and passing the palm of his hand over it as slowly as he could before answering, “He’s all right.”
“What I figured,” said Cowboy. “He still got you doing all that crazy stuff out in the woods?”
“We finished making the feet a few months ago,” said Dinky, clanking the Zippo shut and returning it to its spot on the dresser. “They look pretty cool. If you ask me. You believe in Cedarfoot, Cowboy?”
Cowboy didn’t answer.
“They look pretty cool,” Dinky repeated. “Dad said that something like that can get your name in the paper. Make you go down in history.”
Dinky wanted Cowboy to say something but the old man didn’t comment. Cowboy had been a big man back in the days when he could still stand. Not a tall man, but stocky – wide as a mattress. He was a man who could speak with authority on how long it took to ride a horse from Tulsa to Lubbock and the difference between the scat of a bobcat and a cougar. He’d lost a finger in a wheat thresher one year and his thumb got cinched up in the ropes on a bull named Gillom the next. Dinky would sometimes stare at the knobby stumps on Cowboy’s hands, pink and grey, like the inside of a dog’s ear, and he would admire them.
Mr. Pesto[2] made a noise from the next bed.
“Look at him over there,” said Cowboy. “Getting bedsores and having people flip him over like a sausage to wipe his ass twice a day. Poor bastard probably just wants to be done with it and not spend the rest of his life pissing himself and farting Jell-O out the side of his mouth. Ain’t that right?” Cowboy shouted at Mr. Pesto who lay there inert, eyes closed, his old head as bald as a scrotum.
Cowboy and Dinky waited for a response, but none came, and finally Cowboy whistled through his teeth. Then Dinky did the same.
Littleton wasn’t one of the nicer nursing homes where people went to die – the brick kind where residents had their own kitchens and bathrooms – rather, it was a stucco building the color of a toadstool and, also like a toadstool, seemed to be growing in shit and decay.
“School going all right?” asked Cowboy.
“I got in trouble in my damn history class,” said Dinky.
Cowboy chuckled. “What for?”
“Oh, stupid stuff.”
Dinky, a sixth-grader, didn’t feel like explaining to Cowboy that he’d actually gotten in trouble for not writing his paper on fathers and sons in the White House. He’d tried to write the essay in the hallway before class, making up what he thought was an interesting story about the Roosevelts (which included the near-destruction of the White House by firebombing), but his teacher soon pointed out that Theodore and Franklin were not father and son and that everyone else had done papers on the Adamses or the Bushes. The teacher had given him a zero in thin red ink next to a comment that said See me after class (which he hadn’t). Dinky wished he could have written a story about war heroes or action stars who died in interesting or gruesome ways.
“Well, that happens, don’t it?” said Cowboy. “I got kicked out of a class or two myself. I missed the entire sixth grade, come to think of it.”

* * *

Dinky found his mother, Deena[3], down the nursing home hallway, stacking clean linens on a closet shelf.
“What time’s your dad picking you up?” Deena asked Dinky, as she refolded a bleached pillowcase.
“Five, I think.”
“You’d better call him and make sure. I’m singing karaoke out in Kingsland tonight.”
Dinky gently kicked at a wheel on the plastic cart.
“What are you singing?”
“I’m gonna start with some Faith Hill and then I think I’ll try out some of that new Miranda Lambert.”
“I like it better when you do the old stuff, like Patsy Cline,” Dinky said.
“That old stuff won’t get you noticed,” she said. “Do I smell cigarette smoke? Have you been smoking again?”
“No.”
“Cowboy in there smoking?”
Dinky lifted a stack of sheets off his mother’s cart and loaded them into the closet for her. She leaned toward him in her pink daisy scrubs and sniffed his hair.
“He’s being good,” Dinky said.
“Diana!” One of the patients yelled from across the hall, and Dinky’s mother rolled her eyes. The nursing home patients were always calling her Dinah or Diana instead of Deena – but then again she wasn’t a person they ever really talked to or even talked about. Dinky had watched her, returning from their rooms carrying plastic tubs filled with their urine, little curved turds floating in them. His mother would write down the color of the urine on a form, and Dinky was impressed by how she could tell the difference between “honey” and “golden,” which wasn’t something that anyone else ever took the time to notice or appreciate. But Dinky assumed that folks didn’t want to know the names of the people who did those sorts of things anymore than they wanted to know the color of their own piss.
“There’s some mail outside Cowboy’s room there,” Deena said. “Take it in to him?”
Dinky removed an envelope from the plastic bin next to Cowboy’s door. The return address label was the free kind that came in the mail from cancer foundations and sweepstakes, and the address on it said Connecticut.
“Cowboy, you got an envelope here from CT,” said Dinky, walking back into Cowboy’s room, which still smelled faintly of his Marlboro Red.
“Who the hell’s CT?”
“Connecticut. That’s where it’s from.”
Cowboy stuck out his three chapped fingers and Dinky slid the envelope between two of them, then waited as Cowboy unfolded the letter, read it, and squinted at some other papers he pulled from the envelope.
“You know people in Connecticut?” Dinky finally asked.
“My sister[4],” Cowboy said.
Cowboy handed Dinky the papers. At the top of one of the forms, in all capital letters, it read ERNEST HENRY PUSKAWITZ.
“That your real name? Puska-witz?”
“That’s me,” said Cowboy. “Came down here with the rodeo when I was a hair older than you, with my foot in the stirrup to manhood, as they say. Hated my parents – my father especially. Hated my home. So I up and joined the rodeo when it came through town. Shortened my name so the fellows wouldn’t laugh at me. Haven’t been back since.”
“Then how does your sister know where you are?”
“I wrote her. Time comes when you do things like that. Let’s get me another cigarette and shut that door.”
“I thought you said you were born on a freight train between Texas and New Mexico?” said Dinky.
“Did I say that?”
Dinky perched awkwardly on the corner of Cowboy’s mattress. Then he gathered his nerve and asked, “Why didn’t you like your dad? Can you tell me a story about him? A real story?”
The female hippopotamus pushed her head into the room.
“Cowboy, you supposed to be napping,” she snapped, then adjusted her red hair in the clamp on her head, and disappeared.

* * *

H Tatum[5] leaned against the old Ford truck, smoking and waiting on Dinky, one knee jiggling to a beat that Dinky couldn’t hear.
“You mind running into Walmart on our way?” H asked. “Get me some medicine?”
“You sick, Dad?” asked Dinky. He always knew the answer, but he kept asking anyway. The Styrofoam cooler squeaked as Dinky slid it off the bench seat to make room for himself.
“Sorry,” said H. “I probably should have cleaned that crap up first.” He snatched the cooler and an empty McDonald’s bag off the floorboard and slung them both into the truck bed with an orangutan-arm motion that made Dinky smile. “Two boxes if they’ll let you,” H added as he climbed back into the truck. “Then we’re gonna go out to Cimarron Canyon to see Gene.”
“Is Gene gonna help us?” asked Dinky.
“I just thought we’d do some more tracks in the woods out there.” Dinky looked sideways at his father’s bloodshot eyes. “Oh! And did I tell you I got a guy coming out to see it?” The jiggling of H’s right knee caused his foot to shake on the accelerator, and the Ford slightly sped then slowed, sped then slowed, until Dinky’s stomach churned.
“To see what?”
“This guy up in Idaho. He’s a professor of anatomy or anthropology or something. He’s studied this stuff and already found a bunch of footprints from, like, five different types of primates. He wants to come see what we’ve got on Cedarfoot.”
“And he believes it’s real?”
“I told you, son. People want to believe it’s real. That’s all you need. You just gotta get people to want to believe it.”
“Where did he find the other footprints?” Dinky asked.
“In Montana, I think,” said H, tossing his cigarette out the window.
“Maybe Canada.”

* * *

The inside of Gene’s trailer seemed to slump inward under the wood-paneled walls. In each doorway, instead of doors, hung kids’ bed sheets – sheets depicting dinosaurs and Care Bears and the characters from Toy Story. [6] Dinky surveyed the trailer: the sink overflowing with dirty dishes and empty cans of Van Camp’s beans, a dead plant, the back wall lined with cardboard boxes of Jonny Kat and tins of paint thinner. Gene stood over a table, carefully taking apart a little battery and pressing down on it with the tip of a hammer. Dinky looked at his dad who shifted nervously from foot to foot.
“Let’s go back outside,” H said, putting his arm around Dinky. “I need a smoke.”
“What are we gonna do here, Dad?”
“Why don’t you get the Cedarfoot shoes on?”
Dinky climbed into the truck bed and sifted through the remnants of his dad’s various jobs: a dirty rubber work boot, some bags of grass clippings that had never been dumped, empty Domino’s boxes that H had delved into at some point on his delivery route or just brought home from work and eaten in the truck. Finally Dinky found the Cedarfoot shoes wedged against the wheel well. The shoes were shaped like large footprints (they’d used the shape of a gorilla footprint they found on the internet) and formed out of Styrofoam from beer coolers, then covered in soft buckskin from the fabric aisle at Walmart. H had put bricks on top of the feet so that they would sink deeper into the ground (to approximate the print of a 500‑pound animal), then added elastic straps across the tops, so that Dinky could slip them on over his shoes and stomp around in them.
“Okay, son. I’ll be inside. Got to take care of some business with Gene. Just go tramp around in the woods, maybe a half-mile or so. Try to make it look real.”
“I know, Dad. I thought you were gonna come with me, though.”
H’s hand shook as he returned the cigarette to his mouth, but with his other he reached out and gently pinched Dinky’s nose between his index and middle fingers, then pulled back and looked at his thumb.
“Got your nose,” he said, then added, “Just, you know, think about what Cedarfoot would do.”
Dinky walked a ways from the trailer in his sneakers before strapping on the feet. He and H had decided that Cedarfoot would never pass the tree line, so Dinky was careful to get into the trees before beginning his tracks. He took a couple of steps and twisted around to check if he’d left a print. There wasn’t much to see yet, just some mashed buffalo grass, but he knew he could do more if he found some cold mud underneath the shadows of the live oaks. He plodded through a stand of cedars, at first with a kind of feral ruthlessness, stomping with the full force of his legs, his arms swinging wildly. But as he began wandering deeper into the oaks, he started to think about where old Cedarfoot might go, what he might stop to look at or listen to, where he might sit down for a while. And then Dinky began to wonder. He’d always assumed that Cedarfoot was one-of‑a-kind, but the beast had to have come from somewhere. Dinky began to wonder about what had happened to Cedarfoot’s parents, and he thought about how lonely Cedarfoot must have felt, roaming through the woods, wishing he had someone he could communicate with, someone who understood the spicy musk of his fur and the deep throaty sadness of his growls.
Suddenly Dinky heard the rustle of a tree branch and looked up. The shadows of the oaks had lengthened and he realized he’d come farther than he’d meant to. He was close to the edge of the canyon at the back of the property, barbed wire fences containing him on both sides. He looked out at the mesa walls of the canyon, the yellow and gray and lavender mudstone and sandstone, the layers of gypsum and caprock. He’d once learned the names of the strata at school, but all that he could remember was that it was a million years old. He breathed in the smell of juniper as turkey vultures circled high above the canyon.[7] Dinky tried to picture Cedarfoot scaling the canyon walls. Could he jump the fences? It didn’t seem likely that a 500‑pound creature would have enough room to thrive on this little patch of land. He decided to ask Cowboy about the vertical jump capabilities of High Plains animals the next time he saw him. Dinky chose a path away from the sunset and headed back toward the trailer.

* * *

The nursing home smelled worse than usual. Dinky didn’t see his mother in the front lobby, so he went straight back to Cowboy’s room.
“Hey, how ya doing?” Dinky asked, pulling up the stool next to Cowboy’s bed, eager to talk to him about animals and fences, which he’d been pondering since the week before.
Cowboy didn’t answer.
“You gonna give ‘em hell today, Cowboy?” Dinky asked.
Cowboy blinked. He didn’t move his neck. He didn’t move his mouth. And his eyes, veined and yellowed, swept back and forth, like they were trapped in their sockets and attempting to escape.
“You okay, Cowboy?”
Trying to convince himself that Cowboy was in a state of sleep with his eyes open, Dinky didn’t want to ask him any more questions. But he didn’t want to sit in silence either, so he pulled a deck of cards from Cowboy’s drawer and began to fan them out on the little bedside table. They were blue playing cards from some casino in Las Vegas. Dinky tried to quietly shuffle them, but he hadn’t quite mastered the skill and the cards spilled onto the floor.
“Dinky,” he heard his mother say from the hallway behind him. He looked back at Cowboy, but still there was no response. Then Cowboy’s eyes sort of rolled back in his head, the way Dinky had seen people do when they peed in catheters. Dinky slid off the stool.
“What happened?” Dinky asked his mother, out in the hall.
“He had a stroke the other night, and then they took him in for surgery, but it didn’t go so well.”
“How long’s he gonna be stuck like that?” Dinky asked, looking back at the bed. His mother didn’t answer. “He can’t even look at me?”
“No.”[8]
“He can’t talk?”
“His sister’s coming here to decide what to do.” Deena put her hand on her son’s shoulder. “You hungry?” she asked, softly pushing the hairs away from Dinky’s eyes with her index finger. “We can stop at the Toot-n-Totum on the way home, pick up one of those rotisserie chickens.”
Dinky didn’t answer, just eyed the clot that was Mr. Pesto in his bed.
“Well, maybe a hamburger then,” Deena said. “You gonna be okay? I’m doing that Taylor Swift tribute tonight over in Altus, so I thought you’d want to spend the evening with your dad.”
A gourd-shaped woman in a dressing gown leaned out of her room.
“Was you the girl that was in here yesterday?” she called.
“No,” said Deena.
“Well. I guess it was that big gal,” the woman said. “Need someone to bathe me.”

* * *

Dinky was standing against the handrail, kicking small stones down the wheelchair ramp, when H pulled up in the truck.
“What’s that you got there?” asked H as Dinky climbed into the Ford.
“Nothing,” said Dinky. “Just some cards I got from Cowboy’s room.”
“How’s old Cowboy doing?” H asked, but before Dinky could answer, H had slid a CD into the player. “Wait until you hear this. I sent it to that guy up in Idaho, told him we recorded it out in the woods when we saw Cedarfoot. And now he wants to come down here!”
“You serious?” asked Dinky. “To see the tracks?”
H turned up the volume, and Dinky could hear the sound of crickets, of sticks breaking, of the swishing of leaves, and then a monkeyish growl that sounded like a carburetor.
“Where’d you do that?”
“It’s pretty good, isn’t it? Oh, and check this out.” H reached over and pulled something out of the glove box. “How’s that?”
Dinky took the photos and held them up in the evening light.
“Me and some of the guys took these,” said H.
“Who is that?”
“That’s Gene! We dressed him up in that costume. A friend of mine got it for me. He had it for Halloween or something.”
“That’s pretty good, Dad.”
Dinky studied the photo of Cedarfoot shoving a frog into his mouth. One of the frog’s legs was ripped off. In another picture Cedarfoot hovered over the carcass of a dead deer. The pictures were black and white and blurry, but Dinky could tell that the deer had been busted open, its innards spilled onto the ground like candy from a broken piñata.
“Oh, that’s a deer that my neighbor shot with his crossbow,” H said. [9]
Dinky tried to picture the Idaho professor who was believing all this, a man with glasses, crazy hair, maybe a long, thick beard that looked like tangled tree roots.
“So that professor, he thinks all of this is true, right?”
“Oh yeah. He’s eating this shit up.”
“But, when he comes down here, we’ll have to talk to him about this stuff?”
“Well sure. But it’s just kind of a fun thing. People like to believe in this kind of stuff. It’s not like we’re out-and-out lying. People got to believe in something, and as long as you’re not hurting no one – “
Dinky looked at his father – at the purplish shadows beneath his cheekbones, the black under his fingernails, the dark oily eyelids – and it made him sad. It made him want to wrap his arms around his father’s waist and stay there for a long time.
“I’ve been thinking about it, Dad, and I think Cedarfoot probably lost a finger.”
“Oh really? How so?”
“Well, he’s living out there in the woods. And maybe it got bit off. Or smashed under a dead tree or something. It’d be hard to keep all your fingers and toes if you were sleeping with the rattlesnakes every night.”
“Yeah. That’s probably true. Let’s remember that if we have to do Cedarfoot’s handprints sometime. From this point on, Cedarfoot ain’t got all his fingers.”
Then Dinky added, “But I also think maybe there’s a problem with the footprints.”
“What’s that?”
“When I made the footprints out there at Gene’s, I couldn’t go very far. I went back a ways and hit the canyon, and then there’s the fence lines on either side.” Dinky looked down at one of the Vegas playing cards he’d pulled from the box in Cowboy’s room and tried to trace the maze pattern on the back. “So I don’t know how Cedarfoot would get by on that little piece of land for so long.”
“You’re thinking too much, son,” said H. “He’s not that real.”
H turned onto the main road, the windows down, the engine humming, and the speakers blaring the loud, primal cries of a monster.

***

Dinky walked in to find an elderly woman in a green jogging suit sitting on the edge of Cowboy’s bed, which had been stripped down to a grey plastic mattress. The woman was tugging Cowboy’s things out of the dresser drawer and piling them onto a cart. Dinky carefully shuffled past Mr. Pesto who lay dormant in his bed.
“That’s Cowboy’s lighter,” Dinky said, pointing to the silver Zippo in the woman’s hand.
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s Cowboy’s,” Dinky repeated.
“Oh, Ernest’s? I know. I’m his sister. Emily.”
Dinky tried to recognize Cowboy’s face in hers but he couldn’t, especially with the waxy pink lipstick.
Emily smiled, but Dinky didn’t smile back. Instead he sat down on the worn, familiar stool, trying to find some bit of territory to claim for himself in the still and disinfected room.
“When’s the funeral?” he asked.
“We’ve had him cremated,” Emily said. “I’m taking him back to Connecticut with me.”
“You mean you’re not gonna bury him?”
“We have a family vault back home where we put the ashes. [10] My parents are there,” she said.
“And there isn’t a funeral?”
“I’m sure we’ll have a small ceremony, in Connecticut.”
“You hadn’t seen him for a long time,” Dinky whispered.
“No. Not since I’ve been grown,” Emily said, carefully folding a worn pair of Wranglers. “He left when I was fourteen. I used to tell people he’d gone to Hollywood, but I really had no idea where he was.” She pulled his leather belt out of the drawer and slowly rolled it into a tight snakish coil, but when she set it on the mattress it slowly came undone, and Dinky saw that her face had begun to do the same.
“Did you know Cowboy was a stuntman for a Clint Eastwood movie?” asked Dinky. “One they filmed around Lubbock?”
“Is that right?” the woman said, stroking the pile of faded flannel shirts beside her.
“Yeah. I think maybe he even got to talk in it. I think he had a line like, Put that peashooter down, you lyin’ sack of shit. Something like that.”[11]
The two of them sat awkwardly in the silence of the room, the taxidermed squirrel with its one eye watching them from the dresser.
“You mind if I take this?” Dinky asked, sliding off the plastic mattress and pointing to the squirrel in its little red vest.
Emily smiled.
“It’s all yours,” she said. “Is there anything else you’d like?”
Dinky looked down at the items on the bedside table and took Cowboy’s Zippo and the soft-pack of cigarettes. He slid them into the pocket of his cotton t‑shirt, then tucked the angry, one-eyed squirrel under his armpit.
“Why did Cowboy leave Connecticut?” he asked.
“I guess I don’t really know,” said Emily. “I think maybe it was just too small a place for him. Sometimes people need to be a part of something bigger than themselves.”
“Have a good trip to CT,” Dinky said, then shook her soft, thin hand and wished he had a hat to tip.

* * *

Dinky couldn’t believe it. The professor had shown up, looking much like Dinky had pictured, complete with sandy beard and glasses, but he was younger than Dinky had imagined, maybe just a few years older than his parents. He wore a corduroy jacket over a Flaming Lips t‑shirt and boots caked in what Dinky imagined was the dirt of archaeological excavations in Egypt. Or maybe Canada.
“Call me Carl,” said the professor. He shook H’s hand and then shook Dinky’s. They had met on the roadside near Gene’s house, and the professor clipped his boot against the gravel road, then looked out at the landscape. “It’s beautiful country here,” he said. “The plains. The canyons. Georgia O’Keefe called it a burning, seething cauldron, filled with dramatic light and color. Just wow, man.”
“Huh,” said Dinky, unsure of how to respond.
“And how did you first discover the tracks?” asked Professor Carl, his mud-caked boots crunching the gravel as he walked around his rental car to pull a bag from the trunk.
“My friend lives in that trailer over there,” said H. He pointed down the road to Gene’s double-wide, and Dinky could tell that Professor Carl was less than impressed even though he didn’t say anything. Above the trailer, thunderheads had begun to roll in, inking out the sky.
“Is he there now?”
“I think so,” said H, “but he’s been going through some personal problems lately, so I hate to bother him. You know what I mean.”
“Oh, of course,” said Professor Carl, who seemed embarrassed to have asked. “Well, shall we check this stuff out?”
H had cleaned out the truck bed, stuffing the pizza boxes and dirty shovels into the bed box. He let down the tailgate and began laying out all of the evidence of Cedarfoot: the recordings, the pictures, written testaments from people claiming to have sighted the beast.[12] Professor Carl looked at each piece and nodded his head, saying something like, Oh yes or Yes, you’ve sent me a copy of this over each item, and then looking around sort of nervously. Dinky could tell that H was nervous too, by the way he kept trying to talk over the silence while the professor was reading or looking at pictures.
“And it’s right out there. Dinky and I can show you where the tracks are,” he said several times.
Suddenly they heard Gene calling from the house.
“H! Get your ass over here, please. I mean stat, dude. I need a little help over here!”
H whispered “shit” under his breath. “Excuse me, Carl,” he said. “I’m sorry. Maybe Dinky can show you around a little bit. He knows where all the tracks are. Son, you want to take him out there? I’ll catch up to you in a minute.”
Dinky nodded and Professor Carl hesitated but then said, “Fine, just let me get my molding kit.”
Dinky led the professor through the brush, trying to hold back the cedar branches so they wouldn’t whip the professor in the face. He was afraid to talk, nervous that the professor might press him too hard on the details of Cedarfoot’s existence, or that he might say something that sounded ridiculous to an expert. Then he saw the familiar fallen tree trunk – Cedarfoot’s thinking log – where he’d made the print a few weeks before.
“Here’s one,” he said, crouching down and pointing. It excited him to see it still there, something large and significant that he’d made, still a presence in the world, not yet eroded by the wind and the rain and the other animals traveling through.
The professor looked down at the print, then walked around it and examined it from several angles. And quickly, unexpectedly, he turned to Dinky, looking him up and down like a fossil he’d found freshly crumbled from the earth. Dinky sort of smiled without showing his teeth and then crouched down to examine the print. The professor pulled a camera from a black bag. Above them a rope of lightning whipped across the sky.
As Professor Carl turned the camera lens he said, “So, it’s interesting that the creature seems to be coming in so close to civilization. Also that it’s as tall as it is, as indicated by this print. I mean, you notice that trees don’t get that tall in this area, so a better adapted animal would probably be one that’s closer to the ground. Shorter.”
“Huh,” was all that Dinky could think to say.
“It doesn’t make all that much sense.”
Dinky felt a little sick to his stomach, like he’d eaten one of Cedarfoot’s frogs.
“But, stranger things have happened,” said the professor. “Wow. Just wow.” He took a jar of something out of his molding kit, opened it, and began to stir it with a popsicle stick.
“So, how much do you help your dad in all this?” Professor Carl continued.
“What?”
“What’s your role in all this?” He poured the thick, chalky liquid into the track.
“I helped find Cedarfoot, I guess. I come out here and look around for him.”
“Huh,” said the professor.
And suddenly, standing there by Cedarfoot’s thinking log, Dinky wanted to tell the professor the truth about how they’d made it all up, about how it had been his dad’s idea.
“You got any kids?” asked Dinky, picturing toddlers in khaki shorts and pith helmets following Professor Carl through the jungle.
But before Professor Carl could answer, a loud explosion shook the red dirt beneath their legs and sent flocks of screeching grackles flying up from the trees.
“Was that thunder?” asked Professor Carl.
“I don’t think so,” said Dinky, feeling as if something very dark and dangerous were about to walk over the horizon.
They both stood up from their crouched positions to see a plume of black smoke rising above the tree line.
“Just wow,” whispered Dinky.

* * *

As the rain helped to extinguish the burning trailer, it was also washing away the Cedarfoot tracks. The police had briefly questioned Professor Carl and sent him back to his hotel, and he’d left without saying goodbye to Dinky.[13]
A cop had ushered Dinky into a squad car to wait until his mother arrived so that the police could question him in her presence. From the chapped vinyl backseat, Dinky watched as the firemen carried out Gene’s blistered body and loaded it into the ambulance. And then Dinky watched through the muddy window of the squad car as a cop guided H’s head down and into the backseat of another car, the alternating red and blue lights flashing against his father’s face. H’s eyes caught Dinky’s through the back window, and H lifted his hand to wave, then slowly put down his thumb so that he was waving with only four fingers.
The car door opened and Deena, her face wet, crawled into the seat next to Dinky. Then the cop slid into the front seat and turned around.
“Son, can you start by telling us why you were out here?”
“We were showing some tracks to the professor,” said Dinky.
“So he’s told me,” said the cop. “And you and the professor were in the woods?”
Dinky nodded.
“And where was your father?”
Dinky hesitated. His mind sort of flickered as if it, too, were on fire. He thought about his father and about Cowboy lying on that bed and about Mr. Pesto and about his mother being called by the wrong name.
“He was with us,” said Dinky.
“For how long?”
“For the whole time,” said Dinky, as his mother put her hand over his.
“The professor said your father went back to the trailer about twenty minutes before the explosion.”
“No,” said Dinky. “That wasn’t him. He was with us.”
“Really? Well then who was it?”
“It was Cedarfoot.”
“Who?”
The lines on the cop’s forehead reminded Dinky of an old trail map that Cowboy had once given him.
“Cedarfoot. That’s who we were tracking in the woods. And I’m sure that once we started looking for him, once we came in past the tree line, he got scared. And he was just trying to get away.”
“So you’re telling me it was Cedarfoot that went into the trailer, not your dad?”
Dinky looked at his mother, her wet hair like the mop she wrung out in the nursing home hallways.
“And what was Cedarfoot doing in the trailer, with the Pro-Lawn and the kitty litter and the lithium batteries? Do you know what he was making?” asked the officer.
Dinky swallowed hard and said, “Nobody knows. Cedarfoot’s a mystery.”
The cop closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose, then said, “Look son, telling stories is just gonna get you into trouble.” He opened the car door to talk to another officer, and Dinky leaned into his mother’s chest while she held him, stroked his head, and began to sing an old familiar Patsy Cline song.

I go out walkin’ after midnight
Out in the moonlight, just like we used to do
I’m always walkin’ after midnight
Searchin’ for you

His cheeks suddenly wet with tears, Dinky closed his eyes tightly, took a deep breath, and pictured Cedarfoot scaling the ancient walls of the canyon, arms outstretched, his surviving fingers reaching for the next pit in the caprock, searching for a cool, soft place with space to make his tracks.[14]

[1]. The story that Dinky Tatum’s mother liked to tell was that Dinky got his nickname because he’d been born a preemie. She’d explain that she had gone into labor during a tornado when she was eight months pregnant. Amidst flying debris, she ran through a Safeway parking lot seeking shelter, when suddenly a heroic stranger shoved her inside a Chevy Silverado, just before a flying tree branch skewered the stranger’s abdomen. Dinky was born that night, weighing only five pounds, eight ounces. That was the way she told it, with drama and importance, in the way that people tell stories.

[2]. Mr. Pesto had been a war hero in the Korean War, or at least that’s what his family told the nursing home staff. They hoped that it would somehow result in Mr. Pesto receiving better treatment in the facility and a more respectful and ceremonial presentation at the changing of his soiled sheets and bedpans.

[3]. The story that Dinky often told the other kids about his mother was that she had sung back‑up for Carrie Underwood. After Dinky’s father got in trouble, Deena was left to support herself and her son by working in a nursing home, where she occasionally amused the old folks with WWII standards and old honky-tonk numbers. The notion that she had once sung back‑up for Underwood was something Dinky had chosen to infer after Deena sent a demo tape to Nashville, in which she mimicked the back‑up voices on an actual Carrie Underwood recording. And claimed identity of back‑up voices was hard to disprove.

[4]. Cowboy rarely spoke of his family to any of his friends and acquaintances, since discussion of them involved explaining things that had happened long ago and that he didn’t care to discuss. So, often when relaying a story that involved a relation, he would alter it slightly by referring to them, his sister, for example, as “this gal I used to know.”

[5]. Before H Tatum reentered his son’s life, the story that Deena Tatum told Dinky was that H had been a varsity football player in high school, thin and handsome, with hair like Kurt Cobain. And when the other boys’ fathers were helping their sons to build rockets out of paper towel rolls or coming to Dad’s Day at school to talk about their stints in the National Guard, Dinky would close his eyes and picture his own father throwing spirals through the air in slow motion, the balls spinning like silvery bullets in a video game.

[6]. Gene Loomis told people – even his closest friends – that his kids had chosen to live with their mother because of their seasonal allergies to the cedar grove that surrounded his home. The truth was that the kids had been removed by the courts, and, though Gene’s friends suspected as much, none of them asked about it. Their silence at a friend’s misfortunes was yet another unwritten code of the West as they knew it.

[7]. When the local elementary schools took students to the canyon, the teachers focused on the geological history there rather than on the political history. They were not yet ready to tell the story of the government removing the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne in an attempt at ethnic cleansing and in hopes of demobilizing and demoralizing the tribes, nor did the teachers want to have to explain to a group of wide-eyed first-graders that the U.S. government had destroyed 1,100 screaming, panicked horses braying in the belly of the canyon, the soldiers shooting them one by one until they covered the canyon floor in a bloody, seeping mass. There was only so much time for questions before the kids had to be back on the bus.

[8]. Since people often died at the Littleton Nursing Home, the management made it a policy to suggest to the family that their loved one hadn’t suffered and, whenever possible, that they had died in their sleep. Almost no one ever questioned these stories, although often the blood-stained sheets or yellow contents of the wastebasket suggested that it wasn’t quite the truth.

[9]. H’s neighbor claimed to have killed the deer with a crossbow in an attempt to prove his hunting prowess and to give himself some evidence for the stories he told his wife to account for time he spent away from home. In reality the neighbor spent this time at a Cherokee casino outside of town, where he went to meet men. As for the deer, the creature’s stomach had actually exploded after it ate poison intended for coyotes.

[10]. The Puskawitz family was careful about how it relayed the family history for posterity. Those who died in undesirable places, under undignified circumstances, in states of poverty or nudity, or who had been dishonorably discharged from military duty – and sometimes even those who remained unmarried or childless – were discreetly interned at the back of the vault.

[11]. This was the story that Emily later told the family in New England, although she often replaced the word peashooter with pistol and would usually leave out the lyin’ sack of shit part. Despite much searching she was never able to find the actual movie.

[12]. The written testaments were from some of H’s friends who had no other motive than their good-natured friendship and perhaps a latent desire to sign their names to something seemingly official and lasting.

[13]. The story that Professor Carl later told about the incident focused mostly on the incident’s sociological context. It received a footnote in his colleague’s paper on Primate communication and the gestural origin of language and The origins of narrative: In search of the transactional format of narratives in humans and other social animals. However, it also made for a good anecdote when the bar talk floated to bad child-rearing practices or whenever pretty young undergrads asked about his more memorable expeditions. Sometimes Professor Carl lied and said that he’d tried to keep in touch with Dinky. He didn’t know why he did this.

[14]. Dinky Tatum disappeared from west Texas when he was eighteen. The story his mother told her granddaughter was that he’d joined the army and gone off to do special operations in the Middle East. But no one really knew. Among the possessions Dinky left behind were a pair of dirty feet carved from Styrofoam and a taxidermed squirrel with a vest and one eye.

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Jill Logan’s recent stories have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Greensboro Review, Zyzzyva, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Quarterly West.