Cracker McCracken, Cryptid Hunter
I’d taken great pains where I work to ensure everyone was aware of the prodigious ability I possessed as a writer though I often neglected to mention my absolute dearth of readership. It seemed imperative the boys at the factory understood that I wasn’t just some dumb Polack slinging metal tubes into vats of chrome twelve hours a day. Though, I was that, too. When I talked about the word-slinging portion of my life I was usually met with a severely aggressive form of apathy so rare it was only ever really encountered when telling a deaf mute you dabble in slam poetry.
There’d been an influx of new hires recently thanks to an incompetent management team running off a sizable portion of the experienced workforce. Among these new hires, the jetline welder upon hearing I wrote three poems the day before took an active interest in me.
“Lance McCracken,” he introduced himself. “Most people call me Cracker.”
“You live in a black neighborhood?”
“No. I think they call me that on account of my last name.”
“Oh, good. Cause I don’t care to define folks by their racial identity. You can call me The Polish Hammer.”
“Like the wrestler?”
“Like the poet/ lead singer, banjo player of The Screaming Shits. I also just finished writing a novel. So, there’s that to contend with.”
“Huh. Excellent. I actually have my own YouTube channel. Cracker’s Cryptids. Ever hear of it?”
“No. What the fuck’s a YouTube?”
“It’s like Pornhub without all the sex and nudity.”
“I’ll be damned. And there’s an audience for that?”
“A sizable one for some people. Not so much for me. Not yet. I’m up to like five subscribers. Pretty sure most of those are family, but I’m grinding.”
We sat at the picnic table outside Hydra. On break, ostensibly, but with three video recorders, each equipped with microphones trained on us, you could never really loosen your guard. Cracker wore a bandana in the style of David Foster Wallace. With his glasses and hipster facial hair, he sorta resembled an old friend of mine, Brian Fugett. I wanted to like the guy, but he kept sucking on a vape.
“I was thinking,” he continued. “It’d be really cool if you could collaborate with me on a YouTube video. With your readership, we could at least double my viewership.”
“For a Pornhub video? I don’t know what you heard about me, Cracker, but I don’t swing that way. Now, granted, there was a series of clown sex videos made back in 2003 that many people have purported to be me, but I assure you, even if I did cavort around in a silky, polka dot, crotchless clown suit, I steered clear of that big-bushed brunette with the lazy eye.”
“No, I make Bigfoot hunting videos.”
“You ever catch one?”
“What the fuck do you think?”
“I think that may explain your lack of viewership.”
“It’s all about the intensity of the hunt, Polish Hammer. Listen, I got a lead on some Bigfoot activity from a friend who owns twenty acres of woods near Yellow Bluff in the Pines Church community. Here, check this out.”
He showed me a picture on his Iphone. It was a still shot from a trail cam. Night vision. You could see the salt lick, a patch of dense grass and some surrounding trees.
“Okay. I see nothing.”
“Look at the shadows.”
“I’m looking at the shadows.”
“Don’t the shadows look bigger than that ought to look?
“Well… I guess the larger the spotlight, the larger the perimeter of darkness,” I quoted poorly from some book I read somewhere, sometime ago.
“See, exactly.” He punched me on the shoulder. “That’s the sort of insight that’s going to take me to the next level. Now, with bow hunting season fixing to start, my buddy wants us to investigate his property. He’s thinking it could be likely there’s a Bigfoot up on his acres chasing away all the deer so that he can’t bring down any big bucks when the time comes. And he’s tired of it. I’m inclined to agree with him. What do you say? Wanna get video evidence of Bigfoot and get a few million likes on YouTube?”
I was thinking in my mind, we run across a female Bigfoot in the wild open public and could convince her to partake in a little oral sex… We could get twice as many views on the Hub.
“All right, I’m in.”
***
What do you wear Bigfoot hunting? I wore stylized camo jeans recently purchased from Old Navy, my best red and yellow Acapulco shirt, a leather Australian cattleman’s hat, and an old slip-on pair of Rockports I generally used for lawn care.
The slip-on Rockports was a subject of contention when I met Cracker in the Pines Church parking lot.
“I don’t know if that’s the best footwear for hiking in,” he said as he readied the GoPro cameras he intended to attach to us.
“Hiking? I thought we were Bigfoot hunting.”
“Which is going to require us to go hiking through the woods. One thing I’ve learned from my years of Cryptid hunting experience is that these creatures by their very nature will not come to you while you’re sitting in a church parking lot.”
“Well, I told you I got the diabetes. Rockports are good for my feet.”
“Fair enough. But when shit gets real up there in the mountain wilderness. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The sun was on the downslope. We followed a deer path into the heart of the woods, gaining elevation until we reached an outhouse-sized hunter’s shack. There was still enough light from the sunset, I didn’t quite need my flashlight. I could see a tree stand secured twenty feet up a neighboring tree and the trail cam set-up that had captured the image of a fucking elongated shadow.
“We’re in it, now,” Cracker said. “Nothing but woods for at least a mile and a half in that direction. Three miles in that direction. Another two miles up the mountain and down the back face. And, I guess, maybe five hundred feet from the direction we came.”
“Seems kinda paltry for a Bigfoot habitat.”
“Compared to what? How many acres are you set up on? How many square feet is your house?”
“I’m… I’m not a cryptid, Cracker. I’m just a Polack.”
“You smell that? On the breeze?”
I did smell something. It smelled sorta like a wet dog that had been swimming in a stagnant pond. I said as much.
“That’s exactly what it smells like. But what it actually is, Bigfoot cock.”
“What?”
“Yes. Bigfoots, as a rule, are notorious chronic masturbators. These hairy bastards are always either just finishing or on the verge of pulling Bigfoot pud.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“True fact. And judging by the stench, we’re almost right on top of the son of a bitch.” He took out his vape from the pocket of his camouflaged hoodie and took a prodigious pull from it. He exhaled a continuous cloud that threatened to wreath the mountain in vapor as though a hundred rabbits were cooking their vittles on a hundred personal campfires.
“Ain’t that gonna run the Bigfoot off?”
“Hell, nah, everybody knows the Bigfoot loves the scent of a honey jasmine/boysenberry medley.”
A twig snapped in our near vicinity and Cracker bolted like a shot back the way we came. His hiking boots barely touched the deer path as he descended the mountain. I stood rooted in place for a moment, hoping to see a doe or, fuck, maybe a coyote. Something. I’m pretty sure it was just a possum rooting about but I never did make visual confirmation.
I trudged back down the mountain where Cracker was already back at his KIA Sorento, checking the footage from his GoPro.
“You made it back,” he said.
“Yeah, I escaped it’s clutches.”
“Did you see it? I think I caught a glimpse of it in the tree line just on the other side of that rattlesnake warren.”
“Wait, there was a rattlesnake warren up there?”
“Man, the moment I smelt that Bigfoot splooge, I knew we were in the danger zone. My god, man, times like these, this is what I live for.”
I watched him watch his feed.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’m living for it, too.”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
