A Polack Amok in Bigfoot Country
Cracker McCracken’s latest cryptid video featuring one very disconcerted Polack topped out at twenty-three views. The muted response from the Bigfoot enthusiast community failed to excite Cracker.
“I don’t know what people want,” he huffed. “I thought we put forth some pretty convincing evidence that’s there’s at least one if not seven cryptids that has made Yellow Bluff a temporary home.”
I watched the video twenty-two times and didn’t see shit. I said as much.
“Are you blind, man? Just… Hell, man, just concentrate on the last five seconds of the video feed. You’ll see as I nonchalantly turn to head back down to basecamp, just in the periphery, lurking in the shadows, you can just make out the possibility of a seven-and-a-half-foot tall humanoid.”
“Really? A Sasquatch?”
“I did not say ‘Sasquatch.’ I said ‘Bigfoot.’”
“For fuck’s sake. What’s the difference, Cracker?”
“It makes all the difference in the world, Hammer.”
“Polish Hammer, please. Understand, there’s a Corinthian Hammer only the next town over.”
“My point exactly. You don’t mistake the Polish Hammer for the Lithuanian variety. You don’t confuse gray aliens for the greens. Those ufologists are a hard-nosed people. And you don’t call Bigfoot by any other name. You just don’t. This is shit you gotta know if you have any hope of truly chronicling the hunt.”
It was difficult to maintain my composure while getting chastised by a grown man wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and a Modelo floppy hat, but I somehow endured. Mostly, I think I was capable because this conversation took place at work where I had to kill all emotional responses just to survive the twelve-hour shift. Also, I was limited to talking cryptid hunting with Cracker or discussing Alabama college football with every other mouth-breathing motherfucker wandering the plant.
“Okay, Polish Hammer, you might want to write this down so that you’ll be abler to report factually when the time comes.” Cracker glanced around the immediate area. The supervisor was off worrying the bathroom dwellers, making sure ole Jack-Off Joe wasn’t interfering with himself too vehemently in the corner stall again. Cracker and I stood off to the side of the robot welder where only six security cameras captured partial views of us.
“First thing you gotta realize, Sasquatch is maybe a foot taller than your average Bigfoot, okay? Sasquatch roams the mountain forests of Appalachia. Bigfoot tends to hang out in Northern Alabama, occasionally delving into Tennessee.”
“Delving?”
“It’s a good word,” Cracker said. “Look it up.”
“I know what it means. It’s just not a word I usually hear around here is all.”
“Well, I’m telling you right now, you wanna become an internet personality like me, you gotta expand that vocabulary.”
“I don’t know. My vocabulary’s pretty expansive.”
“Oh, indubitably. You just gotta flash it now and again. Especially when we make our next video.”
“What next video?”
“We’re going back up to Yellow Bluff, my friend. We have some unfinished business with Bigfoot, and we’re too close to give up now.”
“Too close to what? I thought you captured all the video evidence you needed.”
“I’m too close to attaining ten subscribers to slow down. One thing you gotta understand about how these YouTube videos work, Polish Hammer, the only way to beat the algorithms working against the little guy, is through bombardment and repetition. Then, you can monetize that shit. And then the sky is the limit.”
“Fuck. All right. I’ll see what I can do. The wife keeps me on a pretty short leash because of how goddam sexy I am.”
“Be that as it may. Try to do better than those Rockports. As slow as you were coming down that mountain, an enterprising Bigfoot could have grabbed you up by the ankles and slammed you right upside a tree.”
“The Rockports stay. And I’ve yet to meet a Bigfoot capable of withstanding an awesome display of my jujitsu.”
We met once again in the parking lot of Pines Church. I parked my Jeep facing the hood of his Kia.
“How y’all boys doing?”
Cracker McCracken looked at Milt for a hot minute before his gaze shifted to me.
“What the fuck, man? Who’s this?”
“This is Milt, my eighty-year-old, live-in, father-in-law. And before you say a word, understand my wife forced me to bring him. Too many nights out hunting Bigfoot gots her believing I’m spending all our retirement money at the titty flop.”
Sadly, Milt misunderstood the assignment and honestly believed I was taking him to the strip joint. The feisty bastard wore his best pair of jorts, his favorite Michigan T-shirt, and his special ball cap that was supposed to remind everybody he was a veteran in case he didn’t mention it the first time he opened his fucking mouth. He blinked continuously, surprised to find himself beside a wooded area behind a church.
“Well, I only got the GoPros for you and I,” Cracker said. “And you got the face for Bigfoot hunting.”
“People always told me I look like a white Forest Whitaker.”
“I see it! So, when we go up the mountain, I’m gonna need the Polish Hammer to emote curiosity and a child-like sense of wonder.”
I’d never seen Forest Whitaker convey a child-like sense of wonder in any of his film roles, but I promised I’d see what I could do.
“All right, Milt, you demented, old bastard, I’m gonna go traipsing up this mountain to find a Bigfoot. Stay here and keep an eye on the vehicles. I hear there’s Christians afoot, and we know what thieves they can be.”
“Oh, okay.” Milt’s befuddlement at continuing to see kudzu rather than g-strings rocked on.
Cracker and I followed the same deer path we hiked several nights earlier. Dusk descended much quicker on the eastern face of the mountain. Along with the GoPro, Cracker recorded with his phone’s camera. His flashlight illuminated a ten-yard cone ahead of us.
We passed the tiny hunter’s shack, the tree stand, and the salt lick, moving into denser woods where the trail narrowed into a mere thinning of the foliage.
“You smell that?” Cracker asked, excitement growing. “That’s the odor of Bigfoot poops. I’d recognize that shit anywhere.”
“Gah, it reeks. It smells like the last twenty years of Billy Zane’s movie career.”
“At least everything after Demon Knight,” Cracker agreed. “Do you feel it, though? That sensation of being watched? Like Bigfoot is proud his poops are making our eyes water. But I got something to counteract that shit.”
He withdrew his vape contraption and brought the douche nozzle up to his sneering lips. As his cheeks caved in with an almost superhuman sucking action, the bushes to our right began rustling. Immediately, Cracker broke into a dead sprint toward the deer path and all the way back down the mountain, trailing mango and dragon fruit infused vapor like a hipster’s dream of a shitkicker locomotive.
“Oh, come the fuck on, now. Not again,” I hollered at his backside.
The flash of his phone camera snapping pictures as he fled etched out the silhouette of a shambling humanoid approaching me.
“Oh, shit.”
I won’t lie. I turned to run as well, but my goddam, comfortable Rockports betrayed me, sliding on the dead leaves and pitching me onto my ass. The creature loomed above me and in Milt’s voice said, “are you boys done playing around so we can throw down some dollar bills at Uncle Bucks Booty Bungalow?”
“Ah, for fuck’s sake.” I sat up, looking at that idiotic face peering down at me from beneath that garishly patriotic hat. “What the hell you doing up here, Milt?”
“I spent nine months freezing my butt off in Korea. Last thing I want to do is stare at that South Korean hunk of junk half the night. You know just looking at Kias gets my heart to fluctuating.”
“Yeah, these woods are dangerous, though.”
“Son, these woods are like a stroll in the park on a Sunday afternoon compared with the Vietnam jungle I had to deal with. Foliage out there so thick, you could exhaust yourself swinging a machete and not get five feet. Vines thicker than most of these trees. I told you about the time the Colonel had me and the boys digging latrines…”
“Yes, a hundred times. Yes.”
He once outsmarted a Colonel back in Indochina in ’67 and he was still crowing about it.
“I ain’t worried about the woods getting you, Milt. Apparently, there’s a Bigfoot running around these parts, and it’s known to whip an old man’s ass just as soon as look at him.”
“Huh. When I was back in ‘Nam, we had the Batutut running around the jungle. Seven foot tall and hairy as hell. I saw him one time. But he ran away before I could knock him on the head.”
“You know who would have loved that story? Cracker.”
“I don’t like him. He’s too skittish for my taste.”
“Well, be careful around him, too, Milt. He’s an Ohio State fan.”
“Figured for him to be as much. We gonna make it down to the Bungalow, you reckon?”
The answer for poor Milt, of course, was hell no. I couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut about the books I received in the mail, keeping me forever in the doghouse with my penny pinching wife, what would he say to her if he discovered there were no less than three strippers at the Bungalow who were utterly in love with me, right now. An erotic dancer who could resist the charms of the Polish Hammer were as elusive as an Alabama Bigfoot.
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.
