In the Woods

by Carrie Jones

  Dad puts the phone down and takes a bite of bacon, chewing it and staring blankly at the bowl of biscuits on the table in front of him. David looks from Dad to me, his eyes asking if we’re going to get to find out what was said. Finally Kelsey just asks, “What was that about?”

  Dad shakes off whatever he was thinking and looks around at us. “Bob Hennessey, over by Proctor, lost two sows last night. He heard them squealing, but didn’t get there in time. Nothing but blood and tracks when he got there. Whatever it was took them. No signs they’d been dragged. Carried them away, is what Sam Davis was told. Hennessey says those hogs must have been at least two hundred pounds each.”

  “Holy…” David doesn’t finish the expletive, and he doesn’t even see the look Mom casts in his direction.

  “Hennessey and some of his neighbors got a pack of dogs together and went after it right after sunup,” Dad adds.

  “What did the tracks look like?” I ask.

  Dad looks at me, then shakes his head. “Big,” he says. “Long, with deformed toes. And long, pointed nails. Or claws. Not human, is what he said.”

  4

  CHRYSTAL

  The hotel room is easily one of the most horrible places we’ve ever stayed in. It’s all early Salvation Army furniture. Dad drops his suitcases on one of the twin beds and stretches out his arms.

  “Look, Chrystal, I can touch both walls if I spread out my arms!” He bounces up and down on his toes as his fingertips graze the walls’ peeling wallpaper.

  “Cool, Dad.”

  He scrunches up his nose. “Is that mildew?”

  “I think it’s the carpet.” I point at the orange carpet, which is probably the source of the smell. But then I look up to where mold spots the walls. “Or maybe the ceiling.”

  He laughs and bounces down onto the bed, next to his suitcases, while I stand above him, hugging my bass to my chest and watching him smile.

  “Do you know what?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “I think this is the worst hotel room we have ever had.”

  “What was the giveaway?” I ask, giving in to the ridiculousness of it all. “The dog poop by the front entrance?”

  “That was brilliant.” He looks down his beaky nose at me. “But I did like the used condom in the hall.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Hard to miss. I think it was a Trojan Magnum. I wonder what Hector and the rest of the ancient Trojans would think to find their name is now used for prophylactics. I have to think they’d enjoy it.” He laughs at the thought.

  I fall onto the bed next to him. My feet hang in the air, and I laugh too. “Mom would kill if she had to stay here.”

  He tosses an arm around my shoulders. “Good thing she’s in Europe, then.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Good thing.”

  * * *

  After we’ve settled in and inventoried all the equipment and unpacked in our new home away from home, I go outside to call some friends back at my real home. I make laps around the parking lot while I listen to Zoe’s gossip. Bugs chirp under the flickering orange lights that hang from poles above the cars. I wish they weren’t here, so I could just see the stars. I click off the phone and breathe in. The air is so different here; the texture of it is deeper. I can smell the heat on the asphalt even though it’s night, and then there’s another smell—like berries and urine combined.

  I can do this, I tell myself. I can help my dad and not be the typical resentful teen that everyone wants to make me out to be. I can be fine about my mom abandoning me for the Europe trip and me not being able to ever decide what to do with my own summer. It will be fine. Fine … fine … fine …

  But just as I think it, something moves in the trees beyond the parking lot. It’s a scuffling noise. A branch snaps hard, too hard for me to think it’s the sound of a mouse or a squirrel.

  I freeze and count to ten, try to be rational.

  “You’re freaking yourself out,” I say aloud. “Just freaking yourself out.”

  And rationally, I know that’s what I’m doing, but all my skin is suddenly goose bumps, like it’s twenty-five degrees below zero, and I realize I’m walking backward toward the hotel door, away from the noise. I stare into the darkness.

  “Totally fine,” I murmur.

  Then I can hear it, even above the hum of the parking lot lights: the sound of heavy breathing. Something sniffs the air. I step backward again. Lights swing into the parking lot. A Jeep Wrangler roars in, driving right between me and the sniffing in the darkness. Did the lights reflect in two eyes way high off the ground for just a heartbeat? I can’t be sure. Lurching backward, I manage to avoid stepping in dog poop, and yank open the door.

  For a second I think about running into the lobby and not looking back, but that would be wrong. Instead, I wait as two middle-aged businessmen-types haul out their suitcases and make their way safely across the parking lot. I’m like a sentinel standing watch, an ancient Trojan looking down upon the invading Mycenaean.

  Once the men are only a foot away from the door, I do turn and head down the hall, my heart hammering one hundred beats a minute. When I aim the brass key at the doorknob, I have to do it three times before getting the key to fit, because my hand is shaking so badly.

  Dad looks up from his laptop when I enter the room. He squints at me. “My sweet little philosopher, are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I say, trying to convince both of us. “Just tired. Big day hunting Bigfoot tomorrow, right?”

  He goes back to his computer. “Absolutely!”

  “Dad?” My voice is squeaky.

  “What, honey?”

  “We don’t have to stay in Oklahoma too long, right? If we can’t find anything, we can go right to New York?”

  “Of course,” he says, but I can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s hoping for the opposite. He’s hoping for monsters.

  * * *

  The best thing about these trips with my dad is the diner food, particularly the breakfast diner food, particularly the home fries grilled in grease and dripping with fat and calories and salt. It is the glorious existence of such home fries at the Greasy Hog that allows me to get back to my normal, rational self and totally discount that random weird noise I heard in the parking lot last night as an auditory hallucination caused by lack of sleep.

  Unlike my dad, I don’t believe in bigfeet, except on ballet dancers and basketball players.

  “Dad.”

  “Uh-oh.” He sighs. “Are we going to argue?”

  “I just … I have some problems.”

  “With belief? That’s fine. You want proof. All good science comes from trying to get proof.” He squirts some ketchup on his plate.

  “It’s just - I don’t believe in a Bigfoot that eats baby cows. Seriously. Why not just hop over to the Sonic and get a burger there? Why would a Bigfoot go to all that calf-ripping trouble?”

  “It’s a good question,” he admits and then puts some egg in his mouth and chews.

  I look away. Watching your parent eat isn’t fun. I soldier on. “Seriously, for real this time though, why would a Bigfoot suddenly step up all his activity?”

  “There have been missing cows for awhile. You saw my folder. It’s full of various official county reports.”

  “Fine. But why so sloppy? All of a sudden it seems so sloppy? It makes no sense.”

  “Things don’t have to make sense. Maybe what you should be wondering is more personal.”

  I prickle. “What do you mean? More personal?”

  “Maybe you should be wondering why you refuse to believe, to even admit in the possibility that Bigfoot exists, that monsters exist?”

  “Because they don’t.” I stab a nice hunk of home fries with the tong of my super-cheap diner fork.

  “How can you be so sure?” Dad sits across from me, perusing his notes for the 190th time. His barely touched pancakes are getting cold. Fake maple syrup puddles around them. I witnessed him comb
his thick brown hair this morning, but it’s already completely messed up. Some of it stands on end.

  He leans across the table, even more full of energy. “This is going to be the best search we’ve ever gone on. I can feel it, Chrystal. Are you ready for some excitement?”

  His sleeve drags in the syrup. I pluck it out and say, “Then you should eat, Dad, keep up your adventurer energy.”

  “That’s right! Have to keep up your strength when you’re ‘Bigfoot’ hunting.” He makes actual air quotes as he says “Bigfoot,” and then grabs his fork and begins his pancake siege. Syrup splatters across the plastic table top. Pancake crumbs fly in arcs and land on the floor. Guilt courses through me. He loves this so much and I hate it; he’s so excited and here I am being Captain Skeptic. I don’t always have to throw my skepticism in his face, do I?

  “So.” I try not to sigh, but it’s so hard. Only carbohydrates can make it better, therefore I put more potato-ie goodness on my fork before saying, “What’s the plan for today?”

  “We visit the boy.”

  “Reporting-incident boy?”

  He smiles and chews. Then gulps some coffee, slapping some cash on the table.

  “Dad, I still have home fries left.…” I protest. I’d like to stay here in town all day, really, maybe find a good place to dye my hair. I think it would like to be purple for the rest of the summer. Not really. But it would be fun to see if my dad even noticed.

  “Ah!” His eyes are aghast. He rushes around to the counter, reaching behind it to grab a Styrofoam takeout container before anyone can say anything. He rushes back to the table and dumps the contents of my plate inside of it, snapping it closed. “There!”

  Everyone in the whole diner is watching, and some people’s mouths are actually hanging open. It only lasts a second, and then the place starts buzzing with activity again. Dad is completely oblivious, the way he gets when his mind is spinning around with the excitement of a new investigation. He motions for me to follow him and I do, but as we’re passing a table that’s hosting two old-ish ladies in pastel cotton tanks, he stops. I smack into his back. He doesn’t even notice, just leans right over the center of the ladies’ table, totally in their personal space. They start tee-heeing, because the truth is that my dad is kind of cute in an eccentric, full-haired, mismatched-clothing dad way.

  “What did you lovely ladies just say?” he asks, head turning from one to the other to see who will answer and therefore who he should give his attention to.

  The lady in the baggy pink tank top flushes. She’s probably fifty or something. She giggles. I take a step back to watch my dad work. He is a master with older ladies, plays them like a maestro plays the bass, hits all the right notes.

  “Well,” she says, “up at Bob Hennessey’s last night they think that the Bigfoot took two sows.”

  “Really! Where did you hear this?” Dad does his head-turning thing again.

  The ladies are totally eating up the attention. I carefully hold my Styrofoam container away from my shirt so I don’t get any of the ketchup my dad spilled on the side of it on my clothes.

  “I heard it from Max Selmon’s wife, Betty. They’re neighbors of the Hennesseys and Betty’s in my book club at church, don’t you know? Anyway, she’s fit to be tied, she’s so scared,” blue tank top lady says. She’s a bit older than the other one and has that old-lady-blue-hair action going on.

  The word “scared” gets all of Dad’s attention. He actually scoots into the booth right next to her, which makes her giggle some more. “Why scared?”

  She leans in toward him. Her friend leans across the table, too.

  “Well, there weren’t nothing but blood and tracks there. Two sows gone like that”—blue tank lady snaps her fingers—“and whatever it is that killed them just carried them off. That’s a lot of strength.”

  “Indeed…” Dad coaxes, and waits for her to continue.

  She does, so I give up and open my to-go container and start picking up home fries and eating them with my fingers. They aren’t any good cold.

  “So,” she says, “it gets worse.”

  “Tell him, Darlene,” her friend interrupts.

  “I was, Barbara!” She smiles at her friend like this is an exchange that happens all the time. “So, anyways, once it’s daybreak, Bob Hennessey gets Max Selmon and some other neighbors together and they track it and what do you think they find for tracks?”

  “What?” Dad says the word like a sigh—a happy, elated sigh.

  “It’s two-footed like a Bigfoot, but the toes aren’t fat and happy-looking like all them Bigfoot tracks, oh no.… They have long, kinky toes and claws, nonretractable you know, not like a cat’s but more like a dog’s.”

  “No!” My dad’s so excited, I swear he jumps up and his knees knock the table, rattling the sugar shaker and Darlene’s and Barbara’s coffee mugs.

  Darlene raises her right hand. “I swear.”

  For a second everyone is quiet and then Dad says, “Barbara? Darlene? What do you girls make of that?”

  Barbara’s eyebrows raise up toward her receding hairline and she whispers super-loudly, “It doesn’t sound like a Bigfoot to me.”

  “What does it sound like?” my dad asks, matching her whisper.

  “Why, sir, to the both of us, it sounds just like the devil.”

  * * *

  It turns out that Dad didn’t get the best directions from Barbara and Darlene. Two hours later, he hands over the paper map and says, “Okay. Program it. Here’s the address.”

  We don’t actually have the address of the Hennesseys, but we do have the address of the original sighting. I program it into the GPS. Dad prefers maps, like we’re old-timey explorers, but having the GPS device is a recognized fallback plan he has to go to pretty often.

  We haven’t been running the air conditioning. The water in my water bottle is warmer than water in a bathtub. That’s just ridiculous, yet cool, and so different from New England. On my bass case I’ve got all these Kierkegaard quotes and one of them—“Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced”—seems pretty appropriate right now.

  “It’s like a whole different world out here,” I say as the GPS says we have forty-two minutes to our destination. I give it an Aussie accent, male, because if you’re going to listen to a GPS, it might as well be sexy.

  “I know! How fantastic is that!” Dad says, pulling the car back onto the road. He suddenly brakes. We lurch forward. He unbuckles and jumps out of his seat. “You drive! I’m going to scan the roadside for clues.”

  I unclick the seat belt and fling open my door. “Deal.”

  * * *

  The farm is down a dirt road, framed by trees and then opening up into pastures. The house is clean and sweet-looking, like something you’d see out of a movie set. There’s a truck and a station wagon in the driveway, and a huge barn. A girl’s on a swing in the front yard. She sees our car, waves at us, and hops off the swing when we pull into the driveway. She runs into the house, probably to announce our arrival.

  “It doesn’t look like a crazy kid’s house, does it? But guns probably, right?” Dad asks, unbuckling. Before I can answer, he says, “Let me do the talking.”

  Sure thing.

  The sooner the interview is over, the quicker we can determine that it’s a hoax. He’ll be disappointed, which is sad, but we can get on our way.

  He bounces out of the car, all long-legged, quirky excitement. I can’t imagine that this is going to go well. Dad can be a little overwhelming to strangers who aren’t five years old. Sometimes it’s up to me to make him seem more normal. It isn’t easy.

  Sighing, I climb out of the car and follow him up the walk. They’ve planted orange lilies and another plant I don’t recognize all along the walkway. The air smells a bit like cut grass and cow poo and heat. I yank my hair back into a ponytail just to get it off my neck.

  Dad turns around and makes big eyes at me. “I am absolutely excited. Are you exc
ited?”

  Before I can answer, he’s speed walking toward the door again. The swing still moves in the trees, back and forth, slowing down. Before my dad can knock on the screen door, a woman appears. She’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Her hair is pretty and combed back from her face. But she’s not smiling.

  She steps outside. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” my dad says, “I’m Matthew Lawson Smith and this is my daughter Chrystal and we—”

  “You’re a reporter and you brought your daughter?” The woman’s body rigids up and her face is one big ole mask of disdain until she looks at me, and then it softens a bit. “I cannot believe the lengths some of you reporters will go to.”

  Dad starts to say something, but she holds up her hand, stopping him.

  “Baby, call your father on his cell. Tell him to come up here!” she yells into the house, and then lowers her voice to talk to my dad again. “I’m sorry to be rude, Mr. Lawson Smith, but we’ve had enough tabloid reporters and regular old reporters around here to last a lifetime. And I don’t want my son to have to be accosted by any of you anymore.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” Dad says, holding up his hands. “I’m an investigator.”

  She studies him, his quirky long-sleeved shirt and trousers despite the heat, the craziness of his runaway hair. “With the police? I know all the police around here. Are you with the state?”

  “No … no…” Dad blushes. “I’m not that kind of investigator. I’m a cryptozoologist.”

  The woman rolls her eyes.

  Dad gives her his best sheepish grin. “I’m not here to bother you. I’d like to help.”

  For a second they are at an impasse. I move up to stand next to Dad, and when I do, some of the mommy-protector seems to seep out of her and she softens again.