In the Woods

by Carrie Jones

  I go through the door and wait at the counter until the old man with more hair on his bare shoulders showing through his wifebeater than on his head finally looks away from the baseball game he’s watching.

  “You ain’t old enough for a room,” he says. He has at least four teeth in his mouth. His eyes appear puckered because of the fat pockets around them.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Lawson Smith,” I tell him. “The guy from Maine?” I suddenly realize I didn’t see the red station wagon in the parking lot.

  “He ain’t here. Just the girl.”

  I don’t know if this is good news or bad news. My palms are sweating like crazy. That is such a cliché that not even I would try to put it in a poem. Damn. I swallow hard, try to calm down.

  “Can you tell me what room?” I ask.

  He fixes me with a squinty, suspicious eye. “You ain’t gonna go messin’ around with that girl while her daddy’s away,” he warns.

  “I don’t even know her,” I say, getting a little mad at the old guy. “They came out to my farm to talk to me, but I couldn’t talk then, so I’m here to talk to them now.”

  “They know you’re coming?”

  “Are you their personal secretary?”

  “Don’t you sass me, boy,” the man snarls.

  “Sorry,” I concede, holding up my hands in a show of peace. “Can you just please tell me what room number?”

  “Let me see some ID. Anything happens up there and that girl’s daddy needs to whup you, I wanna know who to send him after.” The guy gets off the wooden stool he was perched on and shuffles toward the counter while I withhold a disgusted sigh and pull out my wallet. He copies down my name and address, then pauses. “You’re the kid who saw Bigfoot.”

  “Yeah.” I snap my wallet closed. The guy reeks of tobacco and old, greasy food.

  “Was it big? They say Bigfoot has a powerful bad smell. Did it smell bad?”

  “I really don’t remember.” Of course, I remember everything, but I’m not going to tell him about it. “What room?”

  “Twelve,” he says, his eyes a little wider now, like they’re filled with wonder.

  A minute later I’m standing outside a dull-green door with a “12” screwed to it in flat black aluminum numerals at eye level, just above a peephole. I take a deep breath to steady myself, then wish I hadn’t, as the smell of old urine and mold fills my nose.

  I knock on the door.

  6

  CHRYSTAL

  Kierkegaard said, “Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.”

  Dad is full of faith.

  After he left the Jennings’ farm, Dad lets me rest at the hotel. Before he leaves to check out the tracks at the hog farm, he says, “I think this may be the one, Chrystal. I’ve got a feeling.”

  “I know, Dad. I hope it is.”

  And I do, because I like to see him happy, and sometimes since the divorce and Mom’s remarriages, he gets so sad. I think he must feel all left behind, the way I feel sometimes, and so he needs to have faith in things. I have Kierkegaard and my bass guitar and he has … monsters.

  The problem with my father is that he’ll tell you he’ll be back in an hour and it will end up being eight. So, I settle in for a long haul. I actually have summer homework for AP biology. It’s all anatomy stuff, self-study and tests. I scoot the rickety wooden table and chair right in front of the AC and crank out some of that for an hour. The hotel doesn’t have wireless; we don’t have a good data plan and we use it up when we’re doing the GPS, so I’ll have to figure that out in the next two days, because that’s when this chapter is due. But since I can’t do it now, I give up and take a shower.

  The bathroom is relatively clean of mold, which is a super-plus, and I put the water on lukewarm in an attempt to regulate my body temperature. I’m just toweling off with my own beach towel—I totally don’t trust the hotel’s—when there’s a knock on the door. It takes me a second to figure out what the noise is, because it’s not a forceful knock. It’s timid. At first I thought it was the air conditioning breaking or something.

  “One sec!” I yell.

  I have no idea who could be at the door, and for a minute I’m freaked out. I should have pretended nobody was in the room, but then what if it was robbers and my lack of response made them bold enough to come inside? No … it’s probably housekeeping. I look around the room, at the mold and dirty rugs, and wonder if they even have housekeeping here.

  I swallow hard and look for a weapon. The lamp? Is that a cliché? I don’t care. I unplug it, sending up a plume of dust, and get it solid in my hand before I go to the door. My heart is beating super-hard as I lean my eye toward the peephole and reel backward.

  It’s him.

  Logan.

  He’s looking down. His hands are in his pockets and he’s sort of shifting his weight back and forth.

  Why would he be here?

  Looking again, I verify that it’s really, really him. Some guys in motorcycle leathers walk behind him. Crud. He’s not safe out there. I run back and put the lamp on the table again before I fling open the door.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He looks at me, brown eyes wide open. “Hey.”

  “Oh! I’m wearing a towel,” I babble. “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh!”

  I run into the bathroom and slam the door, then open it again to yell out, “Excuse me for a sec.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Cringing, I try to take a second to compose myself, but there’s no hope of my heart rate slowing down at all. Instead I scoop my clothes off the door hook and slam them on. They’re just green Adidas retro workout shorts and a T-shirt, but they’ll have to do. I put my flip-flops on so I don’t have to touch the carpet with my bare skin any more than I already have, and come back out.

  Logan’s eyes are still super-wide. I check to make sure my T-shirt is facing the right way. It isn’t.

  “Oh man,” I mutter. “It’s on backward. I’ll be right back. I’m so sorry. Sit down.”

  Gesturing toward the one chair, I smash back into the bathroom and whip my shirt into the right place after I’ve shut the door. I quietly tap my head against the wall and chant, “Calm down, idiot. Calm down.”

  Why am I flipping out? Seriously. It’s not like I haven’t seen a cute guy before. I’ve dated cute people before! And it’s not like he’s perfect. He’s a little too broad shouldered and his feet are huge. Seriously though, he has a pimple on his jaw. He’s a little too country for me. Plus, he pretends to see monsters. It’s his fault we’re even out here.

  I close my eyes and make myself breathe deeply. Swallowing hard, I open the door and make my voice as normal as possible. “So … um … hi.”

  He’s sitting in the chair but pops back up. “Hi … yeah … my dad wanted to apologize to your dad for being a jerk today. Is your dad here?”

  “Here?” I look around. There’s not really any place for him to be.

  He blushes. “Yeah. I didn’t think so, unless he’s hiding under the bed.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. He’d hide anywhere if he thought it would help him gather evidence.”

  “He seems pretty”—he searches for a word—“obsessed.”

  “He is.” I sit on the edge of one bed. After a second, the Logan guy sits in the chair again. “Obsessed is a nice way to put it. But he’s not here. He went back out to look at some tracks. He’ll be sad he missed you. I should call him.”

  I grab my cell and call Dad. It goes to voice mail. I leave a message.

  “Sorry,” I say to Logan once I’m done. “Can you stick around for a minute? Just in case he calls back?”

  Logan nods. “Yeah. Of course. I can meet him tomorrow, too, you know, if he doesn’t show up.”

  “Truth is, sometimes he’s gone forever.”

  I smile at Logan. He smiles back. Then this ridiculous silence hangs in the air, which is stale. Then I realize my l
ollipop tattoo is showing. I slap my hand around it.

  “You have a tattoo,” he says, because I’ve completely drawn attention to it.

  “Yeah.”

  Brilliant.

  “Of a lollipop?”

  “I like them. They’re sweet and sort of innocent and I—I know—It’s stupid.”

  His eyes crinkle up and he smiles. “No. It’s cute. Kind of daring.”

  “My mom used to call me her little Poppie when I was a kid because I loved them so much and because I was always popping up into the air when I did gymnastics.”

  He nods. “Do people call you that now?”

  “Oh … no … definitely not.”

  The silence gets awkward again. I want to shout into it, Hey monster-seeing boy, I know I’m weird and probably not like the Oklahoma girls you’re used to and I have a lollipop on my ankle, but you should tell me about this alleged monster so me and my dad can get out of here and I can get on with my life.

  I don’t say that.

  “I’m sorry if I seemed—um—harsh at your house. I just … I don’t believe in monsters.”

  “I never did either.”

  “And now you do?”

  “Sort of. Yes. No.”

  He seems like he is telling the truth. He’s so earnest. That’s the thing.

  I ask, “You couldn’t have been … mistaken? It couldn’t have been a really big creepy guy?”

  “I thought so too. I mean, I actually want to think that. But there are tracks.”

  “People can fake tracks.” I interrupt him and feel guilty about that. “I’m so sorry it smells like cigarettes in here,” I say, jumping up. “The windows don’t open. And we don’t smoke.… It’s just … It’s not the nicest hotel room.”

  He stands up too, and walks over to the window where I’m now standing. He’s taller than me, which is not unusual, but it’s still nice. He smells clean, like he maybe took a shower before he came over here, which is also nice.

  He reaches past me. “Maybe it’s just stuck.”

  “My dad tried—” I start to say, but he gets it open. “Oh … You’re stronger than my dad.”

  He looks at me and smiles and then does this little half-shrug thing. I resist the urge to bang my head against the wall again.

  “So, are you trapped here, waiting?” he asks.

  “Yeah, just me and the TV and my bass.” I point at the bass guitar case in the corner. I haven’t even played it yet.

  He cocks his head. “Did you eat dinner?”

  I shake my head. “No. We had some Doritos for lunch. My dad forgets about food when he’s on a trip like this. It’s cute, but…”

  “But you get hungry?”

  “Yeah.”

  Wow. This is awkward.

  His bottom lip curls in a tiny bit, moving toward his teeth. I wonder if he’s biting it. “You want to get something?”

  “To eat?”

  “Yeah.”

  I don’t know what to say. My stomach growls super-loudly. It makes us laugh. I text Dad to tell him, take the hotel key and my wallet, and follow Logan’s rangy frame down the hall.

  It’s not until we’re in his truck with the windows all the way down and buckled up that he says, “You don’t think I’m a freak because of the whole.… thing, do you? I mean, back at the house, you pretty much said I was lying.”

  Before I can think about it, I reach out and touch his arm. My fingertips tingle. His skin is cool, muscled from farm work, I guess. I resist the urge to stroke it and pull my hand away.

  “I meant that a lot of time people’s fear make them imagine monsters because they can’t understand what they see. And I also meant that you could have been joking, but then you got too caught up in the joke. But … I don’t know. I don’t believe there is a Bigfoot out there eating cows, but I also don’t believe that you’re a liar.”

  “But maybe a freak?”

  I try out his name. “Logan, you met my dad.”

  He starts the truck. It rumbles to life. “Yeah.”

  “He’s a little quirky, right?”

  He starts laughing. “He’s like someone out of a British comedy, only without the accent.”

  “He’s not always this bad. The searches bring out his quirk. Anyway, I’m used to him, so you … you seem totally normal.”

  “I am totally normal? I just saw…” He shudders.

  I touch his arm again. He seems so pained. I need to know if this is all crap or not, but I also don’t want him to look like this. “Was it really that bad?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It was. Topic change. Where do you want to eat?”

  “Have you eaten yet?”

  “Yeah.” He starts moving all these spiral-bound notebooks off the seat between us and putting them in this space behind the upholstery. This reveals a tear in the fabric, where yellow foamy stuff appears. Written there are the words I AM RIPPED. Someone used black ink. I wonder if there are any other messages there.

  “Oh!” I feel guilty. “We don’t have to go. You can just tell me what happened here … in the hotel room of hell.”

  “No … no. I want to. I’m always hungry.”

  “Me too,” I say just as my stomach rumbles again.

  “We are going to be perfect together then,” he says, and then he turns bright red because it’s kind of an embarrassing thing to say. I totally like it. I want to reach out and touch his blushing skin. Instead, I sit on my hands.

  I take a big risk because Kierkegaard said, “During the first period of a man’s life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.”

  So I say, “Yeah, we are.”

  He coughs.

  I add, “We’re going to be … great friends … I think.”

  Awkward. It’s all so awkward.

  7

  LOGAN

  Oh. My. God.

  That thing about being perfect together just popped out. I didn’t even think about what it might mean. Then it was out there. Just there, like a guy who came out of a porta-potty and forgot to pull up his pants. And then … she agreed. And then … she friend-zoned me, I think.

  I swallow hard and stare out the windshield for a few brutal minutes as we drive toward town. I have to say something. Something good. “There are better places to stay than the Cherokee Country Inn.” No! No, stupid. Criticizing their choice of hotel is not the way to go. “I mean … well, I don’t know. I didn’t mean to criticize.”

  “It’s a dump. Not at all what the website showed,” she says.

  “They actually have a website?”

  “Just contact information and a couple pictures of a room that looks like it came from somebody else’s bed-and-breakfast.”

  “Yeah, you hear ‘country inn’ and you think one thing, but that’s not what it is. There’s a little motel down the road that’s much nicer.” I pause, still thinking it’s bad to criticize their room choice, even if it was an accident. “So, are you going to stay long, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. That depends on my dad,” she answers, tucking some half-wet hair behind her ear. “The sooner we can find some resolution, the sooner we get to leave.”

  We enter the two blocks that make up downtown, and I see there’s an empty parking spot right in front of the Greasy Hog. I wheel the truck in and kill the engine, then look at her. Man, she’s pretty. Her hair is wet, but still wavy. She’s not wearing any makeup, but she really, really doesn’t need any. Her eyes are fixed on me, and for a second I can’t talk.

  “Has your dad ever found a monster before?” I finally ask.

  “No,” she answers. “He has pictures of lights he’s sure are UFOs, and he’s made plaster casts of big, deformed-looking footprints. He has one short video clip he says is Bigfoot, but a professor in Orono told him it’s just a bear. Dad doesn’t believe him, though. He says it’s a conspiracy.” She laughs a little. “He said the professor probably ran out in the woods to try to get his own video as soon as Dad left his office.”


  “What does he want to do? I mean, what if he found Bigfoot?”

  She thinks about it for a minute. “You mean, face-to-face? Like you were in the article?”

  I sigh. “It wasn’t exactly face-to-face. I still don’t even know if it was Bigfoot. That’s what a reporter said and then everyone jumped on it. But … yeah.”

  She says, “I don’t know. I think he just wants pictures. Maybe some hair. Proof that the impossible is possible.”

  I nod, then look at my shotgun resting upside down in the gun rack mounted over my back window. “I know what I’m doing if I see it again.”

  She looks at the gun in kind of a funny way and I guess she hadn’t noticed it when we got in the truck.

  “You’d shoot it? Kill it?” she asks. She makes a face like she’s just eaten okra for the first time.

  “Yeah. But whatever it is, it’s killing livestock,” I explain. “That costs us money. Everyone around here. Plus, well, it’s just scary. It’s a way of life for farmers to have guns, for people here to hunt.”

  She nods, but I think she doesn’t believe those are good enough reasons. But hell, she didn’t actually see it rip the head off a calf. Her stomach growls again and I smile at her.

  “They have the best fries here,” I tell her. “You get a pile of them like this.” I raise my hands, keeping them about nine inches apart. “They’re not the frozen kind, like at McDonald’s. These are real potatoes that they peel and cut fresh every day.” Her stomach growls again, and this time it embarrasses me a little. “I’m still talking instead of getting you inside to eat, huh?”

  “You’re making my mouth get all watery,” she admits.