Lemons

by Melissa Savage

“What do you mean, what else? Like Twinkies or something?”

  I laugh.

  “I would bet you a million dollars no Bigfoot in its right mind would eat a Twinkie. They only eat real food,” he says.

  “Twinkies are real.”

  “They are not. They don’t grow on a Twinkie tree.”

  “Well, they’re still real. You can see them. They exist.”

  “Okay, fine, they exist, I’ll give you that one. But what in Sam Hill is so great about them, anyway?”

  I think about it.

  “It’s got to be the cake-to-filling ratio,” I tell him.

  “The what?” He looks over at me.

  “The snack-cake-to-filling ratio. It’s always perfect. Just enough filling to go with every cakey bite. You never have too much filling or too much snack cake. The wrong ratio will ruin your dessert every time.”

  An exaggerated blast of air blows up the brim of his safari hat, telling me we’re done with the whole conversation about Twinkies or any Twinkie-eating Bigfoot.

  “So, are we going to check it out? Mrs. Dickerson’s sighting, I mean.”

  “Yeah, after this. There they are.” He points to the others waiting at Mr. Harold’s iron gate.

  There’s three of them. Joe Kelly, Eliza Rose, and Beau Stitch.

  “It’s only about one hundred degrees out here, Bigfoot hunter,” Beau hollers at us, swinging his bangs. “Are we doing this, or what?”

  “Guess what?” I say to Eliza Rose, putting my kickstand down in the dirt with the tip of my tennis shoe. “We got a call from Mrs. Dickerson, and she thinks a Bigfoot is actually eating the vegetables out of her garden!”

  “No way!” Eliza Rose says.

  “Yep.”

  “Are we going to sit around here yakking, or what?” Beau complains.

  “Yeah, what’s the plan, Tobin?” Joe Kelly asks.

  “Mr. Harold said he’d meet us at the house,” Tobin says. “Let’s head there and then decide how we’re going to do it once we get to the woods.”

  We saddle back up on our bikes and pedal up the long dirt drive toward Mr. Harold’s white farmhouse. The steers on either side chew long blades of grass and stare at us from behind the weathered fencing.

  They chew and stare.

  Stare and chew.

  I wonder what they’re thinking about today. When I look at Tobin, he just shakes his head.

  “They wouldn’t eat the Twinkies either, so don’t even start,” he says before I can even open my mouth.

  I laugh out loud.

  “Then I’ll just say this, I bet they’d love them too!”

  He just rolls his eyes.

  Mr. Harold is sitting on the porch steps drinking an icy bottle of RC Cola when we get there.

  “Hello!” he calls out to us with a wave. “Back for more exploring, are you? You picked a much better day for it. Hot, but at least it isn’t storming.”

  “Hi, Mr. Harold,” I call back, parking my bike next to his blue Ford pickup.

  “Hello, Lemonade.” He takes another sip of the RC, then wipes the back of his neck with the red bandana. “I see you brought along reinforcements.”

  “This is Eliza Rose, Joe Kelly, and Beau Stitch.”

  “Pleasure.” Mr. Harold nods. “What’s on the agenda?”

  “We were just hoping to get out past the fence where you said you saw that Bigfoot and do some more investigating,” Tobin tells him.

  “You have permission to go out past the fence today?”

  “Yes, sir,” Tobin says. “Uh…you know…daytime permission.”

  “Ahhh…well, that sounds good to me.” Mr. Harold smiles. “I’ll be out in the pasture tending to the steers if you need me. Just holler.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Harold,” Tobin says, untying his case from the back of his bike. “Okay, everybody, we’re burning daylight. Let’s get a move on.”

  When we make it to the fence where Mr. Harold said he saw something, Tobin sets down the case.

  “Let’s break up into two groups,” he says, unzipping the case and pulling out the Polaroid.

  “I’m going with Lemonade,” Eliza Rose announces, linking arms with me.

  I turn to her, and she smiles. It feels nice to be making friends here like I had back in San Francisco.

  “How about you boys go your way and we go ours?” I say.

  Everyone agrees.

  “Lemonade, you are assigned to still pictures.” Tobin hands me the Polaroid camera.

  I nod and pull the strap over my head.

  “I’ve got movie camera duty,” he continues. “Joe, me, and Beau will head east. Lemonade, you and Eliza Rose can head west. We are looking for evidence of any kind. Footprints, hair, scat.”

  “What’s scat?” Eliza Rose whispers to me.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I whisper back.

  Eliza Rose raises her hand. “What if we see something?” she asks. “I mean, what if we come across an actual Bigfoot?”

  “They’re mostly nocturnal, but there’s always a chance. Take a picture first and foremost. That’s very important. Always a picture first. Let me hear you all say it.”

  They all look at each other.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Tobin tells them, putting a hand to his ear.

  “Always a picture first,” we drone in unison.

  “We’ll also need a special call, you know, in case we see something. To signal the other group.”

  “How about whoooo-hoooo?” Eliza Rose suggests, standing on her tiptoes and waving her arm in the air.

  “No way,” Joe Kelly says. “A whistle.” He sticks two fingers in his mouth and lets out a loud screech.

  “I’m not going to slobber all over myself to whistle like that.” Eliza Rose puts her hands on her hips.

  “It’s easy,” Joe tells her. “You just wet these two fingers, roll your tongue, and—”

  “How about an owl call, like this.” Beau cups his mouth with his hands and makes the sound of an owl. “Hooo-hooo!”

  “What’s the difference between that and what I said?” Eliza Rose demands.

  “Well, one is a shrill little-girly call, and the other is a wild-bird call. There’s a big difference,” Beau says.

  “Okay, okay.” I hold up my hands. “The call will be one short whooop. Like this.” I cup my hands around my mouth. “Whooop! Like that. Whooop!”

  The whooop puts an end to the whole debate, and everyone nods in agreement. Tobin looks at his Bigfoot watch and holds it up to his ear.

  “It is thirteen hundred hours. We will meet back here at exactly fifteen hundred hours to debrief, and not a minute later.” He looks right at me and then winds the small silver knob on his watch. “Should we go ahead and synchronize?” he asks, squinting down at his arm, still messing with the knob.

  Joe looks at Beau, and Beau looks at Eliza Rose, and Eliza Rose looks at me.

  Silence.

  Tobin looks up at all of us.

  “Well?”

  More silence.

  “What’s he talking about now?” Eliza Rose finally whispers in my direction.

  “And he really thinks it’s monkey hair?” Eliza Rose says as we trudge through tall grasses and push past long pine arms.

  “Half primate and half human,” I say.

  “That’s crazy.” She wipes sweat off her forehead. “Oh, and what’s scat, anyway?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I say, stepping over a large boulder.

  “Sure I do.”

  I turn back to face her. “It’s poo.”

  She stops. “Okay, I didn’t want to know that.”

  “I told you so,” I laugh, sitting down on top of the rock.

  I sneeze and wipe my nose with my forearm.

  “We should have brought a canteen of water,” Eliza Rose says, leaning up against the trunk of a tall oak. “You think Mr. Harold would let us have one of his bottles of RC Cola to share?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  �
��How much longer are we going to do this?” She yawns. “It’s so hot, and Scooby-Doo! starts at three o’clock. It’s the one where Scooby and Shaggy get locked in the basement on an old abandoned farm. I read it in the TV Guide.”

  “We’ll stay until we find some evidence. Plus, I saw that one already. It’s a rerun.”

  “I know, but it’s funny,” she says, fanning herself. “And don’t you think Fred is cute?”

  “He’s a cartoon.”

  “Still,” she says. “When I get married, I want my husband to look just like him.”

  “Let’s keep going,” I say. “We have to find something or—”

  Eliza Rose gasps.

  “What was that?” she whispers.

  “I don’t know,” I whisper back.

  I crouch low behind a thick bush and scan the forest through the Polaroid’s viewfinder, my finger on the red button, ready to click. Eliza Rose scrambles over near me, linking her arm with mine.

  “Was it a branch cracking?” I ask her.

  “Sounded more like someone cracking a stick against a tree,” she says.

  I scan the forest again, but all I see through the lens is green.

  “Oh, no!” she whispers.

  “What?”

  “Now I can’t remember what we decided the call is supposed to be! Was it the owl or the whistle? And what if it’s hungry?”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “They eat mostly vegetation, anyway.”

  That’s not really a lie.

  “What does mostly mean?”

  “The call is the whooop, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right, the whooop,” she says. “Should I do it now? Should I whooop now?”

  “Wait,” I say, squinting through the viewfinder.

  Still just green.

  Green leaves.

  Green moss.

  Green bushes.

  “Now?” she says again.

  “Not yet,” I whisper.

  We crouch in silence, listening to the sounds of the woods. The wind blowing through the tops of the trees makes a shhhhh sound. The birds up above us call back and forth. And far out in the pasture, we hear the low moan of steers complaining about the sun.

  “I don’t hear anything now, do you?” I whisper.

  “No.”

  “Whooop, whooop!”

  We turn to each other with our mouths open and our eyes wide.

  “Was that—?”

  “Yeah!” I say. “Come on!”

  We jump up and dart in the direction where we last saw the boys.

  After four rounds of whooops, we spot the three of them huddled under the bottom bough of a pine tree that has a trunk thicker than the three of them standing side by side.

  “What are you doing under there?” I call out.

  “Shhh!” Tobin hisses, motioning for us to hurry.

  Eliza Rose and I scramble over rocks and old fallen needles and branches to reach them. When we do, we huddle under the pine branches too. It smells like Christmastime under there.

  Pine needles and bark and sap.

  Something is following us, Tobin mouths to us, peering over his wire-rims and pointing to the left.

  “You’re lying,” Eliza Rose says, frantically scanning the woods.

  “Something really is following us,” Joe Kelly whispers. “Something big, too.”

  That’s when Eliza Rose starts bawling.

  “Ohhhh,” she whines. “I don’t want to be eaten by a Bigfoot.”

  “I told you they’re mostly vegetarian, didn’t I?” I say.

  “Is mostly the same as all?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Then I want out of here right this second,” she says.

  “For criminy sake,” Tobin says. “You’re going to scare whatever it is off.”

  “Good!” Eliza Rose sniffs. “Lemonade, let’s go. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “I’ll take her back,” I tell them.

  “I’ll go with her,” Beau says, stuffing his hands in his pockets and flipping his bangs.

  “Yeah…me too,” Joe Kelly says. “You know, it’s so hot and everything…maybe we could do it again when it cools down a little. Like October. October sounds good. Everyone good for October?”

  I look at Tobin, and he looks at me, and then he rolls his eyes so hard I think they’re going to fall right out of his head.

  “Hey! You! You there! Stop!”

  A loud gunshot blast fires, making my ears ring.

  “Move, move, move!” Tobin yells.

  He pushes everyone out of his way and darts out from under the pine tree and through the forest like a rocket. The rest of us scramble to keep up with him.

  When we make it to the wooden fence, I climb on top of it and shield my eyes from the sun with my hand. Mr. Harold is on Cimarron out in the west field at the edge of the fence. He has his rifle in his hand pointed straight upward.

  “Mr. Harold!” Tobin hollers, waving his arm. “What are you doing?”

  Mr. Harold flips the reins and kicks the sides of Cimarron’s fat brown belly. “Yah!” he yells, and the horse begins to gallop in our direction. When they reach us, Mr. Harold jumps off.

  “Was it a Bigfoot?” I ask.

  “Why do you have a rifle, Mr. Harold? They won’t hurt you,” Tobin says.

  “I think someone or something ran off with one of my chickens. One was missing yesterday, too, but I thought it just wandered off or a dog got to it.” Mr. Harold keeps scanning the woods. “Just now, I saw something running through the forest with another one of my chickens under its arm.”

  “What do you think it was?” Joe Kelly asks.

  “Was it a biped, Mr. Harold?” Tobin asks.

  Mr. Harold turns his head to face Tobin and then forces a smile.

  “You know what? It was probably just someone down on their luck…looking for a meal. I don’t know who it was. And he’s gone now, so…so let’s get you Bigfoot hunters an ice-cold RC Cola. You could probably use it.”

  “And then they all wanted to go home,” Tobin tells Mrs. Dickerson, biting into a buttery ear of corn. “Right in the middle of the doggone expedition!”

  Mrs. Dickerson sips her tea. “Is that so?”

  “It is so. And that’s the very reason why I don’t have anyone else in my Inc.” Tobin wipes butter off his lips with his arm and takes another juicy bite.

  “Well, I guess that’s why God sent you, Lemonade.” Mrs. Dickerson winks at me.

  “I guess,” Tobin agrees. “I mean, she’s got the sneezing and has dumb questions sometimes, and there’s all those Twinkie breaks, but at least she’s no chicken.”

  I laugh, which makes me snort, which makes the milk I’m drinking spray out of my nose.

  “I’m so glad that there is some sort of friendship growing with the others,” Mrs. Dickerson says, handing me another napkin. “My guess is Lemonade had something to do with that, too.”

  “Yeah, she schooled me,” Tobin says, taking another bite.

  “Pardon me?”

  “It means Lemonade is good at making friends…and also at comebacks. She says she’s going to make me into the Comeback King.” He looks at me, and we both laugh.

  “Let’s not get crazy,” I tell him.

  “Comeback King?” Mrs. Dickerson pronounces each word very carefully, like she’s speaking Swahili for the first time, which makes Tobin and me laugh even harder.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I tell her. “Tobin said you think you found a nest out back.”

  “Oh, my, yes!” Mrs. Dickerson takes the cloth napkin that she keeps tucked in her lap and dabs the corners of the bright pink lipstick that never seems to want to stay where it’s supposed to. Then she leans forward on her elbows. “I’m sure it’s a Bigfoot nest—sure as I’m sitting here, that’s what it is.”

  “Roofed, right?” Tobin blurts out, spitting corn kernels on the yellow tablecloth.

  “Yes, definitely roofed…and inside it…” Sh
e leans even farther forward and raises her eyebrows. “A soft pile of leaves on top of pine needles and branches.”

  “You mean like a bed?” I ask.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Mrs. Dickerson says. “Not only that, but in the corner, there are piles of vegetables straight from my garden. Mind you, I only saw it from a distance.”

  “So how can you tell they’re yours?” I ask her.

  Mrs. Dickerson looks me straight in the eye.

  “A gardener knows, dear.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “I’ve been missing vegetables for some time now, but of course I just figured it was the rabbits, you know. From time to time, I’m chasing those pesky little guys away with my cane. But today…today”—she points her finger in the air—“was different.”

  “Why?” Tobin asks.

  “Because today I found an entire pumpkin gone.”

  “An entire pumpkin?” I repeat.

  “That’s right. And not just any pumpkin, one that was at least fifteen pounds. Much too big for a rabbit…or any other critter in the forest, for that matter. I was waiting to see just how big it would grow before Halloween rolled around. I thought I could carve a nice jack-o’-lantern out of it, you know, to put on the front porch when trick-or-treaters come—”

  “How big was it?” Tobin asks.

  “Well, I suppose enough to freeze a couple of pies for Thanksgiving and a few pans of roasted seeds for snacking.”

  “No, Mrs. Dickerson…,” Tobin says. “The nest. How big is the nest?”

  “Oh, yes, well, it’s big enough.”

  “Big enough for what?” I ask.

  “Big enough for more than one of them,” she says.

  “Well, I can see why the Bigfoot is stealing your vegetables, Mrs. Dickerson,” I tell her, looking down at the gnawed corncobs on my plate.

  “Oh, my Lemonade, aren’t you a sweet girl!” she exclaims, putting her hands on her cheeks. “The spitting image of your mother, I’m telling you! Just the spitting image.”

  Elizabeth Lilly Witt.

  Except this time when I hear about Mama and say her name inside my head, there’s no lump to swallow down.

  I smile instead.

  No volcano bubbling up.

  No quicksand sucking me in.

  Not that I don’t still wish that Mama was here having dinner at Mrs. Dickerson’s with us right this minute. Or that I could tell her all the things I’ve been doing in Willow Creek. Or that I could see her and Charlie make things right between them. Or even that I could smell her strawberry Suave.