Little Bigfoot, Big City

by Jennifer Weiner

  With one trembling hand, Mrs. Landsman reached for her teacup. She sipped, then set the china gently down in its saucer. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I’d always been my father’s favorite, and I knew that this was his biggest find. But I couldn’t stand to think of her in that cage, carried from city to city, even across the ocean, and never seeing her children again.”

  “What did you do?” asked Jo.

  Mrs. Landsman shut her eyes again. “The next time I saw her was when the men from the circus came. Father fed them dinner and probably made sure they’d had a few drinks before he took them back to the barn. He’d put her in her dress and hat, and I remember . . .” Mrs. Landsman’s throat convulsed as she swallowed. “How they stared. How they laughed at her. How they said she was the eighth wonder of the world, and that she’d make them all a fortune. The newspapermen took pictures, and Father and Giles Sanderson—the man from the Sanderson Traveling Circus—shook hands on the deal. Sanderson said he’d hire a wagon and draft horses and come get her in the morning, and my father . . .” Her lips quirked, like she was trying not to cry. “My father said he’d throw in her cage for free. They’d agreed to call her Lucille and give her some story about how she’d come from some exotic land, Malaysia or some such. I suppose that sounded more mysterious than the woods in New York. Then they all left. She must have known that I was up there—must have smelled me or something—because as soon as they were gone, she started calling. ‘Little girl,’ I heard her calling. ‘Little Cilla.’ Because that was my nickname back then.

  “Her hands and legs were free, because she was in a cage. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I won’t hurt you. Please don’t let them take me. I just want to go home.’ I told her that I’d save her. That night I went back to the stables with the key and one of my father’s guns.

  “She started shaking when she saw it, shivering all over. I said, ‘I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me.’ I threw the keys into her cage, and I ran away as fast as I could, knowing that she could have chased me down if she’d wanted to, easy as a cat catching a baby mouse. But I heard her cage door open, and then I heard her running, the other way, past the horses, toward the front of the barn. Out into the night, and into the woods. I put the key back on my father’s desk and put the gun back in the cabinet where he kept it and went back to my bed.”

  Jeremy had to remind himself to breathe. “What did your father do?” he asked.

  “Oh, he ranted and raved, when he found out his treasure was gone. He tried to tell Sanderson that the creature—whatever it was—had used some kind of magic to escape. He never suspected that I’d been the one to free her. He had to give the circus its money back, of course, but that wasn’t the worst.” Priscilla shut her eyes again. “My father died two years after I let Lucille get away, and he spent almost every minute of those two years in the forest. In the rain, in the snow, in the heat of summer, in the dark of night, he was there, on his horse, on foot, going over every inch of the mountain, climbing into every cave, looking for her.” Another tear slid down her face. “He even hired men to dredge Lake Standish. He would come home to eat and change his clothes and sleep for a few hours, but it was as if the rest of us had vanished. Like nothing mattered anymore. Only her. He was obsessed. He was . . .” She paused, and her eyelids slid down over her eyes. “Broken,” she whispered, and it sounded, to Jeremy, like the word broke something inside of her to say. “He stayed in those woods, even after he caught pneumonia, even after his doctors ordered him to bed. He couldn’t stop looking, and he never saw her again. Never so much as a footprint.” She pressed her lips together. “And now my tale is told.”

  “Your father never saw her again,” said Jo.

  Mrs. Landsman nodded.

  “But what about you?” Jo asked. “What did you see?”

  “Oh, you’re a sharp one,” said Mrs. Landsman as the young man in the nurse’s uniform came into the room.

  “Time for your nap, Mrs. L.,” he said in a gentle voice.

  Priscilla lifted one hand. “A moment, please,” she said. She stood up, grunting softly, her veiny hands clutching the edges of her walker. She scooted toward the fireplace, stood on her tiptoes, reaching for the frame enclosing the portrait of her father, then swung the portrait aside. There was a safe behind it, and her fingers were slow and careful as she spun the wheel left, then right, then left again.

  The safe opened with a click, and Priscilla reached inside, carefully removing a wooden chest. “Help me with this,” she said, and Jeremy leaped out of his seat and carried the chest back to the table beside Mrs. Landsman’s green chair. When she lifted its lid, it breathed the scent of cedar into the room, and Jeremy and Jo could see that it was full of bars of gold and thick gold coins with ragged milled edges. There was a note on top, three words in a pretty script, one that suggested that the writer was no stranger to pen and paper.

  “Thank you,” it read. “From your friend Yetta.”

  “She’s out there,” said Priscilla. Her eyes had drooped shut, and her chin was sagging toward her chest, like her neck could no longer support the weight of her head. “Sometimes . . . at night . . . when I can’t sleep, when the wind is blowing . . . I think I hear her. Calling me. Girl . . . girl . . . little Cilla.”

  “How can we find her?” Jo asked. “Where should we look?”

  She can’t still be alive, Jeremy wanted to say . . . except Priscilla herself was alive. But Priscilla was ancient, and she’d only been a little girl when she’d met Lucille, while Lucille had been an adult, with kids.

  “Where?” Jo was asking.

  “That’s enough,” said the nurse. His voice was gentle but firm.

  Priscilla raised her head. “The biggest heart,” she murmured. Jeremy and Jo exchanged a glance. “Look inside . . . the biggest heart. Ask . . .” Her chin dropped to her chest. Jeremy could see the blue veins in her lids as they slid shut.

  Jeremy was prickling with excitement after he dropped Jo off at home, but as he pedaled the bike to his own house, he found his good mood fading. First, a pickup truck full of teenagers pulled up alongside him, and one of them yelled, “Hey, you’re such a loser, you’re riding a bicycle built for two all by yourself! Don’t you have any friends?”

  He ignored them, trying to focus. What had he and Jo learned that they didn’t already know? That there were Bigfoots in the woods around Standish. That they could talk. That one of them had been captured, then escaped back into the woods, almost a hundred years ago. That she’d given an old woman a chest of gold. The gold part, he supposed, was exciting, but that stuff about “the biggest heart” was a million miles from helpful, and they’d already known about Bigfoots in the forest. He’d been all set to prove it too, when everything had gone so horribly wrong.

  He still cringed when he remembered the story the Standish Times had run: “Hoaxers, Hucksters, Pranksters, and Lies: A History of Standish’s So-Called Bigfoot Tribe,” illustrated with a picture of Jeremy, standing on the back of someone’s pickup truck, begging the crowd to remain calm. Of course, in the picture, you couldn’t tell what he was saying, only that he was yelling, which meant that he could have been saying anything at all.

  Jeremy still dreamed about that night, and in his dreams, it all went right. He’d be walking through the forest, the crowd far behind. He imagined the smell of wood smoke, of curing meat and maple syrup, and how the leaves would crunch beneath his feet as he walked, slow but unafraid, into the midst of the Bigfoot village, with his hands open, held at his sides. I come in peace, he would say, and at first they’d try to hide, but then the bravest one—in his imagination, that was usually a boy Bigfoot, around his age—would step forward and congratulate him and say, In all their years of seeking, no human has ever come close to finding us. You are the first.

  They’d invite him to stay, and they’d tell him the whole history of how they’d gotten there and why they’d left the human world. He would listen, and they would know that Jeremy
wasn’t like the other humans, that he would never hurt them or exploit them, that he would be their friend. Maybe they’d offer him a bed in one of their houses, or even a house of his own, and then, after some time had gone by, the Bigfoot boy would accompany him out of the forest, to Channel 6’s offices on Old Maple Road. Donnetta Dale’s shift started at three in the afternoon (Jeremy had checked). He could imagine the way her beautiful brown eyes would widen when he walked through her office doors, side by side with a real live Bigfoot.

  But that, of course, was not how the story had ended.

  Jeremy’s house was much as he’d left it, only someone had moved the piles of papers off the table and replaced them with a stack of plates and place mats.

  “Jeremy, set the table,” his mother called. Jeremy’s nose crinkled as he smelled something burning. His mom was an indifferent cook in the best of times, but over the past month their meals had gone from unremarkable to inedible.

  His father was in his office, on the phone. His brother Noah was in his bedroom, typing. In the basement, Ben was doing a set of wall slams, hurling a weighted ball into the wall and catching it as it bounced back.

  The biggest heart, he heard the old woman saying in her whispery voice. Look inside the biggest heart. Did that mean finding someone who was especially kind and generous? Someone known for doing good deeds?

  He was still wondering what it meant later that night, in bed, when sleep took him. He dreamed of Bigfoots and a woman in a cage and racing through the woods, only this time he was the hunted one instead of the hunter. He ran as fast as he could, until his breath burned and his throat tasted like blood, and then he tripped over a root and went sprawling on his face. When he looked up, Priscilla Landsman’s nurse was there, looking down at him, holding his coat, telling Jeremy that it was time for him to go.

  ON HER FOURTH DAY OF winter break, after promising her mother that her suitcase was all packed for Hawaii—that yes, she had her swimsuit and her sunscreen and the running shoes for the race she’d signed up for—Alice went to the library, the main branch in the middle of New York City, where two marble statues of lions flanked the front doors. The city streets were decorated for Christmas, with twinkling lights and wreaths hanging from the streetlamps and all the department-store windows done up with holiday displays. Alice walked past the windows, taking in the wrapped and ribboned piles of pretend presents, the Christmas trees dusted with fake snow, the mannequin families rejoicing at their bounty. The air smelled like roasted chestnuts and sugar-glazed almonds, and it was full of cheerful conversations in a dozen languages.

  Alice found an empty chair in the library’s high-ceilinged reading room, where patrons sat at long wooden tables, at workstations lit by individual reading lamps. She threaded her scarf through the chair to claim it, then went in search of a librarian who could help her. She located a man whose nameplate announced that he was Dr. Ettman; he had a soft pink face and wore a bright green bow tie underneath a trio of wobbly overlapping chins. His hair had once been red, but there was only a fringe left, circling his bare skull. He frowned when Alice told him what she needed.

  “They gave you that project for your Christmas break?”

  “It’s more of an independent research kind of thing,” Alice said. In preparation for the morning’s request, she had combed her hair, then bundled it as neatly as she could into a bun at the base of her neck. When she did her hair like that—especially when she pulled it back when it was still wet—Millie told her that her curls looked like an angry squirrel trying to burrow their way into Alice’s brain, and now Alice thought of that hairdo as the Angry Squirrel.

  Dr. Ettman looked down at her list. “Standish, New York,” he said. “That’s upstate, right?”

  “Near Putnam County,” Alice said. “We have to do a project about a place—to write about the people who lived there in the past, all of their customs and languages and beliefs. I know there’s been a lot written about New York City, but I haven’t been able to find out much about Standish.”

  Dr. Ettman’s eyes opened wider, and his chins seemed to quiver in anticipation. “You just said the magic words,” he said.

  Alice felt stupid. “I did?”

  “I haven’t been able to find out much about something,” Dr. Ettman repeated. “Like catnip to a librarian!” He leaned forward happily. “Now. Does this Standish of yours have a local newspaper?”

  Twenty minutes later Alice was back at her workstation with a stack of oversize, musty-smelling books, each one bound in green cloth hardcovers, each containing a year’s worth of issues of the Standish Times.

  “We’re in the process of putting a lot of these smaller local papers online,” Dr. Ettman said, “but for now . . .” He opened a binder to 1987. Alice saw a story about President Reagan doubling the import price on goods from Japan, alongside a headline that read “Standish High Baseball Team Prepares for Upcoming Season.” “At least this will give you a sense of what was going on.”

  “How far back do they go?” Alice asked.

  The librarian consulted the card he’d pulled from the catalog. “All the way to 1906. That’s when it looks like the Times was founded. Happy hunting!” he said, and told Alice where to return the binders when she was done.

  Alice sat down and opened her notebook. The pen felt clumsy in her hand. She’d gotten used to typing her notes, but it hadn’t felt like much of a sacrifice to lend Millie her laptop over the break, although it was a little troubling that she hadn’t gotten a single response to any of the emails she’d sent. Was Millie all right? Had the laptop been discovered? Or—Alice’s stomach lurched unhappily—had Millie made another friend somewhere or just gotten too busy to remember Alice?

  Alice looked at her phone to make sure that Millie hadn’t written. The only mail she’d received was an email from her bunkmate Taley.

  I am spending my break at an allergy clinic at an alternative health center in Lenox, Massachusetts. They are making me eat an eighth of a teaspoon of yogurt at a time and say a mantra beforehand. Three times a day they make us rinse out our sinuses with a neti pot. Please send help. Except they will probably confiscate your help when it arrives here because we aren’t allowed to have mail that might have been contaminated with mildew or pet dander.

  Instead of a signature, Taley had ended her note with four sad-faced emojis and a tiny teapot. Alice smiled, thinking of something Felicia liked to say: No matter how bad you think you’ve got it, someone’s always got it worse.

  Riya had written a short note from the fencing clinic she was leading in her hometown of Tampa, and Jessica had sent a picture of herself on a yacht in St. Barth’s. She had a bikini top and a towel wrapped around her waist. Alice wondered if Jessica could even wear bathing suits, given her unique anatomy, the secret that Millie had literally sniffed out that terrible night at the Center, when she’d forced Jessica to reveal that she had a tail.

  Alice squared her shoulders, opened the first binder, and began to read. It took her a while to get the hang of flipping from one front page to another, and even with that trick mastered, it was almost three hours before she found her first useful headline.

  “Military Men Arrive in Standish on Mysterious Mission.” The article was from 1982.

  On Monday morning, diners at the Standish Café might have noticed a few new faces. Men in sharp suits with short haircuts, driving cars with Washington, DC, license plates. The men declined to tell this reporter what brought them to Standish or if their arrival had anything to do with the recent reports from hunters about strange creatures in the woods. “We’re not at liberty to discuss that,” said one of the men, who acknowledged that he and his compatriots were in town “on government business,” while refusing to give his name or even say which branch of the government employed him. “For the time being, this is a classified mission,” he said. When this reporter asked if he too had heard rumors that the creature was a Bigfoot, the man said, “No comment,” and when this reporter tried t
o ask further questions, the man said, “Are you trying to get yourself arrested?”

  Hmm, thought Alice. There were no other reports of the men or what they might have been looking for, but, three weeks before their arrival, she found the story that might have brought them to Standish. “Hunters Tell of Night of Terror,” Alice read. The same reporter who’d spotted the men in the diner had written about how six men had gone into the woods “for a weekend of hunting, fishing, and camaraderie.” They’d been swimming in Lake Standish when an enormous, hairy creature had appeared on the shore where they’d made their camp.

  “The men shouted at the creature, asking it to identify itself,” Alice read. She wondered if the swimmers had shouted or if they’d actually screamed. “The creature did not answer. Instead, it lifted the cooler they’d packed with steaks and baking potatoes and beer, hoisted it onto its shoulder—‘Like it weighed nothing,’ said Doug Broussard, 42, of Standish, ‘and it had to be at least fifty pounds, with all the meat in there’—and walked back into the forest, pausing only to steal the L.L.Bean jacket that Broussard had left hanging from a tree branch. ‘I tell you what,’ said Broussard, ‘I’m a big guy, but that jacket’s going to be a tight fit. That monster had to be seven feet tall, at least, and three hundred pounds, easy.’ ”