Little Bigfoot, Big City

by Jennifer Weiner

  “What do I call you?” Jeremy asked.

  The man extended his hand. “Milford Carruthers the Third. My friends call me Skip.”

  Jeremy wondered if this man was related to Milford Carruthers, the “famed Bigfoot hunter,” and his youngest daughter, Priscilla, but decided not to ask. The less this man knew about what he and Jo had learned, the better.

  “And before we go any farther, I owe you an apology.”

  Jeremy tried to look tough. “Yes, you do.”

  The man nodded. “We didn’t approach this the right way. But we didn’t know we were dealing with kids. From everything you’d managed to find, and the sophistication with which you did it, we figured you and Jo had to be PhDs at a minimum.”

  Jeremy felt pride swell inside him, like he was full of helium.

  “We worked hard at it,” he said, trying to sound modest.

  “And, like I told you, you guys have gotten further than our entire agency. And we’ve got some of the best minds in the country . . .” Skip Carruthers stopped talking and sipped from his mug. “Well, let’s just say that I was told they were some of the best minds in the country.” His chilly tone made Jeremy glad that he was not the owner of one of those minds. “But let me start with your first question: Why? You asked why this was so important. The reason is . . . Well. Let me back up. How much do you know about Them?” Jeremy could hear the capital T when the man said “Them.”

  “I saw one,” Jeremy said. Skip leaned forward so fast that his coffee lurched in its cup, almost spilling out onto the table.

  “You saw one?”

  Jeremy reached for his phone, glad that it hadn’t been cracked in the fall. The man leaned close, lips pressed together, body still, like a hunting dog that’s just smelled a pheasant or heard the faint rustle of a squirrel. Skip Carruthers gestured for the phone and watched the blurry footage of what Jeremy knew was an enormous, furry creature in overalls and a floppy hat running lightly through the woods.

  Jeremy’s classmates—the few he’d trusted enough to show—had given him endless grief about the tape. Even Jo, who’d sworn that she believed him, hadn’t looked too impressed. But Carruthers seemed to be watching like he was trying to memorize every second, watching it through once, then twice, then holding up a hand for silence and playing it again. The third time through, he stopped the tape and zoomed in as tightly as he could on the shadowy blur of the creature’s face.

  “It looks like he’s wearing glasses,” Jeremy pointed out. “See where the sun’s shining?”

  The man just nodded and watched the video from start to finish again.

  “We’ve seen that one before,” he finally said.

  Jeremy’s skin prickled. The man touched the frozen image with one close-clipped fingernail, tapping the creature’s face.

  “I’m going to tell you everything. But first,” Skip said, “before we go any further . . .” He pulled a piece of white cloth from his pocket and wiped Jeremy’s phone, front and back.

  “Are you making sure you don’t leave any fingerprints?” Jeremy asked.

  This time the man’s lips quirked, as well as the skin around his eyes. “Your screen was a mess,” he said, and handed it back. “And now,” he said, “I’m going to tell you why it matters. Why it matters more than anything else you or I will ever do with our lives. Why it matters more than anything else in the world.”

  Three hours later Jeremy stood in the lunch line at the Standish Middle School cafeteria, being teased by his classmates. Business as usual . . . except he was still so busy trying to make sense of everything he’d heard that morning that he barely even noticed the abuse. All morning he kept his face still, kept his body moving from class to class, putting it behind a desk, walking it through the hallways, but inside, his brain was whirling, like his kitchen’s garbage disposal when it was trying to break up onion skin or ice.

  “Yo, Bigfoot boy,” said Hayden Morganthal, using two fingers to flick Jeremy between the shoulder blades. “You’re holding up the line.”

  Jeremy jumped, then shoved his tray along the metal railings, accepting a partitioned plate filled with mashed potatoes and cubed turkey and gravy, mushy peas boiled past green to gray, and a fluted paper cup of cranberry sauce. He felt like he’d spent three hours on another planet and had been dumped back down on Earth without the benefit of a parachute.

  The power to cure cancer, Skip Carruthers had told him. To cure diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The power to cure anything. It’s all in their blood.

  “You gonna gimme your two fifty or just stand there looking pretty?” asked Mrs. Martin, who wore a black hairnet over her dyed black hair. Jeremy reached for his pocket before remembering that he’d left his filthy, shredded jeans in the van, with his lunch money still inside of them.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I . . .”

  But Mrs. Martin wasn’t looking at him. She was, instead, frowning at the iPad that the school had started using for a cash register. “Huh. Sorry. It looks like you’re all paid up for the rest of the year.”

  Feeling like he’d just fallen even more deeply into his strange dream, Jeremy nodded. He walked through the lunchroom, taking his usual seat at the end of a bench at a table full of other oddball kids, all of them ignoring each other. He opened his container of milk, remembering.

  “Why don’t you just tell them that?” he’d asked Mr. Carruthers. He’d accepted a second mug of hot chocolate and a corn muffin. “If the Bigfoots’ blood really can do all these things, why wouldn’t they, you know, just give you some blood?” An awful thought went scurrying through his mind as he imagined furry bodies hanging from hooks, attached to tubes, being drained, emptied out until there was nothing left. “You don’t need, like, all of their blood, do you?”

  Mr. Carruthers had shaken his head. “No, not all of it. Just a drop or two, really. Our labs could do the rest. But as to why we don’t just ask them . . .” He turned toward the laptop that stood open on the desk. “It’s not as if we can just send them a letter. We’d have to make our request in person. Which means getting close enough for us to ask and them to listen. And that,” he concluded, “is where you and your friend Josette come in.”

  “Jo,” Jeremy had corrected automatically, knowing how Jo hated it when people used her entire name.

  “Jo,” Jeremy whispered out loud at the lunch table, loud enough so that Sophie and Olivia, who were sitting at the next table with the rest of the popular girls, whispering and giggling, giggling and whispering, ceased both activities and stared at him. Jeremy ignored them. If Bigfoot blood could do what Mr. Carruthers said, if it could cure all those things, help all those people, then it could help Jo, too, prevent her from having to go through the other surgeries she’d told him that she’d need. And if he was the one who made it happen—who convinced a Bigfoot to donate a few drops of blood—then he would be the one who’d helped her. Not just her, either, but every sick person in the country. In the world. He’d be a hero.

  That thought had him on the verge of telling Skip Carruthers absolutely everything that he and Jo had learned, about the little furry girl he’d spotted paddling across the lake, and the big, red-haired girl at the Experimental Center, and how Jo had sent their hair off to a lab and learned that neither one of them was human. He’d been leaning forward, mouth open, ready to spill, when something made him stop.

  He thought about all the times he’d ever been lied to by a grown-up and about how badly the Department of Official Inquiry had scared him; how it had felt to see his name typed on a letter that promised consequences for him and for his parents if he and Jo didn’t give up their search. He’d pictured his father’s timid smile when the police cars were at their house, and thought about how his mother had been practically crying on the phone with the bank as she’d begged them to let her talk to an actual person. Finally, he remembered how he’d felt when his parents told him he hadn’t gotten into the young artists program at Juilliard, how his last chance to be s
pecial and important in their eyes was gone. The Bigfoot had given him hope, new hope that he could do something big, be someone who mattered, and he wasn’t sure if he trusted Skip Carruthers not to use him, the way grown-ups always seemed to use kids, taking their ideas and their work, then taking the credit.

  Mr. Carruthers was looking at him, moving his jaw from side to side. “Everything all right, son?” he asked, and when he put his hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, Jeremy had nodded and said that everything was fine.

  In the end, he’d been careful, playing it safe. He hadn’t told Skip Carruthers everything, or even most of it, even after Mr. Carruthers had apologized for scaring him and Jo, had told him, again, that his agency believed it was dealing with not just adults but possible “covert agents,” people from another country, or even just “homegrown radicals” trying to poach American Bigfoots for their own purposes. “There are people like that. Poachers. People who don’t care that the Bigfoot blood can solve global health crises. People who just want the fame and fortune of being the one who proved that Bigfoots were real.”

  Jeremy, who’d had many elaborate daydreams of precisely that fame and fortune, kept quiet. When Skip Carruthers said, again, “Tell me what you know,” Jeremy tried to keep his voice steady when he said, “Why don’t you go first?”

  Carruthers had opened a manila folder with the word “Classified” typed on the tab and that eye on the front. Jeremy saw his school picture paper-clipped to a document that Mr. Carruthers flipped over too quickly for Jeremy to see more than his name and his parents’ names typed at the top. Mr. Carruthers moved rapidly through the stack, but Jeremy saw what he thought were photocopies of the same newspaper stories he’d read; the Standish Times reports from the ill-fated rally; and then—he dug his teeth into his lip again, to keep from gasping—a close-up of the gray-furred girl he’d seen at the Experimental Center. The one who’d first said she was dressed up as an Ewok for Halloween; the one who’d then said she had a skin condition. The one Jeremy and Jo knew wasn’t human.

  Carruthers turned another page, and this time Jeremy couldn’t keep from gasping. “That’s him!” he shouted, reaching for the picture, knocking his elbow against his mug, which would have spilled all over everything had the man’s hand not darted out with an almost uncanny speed and grabbed it. Jeremy barely noticed. “That’s him! That’s the one I saw in the woods!” He looked up at Mr. Carruthers, eyes wide, cheeks burning. “He’s real,” he said. His voice seemed to echo off the walls of the van. “Real.”

  Mr. Carruthers put his big, warm hand on top of Jeremy’s for just a minute. “Of course he is,” Carruthers replied, as if Jeremy had said something totally obvious, and Jeremy felt his whole body relaxing, something deep inside of him unclenching, like he’d finally released a breath he didn’t know he was holding. When he smiled, his teeth were so white and so even that Jeremy didn’t think they could be real. And when he asked, “Want to help us find him?” it was impossible to keep from nodding and grinning and saying, “Yes, sir, I do.”

  Mr. Carruthers—“Call me Skip,” he’d said, more than once, but Jeremy, who’d been taught to call grown-ups Mr. and Ms. and Mrs., was having a hard time doing it, maybe because Mr. Carruthers kept his dark glasses on and chewed his gum like he wanted to hurt it and because of the little scar he had (maybe chicken pox, Jeremy thought, but maybe a bullet wound)—was the most terrifying grown-up he’d ever met. He knew everything; he knew things before Jeremy even had a chance to tell him. He too suspected that the little girl with the skin condition wasn’t actually a human girl and didn’t actually have a skin condition. He believed that the large male Bigfoot, the one Jeremy had seen, was related to the smaller one, and the two of them lived in the forest on the other side of the lake, the direction from which the gray-furred girl had arrived in her canoe, and that there might be others there, including an old female called either Yetta or Lucille, one they’d been hunting for years.

  “Lucille,” said Jeremy. “She was the one . . .” He’d wanted to say, the one Priscilla Carruthers told us about, before he remembered that that was a piece of information he’d decided to keep private. “The one in the paper,” he finally said. “Wouldn’t she be, like, super-old now?”

  “That’s the thing about Bigfoots,” Carruthers said. “We think that they live a very long time. Much longer than we do.”

  “My dad says he read that humans are living longer than they used to,” Jeremy said. “He said that when he was a boy, seventy or eighty was old, but now there’s people that old all the time. And I’ve got a grandfather who’s ninety-one, and he’s still, like, totally with it.”

  Something moved across Skip Carruthers’s face, something that made him look the opposite of how he’d looked when Jeremy had amused him. His lips tightened; the skin around his eyes furrowed. But all he said was, “Yup, lots of old people.”

  After that, Jeremy was careful not to interrupt. He listened as Carruthers explained how a Bigfoot tribe had been rumored to live in Standish for years and how back in the 1960s the government had sent agents to scour the woods but had found nothing. He waited for Mr. Carruthers to mention Alice, the red-haired girl from the Experimental Center, the one whose hair Jeremy had found and Jo had tested, the one who wasn’t human. But if Mr. Carruthers knew about Alice, and how she was friends with the gray-furred one, how they’d even claimed to be cousins, he didn’t say anything, and Jeremy elected not to mention her or Priscilla Landsman and what she’d said about looking inside the biggest heart.

  In the end, he and Mr. Carruthers had agreed to share information. Jeremy and Jo would continue their hunt, and they would tell Mr. Carruthers what they learned. In return, Carruthers would let him be the “public face” of the Bigfoot discovery. When Jeremy asked why, knowing that if their positions were reversed he’d never let anyone dream of taking credit, Carruthers had given him a tight-lipped smirk and said, “You’re a smart kid. You tell me. Which story do you think John and Jane Q. Public would like better: kid finds Bigfoot in the woods, or government agent from Washington tracks one down?”

  It made sense, Jeremy thought, but he still couldn’t help feeling that there was something sneaky about it, something insincere about the man’s promises, not to mention the way he never took his glasses off, which meant that Jeremy never saw his eyes.

  They’d exchanged telephone numbers and email addresses, even though Jeremy was positive the Department knew where he lived, knew how to reach him, and was already monitoring all of his devices. They’d shaken hands. “Keep me posted,” Skip Carruthers had said. When Jeremy had asked if there was anything specific he should do or anyplace special he should be investigating, the man had shaken his head and said, “Just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s worked out well so far.” He’d dropped Jeremy off at school at ten fifteen, and when Jeremy had gone to the office, the receptionist had greeted him with a wave and asked him how the dentist had gone. “Fine,” Jeremy said, feeling dizzy and overwhelmed. The wheels had started to turn.

  When the fifth-period bell rang, Jeremy threw his uneaten lunch in the trash. He moved his body through the hallways, into his chair and out of it again, back to his locker, and then, after the final bell rang, out the front door. He was halfway to the bike rack before he remembered his trashed bike, which he’d last seen in the forest, five miles away, too far for him to walk before it got dark. He was reaching for his phone, hoping his mom would be around to give him a ride, and not busy on the phone with the credit card people, when he heard Austin Riley say, “Whoa, Bigelow, sweet wheels!”

  Jeremy trotted to the bike rack, surprised and yet not surprised to see his bike, no dents or scrapes, the bent wheel straightened out, the crooked handlebars restored. New knobby tires had replaced his regular old ones. There were gleaming new spokes and rims, a new leather seat, new handlebar grips, new shock absorbers.

  “Christmas present?” Austin asked, and Jeremy nodded, reaching for the envelope that had been taped b
etween the handlebars, and was unsurprised to see the Department of Official Inquiry’s by-now-familiar stationery, that strange, all-seeing eye. Only now, instead of typed-out threats, the note had a handwritten promise: “This is only the beginning.”

  At home Jeremy knew, even before he heard his father’s delighted shout, even before his mom high-fived him, even before he and his brothers were packed into the station wagon to go celebrate with a big steak dinner, that the audit had been canceled and his mom’s identity had been restored. Better yet, his father had been sent an unexpected ten-thousand-dollar refund, along with the tax agent’s most sincere apologies. Nor was he surprised when, at the end of the meal, his dad asked for the check and the waiter came back to the table to tell them that it had already been paid: “Sorry, sir, I’ve been requested not to tell you by whom.”

  His mother celebrated the reactivation of her credit cards and the restoration of her good name by drinking two glasses of champagne and giggling as she leaned against Jeremy’s dad, resting her head on his shoulder and even—Jeremy had to look away—kissing his neck. Jeremy’s dad had dabbed a blob of whipped cream on her nose, and she’d laughed, saying, “Shoo, fly,” and waving her hands at him to go away while Jeremy looked around the restaurant, praying there wasn’t anyone he knew eating there that night.

  When they finally made it home, Jeremy went up to his room to start on his homework and logged in to the school’s system. He was unsurprised to find that, according to the school’s records, he’d completed every assignment for the rest of the semester . . . and had gotten As on every one.

  You should have given me a few Bs, he thought. The steak and baked potato felt like concrete in his belly, as he heard Skip Carruthers’s voice, calm and kind and trustworthy, telling him how important the Bigfoots were; explaining that this was only about help (“We’ll help them, and they’ll help us!”); telling him, again, that this was only the beginning.