Bigfoots in Paradise

by Doug Lawson

  “Help!” Ted yelled, trying feebly to wave the Balrog off with the arm that was not pinned underneath him. “He’s a killer!” The Balrog was wagging his stump of a tail. His ears were on high alert and he was making fake rushes at Ted, playing with him: stopping short with his front paws out, barking, spinning a full circle, jumping back.

  “Somebody save me!”

  While my father had never liked dogs, he had always liked attention.

  I ran over and knelt down. “Ted,” I said. “What did you do?” It looked like the arm underneath him might be broken and there was a long scratch on one side of his face that was bleeding. The hair went up on the back of my neck when I looked at his chest, which was thrashing around underneath his jacket like something out of an Alien movie.

  “Scott,” he said. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He struggled and sat up and took a deep breath, reached up inside the shirt with his good arm, and handed me a young, freaked-out bulldog, all chest and jowls, with a spotted coat of white and brown. It smelled of urine, and its belly was wet. The bulldog eyed the Balrog warily, and showed all of its teeth.

  “Here. He reminded me of you.” Which from Ted meant it reminded him of some idea of what he wanted me to be—which meant being more like him. I shook my head. I didn’t have anything to say, really. I held the dog into my chest, up against the shiny new kurta, to calm it. It had my father’s chins and the same ice-blue eyes.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder, and there was Kelly. She was wearing a simple, beautiful sari and her hair flowed down her back like liquid chocolate. There was a delicate gold tiara across her smooth brow from which a simple gold coin on a chain descended to her forehead, like a star. And beneath that shiny star she wore the deeply sarcastic expression that I had come to know oh so very well.

  “Well, the mango chutney? It’s pretty fucking awesome, don’t you think?” She shoved a piece of naan slathered with it into my mouth. She pushed my chin up for me to go ahead and chew, and then watched me with one her hand on her hip.

  As I stood there in front of her, holding the struggling bulldog, smelling of dog piss and gasoline and smoke, I knew that she was, as always, correct.

  That whole year leading up to the wedding had been bad for Kelly and me, and the disaster at the wedding had only put a bright cake topper on the peak of it. We’d met eighteen months ago in a hotel for westerners in Chennai, India, and it was that air of perpetual certainty she carried around her, despite the jet lag, that had initially drawn me in. I was running out of money, traveling through from Singapore, trying unsuccessfully to get our offshore developers to talk to each other and produce something close to what we wanted. She was a new VP, out to meet her development team. She managed a hundred people, cursed like a trucker, and had eyes that lit up like fire when she took me to bed in that damp hotel, a place where we could not drink the water, where men were waiting to carry our bags, pour our wine, check our cars for bombs, bring us fruit, and turn down the sheets.

  But stateside, in one of my father’s rental houses up on this wild ridge, that fire started to splutter. She drank a lot. She provided me with a lot of “in-the-moment coaching” with what she called “direct feedback.” We fought about stupid things: dishes in the sink, dog crap on the floor, the water truck bill. She got into a massive argument with my father one night over the potential value of micro-lending sites in the rural parts of Asia which, in the end, was about nothing really having to do with either micro-lending or Asia and everything having to do with what would be good for me. That devolved into drunken insults, and then both of them refused to speak to each other. And then the satellite navigation company I’d been working at collapsed pretty badly, with finger-pointing and threats of lawsuits. As a result, I spent a lot of time off work, with the dogs and the Internet, brooding and staring up at the sky. That went over really well.

  Finally I let my father get me a contract job as a project manager in a company that shipped computer and networking hardware. (He was on the board.) But the work ran long chaotic hours and was entirely without hope—I’d be on the phone with developers in India late into the night trying to understand why we were so far behind budget, why the bug list challenged the attachment file-size limit of the corporate email system.

  When Kelly was at work, I had free time. Evenings, we took calls from either end of the long deck that overlooked the ocean, both of us stared down into our laptop screens and microwaved take-out. I took up sleeping out in a rundown camper left behind by the last tenant.

  The dogs started off as Kelly’s idea. I suspect she thought that by having something else around to focus on, the two of us would be better off. But I was quickly taken with the Balrog and then for a while I acquired a new mutt every few weeks. There were of seven of them, each a different amalgamation of shepherd and collie, boxer and pit, Labrador, Chihuahua and/or ridgeback. With behavior problems and missing limbs and crooked teeth, not one of them was quite whole. But at two in the morning, worked up after arguing through business prioritization issues in English, bad German, and disastrous Tamil, there was something about their simple need of me as one of the pack that reached into some primeval place and quieted me down in a way nothing else, that no one else, could.

  We developed a ritual, the dogs and I. Sleepless after my calls, I’d grab my large walking stick. We’d wander out in the dark, with no flashlight. It was all part of my father’s land, and I’d grown up out here so I knew it pretty well. They’d all fan out across the dirt of the old logging road, my own little wolf pack. They’d sniff skunk and deer, the neighbor’s horses, the elusive spoor of mountain lion. They’d bark at the moon.

  There was one spot the dogs and I especially liked, out on the end of the ridge where some previous tenant had carved a small chair out of the trunk of an old coastal oak. Under a full moon you could see as far as Loch Lomond, and all the folded ridges of the canyons between us would be filled up with fog off the Pacific.

  The stars are brilliant there. I’d sit and watch them spin and look for bright Sirius, part of Canus Major and just down from the belt of haughty Orion. Though you can’t see it with the naked eye, Sirius is actually two stars. One brilliant, clearly visible from across the galaxy, and one small and dense, a tiny, frustrated white dwarf that is nearly invisible. They spin and dance, throwing fire, locked in each other’s terrible grip. The dogs barked back at their echoes, convinced they were scheming coyote somewhere off in the distance.

  Back at the camper, the dogs and I would all find our spots. I’d curl up in the bunk over the front cab. The Balrog would be at my feet, everyone else scattered across the rotting plywood floor, and after a few minutes of their combined warmth, their steady, humid breathing, my chest would relax and open too. I’d hear the sounds of one or another of the dogs dreaming and think: Good girl. You get ’em.

  We weren’t so different, really. My skin didn’t fit right. I was made up of two many disparate pieces, none of them really my own. I had swallowed too many old bones. My dreams then, too, were a mixture of fear and frustration and desire: IT is out there in the dark. IT’s really big and bad, and IT’s on our turf. Just what am I going to do about IT? Or: I want something that another, bigger dog has, and I need to get it any way, anyhow. It smells incredible, a symphony of aromas like nothing else has ever smelled. I will bark and growl and snap my way to it. I will chase it down and catch it and shake it until it is mine. I’m sure none of it had anything to do with my dad.

  But up on that lonely ridge, I tried to hide the wine and Kelly tried to figure out what questions to ask me about my father, so she could then articulate and then manage my problems. But she found my secret stashes and I didn’t have the answers she wanted, ones that could be broken down into specifications and detailed business requirements.

  When she awkwardly proposed, over a second bottle of Cab, I think she was at a loss for a better answer. When I hesitated, she looked away. “Do you need to call your father?” she said, sighing and st
aring out at the view.

  And I realized: even when drunk, she understood me all too well.

  “I was thinking of Fiji, Scott,” my father said.

  “Fiji,” I said. “The South Pacific Fiji or the bottle of water Fiji?”

  Kelly and I sort of decided to postpone the ceremony. The guests will have a party, eat the tandoori, do some dancing. “It’s all paid for, so why not?” Kelly said. “Why fucking waste it?” She poured herself a fifth glass of wine and didn’t exactly meet my eyes, and I didn’t exactly push it. I ignored the looks from her parents, and I drove my father and Jessica down to the hospital in Capitola in Kelly’s car. The bulldog didn’t seem to want to join the pack of mutts just yet—growling and snapping, trying to sort out rank—so I put him on an old blanket in the back. He settled down there like a little king on his blanket-throne, and put on one of my father’s all-knowing expressions.

  Ted, it turned out, had broken his arm in two places. He got his arm set by a balding, chimp-like ER tech with big wire-rimmed glasses. “Maybe Vanuatu,” he said. “We’ll all go by boat. You know, it’s really very easy to circumnavigate now. There are quite a few blogs I’ve been following of families who have done it. Families with kids. There’s Wi-Fi up and down the coasts. You can get satellite radio broadcasts pretty much anywhere that will show you the weather to within a couple of feet.”

  “And Jessica?”

  He nodded once, the boardroom confirmation, and smoothed down his beard with his good hand. “She’s studying Fijian. Yes, that’s an actual language. She’s good with that sort of thing. She’ll translate while she’s changing the kid and giving me a catheter all at the same time, though they speak a lot of English too, you know. We’ll strap a fucking car seat right into the wheelhouse. You can teach us all how to steer by the stars. Did you know there’s no H, X, or Z in the Fijian alphabet?”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “Makes you wonder if they’re really necessary letters, or just superfluous. Just extras hanging on to words, while the real story is going on somewhere else. Like children.” He grimaced and looked at the tech, who started and looked sheepish.

  “Sorry, sorry,” the tech said. My father reached for another pill and dry-swallowed it.

  I bit back what I actually wanted to say. I felt like a guy in a red Star Trek shirt, just assigned to an away mission. “You’re not a Z, Ted. An H, maybe. But definitely no Z.”

  “That’s why I like you, Scott. You almost tell an old man what he wants to hear. You’re into stars; did you know that the star Sirius is at the same declination as the latitude of the island of Fiji? Seventeen degrees south. It was how the Polynesians used to navigate. Think it through, will you?”

  While I knew he had a boat, a forty-two footer docked in the Santa Cruz harbor, I wasn’t sure if my father even knew how to sail. “I’m getting married soon,” I said. “And I have to do this thing called work.”

  “In the old Solomon Isles, a girl couldn’t marry until she was tattooed,” he said. “And in Fiji you’re supposed to bring her father a whale tooth. Not worth all that effort, if you ask me.” He closed his blue eyes and leaned back in the chair. He folded his chins up like the bulldog.

  I had to wonder if he knew, or at least suspected something about Jessica. I thought about asking. I wanted to see his expression change. He looked tired, and Ted was never tired. I figured he probably did know.

  “How about I just teach you the songs,” I said.

  “Songs?”

  “Wasn’t that how the Polynesians remembered all those stars for navigation? They sang them all to each other.”

  “You never could carry a tune, Scott. You got that from me.”

  Bite me, old man, just let me live my life, I thought to myself in tune. Sounded pretty good to me.

  “It was Singapore a few weeks back,” Jessica told me later. “Or somewhere else in China.” Her hair was plastered to her head from sweat and the straps inside the construction helmet, and she was dressed in a hospital gown now and had a fetal heart-rate monitor strapped across her stomach. The heartbeat rate on the glowing orange screen showed 137 beats per minute. “Then it was some sort of peer-to-peer mobile music thing out of Hong Kong that was really expanding in the Asian market, he said. What’s peer-to-peer mean, anyway?”

  “It’s like a sharing of equals,” I said. “One computer trades stuff with another, but nobody’s really in charge.”

  She laughed, with only a little bit of irony. “Electric anarchy. I like it. It’s pretty unlike either of you, you know.”

  “He sounds a little lost?” I said hopefully.

  “Lost?” She shook her head. She looked tired. “Not really. He’s seventy-three, Scott. Some people settle down quietly, and some people don’t. Ted is a working dog who just needs a new rabbit to hunt. He’s a hell of a guy for someone his age. His mind just spins faster than minds really should. Hand me that Coke, will you?”

  “Should you really be drinking that?”

  “No.” She drained the rest of the can. “Zippy and I, though, we like our little caffeine hit.” She patted her stomach. “It’s how we keep up. Do you have a smoke? Just kidding. You look a little lost yourself, you know.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe I need the caffeine.”

  “Your problem isn’t keeping up, Scott. Your problem is deciding just where else it is you’re trying to go.”

  She was a little right, though not entirely. Compared to Ted, everyone appeared a little lost. We looked at each other, and then I looked away and studied the remote control for the hospital bed. You could put the back up and the feet up separately. You could fold someone in half. There was a needle taped into a vein on her left hand that ran up to a bag hanging from a silver pole. The small clear drops looked like tequila, but probably weren’t.

  I put my hand on the lower part of her stomach. “So, come on—seriously, this time. Boy or girl?” I imagined the kid in there, upside-down and eyes wide open, staring at me with giant anime eyes through Jessica’s translucent skin.

  “Definitely one of the two.” Jessica smiled sadly, took my hand, and put it back in my own lap. “Won’t be long now, will it, bucko? And then boom, all of our galaxies will tremble.”

  Jessica never actually told me I was the father. Most people assumed it was Ted. Jessica was more than his nurse, that was clear—she accompanied him to business events, traveled with him abroad. Nurse was kind of a joke between them, given the age difference. But neither of them ever spoke about the details of their relationship. I had never seen them overtly physically affectionate, though I recognized from a distance a deeper connection that was more than professional. It took a lot to keep pace with my father, both physically (he was still active at the Santa Cruz rock-climbing gym) and mentally, and I didn’t know if Jessica knew that I knew about Ted’s vasectomy, which he’d had done when I was a teenager.

  It had been one of those early-morning walks. The summer fogs had just started coming in the evenings, but they were starting slowly. The leaves were crisp and brittle from the daytime heat and Cal Fire had been on high alert for a month. A large fire that would be traced to an exploding meth lab had ravaged thousands of acres out near Felton, and fires had been burning giant redwoods down in Big Sur for some time.

  Around 3 a.m. I hung up on India, and went out to get the dogs. Their paws left prints in the drifting ashes as the eight of us went up the road in a loose pack. The air smelled of smoke. We went out to the overlook again. Along the way, the dogs sniffed around a red Mini I recognized, parked along the side of the logging road, where the path broke off along the ridge.

  And out at the overlook, there she was, sitting in the old stump chair. I was surprised—it was Ted’s land, his newly built house was on the same road, up about a mile, but since Ted was never home I rarely saw anyone on it. The dogs were ecstatic and they swarmed around her, begging and preening for attention, their back ends waggling.

  I sat
down beside her, trying to keep from doing the same thing. She was in a glittery black dress and her hair was up, though she had changed into running shoes for the path. She was taking refuge, she said, from yet another business meeting. She had one of my dad’s small telescopes in her lap. The moon was high and half full, peering in between the rushing clouds and smoke.

  The dogs calmed eventually and settled around us. We talked about Ted; he’d been entertaining some potential investors and some start-up CEOs and CFOs. Jessica sighed, said she didn’t like the smell of desperation, the egos, the hyperbole. We talked about her. She and I had grown up in different parts of these same mountains. Her father was still a librarian in Santa Cruz. Her mother had grown pot and sold real estate. Their old house was deep in the redwoods, where the sun never really reached, and where everything was damp most of the time. They had raised goats and chickens and grew their own mushrooms.

  I talked about the stars. We used her telescope and I pointed out Rigel and Betelguese, both in the constellation Orion. I told her about how the Egyptians would know the Nile would flood when they saw Sirius rise just before the sun. I talked some about my mother, who I generally never spoke of. I had a few memories of her deep, rich voice, the feel of her hand on my hair, that I played over and over in my head. Sometimes, I said, I’d watch her movies. There was an action flick where she was the naïve woman detective on the trail of a serial killer in rural Idaho. In another, she was the bright, eager young teacher who helps bring an abused autistic child out of his shell. She was on a third marriage now, living in Miami and invested in a chain of steak restaurants.

  “You don’t seem yourself, Scott,” she said. A stray piece of ash landed on her cheek, and I brushed it away. She was right. I didn’t know who I was. I was somewhere in the hot and dry air. I was filled with smoke and fire and frustration. The dog star peered down between the clouds. An owl called nearby and as I leaned over and kissed Jessica, and then slowly slipped the straps of the dress down her freckled shoulders, all I could hear was the crackle and hiss of those far-off Big Sur flames devouring tree after ancient tree.