Bigfoots in Paradise

by Doug Lawson

  “Stay here,” Keith-the-Beard said. He stood up and adjusted something on his camera.

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “And what happened to stay together?”

  “Nothing, all right? Stay together. And stay here. I’ll be back.”

  “You’re going to . . . what?” said Hugo. “Take them all out with that lens?”

  “If nobody finds out about this kind of stuff, then it’s like it never happened.”

  “If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, should we leave without you?” asked Hugo.

  “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, y’all could wait another goddamn fifteen minutes,” Keith-the-Beard said. He peered up over the crates, and then crept around them and down the stairs. I heard him jump onto the dock, and saw his shadow run quickly up into the trees.

  Kim sat back down. “And then there were four!” said Hugo in a deep movie-announcer’s voice. “Dot dot dot.”

  I reached over and slapped him.

  “What the hell?” He touched the side of his face.

  “Just once,” I hissed at him. “For just once, Hugo, can you fucking be serious for one time in your messed-up frat-boy listen-to-what-I-have-to-say-about-everything life?”

  Hecuba made a quiet whistle, and Sam cleared her throat. Hugo looked away from me and studied the boards of the crate next to him. My stomach groaned and then everything was quiet. The boat bumped up against the dock. There were spiders all over the ceiling, but none of them moved, exactly—they just seemed to grow larger and shiver expectantly in place. A wet breeze blew down between the crates and stirred the hair on my forehead. I stood up and looked over the row of crates. The fat, broody moon was just starting to rise over the river. I sat down again. The empty tequila bottle rolled back down the deck toward us. Then the boat shifted and it rolled away and at the end of the line of crates a small brown hand on a brown arm reached out and picked it up.

  “Bloody shite,” whispered Hecuba. “Shite, shite.”

  “What is your problem?” said Hugo, and I elbowed him and then they all looked down to where another Indian was standing. Like the man on shore, his forehead and all around his eyes was painted bright red. He had dark hair cut straight across the brow, and tattooing that looked like stitches encircled his mouth and stretched back to his ears. He wore an oversize pink Power Rangers T-shirt, and in the hand that didn’t hold the tequila bottle he held a large shotgun.

  He stared at us for a moment. Then he tucked the bottle under his arm and held a finger to his lips. He turned and said something over his shoulder and two more Indians appeared behind him.

  “If you say something about wabbit hunting, I will have them kill you,” I whispered to Hugo.

  Hugo opened and closed his mouth and then nodded. He had his hands up. So did Hecuba. There was a large splash on the far side of the boat, and I risked a look. A man who I assumed was the boat’s pilot was swimming for the far shore.

  “All hands abandon ship!” Hugo whispered.

  But the Indians studied us for a minute and then moved quickly around the man with the shotgun to inspect the crates. More Indians came silently on board, some with painted faces and some without, and they began to pick up the oil-company crates and carry them down the stairs and out onto the docks, where other Indians appeared and hauled them off up a different path.

  The whole process took place in complete silence. The man with the gun sniffed the mouth of the bottle, and then held it up in our direction with raised eyebrows.

  “Dude, we’re all out,” Hugo said.

  “Do they speak Spanish?” I said.

  “Sometimes,” Sam said. “Sometimes Quechua, too. No tenemos más,” Sam said to the Indian. “Lo siento.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Hecuba. “But are they going to fucking kill us?”

  Sam shrugged. Around us the crates disappeared. The man frowned and tossed the bottle over the railing. Hecuba put her hands down. After a minute, Hugo did too. As the last crate was carried off, another Indian came up, this one wearing brown pants and a blue soccer jersey, and the two of them conferred. I couldn’t make out any of it. Then the man looked at us and gestured toward the stairs.

  “¿Por favor, queremos quedarnos aquí?” I said. “We want to stay on the boat.” I pointed at the floor. “En el barco.” But the man gestured again, and the other Indian said something.

  “I guess we need to go with them,” Sam said. She and Hecuba exchanged a look.

  “I told you this was a bad fucking idea,” Hecuba said to Sam. “Didn’t I? This whole bloody trip of yours.”

  “You did, dearie,” Sam said sadly, taking her hand. “You did.”

  I looked over at the dock, but there was no sign of the other soldiers or Keith-the-Beard. Just a few Indians remained, watching us without expression. Some carried bows. All of the crates were gone. I sighed. Somewhere a monkey howled. What would Chuck have done in this sort of situation? Jumped into the river with the pilot? Fought off a cayman? Slept with an Indian woman with those tattoos around her mouth?

  “Come on,” I said, and took Hugo’s hand. I led him down the stairs and out onto the dock, followed by the two Indian men. Once we were all off the boat, the other Indians on the dock undid the ropes and used a long pole to push the back end of it away from shore. The current caught it, and the boat slipped away and began to drift sluggishly downstream, turning in slow circles. In the moonlight it looked like a giant wedding cake, floating away out on the water. And then it went around a bend and was gone.

  “Now that’s encouraging,” Hugo said. I took a deep breath. Hecuba’s tattoos looked pale. We followed them up the path, the way the crates had gone. Hugo began to quietly classify the trees and plants by genus and species, and I nodded without actually listening. We walked for maybe five minutes until the path opened up into a small village: ten or so thatch-roofed huts crouched on stilts. The men pointed to one of the huts, and we went in. It was long, with a low roof and a floor made from what was probably bamboo, with compartments along the sides separated by hanging straw mats. All of the crates had been stacked down at the far end. It smelled of smoke and damp and cooking and sweat. There were families in here—women tending to fires, men and children eating. Some of the women were bare-breasted, and some had long palm whiskers piecing their noses and chins, and some of the older women and men had that same red paint across the upper half of the faces. The children wore shirts and shorts.

  There was a larger sitting area on the far side, around another fire, and a woman gestured us over. Sam said something in Quechua to the woman, but she didn’t seem to understand. We sat down.

  “What exactly are we waiting for here?” Hecuba asked. We sat and watched the Indians watching us until they seemed to get bored and ignored us.

  Hugo began to tell the story about how he’d been locked up in Chico on suspicion of grave robbing on Halloween. I stood up and walked down the length of the hut. I stopped beside a single older woman who was stirring a pot, and took the honey jar out of my bag. I held it up. “Has visto a este hombre?” I said, very slowly. I pointed to my eyes, and to the picture of Chuck on the label. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to say it in your language.”

  The woman smiled, squinted into my face and then squinted at the label.

  “That guy with the big hair? You’ll want to look out back,” she said. She pointed out the rear door of the hut.

  I blinked. “You speak English?”

  “Kinda. I’ve only got a PhD in ethnolinguistics from Harvard. If you’re expecting some sort of holistic, nature-based epiphany from a member of a mysterious primitive tribe, though, I may not be of much help. You’ll be fine, by the way,” she said, before I could ask. “Our fight is with the oil companies, not the trustafarians. They’re probably texting for your Jeep as we speak.”

  “You,” I said. “Um . . .” I felt dizzy.

  “You kids are cute,” she said. “Can I take my picture with you?” She held up a smartphone
, stepped over, put her arm around my shoulder, and took a selfie of us. Then she patted me on the head and went back to her cooking.

  “Out that way?” I said, and the woman nodded vaguely.

  I went to the doorway. A path ran into the dark mass of trees. I looked back at the fire and saw the scene had turned homey. Sam and Hecuba were sharing a bowl of plantains. Some of the Indian children had gathered around Hugo, who was hamming it up. He stood and gesticulated, made deep voices, and ran in place like someone’s dad. The kids all laughed.

  I turned and went out into the dark. I felt my way down the path as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight. After a few minutes it curved to the left and opened up into an area that had been cleared of undergrowth. I remembered I had a flashlight and clicked it on. There were the hive boxes, stacked haphazardly around the clearing, but they were old and pretty beaten up. I opened the lid of one, and it was filled with the thick black webs of wax moths, like a beehive designed by H. R. Giger. If these were something Chuck had worked on, he’d been gone for some time. Off on the next adventure that was, in the end, all about Chuck.

  There was a sound of running water from the other side of the clearing, and I decided that sitting by the water for a few minutes might be a good idea. I pushed through the trees and down a small hill, but my foot caught on something and I fell.

  I threw out my hands and found myself up to my chin in mud at the side of a large pool. The moon came out, and I saw something moving toward me in the water, something large and white. I tried to pull myself out, but I was seriously stuck—when I pulled on one arm, the other sank deeper. The thing surfaced just in front of me and from the big round white face and the whiskers and those big round eyes that stared at me I was convinced for a second it was Chuck, after all. But then it belched, huffed air out of its big nostrils, submerged and moved slowly away from me, back out into the pool, gone forever.

  “Did you know,” said Hugo from somewhere behind me, “that the Amazonian manatee replaces their teeth from the back to the front, kind of like a set of double conveyor belts? They can also control the flow of their blood to stay warm.”

  “I did not know that, Hugo,” I said.

  “Are you OK, Kimmy?” he asked. “’Cause, well . . .”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m definitely not OK.”

  “Do you need a hand?”

  “Yes, Hugo. Yes, I think I do.”

  He pulled me out, and we sat at the edge of the mud. I put my muddy head down in his lap and imagined him as that bright little boy to whom everything came easy, the one I’d once stared at for weeks who sat in the back of the class with the huge plastic-framed glasses and those flashy Dungeons & Dragons books.

  He took some of the mud out of my hair and then put his hand on my head. There was a South American fish that had a peculiar mating strategy, had I heard of it? Most of the little poecilia parae males were bright red and yellow, and they would compete for the female’s attention, he said. But sometimes, while everyone was distracted, the smaller, less colorful males (who by the way had the larger testes) snuck up and did the dirty deed while no one was looking. And then that was that.

  I turned my head and looked up at him. It was dark, so I couldn’t see his face—all I could see was his silhouette looming low over me against the curved sky. The way the trees rose up behind his head made him look like he had these immense horns. He was silent for a minute in the way Hugo was never silent, and he started scraping roughly at the mud in my hair again. He pulled out a few drying clumps. His hand caught at something tangled there—a stick maybe. He tugged, harder than I expected, and it came loose painfully with some of my hair still attached to it. He tossed it into the water. A flicker of moon caught the white of his teeth.

  I bit my lip and tried to catch my breath. Neither of us said anything. Somewhere, a parrot screamed. And then he took a deep breath and started again, on the topic of the virtues and dangers of the cryogenic storage of human heads; namely, that if you assume a world of ever-expanding population pillaged by dramatic income disparity and a crumbling slate of natural resources, most of which were by then underwater, where your home was a boat and your boat was a dinghy and the dinghy was sinking and there was nowhere to swim for food, why would anyone bother to bring back another frozen head to feed?

  “But then again, what if? Hey, can’t you see it, Kimmy?” He hefted my skull in his hands. “The two of our heads waking up together every day down on into the twenty-fourth-and-a-half century? What’ve we got to lose?”

  “Nothing, Hugo,” I lied, shivering there in the mud. I felt my stomach churn. “Nothing at all.”

  BIGFOOTS IN PARADISE

  AS THE REST of them trudged over the rise, Brianna’s girls flew on ahead, down the dry hill toward the campsite set back by the trees. They still had their monkey masks on, and the big dirty slippers with the furry brown feet and the stuffed claws. Suki trailed in their wake, saying don’t run, don’t run! and the girls listened to her as much as they did to anyone, especially Brianna, which was not at all. Zoey, the younger, pumped her arms to catch up to her older sister Lizzy, but tripped over a slipper and went down hard in a pile of tangled limbs. She rolled, churning up dust, and then sat up, mask askew, and she screamed a long list of curses at Lizzy’s back. Then she burst into hot tears.

  Suki reached her and knelt down, put a hand out in consolation. She remembered what it was like to always be trailing an older sister—her own had been that pretty girl, with the long flowing black hair, the perfect grades, the beautiful spinny skirt, while everyone had called Suki ‘Little Mouse.’

  But instead of taking Suki’s offered hand, Zoey popped up on her toes and landed a small, hard fist square on Suki’s cheekbone, just below her left eye. The blow knocked Suki back into the dirt. Zoey looked at Suki for a second, tiny shoulders tense, expression unreadable behind the mask: a little gorilla. Suki stared back at her in disbelief, her hand to her cheek. Then Zoey nodded, apparently satisfied, and turned and flew off again down the hill, high-stepping in her big furry feet Lizzy’s pursuit.

  Suki lay back in the dead grass and stared up at the sky. A turkey buzzard wobbled on a thermal way up there. Her cheek throbbed. She remembered a time that her sister caught Suki in her room, trying on her clothes. That withering look as she stood there, mortified to have been discovered, wearing Umi’s too-big bra.

  She wanted to have more sympathy for the little brat. But the kid sure didn’t make it easy.

  Hamsa came down, leaned over her and stuck out her tongue. Hamsa’s eye makeup ran in sweaty black cascades down her cheeks, as though her eyes had struck oil in that dark place that was Hamsa’s heart.

  “Maybe we should have filmed that,” Mike said, as the rest of them circled up wearily around her.

  “Suki, that was great,” Topher said. “Can you get them to do that one more time?”

  With someone else, it would have been sarcastic. Suki raised the hand that wasn’t covering her cheek to flip him off.

  “I think that means no,” Hamsa said, in a dry voice. “But I mean, I’m just guessing. What do you think, Bri?”

  “I guess?” Brianna said. She shrugged and looked over at Topher for an answer, the way Suki knew Hamsa expected her to.

  “Of course you do,” Hamsa said.

  “Hamsa,” Topher said. “Would you just quit.”

  Suki sighed. It had been a long day of trudging, filming, and arguing. They had started off looking for places that met Topher’s elaborate criteria as detailed in a lengthy email none of them had actually read:

  Topography is required to be both interesting and diverse without being too obviously staged or otherwise problematic. Locations can be neither too dark nor too bright, require a specific amount of undergrowth that is not too dense, nor too sparse, too green or brown, too leafy or spindly, too spiky or stark. Per Topher, a big-foot in the classic tradition did not pose half-naked on boulders to show off his significant surfing-enhanced muscul
ature, nor would he demonstrate a sophisticated level of technical rock-climbing acuity, despite Mike’s suggestions to the contrary. A bigfoot, Topher wrote, shall be discovered seemingly at random, fleeing rapidly from the camera-holder through a mixed density of underbrush and filmed largely from behind, though periodic glimpses of the upper body and facial regions as the bigfoot turns and looks back at the camera holder will occasionally be acceptable if presented in the right context.

  It took all morning.

  Then there were the actual filming sessions themselves. Suki knew that Hamsa was a complete perfectionist at most things—they had been roommates for three semesters at UCSC, and where Suki’s side of the room had always been a comfortable disaster, Hamsa’s had been structured with her engineer’s logic: clothes sorted by color and function, her toiletries and make-up (such as it was) in a row left-to-right in order of application. Given what had happened between her and Topher, Suki had expected Hamsa to blow off the videos. But instead, Hamsa took it to the other extreme and spent nearly an hour at each location to configure the drone, test the exposure on Topher’s iPad, adjust the video filters, fiddle with the sound, and then re-check and adjust the settings while having them each stand in different points of the landscape while she flew the drone around them in slow circles. Then she’d move one of them three feet to one side and do it all over again.

  As for the rest of them, Suki had called it all last night, sitting on her small porch and smoking by herself: Topher was more interested in running his fingers through his massive, carefully-cultivated beard and elaborating on the cryptozoological traditions behind each of his directorial “decisions” than actually getting much done. Hamsa’s passive-aggressive micromanagement had Mike ready to kill. Mike was a smart guy but an awful actor, even if his job was simply running away from a camera in a gorilla mask. If he knew the camera was on him, he couldn’t seem to help but stop and stretch and preen.