by Doug Lawson
“Watch out for all those sandwiches,” Hamsa said. “Wouldn’t want them to get, I don’t know, smashed or anything.”
“Did you know they’re wheat-free?” Mike asked.
“I did not know that,” said Hamsa. “And vegan too? Be still my heart.”
Brianna put her face down in her hands, which were round and kind of dirty. Topher stood up and scowled at all of them. “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck all of you. Just leave her alone.”
Hamsa would make a good bigfoot, Suki thought. She’d wear the perfect flowers in her fur. She’d have the world’s most organized cave.
It was quiet for a minute. There was the sound of a hiss, a tiny squeal—like an owl swooping down on a rat.
“So . . .” Mike said, attempting to change the subject. “Did we actually get anything good?” He pointed with his beer bottle at Topher’s backpack, which held the iPad.
Topher sighed and nodded. “I think so.” He took out the iPad, sat down and opened up the video app. He tapped it a few times, turned it around and hit the play button. It was a blurred video where the camera moved fast through the woods, and then it came up over the edge of a dry stream bed. Down in that rocky ditch were Mike and the girls in their masks and claws and slippers. As the camera came over them, they pretended to startle, and then scurried up the rocks on the far side. Mike turned and looked back and shook a furry fist at the camera.
Suki could see the story playing out in Topher’s head: the video, he was sure, would be seen worldwide. Tens of thousands of views the first week of posting alone. It would be relinked and retweeted, picked up by major crypto-news sites, even made part of Discovery channel programs. Then he’d produce a whole series of flashy cryptozoological videos. Yetis in the Himalayas. Diving in Loch Ness. Probably no one else was making them. But if they were, they definitely wouldn’t make them with his consistency with the canon, with his level of superior quality or his intense attention to every production detail.
Suki thought it looked pretty bad.
“Don’t the girls look cute?” Brianna said.
“Would a classic bigfoot shake his fist?” Hamsa said. “Is that consistent with the prevailing cryptozoological fake-video paradigms? I mean, I’m just asking.”
“Good point,” Topher said. He ran his fingers through his beard. “Good point.”
“You know,” Suki suddenly announced, “I think we’re all bigfoots!” It felt important, somehow, to say it—all of them there, around the fire in the middle of nowhere, with those towering trees looming and the darkness just barely held back by the firelight. “All of us!”
“Bigfeet?” Mike said.
“No, really.” Suki leaned forward and gestured in the air. She was stoned, very stoned, and frustrated by her lack of ability to communicate what she was feeling. She ticked things off on her fingers. “We’re all lonely. We all have our secrets. We’re all running and hiding from something, right?”
Brianna looked back at her. Her lips were pursed, her brow was deeply furrowed. She nodded somberly. “I get you, sister.”
“I’ve got something we could hide together again if you want to,” Mike said.
“That’s just so profound, Suki,” Hamsa said. “Maybe we should hug and enjoy our epic connection with the Gaia spirit.”
“Why are we all here?” Mike said to the sky. “What’s the meaning of life? Is the truth really out there?”
Suki looked around at all of them. “Never mind,” she said, deflated. “Never fucking mind.” How was she like a bigfoot? She wasn’t like a bigfoot at all. She sat back and burrowed back into the shawl. She could feel the rubber mask, cold and flaccid in her big double-pocket.
“I think you’re all monsters,” Brianna said quietly. She looked over their heads, out into the trees.
“Grrr,” said Mike, from his bed in the poison oak.
“So what did you guys think?” said Topher. “I mean, really.”
“How is this thing going to bring more people into the museum, again?” Suki said. Suki knew that while Topher “worked” at the Bigfoot Museum in Felton, without Hamsa it was now his parents who paid for his apartment, his fully-renovated Volkswagen van, his iPad, his many drums, his expensive bourbon and his hopelessly rotating ambitions. “Maybe I should have asked that ahead of time.”
“All that hair feels a little derivative of a certain picture that turned up on my phone recently,” Hamsa said.
“What picture?” Brianna asked, suddenly suspicious.
“It’s nothing,” Topher said, quickly.
“You didn’t tell her?” Hamsa said. “You should probably tell her.”
“She means his dick,” Mike said.
Hamsa looked at Brianna and shrugged, faux-innocently. Then she uncoiled herself from her camp chair, went around to Mike and offered him a high-five. Mike took it, but then grabbed her hand and pulled Hamsa down on top of him.
“Eeew,” Hamsa said, pushing up off his chest with both hands. “You smell like chicken.”
“I taste like chicken, too,” Mike said.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Brianna said. She glared at Topher, who looked away, and then she looked at Suki for some sort of sympathy. Suki smiled back vaguely and thought you are a bad mother and you dress like a little kid. Also you apparently make really poor choices about sex.
“You know, if you put your hand here,” Mike said, reaching down to his crotch, “I will quack like a duck.”
“Pass,” Hamsa said. Though she settled herself in on his lap. Topher glared at both of them.
Mike shrugged. “Life is hard when you’re made of meat.” He scratched at a spot on his arm.
The noises again, for sure: Suki heard something large, moving in the leaves; the crack of branches. Why was no one else hearing them? “Did you hear that?” Suki said. She stood up and gestured to all of them. “Shhh!”
“Oh my god, Suki, stop!” said Hamsa. “Just stop it!” She whispered something to Mike, and he guffawed.
“Maybe the truth is out there!” Mike said.
“No, really! Maybe it’s a mountain lion!”
They all listened. It was completely silent, but then the bushes back behind where Suki had been sitting began to sway and thrash.
Suki jumped to her feet and backed away, stepping on the boxes of sandwiches. Hamsa sat up with her hand over her mouth.
Then Brianna’s two girls jumped out of the bushes wearing their masks, with their hands held high over their heads. “Boo!” they shouted, “Super boo!” They ran screaming in circles around the fire. Topher startled and tipped over backwards in his tiny chair.
“Giiirls,” Brianna said, in a forced, light voice. “Girls, it’s waaay past your bedtime now, isn’t it?”
“Giiirls,” mocked Lizzy, who was seven. “It’s fucking time for bed!” She shook her fist at Brianna and then flipped her off. Then Lizzy yanked the iPad out of Topher’s surprised hands while Zoey grabbed the drone, and the two girls ran off with the equipment into the woods.
“Fuck!” sighed Topher, on his back. “All of our footage is on that!” He threw his hands up in the air and let them fall.
“I guess we should go get them,” Brianna sighed, looking dejectedly at Suki. By “we” Suki knew who Brianna meant. “They’re going to get lost again.”
“Yes,” said Suki. “Yes, we should. Except I am not actually the mommy here.” She sat down again and stared pointedly at the fire. Maybe the girls would use the iPad to find a new parent, Suki thought. Was there an app for that?
Brianna stood up and looked at Suki. Suki stared back at her. Brianna huffed and put her hands on her hips. She looked at Topher, who continued to lie on his back. He stared up at the sky for a long minute. Then he groaned and closed his eyes. “I give up,” he said.
“Quick, more whiskey,” Hamsa said. “Maybe that will help.”
Brianna looked around at the rest of them. The fire was low.
Hamsa had sat back down in M
ike’s lap and was fiddling with a lock of his hair. “Grrr,” Hamsa said quietly, looking over at Topher.
“It’s not really that dark,” Brianna said to no one. “I guess.” She stood in front of Topher for a long second with her shoulders low. Then she went over to stand in front of Suki. She moved one foot back and forth in the dust. “It’s not really that dark, Suki.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Suki. She stood up and went over to Topher and kicked him. “If I’m going, you are too.” Topher groaned but did not open his eyes, so she kicked him again. “Rise up, Mr. Beard. Walk the earth once more.”
Topher protested again, but then rolled over and climbed slowly to his feet. “Does anyone have a flashlight?” No one did. Topher sighed loudly, and stuck his hands deep in the pockets of his skinny jeans. Suki gestured to Brianna to go first, into the woods, but Brianna pulled the furry hood closer around her, crossed her arms over her chest and looked fearfully out into the trees.
Suki threw up her hands and struck out away from the fire. She kept her arms out in front of her and walked slowly in the direction she thought the girls had gone, feeling ahead of her with her feet. She couldn’t see anything, but then her eyes started to adjust, and she could at least see the bigger roots ahead and keep from stubbing her toes too badly. Trees loomed up at her out of the dark. “Lizzy?” she called. “Zoey?” She kept walking in what she hoped was a mostly straight line until she walked into a tree and cursed. She stepped around it, saw a faint trail, and followed it. She could smell the ocean. She could hear Brianna and Topher arguing back there in the trees; Topher’s low conciliatory voice, Brianna cursing and crying.
Ahead of her, then: a scream! A girl’s scream, she was sure, and then shouting in Spanish. The moon was coming up, and as she came up over a rise she saw Lizzy tearing up the hill towards her, with Zoey just behind, and several men were in pursuit, flashlights swinging wildly, about a hundred yards behind them. The men wore dirty white T-shirts & cargo shorts, baseball caps on backwards. One of them carried the broken remains of the drone—it slapped against his legs as he ran. Another had a shotgun that he stopped and fired off into the air—the sound made her jump.
Beyond them, where the path opened up and the trees fell away into a field, she could see scattered trash, bleach containers, irrigation lines, and then what were probably marijuana plants: hundreds of them all in rows, an illegal grow.
Suki ducked back behind a tree. She felt her chest go tight, her stomach drop, her pulse suddenly pound in her temples. What would a bigfoot do, she wondered? She felt the mask in her pocket. A bigfoot would stand up a roar. It would fall down on those men like a demon. They would all stagger backwards, jaws dropping, and they would run.
Lizzy ran past her. Suki reached out, grabbed her, and pulled her in tight. Lizzy kicked and squirmed until she saw it was Suki. Then Zoey ran past them, gasping and sobbing. Suki grabbed Zoey’s hand. The kids’ eyes were wild; their chests were pounding, and their noses running with snot. “Come on,” she hissed. “Come on!” She led them off the path, into the woods. They ran between the trees until they found a dry stream bed, filled up with old branches and sharp pin-oak leaves. “Down here,” Suki said, spotting something. It was a lean-to of sorts, a lot of redwood limbs tangled together, covered over with a lot of leaves. “Quiet,” she said. “Don’t say a thing,” and in the darkness she sensed rather than saw both of the girls nodding. They climbed underneath the branches, and she lay back against the dirt. Both of the girls curled tight into her, one on each side.
Maybe this is what a real bigfoot would do? Suki thought. Run. Hide. Zoey shook with silent sobs. Suki could hear the shouting, a little more distant than before. Another gunshot. Should she warn the others, around the fire? She knew she should. And maybe she would, in a few minutes. But for the moment, she’d lie here, quiet in her cave, and feel the girls’ heartbeats pounding through their tiny little bodies, feel their hot breaths against her neck.
AUTHOR BIO
Doug Lawson’s fiction has been cited as a 2014 Distinguished Story by the Best American Short Stories anthology, received an Honorable Mention from the O. Henry Awards, and has appeared in a number of literary publications, including multiple times in Glimmer Train Stories and the Mississippi Review, as well as in Passages North, the Sycamore Review, and others. He’s won Glimmer Train’s yearly Fiction Open, received a Transatlantic Review Award for fiction, a Henfield award, and a fellowship from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
Doug lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Santa Cruz Mountains in California.
His blog is online at HouseOnBearMountain.com.
