Roanoke Ridge

by J. J. Dupuis

“Ladies first,” he says, bowing and making a sweeping gesture.

  “Scared?” I ask.

  Ted fakes a shiver. We click our flashlights on and scan around the adit. Ted raises his light high, pointing it over my shoulder.

  “Be careful,” he says, sincerely.

  The earthen floor of the mine looks like it’s been swept out. The pristine lines in the dirt, like those of Buddhist rock gardens in miniature, are easily disturbed and not likely to stay pristine very long. The walls have faint marks like someone has run a paintbrush over them. There is little else to see. It’s clear that someone has been in here within the last few days.

  “Anything?” Ted calls out from the opening.

  “Definitely something,” I say, “but I can’t be sure what.”

  “It’s getting dark,” he says. “We’ll have to hurry if you want to check that second mine before the sun’s down completely.”

  “Just another few seconds,” I say, as I take out my phone hoping to snap a few pictures.

  “Shit!” Ted yells, and his light disappears.

  “Ted?” I call out. “Ted!”

  It’s difficult to turn in the tight passage with my backpack on, difficult to even move. I’m the proverbial fish in a barrel right now. There’s one exit, which is on a steep incline. I can’t know if Ted fell because the ground gave way, or if he was attacked by God-knows-what, but whatever happened to him can almost certainly happen to me when I try getting out.

  I peel out of the mine, quickly rolling against the wall to the right of the opening. At the foot of the hill is Ted’s flashlight, shining against a small sumac and casting a shadow across the ground.

  The blade is out so fast on the folding knife in my pocket I don’t even know I did it.

  All I hear is the sound of the river rushing and my own breathing.

  “Ted,” I say again, shining my beam concentrically from where I stand, reaching farther and farther out into the dusk.

  “Here,” he says from halfway down the hill. He’s breathing heavily.

  I slide down to his level and see he’s clutching his chest.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be all right,” he says, and nods at the knife in my hand. “Won’t be needing any field surgery.”

  Embarrassed, I fold the blade inward and shove the knife as deep down into my pocket as possible. “What happened?”

  “I … I don’t know,” he says, still catching his breath.

  Ted won’t look at me. His gaze rests just past me, his head right back against the incline. He turns over before I can finish checking him for wounds, then stops squirming and lets out a sigh of relief. Everything goes quiet again. Then he looks up at me with his eyes impossibly blue, innocent like a child’s, with a sincerity that just burns away doubt.

  “I just saw fucking Bigfoot.”

  TWELVE

  In its way, Bigfoot is like the vast number of mystical experiences, occult happenings, extra-sensory perceptions that have been recorded throughout man’s history. The scientist cannot capture such experiences in formaldehyde nor record their existence with the electroencephalograph. Perhaps they don’t exist but it is quite an ego experience to dismiss 5,000 years of recorded history as just so much delusion and wish fulfillment.

  — California Daily News, June 25, 1970

  THE MOUNTAIN IS NOTHING BUT A SILHOUETTE against the purple light of dusk. Clouds like waves reach and ripple across the sky. A passenger jet cuts diagonally across them. A cool breeze blows from the east, carrying the scent of Ted’s aftershave toward me. I don’t know the brand, but I imagine the ads for it feature a cowboy with a five o’clock shadow.

  He’s not saying anything more. Ever since he “saw Bigfoot,” he’s clammed up, wandering in a daze somewhere between shock and awe. We arrive at his truck and he freezes, stares at his silhouette in the driver’s side window. He reaches for the door handle, then draws back again, turns and looks at me with frustration in his eyes. A crunching sound from the woods distracts him. His eyes dart along the treeline. It’s almost night, only the closest trees are definable, the rest blend into shadow, a dark purple wall.

  “Did I really see it?” he asks. “Or am I just losing it?”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  “Up the hill, standing over the opening of the mine. A big, shaggy man. Had to be a man, standing upright, bent over and looking at me. But long, dark hair. No clothes or anything. I was pulling out to make room for you, and I looked up and he was just there, watching me. I was so startled I fell back and rolled down the hill. Got the wind knocked out of me.”

  “What did it look like? Could you see its face?”

  “I couldn’t make out its face, or even its head, really. It was so shaggy that the head blended into the neck and shoulders. It disappeared so fast.”

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  “No, I can … I’m okay to … sure.” Ted puts the keys in the lock, then just leaves them there and walks around to the passenger side of the truck. “You can’t tell anyone about this,” he says. “Not even Saad.”

  “You can trust Saad.”

  “That’s not the point,” he says. “I don’t need him looking at me funny.”

  “He won’t.”

  “I just can’t fucking believe this.”

  We skip the ranger station. Ted directs me down a back road between the park and town, to a small, single-storey cabin tucked among trees with a patch of gravel out front barely big enough to fit Ted’s truck. I put the truck in park and we sit there. Ted doesn’t speak. I take the keys out of the ignition and lean back in the driver’s seat.

  “I need a beer,” he says, and gets out of the truck.

  I get out, too, but I don’t follow, choosing instead to lean against the door of the truck. I watch the lights flick on in the cabin through the windows. Watch him take a beer from the fridge and come over to the window, pointing at it.

  “No thanks,” I say, and shake my head for good measure.

  He comes outside and sits on the tiny porch, pressing himself against the faux log cabin vinyl siding. With his elbows on his knees, he folds himself inward to make space for me. I sit down and text Saad the directions to Ted’s cabin, then watch Ted drink his beer.

  A car comes down the street slowly. It’s got to be Saad, trying to find the place. I stand up and wave once I’m sure it’s the rental car. Ted stays sitting on the porch, drinking his beer and staring out across the road at the patch of evergreen trees that are practically black without the sun. I wonder what he is seeing in that inkblot of branches moving in the wind.

  “Hi, guys,” Saad says. “Any luck with your search?”

  I hesitate. “Well —”

  “I saw Bigfoot,” Ted says. “Deal with it.”

  THIRTEEN

  A man-animal, according to a Southern Pacific employee named Gary Joanis, picked up a deer he had shot and fled with the corpse into the tall timber.

  — San Francisco Chronicle,

  December 6, 1965

  NIGHT HASN’T QUITE FALLEN AS WE FOLLOW the lonely country roads back to the highway. The headlights reflect off road signs and the occasional moth. White cars stick out at a distance; their black bumpers and tires are practically invisible, like the frames are just floating over the asphalt. The woods on either side of us are all shadows now, amorphous except for the tops of the trees.

  “What did Ted see?” Saad asks for the third time.

  “A big, shaggy, upright-standing creature.”

  “And you didn’t see it?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t hear it?”

  “No,” I say. “And I didn’t smell it.”

  “Okay?” Saad says. I can feel him peering at me.

  “One part of the Bigfoot phenomenon, or the legend, is that the creature emits a strong odour, like a skunk. But I didn’t smell anything like that either today or last night.”

  “Perhaps we can write off that el
ement of the legend.”

  “We can write off everything until we have a specimen.”

  “This changes things, though, doesn’t it?” Saad asks.

  “How?”

  “This time, the eyewitness is a forest ranger, an ex-soldier. Ted’s not likely to mistake a bear for Bigfoot, is he? He’s the most reliable witness we have.”

  Saad’s certainty, on top of Ted’s, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve been accused of being a contrarian, but I have a feeling in my stomach that this is all too easy. It took my dad years of trying, of bringing all his skills as a hunter and a soldier to bear, before he captured Bigfoot on tape. Whereas, since we got to Roanoke Ridge, there hasn’t just been one sighting — there’s been at least three. We must have set a world record for sightings in a three-day period.

  Sure, the presence of a large search party and hordes of Bigfoot enthusiasts increases the chance of an encounter tenfold. I mean, the search for Professor Sorel has inadvertently become the largest Bigfoot hunt in history.

  But sometimes a coincidence is just too much.

  We get back to the motel, to the one remaining parking space. Music filters out softly through an open window. There is the sound of laughter, of glasses clinking. The breeze carries with it the thick, root-cellar smell of marijuana.

  Our room is pitch black. Saad opens the door, hits the light switch, and freezes. I look in past him.

  The VHS tapes from Driver’s hideout are gone. Nothing else seems to be missing.

  “I locked the door. The door was locked,” Saad says, to avoid any blame.

  “Let’s check the bathroom.”

  There’s a small frosted window in there that opens up onto the forest behind the motel, with a frame just wide enough to climb through. When we look inside, we see some mud on the toilet tank and on the lid, where someone used it as a stepladder. The water bottle Saad uses as a lota has been knocked over and spilled across the tiles.

  “Why not take the laptop? Or the A/V equipment we borrowed?” Saad asks.

  “Both good questions,” I say, scanning the floor for any other traces. “Whoever did this doesn’t want us trying to track them down or report it to the sheriff. If they’d taken our stuff we might decide it’s worth swearing out a complaint, even though we obtained those tapes illegally. If all that is missing are things that didn’t belong to us in the first place, that we have no right to, we’re not likely to report it.”

  Saad, scratching his forearm, looks around the room as though he could have simply just misplaced the tapes. “Who would want to steal these videos?” he asks after a long silence.

  “No idea,” I say. “But, as far as I know, the sheriff’s been the only one other than us who’s been trying to find out where Driver’s been hanging his figurative hat.”

  FOURTEEN

  The recent glimpses of that strange and prehistoric looking creature, called Sasquatch, tend to confirm the belief that the missing link is still living!

  — Ioganes Johnson, Stag, 1956

  SAAD SITS IN THE ARMCHAIR, COMFORTER laid over his legs, watching a movie on his laptop. I can see the rapidly changing reflection in his glasses. A mixture of uneasiness and self-blame are keeping him up. He looks at me to see if I’m asleep.

  I’m uneasy, too, but I know that no blame falls on either of us.

  He quickly glances at the door, then gets up to check and re-check that it is bolted and that the chain is across. He even looks into the bathroom to make sure no marauders are climbing in through the window.

  I don’t remember falling asleep, but I wake as the light of dawn pours through the gaps in the curtains. Saad is in his bed, the covers over his head, one pillow having fallen to the floor. The parking lot is already buzzing with activity. The Bigfoot Festival has officially begun.

  The Roanoke Valley Bigfoot Festival can be divided in two parts. One half is for the serious squatcher. The other half is for everybody else: every warm-blooded American who loves barbecues, three-legged races, tossing horseshoes, and the Little Miss Bigfoot Pageant. There’s even a Bigfoot Demolition Derby, at the gravel pit just down the highway. And that’s all on Saturday. On Sunday, the Lutheran church offers a pancake breakfast followed by Sasquatch Sunday Service. Then comes the Bigfoot Parade, the climax of the festival, followed by a cookout in Rotary Park, a belly-busting denouement for the whole family.

  For the squatchers, the word conference is bandied about. The language they use is far more academic and professional: there are talks, lectures, and discussions, not to mention the odd screening of a new documentary. Aside from the outdoor lecture series taking place in Rotary Park this afternoon, most of the squatchers’ meetings are in the Rotary Club itself, in the Bigfoot Museum, and in the basement of the Lutheran church. The indoor settings seem antithetical for those serious about finding an elusive beast, but I guess it helps them take themselves seriously among all the rubber-faced Bigfoot costumes and children with face paint and balloon animals.

  Outside my window, a minivan fills with young women being chauffeured to the Miss Bigfoot Pageant. This is not to be confused with the Little Miss Bigfoot Pageant, for contestants ten and under. The Miss Bigfoot Pageant provides the opportunity for women in their late teens and early twenties to parade around in bikinis, perform absurd dance numbers, and display other talents for an audience of sweat-basted roughnecks who whistle because they can’t clap loudly while holding a plastic cup filled with beer.

  The last of the girls, a brunette with a pixie cut, looks right at me as she slides the door of the van shut, before it reverses and turns out of the motel parking lot, Lynyrd Skynyrd playing loudly.

  Saad is dressed and ready. We’re both starving.

  Shirley’s Bigfoot Diner is packed. The entire town’s here. Had Ted not arrived early and waited in line, there’s no way we’d get a table until after the morning rush.

  Andrew Price, the comic book artist, lines up behind us, silently.

  “We have room for one more,” I say to him. “No pressure, though.”

  He shrugs his shoulders and follows, knapsack hanging from one shoulder. Beneath his baggy black hoodie are a bony frame, hunched shoulders, a pair of headphones around his neck, and what I imagine to be pale, beluga-like skin.

  Ted takes Andrew in, head to toe, wearing a can I help you expression on his face. Andrew’s look is that of a man who drinks by campfires and leaves his empty beer cans lying there, which is probably why Ted is suspicious of him.

  “This is Andrew,” I say to Ted. “He’s an artist.”

  “And a writer,” Andrew adds.

  “Ted here is a forest ranger.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Ted says.

  Andrew sits down and hides himself in the menu. Ted looks at me with a hint of annoyance, and doesn’t stop until I meet his gaze and hold it a while. Saad watches the staring contest from the sidelines.

  “I was hoping we could discuss that encounter in the woods,” Ted says.

  “Me, too,” I say.

  “Privately.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Holy shit,” Andrew says from behind the menu. “You saw Bigfoot, didn’t you?”

  All three of us turn toward Andrew.

  “I don’t know what I saw,” Ted says. “Don’t tell anybody that I said I saw Bigfoot, that’s not true.”

  “Tell me what you saw, then. Describe it to me,” Andrew says, taking a sketch pad out of his bag with Christmas-morning eagerness and laying it down on the table.

  Ted leans in, his elbows on the table. “It was shaped like a man, but shaggier,” he whispers. “Really shaggy, like an Afghan hound. It was big. It had black eyes with a sort of sheen to them, like crude oil. There was nothing apelike about its face.”

  Andrew starts with a crude, humanoid outline and adds detail from there. Like a forensic sketch artist, he draws a composite from Ted’s description, turning his pad upside down so Ted can see it and correct details as he goes.<
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  “He was leaner, not so top heavy. Yeah, that’s about the length of the fur. No, the arms were longer, but not long enough to walk with, like a gorilla’s.”

  As Andrew draws, we order our food and it arrives, steaming. We all dig in, except for him. He is possessed by whatever fuels him; Ted’s voice the only one he hears. Finally, he lifts his pencil from the sketch pad and stares down at the page. He furrows his brow and scratches the bottom of his chin with the back of his pencil.

  “Looks like Man-Thing,” he says, then turns to me. “Doesn’t it look like Man-Thing?”

  I wrack my brain, trying to remember what Man-Thing is.

  He slides the pad across the table to me, avoiding the plates and cutlery. I turn the pad around and look at the sketch. The creature is a hybrid of a scarecrow and the sludge of algae and dead grass that collects on the surface of a pond. Immediately I see it in my mind’s eye, crawling out of a bayou and slowly marching toward a Hollywood scream queen with its arms held high and menacing. The image jogs my memory: the Man-Thing Andrew’s referring to is the Marvel Comics version of the much better known Swamp Thing. I remember not being able to tell the difference between them.

  “You’re right,” I say. “It does look like Man-Thing.”

  Saad picks up the pad and squints. He’s not wearing his glasses. Ted leans in and says, “That’s him, all right.”

  “Cool,” Andrew says.

  Ours becomes the quietest, most reticent table in the diner. Even the waitress is taken aback by the solemnity of the three young men sitting around me.

  “Are you up to this?” I ask Ted.

  “Yeah, oh yeah. I’m ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Andrew asks.

  We set out into the woods for what may be the last time. The sun is high above us, permeating the naked branches with ease. I feel like I should have worn sunscreen on the back of my neck — part of me craves the sun, though, like a lizard would. The mountain looms behind us now, like a parent watching over us as we set out deep into the wilderness. There’s an odd feeling in my stomach. Not because I fear we might be rent limb from limb by Bigfoot — it’s because even though the forest in front of me seems limitless, it feels like we’re running out of mystery.