Bigfoots in Paradise

by Doug Lawson

  And yet, Alec had also been a distant, absent lover and husband, a chauvinist by inclination, at times as dismissive of her as he was of foreign bureaucrats who stood between him and a story. He’d had a fierce arrogance, a boiling temper just under the surface, a dilettante’s distractibility. But their frustrated, misshapen love had been love nonetheless.

  As they crossed a long bridge above a wind-tousled stretch of water, Claire began to stir and fuss. She tossed her sippy cup onto the floor and whined for it sleepily.

  April reached down to get it, and when she looked up she realized she was about to hit a brown SUV stopped for a traffic light.

  She stepped on the Subaru’s brakes but it was too late. There was a crunch of metal, the cars lurched, the SUV’s brake lights flickered, and its back window flipped open.

  April raised her face from her hands and turned in her seat. Claire looked back at her. Her blue eyes—Alec’s blue eyes—were big and round, faintly accusatory. Her car toys were scattered over the floor, and somehow she was missing a shoe, but the purple smear across her face was from nothing worse than a blueberry cereal bar.

  Up front, a fine curtain of mist was hissing from the engine and, as April watched, a dog poked a long, brindled nose carefully out through the fog to look around. One nose was followed by another as the car ran out of steam, until four long snouts were pushing and shoving for space and testing the salty air.

  Nothing smelled like it was burning. She turned the music off and sat with her hands in her lap. An older man with a slightly askew turban on his head climbed out of the driver’s side of the SUV and came around to the back. He reached over and put his hands on the dogs’ heads, under their chins, and inspected the interior and back end of the truck, the front of the Subaru. Then he came around to her window. She rolled it down.

  “I’m sorry,” April said. “I was trying to hand my daughter her sippy.”

  “Are you all right?” He looked back at Claire. His accent was British. “Your child . . . your child is not hurt?”

  “No, we’re fine, I think. I’m sorry I hit you.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to say you hit me,” he said. “Insurance?” He straightened his turban with one hand, and rested the hand on the back of his neck. “I’m not injured. Are you sure you are all right?”

  “We’re fine,” April said. “I’m sure we’re fine. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

  From the back seat, Claire said, in a small distinct voice, “Doggies!” April, startled, looked back at her daughter, who kicked her feet excitedly in the air and pointed. “Doggies!” she said again.

  It was the first word she’d spoken since Alec left, exactly her fifth word in her three and a half years of life, and it was more than April could bear. She put her head back down in her hands and burst into tears.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this,” April said. She was talking to Aravind over tea. Surprisingly, Alec’s car was fine—some cosmetic dents to add to the car’s collection, a loose hose the officer reached in and reconnected (though he said he wasn’t supposed to do that sort of thing). The SUV had suffered a dented bumper and a broken window latch.

  The four tall, lean dogs were tied up on long leashes to a railing in front of the restaurant, which was right across the street from the lake. “We had tests, doctors,” she says. “They never found anything wrong.” She didn’t know why she was burdening this poor man. He was her father’s age, and her father was someone April talked to a lot, before he’d died. Aravind’s eyes were large and brown and he had an amused yet proper demeanor, also like her father. Perhaps it was because the tea was too hot to drink, or perhaps the accident had just unhinged the day and everything was suddenly new and uncharted, or perhaps it was because she’d probably never see this man again. Whatever it was, it set the words free.

  Claire was buckled into a restaurant high chair that was too small for her. Her stuffed dog was tucked in beside her, and she alternated between drinking from her sippy and eating salt off the table with her fingers.

  “Why don’t you speak, little one?” Aravind held his own finger out to Claire, who extended one of her own and touched the end of it.

  “Alec was working closely with her. But then . . .”

  Aravind was quiet for a minute. “The dogs,” he said to Claire. “You like the dogs?”

  Claire looked at him, nodded, and grasped his extended finger.

  “Then you must come and visit them,” he said.

  Claire looked at April. “We couldn’t,” April said, quickly.

  “Tosh,” said Aravind in his charming accent. “I care for four. It wouldn’t be an imposition. The house is quite large—it was for the family, and the dogs and I rattle about in it like old dried seeds in a pod.”

  “Your family?”

  “My wife, she has passed on. Our children are grown. Miss . . .”

  “Please call me April.”

  “April. I don’t mean to be forward, or inappropriate. I have seen you on the television. I saw . . .” He looked at Claire. “Well. If I can provide even a small favor to the child . . .”

  Claire was concentrating again on the grains of salt scattered on the table.

  “You want to see the doggies, don’t you?” April said. Claire nodded without lifting her gaze from the table. She pressed her thumb down on one grain of salt after another, and when the pad of her index finger was coated she placed it in her mouth.

  “Come with me,” Aravind said. He led them outside to the dogs, who pulled at their leashes and wagged their long tails. “Watch,” he said. Aravind raised a hand to shoulder height, palm open, and the dogs all sat on cue. He lowered his hand to waist level, palm parallel with the ground, and the dogs stretched out their front legs and extended their long bodies on the ground, heads still poised.

  “Doggies,” Claire sighed, happily. Aravind tossed each of the dogs a biscuit from his jacket pocket.

  “Doggies,” April agreed, reluctantly.

  April had never gotten along well with Mrs. Bill. Mrs. Bill was disturbingly cheerful, verbally upbeat and painfully superficial. Originally from southern Georgia, she was polished and well made-up and she had an elegant house filled with elegant furniture on the main street in Saratoga and she drove a shiny Lexus SUV. She was well connected with corporate wives in the clouded fishbowl that was old Silicon Valley’s social network, and though she was only a few years older than April, she had a stepmotherly air of amused condescension toward April’s artwork, her casual (all right, disheveled) appearance, her lack of social desires, her quietness.

  Initially, April had tried to look at her as a cultural opportunity and worked to get beyond the superficial. But then Mrs. Bill had simply used her as a doormat.

  So as she pulled up to the low, squat house, with a roof canted just enough for the snow, she shouldn’t really have been surprised by the bulldozer parked out front, the surveyor’s flags marking the property line. And yet she was. She sat looking at them for a long minute, until Claire began kicking the back of the seat.

  She got Claire out, unlocked the house, opened some windows to air it out. It wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. The bathroom was clean, the bedrooms were tidy, if a bit tattered, and the kitchen would probably have been disappointing for someone who cooked frequently, though it seemed perfectly adequate for her limited abilities. Most of the furnishings showed clear evidence of Mrs. Bill’s attempts at upscaling, but there was something about the fake-wood paneling and low ceilings that lent a warm nest-like feel to the whole place.

  The house had stood up for itself. It would do.

  Outside again, she made a game of chasing Claire to each of Mrs. Bill’s surveyor’s flags, which she pulled from the ground and stacked near the front door. She made Claire some mac and cheese from a box, and helped her fashion a leash for her blue dog from a piece of surveyor’s line. Claire dragged the dog across the stones as they walked out to the beach and down to the waterlin
e. There were few other people on the beach. The sun was setting behind them. The water was relatively calm, and remarkably blue. Out toward the middle, she saw a fish jump. Beyond that, a small sailboat ghosted along, though there was hardly any wind.

  As night came on, April tucked Claire into one of the small beds in the second bedroom with the fold-out railing she’d bought to keep her from rolling onto the floor. She told her the story about the barking dogs, and after Claire was asleep she took a bottle of beer out to the worn deck.

  The moon nudged up over the distant ridge and shone out across the dark water. Fog from the lake rose up and shimmered. She wanted to think more about Alec, but found herself mired in a mixture of broad generalities and terribly specific details. She wasn’t political and didn’t want to be. War was horrible—well, no shit, what did that mean? To say it felt so shallow, so superficial, and yet to think about Alec’s very public death, put up live online for all the world to see, was far too personal, too painful to dwell on. Even now she struggled to block out the pixelated video, the masks, the loud pronouncements that she couldn’t understand, the terrible violence that followed. There had to be a middle ground, some way of putting it all into a perspective that would let her move on. The world was full of bad things done for good reasons and sometimes good things came of them and sometimes they didn’t. Her own country fought with other countries that had been in conflict with each other for hundreds of years, for what she was sure seemed like good reasons to someone. People died every day. In Syria, Alec had died being Alec—crossing borders other people wouldn’t, talking to those no one else would listen to, trying to bring some clarity to what that fighting really meant, to give a voice to the men and women who were giving up their lives both willingly and unwillingly for the sake of someone else’s ideal. It was their voice, and it was Alec’s, too. And maybe something good would come of Alec’s work. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe his writings—carried in national magazines, published on Internet sites, many of them written in this very spot—would mean nothing. She couldn’t tell. She wondered how she’d ever explain those ambiguities to Claire when she was older, when she inevitably saw what the rest of the world had seen. She wondered how she’d find a way to convey that Alec had died for something of value, when she didn’t even know what that value was.

  The dogs were beautiful. Two of them were brindles, one was an elegant gray, the last one a solid, pure white. All of them greyhounds, former racers with long, elegant snouts, tattoos inside their ears, tremendous rib cages and tiny waists and floppy ears that gave them a friendly, comical air. They surrounded April and Claire when Aravind let them in the door—a moving cloud of waving tails, lapping tongues, and the clatter of claws across the wood floors of the huge house. “They’re all friendly,” he said. “No worries.” Claire hung back at first, but as she stepped across the threshold the dogs surrounded her. She tossed back her tangled curls, closed her eyes, and held her arms above her head. As the dogs pressed in from all sides a smile spread across her face.

  After an initial flurry of interest, the dogs trotted back to the large living room, sprawling long-limbed across cushions and couches, climbing into chairs. “They shouldn’t be on the furniture,” Aravind said. “But . . .” He held up his hands in the same gesture of amused hopelessness her father had used with April. “They lived in cages their whole lives! Imagine. I thought they’d enjoy all the open space, and yet here they are. All in the same room. All on top of each other.” He laughed. “It’s all very American of me, I know. My wife would say I’ve lived here too long. She’d be right.”

  He showed them briefly around the house: a humongous mansion, easily seven times the size of her small place here. “We built it as an investment, of course. But also as a place for the girls to come. You see?” He pulled open a closet door, revealing women’s clothing. “They still come on holidays to humor me, but it is silly to hold a house such as this to use a week or two every year.” His voice echoed from the high ceilings. “My wife and I were fortunate in some ways,” he said, simply. “In others . . .” He started to say something, and then stopped. “Well, enough of that. I’ll be placing it for sale shortly. It will belong to someone else, and I will go back to Milpitas and enjoy my retirement.”

  Alec would have thought it was all too much—the large, empty rooms with elegant furniture, the expensive tile in the bathrooms, the multiple outdoor hot tubs (one for each of the three floors), the endless expanse of decking overlooking the glassy lake. Mansions lined the wooded street for half a mile in either direction.

  But she enjoyed the visit, the company. Aravind served her a spicy iced tea in a tall glass and had mango juice and tiny Indian crackers for Claire. Claire surprised April by actually eating them, one after another, straight through until they were gone. He told them about each of the dogs, their names, their temperaments, their habits. The white one hoarded things: small pillows, the others’ toys, Aravind’s slippers. Two of them ate nothing but meat, and he cooked beef liver for them nightly. When they were walked, they could never be let off the leash—they ran as fast as small cars and had no wariness of traffic. One of the brindles slept upside-down, legs in the air, her tongue lolling out of her open mouth. He hadn’t spent enough time with his own girls when they were young, Aravind said. These dogs were his children now.

  They leashed the dogs and walked them along the beach, looking at the long row of mostly empty mansions tucked among the trees. And when they got back Claire lay down with the pack of them in front of the television. She fell asleep sprawled across the quiet white dog.

  On the couch, with a Disney cartoon wrapping up on the flat screen, April felt the enormous weight of Alec’s death descend on her all at once, as if in the few hours of distraction with Aravind it had been waiting for her, gathering strength. Her chest grew tight. She felt winded, as if she’d been running for miles. She thought she might be able to sleep for weeks on end.

  She studied Aravind’s face as he watched the cartoon. His beard was thick and soft and dark gray, like her father’s had been. If he had been her father, there was so much she would have said to him. She would talk about how she missed Alec and how sometimes she didn’t and how bad that made her feel, and about how awful his death was and how she would never be able to bear the thought of it. She would talk about how raising a girl by herself was the most frustrating, difficult thing she had ever done and yet how there were times when it seemed her whole life would have been wasted and without beauty if Claire had not become part of it. She would ask him what she wanted her to do now that everything had changed, and maybe he would tell her.

  Hesitantly, knowing she was breaking all rules of decorum, she leaned over and rested her head on Aravind’s shoulder. For a long minute he didn’t react, didn’t acknowledge her. But then he reached out, took one of her hands in his and held it.

  Neither of them said anything. April felt her chest relax, her breathing deepen. On the floor, one of the dogs was running free in a dream.

  At home that evening, Claire ran about the small place with her blue dog in tow, teaching it to bark. She’d stop and look out a window, hold up the toy, point and then bark for the dog in tiny, high-pitched yips. That night, April told her the dog story, with an extra ending. After all of the dogs went to sleep in the big house in the forest, the girl dog heard a noise. What could it be? She opened the door and went out onto the dog porch and there was a bear! It wanted to get into the house and eat all of the grilled cheese sandwiches!

  “What did that girl dog do?” April asked. Claire watched her, wide-eyed, and shook her head. “That girl dog barked! She barked as loud and long as she could. And then the mama dog and the papa dog came out and they all barked together. And they scared that bear away. That little girl dog saved all of the grilled cheese! What a great job.”

  “Mama,” said Claire.

  April’s heart leaped into her throat, and she did her best not to show it. “Yes, Claire?”

&nbs
p; “The papa dog didn’t bark. He just stayed dead.”

  April bent her face down next to Claire’s and kissed the girl’s forehead. “But the mama dog and the girl dog scared that bear away all by themselves, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” Claire said. She leaned back and put her head on the pillow. “Yes. They were good barkers.”

  They saw Aravind and the dogs two more times before he left for Milpitas. The first was at a small independent bookstore up in Truckee. April and Claire pulled in and the dogs were tied up on the small porch out front. Aravind came out with a book of old wooden boats under his arm. He saw them, stopped, and hesitantly met April’s eyes. When she smiled, he matched it with a grin and they walked the greyhounds up and down the street, while Claire held the leash of one dog after another.

  The last time was at the beach house. It was late in the afternoon, and April and Claire were planting flowers to resurrect some old dirt beds along the front of the house when Aravind’s SUV pulled up. “Doggies!” Claire cried, pointing. She grabbed April’s hand and pulled her out to the road.

  “I am leaving today,” Aravind said, climbing down out of the truck. He let the dogs out on their leashes. “I will not see you again for some time, I expect. So I have brought gifts!”

  Despite April’s protests, he handed them each a beautifully wrapped package. She took off her gardening gloves, had Claire put down her small plastic shovel, and brushed the dirt off of her small hands.

  Claire insisted on opening both boxes, which held intricately patterned saris. Claire’s had a red pattern on a white background, trimmed with a wide golden edge. April’s was red with a blue and silver border that caught the light. They were wonderfully gauzy; April had never felt gossamer silk.