Bigfoots in Paradise

by Doug Lawson

  Suki had no idea if Topher had actually asked Brianna to bring the girls. On this, at least, everyone agreed: those girls were brats. Suki and Hamsa exchanged exasperated eye rolls when Brianna pulled up with them at the trailhead, flailing around unbuckled in the backseat of her shiny little Fiat. And when Brianna stepped out in her pig-tails and her cute little My Neighbor Totoro cape-hoodie, carrying her artisanal gluten-free vegan sandwiches in pretty boxes with ribbons, and then immediately clicked into a tight orbit around planet Topher, they both understood that as women together among young, Santa Cruz men of artistic aspirations, one of the two of them would also be expected to pick up Brianna’s child-care slack in addition to doing much of the cooking and cleaning. And since Topher and Hamsa had split three months back when Topher had sent a sext of his hairy privates that he’d apparently intended just for Brianna to their own ongoing private group-text, Suki knew she was it.

  Suki liked kids. She liked them a little too much, actually. Sometimes she would lie alone at night, in the loft bed in her tiny house tucked back behind the marijuana dispensary where she worked and think: she could put a fold-away crib there, next to the kitchen counter. A Pack’N Play could go over by the door. She would get one of those pouches you wear on your chest, and carry the kid around there like a little monkey. She’d be a much better parent than either of hers had been: Her mother, the original angry bigfoot, always loomed behind her. Her father was the invisible man.

  Just not these two beasts. As predicted, the girls were a disaster, running off at random in any direction at high speed toward ravines and poison oak. And only Suki took off in pursuit.

  But Topher had asked each of them to come. And just as Suki, Hamsa, and Mike had done in college and after—the awful spring break in Baja, that disaster with the organic farmers down near Big Sur, the time in Death Valley with those horrible mushrooms—they called in sick, they packed their backpacks, and they came.

  Topher, Mike, and Brianna went on ahead, but Hamsa set down the drone, ditched her backpack and flopped down next to Suki. She pointed up to where a few more birds had joined the first one, circling awkwardly in the air overhead. “You think if we stay here and don’t move, they’ll come down?” she said.

  “They can smell the dead a mile away,” Suki said.

  Hamsa leaned over and sniffed her. “Then that would be a yes.”

  “You shouldn’t talk.”

  They lay on their backs, held still and watched. The birds drifted lower.

  Suki closed her eyes. It was hot. She could see the whole list of camp set-up chores written there on the back of her eyelids with her name assigned to most of them. “Do you think bigfoots in the classical tradition would be capable of cooking dinner and cleaning up after themselves, just this one time?” Suki said.

  “One can dream,” Hamsa said. “One can dream.”

  Maybe she could sleep up here, Suki thought. Sure, it was a little rocky. But at least there was a view. She opened her eyes, and there was one of the turkey vultures, swooping down low, not five feet away. “Holy shit!” she said, and threw her arms up. “Shoo, shoo!” The bird startled back and flapped its big, black wings back up into the air.

  She and Hamsa stared at each other, eyes wide. “That was . . .” Suki said, trying to catch her breath.

  “Kind of awesome, in a creepy kind of way,” Hamsa said, shaking her head. “Just don’t tell Topher. He’d probably want to get that on camera too.”

  “Then he can have another word with my little friend,” Suki said, staring down at her middle finger. This whole thing had been a bad idea from the start.

  The tents (Suki) were all up, the fire (Suki) was started, the food largely cooked (Suki, and, okay, some Hamsa too but mostly Suki), the craft beer (Mike, mostly) and local whiskey (Topher, of course) were at least half gone, and all Suki wanted was to stare into the flames and then drift off to sleep, but the incident with the bird had left her on edge.

  And there was no getting rid of Brianna, apparently. “Are you sure? They’re wheat-free.” Brianna asked again. She held up the box in Suki’s face. The ribbon was a perky neon blue, there in the firelight. “And artisanal!”

  Suki avoided eye contact, a skill she had honed with the homeless in downtown Santa Cruz, and blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth. She’d apparently have to settle for getting stoned. Brianna frowned and coughed.

  It was dark. The trees loomed over them. Something, Suki thought, was probably watching them. Hamsa handed the skewer she had been cooking to Suki and leaned over to spear a piece of raw chicken from a plastic bag with another stick. “Isn’t ‘artisanal’ just another term for self-important white guys with beards on Instagram trying to get laid?” Hamsa said.

  “Ouch,” Mike said.

  Brianna sighed. She looked uncertainly down at the box in her hands.

  “Everything with you comes back to money and sex, Hamsa, doesn’t it?” Topher said. He smoothed his beard down and then took a sip from a hip flask that was covered in pictures of gears, submarines, and squid. “I’ll take one, Bri,” he said.

  “Everything with me?” Hamsa demanded.

  Brianna skipped around the fire to Topher. “Take your pick!” she said, tugging on Topher’s topknot.

  Hamsa leaned forward. “I seem to recall you being the one with the search history full of fat cosplay girls in expensive tights.”

  “Here we go,” Mike said. He leaned back in his camp chair and rubbed his hands together eagerly, looking over at Suki. “Again,” he added. He opened another beer.

  Suki sighed and blew smoke at Mike.

  Brianna blinked. “Hey,” she said, quietly. “I rock these tights.”

  “We all have needs, Hamsa,” Topher said. “It’s just that some of us find ways to get them taken care of, while others of us apparently expect to be catered to.”

  “I cater,” Brianna said, looking around at all of them innocently. “I just don’t do wheat.”

  “I’ll bet you cater,” Hamsa said.

  Hamsa had told Suki she was sure that the whole thing between Topher and Brianna had started when Hamsa said she was tired of paying all of Topher’s bills.

  “Did you hear that?” Suki said. “I thought I heard voices.” Or was it just a fox barking? They all stopped to listen. Brianna’s two little girls giggled from off in their My Little Pony tent. A breeze moved through the trees. Nothing. And yet . . .

  Once when they had all been hiking in Nisene Marks she had dropped behind to get a rock out of her sandal, and then she’d taken the wrong turn at a fork in the trail. She went down into a canyon where the coastal oaks tangled with each other and the sun came down through the canopy in columns. Everything was perfectly quiet. While chewing on a paleo energy bar she’d come across a mother boar with some piglets behind her, grunting softly and rummaging through the spiky oak leaves. She tried to be perfectly still. She watched as it dug up something with its snout and ate it and the piglets followed her lead, but when Suki reached in her pocket for her phone something shifted—some rocks dislodged and tumbled down from where she stood on the hill. The mother boar raised its head and saw her. It let out a shriek and feinted up at her. Suki, startled, fell backwards and sat down in the dirt. She heard the mother pig charging up the hill, and she covered her face and held out the paleo bar. She felt rather than saw the mother boar come up, sniff the bar and snort, and then they all ran off. When she’d looked up again, they were gone.

  “Suuuuki,” Mike said, stage-whispering with his mouth full. “Coooook meee more chiiiicken.”

  Topher laughed, but no one else did. Suki shook her head. Things were out there watching them. She heard the distant sound of a plane passing over. The longer she sat, the more she was sure of it. Were they speaking Spanish? Or maybe it was all just in her head. Were they the real bigfoots? The legend had to have been based on something. How was Mike like a real bigfoot? Suki thought. He was tall and kind of muscular. He shuffled his feet when he walked
. He had big teeth. His skull was the size of a basketball. Mike chewed the organic, free-range bird with his mouth open, tasting nothing.

  “Everything about everything comes back to money and sex, I think,” Mike said. He still wore the gorilla mask, pushed back on his head. “I mean we wouldn’t—”

  “Nobody cares what you think, Mike,” Suki said. She reached over and took Topher’s shiny steampunk flask from his reluctant fingers and took a drink. The whiskey warmed her throat. She was exhausted and cold, and she shivered and hunched more into her warm Aztec poncho and tried to ignore that feeling in the back of her monkey-brain. Her face hurt from that bratty kid. She’d probably have a bruise. The last thing she wanted to hear was any more of Mike’s voice. At least chasing after the kids had let her avoid him. She’d had such high hopes there last year. Mike had started going to the gym and had turned his thick, beer-drinking body into something very different. They’d been friends for a long time, and he was a smart guy, and she had always told herself there was something deeper to him than the superficial, sexist persona he put on in a group. He wasn’t her type, really, but she made a bad call in a moment of weakness. Unfortunately, Mike was like one of the best-sellers she kept buying at the Santa Cruz Bookstore on Pacific Avenue. They looked good on display, but were disappointingly lacking when you took one to bed.

  “I get that,” said Mike, frowning. “I get that a lot. It’s the price of being a true genius in my own time. But personally? I’d say artisanal sex is worth every single penny.”

  “You would,” Suki spat. “And anyway, it’s ar-tees-sonal.” She took out another pre-rolled joint from her dispensary package and lit it.

  “Like seasonal,” Brianna chirped perkily.

  “Tis the season to get busy,” Mike sang.

  Topher raised his hand. “Isn’t all sex ar-tees-sonal?”

  “No,” said Hamsa and Suki together, and they looked at each other. “No, it definitely isn’t,” Suki said, looking over at Mike. There were black flecks of meat in the gaps between his big, square teeth. She blinked her eyes rapidly, drew on the joint and blew smoke back over her shoulder. If she had had a baby with Mike, it probably would have been massive. Her stomach would have swelled up like she was having twins. The crib would have been the size of her house.

  “Sing it, sister.” Hamsa took her chicken out of the fire, examined it, and then stuck it back in.

  “I guess you get what you pay for,” Mike said. “Do we all think Brianna’s enjoying herself? Well, do we?”

  Brianna blushed and looked down at her hiking boots. Hamsa frowned and looked away.

  Topher opened his mouth and then closed it. “All you people,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “I thought we were just having a discussion,” Hamsa said. “A simple discussion about overblown hipster egos.”

  “And sex,” Mike agreed.

  “And beards?” Brianna added, with a little clap. She looked around at all of them with big brown eyes as though pleased with herself for almost keeping up with the conversation. Had they been talking about beards? Suki thought. No, they had not.

  “Do not meddle in the affairs of beards,” Mike said, ominously. “For they are smelly and quick to lecture.”

  “Hah,” said Hamsa. “Hah!”

  Topher grimaced at Mike. Mike shrugged an apology. Maybe Topher didn’t actually realize that when he hiked, there was this funky ghost of him that trailed just downwind, a grody shadow? How was Topher like a bigfoot? Suki thought. That was easy. He was hairy. He smelled bad. He wandered through his life in Santa Cruz seemingly at random, foraging for sustenance and sex. In general Topher respected Mike—Mike was smart, but also took direction well. When they played together on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, it was Mike who played that big bass drum that kept everyone on time. It let Topher jam and improvise on his shiny new ashikos and really stand out, and Suki knew Topher liked that. Maybe they’d be bigfoot bros together, high-fiving and backslapping their way through a sort of consequence-free hipster paradise.

  “Did you hear that?” Suki said. Everyone went quiet. Sparks lifted up and scattered away from them, up into the air where they turned into unfamiliar, flickering stars. Somewhere a coyote barked. A bat winged over their heads, high and erratic. “I thought I heard something moving in the bushes,” Suki said. She was sure this time.

  “Again?” said Topher.

  “Again,” said Hamsa.

  “Spooooky,” Mike said. “That’s what you get for not sharing the pot.”

  Suki gave Mike the finger, right up in his face. He pretended to bite at it. She left her finger there and it ended up in his mouth for a minute and both of them looked startled. Suki blushed. She took her hand back. The smoke from her joint drifted past Topher, who coughed and waved his hands in front of his face. “Well, if I wasn’t hungry before, I sure am now,” he said.

  “It’s organic,” Suki said.

  “Hungry for what, exactly?” Hamsa said. She took the piece of chicken out of the fire. It was done perfectly even on all sides, just the right shade of brown without being burnt or under-cooked. She devoured it.

  “Moving. In Brianna’s bushes,” Mike said. “Heh.”

  “Does anyone want to try a sandwich?” Brianna asked, in a small voice. The box still sat by the side of Topher’s chair, untouched.

  “They’re artisanal,” said Hamsa and Mike at the same time. Mike snickered.

  Brianna frowned. She pulled the head of the Totoro hoodie closer around her face. The creature’s ears looked deflated, the big wide grin forced and sad.

  “You know, you are kind of a cretin,” Topher said to Mike, after a minute.

  Mike nodded and stood up. “I am hugely cretinous!” he shouted. “I am a beast of awesomely epic proportions!” He thumped his broad surfer chest hard with two large fists and howled like a wolf. The gorilla mask slid off the back of his head. Then he stumbled backwards and sat down hard, just missing the drone.

  “You are also hugely drunk,” Hamsa said.

  “Maybe he needs to do that in the video,” Suki said.

  “Get drunk?” Hamsa said. “’Cause we all know that’s not a problem for him. By the way,” Hamsa gestured with her skewer. “I think that’s poison oak.”

  Mike lay back on the ground in the leaves. “Do you want to come over and scratch me?”

  “Maybe,” Hamsa said thoughtfully, looking at Topher. “Maybe I do.”

  “I thinks I really needs me a scratching,” Mike said. “Grrr.”

  “I meant the howl,” said Suki, sighing dramatically.

  Topher looked at her across the fire. Hamsa looked back. Suki knew what Hamsa was doing, using Mike to bait Topher. If the last few years were any example, it would work. Hamsa had confessed to her while they were walking: if she was honest, she missed those weekend mornings, waking up in the drafty Santa Cruz Mountain cabin all tangled up in Topher’s hair and gangly limbs, knowing that perfect pour-over coffee was just a few steps away. Hamsa would extricate herself and come back with steaming mugs. Topher would slowly come awake and tell her about all the brilliant ideas he’d had overnight, all the possible futures they could choose to explore, there among all the redwoods. It had been a paradise, of a sort. If only there hadn’t been that tacit, open relationship with Hamsa’s bank account. (And that hi-res picture of his dick.)

  “I’m not sure a classic bigfoot howls,” Topher said, after another minute of staring at them all. “The standard expectation of a bipedal vocalization is more of a roar.”

  “Grrr?” said Mike again, hopefully.

  “I hope the girls don’t itch tomorrow,” Brianna said, looking pointedly at Suki. “They were in the bushes a lot and Lizzy is very sensitive to poison oak.”

  Suki opened and closed her mouth. A bigfoot would be a far better parent than Brianna, she thought. A mama-bigfoot would have her for breakfast.

  The burning wood popped and shifted. A light breeze came through again and b
rought in the salt of the distant ocean, and the redwoods groaned to each other. Off in the tent, the girls were arguing. Suki was sure she heard other voices now, coming in on the wind. Were they speaking Spanish? Two or three of them—what were they saying? And there was that bat again. It swooped down low over their heads, and Suki imagined for a minute the bat was her. She was flying off, away from here. She’d find an old vineyard to roost in, one where she could hang safe, upside-down from the vines, and eat ripening grapes one at a time. Was that something looking at them from between the trees? A face, she was sure: dark skinned, black hair! She was about to stand and point, but then the fire popped and the light shifted. A shadow, and then: nothing.

  “Should we actually be having a fire?” Brianna said to no one in particular. “I mean, we might get in trouble?”

  “It’s a fire ring,” Mike said, sitting up. “Why put it there if we’re not supposed to use it? You know, the whole coastal ecosystem was built up around regular fires before people even got here! The Chumash used to set huge fires to scare out the wildlife for their hunts. If you really want to go back to nature—real nature—I say burn the whole mountain down!” He looked around at them and nodded convincingly to himself.

  “Only, I’m not so sure that’s true,” Suki said.

  “Pretty sure it’s not,” Hamsa said. “But yay you for going for it there, all on your very own.”

  “But what about the footage? Bigfoots fleeing from a forest fire? I mean, that would be fucking awesome, wouldn’t it?” Mike said, laying back and gesturing dramatically with his arms in the air.

  Topher combed his beard with his fingers. “I haven’t seen anything like it,” he admitted.

  “No,” said Hamsa. “Just, no. We’re not burning down the forest for your fake bigfoot video.”

  “Yeah,” said Brianna. “Maybe not the best idea. But I’m sure you’ll think of another one.” She leaned in closer against Topher, almost tipping him over in his tiny camp chair.