The Littlest Bigfoot

by Jennifer Weiner

  “How’d it go?” asked Jeremy’s father, who was waiting outside, keeping an eye on the car, which he’d had to park illegally.

  “Fine!” said Suzanne in a voice that was too high and too bright. Jeremy felt the air shift as his parents exchanged a glance. They’d never say anything out loud, and they’d try to treat him the same, but he knew that something had changed, permanently and profoundly. He had disappointed them . . . and he didn’t know how to fix it, unless it turned out that there was something he was great at, and he was almost positive that there wasn’t.

  Back home, he’d put his oboe, in its hard plastic case, on a high shelf in his closet. Then he’d gone for a walk in the woods. Head down, hands in his pockets, ten-year-old Jeremy wondered if his parents could love him if he was just ordinary, if he never turned into a superstar or a genius the way his brothers had.

  He’d walked for miles and had been deep in the woods, sauntering along, trying to guess what his parents would make him try next, and which sport would be the least humiliating, when he heard a rustling sound. Bird, he thought. Maybe a squirrel or fox. From the corner of his eye he saw a flash of brown, something much bigger than a squirrel or a fox, something bigger, even, than a man. It was almost bear-size, standing upright on two legs, moving lightly and very fast. What on earth . . . ?

  Jeremy started running, sounding like an army on the move as he trampled over sticks and leaped over logs. The thing up ahead of him was man-shaped, but much larger, with a hat on its head and boots on its feet and some kind of pack on its back, but Jeremy knew that it wasn’t a human when it turned sideways and he saw the fur on its face and hands.

  The problem was, when Jeremy saw the creature, the creature also saw Jeremy. Its eyes widened in fear, and it started to run. Jeremy gave chase.

  “Hey!” he yelled, his breath burning in his chest, as the creature pulled farther and farther ahead. “Hey, wait! Wait! I’m not gonna hurt you!”

  Either the creature didn’t hear or didn’t understand or believe him, because it kept running. Jeremy poured on one last desperate burst of speed, fumbled his phone out of his pocket, poked his passcode onto the touch screen, and began to film the thing that ran on ahead of him.

  “Wait!” he yelled. “Wait, please!” The creature never slowed. Jeremy was left with nine seconds of blurry, bouncing footage that showed a large shadowy something slipping through the trees.

  “Probably a camper,” said Martin when Jeremy, breathless with excitement, finally got his father to look up from his magazine back at home.

  “But why would a camper run away from me like that?”

  Martin shrugged. “Maybe he was a hunter. Going after deer without a permit.”

  Jeremy showed his mom the footage. “That’s nice, dear,” said Suzanne, pouring herself more wine, without looking at all.

  Ben, in the middle of a set of jump squats, merely grunted. Noah was the one who talked to him about it . . . but he was far from encouraging.

  “Look, J, Bigfoots are a legend,” he said.

  “I know what I saw,” Jeremy repeated. He must have said those words a hundred times since he’d gotten home with his phone footage.

  Noah reached over and pulled him into a rare one-armed side hug. “I know it’s hard,” he began.

  Jeremy squirmed away. He hadn’t told either of his brothers about the audition disaster. His parents must have filled them in.

  “It was real,” Jeremy said.

  Noah looked dismayed. “Real,” Jeremy repeated. “And I’m going to prove it. And you’ll be sorry you didn’t believe me.”

  He’d jumped off his brother’s bed, grabbed his phone, run to his bedroom, and started googling “Bigfoot” and “sightings” and “Bigfoot is real.”

  For weeks after his sighting, he’d immersed himself in the online world of Bigfoot hunters, paranormal activities, and UFO sightings. On his travels through the Internet’s more obscure byways, he’d found people who believed all kinds of things—that an alien spaceship had crash-landed in New Mexico (and that the aliens from the spaceship were currently running all of the banks and newspapers in America); that the Loch Ness Monster had relocated to the Erie Canal; that NBA TV sent secret, coded messages during its NBA GameTime highlights program that ran every morning.

  He’d gone to the Standish Public Library to try to find out if anyone had ever seen strange creatures in the local woods, and after the librarian, Ms. Putnam, decided he wasn’t a troublemaker, she’d told him about the Standish Historical Society in Mrs. Bradon’s garage. Mrs. Bradon had a hundred years’ worth of back issues of the Standish Times on microfiche, along with a reader that she’d bought when the town library was renovated. Jeremy’s goal was to get through ten years of newspapers every day. He was on 1912 when a front-page headline froze him in place, his hand still on the reader’s dial, his Bigfoot notebook spread open on his lap.

  “Milford Garrison Carruthers and the captive ‘Lucille,’ ” read the caption underneath the black-and-white drawing of a man standing next to a cringing figure in a cage. Milford Garrison Carruthers had an enormous waxed mustache that turned up at the tips and a watch chain that strained against his belly. He wore a black suit, a striped vest, and a pleased expression as he posed in front of the cowering thing. “The captive ‘Lucille’ ” wore a long dress with a high neck and a bonnet that covered most of her face. Most, but not all of it. The illustration showed that her face was covered in short, dark fur. One furry hand held the handle of a parasol. The other rested lightly on the bars.

  Sitting in a corner of Mrs. Bradon’s garage, smelling old paper and mildewed lawn furniture and car wax, Jeremy felt his eyes burn as he read the story. “Carruthers, who has downed lions and rhinos in darkest Africa, captured the fearsome creature in the woods surrounding his Standish estate. He claims that the creature—or ‘Lucille,’ as he has named her—is capable of intelligible speech, and announced plans to sell her to the Sanderson Traveling Circus, where she will be displayed as part of a roster of freaks, including albinos, midgets, giants, Siamese twins, and exotic animals.”

  Jeremy turned the page to a handbill featuring a drawing of Lucille and inviting people to “come marvel at one of Nature’s true Oddities, one of God’s Errors, a Freakish Hybrid of Human and Ape.”

  Back at home, with two copies of the story tucked in his backpack, still feeling hot-eyed and strangely unsettled, Jeremy ate two peanut-butter-honey-banana sandwiches, then sat down in front of his laptop. He’d just started looking up “Milford Garrison Carruthers” and “Standish” and “Bigfoot” and “Lucille” when his screen turned blue. He winced, thinking he’d fried the computer, maybe permanently, when a sentence he hadn’t typed appeared in the top right-hand corner. Greetings, seeker! Want to play a game? it read.

  Jeremy stared at the words, and then shuddered. Maybe he’d been too deeply immersed in the world of space aliens and hidden monsters, but his first thought was that he’d somehow gotten in touch with the ghost of Milford Carruthers . . . or maybe even the ghost of poor Lucille.

  The words just hung there, inviting. Greetings, seeker! And then another sentence. Click yes or no.

  When he clicked yes, a pattern appeared on his screen: nine dots, in three rows of three. Connect all nine dots without lifting your pencil using just four lines, read the instructions.

  Jeremy stared, considering. When he touched the cursor, more words appeared: Think carefully. You will only have one chance. Jeremy decided to draw out the dots on a piece of paper, tried out different possibilities, and finally realized that the trick was to draw the first line through a row of three vertical dots, then extend it out past the grid before angling it back on the diagonal, to swipe two more dots. Then extending out of the grid again, a horizontal swipe back across, and a diagonal stroke, until the finished puzzle looked a little like the sketch of a bow tie. Four lines, running through all nine dots. “I’m thinking outside the box,” he said.

  Nice wo
rk, flashed on the screen. Then another puzzle appeared, this one a word problem. A lily pad grows in a pond. Each day the number of lily pads doubles, until, after ten days, the lily pads cover the entire pond. On what day did the lily pads cover half the pond?

  Luckily, Jeremy had heard that one before. If the number doubled each day, then on day nine, half the pond would be covered. Double half, and on day ten the lily pads had taken over. “Day nine,” he typed, and wondered if this would actually lead anywhere and who was asking these questions.

  What stays in a corner but travels the world? asked the screen.

  Jeremy tried to type the riddle into Google and found that whoever he was playing this game with had disabled the feature. It took him two hours, and help from his brother, to come up with the answer: “a stamp.” The screen barely paused to congratulate him before spitting out the next riddle.

  What starts with the letter t, is full of tea, and ends with t?

  That one was easy. “Teapot,” Jeremy typed. The next riddle appeared.

  “What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries?” Jeremy read aloud.

  “A towel,” called Suzanne, who was working in her office. After he typed in that answer, a rebus appeared.

  Jeremy stared, then yelped, “Space invaders!” He typed it in. Another problem popped up.

  “Corporate downsizing?” said Martin, peering at Jeremy’s screen on his way to the dinner table with his magazine tucked under his arm. “Hey, kiddo, you’ve got to come eat.” Jeremy typed in the answer, gulped down his chicken and biscuits, and raced back to his computer, which was showing yet another puzzle:

  “No u turn,” Jeremy typed. He was, he thought, getting the hang of it.

  After a dozen more riddles and math problems, Jeremy’s screen turned blue. Congratulations! read a banner on top, as silvery confetti fluttered down. Then a string of numbers appeared, and just like that, his computer was back to normal. “See if they’re GPS coordinates,” Noah suggested, after Jeremy had puzzled over the digits for hours, trying to see if they were some kind of code, if each number represented a letter that would spell out a word.

  Of course Noah was right. The coordinates led to a spot right there in Standish, deep in the forest. Jeremy walked for an hour with his phone set to its compass feature and found, balanced on a tree trunk at the precise coordinates he’d received, a cube composed of brightly colored squares, nine on each side: a Rubik’s Cube. When Jeremy solved it, with a final click, the cube twisted into two pieces, and a folded square of paper fell into his hands. It was a note with an address written on it . . . and, on the other side, a copy of the illustration Jeremy had seen in the old newspaper: Milford Garrison Carruthers posing proudly next to the creature in a cage. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as he read the single word handwritten beneath the illustration: “real.”

  The address turned out to be not far from his school: a single-story bungalow, painted gray with white trim.

  Jeremy rang the doorbell. His backpack was full of everything he’d learned or discovered: three Bigfoot notebooks along with printouts of the story about Milford Carruthers; every subsequent newspaper mention of Carruthers, Lucille, or the circus she’d been sold to; and every story about anything—from crimes to Girl Scout cookouts—that took place in Standish’s forests. He had a copy of the footage he’d shot that day in the woods, transferred to a thumb drive, and a copy of the Patterson-Gimlin film, along with a drive containing every tabloid cover that had ever mentioned Bigfoot.

  He wasn’t sure who, or what, to expect when the door swung open. At first he saw nothing. Then he looked down. A girl sitting in a fancy aerodynamic office chair, with glossy black hair gathered in a ponytail that stuck out of her Red Sox baseball cap, stared up at him. Jeremy saw that she was about his age, and that she did not seem to be entirely pleased.

  “You’re a kid!” she said.

  “So are you!” said Jeremy. He hadn’t realized until that moment that he’d half expected whoever had been playing those games with him to be a sixty-year-old man who smelled like cats—not just a grown-up, but a weird grown-up.

  “Well,” said the girl, without getting up. “You’re Jeremy Bigelow, right?” When he nodded, she looked him up and down. “I thought maybe it’d be Noah. We used to go to school together.”

  Jeremy felt his heart descend toward his knees. Everyone wanted one of his brothers. Nobody ever wanted him.

  “But Noah’s not into the paranormal,” the girl continued. “And if you were smart enough to solve my riddles, then you’re smart enough to be here.” She set her hands against the wall, and pushed. The chair spun, then rolled over the smooth wooden floors down the hallway, into the house. “By the way, my father works from home. He’s very big and very strong, and very protective of me.”

  Jeremy raised his hands to show how harmless he was, then realized the girl whose chair was rolling ahead of him couldn’t see him.

  “I’m Jo,” said the girl.

  The house was small but airy, with high ceilings, white walls, and pale-green and light-blue furniture. He followed Jo past a living room and a dining room and a kitchen before they arrived at a glassed-in sunroom that had been converted into what looked like Bigfoot Central, or maybe the Pentagon’s war room.

  “Welcome to the Batcave,” Jo said. Jeremy looked around. A detailed map of Standish covered an entire wall and was studded with pushpins in red and green and blue. On the opposite wall, a bookshelf was stocked with everything that had ever been published about Bigfoots. Photographs were layered on a corkboard—color snapshots, movie stills, fuzzy black-and-white images, pictures taken with infrared light that depicted what looked like nothing more than big greenish blobs.

  Jo spun her chair around again to face him.

  “You’re wondering how I found you,” she said.

  Jeremy had been wondering all kinds of things, including whether Jo was crazy and whether he was safe here. Instead of saying that, though, he just nodded.

  “I run Believeinbigfoot.com. Every IP address that visits the site gets a cookie embedded in the hard drive so I can track who’s been there.”

  “Is that legal?” Jeremy wondered.

  Jo sounded the tiniest bit smug when she said, “You clicked ‘yes’ when the site asked your permission to leave it. Anyhow, I set up the cookie to trigger the array when—if—anyone ever typed in a string of search words about Standish and Bigfoots and . . .”

  “Milford Carruthers,” Jeremy finished for her.

  Jo nodded. “You were the first person since I started the site to ask questions about Bigfoots here in Standish. Did you see one?” she asked him without preamble.

  Jeremy gulped. “One what?”

  “A Bigfoot,” she said, in a tone as calm as if she’d asked him whether he’d seen a squirrel on his walk over. She must have noticed his shocked expression, because she frowned and said, sounding almost apologetic, “I know that’s probably not the preferred term. Probably they call themselves something else.” The right half of her mouth quirked upward in a sort of smile. “The differently footed, maybe.”

  “You think they’re real?”

  “I know they are,” said Jo. She gestured toward the walls—the maps, the books, the photographs. “I know they’re real, and I know they’re here. Nearby. And I know that I’m going to find them. Now,” she said, clapping her hands together, “I want you to tell me everything about your sighting.”

  “I—I have pictures,” Jeremy stammered. He pulled off his backpack and reached for the thumb drive, still trying to make sense of it. Jo held out her hand. Her face was very calm, but her eyes were shining in a way Jeremy had seen in his own mirror. He’d found someone who believed him. More than that, he’d found someone who wasn’t looking past him in order to see his brothers or using him to get to Ben or Noah.

  Jo didn’t care (he hoped) how smart Noah was or how Ben had scored more goals than any soccer player in the town’s entire history in h
is freshman year of high school.

  She cared about Bigfoots . . . and, by extension, she cared about Jeremy, too.

  CHAPTER 8

  ALL THROUGH SEPTEMBER, MILLIE HAD been permitted precisely an hour of reconnaissance in the morning. After that, Teacher Greenleaf, who was almost as old as Old Aunt Yetta but considerably less indulgent, would call her into class. Millie would scramble down her tree and go to her lessons in the dim little school-burrow, which, like most Yare dwellings, was half underground. When her school day was over, she’d visit Old Aunt Yetta’s, where, as part of her Tribe Leader training, she was studying herb lore.

  “Ginger,” Old Aunt Yetta said, on a rainy afternoon in October. Millie picked up the gnarled beige-colored root.

  “For nausea, morning sickness, and . . .” Millie paused, thinking.

  “You should know this,” Old Aunt Yetta chided.

  “Digestion?”

  Aunt Yetta nodded, then named another herb. “Black cohosh.”

  Millie selected a thin branch covered with frilly white blossoms and tiny, round green pods. “Cramps and bone-fret.”

  “Tincture or tea?”

  “Umm . . .”

  Old Aunt Yetta sighed. “Nyeh. Smart as you are, you can’t do better than this? What will you be doing when I’m gone?”

  I’ll be gone too, Millie thought. She’d find a way to shed her fur and keep it from coming back. She was sure it could be done. She’d leave the forest and find her real Tribe. She would . . .

  “Millie.” After all these years, Old Aunt Yetta knew exactly what Millie was thinking. Shaking her head, she set out a small snackle; the crumbly, sweet whole-wheat biscuits that she knew were Millie’s favorites; a wheel of goat cheese made from the milk of her own goat, Esmerelda; and a jar of lavender honey. She piled on scones made with chives she’d snipped from her garden; heavy clotted cream; small, sweet apples; dried cherries; and a fun-size Snickers bar as a treat. Like the rest of the Tribe, Old Aunt Yetta was forever trying to fatten Millie up, always keeping a cookie or a sweet in her pocket, putting extra sugar into Millie’s tea, extra butter on her bread, and cream on top of her morning oats.