Bigfoots in Paradise Read online

  After the dogfight, Kelly moved out.

  Coming back up the hill from the hospital, I was exhausted. Ted, his arm set in plaster, had decided to stay down in Capitola with Jessica. Kelly wasn’t home yet from the wedding. I drank a large bottle of Indian beer, put the bulldog in the fenced yard with the other dogs, and then collapsed on my bunk in the trailer. I had dark dreams of islands and oceans, of dark stars and bright ones all in orbit around each other, of a mountain lion living under the rental house, chewing on a moving, breathing doll, and I woke suddenly to the sound of Kelly screaming.

  I threw open the door of the trailer, and saw the dogs in a pile. There was dust everywhere. Kelly was at the gate to the dog pen, a bottle of wine in her hand and her sari in disarray, and one of my cousins was in the middle of the dogs. He had one of the smaller ones by the collar. Kelly’s mouth was open. She was staring at one of the dogs, a shepherd, who lay motionless in the dirt just on the other side of the fence, and she either could not or would not move.

  I yelled, and waded into the middle of the dogs. I had never seen it this bad. The dogs would growl at one another sometimes, over a toy or a bone, but I’d never seen a fight with all of them involved. One of them latched onto my calf and ripped my pants leg. Another yelped as I got my arm around its neck and pulled it backward. I kicked and jerked at collars, and yelled to Kelly or my cousin to get the hose. My hand was bleeding, and I wasn’t sure how that had happened.

  When I got to the center of the pile, I saw that the new bulldog was planted firmly over the Balrog, with his teeth locked on the Balrog’s throat. The Balrog rolled his eyes and whimpered, working his mouth uselessly. For all his restlessness and incorrigibility, he wasn’t a fighter. He was bleeding from some bites along the ribs, and looked pretty torn up in the pits where the forelegs met his deep barrel chest. The bulldog shook him, and shook him again.

  I grabbed hold of the bulldog’s collar and pulled, but the dog was too strong. I kicked it, got right down in its face and yelled and slapped it, but the dog looked through me with those intense blue eyes, so much like my father’s. I took the hose from my cousin and set it on full and pointed it up the dog’s nostrils.

  It seemed to go on forever. The world stretched out, and there were long stretches of time between heartbeats where there was nothing but me and those two dogs. The Balrog kicked futilely with his back legs. The bulldog growled and shook him, so hard I was worried his neck was broken. Finally, I got behind the bulldog and grabbed him by the back legs, up behind the knees, while my cousin held the hose. The dog sneezed and released the Balrog’s throat, and I dragged it backward, out of the fence and over to the trailer. There was blood in its mouth. I’m ashamed to say I hit it, probably more than once, and then I threw the dog into the trailer and slammed the door behind it.

  We had to put three of the dogs down that night, at the emergency vet clinic in Soquel. Two others needed stitches in their pits and along their rib cages where skin had been torn loose. The staff there said they’d never seen anything like it, and for a time I was concerned they would be calling the County Animal Services on us, though it was plain they could see how distraught we were. Kelly was haggard and exhausted. My cousin was just awkward. I didn’t know him well and he didn’t know us, and in the way he hovered near the door, checking his iPhone, I saw he was working to figure out just what his obligation was, just how much of us he needed to put up with before he could make a socially acceptable exit. I didn’t blame him.

  The Balrog died that night, and I think a part of me did too. The vet was genuinely apologetic as she slid in the needle and slowly depressed the plunger. From opposite sides of the small, white room Kelly and I watched his eyes cloud over, his legs relax.

  On the way out, she paid the bill, and then handed me the car keys.

  “Tell him he wins,” she said. “I give up.”

  I didn’t ask who she meant. I didn’t have to.

  She climbed into my cousin’s rental car, and they drove off together into the fog.

  I put the keys in my pocket and then I just walked. I believe my mind was empty of everything I had held so tightly that year. I turned left out of the emergency clinic and walked down 41st Street, past the malls and the surf shops and the sushi places. When I hit the end I walked up along the coast. It was probably close to 3 a.m. by then, and everything was wrapped in a mist so deep and salty that for a while I walked with my hands straight out in front of me. Streetlamps were tiny, distantly spaced stars. I walked along the beach, and could hear but not see the fierce roaring of the ocean, waves coming all the way from the other side of the world and breaking here, on these sands.

  When I found myself at the Santa Cruz Harbor, I walked the docks at random until I found what I thought was my father’s boat. It was long and lean, a sleek deep-water vessel made of shining fiberglass and steel, and it rolled quietly with the tide.

  I climbed onboard, unsnapped the cover that lay across the cockpit, and went below. The boat had power in from the docks, and I turned on some lights. It was an elegant cabin, lined in carefully polished teak, the brass instruments shiny. I pulled papers from the chart table, sheets and mattresses from the bunks. I had to go back out to the docks to find some fuel with a spare fuel can, but it wasn’t difficult.

  I found the matches in a shallow drawer by the stove.

  Back up on deck, I lay down near the bow. The fog was still dense, and it wouldn’t clear for many more hours, but I imagined I could see through it, see all of those millions of stars out there, and in particular see the two stars of Sirius up close. They spun tightly around each other, straining to the very outer edges of their orbits, yet always getting pulled back in.

  The boat began to kindle beneath me, and before I jumped for the dock I thought about how some day someone far away on one of those spinning stars might see my light. I would be hot and fierce, fiery and brilliant. Any day now, I would burn back at them with an inferno all my own, one that had been here when the universe was formed, one that burned with the hot breath of all the broken animals of the world.

  THE NIGHT WITCHES

  MONTHS BEFORE THE fire—the big one that cuts up through the homes in our hills like a plane through a flock of doves—I see Rochelle in the street. It’s a Sunday. She has her hand in some guy’s pocket. Her hair is paler than I remember it, and it hangs awkwardly around her face like she still cuts it herself. She is tanned, broken-in, like she’s been living outdoors all these years.

  “Is that Rochi?” I ask Hope, forgetting that Hope never knew Rochelle.

  Hope is pointing out the pneumatic metal ostrich to Noah as it hisses and clanks past us. He studies it from up on Hope’s shoulders with a look like he’s swallowed a spider. It’s a moment of summer in Santa Cruz as drawn by Miyazaki: creatures of many colors leap and strut and caper in the street. Pyrotechnic children and dogs with wings grin from alleyways. Cosplay cyborgs loom in doorways. Shops are filled with clockwork angels and satyrs on stilts. Demons with mechanical jaws and painted breasts laugh and hoist lattes. A Victorian house rolls by. A snail-car shoots fire from metal horns.

  Rochelle extracts the guy’s wallet. He has no idea—just another Santa Cruz dad in a tie-dyed T-shirt and cargo shorts and sandals. As Rochelle tucks his wallet into the front pocket of her jean jacket, he watches a passing steampunk submarine.

  She glances around to see if anyone has noticed, and she sees me watching. I can’t tell if she recognizes me. Then she turns and pushes her way back into the crowd.

  I lean forward and tell Hope I’ll be back. She can’t hear me but shakes her head in her way that says what the hell?—mouth tight, eyes looking back at me over Noah’s thigh, and then away. We aren’t doing well this summer.

  I move through the crowd, peering over heads. I look into the shops. There’s a store with acceptably edgy beach clothes for people who don’t spend much time at the beach, a busy independent bookstore, a shop dedicated entirely to socks, a restaurant de
voted to chocolate. I look down the side streets, too, but Rochelle has vanished.

  On the way home, Hope asks Noah, “Where was mommy, anyway?” and Noah looks over at me from his car seat.

  “I thought I saw someone,” I say, looking back at him in the mirror. “Someone I used to know.” Noah looks back over to Hope.

  “I thought the parade was family time, Beth,” she sighs, looking out the window. There’s a homeless guy out there with a sign that says I NEED BEER.

  Noah looks back at me. I shrug in the rearview mirror and smile at him, but then he looks out the window, too. On his side, we’re passing an ice cream place that has flavors like honey-fig-ricotta and lemon basil.

  “Who’s up for ricotta ice cream?” I ask.

  But Hope just leans over and turns on the kid music, louder than any of us really likes it.

  I wonder if I imagined her. I look for her on Facebook. No luck. Google turns up nothing. Maybe a month later, another Sunday, I’m down in Santa Cruz again. Things are getting pretty intense, and Hope has taken Noah down to her dad’s for the weekend. Since I’m home by myself, and the pager is quiet, I dig out the old wetsuit. It says “The Night Witches” across the front, after some of the first Soviet women combat pilots in World War II—they flew these crazy old planes, and would cut off their engines when they got close to their targets and just glide in through the darkness. The wetsuit still has sponsor labels down the sleeves—most for surfing-related companies that aren’t around anymore.

  I get one of the two wooden longboards off the wall in the garage. It’s covered with dust, but I wipe it down. It needs new varnish.

  I bring it down to Pleasure Point, at the end of 41st Street. It’s not a rough spot—mostly kids and older people, with calm and regular waves. The vibe is pretty relaxed. People meditate or do yoga on the rocks, but there’s not a big scene.

  I’m messing around in the water for an hour before my thoughts turn off and my body can remember what it is there to do, and then I finally get some good rides in. My head moves into that place where time and words evaporate. I’m part of the rising swell of the wave, the curve of gusting wind, the spill and spread of the water up onto the shore. When at last I climb out and sit on the rocks, I actually enjoy eating soup out of a thermos.

  “Beth?” a woman’s voice says. “I didn’t think it was you, but then I saw the suit.” She is smoking a cigarette in the middle of the yoga moms, wearing the same jean jacket. Her face is startlingly thin and the hand that holds the cigarette looks like a claw, but she has that same old nervous smirk on one side of her face. She has her hair pulled back in a dirty rubber band.

  “Rochi?” I say. I look at the yoga moms to see if they see her, too. Confirmed: frowns, grimaces—someone waves smoke away from her face and makes exaggerated coughing noises. Rochi always could make an entrance. She stands up, tosses the cigarette into a tide pool, and comes over. We both start to say something at the same time. We stop, do it again, and then I laugh, nervously, and she smirks.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m a little out of practice at this.”

  “At talking to ghosts? Old Bethie,” she says. “Just hug me. I can’t steal your wallet when you’re wearing a wetsuit. Particularly that one.”

  So I hug her, gingerly, though I’m mostly dry by then.

  “I won’t break, you know,” she says, and pulls me in tighter.

  “That was you,” I say, after a minute. “At the parade. Jesus, Rochi.”

  She shrugs, jerkily. “It comes back easier than you think,” she says. “Like watching X-Files or eating tofu. You look like you’re doing all right. A little beat up, maybe, but all right.”

  “Little house up in Felton,” I say. “Driving the hill.”

  “Wild Beth Tompkins, working in Silicon Valley?”

  “Kid’s got to eat,” I say, without thinking.

  She looks away, at the water. Her foot is tapping out a beat. Somewhere a yoga mom starts chanting.

  “I noticed the ring,” she says, after a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “That was tactless.”

  “That you have a kid?”

  “Just . . .” I shake my head.

  “It’s been ten years, Beth. I bet you’re still a good parent.”

  “Actually, I suck.” I know it. Noah knows it. Hope seems to enjoy pointing it out. She got her sharp tongue from her dad—it was funny before we got married. Now, not so much. “Noah’s almost two now,” I tell her. Then I tell her a little bit about Hope.

  She nods and looks away. Then she says, “Well, I’m glad to hear you have a kid, anyway. Anything left in that thermos?”

  I shake my head. “Come on,” I say. “I’ll buy you some fish.”

  I throw on some clothes from the van, clip the pager to my belt, and we walk to the Pink Godzilla, a sushi place up the street. I order a couple of rolls.

  “Do you remember that move?” she says, after the waiter drops off the saki. “The one that always worked on guys?”

  “The Tuck and Nip?” I laugh. After high school, Rochi and I had lived with a bunch of other teens and twenty-somethings at a rundown place over in east Santa Cruz. A guy we called Trustafarian Bob owned an old Victorian with a bunch of land, and someone had parked an old school bus there. A bunch of us would ride the bus downtown on the weekends to see what we could acquire: watches, jewelry, handbags, wallets. Rochi and I would team up. We’d pick an older guy, maybe in his forties. One of us would pass by, drop something, and bend over to get it, making sure our shirt was really loose in front. The other one would pick the guy’s pocket.

  “I doubt that’d work too well now,” I say.

  “You might be surprised,” she says, with that smirk again. “You just have to keep adjusting your targets.”

  We had used that move out on the water, too—one of us would flash the competition, the other would grab the great wave. We brought back trophies and, frankly, the competition had never complained.

  The fish comes. The pager goes off, but it’s not for our station so I switch it over to the quiet setting. Rochi breaks apart the chopsticks and rubs them against each other to smooth them out, and I notice how knobby her wrists look. Then she purses her lips as she examines each roll, deciding, and the slanting sun coming in through the bank of windows lights up her face. I can see the spider-lines that fill up the hollows under her eyes, the deep grooves in her neck down into the hollow of her collar, where her clavicle pushes out against the dirty skin. I want to put my hand against it, to push it gently back in.

  “You a cop now or something?”

  “Fire department in Felton,” I say, around a tuna roll. “I volunteer—just got in last year.”

  “So you’re not going to arrest me.”

  “Don’t sound so hopeful,” I say. “It’s still early.”

  She is passing through with friends, she tells me. They met at Burning Man where she’d put on a big art piece like she used to do back at T-Bob’s, this one an elaborate modern dance choreography of enemy “mimes” and “robots.” The mimes just wanted to do their miming. The robots wanted to control everything, and everyone was naked—I gathered it was basically an anti-capitalist manifesto made arty and more confusing. Burning Man was a lot like our old days in Santa Cruz, I gather. Just less water.

  T-Bob’s house was always the center of an event, and people drifted in and out every few days around the small core group of us. Rochi and I watched them come and go from our bay window on the second floor. Some nights there’d be more than a hundred people there—students from the high schools and UCSC, surfers passing through and living in their Microbuses, anarchists and trustafarians (sometimes with kids in tow), people off the street who didn’t seem too crazy or smell too bad. Phish even played there once. Mornings we’d be up and out early, to catch the tide, and we’d have to pick our way across half-dressed piles of sleeping people just to get out the door.

  “So some of the mimes and robots are living
in a negotiated peace at someone’s camp out past Bonny Doon,” Rochelle says. And after a string of bad relationships, she adds, she isn’t seeing anyone in particular right now.

  She is brittle around the edges, her movements speeded up and a little too precise, like a bird’s. She looks at me, at the door, at my lips, at the sushi, at my chest, at the guy sitting next to us, and then back at me in the course of a few seconds. She doesn’t eat much.

  “So,” she says. “Hope?”

  I tell her the facts: we were tech writers together at Cisco, with the exciting challenge of documenting commercial Internet router specifications. I was drawn in by the way she could command the attention of a room full of engineers with her sarcasm. She liked my surfer slang. We got married as soon as we could.

  I let Rochi know that Hope and I were having a rough time. The hours that Valley companies expect. The amazing logistical overhead that one tiny human requires. “You know how it goes,” I say.

  “I don’t,” she says. She reaches across the table and takes my hand. I can feel the bones in her fingers. “But then I never thought of you as the conventional, settling down type.” I get lost in those eyes for a minute. They are eyes out of the past, clear and smart and blue.

  I don’t say how much having a kid changed things for me. How it brought things up from before that I wasn’t ready to deal with. I don’t talk about how Hope carries my slack. When Noah cries now, he wants Hope. When he’s happy and wants to play, usually lining up dominos in dot order, or arranging his cars by color and size, he wants Hope. When he’s ready for bed, he’ll only let Hope tell him stories—the same ones, the same order. I sit out on the steps, tracking wave heights on my cell phone and listening to the fire dispatches. I’m stuck somehow, and the two of them are moving on together without me.