I’m eighteen when I see Bigfoot for the second time.
At least, I think it’s the second time. I was four when I looked out the pop-up trailer window and saw the silhouette of a long-armed figure stalking through the campground.
This time, though, I’m certain. I’m out walking with my roommate, Jamie, taking a study break and smoking, and he sees it, too: a shadowy figure crossing the night-darkened country road leading out of this tiny New Hampshire college town.
We say nothing until we’ve turned around and are heading back. Then, I say, “Hey, did you see something cross the road—”
Jamie stops and grips my forearm. “You saw it too? I thought I was going crazy.”
That’s all we say. Jamie has to get back. His boyfriend is coming over and I have to make myself scarce for the evening. Jamie doesn’t say anything about that, either, the fact that they’re taking the express train to bang town tonight and I’m going to go get drunk with my straight friend.
• • •
Kyle’s a sophomore, and is probably as unlike me as anyone can get. Taller, broad shouldered, with the legs of a soccer player and the arms of a home run hitter. His olive skin looks perpetually tanned, and his dark brown hair never fails to flop just so over his forehead. I should hate him, but I don’t, and for some reason he likes me. He also has a single room, so I come over whenever Jamie wants to have alone time with his boyfriend—unless, of course, Kyle and his girlfriend are also getting busy, in which case I’m SOL.
We sit on the floor of his dorm room. We’ve finished a six-pack of Sam Adams already and have started into the Rolling Rock—saving the worst for last. Kyle sets down his beer and shrugs into his coat.
“Seriously?” I ask.
“Do I want to see a mythical beast? Like you’ve gotta ask.” Kyle picks up his Rolling Rock and the six-pack. “Dude, come on.”
Kyle’s the only person who calls me dude. Jamie insists on calling me girl, which is annoying, but I keep my mouth shut. Both are preferable to queer and fag being muttered behind my back. That’s part of the drawback of going to a college with a student body under a thousand: everyone knows everyone’s business. I just have to get through the semester and then I’m transferring from this fucking place.
I huddle against the side of Kyle’s dorm and light a joint before we head down the street. I take a hit and hand it to Kyle. He usually doesn’t partake, but this time he accepts, holding his beer bottle between his ring and middle fingers as he takes a drag. He passes it back and holds out the six-pack. I take a beer and we keep going.
We veer from the road and walk across the covered footbridge over the river dividing the town. A year earlier, in the brochures, it looked quaint. That was before I saw the inside, which is covered in graffiti from decades of undergrads. Still, there’s a beam jutting out over the water that makes for a nice place to sit and get drunk or high when no one’s around.
“You sure it was a Bigfoot, dude?” he asks.
“It was Bigfoot, dude.” I don’t mean to sound as snarky as I do. If Kyle notices, he doesn’t say anything. He’s the sort of guy who goes with whatever flow is flowing, so long as it isn’t mean or nasty. Kind of how we met. Someone in line at the dining hall was hassling me, and Kyle smacked him in the back of the head and told him to lay off. I bought Kyle a six-pack in thanks. He and his girlfriend liked me, and turned out we all liked beer and weed. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
“And you kept walking down the road?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“That takes balls, man.”
I shrug. “Maybe we were just dumb. I don’t know. How dumb do we have to be to go back now?”
We walk past the second-to-last building, my dorm. The fifth-floor corner window glows dimly.
“Chicka bow wow!” Kyle crows.
“Knock it off,” I say.
“I was just kidding.”
“At least that little queen is getting some.”
“Wow, pot meet kettle. Kind of harsh, don’t you think?”
“Whatever.” Jamie’s having a lot more fun than me, and he’s having it often and with great gusto. He’s fearless, and I kind of hate him for it. Plus, his boyfriend is cute.
I make to chuck my empty into the woods, but Kyle puts a hand on my arm. “Hey, don’t litter Bigfoot’s living room.” He takes the bottle and slides it into the cardboard six-pack, then hands me a new one. I’m buzzing pretty good already but what the hell. I spark up a second joint, too. It isn’t very strong but it was free so I’m not complaining.
“I just wish they’d do it somewhere else every once in a while,” I say. “Like Todd’s room or, I dunno, Boston.”
He slings an arm across my shoulders, tapping his beer bottle against my chest. “Don’t worry, you’ll get lucky one of these days and then you’ll wonder what the big deal was.”
“Sure.” This I doubt—not that I’ll get lucky, but that it’ll be no big deal.
Kyle then tells me this story about the time he and Stacey went to Boston for some speech competition and how they managed to get into a club on a Friday night, only it turned out to be a gay club. Kyle wasn’t thrilled, but Stacey said she liked the music so they stayed awhile.
“And these two guys are making out pretty heavy, right in front of us,” Kyle says. “It’s like they’re putting on a show for our benefit, you know? But Stacey, she gets really into it. At the hotel later, she finds this gay porn flick on pay-per-view and wants to watch it.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m telling you. I thought it was pretty cheesy, but Stacey practically attacked me after that.” He sighs and stretches his arms out in the dark. “That was a great weekend.”
“Did that not weird you out in the slightest?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Dude, if it gets her in the mood, she can watch Animal Planet for all I care.”
I shake my head. “Way more than I need to know.”
We pass the library at the edge of campus, then a few houses. The road narrows, the streetlights peter out, and the road goes completely black, except for the glow from my joint. The sky’s clear, the moon a thumbnail sliver, stars everywhere. The night sky is the one good thing about going to school in this too-small place.
“How far out did you say it was?” Kyle asks after a while. We’ve passed a hill and now can’t see the lights of town behind us.
“We turned right up a ways and then walked for a few more minutes.” I grin. “Not scared of the dark, are you?”
He huffs a little. “Scared of running into something in the dark or tripping over my own feet, maybe.”
“We’ve got a little farther to go still,” I say. “We haven’t even passed the cemetery yet.”
He stops and turns to face me. “Cemetery? You’re kidding.”
“It’s this wide open place on a hillside and most of the stones are over a hundred years old.”
He stops me again. “You didn’t actually go into the cemetery, did you?”
“Yes, I actually went into the cemetery.” Dead people have never bothered me. It’s the living who scare me more.
I take one more pull on the joint, heavy and deep, and hold it in for as long as I can. There’s a bit left, and I offer it to Kyle. He shakes his head. I pinch it out and tuck it back in my pocket.
“Come on,” I say. “Like five more minutes, tops.”
Before we pass the graveyard I look up at the sky and tell Kyle to look, too. It’s enough to distract him. The pot and the alcohol probably help, too.
“I wonder if they’re done yet,” I say. The beer and weed combo is making me sleepy.
“Dude, they’ve had enough time to do it twice and be asleep for an hour, at least.”
If Kyle does the deed that fast, I feel a little sorry for Stacey. Then I look at my watch. It’s after midnight, and we’ve been drinking since nine.
We walk a short while in a silence broken only by our steps on the blacktop. No sounds come from the woods on either side of the road, no insects or frogs since it’s so cold.
After a long while, Kyle asks, “So what have you done?”
“With a guy? Nothing.”
“Not even a little groping?”
I kind of wish Bigfoot would come and attack us right then. “You know, I figured kissing would be as good a place to start as any.”
“You’ve never even kissed a guy? Like, ever?”
I shake my head.
“What about a girl?”
Again, head shake.
“Wow.”
I narrow my gaze. With his slightly wide eyes and mouth partly open, he looks a little stupid. Well, he is on an athletic scholarship.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I say. “It’s not like it makes me some kind of freak.”
“No, no.” He shakes his head quickly. “It’s just—hell, I’ll kiss you if you want to get it over with.”
“Excuse me? Get it over with?”
“Hey.” He puts his hands up. “I didn’t mean—”
“Is that how much you think it should matter to me?”
“Dude, I’m just sayin’—”
“And I’m just sayin’, dude.” I turn back to the road and point. “C’mon. That’s the spot up ahead.”
“How do you know?”
“See that intersection?” I point again, though it looks like I’m pointing to the exact same spot. “We were that far from it.”
I’m bullshitting, of course. I have no idea how far up the road we were when we saw the thing. For all I know, the spot where it crossed is already behind us.
We fall into silence again, and I’m straining my ears to catch any sound from the woods, any snap of a twig or brushing of leaves. That’s the thing: I believe in Bigfoot, especially after the second sighting. And I don’t want anyone but me and Kyle to find him. I don’t care if no one else believes. Maybe it’s better that they don’t.
We stop about fifty yards short of the intersection. “Well, this is it,” I say.
Kyle does a slow three-sixty in the middle of the road. “I don’t smell anything,” he says. “All the stuff I’ve read says Bigfoot really stinks, like a skunk.”
“It’s pretty cold out here. The smell probably doesn’t hang around that long.”
“Did you smell it earlier?”
I didn’t, but I say I did. I have a feeling Kyle wants to believe, too. I don’t want to let him down. That’s why I say what I say next.
“Fine.”
“Fine what?” he asks.
“Fine, go ahead. I’ll kiss you. Like you said, I might as well get this over with.”
Kyle laughs. “Wow, don’t do my ego any favors here.” Something trembles a little in his tone.
“I think your ego can take it.”
He sets the six-pack in the road, followed by the open beer he’s holding. He takes my beer as well and puts it aside. He bridges the space between us so that I have to resist the temptation to step back. He must read something in my body language, because he puts a hand on my shoulder and gives me a little shake.
“Hey, relax. It’s no big deal.”
“Easy for you to say.”
He laughs, then adds, “You’re not gonna say anything about this to anyone, right?”
“Who am I going to tell? Stacey?”
“Do not tell Stacey.”
“Because you’re gonna tell her, right?”
He hesitates long enough for me to guess exactly what he’s thinking. “Yeah, I’ll tell her.”
“Because you think she’s going to be really turned on by the idea of you kissing another guy? Even if it’s just me?”
If it wasn’t so dark, if the moon was fuller, maybe I’d see him blush. “She’s already said something along those lines.” The hand he has on my shoulder slides down my arm. He puts the other behind my neck. “Secondly, there’s nothing ‘just me’ about you.”
Maybe it’s the pot that makes me giggle and step back. “Dude, do lines like that work with Stacey?”
“You keep laughing at me,” he says, “and I’ll change my mind.”
“Okay, okay.” I straighten up and face him again. “Okay.”
He moves close again, puts his hands in the same place, and—well, it feels like he’s diving for my face, but then he is a couple inches taller than me. From where his hand cups my neck, a jolt runs down my spine right to my groin, and my breath goes shallow. Just before contact, he closes his eyes. I keep mine open and watch his lips part.
It erases my mind a little, blocks out my memory for long enough that I’m not quite sure where I am in space. I imagine Bigfoot coming across us in the middle of the road and wonder what he’d make of it, me getting kissed by my straight best friend who has a freaky girlfriend and who tastes like beer and pot and slips his tongue in my mouth and suddenly I can’t remember my name. All I can think of is this strange feeling that I’m outside of my own body and Kyle’s hands are pulling me a little closer and this is the closest I’ve ever been to another guy.
Eventually, it ends. Like a seal being broken, he pulls away a little, enough to sever contact. His eyes are still closed and I scan as much of his expression as I can in the dark, trying to figure out what’s going through his head. He starts to smile before he opens his eyes, and then he giggles. At me? I can’t tell.
“What’s so funny?” I ask, trying to sound as threatening as possible.
He wraps an arm around me and gives me an awkward sideways bear hug.
“Dude,” I say, seriously this time, “what’s up with you?”
“Nothing.” He grins, his teeth gleaming in the dark. “But someday, dude, you’re gonna make a guy’s toes curl.”
“Just not yours,” I say. I’m already thinking about doing the same thing with someone else, though, someone I haven’t met yet, someone who’ll hopefully erase my mind even more.
Kyle rubs a hand over my face. “Too much stubble, man. But seriously, your technique is perfect. You’re a natural.”
“Great. Super. Thanks for the thumbs up. Can we please go back now?”
Kyle looks around. He’s still breathing a little heavy. I think to ask him what he’s looking for, but keep the question to myself. Instead, I take one more look up at the stars. Soon, we’ll be back under the streetlights and unable to catch their gleaming, but right now, you can’t help but see the sky is full of them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Ricker is the author of DETOURS and the YA fantasy The Unwanted, both published by Bold Strokes Books. His writing has appeared in the anthologies Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction, A Family by Any Other Name, Men of the Mean Streets, and others. A 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow, he is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia.
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LF #078 © 2015 Jeffrey Ricker. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, March 2015.
Guest editor: Sarah Taggart
