Chapter 15

I was able to book Bigfoot Stalks! for the Crow’s Nest only a few weeks after its release. Even though we were on the third-run circuit for regular features, we had some muscle with the distributor for exploitation films.

The Dawsons drove over to see it with us, and we all sat anxiously in the open-air theater waiting for dusk.

Then there it was. There I was. Bigfoot leaped from a cliff into a swarm of hand-held camera angles meant to disguise the lack of special effects. I heard a growl I had not made. The girl backpackers whose down sleeping bags I had shredded on the trail held each other and screamed. Bigfoot jumped high in the air and landed on both feet. The ghost tissues in my leg throbbed. That was one stunt I could never do again.

“Is that really you?” Nat asked me.

“Sure it’s me,” I said, looking at the hulking, furry, terrestrial creature attacking motorists now on the Interstate, pulling skiers out of their lift seats. The animal stormed into the New Mexico state capitol, savaging several senators. Then there he was at the top of the miraculous stairway, shot through the heart by the zoologist hero, staggering downward, then growling piteously and rolling to the bottom. Dead.

We found my name in the credits and applauded. When it was over my leg was hurting more than usual, and I popped a painkiller and limped to the car.

“They should have called it Bigfoot Sucks” Mary Katherine said. “That was terrible. But I was proud of you.”

“Do they really have those?” Nat asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s like the Loch Ness monster. Mythical.”

“Well,” Ella said, with rare irony. “We don’t know how to thank you for such a delightful evening.”

Brad mumbled some pleasantry. He seemed more confused than usual. We stood there for a while in the chilly salt air and made plans to get together again.

“I just had to call you,” the Seamstress said over the phone. “Have you seen the movie?”

“I saw it last night, as a matter of fact.”

“Wasn’t it great?”

“Yes,” I said. “How have you been?”

“Miserable. I’m back in Santa Fe. Working on another movie. Harry Truman vs. Godzilla. I don’t know why, but when I saw Bigfoot I just started missing you terribly. You were really good, Jeff.”

“Thank you. It was the costume.”

“How are things?” she asked.

“I’m married.”

“That’s good. I’m not surprised. I’m happy for you. How are the porpoises?”

“I’m not doing that anymore. I’m running a movie theater now.”

“A real businessman. How’d you get into that?”

“Inheritance.”

“Someday,” she said, “I’ll come down to see you. I’m glad that you’re married, I think it’s the best thing for you. Oh, I’m supposed to ask you if you want to be in the sequel.”

I could almost feel the sharp, delirious mountain air coming through the phone with her voice.

That week I closed down the theater for the winter. In a package of promotional material for upcoming movies there was an announcement for Waldo the Wacky Porpoise, “coming this summer to a theater near you.”

It was time for Mary Katherine to finish with her research and begin writing her thesis. We went out in the little Boston Whaler one last time, on a November morning with a wind-chill factor of thirty degrees. It was the first time I had noticed that winter had arrived, a soft, even change in the quality of the weather that deepened and darkened the water.

The sky was overcast and close around us. Mary Katherine wore her parka, the hood up around her knit cap, the tan on her face replaced by flushed ruddy skin. Nat sat facing her, trying to keep warm between my knees. She did not speak into the tape recorder, simply piloted the boat up Lydia Ann and into the still, blanketed waters of Aransas Bay.

I could feel the ease and the panic beneath the murky waters, the struggle for sensation among the creatures there, and thought of Sammy’s new environment, the Florida lagoon that was as clear as an arctic crevasse. Someday, I thought, it would be pleasant to look into that water, but I knew I wanted this brooding seascape around me for the rest of my life.

My leg ached in the cold wind. The gray water rocked itself smoothly in the inland basin, and I thought of all my dead submerged there, in water nearly as thick and abiding as the earth itself.

Then in the center of Aransas Bay we saw the shapes, after all this time such an unexpected, tantalizing sight. Through my binoculars I could make out Triangle Fin, feeding with his family in the northernmost extent of their range.