In the Woods Read online

  Gymnastics is good like that. So is the guitar. Sometimes when you have skills—even minimal skills like doing a back tuck—that other people don’t have, they forget that you and your dad are just on the other side of normal. My bass skills were going to be insane, because I was heading to New York City, specifically Manhattan, to hang out with Mom this summer and work on my music and check out the indie scene and it was going to be amazing.

  But that ended up being a nonstarter.

  And here we are.

  Like I said, Dad teaches kindergarten. When people ask me what he does in the summer, I tell them he’s an amateur animal behaviorist and that usually stops the questions. It’s lying, but I think it’s the kind that God forgives pretty quickly, not the kind that keeps you in the eternal fires of hell, which is basically where we are right now.

  Hell.

  Also known as Oklahoma.

  Honestly, I’m sure Oklahoma is a fine place when it’s not early summer and when you aren’t stuck in a Subaru station wagon with the heat rippling into the car in waves you can almost touch with your fingers as your dad babbles on and on and on about werewolves. Yes, werewolves.

  “A werewolf is also called a lycanthrope, from the Greek λυκάνθρωπος: λύκος, as in lukos, “wolf,” and άνθρωπος, anthrōpos, ‘man,’” he says. “How fascinating is that, Chrystal?”

  He guns the Subaru around a truck full of cows. They are adorable, actually. I wave at them. I hope they don’t die via Bigfoot or other means. I hope they don’t feel as powerless in their summer as I do in mine.

  “It’s fascinating, Dad.” I pull my leg up so that I can inspect my toes. I took my flip-flops off states ago. “Are we almost there?”

  “That we are, my little helper! I know you’re disappointed that your mom and Bill went to Europe, but I’m excited to have you with me.” He reaches over and rubs my hair. “It’s an adventure, right?”

  “Right.”

  I must not sound too excited because he goes, “Try not to be too disappointed, dear one. It’ll hurt your old man’s ego.”

  “Sorry.” Guilt pushes into my chest. It’s not his fault Mom and Bill ditched me for Europe, and it’s not really even Dad’s fault that he’s so into weird. So I give him my best happy face and say, “I love you, old man, but you probably shouldn’t call me ‘dear one.’ It makes you sound silly.”

  We can’t pass, so we’re stuck behind another cow truck for a while.

  “Good, I love you too.” He smiles back. “Silly is a good thing. I noticed you have a tattoo on your ankle. Isn’t it illegal for minors to get tattoos in Maine without parental written permission?”

  I suck in my lips, lift my eyebrows, and try to look innocent. “It’s a lollipop, though.”

  “You are a sucker for lollipops!”

  “Ha!” I punch his arm and then we sort of just drive more. I watch the cows’ faces. They are all so alike, stuck there staring at a landscape of green trees and rolling hills. “You know, ‘Boredom is the root of all evil—the despairing refusal to be oneself.’”

  “You are still on the Kierkegaard kick, aren’t you?”

  “Yep. All Søren Kierkegaard. All dead philosopher. All the time.”

  “‘The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted,’” Dad quotes at me, as if I don’t know it by heart.

  I let that one settle for a second. “Is that why you do this? Search for weird things that don’t exist. Because it’s difficult?”

  “Partly.” He turns his head to look at me. For a second there is a strange, almost sad look in his eyes, but he blinks it away and then there is only a hint of mischief. “And partly because being bored is the root of all evil. Don’t want to become evil.”

  “You couldn’t ever.” I turn away and reach out toward the cows. The wind whips my hand backward and pushes my hair toward my dad, who has finally had enough, and guns the Subaru in front of the cow truck. It’s a bit close, so the cow truck driver blows his horn. I jump. My dad laughs.

  “I’m refraining from giving him the finger,” he says.

  I’ve turned around. “He didn’t hold back at all.”

  “Two-fisted one-finger salute? Did that fellow give me the two-fisted salute?”

  “Totally.” I wave at the truck driver in a way that I hope seems apologetic and not obnoxious. Then I sit back in my seat, readjusting my seat belt and starting the examination of my toes again. I’m a bit obsessed with my toes when I’m bored. Weird runs in the family, I guess. I give it up and grab my bass from the backseat. I will practice even without a mentor until I can get one.

  Dad said if we have any summer left after this case, he’ll bring me to New York himself. He hates New York and its “teeming humanity,” so this is a big deal. Unlike Mom, Dad keeps his promises and he doesn’t forget me. He’s weird, but not that kind of weird.

  A couple years ago, Mom forgot to pick me up from school and bring me to a bass lesson. She was still living in the state then. I texted her and texted her and finally got a ride with Zoe’s mom. My mom picked me up from Zoe’s, and as soon as I climbed into the car she looked at me all bright eyed.

  “I have met the most interesting man,” she said.

  “That’s why you forgot me?” My voice was tiny and angry. I belted myself into the car and hugged my bass in front of me. Usually I put it in the backseat, but not that day.

  “Oh, honey. Mommy didn’t forget about you, but he was just so interesting.” She looked at me then, finally, and I guess she realized how shattered I was because she said, “Don’t worry. You come first with Mommy. Always.”

  She lied.

  I strum the memory away, and as we loop and climb and coast down green slopes on the hilly highway, Dad starts again. “I like to think about how many places in this world have Bigfoot myths. There’s…”

  From the way he’s going on and on, I think I’m going to be inspecting my toes a lot this summer.

  * * *

  We have to slow down for a truck loaded with logs that’s going, like, twenty miles per hour around a sharp curve in the highway.

  “I thought Oklahoma was all prairie,” I say as I text my friend Zoe another positive affirmation about her character and how no, she should not go out with the guy who does the go-karts at Seacoast Fun Park. When I’m done, I add to my dad’s conversation further. “You know, just flat and covered in waving strands of golden wheat. Like in the song.”

  “That’s the western part of the state,” Dad says. “The east is pretty much all like this, according to what I read. We’re still in the Ozark Mountain range.”

  “I wonder if they drive faster in the flat part of the state.”

  He laughs at me. I finally put my bass safely away and reach for the manila folder behind me.

  “I knew you’d succumb to curiosity,” he says.

  “Succumb to boredom is more like it,” I retort as I open the folder.

  The first page is not mutilated cows, thank God; it’s just facts about Cherokee County, Oklahoma. There’s a mere forty-two thousand people in the entire county: half are white; a third are Native American. It doesn’t say what nation, but I’m assuming Cherokee, hence the name.

  “Not a lot of people here, Dad,” I say. “I think the werewolves would get bored. All the bigfeet, too.”

  “Funny.” He smiles. “The horse who starred on Mister Ed is from here. That’s something.”

  I must give him a blank look because his face turns into disappointed-dad mode.

  “You have no idea who Mister Ed is, do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ve totally failed as a father.” He groans and turns down the radio. “How about Robert J. Conley or Jackson Narcomey or Hastings Shade or Sonny Sixkiller?”

  “Nope. Nope. Nope and … nope.” I flip to a new page. It’s a contact list.

  “Wilson Rawls?”

  “He wrote Where the Red Fern Grows.” I act incredibly triu
mphant about knowing this because I know Dad will love it.

  “Finally,” he says, all pretend-exasperated-father.

  “That was the saddest book ever. We read it in fourth grade. Why do they only make you read sad books in school? Someone always has to die.”

  “Not in kindergarten,” he says proudly.

  I nod and start perusing the new page, which is a newspaper article. “True. It’s The Cat in the Hat and Fancy Nancy all the time in kindergarten. You know, it’s never too early to teach those developing minds that life is full of tragedy and horror. Give them some Stephen King. Some Hamlet.”

  He laughs and scruffs up my hair.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.” He switches into the fast lane of the two-lane highway again. This time it’s to go around a big green tractor. A guy is driving a tractor on the highway! I resist the urge to text this info to my friends.

  Instead, I ask, “All your stuff. This is mostly all about Bigfoot. I thought you said this was a werewolf sighting.”

  “Well, not technically. I have a theory about Bigfoot and werewolves and it’s really pretty interesting, but it’s not an accepted theory at all, Chrystal. I’m still developing it, you know? And anyway, once we start investigating I would rather if you didn’t say ‘werewolf’ to anyone. I think it will spook them and maybe undermine our credibility.”

  “Dad…”

  “What?”

  “‘We start investigating’?” Seriously?

  He gives me his best win-you-over smile, which is half four-year-old boy, half Cookie Monster. “I don’t want you to just hang out in the hotel room playing your bass the whole time, Chrystal. That’s not social. When you were little, you loved helping me. Remember when we looked for Gourd Head in Brazil?”

  Gourd Head is a humanoid cryptic that is supposedly about three feet tall. He has been spotted in Brazil, where they call him negro d’agua, which means “black man of the waters.” His head is super-big and looks like a gourd and he has webbed hands and feet. Needless to say, we didn’t find him.

  “You liked Brazil,” my dad offers. “We had fun there.”

  “Dad. I was five and you dangled me over the side of the boat as bait.”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You totally did.”

  “It was because you liked to be dangled over the side of the boat. You thought it was fun.”

  I don’t respond. It’s not really the best social policy to spend the summer looking for monsters with your dad. Plus, it usually means intruding on people’s lives, or even worse, talking to stuffy professors.

  Finally he says, “I’ll pay you if you help.”

  I smile because I need money for gas and strings and a new amp. Seriously, what choice do I have, anyway? “Deal. Plus, with my mad skills, we might get to New York sooner.”

  “Right.” He pulls off the highway and onto an exit ramp, which is a minor miracle because we’ve been traveling for-freaking-ever, and says, “But only if it doesn’t get too dangerous. If it gets too dangerous, all bets are off.”

  “No dangling me over the side of the boat for bait this time,” I tease.

  His face loses all its jokey dadness and becomes deadly serious. “No way in hell.”

  “No way in Oklahoma,” I rephrase. He doesn’t get the joke.

  3

  LOGAN

  “I don’t know,” I repeat. “I never saw anything like it.”

  Dad. Mom. The sheriff. The lean, weather-beaten guy from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. A reporter for the Tahlequah, then the Tulsa, newspapers. I told them all the same thing over the course of a week. Now I have to say it again to Mrs. McKee, Mom’s friend from church.

  “Did you read about it in the Tulsa paper?” I ask.

  “No, Logan, I saw it in one of the supermarket papers,” she answers, her voice full of awe. “The ones that go all across the country.”

  This makes no sense. “What?”

  “The National Enquirer, I think it was. Maybe Weekly World News,” she confides. “‘Boy Sees Bigfoot Eating Cow,’ the headline said. The paper said your dogs saved your life. Is that true?”

  “Not exactly, Mrs. McKee,” I tell her. I can’t believe this. They’ll be saying I partied with Elvis on a UFO next. Mom finally comes out of the bathroom, her head wrapped in a fluffy pink towel, so I hand the phone off and go to my room.

  The notebook with the horrible rhymes about the moon and crickets is in the drawer of my night table. After church, I take it out and flop down on my bed, opening to the page after the poem, the page where I wrote down everything that happened that night. I’ve read it several times since seeing the thing the papers want to call Bigfoot. I couldn’t sleep at the time. I was awake all that night, afraid I’d hear that horrible yelling howl again. So, I wrote. I don’t think I could ever forget the details, but I wanted to write them down anyway. It’s nothing like a poem. It’s details with no meaning. Words that make no sense. I want sense. I want to understand what happened, what that was, why I saw it.

  I haven’t heard the monster again. It sounds so babyish to say “the monster,” like what I saw is a boogeyman hiding in my closet. But, like I keep telling people, I don’t know what it is. Could it be Bigfoot, like Mrs. McKee said the tabloid paper called it? The sheriff and the wildlife guy didn’t suggest that. None of the reporters had, either. I never called it Bigfoot, and I didn’t even talk to a reporter from the National Enquirer, or whatever paper it was. I should probably go into town and get a copy of it to see what it says. I kept saying I didn’t know what it was, but people in town had jumped on the Bigfoot wagon right off, too. Could it have been? Or was it just some large dude hopped up on roids, pulling off calves’ heads for kicks or his YouTube channel or something.

  Eight days have gone by since that night. We haven’t heard the thing, and no more of our cattle have been killed. Everything has been very peaceful, except for the reporters and people calling because they read about me in the papers. My family is acting like everything is normal, even though reporters randomly call. We do chores. We sleep. We eat together. Life goes on, even though there are monsters.

  I read my description of the monster again. It was extra dark that night because of the cloud cover. In the woods. Maybe it was just a bear. A bear in the dark, seen by a farm kid who has a good imagination and a knack for bad poetry. Maybe I’m just obsessing about it because it’s like a good poem. I know it exists, but I can’t make it. I can’t understand it. I can’t … Maybe it’s just me imagining away my humdrum life where every Sunday we go to church and have roast beef for dinner. Who knows?

  Bears can stand on their hind legs.

  They can.

  The whole thing is just crazy. I start to close the notebook, but then see the poem again. I try reading it aloud, just in case it doesn’t sound so bad. It’s horrible. The theme and scheme aren’t so different from, say, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Summer Sun,” but while his lines shimmer with brilliance, mine seem to give off rays of garbage stink. It’s almost enough to make me wish Mrs. Walker had never praised a poem I wrote in her creative writing class a couple years ago. It was supposed to be a blow-off class, an easy A, not a class that would lead to frustration years later.

  “The poem you judged to be the best in class is…” Mrs. Walker had really drawn it out for effect. Our poems had been typed and posted around her room for a week, and all her students got time to put a mark on the one they liked the best. I remember how nervous I was, waiting, watching her eyes twinkle behind her thick glasses. Then she said it. “‘Moonlight Dancer’ by Logan Jennings.”

  The class had clapped half-heartedly as Mrs. Walker handed me my prize, a denim-covered journal, like a real hardcover book, with blank lined pages. That journal is in my underwear drawer, its pages reserved for final drafts.

  My winning entry wasn’t very good, but I was one of the few students to take the assignment, and the contest, seriously. I wrote about an im
aginary girl and gave it a Lord of the Rings kind of feel. I remember the first couple stanzas. Idly, I copy them into this notebook, under the thing about the crickets.

  In a meadow in the forest of my mind,

  Among winter flowers of unknown kind,

  A spritely maiden dances all alone

  In fragrant evening, all alone.

  Flashing feet—my graceful elf—

  She dances there, dances for herself.

  Her laughter blinds me to my way.

  When she sees me, she will not stay.

  Won’t you dance for me?

  Won’t you stay with me,

  Tonight?

  And do what? There was something in the poem about dancing together under the stars. My friends harassed me for a while over that poem, teasing me for getting in touch with my sensitive side. More than one had asked friends to ask me if I’d written it about them. I was flattered at first. Until I found out they hoped I didn’t write it about them.

  Why write poetry, anyway? Girls? Money? Nobody makes any money at poetry. Yeah, I’ve checked that out. Even poets who have won Pulitzer Prizes and been named poet laureate of their states don’t usually make a living at it. They’re professors or something. But it’s not the money. Can anyone really write for money? Doesn’t it have to be for love? Or at least the need to say something? I feel like I have something to say, but I just can’t get it out.

  Or maybe I just don’t know what it is I have to say yet. Maybe that’s why everything I do write seems so forced. So bad. So very, very bad.

  I put the notebook away and go downstairs. In Tahlequah, David and Yesenia are probably snuggled together in a movie theater, watching a romantic comedy. On the Jennings farm, however, Saturday night is game night and it’s my turn to choose. My sisters, fifteen-year-old Kelsey and ten-year-old Katie, are already sitting at the dining table, munching popcorn as I go to the coat closet, where the games are stored on a high shelf.