E.P. Tuazon

E. P. Tuazon

After Bigfoot

I had not spoken with my sister Mari in more than a year when her text box cascaded down my home screen, draping the face of our father, who had died the year before.

“Kamusta ka, kuya? How’re you doin?” the first text read. Before I could reply, my father’s head was replaced by two more texts. “Know anything about Bigfeet?”

“*Bigfoot.”

I swiped our father away with my thumb. “I know the two but not the one.”

“Hahaha,” my sister replied, “If those were the problem I’d just need the right shoes.”

“Hahaha.” Neither one of us was into lols.

“4real, Kuya. I saw it. Dad was right. It’s here.”

Although I already understood her, I still didn’t want to believe it, so my thumbs played dumb. “Right foot or left foot?” I texted.

For a long time, she didn’t reply, and the sudden illogical dread overtook me that I would never read another word from her again.

My father’s heart attack brought us together. I, his son, and her, his estranged daughter, my half-sister from a country he traded for another. He came to the United States for Mari and her mother, but little did they know their happy lives would be apart. Her mother married the village Albularyo, my father married a fellow nurse, had me, and we all lived happily ever after for a while. My parents sent them money. They sent us pounds of cornick and butong pakwan and healing leaves from rainbow eucalyptus in return. Pictures were exchanged. Mari told me she watched me grow above their altar. I told her I watched her grow on my refrigerator. I used to look up to that familiar stranger whose similarities to myself only deepened with time, like how the tide can uncover debris, and how it can bury all the steps that took it there.

When Mari finally texted back, I was out for my evening jog. Siri’s monotone voice rattled into my headphones while Gary Wright’s “Dream Weaver” and the heavy clops of my tired feet beat in rhythm.

“Sister-said-you-should-come-visit-Koo-YEAH,” Siri dribbled into my ear. “Do-you-want-to-reply?”

I stopped and sucked in a cold, painful breath, then took my phone from its arm strap and brushed our father away again.

“I can’t really take any time off work. Maybe summer?”

“Always summer nalang. You either come now or not at all.”

I read the block of text running down my screen. The choppy guitar of “This is It” led into Kenny Loggins’ raspy falsetto by the time I figured out how to reply.

“Hahaha.”

“He won’t be here for long.”

“Who?”

“Bigfoot tangina.”

“Bigfoot. Sorry.” I waited, a cold gust biting my wet back.

“So are you coming?”

“Can’t I wait for him to come back. To come to me?”

“He’s not from where you are. Who knows where he’ll go next.”

I thought of my father, and for the first time since his funeral, I wished he was still alive in my place. It didn’t matter to me if I saw him. It didn’t matter to me if he existed or not.

“Is next week too late?”

“I’ll ask him.”

By the time she replied that he would still be there, I had already walked the mile home.

I was raised in a house where the less you said the better. If you didn’t talk about a problem, it didn’t become one. I never asked about the people in the Philippines or the girl who looked like me, and my father never talked about them.

The only thing that my father talked on and on about was Bigfoot, and it was hard not to call it anything but a problem. Ok, maybe less a problem and more of an obsession. On the outside, my father looked like a model nurse and family man. Hospitable and knowledgeable to his colleagues and patients, kind and loving to his wife and his son. However, my father’s world was inhabited by conspiracy radio, tin-foil hats, and top-tens of grainy youtube videos of the unexplainable and supposedly supernatural.

In his spare time, especially in his retirement, he studied the obscure and unsolved mysteries in the world. Days before he passed away, he obsessed over the figure from his childhood, the most well-known of the cryptids, the one I thought could never be caught outside of the Americas.

“I saw him once in the Philippines,” he said, shuffling through old papers on the couch while my mother tried to figure out how to fill out the last corner of her sudoku at their dining table.

“The Philippines? Like the Rock Apes in Vietnam?”

“No, no.” He spat into faded clippings of men in monster suits, dead trees with people’s faces in them. “It was Bigfoot. The sasquatch. He was real big and real hairy and real brown and real human-looking except for his arms and legs.” He parroted the gesture of Bigfoot’s famous picture. One arm was in front and the other behind while he was sitting down, like he was the top half of the man in all the walk signs.

“Why was he in the Philippines?”

“Hindi ko alam. I don’t know. Maybe he likes it there. Maybe vacation.”

“What was he doing?”

“What else? He was just walking round, trying not to be seen, hiding in trees. Pagpunta dito at doon.”

“Leaving footprints, saving little girls, and checking on the Hendersons?”

“Susmariosep. Serious ako. I saw him with my two eyes.”

“What did you do?”

“What else is there to do? Tumakbo ako! I ran!”

After our texts, I left that Monday in April on the first ticket I could find. I had never been to the Philippines, and I neglected to notice the seventeen-hour flight duration listed on my boarding pass, until I was well past TSA at the International Terminal at LAX. It was my first time flying, and my stomach had been doing somersaults since the night before. In my initial shock, I walked to the gate in my socks, my sneakers still in hand.

Eight hours, three barf bags, two soiled pillows, and four shirt changes later, I had finally settled into my economy seat, squished between the window and an obese Filipino couple.

“It happens to the best of us.” The husband beside me said, his arm well into my personal space, his flaps of excess elbow skin curled between my arm and my rib. I smiled, smelling my old bile settled behind my teeth and feeling the rest ebb up and down my throat.

After another ten hours, I awoke at last to the captain announcing our descent. Below, lines of smoke and dots of fire covered the emerald landscape. The plane quivered down and bounced at the landing, but I was alive. I was finally there.

Before I could get a sense of the ground on my feet, I was pushed through customs and into the wide, humid berth of this new country. Immediately, I was swarmed by a dozen valets calling me sir and asking to carry my one roller bag to their taxi. In the mass of reaching arms, I saw my name written on cardboard, held at waist-level by a thin man leaning on a maroon van. I apologized to my welcoming committee as I made my way to my ride: a man no less than a decade older than me with barely a hair on his long, naked legs. The driver only took notice of me when I was right in front of him.

“Hello. Did Mari send you?” The man squinted, his eyes like two puckering lips. He brought the sign down and leaned closer, his head almost to my chin. “Ano?”

I stepped back and tried to recollect what Tagalog I knew. “Uh, Kili-lala Mari?”

The man looked up at my face and revealed a surprisingly pristine set of teeth. I looked away, catching the valets from before swarm another set of people leaving the airport. “Ito ay ki-lala.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“It’s okay lang. I especk English-English po.” He winked up at me and took my bag. I watched him roll it to his side and begin opening the sliding door to his van.

“So you know Mari?”

“Oo naman. He paid me to pick you up and dribe you po, okay?” He put his back to me and brought my bag up and in the back seat.

“She, you mean.”

“Ay tanga, a-SHE. Sorry na po. Let’s go, tara na!” He stepped aside to let me in.

I walked beside him and put one foot up before I stopped. I held out my hand. “I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Ako? Amado Veracrus po. Nice to meet you po.” He said and shook my hand vigorously.

“Nice to meet you, Amado,” I said, and took my hand away from him before he broke my wrist. I climbed in and fastened my belt while Amado closed the door and walked around to his driver’s seat. I watched him fidget with his rearview mirror before he started the engine, its low, healthy hum immediately flushing the car with cool air.

“Amado?” I asked, and when he ignored me, I said it louder. “Amado?”

He shook in surprise. “Ah, sorry po. Do you need anything po?”

“Are you hard of hearing?”

“Sorry po. My ears do not work good. No good ngayon na.”

“That’s okay. What time do you think we’ll get there?”

Amado lifted his gold watch to his face. After a while, he held it out to me. “Tangina! what does dot say na?”

I looked at the watch, the face of the clock scratched up but still visible.

“It’s ten-thirty-five.”

“Sorry po. My eyes do not work good needer! But do-not-warry po. I drive good neberdaless na!”

I smiled, a cold line running down my back to my quivering knees, as the van pulled onto the expressway out of the airport.

The roads in the Philippines were menacing to say the least, and for once, it made me miss LA traffic. Bumper to bumper, I once saw a man asleep at the wheel beside me. Afraid for his life, I honked my horn to wake him up and inadvertently startled the Tesla in front of me, propelling him into an expensive-looking camper. The guilt from that time resurfaced the moment Amado and I got on the road. The streets of Manila were crowded and yet its cars maneuvered them at incredible speeds. The wheels swayed from the lines that guided them, limbs dangled from Jeepneys like the thick hairs of stampeding wooly mammoths, and the stoplights did very little of what was intended of them. Each intersection was a magical slam dance of almost-accidents. Through the windshield of the man driving around us from the left, I saw the light of a movie playing on a tablet on his dash, and through the truck pushing forward from our right, the devilish glitter of messages being received, eager hands returning heart and prayer emojis, their palms effortlessly steering his course.

And just when I thought the buildings and people and cars would smother us the entirety of our journey, the road broke into wide, green seas of grass and farmland, the city sucked into the smog-smeared horizon behind us. Speckles of carabao and pig dotted the landscape, while the homes hid and smoldered behind domes of leafy plumes. The straight roads led into turns and the turns led down into thick wood and wetter terrain. We only stopped once, to get gas from a station that also sold Parols. I stepped out, too distracted by the array of circles and paper-star symmetry to avoid the frogs that covered the ground. Three twitched under my sneakers, ruined by my carelessness, another stayed limp but warm under the ball of my right foot.

Pathetically, I danced my way to the cashier and his stars, hopping from one frog to the next, a blather of flat amphibians in my wake, until I met him, smiling. Myself, diminished, sad.

“Amerikano ka ba?” He said, handing me my newly purchased Parol draped in newspaper, a frog jumping up and off the counter.

“What gave it away?” I asked, looking at his bare feet, red without remorse.

He pointed with one of his big toes at my soiled shoe, “You still care.”

A week before our father’s funeral, Mari arrived in LA. What stood out to me the most about her was her impeccable posture and incredibly large hands. I bowed before her and lifted the weight of one to my forehead before she snatched it away and whacked my arm with the other. “Bastos!” She said. Her first words to me ever.

Mari was my elder by five years and, by custom and culture, I was supposed to refer to her as my Ate, and greet her with the same respect any Filipino greets their older relative: the plaintive yet intimate kiss on the back of the hand with the younger relative’s forehead. However, Mari and other Filipino women like her disliked the practice, and preferred designating others the reflexive terms. The elder became the younger, the Ate became the Nene, and the Totoy (I, the younger brother) became the Kuya (older, and less youthful). It was an exchange of words that only siphoned the life from those who cared.

“Kuya,” she called me and took me in her arms. She was shorter than me, but I fell into her easily.

That week, we got to know each other. I told her about my life thus far and our father’s obsession with the bizarre, and she told me about the home he left, the people she helped, her mother and stepfather. Like the father we had in common, she left home to attend medical school and fell in love, but it was not far enough to keep her away, and the love not deep enough to make her forget. She returned to her family and brought with her all she learned. Eventually, her mother and father passed away without me knowing. Eventually, she became the sole person the village depended on, and settled into her own solitary life, the one she had always lived apart from my father and me.

“These big hands I got from my mother,” she explained, gripping a cold mug of tea. We had talked for hours by then. “My ama-ama, my other father, he loved her because of these hands. She could hold so much water.”

I looked into my mug, empty from my lack of words. “What does that mean?”

“Ano? What does what mean?”

“Holding so much water?”

Mari smiled, an edge to her lip the same as my father’s, the same as mine. “Walang meaning, Kuya. It’s just what it is. She could hold a lot. It’s very useful.”

We shared a laugh as the light fell, time moving faster between us, as if it were trying to make up or compensate for the distance that had kept us apart.

“Well, I don’t know anything about big hands, but I can tell you about Bigfoot.”

“Swollen foot? Like Edema? You just need to keep active, Kuya. Jog or walk regularly.”

“No, I mean Bigfoot the creature,” I explained and began going into it and dad’s history. The run-ins and snapshots in America. The websites and dad’s obsession. The one occurrence he wouldn’t let go or deny. By the time I finished talking, all the light was gone, and we were nothing but silhouettes of ourselves draped on my walls.

Mari’s large hand engulfed her cup. In the dark, she appeared as if she were holding the mug upside down, trapping something inside. As if what hid underneath could easily show through the cup and her hands if she wasn’t careful. “If you think about it, if Bigfoot exists, anything is possible, diba?”

I felt my fingers and imagined water running through them, falling away and into a stream. “Yeah, but why the Philippines? I don’t think the climate agrees with his fur.”

Mari let go of her mug, raised her hands, stretched, and yawned. Above her, they domed like an umbrella. At my father’s funeral, neither one of us looked past his casket. “I guess we’ll just have to find him and ask.”

By the time our van came to a halt, we were fully engulfed in bark and leaf, in jagged browns and fluttered greens. The wheels eased at the crunch of dirt and sand, and I did not notice the ocean until Amado opened my door and let the loud roar of waves and the buzz of sea breeze scuttle through the fringe foliage and into the dark, tinted crevice of my back seat.

Amado took my bag and let it down. I watched my step and was relieved that nothing would squirm or perish at my departure. Amado shook my hand, drove his van around me, and was gone. I was alone, the light of the coast shining through the thick mass of life in front of me.

“Kuya!” Mari said from an opening beside where the coast beckoned.

I dragged my roller bag to her, its wheels clogged in leaves and grit, and fell into her embrace. She wore a soft white shirt and jean shorts. Her large hands felt my back and I imagined them texting and stumbling between messages on her phone, each finger overlapping letters several times until she got the words right. It was only then that I thought of why I was there and who I was supposed to meet. Mechanically, I handed her the Parol, the newspaper ruffling in the wind.

“Thank you! How was the trip?”

“Long. But I’m alive. Ruined my shoes though,” I said and lifted a sullied foot, the frog guts now caked in sandy mush.

“Tae ng baka? You step in shit?”

“Frogs.”

“Frogs. Susmariosep. You think they would be fast enough to jump out of the way.”

“They were fast. There were just too many of them.”

Mari patted my back then started towards the trail. She held the Parol before us like a lantern swinging at her fingertips. “Come on now. I can get you new shoes.”

We trudged a few minutes through the trail of overgrowth, Mari pulling a branch away at points as if she were holding doors open, the wheels of my roller getting caught in a root or a vine, the star wrapped in newspaper dodging through foliage until we made it to her village. It was smaller than I expected, a dozen shacks of metal roofs and bamboo beams. The ocean masked most of what smells came from lack of plumbing and running water, but there was a constant dull odor I could only understand as decay and smoke.

The villagers did not look bothered or interested by my arrival. An old man with one eye brandished a yellow smile at us on the path, and a plump woman hummed “Don’t Stop Believing” while bathing her naked child in a kiddie pool. In an open doorway (they were all open doorways), three people slept on a straw banig, their backs turned to me, their rear ends exposed and aimed at a large, battery-operated fan by their window. Life went on as usual.

We entered a shed closest to the path down to the beach and found a pile of shoes inside. They were of mixed sizes and tied together by the laces so the pairs didn’t get separated. Mari hung the Parol on a nail above a window, then began rummaging through them.

“What size are you?”

“Ten. What are these?”

She tossed aside a pair of women’s running shoes and a pair of heavy-looking dress shoes. “These are all the extra shoes we have. Most of them are too big for any of us.”

I picked up a pair of Chucks and then a couple of Nikes. Adidas and Skechers rolled down at our feet. “Why is there so many?”

“People keep asking for shoes, but they keep getting sent the wrong size. Always happens. It’s okay. We get what we get. We keep it for when we can use it, nanaman.”

I looked into the soles of a pair of high heels, then at the red ones of a pair of baby shoes. “So, is he still here?”

“Yeah, he’s at the beach.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s okay. Ten, right?”

“Yeah. What do you mean okay?”

“I mean, he’s not bad.”

“But he’s not good?”

“Tangina, good, bad. It doesn’t matter. He’s here.”

“But why is he here? Did he do anything to you?”

“No, no. I just found him. He’s just here.”

“Bigfoot.”

“Bigfoot, talaga!” she said and held out the perfect pair for me in her enormous hands.

He was smaller than I expected. His arms and legs looked like that of a brown gorilla, hairy and leathery and big like my father had described, but his torso was smooth and toned and thin like a model from a perfume ad. At his waist he wore neon-green swim trunks bulging from all the air and whatever else he packed in there. His head was exactly like how it was drawn and described in all the witness descriptions and first-hand accounts. However, here, his hair was combed straight and reeked of essential oils. His eyes disappeared behind wide Gucci sunglasses. And his smile looked more human than monster.

Reclining before me in his beach chair, his legs straight out, his giant feet, the only thing that really met my expectations, dandily waved at me. Upon my arrival, he leaned forward and reached for his beach umbrella.

“Where’s Mar-Mar?” he said, as I stopped just shy of his shade. His voice was light and kind.

“She’s seeing about a sick kid,” I said, although I did not know if it was true or not. Somehow, there was something in the way that she smiled before handing me the Reeboks and leading me to the beach that reminded me of my father when he talked about home. When he was avoiding things that only became worse the more you ignored them, that showed up at your door at the worst of times.

“Oh, Good on her! Please, have a seat. The sand’s nice and cool over here. It’s been under the umbrella.”

I came closer as he adjusted the umbrella over us. Upon closer inspection, his arms and legs were no bigger than mine, just hairier.

He planted the umbrella in the sand and folded his feet in. “You could get closer. I won’t bite. I don’t do that kind of thing.”

I looked around the ground and carefully sat a foot away from him. “Thanks.”

“No problem, my dude. So, what brings you to the peens?”

My ears burned at the word “peens.” “I’m sure Mari told you about our father.”

“Yeah, sure, sure,” he said, his arms up now, his hands cupping his resting bed of hair. “Real sorry he couldn’t be here. Wish I met the guy.”

“I guess, I just wanted to see what the big deal was?”

Bigfoot let out an unnatural giggle in glee. “Now, now! I wouldn’t call myself a big deal. It’s a lot of hype, but I stay Hashtag-Humble. You know what I mean?”

I nodded. What should have been terror and awe overwhelming me was, instead, an uncomfortable gloss of annoyance. “Yeah.”

“I am just who I am, like you’re just who you are. I’ve been around long enough to tell you that. I’ve lived through empires, wars, and all sorts of civilization. Seen black and white turn to color, life before and after Google. I can tell you things. Just ask. Whatever you want to know.”

I looked at his feet. Callused and worn from years, centuries of travel, they had taken on a stone-like, impenetrable sheen. Despite the fanfare and disappointment, he was who he claimed to be. I thought about what I could possibly ask, but there wasn’t really anything I wanted to know. The one who had all the questions was long gone. My father had raised me as his surrogate, but this was still not my world.

“I just got one real question, really.”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you here?”

“Isn’t that the question for all of us, man?”

“No, shut up. I mean, why are you in the Philippines? You don’t belong here!”

For a while, he didn’t respond. The sea masked our breath, our heartbeats, and even our thoughts. There was no way we could reach each other without intending to, without someone taking the first step.

“Listen, you don’t belong here any more than I do. Does there really need to be a reason to be anywhere? The natives, your sister, they aren’t really looking for me. They know what’s there. And what shouldn’t be . . . that’ll take care of itself, you know what I mean?”

I still talk to Mari sometimes, now and then. A text every month. Once, I wrote that I’d come to her wedding, but she knew better than to reply. Better to let messages like that die. The ones that’ll take too long to type out before the next one comes in. The ones you can’t return.

For things like that, pictures were better to exchange. The Christmas after Bigfoot, we swapped pictures of our Parols. Mine: our father’s old hand-medown. Mari’s: the one I gave her. Both pictures came out as blurs that didn’t look anything like stars at all, but I think they said everything we wanted them to. More than we ever could.