In the meantime, I’ve been trying to do the things Bigfoot might actually do. I ambled around, rubbed my back against a tree, ripped up some wildflowers. I sniffed the air and gave two magnificent roars. But the whole time I felt myself slipping out of character and soon I was only a person in the woods, waiting for something painful to happen. I wonder if this is how Jimmy feels when he wakes in the morning — alone and waiting to be hit.
One evening, when it was still summer, we made a picnic and drove to the lake down the road. We ate pears and ham sandwiches and had a long talk about the days when he was first diagnosed and receiving treatment in a hospital a few hours away from our houses and the Bigfoot park. He’s young — thirty, only four years older than me — and says he’s never even held a cigarette; it wasn’t until the hospital that he began to overcome the shock, to look ahead and weigh all that did and did not await him. He would sit around with the other patients and talk about what they would do if the chemotherapy and radiation and surgeries failed, if their hand was called, as he put it. Some wanted to travel to exotic places, while others wanted to find lost lovers or make amends with children they had neglected. Jimmy said he wanted to drive to the Grand Canyon and stay until he was no longer impressed with the view. He couldn’t say why he chose that destination, only that it was the first thing that came to him. But he didn’t go to the Grand Canyon and he couldn’t say why that happened either. It wouldn’t have been so hard, he told me, only a long car ride and a little money. After that night, I thought a lot about why he never went out to Arizona and finally decided it was fear — of having the experience fall short, of realizing too late that he should have made a different choice. For him, it was better to not know what the Grand Canyon looked like, to retain the splendor of his dreams.
I’m so caught up in my waiting and thinking and not being Bigfoot that the shots come as a terrible shock. Two red splats in the center of my brown chest. I fall on my back, my furry legs and arms rising and then hitting the ground with a thump. Air rushes from my lungs; I gasp underneath the mask. A rock digs into my back, and there’s a sharp pain in my forehead. I hear branches snapping, footsteps. The man is standing over me, still holding the gun. He’s shorter than he looked in the tree, with pasty skin and knobby elbows, a white smudge of sunscreen on the tip of his nose. He’s wearing a tee-shirt with a bull’s eye on the front and camouflage pants.
He nudges me with the toe of his boot and, forgetting I’m supposed to be dead, I squirm to the side. He frowns and raises the gun. I remember my safe word, but I don’t say it. I want to believe I stopped myself because I am playing this role to perfection, because I want the killing to be as good as this man hoped, because if he’s dying, I want him to walk away feeling satisfied with his life. But the truth is, my chest burns and I’m dizzy and I open my mouth to say Jesus and no sound comes out.
He shoots me once in the neck and again in the shoulder. I shriek and press my rubber paw against my arm. I hear quick footsteps, then nothing at all. When my breathing steadies and I’m able to stand, I take off the mask and touch the hard lump on my neck. The ground is speckled with red paint. The man is gone.
“I was always one of those people who assumed I had my whole life to do whatever I wanted,” Jimmy says without any prompting. He talks like this all the time now. I call them philosophy spells.
“Like what?” I’m sitting at his kitchen table, drinking a whiskey and coke. Jimmy has yet to comment on the welt on my neck, which has swollen to the size of a lemon. The bumps on my chest are smaller, but still bright pink. I came home late because I had to clean my costume in the trailer’s bathroom. I picked off the dead leaves that were stuck to the fur, then placed the suit in the bathtub and rinsed away the red paint with a detachable shower head.
“I don’t know,” he says. “See the Great Wall of China. Climb a mountain. Get married. Have a kid.” He opens a beer and joins me at the table. “The point is I never felt much urgency.”
“The last two aren’t exactly the kind of thing you’d want to rush into.”
“I guess,” he replies. “But maybe the only reason we tell ourselves that is because we think we have all this time.” He spreads his arms and turns his palms upwards; the skin on his wrists is as translucent as tracing paper. I remember him telling me about his last day of work, how the weight of the bag bruised his shoulder and he carried it until he couldn’t anymore, how he dumped all the mail onto the sidewalk and began tearing through the pile: phone bills, postcards, renewal notices, credit card offers, booklets of coupons. He told me that even though he’d never become close with anyone on his route, he was suddenly overcome with a desire to know what their lives contained. Because of his health, he didn’t get into much trouble, but was talked into resigning with a year of disability compensation. They only agreed to the disability because they knew the payments would outlive me, he says whenever the checks come, though he lets me take them to the bank and make his deposits all the same.
We’re quiet for a while. I finish my drink and make myself another, this time pouring straight whiskey into the glass. The ceiling light flickers. Earlier in the evening, I washed the dishes and scrubbed the floor. The room looks dull and empty. When I offer to get Jimmy a second beer, he shakes his head and squeezes the can until the metal dents. I stand behind him and rest a hand on his shoulder. He lets me do what I know best: acquiesce, accommodate, allow my desires to melt like wax around the emergency of another life.
“It’s almost a relief to not consider the future,” he says.
“To not wonder if I’ll find what I was looking for or just be disappointed. Everything falls away in the face of this.” He tips his head back and looks at me. His eyes are bloodshot. “So it doesn’t really matter if you love me or not, does it?”
“Of course it does,” I tell him because I think it’s the right thing to say. With Jimmy it seems more important to say the right thing than to be honest. Or maybe I have it backwards. But it does matter in a way, although not in the sense that it could change what’s happening to him.
“What did you do at work today?” he asks. I can tell he wants to change the subject.
“I got killed.”
“They can do that?”
“Apparently.”
“Is that why you’ve got that lump on your neck?”
“Yep.” I brush a clump of hair from his forehead. “Shot dead with a paint ball gun.”
He hunches over the table and hangs his head. I prepare myself to comfort. He surprises me with laughter.
At two in the morning, I’m woken by a barking dog. By the time I kick away the covers and sit up, the sound has already faded. My head is fogged with the remnants of a dream, but all I can see is blood on the corner of my sister’s mouth drying into a shape that resembles a Rorschach blot. Jimmy is curled underneath the sheets, his breathing nearly imperceptible. I watch until my eyes adjust to the darkness and I can make out the rising and falling of his chest. His face is pressed into the pillow, his lips parted so I can see the wet bulge of his tongue.
I get out of bed and wander into the kitchen. I can still smell the cleaning products I used on the floor. I open the refrigerator and hang my head inside the cool fluorescent glow until the light hurts my eyes. Then I hoist myself onto the kitchen counter, lift the phone to my ear, and dial my sister’s number. As the phone rings, I remember the late hour and nearly hang up, but Sara is already mumbling on the other end of the line.