Abbey Birkhead

Dr. Anderson
Prose Fiction
I Am Bigfoot

The car is cramped. Trudy has the air blasting, a sound that competes with the syrupy sweet
woman on the radio selling us a year’s worth of eye cream. “Turn that shit off,” I say. It doesn’t
fit the mood of our getaway car. She switches to 95.5, tapping her purple flip flop to Aerosmith’s
‘Dream On.’ Much better. We are running away together. Trudy, her dog Buster, and me.
Bonnie, Clyde, and a collie— all packed up in a silver Celica.

We met in the woods behind her house. I was checking my traps, hoping to have caught a
raccoon in one of them, and this woman runs up. She’s wild-looking, searching high and low for
something. “Have you seen a dog?” she said. “He’s a collie, Buster’s his name. There should be
a tag on him.”

I wiped my hands on my jeans, sticking one out to shake. “I’m Jerry. Do you want help
looking?” You might think I’m crazy for offering my time up to help this random lady, but my
old man always said time with a beautiful woman is never time wasted. I figured it wouldn’t hurt
to look around a bit.

We walked through those woods for about 15 minutes before stumbling across one of my cage
traps. She was in the middle of a spiel about how she rescued Buster, who was a runt, from the
pound. “He was just so small for a collie, you know, and the owner thought that meant he was
sickly,” she said. Interestingly enough, whatever was inside of my trap was barking. I peeked my
head down and saw that it was Buster.

“Would you take a look at that?” I said, already bending over to open the hinge. Buster shot out
like a bat out of hell, taking off towards the direction of the house. Trudy whistled for him to
come back, but he just kept on going.

“He doesn’t listen much,” Trudy said, running a grimy hand through her hair. The combination
of the dirt on her and the trowel in her back pocket told me that she’d been gardening when she
realized Buster had run off.

“Maybe his brain is runt-sized, too,” I said. She laughed at that, and I liked the sound of it.

In the weeks after that summer day, I found myself in the neighborhood more often than not. I
would walk the line of trees that blended the woods and her backyard, pretending to check traps
that I didn’t really care about anymore. She would turn and wave in the yard, one gardening-
gloved hand up against her brow to shade her face from the sun.

After a while, she started inviting me in. It was about then that I realized she was with
somebody. You see, Trudy wasn’t the type to wear a wedding ring. I only knew he existed
because of the picture on the fridge. I’d see it sometimes when I was reaching for a beer, but I
didn’t pay him no mind. I had decided that he didn’t deserve her. If he appreciated even a
fraction of the woman he married, he would have never left her to rot in the house all day.

Trudy and I started pretending it was our house. After we got a few drinks in us, we would turn
the radio on and dance around the living room. Classic rock was our favorite, because it made us
feel wild, free, and like a lot more than what we really were.

It was during these alcohol-induced moments that we would talk about running away. We
planned for Oregon, mostly because we saw on the computer that it had a lot of nature. It was
also on the other side of the country, which gave us the most adventure we could get a hold of
without leaving the states. Trudy also liked that it was far enough away from her husband. She
said a lot of stuff like “He’ll probably only notice I’m gone once he gets the divorce papers in the
mail.”

So here we are, on our way to Oregon. Neither one of us had much of a life before, but now we
know that we’re getting a second chance. If you ask me, it sounds a lot like fate. A collie
wanders into a raccoon trap… a woman wanders into a man’s life. All I know is that a better
future is at the end of this winding road.