Bigfoot Goes to the DMV

by Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom

Bigfoot folded his large frame into an orange plastic chair and grinned at the balding guy waiting next to him at the DMV. “You know, it’s a shame we got busted, because the Cryptid Party Bus was especially fabulous that night.”

The guy next to him, whose name was Ted, nodded politely but wanted nothing more than to be left alone to do his book of crossword puzzles. But Bigfoot was not the greatest at reading social cues. All humans just looked very small and hairless to him. So, Bigfoot continued: “All of my regular passengers were there. The pack of werewolves who sit in the back row. The will-o-the-wisps who bop around and light up the inside of the bus like a disco ball. The antisocial unicorn with a bum leg who sits in the wheelchair accessible spot and sips from her flask of moonshine. And of course, her flask magically refills itself and she always shares with the rest of the passengers, so she’s awfully popular.”

Most people would have been amazed to be sitting next to an actual Bigfoot, but Ted had a deep-seated aversion to excitement. Ted threw up not only on roller coasters, but on Ferris wheels. He worked as a dental hygienist and always bought the same brand of underwear and T-shirts by the dozen. As a kid, he’d hated that his family moved every two years, so what he’d dreamed of was a steady, predictable life.

Ted raised his eyebrows and made monosyllabic replies like “Huh” and “Wow” as Bigfoot went on: “Then there’s the swamp monster who brings his guitar and takes requests. The werewolves usually ask for the Clash, and the wisps love ‘Free Fallin’.’ Search me how he plays so well with his webbed fingers. He’s like the Django Reinhardt of swamp monsters.” Bigfoot paused and scratched an itch on his hirsute shoulder. “But we had some newcomers that night, and that’s where everything went to hell in a handbasket.”

Who still used expressions like “to hell in a handbasket”? Eight-foot-tall cryptids, apparently, Ted thought. He was there to renew the registration on his station wagon. The DMV had white walls, a beige linoleum floor, and a high ceiling lined with rows of fluorescent lights. The waiting room smelled like coffee and ink from dozens of ballpoint pens being used to fill out forms on dozens of clipboards.

The other people holding paper tags with dauntingly high numbers began to eavesdrop and draw closer to Bigfoot as he told the tale. They assumed Bigfoot would be shy, but years of driving the bus had made him accustomed to chatting with all sorts of creatures. The DMV wasn’t very crowded that day, and Bigfoot felt confident because he was having an especially good hair day.

“You might think the whole passel of hobgoblins would cause problems, but they mostly keep to themselves and gamble with each other at seven-card stud,” Bigfoot said. “They’re regulars, too. No, the one who got us busted that night was the Mothman.”

A teenager who was there getting her learner’s permit perked up and whispered to her mom, “I love Mothman!” Other waiting customers pulled out their cell phones to take pictures and video, but the sasquatch squashed that with a baritone growl. “No pictures.” He straightened his green knit cap over his ears. The rest of his body was covered with dark brown fur.

Bigfoot had heard plenty of stories about humans but hadn’t spent time around them before, so he found their strange behavior oddly intriguing. He decided he was enjoying the audience and continued his story. “Mothman said he was out visiting from West Virginia. Said the movie about him had got it all wrong. He’d never seen the Pacific Northwest. He wanted to check out the Seattle ghost tour, get some bubble tea, see if he could fly to the top of the Space Needle. You know, standard tourist stuff.”

A shy college student with pink hair, who had listened to all the episodes of a Bigfoot podcast, mustered the courage to ask a question. “How long have you been driving the Cryptid Party Bus?”

“I’ve been driving the bus since—well, practically since motor vehicles were invented.” Bigfoot peered at Ted’s wristwatch curiously. “Maybe a hundred years? I’ve never understood how you folks tell time. Or why.” He gave a bemused smile, showing a gap between his front teeth.

Up until that day, the strangest thing that had ever happened to Ted was when a patient swallowed a porcelain crown, waited for it to pass, and brought it with him to the dental office asking to have it re-attached. Actually, American health insurance was so bad that this had happened more than once. Sitting next to Bigfoot was more than he’d bargained for on a Tuesday afternoon.

“I’ve replaced the bus a few times over the years, but right now it’s an old school bus covered with this enchanted paint that the hobgoblins make,” Bigfoot said. “It kept us out of sight from humans for a long, long time. Well, up till a few weeks ago, obviously.”

The audience oohed and ahhed appreciatively. The college student started to sketch Bigfoot in her notebook, and he looked at her curiously but didn’t ask her to stop.

“Where was I? Right, when Mothman came to visit, he took things too far. We all like to paint the town red a little, except me, since I’m the designated driver. But Mothman, he really didn’t know how to hold his liquor.”

“That night he had a little too much moonshine (OK, a lot too much) and insisted that I pull over. You know, I wasn’t keen to clean up the consequences if Mothman got sick inside the bus. So, I pulled over.”

Several of the onlookers surreptitiously typed texts to their friends about the spectacle unfolding, but the DMV (like all DMVs in the whole of creation) was in a dead zone for cell reception. So instead, they moved over a few seats to be closer to Bigfoot.

Bigfoot continued: “What we didn’t count on was that while Mothman was losing his cookies on the side of the road, near a stand of Douglas firs, he was spotted by the state Department of Cryptids. The D-O-C.”

This DMV was not a place for the impatient, the faint of heart, or the leery of acronyms, Ted thought. He didn’t mind a little bit of a roundabout story. He and his husband liked to watch long PBS documentaries on the weekends and bake snickerdoodles.

“Apparently the DOC is this office that fields wacky phone calls and catalogs photos of lake monsters, dogmen, stuff like that,” Bigfoot said. “A lot of bogus sightings, of course, like coywolves with mange. The DOC likes to go on field trips to wander around the woods and look for evidence. That’s how they spotted us that night. The Mothman is pretty noticeable even in the dark, what with his glowing red eyes and his ten-foot wingspan.”

“It would have been fine, they might just have asked for his autograph, if it weren’t for the fact that the state had threatened to cut funding for the DOC unless they produced results. So, the office wrote up Mothman for a drunk and disorderly, and they insisted I come in and get my commercial driver license.”

There was a moment of impressed silence. Then a middle-aged man wearing a black leather jacket with tattoos all the way down to his knuckles turned to Bigfoot and asked, “How do you drive the bus given the, uh, size of your feet?”

Bigfoot smiled and wiggled his toes. He wasn’t self-conscious about his feet. In fact, he thought they were one of his best features. They gave him excellent balance and served as built-in snow shoes in winter. “I had to replace the pedals to fit my feet. Just a larger surface area, really, was all I needed. More space between the brake and gas pedal so I don’t accidentally hit both at once.”

The man in the leather jacket nodded, like this made perfect sense. He went back to sipping from his paper cup of coffee.

Then to everyone’s surprise, Ted finally said something more than a monosyllable. “You have surprisingly little tartar for someone who’s never seen a dentist,” he said appreciatively.

“Thank you,” Bigfoot said. “I chew on a pinecone every night before bed.”

The DMV clerks stopped typing to listen in, too, leaning forward with their elbows planted on the countertops of their stations.

Ted felt an unfamiliar flicker of curiosity driving him on. “What kind of fare do the…creatures pay to ride the bus?” he asked.

“I don’t charge money for bus fare,” Bigfoot said. “Anyhow, I don’t use human currency. But everybody brings something. The unicorn shares her moonshine, the hobgoblins regularly repaint the bus, the will-o-the-wisps provide party lighting, and the werewolves bring homemade banana bread. They bake it into mini loaves to make it easier to pass out, and they add chocolate chips because the unicorn is allergic to tree nuts.”

“That sounds amazing,” the other customers murmured. Ted didn’t like banana bread, but even he had to admit it sounded like a decent time.

“Do you live around here?” the college student asked. “You were talking about Mothman visiting Seattle, but, well—” she gestured at the Oregon DMV driver’s manual that Bigfoot held in one of his large hands.

For a minute, the room got so quiet that they could all hear the fluorescent lights buzzing. “Where I live is…confidential,” Bigfoot said finally. “But I can tell you that the party bus travels a route near the Washington-Oregon border.” The college student blushed a little and nodded.

One of the other customer’s numbers was called over the loudspeaker, but he ignored it and the blinking red sign that lit up overhead because he was so engrossed in Bigfoot’s story.

“Can we ride the party bus?” an older woman with big purple sunglasses asked.

Bigfoot shook his head. “Sorry, folks, no humans allowed on the party bus. We have to be pretty strict about that one.” He smoothed a cowlick on the side of his face.

Finally, he peered down at his crumpled paper ticket and then up at the blinking red sign. “That’s me,” he said. A sigh of disappointment rippled through the crowd. “Shoot, speaking of how I don’t charge currency for bus fare, this form says I need to pay ten human dollars to take the CDL test. Is that a lot of money? Could anyone spare a dollar?”

Everyone around him was eager to chip in, reaching into their wallets and purses. When they realized Bigfoot didn’t have pockets to hold the money, the teenager getting her learner’s permit gave the sasquatch her turquoise fanny pack. It wouldn’t fit around his waist, of course, so he wore it around his furry bicep. They gave him a few extra bucks and, to his great delight, showed him how to order two Big Hunk nougat bars and a package of Red Vines from the vending machine.

“Thank you all,” he said. “Maybe humans are all right sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still asking the hobgoblins to repaint the bus with enchanted paint as soon as I get back.” He paused to wolf down a Big Hunk in two bites, including the plastic wrapper. “But it’s been a real treat.”

Ted wished the sasquatch good luck on his test, and they shook hands. Bigfoot thought Ted seemed like a practical guy, and other than the lack of hair, he kind of reminded Bigfoot of his dad.

As Bigfoot stood up and walked to the testing room, the college student with pink hair ran after him. He turned around and let her catch up with him by the door.

“My friends are never going to believe that I saw you,” she said.

Bigfoot looked down at her sympathetically. “I figure they’ll believe you if you tell the story well enough,” he said. “If you want to give me your address, I can send you a, whatchamacallit, a postcard. Also, can you tell me how postcards work?”

“Here, have my notebook and pen,” she said, and she wrote down her address in it. As the sasquatch ducked to fit through the door, he looked back over his shoulder and gave a big, toothy smile. Then he raised his hand to wave goodbye. Bigfoots are such undeniably charming creatures that everyone in the room, even Ted, waved back.

Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom is a queer, chronically ill writer whose work appears in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. She was born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, on Monacan land.