Bigfoot Dreams

by Francine Prose

  “You just gettin’ home from workin’ now?” says Vera, appalled to hear herself sound like some parody Loretta Lynn. What’s happened to her normal voice, and where are her g’s? That’s the power of the male, she thinks, the draw of the belt buckle and bare chest.

  Earl seems slightly taken aback by her question. Does he think she’s implying he skipped out early, or has social life reverted to what it was in California in the sixties, when it was considered such grievous bad taste to ask people what they did?

  “Yeah,” says Earl.

  “Louise told me you built this place,” says Vera, a little desperately. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” says Earl.

  “I wish I could do something like this,” says Vera, afraid to look at Louise, who would no doubt know she’s lying. Vera’s never had the slightest interest in carpentry or any other manual skill except cooking and making cat’s cradles, though now that she thinks of it, a house does seem like more to show for your time than a stack of yellowing This Weeks and a peculiar resumé.

  “What do you do?” Earl asks.

  “Did,” says Vera. “I got fired.”

  “From what?” From the way Earl perks up, you can tell he likes stories about being fired. Most of the ones he knows probably end with brawls. Vera’s sorry to disappoint him. But when she mentions This Week, he slaps his thigh and says, “Hey, I know that paper. I read it in line at the supermarket. What a piece of junk! Listen, is that stuff true?” Without waiting for Vera to answer, he turns to Louise and says, “Weezy, how come you didn’t tell me? Geez, here I am in a room with two beautiful lady writers and me, I can hardly read.”

  Something about the way Earl says “beautiful lady” reminds her of someone she can’t quite place. Then it comes back to her: the Washington Wild Boy. Alarmed, Vera peers at Earl, then sits back, reassured. Earl’s nowhere near rooting around in Henry Kissinger’s garbage.

  “I guess you’ve read Weezy’s poems,” he’s saying. “She’s even had a couple little ones published.” Earl’s tone is one of heartfelt admiration. Even so, Vera longs to say, A couple little ones? We’re talking about the New Yorker! But what would Earl know about that? To Earl, New Yorkers are dudes who talk too fast and smoke cigarettes and lead stressful, unhealthy lives. While lady New Yorkers all wear purple Gloria Steinem glasses and talk through their noses and have many abortions and hysterical miscarriages, instead of children like Real Women in the West.

  If Vera keeps thinking this way she’ll never make it through the evening. She decides to distract herself by thinking of the poem Louise wrote about the nightmares Rosie had after they saw that catatonic gorilla in the zoo. In the poem, the child dreams a gorilla is stalking the mountain behind her home; and in the morning, the child’s mother sends her off to school and goes up the mountain to look for the gorilla. How much more heroic than what Vera did, which was to let Rosie get out of bed and watch late-night TV. Now Vera wishes she’d gone back to the zoo or up to Bear Mountain or someplace and hunted gorilla. Is she crazy? There are no gorillas on Bear Mountain. It occurs to her now that maybe her version of Rosie’s gorilla is Bigfoot. And here she is, right smack in the heart of prime Bigfoot-sighting territory! The thought gives her stepping-out-of-the shower prickles all down her spine and makes her extremely anxious. So when Earl repeats his question, she says, “Yeah, I’ve seen her little poems,” much more sharply than she intended.

  Poor Earl. What did he ever do wrong besides welcome her? Earl hears the meanness in that “little.” There’s a silence; then he says, “Know who I’m working for these days? This dude from New York, this ad man who came out here to shoot some commercials and fell in love with the place and bought some land. Gonna build a place where he can cool out. So he’s putting in a landing strip so he can jet in and out and not waste a second. That’s how this guy relaxes.”

  Vera knows that telling this story is as close to hostile as Earl will ever get. He’s lumped her with this ad man, her fellow New Yorker. He’s advising her to cool out. The disapproval and paranoia with which he says “landing strip” reminds her of how sixties hippies used to talk about CIA maneuvers, secret landings in the desert. At least they knew what to fear. What scares Earl is people moving too fast. In the grave, she wants to tell him, we’ll all cool out.

  “Wanna beer?” says Earl. It’s a conciliatory offer, one that Vera would surely accept if she hadn’t just realized two things. One: her high from the plane has finally worn off. And two: one whiff of alcohol will definitely make her sick, and she doesn’t even know if Louise has indoor plumbing.

  “No, thanks,” she says. “I never drink on the job.” Louise gives her a quick, searching look in which Vera reads misunderstanding and, Vera imagines, fear that she’ll write about this, that she’ll expose Louise’s life with Earl the way she roasted poor Bunny Sing. Vera wants to throw her arms around Louise and apologize all over again, yet the idea seems no easier or more practicable than whatever similar overtures she’d dreamed of making to Hazel. So all Vera says is, “No, I mean the cryptobiologists. I’m flying out there day after tomorrow and I need to keep clear.”

  “The crypto-whozees?” says Earl. When Vera explains, he says, “Christ, they should have their convention here. Weezy, did you tell Vera about the Bigfoot scare, when was it, two years back…?”

  Finally! An interest in common! Vera’s about to tell Earl she just wrote a Bigfoot story, but as soon as she thinks of Bigfoot smoking those cigarettes, it’s as if she’s on You Bet Your Life and a voice in her head has just said the magic word. Here comes that nicotine-craving duck. “Have you got an ashtray?” she says.

  “Hey,” says Earl. “Could you maybe do that outside? You know, they’re finding out you don’t have to actually smoke the stuff for it to fuck up your lungs. They x-rayed these waitresses working in diners where everyone smokes; their lungs look like they’ve been doing a pack a day.”

  “Is that so?” says Vera.

  Louise puts a hand on Earl’s arm. “Honey,” she says. “You can open a window.”

  Smoking gives Vera the energy to tell her Bigfoot story. Earl’s shaking his hands and going “hoo hoo hoo” like an owl. He makes her repeat it twice, and by the end he’s singing the theme music from The Twilight Zone, which Vera would never have guessed he’d be old enough to remember. “Great stuff,” he says, sounding just like that drugstore clerk complimenting her on her choice of diaphragm jelly.

  “Thanks,” says Vera, her voice echoing so forlornly through a fog of déjà vu that when Louise suggests a swim in the stream, Vera assumes she understands her old friend’s in urgent need of reviving. Still, Vera makes whiny, demurring noises; swimming seems like too much work.

  “I’m joking,” says Louise. “The stream’s seasonal. There’s nothing in it now but newts. We’ll just take a walk.”

  Seasonal, Vera thinks, like strawberries, corn, melons. Struck by an image of herself climbing onto her desk to gauge the weather by the thickness of the overcoats crossing Herald Square, Vera agrees to the walk, especially when Earl says he’ll stay inside and do in a couple more brews.

  There’s no way to get from the house to the streambed without knowing what season it is. The grass is waist-high, dry, and brown. Vera walks into something sticky and screams when a huge black-and-yellow spider abandons its broken web. Halfway down the slope is an orchard, branches so heavy with apples they’re touching the ground. “Can you eat these?” she says, playing her city-mouse role to the hilt. If she heard Solomon say something like that, she’d want to kill him. She picks one; it’s crisp and delicious. “It’s paradise here,” she says.

  “Is it?” says Louise. “I hate August. For all the obvious reasons. Everything’s dying or anyway, on the edge.”

  At last they reach the dry streambed and stand at the edge, staring in as if it were running and they were watching it flow. After a while Vera says, “Have you written any new little poems?”

  Louise laughs
, then says, “Please. Earl loves me,” then pauses again. “I’ll tell you something,” she says. “If I were getting ready to go to a Halloween party dressed as garbage, Earl would lock the door and keep me inside till I came to my senses.”

  Vera’s shocked. It never occurred to her that Louise might have wanted to be protected from her own wacky sense of humor. At this late date it’s finally coming home to her that something more than humor or charm was at issue, that Louise was making a statement she’d rather not have made. She feels she’s betrayed Louise, let her down, that Earl’s a better friend than she is.

  “Anyway,” says Louise, “the answer is no. Not one little poem. At least nothing I’ve finished. I keep trying to write this one poem and can’t get it right and can’t let it go or go on till I get it.”

  “About what?” asks Vera.

  “Oh, God,” says Louise. “Catching fireflies when I was a kid. What could be more sentimental than that?”

  Vera thinks of Louise breaking down in the planetarium show, getting stuck on a poem about fireflies. Perhaps she should stay away from tiny points of light.

  “I get distracted,” says Louise, then kneels down and picks up a dullish-green rock. She spits on it, rubs it, and all at once it’s shiny as marble, like malachite veined with white.

  “Can I have this?” asks Vera.

  “Sure,” says Louise. “There’s enough for everyone.” They start off down the streambed, picking their way over the rocks—boulders when you get up close—a difficult walk made harder because Louise keeps bending down, finding bright-colored stones, some mined with fossils, glittery mica, black and white minerals swirled like a slice of rolled chocolate-and-whipped-cream cake. Vera’s pockets are getting heavy. “I can’t decide which ones to take,” she says. “Maybe I should take all of them.”

  “Or none of them,” says Louise. “Last week in the paper there was a story about a guy who went camping in some Indian ruins in New Mexico. One morning he wakes up and there’s this big black crow that seems to be telling him something, so he follows it, and it leads him straight to this perfect, prehistoric stone axe, half-buried in the dirt. So he digs it up, takes it home to Phoenix or wherever, and the day he gets back he breaks out in this ungodly rash that stumps all the doctors. Within two weeks his business falls apart, his girlfriend leaves him—he’s beginning to think it’s the axe. So he wraps it up in a Baggie—to defuse it or whatever—and sticks it on a shelf. The next day he’s running to answer the phone, the axe falls off the shelf and cuts his Achilles tendon clean through. Finally he goes back to the ruins, puts the axe back where he found it. The story ended with a quote from the park ranger, saying every year they get dozens of packages from folks who’ve taken souvenirs from the ruins and are returning them because things began to go wrong.”

  Vera feels as if the stones in her pocket have turned radioactive—that’s how fast she dumps them out. She waits to make sure this is as appropriate a moment as it seems, then says, “That doesn’t sound strange to me. It’s the story of my life. The last week of it, anyhow.”

  “What do you mean?” says Louise, and Vera tells her. When she gets to the part about going to see Stephanie Green, she says, “Louise, you would’ve liked her,” and is surprised by the desperation in her voice. It’s the first time she’s ever told it this way, as a kind of plea for affection and understanding, the line about Stephanie cast out to catch Louise, who doesn’t take the bait but continues drifting further and further away. By the time Vera’s describing Betty Anne Apple, Louise is walking a few steps ahead of her, and when at last Vera says, “So what do you think?” Louise answers, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s probably a coincidence.”

  “Are you serious?” Vera says and grabs Louise and turns her around. Louise stares at Vera; she looks awful. The silence goes on till someone has to break it. Vera can only repeat herself. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” says Louise. “I think I’m taking fifteen milligrams of Stelazine a day so I won’t have to think about this shit.”

  “Lucky you,” says Vera. Once more she’s wishing she could start over. This time she’ll tell Louise what’s really bothering her: the voice on the phone at the Greens’, Rosie and Lowell leaving, the growing sense that her life—that anyone’s life—will never be anything but one loss after another. But how can she complain to Louise about losing what Louise has never had? And if she mentions her fear of having to give up all the stories she’s told herself for comfort, it may occur to them both that the story of their friendship is one of them.

  “Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” says Louise. “It’s survival. I just don’t let myself think about things that’ll make me suffer.”

  Maybe Louise is right, thinks Vera. She’d certainly be better off if she weren’t always imagining all the terrible things that could happen to Rosie. The problem is, she’s not made that way. If she were an alchemist, her heart would be beating in rhythm: Hippopotamus! Hippopotamus!

  “I’m sorry,” Vera says. But for what? It’s not the first time she’s apologized when really she’s been angry. Vera feels she’s been led on. She can understand how someone with Louise’s history might want to steer clear of the spooky stuff, but it was Louise who told that story about the axe. Still, Vera understands that reading a creepy story in the paper is good deal less threatening than hearing one from your oldest friend. Mostly what she’s angry at is time and all that’s happened since she and Louise started out. When you haven’t seen one another in years, you can pretend everything’s the same as when you were growing up together. But it isn’t; it just isn’t. What Vera doesn’t want to think about it this: Having a friend for the first half of your life is no guarantee you’ll have her for the second. Marriages break up after longer.

  “Why should you be sorry?” says Louise. “It’s your life. You just picked the wrong person to tell it to. I can’t let myself dwell on that stuff. I tend to get sucked in. That’s all.”

  By now it’s unthinkable to ask the one thing Vera’s really curious about, namely, which part is it that Louise can’t let herself dwell on? The possibility of healing by faith, or the pain that would drive someone to call up the Greens and beg for a drop of water? The synchronous and inexplicable, or the axe that leaps off the shelf and slices away at your heel? Vera thinks of Peter Smalley and his HERE WE WILL TALK OF NOTHING BUT GOD sign. If he honestly felt that way, he wouldn’t be able to function at This Week. He’d be out here in the wilderness, spitting on rocks with Louise. Here we will never talk about God.

  Louise begins walking again, and Vera does, too, not because she wants to but because stopping would make Louise turn round, and she’s not ready to look at her yet. Eventually the streambed turns into the woods. It’s cooler here; the light changes, grows dappled. They’re going faster now. Light flashes through the spaces between the firs, striping everything with bands of darkness and sun. The effect is rather strobelike, dizzying. Vera’s starting to feel light-headed.

  Suddenly Vera stops. She’s seen something out of the corner of her eye, something denser than shadow shifting between the trees. A deer. No, bigger. A bear? What lives in these woods?

  Bigfoot, she thinks.

  So this is what it’s all been leading up to: the ultimate coincidence. Oh, it’s perfect. Not only is this Bigfoot’s home ground, he’s been sighted in this very county! If he’s anywhere, he’s here. If he shows himself to anyone, who better than someone who’s dreamed of him for years and clearly intends him no harm? Wouldn’t that be news to take to the cryptobiologists? “Bigfoot!” Vera longs to cry, “come back! I’ve got cigarettes! You don’t have to cook breakfast or take me to your lair. Just show yourself!” But that would only alarm Louise and waste all that good medication she’s taking.

  Vera’s starting to feel desolate. In her fantasies of meeting Bigfoot, she’s always with the people she loves most. And now they’re all scattered, unreachable, and she’s alone with poor Louise, who so
wants those antipsychotic drugs to work, she probably wouldn’t see Bigfoot if he tripped and fell on the path and she had to climb over him.

  A breeze has come up, and the treetops are singing that high-pitched whoosh she used to hear on acid and think was the music of the spheres and later found out was just chemical. Or was it? Once more Vera feels something. A presence. Her knees go weak. Suppose it is Bigfoot out there, and he isn’t the friendly, cigarette-smoking primate of her dreams but a monster with the razor teeth and claws and disposition of a killer grizzly. Feet the size of bathtubs, paws the size of rakes…Vera covers her eyes.

  Where the hell is Louise? Vera can’t see her anywhere. Riding the Cyclone, the front car of the subway, they were in it together. Now she’s skipped out, leaving Vera to perish alone in the wilderness. Once nothing scared Vera, but out here she’s frightened of everything, including the possibility that she may be lost. How she longs for Lowell and his trusty sense of direction! “Louise,” Vera cries, but softly: the meow of a cat in a box. Not loud enough to reach anyone, not even Bigfoot with his heightened senses. Because the truth, after all, is: Vera doesn’t want to see Bigfoot. She’s frightened half to death, embarrassed, too. There’s not even a headline for this. FEAR OF BIGFOOT?

  Vera’s never so terrified she can’t rationalize. Even in this, consolation: If Bigfoot mauls her—fatally—she’ll at least be spared the pain of living with the knowledge that this, too, was nothing like what she’d imagined. Standing here shaking and sweating is no more her Bigfoot fantasy than writing for This Week was her fantasy career. Besides, she was just playing with that dream of meeting Bigfoot and learning a better way to live. Couldn’t God tell she was kidding? Vera’s always hated people who say, You’d better watch what you wish for; you might get it. Now it’s clear that her hatred was just the resentment she often feels when people tell her the truth.