by Ron Carlson
The first thing I saw when I took my mouth from Story’s was the grouping of my three fingers over her white shoulder, those three bald men come to greet us, but then as my eyes rinsed once more I saw them again and this is when I saw it all: they weren’t three old men at all, but three babies I had seen somewhere before. My eyes filled. Three babies. I had painted these guys for the last week, each on a canvas of his own.
Story reached her arm around my neck and turned on her side. “Are you going to get us a blanket?” she said. “Or shall we go to bed?”
I got her the quilt. In my study the only light came from the children. Not one: three. I painted until blue dawn and they focused like photographs: three babies. From my window I could see the sun about to burst over Mugacook Mountain; the trees stood out in chromosomal pairs. My heart was swimming. I could see the children, do you see? In her arms. One. Two. Three.
I I
BIGFOOT STOLE MY WIFE
THE problem is credibility.
The problem, as I’m finding out over the last few weeks, is basic credibility. A lot of people look at me and say, sure Rick, Bigfoot stole your wife. It makes me sad to see it, the look of disbelief in each person’s eye. Trudy’s disappearance makes me sad, too, and I’m sick in my heart about where she may be and how he’s treating her, what they do all day, if she’s getting enough to eat. I believe he’s being good to her—I mean I feel it—and I’m going to keep hoping to see her again, but it is my belief that I probably won’t.
In the two and a half years we were married, I often had the feeling that I would come home from the track and something would be funny. Oh, she’d say things: One of these days I’m not going to be here when you get home, things like that, things like everybody says. How stupid of me not to see them as omens. When I’d get out of bed in the early afternoon, I’d stand right here at this sink and I could see her working in her garden in her cut-off Levis and bikini top, weeding, planting, watering. I mean it was obvious. I was too busy thinking about the races, weighing the odds, checking the jockey roster to see what I now know: he was watching her too. He’d probably been watching her all summer.
So, in a way it was my fault. But what could I have done? Bigfoot steals your wife. I mean: even if you’re home, it’s going to be a mess. He’s big and not well trained.
When I came home it was about eleven-thirty. The lights were on, which really wasn’t anything new, but in the ordinary mess of the place, there was a little difference, signs of a struggle. There was a spilled Dr. Pepper on the counter and the fridge was open. But there was something else, something that made me sick. The smell. The smell of Bigfoot. It was hideous. It was … the guy is not clean.
Half of Trudy’s clothes are gone, not all of them, and there is no note. Well, I know what it is. It’s just about midnight there in the kitchen which smells like some part of hell. I close the fridge door. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever done. There’s a picture of Trudy and me leaning against her Toyota taped to the fridge door. It was taken last summer. There’s Trudy in her bikini top, her belly brown as a bean. She looks like a kid. She was a kid I guess, twenty-six. The two times she went to the track with me everybody looked at me like how’d I rate her. But she didn’t really care for the races. She cared about her garden and Chinese cooking and Buster, her collie, who I guess Bigfoot stole too. Or ate. Buster isn’t in the picture, he was nagging my nephew Chuck who took the photo. Anyway I close the fridge door and it’s like part of my life closed. Bigfoot steals your wife and you’re in for some changes.
You come home from the track having missed the Daily Double by a neck, and when you enter the home you are paying for and in which you and your wife and your wife’s collie live, and your wife and her collie are gone as is some of her clothing, there is nothing to believe. Bigfoot stole her. It’s a fact. What I should I do, ignore it? Chuck came down and said something like well if Bigfoot stole her why’d they take the Celica? Christ, what a cynic! Have you ever read anything about Bigfoot not being able to drive? He’d be cramped in there, but I’m sure he could manage.
I don’t really care if people believe me or not. Would that change anything? Would that bring Trudy back here? Pull the weeds in her garden?
As I think about it, no one believes anything anymore. Give me one example of someone believing one thing. I dare you. After that we get into this credibility thing. No one believes me. I myself can’t believe all the suspicion and cynicism there is in today’s world. Even at the races, some character next to me will poke over at my tip sheet and ask me if I believe that stuff. If I believe? What is there to believe? The horse’s name? What he did the last time out? And I look back at this guy, too cheap to go two bucks on the program, and I say: it’s history. It is historical fact here. Believe. Huh. Here’s a fact: I believe everything.
Credibility.
When I was thirteen years old, my mother’s trailer was washed away in the flooding waters of the Harley River and swept thirty-one miles, ending right side up and nearly dead level just outside Mercy, in fact in the old weed-eaten parking lot for the abandoned potash plant. I know this to be true because I was inside the trailer the whole time with my pal, Nuggy Reinecker, who found the experience more life-changing than I did.
Now who’s going to believe this story? I mean, besides me, because I was there. People are going to say, come on, thirty-one miles? Don’t you mean thirty-one feet?
We had gone in out of the rain after school to check out a magazine that belonged to my mother’s boyfriend. It was a copy of Dude, and there was a fold-out page I will never forget of a girl lying on the beach on her back. It was a color photograph. The girl was a little pale, I mean, this was probably her first day out in the sun, and she had no clothing on. So it was good, but what made it great was that they had made her a little bathing suit out of sand. Somebody had spilled a little sand just right, here and there, and the sand was this incredible gold color, and it made her look so absolutely naked it wanted to put your eyes out.
Nuggy and I knew there was flood danger in Griggs; we’d had a flood every year almost and it had been raining for five days on and off, but when the trailer bucked the first time, we thought it was my mother come home to catch us in the dirty book. Nuggy shoved the magazine under the bed and I ran out to check the door. It only took me a second and I hollered back Hey no sweat, no one’s here, but by the time I returned to see what other poses they’d had this beautiful woman commit, Nuggy already had his pants to his ankles and was involved in what we knew was a sin.
If it hadn’t been the timing of the first wave with this act of his, Nuggy might have gone on to live what the rest of us call a normal life. But the Harley had crested and the head wave, which they estimated to be three feet minimum, unmoored the trailer with a push that knocked me over the sofa, and threw Nuggy, already entangled in his trousers, clear across the bedroom.
I watched the village of Griggs as we sailed through. Some of the village, the Exxon Station, part of it at least, and the carwash, which folded up right away, tried to come along with us, and I saw the front of Painters’ Mercantile, the old porch and signboard, on and off all day.
You can believe this: it was not a smooth ride. We’d rip along for ten seconds, dropping and growling over rocks, and rumbling over tree stumps, and then wham! the front end of the trailer would lodge against a rock or something that could stop it, and whoa! we’d wheel around sharp as a carnival ride, worse really, because the furniture would be thrown against the far side and us with it, sometimes we’d end up in a chair and sometimes the chair would sit on us. My mother had about four thousand knickknacks in five big box shelves, and they gave us trouble for the first two or three miles, flying by like artillery, left, right, some small glass snail hits you in the face, later in the back, but that stuff all finally settled in the foot and then two feet of water which we took on.
We only slowed down once and it was the worst. In the railroad flats I thought we had stopped
and I let go of the door I was hugging and tried to stand up and then swish, another rush sent us right along. We rammed along all day it seemed, but when we finally washed up in Mercy and the sheriff’s cousin pulled open the door and got swept back to his car by water and quite a few of those knickknacks, just over an hour had passed. We had averaged, they figured later, about thirty-two miles an hour, reaching speeds of up to fifty at Lime Falls and the Willows. I was okay and walked out bruised and well washed, but when the sheriff’s cousin pulled Nuggy out, he looked genuinely hurt.
“For godsakes,” I remember the sheriff’s cousin saying, “The damn flood knocked this boy’s pants off!” But Nuggy wasn’t talking. In fact, he never hardly talked to me again in the two years he stayed at the Regional School. I heard later, and I believe it, that he joined the monastery over in Malcolm County.
My mother, because she didn’t have the funds to haul our rig back to Griggs, worried for a while, but then the mayor arranged to let us stay out where we were. So after my long ride in a trailer down the flooded Harley River with my friend Nuggy Reinecker, I grew up in a parking lot outside of Mercy, and to tell you the truth, it wasn’t too bad, even though our trailer never did smell straight again.
Now you can believe all that. People are always saying: don’t believe everything you read, or everything you hear. And I’m here to tell you. Believe it. Everything. Everything you read. Everything you hear. Believe your eyes. Your ears. Believe the small hairs on the back of your neck. Believe all of history, and all of the versions of history, and all the predictions for the future. Believe every weather forecast. Believe in God, the afterlife, unicorns, showers on Tuesday. Everything has happened. Everything is possible.
I come home from the track to find the cupboard bare. Trudy is not home. The place smells funny: hairy. It’s a fact and I know it as a fact: Bigfoot has been in my house.
Bigfoot stole my wife.
She’s gone.
Believe it.
I gotta believe it.
I AM BIGFOOT
THAT’S fine. I’m ready.
I am Bigfoot. The Bigfoot. You’ve been hearing about me for some time now, seeing artists’ renderings, and perhaps a phony photograph or two. I should say right here that an artist’s rendering is one thing, but some trumped-up photograph is entirely another. The one that really makes me sick purports to show me standing in a stream in Northern California. Let me tell you something: Bigfoot never gets his feet wet. And I’ve only been to Northern California once, long enough to check out Redding and Eureka, both too quiet for the kind of guy I am.
Anyway, all week long, people (the people I contacted) have been wondering why I finally have gone public. A couple thought it was because I was angry at that last headline, remember: “Jackie O. Slays Bigfoot.” No, I’m not angry. You can’t go around and correct everybody who slanders you. (Hey, I’m not dead, and I only saw Jacqueline Onasssis once, at about four hundred yards. She was on a horse.) And as for libel, what should I do, go up to Rockefeller Center and hire a lawyer? Please. Spare me. You can quote me on this: Bigfoot is not interested in legal action.
“THEN, why?” they say. “Why climb out of the woods and go through the trouble of ‘meeting the press,’ so to speak? (Well, first of all, I don’t live in the woods year round, which is a popular misconception of my life-style. Sure, I like the woods, but I need action too. I’ve had some of my happiest times in the median of the Baltimore Belt-route, the orchards of Arizona and Florida, and I spent nearly five years in the corn country just outside St. Louis. So, it’s not just the woods, okay?)
WHY I came forward at this time concerns the truest thing I ever read about myself in the papers. The headline read “Bigfoot Stole My Wife,” and it was right on the money. But beneath it was the real story: “Anguished Husband’s Cry.” Now I read the article, every word. Twice. It was poorly written, but it was all true. I stole the guy’s wife. She wasn’t the first and she wasn’t the last. But when I went back and read that “anguished husband,” it got me a little. I’ve been, as you probably have read, in all fifty states and eleven foreign countries. (I have never been to Tibet, in case you’re wondering. That is some other guy, maybe the same one who was crossing that stream in Northern California.) And, in each place I’ve been, there’s a woman. Come on, who is surprised by that? I don’t always steal them, in fact, I never steal them, but I do call them away, and they come with me. I know my powers and I use my powers. And when I call a woman, she comes.
SO, HERE I AM. It’s kind of a confession, I guess; kind of a warning. I’ve been around; I’ve been all over the world (except Tibet! I don’t know if that guy is interested in women or not.) And I’ve seen thousands of women standing at their kitchen windows, their stare in the mid-afternoon goes a thousand miles; I’ve seen thousands of women, dressed to the nines, strolling the cosmetic counters in Saks and I. Magnin, wondering why their lives aren’t like movies; thousands of women shuffling in the soft twilight of malls, headed for the Orange Julius stand, not really there, just biding time until things get lovely.
And things get lovely when I call. I cannot count them all, I cannot list the things these women are doing while their husbands are out there in another world, but one by one I’m meeting them on my terms. I am Bigfoot. I am not from Tibet. I go from village to town to city to village. At present, I am watching your wife. That’s why I am here tonight. To tell you, fairly, man to man, I suppose, I am watching your wife and I know for a fact, that when I call, she’ll come.
MADAME ZELENA FINALLY COMES CLEAN
THE first thing I ever saw in the future was a whale. I mean I saw a beautiful gray whale at close range. I didn’t know what it was, but I’ve seen it twice since, and it’s still in the future but now I know what it means.
You probably know me best as Madame Zelena from the column I used to write, “Zodiac Tomorrow,” for Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World. That’s not my real name. My real name is Janet Wigg, but that isn’t a real great name for a clairvoyant so I was Madame Zelena for three years, and if you were keeping track you know my record there in the annual forecasts was 93 percent, which is good in any league.
People want to know about the future. Isn’t that funny? Because the truth is that the real mystery is the past. Not the prehistoric past, the unrecorded history of our race, our ancestors, but the real mysterious past. Last week. What happened last week? What happened last October? What happened in the Spring of 1979? What happened yesterday? We can all see the future. You know where you’ll be tomorrow at eleven A.M.. Tomorrow night. A week from Saturday. We can all see that; it’s just the future, but where have we been?
As a child I didn’t know I could see the future. I thought I had a lot of dreams like any kid, but every once in a while we’d be in the car and I’d know that around the next corner about halfway down the block there’d be a dog, a black dog jumping around with two kids, two boys in cut-off Levis tossing a brown tennis ball back and forth. For a while I thought nothing of it, I thought maybe I had been down that street before, but then it started happening everywhere.
One time my mother and my stepfather, Mickey, and I drove from Reno where he was a dealer, up over Tahoe and down to Sacramento. I knew everything, even how the birds would cross the highway ahead of us, six long birds going real slow. It was the birds, more than the highway signs (which I’d read before they appeared), that woke me to this little power of mine. I’d see a sign, “Rudy’s Motel, Better Bed and Bath, 40 miles,” aloud and then the sign would appear. Mickey said, “We’re going to get this girl’s eyes checked.” I looked at him driving our Datsun, his plaid shirt making him look almost normal, and I saw him in prison, which is where he was in a year for some cheap casino scam. The day he was arrested I went down to J.B.’s where my mother was a waitress (I must have been about seven by then) and I looked at her through the windows, watched her set coffee in front of all those people, but I couldn’t see her at all. The reason was th
at she wasn’t going anywhere. She’s still there.
As I grew up I couldn’t always see things, the things that were going to happen. The power, or whatever you want to call it, was a lot like the way anybody sees things. We just don’t always see. When was the last time you looked at a tree—or a cloud? But other times I would be so awake or wired with fatigue that things would jump out at me. I could see the car in front of me at a traffic light upside down in three weeks in a junkyard. I could see my mother watching a new T.V., I could see myself in the backseat of some hoodlum’s Pontiac, being pressed into next week, my neck against the door in a posture I still associate somehow with pleasure.
But I knew, in flashes over the years, that I would eventually marry a lovely man. I’m a patient person. When you can see the future, even some of it, why not be?
I didn’t go to college, though I could have and I’d have done as well as I did in high school in Reno; I knew what was on the tests three weeks beforehand. The only B I got was in health where I knew the exam, sure, but the day Miss Evers handed it out, she touched my hand and I saw her drowning on a river trip that summer. Her face, blue and swollen, rolled before me the whole hour. I never finished the test.
And since then, for more or less the same reason, I haven’t finished much. I became a nurse’s aide at Good Samaritan right in Reno and it wasn’t such a bad job because about half the people I nursed were going to get better, which is a higher average than you meet on the streets. Some guy would lie there rattling for a week, that is when he wasn’t sweating blood, but I could see him in two months at the drive-in window at McDonalds ordering a quarter pounder with cheese and fries and it made it all easier, a possible job. Then I met the intern and it was like seeing his face again. His name was Allen Wigg, and as soon as I met him I saw the other thing, the other person, Irene, my daughter, so I bore down and put Allen through his internship while I swelled up big as a whale.
