by Carlson, Ron
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 Onassis 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 b
ack 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.
THE TIME I DIED
I READ a lot. I mean: I read everything. I always have. It used to really drive Grant crazy. My whole side of the bedroom was a hazard: stacks of pamphlets, magazines, papers, paperbacks, and about four dozen hardback books which I received from my book club and the library. But I love to read. Grant would say, “What’s in that damn book, anyway?” But he really didn’t want to know. I know this because several times I answered him. “Honey, this book is about Bud Sackett trying to deliver cattle to Santa Fe . . .” or “The woman in this article says she lost forty pounds of ugly fat by chewing each bite thirty-one times. . . .” But before I could finish the explanation, Grant was in the other room cranking the channels like he was trying to start an outboard motor.
I read a lot of trash. I do. I read The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World from cover to cover. I’ve read all the stories about people coming back from the dead, and all twenty-one people have said about the same thing: there’s that white room and some floating and their relatives and most of the time some music. I have also read some fine books, such as Madame Bovary, the biography of Dorothy Kilgallen called Kilgallen, which my book club sent me, and a large book called The Gulag Archipelago, a book which scared the devil out of Grant. “What language are you reading now?” he said.
Maybe I read too much. But I always felt it was better than drinking too much or chasing around. Later, that is what Grant got into. I suspected he was having troubles, and then I found out when he gave me herpes two. It’s a virus. He stopped coming home. I really started reading.
I was reading fourteen hours a day. In one day I read Are You a Genius?, Great American Mystery Stories (the whole volume), The Book of Lists II, and Frankenstein, which turned out to be different than I had ever thought. It was during this heavy reading period that Susan, my maid of honor, my best friend from high school, since before high school, called, and that led to how I died and why I’m in the hospital now.
Susan has a great attitude. She got married in high school to Andrew Botts, one of the most popular guys in our class, and then about three years ago, Andrew split. He’s in California now, but Susan never let it get her down. She smiles about him like she knew it all along.
She used to call me up and talk, and then sometimes I’d have her over for dinner with Grant and me. Grant didn’t like her, because he couldn’t figure her out; but it was okay, because he would eat and then go in the other room and crank the channels, and Susan and I would talk for three hours. In fact, I’d rather be with Susan, talking, than alone reading in bed. She’s a crazy woman and always has a new story about some new man in her life and what he’s trying to get her to do now. She can laugh way down in her throat for about a minute without taking a breath.
So, when she called the last time she said she had heard about Grant leaving, and she laughed and said, “That’s the real facts of life, Linda,” which was exactly what she said at my wedding. Anyway, she said I was definitely going to stop reading for one night and go out for a night with the girls. I had been reading back through a stack of The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World at the time, and didn’t want to go, because I was reading a pretty good series on UFOs, which have already picked up fifty-four people who have never been seen since and who are living better lives somewhere, according to their relatives and sometimes according to the sheriff. I was also rereading about the twenty-one people who had died and come back. Their stories all matched perfectly even though some of their stories were in different issues. It is their stories which really bother me, because now I have died and I know that there are twenty-one people who have fooled and lied to The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World. But, when Susan called, I decided to close the papers and go out. Sometimes Susan can be just the wild thing I need.
When she picked me up in her Pinto, she told me we were going to a Daycare Fund Raiser at the Redwood Club, and that there would be a male stripper, and she laughed and blew cigarette smoke all over the windshield. I have read about male strippers in at least five magazines. The women all had good things to say in the articles, and in the pictures, the women looked like they were having a good time.
It was twelve dollars at the door, and the woman stamped our hands with a little purple star. The Redwood Club is just a big barroom with a real low sparkling ceiling. Susan knew a lot of the women there and we joined a table with three of her friends near the front. We had been drinking a little vodka in the car, and we had some more, and it was just flat fun being half high out of the house with a room full of women who were just roaring and carrying on.
There were actually two strippers. The first guy was announced as Rick. He came out to a record, the Supremes singing something, and he was very serious about removing his brown silk shirt, and then his brown silk pajama bottoms or whatever they were, and then he played a coy game of thumbs with his G-string for the rest of the song. The second and final song for Rick was The Four Seasons singing “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” He came stepping between the tables like a stretching cat, and Susan actually reached out and stuffed a dollar bill inside his jock along with all the other dollars hanging there like a bouquet.
I’m a buns person. Why that is, I don’t know. But buns can start me up. I loved the arch of Rick’s rear, and when he finally stripped off the G-string and flopped his petunia before us all, Susan and the girls went wild! Susan was laughing and bouncing in her seat and reaching for what she was calling “that banana.” But Rick was a professional; I could tell by the way he kept just beyond an arm’s length.
Then there was a very funny vodka intermission with everyone groaning and laughing and snorting and Susan laughing and asking me wasn’t I glad I came, and you know, I was glad. Not because of Rick’s buns, but because of a warm feeling I had. I really liked Susan and her attitude and the fact that she was a friend of mine.
In high school, when we were juniors, she stopped me after homeroom one morning in the spring and took my arm tightly and walked me down to her locker, smiling so her eyes nearly shut, and she told me she was going to get married. “You’re the first person I’ve told,” she said to me. “And you’re the only person. Do me a favor,” she laughed, “break it to our dear classmates.” And then she said, “You know why we’re doing it?” And she laughed so hard she dropped a book and could hardly get through her own answer, which she had to whisper: �
�To give the baby a father!” Then she straightened herself out and lifted her chin like a queen and walked off down the corridor, turning once to announce: “The facts of life.”
Now, I’m no good judge of penises. Grant had one, I’m sure. He must have, I think. But the next stripper, Doug, made it clear from his entrance on, that he was out to set new standards for us all. Susan was crazy for him. He would back way up then open his shirt and stride toward the audience as if he was going to jab us all with that heavy G-string. Everyone would scream when he did that. Susan couldn’t stop laughing. She did yell: “What have you got in there anyway, Dougie?” And everybody thought the same thing: that is not all him. Susan would yell, “What is that, a shoe?” and the Redwood Club would just go nuts. But at the end of the third song (Doug stretched his strip to three records), which was Elvis singing “My Way,” we all found out the truth. He turned his back on us and flexed his buns in a way that almost made me shudder, and he flipped his G-string into the fourth row, another eruption of screaming, and he rotated to us revealing the most god-awful THING—and that is the right word, “THING”—in the whole world. It looked like a hammer. The place exploded. There was more screaming than if there’d been a fire. He lobbed it around for a good while, and I’m sure people passing by in cars could hear The Redwood Club rising off the earth. It’s lucky for me I like buns, I told Susan, or I would have embarrassed myself. A lot of women did.
After that session died down, we plunged outside and the fresh air really made us drunk. Susan hopped on the hood of her car and leaned against the windshield. The sky was full of stars. It was funny sitting there. I thought: all these stars, are they out every night? I’d never seen the stars before. We sat on her car and drank a little more vodka. Susan had been sweating and the hair over her face was wet in a little fringe. She was smiling, kind of wicked, like she knew things were going to be like this all along. After a while, she said, “You know, all this entertainment has made me kind of hungry. Let’s go eat.”
