Bigfoot Dreams Read Free

Victory, costs twelve hundred fifty a year. You want to meet Gomez ?”
    Vera thinks: She should be writing for us.
    “You don’t want to meet Gomez,” Carmen’s saying. “I’ll tell you what you need. You need to find yourself a wild girl to keep you company. Some nice girl to run the alleys and share your Purina with you.”
    “There isn’t any wild girl,” he says. “There’s just me.”
    “Sure there is,” says Carmen. “If there’s you there’s another one like you. Like the Bible says, God commanded Noah to bring in the beasts of the earth, two by two. Why would it say two if there wasn’t two…?” A few more minutes of this has Vera convinced. And why not? It’s what everyone wants to hear.
    “Go back to Washington,” says Carmen. “She’s out there. Look for her in those alleys. You’ll find her.”
    There’s one last, long moment while the wild boy’s face dances through all the possibilities from stabbing Carmen through the heart to asking her to marry him. Then he smiles and comes as near to radiance as those raccoon eyes and teeth will probably ever come. “Thanks,” he says, and leaves without ever suspecting how close he’s been to the beautiful lady of his dreams.
    Vera’s nearly limp with relief and at the same time charged with the strangest desire to run after him yelling, “Wait! There is no wild girl out there! Don’t bother looking!” For of all her doubts about This Week, this—this message of false hope—is what bothers her most. Your dead loved ones aren’t really dead. Cucumber slices will cure your arthritis. Elvis is alive and well on Mars. Your alien lover is at this very moment winging toward you via UFO. It’s not true, Vera thinks. None of it. Searching for your long-lost feral bride will only bring further loneliness and disappointment.
    It takes all she has to convince herself: This is no time to start telling the truth. She turns to Carmen and puts out her palm and Carmen slaps her five. “Who’s Gomez?” she asks.
    “My brother-in-law,” says Carmen.
    Carmen and Vera came to This Week around the same time but didn’t become friends till a year or so later when Vera called in sick to take Rosie to the circus, and there on line for cotton candy was Carmen, clinging to some guy with slicked-back hair and a satin baseball jacket. Figuring she’d called in sick, too, Vera pretended not to see her. But they met head on in the menagerie. Carmen kissed Vera’s cheek with sticky lips and said, “This is Frankie, my fiancé.” Up close, Frankie was handsome in a slightly reptilian way, with eyes to match his jacket—such an unnatural, Emerald-City-of-Oz green that Vera couldn’t help asking if they were real. “Hey, where’s she from?” he asked Carmen. “Outer space?” The next day Carmen told Vera that Frankie played sax in a salsa band and his friends called him the Lizard.
    Now, four years later, Carmen and Frankie are still engaged, though recently Frankie’s had a fight with a conga drummer and, out of spite, enlisted in the army. Carmen hopes it’s for the best; he’s promised her and his parents he’ll train as a physical therapist. Vera still wants to warn her: “Carmen, don’t marry a man called the Lizard!” Still thinks of the headline, I MARRIED AN IGUANA , and a lead paragraph about a bride who discovers—too late!—her new husband’s body covered with scales. But she’s learned her lesson from Hazel: Some stories are better unwritten. Besides, what good would it do? Carmen believes in her soul that she and Frankie have been paired by God to walk hand in hand up the gangplank to Noah’s ark.
    Now she says, “Carmen, qué pasa ? What’s new with Frankie?”
    “Oh God.” Carmen sighs. “He called last night from Fort Benning. He’s already quit physical therapy and switched to band. He’s so lazy,” she says, with so much love and pride that Vera has to look away, up over Carmen’s head at the THANK YOU FOR NOT