Bigfoot Dreams Read Free Page A

SMOKING sign on the wall. Those words used to make her feel murderous. But in Carmen’s case, she senses something well meant and gracious and even beatific about them, something to do with purity and the body as a temple of the Holy Ghost.
    “We’re no good on the phone,” says Carmen. “Long distance. I get things wrong and then we hang up and…I don’t know. Qué pasa with you?”
    “ Nada ,” says Vera.
    “That’s what you think,” she says.
    At first Vera thinks she’s showing her the same kindness she’s shown the wild boy, telling her what she needs to hear, that her life can’t go on like this—just This Week and Rosalie and nada else except odd longings toward boys with beautiful hands on the subway. But gradually, as Carmen goes on, she understands that the news she has for Vera is anything but reassuring, is in fact so disturbing that the only way Vera can calm herself is to shut her eyes and picture that Texaco station with those fifty cartons of cigarettes just waiting to be dragged off to some safe, cool burrow in the piny woods and smoked five or six at a time.

V ERA HAS A SPECIAL feeling for Bigfoot. At This Week , everyone wants to make the front page, and Vera’s first front-page story was I MARRIED BIGFOOT . It told of an Oregon housewife, missing and long presumed dead, who reappeared claiming to have been kidnapped from her kitchen by Bigfoot, whose patient vegetarian ways—so different from her carnivore human hubby’s—won her heart. Bigfoot taught her the secrets of the forest; she taught him the harmony line to “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Then gradually Bigfoot’s passion cooled. He began spending more time away in the wilderness, until one night he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.
    Vera has no idea where this story came from, except that when Shaefer and Esposito hired her, they gave her a stack of old This Week s, and she noticed how Bigfoot stories appeared at least once a month. Mostly these were reports of sightings and such, so that I MARRIED BIGFOOT was a kind of landmark in Bigfoot literature, changing the focus, bringing Bigfoot home. What pleases Vera is that she was able to write it without coming close to her own Bigfoot fantasy, which is this:
    Vera and the people she loves most—Rosie, Lowell, her friend Louise, her parents—are (and this is the hardest part to imagine) camping in the forest. One morning Bigfoot appears. And though they’re surprised, not even Rosie is scared. His approach is so hesitant and mild, he could be a fifteen-foot two-legged dog come for love. He brings them trout and honey and watercress salad; he cooks breakfast. Then, purposely shortening his stride, carrying Rosie so she won’t trail behind and fall into his footprints, he leads them to his lair. It’s one of those phantasmagorical rag-and-branch kingdoms hermit folk-carvers build, only Bigfoot’s is better hidden. He treats them like guests from a foreign country whose language he doesn’t speak. He teaches them what he can. After a week they leave, more closely bound by their memory of those seven days than by love itself.
    Of course, she’ll never write OUR WEEK WITH BIGFOOT . It’s too private and lacks all the juicy details that This Week readers have come to expect. Still, Vera likes to calm herself by imagining it on nights when she can’t sleep and at difficult moments like this one, when Carmen’s just given her the bad news. Today she adds smoking cigarettes with no harmful physical consequences to the list of things she and her loved ones and Bigfoot will do.
    The bad news is that Frank Shaefer and Dan Esposito were on the phone with some lawyer at eight this morning. Then they called their own lawyer; then they went out. What Carmen and Vera don’t have to say is that Shaefer and Esposito never leave. They send out for lunch. They’re the first to arrive, the last to go home, and when they do, you can almost see something sticking