Bigfoot Dreams Read Free Page B

and stretching and breaking like bubble gum on a shoe.
    Now Frank’s left instructions for Vera and Mel Solomon, the staff photographer, to be in his office first thing after lunch. “What’s it about?” says Vera, knowing Carmen’s overheard more than she’s letting on. “It’s probably nothing,” says Carmen.
    It takes Vera less than a minute to walk to her office and even less than that to jump to the conclusion that she’s written something libelous. She’s feared—been taught to fear—this since her first day at This Week , when Frank Shaefer told her the cautionary tale of how her unlucky predecessor was fired for writing about a silent movie queen returning from the dead, only to learn that the actress was still alive and well enough to sue. “The bottom line,” Frank had said, “is to know who’s alive and who’s dead.” Vera assured them she was a journalist; she had principles, ethics, checked facts. Facts? Shaefer and Esposito exchanged knowing looks, and then with a rueful little smile Dan said, “Look, it’s better all around if you make it up.” “What Dan’s saying,” explained Frank, “is that we’re mostly concerned with that gray area—it could be true, it just isn’t true.”
    Since then reminders have appeared on Vera’s desk, xeroxed clippings from other papers. Vera’s favorite dates from when E. Howard Hunt was working for the CIA, writing spy thrillers on the side, and having to submit his final drafts for security clearance because his most fantastic scenarios so often turned out to be classified information. Scrawled over the clipping is Frank Shaefer’s note: “Too close for comfort!” When Carol Burnett sued the Enquirer , Shaefer and Esposito called a meeting to remind the staff their search for truth need take them no further than the Teletype. Let the wire services take the heat. They hadn’t started a paper like This Week to have reporters yelling, “Stop the presses!” Whole nations might be changing hands in the jungles of Asia and Latin America, but the only jungles that matter here are those remote pygmy hideouts where the brontosauruses still graze. And so while the competition delves ever deeper into celebrity scandal, This Week never mentions a famous name unless the context is innocuous or inspirational ( DEBBY BOONE: I GAVE UP JAVA FOR JESUS ) or, on rare occasions, disguised as letters to the editor (“Dear Sirs: If you ask me, somebody should lock up those Charlie’s Angels and throw away the key till they put on underwear like decent Christian women”).
    Of course, for every Washington Wild Child who shows up at the office, three more write letters containing the line, “I have contacted my lawyer.” Presumably their lawyers are charging stiff fees for what Carmen does for minimum wage: convincing the insulted and outraged they don’t have a case. The same person rarely writes twice. So if Shaefer and Esposito are seeing their lawyer, someone has something solid.
    Suddenly Vera’s seized by the urge to go home and get into bed and start the day over again. She thinks of how, in primitive cultures, magicians often advise bewitched clients to undo spells by doing everything backward. She considers backing down into Herald Square, onto the subway, and up to her apartment. Perhaps she could take it even further, back before she came here to work and wound up where she is now—dreading the prospect of facing Shaefer and Esposito, of losing a job she doesn’t want and doesn’t want to lose.
    Vera sits down at her desk and types out the Bigfoot story in roughly the same six hundred words she’d thought of on the train. After five years she can pretty much think in final-draft This Week -ese, and the typing is in itself a kind of pleasure that calms and distracts her. She retypes it till it’s perfect, then moves on to the next best thing, which is telling herself that losing her job at This Week may be a blessing. She never planned on staying