Bigfoot Dreams (38 page)

“The days got even slower after Willy left. He wasn’t gone long, but oh, how we missed him! We all felt a bit let down.” For the first time Vera wonders if Ethel might have been a little in love with Willy. That let-down, wasted-day feeling is what she remembers from the beginning of love—days she didn’t see Lowell. Vera’s probably romanticizing. When you’re stuck in the jungle with your dinosaur-crazed husband and four non-English-speaking Congolese, any absence must seem like a major loss.

“I was beginning to worry I’d
never
get Carl out of there. And maybe I wouldn’t have if our supplies hadn’t been limited. That evening Willy came back, right on time. We knew we’d have to leave the next day, and poor Carl was so discouraged. And Willy, bless his heart, must have sensed it. He started offering round some palm wine he’d brought back from his village. Even Carl and I—we’re not drinkers at home—said, Well, sure, why not?

“Whew,” Ethel whistles through her teeth. “That was some potent palm wine.” There’s a shot of Carl sitting by a campfire, toasting the camera from a canteen that looks as if it had been made from some sort of rhino bladder. “That evening went a lot quicker than most,” reports Ethel. “I got a little loopy, Carl got even loopier, but neither of us got loopy enough to forget we were going home without having got any closer to the Mokele-Mbembe than the tracks he made leaving town.

“And then dear Willy joined us by the campfire and told the loveliest story, took our minds right off it. Not one of his people’s stories, he said. One he’d heard from a sailor in Dakar:

“Well, apparently after Alexander the Great had conquered all the known world, he got it in mind that the only thing left for him to do was to find the fountain of youth—”

Vera, who’s been lulled into a kind of jungle-campfire reverie herself, sits up straight. The fountain of youth? It’s almost more synchronicity than she can bear. And yet nothing at this convergence seems threatening, nothing’s waiting here in ambush.

“So Alexander searched all around for a cook for his expedition, but since it’s well known that cooks like nothing better than tending the home fires—”

“Like Ethel,” says Carl, lovingly.

“Like me,” says Ethel. “But finally one came forward, a man named…Kezir, Carl?

“Something like that,” says Carl.

“By this time Alexander’s heard that the fountain of youth can be found in the Black Land, the country of permanent darkness.” Ethel shudders. “So he and his army push on through the Red Land, the Blue Land, the Yellow Land. Finally they reach the White Land where everything—the earth, the sky, the sun—is frozen and white. Alexander’s whole party panics and deserts; only the emperor and Kezir, his cook, remain.

“They travel on into the Black Land, where the soil is the color of ebony, the trees are black—the leaves, the sky, the air; they can hardly see. They feel like Carl and I did that last night by the bend in the river: they can’t
believe
the fountain of youth could be there. Alexander goes ahead, ordering Kezir to stay back and cook dinner. The cook takes what’s left of their food—the last dried fish he’s saved for Alexander’s meal. He kneels by a black pond to wash it, and when he dips it into the black water, the fish comes alive in his hands and swims away.”

A murmur goes through the audience, a gasp of such wonder and pleasure you’d think they’d seen the dead fish come to life. Perhaps they’re not quite as cool and scientific as Vera supposes, or perhaps they’re like Vera, looking for some reason to believe: Anything’s possible. Miracles happen when one least expects them, most often when one has stopped looking. Perhaps all this talk of the unexpected is merely a product of the same magical thinking that keeps young girls from saying their boyfriends’ names and businessmen from mentioning their big deals. Talk about it and it won’t happen. Don’t expect it—and there it’ll be. Nor is it the same cruel joke that had the alchemists losing everything each time “hippopotamus” came to mind. For this allows for moments of grace when one’s concentration is elsewhere: cooking dinner, washing fish, not worrying about the fountain of youth. Even now, Vera’s still, small, jaded inner voice whispers on, insinuating baser motives, some mean-spirited private joke in Willy’s parable of the clever servant beating Bwana to the punch. But who cares why he told it? The story offers such promise, such hope; if Vera could just think about it longer, everything might fall into place.

Ethel has the crowd where she wants it and isn’t about to let go. The way she holds the silence as if it were a thread she could stretch or snap at will reminds Vera of a revival preacher, and it’s with a sort of preachery hush that Ethel says, “That night we went down to the river. We thought we’d walk off the palm wine, rest a bit, come back; even with the full moon out, bright as day, it wasn’t any place you’d want to stay long.

“So Carl and I were just turning up to the bank when we heard a splash. Whoosh! ‘Carl!’ I cried. ‘There it is!’ We started running—and then we saw it. Diving into the water, brown, enormous, like some gigantic lizard maybe fifteen feet long—and we only saw the
tail
! And the wake it left! Good Lord, it was ten feet tall! My heart was pounding so fast I had to sit down, I…Carl, do you want to tell them? Carl?”

Carl takes a while answering. The screen’s gone black; the whole room’s dark. Carl and Ethel coo reassuringly at one another. Vera and the cryptobiologists and even Flagstaff Cablevision could be eavesdropping on the most intimate moments of their marriage, on fifty years of whispered conversations in the dark. Finally Carl says, “Isn’t it awful the way you never have the goldarn camera when you really need it?” and the audience cheers.

“We were just pleased as punch,” Ethel says when the crowd settles down. “But Willy and the others seemed rather concerned. After all sorts of hushhush meetings, they told us they were going to hold a little ceremony, some rite their people did in celebration and for protection…so the Mokele-Mbembe wouldn’t eat them for breakfast is really the idea I got. More palm wine, naturally. By now the boys were three sheets to the wind, and soon they began to play the most extraordinary instrument.”

Carl switches on the tape recorder and goes over beside Ethel. In a few moments the room—still pitch-black except for the light from the lectern—fills with a high, unearthly ringing, like someone playing a crosscut saw or running a finger around a wineglass; then the tone sinks to a kind of growl, like rattling gourds, shaking bones, dancing skeletons.

“We heard it before we saw it,” Ethel’s saying, “and of course we figured it was some kind of gourd or special wood, but guess what? It was a metal drainpipe with holes in it. We could hardly believe it, but Willy said it didn’t matter, the sound itself was what was sacred.”

Vera has no problem with that. The sound is so unlike anything she’s ever heard, she’d believe it if Ethel told them it was the voice of the Mokele-Mbembe itself. And who’s to say it isn’t? Vera closes her eyes and listens, feels the sound taking her off to some dark land where everything is black and where it’s possible that the dried fish you wash in the pond will come back to life.

When she opens her eyes, the crowd is on its feet, applauding. Vera joins in for a while, then leaves the Mimosa Room, leaves the Ghost Circle Lodge, and goes outside and stands on the edge of the canyon.

Tonight it doesn’t frighten or disappoint her. It’s so dark she can’t see much, and what she can see looks manageable and tame; it could be a ditch some kid’s dug in the hotel backyard, an excavation on which some neighbor lodge will soon build. In a few minutes she’ll go back inside. Meanwhile she’s thinking of questions she wants to ask the Poteets. The first one is: Could they have made that trip thirty years ago? Already she’s answered for them: no. Thirty years ago they would have fought, like Vera and Lowell, over who spent their last peso on cashews. Thirty years ago they would have run from that dinosaur wake the way Vera ran from Bigfoot. Thirty years ago they couldn’t have inched their way through that swamp; they would never have had the time.

Time: that’s what she most wants to ask the Poteets about. The way lives change unpredictably with time. And suddenly the question of whether they could have made their trip thirty years ago seems less compelling than this one: When Carl and Ethel were Vera’s age, did they ever imagine that in thirty years they’d be hacking a path through the jungle?

When Vera considers this, more things seem possible. Quite possibly Lowell will someday talk her into a dinosaur hunt of their own. There’s no counting on it, Vera knows. No investing one’s hopes in promises that may turn out to be false; no guaranteeing anyone a dinosaur-hunting old age. But if Carl and Ethel can search for the Mokele-Mbembe, why can’t she and Lowell have one more go-around after the lost Mayan treasure? And what if they find it? How sweet it would be to call Dave and Norma and tell them their son-in-law had finally made good.

Vera thinks of her parents, her old room and
its
treasures: postcards, books of fairy tales, a conch shell. It occurs to her that the room she called the Greens from last week was really nothing like the room she grew up in. All the time she lived there, it was a junk heap, and she and Dave and Norma fought constantly about her cleaning it up. Why couldn’t they have had enough faith in the future to have spared themselves that, to have just closed her door and hung on till she had a place and a child of her own, till she’d grown into the kind of woman who’d take pleasure in the small chores, the tidying up, her Saturday domestic life?

But, in the end, what difference would it have made? What permanent harm did any of it do? When Vera thinks of Dave and Norma now, it’s with great tenderness and love, and if there are things about her parents that disturb and worry her, it’s not any leftover bitterness from the fights they had over her room. She swore she’d never have such arguments with Rosie. And she didn’t; she didn’t have to. Rosie was always neat.

Here I am, Vera thinks, poised on the edge of eternity, of the Grand Canyon itself, and what am I thinking of? Children’s rooms. Yet imagining Rosie’s room is enormously reassuring. When Vera pictures Rosie’s orderly bookcase, her collection of Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia, her toe shoes and the hand-tinted ballerina print from Solomon arranged in a kind of shrine, she can almost believe that she will soon leave the edge of this yawning chasm and return to the safe, enclosed, familiar, and—from this distance—much-loved space of her home. Vera knows Rosie will come back. And leave again. She knows she can’t stop time, can’t hold on to Rosie—or anyone—forever. But tonight it seems possible to live with that knowledge, to listen for those moments when whispers of comfort and pleasure are louder than that voice on the phone at the Greens. What’s most unexpected is grace.

A cool wind blows in off the canyon, and this too seems like a promise: this awful summer will finally end, and autumn will come. The idea of autumn brings Vera full circle, back to the Poteets: even though you know things are dying, all their color and glory almost make you feel they’re renewing themselves, beginning life over again.

Vera looks up at the sky—black but for a sliver of moon and two stars. The bright star nearest the earth is Venus. The distant, reddish one must be Mars. Without thinking about what she’s doing, Vera narrows one eye and winks. The red star blinks off and on. And though Vera knows that what she’s just seen is most likely a trick of the moonlight, a reflection of something else, still for a moment she almost believes that it’s Elvis, winking back.

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen novels, including
A Changed Man
, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and
Blue Angel
, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
, and the
New York Times
bestseller
Reading Like a Writer
. A former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prose is a highly regarded critic and essayist, and has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, and she lives in New York City.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1986 by Francine Prose

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-4804-4508-6

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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