Thursday, March 15, 2012

Ron Carlson "Bigfoot Stole My Wife"

Bigfoot Stole My Wife
By Ron Carlson

The problem is credibility.

The problem, as I'm finding out over the last few weeks, is basic credibility. A lot of people look at me and say, sure Rick, Bigfoot stole your wife. It makes me sad to see it, the look of disbelief in each person's eye. Trudy's disappearance makes me sad, too, and I'm sick in my heart about where she may be and how he's treating her, what they do all day, if she's getting enough to eat. I believe he's beeing good to her -- I mean I feel it -- and I'm going to keep hoping to see her again, but it is my belief that I probably won't.

In the two and a half years we were married, I often had the feeling that I would come home from the track and something would be funny. Oh, she'd say things: One of these days I'm not going to be here when you get home, things like that, things like everybody says. How stupid of me not to see them as omens. When I'd get out of bed in the early afternoon, I'd stand right here at this sink and I could see her working in her garden in her cut-off Levis and bikini top, weeding, planting, watering. I mean it was obvious. I was too busy thinking about the races, weighing the odds, checking the jockey roster to see what I now know: he was watching her too. He'd probably been watching her all summer.

So, in a way it was my fault. But what could I have done? Bigfoot steals your wife. I mean: even if you're home, it's going to be a mess. He's big and not well trained.

When I came home it was about eleven-thirty. The lights were on, which really wasn't anything new, but in the ordinary mess of the place, there was a little difference, signs of a struggle. There was a spilled Dr. Pepper on the counter and the fridge was open. But there was something else, something that made me sick. The smell. The smell of Bigfoot. It was hideous. It was . . . the guy is not clean.

Half of Trudy's clothes are gone, not all of them, and there is no note. Well, I know what it is. It's just about midnight there in the kitchen which smells like some part of hell. I close the fridge door. It's the saddest thing I've ever done. There's a picture of Trudy and me leaning against her Toyota taped to the fridge door. It was taken last summer. There's Trudy in her bikini top, her belly brown as a bean. She looks like a kid. She was a kid I guess, twenty-six. The two times she went to the track with me everybody looked at me like how'd I rate her. But she didn't really care for the races. She cared about her garden and Chinese cooking and Buster, her collie, who I guess Bigfoot stole too. Or ate. Buster isn't in the picture, he was nagging my nephew Chuck who took the photo. Anyway I close the fridge door and it's like part of my life closed. Bigfoot steals your wife and you're in for some changes.

You come home from the track having missed the Daily Double by a neck, and when you enter the home you are paying for and in which you and your wife and your wife's collie live, and your wife and her collie are gone as is some of her clothing, there is nothing to believe. Bigfoot stole her. It's a fact. What should I do, ignore it? Chuck came down and said something like well if Bigfoot stole her why'd he take the Celica? Christ, what a cynic! Have you ever read anything about Bigfoot not being able to drive? He'd be cramped in there, but I'm sure he could manage.

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. 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: its 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 trailor was washed away in the flooding waters of the Harley River and swept thirty-one miles, ending right side up and neary 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 trailor 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 a 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 sane was this incredible gold color, and it made her look so absolutly naked you 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 trailor bucked the first time, we thought it was my mother come home to catch us in the dirty book. Nuggy shoved the magazine under his bed and I ran out to check the door. It only took me a second and I holldered back Hey no sweat, no one's here, but by the time Ireturned 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.

It if 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 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 Reinbecker, 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 came 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.

10 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Little Ones

    As the wind exhales,
    it bequeaths life
    into an old doll, the kind
    with dull button eyes—
    the stuffing, long gone.
    The skin swells under the
    wind’s breath;
    the ground sinks away.

    She sails over the home
    where a girl with
    crooked glasses
    and an upturned nose
    used to drag through trails
    of make-believe.

    Caught on a fence post,
    she flutters there helpless.
    This is where I find her.
    She reminds me of dolls
    that collected the dirt of my floors
    in the tiny hands of
    my own girls.

    Like them, I cannot keep her,
    nor can I offer resurrection,
    the best I can do is perform
    a burial with rites under the chain link fence.

    Valerie Sigl

    ReplyDelete
  3. Golden

    the Wire,
    oxIdized, and grey,
    Reluctantly bends, forming indistinguishable
    shapEs

    my hAnds, worn and calloused,
    tighteNs coils along the
    Incoherent skeleton,
    forMing the torso, legs, and neck
    the heAd, now wrapped in bands of gold, extends
    like tenticLes, swallowing the tainted, dark wire,
    revealing a Shimmering, gold barred giraffe


    -Danielle Furia

    ReplyDelete
  4. fall

    I have been there before,
    In the woods and in the dirt.
    my hands pulling colors from the sunrise.
    birch in the lunula of my nail.

    In the woods and in the dirt.
    The leaves, perfumey graves, are my pool to wade in.
    eyes are amber twists of snail shells.
    I lie in flower beds where pirates and bandits lay to rest.

    The leaves, perfumey graves, are my pool to wade in.
    my braids coiling snakes, curling up in the weeds.
    when I lie in flower beds, where pirates and bandits lay to rest
    my body is the garden fence.

    -Adeline Ainsworth

    ReplyDelete
  5. Crispies

    Snap, Crackle,
    oh no.
    What comes next?

    Is it pop?
    It just sounds the same when
    I put my ear next to it.
    Sounds like pop rocks,
    no audible sounds except for
    sizzling.

    The milk doesn’t “snap”
    the crispies,
    nor does it “crackle”
    or “pop” them.

    What does the milk really do then?

    The crispies scream
    for help because
    they are drowning.
    Rice can’t swim!
    Not even the stale bread
    kind of rice.

    So do the crispies just
    snap, crackle, and pop,
    or hold on for dear life,
    right before the giant mouth
    swallows them whole

    -Wade Walker

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. Word Master

    I want to be a flurry of verbs.
    A blitz of complexity.
    A torrent of clever metaphors,
    With a dash of subtle wit.

    A vigilante of the mind,
    Insight as my calling card.
    Prose as my rose.
    Elegant use of language
    Grammatical structure
    My weapon.

    I want to be a wordsmith god.
    A hoard of understanding.
    A gut insatiable, craving for more.
    With the right amount of modesty.

    I could enlighten the masses.
    Stinging their ears,
    Whipping their minds.
    Carving out futures.

    Poetry reflects reality.
    So an unseen prophet,
    Hollows out another message.
    It sinks below the tide
    Of busy-bodied grime.

    -Zachary Gilbert-Mahoney

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  8. Resistance

    The music strangles my mind
    and attacks my nervous system.
    Suppressing me into deep coma.
    A coma of everlasting
    unforgivable sleep.

    Forcing me to think of inexistent
    birds that aren’t there.
    Chasing sweet thoughts
    into my subconscious--
    I fight them away.

    Resisting the snare drums,
    violins, and flutes
    allows me to remain stubborn
    and closed-minded to the world around me.
    The world closes its mind to my existence
    and I remain a speck that was left un-swept.

    The only music I wish to hear
    Is the beat of my own drum.
    Following nothing.
    Hearing nothing.
    Seeing nothing but myself in a mirror.
    Reflecting the epitome of resistance.

    ReplyDelete