Authors: Francine Prose
After all those sweeping vistas, it’s a relief that the Saguaro Room has no windows. Walls of gold-veined mirror remind Vera of her grandmother’s house. Light comes from under the mirrors and from thousands of pinholes in the ceiling that, if you squint, suggest a planetarium, only dingier. It’s a good thing Louise isn’t here.
Filtering out the general buzz, Vera tunes in on the women behind her, listening for
their
Bigfoot stories. But, like conventioneers everywhere, they’re complaining about the food: how their noodles Florentine tasted funny, and how the maître d’ said that many eastern visitors remark on this, but it’s just the different water, different minerals; nothing they can do. Minerals, water—that shut the old ladies up; it must have seemed like sacrilege to sit perched like eagles above nature’s greatest glory and dump on the minerals and water. Now they’re blaming themselves for ordering butter and cheese when all a body needs for lunch is a bit of rye toast and tomato. All this talk of simple food lulls Vera into thinking of Carmen and her radishes, so it’s not till the ladies stop in midsentence that Vera notices the man who’s stepped up to the podium and is waiting politely for silence.
“Good evening,” he says. “And welcome. I’m Ray Bramlett.”
Sixtyish, with a neat, graying moustache and what looks like all his hair, Ray Bramlett evokes David Niven playing gentleman cowboy. He’s wearing a string necktie, a western shirt, and over it, a boxy Navajo vest, handwoven in the palest golds and grays. Vera thinks of the Indian kid in the Van Halen T-shirt. It’s as if the white man and the Indian have swapped clothes, and the clothes the Indians got are worth about as much as the land they wound up with in their dealings with the Great White Father.
“Before we begin,” says Ray, “a few announcements.” There’s a slow, down-home gentleness in the way Ray Bramlett rolls each syllable around in his mouth. It’s impossible to imagine him yelling or getting angry. At the same time it’s very easy to picture him driving a wife or a child or a classroom full of students completely out of their minds with the thoughtfulness and deliberation behind every word.
“Then I’ll say a bit about who we are and why we’re here. I promise not to take too long, since the one thing I
know
you haven’t come for is to hear me ramble on.” Ray pauses for the obligatory murmur of laughter. Vera always wonders who the people are who can be counted on to chuckle at such moments, to make those sounds that have so little to do with real laughter. If Vera tried to laugh now, she’d probably bray like a mule.
“First, I’m sorry to say that Professor Dorothy Chasteen won’t be with us to talk on the sea-serpent myths.” Ray waits for the clucks of disappointment that finally come, as authentic as the laughter. “But I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that Dr. Chasteen’s just completed a major project—the birth of her first child.” Bramlett’s really working the crowd now—more laughter and even a smattering of applause. “And I’d like to remind you that tomorrow, in the Mimosa Room at eight, we’ll have the special event we’ve been waiting for when Mr. and Mrs. Carl Poteet present the first public showing of their history-making slides and tapes.”
Vera can tell how history-making these slides and tapes must be: this time the applause comes spontaneously, without Ray having to work for it.
“And now on behalf of myself and my colleagues on the board, I’d like to welcome you to the Ninth Annual Convocation of the American Cryptobiological Society. I realize that most of you are familiar with our origins, but let me beg your indulgence while I say a few sentences for the benefit of our new members, who, I’m pleased to say, are more numerous than ever before.”
Vera’s pleased, too. There’s no way of telling what numerous means, but it does seem to promise she won’t be singled out as the only new face. Meanwhile Ray steps on the gas and goes into high academic gear:
“Two hundred years ago, three hundred residents of the French town of Julliac saw a shower of stones fall from the sky. Naturally, no one believed them. There were accusations of mass hysteria, cartoons in every paper from Paris to Marseilles adding Julliac to that roster of mythical towns breeding only imbeciles and gullible fools. Luckily for Julliac and for science, just ten years later three thousand stones fell on the town of L’Aigle, nearer Paris and including among its residents a member of the Institute, who brought one of the rocks in for analysis. At which point it was found to be structurally different from any known geological specimen. And science had its first meteorite.
“The tragic thing is that science has yet to learn the lessons of Julliac. Let’s suppose that, one summer morning, the Lake Champlain monster—Champy, to us—emerges from the water and tours the backyards of Burlington, Vermont. Whole families spot it from their breakfast-nook windows. And who believes them? No one except the lunatic-fringe press. Besides, the witnesses will soon convince themselves it was a trick played by light or by their imaginations or hangovers, whichever the case may be.”
Though the audience chortles knowingly, Vera senses it’s hardly a hangover crowd. She’s smarting from that reference to the lunatic-fringe press. Even so, she wants to get up and testify: this narrative of anomaly and disbelief is the story of her recent life! Perhaps she should move to Julliac, her true spiritual home.
“And so,” Ray Bramlett continues, “the American Cryptobiological Society was formed to make sure that an incident like the meteor shower at Julliac will never again be dismissed without a full scientific investigation.
“As most of you know, the gorilla wasn’t formally identified until 1847. The pygmy hippopotamus was not officially collected until 1913. Until those dates, sightings of these creatures were ridiculed as crackpotism, much like contemporary reports of Sasquatch and the yeti. But we must keep open the possibility that these unexpected creatures may one day join the list now headed by the pygmy hippo and the gorilla.
“This word,
unexpected
, is critical. For the life forms we cryptobiologists study are neither ‘extinct’ nor ‘legendary’ nor ‘unknown.’ The extinct is for the biohistorian, the legendary for the ethnographer, the unknown for the science-fiction writer.
We
devote ourselves to the study of creatures that one would not
expect
at the times or in the places where they have nevertheless been reported to exist.”
Vera’s charmed by the notion of all these people gathered in pursuit of the unexpected. And yet it seems slightly disingenuous to call these creatures unexpected. The scientist combing Nepal for the yeti is on some level expecting—certainly hoping—to see one. And for all the shock of that moment when she imagined meeting Bigfoot at Louise’s, Vera knows that some part of her was expecting to see him every moment she was there.
“And now,” Ray Bramlett’s saying, “it’s a great pleasure to introduce a man we
have
come to expect, to
rely
on for the latest Sasquatch research. Professor Gerald Davis.”
While the crowd applauds Professor Davis, Vera registers the obvious irony that here to address a society devoted to the unexpected is a walking cliché, exactly how you’d picture a north-woods anthropologist and Bigfoot researcher: a windburned Paul Bunyan in full beard, jeans, lumber jacket, hiking boots. Not for him the lectern, the timid, rustling paper of the prepared speech. With one broad sweep, he yanks down the screen behind him and yells, “Lights!”
The lights dim; a projector starts to whir. Numbers count down and up comes the flickering, badly lit face of an old geezer. With his whiskers, rheumy eyes, and lumpy alcoholic nose, he’s the genuine article that early TV cleaned up and packaged as Gabby Hayes. From offscreen, Professor Davis asks with exaggerated politeness, Would the geezer care to tell us his name? It takes the old man so long to retrieve this information from his memory cells, the audience grows restive. “Billy Fred Dowdy,” he says. “I’m a prospector. Retired. Worked seventy years in them hills round Mount St. Helens. One what finally blew.”
“And what is your connection with the Bigfoot story?” asks the offscreen voice.
“Don’t rightly have none,” says Billy Fred. “’Ceptin’ for a joke me and my uncle played, must be sixty years back. Up in Paydirt Canyon.” The frame stops halfway down Billy Fred’s chest. He’s wearing a plaid jacket not unlike Gerald Davis’s. His shoulder’s twitching as if he’s scratching something off camera. “One morning me and my uncle seen these loggers come up the canyon with horses and wagons and enough axes to chop down half of Washington. Well, we’d kinda got to feel like it was our woods. So we figured we’d play a little joke on them peckerwoods. Let ’em find someplace else to cut.
“We had these blankets, see, big, hairy, black ones. And—this was my uncle’s idea—we wrapped up in ’em and climbed the ridge and began whoopin’ and hollerin’ and thumpin’ our chests. The loggers just stood there starin’. So we picked up some rocks and rolled ’em into the canyon. That got ’em movin’.” The camera pulls back to show Billy Fred rubbing his knees and laughing, a death-rattle emphysema wheeze.
“And then?” says the professor.
“The next week my uncle goes into Marionville for some grub and picks up the paper, and sure enough, there ’tis ’bout these two Bigfoots tossin’ boulders at these loggers. Me and my uncle like to bust a gut. We figured, Shoot, if they’re goin’ to flap their lips, we’ll give ’em somethin’ to flap about. So we carved these two feets out of pine, like this—” Billy Fred spreads his arms wide. “And we went around makin’ prints in the dirt. ’Ceptin’ it backfired. Next thing we knew, them woods was crawlin’ with guys in monkey suits with tape measures, makin’ plaster castings. Oh, we had to laugh,” says Billy Fred, opening his mouth so wide that strands of saliva form a kind of cat’s cradle between his five or six teeth.
“And now you’ve decided to come forward?” Is there something slightly accusatory in that offscreen voice? Can’t the professor take a joke? “May I ask why?”
“Well,” says Billy Fred, “I’m gettin’ ready to meet my Maker, and I don’t want to get to those pearly gates and hear St. Peter say, ‘Billy Fred, what about that time you tricked those folks into thinkin’ you was Bigfoot? All those lies you tell, all those little stories you make up…they come around.’”
Amen, thinks Vera, wondering if Billy Fred ever feared that one day he’d be panning in some stream and he’d look up and there would be two real Bigfoots hurling rocks at him. Listen, she wants to tell him. It can happen.
“Let there be light!” cries Gerald Davis. Looking around, Vera finds she’s not the only one who looks melancholy—and with good reason. They’ve been promised the latest Sasquatch news, perhaps another sighting. Instead, one’s been taken away.
Davis presses both palms against the podium and leans forward. “Science begins with hunches,” he says. “And from the day I began collecting Bigfoot data, I’ve had a hunch that the Paydirt Canyon sighting was a hoax. Because this scenario—two Bigfoots throwing stones—is at odds with every piece of evidence we have. Sasquatch never appear in groups. There is not one reported incident of Bigfoot attacking man.
“It is my view that Billy Fred Dowdy’s confession is a tremendous gain, confirming what we’ve long suspected. For among the things we know best about Bigfoot are the things he does not do. Bigfoot does not talk. He does not use fire. No Bigfoot dwelling has ever been found. He is not a dangerous animal.”
He does not smoke cigarettes, thinks Vera. He does not cook trout-and-watercress breakfasts. He does not pick children up so they won’t fall in his footprints. As Gerald Davis drones on, she’s getting steadily more depressed. There’s certainly no place for her Bigfoot fantasy in the official canon. How could Bigfoot take her and her loved ones to his rag-and-branch palace if he doesn’t have a dwelling? Anyway, who’s she kidding?
Her
Bigfoot story is what happened at Louise’s: if Bigfoot approached her, she’d run.
By the time his lecture’s done, Vera’s convinced: if Gerald Davis has a Bigfoot fantasy, it’s of trapping Bigfoot in a net like King Kong, degrading him from the uncrowned king of the forest to a specimen to be poked and prodded and written up. Vera stays for the first questions and answers, long enough to watch Davis focus on the prettiest of the scrubbed, outdoorsy girls, addressing all his remarks to her till her boyfriend grows visibly uncomfortable. Then Vera leaves, lighting up as she does. In fact she craves fresh air, but can’t make herself go out. Even facing the other way in the dark, she’d know the canyon was there.
So she paces the lobby, moving from trophy to trophy as if at a museum. How
real
they seem, even in death. This buffalo was never an old geezer in a fur blanket. Vera wants to lay her cheek beside the javelina’s bristles, nuzzle her forehead against the elk’s leathery nose. The prickle of their pelts on her skin would be enough for her, all the unexpectedness she’d ever need.
The next morning, it takes Vera an alarmingly long time to figure out where she is. What she finally decides is that she’s in a fugue state. She used to like the sound of it: fugue state, like Bach’s D Minor Toccata played in your head. Now she sees it isn’t very romantic or, for that matter, comfortable, but rather like some analgesic that doesn’t work, like the drug they gave her in labor that didn’t diminish the pain, only her ability to transcend it.
Once she knows where she is, she need only figure out what’s wrong. And gradually it comes to her: everything. In one week she’s lost her job, her daughter, her husband, her friend, her buffers against pain and loss. All her consolations have turned out to be lies, all her hopes—including the crazy idea that she could write something profound about these cryptobiologists—delusions. There’s no story in a geezer confessing to a sixty-year-old prank. The only publication that would print that is
This Week
.
She imagines running away, going back to her apartment. And what then? She thinks,
WOMAN SITS IN SAME CHAIR THIRTY YEARS
. Yet even now the voice of Vera’s better judgment’s coming through, reminding her of what choices she has left. One: she can lie here forever. Two: she can get up and get dressed and get coffee and go hear “Two Views of Nessie.”