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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.
Lorrie Moore:
"How to Become a Writer"
http://www.sfuadcnf.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/How-to-Become-a-Writer-Lorrie-Moore.pdfhttps://scripturientbibliophile.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/on-how-to-become-a-writer-1985-by-lorrie-moore/
Please add a response in the comment box to Lorrie Moore's and Carlson's.
HMWK: Finish reading Carver stories
For Carlson's story, I feel as though it was very humorous. Even though Bigfoot may have literally stolen his wife from him, the way he orates his story is just something that makes someone laugh. At some points, the story didn't make much sense to me. It was like he made excuses for how his wife was taken, even though they had nothing to do with his current situation. For Lorrie's story, I liked it because it really illustrated real life struggles and trying to find her strengths in writing, putting in her own little pieces of humor throughout.
ReplyDeleteCarlson's story is much like Carver's style, but with humor. The story seems to be a big metaphor for the narrators wife leaving him, but instead of flat out saying it the story is written to kind of "beat around the bush" if you will.
ReplyDeleteLorrie's story is a great example of 2nd person writing using the phrases you and your. The story and style combination is interesting because it makes the audience feel more involved in the story as if it's them and their actions being described.
The story was a little confusing at first but when you finish the story it becomes like dark desperate comedy. The 2nd story was really interesting though I couldn't say I can relate to the experiences she went through. I loved writing her thoughts on the criticism she was given were accurate compared to the way most people secretly take criticism.
ReplyDeleteCarlson's story is sort of on the humorous side, because I love how he automatically assumed Bigfoot was the one who 'stole his wife. I liked Lorrie's story because it is a good example of writing in the second person and it makes you feel as if its you in the story, not just a character
ReplyDeleteLorrie Moore: The writing story had striking sentences because they're really outrageous. I really like how Moore makes the themes of the story lighter by incorporating humorous connotations. The struggle of being a writer is a difficult subject, but Moore uses real life, funny examples to avoid making the story strenuous.
ReplyDeleteCarlson: I thought the story was okay. There's a metaphor in Bigfoot. The narrator doesn't want to believe his wife intentionally left him, so he blames it on another entity. This relates to his flashback because his dad wanted to blame the flood for why the pants were missing, when in reality it was a different case. I don't think much of the detail was necessary, it took me out of the story for a bit.
bigfoot: I didn't really believe the author when he said his wife was kidnapped by bigfoot. Would anyone? Bifgoot isn't exactly confirmed to be real. It's him in denial about his wife taking her things and leaving. Then the gray area that I read is the portion about being in a flood during his childhood. The lesson of the story is supposed to be "Don't trust everything you read" or something like that, so are we even supposed to trust that him and his friend went through a flood or his wife was even taken by bigfoot??
ReplyDeletelorrie: Since the story is humourous, I don't think that her saying to devote all of your time (literally ALL) to writing is her actual opinion. It's more exaggeration than real advice. It lightens the weight on the real topic. The jokes that she tells are weird but that's just what she was going for.
Carlson's story was a descriptive and humorous read. Definitely something very unique and slightly odd. The story as a whole is one large metaphor. The narrator might have been in disbelief, too shocked to take in that his wife left him, so he created this elaborate story in his mind. Or, Big Foot could've been another man, but feeling so humiliated by the situation, the narrator could've demeaned the character who stole his wife by calling him a large hideous beast.
ReplyDeleteLorrie Moore wrote a very detailed and interesting story that portrayed a perfect example for writers being thrown into the "lions den", or new perspective style of second person. Writing in this type of perspective creates an illusion and breaks down that barrier between story and reader and pulls the reader into the world of the novel.
My intake on Big foot Stole my Wife was that it was...weird. I enjoyed it but it was almost as if he denied that she could have just simply left him. The main character blamed his wife's disappearance on a fictional character that has yet to be discovered. At the same time i think he was a bit out of his sanity with this situation, i enjoyed that he has a sense of humor and a wide span of imagination. Overall it was a very passionate story about his sadness when his wife left and he definitely has an active imagination!
ReplyDeletePersonally, I liked the narration in Carlson's story. It was written in a bit of a casual voice, and it kind of felt like I was having a conversation with the narrator, which was nice. As for Lorrie Moore's story, I could easily feel like I knew what the character was experiencing because of the whole second person p.o.v thing, and it showed a detailed account of the main character's experiences, too. Both of these stories had their own comedic flair as well.
ReplyDeleteCarlson's story was funny. The beginning of him explaining how bigfoot stole his wife was funny because he so set on that particular idea that regardless of what anybody says he's made up his mind on what happened.
ReplyDeleteWhen Lorrie first began the story of how to be a writer because it was interesting it made me want to continue reading.
Carlson's story was an interesting read. It was comic but sad at the same time. I enjoyed the narrator a lot mainly because he seemed to wander off topic while telling the story.
ReplyDeleteMoore's story was worth the read, definitely so, but left me feeling... eh. I felt as if I didn't understand anything I had read.
In Carlson's story, the act of first person narrative bias is ever present as the narrator almost melds the world around him to fit his personal desires. Whether he truly believes it or not, he claims that Big Foot Stole his wife and spends almost the entirety of the passage attempting to convince the reader this is true. He does this by describing an unbelievable story and attempting to convince the reader this is true and that if the reader accepts that this unbelievable occurrence is true, logic would follow that his story about his wife being stolen by Bigfoot is also true. If the man in the story does in fact truly believe that Bigfoot stole his wife than a comical feat of dramatic irony is ubiquitous as the writer goes on to detail that his friends would ask that if "Bigfoot stole her why'd he take the Celica?" to which he utterly rejects as cynical. Regardless, I found the short story entertaining and comedic.
ReplyDeleteI throughouly enjoyed Lorrie Morre's "How to Become a Writer." I feel like the problems, interactions, and responses described throughout are very realistic and contain various comedic elements. I find it interesting that the writer, a prestigious author, details the struggles a developing writer undergoes which raises the question: Did she, the author, face those same problems before she herself became the famed writer she is today?
the big foot story was a very weird story. the man tried denying the fact that his wife left him. it was very interesting reading the way he gave examples of what he thought was happening. it was a real funny entertaining story.
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