Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online

how this vocation financed numerous trips to Asia, three spectacular hashish deals, and as many expensive failures. How those scrubbed vegetarian faces lit up when they listed the addictions Lowell had kicked, the substances he’d abused!
    So even before she met him, Vera saw how Lowell’s friends loved him, how his story gave them not just the hope of new possibilities, last-minute changes, exceptions to the rule, but also the pure joy of telling it. The next part was predictable: She almost had to be disappointed by that big, long-faced hillbilly skulking around the edges of his own coming-home party.
    Vera still likes remembering the interval when she convinced herself that her interest in Lowell was just friendly, that all she wanted was to spend time with him, to walk down the street or drive in a car and see what would happen and what he would do; followed by the period when every day she didn’t spend with him seemed wasted. The morning he showed up to see her at eight A.M. , and they knew what was going to happen, but the protocol of her staying on Louise’s living-room couch made them wait like courting teens all day. The strangeness of hearing that hillbilly accent in the darkness, telling her stories that permanently changed her idea of what stories she wanted to hear in the dark. The night he told her about a place in Afghanistan so backward they had no musical instruments but cupped their hands in their armpits and quacked out the rhythms and solos of the Nuristani Underarm Band. Even Vera knew how crazy it was to be falling in love with someone for telling glorified Afghan Polish jokes; and she knew that was what she was doing.
    Meanwhile, the same people who’d told her Lowell’s life story now felt duty-bound to warn her: Lowell could go to Nuristan but not to the corner store. Send him out for a quart of milk and he’d come back with a plastic Aqua Man to wind up and swim in the tub. Yet it made perfect sense that the bazaars of Mazār-i-Sharif would spoil you for the Safeway, and Vera thanked God for sending her someone who could find the magic in the Seven-Eleven.
    By then they’d rented a room in some art student’s Hayes Street flat and were living on love with a food-stamp backup. Then winter came, bringing week after week of rain. One wet morning Lowell rolled up his last antique Bokhara rug and came back hours later with no rug and two plane tickets to Mérida, where, he said, they’d eat enough psilocybin mushrooms to put them in touch with ancient Mayans who’d lead them to their lost buried treasure. Soon after, Vera found herself in a cow pasture in Palenque, watching some Quebecois hippies cook psychedelic-mushroom omelets, and soon after that on her knees in a tunnel under the pyramids, burrowing through the darkness lit only by bunches of sputtering wax cerillos. Her sharpest memory is of sitting by a cenote with Lowell complaining nonstop about the team of crack divers from National Geographic who’d got there first and dredged up a fortune in gold. How soothing it was to picture National Geographic ’s sunny yellow borders instead of that dismal black pool, those thousands of gilded Mayan virgins sinking like stones!
    So what? said Lowell. What good did all that treasure do the Mayans? They’d go to the coast and skindive for the Giant Squid and bring him back to exhibit in New York. But all Vera got skindiving was rapture of the deep before she’d even left the surface and a blistering sunburn on her back.
    By this time their money was almost gone. They had twenty pesos total when Vera asked Lowell to buy some cocoa butter or vaseline, some homeopathic Mayan sunburn remedy—anything to ease the rawness aggravated by the rough rope hammock they were sleeping on in their poverty-level hippie shack on the beach. Hours later Lowell returned with a small bag of cashew nuts, its fifteen-peso price tag still attached. He was bewildered when she hid her face in her hands and cried.