Chew. Swallow. Chew.
Chug water, because to be honest, no matter how much you grind away, the bar still goes down as a solid lump.
“How are the others?” Martin says abruptly. Now he’s the one who has caught me off guard.
“The others? Luciana and Daisy seem fine and dandy. Bob is clearly enjoying the hike. As for the guys . . . Do they actually speak?”
Martin glances across the small clearing, his expression troubled.
“They blame themselves,” he states abruptly. “For what happened.”
“Do you?”
“My son was doing what he loved to do. He . . . disappeared . . . doing what he enjoyed most.”
I notice he doesn’t use the word die.
“Do you know how I ended up meeting Bob and the North American Bigfoot Society?” Martin asks me.
I shake my head.
“I read about another case they were working. A young man who went missing in the mountains of Washington. The Bigfoot hunters are particularly focused on that area. Knowing the trails well, they volunteered to assist. Years later, they’re still combing the woods. One of the guys gave an interview saying they didn’t know what had happened to the young man, but they could see him taken in by a family of Sasquatch and living happily ever after.
“I am a carpenter by trade. A man who works with his hands, believes in things that I can feel and touch. But that quote . . .”
Martin looks at me. “When you lose your child, and I mean lose your son, as in you have no idea where he is, no idea what happened to him, what his last moments might have been like, you need some kind of hope to get you through the day, before the terror finds you again at night. I never even thought about Bigfoot five years ago. Now, I want nothing more than to believe.”
“What was Tim like as a child?”
Martin smiles reluctantly, as if even the happy memories are now forced out of him. “Tim was one of those kids—why walk when you can run, why sit on a sofa when you can jump on the cushions, why talk when you can roar? He drove his mother crazy. That amount of energy . . . he was a force to be reckoned with from the moment he opened his eyes.
“It’s why I took him camping for the first time. Tim had started kindergarten and was already getting into trouble—sitting still just wasn’t his thing. School wanted to hold him back. But Patrice and I could tell that he was plenty smart. He just needed to move.”
Martin shrugs. “I did some asking around and several of my friends suggested camping. Get the boy out, away, into the wild. The activity alone would be good for him. Plus, for many of us . . .” Martin pauses, looks at the towering trees, the endless expanse of underlying green, green, green. “Here is where we belong.”
I’m envious. Forty years later, I still haven’t found that.
“We didn’t have a lot of money. Patrice had just gone back to work as a receptionist in a beauty salon; I’m a self-employed contractor. But twenty-five years ago, there weren’t microfibers this, crazy-expensive-tents that. You borrowed gear, you headed into the woods with a can of baked beans, a package of franks, and that was it. You had fun. You got out, you got away, and you laughed like hell with your kid.
“That’s what we did, Tim and I. We hiked into one of the canyons not far from our home, wore ourselves out exploring during the day, practically froze to death at night—and goddamn, there isn’t a second I would change about any of it. Timmy loved it. No one yelled at him to slow down or lectured him about being too loud or begged him to be anything less than who he was. He shone that weekend. That’s what I remember. My boy, with his wild hair and crazy dark eyes, grinning. Ear to ear. The entire two days. I’d never seen him that happy. After that, we were hooked. We escaped as much as possible. Good for Patrice to have some time to herself. Good for her madmen, she’d say, to have time romping in the wild.
“Later, when she was diagnosed with cancer the first time . . . I took Tim camping to break the news. Meant his mother couldn’t be there, but both she and I agreed it would be better that way. Tim could howl at the moon. And I could howl with him. Because it wasn’t fair. Nothing about cancer is fair.
“We didn’t know it then, of course. We didn’t understand. Those were the good old days. When we had only one battle to fight. Soon enough . . .”
Martin stops speaking. He doesn’t have to continue for me to understand. Soon enough, he’d go from a terminally ill wife to a missing son. And now, in a matter of months, he’ll be the only member of his family left. My eyes are moist. I notice, even if Marty doesn’t, that the rest of the group is listening intently.