The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) (8 page)

"That doesn't mean you can bareback," I said. That basically means having sex without condoms. Full sex.
Penetrative
sex.

"Sure, it does."

"No, no. You're still supposed to use condoms, at least with people you don't absolutely know are HIV-negative. Like, after being monogamous and getting tested together?"

Boston just looked at me, his face completely blank.

"PrEP lowers your chance of getting HIV, but it doesn't eliminate it completely," I said. "Besides, there are other diseases."

"I slammed my dick in a car door once," Boston said. "But I was wearing a condom at the time, so I didn't feel a thing."

It took me a second to realize that he was making a joke about the fact that condoms cut down on the feeling of sex. But what had made Boston think that I'd be willing to have unprotected sex with him—even if he really
was
on PrEP? We hadn't literally "fucked" the last time I'd been here. I'd
never
fucked with a random hook-up. The last time I'd been here, Boston had sucked my dick, and I'd corn-cobbed his. But mostly we'd just kissed and thrust together and jerked each other off until we'd both come.

"I don't get it," Boston said. "What's the problem?"

"Well, for one thing, what if you're lying?"

"I'm not."

"But how do I know that?"

"I dunno. I guess you should be on PrEP too."

"That's not the point."

"What the point?"

"The point," I said, "is that life isn't a Sean Cody video."

The expression on his face was still completely blank. And the bulge in his pants was exactly as big as before.

I realized I didn't know Boston at all, that we had barely anything in common. Why would we? It had just been a random hook-up.

"I think I'm gonna go," I said.

"What?" he said, like the words literally made no sense.

"This just feels wrong."

"We don't have to fuck," he said. "Not if you don't want to. We can do whatever you want."

I'd like to say that I shook my head no and just walked out the door.

But I didn't. I followed Boston into the bedroom, and we stripped and rolled around naked for a while, just like before.

For about five minutes, it helped me forget Kevin. But then after I left, I think I felt even worse than before, even more lonely.

Fuck buddies was an interesting idea, but now I was thinking that maybe it wasn't the next step in human evolution after all.

CHAPTER SIX

A couple of days later, I was in my room in the houseboat Skyping with my friend Otto, who lives in Los Angeles, and I heard thumping from somewhere down below. I figured either we were being robbed, or we were being attacked by the giant squid from
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
.

Turns out it was Gunnar, futzing around in the houseboat's one non-bedroom closet storage area, under the stairs. (The problem with having only one storage area isn't just the lack of storage space—it's also the fact that if you want anything at all out of storage, you basically have to take everything out, sort through it, then put it all back in again.)

Gunnar had already put his backpack off to one side.

"What's up?" I said.

"I'm going on a hike," he said. He peered into some half-collapsed cardboard boxes.

"Yeah?" I said. "When? Where?"

"Today. Now." He pulled a collapsible tent from one of the boxes. "It's sort of this Bigfoot thing."

"Whoa. Really?" It was already, like, noon. "With who?"

"These people I met online. They're some of the preeminent Bigfoot researchers in the world." He found his down sleeping bag. "You wanna come?"

I had to think about this. I did have the day off—and I was pretty sure I could swap some shifts and get the next day off too. I could go if we were back early-ish the day after. Besides, who wouldn't want to go on a search for Bigfoot? If I didn't have any passions or drives of my own, maybe I could at least borrow Gunnar's for a few days.

*   *   *

Between the two of us, we quickly managed to cobble together enough equipment and supplies for a couple of nights in the woods. Mostly, I was just happy to be getting away from my own pathetic life for a bit.

We headed north out of town toward Highway 2, which takes Stevens Pass over the Cascade Mountains.

As we drove, I said, "So you really think Bigfoot might be real?"

"I think it's possible," he said.

"Min doesn't think so. She says it's unscientific."

"It's never unscientific to ask the question."

I thought about this. This was Gunnar's latest project, and I was determined to keep an open mind, but still. "How is it different from asking if Santa Claus is real?"

"There's no evidence Santa Claus exists," Gunnar said. "With Bigfoot, there's at least eyewitness accounts. And
some
forensic evidence."

"Forensic evidence?"

"Hair. Footprints. Scat."

"In that case, it's probably a good thing there's no forensic evidence of Santa Claus!"

I laughed, but Gunnar didn't.

"You know," I said. "Santa comes down the chimney and takes a shit in your living room?"

Gunnar still didn't laugh, just kept driving and staring straight ahead, which annoyed me a little. I thought my joke was pretty funny.

"In 2013, a group of scientists did the first serious study of the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman," Gunnar said. "They did DNA analysis of thirty-six different samples of hair that were said to be from the creature. They matched the DNA with all the samples in the GenBank, the world's largest collection of DNA. Most of the hair came back as being from horses or bears or wolves. But two of the samples came back as perfect matches for an extinct species of prehistoric polar bear."

As he gripped the steering wheel, Gunnar glanced over at me. Clearly he expected me to be impressed.

"Okay," I said. "So?"

"Don't you see? For one thing, polar bears don't live in the Himalayas. For another thing, this was an extinct species."

"But the Abominable Snowman isn't supposed to be a bear. Is it? I thought it was supposed to be a great ape, like Bigfoot."

"You're missing the point. There's now scientific evidence that there's an unknown, thought-to-be extinct species of bear living in the Himalayas! And being a polar bear, this bear would be much more aggressive than the other bears there, just like the legend of the Abominable Snowman says."

I still didn't say anything. I wasn't sure what I was supposed
to
say.

"Don't you see?" Now Gunnar sounded annoyed. "It looks like the Abominable Snowman was based on something real. It's not just a myth or a legend."

"Ah. So Bigfoot might be based on something real too?"

"Yes!" Gunnar was happy that I was finally getting the point, even if he was exasperated it had taken me so long to see it.

"So have they done this kind of DNA analysis on the forensic evidence they have of Bigfoot?" I said.

Gunnar didn't say anything for a second, just kept clenching the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. "That doesn't mean anything. Most of the samples from the Abominable Snowman study came back negative too."

*   *   *

An hour or so later, we finally crossed over the pass and started heading down into the foothills on the other side of the mountains.             

"So where are we going anyway?" I asked. Gunnar and I hadn't spoken much since I'd pissed him off with my Bigfoot push-back, but I didn't want the whole trip to feel awkward.

"It's a tributary of Nason Creek," he said.

That didn't mean a damn thing to me, but I nodded as if it did.

We drove on in silence again. The wind whistled through a gap in my window. One thing I really liked about Gunnar was that he hadn't blown a lot of his money on an expensive new car. It was a red Geo Prizm from the 1990s, and both the radio and the air conditioning had long since stopped working.

But then we took a turn off the main highway, and I started to worry about that car of his. It was all national forest, so there were no houses or farms, and my cell phone coverage had dropped long ago, out along Highway 2. What happened if we had car trouble?

"Who are these people exactly?" I said. "The ones we're meeting." I felt kind of stupid that I was only asking this now.

"They're just people I've been chatting with online," he said. "Once they saw I was really serious about this Bigfoot thing, that I wasn't just another weekend warrior, they've been really helpful."

I couldn't help but think that maybe what they were attracted to was Gunnar's money. It wouldn't be hard to discover that he was a twenty-three-year-old almost-millionaire. The story had been all over the internet a few years back.

"Right now they're trying to raise money to build a Bigfoot blimp," he said.

"A what?"

"It's a remote-controlled blimp. It's really the perfect way to search for Bigfoot. There's too much territory to search on foot, and helicopters and planes are too loud. They can build it for a quarter million dollars."

And here we go,
I thought.

"I know what you're thinking," Gunnar said.

"Oh?" I said.

"Why not a drone?"

"Um, yeah, okay," I said. "Why
not
a drone?"

"Also too loud. If we know anything about Bigfoot, it's that they're incredibly shy and elusive. They'd have to be to avoid detection all these years. A small, unmanned blimp with thermal imaging is the perfect way to observe them, especially at night, since they're probably nocturnal."

"Right," I said.

We drove in silence a little longer. The car bounced and skittered on the gravel road. When had the road turned to gravel? I hadn't even noticed.

"Gunnar—" I started to say.

"They haven't asked me for money," he said. "And I wouldn't give it to them if they did. I'm not stupid. They're doing a Kickstarter campaign. I might contribute to that, but only, you know, a hundred dollars or so."

"That's cool," I said. "Maybe I'll contribute too."

*   *   *

We took a few more side roads, and drove for another hour or so, before we finally arrived at the campground. Except it wasn't a campground. It was just a row of old cars parked along the side of the road. Gunnar and I parked our car behind the others.

"How do we know these are the right people?" I said.

Gunnar nodded to a nearby bumper sticker:
I brake for Sasquatch!

Really?
I wanted to say. This was his confirmation?

We worked our way through the trees. There was a gully next to the road, and a small stream running down through it. The water fizzed and gurgled around the deadfall in the water—wood that had been stripped of its bark and bleached white like driftwood on a beach. At some point during the year, this thing flooded bad. But it was late June, and the flooding was already done for the year, right?

There was a cluster of blue and red tents set up on a grassy bank next to the creek. There were people too, three men and a woman, mostly in jeans and flannel, and all of them in heavy boots. The second we cleared the trees, they looked over at us, one by one. One guy was down on his haunches, fiddling with the campfire. As we approached, he stood up, eyes on us. But we'd been driving for hours, and the sun was now low in the sky, farther down the creek valley, which meant they were all in silhouette, their faces in shadow. Were they happy to see us—or angry that we'd invaded their campsite? Were these even the people Gunnar had come to meet? Without seeing their faces, how could he tell?

But Gunnar just headed forward, and I followed sheepishly behind, my over-stuffed backpack squeaking on my shoulders.

"You must be Gunnar," one of the men said when we were closer.

You must be Gunnar?
I thought. Was it really possible that we'd driven all this way, deep into a remote forest, to meet up with a group of people Gunnar had never even met in person? And before he'd invited me to join him, he'd been planning to do that
alone
? (On the other hand, how was this different from meeting someone for an online hook-up?)

"Ben?" Gunnar said.

"That's me," the man said.

The shadows fell away, and the four faces were revealed at last.

Four friendly faces.

They were old, in their forties maybe. Their hair was tousled, and the men all had beards, but they were mostly trimmed. They had good posture too. Basically, they were a cross between "mountain man" and "beloved community college professor." One of them was black, and I thought,
Cool, a Bigfoot hunter of color.
Which is probably totally racist, but it's still not something you see every day.

And the men were actually pretty hot, especially Ben. I'd never been particularly attracted to old guys, but there was something about this guy's open-faced smile. His hair and beard weren't quite brown and they weren't quite golden—they were more the color of a perfectly toasted marshmallow. Leon was tall and lean and boyish with straight jet black hair, and Clive, the African American guy, had the thickest body, but he mostly looked solid, not fat. Meanwhile, Katie, the woman, was blond and fit, like a middle-aged mom in an ad for granola bars.

I guess hunting for Bigfoot kept a person in pretty good shape.

When Gunnar had finished introducing me, Clive said, "You guys were coming from Seattle, right?"

"Yeah," I said.

"We had a
great
day today," Ben said. "We were out at the viewing site, and I think we even found a partial footprint. After dinner, I'll show you our cast."

"Oh, no!" Katie said, and we all turned to look at her. She was crouched down, looking into a cooler. "I brought a left-over ice cream cake for dessert, but it's melting fast. Oh, well, I guess we'll just have to have dessert first."

So that's exactly what we did, even before Gunnar and I had a chance to set up our tent: we had half-melted ice cream cake sitting around the campfire on the bank of that little tributary to Nason Creek, watching the sun sink the rest of the way behind the trees.

"You have to give Bigfoot credit," Leon said. "He knows the best places to hang out."

He wasn't kidding. That little gully was beautiful, like one of those secret places you read about in books that you have to go through some kind of magical gateway to get to, out of place and time. The air smelled of pine and running water, and a purple fog of campfire smoke swirled and twitched in the air above the creek.

After dessert, Gunnar and I set up our tent while Ben and Katie (who were married) finished cooking dinner, which turned out to be Cornish game hens stuffed with carrots and herbed rice. Each one was wrapped in tinfoil and cooked directly in the embers. And if dessert had been good, the main course was even better.

"This is incredible," I said, meaning the game hens. "What's your secret?"

"They say that everything tastes better around a campfire," Katie said, and we all sort of nodded. Then she added, "But you know who says that?
Jealous cooks!
"

We all laughed.