It is the hitching season, or so the old timers used to call it.  A time to hitch up all dogged-out farm equipment in the fields and drag it into the barn for repairs.  Snow will fall and moving anything abused through the summer into the barn where it can be repaired is essential.  Field work slows.  Coffee flows.  God waits somewhere above the names carved in stone over the mine entrance to comfort the sons of Greeks who died in the great tunnel collapse.  They will return.

SAM

Sam called Darius and told him to be at Angel’s Diner a few minutes early.  He had a favor to procure, and he didn’t want the rest of the boys to hear it.  He pulled up under a rust-colored sky, shuffled through the slush, and slid into a booth with orange vinyl stretched painfully over benches.  Darius was already there.  It was six in the morning at a truck stop between two towns that serve petroleum trucks, umbilical gas lines pumping diesel into their bellies and entertaining locals with near disasters as the land whales shudder southbound tourists onto the shoulder of the highway when they pass.

“Nicky is dying,” Sam told Darius, his winter-swollen hands folded in supplication around his coffee cup.  “The doctors said some kind of cancer they have never seen around here.”

“I’m sorry,” Darius said.  “Can we pray?”

Sam leaned his meaty face into Darius.  “No need yet.  Now about this favor.  It’s complicated.   can’t have Kelli hearing of it, not with the restraining order.  She isn’t to come near either of us.  If she gets wind, she could throw the gears off Nicky’s last days.”

Darius sat back.  His rounded shoulders, big as a steer, leaned forward, his black head mounted securely in the middle.  “The kid is only nine years old.  What does Kelli think?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said with the kind of deep-seated contempt that puts up fences between neighbors.  “She hasn’t been around since she had a go with you.”  Sam paused and let his emotions die down, looking out at the diesel exhaust hanging in the air.  He smelled of it.  He always smelled of it.  The three layers of flannel went the winter without a wash, the belly pulling his shoulders forward.

“You know nothing happened,” Darius said, squinting into the hurt Sam was feeling.

“It’s quite a thing to watch a life get away from you, isn’t it?” Sam asked.

DARIUS

An apparition was steaming on the window where Darius rested his forearm.  His broad, black face flowed in folds down his neck, hiding the sinews that tightened when he talked, drawing his jaw back slightly into a nonthreatening position.  He was a strong, good-looking man of good proportion except for the few extra pounds he carried about the middle.

Trucks exiting the freeway threw waves of slush as they carved their way to the stop, miles of gray wash behind them and gray frags burrowed into fresh snow as if after an explosion.  The dawn seemed stalled against the roiled fog; brackish and heavy, shouldering against the sun.

Darius was rarely up for one of Sam’s favors.  It seemed he was always the first to be asked and the last to get thanked.  He pushed his hands out on the table in front of him in supplication.  “You know that, right?  That nothing happened between me and Kelli?”

Sam looked away from Darius to watch Angel tabbing receipts, balancing plates of eggs and holstering the coffeepot in her apron tie.  “Don’t matter one way or the other.  I don’t want Kelli gobbing up the boy’s life now.”

“She is the mother,” Darius said.

“Don’t pick sides, big man.  You know the woman can’t hold herself up, let alone steady the boy.  What’s done is done, and what’s right is right.”

Darius sat back, his big body taking up most of the bench built for men a hundred years ago who worked all day in the mines on a cup of coffee.  He knew Sam was shaping the story about Kelli to his advantage, the way he always did.  Pushing the truth of things.  The bit of truth in a lie is what mattered to Sam.  Darius had seen it before and he knew challenging Sam would only earn a smug “that’s your way of looking at it.”

Silence.

“Should I tell his baseball team,” Darius went on.  “Do something special, make one of those blankets everybody can sign?”

“No.  He wants to see Bigfoot,” Sam said.

“Judas, Bigfoot?  That’s the boy’s dying wish?”

“Let’s get to my favor before the other boys show up.”

Darius leaned forward with the girth of his chest rested on the booth table.  “Let’s have it then.”

“Kelli can’t know about it,” Sam said, leaning over his coffee.  “She’ll be digging at you looking for answers.  Don’t pick up the phone.”

Darius nodded.  Kelli’s number had been scratched from his phone months earlier.  They had been talking, way back when the war between Sam and Kelli began, with Darius as peacekeeper so Sam could stay on the road.  It was a year after Nicky was born when Kelli unleashed her insides.  Darius had witnessed the scrapes on Sam’s face the width of fingernails and the bashed-out headlights on his truck.  More than once, he found Sam asleep in the café in the early morning.

Kelli called Darius late at night with her long, breathless complaints when Sam tired of yelling into the torrents of Kelli’s accusations, but he never went over to comfort her in person, no matter how many dishes she broke on the floor for him to hear.

SAM

“It come on him in the hospital,” Sam started, his face sagging under the weight of the topic.  His stubble was coarse enough to fray his flannel shirt.  “He shows up for chemo once a week and has nothing to do but sit there and be quiet.  So, he picked up a magazine that’s been in the waiting room for ten years and reads about some Bigfoot sighting.  It was like a drug.  It just got hold of him.  It’s something you know a bit about, how you can’t control the next thing you’re gonna say or do.”

Darius looked at Sam, his eyes tired, weakened by the weight of denial.  He breathed out long.  “And there’s a favor in this story?”

“I’m coming to that.  It takes some time.  That’s why I asked you to come early.”

Darius used his thick hand to prop up his face and give his neck a rest.  Drops of moisture from snowflakes colliding with the big windowpane were spotting the outside gray and breaking up the fluorescent lights.

“He spent a month in the library.  He’s got newspapers laid out like treasure maps in his room,” Sam said, spreading his arms out wide like he was measuring a fish.  “Course you can’t say nothing to a boy in that state, so I’m letting him piece it all out in his head.”

“Sounds serious.”

“Oh, it is.”  Sam sat back and sucked in air like he was storing it for later.  “It is.”

The weight of losing his boy was suffocating him.  It drained all reason and logic, pushing him into abstract unknowns he could not plumb or measure.

A tanker pulled up to the side of the café, splattered with brown highway slush and wobbling to a stop.

“There’s Jim,” Darius said.  “Better get it out before he walks in here.”

“Alright.  So here it is.  I need you to be Bigfoot.”

Darius put his hands on the table like he was showing he had nothing to hide.  “Me?  Why not Jim?”

Sam leaned forward.  “Because you are a big Black man, and you owe me one.”

“Judas, Sam.”

“It’s the kid’s dying wish, Dee.  God honest truth.”

“You want me to be Bigfoot?”

“You’re the best I got.  Jim would blow the whole thing up, dance like a rodeo clown, or worse, holler something out in his real voice and my boy would be pulverized.  Nicky is whip smart.  He reads.”

Jim eased in beside Darius and patted the middle of the table.  Angel set a coffee cup down and filled it.

“What’s got you fellas quiet this morning?  School bus broke down again?”

“No, not that,” Sam said.  “Just a day like any other.”

“Sam says I’m a big Black man,” Darius blurted out.

Jim leaned back and eyed Darius.  “Well, you don’t say.  I never noticed until now.  Damned if he ain’t right.”

Darius chuckled and let the steam from the fresh coffee rise to his face.  Sam tightened his lips until the wings of his mustache readied for takeoff.

“He just wants a favor for his boy, that’s all,” Darius said.

“How is Nicky?” Jim asked.  “I know he’s sick.”

“He’s dying,” said Sam.  “But he still has some strength.”

“Damn. I’m sorry about that.  He up for a ride in the tanker?  I could take him on a route?”

“No,” Sam said.

“He wants to see Bigfoot,” said Darius.

“It’s his dying wish,” Sam added.  “Don’t ask me why.  I’m not good at this at all.”

Jim looked at Darius, stared for a moment at the thick beard, the broad, dark face.  “You know there’s no such thing as Bigfoot.”

“There is now,” Darius offered resolutely.  “There is now.”

“You want to let the other boys in on it?” Jim asked.

“No,” Sam answered.  “A conspiracy ain’t a conspiracy if the whole town knows about it.”

“Okay, let’s go then,” Jim said, standing up.  “We can talk about it at the truck bay.  I’ve got to wash the whale.”

Darius raised his hands like he was calming a horse.  “Nobody’s said yes to anything yet.”

JIM

Compressors sputtered on and off and mist hung in the air.  The spray gun dripped.  The sky was a cement gray.  The boys leaned against the side of the sweating tanker, freshly sprayed down.  Jim’s beard drained droplets onto the front of his T-shirt, into a void the flannel could not cross.  “You’re right about the boy dying with a smile on his face.  That would be my wish.”

“Not here to talk about the dying part,” Sam said.  He had not let himself go to that place where his boy lay in coffin sucking the life out of the world.

Jim held up his hand to overrule the conversation.  “Just saying that it’s hard to get a corpse to smile.  Ask Winifred.  She embalmed a hundred people in her life, and she’ll tell you it’s better if they come in with a natural smile.”

“It’s why we’re here,” Sam said, not knowing where to put his hands.  They were roughhewn and worn and he was trying to stow them somewhere without success.  “The boy deserves the best sendoff I can give him.  Something that keeps him smiling all the way to Heaven.”

“You’d think seeing God would be enough,” Jim said.

“No one asked you,” Sam snapped back.  “The boy’s not even old enough to drink coffee but he’s old enough to know that Heaven is waiting for him.”

“If I had a boy, I’d want to make sure he died happy and not be all tangled up in stuff that doesn’t matter.”

“Like how?” Sam demanded.

Jim stepped back from the tanker.

Darius calmed the tension by offering to help.  “Where do I fit in?”

Sam tugged at his trucker jacket and drew a magazine page out of his pocket.  He pressed it against the side of the tanker.  “I stole this from his stash.  This is what Bigfoot looks like.”

Jim fished in his shirt pocket for his readers.  The boys stared at the photo.

“Where do we get the costume?” Jim asked.

“No costume.  It has to look real,” Sam insisted.  “Nicky’s got a sharp eye.  An ape suit won’t do it.”

“You’re talking a Hollywood makeup job there,” Jim said.  “The best this town has ever seen.”

“The boy is worth it,” Darius said.  “Damn cancer.  We could get Debra over at the Kut and Kurl.”

In the photo Bigfoot’s arms hung long, the hands flapping like a kid wearing his dad’s mittens.  The head coned comically upward, and hair grew unnaturally over the kneecaps, something that would not happen in the wild to an animal who spent any time rooting around for grubs.

“My hell, Sam.  He’s way too clean.  We can do better than this,” said Jim.  “A beast in the wild would have briars and tagalongs on its fur.”

“We have to make the best Bigfoot people have ever seen,” Sam said.  “We can do the trick with horsehair from the groomer and some glue.  We’ll send Darius out early to pick up a few thorns and thatch to look authentic.”

“Hold on,” said Darius.  “You got to give me a say in all this.”

The three men stood at the edge of the concrete.  Cheatgrass pocked the snowy field behind them, rising toward the foothills they could not see but knew were there.  A scramble of sage and scuttled boulders were cloaked in the skirt of fog, buried under a blanket of snow draped on the mountains.  A series of storms was moving in from the west where they would be pinched off by cold dropping down from the north.  Spring was struggling to arrive on the earth tilting slowly toward the sun, changing temperature and time.  The days would be getting longer.  The milky tears of sleet ached to be spring rain.  Beyond the fog was a place Bigfoot could live in the mountains; a place where a boy could find him.  “We’ll do it,” Jim said. “Me and Sam will set it up so it’s believable.  You’ll see.”

NICKY

The night light in Nicky’s room seemed to float the boy in the air in front of the window where he stood with head dark against the glass.

“Can’t sleep?” He heard someone ask.  When he turned around, he saw his father sitting in a chair in the hallway.

“Can’t you?” The boy asked.  He was thin, sixty-three pounds, and the knots of his knees stood out unnaturally because he was just beginning to grow when the cancer overran his immune system.

“No,” Sam said.  “If you can’t sleep, neither can I.”

“I had that dream again,” Nicky said, walking to stand in front of his father, the man he had watched grab a mangy mare by the neck and wrench it to the ground so the vet could draw her foal out with a cable and jack.  He climbed onto his father’s knees and let his pale legs dangle like that foal’s, his mop of blonde hair falling against the father’s barrel chest.  “It seems like I can’t wake up when I’m having it, but then I open my eyes.”

“Tell me about it again.”

“There’s this boy in a cage and there’s all these other cages but they are empty.  It’s like somebody forgot to let him out, the only one.  That’s it.  And I’m just watching him, and nothing happens.  He doesn’t even ask me to let him out.  He just stares at me, and I stare at him.”

“Why does it scare you?”

“I don’t know. It just does.”

“I’ll leave the door open.  You are not in a cage.”

The boy stared at his father for a long time.  His eyes purple underneath where they should have been sunburned from days in the fields chasing crows with a lasso like the other boys, trying to catch something they never would.  His skin bleached rather than browned by the outdoors.  “Will mom come back when I’m gone?”

“Get back in bed, Sam said.  “It’s not your fault she left.”

SAM

On Saturday, Jim rocked his fix-it van to a stop at the Kut and Kurl.  He carried a bag of horsehair trimmings and wore his new Justins because his wife had come home with a new pair of pocket-stitched jeans and he was due.  Sam and Darius had arrived in Sam’s truck and waited so the three of them could walk in together.  Nicky was at the hospital and the doctors said he couldn’t leave until tomorrow.  Sam had dropped him off before picking up Darius.  The radio was still tuned to the gospel channel and a drawl voice commanded listeners to doubt not and thrust their hands inside of Jesus.  Sam cut the engine.  Snow was falling out of the air, thick as down when Sam cleaned geese and the wind kicked up.  It made him think of the elements of nature, how two things can look the same but be so different.

“I brought wader socks,” Darius said.  “I put ball bearings up into the toes to make my footprints look less human.”

Sam nodded.  He was twisting the grip on his steering wheel like he was trying to change the shape of it before he levered the handle and shouldered the truck door open.  Jim hauled the load of horsehair like a bird bag full of dead pheasants.  He was proud of the bounty of mane he had secured from the vet.

DEBRA

Debra stood at the screen door.  “Of course I will,” she said. “I love that boy.”

“Everybody does,” Sam said as the boys walked in, somber and resolute.  “But God loves him more and wants him back.”

Debra trembled, holding back emotions was not easy for her and caused her insides to shudder.  She spun the chair around and motioned for Darius to sit down.  “Take everything off,” she said like a nurse.

“Lock the door,” Darius said, tossing his flannel jacket onto a folding chair.  He pulled off his boots and struggled to roll his socks off while standing.  The Henley shirt came off next, wrestled over his head releasing his round, brown belly.  He dropped his Carhart pants on the floor and Jim picked them up.  “Judas,” Darius said.  “Everything?”

Debra nodded.  “I don’t believe Bigfoot wears BVDs.”

Darius dropped his underwear and tossed them onto the chair with the pile of his clothes that smelled like creosote.  He stood there naked, dark skin pocked on his shoulders, and creased with stretchmarks just above the hips.  Debra looked at him, sizing him up.

Darius sat down on the chair, the vinyl squeaking beneath his bare skin.  He took a deep breath.  Sam dumped the horsehair out on a table and started sorting through it.  Debra cut the tip off the craft glue bottle.  Sam taped the magazine picture on the mirror next to a photo of a woman with short bangs and a long mullet in the back.

Debra stared at Bigfoot for a moment.  Then she sucked air through her teeth and studied the mound of brown human in front of her, the belly like a mare’s, the pebbles of black hair on the chest.  She shuffled back and forth on swollen ankles, eyeing the blank canvas and seeing where the natural worn spots would be if he were Bigfoot, the valleys filled with thick hair, the creases where ticks could burrow.  “It’s somethin’ seeing it from hoof to hide,” Debra said.

Darius took a deep breath and closed his eyes.  “Just do your worst.”

Jim and Sam drizzled craft glue in uneven streams across Darius’ chest.  Debra worked carefully on his whole body, putting hair everywhere.  She was careful about covering up the private area.  When they were done with the front, Sam helped Darius pull on the wader socks with three ball bearings each and they covered those too.  Then Darius got out of the chair and settled his elbows on the armrest while they put hair on his back and rump.  Nobody talked.  It felt as sacred as washing a corpse.

“I’ll go get Nicky,” Sam said.  “See you at Pearson’s Perch.”

Darius nodded. “I’ll be there.”

SAM

Sam arrived at the hospital and slid a laundry basket out of his pickup truck.  It was half-full of towels.  He walked in through the back door and took the stairs up to the third floor, breathing heavy when he reached the top, his mind envisioning every step of his escape as he passed the children’s paintings of winged angels hung in the stairwell.  He held the basket low as he passed the nurse’s desk and slid the glass door back and stood over Nicky.

“There’s been a sighting,” Sam said.

“A what?” Nicky sat up weakly, surprised but glad to see his dad.

“Shhhhh,” Sam whispered.  “There’s been a sighting out to Pearson’s Perch.”

“But…”

“Do you want to go?”

Nicky was pale, his lips gray.  “Bigfoot?”

“Yes.  We’ll only be gone an hour.”  Sam tossed the towels onto the bed and set the basket on the floor.  Nicky slid down and curled up in it, his eyes unnaturally wide.  He folded himself like a baby bird in an egg.

Sam covered his son with towels and unplugged the monitor from the wall.  A faint beeping noise sounded.  He hoisted the laundry basket onto his hip and ducked into the hallway while the attending nurse looked over her shoulder but continued her conversation with the other nurses.

Sam lumbered down the stairs, wobbling with the boy in front of him.  He shouldered Nicky at the bottom, hurried out the door and set his frail son on the front seat of his truck.  “Stay down,” he said.  Nicky giggled.  It was the first happy sound he’d made in two months.

They moved slowly out of the parking lot and Nicky poked his head up, perched in the basket and looking out the window at the snowflakes turning to water when they hit the glass.  The cold made his face grayer than in the hospital.  He shivered.  Sam turned up the heat.  They made new tracks in the snow on the highway.

“I brought you some boots and coveralls.”

Nicky rolled out of the basket and started getting dressed.  “She,” Nicky said.  “Bigfoot is a she.  Everybody thinks otherwise, but it’s a mother.  That’s why it’s so hard to get a look at her, mothers got a way of being invisible.”

Even though Nicky was excited to reveal this bit of information, Sam began to weep.  He didn’t want to hear about mothers and all their willful love.  It reminded him of Kelli.  He steered with one hand and pawed the moisture away.  “Makes sense,” he said.

They motored slowly off the highway and up a sheep road to a gravel turn-around, the snow falling in lager flakes, some the size of aspen leaves in the high altitude.  “Down this slope in Negro Bill’s Canyon where they saw him last,” Sam said, when they were climbing out of the truck.

“They don’t call it that anymore,” Nicky said.  “I saw it on the news.  Now they call it Shadow Canyon since it is so narrow and the sun only gets there part of the day.”

“Old habits.  Old ways,” Sam answered.

“I don’t think Darius liked the old name.” Nicky said.  “He might prefer Bill’s real name, William Grandstaff.”

“You read too much.  I don’t think he minds one way or the other.”  Snow was falling on the trail and Sam inhaled snowflakes when he breathed in.  The large flakes held their shape in the thin air, compressing under their feet, wafting before them as they hiked.  Nicki walked forward awkwardly, bundled in the insulated coveralls, and work gloves.  A towel around his neck for a scarf and oversized work boots.  He looked into the cloud of snow.

“Let me lead,” Sam said.

The two worked their way down the rocky path that overlooked the choked canyon.  The ground was slippery, and the dried Juniper branches damp and brittle, buried like steel game traps.  They moved carefully, the father testing every step and the son placing his feet in his father’s footprints.

Sam reached for a juniper branch to steady himself, but it gave way.  His feet slid; his weight teetered.  He put an arm out to break his fall, but the cross hatch of branches gave way, and he went down hard on his hip and a bank of snow followed him over the edge.

Nicky could hear his father thrashing through the brush and scraping on the shale while a rivulet of high mountain detritus flowed down the furrow Sam left plowed.

“Dad!”

There was a long, dead silence.

“I’m OK, Nicky,” Sam’s voice floated up from the bottom of the narrow ravine. “I’ve jacked up my ankle, son.  Stay there.  Stay right there!”

“I can get help,” Nicky called out.

“Stay there,” his father called back.  “I’ll get up to you.  Just give me a minute.”

NICKY

Nicky fanned the deepening snow around him and stomped a waiting place.  All things in the cold were shrouded.  He listened to his father grunting and turning and kicking loose rubble.  He could hear the labored breaths, the air sucking through his father’s mouth into his lungs, the coughing.

Nicky cocked his head and listened to a new sound, the shuffling of feet not far from him, a strange and soft sound.  His boyhood years in the brush had taught him to see with sounds, gauging size and distance.  He turned his head to the sound as it moved along the bottom, around a stand of oak brush until it was below the rise of the trail that dipped steeply.  Through the veil of snow, he could see his father’s form on the shoulders of some beast he could not make out.  A dark head appeared, covered in hair.  A broad chest, bare in the snow, head facing down, a barrel body covered in hair tangled with briars, snow knots and mud.  The beast moved awkwardly, the snow churning in a wake behind him.

The beast did not look up.  Nicki could not see its eyes.  It opened the truck door and dropped his dad inside.  Sam was passed out from the pain.  His foot bent at a right angle at the shin bone.  Nicky stood facing the beast.  “Will he live?”

“Yes,” said the beast, letting its eyes be seen.

“You’re Bigfoot?”

“Maybe.”

“You could be Negro Bill.”

“He died a long time ago,” Bigfoot said.

“Maybe he didn’t die,” Nicky said.

“Could be.  I have heard of such things.”

“His mother then,” Nicky said.  “Mothers live forever.”

“Yes.  And they always come back.”

“For sure?” Nicky asked.

Bigfoot nodded.

“Will you live forever?”

Bigfoot looked out toward wilderness he could not see.  The veil of snow hung thick in front of him.  “I guess that depends on who you ask.  Sometimes I’d like to die.”

“Well, I am dying,” Nicky said.  “And I’m afraid.”

“There’s worse things.”

“What’s worse?” Nicky asked, now waist deep in snow.

The beast crouched on its haunches and tried to look out at the canyon, lonely and eternal.  Thick hands of snow fell, pressing downward while small gaps of gray light drifted upward.

“We should be going,” Bigfoot said.  He collected the boy in his arms and set him in the laundry basket on the hood of the truck.

Sam woke and moaned in pain, his lower leg now swelling.  “I lost the key when I fell.”

“I’ll go get help,” said Bigfoot.  He hoisted the basket packed tight with boy and white towels onto his shoulder.  With his free hand, he brushed the snow in front of him, clearing a trail in the waist-high drifts, the whiteness floating up and falling at the same time.

ANGEL

“I seen the creature come in off the foothills through the snow.  It was white as steamed milk, couldn’t even see the mountains.  He appeared, trudging like the creature he was, and it was clear that my place was his destination.

“His head was down and his fur like a bison’s was covered in snow knots.  On his shoulder was Nicky, wrapped up like the Christ child in a laundry basket.  He opened the door and the glass fogged.  He set the boy down like a doorstop where the warm air could rush over him and walked back on the same line he came in on, like he had some inner compass directing him back through the snow.  I dropped the coffee right there; you can still see the stain of it on the floor.  I slid the boy in, and he told me the whole story.  God’s angels aren’t what you seen in Sunday school, feathered wings and white and floating.  Some, I guess, are brown and hairy and strong enough to trudge eight miles through the snow to save a boy.  Those such things happen here.”