It may have been the way he glanced from me to the book and back again, and the hope of it, the kind of childish lack of self-awareness he exhibited for a moment, that convinced me to agree to the proposal. I should have told him it was all ridiculous. I should have told him to abandon those irrational ideas about pterosaurs to the swirling depths of forgetfulness, which, for him, were never too distant. But I have a heart. So instead I agreed. In my defense, I knew he would go whether I went with him or not, so I decided that I might as well escort him and try to keep him out of trouble.
“Good,” he said after I agreed. “There’s lots of info in this book. We can both read up on it before tomorrow, before Dennis walks us out to the spot.” He tried to disguise the excitement in his voice by using his formal, fatherly tone with me. It was the kind of voice that seemed to insinuate, This will be good for you, Son. I’ll teach you a few things. You’ll learn something. Develop your character. He didn’t seem to notice the dichotomy between that academic, paternal tone of voice he was using and the absurdity of the expedition. He didn’t seem to understand that he was long past teaching anyone anything, and I was long past learning. He didn’t seem to realize that he wasn’t taking care of me—I was taking care of him. Or maybe he didn’t want to admit these realities to himself. But none of it mattered, and I was done arguing.
“Right, Dad” I said. “I’ll, uh, I’ll let you read it first, though.”
He stared at me for several moments with a placid expression. Then he said, “You’re not going to read it, are you?”
I had misinterpreted—it wasn’t a placid expression. It was a look of scrutiny. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. “No, I am. Really. This time I will,” I insisted. “I just need to run to the gas station before tomorrow. We need more…gas.”
“OK.” He turned back to the book and raised an invisible drawbridge on the conversation. Apparently, he was dissatisfied with my response, but not dissatisfied enough to press the issue. I knew he would be quite unreachable when in this state, and all I really wanted was to get out of the musty, dimly-lit, 1980 Winnebago that was Dad’s home, and have a smoke. So I nodded, smiled, and said, “I’ll leave you to it, then,” and ducked outside.
When Dad first told me that he had sold his house and half his possessions and bought the camper, I was mystified. But then I came to visit him the summer after grad school, a year ago, and I, too, felt the draw of the woods. There was something meditative about pulling on a cigarette in the middle of a hushed and slumbering pine forest, the tangy smell of the smoke mixing with the chill, wild smell of the needles, and the breath of it rising up to blend with the milkiness of stars. My muscles relaxed. Silence save for the sifting wind filled my bones. But it wasn’t to last. Not more than five minutes after my escape, I heard a sharp crack as the door was flung open against the side of the Winnebago. A triumphant “Ha!” rang out through the woods.
I jumped, dropped my cigarette, and swore under my breath.
“Off to get gas, is it?” said Dad.
“Come on, Dad!” I knew it was too late to pretend. Usually, I got away with this kind of ploy, but this time I hadn’t played things right. I hadn’t soothed his suspicions of my indifference.
“How stupid do you think I am?” he demanded. “I didn’t hear your engine start.”
“Since when can you hear anything outside the camper?”
“Since before you were born. I have better ears than you do.”
I laughed. “Not likely. You weren’t listening for an engine. You just waited a few minutes and then came out to catch me. You are just about the limit, you know that?”
“So it’s my fault you’re dishonest?”
“Well, you did raise me.”
“Get back in here and read the damn book.”
“All in good time, Father, all in good time.”
He snorted and slammed the door shut.
I did read the book eventually. After Dad fell asleep. He lay stretched out on the little bed inside the camper with his eyes closed inside their hollow sockets, chest gently collapsing and expanding, raising and lowering the thin hand that was spread over it. He was straight and unmoving, and when he was asleep like this his features seemed to still and sharpen like something carved from marble, mantled with a weariness and pain that he hid at all other times. He looked like one of those statues of a king lying atop his tomb that you go to look at in a church from the Middle Ages.
I opened the book’s covers with only remote interest. Some poor, retired biology professor had convinced himself these things were real and compiled a book of supposed eyewitness testimonies. Self-published, of course. I read the introduction and then skimmed the rest of the book, sifting through the pages under the dim glow of the camper’s inside lights. Apparently, people had been reporting sightings of these creatures all around the country for years, and they were gaining an almost Bigfoot-like reputation. Some witnesses described them as “featherless birds with long, thin tails.” Others called them “dragons.” Some were more specific and swore that what they had seen was a “living pterodactyl,” a “flying dinosaur.” There were sketches and maps and diagrams but no photographs, of course. In an era dominated by camera-equipped cell phones, I expected that someone would have thought to whip out their device when confronted with a living prehistoric creature and procure solid evidence for its existence. But no. No one had. It must have just slipped their collective minds. At least someone could have bothered to whip up a doctored photo, I thought.
I sighed and set the book down. How could my dad be taken in by this sham?
Photographic evidence seemed like such an obvious necessity if the reports were to be taken as genuine. In fact, that was the first question I asked Dad when he told me that Dennis had seen one:
“Well, did he take a photo of it?” I had demanded.
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean ‘sort of?’”
“Sort of.”
“Explain.”
Dad’s eyes seemed to sink further into his skull as he regarded me with hostility.
“He took a photo of something. Probably a pterosaur.”
I tipped my head back, flung a glance heavenward, and shoved my hands in my pockets. “Sure. Sure he did. Probably a pterosaur.”
“If you don’t believe me, then I’ll show you.” Dad straightened in his chair—a slow movement. His sun-browned face crumpled into deep grooves around the eyes and mouth as he grimaced.
“Here, Dad, let me get it,” I said, taking half a stride forward and extending my arm.
“No, no,” he muttered. “You don’t know where it is.” He drew his legs underneath him, grasped the arms of the chair firmly, and hoisted himself up. He looked old to me when he got stiff like this. Older than he was. He moved off toward the far end of the camper, bent just a little further forward than was natural, so that I almost feared he would fall on his face. But after sorting through several drawers of papers, he produced the desired object and brought it to me.
I looked at the photograph. All I saw were two little lights blooming against a dark background. It looked suspiciously like someone had taken a photo of their headlights at night. My eyebrows lifted and I shot a look at my father.
“This is a joke, right?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s not a joke, Nicholas. They glow at night.”
A sharp laugh burst from my throat. I pretended to recover myself. “Sure, they glow at night. That makes sense. Everyone knows dinosaurs are glow-in-the-dark.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of bioluminescence? Lots of witnesses report seeing them glow at night. Dennis took that photo of two lights he saw flying out over the foothills about a week before he saw the one in the daylight.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘headlight-luminescence.’”
He snorted a deep, reverberating snort (one of his special talents), and sat back down in the chair. The conversation was over.
He had been right about the eyewitnesses. Some of the reports in the book included reference to a glow emanating from the pterosaur. Others just mentioned seeing unidentifiable lights flying at a distance. But those people could have been describing any of a hundred things. What evidence did they have that the lights were glow-in-the-dark flying dinosaurs and not just airplanes or bad eyesight? None at all.
I placed the book on the shelf and went to bed, dreading the absurd expedition that I would be a part of the following morning. What bothered me more even than the fruitless journey out to Dennis’s ranch that we would make, however, was the reality that Dad actually believed in the pterosaurs. Never mind that they had died out 65 million years ago. He didn’t care. A few years ago, before the accident, I would never have entertained even the remotest suspicion that my father would believe in such a thing. He had been an astute man in his younger days, so careful and precise, so rational and scientific. But he changed. Now, he was given to strange notions. He’d developed a new interest in an obscure form of Catholicism. He’d taken to reading medieval mystics and books about Atlantis. He’d moved out to the woods and set up solar panels in case of an EMP. None of my criticisms of these extremist or pseudo-scientific pursuits swayed him in the least. Such had proven to be the case with the pterosaurs as well. There was no escape for me—I couldn’t let him go alone. It was dangerous, for one thing, trekking over all that uneven ground. And somehow I felt that I couldn’t let him embark on this childlike and purposeless quest by himself because it was too pitiful. It was altogether too pitiful. We were going to Dennis’s ranch together.
* * * *
We drove out between the foothills, a flash of silver among the scraggly pines and dusty, grass-filled ditches. Broken barbed wire fences ran alongside the gravel road like the discarded strings of some enormous instrument that no one would play again, and past them lay stretches of open grassland. Beyond the slope of the wooded hills, the mountains formed the backbone of the landscape, black and white-flecked, and above them, a heavy gray-blue sky. The bright sunlight caught the side of one peak so that it flashed and stood out against its neighbors, and the slopes beneath it were vibrant with color.
Within the hour we reached the ranch, and I was introduced to Dennis Martin—a man whose voice, ringing out to greet us, seemed too large for his small frame. He had a quick, slanting gate and a lined brow—no doubt the result of many years spent outdoors under bright sun—but he smiled as he approached. His daughter, Lilly, a girl of about twelve wearing oversized cowboy boots, and my dad’s priest, Fr. Peterson, accompanied us.
“This is the spot,” said Dennis, once we had trekked out to a clearing in the forest on his back forty. There was a strange hush in his voice. He planted his hands on his hips. “I come out here sometimes just to get away. Get some time to think. I was out here about this time—maybe a little bit earlier in the morning, I don’t remember—last week. Just sitting and watching the branches bob in the wind like they do. Listening to the sounds. And then I saw it. Over across the clearing, there, something started and rustled. I stood still—I thought it was a turkey or something. Then it kind of eased up its head out of the grass like this and I saw it. I got a good long look at it. It weren’t no turkey. For one thing, it was bigger than a turkey. No feathers. Kind of brown, crinkly skin like a paper bag. It had a spike coming off the back of its head and a big, round yellow eye. It gave me a damn strange feeling, looking at that thing, and suddenly I thought, ‘I’m seeing a demon.’ I dropped down and I was shaking. I started saying my prayers. And then it shot up out of the grass and I saw that it had huge wings and a long tail with some kind of diamond type of deal on the end of it. It started flapping those wings big and slow. And it took off, that way.” He pointed toward the mountains. “I could see the grass just rustling in the wind of it. It flew off over the trees.”
My dad just nodded and had his hand pressed up under his chin, a look of deep thought appearing on his face.
“And you didn’t take a picture of it?” I asked.
Dennis regarded me with a look of genuine confusion. “With what? What would I have taken a picture with?”
“Your phone.”
He laughed. “I don’t have a cell phone. The only phone I have is down in the house. Plugged in. Couldn’t take a picture with that, now could I? I have a reguhler real camera, but I didn’t have it with me.”
“Oh,” I said.
A moment of silence followed. I rubbed my chin and squinted against the sun. It was growing hot.
“Well,” I said at last, “seeing as we’ve seen the spot, I guess maybe Dad and I will head…”
My father laughed a short, painful kind of laugh. “We’re not going anywhere, Nicholas. Didn’t I tell you? We’re going to stay and watch for it. It might return.”
I was about to laugh, but then I realized he was serious. I checked. To my amazement, Dad, Dennis, Lilly, and Fr. Peterson were all finding seats in the grass, settling in, it seemed, to wait.
I sat down next to the priest and ran a hand over my wet brow. The priest smiled but said nothing. He was young, I realized—perhaps even younger than I. Handsome, except for the odd little bend in his nose.
“I suppose you believe in living pterosaurs and everything too, right? I mean, with your religion—you believe in lots of unproved things.” Not my finest moment of interpersonal communication, but I was hot and bored and a bit annoyed that Dad had invited his priest and Dennis’s daughter to go with us.
Dad, who sat only a few feet away, gave me his grave look when I posed my question, but the priest said, “No, I think it’s pretty doubtful, actually. Mr. Martin probably just saw some kind of bird. But I thought I’d come have a look anyway. You never know. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
I sighed inwardly. So he was going to be quoting from scripture the whole time. “The Bible, right? What verse?”
He laughed a light laugh. “No. It’s from Hamlet.”
“Oh,” I said.
A breeze came through the clearing, tousling the grass until it hissed like a serpent. The heat was momentarily repressed. I turned to the girl, Lilly. “What about you? Do you believe there are flying dinosaurs still out there?” I hoped that at least one of my companions would prove to be sane.
Her eyebrows shot up almost to her hairline, and she gave me a look of the greatest shock. “Of course I do. My dad saw one.”
I nodded and smiled because I didn’t know what else to do. We sat there in silence, the four of them and me, listening to the cries of a falcon somewhere overhead and the occasional interjections of the wind. Aside from the irregular breeze, a great stillness lay on the forest and the foothills and the mountains beyond. So we were still, too. Waiting for the pterosaur to appear.
At length I turned to the priest and said, loud enough for my father to hear, “Doesn’t this seem a little pointless to you? Sitting here in the middle of nowhere, waiting for an extinct animal to show up? Just, you know, waiting for it to drop by for a chat?”
He smiled, the sort of little smile you offer when you are amused but too tired or relaxed to laugh. “Yes, a bit. But it’s very peaceful here. And people have waited for more impossible things and not been disappointed.”
Inwardly I rolled my eyes. “Is that why you’re here? You want to see the impossible?”
“I’m here because your father invited me.”
“Oh. You must be friends. You see him regularly?”
“Every Sunday.”
I picked a stalk of grass and began wrapping it around my finger idly. “Hey, how about we stretch our legs? I’m getting so stiff.” He must have caught the look in my eye, because he nodded.
Once we were out of earshot of the others, I said in a low tone, “Have you noticed, Peterson—Father—that since the, uh, the accident, Dad’s been a bit…well, a bit—off? I…worry.” I wasn’t sure why I was asking the priest. After all, according to my thinking, he was part of the problem. But the man did seem to be intelligent, and I almost felt that he knew my dad better than I did.
He frowned a little and directed his gaze up and away, toward the mountain. “You mean you think he’s mentally ill?”
I cringed at the bluntness of it. “Yes. Grief and trauma can do that, you know.”
He turned to me. “Is it mental illness to believe that there might be some mystery, some meaning, some things yet unexplained in this world?”
“Well…” I began, in a tone of voice that meant yes.
“I think he might be more sane than most of us. Or at least more courageous. Most of us want everything tidy. Tied up and boxed away and scientific. Everything explained by science and rendered, therefore, comfortable—almost meaningless—and, therefore, harmless. But he’s not afraid in that way. He’s not afraid of a dangerously mysterious reality.”
“So, you mean, it’s good for people to believe in myths if it benefits their psychological health?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Why would it be good for someone to believe in a lie? You misunderstand me. A mystery isn’t a fantasy—it’s just something we can’t fully understand with our rational minds. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a truth behind it.”
“Yes, but there aren’t any mysteries anymore. Look, you and I know that pterosaurs are extinct. Why do we have to pretend that isn’t true?”
He shrugged. “I’m not pretending anything.”
“So you don’t think they’re extinct?”
“I didn’t say that either. I told you I thought Mr. Martin’s story was pretty doubtful.”
“So what, then?”
He smiled again. “‘More things, Horatio.’”
* * * *
My father was visibly disappointed when at last the heat passed, and the sky became tinted with the colors of sunset in the west, like red ink seeping into a blue-gray cloth, and it was time for us to go. A still, quiet evening overtook a still, quiet day, and we rolled out of Dennis’s ranch in my pickup into a deadening dark. I was lost in thought, so it took me a moment to interpret the sound of trembling sighs and shaking shoulders coming from beside me. I was stunned. Here was my sixty-year-old hard-ass father crying in the seat beside me. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen him cry in my entire life.
“Dad! What the hell?” My eyes flicked from the road to Dad and back again.
“I’m sorry—” he managed to say, and he ran his sleeve over his wet face.
“Dad, what is it?” I felt something like panic inside.
“I—don’t know. I don’t know.” His face was broken and wrinkled.
I tried to calm myself and speak in a quieter tone. “You can tell me.”
He hesitated. Then he breathed deeply and said, “Oh, I guess I was just thinking of your mom. I was just thinking, maybe, just if I’d been the one driving…” He trailed off, and a sound almost like a cough broke from his chest.
“No, Dad,” I said. “No, it wasn’t your fault. Those kinds of thoughts are…are just not worth thinking.” I didn’t know if these were the right words—they seemed so trite.
He breathed in again. “I know. I know. You’re right.” He was calmer. Then he said, “It’s hard, you know? Not knowing where she is. It’s hard. I know she’s somewhere. But I don’t know where. It’s a mystery.”
My throat felt tight and dry. “Yeah. A mystery,” I said.
For several minutes, the only sound was the clink and clatter of gravel under the truck’s tires.
“Dad,” I said.
He looked at me.
“I’m sorry we didn’t see the pterosaur. And I did read that book last night.”
He nodded once slowly, and I felt that, at least for a moment, we understood each other.
* * * *
Back at the camper, after Dad went to bed, I stood by the window and looked out at a glittering sky of stars, just visible through the interlocking branches of the trees. At length I turned, but something lying on the couch caught my eye. It was the photograph Dennis had taken of the lights over his ranch. I picked it up once again and studied it for a moment. And I realized that the lights in the photograph were far too blue to be headlights. Far too blue. And not quite round enough. In fact, they didn’t look like any kind of light I had seen before. I felt something stir inside me, like an ancient, forgotten creature suddenly taking flight.