The Adventurer's Son(53)

As I was listening to Elmer, Thai ran up. He was smiling, out of breath, muddy. It was good to see him. “Roman, hey!” He reached out his hand, gave me a sweaty embrace. He was visibly excited. “It sounds like somebody saw Roman!”

“What? Where?”

“Down here, just a few houses! A guy met someone in the jungle who said his name was Roman!”

The news buoyed me in a way I’d not felt since arriving in Costa Rica five days ago. Here, at last, was evidence.





Chapter 26


Jenkins


Jenkins, Dos Brazos, July 30, 2014.

Courtesy of the author



To a Costa Rican, the name “Cody Roman Dial” has both “Roman” and “Dial” as surnames—like two last names. Anybody explaining that they’d met our son Cody was either lying or mistaken. He’d been introducing himself as Roman since the start of our walk across Umnak twenty years before. No Costa Rican would think to call him “Roman” unless they had actually met him. This was another reason Pata Lora’s story didn’t add up.

Thai led me to a small wood-frame house painted yellow on a concrete pad with a sheet-metal roof. Two little girls peered out the windows. Wearing only shorts, a young man stood erect and muscular with a mustache and a small soul patch under his lip. Like Thai, he smiled easily and broadly. Like Roman, he was twenty-seven. He spoke remarkably good English. I didn’t need Thai to translate.

Breathless and excited, I blurted, “Hi! My name is Roman and my friend Thai says that you may have seen my son in the jungle!”

“Yes, that is true.” He answered in slow, measured English. “My name is Jenkins Rodriguez and I am a gold miner.” He held out his hand and we shook.

“Where did you see him?”

“We saw him in the mountains on a small trail. We have never seen any gringos or foreigners there, so it was very surprising to us.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe about fifteen to seventeen days ago. He said he’d been in the forest for two days.”

I did the arithmetic. It would have been around mid-July when Jenkins had seen him. But people here didn’t keep day planners, diaries, or even time, really. Few wore watches in the villages or jungle.

“Where did you see him?” My hand shook as I scribbled in my notebook.

“On a small creek called Zeledón. It is about three hours upriver from Dos Brazos.”

“Did he tell you his name, where he was from?”

“Yes. He said his name was Roman. He was from Alaska and he was a biologist.”

I took a deep breath, shocked. Other than Do?a Berta at the hostel, this was the first person who I believed when they said they had seen Roman. I racked my brain for what the newspapers had printed, wondering how much of Jenkins’s story could have been pulled from news accounts. Certainly, the fact my son was from Alaska, maybe the part about going by “Roman,” but definitely not the part about being a biologist. To me, Jenkins’s rough dates felt like truth. He sounded honest, with nothing to gain from lying and little to hide.

“What was he doing and what did he have with him? Did you talk to him?”

“Yes, we spoke. The moment we walked up to him he was sitting there, cooking his breakfast on a stove. I think it was some rice. At first, we just walked by, surprised to see him there, and said hello. Then we turned around and came back to talk with him as it was very strange to see a gringo in this part of the forest. He spoke Spanish slowly and was easy to understand, but we switched to English.”

At this point I thought of the blue Jetboil stove I’d given him for Christmas. It wasn’t in the yellow bag. “What did the stove look like?”

“It was not the kind from around here.” Jenkins motioned with his hands that it was taller than wide, and compact. Like a Jetboil.

“Who else was with you?”

“At the time we saw him, I was with Luiz and Arley, but we waited for another miner named Coco, who came very soon. There were four of us.”

My head flooded with questions. “Did he have a camp set up?”

“No. He said he had come up the river the day before, ran into a waterfall, then climbed a cliff and made camp on the ridge. In the morning, he came down to the little creek to make breakfast. He had a green-colored pack with maybe a rolled-up pad for sleeping. I heard about the missing guy and I thought it was the same one who walked through town. The one Elmer saw. But now I don’t think those two are the same guy.”

“Did he have on glasses?” asked Thai.

“I don’t remember glasses. He was shaved, and a little bit serious. He said he was a biologist and just looking at the many different trees and the different things in the jungle. He asked if he was in Golfito, so I thought that maybe he was little bit confused. He showed me his map. It was about the size of your notebook papers. I didn’t want to scare him by staring and making him uncomfortable. I was just friendly with him that day.”

My head was spinning. Even the “Golfito” reference made sense, because the “ESRI world topo link” I’d sent Roman labeled the border between the two cantons Osa and Golfito inside Corcovado’s boundary. Roman would have been referring to the canton of Golfito on the map, not Golfito the town across the bay from Puerto Jiménez.