Emory's Gift

  “Okay,” I responded.

  “War is a terrible thing.”

  “Yessir.”

  “My actual driving time was twenty-one hours and eleven minutes.”

  “The bear’s not home right now, sir,” I told him.

  He gazed with empty eyes at the hills around us, then looked at me. “I’ll just lie down in my car, then,” he told me.

  I went in and told McHenry about the conversation I’d had with the guy now sleeping in his Oldsmobile. McHenry listened to me, his frown deepening. Frankly, I was willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt because he sure seemed to have his facts down, but McHenry thanked me and picked up the phone with a grim expression on his face.

  The soldier in the car was by far not the first out-of-towner to show up that day. My father came home from work at noon, looking stunned at the number of automobiles that were parked on both sides of Hidden Creek Road. The license plates were from California, Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Utah. Some of the people wore strange outfits and some of them sang songs. One man carried a sign saying: “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Another man wore a Daniel Boone raccoon hat and seemed to be totally intoxicated, because he kept falling down and laughing at himself.

  Two motorcycles blasted up the road as if announcing a battle, but the guys who got off the bikes were so fat and old they intimidated no one.

  My father turned people away when they asked to use the bathroom and rather firmly instructed them to leave his property, which they pretty much ignored.

  My dad went in and reluctantly called the sheriff’s department. As he dialed, I heard a loud insistent honking, experience telling me that it was coming from where Hidden Creek Road turned off the paved county road and was getting closer.

  As my dad later related it to me, the sheriff thought it was ironic to get the phone call. That was the word he used, “ironic,” as in “It’s ironic for you to call me, George, since not too long ago you were serving me with a court order to vacate the property.”

  My dad explained that the situation was rapidly deteriorating. This wasn’t the county fair atmosphere we’d seen when the locals had turned out; this was carload after carload of strangers.

  “And good luck,” Sheriff Nunnick replied with a cackle that I could hear all the way across the kitchen.

  My dad hung up and looked at McHenry. They both appeared worried.

  “I called a security firm. I can get some Pinkertons up here, but it’s going to take more than a day,” McHenry said.

  “Not sure what this place will look like in a day,” my dad muttered.

  The honking ceased as a big white van with a TV logo on the side wheeled into our driveway. My dad shook his head.

  “Now what,” he said.

  The side door of the van slid open and a woman and a man got out, stretching their legs and arms. The man was short and muscular, with dark, oiled hair. He wore a brown suit with a light blue shirt and a tie with the same brown and blue in it, pretty much the fanciest clothes I’d ever seen on a man. What I noticed about the woman was that her hair was soft and blond and that she was trim and, when she turned to the house, pretty. She had on a vivid green dress with a big collar. The driver of the van got out and handed her a microphone on a cord and pulled a huge video camera out of the van, hoisting it up on his shoulder. The woman shook her head, tossing her hair, and began speaking to the camera, looking over her shoulder at the pole barn as she did so.

  “We need to get them out of here,” McHenry said.

  I went outside with McHenry. People being the way they are, they were clustered around the camera, the ones behind the woman waving and grinning. The man with the black hair said something to the cameraman, and he dropped the camera off his shoulder and the woman let her arm fall to her side, still holding the microphone.

  “Excuse me; can I help you?” McHenry asked coldly.

  The woman smiled at him and held out her hand. “My name is Nichole J. Singleton, KHQ Channel Six, Spokane. I am so very pleased to meet you, Mr. Hall?”

  “Name’s McHenry,” he said gruffly. “You people need to leave.”

  The woman’s smile didn’t falter. She seemed so friendly I just had to speak up. “My dad’s inside,” I told her. The last I’d seen of him, he’d been heading back to his bathroom, but I didn’t think that was a topic for the evening news.

  “You’re Charlie!” she exclaimed. I found myself grinning with pleasure at her reaction, but my smile dropped when I caught sight of McHenry, who was still giving her a cold stare.

  “This the kid?” the man with the black hair asked. He had very dark eyes and a good tan, and he was handsome in sort of a movie star way, with a strong jaw. He didn’t look very friendly, though, sizing me up and down like I was a piece of furniture he was thinking of buying. He chewed gum, his jaw pulsing.

  “This is private property,” McHenry said.

  “Yeah?” The guy stopped chewing and gave the growing assembly of trespassers an appraising look. When he turned his cold eyes back to McHenry, they were mocking.

  “This is Tony Alecci, our producer,” the woman said smoothly. Tony Alecci didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “And that’s Wally Goetz, my cameraman.” Wally was a folksy guy in jeans.

  “Call me Wally. I’m just the driver,” Wally Goetz said from inside the van, where he was working on the equipment. “The driver, and everything else.”

  Nichole laughed even though I had the feeling she and Alecci had heard the joke a few times before.

  You didn’t have to know Jules McHenry very long to realize he was pretty much accustomed to people paying attention to what he said, so there was no surprise that the expression on his face was one of slow burn. He elected, though, to try logical persuasion. “Look,” he said, stepping forward and lowering his voice. Most of the crowd had lost interest and had gone back to their activities, which from my point of view seemed to consist mainly of littering. The backings from several Polaroid pictures were curled up on the lawn, like fallen leaves from a black plastic tree. More than one beverage can had been tossed in our bushes, and, astoundingly, a group of four people had set up a camping stove on our property, not a hundred feet from our front door!

  “Things here are already pretty much out of hand,” he said, gesturing around. “If we have TV out here, people are going to come from all over. It’ll be a zoo.”

  Alecci snorted. “Late for that,” he said.

  Nichole was still smiling, though she gave Alecci a quick, impatient look. “This is a really big story, Mr. McHenry. We drove a long, long way to get here.”

  Our front door opened and my dad came out. My eyes widened a little when I saw him.

  He’d showered, shaved, and put on a nice shirt and clean pair of pants. He came across the driveway and straight up to us, looking only at Nichole J. Singleton from KHQ Channel 6, Spokane. He was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen in a long, long time.

  I watched him as he introduced himself, saw the way he stared into Nichole’s blue eyes.

  And though my understanding of adult relations was far from sophisticated, it did cross my mind at that instant that my father hadn’t cleaned himself up just for the cameras.

  “We have just a few questions,” she said to him. I caught McHenry frowning at this—he apparently didn’t much like the woman.

  I heard the telephone ring and ran in to answer it, so I missed my dad’s interview. I had planned to take a message and run right back out, but it was Beth and she was by far my number one priority.

  “Charlie, have you seen all these people?” she asked without preamble. “The town is full of cars!”

  I told her about the steadily building crowd of gawkers mingling out on Hidden Creek Road and hanging around on our property, littering and singing and establishing communes.

  “How does the bear react to all those people?” she wanted to know.

  I explained that Emory had left the pole barn that
morning and hadn’t been back since. As I did so, I wondered at how much had changed in so little time. A few months ago I’d been locked in the house of grief, virtually friendless, wasting hours messing with my father’s rifles while the summer petered out, dreading the onset of school. I was a no-name student with no friends and no prospects. Now here I was at the center of a media beacon that was attracting crazy people like ants to a picnic. I had a girlfriend in all but name and a pet bear whom Beth and I were talking about as if it were the most casual, normal thing in the world to live with a grizzly in your pole barn.

  “So when does your suspension end?” Beth asked.

  “I’m back to school on Monday,” I replied. If I can get past the mob, I thought to myself. I looked outside where people were jumping up and down behind my father while Nichole interviewed him.

  “Monday, huh,” she said.

  I snapped to attention. There were stress fractures all over the way she pronounced the word, as if I had disappointed her. Monday. Why was that a bad thing?

  “So you’re probably suspended for the dance,” she observed.

  “Oh.” I hadn’t given it much thought, but hearing her tone made me want to try to fix things for her. “Actually, I think my suspension is through Friday. Tomorrow,” I speculated. “I mean, what point would there be in having me suspended over a weekend, when there’s no school?”

  “Right,” she agreed.

  There was a long pause. Was I supposed to say something else? Ask her to the dance? I didn’t know what to do! Why didn’t they issue some kind of manual when you started junior high, operating instructions for this sort of situation?

  “So,” I said slowly. “I guess I’d better get back outside.”

  “Sure,” she replied, her cheerfulness so phony that I wanted to shout, Stop! No! even as she was saying, “Good-bye, Charlie Hall.”

  I hung up the phone. Okay, that had gone just about as badly as it could have. I looked outside. The TV people had stopped filming my dad. He was standing and talking to Nichole in the front yard while Alecci and Wally wandered down the driveway toward the pole barn.

  Right then, as abruptly as I had kissed Beth by the creek, I made the biggest decision of my life. I would, I decided, not only go to the dance, but when I got Beth alone I was going to tell her I was in love with her.

  My heart immediately began to pound away at my chest wall. Beth wasn’t a normal girl, not that the phrase “normal girl” had any application to my life thus far. She was pretty and smart and in control. I needed to be bold, and that meant doing more than dragging her off into the woods to sneak kisses. I’d just flubbed a perfect opportunity to ask her out on what I presumed would be a date, my very first unless I counted Kay putting her head on my shoulder out of pity. I wouldn’t get very many more turns at bat.

  But if I told Beth I loved her, that would fix everything. Girls at Benny H. often signed their notes: Love, but only the school’s Official Couples said, “I love you,” to each other.

  Besides, it was true. I did love her. My bones ached; my stomach was upset; I felt like I was short of oxygen. What else could it be but love?

  “I love you, Beth,” I told the coffeepot.

  I slipped out the back door and wandered out to where the two TV guys were talking to each other. They were facing away from me and didn’t hear me approach as I treaded on the yellowed grass.

  “We handle this right, this could be big for us,” Alecci was saying. “We got the dad; we need to get an interview with the kid.”

  I halted, eavesdropping, amazed at what I’d just heard. I was going to be on television!

  “You need to talk to Nichole,” Alecci continued.

  “Well, I don’t know; you’re the producer,” Wally drawled. “You should be the one to talk to her, seems like.” There was something a little mocking in the way he said it to the shorter man.

  “Yeah, well, she’s not happy with me because of that thing that happened.”

  “You’re married, Tony.”

  “Jesus, not you, too,” Alecci said. He ran his hand over his hair, smoothing it back.

  “I’m just sayin’, that’s what’s got her upset. You get a couple drinks in you, doesn’t change that you got a wife at home,” Wally observed. “Didn’t change it for Nichole, that’s for sure.”

  “I was just kidding around.”

  Wally snorted. He stroked the sparse hair on his chin—he was as grizzled as Emory. “I’d like to get a shot of the bear.”

  Alecci nodded vigorously. “Hell yeah, the bear, we have to get the bear or there’s no story. But you see all the people showing up for this thing? We’re exclusive on this. By the time the networks wake up, our feed will be the only thing they’ve got. You can’t even get here; it’s the middle of the wilderness.”

  Wally caught sight of me and turned, surprised. Alecci gave a start, his dark eyes reflecting hostility for just a second before he put filters on and suddenly was all friendly. “Hey, kid, you want to be on television?”

  I nodded, feeling shy. Alecci gave Wally a triumphant look.

  “Still gotta get the dad to say okay,” Wally told him.

  Alecci nodded back up to where Nichole was chatting with my father. “She’ll get that done,” Alecci said confidently, apparently thinking a mere kid couldn’t understand what they were saying. Obviously it would be Nichole’s job to manipulate Dad into doing what they needed for the story—something she’d be pretty good at, I imagined. Even now, she was smiling a dazzling smile and reaching out to touch my dad’s arm, and he was nodding and grinning back. Watching it, I had a little sickness in my stomach, a sad, sour feeling.

  Courtesy of Beth Shelburton, I was newly wise in the ways of love, which was why I had the sure conviction that my father was going to wind up getting his heart broken by Miss Nichole J. Singleton.

  chapter

  THIRTY-TWO

  EVENTUALLY the TV crew left to go get a hotel room. It took them a long time to get back to the paved road; I could hear them honking at traffic the whole way down the hill.

  Dad and McHenry came back into the house, and I asked my dad when his interview would be on television, deciding that for now I would withhold the fact that I might be interviewd by Nichole myself. He said he thought it would be on that night. He was animated, more excited and lively than he’d been in a long time, but McHenry seemed gloomy and dour.

  “It will only attract attention,” McHenry observed.

  “Dad, do you think I’m suspended from school just until Friday, or does it last the weekend?” I asked.

  The two men seemed a little surprised at the question, like maybe I was changing the subject, but for me I’d just put my finger on the paramount issue of the day.

  My father said he didn’t know and agreed to call the school first thing in the morning. “Hey, Charlie, Nichole wants to interview you, too,” my dad told me, so he already knew. McHenry stiffened. Dad turned to him. “What is it, Jules?”

  “On television? Charlie’s going to tell the story of how he met the bear, and the words on the wall?”

  “Yes,” my dad responded slowly, trying to figure out the cause of McHenry’s agitation.

  “He can’t do that,” McHenry objected.

  My dad just looked at him. I felt my shoulders slumping in disappointment—I wanted to be on television; no one else I’d ever met had been on television before! “It would be fun,” I ventured.

  McHenry sighed in frustration. “Think about it, George. You know how some people are. They hear that you’re claiming that a human being is reincarnated as a bear, it’s going to make them angry. They might … they might take it out on the bear. We need to protect the bear. Above everything else, we must protect the bear.”

  I didn’t understand why it would upset anybody—either they believed what Emory said or they didn’t. I looked to see what my dad had to say.

  “Then what are you suggesting?” my father asked McHenry.

  ??
?I’m saying, okay, Charlie goes on television. But Charlie, when you do, you can’t tell them about the writing on the wall. You can’t say what’s really happening here.”

  My father pursed his lips. “I’m not sure we even know what’s really happening, Jules.”

  McHenry’s eyes had that strange light in them again. “Can’t you see? Emory. He’s been sent.”

  My father mulled this over. “Charlie can’t lie. I won’t have him tell lies,” he finally warned.

  “It doesn’t have to be a lie.” McHenry turned to me. “Charlie, I know what you believe to be true, but you don’t actually know, do you? I mean, we know, we believe, but you didn’t see the bear write those words on the wall. You don’t even know how it is possible.”

  I bit my lip because I did know.

  “So if you have any doubts at all, it isn’t a lie to say you don’t know, is it?” McHenry reasoned.

  Ah, Jules McHenry was a truth splitter, just like me.

  “Okay,” I said. My dad looked unhappy, but he nodded, too. I wouldn’t say that Emory wrote on the pole barn wall; I would instead say it was possible anyone could have snuck in and done it. I would agree that a bear couldn’t hold a paintbrush in his paw.

  A while later a roar went up from outside: Emory had returned. He stood on two legs at the edge of the property while his eager fans surged forward, the people literally so stupid as to rush up to a grizzly bear with their hands held out to touch him. Then he lowered his head and sprinted for the door, knocking aside one guy who was dumb enough to block his path. I knew what that felt like. The guy went down hard and lay there on the grass, stunned but ultimately unhurt.

  Emory dashed into the pole barn through the side door.

  “Stay here!” my father barked at me. He and McHenry ran outside, pushing their way through people, and slipped inside the pole barn and shut the side door.

  Before long the side window was covered with a tarp from within, and I knew the front pole barn door was still locked in place because when some idiots tried to raise it, it wouldn’t move.