“Wussy,” Dan said again.
Fine. Great. I’m a wussy. I’d like to see you hand-feed a grizzly bear. You’d probably mess your pants.
This actually made me grin, which seemed to disorient Dan a little. I was supposed to be reeling from his insults, and instead I was smiling at some internal thought. I guess he thought that if he called me a couple names I’d become enraged and fling myself at him and he’d drop me with a shot to the face.
“Come on,” someone said in the crowd. They were getting restless. Fights aren’t supposed to be boring; it was a rule.
“You’re just…,” Dan floundered.
A wussy, yes, we’ve established that.
His lips twisted bitterly. “Your mother was a whore,” he said.
The crowd went completely silent. Dan was staring at me, and he looked shocked at his own words. And I …
I …
I simply couldn’t fathom how anyone could say such a thing. The idea that anyone in Selkirk River could so much as think a single ugly thought about Laura Hall, much less utter it in public, struck me literally dumb.
I had nothing to say. I let my fists, which had been up in a halfhearted mimic of Dan’s stance, drop to my sides.
“That’s it,” I said, or think I said. I remember that as I pushed my way through the circle of boys who had gathered for the fight my face was frozen in a tight grimace. That the boys parted for me without a word. That Mike Kappas said, “Jesus, Alderton,” with such contempt it instantly defined for everyone there how they and eventually the entire school would react to what had just happened.
I waited at the bus pickup without looking at or talking to anyone.
The late bus ran a spontaneously designed route depending on who got on board. This meant you had to sit there while the bus driver took you on a meandering exploration of what felt like the entire county.
No one sat near me. They didn’t mean any harm by their ostracism; they just didn’t know what to say.
And Dan, of course, wasn’t on the bus.
We had ground our way methodically up a long series of switchbacks in order to deposit one lone ninth grader at an intersection that looked like the crossroads where Nowhere meets Nothing. Why was he getting off here? If there was a house around those parts it was a secret to me.
What there was up there was a hunting lodge that belonged to the rich oil guy, McHenry. That was his last name and all most people ever called him, McHenry, though his first name was Jules.
He built a log cabin that people said had five bathrooms in it, a fact everyone repeated to each other as an exclamation: “Five bathrooms!” The bus swung around and I got a good look at both the five-bathroom cabin and then McHenry himself, who was unlocking a padlock at some iron gates to let his truck onto his property. He was certainly a character—that’s another thing people would repeat to each other: “That McHenry is certainly a character.” The expression made no sense to me; weren’t we all “characters”? What would the opposite be? Would you say someone was “not a character”?
McHenry’s face was deeply suntanned, a stark contrast to the white hair he wore pulled into an eight-inch ponytail at the back of his head. The pickup’s door was open and even from inside the bus I could feel its custom speakers vibrating the air with Led Zeppelin music. The truck bed had dog cages in it, with hounds who were pacing back and forth in their enclosures, eager to be let out. There were four dogs in all, rust-colored animals. Hunting dogs.
Bear-hunting dogs.
chapter
EIGHTEEN
AT that point it wasn’t strictly illegal to hunt a grizzly bear in the lower forty-eight. Grizzlies wouldn’t make it onto the endangered species list for another year. It was, however, largely pointless to try to find one—as my dad had said, they were considered pretty much wiped out in Idaho. McHenry wasn’t bringing out the dogs to track grizzlies; he was after black bears, which were more plentiful.
Bear hunting wasn’t much of a sport—the bear would run from the dogs until, terrified, it climbed a tree, and then the hunter would come along and shoot the bear out of the tree. But then McHenry was rumored to not be much of a sportsman. People said he pretty much shot whatever he wanted, in season or not, figuring that if he got caught he’d just pay the fine.
The reason people all knew about his poaching but did nothing about it was that when McHenry came to town it injected a nice shot of dollars into the local economy. He could be counted upon to spend big at the restaurants and bars, to lease horses from Mr. Shelburton, and to add weight to the collection plate at Sunday services. McHenry was always buying snowmobiles and powerboats. If he shot a bear or an elk when he wasn’t supposed to, nobody was going to complain.
I had no doubt what would happen if he and his dogs came across Emory in the woods.
When the bus dropped me at the foot of Hidden Creek Road I took off at a run, faster than usual, pushing myself. I dumped my schoolbooks on the front deck without even going inside.
“Emory!” I yelled. I sprinted down the path to the creek. There was no sign of him. What if I couldn’t warn him in time? What if he didn’t trust me, since I had shut him in the barn without food or water?
“Emory!” I shouted. I climbed the big hill on the opposite side of the creek, the vast expanse of forest that was visible from our back windows. At the very crest of this hill there was a ridge of rocks from which you could see for miles and miles, and it was toward this ridge I ran, an uphill climb that tore the oxygen out of my lungs until I was gasping so hard I could barely manage a croak.
It didn’t matter that I couldn’t shout; I was making enough noise as I crashed upward through the trees that the bear heard me coming. He was standing toward the top of the ridge, up on two legs as if he, too, wanted to see everything around him. He was massive, regal, beautiful. The sun was low in the sky, hiding behind some clouds, so that a soft light danced around the bear like an aura.
“Emory,” I gasped. “There’s a hunter. With dogs and … and guns. You have to come with me.”
I’m not sure whether I thought he’d understand me or I just said the words out loud because other than gesturing with my arms I had no other way to communicate. But Emory gracefully dropped his forepaws to the ground and followed me passively as I made my way more slowly back down the hill. Apparently I was forgiven for having locked him up.
When I opened the pole barn door, I glanced up at Emory, thinking maybe his reaction would reveal something to me. Would he somehow indicate surprise that the words were no longer on the wall? Be angry? Notice I’d cleaned up his footprints?
He was maddeningly inscrutable, completely expressionless until I flipped on the light. Then he started in surprise, glancing around wildly until he saw the naked bulbs overhead. When he did he stood on two legs, sniffing, examining the source of illumination.
“They’re called lightbulbs. They’re like candles, only electric.” I hesitated. Shoot, did he even know about electricity?
For the first time since I read the writing on the wall, the date of May 1862 assumed significance. Was Emory from the year 1862? Was he here by time travel? Was it a parallel universe, like in Craig’s Planet of the Apes show? Reincarnation? Open the door on one element of the fantastic and the thirteen-year-old mind will let them all in at the same time.
I was at a point in my life where I thought it perfectly plausible that a radioactive spider could bite you and then you’d be Spider-Man. I believed the Starship Enterprise could travel at warp speed and that soon we would all have flying cars. I knew Superman was a fantasy but thought Batman and James Bond were reasonable constructs, all in all. I guess the people who are disappointed that I didn’t faint dead away with all the spiritual implications of the words on the wall were more sophisticated when they were in the eighth grade.
Emory didn’t seem to care about the new paint job anyway. He strolled over to one of the big freezers, sniffed its edge, and then faced me with what can only be
described as an expectant expression.
I undid the latch, opened the freezer, and dragged out a tub of beef stew and took it to the sink and ran water over it until it dropped out of the tub, landing like a block of cement. “Here,” I said to Emory. The thing skittered across the floor like a hockey puck. Emory stopped it with his foot, giving it a long sniff and then an experimental lick.
Satisfied that it was, indeed, food, the bear sprawled on the floor, holding the stew between his paws, and started chewing at it like a dog with a bone.
“I’ll leave the side door open, but I need to close the big one,” I told him. He didn’t look up from where he was steadily crunching his frozen meal.
As I was reaching for the loop of rope to pull the garage door shut, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I glanced up and inhaled in sharp surprise.
Dan Alderton was standing out on the road. His eyes were wide in disbelief as he took in the sight of the bear lying on the floor of the pole barn, fully illuminated by the lights overhead.
Without saying a word or acknowledging him in any way, I shut the door. My heart was pounding, though—I knew that to keep the bear safe I had to guard Emory’s presence, his existence, from the world. I couldn’t think of a worse person to have spotted the grizzly bear in our pole barn.
But I had a more immediate problem: within half an hour of my chance encounter with Dan, I heard my father’s Jeep turn off the paved road and start chewing up the gravel on its way to our driveway.
Emory raised his head curiously at the noise of my father’s brakes squealing as the Jeep came to a halt outside the pole barn. I faced the bear, my hands open and spread in supplication. “Please,” I said. “That’s my dad. Please stay here until I talk to him, okay?”
As usual, the bear’s eyes were unreadable.
I waited until dinner to talk to my dad. My delay wasn’t strategic; I just couldn’t think of how to introduce the subject or what I should tell him. And though I had irrefutable evidence in the form of a six-hundred-pound beast in our pole barn, I knew that my dad probably wouldn’t believe me. The prospect of his cold rejection filled me first with dread and then with a grief so profound my throat went tight with it, choking me.
The silence probably just felt routine to my dad, who seemed more distracted than usual. He fried up fish on the stove, his back to me. I watched him move around the kitchen and he seemed tired and old. Life hadn’t turned out the way he’d wanted and there was often a sense coming off him that he was sick of the whole darn thing.
“Dad,” I said as we came to the end of another silent dinner. His eyes drifted down the table to where my mom always sat before they turned and looked at me.
I took a deep breath but couldn’t seem to come out with it.
“What is it, Charlie?”
“Dad, it’s bear-hunting season. I saw McHenry with his dogs. He’s going to go after bear.”
My dad considered this, no doubt puzzled that my words were shaking with so much emotion. His brown eyes watched me with almost the same lack of response as Emory’s.
“There’s a grizzly bear. If he finds him, I’m afraid McHenry will shoot him. We can’t let that happen!” I blurted frantically.
My dad frowned in bafflement and I felt my frustration building. This wasn’t going right.
“His name is Emory. He’s not a normal bear.”
“A grizzly?” my dad said. “Charlie…”
“We have to protect him, Dad! McHenry hunts whatever he feels like and people just let him do it. We can’t let him shoot Emory!”
My father was staring at me with a perplexity that under any other circumstance might have been humorous.
“Dad, when you were in the hospital, I put him in the pole barn. And while he was in there, he got into the paint. It wasn’t a duck like you thought. The red was paint, not blood,” I told him in a rush. I hated having to tell him this—I might have explained to myself that I hadn’t technically lied, but I knew my father wouldn’t see it like that.
“You put a bear in the pole barn?” he sputtered, putting his finger on what was, for him, the most critical point. “A bear?”
“He’s in there now,” I said quietly. My dad’s eyes bulged. “Dad, but look! Look what he drew on the wall!”
I handed over the Polaroid photograph. Another half falsehood exposed, but I thought I was probably beyond getting into trouble for using the camera.
My father accepted the picture as if it were fragile, barely holding it. His face was twisted into a grimace of absolute bewilderment. He read the words that Emory had written on the wall, then raised his eyes. “I don’t know what to say, Charlie.”
I didn’t, either. I was almost holding my breath. It was so desperately important to me that my father believed me.
“How does a bear…,” he started to say, shaking his head. I knew the question: How does a bear manage to hold a paintbrush? But was that really the most important issue? How about the fact that the bear could write words?
And then my father translated the first sentence, which had been, to me, mostly gibberish. “‘I, Emory Bain, private, Third Regiment of infantry, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, May 1862, pursued Rebels at,’ uh, ‘Chickahominy, wounded, took fever.’” He paused a moment, then continued with the rest of it. “‘Now returned. I have a message.’” He peered at me. “This is what was written on the wall of the pole barn?”
“Yessir.” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice. Infantry! Emory had been a soldier; that’s what he meant!
“And you painted it out.”
I hung my head.
“And the bear is there now. Inside.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Charlie.”
I lifted my eyes.
“There’s a grizzly bear locked inside our pole barn right now.”
“Yessir, there is. Well, not locked; I left the side door open.” Now that it didn’t matter, I was meticulously sticking to the truth.
His eyes were almost feverish with contemplation, and I suddenly had a sense of what was going on inside him. If he believed me on this, he’d be throwing in with me on something that was completely impossible. It would be my dad and me on one side and the rational world on the other.
But the alternative would tear me in two. If he abandoned me now it would be the final step in the long path toward complete separation that had started the day we put my mother in the ground. I wasn’t without blame in the estrangement; I guarded an awful secret, locking myself behind its walls, but my father had not tried to scale those walls, not once. He’d never even noticed that we weren’t communicating, so wrapped up in his own grieving he didn’t bother to consider what had happened to me.
Resentment churned up in me then, an anger so tightly wound it felt as if I could strike him then, punch him in his doubting eyes. I swallowed it all back, trembling, waiting for him to say something.
“Okay then,” he said quietly. “Let’s go take a look.”
I nodded quickly, turning away from him so he wouldn’t see the tears that inexplicably sprang to my eyes. I hastily wiped them away when he walked toward the door, and then he stopped.
“Just a minute,” he said to me. He reversed course and strode down the hallway to his room, shutting the door behind him.
I didn’t try to puzzle through this odd behavior. I was caught up in a wave of cautious optimism then, a sense that things might actually turn out all right. My father was going to help me, help Emory, Emory the soldier.
Of course, not everyone would turn out to be as easily accepting of the whole thing as I was.
When Dad left his bedroom he wordlessly crossed the floor, a key in his hand, and unlocked his gun cabinet.
“Dad,” I said, anguished.
He carefully loaded the .30-06, the safety engaging with an audible click. “Just in case, Charlie,” he said gently.
We went out to the pole barn. A square of light spilled out from the open side
door, but we went around to the front. I reached for the handle to raise the door, but my dad stopped me with a hand on my arm. He cocked his head, listening, then finally gave me a firm nod.
What would I do, I wondered, if Emory had left?
I lifted the door with a rattle.
Emory was lying on the couch I’d pulled out for him, sprawled out like a drunk man. It was fully dark outside in the driveway, but I knew my father and I would be illuminated in the doorway by the spill of light from the overhead bulbs.
The bear saw my dad’s rifle and came to his feet.
“Emory,” I said tremulously, “this is my dad.”
I felt my father tighten his grip on his gun when Emory stalked forward, moving slowly but with massive power. It must have taken all of Dad’s willpower, but the gun stayed pointed at the floor even as the distance between us and the great bear shortened.
I took a step forward, deliberately putting myself between the bear and the rifle.
“Charlie,” my father warned tensely.
“It’s okay,” I said, speaking to both of them. “Nobody wants to get hurt.”
My dad drew in a breath between his teeth when I reached out my hand. Emory took another step forward and nuzzled my fingers with his nose.
“My God,” my father breathed.
chapter
NINETEEN
I HAD the feeling, as I boarded the school bus the next morning, that there were just too many things to contain, that I was trying to manage a crisis in every significant area of my existence. I was filled with the sense of rampant momentum, of cascading events.
One of my biggest concerns was my father, in whom I had so little faith it was as if he’d become a stranger to me. His shock at seeing Emory, combined with the naked disbelief in my father’s eyes when he spent what seemed like an hour reading and rereading the words captured by the Polaroid, led me to conclude he was the shakiest sort of ally, maybe even an enemy to me and my bear. He’d offered no encouragement or support, that was for sure—in fact, he said nothing at all, handling this new development in our lives the way he handled everything else between us.