chapter
TWENTY
THE man who got out of the Fish and Game truck was Herman Hessler. He wore a gray uniform with green patches on it and had a hat that he seemed to always be carrying instead of wearing on his head. His blond hair was thin and wispy, tucked behind his ears. It was Mr. Hessler’s job to make sure McHenry didn’t shoot things out of season, an official function that, as I’ve said, mostly consisted of Mr. Hessler looking the other way.
“Hey there, George. Hi, Charlie.”
I raised my hand a bit uncertainly, since I had never before directly met the man and therefore didn’t know exactly how I should address him. My heart was pounding, though, and I was eyeing the side door of the pole barn, silently begging Emory to stay in there.
They stood and talked about various things: How many fish there were in the river, how many deer there were in the woods. What kind of winter we were in for. It was so pointless it made me itch.
Finally Mr. Hessler made of show of taking a long pause, and I knew he was ready to get to it.
“The thing is, George, we had an awful strange call from Katie Alderton up the road there.”
My dad waited. Mr. Hessler cleared his throat. “Her boy. You know Danny. He said you all have a tame bear living in your pole barn, there.” Mr. Hessler nodded at the pole barn. “Or maybe a cub; I thought it could be, you know, separated from its mother. They’re mighty cute fellas when they’re little. Docile.”
“They are that,” my father agreed.
“I thought … tell you the truth, I don’t know what I thought, but then I heard from Jules McHenry. He owns the ranch up there on Road Six-fifty-five.”
“I know him.”
“I know you do; he said his dogs tracked a bear onto your property.”
“There’s no hunting on my property,” my dad replied calmly.
“Yeah, well, he said you said that, too.” Mr. Hessler increased the spin of the hat he was tossing and I stared at it as if hypnotized.
“He did say his dogs were pretty interested in your pole barn.”
“I’ve got some food in there,” my dad offered.
“Well, his dogs … Look, George, I have to ask. Have you got yourself either a bear cub or a full-grown black bear in your pole barn right now?”
I sucked in my breath. Ever the truth splitter, ever in charge of parsing words, I saw a clear way out. We had neither a cub nor a full-grown blackie in our pole barn, and that was a fact. My dad could stay clean with the law.
But he surprised me. He scratched at his chin. “I guess I don’t feel like answering that question, Herman.”
I’m not sure that any one of the three of us expected him to say that, so we all sort of stood there a minute, pondering what it could mean.
Even back in the 1970s, northern Idaho had become something of a refuge for people who felt oppressed by the government and wanted to get to a place where nobody official and nothing bureaucratic ever had opportunity to bother them. So we probably weren’t the first people to be obstinate in the face of an official Fish and Game inquiry, but still Mr. Hessler seemed disappointed. Probably what he was thinking was that if my dad had just said that he didn’t have a bear Mr. Hessler could go back to his office and file a report and be done with it, but with this particular answer there was no real obvious course of action.
For what seemed like a full minute, nobody spoke. Then Mr. Hessler seemed to come to a decision. He stopped twirling his hat and placed it on his head.
“Why don’t I just have a look, then,” he said.
There was a long silence. Mr. Hessler didn’t move to go to the barn and didn’t take his eyes off my father. I had the sense that Mr. Hessler needed to put in his report that he’d asked to look into the barn, but that he already knew what my father was going to say.
“Rather you didn’t.”
He nodded, tossing his hat. “Well, that’s that, then.”
We all stood around for a minute or so. Finally Mr. Hessler cleared his throat. “Well, I was sent out to see if there was any evidence you had a bear in your barn, and I don’t see any evidence and I didn’t hear any, neither, so I guess that’s what I’ll report. No evidence.” He put his hat on his head. “I’ll ring up Katie and let her know that her son was probably just making it up.”
“Good to see you, Herman,” my father said evenly.
The Fish and Game agent opened his driver’s door but didn’t immediately get inside. He looked over at the two of us. “If you did have a bear in there, George, that could make a real mess for both of us.”
We watched him back out of our driveway and head down the road. I waved and he waved back.
As far as I was concerned, things had turned out just fine. Dan had ratted us out to the Fish and Game, but nothing came of it. Now Emory was protected from Jules McHenry and I was no longer hiding his existence from my father. From my naïve perspective, it seemed that we had not only avoided getting in trouble but that the three of us—me, my father, and Emory—would be starting a new life together.
My dad’s gaze, as his eyes met mine, was far more troubled. I turned away, a little irritated. The bear was fine. Dad needed to just let things be.
The next morning Coach Briggs thought it would be a wonderful day to run cross-country again. I guess he never bothered to check out what had happened during the recent rains to the stream at the far end of the track, but it had swollen from a spry little trickle we could bound across to a five-foot-wide mass of muddy water with slick, treacherous banks. Barreling down the slope, the three of us in the lead—Tim and Mike and I—fell in the stream, a tangled trio, and everyone who tried to stop on the slippery bank did the same thing.
Tim started laughing and the rest of us quickly joined in, having a great time hurling muck at each other.
The last boy to make it to the slope was a lumbering lad named Tank, who played offensive line in football and was pretty good at getting in the way of the pass rush but who had no accelerator and no brakes. He came crashing into us like a bowling ball taking out pins. Most of us went back into the water with him, and then we all brawled, throwing mud and laughing hysterically.
All of a sudden we heard a whistle, stabbing out shrilly from back up at the school.
“Uh-oh,” Mike muttered.
Coach Briggs stood up there by the tennis courts, his hands on his hips, his whistle in his mouth like a baby’s pacifier. He didn’t look happy.
The coach marched us to the side of the building and told us to stand there in a row and shut up. When he picked up the hose, a murmur of concern rose from us. “Quiet!” he thundered.
The hose had a gunlike nozzle, and when Coach Briggs aimed the stream at skinny Ned the poor guy folded as if hit by bullets. One at a time the coach’s hose sought us out, and I don’t know which was worse: getting hit with it or anticipating how awful it was going to be. As the cleaner water flooded our clothing it rinsed out the dirt and our skinny bodies grew visible under the filmy white cotton: it was like being naked out there, our buttocks plain for all the world to see. Naturally, the girls’ gym class picked that moment to go trotting past, so we were treated to the further humiliation of having them see us in such a state.
Inside, I couldn’t feel my fingers as I peeled off my T-shirt, which was like pulling the skin off a raw chicken.
Nothing has ever felt so good as the warm embrace of that shower. I was vibrating with life.
I was still ebullient by lunch, so charged up that when I saw Tim Humphrey settling in across from Joy Ebert I went to their table as if I had an invitation.
“Hey, Tim,” I sang out, setting my tray down. I launched myself onto the bench seat and even gave Joy a grin. “Hi, Joy.”
“Hi, Charlie,” she said, and it sounded exactly like all she was doing was saying hi and not, What in the world is someone like you doing at this table? Don’t you know I’m the most beautiful girl in the entire eighth grade?
I saw Dan Alderton acros
s the room but didn’t acknowledge him. Nor, it appeared, did anybody else. His words had turned him into a person to be shunned, an outcast. A Kotex.
Tim related the story of what happened in gym class, making it sound like he and Mike and I were the star athletes of the school. I laughed along with Joy at Tim’s descriptions of the facial expressions of the runners as they slid down the hill and into the water. I could see myself going to parties with Tim and Joy and hanging out with them all through high school.
I was shocked and even embarrassed when I felt a vibration and turned and saw Beth sitting on the bench next to me. Tim had finished his story and most of the people at the table were involved in more private conversations, but I was conscious of Joy giving the two of us a coolly speculative assessment. Beth was a seventh grader and as such really had no business being there, but wasn’t that just like her? I didn’t know if she was brave or confident or just stupid.
No, I knew she wasn’t stupid.
“Charlie,” she said. She was giving me an odd look, like there was something she couldn’t figure out.
“Hi, Beth,” I replied weakly. I’d gone from swaggering self-confidence to insecurity in a matter of mere moments.
“Can we talk? Maybe we could go out into the courtyard; it’s nice outside.”
I nodded numbly, dropping off my tray before following her out to the small treed courtyard in the center of the school. She was right: if you weren’t soaking wet and being sliced to ribbons by a garden hose, it was nice outside.
Beth hopped up to sit on a low brick wall. It was funny how much that charmed me; it was just a little jump, her knees together as she scooted her fanny back a bit, but it made me grin with pleasure.
“What is it?” she asked. “Why are you smiling?”
“I don’t know.” Because you’re you, I thought I would say, if I had the nerve to talk like that. You’re just so you.
“You’re not on drugs, are you?” she asked abruptly. The question was so unexpected it sort of slapped me into a state of guilt, as if I were on drugs.
“No,” I protested.
“You don’t take drugs, do you?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t like that. It’s stupid. Also smoking. Smoking’s almost worse.”
“No smoking,” I agreed contractually.
Her green eyes probed my face. How someone could have eyes so clear and clean I had no idea, but I just wanted to sit and stare at them. “I heard what Dan said,” she finally told me. “About your mom, I mean.”
“Oh.”
Sympathy softly warmed her gaze. “I guess I understand why you felt you had to fight him. When I heard about it, I wanted to hit him myself.”
“Yeah, well … we didn’t actually fight, you know.”
She frowned. “Really? I heard there was a fight. That he said … what he said, and then the two of you fought.”
I felt like I was in the position of having to explain something really inane, how boys were making appointments to punch each other with the same odd formality that we’d use to ask a girl out on a date. Worse, what Dan said actually was tangential to the physical fight, which in truth had been neither a fight nor physical. So I took refuge in the universal body language of teenage boys and just gave her a silent shrug.
She pursed her lips. “I wish you’d explained this before. I feel like I was unfair to you. Why didn’t you say anything?”
I stuck with the shrugging; it seemed to be working for me.
“Charlie.” She sighed. “You’re so hard to understand, sometimes.”
I liked the sound of it: Charlie Hall. Hard to understand. Mysterious. Sexy.
Okay, sexy was probably going a little overboard. But I was willing to bet I was the only boy she’d ever met who had made friends with a grizzly bear.
“Why do you look so proud of yourself all of a sudden?” she asked. “Oh, I get it. Charlie Hall, man of mystery.”
I could not believe how easily she read my mind.
“So what does that make me, in this equation?”
I had no answer to that. I was back to feeling like an idiot.
The bell spoke up then, shrilly announcing an end to lunch, and from back inside there was immediately the sound of students rushing the dishwasher station with their plastic trays and scuffing their way out of the lunchroom.
Beth put her hands on either side of her knees to help herself off the wall and I, drawing inspiration from some movie I’d seen sometime, put my arms out and sort of awkwardly placed my hands in her armpits to assist her. It was probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, but when Beth dropped lightly to her feet I was standing there holding her as if about to pull her into a kiss. Her eyes sparkled at me.
“Oh my,” she said, laughing.
I carried that laughter with me the rest of the day; it rang in my ears like the tinkle of a small bell.
That night at dinner my father stopped his fork on its way to his mouth and blinked at me.
“What is it, Charlie?” he asked me.
“What?”
“Why are you grinning like that?”
I hadn’t realized I was grinning, but I knew why. I was still hearing Beth’s voice in my head.
Oh my.
My dad was pretty fidgety during the meal. “Charlie…,” he said at one point.
“Yeah?”
He looked out the window toward the pole barn. “We need to talk soon.”
And though I’d spent the past year craving conversation with my father, what I felt at that moment was only a sense of relief that he’d grown so unaccustomed to talking to me he could only feint at it. I didn’t want to talk. Emory was safe and Beth had forgiven me. My world was coming together perfectly, without analysis or commentary, and I didn’t want to jinx it.
The rain started up again. I was doing dishes when I saw a large black shadow lumber across the yard: Emory was coming in out of the storm. Across the creek, garlands of white steamlike fog rose in stark contrast to the dark evergreen trees—it looked like we were witnessing the birth of clouds. Emory seemed to regard the phenomenon with real appreciation for a few minutes before he turned and walked through the side door of the pole barn.
I felt truly happy.
Later that evening I fed Emory a nice frozen pot roast, just like a normal boy giving his dog a dinner, except that nobody had a dog that big. I didn’t imagine my father would be thrilled to see the pot roast go, either, but what was important was that Emory liked it and seemed to want to live with us in our pole barn now.
I crawled into bed when my dad told me to, but I wouldn’t have bet on my ability to sleep—my brain was just buzzing with everything that was happening. But almost as soon as I turned off the lights I winked out. The fatigue that had settled into my bones from the day’s physical toils had a marvelous, narcotic feeling to it.
A sharp crack of thunder broke me out of my sleep an hour or so later. The wind had kicked up and the rain was hitting the windows so loud it could have been popcorn popping in a metal pan. I drowsily lay in bed and watched the white light flare on my ceiling, not bothering to count the seconds for the thunder, though I could tell it was getting closer.
Then one of the strobes of white light caused me to sit upright in bed. Lightning flickered or burst, but it did not, not ever, trace a quick path across my ceiling in a tight white ball like a searchlight probing for enemy aircraft. Something entirely different had just happened.
I sat there holding my breath, waiting for the dancing ball of light to appear on my ceiling a second time, but there was no repeat. I slid out of bed and silently padded down the hallway and into the living room.
I felt more than saw my way across the floor and peered out the back window. There was nothing to see. I turned and went to the kitchen and looked out the side window over the sink, and that’s when I saw three beams of light, man high, bobbing along as a trio of flashlights ran across the yard to the pole barn.
McHenry.
chapter
TWENTY-ONE
I SHIVERED then, but I wasn’t cold. I knew I should do something but wasn’t sure what. I leaned forward and peered through the wet glass, watching as the flashlights converged on the side door of the pole barn. Their beams bounced off the wet metal sides of the barn and reflected back on the people wielding them, and I saw I was wrong. It wasn’t McHenry.
Dan Alderton, and his buddies Jerry and Gregg.
A flash of lightning illuminated them and I could see by their huddled postures that they were cold and terrified. They were four feet from the door and creeping toward it at what appeared to be about an inch an hour. Dan had his palm out to twist the knob, but at the rate he was going he wasn’t going to have it in his hand until sunrise.
Still unsure what I should do, I just watched. The flashlights were all aimed at the square of new glass in the upper half of the door, and from where I stood I could see that the combined beams were illuminating the other side of the pole barn, a blank, newly painted white wall. If they wanted to see Emory, they’d have to open that door, and it didn’t look to me as if they had the nerve.
I found myself smirking a little. I had never seen three such petrified people in my whole life. The thunderstorm, the rain, the wind in the trees, and their flashlights all combined to give them the spooks—and it couldn’t help that they were convinced that on the other side of the door was a creature who could catch and eat all three of them.
Finally Dan straightened, overcoming his fear. He took a bold step forward, and the other boys joined him. Okay, he could reach the knob now, if he wanted. They kept their flashlights aimed at the window.
Bang! A flash of lightning came with a loud crack of thunder and as it did Emory suddenly appeared in the window, his huge face filling the space, his lips pulled back in a terrible snarl.
Dan dropped his flashlight, Gregg fell down, and even with all the rain I could hear the boys yelling as they backed away from that door as fast as humanly possible. Their torches swinging in the night, they took off in a dead run, scampering past where I stood with looks of abject terror on their faces.