“I know. I’m sorry,” my father said sadly. “I had to get you out here, Jim.”
My father gave the vet the short, easy version: this was a tame bear who had followed me home. We’d set the bear free, but a hunter had winged him with a bullet and we needed the shoulder patched up so the bear could recover.
It sounded reasonable to me, but Dr. Humphrey was hanging on to the door handle as if he were on a wild carnival ride. He shook his head in terror when my dad got to the part about the town’s veterinarian treating a grizzly bear for a gunshot wound.
“Isn’t there something we can give him to knock him out?” my dad asked when Dr. Humphrey remained intransigent.
The prospect calmed the vet a little. He agreed that yes, he could tranquilize the animal, or rather, we could do so while he sat in the Jeep and clung to the door latch. He fussed in his bag and before long produced a large hypodermic, into which he drew some clear liquid from a glass bottle.
He handed the shot to my father. We left the animal doctor in the Jeep and went back to the pole barn together, but my father put out an arm to stop me. Emory was acting strangely. He was off the couch, and his eyes were big and round. He was drooling heavily.
I was both baffled and alarmed, but my father read him better than I did: “He’s scared.” My dad looked back over his shoulder at the vet, realization clicking. “Ah, okay. Wait here, Charlie.”
Unhesitatingly my father stepped closer to a mad-looking, anxious, frightened grizzly bear. It was at that moment that I realized with wonder that my father really did believe me; he truly thought Emory was more than just a bear.
“It’s different now, Emory,” my father said. “We won’t have to amputate. And we have medicine a hundred times more powerful than whiskey that will take the pain away.”
During the Civil War, bullets were mushy, fragmenting metal balls and getting hit with one pretty much guaranteed amputation as the only way to prevent infection and death. If Emory had been a soldier in that war, he had no doubt heard the screams as his compatriots were held down and had their legs and arms literally sawed off, the lucky ones getting a few sips of alcohol before the surgeon operated.
“See how thin this needle is? I’m going to poke you with it, in your other shoulder. All right? This is the medicine that will make you sleepy.”
Dr. Humphrey had heard all this and now watched in amazement as Emory calmed down and went back to the couch and sat there while my father injected him. Almost immediately Emory’s eyes clouded and his head drooped, and he collapsed into a deep slumber.
The Jeep door creaked open cautiously. Dr. Humphrey entered the barn. “How did you … I’m not sure what just happened,” he whispered.
My dad reached a decision. “Charlie, show Dr. Humphrey the Polaroid.”
I handed over the picture to the veterinarian, who accepted it and stared at it numbly. My dad nodded at the newly repainted wall. “The bear wrote those words. We painted them out, but they were right there.”
Dr. Humphrey handed the photograph back to my dad with an absolutely disbelieving expression on his face.
As it turned out, it wasn’t as serious a wound as I’d thought. The bullet came closer to missing Emory than hitting him, furrowing a path that was, as Dr. Humphrey described it, “through and through.” He sewed up the wound with quick efficiency, giving us some antibiotic tablets.
We’d shut the door to the pole barn, which is why we only heard but didn’t see a vehicle crunch into our driveway. My dad indicated with his eyes that I should go see who it was.
McHenry stood in what was now noonday sun. He still looked worse for wear, haggard and drained, his face twitching with residual emotions from his encounter up at the Old Cabin. His ponytail trembled at the back of his head. He came around the front of his big gleaming pickup truck.
“Are you here for your rifle?” I asked him in even tones.
He regarded me with a puzzled expression.
“Your rifle?” I repeated pointedly.
“Oh. No, I just … I wanted to see.”
What I knew he meant was that he wanted to understand, but I wasn’t going to go easy on him and explain that none of us had gotten that far yet. What I said instead was, “Wait here and I’ll fetch it.”
When I came back out of the house with his rifle in one hand and the shells from it in another, he was standing just inside the pole barn, staring at the sleeping bear. His mouth was open in awe.
“Here’s your gun, Mr. McHenry.” I handed him the bullets, too, which he put in his pocket.
“Will he recover, Jim?” McHenry asked the vet.
Dr. Humphrey, like everybody in town, did business with McHenry. They shook hands now. “There’s no reason he shouldn’t make a full recovery. I can’t tell without an X-ray, but I’m all but certain there are no bullet fragments in the wound. It’s through and through. So you’re, uh, part of all this, McHenry?” Dr. Humphrey asked.
“Part of it,” McHenry repeated, as if unsure what that meant.
Dr. Humphrey didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to offend someone like McHenry. So he just shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he finally allowed, a neutral statement that could mean that he believed the bear understood English or that he believed my father and I were lunatics.
“You know, Jim,” my father said, clearing his throat, “I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone what you saw up here today.”
“Of course,” Dr. Humphrey replied, with just enough hesitation so that I knew he thought the request ludicrous. There was a bear with a bullet wound sleeping on a couch up on Hidden Creek Road; how could he not talk about it?
They stood awkwardly for a moment, as if not sure what to say next.
“I’ll walk you to your car, Jules,” my father finally announced firmly but politely. McHenry nodded, took a final long look at Emory, and then followed my father up the driveway to his truck.
“How would a bear do that, do you suppose, Charlie? Write those words?” Dr. Humphrey asked. It was a question I was tired of. I didn’t know how a bear could paint such clear script onto a wall. No one knew.
And there was a larger significance in the question, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. By focusing on the mechanics of how a bear managed to hold a paintbrush, the veterinarian was shying away from the implications of the words themselves. It was as if Emory had drawn meaningless circles and squares, instead of informing us indirectly that we all needed to adjust our bedrock assumptions. Dr. Humphrey was looking at the words as objects and not part of a coherent sentence, so that the main mystery was how the bear had written them.
As Dr. Humphrey cleaned up I kept an eye on my dad and McHenry, who were having what looked like an urgent conversation up by McHenry’s pickup truck. I quailed inside when I saw my father showing him the Polaroid—McHenry was the last person I would trust with anything about Emory!
It was decided that McHenry would swing through town on the way back to his lodge and deposit Dr. Humphrey at his clinic, saving my dad the drive. The last I saw of him, Dr. Humphrey had fully recovered his normal demeanor and was talking animatedly to McHenry, for whom recovery would doubtless take a while longer.
Meanwhile, my dad and I had a serious problem. Emory’s wound meant he was going to be a sitting duck if the Fish and Game came back.
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked anxiously.
“I don’t know.”
“Will Mr. Hessler still come after him? After all he’s been through?”
“I doubt that makes much difference to the Fish and Game Department, Charlie.”
“But Dad, he can’t run away now, not with his shoulder like that.”
“I know.”
I sat on the cement floor of the pole barn and watched Emory snooze away the anesthetic. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN
I DON’T remember sleeping at all that night
. Mostly I just lay rigid, straining my ears for any one of a number of dangers. McHenry’s hounds. The Fish and Game trucks. The faceless people from IGAR. I even worried Dan and his buddies would show up again, this time armed with weapons to shoot themselves a grizzly bear.
My dad let me stay home from school to take care of Emory—I guess he knew that to try to make me go would force a battle we’d both regret. All Emory did was sleep, though. I didn’t know if it was from the antibiotics I faithfully gave him or the wound itself.
I was tired and grouchy all weekend, which describes Emory’s mood pretty much to a T. He didn’t eat much and wandered off the couch in the barn only to make the short trip to the yard to relieve himself. Whenever he was outside I stood nearby, watching anxiously for Fish and Game.
To make matters worse, Beth was occupied with some sort of gymnastics clinic that I guess she’d told me about but I’d not registered as meaning she’d be unavailable until she got home late Sunday night. “You’ll see her at school Monday,” Mrs. Shelburton told me. Monday.
I didn’t know if I was just being acutely sensitive or if traffic was heavier than usual that weekend, people driving past slowly. They all looked at me out their car windows as I stood solemnly regarding them from the driveway. They didn’t wave or react and I didn’t, either, as if the glass made us each invisible to the other.
Astoundingly, my father expected that after all that had transpired, I should get up the next Monday morning and go to school, telling me he’d let me take care of the bear before, but now the danger was past.
School? I could not imagine anything less relevant to my life at that moment than junior high school. I got on the bus that morning with a sense of total unreality.
I hadn’t been in the hall for more than five minutes when Tim Humphrey grabbed my arm. He pulled me over to the wall, out of traffic, his face flushed with excitement. I was quickly encircled by his jock friends, ironically the center of attention among the people with whom I had long craved association, though my plan for the day had been to keep my head down.
“God, my dad told me!” Tim said without preamble. “How long have you had it?”
“Well, like, I don’t know, awhile,” I responded slowly.
“How big is it?” someone asked. “Male or female?” someone else demanded. “Does it do tricks, like a circus bear?” a third asked. “Like ride a bicycle!” someone hooted, and people laughed.
“Never seen him do that,” I answered cautiously. I was enjoying the attention. The group of people was getting larger, the ring deeper, and I was the one they wanted to talk to.
Mike Kappas sort of shoved his way forward because he was Mike Kappas. “So what’s the deal with the bear?” he asked, which was such a broad and general question it rendered me mute. So many people were talking now, speculating and explaining to each other what was going on, that I wasn’t really sure I was necessary to the exchange anymore.
I kept my eye out for Beth, but that conversation, I soon realized, would have to wait for lunch.
Right before lunch was science class, and though my newfound social prominence had put me in a good mood, I felt my stomach lurch at the prospect of seeing Dan Alderton. I’d managed, since the day of the non-fight, to not only keep my distance but to also avoid his eyes, skipping my glance past his part of the room whenever I needed to look anywhere close to where he sat.
I hated myself for it, but I was afraid of Dan Alderton. He made me feel awful inside, just thinking about him and his betrayal and his insults. That’s what I was afraid of—how he made me feel. And now, of course, I had Fish and Game and IGAR in my life because Dan told his mom about Emory. It was all Dan’s fault, all of it.
I entered science class and maneuvered to my desk, so practiced at averting my gaze I wasn’t sure he was even there, at least not until the bell rang and we all settled down. And then it was as if I could feel him staring at the back of my head.
The teacher stood, pushed the glasses back up the steep slope of his nose, and began talking about something while I sat with my book open and stared at it. Slowly the room went away and I was back in the pole barn with my bear.
When would Mr. Hessler return with his posse? Would Emory now, finally, head up into the hills? I couldn’t believe, after all that had happened, that it would wind up with my bear getting shot. When would life decide it had been unfair enough to me and move on to some other kid?
The proximity of Dan Alderton brought it all home to me: this was going to end soon, and it was going to end badly.
Dan Alderton.
“Hey,” he whispered at just that moment. I felt my face grow hot. I knew it was him, and I knew who he was talking to.
“Hey!” he called again. “Hey. Squirrel.”
That’s what broke me. I took a single, deep breath and then, my hands curling into tight fists, I stood up. The teacher stopped talking. I turned stiffly, facing Dan. He had a smirk on his face, his eyes taunting me.
“Charlie?” the teacher asked.
I took a step in Dan’s direction, just one step, and that’s what triggered the explosion. I suppose that deep down I might have understood how I had evolved to be the focus of all of his frustrations, but I was still surprised at the fury with which he boiled up out of his chair and came at me, his fist swinging.
His knuckles caught me right in the mouth and a stunning pain blurred my eyes, and then I was swinging, too. It was clumsy and brutally violent, with me taking several blows to the head and giving back very little, though when my fist hit him in the face I could actually feel the softness where his left eye lived and I knew it had to hurt him.
That turned out to be the last blow in the fight: I connected with him, and then the teacher and a couple other guys swarmed us, pulling us apart.
Dan and I were put in the detention room while our parents were called and the principal read us the riot act, telling us that fighting in school was serious, that we were in serious trouble, that we needed to take things seriously. The message, as I understood it, was that things were serious. Dan and I didn’t look at each other during the harangue. I stayed silent, but Dan felt compelled to protest that I started it, which was as ridiculous as it was false, but as it was explained to us, it didn’t matter who started the fight because of the serious nature of how serious it was.
I guess that no matter what age you are, after you’ve been through a certain amount of hardship and trauma in your life being lectured to by a junior high school principal just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. What did he know about anything?
My dad, though: I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation with him. When he came into the building, he and the principal went into an office and closed the door. Dan and I were left sitting not ten feet apart and if we’d wanted could have gone right back at it, but the mood had passed. A school secretary glared at us from behind her typewriter, as if she had any authority.
Eventually my father came out and, with a jerk of his head, indicated I should follow him out to the Jeep.
“You want to tell me what that was all about?” he asked as we drove home.
“Dan Alderton’s the one who called the Fish and Game,” I blurted, “and then when Mr. Hessler said he didn’t care they called IGAR. He’s the reason Emory got shot!”
My dad didn’t comment on the shortcut in my logic. Instead he went straight to it: “So you attacked him. In class.”
“Dad, I…”
“What?”
I knew how I could turn this whole thing around. All I had to do was tell my father what Dan had said about Mom. Then my dad would probably drive us up to the Aldertons’ so the two of us could beat up the entire family.
Of course, I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him. I just looked at the floor mats. “No excuse, Dad,” I mumbled, which was what I’d been taught to say when I’d been caught red-handed doing something.
“First the gun cabinet, and now fighting in school. I don’t understand w
hat you think you’re doing, but I want to see an attitude change starting now. We clear?”
“Yessir.”
“I had to leave work early. Again. I can’t keep doing that.”
My eyes bulged. “You went to work?” I demanded incredulously.
“Of course.”
“But Dad, what if the Fish and Game came while you were gone? What would happen?”
“I have to earn a living. I can’t afford to lose my job. Not in this economy, with inflation the way it is.”
This was the biggest non-answer I’d ever heard. “Dad,” I protested, unable to articulate the anxious plea stuck in my throat. Emory was more important than any job.
My dad sighed. “I know how hard this is for you. But you have to understand, whether I’m there or not, the Fish and Game Department is going to do what it is going to do. I left the side door to the pole barn open—all we can hope for is that when they show up, Emory is gone.”
“His shoulder is shot!”
“I know. But there’s simply nothing else I can think of to do. Understand? If I knew what do to, I would do it.”
The look he gave me was a little wild and more than a little helpless, and I bit off whatever argument I had been planning to make. For the first time I considered just how out of control things were for my father, not just with Emory, but with me, with his entire life. He wasn’t supposed to be a single parent—I was supposed to have a mom.
When we got home, Mr. Shelburton was parked in our driveway. He waved his hat at us as we got out of the Jeep. “Hey there, George, uh, my wife made some brownies for ya, and…” He shrugged and then grinned. “Could I see the bear?”
We opened the front pole barn door. Emory groggily got off the couch and went over to drink some water. I poured out some dog food for him.
My dad and Mr. Shelburton talked while I made short work of a half-dozen brownies. They had little kernels of caramel in them. Obviously the main attraction of the Shelburton family was Beth, but man could her mom bake.
I saw my dad showing Mr. Shelburton the Polaroid. Then Mr. Shelburton handed my dad something and drove off.