Emory's Gift

  “What was that?” I asked.

  My dad had a funny look. “He gave me twenty bucks for food for the bear. It’s weird. McHenry tried to get me to take two hundred dollars from him the other night. At work, a couple of the guys wanted to pass the hat.”

  “Two hundred dollars!”

  “I refused it.”

  “Why?”

  “Jules McHenry isn’t … he’s not right in the head. I think the shock of it all, what happened that day, he’s still trying to get a handle on it. So I said no, I wouldn’t take his money. I think he’ll be back, though. He asked a lot of questions.” My dad’s eyes focused on me. “We need to talk about school, Charlie.”

  It turns out that the punishment for fighting is to be suspended from school for a week. To me, that was like letting inmates out of prison for bad behavior, but I wasn’t going to question it.

  My father, probably sensing that the school hadn’t exactly provided me with a deterrent, had additional considerations. I would have to keep up on my studies. I was grounded. I had to do my regular chores, plus some other jobs he thought of in a burst of creativity I could have lived without.

  Yvonne showed up during the middle of my father’s impromptu piling on of tasks, interrupting him just as he was hitting his stride—it was the first time I could recall being happy to see her.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” she said breathlessly. “My God, George, are you all right? Is Charlie all right?”

  Charlie, of course, was standing right there and could have answered the question himself. And she obviously had not come right over; she’d stopped at her house to change out of her grocery store uniform and put on a sweater that even I could appreciate made her look very womanly.

  Yvonne stared with obvious distress at Emory shuffling around in the yard, and Emory looked back grumpily. His shoulder seemed to be hurting him a lot more than it had the day before and all he wanted to do was sleep and, of course, eat.

  “You want to come see the bear, Miss Mandeville?” I asked her a bit wickedly.

  She gave me a startled expression, reaching up with a hand to close the open V of her sweater as if worried the bear might want to shove a paw down her cleavage. “Oh, oh no,” she said.

  Mrs. Beck from up the road was driving by and swung into our driveway when she saw Yvonne, blocking in Yvonne’s Vega, which I sourly concluded meant that they would all be there for a while.

  I went in to fix myself a hot dog for lunch. The glass around the gun cabinet had been swept up and all the guns now had trigger locks, which made me angry to see. I wasn’t a baby.

  By the time I went back outside, there were five cars parked on Hidden Creek Road and maybe a dozen people standing around, watching the dozing bear show. The local paper, it seemed, had cobbled together a hasty and mostly incorrect accounting of the doings up at our place.

  After straining so hard to keep it all a secret for so long, this open exposure seemed nothing short of crazy. My father looked especially unhappy, particularly when some people started taking pictures. Dr. Humphrey showed up with the announced intention to “check on my patient,” though when he arrived all he really did was tell the story of the surgery, omitting the part where he was too scared to come out of the Jeep. If he’d had a pen I swear he would’ve signed autographs.

  I sat on the front porch and bemusedly watched the crowd gradually thicken. At one point Emory went out into the yard and left me a steaming present, which was the subject of about thirty photographs. People started wandering in to use our bathroom and I noticed with a curious lack of resentment that Yvonne served as the restroom attendant for these people, ushering them in and out of the house. The whole circus was growing increasingly bizarre.

  I was pretty much unprepared to see Kay and her big ugly boyfriend separate from the crowd and come over to talk to me. I stood up, my mouth dry.

  The funny thing was that even though my heart was kicking around in my chest, I understood that what I’d had with Kay was never the real deal. But she wore a crop top and high-waisted pants, and the slim band of tan flesh below the hem of her shirt, dimpled with her belly button, was enough to give a guy a seizure.

  “It’s really amazing, Charlie. I saw the picture. Oh! This is Glenn. Glenn, this is my friend Charlie.”

  She could have introduced me as anything from “my student Charlie” to “little boy Charlie” and it would have been accurate, so I was grateful for the status upgrade. I shook hands with Glenn. Up close he was unmistakably military, with his hair short and his stocky shoulders held square, his posture disciplined. His muscles were ridiculously large, so big that he probably couldn’t brush his own teeth—his biceps would block the crook of his elbow like a doorstop.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone else approaching the porch. It was, naturally, Beth, because I simply didn’t have enough awkwardness in my life.

  “We’re here to help,” Kay said simply.

  Beth came over to me expectantly. As clumsily as is humanly possible, I introduced Kay and Beth and Glenn. Beth gave me a shrewd look as I fumbled my way through the whole thing, and I felt completely exposed as I stood there between the only two women I’d ever loved during my whole life. Well, as an eighth grader, anyway.

  “I don’t know what you mean, ‘help,’” I said to Kay.

  “Just…” She shrugged. “Whatever you need, okay? I’ve got more friends coming.”

  Later I was to wonder at this instinctive assumption of Kay’s, her unsupported but ultimately prescient conclusion that my dad and I and Emory were in need of some sort of assistance. We certainly hadn’t sent out an appeal. But at the time I was more struck by the sort of person Kay was—someone so motivated to help other people she would lay her head on a young boy’s shoulder to erase his humiliation in front of his friends. That she was on my front porch to “help” now was entirely in keeping with her character.

  I told Kay I was grateful for the offer and would let her know if I could think of anything. My uneasiness was growing with the size of the assembly of townspeople on our property, and I could tell by the way my father kept looking around him that he wasn’t sure he was happy about things, either.

  And, of course, I needed to deal with Beth.

  “Who was that?” was her first question.

  She meant Kay. A whole menu of choice responses presented itself to me. The first girl I ever kissed, I could say with at least 10 percent accuracy. She used to be my girlfriend, I could also claim, because as far as I was concerned, from about twelve minutes into a Goldie Hawn movie until the ending credits had completely rolled that’s what Kay had been. I could also just say she was my Junior-Lifesaving instructor, but I knew that for Beth the issue was the way I’d behaved when I’d had the two of them together in front of me. So instead I gave her some risky, rare honesty. “I used to have a crush on her,” I explained.

  “Oh. Ah,” Beth said. Kay was chatting with some people her age and Beth sized her up and down. “She’s pretty.”

  “Yeah.”

  Beth turned to me. “So who do you have a crush on now?”

  I didn’t answer that one, but I knew my grin gave me away.

  I wasn’t smiling a minute or so later when Beth asked why I’d kept Emory a secret from her. I was learning an important lesson about women—if you start getting the cocky impression you’re doing really well with them, they’ll put you in your place pretty quickly. Since honesty had worked when it came to Kay, I came clean with everything, starting with the first time I’d seen the bear and leaving nothing out. Somehow Yvonne got mixed up in there, too, and I found myself talking about seeing my dad in the chair with Yvonne, how disturbing it had been for me.

  “So now’s the part where I say I’m mad at you for not telling me any of this,” Beth said when I had finished. “And then you say you’re sorry, and I make you promise never to keep secrets from me again.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I get it about Yvo
nne. My mom says she’s trying way too hard.”

  “Really?” I blinked at this. I thought everyone in town saw Yvonne as the default.

  “But you should have told me about the bear.”

  I hung my head. “I know.”

  “Anything else you want to tell me now? Owls in the attic? Alligators in the bathtub?”

  “No. We don’t even have an attic.”

  That made her grin a little. I felt like I’d just been given a pardon by the governor, but I did my best to keep the look of relief off my face.

  By that time, it looked like another twenty people had shown up, and there were cars parked all the way up and down Hidden Creek Road. My dad shut the pole barn door, but if he thought that was going to change anything he was wrong. The buzz of conversation was constant; it was like the county fair out in our front yard. Some kids were chasing each other, and I saw a Frisbee soar elegantly over people’s heads.

  The people seemed happy enough, but some of them were starting to look restless and impatient. There was an air of expectation, that something was going to happen.

  And then something did.

  chapter

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I GUESS because I was more in tune with the normal traffic noise on 206 I reacted to it first: the thin wail of a police siren, a long distance off. I went to the far end of the front porch and looked off into the distance.

  “What is it, Charlie?” Beth asked.

  Eventually the entire crowd was looking in the same direction as the sirens approached, two sheriff cars and two Fish and Game vehicles carefully making their way up the crowded street. Because they were the law, they had no compunction about stopping right out in the middle of the road. They got out of their cars and bunched together in a knot of authority—four officers and four Fish and Game agents, led by Mr. Hessler—and began picking their way down our driveway in a group as formal and stiff as pallbearers.

  Beth and I went over to stand next to my father in front of the pole barn. This was it. I tried to swallow down my dread, to be brave, but inside I felt sick with foreboding. My father put a grim palm on my shoulder, and then I felt Beth’s fingers shyly reaching for mine. I gratefully held her hand.

  They weren’t really going to shoot Emory; they couldn’t do that, could they?

  Of course, everyone moved forward to hear what the law had to say, which slowed any forward progress they had hoped to make. Then the sheriff showed up—Sheriff Nunnick, a white-haired guy who was generally pretty well liked in town. His cowboy hat was soft and worn, as if it had spent a whole year being pummeled by Herman Hessler. The sheriff lit a Marlboro and stood by his car up at the top of the driveway so we could all get a look at his imposing presence—his job required a fair amount of electioneering and he had developed a sense for the dramatic. He made his way down to where his men were standing, raising his hands for quiet. I could see in his eyes that he was surprised there were so many rubberneckers.

  It being a law-abiding town, the people started shushing each other, and gradually they fell silent.

  “I want to thank everyone for coming out,” the sheriff said, as if this had been a pep rally on his behalf. “We’ve got the situation under control, now, so we’ll need everyone to just move on. There’s no need to stick around for this.”

  “For what?” Rod Shelburton asked.

  The sheriff didn’t like the question. He drew on his cigarette, squinting. Everyone was so quiet and intent on his answer I could hear him blow the smoke out over his weathered lips. “We’re here to execute a legal warrant,” he stalled. The crowd started to murmur.

  “Folks,” Sheriff Nunnick said a little sternly. His deputies picked up on his tone and straightened. This was, I thought suddenly, how bad things happened. The sheriff’s department was going to get angry, and then they wouldn’t care what was right or wrong; they would execute my bear just to make a point.

  “Dad,” I whispered. He looked down at me, his eyes sad.

  “Folks, it is time to disperse,” Sheriff Nunnick told them in hard, commanding tones. The murmuring was growing louder. I caught Kay’s eye—she looked distressed.

  “Not right,” said a man I recognized as the cook at the diner. The people standing next to him nodded in agreement. Yvonne stepped out of the house and stood pensively on the porch, hugging herself.

  “We have to let the Fish and Game people euthanize the creature before anyone gets hurt!” Sheriff Nunnick said over the mounting buzz.

  The Fish and Game guys looked unhappily at him. The sheriff had just made them the bad guys.

  “Obviously a tame bear,” someone said loudly.

  “Not hurting anyone,” another observed.

  “A boy’s pet,” a third person lamented.

  And because it was Idaho, more than one person was talking about “private property” and “leave folks to their own business.”

  “People, now,” Sheriff Nunnick warned.

  “Don’t hurt the bear!” someone shouted, much more loudly than anyone else. That gave license to everyone to yell out their opinions as well, and before long someone started chanting, “Save the bear! Save the bear!” which caught on until there were dozens of voices, mine included, all raised together as one. “Save the bear!”

  The funny thing was, Mr. Hessler was grinning and when he caught my eye he gave me a wink. He turned his face away from the sheriff, but I could read Mr. Hessler’s lips, and he was chanting, too.

  The sheriff tried a couple of times to get everyone to shut up so he could say something else, but the crowd had been so bored that they seized with complete delight on this opportunity for recreation.

  After about five minutes, Sheriff Nunnick gave up. When he signaled his men to turn back around, everyone cheered. People were laughing and hugging and jumping up and down and when Beth turned to me I embraced her and then, to my absolute astonishment, I kissed her right on the mouth.

  She was smiling underneath my lips, and maybe I was, too.

  Kissing Beth was nothing like kissing Kay, but I was glad to have had both experiences. Frankly, kissing Beth was a lot better, and not just because I had been holding Kay’s nose and blowing air down her throat. Kissing Beth made me want to sing out loud. It felt as if my insides were jumping up and down in tandem with the crowd.

  When I broke off my lip-lock I saw my dad regarding me with a shocked expression, but I didn’t care, not at all.

  The law was in full retreat. The people of Selkirk River had spoken. Emory the bear was safe.

  Or so we all thought at the time.

  Once the authorities left, there seemed to be a general consensus that the show was over, and people began heading home for dinner shortly thereafter. The ones who stayed were mostly people Kay’s age, and they organized their spontaneous protest rally along the lines of what they’d seen in Look magazine. We’d sort of missed out on the riots and sit-ins during the sixties, up in Selkirk River, so this was the closest they’d come to having a chance to participate in something like that. Some sheets hanging from clotheslines made for makeshift tents, and one guy started playing a guitar until it became evident people wanted him to stop.

  As night fell it looked more like a party than anything else, with a lot of laughter and beer drinking. At one point they all broke into a ragged rendition of “The Bear Went over the Mountain,” the chorus collapsing under the weight of their giggles. I imagined how much fun it would be to sit out there with them in that circle, bathed in flickering light from the campfire, holding Beth’s hand and kissing her a little. Or a lot; I’d probably kiss her a lot.

  Yvonne had to work the late shift and my dad walked her to her Vega and I saw him shaking his head over the idea she should come back after the store closed. His kiss good-bye was pretty awkward, somewhere between the way I’d kissed Beth and the way I’d blown air into Kay’s mouth.

  Kay and her friends held a candlelight vigil through the night—when I looked out into the yard the next
morning, there were half a dozen people in sleeping bags, ready to jump into action if the law tried something. It was a pretty sparse army, but it comforted me to see them there.

  Emory came out of the barn, yawning, giving the campers a sleepy look. The ones who were awake, including Kay, jumped up excitedly, talking to each other, and then Emory wandered away in the direction of the creek. I hoped he had the good sense to stick close to home—we couldn’t be sure the Fish and Game people wouldn’t try to sneak up on us from behind.

  I couldn’t call Beth—she was at school, even if I wasn’t—so the morning went by pretty slowly. Just before noon, though, a delivery truck edged its way up Hidden Creek Road and pulled into the driveway, inching past the curious people.

  I was stunned when I saw what the driver hauled out: boxes of frozen salmon, bushels of apples, a huge basket of strawberries from California, and sacks of nuts and seeds. This cornucopia of bear delights was astounding enough, but it was the sender who really floored me: Jules McHenry.

  It was testimony to Emory’s amazing nose that by the time I’d poured nuts and strawberries into a pan he’d wandered up from the creek to see what smelled so good. As he put down what was for him a light lunch, the people in the driveway watched in awe, and laughed when, after eating, he strolled to the edge of the yard and deposited a big pile. Sure, I thought sourly, they could laugh—they didn’t have to clean it up.

  After my dad thawed the fish in the sink, Emory ate another meal. His shoulder seemed a little better. As I watched him eat with such gusto, it was on my lips to say something like good boy or even good bear, but the words faltered before I uttered a sound. Every time I went to treat Emory like a pet, I was reminded of the writing on the wall, and then I didn’t know how to treat him at all.

  More people were drifting in, most of them people I recognized from town but a couple I did not. I probably should have had a sense of foreboding over the latter group, but to be dead honest I was more interested in the subject of how much time would pass before I could get in some more kissing practice with Beth than anything else that was happening. Every single time I thought of her it felt as if my internal organs were shuffling themselves like a deck of cards.