Emory’s Gift (16 page)

He didn’t look me in the eye; he was watching straight ahead, as if he were a spy or something. I regarded him curiously.

“Dan wants to fight you after school today,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

I thought Dan and I had pretty much settled this particular matter on the first day of school and was more than a little unhappy to hear it brought up again. What would be the point of a fight? We both knew that I’d lose.

It was on my lips to ask why, but I squelched the impulse. I
knew
why. I’d seen adolescent bighorn sheep banging their heads into each other when they were too young to do any mating—it was just a way of proving something to themselves and maybe to the other sheep who were watching. This was the same thing; we were all jockeying and jostling our way into manhood. Boys fought all the time, either because some spark of anger set them off or because of something like this, a formal, almost ritualized appointment, as if we were dueling with pistols.

Why couldn’t I just forfeit?

“We’ll go down to the city park, off school property so you won’t get in trouble. You can take the late bus home,” Jerry told me, anticipating my legal argument.

So, well, there it was. I shrugged. “Yeah, okay,” I said. My heart was pounding as if I’d just asked a girl out on a date.

At the next stop Jerry slipped back to give Dan the good news that I’d agreed he could pound me into a pulp after school that day.

I bolted from the bus as soon as the doors flapped open. I didn’t want to so much as make eye contact with my partner in pugilism. I was oddly embarrassed, as if Dan and I shared an intimacy now.

Word of the fight spread through the school fairly rapidly, and I found myself the subject of a few speculative glances in the hallways. I’d like to say there was admiration in those looks, but it was actually more as if they were picturing me lying in a chalk outline.

Why was I cursed with such a small body? Why wasn’t I big and strong and tough like so many other eighth graders?

I’d have to wait until my twenties before anyone could answer these questions. I had finished defending my dissertation and was officially a Ph.D., but instead of luxuriating in the accomplishment I found I was restless at the sudden cessation of stress, plagued with an intractable insomnia. When my medical doctor’s drugs didn’t work I started seeing a therapist. Dr. Sat Siri was an American Sikh, an elegant, pale woman in white flowing clothes and a turban. Unlike some of the other professional listeners I was sent to in the name of psychotherapy, she seemed to believe that the purpose of our sessions was to make their continuation unnecessary.

Sat Siri was the only person to tell me about studies done on the effect of grief and other stresses on prepubescent children. “It’s no wonder your physical growth went dormant on you, Charlie,” she told me. “You’d lost your mother; that’s a great emotional shock.”

Sat Siri also gently asked me if I didn’t see something “worth looking at,” as she put it, in the fact that when my yearning for some kind of communication with my father was at its most acute I found myself talking to a wild bear. I didn’t have an answer for that one, because she, it seemed, like every other person in her profession, discounted my story about the words on the pole barn wall, choosing to believe they were the product of some rational, prosaic event, like a couple of kids committing vandalism or maybe a cry for help from a growth-stunted eighth grader.

At any rate, I was years away from that conversation, and whatever the cause, I was small and weak and, I knew, terrified. Several times that day I went into the boys’ room, stared into the mirror, and admonished myself over and over,
Don’t
cry.

This was all that I was afraid of. I didn’t mind if Dan’s fist broke my nose; I wasn’t worried about losing the fight or feeling the pain. I was just terrified that I’d become so upset that I’d cry like a baby in front of the other boys and then I’d forever be rejected from the company of men. Just standing in front of the mirror I could feel my emotions fluttering inside my chest, reacting to the upsetting news that Dan Alderton, Danny my friend, wanted to hit me and hurt me.

I sat with Beth and her flock at lunch and it was easier, this second day. Compared to my upcoming humiliation on the battlefield, what did it matter if everyone saw me lunching with a bunch of seventh graders? Besides, Beth was
beautiful.
It never did any male reputational damage to be seen with a pretty girl. I felt lucky that some other boy hadn’t swooped in already.

Beth apparently knew nothing about the title bout that was scheduled for that afternoon and I decided it would be best not to mention it.

I was at my locker when Dan suddenly appeared, flanked by Gregg the ninth grader and fellow eighth grader Mitch.

“Are you going to show?” Dan demanded hotly.

The funny thing is that once you’ve had a grizzly bear in your face, a skinny thirteen-year-old just isn’t that intimidating. I mostly observed that he was flushed and had worked himself into a state of aggression that didn’t come naturally to the Dan Alderton I knew. His freckles were scarlet and pulsing on his pale cheeks.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

“You’d better,” he replied.

It was on my mind to remind him that I’d just said I would, but I bit back the smart remark. “I will,” I finally said when the silence of Dan and his pals became awkward.

“You’d better,” he warned again. I guess that’s all he could come up with.

I turned my back on him then and I suppose there was some deliberation in my movements, a direct expression of contempt. I pulled my history book out of my locker and slammed the door shut, moving past Gregg, who had to step out of my way. As he did so, someone—I’m assuming Dan, but it could have been any one of them—hit me in the back of my head with his knuckles. It wasn’t a hard blow, just one designed to insult, and it did the trick: my eyes were stinging.

Don’t cry.

At the closing bell I trudged down the street to the city park, which was just a place with grass and some benches—probably the whole thing was constructed so that junior high students would have some place to fight. A few boys had already gathered and were milling around in excitement, but Dan and his entourage hadn’t arrived by the time I got there, which put me in the ridiculous position of having to wait to be punched out. I noted glumly that Tim Humphrey and Mike Kappas both had shown up—I doubted they’d have much respect for my physical prowess once Dan had knocked me unconscious.

There was, as they say, a fairly good crowd. No one talked to me—they maintained a respectful distance. I pretended to do some stretching, as if I needed to get my body limbered up before I folded it into the fetal position.

When you were ready to surrender in a fight, you said,
I give.
It was, however, considered poor sportsmanship to say this before the other guy had even shown up.

Eventually Dan, Gregg, Jerry, and Mitch arrived. Dan’s friends were grinning broadly, but Dan seemed pretty grim. His eyes didn’t meet mine as he took off the light jacket he was wearing and handed it to Gregg. If Dan’s freckles got any hotter they’d probably burst into flames.

He knows this is ridiculous,
I thought to myself.
He knows we have no reason to be doing this.

Dan and I approached each other warily. Was this it? Were we supposed to just start fighting?

“Glad you could make it. Wussy.” Dan sneered at me.

I could see that he needed to work himself into a froth before he could justify swinging at me, so I just waited for him to get there. Since I didn’t want to do this in the first place, I didn’t sling any insults back.

“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.