Emory’s Gift (26 page)

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 what 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.

“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.