Emory’s Gift (3 page)

The county road snaked along next to the river, Dad’s thickly treaded tires buzzing on the pavement. When we first moved to Selkirk River five years ago, I noticed the quick transition from utter wilderness to town, a sudden clutch of buildings jumping up from the riverbank as if in surprise. It was like, I told my mom, a house here and a house there got together and said,
Well hey, we might as well have a town while we’re at it!

Selkirk River put everything it had into about five square blocks and then seemed to lose ambition. Downriver the homes and occasional stores continued a ways, and the shop where my dad’s employer turned out customized furniture parts was another couple of miles in that direction, but after that there was nothing to the south until you got to the city of Sandpoint. Up north there were only mountains and Canada, both seeming to stretch forever.

My dad wheeled into the parking lot of the YMCA, turned off the Jeep, and then twisted in his seat to look at me. I felt a rising, unspecified guilt and cast about for something to attach it to. Could he know about the rifle?

“I need to talk to you, Charlie.”

“Yessir.” I swallowed.

“It’s about where I was this morning. Do you remember me telling you I had business to take care of?”

He’d never told me that. I could recall with absolute clarity everything my father had said to me the past month, the past two months, maybe even stretching all the way back to Mom’s funeral, because he spoke so seldom now. I wondered if this meant he was talking to me in his head, like I often did with him, and that he was confused over what was real and what he had imagined.

“I don’t remember that.”

He thought about it. “I guess I meant to. Charlie, I’ve decided to go into business with Rod; you know Rod Shelburton, has that ranch where we all rode horses a couple times? Him.”

Dad was watching me intently. I tried to understand what sort of reaction was expected of me. “Okay,” I finally said.

“The thing is, I’m investing some money with him. What’s left from your mom’s life insurance after we paid off the medical bills. You understand? So it’s like it’s not just my money. It’s our money, Charlie, yours and mine both. So in a way, I’m investing for the both of us.” With that, he stuck out his hand like we were closing a business transaction.

I guess I’d known there was some money after my mother died, but I never thought of myself as having any claim to it. I gripped Dad’s hand and shook it, baffled.

“Okay then. You have a good time in Lifesaving.”

I was dismissed. Still a bit unclear, I swung out of the Jeep and headed toward the building. I heard the Jeep start up behind me but didn’t turn around to wave, because I hated when I did that and my dad wasn’t looking at me to wave back. My hand would just hang there in the air, waving at nothing, noticed by no one.

I was one of only two eighth graders in Junior Lifesaving. The rest were seventh graders and one sixth grader. Seventh graders were in the lowest grade in junior high school and considered to be among the most worthless life-forms on the planet. They were referred to as “sevies.” I didn’t talk to them or acknowledge them because they were so far beneath me.

I had been a seventh grader myself until just a few weeks ago.

Back in my bedroom I had a photograph taken of me when I was in Little League in Prairie Village, Kansas. I’m standing there with the rest of my teammates, and here’s why the picture was on my wall: I was a big kid. Not the biggest on the team but easily one of the three or four largest. My coach called me Slugger.

What happened then was we moved to Idaho and the clean air and water apparently stunted my growth. I just stopped growing, stopped gaining weight. As I stood shivering and wet by the indoor pool at the YMCA, I was acutely aware that I was shorter than any of the despised sevies and barely had any height on the sixth grader. Every one of my ribs was clearly on display, and my scrawny legs stood storklike out of baggy swim trunks, as if someone had put shorts on a tomato cage.

Our instructor’s name was Kay. I thought of her then as an exotic older woman, but looking back on it I suppose she was no more than eighteen or nineteen years old.

I had decided to take junior-lifesaving classes because I harbored a fantasy about saving Joy Ebert, a blond, blue-eyed girl in my grade, from the river rapids. She’d be drowning and I’d plunge in and pull her to safety and she would love me and marry me. I had been in love with Joy since fourth grade and had even talked to her a few times.

Then I went to the first junior-lifesaving class and Joy was forgotten: I was totally in love with Kay. Kay had a thin figure she kept wrapped in a taut one-piece bathing suit—both of us had some blossoming to do, I figured, so maybe she wouldn’t care about our age difference so much. In a part of the country where the faces were as pale and uniformly bland as uncooked biscuits in a pan, Kay was deliciously exotic, some kind of Asian blood adding spice to her look. Now it was Kay, with her short black hair and almond-shaped eyes, whom I pictured rescuing from the river waters; she would be pleased one of her students had learned so well and she would love me and marry me.

I was sort of big on the idea of marriage, which was somewhat of an unusual attitude for an eighth-grade boy, but I liked the permanence it implied. You married a girl and she was yours forever; there was even a law about it.

“Now these are your manuals,” Kay said to us, holding up a pamphlet with the Red Cross on it. “Who wants to pass them out?”

As one all seven of us surged forward, and Kay backed up, laughing a little. “No, I mean one person to hand them out. Here,” she said, turning to Danny Alderton. “Pass these out.”

The rest of us tried to hide our jealousy.

Danny Alderton was a neighborhood friend, though at that moment I didn’t have much use for him, because Kay had picked him over me. He lived up the road from us, next door to the Becks. His skin turned a little pink, his freckles burning, as he accepted the pamphlets and handed one each to his classmates. “Here,” he muttered as he thrust one at me.

“Be sure to study the chapter on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” Kay lectured us. “Once you have someone out of the water, you need to make sure their lungs are clear, and you need to give them mouth-to-mouth until they can breathe on their own. In two weeks, we’ll have a class on it. Okay? You don’t need to wear your swimsuits that day. We’ll be practicing the whole session. Yes, Matthew.”

The sixth grader had his hand up. I never asked Kay questions lest she thought I was unworldly. That’s why God invented sixth graders.

“What do you mean, ‘practicing’?” Matthew asked. His teeth were chattering from the cold and it gave his question a trembling-with-fear quality.

Kay didn’t understand the question. “What do you mean what do I mean?”

Matthew struggled to put it into words. He gestured to us, his classmates. “Practice?” he asked tremulously. “On who?” As in,
do mouth-to-mouth with each other?

The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but now that Matthew had brought it up I figured if his assumption was correct I’d probably skip that lesson.

“Oh,” Kay said, getting it. She shrugged. “On me.”

She turned away to pick up some life rings and thus missed the shock that passed over our faces. I was so flabbergasted I forgot my boycott of the seventh graders and exchanged stunned expressions with them.

I realize times have changed, but it was a more simple era then, and I had never before kissed a girl. The previous year a torrid wave of making out had rampaged through the school like a fever, but it had passed me by as if I had been inoculated. The idea that my first lip-to-lip experience would be with a womanly woman like Kay drenched me with excitement and dread.

We spent the afternoon pulling each other out of the water. Half the time I simulated drowning and half the time I simulated saving, but all of the time I was in a full-out swoon, going through the motions. In two weeks I would be mouth-on-mouth with a
woman.
I had an
appointment.

Dad picked me up and asked me how my lesson went and I said, “Fine.” He asked me if I wanted burgers for dinner and I said, “Fine.” He suggested I go fishing in the creek while he went back to work with Mr. Shelburton; I said, “Fine.” I was in a fog.

What pulled me out of my daydreamy state was what I saw as I headed out the back door with rod and creel. My father had been busy while I’d been dragging fake drowning seventh graders out of the water at the YMCA.

Mom’s tomato cages were gone.

Our paved driveway descended steeply from Hidden Creek Road and swooped into the two-car garage, which was set into the ground floor of our house. If you ignored the curve and went straight, a dirt driveway branched off and ended ten yards away at a pole barn. It looked more like a big garage than anything, with a two-car-wide garage door in front and a person-sized door on the side.

The top of the side door was glass, so I didn’t have to go inside to confirm that the tomato cages were stacked in a neat pyramid over on the far wall; I just peered in the window. I stared at them for a long time.

What was I going to do, put them back? Then it would be by my hand, not my mom’s, that the cages stood sentry in the garden.

I didn’t understand why my father didn’t see any value in leaving Mom’s things alone. I hated it when my dad’s older sister came to town after the funeral and cleared our home of Mom’s clothing and shoes; I despised the way he acted as if her toothbrush in the bathroom meant nothing to him and tossed it in the trash for me to take out with the used dental floss. What was wrong with him?

I trudged down the path to the creek, kicking at rocks. I’d walked that path probably a thousand times; it was my main destination whenever I went outdoors. My mother didn’t like me in the creek because most of it was hidden from the house, etched into a steep crease in the valley floor well past our property line. She preferred I climb the opposite shore and go into the trees where she could see me again, though if I went all the way to the top, where a rocky spine marked the ridgeline, she got nervous because she thought I’d fall from there and tumble all the way back down the hill, like Jack and Jill or something. And if I went over the ridge I was hidden again, and she wasn’t too fond of that, either. It was difficult to have any fun at all under such circumstances.

During the spring the waters of the creek were dark and cold, a sharp contrast from the milky pool water from which I’d been saving sevies all morning. From bank to bank the stream was more than thirty feet. In the summer, though, with the runoff down to a trickle, the creek bed was mainly dry, littered with rocks and mud and tree branches. The creek itself shrank back until it was only six feet wide, hugging the far bank and deep enough to swim in. That’s where the fish liked to lurk, up under the tree root overhang. From the base of our hill the creek had only another couple hundred yards of independence before it joined the river, adding strength to the flow to town.

I started casting along the banks of the opposing shore, and it wasn’t long before I’d hooked and pulled in a nice little brook trout. I put it in the creel, thinking that a couple more just like it and we’d skip the hamburgers that evening.

A few minutes later I had another one, and then another. Man, they were really biting! I left the creel lying on the bank and moved downstream a bit.

The fourth trout was the best of all, fat and glistening, bending my rod with authority while I wrestled it ashore. I was carefully pulling the hook from its mouth when I got the sense of being watched.

I turned and studied the opposite bank. The slight breeze gave the woods an empty sound, but I knew there was someone there, and I felt the hair on my arms stand up as my skin goose-bumped in alarm.

I gave a start when I looked higher up the hill. A pair of amber eyes met mine, unblinking.

It was a cougar, watching me from a jumble of rocks.

When he saw I’d spotted him, he leaped with nimble ability down the slope, closing the gap between us. With a soaring jump that was almost absurdly graceful, he cleared the part of the creek that was deep water and bounded to a sudden halt in the shallows, making scarcely a spray.

It all happened so quickly I never even had time to gasp. He stopped, staring at me, evaluating the situation. No more than fifteen feet of rocky creek bed lay between us.

There was no retreat possible. Behind me the bank was sandy, capable of supporting some sparse grass but no trees—as if climbing a tree would save me from a cat. If I tried to scramble up the bank the cougar could easily take me from behind. The deep water was too far away and there wasn’t enough of it anyway. There were no good options.

The mountain lion was not running away. His rear end was lowered, his gaze intent. I was reminded of what my dad had said:
Ever see a cat jump on a string?
That’s what the cougar looked like to me now, a cat getting ready to pounce.

There were no sticks nearby. My rod was handy but so thin I doubted it would be intimidating. What was it Dad said?
A bite-sized boy like you could make a tasty meal.

My fear was so strong and real I was sick with it.
Stand up big and tall,
my father had instructed.
What you want is for that cougar to see you as a meal that’s going to cost him, put up a real fight.

I took in a shuddering breath, raising my trembling hands over my head.

The cougar moved again, holding his body low, slinking toward me. There was absolutely no question of his intentions. He stopped, crouching. I stood my ground, quivering.

“Go away,” I said in a whisper.

The cougar stood motionless. His muscles bunched; he sank lower; his lips drew back.

I found my voice. “Grrrr!” I roared at him.

There was no reaction at all.

“Grrrr!”

I watched in terrified fascination as the tension built in the big cat’s shoulders. His eyes were locked on mine.
This was it.
I braced myself for the attack. I would put up a good fight. I would make him decide that, as meals go, I was too much trouble to bother with.