Emory's Gift Read online

  It took her about three minutes to extricate herself from the conversation because the principal was so in love with talking about himself he just couldn’t give it up. When she finally set the phone down she gave me a big grin. “You’re going to the dance, Charlie!”

  The storm howled for most of the rest of the day, but just as the light was fading the precipitation let up and the wind backed off a little. Everything was scrubbed clean by the rain, the air so pure it almost hurt.

  I gazed sourly at all the wet trash that had been tossed in our yard. It would be Charlie Hall, the house janitor, who had to clean it all up.

  Emory lumbered past me without so much as a glance when I opened the pole barn to air it out. I imagined that being cooped up in there was making him pretty grumpy.

  It was a real relief to stand there and look around and not see any strangers. The weather Saturday was supposed to be even more inhospitable, which I hoped would keep the crowd away.

  My interview was aired on television that night and I came off looking like a real smooth operator, in my opinion. They’d cut my conversation down from five minutes to about ten seconds, but they were my best ten seconds. It came out that I believed Emory was somehow a Civil War soldier now living in a bear’s body because he’d written words in our barn to that effect. Despite McHenry’s misgivings, that’s what I had wanted to say.

  I was less happy with the way the reporter sitting at the news desk treated the whole thing. After cutting to the dancing bear man and then some woman who said she figured the whole thing was a publicity stunt, the look to the camera the anchorman gave seemed to imply that I was a liar and everyone who believed me was crazy.

  My dad asked Nichole to stay for dinner and he thawed some fish and fried it up with potatoes and onions. She set the table and put herself next to my dad, not at the other end where Mom used to sit.

  I remembered we had some candles and it just seemed right to light them and set them on the table. Dad opened a bottle of wine, which I hadn’t seen him do in more than a year. Everything was relaxed and comfortable, but then my ears picked up the sound of a car coming up the road and I recognized the labored, tinny clanking of Yvonne’s Chevy Vega. I slid out of my chair.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” I said. Dad and Nichole were talking about something in which I’d lost all interest, and she gave me a small smile but kept nodding at my dad, who didn’t so much as glance up.

  I went out the door and walked up the driveway, which still had the Jeep blocking it. Yvonne was just emerging from the darkness, carrying a cake box. She had escalated her outfit to a short skirt and precariously high heels, with a long raincoat flaring open and framing her legs.

  “Hi, Miss Mandeville!” I called to her.

  She looked up from where she’d been concentrating on how to place her feet.

  “Hello there, Charlie. My goodness, can you believe the fuss? All because of your bear, we have out-of-towners, and TV people, and everything.”

  While I didn’t want her for a stepmother, I had no reason to hurt Yvonne Mandeville. Letting her barge in on Dad and Nichole would have been just cruel. Yet I wasn’t really sure how I could stop it.

  “None of this would have happened if not for you. You’re famous!” she exclaimed.

  “So, hi,” I said as she got closer. “Hey, uh, listen.”

  She picked up something in my voice and stopped, regarding me warily. “Is your dad home?”

  There was no way to half-truth my way out of that one. “Yes,” I admitted reluctantly. “But he’s busy.”

  “Oh.” She gave me a puzzled look. No doubt my tension was communicating better than my words. “I brought a cake,” she said, making to move on.

  I sort of slid sideways, as if to block her, and that seemed to startle her. She frowned at me, then raised her eyes and of course could see my father and Nichole sitting at the table, drinking wine by candlelight.

  Nobody should have to watch the realization and hurt sink into another person like that, but I was as trapped in the situation as Yvonne was. It didn’t take more than a few seconds of seeing my father fawn over his dinner guest to know just how smitten he had become.

  When the shock had worn off, Yvonne’s eyes narrowed down to hard points. She glared at me in the dim light. “Charlie,” she hissed at me, “you are a hateful, hateful child.”

  Her shoes were so spiky her return ascent up the wet driveway was treacherous, so despite her obvious agitation she had to carefully pick her way, her head and arms making odd, jerky motions. At the car she had to contend with the cake, grappling with the box, but I didn’t dare go help her with her door. Eventually she managed to get inside her Vega and drive off, her tires spitting gravel at me.

  Neither Nichole nor my father had noticed the interaction.

  It started to rain again.

  I stopped in to see Emory, who was lying on the couch. He raised his head and looked at me, and I stood there, unsure. What I wanted to do was go over and pet him, but if there really was a man inside him, that seemed like the wrong thing to do. Eventually I waved at him, to which he provided no reaction, and turned and went back into the house.

  At some point in the evening, my father began referring to my bedroom as “the guest room,” so I went in and changed the sheets and put some blankets on the couch. Nichole slept in my bed and I slept in front of the fire, drowsily aware of the storm howling away outside.

  Saturday the weather couldn’t decide if it was ready to fully entertain winter or if we were still stuck in the fall. The temperature was in the thirties, with wind and sleet adding to the general misery. Yet despite the meteorological onslaught, more than a dozen people came to see the bear, or at least to see the pole barn, which was the only show they got that cold, sodden day. One man carried a sign saying: “There Is No Reincarnation” that disintegrated in the wet. I wondered if he’d had the opportunity to meet the fellow who said he’d fought in all the wars.

  I called Beth and she wasn’t home, so I told Mrs. Shelburton to tell Beth I would be at the dance. Mrs. Shelburton gushed that it was so nice to hear it, but I had the sense that passing the message through Beth’s mom wasn’t going to win me any points. But how does a person ask a girl for a date? What topic could I start with that would eventually lead to such a question? In my opinion, it was a lot less scary to arrange a fistfight.

  I, like Emory, had a message. I love you, Beth, I would tell her. I love you, too, Charlie, she would reply. Kissing would ensue.

  Nichole and my dad sat and talked while I concentrated on the serious question of what to wear to the party. Were you supposed to dress up, or would that look stupid? What if I wore jeans and everyone else was in nice slacks? What if I wore nice slacks and everyone else was in jeans?

  Nichole was hanging up the phone as I came out of my bedroom carrying all of my pants.

  “Tony’s got a bear expert coming to ‘evaluate’ the situation. He wants to let the man examine Emory tomorrow; is that okay?”

  “It’s okay with me if it is okay with the bear,” my dad said gaily. His mood was irrepressible with Nichole around.

  I asked Nichole about my clothing situation and she said that as far as girls were concerned, wearing nice clothes was always the right choice. That one hadn’t occurred to me.

  Nichole was on the phone with Alecci when McHenry parked out on Hidden Creek Road and hurried down the driveway out of the rain. Another vehicle pulled up behind him, and then another one after that—big four-door AMC Matadors, painted black. I opened the door for McHenry, one ear trying to listen in on Nichole’s argument with Alecci. “I think it would be interesting to hear what the principal has to say about all this,” she was telling him.

  McHenry greeted my father and me somberly—he’d seen the TV interview, and I knew he wasn’t happy about it. But I also could tell by the way he deferred to my father that he didn’t feel he had any vote in the matter.

  “I’ve got two carloads of private
security out there, but it doesn’t look like we need them right now,” McHenry announced.

  “Weather’s driven everyone away,” my father agreed.

  “Well…” McHenry glanced over at Nichole, who waved, the spiral telephone cord bobbing up and down.

  “Your men want to come in?”

  “Oh no. They’ve come prepared to secure the area around the pole barn. I should let them get to it.”

  “Now?” My dad looked out at the weather. “Seems like a waste. How about if they come back tomorrow?”

  McHenry thought that would be okay. “We’re using CB channel five,” McHenry replied. “You need anything, you call out.”

  Nichole came over and shook hands with McHenry. “Tony’s not going to go for talking to the principal,” she told us. “He says the interview would be a waste of time. Wally would do it for me, but with Tony here, Wally’s not able to make decisions.”

  “He’s the driver, and everything else,” I said.

  Nichole smiled at me. “But I don’t think you should worry. The principal told me you could go to the party. Tell him I’ll call him Monday morning. And I will; I’ll call him.”

  “You know what you could do,” my dad said to McHenry. “Drive Charlie to the party. Drop him off at school. I’ll come down after the party is over and pick him up.”

  So that’s how I got what amounted to an armed escort to a junior high dance. McHenry drove his truck, and when we pulled up in front of Benny H. a man jumped out of the Matador in front and the Matador in the rear and came and opened the door for me like I was the President of the United States. A whole procession of cars was disgorging students at that time and they gawked at me as I went into the building, an irrepressible grin on my face, completely oblivious to the disaster that awaited me inside.

  chapter

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I HAD never been to a junior high dance before. My mother probably would have insisted I go, but living with just my father all I needed to say was I didn’t feel like it and that was good enough for him. He didn’t know that I was shy and needed prodding. But that night I would have sung a solo in front of the whole school if I thought it would allow me to secure my relationship with Beth Shelburton.

  Man, I was nervous. I was wearing plaid bell-bottom trousers with a wide black belt and a cotton dress shirt with a very long, pointed collar. My shoes were brown suede with big thick chunky soles that would probably make dancing impossible. I smelled like my dad’s Old Spice plus my dad’s Brut plus my dad’s Jade East.

  The gym was lit up with red and blue lights and the band was already playing when I stuck my head in to look around. It was a pretty good band from a volume perspective, not so great on the quality. I noticed that I was better dressed than a lot of the guys and not as well dressed as most of the girls, which struck me as perfect.

  A hard hand gripped my shoulder and I turned around and Mike Kappas was grinning at me. “Saw you on TV, boy!” he shouted over the music. He pumped my hand in congratulations.

  “Yeah!” I shouted back.

  We nodded and grinned at each other awhile, until that got tiresome. Then he slapped me on the shoulder and moved on.

  I found that a lot of people wanted to tell me they saw me on television and nobody wanted to tell me what they thought of my performance. Did I do a good job or not? If I had sung a solo, these people would have come up to me afterward and said, I heard you sing!

  Being a junior high school celebrity wasn’t all I thought it would be, in that a lot of guys wanted to talk to me and then I’d break away and somebody else would grab me, so I was passed around like a plate of cookies. I just wanted to get it over with and head off by myself so I could get down to business with Beth, but it felt like an hour went by before I was able to maneuver like a lone wolf.

  For an occasion that was supposed to be social, there sure were a lot of people who seemed to be doing their best to avoid any male/female interaction. Because it was the gym, at the far end, away from the band, there were boys actually playing a game of basketball. Sometimes the ball would get loose and they’d have to chase it down, going on the dance floor and retrieving it without once making eye contact with a girl.

  Groups of guys stood against the wall and talked sideways to each other, cracking jokes, and then sometimes one of them would break away and go talk to a girl. Usually this happened when the girl went to get some punch. Otherwise, the girls formed dense, circular packs.

  When I was researching Alaskan brown bears for my Ph.D., I witnessed the protective behavior of the oomingmak—the Alaskan musk ox. When a bear approaches the herd, the musk oxen form a tight circle and push their young into the center. Then they face outward, fierce and ready for anything. It would take a Sherman tank to penetrate the ring of oxen, and even a starving bear will move on rather than try to attack such a fortified defense.

  That’s just what was going on at the dance, only the girls were all facing inward. I spotted Beth: she was wearing a short, light-colored dress with a square neckline and sleeves that were puffy down to the elbows and then were normal from there on out. She had on clunky black platform shoes that laced up, and her hair was all straight except two pieces on either side which were pulled back and were tied with a thin ribbon. She was standing with her birdlike friends and I had no idea how I was going to separate her from the flock for what I intended to be a life-changing conversation. I made a couple of passes at the group like an airplane buzzing a platoon of enemy soldiers, but she didn’t break from the protective ring of seventh graders.

  “Hey, Charlie, I saw you on TV!” a female voice called. I turned and Joy Ebert was grinning at me. She, too, had puffy sleeves and a square neckline, along with a choker necklace of velveteen ribbon with a little cameo in the center of it. I yanked my eyes away from that necklace because I didn’t want her to think I was trying to look at her boobs.

  It would be difficult to overstate the impact a girl like Joy could have on a boy like me when she focused her smile like she was doing. It was like being caught in a Star Trek tractor beam—I was transfixed. I nervously agreed that I had been on television and fumbled my way through what had sort of become my stump speech for the evening, explaining how nice Nichole J. Singleton was in person.

  The funny thing was, when the conversation hit the point where it had always petered out with everyone else Joy started asking me about other things, like my dad’s American bison business. Several times she put her hand on my arm, sending a warm sensation all the way up to my shoulder.

  More than once during this process—and later I did come to realize that it was a process—Joy would longingly glance out at the dancers crowding the floor, but even when she said, “I really like this song!” I didn’t get the hint. Finally she grabbed my hand. “We should dance!” she called out.

  Me, dance with Joy Ebert? I numbly followed her, feeling foolish, and then we were facing each other and dancing.

  There were two types of people out there on the floor: (a) people who could dance and (b) boys. I fell into the latter category, but I gave it my best shot. Joy was so lovely when she moved it was hard for me to keep the grin off my face.

  We danced through two songs and then, when the band announced they were going to “slow it down,” Joy sort of spread her arms and I found myself, contrary to all the rules of the universe, clutching the most popular girl in the eighth grade to me, drinking in her perfume, swaying to the music.

  “You’re so normal,” Joy told me.

  “What do you mean?” I pulled my head back so I could see her, and having her beautiful face up so close nearly sent me into a full swoon. I hastily bent back to my original position, my jaw resting on her shoulder.

  “I mean with the bear and all. The whole town’s talking about it. There’s TV here. Yet you just come to the dance like everything’s normal. That’s so cool.”

  I thought about this. After my mom died it seemed like everyone expected me to act normal. So I
changed my outward behavior, pretended I wasn’t hurting inside, and I got pretty good affecting normalcy. What an odd talent to praise, out on the dance floor at a junior high party.

  Several couples on the floor kissed as the song ended. That was strictly against Benny H. rules, but we were starting to figure out that if one or two students misbehaved, it was considered criminal, but if a bunch of us did it, it was considered political protest. I got the feeling that Joy would kiss me, if I wanted, but when I was making up my mind about it I caught sight of someone staring at me from across the gym.

  It was, of course, Beth.

  She turned and marched away from me and I felt hopeless with loss. What in the world did I think I was doing?

  Joy didn’t notice anything. She was smiling at someone over my shoulder, and then Tim Humphrey was there, smiling back. He gave an approving look at the two of us as a couple, which I now felt was ridiculous. He was the person who should be with Joy Ebert, not me. They would get married and produce model-quality children who would go on to become movie stars and NFL draft picks.

  “You come over to ask me to dance?” Joy asked flirtatiously.

  “Oh,” Tim said uncomfortably. He looked at me, seriously contemplating that I, Charlie Hall, might have a claim on the most popular girl in eighth grade.

  “You should!” I told him as the music cranked up. I practically threw the two of them together. I received a strange look from both of them, but then they got swept up in the band’s semiclose approximation of “Crocodile Rock.”

  I went after Beth and she retreated into the impregnable fortress of the girls’ room. I saw her as the door swung shut, and then one of her friends came out and stood sentry, her face frozen in disapproval.