Lone Wolf

21

BEFORE ANY OF US COULD ASK BOB anything else, or suggest he not drive in his excited state, he’d turned his truck around and was racing back up the drive. Dad and I got into Lawrence’s Jaguar while Orville and his two pals piled into his cruiser. Orville was talking on his radio at the same time as he was turning the car around, calling for an ambulance to meet them up the highway.

Bob’s truck jerked forward as it hit the highway, the wheels hitting pavement after spinning on gravel.

“Bob shouldn’t be driving,” Dad said. “He looked like he was in shock or something. Why didn’t he take some bear spray? I thought we had another can of the stuff. What the hell was he thinking?”

The Jaguar’s engine hummed as Lawrence pushed down on the accelerator.

“You know what I bet he was thinking?” Dad said, answering his own question. “I bet he was thinking there was no bear. And you know why he’d be thinking something like that?”

Dad was sitting in the back, so I didn’t have to look at him.

“Because of all your crazy talk, that’s why.”

“My crazy talk? You’ve been thinking something different? After our dinner at the Wickenses? You mean to tell me you haven’t been thinking the same thing I’ve been thinking?”

“I’m just saying.”

“And besides,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever even told Bob my theories about what happened. It’s one thing to involve you and Orville in conjecture, but it’s quite another burdening your guests with all this shit.”

“So,” Lawrence said, his eyes darting back and forth between Bob’s truck and Orville’s police car in the rear-view mirror. “It sure is beautiful up here.”

Dad said, “My son tells me you’re homosexual.” Lawrence took a long breath. “You don’t look homosexual,” Dad said. “Of course, that might be because you’re black. Most of the homosexuals you see on TV are white. Isn’t that right, Zack?”

Orville had put the siren on. I glanced back and saw that he had the flashing red light going, too. I had a pretty good feeling that he was going to be insufferable very soon. And I had a pretty good feeling I was going to have to endure it.

Ahead, Bob’s brake lights came on and the truck skittered over to the shoulder. The truck was barely stopped before he had the door open and was running back to us, pointing into the forest.

“I think it was here!” he shouted as Lawrence pulled the Jag over. Bob was an older guy, and he was looking winded.

Lawrence and I got out. Dad, who’d hopped into the car and come on this adventure without crutches, opened his door but made no move to get out.

“Bob,” I said, as calmly as possible. “You have to slow down. You’re going to have a heart attack.”

He put his hands on the Jag hood to steady himself. Lawrence glanced down at the bloody smudges being left on his sheet metal.

Bob took a couple of breaths. “We might,” he said, gasping for air, “already be too late.”

Orville and company bolted from the police car like it was rigged to explode, running forward, rifles held across their chests. “Which way?” Orville asked.

Bob pointed again toward the forest. “I’m gonna have to lead you in, show you where I last saw him. Jesus, I don’t believe this.”

I put an arm around Bob’s shoulder. “First of all, how badly hurt are you?” Bob’s face was cluttered with several cuts and scrapes and smudges of dirt. The skin was scraped in several places on his hands.

“I fell,” he said. “Couple of times, I think. I was running fast as I could. I didn’t want him to get me. Jesus, he was huge.”

“Okay, but you haven’t broken anything, right?”

“I, I don’t think so, no.”

“Okay.” I looked into the back of the Jag. “Dad, you can’t walk anyway, so you watch for the ambulance, all right?”

Dad gave me a thumbs-up as Orville brushed up next to me. “I’m in charge here,” he said. “And you’ve got a lot to answer for.”

We all started following Bob through the high grass at the edge of the road and into the woods. Orville had taken a position next to Bob.

“Mr. Spooner, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What happened exactly?”

“Um, Leonard and I, we were hiking through here, this is the land where he wants to build his fishing resort, you know? He was showing me around, and we heard this rustling behind us, and we turned around, and there it was.”

“The bear.”

“Fucking right, the bear. He was standing on his back legs, kind of rearing up, you know, and he roared, Jesus, I never heard anything like it in my life.”

“Did he attack you? Did he go after you and Leonard?”

“We must have been in shock for a second, I guess we must have just stood there. And I noticed, I saw that one of the bear’s ears was clipped, like it was sort of torn off.”

I thought back to what Timmy Wickens had said. That the bear they’d seen, the one Morton Dewart had supposedly gone after, had a torn ear.

Orville picked up on that, too, glanced back at me and shook his head.

“Then what happened?”

“We both turned and started to run. I went one way, Leonard started off in another. I shouted to him, I said, ‘Come on! The road’s this way!’ But then I wondered, maybe he was right, maybe the road was the other way. All I could think to do was keep running, and hope to Christ I was heading for the road, and not deeper into the woods. I glanced back once, tripped over something and scraped myself up a bit, figured the bear would be right on me, because they say you can’t outrun a bear, but you can’t think of anything else to do, you know?”

“Sure,” said Orville, nodding, lots of sympathy. His two buddies, their rifles drawn, were scanning the woods. One caught his rifle on a tree branch and stumbled back. “Was the bear right behind you?”

“No. So I figured it must have gone after Leonard, and I started calling out for him, going back the way I’d come. I was screaming till I nearly lost my voice, but I didn’t see any sign of him, or the bear. Jesus, this is terrible.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Spooner. Did you ever find him?”

“No, no, I never did. I found my way back to the highway, maybe a quarter mile down from where I’d left my truck, ran down to it and went back to the camp, figuring I could get more help, that we could come back and find Leonard.” Impulsively, he shouted, “Leonaaard!”

Then we all started doing it. “Leonard!” I shouted. The two hunters called out, even Lawrence cupped his hands around his mouth and called. We were all shouting at once, and then, as if on cue, we all stopped.

No one answered.

This was, I was pretty sure, the same part of the woods Leonard had led me into when he wanted to show me where he was going to build his dream.

“He got him,” Bob said, shaking his head. “The bastard must have got him.”

He stopped, looked around. “I’m pretty sure it was around here where we encountered him,” Bob said. He pointed to the right, raising his arm halfway, as if he wasn’t totally sure. “I think I went this way, and Leonard”-he pointed in the other direction-“went thataway. We should probably look over there.”

We all kept fairly close together, the six of us, maybe twenty to thirty feet apart, looking down and up and from side to side. Up by the highway, we could hear the wail of an ambulance.

Lawrence moved in close to me, whispered, “I thought you said on the phone there was no bear. That that other guy was killed by dogs, you thought. That that Wickens guy had the dogs kill him for some reason.”

“Yeah, well, that was kind of one of the theories I was tossing around.”

“So now it looks like you dragged my ass up here to go after a real bear. I have to tell you, that’s really not my area. You want Grizzly Adams.”

“I thought he liked bears.”

“Fuck, I don’t know.”

“Listen, there’s more to what’s going on up here besides the bear,” I said, pointing my finger into the air in front of me. “Even if Dewart was killed by a bear, it doesn’t change all the other stuff.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure you’ll bring me up to speed later.” Lawrence ducked under a pine branch. “Your dad, he’s fun.”

“I think he was hoping you’d be a bit swishier.”

“Maybe later I’ll do some show tunes.”

Bob and Orville had pulled farther ahead, then stopped. Bob was looking around, seemingly bewildered. I was thinking maybe, once that ambulance arrived, they should have a look at him while we kept looking for Leonard. Bob might have suffered injuries he wasn’t even aware of.

“Hello?” From the road.

My heart stopped. Leonard?

We all looked back, and saw an ambulance attendant in the distance. “We haven’t found him yet!” Orville called back. “Soon as we know, we’ll give you a shout!”

Lawrence and I had wandered a bit off to the right of everyone else, where the ground gradually sloped up through the trees. I remembered this climb. It led up to the cliff, which overlooked the area where Leonard had talked about putting in a fake whale for kids to play in.

When we got to the top, Lawrence said, “Whoa.”

It was a sharp dropoff down onto jagged rocks and then more forest below. Lawrence nudged me in the shoulder and pointed.

Down at the bottom, off to the left, was the twisted body of a man.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Hey!” I shouted. “Over here! Over here!”

Everyone came running, Orville in the lead. When he reached the edge, he reeled back a bit, like he thought he was going to fall over. Lawrence pointed.

“We have to find a way down there,” Orville said.

I looked off to the right, where the ground appeared to slope down less precariously. “That way,” I said.

Orville shouted back toward the highway. “Back here!” In the distance, a muffled “Coming!”

Lawrence was well ahead of everyone else, hopping over fallen limbs, skittering down the edge of the hill, his arms out for support. He got to Leonard Colebert about ten seconds ahead of the rest of us and was kneeling over him when Orville rushed up.

“Don’t touch him!” he said.

Leonard Colebert’s body lay flat, on its back, on the forest floor, but his head was twisted nearly 180 degrees, like he was looking over his shoulder when he hit the ground, and his neck stayed that way. His eyes were open and blank. The fall had torn his down-filled jacket, and his pants had slipped partway down his butt.

It seemed apparent to everyone that he was dead, but he still looked in a lot better shape than Morton Dewart did when he was found.

“Oh my God,” Bob said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

No one said anything, but everyone was nodding.

“Why isn’t he, I mean, he doesn’t look like the bear got to him, does it?” Bob said.

Orville was shaking his head, looking back up the hill. “My guess is, he was running, looking behind him to see if the bear was gaining, went right off the cliff before he even knew it was there.” Orville paused. “All things considered, it was probably a lot better way to go.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

One of the two hunters with Orville pointed to Leonard Colebert’s partially dropped pants. “Look,” he said. “The guy was wearing a fucking diaper.”

His friend giggled and said, “I guess, if I ran into a bear in the woods, I’d wanna be wearing one of those, too.”