“I don’t know,” the boy/man said. He was breathing hard. “I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean?”
Reggie was always sure of where he was going. Ask anything that had to do with a direction or a place, and Reggie knew it. He could walk through the deep woods blindfolded and never hit a tree.
“I mean I’m lost.”
“Lost?”
“Look, Chance,” Reggie said. “I don’t know what’s happening. It’s like I’m not anywhere at all, like there aren’t any rules anymore.”
We stopped at the bottom of the valley. The stream was burbling and sunlight winked down through the branches and needles. We were lost in paradise and Addy was dying.
“Well, you can see by the sun that we’re on the west side of the range,” I said. “So that means if we follow the stream down, we’ll get to the lake sooner or later.”
“What difference does that make?” Alacrity asked.
“At the lake is a road. We can get a ride and get your mom to a doctor.”
It seemed like a good idea. Reggie hunched his shoulders, hitched his living load up a few inches, and groaned. Addy was deadweight; she hadn’t even opened her eyes that day.
We made it about a half a mile before coming across the bear. Big and black, he reared up in the middle of the stream and roared. I moved quickly out in front of the children. I waved my hands and yelled, “Ho! You big ugly bear! Get! Get away!”
As if he were mimicking me, the bear waved his great clawed paws and roared again. Then he charged.
“Run!” I yelled, pushing my arms behind me as if I were performing some underwater swimming maneuver.
Then I was flying. Up in the air and in a small arc until I hit the stream, and the hard stones therein, with a loud splash. The girls were screaming. Reggie had pulled a large stone out of the stream and was ready to throw it like a medicine ball.
“Drop it, Reg!” I shouted. “Run!”
And that’s what we did. Straight up the valley. The bear growled and came from behind but didn’t catch up. He just threatened and kept close enough so we couldn’t consider running up into the woods.
The girls were ahead of Reggie and me, screaming. The bear kept coming on.
Over the next hour our retreat slowed to a fast walk. The bear always behind us.
Finally Reggie fell to his knees.
“Take Addy,” he said. “Take her with you.”
I looked around for a weapon. Alacrity was already armed with a yard-long branch that she held like a baton.
But the bear had stopped too. He held back a few steps and sniffed the air. He let out a great bellowing roar that made Wanita scream and cry.
“Shut up, you ugly bear,” Alacrity said.
Reggie was lying on his side, Addy tied to his shoulders and still unconscious.
I struggled with the double weight of Addy and Reggie, pulling them both up a few feet from the stream. Alacrity stood guard with her stick, shouting at the bear now and then. Wanita stood close by me.
“Alacrity, come on back here to me,” I said in an urgent but muted voice. “Come on. Leave that bear alone.”
“Tell him to leave me alone,” she said, more to the bear than to me.
“Come back here,” I demanded.
Slowly she obeyed. You could see that she hesitated to back down from her attacker. She was ready to go down fighting.
“Come on, now.”
We huddled together on the steep sloping bank of the small mountain stream. The bear watched us closely from the other side. He alternated between sniffing the ground and standing on his back legs, surveying the full area.
“You can go to sleep, Chance,” Alacrity told me. “I’m not tired. I’ll watch him.”
I laughed to myself at the maturity of the child. I would have told her to take a nap herself, but before I knew it I was in a deep sleep.
“Hello, little man,” Juan Thrombone said.
He was sitting on a big stone set alone in a wide desert. The sun was already down, but there was enough light to see the receding field of sand and rock.
“It’s all in our mind, little one,” Thrombone said.
“What?”
“The things you count and calculate. The number of colors, the weight of light on a lawn. It’s all in our mind. I know because I have seen it. I have seen it. And it’s not really there.”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man.”
“The smallest one can tell you.” Thrombone’s smile grew large with something he was thinking. “I tried to talk to her, but she drew me away to a place where stone moves within stone, thinking deep rocky thoughts and singing to the stars. I never knew that a stone’s voice could be so high.”
The man of stone and bone, cloth and flowers, stood up. It took a long time for him to attain his full stature. He was a short man seeming to be a giant. He stretched, and this made him laugh. The laugh was a musical tenor with a twang and a whine around the edges.
I thought that I probably couldn’t kill this man; he probably couldn’t die.
“No, little man. No. We can all die — and you” — he looked at me with intent yet benign eyes — “you could kill anyone. That’s what makes you human. You’re the best at it. You’re the cream of the killers.”
I didn’t like his knowing what I was thinking.
“But let’s not worry about that now,” Juan Thrombone said. “You can kill me whenever you want, Chance. But first we should drink something and eat something. First we should sing, little man. My friends will bring you to me.”
“What friends?”
“You’ll know them,” he said. Night was descending on the desert. I strained to glimpse the odd Mexican man, but he faded away.
“Chance.” Wanita was tugging at my arm. “Chance, wake up. Wake up. Look, look.”
I sat up quickly but got dizzy and fell back.
“Chance!”
I sat up again. The green canopy of leaves was spinning around in my head, but I stayed up. Wanita was still pulling, wanting something from me.
We were surrounded by bears. They ranged in color from cinnamon to black. Some were very large, others were less than three feet in length.
We weren’t actually surrounded. There was one path, up away from the stream, to the east, that we could take.
The bears, some of them, were yowling and standing up on their hind legs. The big black bear that chased us at first was already halfway across the stream. He was telling us to move on — there was no doubt about that.
I hefted Wanita in my arms. Reggie groaned and rose. Addy was still tied to his back. Alacrity naturally took up the rear guard even though I told her to go ahead of us. She walked backward behind us, swinging her staff as the bears herded us upward.
They flanked us, big woolly shepherds bringing their flock to a man in a dream. I was sure that these bears were Thrombone’s friends. I was sure that he’d changed his mind and, instead of chasing us away, was calling us on.
I would have dreaded the destination if it wasn’t for those bears. I counted more than sixteen, but I think that there were even more. Smelling strongly of bear musk, roaring and barking. The deep growls sent fear through me, fear for the children and myself. If we slowed down, snapping jaws would urge us forward. And if a bear snapped, Alacrity cracked it with her staff, which sent out a communal bear complaint that was deafening.
They drove us all day long, into the moonlit evening.
Wanita sobbed on and off in my arms. I wanted to check on Addy, but the bears wouldn’t let us slow down. We moved deeper and deeper into the woods until late in the evening.