“What is it?” Dad shouted.
“The bear!” he shouted. “I think he’s got Leonard! Jesus Christ, follow me!”
Lawrence Jones, taking off his glasses and looking at me, said quietly, “Is it always this busy around here?”
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.”