The Weirdo (16 page)

"Who? I'm confused."

"The man I saw from the stump and the man you saw when you were behind Telford on Trail Six."

"I think I'll know. He'll touch all my alarm buttons just by being there. I'll 'feel' him, despite what Truesdale said."

"So will I," Sam said.

***

CHIP and his father were in the front room of the spillway house. Chip said, "Truesdale asked her if she was a psychic of some sort. He was nice enough about it but didn't take any stock in her dreams."

"And he didn't think there was any connection between the other man ... Howell ... and Telford?"

"Nope," Chip said, flatly.

John Clewt turned away from his easel. Under the floodlights, he was making a great blue heron come to life. "I'm not sure you can blame him. Dreams are pretty iffy."

"What are they?"

"Who knows, exactly. I've read they're connected
to rapid eye movement—visual images lasting a few seconds or longer. They're brought on by anything from aching muscles to traumatic happenings. Supposedly, they're necessary for good sleep."

"I've certainly had some that didn't make me sleep well," Chip said. His plane-crash nightmares had been horrendous.

"Me, too," John said. He was fine-lining feathers with a tiny brush. Then he asked, "Is Truesdale giving up?"

"He told
me
not to, but he's got a lot of other things happening, I'm sure. How much time can you spend on someone who's missing?"

"Has anyone thought about hypnotizing Samantha?"

Chip was startled by the idea. "I doubt it."

"Do you think she'd be willing?"

"I don't know."

"Medical science doesn't really understand it, but it does seem to work with some people. I've heard it's harmless."

"I've seen it a couple of times on the tube—Your eyes are getting heavy, so very heavy.... Your arms are getting heavy.... You're becoming drowsier and drowsier.... You want to sleep...." He closed his eyes.

"You can laugh about it, Chip, but it does work."

"What could we learn?"

"I don't know. Some detail she draws a blank on now. Her memory could be sharpened."

"Who could do it?"

"I'm sure the Norfolk police would know."

***

CHIP had asked her to meet him at Dunnegan's. When she'd asked why, he'd said he wanted to show her a special bear.

Her papa didn't buy the idea of tame bears, and the rogue that had bitten Grandpa Sanders certainly wasn't tame. Yet she wanted to watch Chip Clewt with them, watch this relationship he had. Or thought he did. Or maybe she just wanted to be with him.

It was Saturday again, sun rising in a cloudless sky to melt sparkling frost-tips.

Chip nodded, studying the far shore. "When we get closer I'll just idle in. Seventeen is about a mile back in there. I'll cut the engine, and we'll wait a while."

"Seventeen?"

"Seventeenth bear we snared last year."

"Chip, my papa said to stay away from them."

"The truth is they stay far away from us. We'll follow the prints and scat—that's dung—back to where it's feeding. I know exactly where it is."

Sam was tempted to say, Let's just walk along the shore.

Or, Let's go back to the house.

Or, I should really get back to Dunnegan's.

Skeptical, she wanted to turn back but couldn't bring herself to tell him.

As he dropped the engine to an idle, Sam asked, a nervous edge in her voice, "Chip, what's the real purpose in this?"

"I just wanted you to have the thrill of seeing one in the wild."

"I'm scared, if you want to know the truth."

"Don't be. Just stay close and do what I say."

He cut the engine, and twenty feet later the bow of the boat shoved up onto the mushy shore. As the exhaust died out, the swamp sounds faded in.

He whispered, "Just sit here quietly for a few minutes."

He was facing her on the stern sheets, and she realized that as days went by the jolt of seeing what the fire had done to him was lessening. There was a one-armed girl in school, and no one except newcomers even noticed she was different.

"I'm getting to know them, Samantha. Truly know them. Every day I learn something new about them. I'm keeping a notebook for college, writing down everything I see out here."

"You really like them, don't you?"

"They've become friends. You can laugh, but I'm even practicing the way they grunt and growl. I do a pretty good
whuff....
"

She saw no reason to laugh. Whatever Chip Clewt did wouldn't be much of a surprise.

Finally he said, "Let's go—quietly," dropping the binoculars' strap over his head. Around his waist was a canvas pouch. "Another thing, in case you're worried. I've got a can of pebbles and a bear-chaser in here."

"Pebbles?"

"You rattle them. The bear doesn't like the noise, and you move away."

"What's a bear-chaser?"

"Capsaicin. Telford left it with me."

He opened the pouch and help up a vial that looked like a breath atomizer. "You spray it into their eyes. It wears off in a few hours. But I don't think we'll need either one."

"I hope not," said Sam.

***

HE POINTED as they walked: paw prints. Putting his mouth almost to her ear, he whispered, "Five toes, just like ours. The right forepaw pushes down more than the left, left hindpaw more than the right. Rolling walk..."

Twenty-five or thirty yards farther on: "Tracks here..."

She saw an unmistakable bear trail, a tunnel into a shrub thicket. It looked well used. Sam felt herself being drawn into a secret place where humans seldom ventured. Confidently ahead was her gimp-legged, egghead guide, who understood how bears talk.

About five minutes later he held up a hand, stopping her, nodding off to the right, whispering, "They're back in there...."

"More than one?"

"Seventeen is a sow. She has two cubs."

Sam could hear faint noises in the stillness. She whispered, "The worst thing you can do is get near a mother and cubs." With all his knowledge, didn't he know that?

Apparently not the least bit worried, he whispered back, "Just follow me. Don't talk; walk softly...."

Sam shook her head at the idiocy, both his and her own, but followed him across a pair of rusted-out narrow-gauge tracks that led toward a small grove of gum trees. She knew he was challenging her.

They crossed a small lily-padded ditch with a few inches of water in the bottom, then Chip held up his hand again, pointing ahead and to the left. In the distance she saw the cubs. They were at the foot of a black gum, in a damp area.

Chip sank to his knees, looping the binoculars' strap back over his head. He passed the glasses to her. "Look up in the tree," he whispered. The branches were shaking and cracking.

Dropping to her belly, Sam focused the glasses.

The radio-collared mother was pulling in the limbs with her paws, gathering them to her mouth, busily eating the frost-ripened blue-black berries, completely unaware she was being observed. She was much too occupied stuffing herself.

"She'll tear some off, then drop them down to the cubs now and then. Watch."

Rising on their hind paws, the cubs appeared toylike, with big, erect ears. They replied in squeaks to the grunts overhead.

"They're less than a year old. We put the collar on her before they were born."

She passed the glasses back.

"No, you watch. I've seen it before."

"You have a name for her?"

"Eliza."

Eliza was well named. With a small potbelly, she looked like one of those life-sized bears in a toy store.

Chip was watching the cubs, and Sam studied his face. He was smiling.

Down came a laden branch, and the little ones
went after it in a scene straight out of a Disney film.

Soon, Number 17-88 backed down from the branches, full up for the moment, stretching out on the ground near the trunk.

"Watch the cubs," Chip whispered.

They wrestled awhile, and then one began to pester the dozing mother.

Sam looked at her watch. It was already eleven-thirty. She'd be lucky to make it back to Dunnegan's by twelve-thirty. "I have to go, Chip. I'll be late for work."

Sitting up, looking at her intently, he said, "Okay, but I've got a question. Do you want to see them killed?" His head tilted toward the gum tree.

She frowned back. "Certainly not. What kind of person do you think I am?"

***

IN THE boat, recrossing the lake, Sam warned, "Chip, people around here won't take to anyone stopping their hunting rights. They only put up with it once. After five years off-limits, they're going to be cleaning guns by this time next year, my papa first among them."

As if he hadn't heard a word, Chip said, "It'll be announced tomorrow morning in the
Pilot.
"

"What will be announced?"

"The National Wildlife Conservancy campaign to save the Powhatan bears. Dad will paint posters for it."

Sam shook her head in disbelief. "God, Chip, you and your father could get hurt. There are men living around here who might run you away at rifle point. Beat you up! Maybe that's what happened to Telford?"

"Will you help me, Samantha?" Chip said, evenly. "Telford told me last month that he'd decided there weren't more than two hundred fifty, two hundred sixty bears in the swamp, that the habitat could handle eight hundred or more, that he was going to fight against opening it up. Now he can't and I have to...."

"My papa would put my clothes out in the middle of the road and lock the door on me."

"We'd make a good team, I think."

"You are not listening to me, Chip. My papa's a hunter. And there's five or six hundred more like him in this area. Bears are wild animals. That's how he thinks. He's made a steel trap to catch. Henry and plans to shoot him dead."

Chip ignored her. "We won't even try to convince him. It's the Wildlife Service that needs convincing."

"But they'll also listen to the hunters."

"The bears can win! And tell your father he'd better not shoot Henry."

Sam shook her head. This strange boy just didn't listen.

Chip said offhandedly, "Why don't you strip the rest of those apples out of the treetops, and maybe Henry won't come back."

Sam looked out across the lake in frustration. What else could she say? He had an iron head.

The voyage back to the spillway house seemed to last an eternity.

Chip stood in the stern, fingers of the gloved hand barely touching the tiller of the outboard, looking over Sam's head to the far shore as he shouted.

"I've got myself inside them, Samantha. I've put myself into their skins when they're being hunted. Felt their terror as the dogs chase them through the brush, mile after mile. My heart pounds out of my body. Then I finally go up a tree and wait for the dogs to go away. Instead, a hunter comes and there's a flash and a boom, and it's over...."

He lowered his eyes, the good one and the droopy one, to look at her. "I know the ways of the bears. I'm going to save them," he said quietly.

He's crazy,
she thought.
Totally insane. That airplane crash and all those times in the hospital trying to get new skin have twisted his mind.

Little else was said until they started down the Feeder Ditch in the other boat, then Chip asked, "Would you be willing to let an expert hypnotize you?"

Had she heard right? "For what reason?"

"To sharpen your memory of that day when you found Howell and that morning in the stump...."

"Hypnotize me?"

He nodded.

"This your idea?"

"No, my father's. I told him how Truesdale reacted."

Sam shook her head slowly. Chip Clewt had a way of dropping words that exploded. Hypnotize her?

***

"MAMA, did Papa ever have some kind of power over you when you started going together?"

Dell, having just returned from the Lizzie City swap meet, was in the kitchen finishing lunch. She looked up at Sam, brow knotting a little. "I don't know what you mean."

"Asked you to do things you really didn't want to do? I don't mean going all the way. I mean other things," Sam said, sitting down at the table with a hurriedly constructed tuna on wheat.

"Other things?" Dell's frown widened. "What other things?"

"Oh, like getting you to help him do something you weren't sure about."

"Samantha, it's been twenty-three years since I started going with your papa. I was nineteen. How can I remember unless you give an example? I was in love with him, and I did most things he asked me to do. He wouldn't ask me to do something wrong. That answer you?"

Sam sighed and said, "No."

"Quit beating around the bush."

"Okay, Chip wants me to help him with that Save the Bears thing, and I think I'd be in the middle."

Dell laughed softly. "Would you ever...."

"But another side of me says I'd like to help him."

"Those sides date back to Adam and Eve."

"What would you do?"

"Oh, no, you won't get any encouragement from me. You know how I feel about this situation."

"But if you were sixteen and your boyfriend..."

"He's a boyfriend now?"

"Not really. But if you were sixteen and your friend asked you to help him on something like this, would you have done it?"

"If I'd known my papa was dead against it I'd've thought a long time about it."

"I've got to go." Sam gulped down her glass of milk, then headed for the door—but stopped short. "Do you know anything about hypnotism?"

Dell shook her head. "Not a thing. What's more, I don't want to know. What brought that on?"

"Tell you later."

The door closed, and in seconds the Bronco started up Chapanoke Road, bound for Currituck and the Dairy Queen.

***

SUNDAY morning Sam rode her bike out to the highway to retrieve the
Pilot
from the orange oval roadside container. Four of them perched by the mail route boxes for people who lived on Chapanoke. Sam always brought back Mrs. Haskins's paper along with theirs, tossing it onto her doorstep.

Usually she waited until she was home before opening it, but this day she slid the rubber band off and there at the bottom of the front page was a two-column headline,
Environmental Group Will Attempt to Save Powhatan's Bears.