(1995) The Oath (6 page)

He made a concerted effort to reorient himself and tried a rephrased version of the question. His voice was stronger now, and he hoped it didn’t betray the turmoil he felt inside. “Well,” he said slowly, “I’ll have to know eventually. Just tell me what you found.”

He could tell this was misery for her.

“Go ahead.”

Her words hit him with the force of a blow. “We found—we found the left arm detached at the shoulder, several feet away, still in the shirt sleeve—”

He felt his stomach turn. Quit it!

She slowly, reluctantly lifted her hand to her left shoulder. “And everything above this line—” She slowly traced a line downward, across her torso to her right hip. “—was gone.”

LEVI COBB
read the leaflet in silence, then reread it, digesting the news.

“Happened last night,” said Jerry Fisk, another sheriff’s deputy, “up on Wells Peak.”

They were standing by the gas pumps in front of Levi’s old garage. Jerry had just arrived in his patrol car and had a stack of the pink leaflets to spread around town and post in the windows of the businesses. Normally, Levi and Jerry would be telling stories and playfully exchanging insults. Today that was impossible.

“So,” Jerry continued, “we’re spreading the word, warning people, trying to find out if anybody’s seen anything.”

Levi asked, “Who was it?”

“Oh, nobody from around here.” Jerry took a quick glance at some notes in his pocket. “He was a photographer from Oak Springs, a guy named Cliff Benson. He and his wife were camping up on the Staircase Trail and apparently a bear attacked them in the middle of the night. The wife tried to fight it off with a hunting knife . . .” His words trailed off.

Levi looked up from the leaflet to examine Jerry’s face. There was something in Jerry’s tone that didn’t fit. “What?”

Jerry stuffed the notes back in his pocket just for something to do. “Oh—it was bad, that’s all.” He glanced around, a little short on words, then lowered his voice as if someone might be listening. “It’s not my official role to be telling you this, but . . .Tracy Ellis helped bring the body down, and she says the whole upper half of it was gone. It’s missing—just chomped right off.”

Levi turned pale and sank into an old folding chair by the front door. He sat there, staring at the ground, muttering to himself. Jerry didn’t ask Levi to speak up. When Levi muttered, it wasn’t meant to be heard. He just had to mutter.

Jerry shed his official role as a deputy for a moment. “Just between you, me, and the gas pumps, I’m having some trouble with this one, and I think Tracy Ellis is, too. We’re not sure what Collins will do.”

“Collins?” Levi asked, raising one eyebrow. “You think he’ll want to make waves over this?”

Jerry shrugged. “We’ll see. We’ve had people killed by bears before, maybe more than our share, but this one’s pretty spectacular.”

“Oh, yeah, spectacular,” Levi said.

Jerry tried to soft-pedal his way out of the subject. “Well anyway, we don’t want to get people all upset, so we didn’t put the gruesome details in the leaflet and, uh, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk it around too much.” He walked over to his patrol car and opened the door on the driver’s side. “But if you hear anything, if you talk to anybody who’s seen anything, give me a call, will you?”

Levi answered almost absent-mindedly, “Uh-huh.” Then as Jerry drove away, Levi muttered to himself, “As if anyone’s gonna talk to me about this.”

THAT NIGHT
Steve got a call from Marcus DuFresne, and the next morning they went into the mountains as a team.

Marcus, a state game warden with silver hair and a handlebar mustache, was most familiar with
318
, having patrolled the bear’s favorite haunts far up the Tailor Creek drainage, some thirty miles north of Wells Peak. He even had a nickname for the bear: Herman, after his overweight and cumbersome brother-in-law. He and Herman had shared the area for several years without incident, so this hunt was nothing Marcus felt happy about. Apparently, the trouble started the way it always started, when a bear and people got a little too used to each other. Bears normally didn’t want anything to do with humans, but offering a big grizzly an easy and predictable food source such as a garbage dump or unprotected trash cans could change all that. Herman had lost his fear of people and started claiming their refuse as his own, and that made him dangerous. Now the local farmers, ranchers, and homesteaders were seeing him all too often, prowling and scavenging around their homes and livestock, terrifying their children. Marcus was just planning how he would sedate the big fellow and relocate him when the attack occurred on Wells Peak. Suddenly, just moving Herman was no longer an option.

Herman’s size didn’t help his case any. He was at least seven hundred pounds, and the general agreement seemed to be that no smaller bear could have inflicted the extent of injury sustained by the mauling victim. It had to be the biggest bear available, and that meant
318
.

By midmorning, Steve and Marcus, dressed in camouflage and carrying rifles, had reached a well-used game trail that twined across the face of the draw just above Tailor Creek. It was a path used by bear and elk alike, and recent signs indicated
318
had been in the area, making his midsummer rounds among the huckleberries, then ambling routinely down to the creek to wash it all down.

At the bottom of the game trail, alongside the creek, Steve and Marcus hoped to encounter the old grizzly. In a curious reversal of standard camping rules, they had brought two large bags of day-old doughnuts and a tub of rancid bacon grease, an odorous and tempting combination they intended to mix together and leave uncovered, open to the breeze. This time they fully intended to attract a bear.

“This’ll do,” said Marcus, setting down the bucket of grease and doughnuts. “We can set the bait here where he’ll stumble right over it, and—” He looked uphill, where a thick growth of service-berries formed a tightly woven thicket around the trunks of some ancient cottonwoods. “Yeah. We can set up one blind in those trees.”

Steve paused to listen to the sound of the creek. It was a nice, noisy spot with lots of splashing and gurgling, enough to drown out any rustling noises he or Marcus might make from their hiding places. The wind was moving uphill, away from the bait; hopefully
318
wouldn’t get a telltale whiff of their presence.

“I’ll try up in there,” Steve said, pointing to another thicket a little farther up the trail, in sight of the bait. “Should give me a good angle.”

Marcus took a long, steady look at where Steve was indicating. “This blind here would be closer.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re going to want a good shot at him, I know.”

Steve met the eyes of his hunting partner and saw no need to deny it. “I appreciate that, Marcus.”

“So go ahead and take the closer one. I’ll back you up from that other spot.” Marcus looked up the trail and listened to the river a moment. “Maybe you won’t even need me.”

Steve knew what Marcus was driving at. “You are going to shoot, aren’t you?”

Marcus smiled resignedly. “Don’t have much choice. Around here we’ve got Herman, two young boars, three sows, and that’s it. If there’s some other nut-case bear out there, we don’t know about it, we’ve never seen it, and we’ve never gotten any reports. So, yeah, it must be Herman. I just don’t want to believe it, that’s all.”

“Maybe after today we’ll know.”

“Well, it’s been at least thirty-six hours. And we didn’t see anything in the scat.” Marcus stopped speaking abruptly, aware he was on thin ice. “Oh brother, I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s all right,” Steve said. He understood Marcus’s dilemma. The evidence of what a bear had eaten some thirty-six hours before would most likely be a pile of scat on a game trail by now, and they both knew it. What made the matter difficult to discuss was the possibility that the pile of scat could consist of Steve’s brother.

Steve reiterated what he’d said on the trail earlier. “Marcus, just standing back from it, I agree with you. After this long, we might autopsy
318
and not find a thing. And you’re right, the scat we found didn’t show anything either. So . . . we’re about to shoot a bear on circumstantial evidence.”

Marcus shrugged. “His days were numbered anyway.”

Steve set to work on the baiting area. He’d said enough and heard enough.

They cleared a wide spot on the ground, dumped the doughnuts in a heap, then poured the grease over the doughnuts.

“Woo!” said Marcus. “Good stuff.” It was a smell no bear could resist.

Then each man worked his way carefully through the underbrush to his hiding place, and so began the wait.

LEVI WASN’T
worth much the rest of the day. He managed to carry on conversations with those who stopped by to fill their tanks, but he couldn’t keep his thoughts on fishing talk or complaints about growling noises in transmissions. Whenever he was alone, his thoughts centered on what had happened at Wells Peak, and he talked about it to whatever object was available and wouldn’t interrupt. First he muttered to the gas pumps as he swept around them. “Wells Peak . . . come on now, help me out. Who’s been up there before that you know about and what for and when? No, I don’t know. Shhh! Beats me. Don’t even know who to ask . . .”

Then he discussed things with a Ford pickup while he greased the bearings. “Well, sure, somebody out there knows something, but you think they’ll ever tell me? No sir, not on your life or mine or anybody’s—boy, how long’s it been since you’ve had this done? You’re feeling kinda worn right here, pretty dry. . . Well, anyway, to heck with ’em. They made the mess; they can clean it up.” Then he felt ashamed. “I know I shouldn’t be talkin’ that way, but . . .”

Then he sat at his grubby desk inside the garage and went through some bills while he talked to the tools hanging on the walls around him. “Cliff Benson. He was a photographer. Don’t imagine you’ve ever heard of him. I sure haven’t.” He let the bills fall to his desk as he looked out the murky window and up the street. “It’d be nice to know what the folks in town are thinking. Betcha they’re just jawin’ up a storm.”

He leaned back in his old wooden, wheeled office chair, his paunch hanging over his belt buckle, and asked the floor jack, “You’ve been around here a long time. You know people. You think that guy was the stranger Jerry made him out to be?” He snickered to himself as he clasped his hands behind his neck. “Well, yeah, you bet I’m havin’ trouble with that.”

Next he forced himself to work on the telephone company’s ladder truck even though he could only talk about the stranger named Cliff Benson.

“I don’t think an outsider would get eaten like that, you follow me?” he asked the rear axle he was working on. “Around here, you earn something like that, which means you can’t be no stranger— but now don’t go rollin’ out of here and tellin’ people I said so. Here, hold still; you think I got all day?”

The axle quit rotating, and Levi reset his wrench.

“But I can smell it. I can feel it, you know? Mr. Cliff Benson’s put his big feet just one step too far into Hyde River muck.” He gave a wheezy laugh and shook his head. “And now his feet are all he’s got left!” Then he grew serious and thought a long time before he spoke. “Hate to think Maggie would know anything about this—or him—but—”

He cinched down the bolt and then banged it to emphasize a decision he’d just made. “All right. Tonight, as God is my judge, I’m gonna ask her! I’m gonna flush this thing out of the bushes! I’m gonna—”

“Hey, Levi, come down to earth, buddy.”

Levi came back to earth, back to his old rundown garage and the wrench he was still holding in his hand. He looked out to see his old friend Ebo Denning standing outside. He crawled out from under the ladder truck, embarrassed. “Sheesh! Sorry.”

“Well,” said Ebo, leaning on the gas pump, “we’ve all got things on our minds today.”

Levi started pumping gas into Ebo’s old Ford pickup. Yeah, Ebo had to be under quite a load today, just like his truck. His wife Emily and his two daughters were squeezed into the cab, and the truck’s bed, roof, and sides were stacked with furniture, boxes, his old lawn mower, pictures in frames, his favorite cooking pans, his old cash register. He had to be carrying out everything he owned, Levi thought, which, by this point in his long struggle, wasn’t much. Yeah, Ebo Denning, a black businessman with snowy hair carpeting his head, was folding up his business and leaving town. It was over.

“Where’re you gonna go, Ebo?” Levi asked.

Ebo checked all the ropes holding his load, tightening a few. “Oh, head south, I think. I got friends and family down in Sacramento, and they’re into retailing. One’s got a furniture store, one’s got a hardware business down there. I think it’d be a good place to start over.”

“Well,” Levi said, glancing up the road, taking in the dismal little town, “to be honest, any move from here is probably gonna be a move for the better.”

Ebo forced a smile. “Yeah, that’s how I try to look at it.”

Levi finished filling the tank and replaced the nozzle on the pump. “Twenty-three fifty.” He would have said no charge at all, but he knew Ebo would never allow that.

Ebo dug the cash out of his pocket and counted it out. “You’ve been a good friend, Levi. Wanted to say that while I had the chance. And I do remember how you helped keep me in business there for quite a while.”

“Well, that worked both ways.”

Then Ebo said in earnest, “You take care of yourself, Levi. You know what this town can do to you.”

Levi returned Ebo’s serious gaze. “I know.”

They shook hands. Then, as if they both felt a handshake wasn’t enough, they embraced and slapped each other on the back.

“Good-bye,” said Ebo, his eyes moist.

“Drive careful.” He waved to Emily and the girls.

Then, with a rumble and a creaking, the old truck pulled out onto the Hyde River Road and drove off, leaving behind only the memory of Denning’s Mercantile and the good family who had owned it.

Ebo was also leaving behind a problem named Charlie Mack, who was just now standing on the other side of the road, looking over at Levi but trying not to look like he was looking. Now what was he after? Levi wondered. Just trying to be sure Ebo was really leaving? Perhaps he was getting his jollies by watching Ebo drive away with just about every remaining sign of his presence, thus erasing himself from the town.