There Will Be Bears (17 page)

Can’t there be a third option?

I breathe in through my nose and out my mouth, and I can’t regret this decision. I say, “We spotted her between Purdy and Hackamore.”

Stunned, Mike says, “We’ll get on the CB and call it in. You guys need a lift?”

Gramps looks at me and says, “What’s another two hundred yards?”

“And don’t mention our names,” I add. I don’t want Dad finding out through a newspaper blurb that I lied to him.

When the rumbling ATV retreats, Gramps says, “You did the right thing, telling them about Sandy.”

“It doesn’t feel like the right thing.”

Gramps puts his arm around me and says, “Welcome to adulthood.”

God, being an adult sucks. You have to make all these horrible decisions. If you don’t kill a majestic grizzly bear whose only fault was that she loved her cubs, she could attack someone else. If you don’t screw over your Taylor Swift–loving best friend, you’ll never hear the end of it from your teammates. If you don’t spend the rest of your life in a nursing home, your kidneys could fail tomorrow.

It’s funny — I’m not mad at anyone anymore. We’re all doomed to be adults.

We pass the wooden fence and the orange sign and reenter civilization. I want to ask Gramps about all those secret grown-up conversations he had with Mom and Dad before they put him in the nursing home. But today’s been heavy enough.

I say, “Hey, Gramps, how old were you when you got your first kiss?”

“Uh, that would be Dorothy McCoy, the homecoming queen from Abilene.”

“I thought you met her fifty-nine years ago.”

“Good memory.”

“But that would make you eighteen.”

“Seventeen, actually. A week before my eighteenth birthday.”

“You got your first kiss when you were seventeen?” My whole world tilts. I always pictured Gramps flirting in his high chair.

He says, “I was a pretty awkward kid. All my friends were playing baseball and meeting up with girls, but I wasn’t what you’d call athletic, and I was downright terrified of girls.”

“Wow, really? I guess you
are
my grandfather.”

He smiles.

“So how’d you change?” I say.

“My folks, my three sisters, and I were in Texas to visit my grandparents, and I met Dorothy waitressing at a burger joint. I knew I would regret it if I didn’t ask her out. I took her to the county fair. I called her my little Texas bear. Oh, and Tyson?”

“Yes, sir?”

“The bear thing? Calling them a Texas bear or a sweetie bear? Don’t stop. Girls love it.”

The buckskin is standing outside the barn, eating from a flake of hay. Her pack saddle and panniers have been removed and are sitting on the ground. My elk’s head is still strapped to the saddle.

“Hey, at least we managed to get the rack,” I say.

Gramps unties the head from the saddle and pulls a set of pliers from his multitool. “Only two North American animals produce ivory. One of them is the walrus.” He rolls up his sleeves, pulls back the elk’s upper lip, and latches on to a shiny tooth near the front. With a bunch of firm wiggles, his wrist and arm muscles tightening, he gets the tooth free. The root is deep and covered in gore.

He puts it in my palm and says, “The other is the elk.”

“This is actual ivory?”

“Yes, sir. Every elk’s got two of them. I know of a place just south of Jackson that can clean them up for us.” He removes the other one. “Cool, huh?”

“Very.”

It takes Nancy about an hour to dress the gashes on my back. And as I sit there with my shirt off and the alcohol stinging my wounds, I think about Brighton. Even though he’s got more muscle than I do, he isn’t stronger than me. He sucks at kicking, he’s desperate to have people like him, and he puts makeup over his zits. Oh, and he’s a raging yamhole.

I wouldn’t want to hang out with anyone else.

I’ll still be friends with him. I mean, life’s too short to hold stupid grudges. But I’m not going to let Bright off the hook for telling his football buddies my secrets. There’s only one punishment to fit the crime.

“She must have liked you,” Mike says.

I look up. “Huh?”

“Sandy. Looks like she was just playing with you. Like a cat does with a toy mouse. She must’ve felt a bond.”

“Just call me Grizzly Kid,” I say, paying homage to Timothy Treadwell the Grizzly Man, and get a laugh out of everyone.

We don’t have time for hanging out — it’s Sunday afternoon, and I have to get home so I can get some studying in, even though the whole concept of school seems so . . . civilized.

I get cleaned up in the ranch’s icy shower and put on a fresh set of clothing, tossing the dirty stuff away. We thank Mike and Nancy for everything and then load the elk meat and the head into the bed of the truck.

We get back on the Gros Ventre Road. It’s so different from the horrifying and winding dirt trail we came in on, even though it’s the same road. It turns out it’s actually pretty and rustic and not scary at all. We pass vast pastures filled with horses, and mountains of different colors. We drive tire-deep through four creeks. At one point on a nearby hill, a pack of pronghorn antelope stares us down for a minute before we get too close and they gallop away. Gene flags down a pickup truck that’s got a dead black bear in the bed. The driver shares his hunting stories and talks about how afraid he was that he’d run into Sandy.

I yawn, not because I’m not interested. I’m just really, really, really tired.

Gramps pulls over at a lookout point where hundreds of feet beneath us is a massive lake. A whole forest of treetops is poking out of the water.

“That’s Slide Lake,” he says while taking a pee off the cliff. “Great place for trout fishing. Back in the 1920s, a massive landslide blocked off the river and flooded the entire area. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

It’s a perfectly blue day, and in the distance the white-capped Grand Tetons watch over us. This is a place I’ll want to take my kids and my grandkids to.

Somewhere before we reach the main highway, I pass out, and I don’t wake up again until the truck comes to a stop and Gramps shifts into park. The sun is already setting.

We’re back at the nursing home in Rock Springs. Everything we just did — the horseback riding, the elk hunt, the bear attack — feels like a distant dream.

“What about the meat?” I say.

“I left it with a processor back in Jackson.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t want to wake you. Now, either they can ship it all to Rock Springs, or we can split it fifty-fifty and they’ll deliver to the house.”

“Then Mom and Dad will know we went hunting.”

“It’s your call.”

Yeah, there really isn’t any debate. Dad will say I’m grounded until I’m eighteen, but he’ll forget or lose interest in a few weeks. Hopefully.

I say, “Let’s do it. What about the rack?”

“It’s your elk. Besides, I got what I came for.”

He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the two elk ivories, already polished up and fashioned into simple necklaces. “I stopped by my friend Rod Husky’s shop in Hoback Junction. He’s a jeweler — fixed these up for us in an hour.” He hands me one and says, “One for you. One for me.”

I put it on and check myself out in the vanity mirror. Not gonna lie, I look hot. “These will be like our BFF necklaces.”

“What’s BFF?”

“Best friends forever.”

Gramps smiles and laughs, and as hard as he’s trying not to cry, his eyes are getting red and sad. “I’m going to miss you so much. I really wish I could live with you and the family, but . . .”

But I already know. There’s no going back to the way things were before. His broken kidneys aren’t magically going to fix themselves. Maybe if we were rich, he’d be at home in his reclining chair watching
Wheel of Fortune
and
Jeopardy!
while his home dialysis equipment pumped away. And then he could go about his daily routine, living his golden years with his family by his side.

The Sunrise Village Nursing Home is his new life.

I say, “I’m going to visit all the time. I
bear swear
.” I hold my hands out and make them into claws.

He takes his claws and interlocks them with mine. And we growl.

It’s dark by the time Mom and Dad arrive at the nursing home. They ask a hundred questions about our trip to the Targhee National Forest, but I don’t say much. I’m too tired to lie and too tired to tell the truth.

The five of us have dinner at Red Robin. As Mom and Dad are going on about their adventures in Rock Springs, I just sit there, taking the skin on the top of my hand and folding it together so it’s all wrinkly like I’m some seventy-seven-year-old man who fought in Korea, saved a beautiful woman and her son from a deadbeat, worked at a feed and tractor supply store for over thirty years, and loved everyone.

We drop Gramps off at the nursing home. We each take turns giving him a hug and a kiss and then we say our good-byes. I want to tell him that he’s going to get better and that maybe someday he’ll live with us again. But I can’t lie to him. All I can do is say, “I love you, Gramps.”

When I get home from school on Tuesday, there’s a blurb from the newspaper cut out and taped to my door:

“I found that this morning,” Ashley says, standing outside her bedroom door. “Thought you’d be interested.”

“Thanks, Sis.”

“You didn’t see her at all, did you?”

“The bear? Nah, no luck.”

“It’s a shame the bear had to die.”

I nod understandingly, but what the heck? She’s wearing my belt with the rattlesnake buckle! I was looking all over my room for it this morning.

She goes, “I’m really glad you and Gramps got to go on that trip.”

“Nice belt.”

“Huh?” She looks down. “Yeah, I think I look kinda cute with it.”

The truth is, it does look good on her.

I say, “You keep it.”

“Really? I was going to ask you if I could wear it next weekend to Rock Springs.”

“I also have a couple of flannels that don’t fit me anymore.”

“Gee, thanks, Tyson. There’s nothing I want more than your disgusting old shirts.” She wraps her arms around me and sarcastically says, “Oh, how I love my big brother. He’s so generous.”

“Gross. Get off.” I squirm away and open my door.

“Old flannels. You’ve got such good taste. Come here!” She tackles me onto the floor. I’m laughing, and then she starts laughing, too, and wow, her breath reeks.

I go, “Dude. You smell like McNuggets. Get off.”

“Hey.” She playfully smacks me across the cheek. “That’s not nice.”

My phone beeps.

“Who is it?” Ashley says.

“Nobody. Get out of here.”

She snatches the phone from me. “You got a text? From a
girl
? Tyson!” She acts like this is the biggest deal. “Who’s Karen?”

“Don’t worry about it.” I shove her out of my room, lock the door, and hurry to check my phone.

Karen wrote:
We still on for karaoke?

I message back:
See you in ten, karenbear
.

I wait a minute for her to respond. My entire body tingles with anticipation. And then finally:
lol okay tysonbear :)

I grab my bike from the garage. For an early November day, it’s surprisingly warm and bright out. I’m wearing my Taylor Swift T-shirt untucked for a change, and it feels good having the breeze around me.

Bright’s bike is locked up in front of Party Fiesta Karaoke, and I put mine next to it. There isn’t anyone inside except for him, Mika, and Karen, and an extra-large pizza, which is solid. But the stage is empty, which is not solid.

“Hey, guys,” I say, and take a seat next to Karen. She’s staring at my elk ivory necklace. “You got supreme pizza. That’s totally yam.”

Karen says, “You guys keep saying that. What on earth do ‘yam’ and ‘yamhole’ mean?”

I’ve gotten much better at my sexy eyes. I say, “Whatever you want them to mean.”

Unfazed, Karen responds with “Is that some Colorado thing?”

Mika shakes her head. “No, it’s some Tyson and Bright thing.”

I say, “We need to hurry up and eat, because at six o’clock, me and Bright purge.”

“Now, what does
that
mean?” Karen says.

“We’re each going to drink a jug of prune juice,” Brighton says sadly.

After we finish our pizza, me and Bright take the stage and tell the deejay to put on our song: “Mean” by Taylor Swift.

I say into the mike, “All right, ladies and gents out there, here’s a classic by Pizza Bear.”

And then Bright says, “And Booger Bear Five Thousand.”

When we get to the chorus, my voice cracks like someone just took a claw to my throat and sliced it open. I stop for a moment and my face gets warm, but Bright doesn’t laugh. He continues to sing as if nothing happened.

We do two more songs together, and after convincing the girls for five minutes, we get them onstage, but they’re pretty much just laughing and blurting out random words.