The Weirdo (9 page)

"And what does your mom say?"

"
Silencio.
Nothing. My mama is the smartest woman
on earth when it comes to Papa. She waits until the right time to talk, then attacks. In bed, I think."

Binkie laughed. "That doesn't happen where I live. Italians don't wait. If they don't agree, there's a shouting match on the spot."

"That's the best way."

"When's your next day off?"

"Wednesday."

"Let's hit the sand. Go to Nag's Head. Get a couple of sexy paperbacks, take my boom-box, daub on the sun-block."

"I'm tempted."

"Can you get the Bronco?"

It was sitting outside the Dairy Queen for transportation home. Dell was good about lending it. "I can try."

Dennis emerged from the back room, the day's take locked carefully in the safe. "Your old man is right, Sam. First guy that sticks a gun in my gut gets it all, and I'm out the door. Forever. They can take this job and shove it."

"You nervous?" Sam asked.

"For five hundred eighty-six dollars and forty cents, I am nobody's victim. Let's cut the lights and hit the street."

A moment later the Dairy Queen faded into the night, and ten minutes after that Sam dropped Binkie
off at her house and headed toward that black sponge known as the Powhatan.

Her mother always left the porch light on, as well as several lamps inside. Once Sam turned onto Chapanoke, the juniper-wood house stood out like a warm beacon, the windows welcoming white rectangles. The neighbor's lights, a quarter mile away and around a curve, were never visible.

She'd only begun to make this drive alone in the past year and always felt relieved when she was inside the house, locking out the swamp behind her.

Unlike Sam, Dell, a farm girl herself, had never felt isolated living by the black sponge. Sam realized too well that her mother would have been unhappy in town. Yet there had been a few nights, the bo'sun away on duty, when the dogs barked loud and long. Dell had taken her husband's loaded pistol and had gone out on the porch to look around.

Sam wished she had her mother's courage.

She arrived home safely, seeing nothing more than a red fox flash across Chapanoke.

***

TELFORD'S portable battery-powered radio receiver had a two-megahertz range, and the bears' collar transmitter frequencies were placed ten kilohertz apart to
minimize interference. Each individual collar had a separate sending frequency. Each bear had its own channel within the Powhatan.

"The swamp's so flat that there's no signal bounce, but we'll get some interference from the thick vegetation," Telford said.

Under thick afternoon clouds, smell of rain strong in the warm air, he stopped the truck not far from the footbridge and loblolly grove, taking the receiver, along with the directional antenna, out of the back. They'd collared two more and set an additional three snares in the morning, going four miles south of the first site.

"What we'll hear is a
beep-beep-beep
once we're operating."

"Henry's
beep-beep-beep?
"

"If he's still around. If we can't bring him up, we'll move on and try Number 2-88." That was the second bear they'd collared, a female.

Connecting the directional antenna to the receiver, Telford plugged headphones into the jack and put them on, saying to Chip, "Okay, hold it up and slowly rotate it all the way around, the full three-sixty degrees. We'll see if he's home."

The antenna resembled a toaster element about two feet long. Rotating slowly, Chip watched Telford's face for a sign that he'd picked up a signal.

"What you have to do is listen in an arc...." Telford moved his head, listening. "Hold it there," he said, reaching over to the volume control.

"The trick is to turn it down until you get the signal from a very narrow range, and then move the antenna until it's loudest and take the compass bearing."

Telford placed the headphones on Chip. He heard the faint signal, and he could imagine Henry snuffling around on his daily food hunt.

A moment later, Telford got the bearing, then moved the truck a quarter mile north to take another. "We'll get a preliminary fix on him by intersecting the two of these, then one that's pretty positive with a third. It's called triangulation."

"What happens then?"

"This evening I'll take the coordinates back to the trailer and compute Henry's actual location as of two or three
P.M.
Start his chart of movements, record his activity patterns, see how large his home range is, find out what he's eating."

Telford's trailer was in the RV park not far south of Dunnegan's.

"I'd like to see you do that sometime."

"Whenever," said Telford.

 

JUST after noon, they sat on the tailgate of the four-wheeler and ate their lunch.

"You miss Columbus?" Telford asked.

Chip said, "No, I don't miss it. I'm having too much fun here. But I had a lot of second thoughts until you came along."

"You were separated from your father for a while?"

"A long while."

Chip looked out over the swamp thoughtfully. The sounds from it were always subdued at midday during the summer. Even the insect buzzes were softer in the noon sun. Finally, he said, "After the crash, Dad started drinking. He went on a guilt trip. Said he should have been aboard the plane. Stayed drunk most of the time. Lost his job, lost our house after borrowing against it. I didn't see him for two years. Then he came to Columbus, came to my grandparents' house loaded, almost falling down, and Gramps ordered him away...."

Telford listened, face a blank, eyes focused up the trail.

"The AA people say to talk about it. Anyway, Dunnegan rescued him and started him off at AA. Got him the spillway job and started him painting again. That was four years ago. Dunnegan served with him in Vietnam."

Looking over, Telford said, "He seems fine now."

"He is. Said he hasn't had a drink since he came here. But it's been tough for him, I know. Sometimes I don't think I'm helping him by being here. I remind
him of what happened. The first night I was here I took off my cap. The hair grows on one side of my head, but not the other. Like this..."

Off came the cap.

Telford tried not to react to the semi-Mohawk appearance. It was carnival-freakish.

The cap was replaced.

"Dad closed his eyes and went outside. So I've kept it on ever since, except when I sleep."

"Things take time," Telford observed, still shaken by the sight of Chip's slick, scarred half-scalp.

"I wish he'd find a woman who'd live back here with him. When I go to Ohio State, he'll be alone again. I asked if he'd ever remarry. He said, 'Someday, maybe.' Not much of an answer, is it?"

"He's probably not ready."

"After ten years?" Chip asked, with a sad half-laugh.

Telford shrugged. "Has to be his decision."

"Have you ever been married?"

Telford chuckled. "No. Close a couple of times. I have a girl in Raleigh who'll come and live with me during July and part of August. We'll probably get married once I get my Ph.D. Two years down the line, I'd guess."

"I've never had a girl. I'd like one."

"It'll happen."

"I don't know. The way I look, not many girls will
exactly break the door down. All I'd have to do is take my hat off and they'd say, 'Yikes! What a weirdo!' I've heard that's what some people call me."

"The right girl won't."

"To be honest, I've got some more hidden deficits. Scars from my navel to my breastbone. They've taken skin for grafts from my right side. Put me in shorts, and I look like I'm wearing bark."

"It just takes the right girl, Chip."

"I hope."

By two forty-five, they had other compass bearings, and Telford decided to set two more snares before calling it a day.

***

THOUGH he was tired, Chip struggled with sleep. He tried to steer his mind away from times past and think only about tomorrow and the future, but, as usual, questions seemed to reflect off the dark wall and ceiling shadows. On certain nights they wouldn't go away. He always wondered what triggered them. Some nights he knew. A look in the mirror, someone reacting. A whisper overheard.

What if they'd got on another aircraft? What if his father had been with them, and he was killed? What if they'd all died? Perhaps that would have been best,
Chip had thought more than once. The reformed drunk reading and listening to a concerto in the next room certainly wished he'd been on the plane. He'd said as much. "I wish I'd been beside your mother and sister, beside you." John Clewt would carry that wish to his grave.

"Your mother would be so proud of you," his father had said tonight.

Chip remembered quite a lot about his mother, not so much about his sister. He remembered the fine house in Colonial Place, off the Lafayette River, and her presence in it. How nice she kept it. He remembered her soft touch and the cologne she used. Once, going by the toiletry department at Lazarus, in Columbus, the same aroma hit him and he fled the store, never to return.

***

LATE AUGUST: The Powhatan was, as usual, humid and miserable, the air thick and moist, full of those murderous yellowflies and ticks and chiggers and gnats and gallinippers. Chip endured them cheerfully, eager to motor across the lake each morning and meet Telford for the day's work.

He noticed that water levels in the lakes and ditches were going down slowly, but vegetation, sucking on roots
deep in the fertile soil, thrived, growing thicker each day in the summer cycle.

Yellow cowlilies bloomed in irregular patches along the shore, and wild violets added a shocking purple border in other spots. There was a painter's palette of color all over the swamp—clumps of orange jewelweed and stalks of deep lavender, red-flowered trumpet honeysuckle, blue-white morning glories.

Those who said the Powhatan was an ugly place were blind, he'd decided after living there almost four months.

The blackberries that had blossomed white in April were gone, and the bears had shifted to wild black cherries, awaiting the sweet gallberries, pokeberries, and devil's walking sticks of the fall.

Telford and Chip had handled twenty-three animals thus far, placing collars on twenty-one of them, logging in all the information. They'd spent most of each day tracking the beeps. They'd try to catch ten more to occupy the rest of the frequencies, then stop snaring until spring. During fall and winter, they'd continue monitoring.

Chip was wetting down a sleeping bear, carrying bucketfuls of water from the nearby ditch. He doused the black every few minutes. They'd lost one two days before from heat exhaustion. The bear had probably struggled in its snare for hours. It felt terrible to be responsible for the death of even one bear.

The temperature in the Powhatan neared a hundred degrees; the humidity pushed eighty even though it was only ten o'clock. The swamp steamed.

Overnight, Telford had decided not to trap any more until the weather cooled down; they'd just concentrate on tracking them. This would be the last one.

In late afternoon, a red-tailed hawk attempted to flutter up from Trail Four as they headed back toward the dam. Telford said, "There's a raccoon's meal," stopping the Toyota to avoid hitting it.

"What's wrong with it?" Chip asked, frowning.

"Broken wing, probably."

"Can it be helped?"

They watched as it tried again to get airborne.

"Maybe. Put a splint on it, keep it safe for a while, and let nature do the healing."

Chip stepped out of the truck.

"Hey, what are you doing?"

"See if I can repair it."

"You'd better take my gloves," Telford said. "That's a sharp beak."

A moment later, after a struggle, Chip was cradling the bird on his lap as they drove on.

"What do you feed a hawk?" Chip asked.

"Meat, table scraps. I'm not sure. Watch it doesn't eat you."

Chip grinned over. "Am I crazy?"

"Not altogether."

Chip soon established the bird hospital in the spillway house yard.

***

"I WISH Papa would get off my back about the Dairy Queen," Sam said. "He's been at it for two months."

"He's stubborn, Samantha, you know that. He wants you to get a daytime job. He doesn't like you driving home alone at night," Dell replied. "No mystery about that."

"It's still August, Mama. Summer! All the jobs have been taken. Does he want me to go to Norfolk, Portsmouth, Lizzie City...?"

"Of course not."

"Well, then..."

The smell of peach jam was heavy in the old kitchen, a pot of the sugary, peeled, crushed fruit boiling on the stove. Sam had helped Dell wash pint-sized Ball mason jars earlier in the morning. It was pectin-time at the Sanders house, the height of the jam and jelly season.

Next would be wild grapes. Dell had already made her quota of blackberry jam, close to a hundred pints, and she would sell every jar.

"Do I have to say it again? He cares about you; he worries about you. You're the pride of his life. You're
the one he talks about, brags about—not me. How smart you are, what a good girl you are."

"He doesn't tell me that. All he tells me is, get another job."

"Samantha, we've been married twenty-two years, and he still has trouble communicating with me. You're sixteen, and that's double trouble. But I'm telling you, he'd walk through fire for either one of us, and Steve, too."

Sam pushed a damp curl from her forehead and sighed deeply.

Dell laughed. It was a laugh of understanding more than of humor. "Just because he doesn't hug you all the time or tell you he loves you doesn't mean it isn't so. There are just as many women who can't do that as men. So take a lesson from a homegrown example." Dell stopped and regarded her daughter a moment in silence. "I'll bet this kitchen sermon has been preached by mothers a trillion times."

Sam nodded and smiled, at last. Then asked, "But, Mama, what's he so afraid of?"

Dell threw up her hands. "Samantha, he doesn't want you to get shot at that dam Dairy Queen!"

"The chances of
that
are a trillion to one."