“Yeah, well, I’m sure you’ll bring me up to speed later.” Lawrence ducked under a pine branch. “Your dad, he’s fun.”
“I think he was hoping you’d be a bit swishier.”
“Maybe later I’ll do some show tunes.”
Bob and Orville had pulled farther ahead, then stopped. Bob was looking around, seemingly bewildered. I was thinking maybe, once that ambulance arrived, they should have a look at him while we kept looking for Leonard. Bob might have suffered injuries he wasn’t even aware of.
“Hello?” From the road.
My heart stopped. Leonard?
We all looked back, and saw an ambulance attendant in the distance. “We haven’t found him yet!” Orville called back. “Soon as we know, we’ll give you a shout!”
Lawrence and I had wandered a bit off to the right of everyone else, where the ground gradually sloped up through the trees. I remembered this climb. It led up to the cliff, which overlooked the area where Leonard had talked about putting in a fake whale for kids to play in.
When we got to the top, Lawrence said, “Whoa.”
It was a sharp dropoff down onto jagged rocks and then more forest below. Lawrence nudged me in the shoulder and pointed.
Down at the bottom, off to the left, was the twisted body of a man.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Hey!” I shouted. “Over here! Over here!”
Everyone came running, Orville in the lead. When he reached the edge, he reeled back a bit, like he thought he was going to fall over. Lawrence pointed.
“We have to find a way down there,” Orville said.
I looked off to the right, where the ground appeared to slope down less precariously. “That way,” I said.
Orville shouted back toward the highway. “Back here!” In the distance, a muffled “Coming!”
Lawrence was well ahead of everyone else, hopping over fallen limbs, skittering down the edge of the hill, his arms out for support. He got to Leonard Colebert about ten seconds ahead of the rest of us and was kneeling over him when Orville rushed up.
“Don’t touch him!” he said.
Leonard Colebert’s body lay flat, on its back, on the forest floor, but his head was twisted nearly 180 degrees, like he was looking over his shoulder when he hit the ground, and his neck stayed that way. His eyes were open and blank. The fall had torn his down-filled jacket, and his pants had slipped partway down his butt.
It seemed apparent to everyone that he was dead, but he still looked in a lot better shape than Morton Dewart did when he was found.
“Oh my God,” Bob said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
No one said anything, but everyone was nodding.
“Why isn’t he, I mean, he doesn’t look like the bear got to him, does it?” Bob said.
Orville was shaking his head, looking back up the hill. “My guess is, he was running, looking behind him to see if the bear was gaining, went right off the cliff before he even knew it was there.” Orville paused. “All things considered, it was probably a lot better way to go.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
One of the two hunters with Orville pointed to Leonard Colebert’s partially dropped pants. “Look,” he said. “The guy was wearing a fucking diaper.”
His friend giggled and said, “I guess, if I ran into a bear in the woods, I’d wanna be wearing one of those, too.”
22
SOMEONE PUT IN A CALL to the local general practitioner/coroner, my good friend Dr. Heath, and being the oldest of all of us out there, even if Dad had been with us and not stuck back up there on the highway, he was offered some assistance navigating his way down the steep hill to examine Leonard Colebert and declare him officially dead. I offered my arm, but when the doctor saw who it was attached to, he pulled back and clung to someone else, a gesture Lawrence Jones didn’t fail to pick up on.
Lawrence said, under his breath, “How many days you been up here? And how many people have you already managed to piss off?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
The ambulance attendants didn’t mind accepting my help, and that of others, getting Leonard’s body, once it was on the gurney, back out to the ambulance. It took a good ten minutes to carry him up the hill and through the woods to the road. Dad was out of the car, leaning against it without his crutches, watching the action.
“What happened?” he asked when I walked up onto the shoulder of the highway. I brought him up to speed, including Orville’s theory, which, it pained me to realize, seemed to make a lot of sense. Leonard had been looking for what was behind him, instead of what was in front of him, and taken a header over the edge. The bear must have decided it was too much trouble to go down there and make a meal of him, and maybe had gone looking for Bob instead.
One of the ambulance attendants came up to us, a backpack hanging from one hand, and said, “This was Mr. Colebert’s.”
I reached out to take it as Dad said, “We can take that back and put it with his other stuff. I don’t know what family he has, but I guess they’ll be coming up to claim his things.”
The attendant said, “We think Mr. Spooner should come to the hospital to have those cuts and scrapes looked at, but we don’t want to make him ride in the ambulance with the deceased. Would one of you be able to take him in? We don’t think he should drive his truck.”
I offered to take Bob, in his own pickup, into Braynor. I made this proposal to him as he stood at the back of the ambulance, watching them load Leonard. He still appeared to be in a mild state of shock.
“I think I’m okay,” he said, looking numbly at the palms of his hands.
“You should go have those cuts checked,” I said. “You might get an infection if they don’t treat them. Why don’t you get in the truck.”
Chief Orville Thorne strode up to me, his finger pointing. “Not so fast with the smart remarks now, are you?”
I said nothing.
“You come up here from the city, bring along your fancy smart friends”-he nodded in Lawrence’s direction-“because we don’t know anything, we’re just a bunch of hicks, right? You think Dr. Heath and me don’t know what we’re doing, you have the nerve to cast doubt on his conclusions, suggesting he didn’t know a bear attack when he saw it. You tell me how to do my job. You really take the cake, you know that? You have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused? You probably got this man killed, telling him there really was no bear. Maybe, if he hadn’t listened to you, he’d still be alive.”
“I never told him anything,” I said.
“Yeah, well, whatever,” Orville said.
I said, “I’m going to drive Bob into town. Nice talking to you, Orville.”
I got Bob into the passenger seat and got myself back in behind the wheel. The keys were still in the ignition. The steering wheel was smeared with blood, and I tried to wipe most of it off with a tissue from my pocket. Once we were on the road and heading into Braynor, Bob said to me, “What was he talking about?”
“Nothing,” I said. “He just thinks I’m an asshole.”
“What did he mean, that you questioned the findings of the coroner, Dr. Heath? That he was wrong thinking it was a bear that killed that man at the camp?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, Bob. It’s just, I always had my doubts, because of those damn dogs. And how weird the Wickenses are, and what Betty had to say.”
“Betty? What did Betty have to say?”
“She used to be a nurse, and she saw Morton Dewart’s body, and she just didn’t think he looked like he’d been
