“I’m going to talk to Magnuson about this,” Sarah said, invoking the name of our much-feared—at least by me—managing editor. “This is stupid.”
“So you’re saying don’t worry about it.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?” I said.
I sensed Sarah smiling at the other end. “I know,” she said tiredly. “But you have had lapses.”
Not more than a minute after I hung up, the phone rang again. “I’m finally done,” Dad said. “Can you come get me?”
“Sure.”
“Are you planning to pick me up in that little car of yours, or are you going to bring my truck?”
I did a brain-sigh. “It’s a safe car, Dad. It’s also good for the environment. It’s a hybrid.”
“Oh jeez, say no more. Why don’t you come in the truck. Extra set of keys in the drawer. I’ll have more room to stretch out my leg, which hurts like the bejeezus.”
“Twenty minutes,” I said. “But we have to pick up some things on the way back.”
“Like what?” Dad asked.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, and hung up.
Dad’s truck was like his cabin: immaculate. Except for a few dead leaves on the driver’s floor mat, it was spotless inside, and the gas gauge was only a needle’s width from full. Dad had never let the tank on any vehicle he’d ever owned go below the halfway point, and any time I’d ever borrowed his car as a teenager, I made sure to never leave it with anything less than three-quarters of a tank of gas. “It’s simple preparedness,” he’d say. You get an overnight oil crisis, and you’re all set.
Braynor District Hospital wasn’t hard to find. It sat on a hill on the road going out of Braynor to the north, and driving into town from the south you could see the blue “H” atop the building in the distance. I swung through the entrance to Emergency and saw Dad waiting for me behind the glass doors, sitting in a wheelchair with a pair of crutches in front of him, propped on his shoulders.
I left the truck running, exhaust spewing out the tailpipe, and as the electric doors parted, Dad said, “What are you doing, leaving the truck running?”
“Dad, I’m right here, I can see the tr—”
“Someone could just run up and make off with it,” he said.
“For Christ’s sake, Dad, we’re like, twenty feet away from it,” as I reached over to take the crutches. “Can you just crank it down for a second?” I went back to the truck, slipped the crutches in the short cargo area behind the seats, then returned to my father.
“We taking the wheelchair?” I asked.
“No, just wheel me to the truck, and then you leave it here.”
I nodded, pushed the chair close to the truck, opened the passenger door, then wheeled the chair a bit closer. Dad reached out, grabbed the truck’s inside door handle, and started hauling himself out of the chair, resisting my attempts to assist him. “I’ve got it,” he said, putting his weight on one foot only. The other was clad in just a thick sock, which was pulled up over whatever bandaging they’d wrapped around his ankle.
Once he was in the truck and seatbelted in, I closed the door and returned the wheelchair to the lobby. Then I was back in the truck.
“Where’s a good sporting goods store?” I said, putting the truck into gear.
“What?” asked Dad. “You’re not going to help me? You’re just up here to do a little fishing?”
Just hold it together, I told myself. “Bear spray,” I said. “It’s like pepper spray. It was a friend of your neighbors became dinner for a bear in your woods. So I figure, unless you want to be his breakfast tomorrow, maybe we should get ourselves a can or two.”
My father considered that a moment. “That’s a good idea,” he said, apparently surprised that I could come up with one. “You can’t be too safe, you know.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I said.
6
WE DISCUSSED BUYING FIVE CANS of bear pepper spray—one for each of the cabins—but when I ran into the sporting goods store and found they were about fifty bucks each, I knew Dad would be relieved to find that they only had a couple cans of the stuff left. There was dust on the tops, indicating that the product was not exactly flying off the shelf.
I popped into a men’s shop on the main street for some extra underwear and socks, since I’d left the city without packing. When I got back into the pickup, Dad said he was thinking about inviting everyone from the other cabins to his place for dinner and beer.
“Everyone’s probably kind of shook up, with what happened and all,” Dad said. “That poor son of a bitch, getting eaten by a goddamn bear. And I don’t want everyone bailing on me either, leaving me with a bunch of empty cabins. Cabin three’s already empty. You can help yourself to that one.”
“Thanks,” I said.