by Ben Clabaugh
CHAPTER 7
In what David came to learn was her typical over-protectiveness, Mrs. Skievaski kept Shelton in the next few days insisting he must have caught some hideous virus in the crush of all those people - resulting in his vomiting and subsequent exhaustion. David’s initial reaction was elation, but he couldn’t help but feel a little lonely. He wandered the empty house, watched Brady Bunch and Star Trek reruns, but was finally driven from the house with the onset of daytime soap operas—what his mom called ‘Cry Shows.’
He crossed the back yard, no particular destination in mind. Spreading the strands of rusty barbed wire, he bent down, stepped through the fence, and set off through the knee high pasture grass. The land sloped gently upward, and he imagined he was crossing the vast prairie heading into the western frontier to trap beaver, hunt grizz’, and find his fortune in gold—if the Indians didn’t get him first, that is. The ground was dotted with round, fibrous cow pies that he pretended were the spoor from a vast herd of buffalo. David knelt, gently touching a desiccated pile with his fingertips. “Hmm,” he murmured to Kicking Deer, his long-time friend and Indian scout. “Must be two-three days out.” Kicking Deer nodded and they set off at a trot, hoping to catch up to the buffalo before their meager supplies ran out.
At the top of the rise the pasture sloped away toward the north and west to a shallow valley filled with large trees—oak or walnut, he guessed. He never had been very good at remembering which trees were which. Cottonwoods were easy, but after that a tree was a tree as far as he was concerned.
David approached the trees in a half crouch hoping to make a difficult target if any hostiles hid in the shadows. He was a couple of dozen yards from the tree line when he noticed Kicking Deer was no longer at his side. Not knowing whether he had gone to ground out of some superior Indian sense or had been cut down by unseen attackers, David stood preparing to bolt, but froze before he could take a step. A flash of light winked from out of the trees to his left. David dropped to his stomach and then slowly raised himself up and peered in that direction.
“Hu….hello?” he called out. His heart skipped a beat as a shadow within the deeper shadows of the trees rose up and seemed to detach from the undergrowth. The foliage at the edge of the tree line shuddered, and a man stepped out.
He was short and stout and most of his thin dark hair was woven over and around his sweat-beaded bald pate. Several long strands had come free and floated around his head like stray feathers. He was dressed in dark pants and a dark shirt,—very uncomfortable in this heat, David thought—and a camera with an enormous telephoto lens attached hung from a strap around his neck. The strap bit into the piles of flesh at the back of the man’s reddening neck. It looked painful.
The man took a few steps into the field, stopped, glanced up and all around as if looking for something. A moment later he turned, saw David, and raised a hand.
“Oh hello,” he called with what seemed to David like forced cheer.
He pointed at the camera. “Bird watching,” he explained. He stood a moment longer as if waiting for a response.
With a lens like that, David thought, he must be trying to count the feathers of the bird he was watching. The way the man moved, looking up into the sky, glancing around too quickly to have spotted anything, made David suspicious.
When David did not respond, the man glanced around, stared a long moment past David toward the houses, nodded once, and mopped his forehead and the back of his neck with a dingy, white handkerchief.
“Okay then,” he said, chopping a wave at David. “Have a nice day,” and he set off walking briskly across the field parallel to the tree line, away from the houses.
David watched him go, unsure of what to do. He wanted to run home, but did not want the creep finding out where he lived.
He strolled casually to the edge of the trees, stopped, and peered through the leaves just in time to see the man step through the fence at the southern border of the pasture and disappear into the trees at the edge of the road. A moment later, he caught the glint of sunlight on a windshield of a car accelerating away.
Relieved to be alone, once more, David looked back toward his house once more, took a deep breath, turned, and walked into the trees.
