Read The Weirdo for Free Online

Dell.
    "My feet feel like they were in that threshing machine with Buck. Otherwise, I'm fine."
    "You spent the night in the swamp?"
    Sam laughed. "It sure wasn't at a Holiday Inn. I was in a hollowed-out stump."
    Dell said, "As soon as your papa gets back, he'll come up there and get you. Don't try to walk out, Samantha."
    "I can't walk across the room."
    The boy had listened and now said, "Tell your mother I'll bring you out to Dunnegan's."
    "You don't need to do that," Sam said.
    "I don't mind."
    Sam shrugged and nodded. "Mr. Clewt's son will bring me out. I'll call you just before we leave." The ride down the three-and-a-half-mile Feeder Ditch would take thirty minutes.
    Dell said again, "I'm so relieved, Samantha."
    Beginning to feel like herself once more, despite being weary and hungry, Sam said, "Likewise. I'll call you."
    ***
    AS SHE placed the phone down, Clewt's son said, "I'm Charles. People call me Chip."
They also call you something eke,
Sam thought. She wondered if he knew.
    "I'm Samantha Sanders. People call me Sam. I prefer that."
    "Sorry about the dogs. They're here to guard, and they do it well."
    "I'm a living example."
    "You said you spent the night in the swamp. You must be hungry."
    "I'm about starved. Last bite I had was yesterday afternoon."
    "We're vegetarians. Watercress sandwich okay? I'll make you two."
    So they didn't eat the birds. "Even plain bread would
be great." She'd never had a watercress sandwich. She'd never even known a vegetarian.
    "Diet drink?"
    "Fine."
    He limped across the room to the refrigerator and opened it.
    "Your father not around?"
    "He's in New York for a few days for an art exhibit."
    John Clewt, the Powhatan spillwayman, in New York City for an art exhibit? Sounded pretty farfetched, but Sam decided to let it pass.
    "I heard you lived back here with him."
    He was busy at the countertop. "I've been here a year and a half. I lived in Ohio the last eight years."
    "You don't go to school?"
    "I finished high school two years ago."
    "You don't look old enough to be out of high school two years ago."
    "I'm seventeen. I studied year-round."
    A brain,
she thought.
A huge brain. A bulging brain. Out of school at fifteen!
As her mother often said, "Don't be so nosy, Samantha."
    "Where'd you live in Ohio?"
    "Columbus, with my grandparents. It's okay," Chip said. He added, "If you like big cities."
    Oh, oh,
Sam thought.
Another one of those.
"Well,
I think I'd like to live in a big city," she said with purpose. "New York, Chicago..."
    "Where do you live?"
    "Five and a half miles due north, if a rotten buzzard flew a straight route. On Chapanoke Road. We live on a farm. But my papa's not a farmer. Not until he retires. He's in the Coast Guard."
    Chip limped back across the kitchen with the watercress sandwiches and a 7-Up. She noticed he'd taken the cotton glove off his left hand. It was the light leather color of the left side of his face and just as shiny. It was also partially withered. What had happened to this boy? He looked as though he'd been horribly burned.
    She thanked him for the food and drink, then asked, "What were you doing on the south side of the lake?" That wasn't being too nosy.
    "Checking on the bears."
    "Checking on the bears?"
    He nodded.
    "One of them got me into all this trouble." She told him what had happened with Buck.
    "That was probably Henry, Bear 56-89. He comes over on this side quite a lot. We've captured him twice. His original number was 1-88."
    "You have names and numbers for them?"
    All she knew about bears was what her father and grandfather had told her. Bear grease was good for
cooking doughnuts and softening boot leather. The fur wasn't worth saving. They had a sweet tooth and ruined trees. Keep away from them. Far away.
    "Human names?" That was ridiculous.
    "I name them for the fun of it. I've been helping a graduate student, Tom Telford, from NC State, keep track of them. He's gone back to Raleigh. Did that bear have a radio-collar?"
    "I