A Winter Haunting Page 5

  “It’s . . . the way you predicted,” she said at last.

  “I’m too old,” said Dale. They had come to a steep pitch and he instinctively leaned back in the saddle and put more weight on the stirrups to help the gelding keep its footing. Clare was doing the same with the roan.

  “I’m too young,” she said. For four years she had insisted—sometimes violently—that their age difference had made no difference. He had always disagreed with her. He wished she would disagree with herself now.

  “There’s no room for me in your life at Princeton,” he said. “You’re with people your own age and it’s a relief.”

  “No,” she said. And then, “Yes.”

  “You’re with someone else,” he said, hearing the hopeless flatness in his voice despite himself. They rode into an aspen grove alive with shimmer and the dry-autumn rasping of heart-shaped leaves.

  “No,” she said again. “Not completely with. Not in love. I don’t think I’ll be in love again for a long, long time. But there is someone I’m attracted to. Someone I’ve been spending time with.”

  “During the summer pre-program seminars?” Dale hated asking questions right then but could not have stopped himself if his life depended upon it. Perhaps his life did depend upon it. His voice sounded alien and dead even to him. The aspen leaves rattled and the wind stirred the dry, high grass as they rode out into the upper pasture. Clare’s nipples were hard against the thin cotton of her T-shirt. Her cheeks were flushed. She looked beautiful. At that moment, he almost hated her for that.

  “Sure,” she said. “I met him then.”

  “Have you . . .” He stopped himself just in time and looked away, west down the long canyon. The ranch was not quite in sight. He knew that it would not look the same to him when it did appear through the pines.

  “Slept with him?” finished Clare. “Yes. We’ve had sex. It’s part of my new life there. Exciting.”

  “Exciting,” repeated Dale. One of their generational differences over the past four years of surprise encounter, attraction, involvement, had been her use of the phrase “having sex” and his old-fogey insistence on his version of “making love.” Eventually she had spoken of their lovemaking only as lovemaking. Dale had seen it as a great step forward in their relationship. He chuckled at that now, feeling no mirth whatsoever. The gelding tried to look around at him as if he had given it a confusing command through his legs or the reins. He kicked it in the ribs to keep up with Clare’s roan, who had to be held back from a canter this close to the ranch.

  “Exciting,” said Clare. “But you know me. You must know how little it means.”

  Dale now laughed with some sincerity. “I don’t know you, Clare. That’s all that I do know right now.”

  “Don’t make it difficult, Dale.”

  “Heaven forbid.”

  “You predicted this a thousand times. No matter how often I said that it wouldn’t play out this way, you insisted it would. Every time I wanted to settle things between us . . . about Anne and the children . . . this was one of your reasons for waiting. What I didn’t understand was that . . .”

  “All right,” said Dale, interrupting her with a harsher note than he had meant to use. “You’re right. I understood then. I understand now. You just denied that it could happen so many times that I got stupid. I sold myself on the fantasy.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you any more than . . .”

  “What do you say we shut up for now and just talk later, during the drive back to the airport? Let’s just enjoy the last half-hour or so of the trip.”

  They did not, of course. Enjoy the end of the camping trip. Or talk during the ride back to Missoula.

  It was the last time he had seen Clare. It was two months before he loaded the Savage over-and-under, set the barrel against his brow, clicked off the safety, and pulled the trigger. It was ten months before he decided to spend his sabbatical year writing in Illinois. It was one year, six weeks, and three days before he arrived at his dead friend Duane’s house in this godforsaken exile in Illinois. But who was counting?

  It took Dale a while to unload the Land Cruiser and to find someplace for his stuff. The boxes of books and winter clothes could wait, of course, but he wanted to set up his ThinkPad computer somewhere comfortable and to dig out the clean sheets, pillowcases, towels, and other items he had brought from the ranch. Everything personal, he realized, was going into the parlor/study where Mr. McBride had slept long ago and where Mr. McBride’s aging sister had lived—without changing anything—for most of the past forty years.

  The ThinkPad went on the old desk comfortably enough—the wall outlet had no polarizer holes, but Dale had anticipated that and brought a two-prong adapter for the surge protector. Sandy Whittaker had warned him that there had been no phone lines to the house since 1960, but Dale had brought his cell phone. The phone was equipped for e-mail, of course, but he was old-fashioned and he made the infrared connections to the Thinkpad and dialed up the Peoria AOL access number. His phone informed him that there was no service. None at all. He could not even make a telephone call.

  “Shit,” said Dale. He had deliberately checked with Illinois Bell to make sure that there was service to this part of the county.

  Well, this had to be some sort of local glitch . . . a cell shadow or perhaps even a problem with the cell phone itself. He could always drive a few miles to get back into clear reception to make his calls and launch his e-mails. The thought gave him a frisson that was not totally unpleasant. It had been years since he had been so isolated. Even at the ranch he’d had the C-band antenna pulling in a score of satellites for TV—some of them broadcasting in high-definition now—and two regular phone lines, one dedicated for fax, as well as his mobile phone. Now he was . . . quiet. Hell, he thought, I wanted time for serious reading . . . research. This will help. He wanted to believe it.

  Dale unpacked more stuff through the dim afternoon. He knew that he should drive to Oak Hill and do some grocery shopping—he’d be damned if he’d go to something called the KWIK’N’EZ—but he had packed a cooler for the trip with some sandwiches, three bottles of beer, some orange juice, a few apples and oranges, other stuff, and it seemed still good. He set these few things in the refrigerator, decided he was hungry, and had one of the ham sandwiches and a beer for lunch.

  For years, every time he had packed a lunch to eat in his office at the university or for a trip, Anne had done something she first started while packing picnics during their honeymoon twenty-seven years earlier: when Dale unwrapped his sandwich, there would always be a single bite taken out of it. A salutation. Beatrice saying “salve” to young Dante. A reminder.

  There were no bites taken out of this sandwich. Nor would there be any in the future.

  Dale shook his head. He was still tired and the beer had not helped that, but this was no time for more self-pity.

  He carried the last couple of boxes in from the truck. The sheets and clean blankets and pillowcases and towels were in the last box, of course, and he took his time unpacking them. The sheets were too big for the small bed in the study, but he folded them over until they fit without too much wrinkling. The thick towels looked out of place in the severe bathroom.

  It was getting dark. Dale went into the parlor and wandered through the dining room and back into the kitchen. No TV had magically appeared. It would have been nice to watch the network news and then the local news from Peoria . . . even nicer to catch CNN Headline News or call up some news sites on the Net. He went back to pull the last of the extra towels and sheets from the boxes.

  His Savage over-and-under shotgun/.22 rifle was packed beneath the bottom layer of towels, wrapped in plastic, broken into its two component parts, but clearly oiled and ready.

  Dale actually took a step back from the box in shock. He not only clearly remembered not packing the weapon, he remembered where he had put it—in the basement at the ranch, wrapped in its soft gun case, far back on the highest and hardest-to
-reach storage shelf.

  Dale’s hands were shaking as he lifted the old weapon out of the box and carefully unwrapped it. At least there was no ammunition—neither .22 shells nor shotgun shells for the .410. He looked in the lower breech.

  A shotgun shell was nestled there. Dale had to try three times before his fingers could extricate it.

  It was the shell. The one from 4:00 A.M. on November fourth, almost a year earlier. Dale could clearly see the indentation where the firing pin had struck the center of the shell.

  Fire in the hole, he thought. A shell on which the firing pin had dropped could, theoretically, go off at any time.

  Even more clear than his recollection of wrapping and storing the Savage in the basement of the ranch was his memory of throwing the shell far out from the porch, deep into the Douglas fir and lodgepole pines there.

  I am nuts. I’ve gone fucking crazy again. He reached for the phone and actually speed-dialed Dr. Hall’s office number before the no service sign on the LCD reminded him that such a quick sanity fix was no longer an option.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dale said aloud. He set the phone back, weighed the death shell in his palm, went to the back door, walked out into the muddy lot in the freezing rain, and threw the shell as far out into the stubbled cornfield as he could. Then he went back into Duane’s farmhouse and went through every other box he had brought in, dumping scores of books on the floor of the dining room and study, throwing clothes on the sagging furniture, leaving his stuff on every surface until he was confident that he had not packed any other ammunition.

  Finally he carried the rewrapped Savage over-and-under down to the basement—Duane’s basement, filled with lamps and warm from the furnace—finally setting one piece of the weapon behind a workbench and the other piece in a small niche filled with bell jars in which small, bloody human organs seemed to be floating. Tomatoes, he thought.

  Then he went upstairs, read for an hour or two—starting with Dante’s Inferno but soon switching to a Donald Westlake Dortmunder comedy mystery—and turned off the light by 8:00 P.M., but not before he went into the bathroom and took two flurazepam and three doxepin. He would sleep this night.

  Sometime around 3:30 A.M.—he could not quite read the dial of his watch because his mind and eyes were so fuzzy from the medication—Dale woke to the sound of the dog growling in the kitchen. He realized that he was not at the ranch, that he must have fallen asleep again on the leather couch in his study in the Missoula house, and he wished that Anne or one of the girls would let the dog, Hasso, out. The growling grew louder and then faded. Dale started to fade as well, but then the girls began stomping and thumping upstairs . . . no, the footfalls were much too heavy to be the girls. They must have some boys visiting. So late? Dale thought fuzzily. And isn’t Mab in college?

  While he tried to sort this out and simultaneously figure out why his leather couch was so hard and lumpy, the upstairs thumping stopped but another dog began howling just outside. Probably the Beckers’ dog outside again. He knew he should get up and let Hasso out, then go upstairs to bed—Anne would chide him in the morning about falling asleep downstairs again—but he was just too damned tired.

  He went back down into a drugged sleep to the sound of Hasso’s nails scraping on the tile of the kitchen just down the hall.

  SIX

  * * *

  I SAID that I did not know the details of my own death—and that is true—but I know very well, better than Dale himself, the details of Dale’s attempted suicide.

  He had been alone at the ranch for almost five months when Clare visited for the last time in September a year ago. He had confronted Anne in the spring, moved out of his Missoula home in April, saw the girls only sporadically over the summer—and never at the ranch, since Mab refused to visit there and Katie followed her lead—and then was truly and totally and irreversibly alone come the middle of September when Clare said good-bye and flew back to Princeton.

  Dale had not been sleeping well during the spring and summer, and by the time the cottonwood and aspen leaves had fallen in the hills and valleys around the ranch, he was not really sleeping at all. Night was a vortex of thought, a firestorm of frenzied and useless mental activity. He would wander the dark rooms of the ranch, ending up in his study there, the wind rattling the wall of windows, sitting in the blue-lighted dark writing letter after letter—usually to Clare, but sometimes to Anne, frequently to Mab or Katie, occasionally to friends he had not seen for years—and then, come dawn, he would destroy the letters and try for an hour or two of dream-plagued dozing. His teaching at the university—already on autopilot—went to hell. The head of the department—no friend—called him in to warn him. The dean, an old friend, finally followed suit, explaining that she knew about Dale’s divorce, knew that he had been drinking, and suggested ways that she and his other colleagues could help. Dale ignored the suggestions.

  Dale had not been drinking. Alcohol interested him no more than did food. He lost almost thirty pounds between the middle of September and November 4 of that year. His short-term memory had all but ceased to exist, and he had reached the point where he was getting essentially zero REM sleep. One of his English department colleagues suggested that Dale’s eyes looked like two cigarette holes burned through a white sheet. Dale had never heard that cliché before—he had been spared it until then, he told the colleague—but now that he had heard it, he thought of it every time he looked into a mirror.

  Dale rode the gelding through the valleys and orchards near the ranch, sometimes staying out for days at a time, eating nothing but the occasional hardtack, brewing thick coffee over campfires, and sleeping under thin blankets. He was sure that the gelding thought he was crazy. He was not sure that the gelding was wrong.

  In the third week of October that year, after having written and deleted more than a score of letters, after having picked up the telephone a hundred times only to put it down after dialing the number in Princeton but before he heard a ring, Dale threw some clean underwear, extra jeans, his old blue flannel shirt, and a water bottle into his canvas pack, jumped into the Land Cruiser at 10:30 one night, and drove toward Princeton, following I-90 through Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Chicago, northern Indiana, northern Ohio, the corner of Pennsylvania, and western New York until he finally pulled over to sleep on the New York Thruway sixty-three hours after he had left, awoke, realizing that this was the wrong thing to do, and drove slowly back to Montana, swinging north from Minneapolis to I-94 and then across a suddenly wintery North Dakota.

  In the last few days of October, he had written a sixty-four-page poem—a combination epic odyssey of his drive and a letter of love and understanding to Clare. Personally, I think the thing is a masterpiece of madness—a logical explication of total freewheeling insanity—and perhaps the most interesting thing Dale Stewart had written to that point.

  Unfortunately, while he would never have lifted such a pathetic thing set down on paper, placed it in an envelope, found a stamp for it, and driven it to a mailbox, he had written it as an e-mail attachment. Weighing on him so heavily, it had no real weight. He e-mailed it at 3:26 A.M. on November 1, using Clare’s new university e-mail address, which he had looked up on Bigfoot. Dale slept for six hours that day—the longest uninterrupted rest he had enjoyed in more than a month. The one-line note and sixty-four-page attachment returned later that day, forwarded back to him without comment, almost certainly unread. Dale was not surprised. He deleted all copies of the poem.

  The next seventy-two hours are essentially lost to Dale—his sleep deprivation had reached the point of brain cell death—but I am aware of every hour and minute of his wandering through the ranch, his muttering in the middle of the night, his repeated walks to the barn as if to saddle up his gelding—which was already stabled for the winter down in Missoula—and his hundred false starts at e-mailing or calling Clare . . . or Anne . . . or someone.

  At a little before four o’clock on the morning of November
4, Dale got out of bed after six hours of lying there awake, wrote a brief note on a Post-it pad—the note read “Don’t come inside. Call the county sheriff” and gave the sheriff office’s phone number, which he had to look up in his county directory—stuck the note on the inside of the back-door windowpane, pulled his Savage over-and-under out of the closet and out of its old canvas case, went into his office, unlocked a drawer, fumbled a .410 shell out, loaded the shotgun, paused a moment to consider which room would be most appropriate, and then went into the master bathroom, knelt on the tiles, set the muzzle of the shotgun against his forehead, selected the correct firing chamber with a click, and—with no hesitation or final thoughts—pulled the trigger.

  The hammer fell. The firing pin clicked. The shell did not fire.

  Dale knelt there for several minutes, waiting. It was as if time had stretched out in his final instant of life—rather like the mathematics of a person falling into a black hole where seconds become eternities just before time itself disappears into the singularity forever—but the shotgun blast never came. Eventually Dale lowered the barrel, broke the breech, and looked at the shell, wondering if some cowardly part of his subconscious had selected the .22 barrel rather than the loaded shotgun.

  No, the firing pin had fallen on the shell. Dale could see the dent in the center of the brass circle.

  Dale’s father had given him the Savage over-and-under when Dale was eight years old. He had fired it hundreds of times, cleaned and oiled it well, stored it carefully, and never abused it. It had never misfired before. Not once.

  After a while, Dale’s knees became sore from kneeling on the bathroom tiles. He got up, removed the shell, propped the shotgun against the bedroom wall, set the misfired shell on the bookcase, took the note down from the back door, and slept for three hours. When he awoke, he called his doctor. Within forty-eight hours he had an appointment with a Missoula psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Hall. The talk therapy was useless. The Prozac began to help about two months later.