A Winter Haunting Page 6

  What I find interesting about this is not that Dale tried to kill himself—it was the fatigue and depression that led to that, not any self-pity he was generating, and I can say with more confidence than he could what his motivations were during this entire pathetic, disoriented time—but the fact that he chose suicide at all. Dale Stewart had always despised the idea of suicide and felt anger toward those who tried it and a real fury toward those who succeeded at it. These included a close friend in college, an even closer and much older friend in Missoula, and one of his students whom he had thought the world of.

  Even before Dale’s own descent into functional insanity, he had understood that suicides were not usually responsible for their decisions—his older friend, a French woman writer named Brigitte, had spent years battling depression before she locked herself in her bedroom and took two vials of horded sleeping pills—but Dale had always hated the narcissism of self-destruction, the ineluctable selfishness of the act. Brigitte had left four school-aged children behind. His former student, David, had left a pregnant young wife to deal with the trauma of finding his body hanging in the garage. It was, to Dale, inexcusable to leave such messes behind. Dale hated messes as much as he despised self-pity.

  Dale had once taught a semester-long seminar on Ernest Hemingway, and he had fallen into flat-out argument with a few of his smarter students on the writer’s culpability in ending his life the way he had.

  “The selfish bastard pulled the trigger on his Boss shotgun right at the foot of the stairs,” he had half yelled, “so that Miss Mary would have no choice but to walk through the puddles of blood and brains and shards of skull on her way to the phone.”

  “His dear Miss Mary had been the one to leave the keys to his gun case in plain view on the kitchen windowsill,” said his sharpest student, not retreating a bit. “Perhaps he was just acknowledging her choice and making her pay for it a bit.”

  Dale had actually glared at Clare across the seminar table. “Don’t you think that he was making her pay too high a price for agreeing with him that access to a man’s property was his right?”

  “After he’d received shock treatment for depression?” said Clare. “After he’d tried to walk into a spinning propeller during the flight to the clinic? After Miss Mary had needed to call a friend over to the Idaho house to wrestle a shotgun away from Hemingway the week before? No, I don’t think he made her pay too high a price. Besides, she received—and exploited to the teeth—all of his copyrights, including those miserable posthumous books that he never would have chosen to see in print. I think Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing when he sat on the steps to blow his brains out, knowing full well what Miss Mary would have to step through to get downstairs to the phone. They each got what they wanted.”

  Dale had blinked at Clare’s toughness on this. He had had no idea.

  Dale Stewart!”

  Dale almost dropped the last sack of groceries he was putting in the rear of the Land Cruiser. The last thing he expected to hear in the parking lot of the Oak Hill City Market was someone calling his name.

  Two women walked quickly toward him across the wet tarmac. The one who had called his name was vaguely familiar but still a stranger to him: indeterminate middle age, red hair that had been cropped short, once-fair skin that had been tanned to the consistency of leather, evidence of plastic surgery in the sharp face and neck and breasts—breasts too large and round and firmly packed even glimpsed through a sweater—hardly an Oak Hill or Elm Haven sort of person. The other woman was short, scowling, stocky, and sporting a Phys Ed woman teacher’s butch haircut. Dale, who was usually naive about such things, knew at once that the redhead and the short brunette were a couple. Dale, who had practiced safe political correctness for more than twenty professional academic years, indulged himself in the thought, Dykes.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” said the redhead.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dale. “I’m not sure . . .”

  “Michelle Staffney,” said the woman. “Now I go by Mica Stouffer.”

  Dale could only stare. Michelle Staffney had been the little sex grenade of his fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classes at Old Central School. Every boy in Elm Haven during the period 1957–1960 had probably celebrated his first erotic fantasies with Michelle Staffney in a starring role (unless they opted for Annette Funicello). And now, this worn and sharp-boned middle-aged woman with breast implants and a whiskey-cigarette voice.

  “Mica Stouffer?” Dale said stupidly.

  “I was out in L.A. for a lot of years,” said Michelle as if that explained everything. “What the hell are you doing back here in Illinois?”

  “I’m . . .” began Dale and then stopped. “How on earth did you recognize me, Michelle . . . Mica?”

  She smiled. The smile, at least, reminded him of the delectable, soft-voiced little girl he had known. “One of the producers I was living with had a copy of your book that some lamedick screenwriter was trying to push . . . a second Jeremiah Johnson or something. They wanted Bob Redford for the leading role, but Redford wouldn’t even read the treatment. But the book was always lying around in the bathroom or somewhere. I read the bio under your photo one day and decided that you were the same Dale Stewart I knew in Elm Haven about two hundred years ago.”

  “My book,” repeated Dale. “Do you remember which one?”

  “Does it matter?” said Michelle, the little-girl smile flickering into something much older and tougher. “I didn’t read the thing—didn’t read it personally, as they say out there—but the screenwriter told my producer friend that all of your books were essentially the same one, big tough mountain man shit. He said that if we optioned one, we’d really own all of them. Oh, this is Diane Villanova.”

  Dale shook hands with the brunette and had to flex his fingers afterward.

  “So what are you doing back here, Dale Stewart?” said Michelle/Mica.

  For a mad instant, Dale considered telling her the whole sad story of the last few years of his life, right down to his last view of Clare and all about Anne’s contemptuous farewell. Instead, he said, “Writing a book . . . I think.”

  “I thought you were a teacher or something as well.”

  “Professor of English,” said Dale, wondering if that were still true. “University of Montana at Missoula. On sabbatical.” He could hear the staccato telegraph-style of his speech and wondered where it was coming from.

  “And you’re staying in Oak Hill?” There was incredulity in her voice.

  “Near Elm Haven, actually,” he said. “Renting Duane McBride’s farmhouse for a few months.”

  Michelle Staffney blinked at this. “Duane McBride? The kid who was killed in that awful farm accident when we were ten or something?”

  “Eleven or twelve,” said Dale. “Summer of 1960. Yeah.”

  Michelle looked at her friend and then back at Dale. “That’s weird. But no weirder than our situation, I guess.”

  Dale waited.

  “Diane and I are spending a few months at my folks’ home in Elm Haven.”

  “On Broad Street,” said Dale. “The big house with the big barn behind it.”

  “Yep. The same. Only when I lived there as a kid, it was a great house . . . hell, even a great barn. Now it’s all a ramshackle fucking mess. Di and I are trying to get it fixed up a bit so we can sell it. Hoping that there’s some rich, snot-nosed young couple out of Peoria who wants a big Victorian house and who won’t check the wiring or the furnace or anything.”

  “Are your parents . . .” began Dale. He always felt strange asking someone his own age about their parents. His own folks had died young in the 1960s.

  “Dad died in . . . Jesus, 1975,” said Michelle. “But Mom just hung in there—senile as a loon, warehoused away in Alzheimer Manor here in Oak Hill for a few decades—until she died a couple of months ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dale.

  “Don’t be. It would have been a blessing for everyone if she�
��d shoved off years and years ago. Anyway, the house was empty and needed work, so it gave Di and me an excuse to get out of L.A. and away from the Industry for a while.”

  Dale heard the capital “I” in Industry. Just like everyone else in L.A. he thought.

  “You were involved with movies?” he said politely. “Producing?”

  “No,” said Michelle, the Mica smile returning and then fading. “I was mostly fucking producers. Even married two of them. I was an actress.”

  “Of course,” said Dale, making a conscious effort not to drop his gaze to the obviously unfettered and obviously unnatural breasts under her sweater. “Have you been in anything I might have seen?” He hated questions like that. Why did I ask it? When people asked him, “Have you written anything I might have read?” his impulse was always to say, “I don’t know. Do you read anything decent, or just the occasional John Grisham crap?”

  “Did you see Titanic?” asked Michelle.

  “Wow,” said Dale. “You were in that?”

  “Nope. But I was in It’s Alive IV that went straight to video the same month Titanic came out. And I was one of the alien dancers in the spaceship scene in The Fifth Element with Bruce Willis. The one with the bare blue tits. That was the last time anyone hired me . . . more than four years ago.”

  Dale nodded sympathetically. Bare blue tits, he thought, keeping his gaze level with hers through an act of will.

  Diane touched Michelle’s arm as if reminding her that it was cold and wet out here in the parking lot.

  “Yeah,” said Michelle. “Well, hell, we really should get together sometime and swap lies about the good old days. Di and I will probably be here through Christmas . . . maybe longer, given the mess we have to deal with. You got a card with your phone number?” She took out a pen and scribbled her number on her grocery receipt and gave it to him.

  Dale dug out a business card, using her pen to scratch out his ranch, university, and home phone numbers, and circling the mobile phone number. “The only problem,” he said, “is that cell phones don’t seem to work around Elm Haven.”

  Michelle raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I’m using there as my only phone. It works fine in town.”

  Dale shrugged. “Well, I guess there’s a dead area out near the McBride farm.”

  Michelle looked as if she was going to say something, stopped herself, tapped him on the arm, and said, “I’m serious about gabbing. Come on over and we’ll cook you a good dinner and drink a shitload of tequila.”

  The two women walked back to their Toyota pickup and drove off.

  “Michelle Staffney,” said Dale, still standing in the rain. “Jesus Christ.”

  SEVEN

  * * *

  DALE had driven only a few miles south out of Oak Hill toward Elm Haven when the two pickup trucks cut him off.

  At first he thought it was Michelle and her friend in the white pickup approaching quickly in the rearview mirror, but then he saw that it was not a new Toyota truck, but a beat-up old Chevy, with another old pickup—this one a scabrous green Ford—roaring along just behind it.

  Dale slowed down, waiting for the idiots to pass, but the first pickup pulled up alongside and stayed there, slowing when he did, accelerating when he did. Dale glanced over, saw the black leather jackets and the shaved heads, and thought, Oh, shit.

  The white Chevy pickup passed him and then slowed. The green Ford pickup pulled closer to his rear bumper. Suddenly the white pickup in front of him hit the brakes.

  Dale braked hard, lurching forward against the Land Cruiser’s shoulder harness, but still had to swerve right to avoid the Chevy. Luckily there was a gravel turnout by the side of the road—some sort of small picnic area rest stop. The Land Cruiser slid to a stop in the gravel there, and the green and white trucks blocked his way out.

  Three young men spilled out of the white Chevy pickup. Two more jumped out of the cab of the green Ford. All five of them had extremely short hair or shaved heads. All five wore black leather coats and combat boots. The tallest of the five had a swastika tattooed on the back of his right hand. The tallest was also the oldest—perhaps in his middle twenties—and the youngest looked to be about sixteen. At least three of the five were taller and heavier than Dale.

  Dale had perhaps ten seconds to decide what to do. It wouldn’t have been a problem for Dale’s father; he had always carried a lug wrench tucked under the driver’s seat of the family station wagon. Dale had always noticed that fact but had never asked his dad why he carried the heavy lug wrench there. Now he knew. But Dale Stewart—even while living and traveling in the wilds of Montana—had never thought that he needed a weapon handy.

  He wished like hell that he had one now.

  Heart pounding, Dale briefly considered locking the truck’s doors and waiting in the Land Cruiser. He even considered throwing the truck into four-wheel drive, going up and over the curb, driving through the grassy picnic area and the adjoining cornfield if necessary, and making a run for it down the county road. His pride kept him from doing either.

  Dale stepped out and down just as the five skinheads made a semicircle around him. Well, he thought, there’s still an outside chance that they are Jim Bridger: Mountain Man fans.

  “You the Jewboy Zionist motherfucker?” snarled the tallest of the skinheads.

  There goes the fan theory, thought Dale. He was amazed to realize that his pulse rate had fallen back to near-normal and that he was no longer frightened. Perhaps the situation was just too absurd for him to take seriously. It seemed like a bad postmillennial remake of Gentleman’s Agreement by way of Deliverance.

  Dale took his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and held it up with his thumb over the speed dial button. None of the programmed speed-dial numbers would do him a damn bit of good—even if the phone condescended to work out here in the boonies—but maybe the skinheads didn’t know. Standing there, phone poised, Dale felt a bit like Captain Kirk preparing to have Scotty beam him up. Yeah, I wish, he thought.

  “One of you named Derek?” said Dale, his voice strong and steady, all the while shooting an I’m-an-adult-and-you’re-going-to-be-in-deep-shit-in-a-minute look at each of the punks.

  The skinheads blinked. The next-to-youngest, an overweight mouth-breather who looked to be the least sharp knife in this particular drawer, actually blushed through his acne and took a step back. Dale fixed his heavy glare on Derek for a minute and then moved it to the leader’s face.

  “You didn’t answer our question, asshole,” said the leader, a gaunt-faced, hollow-eyed fascist if there ever was one. “You that nigger-loving Jewboy that wrote those magazine things?”

  “Articles,” said Dale. “Magazine and newspaper articles. That’s your vocabulary word for the day. No charge.”

  Four of the five stared blankly at him. Obviously they had not imagined the dialogue going quite this way in their fetid little power fantasies, and the discrepancy threw them off stride. The leader reached into his jacket pocket with a menacing glower.

  Will it be a knife or pistol? wondered Dale as he raised his own weapon—the useless cell phone. He heard himself say, “I know Derek, of course,” looking straight at Derek, “but I’ll need to know all of your names when I punch the state police number here. But I guess they’ll already know who Derek hangs around with.”

  Four of the skinheads looked at their leader. The older man’s hand came out of his pocket.

  Ah, thought the strangely detached part of Dale’s mind. Knife it is. He had always hated edged weapons.

  The other four clicked out their own knives: not switchblades, but ridiculously long survival knives that came from scabbards under their jackets.

  Dale punched Clare’s speed dial number at the same time, surreptitiously touching cancel as he heard the dial tone and the first rings, and raised the phone.

  “Get the fuck out of here and stay out,” said the oldest skinhead. He nodded to his pals.

  The younger boys slashed the closest t
wo of Dale’s tires. Dale made no move to stop them.

  The lead skinhead gave Dale the finger—an oddly childish gesture under the circumstances, Dale thought—and then all five were scrambling back into their pickups and roaring away, throwing gravel against the Land Cruiser and Dale.

  Dale waited a minute to make sure they were really gone and then checked the damage.

  He had a can of flat sealant in his emergency kit in the back, but these tires were well and truly slashed. And he had only one spare.

  Dale dialed 911. Amazingly, someone answered. “Creve Coeur County Emergency Services. Please state the nature of your emergency.”

  Feeling sheepish, Dale explained his situation and asked for the number of a towing service in Oak Hill. The 911 lady did not chastise him for using the emergency number for frivolous purposes, but gave him the number of a repair garage with towing service, offered to connect him, told him to call back if the belligerent youths—her phrase—returned, and then told him to sit tight, that someone would be there in fifteen minutes or less.

  “I don’t need . . .” began Dale but the 911 lady had signed off.

  Dale had not called the sheriff, but the sheriff arrived before the tow truck. Dale took one look at the fat man getting out of the green county sheriff’s car and felt his heart pounding with fear.

  C.J. Congden looked nothing like he had in 1960—the thin, lanky bully had gone to fat—but the mean eyes and yellow teeth and stupid expression were somehow the same. It can’t be him, thought Dale, but the fat man wheezed closer and Dale saw the name tag over the badge—“C.J.” Dale tried to remember the last time he had seen C.J. Congden: an image came back of the sixteen-year-old, mean-eyed bully hanging Dale over the edge of the Spoon River Bridge while Dale’s eleven-year-old friend, Jim Harlen, aimed a snub-nosed .38 revolver at Congden’s hot rod and threatened to pull the trigger if the bully dropped Dale into the river.