A Winter Haunting

EIGHTEEN

ABOUT three months after Dale began his affair with Clare Hart (aka Clare Two Hearts), he traveled to Paris as a guest of his French publisher and the Ministry of Culture for a conference on “Liberation Fiction of Indigenous Peoples.” It was January break at his university after a depressing Christmas that he spent at home but not really at home, and Anne had not even considered accompanying him to the conference. Dale himself had originally decided to skip the conference despite the rare treat of a free trip to Paris—he knew that the invitation was based on a French misreading of his third Jim Bridger book, Massacre Moon, in which several of his mountain man characters, including several impossibly benevolent French beaver trappers, sided with the Blackfeet to help the tribe avoid a massacre by encroaching federal troops. It was the most politically correct of all his novels and the most historically inaccurate. The French had loved it. In the end, Dale had decided to accept the invitation at the last minute, both to bolster his sagging credit with his dean and department and to get away, even if just for the seven days of the conference, from the double life in Missoula that had been driving him crazy.

Montana had been uncommonly warm and relatively snowless that winter, but Paris was wet and freezing. The conference writers were all being put up at the swanky Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail, but of the ten American writers there, only Dale seemed to know that this hotel had been the headquarters for the Gestapo all during the Occupation. A faded bronze plaque near the entrance announced the historical importance of the hotel only in terms of it having been the headquarters of the Red Cross after the war and the locus for attempts to reunite refugee families.

Dale’s editor from Editions Robert Laffont had been busy squiring around his real writers—Dale was the only non–Native American author invited from the States—so he was met at Roissy–Charles de Gaulle airport by a woman representing the Ministry of Culture’s Agence Pour l’Organisation de l’Accueil des Personalitiés Étrangères from the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, which Dale immediately translated through his jet lag as the Poor Organization to Acquire Strange Personalities, a part of the Ministry for Strange Affairs. Since the woman’s job was to deal with foreign artistic types, specifically Americans, she spoke zero English and was obviously shocked that Dale spoke no French. She quickly led him through the Death Star concrete bowels of the airport to a Renault in the oppressive parking garage and drove him into Paris in a silence broken only by her exhalations of cigarette smoke.

His work at the conference began that evening. The meetings were being held in the ornate Hôtel de Ville—the city hall—and the first evening was given over to a series of greetings by the mayor, by various ministry officials, by the organizers, and by others—possibly including the president—although Dale would never be certain who was who because all of the proceedings were in French and there was no one to translate for him. He was just happy that he had worn his best black suit that evening and that he was able to stay awake through the jet lag and that he never heard his name called so that he did not have to speak. Actually, none of the thirty or so writers present, mostly African other than the exhausted-looking Native American writers and himself, were asked questions that evening, not even by the French media who crowded the anterooms and wide hallways outside the conference room and shouted questions only at the French politicians and ministry officials.

This sense of being lost in a jet-lagged nightmare in which human speech dominated everything yet in which almost nothing could be understood continued through the next two days, although by that time his editor had spared him some time and he had been assigned an interpreter—a pale young woman who chain-smoked Galoise’s and who interpreted only the parts of the conference that directly required Professor Stewart’s attention, which was almost none of it.

Dale’s editor was in his early thirties—twenty years younger than Dale—and was very pale, a condition emphasized by the unrelentingly black turtlenecks, suits, and sport coats the young man wore. The editor specialized in Native American fiction and boasted that during his six visits to the United States, comprising more than three months in the country, he had never set foot anywhere other than Native American reservations, with the exceptions of several Indian war battlefield memorials and, of course, the rides to and from airports. His paleness was also emphasized by a small mouth that looked unnaturally red—although Dale was never sure that his editor wore lipstick—painted eyes and eyebrows, and severely cropped black hair with a small, sprayed, upturned crest in front. His name was Jean-Pierre, but Dale immediately thought of him as Pee-wee Herman and was never able to rid himself of that image.

On the second day, his publisher had arranged a small press conference for Dale at the Hôtel de Ville, and Jean-Pierre, whose English was atrocious, took over the interpreting duty from the bored, chain-smoking woman whose name Dale never quite caught.

The first question from the press was translated as “When the armed revolution from the oppressed indigenous peoples of America becomes reality, on which side will the bourgeois pseudo-intellegentsia such as yourself proclaim?”

To which Dale could only reply, “What?”

On the third day, just as Dale was leaving for the late-morning beginning of the conference, Clare arrived.

Dale stopped in the lobby and stared at her in pure shock and surprise. The night before he had phoned Anne and they had actually talked—the first real conversation they had enjoyed for many weeks. Dale knew that it was only his sense of feeling homesick and out of place that had prompted the call and tone of the conversation, but it felt natural nonetheless. Now this. Now Clare.

He had no idea how she had found him. She had gone home for Christmas break—home being Italy—and Dale had not expected to see her again for another two weeks. He had never told her that he had decided to go to Paris for this conference, and there was no one at the school to give her the hotel address. How had she tracked him down?

“Don’t be silly,” said Clare, taking his arm as they returned to the elevator and went back up to his room to make love, the first hour of the conference day be damned. “I’m part Blackfeet. That’s what they do—track people. Don’t you read your own books?”

After this, the week changed magically. Clare had her own plans for Paris, but she found time to accompany him to what she called the Liberal Fiction of Indigenous Pimples, to dismiss the chain-smoking non-interpreter, and to whisper translations to him during the stultifying proceedings. Her French, Dale soon realized, was perfect, unaccented except for its Parisian sophistication. The conference proceedings amounted to even more bullshit shoveling than Dale had imagined, but Clare livened it up with commentary so that sometimes the presiding academician or politician had to look over at their end of the table like a schoolmarm frowning at giggling children.

In the late evening, after the de rigueur three-hour conference or publishing-related dinners, which Clare attended without asking permission of Dale or anyone else, invariably identifying herself only as “Clare” to the obviously curious French hosts and indigenous-peoples’-writer guests, at the midnight hour when Dale had just begun dragging himself back to the Lutetia and bed for the first two nights, now he and Clare would go out and see Paris.

Clare took him to a wonderful all-night jazz club with the ironic name of Montana. They had memorable chocolate mousse at 1:30A.M. at a place near the Pont Neuf called Au Chien Qui Fume, went to Montmartre to watch topless dancers at the Lili la Tigresse, stopped at a fantastic little bar off the Boulevard Raspail that Clare insisted had been a favoring watering spot of Hemingway that no tourists knew about—they were all over at the overpriced Harry’s Bar—and which offered more than fifty varieties of single-malt scotch, popped over to the Right Bank for more music with a young crowd at the Le Baiser Sale, took a cab to the Alsace brasserie on the Champs-Élysées to eat seafood as the street-sweeping machines swished down the avenue in the pre-dawn, and walked along the Seine as the sky lightened to the east.

In midmorning, after hours of lovemaking, Clare insisted that they take the corny Bateux-Mouches tour on the Seine even though the day was freezing, and they sat huddled together for warmth on the upper deck. Afterward, they walked slowly through the Jardin du Luxembourg and then sought out Baudelaire’s tomb in the Cimetière de Montparnasse. When Dale suggested that this common Parisian activity of visiting tombs was a bit macabre, Clare said, “Macabre? You want macabre? I’ll show you macabre.”

Clare took him down the Boulevard Raspail past the avant-garde building housing the Foundation Cartier center for modern art, to an intersection labeled Denfert-Rochereau. “Denfert is a muddling of enfer,” said Clare. “Inferno. Hell.” They passed through a small iron door in a stone wall, rented a flashlight from a sleepy attendant, and spent the next two hours wandering the underground maze of Paris’s catacombs, a storage point for skeletons disinterred from overflowing surface cemeteries since the days of the French revolution. Clare gave him pause when she explained that the bones and skulls neatly stacked two meters high on every side of their tunnel and extending off in niches and side tunnels everywhere were thought to number about six million. “We’re seeing the Holocaust in this mile or so of walking,” she whispered, flicking the flashlight across the walls of thigh bones and empty eye sockets.

That night they dined with Dale’s editor, Jean-Pierre. . . or, as Clare invariably called him since he had shared his thoughts about the little man’s appearance, Jean-Pee-wee. The restaurant was the Bofinger near the Bastille. The food was fantastic and the atmosphere was pure upscale Alsatian brasserie—black and white tile floors, wood, brass, tall glass looking out on the rain-swept streets, and people who knew how to dine and drink in style. There were several dogs in attendance late that evening, but no children. The French knew that dining was serious business and not improved by the presence of children.

The food that night was as no-nonsense excellent as Jean-Pee-wee’s monologues were nonsense merde. Dale had the chef’s special—a stew called cassoulet that included white beans cooked with preserved goose, carrots, pig’s trotters, and God knows what else, while Clare enjoyed choucroute —which looked suspiciously like sauerkraut to Dale—complete with wonderfully prepared versions of pork chops, bacon, sausage, and boiled potatoes. Jean-Pee-wee ordered canard à la pressé, which, he explained with much pleasure, literally meant duck killed by suffocation, and everyone enjoyed side dishes of heaped pommes frites. The Alsatian wine was wonderful.

Jean-Pierre was explaining Dale’s novel Massacre Moon to him. “What you explained and which the American-Anglo bourgeois will never understand in their capitalist self-satisfaction of suburbs, is the—how shall we say it? The spiritual completeness of Native Americans as to opposite of which the devoid of your average United States personage. . .”

Dale concentrated on sipping the wine and enjoying his cassoulet. Clare looked up from her choucroute and smiled ever so slightly at the young male editor. Dale had seen that smile before and knew what was coming.

“The ghosts in your tale, for instance,” continued Jean-Pierre. “The average American would dement himself if such should be seen, no? Of course. Whereas, for the oppressed indigenous soul, for the enlightenment Native American who is to nature as tree is to wind, ghosts are much to be understood, commonplace, beloved and welcomed, no?”

“No,” said Clare with her smile deepening.

Jean-Pierre, a born monologist, blinked at this interruption. “Pardon, mademoiselle?”

“No,” repeated Clare. She ate a ribbon of pommes frites with her fingers and turned her attention and smile back to the editor. “Indians neither love nor understand ghosts nor find them commonplace,” she said softly. “They’re scared to death of ghosts. Ghosts are almost always considered the pure evil part of a living person and are to be avoided at all costs. A Navajo family will burn down their hogan if a person dies inside, sure that the person’s chindi —the evil spirit—will contaminate the place like a cancer if they remain.”

Jean-Pierre frowned deeply at her, his too-crimson mouth looking rather clownlike against his white skin. “But we are not speaking of the Navajo, with whom I spent a wonderful three weeks in your state of Arizona this two years past, but of the Blackfeet of Professor Stewart’s novel!”

Clare shrugged. “The Blackfeet are as terrified by ghosts as the Navajo. At least the ghosts in European tradition—say, the ghost of Hamlet’s father or Scrooge’s partner Marley—have personalities. They can reason, talk, defend their actions, warn the living of the folly of their ways. To the Plains Indians—to almost all Indians—the spirit of a dead person has no more personality than a fart.”

“Pardon?” said Jean-Pierre, blinking. “A. . . faret?”

“Un pet,” said Clare. “Just a noxious gas left behind. Ghosts in Indian traditions are always evil, always unpleasant, absolutely one-dimensional—less interesting in their way than the powerless shades in Hades that Orpheus and Eurydice visited.”

She was obviously speaking too quickly for Jean-Pierre. Dale guessed that his editor had understood no words after “un pet.” “If mademoiselle refers to the indigenous people of the United States as ‘Indians,’ “said Jean-Pierre, his voice dripping Gallic sarcasm, “then mademoiselle has no understanding of indigenous people.”

Dale started to speak then, but Clare encircled his wrist with her thumb and forefinger and squeezed. She smiled sweetly at Jean-Pierre. “Monsieur Pee-wee must certainly be correct.”

The editor had frowned again, paused, started to speak, and then changed the subject, moving his monologue along to the current political folly in the United States, explaining the vast conspiracy of moneyed interests—probably Jews, Dale interpreted—who controlled all reins of power in that benighted country.

Later, at Gestapo headquarters, in their bed, with the moonlight flowing over the rooftops of Paris and falling on their naked bodies, Dale had whispered, “Is this real? Are we real? Is this going to last, Clare?”

She had smiled at him from inches away. Dale was not sure, but he did not think that it was the same smile that she had showed Jean-Pee-wee in the Alsatian brasserie. “I can only think of Napoleon’s mother’s favorite quote,” she whispered back.

“Which was?”

“Ça va bien pourvu que ça dure—”

“Which means?”

“It goes well as long as it lasts.”

Dale awoke in the basement of The Jolly Corner. It was late morning. His restarted and reset watch said 10:45, and a weak, sluggish light filtered through the slits of the grimy basement windows. Padding in his slippers, still in the old sweatsuit he wore for pajamas, he went up to the kitchen. The farmhouse was cold and drafty, and the sunlight outside looked as weak and hung over as he felt. The rain from the night before had frozen into long icicles that hung outside the windows and door like prison bars. The refrigerator and cupboards were almost empty. He was starved and hungry for something other than the cereal and milk he always ate for breakfast, hungry for something like rich, black coffee and warmed croissants with melted butter dripping on them. He wondered if he had dreamt about food.

He walked into the study and stopped. The computer was on. The stupid quote from Milton was still on the screen, as was his ultimatum from the previous night:

>Tell me who you are or I’ll shut this fucking computer down forever.

Beneath that, this:

>I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow, grafted onto daylight. Maudlin evasions, theopathies—every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything dies, unwanted and neglected—everything.

Irritated by the double-talk on the screen and by a half memory of disturbing dreams and by the real memory of his conversation with Mab and his failure to wait for Anne’s call, Dale hurriedly blocked the passage and reached for theDELETE key.

He paused.

Rereading the paragraph of nonsense brought words, almost a phrase, to mind. Icicles. Sisters. Sybil.

He shook his head. He had a headache and he was out of food. Even the fucking bread was moldy. He’d go shopping and worry about this later.

An hour later, Dale came out of the KWIK’N’EZ carrying his three plastic bags of groceries and froze in place. Derek and his four skinhead friends were standing at the pumps between Dale and his Land Cruiser. Their two old Ford and Chevy pickups were the only other vehicles on the rainy tarmac.

Dale paused just outside the gas station/convenience store’s doors. He felt a surge of adrenaline and panic and instantly hated himself for being afraid.

Go inside and call the cops. . . the state police, if not the sheriff’s office. He glanced over his shoulder at the fat and acned teenage girl behind the counter. She met his stare with a bovine gaze and then deliberately looked away. Dale guessed that she was probably a girlfriend of Derek’s or one of the other skinheads. . . or perhaps she served all of them.

Hefting the plastic bags and wishing they were heavier—filled with heavy cans of vegetables, perhaps—Dale stepped off the curb and began walking toward the clustered skinheads.

The leader—the man in his mid-twenties with a swastika tattooed on the back of his right hand—showed small, irregular teeth in a wide grin as Dale approached. He was holding something in his hand, hiding it.

Dale felt his legs go weak, and again he was furious at himself. In an instant he played out the fantasy of the boys parting for him just long enough for him to get his loaded Savage over-and-under out of the backseat, of blasting away into the asphalt to frighten them, of knocking the lead skinhead down, of kneeling on his chest and banging his fucking skull into the wet pavement until blood ran out of the motherfucker’s ears. . .

The Savage was not in the backseat. In any fight, Dale knew, the skinhead would have all the advantages—experience, meanness, willingness to hurt another person. His heart pounding uselessly, Dale abandoned his fantasies and tried to focus on the unpleasant reality of now.

“Hey, Professor Jewboy motherfucker,” said the skinhead leader, reminding Dale that this crew had heard of him through the series of anti-militia articles he’d stupidly written. The anti-Semitism of these so-called patriotic groups had been one of his major themes.

Now losing your teeth and getting cut up will be your major themes, he thought as he stopped in front of the five young men. He wanted to tell them to get the fuck out of his way, but he didn’t trust his voice to be steady. Wonderful. I’m fifty-two years old and I just discovered that I’m a coward.

A blue Buick drove into the gas station lot and pulled up to the closest pumps, right where Dale and the five losers were standing. The old couple in the front seat stared bleary-eyed and uncomprehending at the boys as the sullen gathering moved aside.

The interruption gave Dale the chance to hurry to his SUV and clamber inside. The leader leaned close to the driver’s-side window just as Dale clicked the locks shut. The boy standing closest to Derek dragged a key along the left rear quarter panel of the Land Cruiser.

If I were a real man, thought Dale, I’d get out and beat the shit out of that kid.

Dale drove off, hoping that would be the end of it. No such luck. The five skinheads scrambled to their pickup trucks—Derek and the next-youngest hopping into the white Chevy, the leader and two of his older friends crawling into the scabrous green Ford with the oversized tires. Both trucks roared to follow Dale out of the KWIK’N’EZ lot.

Dale paused at the entrance to the county road. Should he head south a couple of hundred yards to the entrance to I-74? Once on the interstate, he could drive straight to Peoria. If the punks followed him he would flag down a police car or go to the police center he dimly remembered on War Memorial Drive. Or should he turn north toward the Hard Road and Highway 150A, then back west to Oak Hill Road and north to the sheriff’s station in Oak Hill? That wouldn’t make much sense. Not with Sheriff C.J. Congden there. One of these punks was probably C.J.’s kid. They probably all attended skinhead gatherings together and lent each other white robes for their cross burnings.

Dale turned north toward the Hard Road. He’d be damned if he’d flee to Peoria whenever some assholes made threatening noises.

Why not? he thought. Why not just drive straight to Montana?

The two pickups followed him to the Hard Road, the green Ford leading Derek’s white Chevy.

Dale paused again at the Hard Road. The trees and water tower of Elm Haven were visible just a mile or so to the west. Straight ahead stretched the narrow, asphalted lane—too narrow and roughly paved to be called a road—that cut between fields for two miles before connecting to County 6. Dale had come that way on his drive to the KWIK’N’EZ, staring out at the muddy fields and remembering again how the lane used to be two tractor tracks across the field, heavily used by locals but absolutely impassable in the mud season. Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena had told stories of the local farmers waiting with their teams of draft horses to pull out the unlucky Model Ts and fancy new Ford coupes—a lucrative business during a muddy spring.

Dale drove straight ahead down the lane, the truck’s tires hissing on the soft asphalt and melting slush.

If the skinheads had any idea of pulling alongside him and causing trouble, there was no opportunity for them to do so on this skinny stretch of potholes. The road was wide enough for just one vehicle, and there were deep drainage ditches on each side.

Dale glanced in his rearview mirror. The two pickups were following closely. Dale could make out the pale oval face and black eyes of their leader behind the wheel of the Ford.

Dale tried to estimate the age of the pickups and whether they had four-wheel drive. He thought possibly no on the Chevy, but the Ford probably did. At least, the expensive, oversized off-road tires suggested four-wheel capability.

What the fuck do I think I’m doing here?

The lane ended at County 6 just south of the Black Tree Tavern. A mile or so north and he’d be at The Jolly Corner. The Elm Haven water tower was just visible to the west.

Dale turned east onto Jubilee College Road.

You’re nuts. This county road ran east about seven miles to Jubilee College State Park, but there was nothing this way—hills, narrow bridges over creeks, a few farmhouses. But the road’s wide enough for them to pull alongside—force me off the road.

Dale floored it. The big straight-six Toyota engine growled and got the two and a half tons of vehicle moving smartly.

The two pickups behind him were honking—either in exultation at Dale’s stupidity or in anticipation of what came next.

Dale drove seventy-five miles per hour down the poorly maintained county road, the Land Cruiser lifting high on its springs at the tops of hills, hunkering in the steep little valleys. The skinhead leader pulled his green Ford alongside as they roared up the next hill.

A car coming the other way and someone dies, thought Dale.

They crested the hill together. There was no car coming the other way. The white Chevy pickup loomed in Dale’s mirror—actually contacting his rear bumper. The pickups honked their horns; the skinheads waved from the open windows.

The punk in the passenger seat next to the lead skinhead lifted a hunting knife and gestured with it, only two feet away from Dale. The punk’s window was down and he was shouting and cursing above the roar of the wind and engines and tire hiss on wet asphalt.

Dale ignored him and accelerated down the hill. Jubilee College Road was wide enough for two vehicles here, but the bridge over the creek at the bottom of the hill was wide enough for just one.

The green Ford lurched ahead, but Dale had vehicle mass, engine displacement, and desperation on his side. He reached the bottom first and swung in ahead of the Ford. The three vehicles roared across the narrow bridge and accelerated up the next hill.

That was the bridge where Duane’s uncle Art was killed in that same summer of 1960, thought Dale. Someone forced Uncle Art’s old Cadillac off the road and into the bridge railing there.

Then Dale had no more time to think as the green Ford pulled alongside again and the white Chevy surged close behind him.

Dale tapped the brakes. The white truck behind him slammed on its brakes and fell back rather than rear-end the Land Cruiser. The Ford swerved in front of Dale’s vehicle and pulled ahead. Dale braked again, braked harder, the Chevy pickup actually skidding behind him now, and then Dale locked the steering wheel hard left. The Land Cruiser turned, almost tipped, skipped across asphalt, and literally slid into a gravel side road running north toward a line of trees. The shotgun-pelleted yellow sign in the frozen weeds at the side of the road read dead end.

Why did I turn there?Dale thought wildly. The two pickups had already backed up on Jubilee College Road and pulled onto the gravel road a hundred yards behind him. What the hell was I thinking of?

The answer came to him in a mental voice not quite his own: Gypsy Lane.