A Winter Haunting

FIVE

THE last time Dale had seen his young lover, Clare, more than a year earlier in the clean, bright, achingly blue-sky Montana mid-September, they had saddled up at the ranch—she on the spirited roan he had bought for his oldest daughter and that his daughter had ridden only twice but that Clare had ridden a score of times, he on the docile, older gelding that had come with the ranch—and then they had led two pack mules up into the high country for a three-day camping trip. The weather stayed perfect during the entire long weekend. The great clone groves of aspen covering the subalpine hillsides had gone golden earlier that week and because it had been a wet, warm summer, the leaves were a perfect yellow-gold, shimmering against the blue-vaulted sky and filling the hillsides and valleys below them with a constantly dancing light. Clare reminded him that aspen leaves glittered that way because they were attached to the branch at a slight angle so that both sides of each leaf could photosynthesize during the short growing season. Dale reminded her that he had taught her that a year earlier.

The first night they camped below treeline, and they allowed themselves the luxury of a small campfire, sitting around it and talking over coffee for hours as the stars burned almost without twinkling above them. Before Dale lit the fire, Clare gave him a small box wrapped in perfect gold paper. He looked at her quizzically.

“A small present,” she said.

“What’s the occasion?” asked Dale.

“Open it,” said Clare.

Inside the box was a beautiful gold Dunhill cigarette lighter. “It’s beautiful,” said Dale. “But I know that you know that I don’t smoke.”

“You don’t light campfires all that well, either,” said Clare. “I remember Ghost Ridge. Your matches are always wet or missing or something. That thing might save your life someday.”

Dale had laughed and lighted their stack of kindling and wood with two flicks of the lighter.

There had been several nights of frost, so there were no mosquitoes. The breeze from the high ridges was cold, but the fire was warm and they were comfortable in leather riding coats over fleece vests and flannel shirts. Clare told him about the first days of her graduate program at Princeton. He told her about the new book he had begun—a “serious” novel about Custer at the Little Bighorn, from the Native American perspective. Clare winced, as she always did, at the term “Native American,” but she made no issue of it this time. Neither of them mentioned the reason for her long flight back and extended weekend with him at such an important time in her life: namely, their plans to get together this year—Dale’s hopes of spending Thanksgiving break with her—their earlier plans to travel to Barbados during her Christmas break—their ultimate plans of Dale moving near Princeton to be with her starting the following summer, taking at least a year of sabbatical from his university and perhaps quitting to write full-time. All of their plans. All of their futures.

They made love for hours by the dying campfire that first night, spreading Dale’s sleeping bag out on the soft grass and using Clare’s as a blanket over them when the cold winds blew over their sweaty bodies. Eventually the campfire embers dimmed and they slept a while, making love in the middle of the night and again just after sunrise. Dale noticed that Clare’s lovemaking was more intense than ever—as if she were trying to lose herself in the intimacy, thus putting distance between them—and he knew then that when they did talk, the news would be bad.

The second night, camped high on the ridge above treeline, they used only the white-gas backpacking stove for cooking and adjourned early to the tent as a freezing wind from outer space seemed to blow in. There was even less atmosphere up there to make the stars twinkle, but they seemed to shake more, as if also blasted by the arctic winds that made Clare and Dale huddle in their goose-down bags as they stroked each other and made love repeatedly, finding their orgasms separately and then together, knowing and respecting each other’s bodies and needs in the way only lovers long experienced with each other can appreciate true lovemaking. It was not enough. Dale again felt the distance and lay awake after Clare’s slow breathing began—the soft sighing of sleep lost in the wind-against-rainfly-nylon noise, but stirring warm and tactile against his bare shoulder. He knew for certain now that something was wrong. The day’s dialogues had been enthusiastic but abstract, intimate but impersonal, occasionally touching on their past experiences but never turning toward a shared future. This was profoundly different, and as Dale lay awake feeling his young beloved breathe on his shoulder, he thought of Anne and the girls, lost to him now by choice and action, and of the house in Missoula and of his job and the long academic year ahead—an unbelievably empty year if he was not pursuing his sabbatical as he and Clare had planned—and now he felt the cold and vacuum of the dark sky enter into him until he was shaking even in the warmth of the enveloping sleeping bags with Clare’s warm, bare breasts and thigh against him. He shivered and waited for dawn.

She told him the next day, as they led the pack mules down the couloir toward the high pastures above the ranch.

“It’s not going to work, Dale.”

He did not have to ask her what was not going to work—it was the Great Unspoken Topic of the long weekend, of their life—and he played no games just to make himself feel better by seeing her feel worse. “All right,” he said. “Why not?”

She had hesitated then. It was a warm day and she was wearing his oldest, most comfortable flannel shirt—the blue one that she had worn that first weekend more than four years earlier and that she wore each time they spent time together—wore it open today, sleeves rolled up, a white T-shirt showing the strain of the full breasts he had kissed at sunrise just hours ago.

“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 4:00A.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 8:00P.M., but not before he went into the bathroom and took two flurazepam and three doxepin. He would sleep this night.

Sometime around 3:30A.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.