A Winter Haunting

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 3:26A.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.

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.”