by Dan Simmons
The white oval of her face bobbed up and down, although he could not tell if she was agreeing or signifying that the dogs had meant her harm.
“I’d never get in a car with him,” she said softly and it took Dale a few seconds to realize that she was speaking of Sheriff C.J. Congden.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “Shall I come in with you until you get the lights on?”
“No need,” said Michelle. She handed him a square box, and it took him a minute to realize that it was the box of .410 shells he’d bought in Oak Hill earlier that evening. “This was on the passenger seat and I didn’t want to sit on it,” she said.
Dale set the box of shells in the backseat. I could have thrown them at the dogs, he thought.
The overhead lights came on as she opened the passenger door, but her face was turned away so Dale could not see her expression, see if she had thought his invitation to see her inside had been a come-on. Walking around the truck to stand outside his open driver’s-side window, the snow crunching under her feet, she said, “Just watch until I get down the drive, would you? Make sure the hounds don’t get me?” Her voice sounded normal. “The power’s off right now, so I’m using candles and flashlights until it’s fixed. Don’t worry if you don’t see any lights.”
“If the power’s off, do you have heat? No need to stay here in a cold, dark house.” Dale tried to think of where he’d sleep—Duane’s bed in the basement, giving her the daybed in the study, or upstairs while she took the more comfortable bed?
“The furnace works,” said Michelle. He could see starlight reflected in her eyes now. “It’s on a separate circuit. Diane and I blew some fuses when we were messing around with the old wiring. I’ve got a guy coming from Peoria to fix it tomorrow. Good night, Dale. Thanks again for rescuing me.” She reached out and squeezed his bare hand with her mittened one.
“Anytime,” said Dale. He watched as she walked carefully down the snowy lane and disappeared around the back of the house. As advertised, the house stayed dark, but he thought he detected the slight glow of a flashlight through a dark side window.
He backed the Land Cruiser out and headed back down Depot Street toward First Avenue and the road to The Jolly Corner. There was no sign of Congden or his car.
The interior of Duane’s farmhouse, except for the cold draft sliding down from the second floor, seemed warm after the cold night air. Dale went from room to room, turning on lights as he went.
He carried the shotgun shells down into the basement and retrieved the two parts of his Savage over-and-under from where he’d stored them. It was time, he thought, to have a real, loaded weapon on the premises.
Dale was attaching the over-and-under barrel when he saw that there was a shell in the shotgun breech. He removed the red shell carefully, shocked that he would ever store a loaded weapon, even one that was broken down this way. He’d learned better than that at his father’s knee when he was six years old.
The shell had an indentation, the mark of a fallen firing pin, near the center of its brass circle. This was the shell—the one that had misfired a year ago November when he had tried to take his own life.
Dale stepped backward and sat on the edge of Duane’s old brass bed. The springs creaked. He took out his treasured Dunhill lighter, flicked it on, and turned the shell around and around in his hand, looking at the gleam of light from the lighter flame glint on the brass. There was no doubt. This was the suicide attempt shell.
I threw it away. Here at the farm. Before I stored the weapon. Threw the shell far out into the field.
Had he? Dale had a distinct memory of walking out across the frozen mud, past the burned-out pole light, to the opening in the fence where the rows of frozen corn began, and tossing a shell far out into the night.
Maybe it was a different shell.
That made no sense. He had found only the one shotgun shell when he had discovered that he had somehow packed the shotgun with his books and plates and other possessions.
And I’d never have stored the shotgun with a shell in place.
Dale shook his head. He was very tired. The heavy reading at the Oak Hill library and the strange scene with Michelle and the dogs had filled his head with blurred images.
He propped the assembled over-and-under against the wall, making sure that it was open and unloaded, and went upstairs to lock the kitchen door and shut off the lights there.
The ThinkPad had been turned off when he left. Now words glowed on the black screen after the C prompt.
>Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
Dale stood a long minute staring at the stanza and scratching his chin. It was Milton. Definitely Milton, but not from Paradise Lost. Perhaps from one of the surviving drafts for Milton’s Adam Unparadised.
Unlike in Paradise Lost, where Satan is the most human and compelling character but the reader never sees Satan in his unfallen state as the beautiful Lucifer, the “morning star” of heaven, most favored and beloved of all of God’s angels, this was hell-bent Lucifer’s lament. It was derivative, Dale guessed, of Marlowe’s Mephistopheles—“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”
Dale was too tired to play literary trivia games. He typed—
>Tell me who you are or I’ll shut this fucking computer down forever.
Then he shut off the light and went downstairs to sleep in Duane’s bed.
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 in
to 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 1:30 A.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!”
