The low battery indicator glowed steadily.
“Daddy,” said Mab at last, “Mom’s just run out to the drugstore for something, but she should be home in a minute or two. If she called you . . . if she called your cell phone number in just a couple of minutes . . . would you talk to her about you coming home while we’re all here for Christmas?”
Dale could not speak. His mind seemed as wind-blown and empty as the fields beyond the reflections on the glass.
“Good,” said Mab as if he had agreed. “Stay where you are. Mom’ll call back in the next two minutes.”
The line went dead. Dale clicked off the phone, left its power on, and set it on the console between the two front seats. It was beginning to snow, flakes visible in the twin cones of the headlights. No other vehicles had passed him.
Dale sat there for ten minutes—his watch was still stopped, but the green letters of the dashboard clock read 9:52. He stared at his cell phone. The Low Battery glowed, but the power was still on.
The phone rang. Dale jumped as if a rattlesnake had made a noise inches from his hand. He grabbed the phone.
“Hello?” His heart was pounding, and he heard the shakiness in his voice.
“Dale? Dale, it’s Michelle.”
“Who?” Dale said stupidly.
“Michelle. Michelle Staffney. Dale, I’ve got a problem.” Her voice was also trembling.
For a minute, Dale could not shift mental gears. It was as if Michelle Staffney had been only a dream and now he was beginning to doze again. She had never called him on his cell phone before. He could not remember giving her his cell phone number.
“Michelle?” he said thickly.
“I’m at the school grounds, Dale. In Elm Haven. On the playground where Old Central School used to be . . .”
Dale waited, wondering if he should hang up. The low battery indicator was very bright.
“. . . and the dogs are here, Dale. They’re all around me.”
“What?” said Dale.
“The black dogs. The ones from Duane’s farm. They’re here . . . in town. They’re all around me.”
The phone went dead.
SEVENTEEN
* * *
AT this point I begin to worry about Dale. The missed phone call from his wife, Anne—if, indeed, Anne had called back at all—seems the kind of turning point that too often converts light farce to tragedy.
Obviously I know nothing about women. I grew up with just the Old Man and Uncle Art around and paid almost zero attention to the girls at Old Central School. I remember Michelle Staffney as the fifth- and sixth-grade redheaded sex grenade, but since “sex” didn’t really mean much to kids back in that prehistoric era circa 1960, none of the boys in the Bike Patrol really paid much attention to her other than to act like idiots whenever she was around.
Through Dale, I have memories of sexual intercourse—with girls he knew in high school and college, with Anne, even with the self-appointed Beatrice of his idolatry, this aptly named Clare Two Hearts—but memory of lust, much like memory of pain, is a surprisingly unspecific, clouded thing, and I can’t say I feel that I missed too much of that particular aspect of not having lived to adulthood. I confess that I regret more never having seen King Lear performed than never having had a sexual encounter.
But I don’t think that Dale rushed into Elm Haven this December night on some lustful errand; he had found some respite from solitude in talking with Mica Stouffer née Michelle Staffney, but at this point he certainly did not desire her other than in the most passing way. His affair—his romantic interlude—with the person called Clare had driven him quite far from desire’s dark shores. Of course, so had the clinical depression that had rendered him impotent for months and the heavy dosage of Prozac and other drugs that followed. One might say that Dale Stewart’s libido had taken a direct hit from a pharmaceutical heat-seeking missile.
If I had lived and become a writer, I might have tried to explain the role that eros plays in the lives and misfortunes of men, but I suspect that it would have been in a classical and twice-removed fashion. When I lived outside of Elm Haven, reading away my less-than-dozen winters and summers and equinox months, my ideal of the perfect woman was the Wife of Bath. I suspect that if I had grown up, moved on, sought, and found such a woman—identifiable, I always assumed, by that delightful, sensual gap between her front teeth—I would have, in the end, fled from the vitalism of such a sexual life force. More to the point, what would she have wanted with me—the sedentary lump, the solipsistic, overweight, clumsy, and poorly dressed geek?
But then again, Arthur Miller ended up with Marilyn Monroe, however briefly.
Of more interest to me now than Dale’s imperfect memories of past lovemaking were the images and recollections of his two daughters. Perhaps it is only with one’s mother and girl children that a male human being can really hold any hope of knowing and understanding women.
Margaret Beth—Mab—his oldest girl, was always the apple of his eye. Remembering her through his remembering, I cannot help but think of literary equivalents I had encountered—Aaron Burr with his beloved daughter, Sir Thomas More with his. These intellectual equals were the real women in these famous men’s lives, and there was some of that with Mab and Dale . . . at least until this Clare appeared on the scene.
Katherine Sarah—Katie—rises less frequently in Dale’s thoughts, but I see a wonderful person there, at least equal in her compassionate way to Mab’s fierce intelligence. Katie was a feminine definition of empathy and connection, a gestalt humanist, the likes of which I never encountered in Elm Haven, either in the girl-children there or in their mothers. Where Mab delighted her father with precocity in language and precision in logic, Katie was quiet as a child—observing, feeling, preparing to give of herself. Dale did not ignore this trait in his youngest daughter—he loved both of his children and admired Katie’s empathy beyond words—but where Mab’s strengths might reflect (and thus confirm) his own, Katie’s human beauties were most like her mother’s. It might be this sharp fact that made him think more of Mab in his exile than—more painfully—of Katie. I won’t speculate further here. I understood very little of being a son and nothing at all about being a father of girls.
Before we return to Dale’s chivalric rush to save Ms. Staffney from the black dogs, we should discuss the book he is writing—the Elm-Haven-in-summer book—and the issue of his writing in general.
Dale was not a good writer. Trust me on this. I was a better writer at age nine than my friend is in his fifty-second year. The reason is, at least partially, I suspect, that he was not born to the craft, not driven to the task by the non-negotiable flames of internal fires, but, rather, made a conscious decision to become a writer at the end of that summer of 1960, the summer in which I died. Added to that is the simple fact that in training to be an academic, Dale was crippled by the need to write in academese. It is not a language formed by any human tongue, and few, if any, academics survive the degradation of it to move on to actual prose. Finally, there is the choice of Dale’s fiction—“mountain man” stories. This was a conscious choice on his part—an attempt to retain his professorial status by not slumming in such genres as mystery or science fiction or, god forbid, horror—but, again, a cool one, a cerebral one, and not one forged by desire. Patterning his style on the work of the limited genre’s masters—Vardis Fisher, for one—Dale wrote about the few white men in the West of the 1830s and the Native American tribes (his professor self made it almost impossible to be politically incorrect enough to think “Indians”—even though his mountain man characters did so frequently enough—much less frame some obscenity like “savages”).
Hemingway once wrote that a true writer had to “work from the inside out, not from the outside in.” The difference, he explained, between art and photography, between Cézanne and mere documentation. All of Dale Stewart’s so-called Jim Bridger books, as I have said before, were written from the outside in.
Clar
e had confronted him with this fact more than once and Dale had demurred rather than defend himself, but he was hurt. He thought of his books as a contribution to literature, sort of. She would not allow him that illusion, just as, in the end, she allowed him none of the illusions one needs for survival.
This Elm Haven book that Dale is so enthused about—the book that makes him willing to stay at The Jolly Corner despite its discomforts and psychic uneasiness—is, at least, different from the mountain man books. But it is also, in its own exuberant way, a lie. It is all sunlight and summer days, swimming holes and dirt-clod fights, bicycle freedoms and idealized friendships. Dale had sworn, in his own mental preparation to write this book, to be “true to the secrets and silences of childhood,” but in his actual writing of it, the secrets have become smug and the silences far too loud.
Dale Stewart’s work lacked irony without even the protective camouflage of the postmodernist abandonment of irony. Dale the man might have been ironic at times—this time seeking protective camouflage—about the whole idea of writing mountain man tales, but the tales themselves were almost never leavened by irony or self-judgment. A work completely devoid of irony has no more hope of becoming literature than does the most sincere piece of Christian apologetics or Marxist polemic. As Oscar Wilde once said, “All bad poetry is sincere.” Dale’s writing, in both the mountain man entertainments and his Elm-Haven-summer-of-1960 manuscript, was overwhelmingly sincere.
Of course, this is just my opinion. And I hope that I would not have become a literary critic (or its idiot sibling, a reviewer of books) had I lived. Certainly my pedantic and opinionated side would have gravitated to that vocation, but all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live. Besides, somewhere in the basement of The Jolly Corner to this day, mildewing amidst the pages of an equally mildewed paperback, is a 3-x-5 card on which I had scribbled this quote from Flaubert:
Books aren’t made the way babies are: they are made like pyramids. There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there on the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and the bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.
I was eight when I jotted down that quote, but even then, the part I enjoyed the most was the delightful “Continue this comparison.” And even then, I understood at once that the pissing jackals were critics.
It was only a little after 10:00 P.M. when Dale drove into Elm Haven, but from the darkened and abandoned feel of the little town, it might as well have been 3:00 A.M. on Walpurgis Nacht.
The fastest way from Oak Hill to Elm Haven was the old way—Oak Hill Road, which ran north and south, crossing 150A just east of the Elm Haven city limits. Dale drove quickly down Main, noting but ignoring the dark storefronts, the empty lots, and the lack of streetlights, then turned north up Second Avenue to the schoolyard.
He saw Michelle Staffney and the dogs almost at once. The schoolyard, once the near-majestic tableaux of the huge Old Central School on its low hill, surrounded by ancient playgrounds and sentinel elms, was now just this flat and treeless patch of weeds poking through dirty snow, the field littered with some sad plastic playground equipment, an empty parking lot, and some town storage sheds.
Michelle was at the top of the slide. The five dogs—the lead dog looking impossibly large in the headlights, as if it could easily leap to the top of the slide without exertion—stood around the slide like points on a five-sided star.
Dale stoppped the car sideways in the asphalt street, headlights cutting white cones from the old schoolyard’s darkness, and hesitated. The dogs did not turn toward the light or acknowledge the Land Cruiser’s presence. Michelle Staffney’s face was white and her eyes wide as she raised one hand more in appeal than greeting.
Dale drove off the pavement, across the low ditch that had been much deeper when he had crossed it every day on his walk across Depot Street to the school, and accelerated across the snowy field toward the slide.
The five black dogs did not move. Their gaze stayed locked on the middle-aged woman at the top of the ladder.
Dale felt panic and tasted bile. For an instant he was sure that the five dogs were going to attack Michelle before he closed the last ten yards, then drag her down and off into the deeper snow and higher weeds behind the steel storage shed.
The dogs did not move. In a surge of absolute, senseless hatred, Dale gunned the throttle and slewed to run down the largest dog, the one he thought of as the original black dog, even though it was four times too large to have been so.
The dog whirled and ran an instant before Dale had to decide whether to brake wildly or actually run down a defenseless animal, probably someone’s pet. The other four dogs also turned and loped into the darkness, each of them running in a different direction and all five blending into the night in seconds.
Dale slid the Land Cruiser to a stop, throwing up snow and dirt as he did so. Leaving the headlights on, he stepped onto the running board. “Michelle? You all right?”
The white face nodded. She was wearing a light parka and a scarf and mittens. In the harsh glare of the halogen headlights, Michelle looked simultaneously much older than she had the last time he had seen her and somehow much younger, childlike. Dale thought that perhaps it was the mittens.
He walked over to the slide and held his hand up as she descended. She ignored the hand but touched his arm when she reached solid ground.
“What happened?” said Dale.
Michelle shook her head again. “I don’t know. I was out for a walk . . .”
“This late?” said Dale and realized how silly that sounded. At 10:00 P.M. in Beverly Hills she would probably still be at dinner before the late screening of a new film.
“They just . . . appeared,” said Michelle and began shaking.
Dale reached a hand out to reassure her just as an extra pair of headlights swept across the schoolyard and pinned them. A car was driving across the snow toward them.
The car stopped next to Dale’s truck, but the headlights blinded them. The silhouette of a heavyset man emerged from the driver’s side.
“Trouble here?” came C.J. Congden’s phlegmy voice.
Michelle suddenly leaned against Dale. She was shaking very hard now. She turned away from the sheriff’s headlights, almost burying her face in Dale’s coat.
“No trouble,” said Dale.
“You drove up on city land here, Mr. Stewart,” said Congden. Dale could see the headlight glare reflecting off the underside of the sheriff’s Smokey hat, but the big man’s face was still in shadow. “City property. You been drinking, Professor?”
Dale waited for Michelle to say something, but she kept her face against his chest.
“Ms. . . . Stouffer here was taking a walk,” called Dale, his voice sounding very loud to himself in the cold night. “Some huge dogs appeared and started to attack her. I saw her and drove out here so the truck’s lights would drive them away.” He was irritated at himself for providing such a detailed explanation to this fat slob of an ex-bully.
“Dogs,” said Congden, his tone dismissive and amused. To Michelle, he said, “You’d better come with me, Missy. I’ll drive you home.”
Michelle gripped Dale tightly now, her arms hugging him fiercely through her parka and his jacket. “No,” she whispered to Dale.
“I’m taking her home,” said Dale. He put his arm around her and led her to the passenger side of the Land Cruiser.
The sheriff’s car was at enough of an angle that the vehicle and its driver remained just dark silhouettes against the night. The cheap plastic slide and swingless swing set looked unreal—too bright, too orange and red, too fake—in the twin sets of headlights.
“She should ride with me,” said C.J. Congden from the other side of the police cruiser. His voice was flat, emotionless, but so
mehow both amused and threatening.
Dale ignored the sheriff, helped Michelle up into the truck, shut the door carefully, and went around to the driver’s side. For an instant he wondered what he would do if Congden came around his own car and tried to stop Dale from driving off. Why would he do that?
Because you questioned his authority, stupid, was Dale’s answer to himself.
Congden did not come around.
Dale backed the Land Cruiser up, turned it around on the snowy field, and drove back to the asphalt line of Second Avenue. Checking in his rearview mirror, Dale could see only the headlights of the sheriff’s car. Congden did not follow.
Dale drove up to the junction of Depot Street, where his old house—dark now—was illuminated in the headlight beams, started to turn left, but paused.
“Do you want to go home or come out to . . . the farm?” he asked.
Michelle was still shaking violently. She hadn’t seemed so frightened of the dogs out at The Jolly Corner. Dale wondered if it was from the cold.
“Home,” she said softly.
Dale dutifully turned left on Depot Street and drove toward Broad and the old Staffney house there.
“I mean home in California,” said Michelle.
Dale laughed. He turned to look at her, to smile reassuringly, but he could see only the pale white oval of her face in the darkness. He had an irrelevant memory of the faceless man in uniform he’d glimpsed twice on his walks past the cemetery.
The Staffney house was absolutely dark. Her own truck was not in the driveway, nor were there tire tracks.
“It’s in the shop in Oak Hill,” said Michelle, her voice more steady now. “It’s some black box screwing up the ignition system. They say it’ll be a few days before they get the part in.”
“You all right for groceries . . . and everything?” said Dale.
Michelle nodded and touched his arm again. “Thanks for saving me.”
He tried to sound light as he said, “I don’t think the dogs meant to hurt you.”