Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

“There was some other boy in your bunch,” said Sandy.

Dale thought for a moment. “My kid brother Lawrence?”

“No, someone else. . .”

“Duane McBride?” he said.

Sandy Whittaker actually blushed. “Yes, I guess that’s who I was thinking of.” She got in the car and started the engine.

Dale stepped back, preparing to wave good-bye, but Sandy rolled the window down. “Oh, I meant to tell you, Dale. My cousin’s boy—Derek—when he heard you were renting the place, he said he knew all about you.”

Oh, Christ , thought Dale, a Jim Bridger: Mountain Man fan.

“Derek’s sort of a. . . well, a problem child, I guess you could say, though he’s nineteen now, so not really a child. Anyway, my cousin Ardith says that Derek knew your name from his Internet friends. That they’d sent your photograph and articles out to all the others.”

“Articles?” said Dale. “Do you mean novels?”

“No, the articles that were in some Montana newspaper.”

“Oh, Christ,” Dale said aloud. “Do you mean the editorials on the Montana Militia?” At the height—or depths, to be more accurate—of his clinical depression a year earlier, he had written a series of editorials about the right-wing militias. “I thought those were only being routed around to other neo-Nazi groups and skinheads.”

Sandy bit on her lower lip. “I don’t think Derek is a whatchamacallit Nazi, but he does hang around with skinheads. Heck, he is a skinhead. Anyway, I wanted to tell you. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Derek and his friends.”

“Sounds like I already have,” said Dale. He folded his arms. Great beginning to my sabbatical. It was starting to rain again.

“Call me if you need anything,” said Sandy Whittaker. She rolled up the window, ponderously turned the huge Buick around in the muddy lot, and drove down the long driveway in the rain. In the dim daylight, the dead crabapple trees looked even sadder and more skeletal.

Dale shook his head, went over to the Land Cruiser, and started hauling his boxes of junk—his life—into the McBride farmhouse.

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?”