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.

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.