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.”