“That’ll do,” said Dale.

Dale did not get out of Oak Hill until after 7:00P.M. The tires would be delivered the next day and he could pick up the Cruiser the next afternoon. He ate dinner at the counter of a five-and-dime on the city square—not a Woolworth’s, they had all disappeared from America years before—and Mr. Jurgen brought his late wife’s blue Buick by from the bowling alley. The Buick was older than most people Dale knew, it reaked of cigarette smoke, and it cost Dale more to rent than it would have to rent a luxury car from Hertz and he had to leave $300 for a damage deposit, but he was glad to pay and get out of Oak Hill before C.J. Congden thought to come looking for him.

It started to snow again during his drive back to Duane’s farmhouse. Dale was sleepy as he turned down the long lane and drove past the dead trees, snow dancing in his headlights, but he woke up quickly and slammed on the brakes a hundred yards from the farmhouse.

Dale had not left any lights on when he had driven off to buy groceries earlier in the day. The downstairs was dark.

But there was a light burning on the second floor.

EIGHT

DALE sat in the reeking Buick, looked at the light glowing in the second-floor upper left window, listened to pellets of sleet bouncing off the windshield, and thought, Fuck this.

He backed the rattling old car down the long lane, pulled out onto County 6, and headed back south. Dale had seen enough scary movies in his life. He knew that his role now was to go into the dark farmhouse by himself, call, “Is somebody there?,” go fearfully up the stairs, and then get cut down by the waiting ax murderer. Either that or Realtor Sandy Whittaker had let herself in with her key, cut through the layers of plastic at the top of the stairs, and even at that moment was waiting for him, naked, on one of the beds up there.

Fuck that, too.

Dale drove up the second hill and paused at the stop sign at Jubilee College Road. He wasn’t sure where to head next.

Montana, came his answer.

He shook his head. Besides a natural reluctance to abandon his $50,000 Land Cruiser in swap for this cigarette-stinking old Buick, he had nowhere to go in Montana. The ranch was rented out. Missoula was hostile territory for him these days. He had no job this year at the university there.

Oak Hill?

That made sense, since his truck was there and would be ready the next afternoon. But Dale could not remember if Oak Hill even had a motel—and if it did, it was a primitive one.

He crossed Jubilee College Road, took the narrow cutoff road through frozen fields to 150A, kept going straight, and turned east onto an empty I-74. Twenty-five minutes later he was in Peoria. Exiting onto War Memorial Drive, he found a Comfort Suites, paid with his American Express, asked the counter guy for a toothbrush, and went up to his room. It smelled of carpet cleaner and other chemicals. The king-size bed was almost obscene in its immensity. A card on top of the TV offered him recent-release movies, including softcore dirty movies.

Dale sighed, went back out to the rented Buick, and grabbed the sack of groceries that held fruit drinks and some snacks. He rooted around in another bag, found the new tube of toothpaste, and tossed it into the bag. That left only another $230 worth of groceries in sacks covering the back seat, the rear floor, and the front seat of the car. He carried the bag back up to his room, kicked off his boots and sweater, and munched Fig Newtons and sipped orange juice while watching CNN. After a while, he turned off the TV, went in the bathroom and brushed his teeth.

Eventually he went to sleep.

Dale awoke with the kind of absolute, heart-pounding, bottom-dropping-out-of-everything sense of desperation that comes most solidly between 3:00 and 4:00A.M. He looked at the motel alarm clock. 3:26A.M.

He sat up in bed, turned on the light, and ran his hands over his face. His hands were shaking.

He didn’t think that it had been a nightmare that had brought him swimming up out of a troubled sleep. It was simply a sense that the world was ending. No, he realized, that wasn’t quite right. It was simply the conviction that the world had already ended.

The clickover of the century and millennium had been problematic for Dale. Of course, his life had turned to shit about that time and he’d tried to kill himself, but even more troubling than that had been his deep and silent conviction that everything of value to him had been left behind in the old century. Tonight that conviction was totally pervasive and endlessly empty.

Christ, thought Dale, I left my Prozac, flurazepam, and doxepin at Duane’s farmhouse. He had to smile at the thought. An old short circuit brings a light on in the second floor of a farmhouse and Professor Dale Stewart blows his brains out for lack of meds. Difficult, he thought. I left the Savage over-and-under at the farmhouse, too.

Dale glanced at the phone. He could call Dr. Hall. It was earlier in Montana—only about 2:30A.M. Psychiatrists must be used to that crap.

What would I tell him?Well, the black dog was back. That had been Dale’s term of choice for deep depression, borrowed from Winston Churchill, who had been plagued by his own Black Dog for decades. Churchill had saved his life by taking up oil painting.

Why is the black dog back?Dale went into the bathroom, ran some tap water into one of the little plastic glasses—sanitarily wrapped for his protection—and came back and sat on the small couch and thought about it.

I don’t like running away from here. From Duane’s place.Why not? Duane’s farm and Elm Haven and Oak Hill and C.J. Congden and even Michelle Staffney were depressing enough in their own right. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to leave now?

No.Missoula and the ranch were out of bounds for him now. He knew that. If he returned, it was probable that he would finish what he started on November 4 a year earlier.

But why Duane’s drafty old place? Why Elm Haven?Because he had old connections there. Because the place had changed—for the worse—but so had he, and perhaps it was necessary for him to find that connection to his childhood, to something good about himself, to Duane, to the reason he became a writer and a teacher.

And there’s the book. This is the only place I can write it.For the first time, he consciously acknowledged that he was going to spend his sabbatical year writing a novel about Duane, about Elm Haven, about 1960, about the summer he had so much trouble remembering, and, ultimately, about himself.

Vanity, vanity, vanity.He knew better. It would take great humility to write this novel: humility, not the professorial, historical, commercial, and auctorial cleverness that went into his Jim Bridger mountain man books. This novel would be just for him. And he would need both Duane’s notebooks and a connection with Duane’s life to write it.

The heater hummed on. A big truck roared up through its endless gears out on War Memorial Drive. Dale turned the light out and went back to sleep, even without his Prozac and flurazepam and doxepin.

Stewart! Dale. . . Stewart!”

Dale paused just outside the garage where the mechanics were finishing mounting the Land Cruiser’s wheels with his two new tires. He looked over his shoulder, but he had recognized the voice.

Sheriff C.J. Congden was strolling across the oily concrete driveway toward him. Congden had one hand on the revolver in his holster. He was wheezing slightly as he came. Dale waited.

“Miller, huh?” said Congden. “TomMiller. Yeah, cute. Well, I knew I’d seen your ugly-ass face before.”