The shell had an indentation, the mark of a fallen firing pin, near the center of its brass circle. This was the shell—the one that had misfired a year ago November when he had tried to take his own life.

Dale stepped backward and sat on the edge of Duane’s old brass bed. The springs creaked. He took out his treasured Dunhill lighter, flicked it on, and turned the shell around and around in his hand, looking at the gleam of light from the lighter flame glint on the brass. There was no doubt. This was the suicide attempt shell.

I threw it away. Here at the farm. Before I stored the weapon. Threw the shell far out into the field.

Had he? Dale had a distinct memory of walking out across the frozen mud, past the burned-out pole light, to the opening in the fence where the rows of frozen corn began, and tossing a shell far out into the night.

Maybe it was a different shell.

That made no sense. He had found only the one shotgun shell when he had discovered that he had somehow packed the shotgun with his books and plates and other possessions.

And I’d never have stored the shotgun with a shell in place.

Dale shook his head. He was very tired. The heavy reading at the Oak Hill library and the strange scene with Michelle and the dogs had filled his head with blurred images.

He propped the assembled over-and-under against the wall, making sure that it was open and unloaded, and went upstairs to lock the kitchen door and shut off the lights there.

The ThinkPad had been turned off when he left. Now words glowed on the black screen after the C prompt.

>Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell;

And in the lowest deep a lower deep

Still threatening to devour me opens wide,

To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

Dale stood a long minute staring at the stanza and scratching his chin. It was Milton. Definitely Milton, but not from Paradise Lost. Perhaps from one of the surviving drafts for Milton’s Adam Unparadised.

Unlike in Paradise Lost, where Satan is the most human and compelling character but the reader never sees Satan in his unfallen state as the beautiful Lucifer, the “morning star” of heaven, most favored and beloved of all of God’s angels, this was hell-bent Lucifer’s lament. It was derivative, Dale guessed, of Marlowe’s Mephistopheles—“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

Dale was too tired to play literary trivia games. He typed—

>Tell me who you are or I’ll shut this fucking computer down forever.

Then he shut off the light and went downstairs to sleep in Duane’s bed.

EIGHTEEN

ABOUT three months after Dale began his affair with Clare Hart (aka Clare Two Hearts), he traveled to Paris as a guest of his French publisher and the Ministry of Culture for a conference on “Liberation Fiction of Indigenous Peoples.” It was January break at his university after a depressing Christmas that he spent at home but not really at home, and Anne had not even considered accompanying him to the conference. Dale himself had originally decided to skip the conference despite the rare treat of a free trip to Paris—he knew that the invitation was based on a French misreading of his third Jim Bridger book, Massacre Moon, in which several of his mountain man characters, including several impossibly benevolent French beaver trappers, sided with the Blackfeet to help the tribe avoid a massacre by encroaching federal troops. It was the most politically correct of all his novels and the most historically inaccurate. The French had loved it. In the end, Dale had decided to accept the invitation at the last minute, both to bolster his sagging credit with his dean and department and to get away, even if just for the seven days of the conference, from the double life in Missoula that had been driving him crazy.

Montana had been uncommonly warm and relatively snowless that winter, but Paris was wet and freezing. The conference writers were all being put up at the swanky Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail, but of the ten American writers there, only Dale seemed to know that this hotel had been the headquarters for the Gestapo all during the Occupation. A faded bronze plaque near the entrance announced the historical importance of the hotel only in terms of it having been the headquarters of the Red Cross after the war and the locus for attempts to reunite refugee families.

Dale’s editor from Editions Robert Laffont had been busy squiring around his real writers—Dale was the only non–Native American author invited from the States—so he was met at Roissy–Charles de Gaulle airport by a woman representing the Ministry of Culture’s Agence Pour l’Organisation de l’Accueil des Personalitiés Étrangères from the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, which Dale immediately translated through his jet lag as the Poor Organization to Acquire Strange Personalities, a part of the Ministry for Strange Affairs. Since the woman’s job was to deal with foreign artistic types, specifically Americans, she spoke zero English and was obviously shocked that Dale spoke no French. She quickly led him through the Death Star concrete bowels of the airport to a Renault in the oppressive parking garage and drove him into Paris in a silence broken only by her exhalations of cigarette smoke.

His work at the conference began that evening. The meetings were being held in the ornate Hôtel de Ville—the city hall—and the first evening was given over to a series of greetings by the mayor, by various ministry officials, by the organizers, and by others—possibly including the president—although Dale would never be certain who was who because all of the proceedings were in French and there was no one to translate for him. He was just happy that he had worn his best black suit that evening and that he was able to stay awake through the jet lag and that he never heard his name called so that he did not have to speak. Actually, none of the thirty or so writers present, mostly African other than the exhausted-looking Native American writers and himself, were asked questions that evening, not even by the French media who crowded the anterooms and wide hallways outside the conference room and shouted questions only at the French politicians and ministry officials.

This sense of being lost in a jet-lagged nightmare in which human speech dominated everything yet in which almost nothing could be understood continued through the next two days, although by that time his editor had spared him some time and he had been assigned an interpreter—a pale young woman who chain-smoked Galoise’s and who interpreted only the parts of the conference that directly required Professor Stewart’s attention, which was almost none of it.

Dale’s editor was in his early thirties—twenty years younger than Dale—and was very pale, a condition emphasized by the unrelentingly black turtlenecks, suits, and sport coats the young man wore. The editor specialized in Native American fiction and boasted that during his six visits to the United States, comprising more than three months in the country, he had never set foot anywhere other than Native American reservations, with the exceptions of several Indian war battlefield memorials and, of course, the rides to and from airports. His paleness was also emphasized by a small mouth that looked unnaturally red—although Dale was never sure that his editor wore lipstick—painted eyes and eyebrows, and severely cropped black hair with a small, sprayed, upturned crest in front. His name was Jean-Pierre, but Dale immediately thought of him as Pee-wee Herman and was never able to rid himself of that image.