“In more ways than one,” she said, in a take-it-or-leave-it way.
I nodded and decided to leave it. And she nodded back and said, “So — I guess we’re still nowhere.”
I opened the door of the car and stood outside saying, “I have my own problems, Loretta.”
“I’ll say you do,” she muttered angrily.
She gunned her car’s engine and spun quickly out of sight, down the road to the highway.
Leaving me standing and staring after her.
Sleep that night was a long time coming, and not as restful as it should have been. The cabin creaked under the strain of the wind, waking me up half a dozen times, leaving me awake to think about the things I’d wanted to avoid thinking about but now I couldn’t.
Something about Dilly reflected something about me, and suddenly a lot of what had mystified and confused me became clear — and I was very uncomfortable with myself.
The Winter of Virginiak’s Discontent continued.
In any case, sleep was a hard job that night, but as hard as it was, getting up the next day was even tougher, and when I got up finally, around nine o’clock, a blizzard was blowing its head off outside, so I passed on my morning run, started a blaze going in the fireplace, put myself in a big easy chair in the front room, and spent the day reading.
The Genealogy of Morals.
A book I’d skimmed in college but always intended to reread, and now found almost compelling.
Something about its contempt, its merciless appraisals, struck home again and again, and I couldn’t put it down.
And so I passed the day quietly — albeit thinking disparaging thoughts about my bourgeois neighbors. Around five P.M., with a feeling of self-mockery I couldn’t shake, I finally showered, shaved, and got dressed and hiked the two hundred yards or so through a heavy fall of wet snow to the motel restaurant where I had filet mignon, baked potato, broccoli in hollandaise, and a couple of Heinekens.
Which left me feeling, if not quite a “superman,” at least not the “sick animal” I’d been.
Dr. Nietzsche’s Midlife Crisis Remedy.
After dinner I considered getting mellow in the bar but decided enough was enough for one day — a prudent man takes Nietzsche in small doses, I thought — so I settled for espresso and a local newspaper in the lookout lounge.
Where I read articles about Billy’s arrest of Charley White Hand the night before — which characterized Dilly as “tough,” and White Hand as “desperate” and “violent” — and about the efforts of the local law to identify the body I’d found the previous morning — which were characterized as “ongoing” but “lacking results.”
Which, aside from a lot of talk about the weather — the promise of snow and the lengthening of the ski season occupying most of the front page — was all the news in Big Pine fit to print.
What else would there be?
Putting aside the paper, I people-watched for another half hour before I started getting bored, making up my mind that if I stayed on the full two weeks I would damn sure rent a car because this was not my kind of place and these were not my kind of people. Then I hiked back up to my cabin.
Where Dilly, dressed in her sheriff’s outfit, was waiting in her car.
“Hi,” she said tentatively, getting out as I walked up to her.
I nodded and waved a hand to my door, then led her inside, and once we were there she said, “We’ve just tentatively I.D.’d the body you found the other day.”
“Oh?”
“He seems to be a Vietnamese named Doan. He drove a taxi down in Portland. We found his car in a gully about ten miles north of Big Pine. Wallet and I.D. were in the glove compartment.”
“I see.”
“I’m on my way to see his wife — to tell her — and bring her in to make a formal I.D.” She shrugged. “I thought you might come along, unless you’re... busy, or...”
I told her I’d be glad to tag along.
Once in her car and on our way down the mountain, she said, “I feel bad about last night.”
“So do I,” I admitted.
She sighed raggedly. “I was way out of line.”
“Out of control,” I said.
She looked at me sharply as if to argue but then nodded. “You’re right. Out of control.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have pushed that kid around. I know.” She looked at me again. “That’s not me, really.” She laughed ruefully. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
I said, “You’re trying to be something you’re not.”
“I suppose.”
“Like me, I guess.”
Dilly frowned at me.
I sighed and stared out at the black night world for a moment. “Last night,” I said, “I had a good long think about how I feel, and I decided I feel pretty rotten, actually. Sandy is twenty-three,” I told her. “About half my age, and... it was not a mutually arrived at decision to break up. It was her idea, and the issue was age.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not so broken up over our breaking up as I am over being so damned old all of a sudden.”
“You’re not old.”
“When you get a look at yourself through the eyes of someone twenty years younger, you’ll know what I mean.”
She thought that over, then said, “Hmmmm.”
I nodded. “Anyway,” I went on, “I’ve been putting myself through some hoops lately. Trying to make myself over into someone — with a more youthful outlook or something.”
She went quiet for a moment, then said, “You quit smoking and turned vegetarian.”
“I’ve also started running, getting in shape...”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“No,” I agreed, “but it’s a front. A way to kid myself. The point is, I have to learn to live with my age, whatever it is. And you have to live with yourself,” I told her. “Be the kind of law officer you are.”
“I know,” she said with a hint of hopelessness. “But that’s the kind of law people around here expect.”
“You could change their expectations,” I said. “You said before you hadn’t made your mark yet. Well, make it.”
She laughed. “That’s easy to say...”
“Loretta, this isn’t the nineteenth century, and you’re not Wyatt Earp, so quit pretending. Be the new sheriff in town.”
She had nothing to say to that, and I was done preaching, so I settled back and let her think.
Loretta drove us into Portland, through a semithriving business section and into a not so thriving semiresidential area where we eventually found the right street of older, two and three story buildings, store-fronted, apartment-topped, with cars parked at every inch of available curb space.
We parked about a block away and walked back, checking the numbers on the buildings. We found the right one at the end of a wide, dead-end alley. Overhead, dark laundry hung from lines that crisscrossed between buildings; it waved like black pennants in some ancient battle in the stormy night sky.
There was the heavy odor of drying squid in the air.
The building we entered was fronted by a small store that advertised fresh fish, but once we were inside and out on the stairs there was some room for doubt about the claim.
“This is not a haunt of the rich and famous,” said Loretta as we climbed the stairs.
The second floor hall was narrow and rather dark, and we had to flick lighters before the doors to read the numbers.
The right apartment was at the end of the second floor hall, where, in response to Loretta’s knock, the door opened the length of the double chain-lock and a pair of curious brown eyes peered up at us.