“What the hell is this?” Loretta muttered. She stepped on the gas suddenly and drove past the station, making a couple of squealing turns that took us into a small parking lot at the rear of the building.
As we stepped inside the back entrance, a deputy came up to her, gave me an apologetic look, and asked to speak with Loretta alone. The two of them went into her office.
I strolled down the hall to the large front office, which was oddly quiet given the fact that there were a half-dozen other people there. They were speaking in whispers, as if embarrassed about something, and I sat down to wait.
I could hear other voices coming from the downstairs cell-block, but I couldn’t make out what was being said.
I could hear raised voices from outside on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t hear them well, either.
After a while the deputy who’d spoken with Loretta came out, looking worried, but he said nothing to me, so I sat and waited some more.
But then, when it seemed like a very long time, I got up and went down the hall to Loretta’s office and found her sitting behind the large oak desk, staring at nothing, with a look of blank astonishment on her face.
“Loretta?”
She blinked at me.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She stared at me for a long moment, then swallowed and looked away again.
I came up close to the desk. “What is it, Loretta?”
“Charley White Hand,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
Oh no, I thought.
She took a few hard breaths, then frowned up at me. “He hanged himself in his cell.”
Which was the perfectly depressing end to a perfectly depressing night.
I tried to comfort her, because I could see she was taking it as hard as she should, but she’d crawled into an emotional carapace that I couldn’t crack through, and then people started to arrive — the boy’s family, looking stunned and solemn, two county council members, looking politically solicitous, and the county coroner finally, looking harried and overworked. For the next couple of hours Loretta was never alone, and I waited, feeling useless, in the outer office again.
After a while, Charley White Hand was taken out in a black body bag, and after another while Loretta, with the two county councilpersons standing stiffly near her — but noticeably not by her side, gave a brief, matter-of-fact statement to the reporter. Then she disappeared into her office again, and after another long while, one of the deputies told me she’d gone home and had asked them to tell me that she just wanted to be alone.
And partly because I respected her wishes, partly because I didn’t know where she lived, but mostly because she was a big girl, I left it.
Which put me on the street at a quarter to twelve without a clue as to how to get home.
But just as I was examining this problem, Mac’s cab pulled up and solved it.
“So,” Mac said tentatively after I’d gotten in and we were headed up the mountain. “They find out who it was?”
I looked at him looking at me in the rear view. “I beg your pardon?”
He waggled his head toward Mount Fear. “That body you found the other day,” he said. “Newspaper this morning said the cops didn’t know who it was.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. They’ve I.D.’d him.”
He drove in silence for a while, which was fine with me, but once we were through the switchbacks on the mountain’s south face, he said, “Paper said he froze to death.”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
He hmmmphed, then gave me a look over his shoulder. “You in ’Nam?” he asked.
“I was there,” I told him.
He nodded. “Khe Sanh, ’68-’69.”
“Saigon,” I told him, not really wanting to talk about it, “ ’69–72.”
He sighed. “Long time ago, eh?”
Not long enough, I thought.
The mountain road was slippery with frozen patches of snow, so he had to slow down. He was quiet most of the way, and I really hoped he didn’t want to talk about the war, but once we were close to the lodges, he said, “Never got over how hot it was, y’know? Like a steambath, sometimes, you remember?”
“It was hot,” I agreed.
He turned onto the road that led up to my cabin and said, “Stupid bugger, probably didn’t know what the cold could do.”
“I’m sorry?”
He pulled to a stop, then turned in his seat. “You know,” he told me. “Walkin’ around in the middle of the night, up on this mountain in the dead of winter.” He shook his head with surprising sadness. “Comin’ from over there, he probably had no experience of such cold before. He sits down for a rest, and before he knows it, he’s asleep — and that’s all she wrote.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
I paid him his fare and got out of the cab.
“Stupid bugger,” he said again.
I was dead tired by the time my head hit the pillow, but sleep was no easier won that night than the night before.
In fact, that night I had the worst nightmares of my life.
Rippling the fabric of my unconscious, bad little memories, tiny nut-hard guilts that harbor mostly quietly in my mind’s dark alleys, careless cruelties half-forgotten that wait like thumbtacks in a pile rug waiting to jab when I didn’t expect it, things I’d done and wished I hadn’t — I don’t know why they picked that night to attack me, but they did and tossed me every which way, and I didn’t get the sleep I needed until nearly dawn.
But then, thank goodness, I did sleep, and it was midafternoon before I woke up.
To a brilliantly bright day — and, for some reason, my head was clear, my mind sharp, and as I started out on my run down the mountain, I felt really good.
Despite some sombre thoughts.
About young Charley White Hand, and his bad, bad choice; and Loretta and the second guessing she was now probably putting herself through; and Tuyet Le and her children and the quietly desperate lives they’d lived so far and had before them; and Long Van Doan.
My snowman.
His own life ended as coldly as it had been lived.
R.I.P.
I jogged past the lookout, feeling strong and good, and around the turn that would take me to the ranger station, a little girl of eight or nine standing in the driveway of a large white house on the mountain side of the highway waved at me as I went by, so I smiled, waved back, and kept moving, thinking I’d better slow down or I’d never have enough for the uphill leg...
When a snowball hit me smack in the back of my head.
Surprised, then amused, I skidded to a stop and looked back at the little girl, who’d been joined by a littler boy and who both stood together in the driveway, semihiding behind a mailbox, giggling.
Their eyes looked wide and excited and a little scared.
I waggled a remonstrating finger at them, then grabbed up some snow, made a ball of my own, and threw a perfect strike at the mailbox, which sent both children laughing up the driveway.
I watched them run, casting half-worried, half-happy looks back at me, then I laughed myself and started to run again.
Down to the ranger station, then back the way I’d come, thinking about the steak I was going to reward myself with that night, thinking of the wine I’d have with it, and thinking about my life and how I was living it — and I came to a few decisions, not the least of which had to do with the new me I’d started to create.
I decided to stay off cigarettes, moderate my meat and liquor intake, and keep running.
Not to be young again but to be everything my age can be, and for the first time in a while, my discontent had less of an edge to it, and I was feeling pretty smug...
When a squad-sized unit of children, aged five to ten — including the little girl and boy who’d assaulted me earlier — rose up from behind bushes and trees on either side of the highway and let me have it from all sides.