It was a short, noisy, happy snowball fight that ended when I caught one on the side of the head and fell spread-eagled and laughing into a drift on the side of the road. I was too exhausted to defend myself any longer, so after I’d taken a few more hits but didn’t return fire, the children got bored with me and ran off, and I stood up, hearing their noise grow fainter, deciding I’d just walk the rest of the way — and feeling, for the first time, glad to be where I was...
When the whole thing exploded in my mind like a starburst.
Which is how it happens sometimes.
I took my time walking back up the hill, giving it a good long think — making sure — and when I got back, I nosed around the Fear Mountain Lodge’s facilities, talking to people, keeping my questions vague because I wanted reaction less than I wanted answers really — but I got lucky with the restaurant manager, confirmed what he told me with a waitress in the bar, and then I was sure.
Which left me with some decision-making to do. I hiked back up to my cabin, thinking through the options, and was halfway there when Dilly’s Trans Am came up behind me and stopped.
I got in and looked at her. “How’re you doing?” I asked.
She looked as though she hadn’t slept. Her face was pinched, her eyes red and puffed. She swallowed and said, “I’m... not letting myself feel what happened. Not now. Not yet.”
I could see that wasn’t true, but I nodded.
“I’m going to resign. I wanted you to know.”
“Loretta...”
“You were right,” she said. “That boy didn’t belong in jail. I don’t know what I was thinking. He was just a kid. Just eighteen...”
“Loretta, will you listen to me?”
“I don’t know why I came down so hard on him,” she went on. “He only took a coat, for God’s sake. Just a coat.” She banged the steering wheel with a fist.
I grabbed her hand and held it.
“I should have put a close watch on him,” she went on. “I should have known.”
“Loretta!”
She stared at me.
I stared back at her for a moment, thinking up words to say; then I dropped her hand and nodded toward the road. “Drive me to my cabin,” I told her.
Once we were there, I took her inside, put her in a chair in the front room, gave her a long, “I-don’t-why-I’m-telling-this-to-you” look, then said:
“About ten years ago, I was stationed at Fort Ord.”
She frowned up at me.
I sighed. “I was doing background followups on ROTC grads who’d just gotten their commissions. I turned up some dirt on this kid, a twenty-three-year-old accounting major. He’d had a sexual encounter with another boy about a year before.”
Loretta kept her frown in place.
I put a small smile on my face. “So, naturally, I talked to him about it. Told him what I knew — and he was scared. He admitted what I’d found out but told me he was straight. He said he’d gotten drunk on the night in question, and he barely remembered what happened.” I laughed shortly and shook my head. “He told me he had a girlfriend, and I could ask her if he was straight or not. He pleaded with me not to jerk his clearance, that he wanted to stay in the ROTC, and get his M.B.A. Said he’d wanted to be an army officer all his life.”
Loretta sighed. “I don’t see what this has to do with...”
“His name was Springer,” I told her, in a haunted way. “David Springer.”
I walked over to the window and looked out over the sun-bright mountainside, where, not very far away, a man and woman on skis were sidestepping along a gentle slope.
I said, “I not only jerked his clearance, but I recommended a BCD for his failure to disclose his homosexuality.”
The woman fell suddenly, and the man laughed, then fell himself.
“A week later, he put a .45 slug into his brain.”
Behind me Loretta made a short sympathetic groan.
“A long time ago,” I told her. She nodded.
“But, hell, Loretta, that’s not even the worst thing I’ve ever done, but the point is, I didn’t quit. I found a way to live with what I’d done and carried on.”
She made a face that reflected doubt.
“And that’s what you have to do,” I told her. “You didn’t kill Charley White Hand. He did it — and there was no way for you to know what was in his mind. He made his own choice, and now he’s dead.” I went over to her and squeezed her shoulder. “But you’re alive, and only the living matter, Loretta.”
She shook her head.
“And you can feel bad about it,” I went on. “You should feel bad about it, but don’t let it kill you, and don’t take yourself out of a position where you can make a difference the next time.”
She laughed without humor. “And what happens the next time?”
“Next time?” I smiled and shrugged. “Next time you’ll do better.”
She shook her head again, with doubt still on her face, but the look of fatalistic determination was gone.
I changed the subject.
I flopped down on the sofa opposite and said, “Autopsy done on Doan?”
“No marks on the body,” she told me. “No trauma. No apparent illness. No toxins in him, either. Nothing wrong with him at all, except being frozen to death.”
I nodded. “Suicide, then?”
She heard something in my voice that made her cock her head at me slightly. “Do you think different?” she asked.
“No,” I told her truthfully.
She gave me a long thoughtful look. “Well...”
“You look beat,” I said.
“I haven’t slept in I don’t know how long.”
“You can crash here if you like.”
She gave me a tired, what-does-that-mean look, and I gave her a take-it-or-leave-it shrug right back, and after a moment she smiled and sagged back on her chair.
“Tell you what,” I said, getting to my feet. “You catch some sleep while I do some shopping, and when you get up, I’ll make you a Spanish omelette that will be a poem.” I grabbed her hands and pulled her up. “Deal?” I asked, with my face an inch from hers.
She agreed in a manner that suited us both.
Later, with Loretta asleep in my bed, I sat drinking coffee — instant, but real — in front of the fire I’d built in the fireplace, and finished the decision-making process I’d started earlier.
Deciding among other things that although a prudent man indeed takes Nietzsche in small doses, when he was right, he was right.
“Like every good thing on earth,” he’d written, “justice ends by suspending itself. The fine name this self-cancelling justice has given itself is mercy. But mercy remains, as goes without saying, the prerogative of the strongest, his province beyond the law.”
Which, if knowledge was power, and power characteristic of the strongest, made mercy my prerogative.
At least for the moment.
At dusk, I walked down the highway and found Mac lounging against his cab in his usual place in front of the restaurant. After I’d climbed inside and after he’d gotten in behind the wheel and asked me where to, I said, “Just down the road a ways, Mac. There’s something I want to check out.”
He took me down the hill, and I directed him to the lookout where I’d first come across the corpse on the bench.
The sun had set by then, and after he stopped the cab, I got out and looked at the lights in the houses, plainly visible through the pines that covered the face of the mountain.
I waved at Mac, who was still sitting in his cab with the motor running, and said, “Could you step out here a minute, Mac?”