by Dan Simmons
My Jeep is old and ugly, but it’s useful. A few years ago I had an electric winch installed on the front with two hundred feet of cable wrapped around its drum. I powered it up, took the drum brake off, secured the cable around a solid bridge stanchion about thirty feet from the edge of the fissure, set it again, and prepared to back the Jeep down the fifty-degree embankment. I didn’t know if I could climb the opposite slope even in 4-wheel-low, but I figured I’d think of something when I got down there. If worse came to worse, I’d come back, find a bulldozer somewhere, and grade my own way out of this trap. Anything was preferable to playing Kelly Dahl’s game by Kelly Dahl’s rules.
I’d just gotten the rear wheels over the brink and was edging over with just the cable keeping me from falling when the first shot rang out. It shattered my windshield, sending the right-side windshield wiper flying into the air in two pieces. For a second I froze. Don’t let anyone tell you that old combat reflexes last forever.
The second shot smashed the Jeep’s right headlight and exited through the fender. I don’t know what the third shot hit, because old reflexes finally reasserted themselves and I was out of the Jeep and scrambling for cover along the steep cliffside by then, my face in the dust, my fingers clawing for a hold. She fired seven times—I never doubted that it was Kelly Dahl—and each bullet created some mischief, taking off my rearview mirror, puncturing two tires, and even smashing the last two bottles of Johnnie Walker Red where I’d left them cushioned beneath the seat, wrapped in my shirt. I have to believe that last was a lucky shot.
I waited the better part of an hour before crawling out of the cleft, looking at the distant buildings for any sign of the crazy woman with the rifle, winching the Jeep out on its two flat tires, and cursing over the smashed bottle. I changed the right front with the spare I had and limped into town, thinking that I’d head for the tire place on Pearl—if that was there yet. Instead, I saw another Jeep parked in a lot near 28th and Arapaho and I just pulled in beside it, took one of its new, knobby tires, decided that my spare was in bad shape and the rear tires looked shitty with these new ones on front, and ended up changing all four tires. I suppose I could have just hotwired the new Jeep and have been done with it without all that sweat and cursing under the blazing July sun, but I didn’t. I’m sentimental.
In the early afternoon I drove to the old Gart Brothers sporting goods store and chose the Remington with the twenty-power scope, the .38 handgun, the Ka-bar knife of the sort that had been prized in Vietnam, and enough ammunition for the two guns to fight a small war. Then I drove to the old army surplus store on Pearl and 14th and stocked up on boots, socks, a camouflaged hunting vest, backpacking rations, a new Coleman gas stove, extra binoculars, better raingear than I had in the old pack, lots of nylon line, a new sleeping bag, two compasses, a nifty hunting cap that probably made me look like a real asshole, and even more ammunition for the Remington. I did not leave any money on the counter when I left. I had the feeling that the proprietor was not coming back and doubted if I would be, either.
I drove back to the mom-and-pop liquor store on 28th, but the shelves were empty. The hundreds of bottles that had been there three hours before were simply gone. The same was true of the four other liquor stores I tried.
“You bitch,” I said to the empty street.
A phone rang in an old glass booth across a parking lot. It kept ringing as I removed the .38 Police Special from its case, opened the yellow box, and slowly loaded the cylinder. It stopped ringing on my third shot when I hit the phone box dead center.
A pay phone across the street rang.
“Listen, you little bitch,” I said as soon as I picked it up, “I’ll play your game if you’ll leave me something to drink.”
This time I did expect God to be on the other end.
“You find me and stop me, and you’ll have all the booze you want, Mr. Jakes” came Kelly Dahl’s voice.
“Everything will be the way it was?” I was looking around as I spoke, half expecting to see her down the street in another phone booth.
“Yep,” said Kelly Dahl. “You can even go back up in the hills and drive into a mineshaft, and I won’t interfere the next time.”
“So I actually drove into it? Did I die? Are you my punishment?”
“Mu,” said Kelly Dahl. “Remember the two other Eco-Week fieldtrips?”
I thought a minute. “The water filtration plant and Trail Ridge Road.”
“Very good,” said Kelly Dahl. “You can find me at the higher of those two.”
“Do the roads continue to the west…” I began. I was talking to a dial tone.
III
Palimpsest
On the day I surprised Kelly Dahl near the mountain town of Ward, she almost killed me. I had set an ambush, remembering my training from the good old Vietnam years, waiting patiently where the Left Hand Canyon road wound up to the Peak to Peak Highway. There were only three ways to get up to the Continental Divide along this stretch of the Front Range, and I knew Kelly would take the shortest.
There had been a chainsaw in the old firehouse in Ward. The town itself was empty, of course, but even before Kelly Dahl kidnapped me to this place there were never more than a hundred people in Ward—hippies left over from the ’60s mostly. The old mining town had been turned into a scrapheap of abandoned vehicles, half-built houses, woodpiles, junk heaps, and geodesic outhouses. I set the ambush on the switchback above the town, cutting down two ponderosa pines to block the road. Then I waited in the aspen grove.
Kelly Dahl’s Bronco came up the road late that afternoon. She stopped, got out of the truck, looked at the fallen trees, and then looked over at me as I stepped around a tree and began walking toward her. I had left the Remington behind. The .38 was tucked in my waistband under my jacket; the Ka-bar knife remained in its sheath.
“Kelly,” I said. “Let’s talk.”
That was when she reached back into the Bronco, came out with a powerful bow made of some dark composite material, notched an arrow before I could speak again, and let fly. It was a hunting arrow—steel-tipped, barbed for maximum damage—and it passed under my left arm, tearing my jacket, ripping flesh on the inside of my arm and above my ribcage, and embedding itself in the aspen centimeters behind me.
I was pinned there for an instant, a bug pinned on a collecting tray, and could only stare as Kelly Dahl notched another arrow. I had no doubt that this one would find its target in my sternum. Before she could release the second arrow, I fumbled in my belt, came out with the .38, and fired blindly, wildly, seeing her duck behind the Bronco as I tore myself free from the tattered remnants of my jacket and leaped behind the fallen log.
I heard the Bronco roar a moment later but I did not look up until the truck was gone, driving over the fallen trees as it turned and accelerating through Ward and back down the canyon.
It took a trip back to Boulder—an early ’80s version this time but still as empty—to find bandages and antibiotic for the slash on my ribs and inner arm. It is beginning to scar over now, but it still hurts when I walk or breathe deeply.
I carry the Remington everywhere now.
EVEN after I had been teaching drunk for two years, the central administration did not have the balls to fire me. Our Master Agreement specified that because I was tenured, malfeasance and gross incompetence had to be documented by one or more administrators, I had to be given at least three chances to redeem myself, and I was to enjoy due process every step of the way. As it turned out, the high school principal and the director of secondary education were too chickenshit to confront me with any documentation sessions, I didn’t want to redeem myself, and everyone was too busy trying to figure out a way to hide me from sight or get rid of me outside of channels to worry about due process. In the end, the Superintendent ordered the Director of Elementary Instruction—a gray carbuncle of a woman named Dr. Maxine Millard—to observe me the required number of times, to give me my warnings and chances to rehabilitate myself, a
nd then to do the necessary paperwork to get rid of me.
I knew the days that Dr. Max was going to be there so I could have called in sick or at least not shown up drunk or hungover, but I figured—Fuck it, let them do their worst. They did. My tenure was revoked and I was dismissed from the district three years and two days before I could have put in for early retirement.
I don’t miss the job. I missed the kids, even the slumpy, acned, socially inept high school kids. Oddly, I remember the little kids from my earlier years in elementary even more clearly. And miss them more.
A sage without a stage is no sage, drunk or sober.
THIS morning I followed Kelly Dahl’s tire tracks down Flagstaff Mountain on a narrow gravel road, came out where Chautauqua Park should be to find Boulder gone and the Inland Sea back again. Only this time, far out on the mudflats, reachable by a long causeway raised just feet above the quicksand beds, was a great island of stone with a walled city rising from its rocks, a great cathedral rising from the stone city, and Michael the Archangel standing on the summit of the tallest tower, his sword raised, his foot firmly planted on a writhing devil, a cock signifying eternal vigilance perched on his mailed foot.
“Christ, Kelly,” I said to the tire tracks as I followed them across the causeway, “this is getting a little elaborate.”
It was Mont-Saint-Michel, of course, complete down to its last stained glass window and wrought-iron balustrade. I only vaguely remembered showing my sixth-grade class the slides of it. The 12th Century structure had caught my fancy the summer before when I took my family there. Maria had not been impressed, but ten-year-old Allan had flipped over it. He and I bought every book on the subject that we could and seriously discussed building a model of the fortress-cathedral out of balsa wood.
Kelly Dahl’s old Bronco was parked outside the gate. I took the Remington, actioned a round into the breech, and went through the gate and up the cobblestone walkway in search of her. My footfalls echoed. Occasionally I paused, looked back over the ramparts at the Flatirons gleaming in the Colorado sunshine, and listened for her footsteps above the lap of lazy waves. There were noises higher up.
The cathedral was empty, but a thin book made of heavy parchment bound in leather had been set on the central altar. I picked up the vellum and read:
Ço sent Rollánz que la mort le trespent
Desuz un pin i est alez curanz
Sur l’erbe verte si est suchiez adenz
Desuz lui met s’espree e l’olifant
Turnat sa teste vers la paiene gent.
This was Eleventh Century French verse. I knew it from my last year of college. This was the kind of thing I had devoted my life to translating in those final months before being drafted and sent around the world to kill small Asian people.
Then Roland feels that death is taking him;
Down from the head upon the heart it falls.
Beneath a pine he hastens running;
On the green grass he throws himself down;
Beneath him puts his sword and oliphant,
Turns his face toward the pagan army.
I set down the book and shouted into the gloom of the cathedral. “Is this a threat, kid?” Only echoes answered.
The next page I recognized as Thibaut, 13th Century:
Nus hom ne puet ami reconforte
Se cele non ou il a son cuer mis.
Pour ce m’estuet sovent plaindre et plourer
Que nus confors ne me vient, ce m’est vis,
De la ou j’ai tote ma remembrance.
Pour biens amer ai sovent esmaiance
A dire voir.
Dame, merci! donez moi esperance
De joie avoir.
This took me a moment. Finally I thought I had it.
There is no comfort to be found in pain
Save only where the heart has made its home.
Therefore I can but murmur and complain
Because no comfort to my pain has come
From where I garnered all my happiness.
From true love have I only earned distress
The truth to say.
Grace, lady! give me comfort to possess
A hope, one day.
“Kelly!” I shouted into the cathedral shadows. “I don’t need this shit!” When there was no answer, I raised the Remington and fired a single slug into the huge stained-glass window of the Virgin opposite the altar. The echo of the shot and of falling glass was still sounding as I left.
I dropped the handmade book into the quicksand as I drove back across the causeway.
WHEN I returned home from the hospital after the accident that killed Allan, I found that Maria had emptied our eleven-year-old son’s room of all his possessions, our house of all images and records of him. His clothes were gone. The posters and photographs and desk clutter and old Star Trek models hanging from black thread in his room—all gone. The rocking-horse quilt she had made for him the month before he was born was gone from his bed. The bed was stripped as clean as the walls and closet, as if his room and bed were in a dormitory or barracks, waiting sterilely for the next recruits to arrive.
There were no next recruits.
Maria had purged the photo albums of any image of Allan. It was as if his eleven years simply had not been. The family photo we had kept on our bedroom dresser was gone, as were the snapshots that had been held to the refrigerator door by magnets. His fifth-grade school portrait was no longer in the drawer in the study, and all of the baby pictures were gone from the shoebox. I never found out if she had given the clothes and toys and sports equipment to the Salvation Army, or burned the photographs, or buried them. She would not speak of it. She would not speak of Allan. When I forced the subject, Maria’s eyes took on a stubborn, distant look. I soon learned not to force the subject.
This was the summer after I taught my last sixth-grade class. Allan would have been a year younger than Kelly Dahl, twenty-two now, out of college, finding his way in the world. It is very difficult to imagine.
I tracked her to Trail Ridge Road but left the Jeep behind at the beginning of the tundra. There was no Trail Ridge Road—no sign of human existence—only the tundra extending up beyond treeline. It was very cold out of the shelter of the trees. When I’d awakened at my high camp that morning, it had felt like late autumn. The skies were leaden, there were clouds in the valleys below, hiding the lateral moraines, wisps of cloud edge curling up against the mountainsides like tentacles of fog. The air was freezing. I cursed myself for not bringing gloves and balled my hands in the pockets of my jacket, the Remington cold and heavy against my forearms.
Passing the last of the stunted trees, I tried to remember the name for these ancient dwarfs at treeline.
Krummholz came Kelly Dahl’s voice almost in my ear. It means “elfin timber” or “crooked wood.”
I dropped to one knee on the frozen moss, the rifle coming up. There was no one within a hundred meters of open tundra. I scoped the treeline, the boulders large enough to hide a human figure. Nothing moved.
I love all the tundra terms you taught us, continued Kelly’s voice in my mind. She had done this only a few times before. Fellfield, meadow vole, boreal chorus frog, snowball saxifrage, solifluction terraces, avens and sedges, yellow-bellied marmots, permafrost, nivation depressions, saffron ragworts, green-leaf chiming bells, man-hater sedge…
I looked up and out across the windswept tundra. Nothing moved. But I had been wrong about there being no sign of human existence: a well-worn trail ran across the permafrost field toward the summit of the pass. I began following it. “I thought you hated all the technical terms,” I said aloud, the rifle ready in the crook of my arm. My ribs and the inside of my left arm ached from where her arrow had cut deep.
I like poetry. Her voice was in my mind, not my ear. The only real sound was the wind. But her voice was real enough.
Mr. Jakes, do you remember that Robert Frost thing you read us about poetry?
I was two hundred meters o
ut from the last line of krummholz now. There were some house-sized boulders about three hundred meters above and to my left. She might be hiding there. I sensed that she was close.
“Which poem?” I said. If I could keep her talking, thinking, she might not notice my approach.
Not poem, the Frost introduction to one of his books. It was about the figure a poem makes.
“I don’t remember,” I said. I did. I had shared that with the high school juniors only weeks before Kelly Dahl had quit school and run away.
Frost said that it should be the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. He said that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. He said the figure is the same for love.
“Mmmm,” I said, moving quickly across the permafrost field now, my breath fogging the air as I panted. The rifle was gripped in both hands, the cold forgotten. “Tell me more.”
Stop a minute. Kelly Dahl’s voice was flat in my mind.
I paused, panting. The boulders were less than fifty meters from me. The trail I had been following cut across the grassy area once used by the Ute and Pawnee women, old people, and youngsters to cross the Divide. This path looked newly used, as if the Utes had just disappeared over the rock saddle ahead of me.
I don’t think the Indians left trails, came Kelly Dahl’s soft voice in my mind. Look down.
Still trying to catch my breath, dizzy with the altitude and adrenaline, I looked down. A plant was growing on the cushioned terrace between two low rocks there. The wind was whipping snow past me; the temperature must have been in the twenties, if not lower.
Look more closely.
Still gasping for air, I went to one knee on the fellfield. When Kelly Dahl’s voice began again, I took the opportunity to action a round into the Remington’s chamber.
See those little trenches in the soil, Mr. Jakes? They look like smooth runways, little toboggan runs through the tundra. Do you remember teaching us about them?
I shook my head, all the time watching for movement out of the corner of my eye. I truly did not remember. My passion for alpine ecology had burned away with all of my other passions. Not even an ember of interest remained. “Tell me,” I said aloud, as if hearing the echo of her mental voice would reveal her position to me.