“LOOKS LIKE A RAIN FOREST,” PEGGY REMARKED AS the film’s opening scene began, the camera tracking hunters sloshing through swampy woodlands, gloomy beneath towering conifers. “I thought you said the Arikara lived in the Great Plains.”
“They did,” I said. “At least, the ones I dug up did. South Dakota and North Dakota. This looks more like Montana. Or Oregon.”
Soon, the shot widened to show us that the sloshing hunters were white men, one of them a bearded, filthy, but recognizable Leonardo DiCaprio. “Maybe the hunters are lost,” Peggy offered. “Or maybe they track their prey all the way to the Plains.”
“Shh,” I said.
A few minutes later, the Arikara made their entrance, which they announced by shooting an arrow through the back of a running white man—a running white man who was, for some reason, buck naked. Peggy started and gasped when the arrow plowed into him and emerged halfway from his chest, just before he fell. An instant later, an Indian war party on horseback, whooping and unleashing a hail of bullets and arrows, galloped down a slope and surrounded the band of white trappers, unleashing swift, brutal death. “I thought you said the Arikara were farmers,” Peggy said. “And sedentary.”
“They were,” I said. “At least, the ones I dug up.”
“I thought you said they didn’t have horses or guns.”
“Artistic license,” I said. “Now shh.”
Miraculously, DiCaprio—or, rather, ace wilderness scout Hugh Glass, whom DiCaprio was portraying—managed to survive the slaughter, along with a dozen other men, including Glass’s half-Pawnee son. Racing to their boat, hauling heavy bundles of animal pelts, they pushed off and beat a hasty retreat downriver, the Indians continuing to lob arrows at the boat until it was out of range.
But we were only ten minutes into a three-hour movie, so clearly the trappers weren’t out of the woods yet. Knowing the Indians would surely race downstream to ambush them, Glass persuaded them to ditch the boat and head overland instead, angling toward the nearest fort. The battered group made camp, and Glass went hunting alone, seeking food for the group. That’s when his troubles began, for Glass had the misfortune to come between a mother grizzly and her two cubs. Distracted by the cubs, Glass didn’t see the mother charging until it was too late to get off a shot.
When the immense bear hit Glass, Peggy shrieked, and when it ripped him open, she grabbed my hand, squeezing so hard it hurt. After a moment, her grip eased, but she didn’t let go, and I found myself only half watching the movie. Had she forgotten that she was holding my hand? Should I extricate my palm from her grip? Probably, I told myself. But not yet. It had been years since I’d held hands with anyone, but I hadn’t even realized how much I’d missed it, that simple human touch. On any given day, it wasn’t uncommon for me to shake hands with ten or twenty or even a hundred people, but a handshake was different—profoundly different—from holding hands.
I sat like that, silent and unmoving, though moved, for the next two hours, Peggy’s grip occasionally tightening again, when yet another brutal calamity occurred on-screen. And when the end came, she gave my hand a final, gentler squeeze, as if to say “thank you” or perhaps “good night”—it was now after eight o’clock—then wiped tears from her eyes, stood up, and hurried out of the office, leaving me sitting in half darkness and utter confusion.
She also left me surrounded by ghosts. The ghost of Kathleen, my wife of thirty years, who had died a swift, unexpected death from cancer a decade before. The ghost of Jess Carter, a medical examiner from Chattanooga who had coaxed me from my cave of grief and shown me that I could love again—had shown me that I wanted to love again—but had been murdered by a jealous colleague. The ghost of Isabella Arakawa Morgan, a beautiful, brilliant, but deranged Japanese American librarian I’d worked with—and slept with, once—before discovering that she had murdered a scientist she blamed for the atomic blast that had killed her parents decades earlier, at the end of World War II. The only two women in my life now, apart from my son’s wife, were my graduate assistant and my secretary: one of them thirty years my junior, and about to leave; the other a longtime subordinate who—despite her fearful clutching of my hand—surely knew my failings far too well to harbor romantic feelings for me.