David Vann: Legend of a Suicide

My first aquarium was only a clear plastic tray of the kind most often used to hold nuts and bolts. In it were two goldfish I had won at the county fair and some gravel my mother had bought at Sal’s Fishworld on our way home.

I watched over those thin, pale goldfish, but the tray had no cover, and after our cat, Smokey, snagged them with his paw and ate them on our countertop as I watched, unable to move, my mother took me down to Sal’s and bought a proper ten-gallon tank with a bubble filter, more gravel, a wide-leaved plastic plant, a piece of volcanic rock with a hole in it, a few goldfish, and even one of those orange-and-black-striped fish I knew from Ketchikan, which I now discovered were called clown loaches.

We watched those fish every evening, cleaned their tank every weekend, and also survived the occasional ich plague: a sudden, mysterious proliferation of white spots on fins and tails that threatened to kill them all.

We buried the first of the deceased in elaborate ceremonies, during which my mother would sit beside me on her knees in the dirt and I would wear an old white bedsheet. The fish themselves were always wrapped in many layers of toilet paper, placed in small boxes, and buried six inches under, where the cat wouldn’t dig them up.

Soon we just flushed the fish down the toilet and replaced them, but even then they were all I thought about. I wrote reports on them at school in lieu of book reports. My elementary school teachers never seemed to catch on, but apparently believed I had read books titled The Clown Loach, The Silver Dollars, The Iridescent Shark, and The Plecostemus, or Bottom-Sucker . Everything in human life was to be found in that tank. Yellow-and-black angelfish floated delicately by, all glamour and glitz, while behind them trailed their waste in streamers. Suckers at the bottom of the tank ate this waste, spat it out in disgust, and roved on, still hungry. And within five minutes of placing two new silver dollars in the tank, I saw real brutality. These silver dollars were large, thin fish, nearly identical in shape and shine to the coins after which they had been named, and once out of their plastic bag from Sal’s, they swam up on either side of my one lazy, boggle-eyed iridescent shark. This iridescent shark had been badly misnamed; he was in actuality no more than a long, thin goldfish with a shiny body and two large, bulbous eyes. The silver dollars were slick and merciless and knew how to work as a team. In one quick flash each went for an eye and sucked it out. They didn’t even swallow, but let the round, billiard-ball eyes float dreamily down to the rocks, where they were ingested by the sucker fish.

My mother was swift in her retribution. The silver dollars were netted and flushed within minutes, and we spent that evening together watching the iridescent shark bump blindly into the sides of the tank, waiting for him to die.

As we spent these years in California leading steadily more circumscribed lives, my father ranged farther and farther up in Alaska, and everything he did seemed to lack sense. He had never enjoyed dentistry, and felt now that perhaps fishing was more what he wanted to do. In this I believe he was right, and he was certainly earnest, but he didn’t think ahead very well. He sold his practice, ordered a beautiful, expensive, sixty-three-foot aluminum commercial fishing boat, to be completed before the halibut season, and persuaded my uncle to be the crew. They had fished together for sport all their lives, but neither of them had any experience on a commercial fishing boat, and they were to be the only two on board. My father’s lone-explorer image of himself would have been undercut if he had worked first on another boat or had hired a captain.

He named this boat the Osprey . Whereas the Snow Goose had been a bird to fly its white wings over the waves on short one-and two-day sport-fishing jaunts, the Osprey was a more wide-ranging creature. With wingspans of up to six feet, ospreys are known to soar far out over the waters in vast arcs and circles, and they often soar alone.

The Osprey was not finished on time, so my father and my uncle entered the season a month and a half late. In their hurry they fouled up one of the halibut lines they had set, thus jamming for more than a week the huge hydraulic wheel that pulled the fish in, and of course they caught almost nothing. The loss of above $100,000 that year on fishing alone left my father undaunted, however, because he had already entered the last beautiful, desperate, far-ranging circlings of his life.

My uncle tells of one night on the bridge of the boat when my father, having lost for the seventeenth consecutive time at gin rummy, instead of looking glum and muttering an insincere congratulation, curved his back suddenly and spread wide his arms. Standing up on his captain’s chair amid the blue-white glow of radar and sonar, he stretched out his chin, tilted what my uncle remembers to this day as a distinctly curved beak, and squawked out, “Three degrees starboard!” My uncle adjusted the automatic pilot accordingly, and in the morning they set what was to be one of only three or four successful lines that trip.

This correlation between my father’s predictions and actual success was rare. The hardware store he had also invested in that year collapsed, as did the price of gold, the IRS’s patience with his tax dodges in South American countries (he was angry at having to pay Social Security, which, ironically enough, supported us after his death), and his relationship with his receptionist-turned-fiancée. In short, the year was not a good one. I spent all of four days with him, in mid-January.

Each night during that vacation, as I lay in a sleeping bag on the hotel-room floor at the foot of his bed, I heard his tossings and turnings until very late and sensed, with the assurance children sometimes have, that he would not be my father for much longer. His movements came in cycles that were closing in steadily around him. He kicked wildly at the sheets, groaning in frustration, anger, and despair, until they billowed and ruffled like an offshore wind, then sank face first, utterly resigned and collapsed, into his pillow to weep. Then he began the cycle again. I assumed all along that he thought I was no longer awake, since he had never to my knowledge let himself weep in front of anyone. But one night he spoke to me.

“I just don’t know,” he said aloud. “Roy, are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“God, I just don’t know.”

That was our last communication. I didn’t know, either, and I wanted only to shrink farther down into my sleeping bag. He had a terrific pain in his head that painkillers couldn’t reach, an airiness in his voice that was only becoming more hollow, and other mysteries of despair I didn’t want to see or hear. I knew where he was headed, as we all did, but I didn’t know why. And I didn’t want to know.

My father ranged farther and farther that next year in the Osprey , changing gear for albacore off Mexico, then again for king crab in the Bering Sea. He began to sport-fish off the wide, high stern, and one day caught several large salmon, which he gutted on the spot. With the return to port and sale of the failed Osprey imminent (after two years of severe losses he could no longer even get a loan), with the IRS closing in, and with no further flights imagined, he took his.44 Magnum handgun from the cabin and walked back to stand alone on the bright silver stern under a heavy, gray-white sky and the cries of gulls, his boots slathered with the dark blood of freshly caught salmon. He may have paused for a moment to reflect, but I doubt it. His momentum was made up only of air, without the distraction of ground. He spattered himself amid the entrails of salmon, his remains picked at by gulls for several hours before my uncle came up from the engine room and found him.