David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

Roy watched him go until he’d disappeared into the trees, then he looked at the pistol in his hand. The hammer was back and he could see the copper shell in there. He eased the hammer down with the pistol pointed away from him and then he pulled the hammer back again, raised the barrel to his head, and fired.

Jim in the trees heard the shot and didn’t know what it was about. He wondered for a moment whether he had really heard it, but then he figured he had. Roy was making some kind of scene. He was going to shoot up their cabin because he needed to be taken care of now. Jim hiked on. He hoped Roy would hit the radio.

It was drizzling and the fog was in close. The trees had become ghosted and the entire island seemed uninhabitable. Jim hiked on, hearing his breathing the only rhythm, the only moving thing. He couldn’t think about Rhoda. She had become a sense now, a part of him that he couldn’t differentiate enough to think about. She was a longing and regret in him like a growth. And she was really doing it, really leaving him. Jim could feel himself on the edge of crying again, so he hiked on faster and counted his steps in rhythm, onetwothreefour in a group, fivesixseveneight, over and over. He hiked on until he stopped because he was tired and then he turned around and hiked back, but he didn’t like the thought of arriving, of having to find the next thing to do to fill his time. The days were so long.

When he neared the cabin, he saw the door was still partway open, which pissed him off. It was like Roy to storm off on his own little hike and not close the door but just let them freeze.

And then he got to the door and looked down and saw his son. His son’s body and not really his son because the head was missing. Torn and rough, red, with dark slicked hair along the edge and blood splattered everywhere. He stepped back because looking straight down he saw that he was stepping on a piece that had come free, a piece of his son’s head. A piece of bone.

He stood there rocking and looking and breathing. He glanced around the rest of the room but there was nothing else to see, and then he had to sit down and he sat down in the doorway, a few feet from Roy, and as soon as he heard this name in his head, he started to shake and it seemed that he was crying but he wasn’t crying or letting out any sound. What’s happening here? he asked out loud.

He touched Roy’s jacket then, and shook Roy’s shoulder gently. Then he looked at the blood on his hand and back at the stump for a head that was all Roy had now and then from inside him he began to howl.

And howling did nothing but fill itself and he was like an actor in his own pain, not knowing who he was or what part now to play. He shook his hands oddly in the air and slapped them against his thighs. He pushed himself back farther away from Roy but this was phony, another act, and still he didn’t know what to do. No one was watching. And though it couldn’t be his son there, it kept being his son there.

Some of the inside was white. He kept waiting for it all to turn red, but it wouldn’t. And soon there were small flies, gnats and no-see-ums, landing there inside his son’s head and crawling and hopping around. He swished them away, but he didn’t want to actually touch the head and they kept landing again. He leaned in close and blew on them and could smell the stink of blood and then he grabbed Roy’s jacket and pulled him onto his lap, the stump with part of a face showing now, a jaw and cheek and one eye that had been hidden against the floor. He looked at this and kept looking and shook him there and looked when he could see and wasn’t blinded by the heaving and all he could think was why? Because there was no sense to it at all. He was the one who’d been afraid he might do this. Roy had been fine, had always been fine.

No, he kept saying out loud, even though he knew this was a stupid thing to say. He kept trying to think because whenever he stopped thinking for a moment he was crying terribly. And yet even this he was aware of. It was as if he couldn’t reenter the world to act unconsciously. As if every thought and feeling and word and everything he saw were artificial, even his mutilated son. As if even his son dead before him weren’t real enough.

He put Roy back down on the floor and looked at all the blood on his hands and jacket and jeans, blood everywhere so he got up and went down to the water and waded in. He gasped from the cold and already his legs were numb. They were stumps, and then the terror ripped through him again from that word, stumps, and he was sobbing hideously. He walked around and around in the shallows and slipped and went under and came back up and walked out, shaking now from the cold also, and went back to Roy, who still lay there dead, who hadn’t moved. He had just seen Roy alive. It hadn’t been more than an hour ago, and Roy had been fine.

And then Jim felt an unaccountable rage. He went into the cabin looking for something and he went to the radio and picked it up and smashed it down onto the floor and then kicked it again and again and grabbed the lantern and hurled it against the wall where it shattered and then he grabbed the VHF and hurled that, too, and threw a bag of smoked salmon that lay open on the table, then kicked over the table, but then he stopped, standing in the middle of the room, because only a few more minutes had gone by, if even that, and all this destruction had not helped. He wasn’t even interested in it. It had seemed like living but now it seemed like nothing.

Jim sat beside Roy again and watched him. He was still the same, still exactly the same. He picked up the.44 Magnum from where it had bounced a few feet away. He put the barrel to his own head but then put it down and laughed savagely. You can’t even kill yourself, he said to himself out loud. You can only play at killing yourself. You get to be awake and thinking about this every minute for the next fifty years. That’s what you get.

And then he cried, as much from self-pity as for Roy. He knew this and despised himself for it, but he stripped out of his wet clothing, put on his warmest clothes, and cried this time for hours and there was no break, no end to it, and he wondered only whether it would ever stop.

But it did stop, of course, in the evening and Roy still there on the floor and Jim didn’t know what to do with him. He realized now that he would have to do something with him, that he couldn’t just leave him there on the floor. So he went around back and found a shovel. It was past sunset already, getting dark, but he went off a hundred feet or so behind the cabin and started digging, then realized this was too close to the latrine and he didn’t like that, so he went farther into the trees, toward the point, and then he started digging again, but there were roots, so he went back for the ax and chopped and dug his way through until he had a pit about four feet deep and longer than Roy’s body, and then this idea, Roy’s body, sent him crying again and when he finally stopped and returned to the cabin it was the middle of the night.

Roy was in the doorway, blocking it. He still hadn’t moved. Jim knelt down to pick him up but what was left of his head lolled wet and cold against Jim’s face and Jim threw up and dropped him and then walked around in circles outside saying Jesus.

He went back in and picked up Roy again and carried him this time fast out to the grave, and he tried to set Roy carefully into it but ended up dropping him and then howled and hit himself and jumped up and down at the edge of the grave because he had dropped his son.

And then it occurred to him that he couldn’t do this, that he couldn’t just bury Roy out here. His mother would want to see him. And the thought of having to tell her twisted him up again and he was off in the woods stumbling around again and feeling sorry for himself and by the time he got back it was already getting lighter, even through the trees.