David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

It seemed to Jim that he hadn’t understood Roy well. It seemed that Roy had been more dangerous than Jim had thought. As if all those years he had been ready to kill himself but waiting for the right time. This didn’t seem quite accurate, but Jim followed it for a while. What if suicide had been in Roy’s nature all along? What then? It would change responsibility, at the very least. And why was it that anyone ever killed himself? What had made Jim so sure that he himself could do it? It was difficult to understand now. It was hard to make the idea seem plausible. Jim didn’t believe that he had ever really felt suicidal, even when he had decided to step off the cliff. Even then he had felt only self-pity, nothing more.

This thought made Jim pause. He hadn’t thought about the cliff for a while. He wondered what Roy had thought of that, wondered whether Roy had known that he had done it on purpose. He had never really admitted to Roy that it had been on purpose. If he had, it would have been harder to make Roy stay. But Roy must have suspected something odd.

To get away from these thoughts, Jim tried to think of other things. He invented diversions. He tried to imagine who would find him, and how, and what they would say. The homely couple coming up the path with their children lagging behind. They would stop and watch him and consider him dangerous. They might run. They might arrive and leave before he’d even seen them, and he wouldn’t know until the authorities arrived later. But he believed they would walk right up and be indignant. They were the owners and they were otherwise ignored by everyone, he was sure, so about this they would be fierce. They would come and drag him out and attack him with their parrot beaks and twisted eyes and peck and tear at him until they had stolen little pieces away. So then he was thinking of Roy on the beach and the seagulls and in this way he tortured himself each day and night under the guise of trying to fill his time and survive.

He still looked for boats occasionally, on good days. The rare ones he did see were too far away. He had no flares. It had occurred to him that he could try to light a giant forest fire on one end of the island and this would bring spotter planes at the least, but he didn’t know how long they would take or whether he would end up dying in the fire. His own death seemed likely if he set a huge forest fire on an island. He would be in the water at the end, trying to find air. And he didn’t like the idea of the firefighters shoveling at the dirt where Roy lay.

Then it occurred to him to set some other island on fire, if he could find a small one nearby that was uninhabited. He could row over there, get it going with the little bit of gasoline he had left, then row back or even just stay out on the water where they could see him.

Not a bad idea, he told himself. That could work.

But he didn’t do it. Rowing in these channels wouldn’t be easy, and he wasn’t ready to face anyone yet. So he waited in his cabin and schemed and saw the flames everywhere and imagined himself rescued and tried to remember what Roy had looked like before he had blown off half his face. It was terrible that Roy had left Jim with that image. Jim couldn’t remember the face before, the way his son had looked. It was as if his son had been born into the world mutilated.

At least no one else would have to see him that way. Enough time had passed now that no one else would have to see anything at all. This relieved him somewhat. He couldn’t explain why the sight would have seemed such a personal embarrassment. But it would have. What he wanted now was to come up with some way of telling things that made it all seem sad but somehow unavoidable. Something along the lines that things had been hard, but he hadn’t realized quite how hard for Roy because Roy hadn’t said anything. If only Jim had known, they would have left immediately, but he’d had no way of knowing.

But then these thoughts disgusted Jim. He had no patience for his own mind.

Mid-January and still no one had come. It was remarkable, really. It seemed the world had forgotten them, though they were probably less than ten miles from where they were supposed to be. Jim assumed that their cabin had been found by now with the blood on the floor and the smashed radios and the boat gone. The sheriff or someone must have searched the area after that, but he had not heard a single helicopter or plane, nor had he seen a boat for weeks, and never a boat close enough.

Jim’s food was running low and he had lost weight trying to conserve. He had only one meal a day now, with a few light snacks at other times. He figured his food would last at this rate another month or two at most and then he’d be eating seaweed or starving.

He slept all through the night now and even sometimes part of the day. It was the easiest thing to do and didn’t use food or even wood for the fire. He had cut several large pieces from the inflatable boat to lay on top of his blanket and sheets and he was wearing an extra sweater he had found as well as the clothes he had arrived in. He hadn’t bathed in nearly three months. He had begun to smell almost clean again, as far as he could tell.

He tried not to think during this time. When it would start, he’d look at something, a board in the ceiling or even just the darkness, and try to lose himself in that and not let the thoughts get going, though he couldn’t avoid them always. They were repetitive and insistent. Roy saying he wanted to go. He saw that scene over and over, couldn’t get it out of his mind. Another repetitive one was about his neighbor in Ketchikan, Kathleen, the woman he had first wanted to cheat with. He kept seeing the gray afternoon when he’d stood out on their side porch chatting with her and asked her if she’d like to come inside, since Elizabeth wasn’t home. The look of disgust on her face. She knew exactly what he meant. Elizabeth was in the hospital, pregnant with Tracy. Not the best timing, he saw now. He thought about food, too. Milkshakes, especially. That was what he most wanted. And barbecued ribs. He thought mostly about Roy, and he visited him when the weather was calm and he was feeling restless.

The mound had caved in with the rain; the grave was now a shallow depression grown over with mushroom and fern. At first he had torn out the mushrooms that grew there, considering them obscene, but as they kept growing back, he finally left them, gray-white bulbs and sharper, smaller cones like tepees. He wondered how long it would take for a nylon sleeping bag to decompose, and he imagined it must be a very long time.

You’re still alive, he told Roy one day. I’ve been thinking about this. You don’t get to experience anything anymore; your life stopped for you when you died. But things are going to keep happening to me because of this, and that makes you still alive, in a way. And because no one else knows, because your mother doesn’t know, you aren’t even completely dead yet. You’ll die again when she hears, and then she’ll keep you alive for a long time after that. And even after all of us die, someone’s going to dig up that sleeping bag and find you again. Though I guess they might be digging you up earlier than that. They’ll probably want to make sure it’s you. They’re not likely to take my word on anything after all this.

He liked talking out loud to Roy, so he made a habit of it. Unless the weather was terrible, he went out and chatted for a while each afternoon. He chatted about being rescued, and about the weather, and he confessed things from time to time. I was impatient, he told Roy. I know that. I should have relaxed a little. I just felt responsible. He talked with Roy about little things that were bothering him. The day I walked in on you, he said. When you were jacking off in the outhouse. I still feel bad about that. I don’t think I handled it well. I should have said something, but I just didn’t know what to say.