David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

In the first part of March, Jim scrabbled around at the water’s edge trying to catch crabs. They were still here, even in winter, but they seemed faster now. Each time he reached out, they retreated sideways into a crevice and disappeared. It took him a long time to realize that the crabs had not actually gotten faster but he had slowed. He hadn’t eaten a regular meal in almost a week. He’d had mostly seaweed and water. And for several months before that, he’d been conserving. He saw now that this had been a mistake. He had made himself too weak. He went back to the cabin and tried to outthink the crabs.

The next day, he went after their babies. He overturned rocks and, sure enough, just as he had hoped, occasionally he found small colonies of baby crabs that were too small to get away from him. He picked them up by the handful and didn’t see how he was going to be able to clean them in his usual way, so he just ate them whole and crunched them down, shells and guts and all.

I’ll be shitting shell necklaces, he told them. It’s going to be real pretty. He chewed well so that the pieces wouldn’t come out too big.

At Roy’s grave, he spent a long time talking about Roy’s mother and how they had met and what had gone wrong. She was only my second serious girlfriend, really, he told Roy. My brother thinks that was a mistake, to settle down with only the second one, and I think he’s probably right. The thing is, the first one had dumped me, and I think I was mostly scared when I went out with your mother. And there were things that were never right with her. Her parents, for instance. They didn’t like me, thought I was too much a country boy, because they had money. Your grandfather, especially, I didn’t get along with. The man was a bastard. Your mom didn’t want to be critical of him, but he had been hitting his wife and doing other terrible stuff all along. So we couldn’t talk about that. And then, generally, she wanted me to talk more, to entertain her more. She told me about a year into our marriage that she had just expected that eventually I’d have interesting things to say. That wasn’t real nice to hear. I don’t think she thought much about what she said sometimes. Anyway.

It was while Jim was out talking to Roy that he heard the boat go by close and slow down. He got to his feet and trotted as fast as he could toward the beach, but then he stopped. He could hear it out there, at low revs, probably checking out the cabin, but he couldn’t decide whether to run the rest of the way and flag them down. That seemed like too much for this particular day. He didn’t feel ready yet. So he hid in the trees and waited, unsure, and then he heard the engines rev up again and the boat was gone.

Jim went back to the grave. Oh God, he said. I can’t believe I just did that. Something’s wrong. I’m not ready yet to tell people about you.

He lay in bed that night under all of his covers wondering what was coming next. He couldn’t stay out here and starve, yet that was what he had chosen just this afternoon. He couldn’t hide Roy forever. Roy’s mother and sister had to know. Jim felt so confused that he cried for the first time in weeks. I just don’t know, he kept saying out loud to the ceiling.

The next day, he stayed in bed and didn’t go to the grave. He didn’t go hunting for crabs, either, or have any other kind of food. He kept wanting to get up, but it was cold out and he was preoccupied by daydreams that he kept extending, closing his eyes until finally it was night again and he was still in bed.

He was thinking about Lakeport, about high school, and how he had worked so many hours at Safeway. He had hated that, had known that it was all a waste, that his time there amounted to nothing since he’d eventually do some other kind of work. And killing mosquitoes in the spring. He remembered how they’d oil the ponds and spray insecticides to keep the mosquitoes down. Big tanks of chemicals. He wondered now what had been in them. It couldn’t have been good.

His sinus troubles had begun back then. Persistent infections and then the headaches. They were back now, the headaches. This was what had taken him closest to killing himself, just the pain in his head. It was impossible to get away from, impossible to sleep through. He’d been an insomniac most of the time for probably twenty years now. He should have gotten an operation, but he didn’t like the idea of an operation. He’d worked on too many patients in his dentistry. He knew how brutal surgery was, and the terrible risks.

Another memory from even earlier was the boat they’d had on the lake, an old converted Navy cruiser from the 1920s. They replanked the hull and took it out on warm summer nights, sang out there on the water. That was what he wanted now, he realized, and what he hadn’t had in decades: a community of people and a particular place and a sense that he belonged. What had happened to that?

The next day he rose and went looking for crabs. It was low tide and there was quite a lot to choose from. He found some kind of small rockfish hiding in one pool and finally killed it with a stick. It was spiny, but he cleaned it right there on the rocks with his pocketknife and ate it raw. Then he sat back in the rare bit of sunshine and smacked his lips. That was damn good, he said. Now that was a meal.

He finished off with a bit of seaweed and went back to the cabin for a drink of water, then went out to visit with Roy. Haven’t been thinking about you as much, he told Roy. Been thinking about myself when I was your age. How I used to hunt ducks right in front of the house. Croppies and bluegill and catfish at night on the pier with a lantern. I’ve been thinking about all of that, too. It seems to me that one life is actually many lives, and that they add up to something surprisingly long. My life then was nothing like my life now. I was someone else. But what makes me sad, I guess, and the reason I bring all of this up, is that you won’t be getting any other lives. You had two or three at most. Early childhood in Ketchikan, then living with your mother in California after the divorce. That would be two. Maybe being out here with me was the beginning of the third. But you know, you killed yourself, I didn’t kill you, so that’s what you get.

The rest of the afternoon, Jim poked around the shed, looking at all the rusting tools and odd projects. He was getting more active, mostly because it was a weirdly warm spell. Normally he wouldn’t stay outside this long. But really, winter in Southeast was not that big a deal. He had been too freaked out with that cache and everything. It wasn’t that hard to survive here.

And then Jim went through a time when he didn’t seem to have any thoughts or memories at all. He stayed in bed and stared at the ceiling. When he went out, he stared at the trees or at the waves. The water was calm, no whitecaps. A surge more than waves at times, the water gray and opaque and thick-looking. He sat with Roy sometimes, but he was through talking. He was ready to get back to his life, to get back to other people.

But he stayed. A storm came through for over a week and he had nothing to eat. He didn’t want to go outside. It seemed the cabin might collapse under the strain. Hail pelting the windows, rain, snow, outrageous winds, dark all the time. He hated this place. He wanted a hot tub.

When the storm finally ended, he was so desperate and starved he decided to set the fire. Everything was soaked, but he walked out into the trees with his spare gas can and a box of matches, resting several times along the way. He found a spot with a lot of deadfall and trees packed in close and he doused as much wood as he could with the gasoline, then struck a match to it and stepped back as it flared up. He started yelling, excited, as the flames devoured the deadfall and licked up the sides of the small trees. The heat was a beautiful thing. Truly warm for what seemed like the first time since summer, Jim stayed as close to it as possible, close enough that he could feel his face too hot and probably burning. The smoke obliterated the tops of the trees and the evening sky, and the sound of the fire overcame everything else. Jim danced around at the edges of it, telling it to consume everything. Grow, he yelled. Grow.