David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

No problem. But I have to tell you, if you’ve killed your son, and I think you did, I’ll see you put in prison, and if you ever get out, I’ll kill you myself.

Jesus, Jim said.

The doctor examined him quickly and said all he needed was lots of food, water, and rest. He looked at the end of Jim’s nose and said he had lost a little piece to frostbite but there was nothing he could do about that. Then Jim was taken to the sheriff’s office to give a longer statement. For the rest of the day, they made him give his statement over and over. They kept coming back to why his son would have wanted to kill himself.

I wanted to kill myself, and I came close to doing it. I was on the radio with Rhoda, and I intended to do it. Roy had been having to listen to a lot of that for a while. Not just on the radio, but when I would talk with him about it and when he’d have to hear me crying and such.

Jim shook his head. He was having trouble continuing, trouble breathing. His lungs were getting all gluey. So I was there with the pistol to my head and ready. I’d been like that for a while and hadn’t been able to actually pull the trigger. I kept thinking, What if I’m wrong. But Roy walks in and sees this and the way he looked at me I didn’t know what to do, so I turned off the radio and handed him the pistol and walked out. I didn’t mean anything by that. I had no idea what he might do.

Tell us what happened then, Jim.

Well, I was out walking and I heard the shot, and even then I didn’t figure out what had happened, so I kept walking around like a dumbass for a while longer and then I got back and found him.

What did you see when you found him?

Jesus. How much do you want? It was him lying there. He’d blown off his head. You know what that looks like.

No, I don’t.

Don’t you? Well, he only had half his face and parts of him were everywhere, and there was nothing I could do to put him back together.

What did you do after with the body?

I buried him. But then I realized he needed a burial with his mother and sister to see it, so I dug him up and then I guess I went looking for a boat or cabin or someone with a radio.

What happened to your own radios?

I broke them.

When?

Right after he killed himself. I don’t know why I did it.

You broke the radios right after your son’s death. Was this so no one would be able to contact you? Did you have something to hide?

Stop it, Jim said. Stop being idiots. I just broke them and then went looking and couldn’t find anyone and had to break into that cabin to survive while I waited. It took you forever to find me, and that was only after I set half the island on fire. Otherwise I’d still be rotting out there.

Who was rotting?

Shut up, you fucker.

Mr. Fenn, let me remind you. We have you on many charges, not only murder. You need to cooperate with us and answer our questions.

I’m a dentist. This is outrageous. I didn’t kill my son.

That may be.

This was only the first of many sessions. They had him tell the story over and over, all the details, trying to find pieces that didn’t fit. Why Roy was in the sleeping bag. Where the pistol was, which was something Jim honestly could not answer. Where had he put it? He had no memory of putting it anywhere. The last he remembered it had been on the floor, but they hadn’t found anything. So apparently he had done something else with it.

Breaking the radios was another thing they went back to again and again. And the time he’d stepped off the small cliff. And handing Roy the pistol. All of these things over and over until Jim could not be completely sure whether any of it had happened exactly as he remembered. It began to seem almost like someone else’s history.

They kept him in jail for several days and didn’t let him make any calls. No one except the doctor knew he was there until finally they sent in a lawyer. But this man wouldn’t say much. He only paced back and forth in front of Jim’s cell, then said, You want your own private lawyer, right? Is that what you’re asking me right now?

Sure, Jim said.

Okay, the man said. I’ll go call one and he’ll be in today.

The man left then. Much later in the day, another man in a suit and tie came in.

Name’s Norman, the man said. Be happy to have me. It sounds like you’re in trouble. But first I need to know whether you can afford me.

I need to get out of here, Jim said. On bail or something.

That’s all. I don’t care what it costs me.

Okay, Norman said. I can work with that.

It was almost a week before they held the arraignment and Jim was able to leave. He wanted to fly to California to see Elizabeth and Tracy and Rhoda and try to explain, but the terms of his bail were that he couldn’t leave Ketchikan, so he took a taxi downtown to a hotel, a crappy little place called the Royal Executive Suites. When Jim had lived here in Ketchikan eight years before, he had befriended the owner of this hotel, who at that time had been only a young guy fresh off the ferry. The man had been moving here, and though he was a Mormon and Jim was not, Jim had taken him fishing and let him stay at the house and helped him to find work. The man’s name was Kirk, and he didn’t have time for Jim now, but he did let Jim buy a room for twice what it was worth.

Jim stayed in his room with the heat on and made phone calls. He called Roy’s mother, Elizabeth, but only got the answering machine. After the beep, he stood there with the receiver in his hand and had no idea what to say. He finally just said, Sorry, and hung up. Then he thought about calling Rhoda, but he didn’t feel ready for that yet. He didn’t feel ready to talk with anyone, really, so he gave up on the phone calls.

He spent the rest of the day sitting in a chair by the window, looking out at the water and not thinking anything coherent. He daydreamed that Roy had been shot and he had killed the men who had done it, picking them off one by one from around the cabin with the rifle, and then he carried Roy to the inflatable and sped over to the next island, where he found a fishing boat and got Roy aboard. They laid him on the deck with the red salmon and Jim pumped at his chest to keep him alive until a helicopter came and lifted him away. Jim tried to hold on to this last image of Roy spinning slowly above him on the stretcher, being lifted into safety. He felt his love for Roy hard in his chest and was overwhelmed by the grief of having saved his son.

But he couldn’t hold the daydream forever, and soon he was just sitting in a chair by the window and it was another overcast day with the heater going. He looked down at his feet in socks on the clean beige carpet and looked at the cream walls and spackled ceiling and back down to the bad watercolor of a gillnetter pulling in its catch. He wanted to talk to his brother or Rhoda, but he also couldn’t imagine calling. When he was too hungry to sit there any longer, he bundled himself up and prepared to face the good folk of Ketchikan.

Jim walked through the lobby without looking at anyone and crossed the street to a restaurant that served fish and chips. He sat himself in a corner booth and stared down at his own clenched hands. The waitress when she finally came over didn’t seem to recognize him, though he had seen her here years before. He didn’t seem to be famous yet for what had happened out in the islands, either. He had imagined the whole event might attract more attention.

Jim drummed his fingers on the red Formica and waited and sipped his water and wondered how it was he had ended up without friends. No one was flying up here to visit him or to help him wait this thing out. John Lampson in Williams and Tom Kalfsbeck in Lower Lake: he hadn’t called them yet, so they couldn’t know, but even if he did call, he was pretty sure they wouldn’t come. And this was because of women, too. It was because of his obsession with Rhoda over these past years that he had lost touch with his friends in California and not made new ones in Fairbanks. He had done his work and bought things and talked on the phone and seen prostitutes and had dinner a few times with other dentists or orthodontists and their wives, but that was about it. It was no wonder to him now that he had fallen so low. He had cut himself off from everyone and had nursed what he thought was love but was only longing, a kind of sickness inside him that had nothing to do with Rhoda at all. And it had taken this to get him out of it, to get him to see it. His son had had to kill himself so that Jim could get his life back. And yet that wasn’t going to work, either, because it wasn’t just that his son had killed himself.