David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

Jim held back his sobbing as well as he could for fear that someone might notice and he might seem like a guilty man, though they couldn’t possibly know the crimes he had actually committed. None of the obvious ones like murder, but all of the more important ones.

The waitress set his food before him finally and he ate though it was tasteless to him and he could think only of Roy.

That evening, late, he went back out and walked along the waterfront. He walked past the downtown area where he had practiced and on to the old red-light district, preserved now as a kind of monument and converted to small tourist shops. The small wooden buildings hung precariously along the banks of the narrow river. He stood at the bridge and stared at them, trying to imagine life here before he’d been born. But this was what he’d never been able to do, send his life into another’s.

In the morning, he heard knocking at his door and he opened it to Elizabeth and his daughter Tracy.

Whoa, he said. God, I didn’t expect you.

Oh Jim, Elizabeth said, and she wrapped her arms around him for the first time in years. It felt unbelievably good. Then Jim bent down and hugged Tracy. She had been crying and looked exhausted. Jim didn’t know what to say.

Come in, he said. They followed him in and sat down on the couch.

Tracy started crying. Elizabeth held her and kissed the top of her head, then looked at Jim and asked, What happened out there, Jim?

I don’t know, Jim said. I honestly don’t know.

Try a little harder? But then she started crying, and Tracy was crying, and they went away, Elizabeth promising they’d be back later in the day.

So Jim waited, in a chair facing the door to his hotel room, unable to believe they were here in town. He had been gone so long, and it was harder still to understand that they were all here in Ketchikan, all together, except Roy of course, and then his mind stopped again. It was all too much to take in. He felt very afraid, and yet had no idea what in particular was frightening him.

When Elizabeth and Tracy returned, it was past dinnertime, but they weren’t hungry, so they sat in the room not talking and Jim wanted this family and this life back, and he kept fantasizing that Roy might just walk in.

Did you kill him? Elizabeth asked, and then she was lost in loud, awful, ugly sobs that got Tracy going again, too. Jim wasn’t crying; he was calculating, trying to figure a way to get them back, but he couldn’t see how.

I’m sorry, he said. I was afraid all the time I was going to kill myself. He was taking care of me. Then he surprised me and ended up killing himself.

What happened, Jim?

I handed him the pistol as I walked out the door. I didn’t mean for him to use it.

You handed him the pistol?

Jim could see this had been the wrong thing to tell her. I didn’t mean anything by it, he said.

You handed him the pistol? And then Elizabeth was up and crossing the room and hitting him, hard, and he was looking at Tracy, who had this terrible frozen look on her face and was just watching, and then they were gone and he waited that night for them to return, and the next morning and still they hadn’t, so he started walking around town, searching, and finally found their hotel but they had checked out. He searched until night and then realized he could call the airlines but he could only get a recording so he had to wait until morning, when he found out they had flown back to California, and with Roy’s remains.

Jim called and kept calling Elizabeth, and finally one day she answered. He tried to explain himself, but she wouldn’t listen.

I don’t understand this, Jim, she said. I will never understand this. How my son became the boy who did that to himself. What you did to him to make him that way. And then she hung up and didn’t answer for days and then changed her phone number with no new number listed and he couldn’t leave Ketchikan or reach anyone he knew who would tell him her new number. Everyone, even his own brother and friends, was against him. The only person he didn’t call was Rhoda. He couldn’t call her, because in a way she had killed Roy, too.

Jim tried to discover how to spend his days. He would have to reenter his life at some point. He couldn’t spend the next fifty years sitting here aching. But the truth was, he was scared now. He wasn’t sure how he could prove he hadn’t murdered his son.

Sometime after two a.m., Jim realized it had been almost a year since he’d been with a woman. So he bundled up and went looking for a prostitute.

The streets were wet, the fog down close. Sound carried oddly from the waterfront and from the road. Fishing bells, fog bells, seagulls, and the hiss of tires on asphalt. He walked downtown to his old office.

They had redone the front of the building. It looked more modern now and was a dark green. Gold lettering on the window with the dentists’ names, two of them.

I could have stayed here, he said. If I had not cheated and broken everything up. If I had been able to stand my wife. If salmon had flown like birds through the streets.

He wasn’t sure what to do with this office. He turned away from it, finally, crossed the street and headed down the other side toward the canneries.

The canneries were packed in summer with college students, but now, in the spring, they were deserted. He passed an old man sitting on a bench in front of a cannery and they ignored each other. He continued on past all of the canneries but couldn’t find any prostitutes. He went to the old red-light district along the river just for the hell of it, knowing he wouldn’t find any there, and he didn’t. He stood at the wooden railing looking down into green-black water moving swiftly out to sea and he gave up.

But instead of walking back to the hotel, he walked in the opposite direction, away from town. Past the canneries, along the highway, he walked in fog and drizzle, the only walker on the road. It was a pleasure to walk, and a pleasure to be alone outside. He couldn’t stay much longer in that hotel.

The forest on either side of the road loomed roughly out of the fog. It had been better out on the island, he saw now. He had still believed in his rescue then, and he had been able to go talk with Roy. Now Roy was fifteen hundred miles away.

A dark-green pickup came out of the fog quickly and swerved to avoid Jim. It stopped about a hundred feet past him and the two men looked back at him through the rear window. They looked for a long time; Jim stood in place and stared back at them until they moved on. He was scared, though, that they would come back with others. He had been stupid to stay here. It was too great a risk. Then he realized this was only paranoia, since no one could possibly know who he was.

Jim hurried back anyway, walking on the side of the road and hiding himself in bushes whenever he heard a car coming. It was a long way to town. He hadn’t realized how far he had gone. Curve after curve and the shoreline appearing twice through the fog, calm gray water lit by a shrouded moon.

He reached the canneries finally and stopped hiding from cars. He passed the old red-light district and the tourist area and then downtown and continued around the point to his hotel. It was nearly dark but he grabbed the few things he had: a change of clothes in a plastic bag, his razor and shampoo, his wallet, his boots. He threw everything in the bag, left a note to Kirk saying, Thanks for ripping me off, and walked out into the evening toward the ferry that could take him across to the airport.

The ferry terminal was over three miles away, past Jackson Street, at the end of town. He was tired when he got there, and hungry, and there was nowhere to eat. He looked at the schedule, then found out this wasn’t the right terminal for the ferries that went across to the airport. This terminal was for the big Alaska Marine Highway ferries that went clear up to Haines and down to Washington.