David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

Jim went to the bigger boats first. It was hard to find anyone around. He asked people, though, and got phone numbers and addresses of homes and bars. Then he found one guy cleaning up on one of the smaller gillnetters.

Howdy, Jim said, but the man only looked at him, then went back to work. He was so much what one would expect he was laughable. A beard and battered old cap, a pathetic alcoholic.

I’d like a ride down the coast to Mexico. I’m paying fifteen thousand. Interested?

The man looked at him then. Just kill somebody? he asked.

Only my own life, Jim said.

Let me just go down to the sheriff and ask around, then we can talk about it.

Is this your boat?

No. But I know the captain.

Why don’t we skip the sheriff’s office and make it twenty thousand.

The man took off his cap and scratched his head. Will we be skipping the Coast Guard, too? And maybe offering a crew list in Mexico that might be a name short?

That would be the deal.

Well, let me talk to Chuck. There obviously ain’t much else going on for us.

The man went inside the cabin house then and was gone a long time. Jim couldn’t hear voices or anything. The boat was a piece of crap, rusted out and held together with wire. But it would get him down the coast. It was hell coming up the coast, but going down was easy enough.

The man returned with Chuck, who was in his sixties and seemed to be the captain and owner. He was a fiercely ugly man, liver spots on the bald top of his head fringed by a dark and greasy mane. He stared at Jim with such hatred that Jim knew immediately not to trust him, and yet what choice did he have? He had nothing left. He needed to go and these were the only guys around.

What kind of trouble you in? Chuck asked.

Jim didn’t answer but only waited. Finally Chuck said, All right. I suppose you’ll be wanting to leave right away.

That’s right.

We need to provision, get diesel, get some spare filters and such. The engine has a few problems. It’s not going to be a fast or a glamorous ride. But the price is twenty-five.

I don’t have twenty-five. I’m not trying to bargain or save up. I just don’t have it.

All right, Chuck said. We’ll need about three or four hours, and ten up front. And I want to see the other ten, too, just to see that you have it.

So Jim went aboard, handed over ten thousand and showed the other ten. And he stayed right there while they went out and provisioned. He wasn’t going to let them slip out without him. Nine hours later, in the evening, they were on their way.

The wind was up and cold, the chop enough to put a little spray over the bow. It was clear out, though. Standing on the stern, Jim could see all the lights in Haines and a few scattered lights along the shoreline beyond and fishing boats out on the water rafted together, waiting. Beyond them, abandoned land and waters among the land, the boundary between them dark and changing. Boating in a strange place at night you could believe almost anything, he knew, any direction, any depth, so sure of innate fears you could distrust your compass and depth finder right up until you hit the rocks. He hoped Chuck and Ned were competent.

They motored through the rest of the night toward Juneau, slipping past darkened land barely perceptible against the darkened sky. He felt a stranger. He had lived in this land much of his life, but the land had not softened or become familiar in that time. It felt as hostile as when he had first entered it. He felt that if he were to let himself sleep, he would be destroyed. Chuck would be drunk at the wheel, currents would carry them, slip them sideways until the bottom rose to meet the hull and they would tip and fill with seawater and drown. It was just a fact that this was always waiting in close. They would be much safer far from land. He was thinking of this as a way of thinking about Roy. Roy had been hostile to him also. They had never known one another, never softened. He had not been wary enough of Roy. He had lost himself in his own problems and not seen Roy for the threat he was. He had let himself sleep.

The next day came slowly. A thin line of gray, or perhaps a blue less dark, and then the peaks outlined as if by their own emanation, and then a faster lightening above them until their edges curled in fire and suddenly everywhere was white and the orange sun ticked upward in thin, segmented lines between two peaks to grow heavy and yellow and merge into the world too hot to look at. All became blind. The water and mountains and air all the same brightness, glaring. Jim couldn’t make out boats or waves or land, could not see a thing for nearly half an hour until the day filled out and land became land again, waves had distance, and he could see boats upon them everywhere. The surface still opaque, gray-white, a solid membrane. The boat wallowing slowly through at eight or nine knots, Haines in the distance now or gone, too far to see.

By eight o’clock, as Ned relieved Chuck and dug into an entire box of jelly doughnuts, they passed what Jim at first had thought was Juneau but was only Point Bridget State Park, he saw on the chart, connected to Juneau by a small highway.

If you know how to read a chart, you can take a turn at the helm, Ned said.

Fair enough, Jim said. I’ll be next.

Soon after, Jim had his best chance of seeing Juneau down Favorite Channel. Then, a little later, down Saginaw Channel, but he really didn’t see anything. They weren’t very close and it didn’t look like much. By noon Jim was at the wheel, exhausted, and they were around Couverden Island, heading west out Icy Strait.

He grinned when he hit Icy Strait because it was indeed suddenly a lot colder. It was a kind of joke. You could tell even from inside the pilot house, through the small cracks and vents.

The channel was huge — at least five miles across — but there was a lot of traffic. A few cabin cruisers and two sailboats but many other commercial salmon and halibut boats and some tugs with loads far behind them. Those were the ones he had to anticipate. He wasn’t used to being so slow. He just couldn’t get out of the way quickly in this thing. And he didn’t turn on the VHF, because he didn’t want attention.

They passed Pleasant Island around three o’clock, then Point Gustavus, and the wind howled down from Glacier Bay to the north, down through the Sitakaday Narrows.

As they passed the next small bay, Dundas Bay, a bit later, he saw a Coast Guard cruiser, one of the big ones, passing on the other side of the Inian Islands, and he felt panicked. If they came over to board him, to inspect for safety equipment and drugs, as they routinely did, he would be caught. He had no faith in Chuck or Ned to stand by him. He was afraid even to sleep, although he could hardly keep awake at this point. But the cutter passed far on the other side of the northernmost island and went into the next bay. Jim stayed as far out of the way as possible, ducking slightly into Taylor Bay as he passed. Brady Glacier looked enormous, a thing from another time, on a different scale that denied anything now, as if Jim could not possibly be Jim because the thought was too small, instantaneous as the glare. The glacier dwarfed mountains.

The wind tore down off the glacier in gusts that set the boat rocking, but this was good because it kept him alert.

And then he was out. He passed Cape Spencer by eight o’clock and was heading out to sea, free of the coast, free of the islands and southeast Alaska. On the chart, he was out of U.S. waters in less than an hour. He would cross them again because of the way the lines were drawn, but only briefly. Within another night and day, he’d be far enough offshore that no one would know to find him or care. He would be entering another life.