David Vann: Legend of a Suicide

Leonard was the next in the series. He occurred during the summer months. What an ugly-looking man, I thought when I first met Leonard. He was an astrologer who explained to me that my Jupiter in Venus meant I should expect big things from love. I could find no pattern at all to the men my mother picked: Angel and Leonard were as unalike as two people can be.

“Men,” my mother said, “are full of surprises. They’re never who you think they are.” I began to imagine that all men were in costume, that somewhere down each of their backs was a zipper. Then it occurred to me that someday I would be a man, also, and I wondered about the zipper thing.

My mother and I each had our routines. She taught high school, took long hikes in the state parks near our house, read mystery novels, and sometimes disappeared with explanations as thin as, “I just need a few days,” or “I’m going to visit a friend.”

“Which friend?” I would ask.

“That’s right,” she would say.

I ate ice cream in front of the TV, did my homework well enough, and sneaked out at night with my father’s rifle to shoot streetlights. Within half a year, I had blacked out whole neighborhoods and begun blacking them out again after they had been repaired.

Nothing was more beautiful to me than the blue-white explosion of a streetlight seen through crosshairs. The sound of it — the pop that was almost a roar, then silence, then glass rain — came only after each fragment and shard had sailed off or twisted glittering in the air like mist.

John Laine was exceptional in that he was the first man to last over three months. Even that day at the lake didn’t faze him. There was no telling how long he’d stay.

Though I was only thirteen, John taught me to drive his pickup — the Silver Bullet, he called it — and let me speed through the back roads all over Sonoma County. If we passed another cop, we just waved. I remember vineyards in late September at a hundred miles per hour, the way their matted purple, red, and green whirled by like patches of seaweed on an overgrown ocean. John, whose voice was always calm, even as the tires were slipping beneath us like bars of soap, said I was a natural. He said I might even make a good officer one day.

John had dark sideburns he could wiggle up and down. He had descended from a tree, he told us when we asked where he was from. And before that? I asked. He pinched my nose with his rough fingers and told me to go to bed. I was sitting on the couch with him and my mother. She grinned at me and jerked her thumb toward my bedroom.

When my mother finally broke up with John, on that same couch as I hovered in the kitchen, peeking through the louvered doors, John said, “Okay,” and kept holding her hand. Without a fight, my mother wasn’t sure what to do. My father had wronged her in concrete ways that could be yelled about. With my father, there had been the possibility of righteousness. But with John, for both of us, there was only the ache of knowing how much we had wanted him to stay.

After John came Emmet. This was during January, when my mother was dreaming of Legoland and personal fame. With Emmet’s help, she dragged our dining table into the living room, added its extra leaves until it was at full length, and commanded us to be quiet. She had written to Motorland Magazine, asking whether they might be interested in an article on the trip we had taken to Denmark’s Legoland, and against all expectation, they had responded positively. Every evening she sat before her notes and 35-mm slides while Emmet and I sat obediently on the living room couch, Emmet reading Louis L’Amour Westerns and I doing my homework.

Emmet was a man who kept telling us who he was. And who he was kept changing. One week he had grown up in Sandpoint, Idaho; the next week it was Red Bluff, California. Shrugging his shoulders, he’d claim his memory was improving, that was all. And if you caught him in his sleep, as I once did, his claims were even wilder.

“Mittenwald,” he sighed, pushing his head farther into the corner. I had found him in the back of our hallway closet at 4:30 a.m., curled around the vacuum cleaner, our old drapes under his head. “I have to; I’m from Mittenwald. Small town just north of here. Lots of fires.” He had mistaken the closet for my mother’s bedroom, I was sure. I could sympathize. Years before, I had mistaken that same closet for the bathroom and peed in the corner where he lay now, then pulled down two of my mother’s old skirts in an attempt to flush the toilet.

“The impossible has become real,” my mother told us one of those first Legoland evenings. Wearing her purple velour robe, she actually raised her hands into the air.

Emmet and I smiled at each other. He was a man who could appreciate exaggeration.

My mother’s slides were of me and some Danish girl she had corralled that August along with the girl’s single father. The move had been pure calculation: my mother knew that a potential magazine article would have to include two children and both parents. This girl had a blond pony tail and very large eyes. Her forehead, also, was uncommonly wide. My mother called her Helga, because neither of us could remember her name.

Helga and I drove Lego cars, held up our Lego driver’s licenses, sailed in Lego boats past Lego Mount Rushmore, and shot each other with Wild West Lego revolvers. My mother’s favorite slide was of twenty or thirty Lego horses and Lego men all piled up on the porch of a Lego palace while the very large and human gardener came by with a lawn mower. Helga and I were peering over from either wing of the palace. Something about that picture just delighted my mother. Quaint little Europe was a part of it, perhaps, but all those men dumped unceremoniously, along with their horses, had its appeal, too. Plenty of hints were available, if only Emmet had cared to take note.

Toward the end of my mother’s Emmet period, I traveled farther into the hills, began firing from thick patches of brush, and nailed my first stoplight from a distance of over four hundred yards. From Survivalist Magazine, I had mail-ordered a converter kit that allowed me to shoot.32-caliber pistol shells from my father’s.300 Magnum. The pistol shells were perfect for neighborhood streetlights because they were much quieter and could be mistaken, even, for firecrackers. With the stoplight, however, I began using full-sized shells. The shock they gave out echoed clear off the other side of the valley, miles away.

I ricocheted three bullets off the pavement before I finally hit the red light. At the gas station, people ran for cover, hid behind poles and cars, but some hid with their backs open to me. No one could tell which direction the shots were coming from. I was firing from too far away.

The entire stoplight bounced on its line into the air, its red gone silver. I smelled sulfur and heard dogs yowling and sirens from across the valley. Through the crosshairs, I watched a patrol car screech up and wondered whether John was inside.

Pat was the man who was always laughing. Followed by a cloud of Amway aftershave, he laughed himself in one door and out the next. As far as I could tell, even the breakup seemed funny to Pat.

Merril lived next door. He came over with some vegetables from his yard a few months after his wife had left him and didn’t return home for more than three days. His back sliding glass door was unlocked that entire time, so I went in. I cataloged everything; I even opened his cheapo safe and wrote down how much cash he had. I found copies of Playboy and The Joy of Sex under his bed. From his medicine cabinet, I discovered that he suffered from hemorrhoids and cold sores, from a bad elbow and gingivitis. I saw pictures of all his kids — grown up by then and moved out — and found even the cause of his divorce. His wife, Carolyn Somers, maiden name Alexander, had spelled out everything very carefully in a letter from half a year earlier. Merril had videotaped himself having sex with one of his daughter’s girlfriends, then left the tape lying around for years. Alise, his daughter’s friend, had been only fifteen at the time. I even watched the videotape myself. Merril still hadn’t gotten rid of it.