David Vann: Legend of a Suicide

My mother got rid of Merril when he refused to go home one night. It was late. She actually hit him, with a ceramic frog my aunt had brought from New Zealand. Then she called the police, filed the next day for a restraining order, and he left us alone.

A few weekend afternoons that summer, when Merril was sunning on his lounger in his backyard, I sighted in on him with the.300 Magnum from my mother’s bathroom window. Through the crosshairs, I could trace the flabby outlines of his gut and even the thin blue veins in his arms. What would it have looked like if I had pulled the trigger? One day in John’s pickup, when I had run over a pigeon at ninety and glanced in the rearview, I had actually seen a puff of feathers.

My mother was disheartened by the whole thing with Merril. He had been talking to her about family and commitment and how she made him feel like he was in high school again, and she had started to believe. I didn’t mention Alise. My mother cried with me on the living room couch and told me she still missed Angel and John.

“And your father, too,” she added. So then we were both crying. After a while, however, even that seemed funny.

“What a stupid, stupid man,” my mother said, laughing.

“You’re never going to marry anyone else,” I said.

She stared out the sliding glass door. “I mean, come on,” she said. “After all that?”

In early fall, post-Merril, when my mother wasn’t dating anyone, when it was just the two of us, I broke into our own house. I had left the key hanging in my locker at school. We didn’t have a spare hidden under the welcome mat anymore, and my mother rarely made it home before 6 or 7. So I checked all our windows and doors, and when I could find nothing that was open, I picked up a flat gray rock from our yard and smashed it through her bathroom window. I unscrewed the lock, slid the pane aside, and crawled in.

I checked the master bedroom first. I found sixteen paper bags in the closet, filled with everything from school papers to clothing to spare batteries. The inevitable rings were hidden in shoes, wrapped up in nylons. The only safe was a toy one for a child, with the combination printed plainly on the bottom. Bras and panties were hanging from clothespins, but there were no ties, so clearly this room was without men.

In the bathroom, a single purple toothbrush hung from the wall. The fact of a diaphragm in the cupboard by the sink had not been noticed before. This woman’s teeth were brittle or else she ground them together at night, because in that same cupboard she had both Sensodyne toothpaste and a plastic mouthpiece for sleeping.

This woman kept no pictures of anyone on display, so it was hard to tell whether she had a family. In the only other bedroom, the wallpaper was a print of bamboo thatching that covered even the ceiling. In the corner was a fish tank with the light turned off and a poster listing 250 species of shark. The shark poster and the small pairs of white Fruit of the Loom underwear strewn about the floor suggested that a boy or several boys lived in this room. The single pair of hiking boots in the closet, as well as the single pair of soccer cleats, narrowed it to one boy. The guns in his closet — a Browning.22-caliber rifle, a.30-.30 Winchester carbine, a.300 Winchester Magnum with scope, a Winchester Model 25.12-gauge pump shotgun, a Sheridan “Blue-Streak” pellet rifle, and a Ruger.44 Magnum handgun — were difficult to explain. Where had he gotten them all?

The buildup of carbon in the chamber of the.300 Magnum indicated that the gun had been used frequently, perhaps even recently. The block of wood under his bed, shot full of holes that didn’t go all the way through, suggested that he not only had fired the.22 but may even have fired it inside the house. The box full of Playboy s , Penthouse s , Hustler s, and trash novels with “Adults Only” on the cover suggested that this boy was some kind of pervert, and why he kept so many pictures of his father in this same box but not on his desk or on his walls didn’t make much sense.

Right around that time, after looking through that box, I loaded my father’s.12-gauge and blew out most of our windows and doors. It was a fairly extreme thing to do, I realized afterward. I went through two and a half boxes of shells before I was done; the front doors, especially, took a lot of rounds — one for each hinge, plus two more to knock them over. The sliding glass door in our family room was by far the most beautiful. I blew one small hole through its middle, about the size of a half dollar. Everything was absolutely still for a moment, then the glass began to tremble. It rippled and shook its entire length, the glass bending in waves, then it shattered into a billion fibers.

John Laine was the only man to reappear in our lives. As I sat on our front porch and waited for the patrol cars to arrive, I hoped he might be in one of them, and he was. He and his partner arrived in the fourth car. They screeched up onto our sidewalk, threw open their doors, and pointed their pistols at me, just as the others had done. I was unarmed and willing to cooperate, but I wasn’t sure what to do. No one told me anything at first. I was expecting a bullhorn, but they only stared at me.

I waved my hand in the air. “John,” I said. Here he was, delivered practically to my doorstep.

I HAD A Morris Mini with your mom. It was a tiny car, like an amusement-park car, and one of the windshield wipers was busted, so I always had my arm out the window working the wipers. Your mom was wild about mustard fields then, always wanted to drive past them on sunny days, all around Davis. There were more fields then, less people. That was true everywhere in the world. And here we begin home schooling. The world was originally a great field, and the earth flat. And every beast roamed upon the field and had no name, and every bigger thing ate every smaller thing, and no one felt bad about it. Then man came, and he hunched up around the edges of the world hairy and stupid and weak, and he multiplied and grew so numerous and twisted and murderous with waiting that the edges of the world began to warp. The edges bent and curved down slowly, man and woman and child all scrambling over each other to stay on the world and clawing the fur off each other’s backs with the climbing until finally all of man was bare and naked and cold and murderous and clinging to the edge of the world.

His father paused, and Roy said, Then what.

Over time, the edges finally hit. They curled down and all came together and formed the globe, and the weight of this happening set the world spinning and man and beast stopped falling off. Then man looked at man, and since we were all so ugly with no fur and our babies looking like potato bugs, man scattered and went slaughtering and wearing the more decent hides of beasts.

Ha, Roy said. But then what.

Everything after that gets too complicated to tell. Somewhere in there was guilt, and divorce, and money, and the IRS, and it all went to hell.

You think it all went to hell when you married Mom?

His father looked at him in a way that made it clear Roy had gone too far. No, it went to hell sometime before that, I think. But it’s hard to say when.

They were new to the place and to the way of living and to each other. Roy was thirteen, the summer after seventh grade, and had come from his mother in Santa Rosa, California, where he’d had trombone lessons and soccer and movies and gone to school downtown. His father had been a dentist in Fairbanks. The place they were moving into was a small cedar A-frame, steeply pitched. It was tucked inside a fjord, a small finger inlet in southeastern Alaska off Tlevak Strait, northwest of the South Prince of Wales Wilderness and about fifty miles from Ketchikan. The only access was from the water, by seaplane or boat. There were no neighbors. A two-thousand-foot mountain rose directly behind them in a great mound and was connected by low saddles to others at the mouth of the inlet and beyond. The island they were on, Sukkwan Island, stretched several miles behind them, but they were miles of thick rain forest and no road or trail, a rich growth of fern, hemlock, spruce, cedar, fungus, and wild-flower, moss and rotting wood, home of bear, moose, deer, Dall sheep, mountain goat, and wolverine. A place like Ketchikan, where Roy had lived until age five, but wilder, and fearsome now that he was unaccustomed.