by David Vann
“We can do it,” Jim says. “Why not. We can drive into the hills and pull off somewhere to hunt for quail.”
“It’s all private land around here,” Gary says. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“We’ll just do it,” Jim says. “Get your pellet gun and make sure you and your sister have your rain jackets and hiking boots.”
“Yeah!” David says, excited, and he’s running into the house. Tracy is hopping up and down, excited but probably not knowing what’s going on.
“Jim,” Elizabeth says. “You can say no. This doesn’t sound like a good plan.”
“It’ll be fine. It’s only a pellet gun. We won’t end up in prison.”
“We’re planning to have dinner tonight at Mary’s,” Gary says. “There’s a full moon tonight if the sky clears, so we can get out the spotting scope. There’s not much light where Mary lives. It’s pretty clear.”
“When will they be back?” Elizabeth asks.
“How about by nine?” Jim says.
“Okay. And Jim, are you alright? You seem low.”
“Yeah,” he says, but his chest feels so tight he can’t say more than that. Why didn’t he stay with her and have his family? There was a time it seemed impossible to stay. Now he wonders why it was so hard. She loved him and thought all was good, some kind of fairy-tale fantasy he disrupted. He had felt his life closing in too fast, having a second child, a house in Ketchikan, living in a small community and everything known by everyone, and most of all the emptiness, sitting with her at dinner in the evening with nothing to say. Terrifying how slow and empty and small that felt. But still, look what he would have now if he had stayed. A family, his kids old enough to talk to, share things with, probably no emptiness now, their lives too busy for that, if only he had waited.
“What’s wrong, Jim?” she asks.
“Just everything,” he says. “I’m sorry we’re not a family. I’m sorry I wrecked everything.”
“Jim, that was a long time ago. You have to forgive yourself for that. You’re a good person, a good father.”
He realizes Tracy is holding his hands, swinging his arms a bit from below. He kneels down and she collapses against him in a hug that’s just pure love.
“I love you, Daddy,” she says, as if on cue, as if she knows this is the time to save him, but the truth is she knows nothing and also can do nothing to help him. She’s far away. She won’t be there each night when he can’t sleep, and his thoughts would be unimaginable to her, monstrous. Her daddy so much worse than anything she could imagine from a fairy tale.
“I love you too,” he says. “I love you and your brother more than anything.” But he wonders about this. It’s true he feels an ache whenever he leaves them. It feels wrong every time they say goodbye. And he thinks of them and has some abstract sense that they are most important. But he thinks of Rhoda more. She’s the one he misses late at night and even right now. This may be his last trip seeing his children, and still he can’t focus.
He holds one hand on the back of her head. “Tracy,” he says. “I hope all of your life is good, that you never feel terrible, that you’re never lost.” But he realizes what he’s going to do to her, what she’ll feel when her father is gone so suddenly. And since David is older, he’ll feel it more, probably, though who can know?
“Jim,” Elizabeth says. “She’s eight years old.”
“Sorry,” he says, and lets Tracy go and stands back up. “I’m not myself really.”
Elizabeth steps closer and puts a hand on his back. “It’s okay. You’re going to get through whatever it is. You have so many people who love you.”
Then David is back out with his pellet gun and the rain jackets, smiling. Lopsided grin just like Jim’s. “I brought all the pellets,” he says. “And my slingshot too.” He’s carrying a Wrist Rocket, aluminum frame and surgical tubing for the bands, so much more powerful than anything from when Jim was a kid. Steel ball bearings for ammo. “You have to see the crossbow I made.”
They all walk through the garage to the backyard. David’s crossbow is a piece of wood with another nailed at the end in a T. Thick surgical tubing leading to a pouch of leather. Jim steps closer to examine, and it’s pretty good. A long groove for the arrow, a thick nail that acts as the trigger.
“Pretty nifty,” Jim says. “Let’s see it in action.”
David smiles, obviously proud. He has a target arrow with a rounded metal tip, meant for a bow. When Jim first gave him this, David was only eight or nine years old and practiced in the walnut orchard where Jim lived in Lakeport. Jim saw his kids every weekend then. He probably shouldn’t have moved back to Alaska. But what he remembers most is that David shot his arrows straight into the sky to see how close they would land. Jim never stopped it, because he thought it was funny. Real risk, possible death seemed so much further away then.
David raises the crossbow to his shoulder, takes aim at their fence, and fires. It’s too fast to see. The arrow stuck in the fence, hard sound of wood, and a memory of flight.
“Holy shit,” Gary says and laughs.
“I didn’t realize,” Elizabeth says. “That’s not good. I thought it was just a toy, something that would kind of lob it in the air a bit.”
David is looking at Jim, proud, waiting for his father’s approval. Is everything we want and need this clear, in every moment, if only we could see?
“Hey hey,” Jim says. “That was something. You would have been useful back in medieval times.”
“Sir Darvid of Van Amberg,” David says, and sweeps his arm as he bows. So strangely similar to Jim’s own grand gesture of exit earlier today. Are we all controlled from somewhere else, puppets without visible strings? How could these two gestures happen, and only today, never before? He has no memory of either of them doing this in the past.
“My brother,” Tracy says. Pride at eight years old, and what is that? What the fuck are any of them doing here?
“Well,” Jim says, and then he doesn’t know what should follow. What’s the plan?
“Wanna try?” his son asks, and this seems perfect, a distraction, something to do.
“You bet,” Jim says, and he takes the crossbow, which is fairly heavy, pushes up the nail trigger and pulls the bands, which are like Jim himself, stretched and held back. The feeling of all that potential energy. When he holds the crossbow, he can feel it, physically, the tension. A lightness to the power. He wonders about the physics of it. Does something under tension actually lose weight?
David hands him the arrow and Jim fits it in the slot. Gary should stand against the fence, and Elizabeth in front of him, in close, then David in front of her, and Tracy. Jim will set the crossbow in place, tie a string to that nail and go join them, in front, to feel the first piercing. They can all be linked, held together as one body, a family. In order to include Tracy, the arrow will have to come in low, at his belly.
Jim lifts the crossbow to his shoulder. He likes this too much, the feeling of power. When nothing can be controlled inside, that’s when a trigger is most beautiful, most perfect. The .44 magnum takes only the lightest touch to release all that powder behind a heavy slug, a kick that feels like it could break your wrists. The slug will stop a grizzly at close range, knock it back and tear a hole in its chest.
The crossbow has no sight, the leather pouch resting too high, making it impossible to see the arrow. And a nail is not as satisfying as a trigger. Jim realizes that if one of these bands ever fails, it’s going to snap back into the shooter’s face and probably blind him, but he knows that won’t happen right now, because he’s cursed with an empty world without event. Nothing will take over and determine what he should do or who he should be. All the world is only waiting.
He aims at the fence because where else would he aim, and he pulls that nail down and the arrow is there in the fence again. Such a strange release, the opposite of a gun. No kickback but instead the bow pulled forward. No punishment but a load taken away
.
“Can I try?” Gary asks. “That thing’s a trip.”
“Do you like it?” David asks.
Jim wants to respond, but he feels lost. He hands the bow to Gary, and nods to David, hoping that will be enough. If he speaks, he’s afraid his face will break and show too much. So he stands and watches his brother shoot, and he wants a time mover, something to make it all pass smoothly, something to keep him out of it. He shouldn’t be responsible for its workings.
“You haven’t seen my present,”Tracy says.
He’s happy to have a reason to move.
“I can see now,” he’s able to say.
She grabs his hand and tugs, pulling him through the garage into the house, to the living room with its brick fireplace and low ceiling, a sliding glass door looking out to pine trees.
“Close your eyes,” she says when he’s sitting on the couch, and he closes them gladly. You don’t have to respond if your eyes are closed. Everyone will let you have a blank face, a nothing face. It’s the only time we can be free around others. A gulf banded with leftover light and he’s sliding to the side, falling in waves of pressure, his pulse. The heart could be only a foot away or this could be on the scale of planets, rings of Saturn and such. Impossible to measure distance inside, no reference, only our sense of things, insanely variable.
“You can open now,” she says, and when he does, he sees a drawing of the two of them, walking slanted in a world where there is no ground. His body without flesh, made only of sticks, and his face simple, a circle, happy to match hers. Their stick hands joined in a jumble of crayon, and this must be what we feel when we touch someone we love. It would look like that if it were visible.
“I love it,” he says, and he does. He’s always lied about his children’s art, but this time he does love it, a gift of the depression, that there are moments of clarity, of purity, and he can respond more directly to the world than he ever has before. “I love that there’s no ground,” he says. “Just the two of us, holding hands. Not coming from anywhere and not going anywhere. There’s only the sun and the feeling we have when we hold hands.”
“I love you, Daddy,” she says and wraps her arms around his neck. The innocence of it makes him feel so sad. He closes his eyes and clings to her.
“Jim,” Elizabeth says.
“You’re crying, Dad,” David says. “Why are you crying?”
“Sorry,” Jim says, and he lets go of Tracy, stands up, wipes his eyes. “I just haven’t been sleeping enough. Just tired.”
What’s true is that he has no control now. Different feelings are getting him all day and night, and never any warning, no idea what will be next. It’s terrifying to have no control, especially in front of his children. He doesn’t like at all that they’re seeing this.
Elizabeth is beside him, holding his arm. “Would you like to lie down and rest?”
“No. No. I’m fine. Let’s go hunt for quail. Red-eye?” He tries to say this last bit to David with more energy. David nods but still looks worried.
Jim starts walking toward the front door. If he can make it outside, that will be better, the ceiling too low in here and also the air too warm and closed.
“You forgot your present,”Tracy says, so he turns and she hands him the drawing and he takes it in both hands to keep it safe, makes it down the hall and out the front door. The sky still heavy. He wants to rise up into it, wants to not be held to the earth.
4
They drive into low hills, fancy houses set far apart. A few private vineyards, rows of stumps just starting their spring growth. Spring is so much further away in Alaska.
It’s a paradise, this place. He can see that now. Oak trees and shade, narrow winding lanes, all newly paved by the rich, and so much open space. Not wild, not a place to hunt, but he asks Gary to pull over when there’s no house in sight, and they all get out.
A wooden fence meant only for looks, just one heavy log low and one high, very easy to duck between. A fallen oak wet and covered in white lichen, or is it something else? Does lichen grow only on rocks? So delicate, like lace all along the dead bark. But is all bark dead, even on a living tree? What is it that’s alive about a tree? How is it he knows so little at almost forty? His birthday is in three months, if he makes it that long, but he knows he won’t. He’ll die at thirty-nine, a more awkward number. They’ll say he was forty, just to keep it simple, or “almost forty.” Gary will speak at the funeral. He’s the executor of the will, so he’ll be doing everything, including fighting the IRS to keep the few assets away from them. That won’t be easy. Jim is leaving his brother with a terrible job.
David has been talking this whole time, but Jim hasn’t heard a word. He knows only that there’s talking and that it doesn’t matter. And he should care more but he can’t. He’s watching the dark red meat of the tree where termites have opened it up. So much like flesh. Why do trees have to have skin too, with their sap and raw meat hidden beneath? Why did there have to be that correspondence? Why doesn’t the sky also have a skin? Earth does, and just as changeable as human skin, always shifting, but more slowly. He’d like to understand something before he goes, something about all of it.
Gary has a hand on his shoulder now, so he must stop ignoring everyone. “Okay there, buddy?” Gary asks.
“Yeah,” Jim says. “Just looking at how beautiful this is and wondering why it has to have skin like us. And why doesn’t the sky have skin?”
David is looking at him intently. Standing there in his rain gear like a little man, holding his pellet gun. “The sky does have a skin, if you look at it upside down,” David says. “The atmosphere is the skin, in a few different layers, and then outer space is the meat. We’ve been studying it in science. There’s the troposphere, which is what we live in, then the stratosphere after seven and a half miles, then the mesosphere and thermosphere. Heat is the last thing, and space isn’t far away. Less than two hundred miles. If we could drive on a highway straight up, we’d be there in three hours.”
“Wow,” Jim says. “I like that idea, driving into the sky. It would have to be a convertible. A fifty-five Olds, red and white. Remember those?”
“That’s before my time,” Gary says.
“Well they were the thing. I’d have my arm resting on the door, driving with one hand, heading for the stars. The sky would get darker, an intense blue like winter in Fairbanks, the sky the richest blue you can imagine, cobalt or navy or royal or something, I’m not sure what they would call it.”
“It would have to be night,” David says. “Because otherwise it would just get brighter and you’d get cancer from the radiation. And even at night, if you went far enough you’d leave the shadow.”
“Like father like son,” Gary says. “How old are you? Thirteen? I’ve never had any thoughts like that, even now.”
What Jim realizes then is that his son could end up with the same depression and mood swings and endless unstoppable thoughts about his life, second-guessing everything. Mental illness a curse to pass down through generations. When did it begin in the past, how far back? And how many new generations will suffer?
Tracy laughs, that kind of low nothing laugh kids do just to be delightful and get attention. She has no idea what’s going on, but she wants to be a part of it. So he reaches down and takes her hand. “Do you want to drive up into the sky, Tracy? Take a nice car and just drive straight up?”
She looks worried, and he can’t tell if it’s because she doesn’t understand or because she does understand and believes it might be possible and they might do it, which would of course be terrifying. “It’s only a joke, sweetie. No one can drive into the sky. So we won’t be doing that. We’re just going to walk here and look for quail.”
“Did you believe it?” David asks her.
“Be nice to your sister,” Jim says, but David is laughing.
“You believed people can drive into the sky!”
“Shut up,” she says, and Jim doesn’t have the e
nergy for this, so he walks forward over ground that has been grazed. Cow pies black and rippled, grass chewed, ground rutted by hooves during rains, every opportunity for weeds, thistle spreading wide spiny leaves to steal the sun. Laced with white, an indication of poison. It doesn’t have any that he’s aware of, but it’s following the pattern of brightly jeweled spiders and snakes and frogs that announce their poison, and the showiness must be enough, along with a few spines. No thistle has been touched. All free to grow.
Are there any signs in Jim? If he walks past someone on the sidewalk, someone he’s never met, can they tell he’s poison? That’s a problem with humans. There’s no sign at all. No warning. It’s a time his family should help him, but the safest for all would be if they stayed away. The solution would be to strip him bare of possessions and set him walking in an earlier time, before fences or roads, let him walk from here to the other coast, three thousand miles, and by then the poison might be out of him. He needs something as extreme as that, something as elemental and basic and external. He can be fixed only from outside, by doing. Thoughts have failed.
He’s beneath another oak, black oak, dark pitted bark in patterns ancient and unreadable, grown twisted out of the ground. Heavy arms flung wide, like a man staggering and bent, but no weight visible above, only the sky. Torment without source but shaping nonetheless.
A scrub jay high up, roughest call of the blue jays and largest body, banded in black. Jim points at the bird. “Shoot that one,” he says, because he knows David must be near.
He hears the pumping of the air rifle, seven times, max pressure, and the tiny bolt slid back, a pellet inserted. A pause as his son aims, then the spit of air and sound of impact, feathers loosened in the scrub jay’s chest. The delicate inner lace, a whiter blue.
The bird goes straight down. No flapping or struggle, a shot straight to the heart. “Good aim,” Jim says.
David is rushing to where the bird lies on its back. Jim takes his time, feels that he’s a giant, that his steps are slow and can sink into the earth.