by David Vann
Tracy is there too, squatting beside the bird, using a thin stick to poke at it. She’s wearing a pink shawl, something knit with big spaces. He didn’t notice it before. He thought she was wearing rain gear.
The bird has shat itself, a light brown ooze that looks squeezed from a tube. Legs thin and dark. Beak and eye closed. Tracy is poking at the breast, mini CPR but lazy, without any real interest in saving. Can children believe in death, even if they see it?
“We should fry up the breast,” Jim says. “I’ve never tried scrub jay. I don’t know why I’ve never tried it.”
“You can’t eat scrub jay,” David says, looking up at his father.
“Yeah,” Gary says. “Just leave it there.”
“No,” Jim says. “We’re going to try it. This bird gave his life for us. We shall partake of his noble breast.”
David laughs. Jim looks up into the sky, closes his eyes, and raises his arms. “Scrub jay maker, thank you for this gift.”
David and Tracy are both laughing now. Gary is not. “Enough of that,” Gary says. “Let’s move on and look for quail.”
Jim kneels beside his children and takes the scrub jay in his hands. He plucks the feathers from the breast, quickly, smelling the stink of the bird, the oil in the feathers.
“I can do it, Dad,” David says, and so Jim hands it over. His son finishes plucking, then rips the hinge of the breast open, scoops out the guts. Smallest heart and liver and entrails, fit for a doll’s house.
“We don’t need the whole thing,” Jim says. “Just the breast. Slice off one piece on each side.” He hands his pocketknife to his son, but David is already pulling out his own, red Swiss Army. Cutting small filets with bloody fingers.
“I’m thinking a red wine reduction,” Jim says. “What do you think, Gary?”
“Yeah,” Gary says. “Finish with some truffle oil.”
“White truffle oil.”
“Yeah.” Gary has his hands in his pockets, looking down at the ground and kicking at a thistle, ignoring the warning signs.
David holds the two filets in his palm, dark meat. What our own flesh might look like if we cut away small chunks.
Jim stands and feels dizzy. The sky and clouds tilting out of unison with the earth. Edges revealed, misaligned, like a montage in an old movie. “Quail,” he says. “We should hunt for quail. That’s what we’re doing here.”
And so they walk on, fanned out over the land, waiting for the thrum of wings to erupt at their feet, listening for the sucking sound of quail hiding, looking for small bluish bodies and dark topknots.
“We should go uphill, where there are more trees,” David says, and so they do that, following the curve of the land skyward. Jim could survive if all he had to do was walk, away from cities and other people, just walking from one tree to the next.
So much thistle and doveweed. All good grasses gone. Wide leaves of spine or velvet spreading over the broken earth, and the stink of them, all so we can have more hamburger. Clumps of poison oak, also uneaten.
The wind picks up and they feel the first drops. “You need to wear your rain gear, Tracy,” Jim says. “Where’s your rain gear?”
“It’s in your hand,” Gary says, and Jim looks down and there it is, a small blue rain jacket.
“Okay,” he says. He kneels down and helps Tracy put in one arm and then the next, still wearing the odd pink shawl underneath.
“I can do it myself,” she’s saying, and he realizes how big she is. It was crazy that he picked her up earlier. She’s not a young kid anymore. How did she become eight? And yet she’s still making him drawings. He doesn’t know where to place her.
“Sorry,” he says.
“It’s okay, Daddy.” This bright look on her face suddenly, a feeling he can’t imagine having. Her eyes so blue and large and flawless.
He can’t look anymore, so he keeps walking, head down against the rain, sound of it falling all around. Much louder than he remembers. Loudest on leaves, a smack, but he can hear it hitting earth too, brutal. His boots slipping a bit in mud and slick cow pies. He steps in anything, curious how it will feel. The ground so dark and the sky gone, only cloud in close, a dirty white, and why not pure? How do clouds become gray?
“Hey,” he hears. Some other voice, from behind. He turns, sees a man walking toward them. Wearing a brown jacket, old-fashioned oilskin. Yellow Carhartt pants. He raises one arm.
“Now we’re in the shit,” Gary says quietly.
“What will happen?” David asks in a whisper that is too loud.
“Nothing,” Jim says. “Nothing ever happens.” He steps toward the man, to bring fate closer, to speed things up. The man should be carrying a shotgun or rifle, out to protect his land, but he has nothing. Jim also has nothing. He’s left the .44 magnum in Gary’s truck. So they will have to use their fists or sticks and stones, beating each other to bloody pulps until one gives out. This is what Jim wants, some contest, no more dodging ghosts in his head.
The man is too old. At least twenty years older than Jim, and moving slowly. He seems to regret his task, doesn’t have enough will to fight. This is a disappointment.
“Yeah?” Jim asks when they’re within easier earshot, twenty paces apart.
The man stops, looks baffled. He spreads out his arms, hands open. “Well you’re on my land.”
“Yeah,” Jim says.
“We were just hunting for quail,” David says. “But we didn’t find any.”
“That’s enough,” Gary says to David. “Let your dad handle this.”
“Handle what?” the man asks. “You’re on my land, hunting illegally. You need to leave. I could call the police.”
“We took one scrub jay,” Jim says. “We carved its breast, in two pieces. You can have one. We can share our kill. Show him the pieces, David.”
“What?” the man says. “I don’t want a piece of scrub jay. Are you crazy or something? Just get off my land.”
“Are you carrying a firearm, sir?” Jim asks.
“What the fuck,” Gary says. “Why are you asking that?”
“No, I’m not,” the man says.
“Well maybe you should next time,” Jim says.
“Don’t tell me what to do. Just get the fuck off my land.”
Jim looks at the man, his weak mouth and worried eyes. He feels like he has all the time in the world. There’s a kind of opportunity here, if he could just understand what it is. So he steps closer. His boots paw at the earth, and the man steps backward, puts his hands out as if he’s ready to catch a basketball, so strange.
“Stop, Jim,” Gary says, but Jim does not stop. He will walk until some external force finally intervenes. He will walk through man and walls and trees and fences, anything that gets in his way.
The man turns and runs, a weak hobble, his feet slipping in the rain and new mud, and Jim knows he could be faster, could run him down, tackle him and beat him to death, but he likes the feel of walking, wants only to walk, nothing more.
Gary grabs his arm, holds him back, so much stronger. “We need to get out of here now,” Gary says in a low voice. “The cops will be coming. And you’re doing this in front of your children.”
Jim still is trying to walk, but he’s held back. He likes the feeling of that, likes being determined from outside, wants the gods to reach down with thin fingers of steel and keep him in place.
“Your children,” Gary repeats. “What are they supposed to think of this?”
Jim tries to care. He tries to feel something, tries to reach to wherever feelings are stored. That must be somewhere inside him. But he can’t find anything, or even why anything is wrong. Why is it wrong for them to see this?
“It’s like there are no rules now,” he tells Gary. “Or reason or what I’m supposed to do. If I tackle that man and beat him on his own land and kill him, that’s the same as never touching him. It’s no different. And it doesn’t matter at all that it’s his land. It isn’t his land. The idea is ridiculo
us. And the police are ridiculous. What are they doing? How do they know what to do and what not to do, and why should I care about them?”
“You’ll care about them when they beat you with a night stick.”
“Or maybe not. Maybe I’d like it. I don’t know.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
Jim wonders how it would feel, to be beaten like a dog, and then he’s down on all fours in the rain and mud, and he takes off at a four-legged gallop for the man, who is still not too far away, still slipping and righting himself like a ship at sea. Jim’s hands stinging from thistle and rocks and whatever else, but he loves the feel of this, running with his shoulders, the easy lope of it, natural, his head hanging and mouth open, breathing hard, slavering. Only his knees too weak.
He tries to run on his feet and hands, keeping his knees from touching, but he falls forward, rolling, then uses his knees again.
He can hear David laughing, yelling that he’s doing it too, but Jim doesn’t look back. He’s immersing, finally, into something better, into movement and breath and mud, exactly what he needs. No therapist in an office, just this. Running down the man in the brown jacket. He’ll bite a leg first, fell him, and then he’ll go after the neck. He wants the man’s neck in his teeth, wants to clamp down and taste blood. And he’s gaining. He’s faster on all fours than he ever could have imagined, and stable, but the man is terrified. He falls, takes too long getting up, and the gap is closing. The thrill of this. Jim can feel his chest, how powerful he is, the muscles working.
But then he’s tackled, swept from the side, held face upward to the sky, his arms and legs dangling useless, and he tries to punch at his brother but Gary’s arms are in the way, tries to kick but now his legs are trapped. So much stronger. All he can do is stare into the sky as the rain comes down, open his mouth, and let out some low moan he doesn’t recognize. What it means, who can tell?
5
Gary pulls him back to the truck and they take off fast. Jim wet in his rain gear, head slumped down into the green rubber, fisherman’s slicker, smell of it and he could be at sea again. Coves in southeast Alaska shrouded always in fog, the water gray, but looking down he might see a hundred salmon, dark bodies aligned and perfectly spaced and without thought. Water so cold and clear. Shadow forms of ridges below them, outcrops, sand and mud and seaweed all indicated differently by shadings at depth, distorted by temperature bands.
This is what he’s always loved, moments of purity, finding remote coves by boat, no one else around, or hiking far along a river with no trail to find a deep pool where steelhead have never been fished. The silence of those places. He wants to retreat now, doesn’t want his children here, or Gary, or to hear the noises of a truck revving and thick tires carving turns. He doesn’t want to think about what he’s done or who he is or what any of it means. He wants to be without responsibility, without attachment, without consequence, without feeling except the basic awareness of sight and sound and smell in a place untouched.
But they won’t let him hide. Grumblings from Gary, questions from David, and the most basic is the most difficult to answer: “What were you doing, Dad?”
The need to account for our lives, for everything we’ve done. What if we didn’t need to? What if everything we’ve done is simply that?
“Song, sung blue, everybody knows one,” Jim sings. “Song, sung blue, da da da da da da. Me and you, a number two, with a cry in our voice, ba dum dum dum dum, is that right?” He can’t remember the words. “Help me, brother.”
But Gary is gripping the wheel in both hands, driving very fast along curves and dips and rises, trying to get to a main road, probably. Hard to be faster than a phone.
“We’ve really got no choice,” Jim continues singing. “We’ve got no choice.” But he doesn’t know if these are the words. Maybe they’re only his words.
“I was crawling too,” David says. “But you were going really fast, like a werewolf.”
“I have to pee,”Tracy is saying, and maybe she’s been saying this for a while, because her voice is at high distress now.
“We should pull over for Tracy,” Jim says. “She has a bladder the size of a peanut. I know from when I moved from Anchorage to Fairbanks. I had to stop maybe fifty times for her each way, and we did a few trips. What a pain in the ass.”
Gary is saying nothing, though, only driving way too fast, concentrated.
“You were just like a werewolf, Dad.”
“Ahoooo,” Jim howls with his head back, and it feels right with the tires slipping and getting air on the rises. He’s never seen his brother drive like this.
“Personally, I don’t care at all if we’re caught,” Jim says. “Because what’s going to happen, little brother? We walked on some guy’s land, and then I crawled in the mud. Wow. What a terrible crime. And if they get really detailed in the investigation, we carved the breast of a scrub jay. I’m sure that comes with a life sentence.”
Gary slows a bit. “Maybe you’re right. I’m driving too fast. This is dangerous.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll slow down. Normal speed.”
The tires become heavy again, attached to the road, and the turns are without so much g-force, whatever g-force is.
“What’s g-force?” Jim asks. “Does it just mean gravity?”
“Yeah,” David says. “Two g’s means twice the force of gravity.”
“Voilà. It’s been worth it sending you to school. Better than having you work the crops and milk the cows. We had to sacrifice a bit, no Christmas oranges for three years running, and your ma had to make jeans out of wood, but we got by and it shore is worth it.”
David is laughing. Gary is not.
“What’s wrong, little brother? Cat steal your milk? Not seen your Christmas orange in nary a long while?”
“Manic,” Gary says. “This is the manic part. You’re on a high now, and it’s way too high, as in crazy.”
“I took a pill already though,” Jim says. “So I’m saved, right?”
“The pills take a couple weeks, and he warned us they might just make everything worse during these first two weeks.”
“Well that doesn’t sound safe.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I have to pee!” A wail of despair now from Tracy, who probably is barely holding it in, so Gary pulls over and she hurries out, hopping, gets her pants down, hiding behind the door, and they all hear her water on the roadside gravel, a bonding moment for a family.
“All distress gone,” Jim says. “Taken care of so easily. We just have to find a way to piss out who I am, leaving a happier something else.”
It seems to be more and more true that his utterances are met with silence. Perhaps that’s the clearest sign of crazy. But it doesn’t matter, which is the other sign of crazy. He feels he should make an effort, though.
“Seriously,” he says. “The warnings Dr. Brown gave, they were missing something.”
“What?” Gary asks.
But then Jim realizes he can’t say this in front of his children, can’t talk about the risk of killing others before killing himself. We’re supposed to protect children, right up until whatever terrible moment in which we no longer protect them. Like telling David about the divorce. He was five or six then and still probably knew it was coming, without really knowing. Just announced one morning, sitting in the living room, the view out to Clear Lake, a nice rental on the water they had that year, after leaving Alaska. So much warmer in California, and the lake was glass. Jim was thinking of waterskiing while Elizabeth said the words.
So is this what we all want, to not be told until it’s too late? If he decides to kill Rhoda, should he tell her ahead of time or would she not want to know until the last possible moment, the gun raised and just one word, yep, to confirm it, then pull the trigger?
He wants it to be like in the Dirty Harry movies. In the hotel room, she should be wearing lingerie and standing by the bed or even on it. She s
hould take off her bra and her tits hanging there and he shoots one of them, the one over her heart, and a hole just appears, neat. Better if it’s in a pool, more exactly like the movie, but that won’t be possible, because if you kill one, why do you not kill others? Aren’t his parents responsible also? Don’t they deserve a visit? And what about his brother? A lot of open questions.
“Not much time,” Jim says. “So much to think about. The big questions. And I mean the really big ones.”
“Are we going to eat the scrub jay?” David asks.
Gary puts his hand on Jim’s shoulder. “Slow down, Bud. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to think about anything. Just let it all go. Nothing to worry about.”
“Are we?” David asks again.
“Yeah,” Jim says. “We’re going to fry it up. We’re going to Mary’s now, right?”
“Yep.”
“So yeah, we’ll have dinner, and in one little skillet I shall personally prepare the noble breast.”
David is laughing, but now Jim is thinking of porn and noble breasts. He’s getting a boner and wants to jack off. He wants to be left alone. He wants to fuck Rhoda, but that’s not happening this evening, so he needs a magazine at least. He has a couple in his duffel. He keeps his chin down inside his rain gear and can avoid conversation that way.
What is a body? Slick with sweat and rain, feeling hot and chilled at the same time, an ache in his groin. He puts his hands together in his lap, as if he’s curled in close for warmth, but he’s pressing against the boner. No one will know. Sex always secretive.
His shoulders feel strong, pumped from crawling, but the joint in his left elbow feels out of whack. And his knees are sore, crushed, and the pain in his forehead pulsing and soreness all around his eye caves, a tiredness there from months and months of not sleeping well, a deep fatigue. But Gary is right about the high, the euphoria. He’s still riding it, a feeling that he could do anything, even step outside the truck at speed and fling it into the air. He can feel it in his veins, a chemical rush making him stronger, and this is nothing compared to what it does to the part of him that is not his body.