Halibut on the Moon

by David Vann

  “You’re a step back in time,” Jim says to her. “You look like our high school dreams.”

  John chuckles. “That’s my wife you’re talking to. But yeah, you’re right. The girls then did look similar.”

  “And she’s not much older now than they were then.”

  “Jim,” she says, smiling. “You’ll have to stop that. You’ll make me shy.”

  “Well you look beautiful,” he says. “And John you have the perfect life. Look at all this.”

  Their son comes out the door then.

  “Holy crap,” Jim says. “He’s even bigger now.”

  “Crusher,” Gary says. “Definitely the biggest strongest baby I’ve ever seen.”

  “Toddler,” John’s wife corrects.

  “Linebacker,” John says. “Well come on inside. We can’t just stand out here.”

  Inside is even nicer, the dream of a home and family, dark wood and big leather couches with John’s kills spread over them, bobcats and bears, mule deer and elk. Puffy handmade throw pillows and smiling photos everywhere. His rifle, a .30-06, hung over the wide fireplace. A life built on every day repeating, every day being exactly like the last, something Jim has never been able to endure.

  “Would you like lemonade?” Carol asks.

  Jim is looking at the floor, made of old railroad ties sanded smooth and polyurethaned. All the knots and spike holes and lines of grain. He rubs the toe of his boot over it, Gary’s boot really, and can’t touch the wood. A world encased below, holding events from a hundred years, every day of the sun rising and all the rain and everything else. In an epoxy bubble like an ant in amber.

  “Yes,” Gary says. “We both would.”

  Jim sits on the couch and lies back, resting his head on bobcat, not as soft as he would have hoped. The hairs harden over time, maybe just from dust. His own hides up in Alaska all bristle now too.

  The dark beams above, an open roof like in a cathedral, triangles on stout posts. “Is the wood up there old too?” he asks. “Or just stained?”

  “Left rough and with about half a dozen layers of dark stain,” John says. “A kind of antiquing they can do to make wood look old. They beat it up for a while, gouging and splintering the surface and maybe digging too deep with the belt sander. Like all of us in our woodworking class. We were ahead of our time.”

  Jim grins. “That’s pretty funny. We did do some excellent antiquing without knowing.”

  “Lakeport’s finest, to fill the castles of Europe.”

  “Is that what all this is, to look like Europe, like something as old as that?”

  “I don’t know. That or the Wild West. Must be one of the two. I guess I have no idea what we’re trying to look like here.”

  “My whole life is like that, based on some dream but who knows which one.”

  “Is this where I get out my tears?”

  “That’s why I came to see you,” Jim says. “You’re the only one with a sense of humor about this. Gary is more like a grumpy nanny.”

  “Thanks, brother. As I go up to Alaska with you to babysit, and meanwhile leave my whole fucking life behind, I’ll be happy to know it was worth it because you’re so grateful.”

  Carol arrives with the lemonade in big glasses with pink straws.

  “Where’s the umbrella in my drink?” Gary asks.

  “I’ve never even had a drink with an umbrella,” Jim says. “What a sad sucky small thing I lived. I did nothing.”

  “Not too late,” John says. “Go down to Mexico. Hang out on the beach for a while. I think you should do that right now and not go back to Alaska. Get some sun and go swimming in the ocean. Eat fresh fish and find a señorita. And because of the IRS, don’t come back. Make us visit you down there.”

  “You’re right,” Jim says. “Really. That is exactly what I should do, and yet I’ll be getting on that plane to Alaska.”

  “Is Gary going with you?”

  “Yeah. I’ll have to change my tickets too,” Gary says. “Extra hundred bucks probably, because I’m a rich teacher who cares nothing about money. You fat cats don’t care, but a hundred means something to me.”

  “A hundred still means something to me,” John says.

  “I’ll pay you back for your ticket,” Jim says. “And you’re in my will, so you’re about to get half my share of the ranch, the other half to my kids. And cash if there’s anything left over after the IRS.”

  “They’ll want everything,” John says. “You have to set up a trust or they’ll take the ranch.”

  “Maybe too late for that.”

  “Hey!” Gary says. “How about think for a second what you’re talking about?”

  “I think he knows,” John says.

  “That’s what I like about you,” Jim says. He closes his eyes and enjoys the lemonade, fresh squeezed with crystals of sugar not yet fully dissolved.

  “Game of chess?” John asks.

  “Yeah,” Jim says, opening his eyes. “That sounds good.”

  This is their ritual. Sit here for a bit of chitchat then go into John’s study and play one or two games for about three hours. Usually his kids are waiting here the whole time, going crazy with boredom, but this time it will be Gary.

  “Entertain yourself,” Jim says to him.

  “I’ll count my blessings,” Gary says. “That should get me through a couple hours.”

  More leather in the study, big desk, a small chess table, a globe old-timey with ancient maps, California distorted and Alaska missing. A brass telescope. Bookshelves to the high ceiling and a ladder that slides along them. “Are you a count or a duke or something?” Jim asks John.

  A wood duck mounted on the desk, prettiest of them all, blues and greens and reds.

  “You’ve got me thinking,” John says. “It’s true this is supposed to be Europe. But I’ve never even been there.”

  “We have no idea why we want what we want, or who we were supposed to be.”

  “Do you just say those things, or do you actually think them?” John has these small round glasses that make him look smarter. Stocky build, strong, so it’s hard to imagine he’s been near a book, but the glasses make it seem he’s some kind of natural philosopher, come in from the hunt or lumberjacking to hold forth.

  “I lie awake every night,” Jim says. “I sleep maybe a couple hours. Then I fall asleep again during the day. I was doing that at work, missing appointments. And all I can say about my thoughts is they’re like mud, or silt, whatever might be in layers and shift around, gathered on the bottom. I get part of one and it’s stuck to another, without beginning or end, and all they have is weight, finally, no shape. Imagine you dive down and grab at the mud with your hands. That’s what trying to understand is like. You get all you can hold in your hands, but that’s not the whole thing and isn’t even a part of it, and as you come back to the surface it’s all streaming away into the water. What you lift out at the end is only enough to make your hands dirty.”

  John smiles. “It’s making you more interesting at least. You should have had your sleepless nights earlier.”

  “I was boring you before?”

  “Let’s just say you were never introspective. When I asked if you were sure about marrying Elizabeth, you wouldn’t discuss it or even think about it. You had a plan, and you were doing the plan. Your whole life was like that, even when we were young, in grade school. You just always had a plan.”

  “That wasn’t good.”

  “No it wasn’t. The plan has worked for me, for some reason, but it never worked out for you.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I don’t know. Luck?”

  Jim sits in one of the leather chairs at the chess table. He feels overwhelmed. The idea that he always had a plan, and that that was the problem. “The plan is what got me here,” he says. “Having a plan, that was the problem all along, because it was never my plan. It was only what I was supposed to do.”

  “Seems kind of simple to blame your whole
life on that. And maybe it was your plan.”

  “No. It’s not too simple. It’s the truth. The truth is always simple. I was a good person. I did what I was supposed to. But then I did what I wanted, and the two don’t match.”

  John sits across from him and leans forward with his elbows on the table. “Then just do what you want from now on. That’s simple too, right?”

  Jim closes his eyes and leans back in the chair. The pain radiating and pulsing. There might be some way here, but he can’t focus. “I can’t let me be the bad me. I think the good me went on too long,” he says. “I can kill it only by killing everything.”

  “Since I’m your friend, now is when I step in and say that’s not true and don’t do it.”

  “But what do you believe?”

  “I believe you’re going to kill yourself as soon as you get back to Alaska.”

  “Do you think I have a way out?”

  “Yes. As easy as just taking a breath. But you won’t do it. The same thing that made you valedictorian will also make you pull the trigger. You can’t pull out once you head into something. You’d be disappointed now if you didn’t blow your head off. It would be a failure, not accomplishing a kind of goal.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “I’ve never seen you not finish a plan.”

  All the chess pieces lined up and waiting, carved wood. The idea of making each move and thinking out all the possibilities before making the next, this just seems overwhelming, because it’s what he has always done. Carefully thought about each step of his life and thought through all the consequences, and it turns out all that was wrong, the entire method wrong. “How was I supposed to think?” he asks. “If it wasn’t like chess, going through and eliminating every possibility to finally make the one move that seemed to be the only safe one, what was the method supposed to be?”

  “How we feel, and a bit of faith,” John says. “I think that’s how. But sometimes that doesn’t work either.”

  “You’re good on analysis but short on answers.”

  “I can’t live someone else’s life.”

  Jim feels so exhausted. He lies down on the floor, padded by carpet. “I think that was the euphoria stage,” he says. “While we were talking. That was my high. I didn’t even notice it. But I just fell off the cliff. I’m miles lower now.”

  “Let me get you a pillow.”

  “Okay,” Jim says, but he’s still falling in waves of pain and pressure, and this is what lies underneath all the talk, this is the bedrock he’s made of now, and he knows there’s no hope of anything new. He knows where he’s going, and the only mercy now is that he’s so exhausted he may sleep.

  23

  When he wakes he’s alone in John’s study. Sound of rain outside, dark even though it’s day. He feels some panic about what time it is and rushing to his appointment with the therapist, but he also doesn’t care. His knees are sore from sleeping on the carpet, and his neck hurts despite the small pillow John brought, but the sinus pain is of course always the worst thing. Acute whenever he wakes, all the pressure built.

  He rises, looking for tissue, and finds a box on the desk. Blows and it’s like trying to move rocks in a quarry with a hand fan, one of those bamboo folding jobs that a lady would take to the opera. That against boulders the size of houses. Nothing is moving. He can see how surgery could start to seem like no risk at all. Just drill a hole right into my forehead. I don’t care how it looks as long as everything drains.

  He doesn’t have his watch, and the clocks in here don’t look functional. Antiques, ornamental, disagreeing on the time.

  He can’t get over the idea that suicide is now his plan and he won’t be satisfied until he does it. John might be right about that, and understanding this might be the key to not doing it.

  His head is throbbing, the inside three sizes too big for his skull, like the Grinch’s heart when it grows. The casing feels like it’s about to break. He sits in John’s chair, heavy thick padding, and wonders what the satisfaction feels like, to be John sitting here knowing all his life is good, that everything worked out, that he can rest and simply continue on. But Jim would find it frightening, and he still doesn’t know the source of that. No closer, even after talking with everyone.

  Large windows, like at the therapist’s, but a wider view to oaks and green grass, a small creek running through the back of the property and a hillside rising. Some nice rocks up higher. He’s hiked there with John before. They brought their rifles in case they might spot a buck or an old boar.

  The oaks have new leaves just coming in, bright green, a much lighter color than they’ll be later. A gray squirrel bounding up onto one of the trunks and clinging there, hung sideways to the world, pausing in fear, and then another squirrel leaps up and the two chase each other around and around the trunk, going higher. So simple. Joy. Or maybe they’re fighting over territory. He’s never really understood what they’re doing or cared. David shoots them all the time, and they’re not bad eating. That’s as far as Jim’s interest has gone. He shot them when he was a kid, too, along with everything else. Thousands of things he’s killed. All that walks or flies or swims. He should count, maybe even write it down.

  He grabs a piece of John’s stationery, gold embossed, suitable for a duke but missing the title, thick bond paper, and a pen. He begins at the top.

  Things I have killed: Gray squirrels. He should note how many. But so hard to guess. A hundred?

  “John,” he calls. “Come in here.”

  Ground squirrels, he adds, wondering if they were supposed to have another name.

  “John!” he yells again, and this time John opens the door.

  “Sleeping Beauty awakes?”

  “Yeah, and my dress was all bunched up. What did you do while I was sleeping?”

  John chuckles. “That was Gary. Brotherly love.”

  “Gary!” Jim yells. “Get in here too. And take a seat John. We have an important task.”

  Gary walks in. “What’s happening now?”

  “I’m making a list of everything I’ve killed. I need your help.”

  “Why are you doing that? We need to get going.”

  “So I have gray squirrels and ground squirrels so far, estimated at two hundred gray and a hundred ground.”

  “We have to go,” Gary says. “Just count the big things. Bears and moose and mountain goats.”

  “Okay. A little weird to list bears after squirrels, but whatever. I only killed brown bears, no black or polar, so that’s easy. And I know it was only three. How many moose though?”

  “About ten?”

  “Maybe just list all the species first,” John says. “Then fill in the numbers later.”

  Jim has no will, really. Any way is as good as the next. “Okay,” he says.

  “So you got mountain goats,” Gary says. “And Dall rams. Caribou, wolverine.”

  “Don’t mix families,” John says. “Once you say caribou, we should do all the deer.”

  “Okay,” Jim says. “Elk, mule deer, white-tails, antelope, along with caribou.”

  “Cats next,” John says. “You got a lynx, just one, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s rare.”

  “Shot it right in the ass. That’s all I’d ever seen, just the ass of one getting away.”

  “Nicest piece of ass in your life.”

  “True, actually. Much softer and shapelier. Having fur and having to hunt all day.”

  “You two are a bad combo,” Gary says.

  “Bobcat,” Jim says. “Mountain lion. And dogs next. Coyote, timber wolf, red fox, stray dogs.”

  “Rabbits and jackrabbits,” John says. “I’ve never known if there are more than two species.”

  “Yeah just the big ones and the small ones,” Gary says. “And who cares.”

  “Birds,” Jim says. His hand is getting sore from scribbling too fast.
“Birds are going to take forever.”

  “Lifer,” John says, and grins.

  “We should have said that each time right before we shot.”

  “Start with ducks,” Gary says. “Mallard, wood, blue, canvasback, bufflehead, ruddy, that’s about all we wanted to shoot.”

  “But we shot others anyway.”

  “Yeah, I guess add wigeons, teals, mergansers, and who knows what else.”

  “Move on to geese,” John says. “Snow geese, Canadian, and you shot emperors up on Adak, right?”

  “Yeah. And sea lions, seals, and found a dead otter. Not sure whether that counts. If there’s such a thing as karma, I don’t know what kind of solution they’ll come up with for me. No bug is low enough.”

  “We haven’t even started on the fish,” Gary says. “And you’ve still got so many birds: quail, doves, pheasant, grouse, turkeys, all the blue and scrub jays, flickers, random songbirds. And snakes, lizards, gophers, moles, bats, insects, maybe other things too. Ever shoot a worm?”

  Jim’s list is already too long. He lays his forehead on the desk. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he says. “I can’t remember now why I thought it would matter.”

  “To take account of your life,” John says. “To see how it all adds up.”

  “But it doesn’t equal anything. Adding or subtracting a hundred birds or squirrels has no effect.”

  “Did you think it would?” Gary asks.

  “Yeah, I did. But only a few numbers matter. Two divorces. Two kids. Two careers. Three hundred sixty-five owed to the IRS.Two nights here so far, long nights. Two men for Rhoda, and I’m not the one. Subtracted. One shot. One empty house waiting. One life and then none.”

  “Your life isn’t math,” Gary says.

  “I’m so tired of talking about my life. Let’s talk about your life.” Jim raises his head from the desk and digs his thumb under his right eyebrow, trying to blunt the pain.