by David Vann
John Laine had not meant to shoot me. He was dating my mother and was trying to win my favor. He had posted me farther to the side, behind some tules, but I had crawled over on my hands and knees, through mud and the stubble of wheat, then risen up when I heard the muffled explosion of duck wings against water. John could not have seen me until his finger was already easing back on the trigger.
From where I lay, the yells and splashing seemed to come from every direction. Then the mud oozed in around my ears. I stared vacantly into a gray sky. I’ll remember this, I thought. Today is Saturday, November eighth. I’m thirteen. Even my ankles are sinking.
My mother’s hands ripping me out of the mud made me smile, and that gave me away. I landed with a wet smacking sound.
“You little shit,” my mother said. Then she laughed. Then John laughed, relieved that he hadn’t killed me. He was a police officer, so it wouldn’t have looked good.
My mother grabbed a handful of mud and threw it at him; it spread across the front of his red flannel shirt like a wound. She launched herself backward into the mud beside me and began to cry. That was the beginning of the end for John. He didn’t know it as he stood there smiling nervously, unsure whether my mother was really crying or not, but he was on his way out. I squinted at him with one eye and could almost see him vanishing.
Although my mother had dated one man steadily for several years after the divorce, she didn’t keep any man around for long after my father killed himself. The men she dated then were a lot like the circuses that passed through our town. They’d move in quickly and unpack everything they owned, as if they had come to stay. They’d tempt us with brightly colored objects—flowers, balloons, remote-controlled race cars—perform tricks with their beards and hands, call us funny names like snip, my little squash plant, ding-dong, and apple pie, and yell their stories at us day and night. Then they’d vanish, and we’d find no sign left, no mention even, as if we’d simply imagined them.
John was only one in a series. Angel was the most important of the ones who came before. When my mother told me Angel’s name, I thought she was saying “on hell.” I thought that was a wonderful idea, that one could be on hell without being in it, like “Just Visiting” on the Monopoly board. With Angel we went skiing in the Sierras, dozed in front of fireplaces, “experienced” the opera, and generally dressed more nicely. Beneath all the glitz, however, my mother was still the same. She dumped Angel in under two and a half months, with no advance warning that I could detect, late on a Tuesday afternoon. She did it over the phone. The difference was that this time she cried. I did, too, though not because I missed Angel.
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.
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 Playboys, Penthouses, Hustlers, 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.
SUKKWAN ISLAND
PART ONE
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 n
o 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.