by David Vann
Jim slept again and in the morning Roy definitely had been picked at. The seagulls were still milling nearby and Jim went after them with rocks, chasing them so far along the beach that by the time he returned the others were back at Roy again, stealing away little pieces of him.
Jim put him back in the sleeping bag and tied it up again and reloaded the boat. This time, Jim said. This time we find someone.
Under way, he was hungry and cold and had trouble staying awake. He saw no cabins or boats of any kind, but he kept going into the waves and trying to look around and trying not to think but thinking anyway of what he was going to say. I don’t know why he did it, he imagined saying to Elizabeth. I just came back from a hike one afternoon and there he was. There was no sign, no indication. I hadn’t imagined he could do this kind of thing. But then he lost it again because there really hadn’t been any sign and he really hadn’t imagined Roy could do this. Roy had always been stable, and sure they had argued a little, but things hadn’t been bad, and there was no reason to do this. Damn you, he said out loud. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.
As he rounded another point, he saw a boat far away, heading into the next channel. He stopped the engine and fumbled with one of the flares, finally got it lit and then held it high over his head smoking orange and burning and stinking of sulfur, but the boat, something big, some kind of huge yacht with a hundred fucking passengers, one of whom must be looking this way, just passed on and disappeared behind another coastline.
So Jim continued along the island at a slow five knots maybe and against the current again and wondered how well he knew this area. He wondered if he could just keep going along this and other islands and run out of gas and never find anyone. It seemed possible. It wasn’t exactly everyone living out here. But then late afternoon, after he’d poured in the spare gas and was sure he was just going to run out and have to drift around forever, he saw a cabin cruiser crossing on the other side, back toward the island he and Roy lived on, where they’d come from. They could have hailed it from there. Jim got out another flare and struck the end with the cap and nothing happened, so he struck again and looked up at the boat going fast and passing away from them now. He grabbed the last flare and struck it and it ignited and he held it high and the boat swerved slightly toward him and he was sure it must have seen him. But then it swerved back the other way, just avoiding a log or something in the water, and the flare went out and the boat was only a speck receding into the gray.
Jim yelled, over and over, growling at the shoreline and the water and air and sky and everything and hurled the burned-out torch and just sat there looking at the sleeping bag that held Roy and then at his hands on his knees. The boat was rocking and drifting and cold water was lapping onto his lower back and down his seat.
Jim continued on and, coming around a small point, happened to look over just in time to see a small cabin disappearing back into the trees. He turned the boat around and motored back and saw it was bigger, actually, than that, a home it looked like, a summer house, and he landed the boat on the small gravel beach before it and left Roy to go up and investigate.
It was hidden behind a stand of spruce and he’d been lucky to see it at all, though it wasn’t far from shore. There was a path leading to it and when he got up close he saw it was a log cabin but big enough to be someone’s house, with several rooms and storm boards on all the windows, locked up for the winter.
Hello, he said. Then he walked up onto the porch, which had debris all over it from the storm, and he knew no one would be around. Hey, he yelled, I happen to have my dead son with me. Maybe we could come in and chat and have dinner and spend the night, what do you say?
There was no answer. He went back to the boat and Roy and tried to think. It was late in the day and he hadn’t seen anything else. He was on his reserve gasoline already. It wouldn’t last long, and he was still shivering and starving and dizzy and they might have left something in their house for him to eat. And maybe a radio. They would certainly have some kind of blanket, and a fireplace and some wood. He had seen the chimney. And he had been lucky to warm up enough last night. He hadn’t been sure he would in a wet sleeping bag, and it might not work out as well a second time, because he was much weaker now. He had to deliver Roy, he knew, but the truth was, the kid didn’t look all that great anyway. Jim laughed grimly. You’re a card, he said out loud. You’re a hell of a father and you’re a comic, too.
Wait right here, he said to Roy, and he went back up to the cabin again and this time continued around back. He was looking for a way in. The windows all had storm boards fitted and probably locked from inside. The front door had a big padlock and, as it turned out, so did the back door. He looked all around and there was nothing left open, no glass to break, even.
Okay, he said. It was quiet, only a few drips from the trees. And it was getting on toward sunset. He had no flashlight, no food. He continued farther and found the wood shed. The door was padlocked but looked weak enough, so he found a good-sized rock and threw it at the door and it made a crunching sound, then bounced back at him so he had to jump out of the way. Goddamnit, he said. He ran to the door and slammed himself against it, fell down and got up and did it again. He was breathing hard now. He kicked with his boot at the center of it and could feel it bend each time, but it wouldn’t give, so he walked back down to the boat.
He saw the sleeping bag propped up there with Roy in it and realized he had forgotten about Roy for a few minutes. The thought that he could do that seemed terribly sad, but he didn’t stop and indulge himself. He had work to do before dark. He loosened the engine from its mount and carried it stiffly up to the cabin, set it down on the porch. The thing weighed at least fifty pounds, all metal.
Jim went to the shed again for the rock and came back to the cabin. He had hoped to find an ax or a saw or something in the shed, but he decided now to just work on the cabin directly. He pounded at each door and storm board with the rock in his hand until he found one over the kitchen window that seemed to give a little more. It was because the window was bigger, he thought. So he carried the outboard around and then he grabbed the housing with both hands and rammed the prop end into the board and it only scraped a little on the prop and knocked him off balance so that he almost fell with the engine on top of him.
He was beyond swearing or yelling. He felt only a cold, murderous hatred and wanted to destroy this cabin. He picked up the outboard, this time by the lighter, skinnier shaft end, and could get the other, heavier end to lift only by turning like a shot-putter, so he turned a couple of circles like that and hurled the motor at the storm board and jumped back.
The crash was monstrously loud and the engine fell back onto the porch with a smashed housing.
Of course, Jim said. The housing was only plastic. He un-latched it and lifted it off twisted and crushed and now he had steel motor sticking out, the engine head, and he swung the motor around again and hurled it, screaming, and it bounced back again and almost got him but this time it had crushed part of the storm board. He picked it up and hurled it two more times and by then had destroyed his engine but also had shattered the storm board and the glass behind it and had a way in.
The cabin was dark inside and there was no electricity, no light to switch on. Fumbling around in the kitchen in the dark, he finally found matches and then a paraffin lamp that cast weird shadows everywhere as he hunted around from room to room. He found a wood stove in the kitchen and then another for heat in the living room. Beside this one there was still a stack of dry wood. There was a bedroom off this and it had been stripped, the mattress bare, without blankets. The whole place had been stripped, winterized. But he kept looking in every closet and shelf and drawer and under the bed and couch, and finally in a dresser drawer he found two sets of sheets and a blanket.
Okay, he said. Now, where’s the food? You don’t bring everything every time. You must leave something here. Some canned goods or something. Where is it?
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sp; He looked in the kitchen and found it surprisingly bare. He did find a few cans of soup in the cupboard, though, and then another cupboard with canned vegetables.
Not enough, he said. Not enough. I’ve got a growing boy with me, a strapping young lad. You must have a cellar. Your own little indoor cache in a fancy place like this. He stomped on the floor all around the kitchen and looked for latches and looked in the living room, pulling back the small piece of carpet, and looked in the bedroom, and then, giving up, on his way back into the kitchen followed by his own paraffin shadow like a nimble doppelgänger, he saw a latch in the passageway from living room to kitchen.
Open sesame, he said and lifted it and found the cellar, a hundred cans and jars and bottles and freeze-dried packets of Alpine Minestrone and vanilla ice cream and in a large bag even vacuum-sealed packets of smoked salmon. Okay, he said.
Roy was still in the bag. He lifted him over a shoulder and pushed him through the kitchen window, trying not to tear the bag on the bits of glass on the sill but tearing it some anyway. Then he climbed in himself.
Time to get to work, he said. We need to make this place home. He dragged Roy back to the bedroom, where he’d stay cold and out of the way. Then he started a fire in the kitchen stove and decided not to light the one in the living room, to conserve wood. He’d just sleep in here in the kitchen. And that would help Roy keep cooler, also.
He opened a can of ravioli and put the can right on the burner, then decided he wouldn’t be such a slob and put it in a small pot. He heated canned milk in another pot and made himself some hot chocolate. A treat, he said. He ate there in the kitchen in the lamplight and was looking all around trying to find something to focus on, something to read. He kept thinking about Roy and Roy’s mother and he didn’t want to do this, so he looked all around the cabin for reading material and couldn’t find any but finally found some family pictures in the bedroom and brought them back to the kitchen and stared at them while he ate.
This family was not good-looking. They had a parrot-faced daughter and a son with big ears and eyes too close together and a mouth that twisted up oddly. The parents were no lookers, either, the man stocky and a nerd and his wife trying to look surprised for the camera. They went for vacations everywhere, apparently. Camels and tropical fish and Big Ben. Jim disliked them and felt fine about eating their food. Fuck you, he said to the pictures as he slurped up their ravioli. But this lasted only so long and then he was sitting there at the table in lamplight with nothing to focus on. Time, he said.
He went back out to the boat, though it was dark now and very cold, and brought all of the gear up to the porch, then dragged the boat around back and left it and lifted his stuff through the window. Then he carried it all into the back room with Roy, who still was just there in the sleeping bag, not doing anything, not participating, just like a junior high kid. Fine, Jim said to Roy. Then he returned to the kitchen and made his bed on the floor.
That night he kept waking, paranoid that something awful had happened, and then he’d remember Roy and cry and then, because he was so exhausted, fall asleep again. He had no dreams and saw nothing. It was fear he woke to each time, his breath tight and blood pounding, and a sense that the sky was bearing down on him. And in the morning, when it had been light out for hours and he finally got up off the floor, the sense had not completely gone away.
He stoked the stove and wanted to boil water to cook Malt-
O-Meal but no water came out of the tap. Okay, you fuckers, he said, you parrots, where’s the water switch? He searched the kitchen and the cellar and then walked around the back of the cabin and searched for faucets but found nothing. He hiked up to the shed and still nothing so he searched the entire hill behind the house for two or three hours, foot by foot, and finally found a pipe buried partly in the dirt and then covered with bark. He went along it on his hands and knees feeling for fixtures until he found the faucet. He turned it and went back inside, found water and air sputtering out of the tap.
Okay, he said, give me a steady stream, and as if all things followed his spoken will, the tap stopped sputtering and emitted a solid stream of clear, cold water.
He made the Malt-O-Meal, put brown sugar in, and sat down to it but again needed something to look at and didn’t have anything. So he went back and dragged Roy out, still in the sleeping bag, and tried to prop him up in the other chair in the kitchen, but he wouldn’t bend right. The blue sleeping bag was terribly stained now, still wet and dark all around the top.
Okay, he said. If you’re not going to sit right. He looked in the drawers until he found string and scissors and he wrapped Roy, then tied him to a rafter and a leg of the table and a hook that came out of the wall for hanging pots or something, and so Roy was standing there in his sleeping bag and Jim could sit down and eat.
Your father’s becoming pretty weird, he told Roy. And it’s not like you haven’t had a part in that. And yet, the truth is, do you want to know the truth? Well, in some ways I feel better now. I don’t know why that is.
Jim concentrated on his eating then and when he was through he did the dishes. Then he wiped his hands on his jeans and turned to Roy. Okay, big boy, he said, time to go back in the cooler. And he untied Roy and carried him back to the bedroom, then felt so lost all of a sudden he lay down on the bare wooden floor in the bedroom and just moaned for the rest of the day, no idea at all in his head as to what he was doing or why. The room was cold and dim and seemed to stretch on forever, and he a tiny speck lost in the middle of it.
At dinner, after dark, Jim ate alone. I don’t feel like company, he said aloud. Then he went for a walk in the woods.
Jim, Jim, Jim, he spoke out loud, you have to do something. You can’t just leave your son tied up in the sleeping bag and cooling in the bedroom. Roy needs a funeral. He needs to be buried. His mother and sister need to see him.
He hiked on some more, not bothering to duck much and getting scraped up a lot by small branches, one of his hands on fire from nettles. There was no moon or anything out, and he couldn’t see a damned thing.
As he talked, he imagined he was in a great room, at a trial, and these words were being spoken to him. He was sitting at a heavy desk and listening and couldn’t speak.
How was he tied up? someone was asking. Why did you tie up your son at the table? Did that make any sense at all? And what about the sleeping bag? Was that your idea, too? Have you been planning this for some time? Was that really what this whole trip was about? It could have been suicide, sure, but it could also have been murder.
This idea stopped him. He stood in place in the woods breathing hard and hearing nothing else and thinking that they could think that. How could he ever prove that he hadn’t shot his son himself? And now he’d run away, too, and broken into someone else’s place and was hiding out with the body. How could he possibly explain any of this?
Jim was scared now for himself, and turned around to hike back to the cabin, but he wasn’t sure which way it was. He hiked for over an hour, it seemed, and much farther than he had come, he was sure, and still he couldn’t see the cabin or anything familiar or really anything at all. He had just hiked out into the dark and not bothered to pay any attention to where he was going.
The ground was uneven and occasionally he fell through where the dead wood and undergrowth had built up and he was scraped from the sides and above. He had his arms out and head turned away and was walking sideways hoping just to find his way somehow and listening but hearing only himself and starting to feel very afraid of the woods, as if all he had done wrong had somehow gathered here and was out to get him. He knew that didn’t make any sense and that scared him more, because it felt so real anyway. He seemed impossibly small and about to be broken.
He stopped periodically and tried to stand still and be quiet and listen. He was trying to hear what way to go, or because that didn’t make any sense, maybe trying to hear what was after him. Up through the trees, he could see a few faint stars much lat
er, after the sky had cleared some. He was cold and shivering and his heart still going, and the fear had sunk deeper into a sense that he was doomed, that he would never find his way back to safety or be able to run fast enough to escape. The forest was impossibly loud, even over his pulse. There were branches breaking, and twigs and every leaf moving in the breeze and things everywhere running through the undergrowth and larger crashings beyond that he couldn’t be sure whether or not he had simply imagined. The air in the forest had bulk and weight and was part of the darkness, as if they were the same thing, and rushed toward him from every side.
I’ve been afraid like this all my life, he thought. This is who I am. But then he told himself to shut up. You’re only thinking this stuff because you’re lost out here, he said.
It was impossible that it was taking him this long to find the cabin. He’d never been lost in the forest in his life, and he had been in forests all the time, hunting and fishing. But once you take that first wrong step, he told himself, because he knew that after that it was possible to never find your way again, because you couldn’t know where you were coming from and so wouldn’t have any firm basis for any direction. And that seemed appropriate for more in his life, too, especially with women. Things had become so twisted early on that it had been impossible to know what was good, and now, with Roy dead, there was absolutely nothing left to go on. It wouldn’t matter if he perished out in the forest tonight, if he just gave up and lay down and froze.