by David Vann
He grabbed a shovel and dragged Roy far into the trees. He didn’t want to be close to the cabin, didn’t want Roy’s grave so near that these people might want to move it. So he went far enough into the trees that he didn’t think Roy would be found, and then he stopped and began digging. The earth was hard for the first foot, then it was loose for another foot at most before he started hitting rock and root and sand; it was very hard to dig. He labored all day at the grave, stabbing and cutting roots, digging around rocks, smashing his way through with the tip of the shovel.
He had to rest often, and each time he would walk away from the pit and the awful smell of his son rotting. He would sit in the trees a few hundred feet away and think of how he would tell all of this. He wasn’t sure the story could make any sense. Each thing had made the next thing necessary, but the things themselves did not look good. Though he couldn’t admit it completely, part of him wished he would never be found. If no one ever returned to this cabin or noticed them missing from their own, then he would not have to try to tell anyone. He felt he could live now with what had happened if he didn’t have to face anyone else. His son had killed himself and this was Jim’s fault and now he was burying his son. He could believe this. But he didn’t want anyone else to know.
He dug until late afternoon, near the end of the day, and then decided it would have to be good enough because he couldn’t do this in darkness, so he dragged Roy and the sleeping bag into the pit, not wanting to try to empty him out of the bag, and then stood there wondering how he could have a kind of funeral in just a few minutes before heaping the dirt and getting back to the cabin.
I didn’t mean to rush this, he told his son. I know this is your burial. It should be something special and your mother should be here, but I just can’t do anything about all that. I just…and here he stopped and didn’t know what to say. All he could think was I love you, you’re my son, but this bent him so that he couldn’t speak, so he wept and shoveled in the dirt and mounded it and packed it and walked back to the cabin in near darkness, not caring much anymore whether he lost his way.
The smell of Roy was still in the cabin that night and the next day and continued in traces for over a week. After that, Jim still thought he could smell it, but it had become faint enough to be indistinguishable from imagination. On cold days when it seemed to have gone, he walked around the rooms trying to remember it. Outside, too, during hikes through the forest he would sometimes smell it and stop and think of his son. He told himself that these had become the only times he would think of his son, as if only this one kind of memory were strong enough, but of course this was a lie. He was always thinking of Roy in one way or another. There was very little else to do. He had settled in for the winter, was waiting now.
It seemed to Jim that he hadn’t understood Roy well. It seemed that Roy had been more dangerous than Jim had thought. As if all those years he had been ready to kill himself but waiting for the right time. This didn’t seem quite accurate, but Jim followed it for a while. What if suicide had been in Roy’s nature all along? What then? It would change responsibility, at the very least. And why was it that anyone ever killed himself? What had made Jim so sure that he himself could do it? It was difficult to understand now. It was hard to make the idea seem plausible. Jim didn’t believe that he had ever really felt suicidal, even when he had decided to step off the cliff. Even then he had felt only self-pity, nothing more.
This thought made Jim pause. He hadn’t thought about the cliff for a while. He wondered what Roy had thought of that, wondered whether Roy had known that he had done it on purpose. He had never really admitted to Roy that it had been on purpose. If he had, it would have been harder to make Roy stay. But Roy must have suspected something odd.
To get away from these thoughts, Jim tried to think of other things. He invented diversions. He tried to imagine who would find him, and how, and what they would say. The homely couple coming up the path with their children lagging behind. They would stop and watch him and consider him dangerous. They might run. They might arrive and leave before he’d even seen them, and he wouldn’t know until the authorities arrived later. But he believed they would walk right up and be indignant. They were the owners and they were otherwise ignored by everyone, he was sure, so about this they would be fierce. They would come and drag him out and attack him with their parrot beaks and twisted eyes and peck and tear at him until they had stolen little pieces away. So then he was thinking of Roy on the beach and the seagulls and in this way he tortured himself each day and night under the guise of trying to fill his time and survive.
He still looked for boats occasionally, on good days. The rare ones he did see were too far away. He had no flares. It had occurred to him that he could try to light a giant forest fire on one end of the island and this would bring spotter planes at the least, but he didn’t know how long they would take or whether he would end up dying in the fire. His own death seemed likely if he set a huge forest fire on an island. He would be in the water at the end, trying to find air. And he didn’t like the idea of the firefighters shoveling at the dirt where Roy lay.
Then it occurred to him to set some other island on fire, if he could find a small one nearby that was uninhabited. He could row over there, get it going with the little bit of gasoline he had left, then row back or even just stay out on the water where they could see him.
Not a bad idea, he told himself. That could work.
But he didn’t do it. Rowing in these channels wouldn’t be easy, and he wasn’t ready to face anyone yet. So he waited in his cabin and schemed and saw the flames everywhere and imagined himself rescued and tried to remember what Roy had looked like before he had blown off half his face. It was terrible that Roy had left Jim with that image. Jim couldn’t remember the face before, the way his son had looked. It was as if his son had been born into the world mutilated.
At least no one else would have to see him that way. Enough time had passed now that no one else would have to see anything at all. This relieved him somewhat. He couldn’t explain why the sight would have seemed such a personal embarrassment. But it would have. What he wanted now was to come up with some way of telling things that made it all seem sad but somehow unavoidable. Something along the lines that things had been hard, but he hadn’t realized quite how hard for Roy because Roy hadn’t said anything. If only Jim had known, they would have left immediately, but he’d had no way of knowing.
But then these thoughts disgusted Jim. He had no patience for his own mind.
Mid-January and still no one had come. It was remarkable, really. It seemed the world had forgotten them, though they were probably less than ten miles from where they were supposed to be. Jim assumed that their cabin had been found by now with the blood on the floor and the smashed radios and the boat gone. The sheriff or someone must have searched the area after that, but he had not heard a single helicopter or plane, nor had he seen a boat for weeks, and never a boat close enough.
Jim’s food was running low and he had lost weight trying to conserve. He had only one meal a day now, with a few light snacks at other times. He figured his food would last at this rate another month or two at most and then he’d be eating seaweed or starving.
He slept all through the night now and even sometimes part of the day. It was the easiest thing to do and didn’t use food or even wood for the fire. He had cut several large pieces from the inflatable boat to lay on top of his blanket and sheets and he was wearing an extra sweater he had found as well as the clothes he had arrived in. He hadn’t bathed in nearly three months. He had begun to smell almost clean again, as far as he could tell.
He tried not to think during this time. When it would start, he’d look at something, a board in the ceiling or even just the darkness, and try to lose himself in that and not let the thoughts get going, though he couldn’t avoid them always. They were repetitive and insistent. Roy saying he wanted to go. He saw that scene over and over, couldn’t get it out of his mind.
Another repetitive one was about his neighbor in Ketchikan, Kathleen, the woman he had first wanted to cheat with. He kept seeing the gray afternoon when he’d stood out on their side porch chatting with her and asked her if she’d like to come inside, since Elizabeth wasn’t home. The look of disgust on her face. She knew exactly what he meant. Elizabeth was in the hospital, pregnant with Tracy. Not the best timing, he saw now. He thought about food, too. Milkshakes, especially. That was what he most wanted. And barbecued ribs. He thought mostly about Roy, and he visited him when the weather was calm and he was feeling restless.
The mound had caved in with the rain; the grave was now a shallow depression grown over with mushroom and fern. At first he had torn out the mushrooms that grew there, considering them obscene, but as they kept growing back, he finally left them, gray-white bulbs and sharper, smaller cones like tepees. He wondered how long it would take for a nylon sleeping bag to decompose, and he imagined it must be a very long time.
You’re still alive, he told Roy one day. I’ve been thinking about this. You don’t get to experience anything anymore; your life stopped for you when you died. But things are going to keep happening to me because of this, and that makes you still alive, in a way. And because no one else knows, because your mother doesn’t know, you aren’t even completely dead yet. You’ll die again when she hears, and then she’ll keep you alive for a long time after that. And even after all of us die, someone’s going to dig up that sleeping bag and find you again. Though I guess they might be digging you up earlier than that. They’ll probably want to make sure it’s you. They’re not likely to take my word on anything after all this.
He liked talking out loud to Roy, so he made a habit of it. Unless the weather was terrible, he went out and chatted for a while each afternoon. He chatted about being rescued, and about the weather, and he confessed things from time to time. I was impatient, he told Roy. I know that. I should have relaxed a little. I just felt responsible. He talked with Roy about little things that were bothering him. The day I walked in on you, he said. When you were jacking off in the outhouse. I still feel bad about that. I don’t think I handled it well. I should have said something, but I just didn’t know what to say.
In the first part of March, Jim scrabbled around at the water’s edge trying to catch crabs. They were still here, even in winter, but they seemed faster now. Each time he reached out, they retreated sideways into a crevice and disappeared. It took him a long time to realize that the crabs had not actually gotten faster but he had slowed. He hadn’t eaten a regular meal in almost a week. He’d had mostly seaweed and water. And for several months before that, he’d been conserving. He saw now that this had been a mistake. He had made himself too weak. He went back to the cabin and tried to outthink the crabs.
The next day, he went after their babies. He overturned rocks and, sure enough, just as he had hoped, occasionally he found small colonies of baby crabs that were too small to get away from him. He picked them up by the handful and didn’t see how he was going to be able to clean them in his usual way, so he just ate them whole and crunched them down, shells and guts and all.
I’ll be shitting shell necklaces, he told them. It’s going to be real pretty. He chewed well so that the pieces wouldn’t come out too big.
At Roy’s grave, he spent a long time talking about Roy’s mother and how they had met and what had gone wrong. She was only my second serious girlfriend, really, he told Roy. My brother thinks that was a mistake, to settle down with only the second one, and I think he’s probably right. The thing is, the first one had dumped me, and I think I was mostly scared when I went out with your mother. And there were things that were never right with her. Her parents, for instance. They didn’t like me, thought I was too much a country boy, because they had money. Your grandfather, especially, I didn’t get along with. The man was a bastard. Your mom didn’t want to be critical of him, but he had been hitting his wife and doing other terrible stuff all along. So we couldn’t talk about that. And then, generally, she wanted me to talk more, to entertain her more. She told me about a year into our marriage that she had just expected that eventually I’d have interesting things to say. That wasn’t real nice to hear. I don’t think she thought much about what she said sometimes. Anyway.
It was while Jim was out talking to Roy that he heard the boat go by close and slow down. He got to his feet and trotted as fast as he could toward the beach, but then he stopped. He could hear it out there, at low revs, probably checking out the cabin, but he couldn’t decide whether to run the rest of the way and flag them down. That seemed like too much for this particular day. He didn’t feel ready yet. So he hid in the trees and waited, unsure, and then he heard the engines rev up again and the boat was gone.
Jim went back to the grave. Oh God, he said. I can’t believe I just did that. Something’s wrong. I’m not ready yet to tell people about you.
He lay in bed that night under all of his covers wondering what was coming next. He couldn’t stay out here and starve, yet that was what he had chosen just this afternoon. He couldn’t hide Roy forever. Roy’s mother and sister had to know. Jim felt so confused that he cried for the first time in weeks. I just don’t know, he kept saying out loud to the ceiling.
The next day, he stayed in bed and didn’t go to the grave. He didn’t go hunting for crabs, either, or have any other kind of food. He kept wanting to get up, but it was cold out and he was preoccupied by daydreams that he kept extending, closing his eyes until finally it was night again and he was still in bed.
He was thinking about Lakeport, about high school, and how he had worked so many hours at Safeway. He had hated that, had known that it was all a waste, that his time there amounted to nothing since he’d eventually do some other kind of work. And killing mosquitoes in the spring. He remembered how they’d oil the ponds and spray insecticides to keep the mosquitoes down. Big tanks of chemicals. He wondered now what had been in them. It couldn’t have been good.
His sinus troubles had begun back then. Persistent infections and then the headaches. They were back now, the headaches. This was what had taken him closest to killing himself, just the pain in his head. It was impossible to get away from, impossible to sleep through. He’d been an insomniac most of the time for probably twenty years now. He should have gotten an operation, but he didn’t like the idea of an operation. He’d worked on too many patients in his dentistry. He knew how brutal surgery was, and the terrible risks.
Another memory from even earlier was the boat they’d had on the lake, an old converted Navy cruiser from the 1920s. They replanked the hull and took it out on warm summer nights, sang out there on the water. That was what he wanted now, he realized, and what he hadn’t had in decades: a community of people and a particular place and a sense that he belonged. What had happened to that?
The next day he rose and went looking for crabs. It was low tide and there was quite a lot to choose from. He found some kind of small rockfish hiding in one pool and finally killed it with a stick. It was spiny, but he cleaned it right there on the rocks with his pocketknife and ate it raw. Then he sat back in the rare bit of sunshine and smacked his lips. That was damn good, he said. Now that was a meal.
He finished off with a bit of seaweed and went back to the cabin for a drink of water, then went out to visit with Roy. Haven’t been thinking about you as much, he told Roy. Been thinking about myself when I was your age. How I used to hunt ducks right in front of the house. Croppies and bluegill and catfish at night on the pier with a lantern. I’ve been thinking about all of that, too. It seems to me that one life is actually many lives, and that they add up to something surprisingly long. My life then was nothing like my life now. I was someone else. But what makes me sad, I guess, and the reason I bring all of this up, is that you won’t be getting any other lives. You had two or three at most. Early childhood in Ketchikan, then living with your mother in California after the divorce. That would be two. Maybe being out here with me was the
beginning of the third. But you know, you killed yourself, I didn’t kill you, so that’s what you get.
The rest of the afternoon, Jim poked around the shed, looking at all the rusting tools and odd projects. He was getting more active, mostly because it was a weirdly warm spell. Normally he wouldn’t stay outside this long. But really, winter in Southeast was not that big a deal. He had been too freaked out with that cache and everything. It wasn’t that hard to survive here.
And then Jim went through a time when he didn’t seem to have any thoughts or memories at all. He stayed in bed and stared at the ceiling. When he went out, he stared at the trees or at the waves. The water was calm, no whitecaps. A surge more than waves at times, the water gray and opaque and thick-looking. He sat with Roy sometimes, but he was through talking. He was ready to get back to his life, to get back to other people.
But he stayed. A storm came through for over a week and he had nothing to eat. He didn’t want to go outside. It seemed the cabin might collapse under the strain. Hail pelting the windows, rain, snow, outrageous winds, dark all the time. He hated this place. He wanted a hot tub.
When the storm finally ended, he was so desperate and starved he decided to set the fire. Everything was soaked, but he walked out into the trees with his spare gas can and a box of matches, resting several times along the way. He found a spot with a lot of deadfall and trees packed in close and he doused as much wood as he could with the gasoline, then struck a match to it and stepped back as it flared up. He started yelling, excited, as the flames devoured the deadfall and licked up the sides of the small trees. The heat was a beautiful thing. Truly warm for what seemed like the first time since summer, Jim stayed as close to it as possible, close enough that he could feel his face too hot and probably burning. The smoke obliterated the tops of the trees and the evening sky, and the sound of the fire overcame everything else. Jim danced around at the edges of it, telling it to consume everything. Grow, he yelled. Grow.