by David Vann
By eight o’clock, as Ned relieved Chuck and dug into an entire box of jelly doughnuts, they passed what Jim at first had thought was Juneau but was only Point Bridget State Park, he saw on the chart, connected to Juneau by a small highway.
If you know how to read a chart, you can take a turn at the helm, Ned said.
Fair enough, Jim said. I’ll be next.
Soon after, Jim had his best chance of seeing Juneau down Favorite Channel. Then, a little later, down Saginaw Channel, but he really didn’t see anything. They weren’t very close and it didn’t look like much. By noon Jim was at the wheel, exhausted, and they were around Couverden Island, heading west out Icy Strait.
He grinned when he hit Icy Strait because it was indeed suddenly a lot colder. It was a kind of joke. You could tell even from inside the pilot house, through the small cracks and vents.
The channel was huge—at least five miles across—but there was a lot of traffic. A few cabin cruisers and two sailboats but many other commercial salmon and halibut boats and some tugs with loads far behind them. Those were the ones he had to anticipate. He wasn’t used to being so slow. He just couldn’t get out of the way quickly in this thing. And he didn’t turn on the VHF, because he didn’t want attention.
They passed Pleasant Island around three o’clock, then Point Gustavus, and the wind howled down from Glacier Bay to the north, down through the Sitakaday Narrows.
As they passed the next small bay, Dundas Bay, a bit later, he saw a Coast Guard cruiser, one of the big ones, passing on the other side of the Inian Islands, and he felt panicked. If they came over to board him, to inspect for safety equipment and drugs, as they routinely did, he would be caught. He had no faith in Chuck or Ned to stand by him. He was afraid even to sleep, although he could hardly keep awake at this point. But the cutter passed far on the other side of the northernmost island and went into the next bay. Jim stayed as far out of the way as possible, ducking slightly into Taylor Bay as he passed. Brady Glacier looked enormous, a thing from another time, on a different scale that denied anything now, as if Jim could not possibly be Jim because the thought was too small, instantaneous as the glare. The glacier dwarfed mountains.
The wind tore down off the glacier in gusts that set the boat rocking, but this was good because it kept him alert.
And then he was out. He passed Cape Spencer by eight o’clock and was heading out to sea, free of the coast, free of the islands and southeast Alaska. On the chart, he was out of U.S. waters in less than an hour. He would cross them again because of the way the lines were drawn, but only briefly. Within another night and day, he’d be far enough offshore that no one would know to find him or care. He would be entering another life.
Again he thought of Roy. He couldn’t seem not to. He would be thinking along and not expecting the shift, and then he’d see the pistol, handing it to Roy, or he’d come in after and find him there on the floor, or what was left of him. And then he was thinking of the sleeping bag and wondered what had happened to it. They had taken it away in the clear plastic bag with Roy’s body, and they had not wanted to try to pour him out. It was too much to think of him that way, but then what could they have done? They must have done that at some point before they had buried him. But who? Who had poured him out? And what had Elizabeth seen? What had his daughter Tracy seen? He might not see her again. He had lost her, too.
The Gulf of Alaska was very cold. The wind blew hard and the waves were large now and confused, wind waves and swells, breaking around him and soaking the foredeck, occasionally coming over the side. Chuck came up to relieve him at four. Get some sleep, he said.
How far out are we going? Jim asked. I’d like to be at least a hundred out all the way down.
We can do that, Chuck said. Though we’re gonna have to stop for fuel somewhere. Oregon, probably.
Jim went below and sacked out in a tiny bunk that smelled terribly of Chuck’s old sweat and alcohol. He was hungry, but he was too tired, so he tried just to sleep.
A boat under way is a noisy thing. He had known that. But this boat’s walls creaked and popped in a way that couldn’t be good. And her diesel was extremely uneven, dropping low in revs and then racing, not only because of the swells and cavitation. Jim lay curled up in fear and exhaustion and waited for it to pass, waited for sleep, but waiting and fearing like that he thought too much about everything. He thought about the IRS, the sheriff, the Coast Guard, his brother, Elizabeth, Tracy, Rhoda, Roy. He imagined a long conversation with Rhoda trying to convince her he hadn’t killed Roy. He pointed out that Roy was thirteen, that he had a mind of his own, that he could do things that were his own choice.
His own choice? Rhoda asked.
It wasn’t my doing, Jim said. It was never my idea that he kill himself.
Never your idea, Jim?
No, he’d tell Rhoda. But then he confessed one more detail. He told about the time shooting up into the ceiling.
And what was that about?
I don’t know. I was just shooting.
Just shooting?
Shut up, Jim said aloud in the dark, but he could hardly hear himself, it was so damn loud. And then he worried about what course they were on. How would he know if the boat swung around, if Chuck decided to head back? And what about islands? It was an old, irrational fear of his when under way. He was always afraid of hitting islands that weren’t on the chart, even in mid-ocean.
He couldn’t keep his head still. That was why he wasn’t sleeping. No matter how he wedged it in between a few shirts and the lee cloth, he couldn’t get it not to rock when the boat rocked. He couldn’t relax his neck. And the whiskers along his jaw scraped against the shirts every time his head moved. Roy hadn’t gotten to the point where he’d had whiskers. He was starting to get peach fuzz. They talked about shaving one day, Roy worried about cutting himself, not realizing the blade head swiveled. Jim grinned. Then he was crying again and hating how weak he was. He saw himself in Mexico and maybe someday in the South Pacific, down there in all the nice weather with warm, beautiful blue water and the green mountains, and he saw that he would still be alone. Roy would never catch up to him. And he wondered what Roy’s grave looked like. He realized he’d never get to see it now.
Jim looked across to the other side to see if Ned was awake, too, but apparently he wasn’t.
Jim lay there against the lee cloth with his eyes closed and couldn’t find anything. It was just windblown space inside him, a vacuum. He didn’t care about anything, and it would have been better just to kill himself, but Roy had done that, and now he couldn’t. Roy had killed himself instead, in a clear trade, and this was why Jim was responsible for killing Roy. It was not the way things were supposed to have been, but because Jim had been cowardly, because he hadn’t had the courage just to kill himself before Roy returned, he had missed that moment, the one moment he had to make things right, and he forfeited that moment forever and handed over the pistol to Roy and asked that he fix things in the way that he could, even though it was not the right way.
And Roy had done it. Roy wasn’t cowardly and didn’t flinch, and he put the barrel up and pulled the trigger and blew off half his head. And Jim did not recognize what had happened when he heard the shot. He didn’t know enough to recognize the sacrifice at the time it was made.
Jim still hadn’t believed what had happened even after he saw Roy’s body lying there in the doorway with his blood and brain and bone everywhere. He still had not believed or seen anything, even as the proof lay before him. And now here he was escaping, thinking he could run off and evade the law and his punishment and have his perfect life somewhere eating mangoes and coconuts like Robinson Crusoe, as if nothing had happened, as if his son had done nothing and he had played no part in it. But that was not the way things could be, he knew now, and he knew also what he had to do.
Jim got up out of his lee cloth and went into the pilot house. Chuck was tilted back in his captain’s chair, looking at a porno magazine. He
raised his eyes from the page for a minute and said, What do you want?
We have to go back, Jim said. I can’t run from this. I’m turning myself in.
Chuck looked at him steadily, and Jim had no idea what he was thinking. You’re gonna turn yourself in, Chuck finally said.
Yeah.
And where does that leave us? We helped you get out of town, remember?
Jim wasn’t sure what to do. Okay, you’re right, he said. You’ll get your full payment and I’ll wait a few days until you’re gone before I do anything.
Chuck went back to his porno. All right, he said. Go ahead and wake Ned up for the next watch before you sack out again.
Jim woke Ned, who complained that it was early. Jim lay down again and tried to sleep. He was practicing his confession as he drifted off. I, Jim Fenn, murdered my son, Roy Fenn, back in the fall, probably nine months ago. I killed him by shooting him in the head at close range with my pistol, a Ruger .44 Magnum, which was recovered, I think, by the sheriff. I was suicidal and had been talking on the radio with my ex-wife Rhoda, who said she didn’t want to get back together with me and was planning to marry another man, and I couldn’t stand it any more and I was too cowardly to kill myself so I killed my son.
That wasn’t quite right. He went back to his motivations, because they would ask about those, he knew. He went over each incriminating detail, over and over, the pistol, the radios, using everything. He was so exhausted he couldn’t keep it straight. His mind had stopped and his body felt tiny, as if he were an infant. He was a tiny golden infant shrunken inside himself with strings reaching out to each part of this larger body, pulling in. He was vanishing.
Jim woke with a rope around his neck yanking him from his bunk. He tried to scream but he couldn’t. He was on the floor, hit a bulkhead, was struggling, then saw Ned with a wooden bat hitting him across the legs. He fell, was dragged along, got a glimpse of Chuck at the other end of the rope and knew he should have seen this coming. It should have been so obvious. Then he blacked out.
When he hit the water, it was so cold he woke and wanted them to find him and rescue him. Wanted Chuck and Ned to come get him. He struggled with the rope at his neck, freed it easily, but he was in his clothes, sinking, weighted down, and he didn’t have a life jacket. He felt enormously sorry for himself. The open ocean was an awesome sight. Peaks forming everywhere, tossing and disappearing, hillsides rolling past. It was impossible to believe it was just water, impossible to believe, also, how far it extended beneath him. He struggled for what seemed forever and might have been ten minutes before he numbed and tired and began swallowing water. He thought of Roy, who had had no chance to feel this terror, whose death had been instant. He threw up water involuntarily and swallowed and breathed it in again like the end it was, cold and hard and unnecessary, and he knew then that Roy had loved him and that that should have been enough. He just hadn’t understood anything in time.
KETCHIKAN
AT THIRTY, I rode the Alaskan ferry past the coastline of British Columbia, past white-ringed islands, forests extending beyond the horizon, gulls and bald eagles, porpoises, whales, all in close, rode past sunsets over the open ocean, lighthouses, small fishing villages, into Alaskan waters where mountains sloped steeply upward out of fjords, and on, finally, to the town of my childhood, strung narrowly along the waterfront, drenched perpetually in mist, the place of ghosts, I felt, the place where my dead father had first gone astray, the place where this father and his suicide and his cheating and his lies and my pity for him, also, might finally be put to rest: Ketchikan.
My first day and evening, I found a place to live where the houses were narrow and thin streets traversed but never descended directly. Long wooden stairways, their sea-grayed wood slick from mist and worn like stone, fell through skunk weed, fern, and salmonberry toward the docks and ocean below where fishing boats paused like apparitions, the small yellow floats in their netting the thousand eyes contained, rolled up, waiting. I stood before them that first night of my return, beyond sleep, and wondered at the spread of their nets, at the full transfiguration, the peacock eyes and fan sifting silently through half a mile of open ocean, drifting, seemingly, as grand and unplanned as jellyfish but more terrible, more calculating in their single purpose. This was overwrought, but it seemed in keeping with the indulgence of this trip, with the extravagance of an attempted return to childhood. The world had become, in brief moments, animated, and I its briefly unself-conscious observer.
I walked among the purse seiners and trawlers, gillnetters and great tugs, down floating planks iridescent with fish scales and waved to the two or three fishermen in their lighted cabins who heard or otherwise sensed me and looked up from their odd hours, their strange, solitary lives, to nod and look down again. Most had shotguns within reach, I remembered. Most did not feel strange and solitary at all, but hassled and trapped, limited, cheated. Fishermen, as a group, complain bitterly, despite appearances. All of which came back with a new familiarity, gifts from what felt like another life. Though I was an intruder, this was perhaps the closest I’d felt, in my few adult years, to belonging.
But I moved on, an intruder still, a tourist always, and wished I could find again the woman I had talked with just before I’d left who was working on a tug out of Seattle. She told of a seven-hundred-pound halibut, over nine feet head to tail and nearly as wide. This was during the time of waiting, when a group of tugs had to pause three days to wait out a storm farther north in their path. It was her crew’s turn to fish, to pull up twelve hundred pounds of halibut to feed crews from all the tugs, and when they had pulled this great fish to the surface, they shot it six times through the head with a .45-caliber pistol before winching it from the waters onto the deck. Even shot through and drowning in the open air, its tiny brain pierced and huge, mythical lungs exploded, the halibut was too strong to approach. Smaller halibut were impaled on a long board with a spike at one end, then stripped immediately of their skin and cut into filets, but the crew left this one to lie alone on the whitewashed concrete deck and watched from a distance.
This woman, Kate, drew the lot to clean and filet. After waiting an hour, she began with a long knife to slice one side—the back, mottled dark green and brown—into thick steaks. The spine and thin bones radiating from it lay exposed before her and she went to the head to cut away the cheeks, where the meat is rich and stringy, a delicacy. One cheek had been shot through and could be recovered only in part, but the other came free in a single huge steak white as marble that lay folded over her hand as she went to the hose to wash it and drop it into a plastic bucket. As she walked, however, the halibut cheek convulsed and leaped in an arc four feet into the air, over a line and onto the deck, where it hit with more of a thud than a splat, though only a small remnant of the huge corpse before her. “Gods are born of less than that,” she told me, leaning in close, laughing.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals…I mumbled Elizabeth Bishop poems to the water, to the oil stains like rainbows in this artificial light and the red starfish rippling below. I had always imagined the poems set here, in Ketchikan, not on the Atlantic.
Out in the channel, the lights of a convocation, twenty to thirty boats all drawn together to wait for a storm to pass, for the time when they could leave the shallows and enter open ocean again. Their arrangement puzzled in a way that pleased, also: bright floodlights high up, small cabin lights, globes everywhere across their backs exposing the great nets, buffed aluminum, floats orange and red, all intermingled and reflected on waters calm as mirrors and no horizon visible, no clear seam for the surface, for water and air, reflection and light. And the only sound that of small bells, seeming to come from much farther away, the bells high up on the lines of trawlers, the bells that signaled fish. No voices.
I walked to the end of the docks, studied for a long time a small rowboat. A rare quiet night, no fishermen visible at this far end, no one to see me,
and this rowboat tied only by two frayed ropes, bow and stern. It was old wood, green paint blistered and cracked, patchy pale white showing underneath, and the name on its stern the Lady J, in black lettering, also cracked. I stepped into it, still not deciding to take it out but dreaming already of rendezvous with ocean liners, of guests in tails and sequins, voices near as infants, intimate, faces thin and sharp as beaks. A warm, strong breeze carrying all but the water, no ripple but its hold strong on everything else, making distance impossible. I rowed unnoticed beneath masts and sonar, bells and spotlights, rowed, I fancied, with the seamless propulsion of jellyfish in the one element, rowed past jagged rocks onto a sea nostalgic and opaque, swelling slowly, as if considering spilling over until the rim of the world lifted inevitably, slipped, and I was in a rowboat, wet from mist and shivering, hearing the slap of oars, the creaking of the locks. I sang because the high moment had passed and that was what was left, sang a song by Memphis Slim, crooning the lament of a fool in love back to the docks, seemingly loud and a little dizzy and, by all apparent signs, invisible. Small sucking noises from the boats in their slips as I returned, trapped water beneath tri-hulls and the rub of bumpers against wood.
My father loved something about Alaska. Though frustrated himself, he had many friends who lived the kinds of lives he imagined. One was a man named Healy who lived a hundred miles off the Parks Highway at a point between Anchorage and Fairbanks where the highway cross-sected nothing. No other human habitation as far as any horizon, so that on a cool summer evening, when the ranges far off, their snow gone violet near midnight, seemed to float up out of the tundra as if out of oceans and the ground everywhere lost its solidity, its particularity, in my father Healy vanished, became him, and he knew freedom.
Then the night would grow colder, the light would almost fade, and my father would go inside, see the cabinets Healy had built, even the walls of his small cabin, and the blankets hung between the bed for himself and his wife and the bed for their two small children. Over a couch, Healy had draped the hides of black bears, brown bears, mountain goats, deer, caribou, and my father would touch these with one hand but keep the other in his pocket. At this point, he would have lost words, too broken any longer to praise. I touched these hides, also, forgotten by my father but watching him, feeling a child’s portion of regret, desire, longing, my father’s longing. If only a life could be bent into the shape of another’s, momentum diminished. After a long drive home very late, during which I slept, my father would rise again early to drill out the tiny infected nerves of teeth, fill cavities, make molds, instruct and squint and see his whole life reduced to something cramped and small.