by David Vann
“Thank you,” I said.
“To answer your question, I came out to work in one of the canneries for a summer after my sophomore year of college, and I met Bill through a friend who came out with me.”
“Wow,” I said. “So you came out for a summer, and here you still are.”
“Yes,” Gloria said.
I let her pause for a moment to eat. I picked a few marshmallows off my sweet potatoes, saving them for last. As I glanced up, Gloria was looking right at me. She knew who I was; I was sure of it.
“I wanted to be an ichthyologist when I was a little kid,” I said, just to be saying something. “And now here I am cleaning out the strainers at a hatchery, not studying anything. I even have a college degree, but not a useful one for anything I want to do.” I raised up my fists in a boxer’s stance. “I coulda been a contender,” I bellowed. I have always entertained when I haven’t known what else to do. Gloria laughed. Bill laughed, too, though he looked confused.
“It’s never too late,” Gloria said.
“Can you pass the halibut, Gloria?” asked Bill.
I saw fingerlings falling end over end through the air, their eyes rings of blue-inlaid silver, huge, unblinking. “Jesus,” I said.
“What?” Gloria asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Sorry. I thought I saw something outside the window. Did you know these windows are real glass and they warp everything?”
“Really?” Gloria asked. She and Bill both got up to see.
“It’s dark out,” Bill said. “How can you see anything?”
“Go outside,” I said. “I’ll walk around the living room, and you can watch me.”
“All right,” Bill said. “But no funny business.”
Gloria laughed.
“You got it,” I said.
So the door banged shut and I stepped out across the floor as if for the first time. I couldn’t remember how I usually walked. My steps felt too small, and the linoleum made crackling sounds, I realized. The lighting in here was too bright. No decoration of any kind on the walls. I waved my arms a little for effect and puffed my cheeks out; I swung my head back and forth toward the ceiling; I wondered what all this meant. I wondered how soon I could end the dinner and not appear rude.
Bill and Gloria were laughing when they came in.
“No funny business indeed,” said Gloria.
“That was quite a show,” Bill said. “Like seeing myself in one of those funny mirrors, except it wasn’t me.”
“Bill,” Gloria said, “you’re waxing poetical.”
“I’m not waxing anything,” Bill said. “And I don’t do windows, either.”
I laughed. “Especially not these windows,” I said.
I sat back down and motioned for Bill and Gloria to do the same. I endured the small talk. I finished my halibut, sweet potatoes, bread, and even the marshmallows. I had a beer, then another beer. I talked about the fishing boats my father had owned, which was a mistake.
“Was your father a commercial fisherman?” Gloria asked.
“Sort of,” I told her. “He had a lot of jobs.” It struck me that Gloria was a very attractive person, that my father might have found in her first a kind of friend. Perhaps he had never felt this with my mother. Perhaps he had even been, to some degree, lonely. This was not the kind of thinking I wanted to take very far. My pity for my father up to this point had been limited to a man who had inflicted avoidable pain on everyone around him but who must have suffered some himself. I didn’t care to enlarge on this.
“But anyway, my mother’s working as an elementary school counselor now on Kauai,” I told Gloria and Bill. This was as much to escape my own thoughts as to escape the conversation. We talked about pineapples and sugarcane, about running around in bare skin all year and even the rain being warm. Then I added that I had run around naked at night right here in Ketchikan, which I of course shouldn’t have shared.
“Here?” Bill asked.
“What were you thinking?” Gloria wanted to know.
I spread my hands in the air, having no idea what to say.
“We probably shouldn’t touch this one, Gloria,” Bill said.
“Well,” I said, “maybe it’s getting late anyway.”
So I had them out the door, coats and all, but Gloria walked back as Bill was warming up the Monza.
“Back again,” I said.
“You know, Roy, I appreciate you having us over. Bill drinks a little more than he should, but I appreciate you having us over.” She put her hand on my arm, a simple enough gesture, but one that made me wonder nonetheless what my father had felt under her touch.
“That’s fine,” I said. “It looks like the car’s warmed up now.” I should have talked with her then, told her who I was, asked about my father and perhaps learned something real, but I didn’t have the courage. I couldn’t even look at her.
“Good-bye,” Gloria said.
Two a.m., standing knee-deep in the channel off Ketchikan, ashamed of myself. The water gnawing at the rocks. Loons hidden away somewhere at the edge of the trees calling. The dusk that never seemed true darkness thickening in the mist. All the stupid images of loneliness, a mockery.
I am wearing a coat, I thought to myself, trying to keep the tone light. My mother would be proud. And then I was crying again, and then I was disgusted again, and then I took a step deeper into the channel, my shoes sliding over the stones. My thighs were very cold now. The rest was numb. I’m standing here in the water, I told myself in an attempt to banish the feeling that perhaps the tragedies I had imagined for years, the divorce and suicide that I had let shape my life so permanently, had been something else altogether, or at least not as I had imagined. And what, then, of what I had become?
The mist in gauzy layers like summer cloth, which could only be deception. Salmon beneath me right now, beautiful silver salmon, their dark bodies slipping invisibly on all sides, running for the creek mouths, considering me what? Jellyfish, too, floating, and starfish orange and red. The rockfish my father called crappies and slammed against the side of the boat until their bodies flew off the jigs and sometimes only their heads remained. Red snapper swollen and discolored, eyes popping, exploded swim bladders protruding from their mouths like secondary, translucent tongues. Brought from a world where weight and air were known differently, a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all.
THE HIGHER BLUE
IN THE VERY end—always a surprising time—my father fixated on zabaglione. This is all hearsay, you understand, but I like to think that when my father purchased his first copper pot, when he stood in his dental smock in a tiny kitchenware store in the only mall of a nearly abandoned Alaskan town and vaulted startlingly into his new life, I was at his elbow selecting a whisk.
My father’s house had no furniture. It was brand new, and everything was still bare, no address even. A faint hill near the top of a ridge, paper birch spaced regular as candles, darkness at 4:00 p.m., March 15, 1980, aurora borealis in pleasing shades of green unnoticed, a boy and his father in parkas, a flashlight, copper bowl, whisk, last-minute sugar, and though the mind refuses it, a sense of home. All of this carries the boy and his father, the father and his boy, into the kitchen, where the air is not quite right for zabaglione, too dry perhaps, so the father closes tight the windows and doors, leaves water in the sink, isolates the kitchen from the rest of the house while the boy shoves dish towels in all the cracks for a tight seal.
“I need an apron,” the father says. But there is no apron, he knows. This is a new house. Until the boy arrived, there was no one. If curtains existed, he would take one down from the window above the sink and use that.
“Okay,” the father says, tying his winter parka around his middle. “This’ll have to do. Let’s put everything out on the counter.”
Three new cookbooks, three eggs, plastic yolk separator, tablespoon, five-pound bag of sugar, measuring cup, marsala wine, two bowls, two sherry glasses, two spoons,
whisk, and a copper pot. I like to think the boy is helpful, that the items are neatly arranged. The father doesn’t have a double boiler, but he does have a metal gravy bowl, and this, filled with water, he places on the burner. “Hmm,” he says when he turns on the gas and the self-starter clicks away but there’s no flame.
“‘Pure zabaione would be overly rich to eat by itself,’” the boy reads aloud to his father. “But that’s what we’re making, right?”
“Where’d you read that?” the father asks and takes the book from his boy. He reads, his opaque brow etched. The window is dark, and the only sound is the clicking. The boy hasn’t had dinner yet and senses himself about to complain. The more he thinks about this, the more hollow his stomach.
“This isn’t the one I read before,” the father says. “Or at least not all of it. The author—Giuliano Bugialli—ha, what a name—keeps talking about a wooden spoon, and I don’t even have a wooden spoon. ‘Just at the moment before boiling,’ the guy says here, ‘zabaione’—and he’s spelling it different, too—‘zabaione should be thick enough to stick to the wooden spoon. That is the moment it is ready.’” The father returns the book to his boy. In a faked Italian accent, one arm waving in the air, he repeats, “‘That is the moment it is ready.’” The boy grins.
The father opens another recipe book. “Here we go,” he says, “Simple—‘whip vigorously with a wire whisk until the custard foams up.’”
“Let’s use that one,” the boy says, agreeable to the last.
“Okay,” his father says, fulfilling dreams.
The stove is clicking away but still no flame. The father moves his metal gravy bowl to the counter and lifts off the top of the stove to get a closer look. “Brand new,” he says, and tries another burner. Still only clicking and a faint hiss. “Why don’t you crack the eggs and separate the yolks while I’m fixing the stove,” he says.
“Okay,” the boy says, agreeable to the bitter end. But when he looks at the recipe, he sees that it calls for six egg yolks. They have only three eggs. The other recipe called for only three eggs. The boy grapples with his fear of annihilation. Does he dare point out another flaw? Won’t it start to look like his own fault? The boy cracks the three eggs and separates the whites into one bowl, the yolks into another.
The father closes the oven door. “No clue in there,” he says. “I don’t know how the hell this thing works.” He grins at his boy.
“We could try using a match,” the boy suggests.
“A match!” the father yells triumphantly. “That’s my boy.” And lo and behold, one of the kitchen drawers by the sink does, in fact, contain a box of matches. The boy is emboldened; perhaps this is a flaw in his own character. But forgetting the consequences for a moment, he points out to his father the thing about the six eggs.
“Six?” the father asks. Annihilation comes rushing in. The boy backs up against the sink as his father reads extensively in all three books. The boy isn’t hungry anymore. He’s lost his appetite and he’s a little dizzy. If his father is intent on killing himself, the boy doesn’t want a part in it anymore. He opens the cabinet beneath the sink and crawls in.
“Oh, hell,” the father says. “We’re just gonna have to try it with three.” The boy hears the metal gravy bowl placed on the burner, the water sloshing a little, the thin sides ringing—a kind of water gong, almost, a low shimmer. Then the scrape of a match, an explosion, the air sucked from the boy’s lungs, and the boy imagines one tiny glimpse of a burning parka, of a father whirling fiery through the air.
The boy survives, of course, because he’s thousands of miles away. The father isn’t so lucky. Red lights, the trees quiet. But I should start closer to the truth.
The bachelor, prefiguring my existence, was living on his own, measuring out his life by soup can and frozen waffle carton. Were it not for the persistence of habit and a metal gravy bowl never washed but used over and over, kept warm on the stove, life as I know it might never have begun.
Hunched and dim-sighted, bent over tomes of anatomy, periodontics, endodontics, and the other dental sciences, clenching a jaw that was understood but underused, locked in realms of fluorescence and linoleum, dreaming only of sunny wilderness, of rod and gun and the clomping of trail-worn boots, this creature inspired pity in a woman who herself had no domestic talents but had the sense, at least, to eat out occasionally.
“I bought him one dinner at a Chinese restaurant, served him one cup of coffee and a bowl of mint-chip ice cream at my apartment, and he was mine,” my mother told me.
The creature began to walk upright, lose his pallor, see occasionally the light of day, sample rich foods from many lands, and dream of things softer and more varied than his own leathery boots. The creature was given a name. He was called Honey.
“The first two years were good. Then he took me for granted. I gave him a life, and he was so pleased, he started giving it to others. To a receptionist named Gloria, to be exact.”
The thing called Honey, which had learned to walk, see, sample, and dream, walked farther, saw more, sampled extravagantly, then dreamed about it, over and over. The thing was told to stop walking, but the thing kept walking. The thing became inflated and soared over the city, lighter than air.
“I gave him a can opener the day I divorced him,” my mother said. “He didn’t know what it was for. I told him he’d find out soon enough.”
The thing popped, landed like minestrone, a fall more terrible than the face-plant of Icarus. Out of the goop grew a hand that could turn, and turn, and turn, and turn, and turn.
In later years, I tried to know the father. I called him Dad, brought groceries to his house, and, despite my native inhibitions, learned to cook spaghetti. In hopes of drawing some response, I even asked pointed questions about his life.
“When did you first realize you had made a mistake?” I asked.
“What mistake?”
I might have given up if not for the fact that he was the only father in the world, the narrow remnant of all those suitors and potential suitors. I worked with what I had.
And what I had was this: a sulky thing, easily wounded, that sat at a card table in a dental smock and made promises: “Let me help you there with the noodles. Your mother never understood me; there’s more to what happened than she thinks. I could make the salad. Would you like me to make the salad?”
The father had receding gray-blue eyes and various minor aches and pains. When he was cheating on the current girlfriend, there was always diarrhea in the mornings. Spring and fall, he had allergies. When he thought about money, about all the shaky, hasty investments over the years, a thin trail of intense pain rose from behind his right eye and spiraled across his forehead.
Occasionally, jarred for a moment, the father would realize I had a separate existence and fire off a few questions of his own.
“How’s that girl you’re seeing, what’s her name?”
“We broke up in August, Dad. It’s November now.”
“Huh.” But he rallied quickly. “Do you remember the tractor?”
“What?” I asked.
“The green tractor, you know. I used to give you rides on it when you were little. Do you remember anything like that?”
“No. I don’t think I do.”
Then there was the trip to the mall. The father was very nervous about this. A present was needed for current girlfriend’s birthday.
“I don’t know,” he said, which communicated several things: no gift meant no girlfriend, no girlfriend meant landing once again like minestrone, landing once again like that meant a lifetime of guilt, shame, and general self-hatred in the one responsible, which would, of course, be me.
“I’d love to do it,” I said.
Once in the domain of hair spray and Lycra, I buoyed a cowering thing with remembrances of hunting trips past. I spoke the well-known tales of the buck at close range who had leaped over my bullet and vanished in the brush. I spoke of the wild boar who had sneaked up from
behind when I was armed only with binoculars, who chased me along razor-backed ridges till I nearly fell (the small stones twisting out over the edge), whom I escaped only by stretching across the top branches of the only tree, an oak barely ten feet high. Neither the buck nor the boar had ever existed, of course. I had fired that shot into blank air. The pig, also, had been born alchemically of boredom, pride, fancy, and innate terror.
“You’ve had some amazing experiences, all right,” the father said as he gazed at the behind of a junior higher, causing a moment’s doubt in me: a liar, after all, would be the thing most likely to know another liar.
But the father was buoyed, in any case. “Let’s go hunt down a necklace, maybe,” he said, “or some other kind of ornament.”
For the rest of the afternoon, we ran our trigger fingers over every piece of gold and silver the mall could provide. The bowed legs of the father became nimble, and his tongue was loosened.
“Did I ever tell you I wanted to be a painter?” the father asked.
“You?”
“Sure. I was a kind of Brueghel with less patience.”
I thought about that for a while. Then I asked, “What else?”
“What do you mean, what else?”
“What else should I know about you? I know very little, you know.”
“Well, son, let me tell you everything.”
The father never told me anything, of course, but looking back, I can see that I felt closest to the father on that very afternoon. Perhaps it was only gestures—the way the father hitched up his jeans, his sideways grin at the spiel of a salesman, the gratitude and love I thought I saw in certain small movements of the eyes—but even if these indices were only imagined, they did seem to provide what I had wanted for a very long time.
Looking back, I can see also that the father reached a kind of high point that afternoon in the mall. I could say, even, that the father soared once more over the city. Well pleased with a choker in three colors of gold, not suspecting the inevitable plummet to come, as if the downward spiral of his life had been arrested for a moment, the father climbed a display case in the corner of Oshman’s, and, as I distracted the salespeople by smacking a squash ball again and again against the far wall in a two-player match for one, he strapped himself into the harness of a hang glider strung from the ceiling. He wore a yellow fluorescent windbreaker and sporty strapless helmet, gave me the thumbs-up, and soared.