Last Day on Earth

by David Vann

  I saw two points on one side of the buck’s horns, making it legal to shoot. I levered a shell in the chamber and raised the rifle, but my father put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You have time,” he told me. “Rest an elbow.”

  So I knelt in the bed, rested my left elbow on the side of the pickup, much more stable, and looked through the peep sight, lined it up with the deer’s neck. I couldn’t shoot the deer behind the shoulder because its body was hidden by the trees. I had only the neck, long and slim. And the sight was wavering back and forth.

  I exhaled and slowly squeezed. The rifle fired, and the neck and head whipped down. I didn’t even notice the hard kick or the explosion. I could smell sulfur, and I was leaping over the side of the pickup and running toward the buck. My father let out a whoop that was only for killing bucks, and it was for me this time, and then my uncle did it, and my grandfather, and I was yelping myself as I ran over ferns and fallen wood and rock. I charged through the stand and then I saw it.

  Its eyes were still open, large brown eyes. A hole in its neck, red blood against soft white and brown hide. I wanted to be excited still, wanted to feel proud, wanted to belong, but seeing the deer lying there dead before me in the ferns seemed only terribly sad. This was the other side of Faulkner, conscience against the pull of blood. My father was there the next moment, his arm around me, praising me, and so I had to hide what I felt, and I told the tale of how I had aimed for the neck, beginning the story, the first of what would become dozens of tellings. I slit the deer with my Buck knife, a gift from my father, slit the length of its stomach, but not deep, not puncturing innards. It seemed a monstrous task. I had both hands up to my elbows in the blood and entrails, not the overpowering foul bile of a deer that’s been gut shot but foul nonetheless, ripping out the heart and liver that I would have to eat to finish the kill, though luckily they could be fried up with a few onions first, not eaten raw. I pulled out everything and scraped blood, cut off testicles, then my father helped me drag it to the truck. He was grinning, impossibly happy and proud, all his despair gone, all his impatience. This was his moment even more than mine.

  Back at camp, we hung the buck upside down from a pole and I skinned it, punching down between meat and hide with a fist. My uncle fried up the heart and liver, and then I was sitting at a wooden bench under a tin roof with a slice of heart on my plate. Two holes in the slice, one big, one smaller, two chambers. It was tough and tasted awful, but I was able to get it down. The liver was not so easy. Mushy and strong. I forced several swallows but managed to feed most of it to the dog under the table.

  The next day, in the lower glades—wide expanses of dry yellow grass on an open hillside, fringed by sugar pines—I saw another buck. It was in short brush off to the side, a three-pointer this time, bigger. I aimed for the neck again but hit it in the spine, in the middle of its back. It fell down instantly. Head still up, looking around at us, but it couldn’t move the rest of its body. So my father told me to walk up from behind and finish it off execution-style, one shot to the head from five feet away.

  I remember that scene clearly. The big buck and its beautiful antlers, its gray-brown hide, the late-afternoon light casting long shadows. After all the rain, the air was clear and cool, distances compressed, even in close, as if through a View-Master. As if I were looking at this deer through a magnifying glass. I remember staring at the back of his head, the gray hide between his antlers, the individual hairs, white-tipped.

  “Be careful not to hit the horns,” my father told me.

  I walked up very close behind that deer, leaned forward with my rifle raised, the barrel only a few feet from the back of his head, and he was waiting for it, terrified but unable to escape. I could smell him. He’d turn his head around far enough to see me with a big brown eye, then turn away again to look at my father. I sighted in and pulled the trigger.

  After that, I began missing deer, closing my eyes when I shot. And I also made up imaginary deer. The next fall, when we split up to hike down through brush, I imagined a deer leaping out in front of me. The blood came to my ears, my breath gone, and it was the same as a real buck. I levered a shell in and fired, imagined the buck leaped at just that moment, arcing over the bullet, and I fired again.

  My father came running, arrived breathless. “Did you get it?”

  “It got away,” I said.

  “Did you wound it?”

  “I don’t think so. It was leaping. It leaped right over the bullet.”

  My father and uncle and I spent an hour searching everywhere for blood as I retold the story several times, how the light looked on its hide, a big three-pointer.

  My father would finally catch on, though. We were on an outcropping of rocks over the big burn, an area consumed by fire years before, with only shorter growth now. A buck leaped out from a draw and bounded across the hillside opposite us.

  My father was hunting with his .300 magnum, and he was an excellent shot, but this deer was far away and moving fast and erratically, dodging bushes and rocks. I was firing, too, but only pointing the gun in the general direction, closing my eyes, and pulling the trigger. I opened my eyes in time to see one of my bullets lift a puff of dirt about fifty feet from the buck, and my father saw this, too. He paused, looked over at me, then fired again.

  This was the last time we hunted, and we never talked about what happened.

  I turned thirteen that fall, after the hunt, and I saw very little of my father. At Christmas, he was having troubles I didn’t understand, crying himself to sleep at night. He wrote a strange letter to me about regret and the worthlessness of making money. At the beginning of March is when he asked whether I would come live with him in Fairbanks, Alaska, for the next school year, eighth grade.

  Not long after I said no, my father called my stepmother. He was alone in Fairbanks in his new house, with no furniture, the ides of March, cold, sitting at a folding card table in the kitchen at the end of a day. He had broken up this second marriage the same way he had the first, by cheating with other women. And now my stepmother was moving on. She’d found another man and was thinking of marrying him. My father had other problems I would learn about later, including the IRS going after him for tax dodges in South American countries, failed investments in gold and a hardware store, unbearable sinus headaches that painkillers couldn’t reach, in addition to all the guilt and despair and loneliness, and he told my stepmother, “I love you but I’m not going to live without you.” She was working in a dentist’s office in California, where she had moved after their divorce, and couldn’t hear well. She had to duck behind the door with the phone and ask him to repeat what he had said. So he had to say again, “I love you but I’m not going to live without you.” Then he put his .44 magnum handgun to his head, a caliber bought, like the .300 magnum, for grizzlies, capable of bringing a bear down at close range, and he pulled the trigger. She heard the dripping sounds as pieces of his head came off the ceiling and landed on the card table.

  I stopped hunting after my father’s suicide, but I inherited all his guns. Everything except the pistol. My uncle wanted to get rid of that, sold it right away. But that still left me with my father’s .300 magnum rifle, the .30-.30 rifle, his 12-gauge shotgun, the 20-gauge shotgun, the pellet gun, and various odds and ends I had picked up, such as a pellet pistol and a pistol crossbow.

  In my eighth-grade year of shooting out streetlights and living a double life, I tried to be the boy my father had wanted me to be. I joined the wrestling team, which he had always wanted me to do, and I was unflinching with his rifle. I sighted in on neighbors at night from the hills, but I also sighted in on them from my own room, from my bedroom windows in the afternoon, watched the man across the street swirl a glass of scotch in his living room. I could see every detail of his face through the scope, even a few dark hairs in his nostrils. Shell in the chamber, finger near the trigger, trained for execution.

  ON DECEMBER 1, 2001, as he completes basic training, St
eve is notified he’ll be stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, in the Sixth Air Defense Artillery Brigade. Fine with him. It doesn’t matter where.

  And then something happens.

  It’s unclear exactly what triggers it—maybe Steve loses his temper. Maybe the Army was just late in processing his full background check. But the medical examiner finds out that Steve has been hospitalized in the past for psychotic episodes and suicide attempts. Steve is flagged.

  On February 1, they pull him in for a psych exam. He’s worried. What do they know? Is this normal, to be tested like this? He tries to get the doctor to tell him what’s up, but he won’t say anything.

  Three days later, February 4, 2002, they cart him off to William Beaumont Army Medical Center, throw him in the Army nuthouse as a precaution against any suicide attempt. They tell him he’s possibly a danger to himself or others. He asks them what all this is about, and they don’t tell him until the next day. They’ve discovered he lied on his application, concealed his mental health history, his suicide attempts and his psychotic episodes, including hearing voices and hallucinations. He’s going to be kicked out.

  He tells them they can’t do this. He’s a good soldier, he’s fine now, but they tell him it’s a fraudulent enlistment, because he did it for monetary gain, for the cash bonus and the Army College Fund. He worries that he’s going to get a dishonorable discharge, but they give him an uncharacterized discharge, an entry-level status separation.

  On February 13, 2002, they dump him in his hometown, Elk Grove Village. No notifications to anyone that he might be a danger to himself or others, just dump him, as the Army does.

  Steve is crushed about being kicked out. He could have spent his life in the military. It was home, finally. Everything was right. But he does understand that a kind of minor miracle has happened. After all the years of mental health treatment, he was headed straight into the shitter, but the Army has turned his life around. He’s been off the meds for a year now, he’s in good shape, his head is clear, and finally he can make something of himself. He applies to NIU, gets in, enrolls in the fall.

  August 2002. Strange Steve, that’s what they call him in the dorm. He knows they call him this, and it’s because of his roommate, Ahron Mack. Ahron tells everyone Steve’s a psycho.

  They’re in a double suite with three other guys in Stevenson Towers on campus. Steve takes his food from Stevenson Dining Hall, goes up to the room, sits at his desk and eats alone. Watches the news on CNN, but all he can think about is goddamn Sallie Mae. He’s not going to have the money in time to pay his tuition.

  He’s busting his ass, every single day. He knows if he doesn’t make it now, it’s straight back to the SRO in Chicago. This is his one chance. No meds. No more Suicide Steve. But everyone’s against him. Even Sallie Mae.

  Ahron comes back from dinner, so Steve fires up the Xbox, puts in the earphones, plays Halo. He likes the sniper rifle best. Zoom in 5×, or 10×, one shot, one kill, clear across the canyon. You can see the vapor trail from the bullet. He’s one of the marines.

  Ahron tries to get Steve off Xbox, tries to get him out, but he refuses. Steve doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, won’t leave the room except to eat, Ahron tells the police later.

  At midnight, Steve takes a shower. He wears long sleeves every day, even when it’s muggy and hot. He doesn’t want anyone to see his tattoos, the homemade sword on his forearm. He showers when no one will see, keeps the light turned off, likes the darkness.

  Steve can’t sleep. Ahron snores. Everything about him is loud. But Steve can’t sleep because he’s thinking about Sallie Mae and thinking about everything that’s due in his classes. Not tomorrow, not even next week, but for the entire semester. He goes over everything in his head, every midterm, every final coming up, every paper. It all has weight, heft, a physical presence pressing in on him, his mind a flatland still but the horizon building up, coming closer.

  He feels hollow, also. He remembers beautiful dark brown skin, wants to touch it, wants to feel her again. He remembers her, jacks off and then feels lost. It was impossible, just from the way everyone looked at them when they went out. And they were right. It was an abomination. Phillip Schroeder, one of his suitemates, will tell police later that Steve “was struggling to recover from a former relationship. Apparently he had been involved in an interracial relationship with an African-American woman. However, the racial differences between them had created too much stress and strain on both of them.” Another part of Steve’s racism, to be drawn to what he said he hated? Another denial from a man who wanted not to be gay? Who was this woman, and how long were they together?

  Ahron’s alarm goes off, and Ahron doesn’t wake up. He has some sort of condition where he doesn’t wake up from sleeping. You can yell at him or even shake him, and he won’t wake up. But he still sets the alarm, a little gift for Steve.

  So Steve hucks tennis balls at his head, hard, and this finally wakes him up. Ahron is upset, has the nerve to complain. Steve turns on CNN, loud.

  Steve has class that day in Cole Hall, a big auditorium. Three sections of seats for several hundred, two aisles between. The seats go right up to the wall in the side sections, a kind of trap. The two aisles the only way out. The professor is up on a stage. Music 220—Intro to Music. Steve listens.

  Back at the dorm, he runs into Phillip, the only one of his suitemates he can really talk to. Ahron isn’t around. Steve speaks quietly, but he’s hurrying, tripping over his words, telling Phillip about Ted Bundy, about Jeffrey Dahmer, about Hitler. Amazing, the things they did, how they got away with it. The planning, and can you imagine actually eating human flesh? Frying it up like a steak? “He would talk about them as if he idolized them,” Phillip wrote in his statement to police. “He was intrigued as to how they committed their murders and he would tell their stories to others over and over again.”

  Phillip is good to talk to. He listens. But then he says he has homework to do, breaks off the conversation just as they’re really getting into Hitler, and then there’s dinner, and Steve is eating alone again, watching CNN. The news, always something, always some killing somewhere, some disaster. And the control. The façade of two parties, masking the real power brokers. But Steve can see. He can read between the lines. He’s going to switch his major from computer science to political science. While he watches, he reads Hunting Humans, a book that covers many of the most famous mass murderers, or one of his gun magazines. Then he’s back to studying.

  The next day, he’s on the phone again with Sallie Mae, screaming at them. He needs his tuition money now. They tell him spring semester isn’t until January, months away, and he’ll have the funds before then, but he tries to make their tiny little brains understand he needs the money now. Anything could happen.

  Later, he talks with Phillip again, getting back to their conversation about Hitler and the others. “I told him to stop because I had already heard him tell me their stories too many times and I was tired of hearing them,” recalls Phillip. He doesn’t want to talk about Hitler or Bundy or Dahmer anymore.

  Steve must think Ahron has gotten to Phillip. “Strange Steve.” So to hell with them all. He’ll move out, get a single. This is unbearable, especially Ahron, but Phillip and Tom, too, and everyone else on the floor. He needs his own room. He’ll tell them he won’t take anything else.

  It’s a long fight with housing, but he does finally get his way, before the end of the school year. He moves out.

  And the next fall, 2003, things are much better. He takes Intro to Sociology in Cole Hall with Professor Jim Thomas. Thomas is an old guy, tall, with wild white hair. He asks questions. He puts them all on the spot. He makes them think. He challenges his own authority. “How can you subvert the power of the professor?” he asks. “If you’re not happy with this power relationship, what can you do to affect it?” He’s into “crim,” which is criminology, studies prisons.

  Steve realizes prisons are a way into understanding America. The ave
rage stay is only a year, but the country believes they can lock people away, toss the key. Human garbage, just like how he was treated, but he’s back, he’s here, and so is nearly everyone who’s been incarcerated. And nearly everyone who’s served in the military. Thomas offers a way of understanding institutions, the history behind them, how they take shape. He’s a softy, an old lefty, wants people rehabilitated, doesn’t ask questions about Steve’s past.

  Steve takes two classes with Jim, drops by his office, feels uncomfortable calling him JT as the others do, but Jim encourages him, as he does with all his students, breaking down the barriers, questioning power. A small cinderblock office, yellowish, crowded with two gray metal desks, gray chairs, servers for running WebBoard, Unix, and the department site, filing cabinets, no extra space at all, slatted windows, but it feels homey, welcoming, safe. Jim keeps strawberry Crush in a small fridge. He lets his grad students have the run of the place, and Steve wants in, but he worries about offending, always feels like he’s intruding. “In the first year or so, he was always apologetic, extremely deferential, and seemed sheepish about taking up my time,” recalls Thomas. “He always asked: ‘Is this ok if I . . . ??’ I’d respond with something like, ‘Steve, it’s as much your office as mine—just don’t turn off the Unix servers.’”