Legend of a Suicide (13 page)

Blowing like there’s no tomorrow, his father said. As if it could wipe time clear off the calendar.

The whole cabin shook occasionally and the walls seemed to move.

It couldn’t actually blow off the roof or something, could it? Roy said.

No, his father said. Your dad wouldn’t buy a cabin with a detachable roof.

Good, Roy said.

His father tried the radio again, saying, I’ll make it quick. I just have a few things to say to her. You won’t have to go outside or anything, of course.

But he couldn’t get any kind of signal in the storm and finally he gave up.

This is one of those things she’s not going to believe, he said. I tried to call her but the storm kept me from doing it. But when the tally is made, I didn’t get through to her, and the storm doesn’t count.

Maybe it’s not like that, Roy said.

What do you mean?

I don’t know.

Listen, his father said. Man is only an appendage to woman. Woman is whole by herself and doesn’t need man. But man needs her. So she gets to call the shots. That’s why the rules don’t make any sense, and why they keep changing. They’re not being decided on by both sides.

I don’t know if that’s true, Roy said.

This is because you’re growing up with your mother and sister, without me around. You’re so used to women’s rules you think they make sense. That will make it easy for you in some ways, but it also means maybe you won’t see some things as clearly.

It’s not like I got to choose.

See? That’s one of them. I was trying to make a point, and you turned it around to make me feel bad, to make me feel like I haven’t done my duty according to the rules and haven’t been a good father.

Well, maybe you haven’t. Roy was starting to cry now, and wishing he weren’t.

See? his father said. You only know a woman’s way to argue. Cry your fucking eyes out.

Jesus, Roy said.

Never mind, his father said. I have to get out of here. Even if it is a fucking hurricane. I’m going for a hike.

As he pulled on his gear, Roy was facing the wall trying to make himself stop crying, but it all seemed so enormously unfair and from out of nowhere that he couldn’t stop. He was still crying after his father had gone, and then he started talking out loud. Fuck him, he said. Goddamn it, fuck you, Dad. Fuck you. And then he cried harder and made a weird squealing sound from trying to hold it back. Quit fucking crying, he said.

Finally he did stop, and he washed off his face and stoked the stove and got in his sleeping bag and read. When his father came back, it was several hours later. He stomped his boots out on the porch, then came inside and took off his gear and went to the stove and cooked dinner.

Roy listened to the kitchen sounds and to the howling outside and the rain thrown against the walls in gusts. It seemed to him they could just go on like this, not speaking, and it seemed even that this might be easier.

Here, his father said when he put the plates on the card table in the middle of the room. Roy got up and they ate without looking at one another or saying anything. Just chewing away at the Tuna Helper with sculpin in it and listening to the walls. Then his father said, You can do the dishes.

Okay.

And I’m not going to apologize, his father said. I do that too much.

Okay.

The storm continued for another five days, days of waiting and not talking much and feeling cooped up. Occasionally Roy or his father went for a short hike or brought in wood, but the rest of the time was just reading and eating and waiting and his father trying to reach Rhoda on the shortwave or the VHF but this never worked.

You’d think I could get through for just a few minutes, his father said. What good is all this shit if we can’t use it in bad weather? Are we supposed to have emergencies just on good days?

Roy considered saying, Good thing we haven’t needed it, as a way of getting talking again, but he was afraid this would be interpreted as some kind of comment about his father’s need for Rhoda, so he kept quiet.

When his father did finally get through again, the storm had mostly died. Roy went out into light drizzle and ground so soaked it was like walking on sponges. The trees were dripping everywhere, big drops on the hood and shoulders of his rain gear. He wondered who Rhoda really was. He had spent a lot of time with her, of course, when she and his father had been married. But his memories were all a kid’s memories, of how she threatened to stab their elbows with her fork if they left them on the table at dinner, for instance, and a peek of her once in the bathroom through the crack in the door. A few arguments between her and his father, but nothing distinct. They had divorced only one year ago, when he’d been twelve, but somehow everything was different now, all his perceptions. As if thirteen were a different life than twelve. He couldn’t re
member how he’d thought then, how his brain had worked, because back then he hadn’t thought about his brain working, so he couldn’t now make sense of anything from that time, as if he had someone else’s memories. So Rhoda could have been anyone. All she meant to him now was this thing his father had to have, a craving as if for pornography, a need that made his father sick, though Roy knew it was wrong, incorrect, to think she actually made him sick. He knew it was his father doing it to himself.

Around the point, Roy sat on a large piece of driftwood that was soaked through and cold. He watched his breath fogging out and looked at the water and actually saw a small boat pass, about a mile away. An extremely rare event. A small cabin cruiser out fishing or camping, with extra jerry cans of gasoline tied along the bow rails. Roy stood up and waved but he was too far even to see if there was a response. He could see the dark patch inside where there was a person or several people but could not make out anything more distinct.

He wondered whether this thing his dad had with Rhoda would ever happen to him. Though he hoped not, he knew somehow ahead of time that it probably would. But by now he was just thinking to be doing something and wished he were back in the cabin where it was warm. It was just too cold out here. It was a miserable place.

When he returned, he was still too early, but he didn’t go back outside. He figured he had stayed out long enough.

I know that, his father said. That’s not what I’m saying. Roy’s here now, by the way. He was outside.

Rhoda’s voice came in unclear, warped by the radio. Jim, Roy’s
not the only one hearing this. Anyone with a ham radio is getting to hear everything.

You’re right, his father said. But I don’t care. This is too important.

What’s important, Jim?

That we talk, that we work things out.

And how are things going to work out?

I want us to be together.

They listened to the static then for at least half a minute before Rhoda came back on.

I’m sorry I’m having to say this in front of Roy and everyone else, Jim, but we’re never going to be together again. We’ve already tried that, many times. You have to listen to me, to what I’ve been saying. I’ve found someone else, Jim, and I’m going to marry him, I hope. And anyway, it doesn’t matter about him. We still wouldn’t be together. Sometimes things just end, and we have to let them end.

Roy pretended to be reading while his father sat bowed before the radio.

Fucking radio, his father said to Rhoda. If we could be together now, in person, face to face, this would be different. And then he turned the radio off.

Roy looked up. His father was hunched over with his forearms on his knees and his head down. He began rubbing his forehead. He just sat there like that for a long time. There was nothing Roy could think of to say, so he didn’t say anything. But he wondered why they were here at all, when everything important to his father was somewhere else. It didn’t make sense to Roy that his father had come out here. It was beginning to seem that maybe
he just hadn’t been able to think of any other way of living that might be better. So this was just a big fallback plan, and Roy, too, was part of a large despair that lived everywhere his father went.

There were no good times after this. His father sank into himself and Roy felt alone. His father read when the weather was miserable and went for hikes alone when it was only bad. They talked only to say things like, Maybe we should fix dinner soon, or Have you seen my gloves? Roy watched his father all the time and could discover no crack in the shell of his despair. His father had become impervious. And then Roy came in one day from a hike alone and found his father sitting at the radio set with his pistol in his hand. It was oddly quiet, with only a few small humming and chirping sounds from the radio.

Jim? Rhoda said over the radio. Don’t do this to me, you asshole.

His father turned off the radio and stood. He stood looking at Roy in the doorway and then looked around the room as if he were embarrassed by some small thing and searching for something to say. But he didn’t say anything. He walked over to Roy and handed him the pistol, then put on his coat and boots and went out.

Roy watched him go until he’d disappeared into the trees, then he looked at the pistol in his hand. The hammer was back and he could see the copper shell in there. He eased the hammer down with the pistol pointed away from him and then he pulled the hammer back again, raised the barrel to his head, and fired.

PART TWO

Jim in the trees heard the shot and didn’t know what it was about. He wondered for a moment whether he had really heard it, but then he figured he had. Roy was making some kind of scene. He was going to shoot up their cabin because he needed to be taken care of now. Jim hiked on. He hoped Roy would hit the radio.

It was drizzling and the fog was in close. The trees had become ghosted and the entire island seemed uninhabitable. Jim hiked on, hearing his breathing the only rhythm, the only moving thing. He couldn’t think about Rhoda. She had become a sense now, a part of him that he couldn’t differentiate enough to think about. She was a longing and regret in him like a growth. And she was really doing it, really leaving him. Jim could feel himself on the edge of crying again, so he hiked on faster and counted his steps in rhythm, onetwothreefour in a group, fivesixseveneight, over and over. He hiked on until he stopped because he was tired and then he turned around and hiked back, but he didn’t like the
thought of arriving, of having to find the next thing to do to fill his time. The days were so long.

When he neared the cabin, he saw the door was still partway open, which pissed him off. It was like Roy to storm off on his own little hike and not close the door but just let them freeze.

And then he got to the door and looked down and saw his son. His son’s body and not really his son because the head was missing. Torn and rough, red, with dark slicked hair along the edge and blood splattered everywhere. He stepped back because looking straight down he saw that he was stepping on a piece that had come free, a piece of his son’s head. A piece of bone.

He stood there rocking and looking and breathing. He glanced around the rest of the room but there was nothing else to see, and then he had to sit down and he sat down in the doorway, a few feet from Roy, and as soon as he heard this name in his head, he started to shake and it seemed that he was crying but he wasn’t crying or letting out any sound. What’s happening here? he asked out loud.

He touched Roy’s jacket then, and shook Roy’s shoulder gently. Then he looked at the blood on his hand and back at the stump for a head that was all Roy had now and then from inside him he began to howl.

And howling did nothing but fill itself and he was like an actor in his own pain, not knowing who he was or what part now to play. He shook his hands oddly in the air and slapped them against his thighs. He pushed himself back farther away from Roy but this was phony, another act, and still he didn’t know what to do. No one was watching. And though it couldn’t be his son there, it kept being his son there.

Some of the inside was white. He kept waiting for it all to turn red, but it wouldn’t. And soon there were small flies, gnats and no-see-ums, landing there inside his son’s head and crawling and hopping around. He swished them away, but he didn’t want to actually touch the head and they kept landing again. He leaned in close and blew on them and could smell the stink of blood and then he grabbed Roy’s jacket and pulled him onto his lap, the stump with part of a face showing now, a jaw and cheek and one eye that had been hidden against the floor. He looked at this and kept looking and shook him there and looked when he could see and wasn’t blinded by the heaving and all he could think was why? Because there was no sense to it at all. He was the one who’d been afraid he might do this. Roy had been fine, had always been fine.

No, he kept saying out loud, even though he knew this was a stupid thing to say. He kept trying to think because whenever he stopped thinking for a moment he was crying terribly. And yet even this he was aware of. It was as if he couldn’t reenter the world to act unconsciously. As if every thought and feeling and word and everything he saw were artificial, even his mutilated son. As if even his son dead before him weren’t real enough.

He put Roy back down on the floor and looked at all the blood on his hands and jacket and jeans, blood everywhere so he got up and went down to the water and waded in. He gasped from the cold and already his legs were numb. They were stumps, and then the terror ripped through him again from that word, stumps, and he was sobbing hideously. He walked around and around in the shallows and slipped and went under and came back up and walked out, shaking now from the cold also, and
went back to Roy, who still lay there dead, who hadn’t moved. He had just seen Roy alive. It hadn’t been more than an hour ago, and Roy had been fine.

And then Jim felt an unaccountable rage. He went into the cabin looking for something and he went to the radio and picked it up and smashed it down onto the floor and then kicked it again and again and grabbed the lantern and hurled it against the wall where it shattered and then he grabbed the VHF and hurled that, too, and threw a bag of smoked salmon that lay open on the table, then kicked over the table, but then he stopped, standing in the middle of the room, because only a few more minutes had gone by, if even that, and all this destruction had not helped. He wasn’t even interested in it. It had seemed like living but now it seemed like nothing.