Legend of a Suicide (15 page)

Wait right here, he said to Roy, and he went back up to the cabin again and this time continued around back. He was looking for a way in. The windows all had storm boards fitted and probably locked from inside. The front door had a big padlock and, as it turned out, so did the back door. He looked all around and there was nothing left open, no glass to break, even.

Okay, he said. It was quiet, only a few drips from the trees. And it was getting on toward sunset. He had no flashlight, no food. He continued farther and found the wood shed. The door was padlocked but looked weak enough, so he found a good-sized rock and threw it at the door and it made a crunching sound, then bounced back at him so he had to jump out of the way. Goddamnit, he said. He ran to the door and slammed himself against it, fell down and got up and did it again. He was breathing hard now. He kicked with his boot at the center of it and could feel it bend each time, but it wouldn’t give, so he walked back down to the boat.

He saw the sleeping bag propped up there with Roy in it and realized he had forgotten about Roy for a few minutes. The thought that he could do that seemed terribly sad, but he didn’t stop and indulge himself. He had work to do before dark. He
loosened the engine from its mount and carried it stiffly up to the cabin, set it down on the porch. The thing weighed at least fifty pounds, all metal.

Jim went to the shed again for the rock and came back to the cabin. He had hoped to find an ax or a saw or something in the shed, but he decided now to just work on the cabin directly. He pounded at each door and storm board with the rock in his hand until he found one over the kitchen window that seemed to give a little more. It was because the window was bigger, he thought. So he carried the outboard around and then he grabbed the housing with both hands and rammed the prop end into the board and it only scraped a little on the prop and knocked him off balance so that he almost fell with the engine on top of him.

He was beyond swearing or yelling. He felt only a cold, murderous hatred and wanted to destroy this cabin. He picked up the outboard, this time by the lighter, skinnier shaft end, and could get the other, heavier end to lift only by turning like a shot-putter, so he turned a couple of circles like that and hurled the motor at the storm board and jumped back.

The crash was monstrously loud and the engine fell back onto the porch with a smashed housing.

Of course, Jim said. The housing was only plastic. He un-latched it and lifted it off twisted and crushed and now he had steel motor sticking out, the engine head, and he swung the motor around again and hurled it, screaming, and it bounced back again and almost got him but this time it had crushed part of the storm board. He picked it up and hurled it two more times and by then had destroyed his engine but also had shattered the storm board and the glass behind it and had a way in.

The cabin was dark inside and there was no electricity, no light to switch on. Fumbling around in the kitchen in the dark, he finally found matches and then a paraffin lamp that cast weird shadows everywhere as he hunted around from room to room. He found a wood stove in the kitchen and then another for heat in the living room. Beside this one there was still a stack of dry wood. There was a bedroom off this and it had been stripped, the mattress bare, without blankets. The whole place had been stripped, winterized. But he kept looking in every closet and shelf and drawer and under the bed and couch, and finally in a dresser drawer he found two sets of sheets and a blanket.

Okay, he said. Now, where’s the food? You don’t bring everything every time. You must leave something here. Some canned goods or something. Where is it?

He looked in the kitchen and found it surprisingly bare. He did find a few cans of soup in the cupboard, though, and then another cupboard with canned vegetables.

Not enough, he said. Not enough. I’ve got a growing boy with me, a strapping young lad. You must have a cellar. Your own little indoor cache in a fancy place like this. He stomped on the floor all around the kitchen and looked for latches and looked in the living room, pulling back the small piece of carpet, and looked in the bedroom, and then, giving up, on his way back into the kitchen followed by his own paraffin shadow like a nimble doppelgänger, he saw a latch in the passageway from living room to kitchen.

Open sesame, he said and lifted it and found the cellar, a hundred cans and jars and bottles and freeze-dried packets of Al
pine Minestrone and vanilla ice cream and in a large bag even vacuum-sealed packets of smoked salmon. Okay, he said.

Roy was still in the bag. He lifted him over a shoulder and pushed him through the kitchen window, trying not to tear the bag on the bits of glass on the sill but tearing it some anyway. Then he climbed in himself.

Time to get to work, he said. We need to make this place home. He dragged Roy back to the bedroom, where he’d stay cold and out of the way. Then he started a fire in the kitchen stove and decided not to light the one in the living room, to conserve wood. He’d just sleep in here in the kitchen. And that would help Roy keep cooler, also.

He opened a can of ravioli and put the can right on the burner, then decided he wouldn’t be such a slob and put it in a small pot. He heated canned milk in another pot and made himself some hot chocolate. A treat, he said. He ate there in the kitchen in the lamplight and was looking all around trying to find something to focus on, something to read. He kept thinking about Roy and Roy’s mother and he didn’t want to do this, so he looked all around the cabin for reading material and couldn’t find any but finally found some family pictures in the bedroom and brought them back to the kitchen and stared at them while he ate.

This family was not good-looking. They had a parrot-faced daughter and a son with big ears and eyes too close together and a mouth that twisted up oddly. The parents were no lookers, either, the man stocky and a nerd and his wife trying to look surprised for the camera. They went for vacations everywhere, apparently. Camels and tropical fish and Big Ben. Jim disliked
them and felt fine about eating their food. Fuck you, he said to the pictures as he slurped up their ravioli. But this lasted only so long and then he was sitting there at the table in lamplight with nothing to focus on. Time, he said.

He went back out to the boat, though it was dark now and very cold, and brought all of the gear up to the porch, then dragged the boat around back and left it and lifted his stuff through the window. Then he carried it all into the back room with Roy, who still was just there in the sleeping bag, not doing anything, not participating, just like a junior high kid. Fine, Jim said to Roy. Then he returned to the kitchen and made his bed on the floor.

That night he kept waking, paranoid that something awful had happened, and then he’d remember Roy and cry and then, because he was so exhausted, fall asleep again. He had no dreams and saw nothing. It was fear he woke to each time, his breath tight and blood pounding, and a sense that the sky was bearing down on him. And in the morning, when it had been light out for hours and he finally got up off the floor, the sense had not completely gone away.

He stoked the stove and wanted to boil water to cook Malt-

O-Meal but no water came out of the tap. Okay, you fuckers, he said, you parrots, where’s the water switch? He searched the kitchen and the cellar and then walked around the back of the cabin and searched for faucets but found nothing. He hiked up to the shed and still nothing so he searched the entire hill behind the house for two or three hours, foot by foot, and finally found a pipe buried partly in the dirt and then covered with bark. He went along it on his hands and knees feeling for fixtures until
he found the faucet. He turned it and went back inside, found water and air sputtering out of the tap.

Okay, he said, give me a steady stream, and as if all things followed his spoken will, the tap stopped sputtering and emitted a solid stream of clear, cold water.

He made the Malt-O-Meal, put brown sugar in, and sat down to it but again needed something to look at and didn’t have anything. So he went back and dragged Roy out, still in the sleeping bag, and tried to prop him up in the other chair in the kitchen, but he wouldn’t bend right. The blue sleeping bag was terribly stained now, still wet and dark all around the top.

Okay, he said. If you’re not going to sit right. He looked in the drawers until he found string and scissors and he wrapped Roy, then tied him to a rafter and a leg of the table and a hook that came out of the wall for hanging pots or something, and so Roy was standing there in his sleeping bag and Jim could sit down and eat.

Your father’s becoming pretty weird, he told Roy. And it’s not like you haven’t had a part in that. And yet, the truth is, do you want to know the truth? Well, in some ways I feel better now. I don’t know why that is.

Jim concentrated on his eating then and when he was through he did the dishes. Then he wiped his hands on his jeans and turned to Roy. Okay, big boy, he said, time to go back in the cooler. And he untied Roy and carried him back to the bedroom, then felt so lost all of a sudden he lay down on the bare wooden floor in the bedroom and just moaned for the rest of the day, no idea at all in his head as to what he was doing or why. The room
was cold and dim and seemed to stretch on forever, and he a tiny speck lost in the middle of it.

At dinner, after dark, Jim ate alone. I don’t feel like company, he said aloud. Then he went for a walk in the woods.

Jim, Jim, Jim, he spoke out loud, you have to do something. You can’t just leave your son tied up in the sleeping bag and cooling in the bedroom. Roy needs a funeral. He needs to be buried. His mother and sister need to see him.

He hiked on some more, not bothering to duck much and getting scraped up a lot by small branches, one of his hands on fire from nettles. There was no moon or anything out, and he couldn’t see a damned thing.

As he talked, he imagined he was in a great room, at a trial, and these words were being spoken to him. He was sitting at a heavy desk and listening and couldn’t speak.

How was he tied up? someone was asking. Why did you tie up your son at the table? Did that make any sense at all? And what about the sleeping bag? Was that your idea, too? Have you been planning this for some time? Was that really what this whole trip was about? It could have been suicide, sure, but it could also have been murder.

This idea stopped him. He stood in place in the woods breathing hard and hearing nothing else and thinking that they could think that. How could he ever prove that he hadn’t shot his son himself? And now he’d run away, too, and broken into someone else’s place and was hiding out with the body. How could he possibly explain any of this?

Jim was scared now for himself, and turned around to hike back to the cabin, but he wasn’t sure which way it was. He hiked for over an hour, it seemed, and much farther than he had come, he was sure, and still he couldn’t see the cabin or anything familiar or really anything at all. He had just hiked out into the dark and not bothered to pay any attention to where he was going.

The ground was uneven and occasionally he fell through where the dead wood and undergrowth had built up and he was scraped from the sides and above. He had his arms out and head turned away and was walking sideways hoping just to find his way somehow and listening but hearing only himself and starting to feel very afraid of the woods, as if all he had done wrong had somehow gathered here and was out to get him. He knew that didn’t make any sense and that scared him more, because it felt so real anyway. He seemed impossibly small and about to be broken.

He stopped periodically and tried to stand still and be quiet and listen. He was trying to hear what way to go, or because that didn’t make any sense, maybe trying to hear what was after him. Up through the trees, he could see a few faint stars much later, after the sky had cleared some. He was cold and shivering and his heart still going, and the fear had sunk deeper into a sense that he was doomed, that he would never find his way back to safety or be able to run fast enough to escape. The forest was impossibly loud, even over his pulse. There were branches breaking, and twigs and every leaf moving in the breeze and things everywhere running through the undergrowth and larger crashings beyond that he couldn’t be sure whether or not he had simply imagined. The air in the forest had bulk and weight and was
part of the darkness, as if they were the same thing, and rushed toward him from every side.

I’ve been afraid like this all my life, he thought. This is who I am. But then he told himself to shut up. You’re only thinking this stuff because you’re lost out here, he said.

It was impossible that it was taking him this long to find the cabin. He’d never been lost in the forest in his life, and he had been in forests all the time, hunting and fishing. But once you take that first wrong step, he told himself, because he knew that after that it was possible to never find your way again, because you couldn’t know where you were coming from and so wouldn’t have any firm basis for any direction. And that seemed appropriate for more in his life, too, especially with women. Things had become so twisted early on that it had been impossible to know what was good, and now, with Roy dead, there was absolutely nothing left to go on. It wouldn’t matter if he perished out in the forest tonight, if he just gave up and lay down and froze.

But he continued on anyway, until the sky lightened finally and then it was dawn and he had found the shore by going consistently downhill. It wasn’t the shore in front of the cabin, and he didn’t know in which direction to follow it, but it was a shore, and he went the way that seemed right, hiking along it and waiting for the cabin.

It was a sunny day, cold and bright, the first clear day they’d had in a long time. He was very hungry and tired and sore but grateful for the sun. He didn’t find the cabin after several hours, so he turned and walked back the other way, but even this seemed all right. At what must have been about noon, the sun overhead, he passed the point where he’d started and continued
on for another hour or so before he arrived at the beach in front of the cabin. He stopped and stood there and just looked at it for a while, then he went in.