by David Vann
Jim held back his sobbing as well as he could for fear that someone might notice and he might seem like a guilty man, though they couldn’t possibly know the crimes he had actually committed. None of the obvious ones like murder, but all of the more important ones.
The waitress set his food before him finally and he ate though it was tasteless to him and he could think only of Roy.
That evening, late, he went back out and walked along the waterfront. He walked past the downtown area where he had practiced and on to the old red-light district, preserved now as a kind of monument and converted to small tourist shops. The small wooden buildings hung precariously along the banks of the narrow river. He stood at the bridge and stared at them, trying to imagine life here before he’d been born. But this was what he’d never been able to do, send his life into another’s.
In the morning, he heard knocking at his door and he opened it to Elizabeth and his daughter Tracy.
Whoa, he said. God, I didn’t expect you.
Oh Jim, Elizabeth said, and she wrapped her arms around him for the first time in years. It felt unbelievably good. Then Jim bent down and hugged Tracy. She had been crying and looked exhausted. Jim didn’t know what to say.
Come in, he said. They followed him in and sat down on the couch.
Tracy started crying. Elizabeth held her and kissed the top of her head, then looked at Jim and asked, What happened out there, Jim?
I don’t know, Jim said. I honestly don’t know.
Try a little harder? But then she started crying, and Tracy was crying, and they went away, Elizabeth promising they’d be back later in the day.
So Jim waited, in a chair facing the door to his hotel room, unable to believe they were here in town. He had been gone so long, and it was harder still to understand that they were all here in Ketchikan, all together, except Roy of course, and then his mind stopped again. It was all too much to take in. He felt very afraid, and yet had no idea what in particular was frightening him.
When Elizabeth and Tracy returned, it was past dinnertime, but they weren’t hungry, so they sat in the room not talking and Jim wanted this family and this life back, and he kept fantasizing that Roy might just walk in.
Did you kill him? Elizabeth asked, and then she was lost in loud, awful, ugly sobs that got Tracy going again, too. Jim wasn’t crying; he was calculating, trying to figure a way to get them back, but he couldn’t see how.
I’m sorry, he said. I was afraid all the time I was going to kill myself. He was taking care of me. Then he surprised me and ended up killing himself.
What happened, Jim?
I handed him the pistol as I walked out the door. I didn’t mean for him to use it.
You handed him the pistol?
Jim could see this had been the wrong thing to tell her. I didn’t mean anything by it, he said.
You handed him the pistol? And then Elizabeth was up and crossing the room and hitting him, hard, and he was looking at Tracy, who had this terrible frozen look on her face and was just watching, and then they were gone and he waited that night for them to return, and the next morning and still they hadn’t, so he started walking around town, searching, and finally found their hotel but they had checked out. He searched until night and then realized he could call the airlines but he could only get a recording so he had to wait until morning, when he found out they had flown back to California, and with Roy’s remains.
Jim called and kept calling Elizabeth, and finally one day she answered. He tried to explain himself, but she wouldn’t listen.
I don’t understand this, Jim, she said. I will never understand this. How my son became the boy who did that to himself. What you did to him to make him that way. And then she hung up and didn’t answer for days and then changed her phone number with no new number listed and he couldn’t leave Ketchikan or reach anyone he knew who would tell him her new number. Everyone, even his own brother and friends, was against him. The only person he didn’t call was Rhoda. He couldn’t call her, because in a way she had killed Roy, too.
Jim tried to discover how to spend his days. He would have to reenter his life at some point. He couldn’t spend the next fifty years sitting here aching. But the truth was, he was scared now. He wasn’t sure how he could prove he hadn’t murdered his son.
Sometime after two a.m., Jim realized it had been almost a year since he’d been with a woman. So he bundled up and went looking for a prostitute.
The streets were wet, the fog down close. Sound carried oddly from the waterfront and from the road. Fishing bells, fog bells, seagulls, and the hiss of tires on asphalt. He walked downtown to his old office.
They had redone the front of the building. It looked more modern now and was a dark green. Gold lettering on the window with the dentists’ names, two of them.
I could have stayed here, he said. If I had not cheated and broken everything up. If I had been able to stand my wife. If salmon had flown like birds through the streets.
He wasn’t sure what to do with this office. He turned away from it, finally, crossed the street and headed down the other side toward the canneries.
The canneries were packed in summer with college students, but now, in the spring, they were deserted. He passed an old man sitting on a bench in front of a cannery and they ignored each other. He continued on past all of the canneries but couldn’t find any prostitutes. He went to the old red-light district along the river just for the hell of it, knowing he wouldn’t find any there, and he didn’t. He stood at the wooden railing looking down into green-black water moving swiftly out to sea and he gave up.
But instead of walking back to the hotel, he walked in the opposite direction, away from town. Past the canneries, along the highway, he walked in fog and drizzle, the only walker on the road. It was a pleasure to walk, and a pleasure to be alone outside. He couldn’t stay much longer in that hotel.
The forest on either side of the road loomed roughly out of the fog. It had been better out on the island, he saw now. He had still believed in his rescue then, and he had been able to go talk with Roy. Now Roy was fifteen hundred miles away.
A dark-green pickup came out of the fog quickly and swerved to avoid Jim. It stopped about a hundred feet past him and the two men looked back at him through the rear window. They looked for a long time; Jim stood in place and stared back at them until they moved on. He was scared, though, that they would come back with others. He had been stupid to stay here. It was too great a risk. Then he realized this was only paranoia, since no one could possibly know who he was.
Jim hurried back anyway, walking on the side of the road and hiding himself in bushes whenever he heard a car coming. It was a long way to town. He hadn’t realized how far he had gone. Curve after curve and the shoreline appearing twice through the fog, calm gray water lit by a shrouded moon.
He reached the canneries finally and stopped hiding from cars. He passed the old red-light district and the tourist area and then downtown and continued around the point to his hotel. It was nearly dark but he grabbed the few things he had: a change of clothes in a plastic bag, his razor and shampoo, his wallet, his boots. He threw everything in the bag, left a note to Kirk saying, Thanks for ripping me off, and walked out into the evening toward the ferry that could take him across to the airport.
The ferry terminal was over three miles away, past Jackson Street, at the end of town. He was tired when he got there, and hungry, and there was nowhere to eat. He looked at the schedule, then found out this wasn’t the right terminal for the ferries that went across to the airport. This terminal was for the big Alaska Marine Highway ferries that went clear up to Haines and down to Washington.
He decided he didn’t need to fly. He just needed to leave, and a ferry was leaving for Haines early in the morning. He would sleep on one of the benches.
On the ferry, he ordered a hotdog and a mini-pizza and some frozen yogurt. The constant vibration and sound of the engines beneath the floors were a comfort. It occu
rred to him that if his whole life had been spent under way, he might have been a lot happier. These ferries were heavy and solid and almost never rolled or pounded at all, but as he sat there eating, he did feel different, anyway. And then he got to thinking again about sailing away to the South Pacific. If he got through all of this okay, he might try that. He felt like telling this to someone, felt like talking about it with someone to find out how it sounded.
Jim looked around but everyone was sitting in groups. He chewed on through the rest of his food, then walked around the upper deck looking for someone standing alone at the railing, but this boat, at least on deck, seemed to be Noah’s Ark, everyone in pairs.
Though he didn’t drink, he went to the bar, because that seemed a likely place, even though it was morning. And he did find a woman sitting alone at one of the tables. Dark hair and an unhappy look, or perhaps just bored. She looked a few years younger than he was. She didn’t look as if she were waiting for anyone.
Mind if I join you? he asked.
That’s okay, I guess, she said, but this sounded so bad, so bored, he hesitated. She just watched him.
Okay, he said, and sat down.
It’s not like you’re doing me a favor, she said.
Jim got up and walked away. He stood on the stern and stared at the wake. He had wanted to tell that woman about Roy. He wanted just one person he could tell the whole story to, to work it out. Because when he left it alone, it just seemed more and more like he had killed Roy.
Jim couldn’t think about this well. He stared at the wake. Though it trailed away and spread and dissipated, it remained exactly the same from his viewpoint. It would never catch up with the boat nor would it ever be lost. It seemed like this might mean something, but then Jim was only wondering what his life was now, and not knowing. One thing had happened after another, but it seemed to him random and odd that things had worked out the way they had.
Jim could smell the diesel exhaust back here. It made him nostalgic for the Osprey, his fishing boat. He had failed at that, finally, and had to sell the boat, but really it hadn’t been a failure. He had spent all that time with his brother Gary pulling in albacore and then halibut; he had gotten to know the fishing fleet, all the Norwegians, even though he had not really talked to them. He had listened to them on the radio, their check-ins every morning and evening, their reports on the fishing, their evening entertainment. They had taken turns singing old songs and playing harmonica and even accordion. It had been an amazing time, really, though he and his brother had been outcasts. The Tin Can, they had called his boat, for the raw aluminum. They had older wooden boats, most of them. Some of them were fiberglass. He’d hear them mention him occasionally, but it was never an invitation to come on the radio and join in. He missed that life. He wished it had worked out. Roy could have worked on the boat in the summers.
One night, the Norwegians lost one of their boats. They came on in the morning, checking in, and no one knew where that one boat was. Most of it was in Norwegian, but there was enough said in English that Jim and Gary knew what was happening. They had slipped anchor themselves once when their sea parachute collapsed. The water was far too deep for bottom anchors, so the whole fleet put out sea parachutes off their bows and stayed anchored together that way, but the night their parachute collapsed, Jim and Gary awoke far from the fleet, no fishing boats around and right in the shipping lanes. So this was what must have happened to this Norwegian boat, they figured, and nothing was heard from it again.
In Haines, Jim called his brother Gary. Hey, he said, it’s me, and then there was silence. He waited.
Well, Gary said. Some people are looking for you.
Looking for me?
You jumped bail, didn’t you?
No.
Another pause. There might be a difference of opinion here, Gary said. And you might think about trying to make amends somehow, since I think the sheriff’s opinion wins.
Why are we talking about this? Jim said. I called you to talk about other things. I wanted to talk to my brother. I’ve been thinking a lot about our time on the Osprey, thinking that it’s too bad that didn’t work out. I wish we were still doing it. And I was thinking it would have been nice if Roy could have worked on the boat in the summers.
Jim, where are you?
I’m in Haines.
Look, you have to turn yourself in. You can’t run from them, and you’re just going to make yourself look bad in front of a jury.
Are you listening to me? Jim asked. I wanted to talk about other things. Do you think about the Osprey, or about living out there?
Jim waited then. He could hear his brother breathing.
Yeah, I do, Gary finally said. I think about those times. And though it was hard then, I’m glad we did it. It was an adventure. I wouldn’t do it again, though.
No?
No.
That’s too bad, Jim said. You know, I’ve been a little lonely in all this since I’ve been back. I haven’t had anyone to talk to. No one’s come to visit me or help me.
No one can now, Gary said. They’d be an accessory or something. Harboring a fugitive. I don’t know what they’d call it, but they’d call it something.
I don’t have any chance of beating this, do I? Jim said. He paused, and Gary didn’t say anything, and Jim realized finally that this was true. He was just waiting around for his own fall. He realized also that he needed not to tell his brother anything more. I need to go now, he said.
Okay, Gary said. I wish I could help you. I really do. I should have come to see you while you were still in Ketchikan.
That’s all right.
Jim walked straight into town looking for his bank. They had to have a branch here. He found several other banks and got toward what appeared to be the end of the small town and started panicking, but then he saw it. He walked in with his checkbook and ID in his hand, waited in line, and then was ushered to a side desk because of the amount of his withdrawal, almost $115,000 in cash. He intended to clean out what was left of this savings account completely, though the sheriff had probably already frozen it. Coos knew about it because he’d already taken over $200,000 for bail and fees and a few thousand for living expenses in Ketchikan.
The financial officer assisting him didn’t really want to assist him. This is a very large and unusual withdrawal, she said. Especially in cash. I have to let you know that we’ll have to report this. We have to report any large deposit or withdrawal such as this.
That’s okay, Jim said.
May I ask what the withdrawal is for?
To buy a house, Jim said.
We can have a cashier’s check made out for that.
Nope, it has to be cash.
A cashier’s check is cash.
Cash cash.
The woman frowned.
Look, Jim said, is it my money or is it not?
It is, of course, the woman said. I’m not sure we have that much cash on hand, though. In fact, I’m sure we don’t.
How much do you have?
What?
I’ll take whatever you have.
Jim left with $27,500 in cash. He knew he had been ripped off, that they had more cash than that, but it was enough. He didn’t need to buy his own boat. He could find some fishing boat that had just finished the March opening and was waiting around. They’d need money.
Jim went to the bigger boats first. It was hard to find anyone around. He asked people, though, and got phone numbers and addresses of homes and bars. Then he found one guy cleaning up on one of the smaller gillnetters.
Howdy, Jim said, but the man only looked at him, then went back to work. He was so much what one would expect he was laughable. A beard and battered old cap, a pathetic alcoholic.
I’d like a ride down the coast to Mexico. I’m paying fifteen thousand. Interested?
The man looked at him then. Just kill somebody? he asked.
Only my own life, Jim said.
Let me just go down to the sheri
ff and ask around, then we can talk about it.
Is this your boat?
No. But I know the captain.
Why don’t we skip the sheriff’s office and make it twenty thousand.
The man took off his cap and scratched his head. Will we be skipping the Coast Guard, too? And maybe offering a crew list in Mexico that might be a name short?
That would be the deal.
Well, let me talk to Chuck. There obviously ain’t much else going on for us.
The man went inside the cabin house then and was gone a long time. Jim couldn’t hear voices or anything. The boat was a piece of crap, rusted out and held together with wire. But it would get him down the coast. It was hell coming up the coast, but going down was easy enough.
The man returned with Chuck, who was in his sixties and seemed to be the captain and owner. He was a fiercely ugly man, liver spots on the bald top of his head fringed by a dark and greasy mane. He stared at Jim with such hatred that Jim knew immediately not to trust him, and yet what choice did he have? He had nothing left. He needed to go and these were the only guys around.
