Legend of a Suicide (22 page)

I sometimes walked up the hill to visit the house I had lived in as a child. Up on a slope set between two mountains, the small house that once had been bordered on two sides by forest was now dwarfed by a dozen two-and three-story dark wooden houses with stained glass and gazebos. The view of the channel and ranges beyond was blocked by lower-cost developments. The house had not been painted in the twenty-five years since I had left, nor the fence repaired. The green my father and mother and I had applied had decayed to show pink beneath and, beneath that, white and, finally, bare wood. The roof showed tar paper, the metal screen door and mailbox at the street both stood at angles, though each distinct, the pavement of the driveway had become its own map of small islands, and the fence hung bare where it hung at all. The current residents remembered my family and invited me in, but there were no memories here, only the foreign stains of smoke, pets, food, and children, cans and clothing strewn everywhere across the floor. The cherry tree in back, which I remembered as very tall, since I had climbed, hidden in, and fallen from it, stood maybe ten or twelve feet, narrow and unimpressive. The tall fence came to my waist. Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because mem
ory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

On the phone with Gloria, I didn’t use my last name. I wondered whether she knew, but there were no indications either way. The conversation was cordial and short and told me nothing, really, except that she sounded like she was from Boston, not the loud Bostonian dialect but the classier kind, upper-crust, not that this meant anything in particular. I wondered for the hundredth time why I was doing all this, why I was here in Ketchikan. After the initial return and rush of belonging, I had felt only out of place. The divorce and my father’s suicide seemed to exist in another world.

I looked all around my house that night, feeling a little crazy, I think, studied the wood and even the cracks in the linoleum. Part of the mountainside had been dug away to accommodate. Rock had been blasted. The wood was old and had perhaps never been fully dry, but I was convinced it would remain forever. The stains on the walls, too, the fierce green linoleum, the teapot with its inward formations of minerals white, red, and other, as well as the windows that warped what was looked at—all of these would resist wearing away, would remain for as long as the house could be called a house, and longer.

Late night, I wandered. At the gates of the hatchery, I spun the lock, slipped inside. I took hundreds of fingerlings by net, dumped handfuls in my pockets, walked along cliffs above the roadway, bare rock cut in grooves, and held out the fish one by one in an open palm. The miniature salmon leaped each of their own accord, a tail flash into the night, glint of silver, sixty feet of
twisting, and an inaudible slap to the pavement below. Waiting, then. For water, for some new rule, new possibility, that could make pavement not pavement, air not air, a fall not a fall.

I made each fish do this, waited patiently for each to send itself, all the time muttering obscenities: “Walk the plank, matey. Time to sleep with the fish.”

I watched the last one vanish, listened for the tiny slap, heard nothing. The mist was orange from streetlight. The air cold. I took off my coat, my shirt, folded them and placed them on a stump. I removed my shoes, pants, underwear, watch, and put my shoes back on. I double-knotted them. I would run through the forest until I was exhausted and could sleep; perhaps even as I ripped through ferns and over the rotting logs invisible now beneath the false second rain-forest floor I would have some kind of vision. So I set off running. But before long, I only felt tired and stopped and turned around and walked slowly back. I had no faith in that kind of thing anymore, I realized. It had worked in high school, a few times even in college, but it seemed ineffectual now. So I put my clothes back on, descended past rubble and wire, concrete, brush, and stood over the wide-flung fingerlings to twist each delicately under my heel.

At work the next day, my boss, a young biologist whose eyes were not quite in alignment, so that I could never be sure whether or not I had been seen, asked me to write a letter to the
Ketchikan Daily News
and to post flyers asking for information leading to arrest. I suggested a reward of dinner for two at the Fisherman’s Grotto, but my boss didn’t think that was funny.

“I don’t think you understand,” he said, scratching at one of
his sideburns. “If this asshole keeps this up, and we don’t catch him, you and me are out a job.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m your man. I’m the one. I’ll have the letter and flyers ready by the end of the day.”

So I wrote a short press release, included the fact that the theft had probably occurred at night, asked for vigilance, suggested the ever-expanding threat crimes like this posed to us all, and delivered the release to the newspaper. I made flyers with a close-up photo of fingerlings schooling, a shot with rings like a peacock’s fan, difficult to recognize but startling in its way. Under this, I printed, in bold letters, missing, and beneath this the details of the crime and numbers to call. I wrote that they had been netted at night and taken away for unknown purposes. I asked, “Is your neighborhood known to you?”

Bill and Gloria arrived in the Monza and I swung my rickety door wide. I had made everything inside as cozy as possible, despite the fact that Gloria was the woman my father had cheated with. I had baked sweet potatoes and lit candles, tuned the radio to the softer of the two available stations, beer-battered fresh halibut. I was determined to have a good time and to make Bill and Gloria have a good time, too.

Gloria was taller than Bill. Younger, also—early fifties, perhaps. Her hair was still mostly blond. “Hello,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

I muttered something inane, then moved on to what I really wanted to know. “You’re not from here originally, are you? You’re from the East Coast, right, somewhere in New En gland?”

“Boston,” she said.

“Boston,” I repeated. “Well,” I said, “I have food. And would you like something to drink?”

“Howdy,” Bill said, and shook my hand. He was more awkward around his wife.

“A beer?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I could not believe this was the receptionist my father had slept with. I had always imagined her with a wide smile in red lipstick, a brassy, obnoxious voice, and no brain. This was a child’s conception, of course, built from the feel of my mother’s attacks on my father more than their content, but still it had persisted. Even the conversation over the phone had somehow dispelled nothing. I was embarrassed.

“It’s getting colder out there,” Bill said from the couch. “It’ll be an early one this year, looks like.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard them talking about that on the radio. That and the decline in tourism this year seem to be about all I’ve heard about.”

“That’s true, you know,” Gloria said. “And agencies everywhere are suffering. At the library we’ve had to trim our hours and staff and reduce or even eliminate many of our services. You can’t call us with reference questions anymore, for instance. And there will be more cuts next year.”

“You work at the library?” I asked, a doubly pointless question since I already knew the answer from trying to track her down when I first arrived in Ketchikan.

“Yes,” she said.

“In Lake County, California, where my grandmother still lives,” I said, to cover myself, “they don’t even have a public li
brary now. Not a single branch in the whole county. They’ve all closed down. And a few of the elementary schools, too.”

I joined Gloria and Bill in the tiny living/dining room off the kitchen. The table was along one wall of this room, the couch along the other. I sat in a chair with its back touching the table.

“I don’t know,” Bill said. “It doesn’t seem to me we need to give everyone a handout. I know that view will be unpopular with my wife, but I just have to say, if someone’s going to make it in this country, they’re going to make it, that’s all.”

Gloria scooted closer to her husband on the couch and took his hand in hers. “I’d prefer not to talk about Amway tonight, honey, if we could. I want to hear what Roy’s up to.”

“Oh,” I said. It was hard to hear her voice. “That’s fine. I haven’t been doing much of anything.” I didn’t know what to do about Bill’s conversational minefield. And I knew I would have to say something stupid now to try to smooth things over. “My uncle used to sell Amway,” I said.

“It’s not such a bad organization, really,” Bill said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I used to listen to the tapes when I’d go goose hunting with him up to Modoc. My uncle and this friend of his named Big Al. They kept the windows up and shouted a lot—my uncle was from Nebraska—and every once in a while, Big Al would turn to me and hold out his finger and…you know, I probably shouldn’t continue with this. I’m sorry.”

“No, no,” Gloria said.

“I think it should wait till another time,” I said.

“That’s all right,” Bill said.

I looked down at the linoleum. “Well,” I said, “why don’t we go to the table. I’ll bring over the halibut and sweet potatoes.”

“Sweet potatoes?” Gloria asked. “That sounds lovely.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I got them at the store.”

I hated sounding like an idiot. But I was shaking now for some reason, and I couldn’t think well. I took the tray of halibut out of the oven, where I’d been keeping it warm, used tongs to transfer the pieces onto a plate, and served up the sweet potatoes. I’d put miniature marshmallows on them, not because I thought that was a classy touch, because it isn’t, but because I had felt so warm and happy earlier, a rare and simple feeling I was trying to prolong, and this was how my mother had fixed them when I was a child. Now they looked a bit odd.

“Sorry about the marshmallows,” I said as I brought over the plates. “I was suffering from nostalgia earlier today.”

“I like marshmallows,” Bill said.

“Our own oven has seen them as recently as last week,” Gloria said. “Though we did pull the blinds to be sure no one else saw.”

I laughed. “That’s pretty good,” I said, but I felt sick. None of this was working out right. Gloria was not disturbed at all. I was the only one. Then this thought made me wonder whether I had been looking for some kind of revenge. “So what brought you out to Alaska, Gloria?” I asked.

The radio was playing Miles Davis, a rare moment in Ketchikan. Nothing was solid or reliable. I felt that maybe I was somewhere else.

“This halibut is delicious, Roy,” Gloria said.

“Yeah, it’s really great,” said Bill.

“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.