Sukkwan Island Part 9

He hiked on around point after point and so imagined he must be curving around the island, though he could not know for sure until the sun set slightly behind where it had before. It was a long island, apparently, and there was no way to know beforehand whether or where anyone might be living. It could be that his was the only cabin.

The late sunset was still red in the sky as the rocks at his feet became difficult to distinguish. The sky above the red was green and then faded into blue. He continued until it was no longer safe, until he nearly ran face first into a dark snag without having seen it at all, and then he stopped. He went up into the woods, wrapped himself in his blanket, and cut open a pack of smoked salmon for dinner. The salmon was tangy and good, a recipe with spices other than just salt and brown sugar. He sat chewing and looking at the pale light on the water and listened to the forest around him, which seemed more quiet than usual, no sound except light wind and an occasional settling, no movement of a living thing that he could detect.

Roy had not wanted to come here. Jim saw that now. Roy had come to save him; he had come because he was afraid his father might kill himself. But Roy had not been interested in this place, or in homesteading. Jim had imagined that any boy would want to homestead in Alaska with his father-though technically they were not quite homesteading, of course, since he had bought the land and it already had a cabin-but he hadn't really thought of Roy or of what Roy might have wanted for even an instant. And that had still been true after they'd landed. Jim had taken his son for granted at every moment, and now his son was gone. That was the odd thing.

If Roy were still alive, and Jim could take him somewhere now, he would take him sailing around the world. That was something Roy had actually wanted to do. He had said so himself. And it was something Jim could have arranged just as easily as homesteading. He had the money for a boat, he knew how to sail, he had the time. But for that to have been possible, he would have had to listen to Roy. He would have had to notice him while he was still alive. And that was what simply could not have happened. Jim had been thinking of Rhoda, and of other women.

Jim tried to sleep then, lay back on the moss in his blanket and kept his food close to his belly. He didn't care if a bear did come; he wasn't giving up his food.

But he couldn't sleep. He looked for stars, kept looking even though there were none, kept his eyes open though there was no light and nothing to see. He imagined what sailing through the South Pacific might have been like. He had seen pictures of Bora-Bora. Dark-green jungle and black rock, light-blue water and white sand. It would have been warm always, and comfortable, and they could have snorkeled. They could even have learned to scuba. Why spend any part of a life in a cold place? It didn't make sense to him.

Jim didn't feel tired, couldn't imagine sleeping, so he rose again, put his blanket in his bag with the food, and hiked carefully back down to the sh.o.r.e.

The night was dark, without stars or moon. He couldn't see anything, though his eyes had had hours now to adjust. He put out one foot at a time and felt around with it before putting weight on. He moved slowly step by step this way along the sh.o.r.e until he came too close to the water's edge and slipped on seaweed and went down hard onto wet rock. He got back up fast and fell again, then groaned from the pain in his elbow and hip and found his bag and crawled up onto the dry rocks on hands and knees until he could stand safely. He continued on into the woods, his hurt leg trembling, and lay down with the blanket over him and rested and woke in the morning to find he had fallen asleep.

This second day he made good progress, though he was sore from the falls. His elbow ached as if he had bruised the bone and his leg felt badly attached, but this didn't matter to him much. He kept alert for boats and cabins and rea.s.sured himself as he walked that he would find someone. But then he wondered whether this might be Prince of Wales Island, the big one. It wasn't so far from where he had come from, it looked just like everything else around it, and it was almost more remote than Sukkwan just because it was so big. Long stretches of its sh.o.r.eline were uninhabited. And he supposed there could be more problems with bears on the big island, too. There would be no way of knowing for sure whether this was a smaller island until he had circ.u.mnavigated it, but he was still going along this sh.o.r.e, with the sunset to his left.

At midday he rested and ate. He sat in the shade, though the sun shone only weakly through haze. He saw no boats. He had seen no boats at all at any point. It was remarkable to him how remote this place was. He had come into nowhere and had thought somehow that that would be a good thing; when he had originally looked on a chart, he had thought his cabin too close to Prince of Wales Island and the few towns along its southwestern coast, but now he wished he could remember those towns and the other small enclaves scattered on neighboring islands. Colonies, really, just two or three houses, with almost no roads. The kinds of places he had always romanticized. He had known a few families who lived in them, had visited their one-room cabins built by hand with homemade dressers and blankets hung to make a bedroom. Bear rugs on the floor and walls. What was the magic in those places? What was it about the frontier that made him feel nothing else was really living? It made no sense, because he didn't like to be uncomfortable and couldn't stand to be alone. Every moment of every day now he wanted to see someone. He wanted a woman, any woman. Landscape meant nothing to him if he had to see it alone.

He packed up and continued on. Within the next hour, the coastline fell back sharply to the right and he felt certain now that this was not the big island. When the sunset came, he could see pink in the clouds above to the east but the west was blocked by forest.

Still no one, he said. I might be spending the entire winter here.

It was getting colder again each night. He had been lucky to have this warm spell over the past week, but now the snow and rain would set in again, he knew. He had only his warm clothes and the one blanket with him. This had been enough so far, but he knew he needed to find someone soon or else get back to the cabin where he had left Roy before it became too cold.

That night he woke s.h.i.+vering several times and was never warm enough. He dreamed of hiking around and around in circles with something after him. In the morning, a dusting of snow on the trees, which the drizzle melted away by noon. He had a waterproof jacket but still felt soaked and cold. He ate his lunch sitting on a log at the water's edge and thinking. If no one else were on this island, he would have to stay here and wait. There would be almost no boat traffic now until the late spring, until May probably or even June, and the people whose cabin he was in would not come back until July or August. And he had wrecked the outboard and radios. So he could be here a long time. He wondered whether his food would hold out. It didn't seem that it would, and he had not brought his rifle or fis.h.i.+ng gear with him. There was no way of going back, either, to all that food he and Roy had stored up.

It was crazy how much food they had stored up. Enough to feed a small colony through the winter. But that was what the trip had become for him. Instead of relaxing and getting to know his son, he had worried only about survival. And when it had finally been time to stop putting food away, that was when he had become terrified; he'd had no idea how to pa.s.s the time, how to get through the winter. So he had started calling Rhoda on the radio. Within a month, he would have left, he was sure. He wouldn't have been able to stay. But Roy had believed they were staying.

Jim was crying again. Roy had wanted to go, and he hadn't let him. He had trapped him. But Jim made himself stop crying and got up. He continued on until dusk and by then realized he hadn't been looking for hours, had only been hiking along non-stop and not looking at all for boats or cabins. He didn't believe anyone else was here.

This night was so cold he couldn't sleep and instead tried to make some kind of shelter. It was black again, no light, so he could only feel around in the darkness for enough branches and ferns and such to make a pile that he could sleep in. He mounded it all up the length of his body and slid in carefully, trying not to disturb it. This was much warmer but he fell asleep thinking of all the bugs and things in his pile that must be working their way through his clothing right now.

The days continued like this and became indistinguishable. It was a monstrously long island. If he had been certain he could find his cabin, he would simply have hiked across the island and returned, because by now he knew no one else lived here, but he didn't know how wide the island was and he wasn't sure he'd recognize coastline on the other side even if it was coastline he had seen before. So he continued on, hiking the full length of the short days and then waiting through each night, waking more than sleeping.

He was thinking of Roy these nights, remembering him as a child, riding the toy green tractor in Ketchikan, wearing a chef's hat at three and standing up on a stool to reach the mixing bowl. He remembered Roy picking blueberries in his red jacket and knocking down icicles and finding the antlers Jim had thrown behind the fence. Jim had thrown them there because they were small, but Roy discovered them and treasured them as if they were artifacts of another people. They seemed mysterious and wonderful to him. Jim didn't know how these times became the last years with Roy, didn't understand any of the transformations, and remembering, Jim realized he was gone for years of Roy's life, even in Ketchikan when they all still lived together, because Jim was thinking then of women, scheming, beginning to cheat. He had fallen into his secret life with other women and not known anyone or anything else. After the divorce, he still didn't wake up, but continued after women. And so he could not say who Roy was in the end. He was missing too many of the years leading up to him.

Jim reflected on all of this more calmly now, as if he couldn't afford the expenditure of crying when he was trying just to stay warm and survive each of these nights. It was not a time for extravagance. He would have to conserve if he was to survive until spring.

During the day, he tried to cover ground but his hiking became slower and slower. He had run out of food nearly a week before and was surviving now on seaweed and mushrooms and small crabs he caught at low tide. He drank from the occasional streams he crossed but was thirsty sometimes for days on end.

The crabs were very good, actually, and he looked forward to them. They were only three or four inches wide, but he cleaned them as he would have a larger crab, grabbing all their flexing legs from behind, underneath the sh.e.l.l, and then smas.h.i.+ng the face onto a sharp rock until the top of the sh.e.l.l flew off. Then he broke the crab in half and shook once to get rid of the guts. He rinsed in seawater and sucked out the tender clear meat. He did this throughout the day, eating four or five crabs at a time. The only hard part, really, was when he couldn't find enough fresh water for a few days and his lips became swollen and his throat sore. But sucking on the needles of the spruce trees in the mornings gave him some relief, and there was often rain. No snow, luckily. He was getting very lucky with the weather.

He daydreamed about the South Pacific, drinking water from large strange leaves, eating fruit that grew everywhere. Mangoes, guavas, coconuts, and wild fruits he had never seen. These new fruits he imagined to be purplish and very sweet. The sun would be out constantly, and he would bathe under waterfalls.

And then one evening he saw the edge of the sunset to the west and knew he had come around the southern tip of the island. He was on his way home now. He continued on to the point and sat in the trees watching the thin line of sunset devoured in watery gray clouds. Then he sc.r.a.ped up enough small stuff to make a mound, pushed his way in, and slept.

It was five more days before he reached the cabin. He arrived fairly early in the morning, had slept the night before less than a mile from it. s.h.i.+t, he said. It's right here. He stood on the beach and looked at it for a while, through the trees.

As he walked up to it, up onto the porch, he could tell that no one had come. Everything was just as he had left it. The note had streaked and faded from the rain, but that was the only change. He went around back for the hammer. The deflated boat was still there, the broken door on the shed, no changes.

Jim pulled the nails from the boards he had placed over the kitchen window, starting to smell Roy even before the first board was fully removed. When he stepped inside, the stench was a thing with weight and heft. He threw up right there on the kitchen floor, threw up his few precious crabs and mushrooms and the fresh water he had sucked yesterday from dew. It seemed a terrible waste, even though he knew he would have better food and water now.

He cleaned himself up at the sink, rinsed out his mouth. The smell was overpowering. He could see well enough in the kitchen, but the back rooms would be dark, so he lit the paraffin lamp and walked back as if against a strong wind into the smell.

Roy was not as stiff as before. The sleeping bag was on the floor now and wet and had white fuzz growing even on the outside. Jim tried to grab the end of the bag but couldn't and stepped back again. I'm sorry, Roy, he said, weeping now for the first time in a while. And he knew he would have to bury him now. He had tried to find someone, had tried to find a way to show Roy to his mother and sister and give him a funeral, but now he would have to settle for burial on this island. There was no other choice. He couldn't live with this smell, couldn't let his son just rot here.

He had to go back outside first to breathe. He waited until he had stopped crying, too, then he went back inside quickly, grabbed the wet bag, and dragged it out to the window. When he hefted it through the window, the contents inside mushed together and some of Roy leaked out through the tears in the bag. Jim was making sounds, disgusted. He couldn't believe he was having to do this.

He grabbed a shovel and dragged Roy far into the trees. He didn't want to be close to the cabin, didn't want Roy's grave so near that these people might want to move it. So he went far enough into the trees that he didn't think Roy would be found, and then he stopped and began digging. The earth was hard for the first foot, then it was loose for another foot at most before he started hitting rock and root and sand; it was very hard to dig. He labored all day at the grave, stabbing and cutting roots, digging around rocks, smas.h.i.+ng his way through with the tip of the shovel.

He had to rest often, and each time he would walk away from the pit and the awful smell of his son rotting. He would sit in the trees a few hundred feet away and think of how he would tell all of this. He wasn't sure the story could make any sense. Each thing had made the next thing necessary, but the things themselves did not look good. Though he couldn't admit it completely, part of him wished he would never be found. If no one ever returned to this cabin or noticed them missing from their own, then he would not have to try to tell anyone. He felt he could live now with what had happened if he didn't have to face anyone else. His son had killed himself and this was Jim's fault and now he was burying his son. He could believe this. But he didn't want anyone else to know.

He dug until late afternoon, near the end of the day, and then decided it would have to be good enough because he couldn't do this in darkness, so he dragged Roy and the sleeping bag into the pit, not wanting to try to empty him out of the bag, and then stood there wondering how he could have a kind of funeral in just a few minutes before heaping the dirt and getting back to the cabin.

I didn't mean to rush this, he told his son. I know this is your burial. It should be something special and your mother should be here, but I just can't do anything about all that. I just...and here he stopped and didn't know what to say. All he could think was I love you, you're my son, but this bent him so that he couldn't speak, so he wept and shoveled in the dirt and mounded it and packed it and walked back to the cabin in near darkness, not caring much anymore whether he lost his way.

The smell of Roy was still in the cabin that night and the next day and continued in traces for over a week. After that, Jim still thought he could smell it, but it had become faint enough to be indistinguishable from imagination. On cold days when it seemed to have gone, he walked around the rooms trying to remember it. Outside, too, during hikes through the forest he would sometimes smell it and stop and think of his son. He told himself that these had become the only times he would think of his son, as if only this one kind of memory were strong enough, but of course this was a lie. He was always thinking of Roy in one way or another. There was very little else to do. He had settled in for the winter, was waiting now.

It seemed to Jim that he hadn't understood Roy well. It seemed that Roy had been more dangerous than Jim had thought. As if all those years he had been ready to kill himself but waiting for the right time. This didn't seem quite accurate, but Jim followed it for a while. What if suicide had been in Roy's nature all along? What then? It would change responsibility, at the very least. And why was it that anyone ever killed himself? What had made Jim so sure that he himself could do it? It was difficult to understand now. It was hard to make the idea seem plausible. Jim didn't believe that he had ever really felt suicidal, even when he had decided to step off the cliff. Even then he had felt only self-pity, nothing more.

This thought made Jim pause. He hadn't thought about the cliff for a while. He wondered what Roy had thought of that, wondered whether Roy had known that he had done it on purpose. He had never really admitted to Roy that it had been on purpose. If he had, it would have been harder to make Roy stay. But Roy must have suspected something odd.

To get away from these thoughts, Jim tried to think of other things. He invented diversions. He tried to imagine who would find him, and how, and what they would say. The homely couple coming up the path with their children lagging behind. They would stop and watch him and consider him dangerous. They might run. They might arrive and leave before he'd even seen them, and he wouldn't know until the authorities arrived later. But he believed they would walk right up and be indignant. They were the owners and they were otherwise ignored by everyone, he was sure, so about this they would be fierce. They would come and drag him out and attack him with their parrot beaks and twisted eyes and peck and tear at him until they had stolen little pieces away. So then he was thinking of Roy on the beach and the seagulls and in this way he tortured himself each day and night under the guise of trying to fill his time and survive.

He still looked for boats occasionally, on good days. The rare ones he did see were too far away. He had no flares. It had occurred to him that he could try to light a giant forest fire on one end of the island and this would bring spotter planes at the least, but he didn't know how long they would take or whether he would end up dying in the fire. His own death seemed likely if he set a huge forest fire on an island. He would be in the water at the end, trying to find air. And he didn't like the idea of the firefighters shoveling at the dirt where Roy lay.

Then it occurred to him to set some other island on fire, if he could find a small one nearby that was uninhabited. He could row over there, get it going with the little bit of gasoline he had left, then row back or even just stay out on the water where they could see him.

Not a bad idea, he told himself. That could work.

But he didn't do it. Rowing in these channels wouldn't be easy, and he wasn't ready to face anyone yet. So he waited in his cabin and schemed and saw the flames everywhere and imagined himself rescued and tried to remember what Roy had looked like before he had blown off half his face. It was terrible that Roy had left Jim with that image. Jim couldn't remember the face before, the way his son had looked. It was as if his son had been born into the world mutilated.

At least no one else would have to see him that way. Enough time had pa.s.sed now that no one else would have to see anything at all. This relieved him somewhat. He couldn't explain why the sight would have seemed such a personal embarra.s.sment. But it would have. What he wanted now was to come up with some way of telling things that made it all seem sad but somehow unavoidable. Something along the lines that things had been hard, but he hadn't realized quite how hard for Roy because Roy hadn't said anything. If only Jim had known, they would have left immediately, but he'd had no way of knowing.

But then these thoughts disgusted Jim. He had no patience for his own mind.

Mid-January and still no one had come. It was remarkable, really. It seemed the world had forgotten them, though they were probably less than ten miles from where they were supposed to be. Jim a.s.sumed that their cabin had been found by now with the blood on the floor and the smashed radios and the boat gone. The sheriff or someone must have searched the area after that, but he had not heard a single helicopter or plane, nor had he seen a boat for weeks, and never a boat close enough.

Jim's food was running low and he had lost weight trying to conserve. He had only one meal a day now, with a few light snacks at other times. He figured his food would last at this rate another month or two at most and then he'd be eating seaweed or starving.

He slept all through the night now and even sometimes part of the day. It was the easiest thing to do and didn't use food or even wood for the fire. He had cut several large pieces from the inflatable boat to lay on top of his blanket and sheets and he was wearing an extra sweater he had found as well as the clothes he had arrived in. He hadn't bathed in nearly three months. He had begun to smell almost clean again, as far as he could tell.

He tried not to think during this time. When it would start, he'd look at something, a board in the ceiling or even just the darkness, and try to lose himself in that and not let the thoughts get going, though he couldn't avoid them always. They were repet.i.tive and insistent. Roy saying he wanted to go. He saw that scene over and over, couldn't get it out of his mind. Another repet.i.tive one was about his neighbor in Ketchikan, Kathleen, the woman he had first wanted to cheat with. He kept seeing the gray afternoon when he'd stood out on their side porch chatting with her and asked her if she'd like to come inside, since Elizabeth wasn't home. The look of disgust on her face. She knew exactly what he meant. Elizabeth was in the hospital, pregnant with Tracy. Not the best timing, he saw now. He thought about food, too. Milkshakes, especially. That was what he most wanted. And barbecued ribs. He thought mostly about Roy, and he visited him when the weather was calm and he was feeling restless.

The mound had caved in with the rain; the grave was now a shallow depression grown over with mushroom and fern. At first he had torn out the mushrooms that grew there, considering them obscene, but as they kept growing back, he finally left them, gray-white bulbs and sharper, smaller cones like tepees. He wondered how long it would take for a nylon sleeping bag to decompose, and he imagined it must be a very long time.

You're still alive, he told Roy one day. I've been thinking about this. You don't get to experience anything anymore; your life stopped for you when you died. But things are going to keep happening to me because of this, and that makes you still alive, in a way. And because no one else knows, because your mother doesn't know, you aren't even completely dead yet. You'll die again when she hears, and then she'll keep you alive for a long time after that. And even after all of us die, someone's going to dig up that sleeping bag and find you again. Though I guess they might be digging you up earlier than that. They'll probably want to make sure it's you. They're not likely to take my word on anything after all this.

He liked talking out loud to Roy, so he made a habit of it. Unless the weather was terrible, he went out and chatted for a while each afternoon. He chatted about being rescued, and about the weather, and he confessed things from time to time. I was impatient, he told Roy. I know that. I should have relaxed a little. I just felt responsible. He talked with Roy about little things that were bothering him. The day I walked in on you, he said. When you were jacking off in the outhouse. I still feel bad about that. I don't think I handled it well. I should have said something, but I just didn't know what to say.

In the first part of March, Jim scrabbled around at the water's edge trying to catch crabs. They were still here, even in winter, but they seemed faster now. Each time he reached out, they retreated sideways into a crevice and disappeared. It took him a long time to realize that the crabs had not actually gotten faster but he had slowed. He hadn't eaten a regular meal in almost a week. He'd had mostly seaweed and water. And for several months before that, he'd been conserving. He saw now that this had been a mistake. He had made himself too weak. He went back to the cabin and tried to outthink the crabs.

The next day, he went after their babies. He overturned rocks and, sure enough, just as he had hoped, occasionally he found small colonies of baby crabs that were too small to get away from him. He picked them up by the handful and didn't see how he was going to be able to clean them in his usual way, so he just ate them whole and crunched them down, sh.e.l.ls and guts and all.

I'll be s.h.i.+tting sh.e.l.l necklaces, he told them. It's going to be real pretty. He chewed well so that the pieces wouldn't come out too big.

At Roy's grave, he spent a long time talking about Roy's mother and how they had met and what had gone wrong. She was only my second serious girlfriend, really, he told Roy. My brother thinks that was a mistake, to settle down with only the second one, and I think he's probably right. The thing is, the first one had dumped me, and I think I was mostly scared when I went out with your mother. And there were things that were never right with her. Her parents, for instance. They didn't like me, thought I was too much a country boy, because they had money. Your grandfather, especially, I didn't get along with. The man was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Your mom didn't want to be critical of him, but he had been hitting his wife and doing other terrible stuff all along. So we couldn't talk about that. And then, generally, she wanted me to talk more, to entertain her more. She told me about a year into our marriage that she had just expected that eventually I'd have interesting things to say. That wasn't real nice to hear. I don't think she thought much about what she said sometimes. Anyway.

It was while Jim was out talking to Roy that he heard the boat go by close and slow down. He got to his feet and trotted as fast as he could toward the beach, but then he stopped. He could hear it out there, at low revs, probably checking out the cabin, but he couldn't decide whether to run the rest of the way and flag them down. That seemed like too much for this particular day. He didn't feel ready yet. So he hid in the trees and waited, unsure, and then he heard the engines rev up again and the boat was gone.

Jim went back to the grave. Oh G.o.d, he said. I can't believe I just did that. Something's wrong. I'm not ready yet to tell people about you.

He lay in bed that night under all of his covers wondering what was coming next. He couldn't stay out here and starve, yet that was what he had chosen just this afternoon. He couldn't hide Roy forever. Roy's mother and sister had to know. Jim felt so confused that he cried for the first time in weeks. I just don't know, he kept saying out loud to the ceiling.

The next day, he stayed in bed and didn't go to the grave. He didn't go hunting for crabs, either, or have any other kind of food. He kept wanting to get up, but it was cold out and he was preoccupied by daydreams that he kept extending, closing his eyes until finally it was night again and he was still in bed.

He was thinking about Lakeport, about high school, and how he had worked so many hours at Safeway. He had hated that, had known that it was all a waste, that his time there amounted to nothing since he'd eventually do some other kind of work. And killing mosquitoes in the spring. He remembered how they'd oil the ponds and spray insecticides to keep the mosquitoes down. Big tanks of chemicals. He wondered now what had been in them. It couldn't have been good.

His sinus troubles had begun back then. Persistent infections and then the headaches. They were back now, the headaches. This was what had taken him closest to killing himself, just the pain in his head. It was impossible to get away from, impossible to sleep through. He'd been an insomniac most of the time for probably twenty years now. He should have gotten an operation, but he didn't like the idea of an operation. He'd worked on too many patients in his dentistry. He knew how brutal surgery was, and the terrible risks.

Another memory from even earlier was the boat they'd had on the lake, an old converted Navy cruiser from the 1920s. They replanked the hull and took it out on warm summer nights, sang out there on the water. That was what he wanted now, he realized, and what he hadn't had in decades: a community of people and a particular place and a sense that he belonged. What had happened to that?

The next day he rose and went looking for crabs. It was low tide and there was quite a lot to choose from. He found some kind of small rockfish hiding in one pool and finally killed it with a stick. It was spiny, but he cleaned it right there on the rocks with his pocketknife and ate it raw. Then he sat back in the rare bit of suns.h.i.+ne and smacked his lips. That was d.a.m.n good, he said. Now that was a meal.

He finished off with a bit of seaweed and went back to the cabin for a drink of water, then went out to visit with Roy. Haven't been thinking about you as much, he told Roy. Been thinking about myself when I was your age. How I used to hunt ducks right in front of the house. Croppies and bluegill and catfish at night on the pier with a lantern. I've been thinking about all of that, too. It seems to me that one life is actually many lives, and that they add up to something surprisingly long. My life then was nothing like my life now. I was someone else. But what makes me sad, I guess, and the reason I bring all of this up, is that you won't be getting any other lives. You had two or three at most. Early childhood in Ketchikan, then living with your mother in California after the divorce. That would be two. Maybe being out here with me was the beginning of the third. But you know, you killed yourself, I didn't kill you, so that's what you get.

The rest of the afternoon, Jim poked around the shed, looking at all the rusting tools and odd projects. He was getting more active, mostly because it was a weirdly warm spell. Normally he wouldn't stay outside this long. But really, winter in Southeast was not that big a deal. He had been too freaked out with that cache and everything. It wasn't that hard to survive here.

And then Jim went through a time when he didn't seem to have any thoughts or memories at all. He stayed in bed and stared at the ceiling. When he went out, he stared at the trees or at the waves. The water was calm, no whitecaps. A surge more than waves at times, the water gray and opaque and thick-looking. He sat with Roy sometimes, but he was through talking. He was ready to get back to his life, to get back to other people.

But he stayed. A storm came through for over a week and he had nothing to eat. He didn't want to go outside. It seemed the cabin might collapse under the strain. Hail pelting the windows, rain, snow, outrageous winds, dark all the time. He hated this place. He wanted a hot tub.

When the storm finally ended, he was so desperate and starved he decided to set the fire. Everything was soaked, but he walked out into the trees with his spare gas can and a box of matches, resting several times along the way. He found a spot with a lot of deadfall and trees packed in close and he doused as much wood as he could with the gasoline, then struck a match to it and stepped back as it flared up. He started yelling, excited, as the flames devoured the deadfall and licked up the sides of the small trees. The heat was a beautiful thing. Truly warm for what seemed like the first time since summer, Jim stayed as close to it as possible, close enough that he could feel his face too hot and probably burning. The smoke obliterated the tops of the trees and the evening sky, and the sound of the fire overcame everything else. Jim danced around at the edges of it, telling it to consume everything. Grow, he yelled. Grow.

And it did grow, quickly. It took over the entire area where Roy was buried, burned all the way to the water's edge, and moved along the sh.o.r.eline toward the cabin. Jim hoped it was spreading in other directions, too. The wind was coming this way, though, toward the cabin, so this was its main movement. He thought for a moment that he should have set it on the other side, so that the cabin would have been upwind, but then he didn't care. Let it all burn, he thought, and then let them come for me. I can't spend the rest of my life out here like this.

The fire grew over the next hour, through sunset, and reached the cabin just as it started to rain. Jim raged at the skies, threatened to punish the rain, but it kept coming. The fire burned part of the roof and one wall of the cabin, then drowned and smoked and finally only smelled. It was the middle of the night. He went into the bedroom, which had been spared and now smelled of smoke rather than of Roy, and he slept.

He woke to the roof collapsing in the kitchen under the weight of all the rain. The crash was monstrously loud, but he knew what it was and he didn't get up. He went back to sleep and woke again at midday wet and s.h.i.+vering. Though the section of roof above him was still good, the rain was blowing sideways into the room and drenching him.

You better find me, he said. You better find me now.

He hiked through the charred forest later that day to Roy's grave. The rain had ceased. He wasn't completely sure he was in the right place, but the depression was still there and the charred trunks in roughly the right places, so he sat down s.h.i.+vering in the wet black ash and visited for a while.

I don't know, he answered Roy. Could be they'll see it, could be they'll see it and not care. It's not burning anymore, after all. It's not a fire now.

He went to the unburned section of the forest and was stripping bark to eat when he heard the helicopter pa.s.s overhead and then come back and hover just offsh.o.r.e from the cabin. He walked out as fast as he could to meet it, but he was very slow and had to rest several times. It was still there, however, when he cleared the tree line and waved.

Hey, he yelled. You look beautiful. He kept waving. Come on, he yelled.

They weren't able to set down anywhere, he a.s.sumed, because they only hovered. It was a sheriff's helicopter, but it didn't have pontoons. He could see their faces, the two of them with their earphones and caps and gla.s.ses. He waved and rubbed his arms to make it clear he was freezing, and they waved in return. Their machine seemed a modern wonder to Jim. They stayed there hovering for probably five minutes before they came on over the loudspeaker.

We've radioed for a float plane, they told him. You'll be picked up in an hour or two. If you are James Edwin Fenn, please raise your right arm to confirm.

Jim raised his right arm. Then they rose and turned and flew off. Jim was excited. He was ready to have a normal life again.

An hour or two later, after he had gone back to the cabin, dug out the stove, and started a fire in it to warm himself, afraid now of hypothermia, a float plane came up the channel, banked, and landed hard in the small chop out from his beach. Jim waved and stood at the edge of his beach waiting. They taxied up until their pontoons. .h.i.t the gravel and then they cut their engine and two men in uniform came down onto the pontoons while the pilot stayed inside.

Howdy, the lead man shouted.

Jim waved. I'm glad you're here, he said. I was over on Sukkwan with my son.

We found that, the man said. Been looking for you and your son. Sheriff Coos.

They shook hands.

We've been worried about you. Had a missing persons out for both of you for almost two months now.

Well, I've been right here. Look, my son died. He killed himself. So I went looking for help and I didn't find any. I ended up here and I had to survive the winter. I pretty much wrecked these people's place but I'll pay for it; I had to do what I did to survive. I buried my son out in the woods.

Whoa, Coos said. Slow down. Your son killed himself?

Yeah.

Okay, Coos said. Let Leroy here take your statement. He has to write all this down.

So Jim waited and then gave a slower, more complete version, though still not the whole story. They said they'd take a more complete statement when they got back to town. But for now, they took the basic story and then wanted to see where he'd buried Roy.

The men were close behind him. Jim tried to walk faster but he couldn't. And then he got confused and was having trouble finding Roy. Hold on a second, he said. It's somewhere around here. It's hard to find now because of the fire. I came out here and talked to him earlier today, but I can't find it now.

They only stood close and didn't say anything. He knew this looked bad, that it looked like he was trying not to find Roy, and that panicked him and made it harder still. Every charred bit of forest was starting to look the same. I can't do this, he said. I'm sorry, but I just can't find him today.

He turned to face Coos. Jim knew he could be reasonable. I haven't seen anyone in so long, he said.

I'm sorry for your troubles, Coos said. And we'll get you home today. But you need to find your son.

So Jim kept looking until he was standing in one spot and looked down to see that he was in a small depression and saw his prints from earlier in the day and realized this was the grave. He started crying without meaning to and told them, This is it.

Jim backed away from the grave and sat down while the men inspected the depression and Leroy took pictures of it and then went back to the plane for a shovel.

I'm sorry, the sheriff said. But we can't leave the body here. You understand.

Sure, Jim said. He lay down on his side to watch them. The smell of smoke was so strong close to the ground that it was difficult to breathe, but he felt he was safer lying down here and had no intention of getting up. He would watch and then soon he'd see Roy buried decently. And then if they tried to charge him with anything, he'd get a good lawyer and get out of this. He hadn't done anything wrong. His son had killed himself, and though Jim had broken a lot of laws after that, it had all been necessary for survival. Jim felt an enormous pity for himself and hated the sheriff and Leroy, unreasonably he knew. They were just doing their jobs, and they hadn't even accused him of anything.