Free Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

bags to see if anything was usable.
    His father’s bag was still almost in one piece. It had only a few small tears in it. But his own bag had been used as some kind of toy. The upper half of it had been shredded and the stuffing strewn all over the room. He could use the bottom half still, he thought, but there would be no way to repair the rest.
    The food was almost all wrecked. Some of the bags of flour and white sugar and salt were still intact, but only some of them, and the brown sugar for smoking had been eaten completely. There were still some cans of food that had only been dented, but most had been punctured.
    Roy put the pieces of the stove back on that had been knocked off. He started a fire in there, put the only two cans of unopened chili in a pot that wasn’t too badly dinged up, heated the chili, and sat out on the porch waiting for his father.
    When it got dark and still his father wasn’t back, Roy reheated and ate the chili, both cans because he couldn’t stop. I ate your chili, he apologized out loud, as if his father could hear.
    Roy stayed up that night, in his father’s sleeping bag on the porch with his rifle across his knees, and still his father didn’t return. When morning came he hadn’t slept and he was hungry and felt sick and very cold from being out on the porch, so he went inside.
    The radio wasn’t hurt too badly. It had just been sat on or something, it looked like. But still it might not work anymore. Roy couldn’t tell. He wanted to be able to do something, something useful, but he just didn’t know anything about the radio. So he went back outside in his boots and his warm jacket and hat and gloves, all of which were still okay, and he started sawing shingles. He kept his rifle near him with a shell already in the chamber and the safety off and he sawed and thought about shooting his gun into the air a few times. His father would come then, but he’d also be angry, because the shots would be about nothing. He wanted his father just to return. He didn’t like this at all. He had no idea what to do.
    When it was afternoon, he had made only a few shingles and had a blister on his thumb. The shingles were impossibly difficult. Something wasn’t right about how they were doing it. His father hadn’t come back and he hadn’t heard any gunshot, so hegot up to write a note saying, I’ve gone looking for you. I’ll be back in a couple hours. I’m leaving in the afternoon.
    He set off the way his father had gone, but he realized quickly that he had no idea which way to go. He looked at the ground and could see faintly the signs that they had walked here yesterday. Occasionally a bootprint but mostly just torn-up dirt and flattened grass. He followed this trail, though, to where the mountain started and there was no way of seeing any track in that spongy stuff and he hadn’t seen any trail heading off the main one, so he sat down against the mountain and tried to think.
    His father hadn’t left him anything to go on. He hadn’t said where he’d be going or for how long. So Roy just sat there and cried, then walked back down to the cabin. He tore up the note and sat on the porch looking out at the water, and he ate some bread and peanut butter and scooped up a little of the jam from where the jar had been smashed on the rocks below the porch. Ants and other bugs had gotten to most of it, but he saved almost a spoonful of stuff that looked okay. He got back on the porch, ate it, looked out toward the setting sun, and waited.
    His father returned just after dark. Roy could hear him coming down the path and he yelled out, Dad?
    Yeah, his father answered quietly and came up to the porch and stamped his boots and looked down at Roy with the rifle across his knees.
    I got him, he said.
    What?
    I got the bear, up in a draw about two mountains over. Got him this morning. Did you hear the shots?
    No.
    Well, it was a ways.
    Where is he? Roy asked.
    Still over there. I couldn’t carry him