cw: suicide
“Benny—where the hell are you? We got half the town here waiting for crab legs,” my brother Gavin shouted into his phone over children’s laughter and picnic revelry. Behind the cloud of grill smoke, his face was troubled. He caught my eye and shook his head, stuffing the phone into his pocket. He’d been calling all morning. “That’s it. I’m gonna go get that sucker. Hold the fort.” He tossed me his prized Stingray combo stabber fork/hamburger flipper, threw his “Eat Me” apron over a stump, and headed for his truck.
“Okay, everybody! Slight schedule change!” I called out. This Memorial Day barbecue was supposed to be Gavin and Benny’s first big shindig since coming back from Afghanistan. They’d bought the little tackle booth at the lake together and fixed it up with a taco stand and a boat rental. Everybody had turned out with fishing poles and picnic blankets, creamy jello salads and packaged footlongs. Now they were all staring at me with expectant faces. “Sack race is starting early!”
But half an hour went by, and then a full hour, and Gavin didn’t come back to the barbecue.
When his call finally came, his voice was strange and fractured. I could barely hear his whisper. He’d had to break a window at Benny’s trailer. There, behind the curtain sheer, Benny’s body was slumped against the headboard, puffed up like a blowfish. “He told me just Tuesday he was going to spend a couple days at Wrightsville Beach before coming back with the crab haul.” He sounded like he had a fishhook in his throat. Like he was gurgling on something.
I sent everybody home from the barbecue.
That evening, Gav and I sat at the picnic table between our two little houses—the remnants of our family’s farm—poking at leftover hush puppies and Brunswick stew.
I could already see the beginning of a change. Gavin was twitchy, picking the meat out of his stew with his fingers, dropping half of it before he could stuff it into his mouth.
“Easy there,” I said. Since he’d come home, I already felt like maybe I didn’t know a part of him anymore, but this was weirder than usual.
“He left on Memorial Day!” I jerked back as Gavin sprang to his feet and squinted across the road. All I saw was the neighbor’s cornfield, but then I realized he was looking in the direction of Benny’s trailer. Seven miles away as the crow flies and twenty-five minutes in the truck, but Gavin craned his neck like he could see it if he tried hard enough.
I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Of course, no one was there, but it was just a feeling I had, like I didn’t want no one to see him like this.
“They said it happened at least three days ago,” I said.
He hopped up on the picnic bench and tried looking further. “Yeah, but Memorial Day,” he said. “I should have seen it coming.”
You don’t see the future by looking harder, I wanted to tell him. But I’d always known him to have his own way of solving things, ways I couldn’t always make heads or tails of, so “We’re all doing the best we can,” was all I said.
He was quiet, but as the sun dropped behind the hickory at the back of the yard, he looked up into the sky and said, “I got to go.”
Sudsing the dishes as night fell, I watched out the window to see the lights come on in his house. None did.
Next morning, I woke to the plock plock plock of woodchopping. Gavin had so much piled up I knew it wasn’t all just stray branches he’d pulled from the ground. He’d gone into Old Steadman’s woods and cut down fresh boughs and hauled them onto our property. I could see the green ends on them. He was chopping them into long lengths. Steadman barely tolerated us shooting down mistletoe at Christmas, let alone cutting down full-on limbs with the life still coursing through them. This wouldn’t go down well.
I put my bathrobe on and went outside. “What gives?”
“Just channeling energy, I guess. Blowing off steam.” He didn’t stop chopping. His movements were rhythmic as a woodpecker’s, jabbing at the branches with a concentration that left me out.
“No call to bring Old Steadman down on us. You can blow off steam jogging to the lake.” Even as I said it, I realized I’d put my foot in it. Benny wasn’t there to jog with. Benny wasn’t there to make a killer taco or hand out life vests with him at the lake.
Gavin held up chopping and popped his eyes at me. I saw then the dark churning he was struggling with and thought maybe I best leave him be for the time being.
Afternoon, he didn’t answer the door, so I left a plate of leftovers on the picnic table. Later, when I looked out, it was gone.
That was it. The weekend was over. Next day, I went back to selling prom dresses at the mall.
Gavin kept chopping. Branches piled up and disappeared. We no longer fished together as we had as kids—lately he’d only done that with Benny—but now he wouldn’t even go to the tackle shop. I kept the kids he’d hired going by phone.
Sure enough, pretty soon Old Steadman showed up at my door. I thought he was going to haul me into court for the cost of the wood Gav had been cutting, the same way he’d tried to convince Judge Motts that we owed him rent and damages for the time our goat Cheddar got out and spent the night in the woods stripping the bark off his maples, but he surprised me by asking after Gavin. Then I remembered Ma telling me once that for about twelve years after Steadman came back from Vietnam, sometimes when he was walking around town, he would suddenly whip his cane into the air, and for a provocation no one else could reckon, sight along its length into the sky for a minute or more, then pick up walking again as if nothing had happened.
For the first time I invited him into my house and we trudged to my kitchen and looked out the window.
I’d been seeing less and less of Gavin, but the worn area where he did the chopping was as clear as a meteorite crater in the ground.
“Where’s the wood?” Steadman asked.
“I don’t know. He takes it somewhere. I honestly don’t know where he goes.”
Steadman frowned. “I don’t think that boy’s okay.”
“He’s got to be OK,” I said. “That’s the way we was raised. We don’t let nothing get over on us. I know it may look like he’s somewhere we can’t reach him, and maybe he is, but I got to believe in him.”
Steadman didn’t say he disagreed with this, but he didn’t say he agreed, neither. “Does he go to a group?”
I said I didn’t think so. “I think he’s got his own way.”
Steadman glared at the wood chop crater another moment, and didn’t say another word about the wood, but on the way out, he slipped me a card with the number for the veterans group. “You might could just leave this where he can find it.”
Independence Day came and went. We didn’t celebrate. We still ate together at the picnic table on occasion. Sometimes I wondered if I should try to talk Gavin into calling the number. He hardly said a word anymore. Only once, he said, “We were recon. It was our job to see things coming. We saved so many kids, you don’t even know. And we got home safe.” His eyes seemed dark and pupilless, smaller than before, like they’d narrowed their focus. His body, too, was changing, bulking up in the shoulders, maybe from the chopping.
One time I saw him sitting hunched up on his screen porch, eying the shadows in the woods like he was waiting for something dark and terrible. I wanted to go take the grief offa him so bad. I let myself through his screen door and sat on his camp stool. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t start up, but he seemed to puff up a bit at my presence and crouched closer and we watched the woods together until the dusk started to fall. Then his eyes narrowed, he went into the house, and I heard him go right back out the side door.
As the summer wore on, he kept to his new schedule. He woke so early now, I was rarely up in time to see him come out. Some days I didn’t see him go in or out at all. I wasn’t even sure he was always home. When I did see him, I saw he’d taken to wearing a dark trench coat, though the weather was still hot and blustery. It engulfed his whole body in iridescent black, the waterproof fabric catching the blue light of the sky.
“What’s up with this?” I asked.
“Seasons are changing.” He shrugged. “I feel cold.” Under the coat, his shoulders looked distorted, like the coat was hiding something under its back flap.
About this time, someone told me they thought they’d seen him perched on the roof of the AgSouth Credit Union in the town square, huddled in his trench coat, head pulled tight between his shoulders, but when they looked a second time, he wasn’t there.
And then somebody said he’d been seen on the cell tower overlooking the football field, which didn’t make any sense to me at all. Was this another weird way to blow off steam, I wondered? I couldn’t see how.
Then people started looking at me funny and shutting up when I came into their aisle at the Piggly Wiggly. Millie, who’s on the same shift with me at the mall every third day, yanked me into the stockroom and told me I had to call someone about Gav.
“What for?” I asked.
That’s when I found out. “Shooter, that one,” people were saying. But it couldn’t be. Not my Gavin. Though a year younger, he’d always been the one who took the lead for both of us. Always trying to protect me. There was no way.
“He’s looking for vantage points,” Millie said.
“You got him all wrong,” I said. I tried to explain about looking over the cornfield and watching into the woods, but I couldn’t make it make sense to her and she started to look at me like maybe I was in on it.
I’m ashamed to say it, but a part of me started to wonder if Mr. Steadman, Millie, and, let’s face it, the whole town, weren’t right, and maybe I was like Ms. Davy’s horse Gus, who didn’t know he was getting sold for meat after he threw her son Raine into the arena rail, and who got into the trailer that last time just as willingly as if it were another Saturday ride to the Harmony Youth Rodeo for calf roping.
So after that, I had to know where Gavin was going. I started getting up before daybreak and looking through the woods for him before going off to the mall.
It took more than a week of traipsing before I finally heard a rustling in the hickory overhead that wasn’t like any sound I’d heard in the woods before. Way up the tree, maybe sixty feet high, I could just make out a makeshift platform among the branches. “Gavin,” I hollered. “Is that you?”
A head peeked out over the edge.
“How did you get up there? What are you doing?”
“Watching. I can see a lot further out from up here.”
The watching, again. “How long you gonna keep on with the watching?”
“I always been watching.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but not like this.”
He looked out over the treetops for a moment. “If something isn’t working,” he said. “Maybe you got to find a new way to be.” He pulled his head back out of sight.
I walked around the base of the tree, looking for maybe some handholds he’d nailed into the trunk or something so I could climb up, but there wasn’t anything like that. It just went straight up without a branch for at least half its height.
There was no way to get around what I had to say. “Gav! They’re saying you’re gonna shoot up the town.”
His head popped out again. “What? Why would I do that?” He was way up there, but I could tell he was glaring me down, like I could really have an answer to that.
“Well, I mean, sometimes people got to worry about things.”
The tree swayed a bit as he shifted position at the top. “How long you known me, sis?”
“The whole time.”
“Darn right. So you know that ain’t me.” I felt the hot shame of the breaking sun coming down on my head, cracking its way down to me even at the bottom of the woods. “People got no imagination. Like there’s but one way to deal with something. Like we can only think of the worst way out.”
After that, I didn’t pay any mind to what they said in town, and I didn’t pay any mind to the looks they gave me, either.
I only ever saw him on the ground once more after that. He swooped by outside my window, grabbing at something out on the dirt and then disappeared again before I could say anything.
I thought everything would just die down, that people would forget about their gossip and that everything would go back to normal. But that wasn’t the way it turned out.
I heard from people in the line at the prom shop that complaints were coming in. One person thought they’d seen his face flash by outside a second story window. Another said he’d squatted on the tailgate of his truck, watching kids in the playground at the elementary school we’d all gone to. It didn’t look good, and in a few more weeks the detectives turned up.
“We’re just worried about him, is all,” they said, but the questions they asked were all like where he went, what did he do with his time, what did we talk about, not how was he doing, how did he feel, or how was his health.
“We don’t talk about anything,” I told them, and it was true. I didn’t have to lie to tell them I didn’t fully know what he was about these days. “But he ain’t breaking the law,” I said. “He’s done nothing wrong.”
And no one besides Old Steadman ever came round to ask if he was okay. Not a one. Only Steadman came of a Saturday now and again and had a bottle of Cheerwine and a barbecue plate with me at the picnic table. The wood chop crater was grown back over in clover and we didn’t look at it anyway. We didn’t talk about where Gav was, but I think he knew.
It was only after the first snow and I hadn’t seen or heard anything for a couple of weeks that in the middle of the night I got woken by the barks of police dogs and a banging on my door.
“Where is he?”
I opened it, and they swarmed in, searching every corner. Flashlights bounced around inside Gavin’s house, too.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“We know he came back here. His truck’s outside.”
“From where? That truck ain’t been driven in weeks.”
A yelp came up among the dogs outside and someone started yelling, “The woods!”
I barely got my boots on in time to stomp after them.
I spotted Deputy Tillson—Kenny, who’d been between Gavin and I at school—and grabbed at his sleeve.
“You got to tell me,” I said.
Even in the frost, he was sweating. “Potential shooter up at the Terrapin Bar, guy with a rifle, but there was some kind of fight—maybe with a second shooter. We took the first one, but the other slipped away. The second guy—they’re saying it was Gavin’s coat.”
“No way Gavin would shoot up a bar,” I said. “It’s got to be something else.” But Kenny had already rejoined the throng advancing on Gavin.
My heart was like to break. I hadn’t spoken to Gavin since the time under the tree, and I didn’t want to see him in the way of whatever was about to happen.
The dogs were like pinballs, finding a scent and then losing it, running in all directions and back again, like Gavin had just touched down here and there and they couldn’t get a lock on his path. Maybe they would still decide this was all just a wild goose chase. They were just as like to lose him as find him, I thought. There was a lot of back and forth and shouting. But finally, we all wound up at the base of the towering hickory. They trained their beams toward his platform and taped off the area. We all had to wait while they crunched their four-wheel drive scissor lift through the woods.
Once it was set up, they sent up two guys in bulletproof vests. I expected maybe some screaming and a hail of bullets, but within five minutes they were back down on the ground and whispering in a huddle. Sheriff Clemson himself came over to me. “We need you to identify some things.”
Rising in the crane alongside the tree trunk was like ascending the mast of a ship. At the top, the structure he’d built was so much bigger than it looked from the ground. Intertwined branches formed the concave indentation which had cradled his body. The trench coat was balled up like a pillow. Strewn about were scraps of packaging, a fish carcass, and a half-pecked ear of corn from the neighbor’s field. More important, there were three or four large black feathers. Not large as in, a large bird, but the full length of a man’s arm or even longer. Putting my hand on one of them was like holding onto a railing.
“Don’t touch that,” Sheriff Clemson said.
I gave him the side eye, and before he could say another word, I climbed into the nest. For a moment, standing straight, I could see out over the entire town all the way to the lake. Not gonna lie, it hurt. I wished I’d found a way to climb up to where Gavin was before now, because I could see the appeal. From here, I should have been able to see anything coming.
For a split second, I felt the sway of the tree beneath me. It was almost like I was the one that was still and it was the earth slowly shifting under the tree, way down below. The next moment, Sheriff Clemson came to his senses and hauled me back onto the lift.
“That’s his coat,” I said.
When they finished searching both our houses and didn’t find what they expected, they dragged me down to the station. There are no guns, I told them, no notebooks, no explosives. That’s not Gavin. It’s nothing like that. What is it like? they asked, but I couldn’t tell them a thing that made sense, so they didn’t believe me. They took my statement and charged me with obstruction. It was Old Man Steadman who paid my bail and my court fees and got them to relax the charges. Later, I found out he’d had to sell a couple of acres of the wood to do it. They’d torn down Gavin’s nest, and I was pretty broken up about that, and because Steadman didn’t deserve to lose anything.
They put out all the bulletins and kept their search going for months, but no one ever saw Gavin again, and once the Terrapin shooter admitted he hadn’t had a partner, eventually people stopped their chatter.
Millie started talking to me again but said she didn’t understand why I didn’t just get over the whole thing. “You ain’t got a brother,” I told her, and I could see there was a part of her that wanted to say, “You don’t got one now, either, so maybe we’re alike now,” but luckily she never said it out loud, because I would have had to get bailed out by Mr. Steadman again.
I thought I’d get to the point where I’d stop wondering where he’d got to and whether it could really be better than the town we grew up in and loved even when it didn’t seem like it had come to the aid of either Benny or Gavin, but that didn’t happen for me. I thought about him twenty-four hours a day, walked in the woods looking for any sign of him, watched for him along the shoulder as I drove the quiet road to the lake to run the tackle booth. People told me the pain would dim, but it didn’t. I couldn’t stop feeling that I’d see him any second, that he’d be in his running shoes blowing off steam, or that I’d pull up to the taco stand and he’d be there making sure all the families got their boats in and out of the water safely.
But I’d been looking for the wrong thing. It was after the rains came the next autumn, right at the freezing point between slush and snow before they closed the Parkway for the winter, and I’d closed up the tackle booth for the season. I was winding down the hill toward the Parkway and all of a sudden a clattering of wings and claws hailed down on my windshield. Shit, I’ve hit something, I thought, and slammed the brakes hard, but that wasn’t it. It was this bird attacking the pickup until I was forced off the road just before the exit ramp from the Parkway. Before I knew it, Sheriff Clemson’s kid Josh came barreling down the ramp in his father’s Silverado and went for the brakes way too late. He screeched and slid into the road right where my truck had been headed, skidded across its surface and nose planted into the bank on the other side. My heart was pounding like half-time.
When I got out of the truck, the giant hawk was sitting calmly on my roof. I ran across the road to the Silverado. I could smell the Crown Royal before I even pulled open Josh’s door. He was limp as a cornmeal sack, but he wasn’t hurt bad and babbled about getting home to see some stupid television show. I pulled him clear and then looked back to Gavin’s Ranger, thinking how close I’d come to being in the path of the Silverado. The hawk shifted his weight from claw to claw, holding onto the roof rack as it watched me for a second, then launched into the air. As it climbed into the sky, it didn’t get smaller with the distance as I expected. Instead, it seemed to swell in size, till it was the breadth of a man.
After that, I started seeing hawks everywhere I looked. Of course, there’s always hawks everywhere, always have been, but I’m pretty sure I was seeing the same one, sitting on the tops of buildings in town, looking down over the traffic on the streets, on the fence of the playground watching in all directions. No one ever said anything specific, but when I looked into it, I found our accident rate was down in the town. Not another stoned teenager ever fell into the lake during a late-night fishing trip. No unattended toddler ever drowned in a swimming pool again. I even heard calls to the veterans hotline were down and I liked to think it was for the same reason I felt comforted at night, when I’d sit on Gavin’s screen porch. I’d be selling Gavin’s house and paying Old Man Steadman back, but I couldn’t bear it just yet. I’d watch the darkness in the woods creeping up as night fell, and near every night, I’d see what looked like the same hawk, setting on the laundry pole near the picnic table, its sleek head hunched between its shoulders. We’d sit like that together for up to an hour sometimes, quiet and companionable, before it took off into the night, maybe to take shifts with people all across town who might be sitting up late with their troubles, and it comforted me to know that there were a lot of ways to be in the world, even if we didn’t always understand them, even if we never really knew what path our lives would take.
Kiran Kaur Saini’s stories have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. At the start of the pandemic, she left her career in film production to care for her elderly mom. In her spare time, she practices Szymanowski and Mompou preludes on her family’s 1927 reproducing piano.
Translunar Travelers Lounge 