“I can’t face them.”
That was enough for me. I slammed on the brakes, just about sending him through the windshield. “Listen,” I said, as he fell back into his seat. “I’ve had enough of this, all right? You want me to tell you it was a stupid thing to do? Okay, I’ll say it. It was stupid. It was damned stupid. It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do. And yeah, everybody in your family is gonna be pissed off at you. And yeah, I would be, too. Okay? Have we settled that now?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Yes, we’ve settled that.”
“Okay, then.”
I put the truck back on the road and drove. Vinnie didn’t say anything for another hour, until we hit Hornepayne. There was no train this time, so the whole town flashed right by us like an idle thought. There was nothing but open road again, and the headlights against the trees. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Don’t you want to know why?”
“Why what?”
“Why I let Tom come up here?”
“You told me,” I said. “You thought you were helping him. You thought he could use the money.”
“No, that’s not why.”
“So tell me.”
He settled back in his seat, looked out into the night. “About a month ago,” he said, “I was coming home from the casino. It was like ten o’clock at night. I stopped by my mother’s house, but it didn’t look like anybody was home. I mean, the cars were all gone. The place was dark. So I figured, okay, they’re all over at the healing center in Garden River or something. I’m about to back out of the driveway, and I notice that the porch light isn’t on. Which is the first weird thing. The second weird thing is that there’s a light on in the house. Believe me, when my mother leaves the house, she turns every light off, except the one on the porch. And God help you if you mess that up.”
“I believe it.”
“I went inside to see what was going on. At the very least, I figured maybe somebody else had left the house after she had. I was thinking I’d be saving somebody a lot of abuse if I turned that light off in the house and turned the porch light on. But when I got inside, I thought I heard something from one of the back rooms. I called out, you know, ‘Hey, anybody home?’ Nobody answered. But then another noise. It was dark, and hell, it had been a long day, so maybe my imagination got the best of me. I was thinking maybe it was a burglar back there, so I grabbed a fireplace poker, just like in the movies. I go down the hallway real slow, holding that poker, listening for somebody. And then I see there’s a light on in the bathroom.”
He stopped for a moment, took a deep breath.
“So I called out again,” he went on. “‘Hey, who’s there?’ Nobody answered. So I went up to the door and I opened it.”
He stopped again. There was nothing but the sound of the tires on the road, and the cold air whistling by.
“Who was it?” I said.
“It was Tom. He had stayed home, all by himself. You wanna know why?”
I didn’t even try to answer.
“He stayed home so he could hang himself with an extension cord in the shower.”
I kept driving. I waited for him to start talking again.
“His face was blue, Alex,” he finally said. “It was actually blue. A minute later and he would have been dead. I grabbed him and tried to lift him in the air. And he started fighting me, kicking me all over. It was just… I was so mad, Alex. It’s almost funny looking back on it. I wasn’t mad that he was trying to kill himself. I was mad that he was doing it in the bathroom. That was my first thought. This is the bathroom my uncles worked so hard on. Putting in all that new tile and the sink and the bathtub and the separate shower stall. And they’re all gonna come home in a little while and find your dead stinking body hanging there.”
He rubbed one hand over his face and through his hair.
“In the bathroom, Alex. God damn it. If you’re gonna kill yourself, you go up to the old graveyard on Mission Hill. You know what I mean? You say hello to your ancestors and then you jump off the cliff. Just walk right out into the sky. That’s how you kill yourself.”
“So what happened?” I said.
“Well, at that point I’m fighting him, trying to get him down, and the stupid shower rod breaks. We both go falling in the shower and I just about crack my head open. The extension cord was coming loose and he’s getting his breath back. He’s trying to yell at me, and trying to punch me. I could have killed him right there. I could have strangled him with my bare hands. Which was kinda weird, I guess, after I stopped him from killing himself. But finally he gives up fighting me and he’s just lying there, half in the shower and half out. He starts crying. I sat there with him for, what, maybe thirty minutes, just sitting there watching him cry. I finally asked him, ‘Why, Tom? Why were you gonna do that?’ And he says, ‘This is the only way out. It’s either go back to prison, or this.’”
“Okay,” I said, after another long silence. “So how does that end up with you sending him up here?”
“You’ve got to understand, the only jobs he’s ever had aside from leading hunts were either washing dishes or cleaning toilets. He can’t even work at the casino, now that he has a record. It’s just more of the same. Hell, I’d be going crazy, too.”
“You wouldn’t try to kill yourself.”
“Who knows, Alex? Who really knows? If I had to stay in that house, with everybody looking at me all the time like I was a criminal.”
“So what then?”
“I told him just to hold on, you know? Just give me some time to help him. And then when this thing came along. Three thousand dollars for a week of hunting. Only problem was, it was in Canada. There’s no way they would have let him leave the country.”
“Vinnie, I know it’s good money, but-”
“It’s more than that. Don’t you get it? You know why he loves doing hunts so much? Same reason I do. It sounds kinda stupid, but going out on a hunt makes you remember who you are. I mean, most of the time, you’re just hanging out with your own people, you know, doing regular stuff, sitting around or going to work, whatever. Then you go out in the woods with a bunch of white guys and all of a sudden they’re treating you like you’re fucking Geronimo. Like you’re this amazing, wild Indian shaman who can hear messages in the wind and talk to the animals and learn their secrets. At first, you think, okay, these white guys are totally into some kind of cartoon character they saw on television. But then you realize, shit, they’re right. I am different. My ancestors, they did know all this stuff. And I’m still a part of it. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I get it. So you decided-”
“He needed this, Alex. He really needed this. Otherwise-”
I shook my head.
“It was either that or let him kill himself,” Vinnie said. “That was my choice. If I hadn’t let him go, he’d be dead. No doubt about it.”
I slowed down to let a string of deer run across the empty road. We watched five of them go by, white tails flashing in the headlights. I waited another few seconds. There’s always one more.
Then it came. The sixth deer, smaller than the rest. It jumped into the brush, following the rest of its family.
“What would you have done?” he said.
“I’d have to think about it,” I said.
“You of all people should understand.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’ve been there.”
I looked over at him. “Excuse me?”
“It’s like my mother said, you carry around so much pain, and you won’t let anybody else help you carry it. She says you have such a lonely heart, it’s hard to even look at you.”
“All right,” I said, “can we leave me and my lonely heart out of this? I think I’m doing a lot better now, anyway.”
