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.”
“She says you need a woman.”
“Your mother sees all this in me? How about Tom? How come she didn’t see it in her own son?”
I regretted it as soon as I said it, but Vinnie just laughed. “Your own family,” he said. “That’s different.”
We both seemed to want to leave it alone for a while, so another hour passed as we made our way down to White River.
“You know what we should be doing?” I finally said.
“What’s that?”
“You said you were at the duty-free shop when Tom left with those guys. But you didn’t see them.”
“No. Just the van. Why, what are you thinking?”
“I’m just wondering,” I said. “If they came this way on their way up, and then again on their way back down, somebody must have seen them.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Vinnie said. “How many places could they stop?”
“We’re about to hit one of them,” I said. “Here comes White River.”
The road ended at Highway 17. That plus the railroad going through was excuse enough to put a town there. White River had three different places where you could get something to eat and drink. “If you were a rich guy passing through,” Vinnie said, “which one would you stop at?”
“They all look about the same to me,” I said. I stopped at the first establishment, a little cinder block bar and restaurant called the T-Spot. It turned out to be a real momand-pop operation, with card tables spread out all over the place and a tiny bar that looked like it had once been in somebody’s basement. We ordered a couple of cheeseburgers from a lady who looked like she owned the place. Hell, she looked like she had built it herself. When we asked her why she called it the T-Spot, she looked at us like we were idiots and asked if we had noticed the two highways forming a T in the middle of town.
“I’ve got another question for you,” I said. “Eleven days ago, six men came through here on their way to a hunting trip.”
“Five men,” Vinnie said.
“Yeah, maybe five. They would have come back through again four days ago.”
“Well, let’s see. Men on their way to hunt. In October. Hey, Earl!” she called behind her. “Have we seen any men on hunting trips the past few days?”
“I haven’t been counting them,” he said, without even looking up. “I’d guess around a thousand.”