Legend of a Suicide Read Free Page A

one-eyed,” my grandmother whispered to my grandfather, loud enough so we all could hear.
    “Jesus,” my father said.
    “That’s okay,” Rhoda’s sister said. “We know it’s meant well.
    It’s just the situation that’s awkward, is all.”
    “That’s right,” my grandmother chimed in. “That’s what I was trying to say.”
    “She’s coming,” I whispered.
    Rhoda gave us all a careful looking-over as she sat down. “You’ve been talking about me, haven’t you?”
    “Well, of course,” my grandmother said, smiling. “You’re the bride.”
     
    My father and Rhoda didn’t have a honeymoon. They had me for the weekend instead, and they gave me presents. This was a form of bribery, perhaps.
    I was on the porch, watching the sun go down between two mountains, the air warm and dry. I could hear the sucking noises of quail in the bushes. The guests had all left, and the only sign that remained of the wedding was the smoldering hibachi.
    “Happy Wedding!” my father and Rhoda both sang out as they stepped onto the porch.
    Rhoda gave me a Walkman. I must have looked a little stunned, because she frowned again. I wasn’t used to expensive presents. Then my father handed me my first gun, a .30-.30 carbine for deer.
    “Try it out,” he said. “There’s a gray squirrel up there.” He pointed to the large oak in front of us.
    I had seen the squirrel, too—about twenty feet up. I could have hit it with a Wiffle ball.
    “It isn’t loaded,” I said.
    “There’s a shell in the chamber. Just pull back the hammer.”
    I pulled back the hammer and aimed at that squirrel. He was eating something, turning it over and over in his hands, with spindly black fingers, his gray cheeks pink now in the light and rippling as he munched, one eye looking right at me. I pulled the trigger and saw a chunk of meat fly from him like a small red bird. He seemed to explode. There was the sound of rain through the trees as bits of him fell back to earth.
    “You got him,” Rhoda said.
    That evening, we drove into town, to Rhoda’s parents’ house, and I met Rhoda’s mother. She sat on a barstool chain-smoking and drinking the whole time we were there. She had a dog about the same length as a squirrel, but shaved and fattened, with a smashed face and angry little eyes; the thing hid under her stool growling so loudly it was hard for us to hear each other. Every now and then, Rhoda’s mother would yell, “Shut up, Prune!” and stretch her leg down to kick it. The dog would run across the kitchen, toenails clicking and slipping on the linoleum, then run back, spitting a little as it breathed.
    Rhoda’s mother told me, in a smoker’s rasp, “You’re a good kid, aren’t you.”
    Rhoda’s father had invited my father back to his gun room, where he had a fair collection, he had said, of shotguns and pistols.
    “How are you, Mom?” Rhoda asked at some point far into the conversation. It sounded as if she hadn’t talked with her mother for a while.
    “Your bastard father wants to leave me.”
    There was a long and ugly pause before Rhoda spoke. “You know that’s not true, Mom. That’s never been true.”
    “Okay. Things were never better, then.” She took another swallow from her drink. “But you just got married again. Off to good times, right?” Rhoda’s mother poured herself another drink and looked at me. “So what do you like to do.”
    She breathed smoke out her mouth into her nose. Her slacks were pink, and she had hooked her slippers under the bottom rung of the barstool. Her little dog was staring at my shins.
    “I don’t,” I said.
    She laughed, then coughed, then looked at me suspiciously. I had meant to say, “I don’t know,” but had lost the final word somewhere.
    “He’s only twelve, Mom,” Rhoda was saying.
    “He’s a good kid.” Her mother winked at me, then ground out her cigarette in an ashtray. “Hey, Billy!” she yelled down the hallway. “What’s so damn interesting about