The Marsh King's Daughter(57)

I set up the Ruger one last time and watch my father through the scope. He of course looks older than I remember. He looks thinner. The dead man’s clothes hang loosely on his frame. His hair and beard are gray, and his skin is wrinkled and sallow. In the photo the police are circulating, my father looks as scraggly and wild-eyed as Charles Manson. I assumed they chose the most intimidating picture they could find so there’d be no question my father is dangerous. In person, he looks even worse: cheeks as hollow as a cadaver’s, eyes sunk so deep into their sockets that he looks like the wendigo from his old sweat lodge stories. Now that I’m seeing him for the first time as an adult, I realize precisely how unhinged he looks. I suppose, to my mother, he always did.

My father has my dog in a choke hold, the cut end of the leash wrapped several times around his left hand. He carries a Glock in his right. I imagine the other guard’s weapon is beneath his jacket in the back of his jeans. Rambo trots along easily on the creek bank beside him. Not for the first time, I marvel at how effortlessly my dog moves with only three legs. The vet who put him back together after the bear incident told me a lot of hunters would have put down a dog that severely injured. I took this to mean that if I couldn’t afford the surgery to fix him, she’d understand. Most of the people who live in the Upper Peninsula have a hard enough time taking care of their families, let alone paying for an expensive operation for an animal, no matter how much they want to. I could tell she was happy when I told her I’d rather give up bear hunting than give up my dog.

I track my father through the scope as he continues toward me, unaware. I used to fantasize about killing him when I was a child—not because I wanted to, but because he’d planted the idea when he changed the rules of our tracking game. I’d watch him for a long time after I found him, thinking about what it would be like if I shot him instead of the tree. How killing my father would make me feel. What my mother would say when she found out I was now the head of our family.

As I watch him walk ever closer, I think again about killing him—this time, for real. From this distance and angle I could take him down easily. Put a bullet through his heart or head, and the game would be over without his even realizing I’d won. I could shoot him in the gut. Make him bleed out slowly and painfully as payback for what he did to my mother. I could shoot him in the shoulder or in the knee. Hurt him badly enough that he wouldn’t be going anywhere without a stretcher. Go home, call the police as soon as I can pick up a signal, and tell them where to collect him.

So many choices.

Back at the cabin, my father and I used to play a guessing game where he’d hide some small object he knew I’d like in one hand—a piece of smooth white quartz or an unbroken robin’s egg—and I had to choose which hand held the treasure. If I guessed correctly, I got to keep it. If not, my father threw the treasure in our garbage pit. I remember trying so hard to reason it out. If my father held the treasure in his right hand the last time we played, did that mean that this time the treasure would be in his left? Or would he hold it in his right hand again to trick me? Perhaps several times? I didn’t realize then that reason and logic had nothing to do with the outcome. No matter which hand I chose, the odds of guessing correctly remained the same.

This is different. This time there is no wrong call. I take off the safety. Slip my finger through the trigger and hold my breath and count to ten.

And shoot.

—

I WAS TERRIFIED the first time I shot my father. I remain astounded that he let me do it. I try to imagine putting a gun in Iris’s hands and telling her to point it at me and pull the trigger—and, oh, yes, make sure you miss—and I simply can’t picture it. I doubt I would ever consider doing such a thing with Mari, either, no matter how good a shot she turns out to be. It’s reckless to the point of being suicidal. And yet this is exactly what my father did.

This happened the summer I was ten. We didn’t play our tracking game in the winter because after there was snow on the ground, following my father’s trail would have been too easy, and we didn’t play in the late fall or in the early spring after the leaves had fallen or before the trees had budded out for the same reason. Only when the foliage was lush and dense was tracking a person through the forest a true challenge, my father said. This is also the time of year when the bugs are at their worst. You have to admire the self-control it must have taken him to sit in the swamp for hours while he waited for me to find him, bugs swarming and biting but my father resisting the urge to swat or even to twitch.

My father explained the new game rules at breakfast. After I found him, I had two options. I could shoot into the tree he would be hiding behind, either beside him or above his head, or I could shoot into the dirt near his feet.

If I didn’t find him—or worse, if I was too scared to take the shot when I did—I would have to give up something that was important to me. We would begin with the National Geographic issue with the pictures of the Vikings that I’d hidden under my bed. I don’t know how my father even knew it was there.

My father took me in his canoe to a ridge where I had never been. I was blindfolded to make it harder to judge how far we’d traveled and how much time had passed, and also so I wouldn’t be able to see which direction he went when we got there. I was very nervous. I didn’t want to shoot my father. I did want to keep my Geographic. I thought a lot about my two options. Shooting into the dirt would be easier and safer than shooting into a tree because the bullet would bury itself in the sand and be less likely to ricochet and hurt either me or my father. Also, if I missed the dirt shot and accidentally hit my father, shooting him in the leg or in the foot would be a lot less traumatic than shooting him in the chest or head.