Settlement

The Death of David Martin

Tijuana c. 1997. Myself on the left. David Martin on the right. About a year later he shot himself in the head while his father was mowing the lawn.

That detail always moves me to silence. His father was mowing the lawn, an activity inherently bent toward the future.

Outside the father is preparing the home for tomorrow while in the bathroom the son has a gun to his head.

Terminus. All-stop. The plane is at the gate. The passengers are on their feet.

It’s November when David’s father hears the shot. The blades halt, the lawn half-cut around the swimming pool. He listens, stooped for a distraction. Empty the grass catcher, he thinks. It was nothing. A car backfire. His wife and other children are away at a soccer game. Summer. Cicadas. Cool blue light. About 6:30 in the evening.

For a long time I wondered if he looked in the mirror when he did it. But I’ve decided that’s just me wanting him to look in the mirror with a gun to his head. It’s too much. Overly cinematic. No such thing happened. He sat on the floor, curled into a ball and shot himself in the head.

People who went to the house the next day said that his mother was washing bloody handprints off the doorjambs. It seems there was a rush to save him. To get in some last words. He was alive long enough to make them want closure.

In the end he bled out in the hallway, deaf and blind, sputtering last fixtures. Then it was just visitors staring at red fingerprints. How like humans to see death in blood, in the immediate spray.

The lawnmower is the real thing. Go into the backyard and look at the silent lawnmower. The grass catcher unlatched, the wet green mulch. Go back and see the father’s hands just letting off the push-bar, the long grass yet uncut rising back inside his footprints as he lifts his feet, steps away, heads to the house to ruin his world.