Two Swans, One Shot

I saw it out of the corner of my eye as my boat came around the bend in the river: a flash of brilliant white in a country filled with color, like seeing a patch of snow among the vibrant foliage smeared across the tundra. I cut the engine and glided in. As the boat nestled into the mud, I peered over the edge of the land and saw a sleek white neck standing out against the red and gold and green. A swan. The head darted left and right as if following the diminishing echo of the engine. I grabbed the anchor and my shotgun, quietly speared the anchor into the wet tundra, and crept on my belly toward the small lip of land that hid me from sight. I rested there for a moment to steady my breathing. The wake of my boat spread out across the river, quietly absorbed by the long grass at the river’s edge undulating as the wave worked its way through the stalks.

The red light on my answering machine was blinking as I walked into my new home, an old contractor’s cabin, up the hill from the school. It was my first year as a principal. Or at least it would be in a few weeks when classes started. I had spent the summer in Tununak, preparing. I was nervous.

I pushed the button on the machine. The miniature cassette tape rewound, and I heard a slight buzz before the voice echoed in the largely empty room: “Brett… stay in your house. Don’t go outside. Someone has a gun.”

I looked out my window but saw nothing. No one outside. No kids playing. Tununak is largely situated on a narrow spit of land between the Bering Sea and the river that runs parallel to the sea before doubling back and heading inland. No four wheelers moved from “downtown” up to housing. Looking down at the haphazard collection of houses strewn across the spit, I could tell something was wrong.

I was still looking out the window, admittedly not a good idea, about an hour later when the phone rang, startling me.

“You all right.”

“Yeah,” I said, not recognizing the voice on the phone.

“They got them.”

“Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh… OK. Wait, they got who?”

“Couple of boys. Got drunk. Were shooting guns at houses. Guess they threatened someone,” my cook explained.

The boys were eighteen and twenty. One was supposed to start his senior year in a couple of weeks. The two boys had imbibed a bunch of homebrew. Prepared in a bucket with raisins, sugar, and bread yeast, the mixture is alcoholic enough after twenty-four hours to get you drunk, but it’s a violent concoction often with a violent drunk. These two, for reasons unknown, had grabbed a couple of guns, a twelve-gauge shotgun and a .22 and fired a number of rounds at buildings in town.

I imagine they found some great entertainment in this turn of events at first. As the alcohol took its intended effect there was probably elation their plan had worked. Before long, teenage hubris, soured by drink, set them off on a rampage of terror. Gunshots echoed through town. Shotgun pellets thwacked into the sides of plywood houses. Doors normally propped open were slammed and locked until the pair, fueled by drink and demons and darkness lost sight of the lucid world, busted down a door and entered a home, the shotgun leveled to kill.

Two heads swiveled on long graceful necks. A pair of swans. I ducked back down, my breathing rapid. I positioned my knees under me. One shot. Focus on one shot. If I was lucky, I could get off one shot before they took flight. Once they were in the air, my chances of hitting either of them diminished exponentially.

I had been here before hunting swans on this river, a decade ago, in a different boat, with a different gun held by a different man. The birds had panicked and become tangled in the overhanging brush protruding from the muddy bank, hunks of tundra thawing and dropping off the solid earth. Trapped, they were easy targets. Two quick shots, dead bodies dropped in the bow, and we were back on the hunt.

The birds were close. I checked the safety on my shotgun and clicked it. One shot. I steadied myself. Get off one good shot. I paid attention to my breathing. Aim for the head. I visualized what I was about to do, pop to a knee, level the gun and fire. One shot. Breath. Ready? Go.

I pushed hard off the spongy ground, calf muscles straining in the rubber boots and planted a knee. The gun was rising even as I settled into position, my torso above the edge of the bank. I focused on the swan a couple dozen yards ahead of me. Both heads turned quickly, black eyes wide, wings feathered out, their white wingspan spreading brilliant across the crimson and gold leaves on blueberry shrubs and low bush cranberries. My finger tensed on the trigger, resting on the thinnest of lines between life and death, the slightest pressure and the world would explode in thunder and feathers and blood.

“Good morning, Tununak School, this is Brett.” I answered the phone in my most cheerful voice which is never easy and I hope doesn’t sound fake or sarcastic.

“May I speak to the principal?”

“You’ve got him,” I said, still trying to sound both confident and cheerful but feeling neither. It was day four. On day two, a kindergartner bit one of my aides and ran out the front door after calling me a four-syllable word that rhymed with trucker. His enunciation was perfect.

“Mr. Stirling, this is Sergeant Reid with the Alaska State Troopers.”

“Yes sir, how can I help you?” Day three had left me covered in mud and wreaking of diesel as I tried to help with a fuel leak under the school.

“Do you have a Thomas Noah enrolled in your school?” Day four was not starting well.

“Ah…yes,” I said. Thomas had been one of the two boys arrested for shooting up town two weeks prior. Yet he had walked into the school on the first day as if nothing had happened, ready for his senior year. The court in Bethel had not called. The troopers had not contacted me until now. And the district office had no answers. So I greeted him at the door like every other student, plugged him into the schedule and handed him a book for Algebra two.

“We are coming to pick him up,” the officer said. “We are in Toksook.”

They had already flown the 120 miles from Bethel and were now waiting seven miles over the hill to make their snatch and grab.

“You need to pick us up at the airport.”

“OK,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Is he at school?”

“I haven’t seen him yet, hang on.” I opened my office door. “Is Thomas here?”

“Not yet,” my secretary replied.

I turned back to the phone and shut the door louder than I intended. “He’s not here.”

“Then you will need to take us to his house.”

“OK,” I said.

“Once we get off the ground, we will land in four minutes. We will not announce ourselves. You need to be there when we land.”

“OK,” I repeated for the third time, the conversation too surreal for any other response.

I hung up the phone, told my secretary I had to go to the airport and left. It might have been a four-minute flight from Toksook, but driving the three quarters of a mile to the airport took at least twice that. The road between the houses on the spit was a pothole strewn, puddle filled, axel-breaking mess.

As I turned away from the ocean to cross the tiny bridge spanning our river and connecting town to the runway, the nose of the Suburban pointed in the direction of Toksook Bay. The unmistakable blue taildragger of the Alaska State Troopers was flying in fast, maybe two hundred feet above the tundra, set up for a landing. The plane touched down, taxied in and hid behind the large building that housed the snowplow. Two troopers got into the Suburban. The pilot stayed with the plane to guard against vandalism. Trooper Reid shut the door and said, “Let’s go.”

A few minutes later I was idling in the middle of the road in front of Thomas’s father’s house as the two troopers walked him down the rickety steps of the arctic entry jutting from the house like an afterthought. He was handcuffed and looked like he had just woken up.

Again, trooper Reid sat shotgun and said “Let’s go.” As we made the teeth jarring drive up to the school where I had been told to go, I tried to focus on the road ahead. The vibrant tall grass lining the road rippled as we passed. The homes lining the street must have once been bright but were now pale memories of purple, blue, and red. The sky was clouded. Deep clouds hung over everything on the island as if a torrent of rain was about to fall. We lumbered through a particularly deep puddle, water splashing up to wet the mirrors. Thomas was looking out the window. He did not appear nervous or particularly concerned, perhaps because this was the second time in two weeks he has been brought into custody, his recent freedom the result of a clerical error.

“Sorry, Brett,” Thomas said from the back seat.

I looked up into the mirror and saw him staring straight at me. Our eyes locked for a second, and then I had to turn back to the road as I tried to avoid more potholes.

“I left that Algebra book at my dad’s.”

I looked back to the mirror. He had dropped his gaze and was staring out the window again.

“It’s all right, Thomas,” I said, “I’m sure I can get it from your father.”

I don’t know what made me release my grip on the trigger. I just knew something was wrong. Like the smell emanating from the Labrador tea crunched under my boots, it was all around. I paused, finger still on the trigger, safety still off, eyes still trained down the barrel at the pair of swans frantically shuffling across the mossy ground, wings beating but earthbound.

I could see their wild eyes clearly. The panic was as clear as if it had been in the mirror. I lowered the shotgun and stared. The birds ran a few yards away. They had not risen on those massive wings into the sky dotted with fat clouds. I stood properly, and took the three steps up the remaining edge of the creek bank to the level ground. Before me, the birds paused and turned and continued again waddling across the tundra in the wake of my giant shadow.

They stopped. I walked. They paced in quick circles. I edged closer. Forty yards. They huddled together. Thirty. Necks twisting and bumping each other. Twenty five. They refused to take flight. Twenty. I raised the barrel again. I could see the individual feathers spread at the wing tips. I tensed my finger on the trigger and they stared at me with deep onyx eyes. Their heads bumped awkwardly, and they stopped moving, startled, as if waiting.

“I want to make myself very clear,” I said as I faced Thomas in my office. “You have one shot at this. You will work next door, and you will be done before Christmas. If you do not finish before Christmas then this opportunity is over. I will not have a twenty-one-year-old man coming to school.”

“I understand,” he said.

“And I’m not going to have any problems.”

“No sir.”

“OK, then let’s get to work.”

“Thanks, Brett.”

“You’re welcome,” I said and led Thomas down the hallway to the office of my home school liaison who would be supervising Thomas as he worked independently on the last two classes he needed to graduate from our high school.

I had a feeling I was making the wrong decision. Two years had passed since the moment in the rearview mirror of the Suburban. I had received the call in the spring. Thomas was being released from prison and wanted to return to Tununak. I was asked what his options were. He had done well in their program. I tried to explain that there weren’t any good options. He only needed two classes. I wasn’t offering those classes in the fall. He could have finished school in jail, but wanted to graduate in Tununak. I reiterated: he was twenty.

Years ago, as a teacher I had a student who struggled. He made mistakes and as a new teacher, I did too. He did not earn a diploma, and I have always felt personally responsible despite the fact a majority of the blame rested with our principal at the time. My principal for those five years had no business being in charge of anything let alone a school. His decisions hurt kids’ futures. I was not going to be that principal.

Thomas made a bad decision: a bucket of booze and a shotgun. There were consequences, but there was hope too. The hope of mistakes made and lessons learned. The hope of an educator who wanted to see boys become men, girls become women. A simple hope for the future. Hope helps weather the days when kids or parents call you names that rhyme with trucker.

As my third year started, I was more experienced. The sewer had backed up into the kitchen my first fall. I shot the rabid fox on the front steps that same winter. And we survived the food shortage when planes couldn’t land for nineteen days the previous winter. The year started calmly enough, and Thomas, true to his word, worked in relative solitude near the office. And then October hit.

One Friday morning, a bunch of kids were late to school. Really late. And then the girl stumbled in after ten. She just walked in the front door, slunk into the office and plopped herself down on my floor. She had not slept. She was still drunk and couldn’t go home. She was scared and crying and then asleep. She slept for hours on the floor of my office.

Later that week, Thomas was gone. The troopers had come to town. Thomas and another man were taken back into custody for parole violations.

A few weeks later, I was sitting at a filthy plastic folding table in the suffocatingly hot community center briefing the city council on events at school including my concern about our students’ access to drugs and alcohol in our supposedly dry community. One of the council members, an ornery man from Arkansas who had married into town, was questioning me. Earlier in the year, like my kindergartner, he had called me a four-syllable word that rhymed with trucker. In the front hallway of our school. At 8:30 in the morning. In front of dozens of students.

“I’d like to know what happened to one of your seniors, Thomas Noah,” he said. From his body language, the way he was leaning into the table, he was not happy with me and the interrogation was just beginning.

I mustered a polite response hoping the matter would drop.

“It is my understanding he violated the conditions of his parole,” I said.

“Really?” he said, sounding exasperated. “And just how come the troopers happened to come out here? Huh?”

I looked at him for a second, he was not going to let this go. His face was getting pink. There was no reason to avoid it now. “Because I told them too,” I said flatly.

“You… did what? Why?” he stuttered. His anger was visible to everyone in the room and his voice was rising in both volume and pitch.

“The other day a girl walked into school drunk,” I said, “A lot of our students were at the party, so I called the troopers to report it.”

“Now what?” he shouted. He was leaning on the rickety table. It slid across the peeling linoleum floor. “Is he going to graduate? Will he be welcomed back?”

“No,” I said, “He will not graduate from our school. Look, Thomas knew the expectations. I have one hundred and twenty-five other students to think about including four and five-year-olds, so if you think I made the wrong decision let me know right now, because you’ve got the wrong principal.”

The man, mouth open, looked ready to unload on me when the chairman turned to him and said, “You can shut up now.” I felt good. Vindicated. Still, despite what I said out loud, I wasn’t entirely sure I had made the right decision.

The swans stood still, staring at me with their dark eyes, a tiny speck of gold above the beak. Waiting. One shot. Nearly four years had passed since that meeting. Aim for the head. Since I had left Tununak. I was a father now and so, I had heard, was Thomas. The pair of swans were frozen in front of me; we stared at each other. My son was four and my daughter nearly two. Even flightless, their grace, the flapping of the wide white wings, laid out so close, so perfect, gave the impression of flight arrested. My wife and kids were awaiting my return while I was here on this creek, staring down the barrel of a gun at another pair of swans. I took a step. My daughter was walking now, caterwauling steps everywhere, fearless. Another step forward, the barrel leveled. One shot. The two swans fled. They hopped and scrambled off-balance on the uneven ground. And I let them go, lowering the shotgun and flicking the safety back on. Say good-bye.

“Tununak man charged with killing his 2-year old son.” The words made a sentence. They conveyed meaning. And yet the meaning was unfathomable. The newspaper said Thomas used a shotgun. They found the body down the beach from town. I had read the article more than once hoping the words would be different. One shot. Say good-bye to your aunt. A father’s reassuring voice and then the trigger. I know that beach, I know the shot rang out loud and deep and echoed off the cliffside and out over the quiet waves of the Bering Sea and the blood ran between tiny stones to wash into the salty waters.

As I watched the two swans retreat across the speckled earth, I felt the earth spin hard and sat heavily on the spongy ground. I was out of breath. Tears came quickly. Another bucket of homebrew. Another shotgun. Two figures walking down a beach together, a father and son. Say goodbye. And then a decision never to be undone. One shot. I could find no answers in me or in the blue sky above, and I just sat there among the blueberries and hard little cranberries where nobody would see me cry. Over my shoulder, the two swans receded into the distance, their brilliant shapes so out of place in this world.