“You don’t know how to die.”
“What?”
“You’re no good at dying. You’ve got no bravado. No chutzpah. Admit it,” Louisa said.
Orson said nothing, but he knew she was right. Orson Lovelace did not know how to die. And everybody knew it. He wasn’t even barely worth killing.
What everyone also knew was that all the chasing and crouching behind sagebrush, the belly-crawling on the ground through knapweed, the effort to stifle your beating heart, to quiet your breath—the whole game of war—was all just a setup for the finale. It was all building toward the climax, that inevitable, sweet, cathartic explosion. It was the reason they were all there. To die. Everyone came for the killing, but stayed for the dying.
It was true: Orson had never been good at dying. He had always had reservations about his fall, about the gagging. He was tentative and half-hearted. Not convincing at all. Self-conscious and clumsy. Paralyzed with fear and riddled with self-doubt, he just couldn’t commit to it.
Not like his cousin Danny. Tanned and lanky, muscular and handsome, the older Danny would visit from Butte every summer. And every summer, the envy Orson felt for Danny simmered to a boil. As Louisa grew and began to mature, Orson suspected that Danny had begun to notice her. He saw the way Louisa watched Danny, and it made Orson’s face burn with jealousy.
Danny was nothing if not gusto. Everyone who played wanted to kill Danny. He was the prize kill. He was the most fun to watch die. He had mastered the art. There was nothing premeditated, nothing artificial about it—the jolts from invisible rounds, the gurgling. He died with passion, with style, panache. As if he was born to do it. Yes, Danny was born to die.
The last summer they played war was the last time Orson ever saw Danny. After hours of hiding and running, crouching and chasing under the hot August sun, Danny had taken a small rowboat to the center island of Dead Man’s Pond. No more than four feet in diameter, he balanced gracefully on the rocky land mass. He was practically begging to be shot. They’d all aimed, surrounding him from every direction along the banks of the pond, and several imaginary gunshots whirled past his head as he gracefully dodged them. But it was Louisa’s invisible bullet that struck Danny right in the heart. He had given her that unspeakable honor. The force shook his torso in multiple directions. In slow motion, he jolted backward, limbs slowly grasping at the air as he flung himself into the muddy swamp water.
Everyone stood mesmerized, as if suspended in time, frozen in motion. His eyes swept across the sky, catching hers for just a moment—and they locked. The thrill was electric. The glee that Danny had given her—choosing her to be the celebrated soldier who would have bragging rights to his death—flushed her face with joy and the thrill of the kill.
Undoubtedly, this death would be told and retold for generations. The best death they had ever seen. The best death they would probably ever see. A round of applause and cheering erupted.
The timing, the movement, the scream. The gurgling was so palpable they could almost see the blood bubbling from the corner of Danny’s mouth—the mouth that Orson imagined might soon touch Louisa’s.
That would be the last game of war they’d ever play. How could any game live up to that death? It couldn’t. Everything afterward would be lackluster.
Danny’s parents divorced, and he moved to Billings to live with his dad. He was drafted and joined the military a few years later. But that moment in time was etched in Orson’s mind for the rest of his life.
Even years after Louisa and Orson graduated from high school, after they were married and had their third child—a young son Louisa insisted they name Daniel—even then, Orson could hear the splash of Danny’s golden-brown arm hitting the water. And it filled him with a deep sense of inadequacy. He’d be changing the oil in his truck, or drying a dish with a hand towel over the sink, or skinning an elk from a fresh hunt, and he would be haunted by that moment. He would see his wife’s eyes locked with his cousin’s—one he would never see again.
Orson was driving back from work when the rain began. What started as plump, friendly droplets became aggressive as they pelted the windshield. They soon gave way to violent streams of gray water, erasing the view of the road. He knew every turn of the route home by heart, but the rushing downpour melted the route from his memory.
All of a sudden, the mountain slope on one side collapsed onto his small pickup. The ground gave way beneath him. There was an instantaneous weight, and as the cab rolled, he was thrown like a sneaker tumbling inside a dryer—around and around. Motion and force, alarm and earth growling above and below. Then, suddenly, the movement stopped.
And Orson was frozen, in shock. His eyes opened—but all there was, was darkness. Was he blind? Was it suddenly night? Was he even alive? He felt a sharp, cold, wet pain pierce through his body. But he heard nothing. Silence. The rain must have stopped. He tried to move a finger. Then a toe. He could not.
Orson didn’t know how much time had passed. He must have drifted in and out of consciousness. That was when he heard her voice. At first, it gave him comfort, thinking perhaps he had been found, that he might be saved—or that this was the afterlife.
It filled him with the warmth of the familiar.
But then it began to turn on him, just inaudible enough that he couldn’t quite tease out the words. He recognized the voice as the words took shape—each cruel, familiar echo of what he’d heard in his mind since he was a boy. The words that had jolted him awake in the middle of the night.
It was his wife, Louisa. And she was 12 years old. And as Orson Lovelace lay dying under thirty feet of mud and earth, he understood that when she said he was no good at dying, what she had really meant was that he was no good at living.
And those words had struck him as so true that he built his whole life around them. He’d followed Louisa through their adolescence, stubbornly remaining until she agreed to marry him. He had packed it all so tightly that here he was—cemented, unmoving, thirty feet under the earth. His balding head and the curve of a middle-aged paunch fossilized in time.
It was at this moment, ironically, that Orson first felt freedom. It occurred to him suddenly that what had trapped him was not about his cousin Danny. Danny had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t trying to one-up him. He wasn’t striving day after day for the pure purpose of spiting Orson, bettering him at every turn. Danny was just out there in the world being Danny. The truth was, he probably never even thought about Orson. No—it was Orson himself who had dragged Danny around in his mind, a shadowy burden, day in and day out.
It wasn’t even about Louisa. The way she rolled her eyes at him or muttered small insults under her breath. The loud sighs when he dropped something or forgot something at the grocery store.
No—the rush of exhilaration, the wave of warmth that rushed through Orson’s body, came as he realized it was he who had been beating this drum in his head all these years. He was the one keeping alive this idea that he didn’t know how to live. And it became clear—it wasn’t the fact of his life. It wasn’t even a fact. It was a lie.
And for the first time in Orson Lovelace’s 43 years of life, he felt ease and comfort—the sweet release. And he knew, in that moment, he was really living.