It started with a blues lyric Gill sang that night. “Gonna take a shotgun, and disconnect my brain.”
The five of us were sitting around the campfire at Irksome’s cabin at Tonto Creek. “Messy,” said
Irksome. The fire crackled.
“Not necessarily.” Gill fingered his wispy mustache. “A guillotine does the same job very neatly.” He
passed the bottle to me. “You agree, Clete?”
I was not ready to be recruited to the shotgun side. “But a guillotine comes with a guillotine crew.
The head goes into a basket, the blood drains out of the body into the gutter. Very neat and clean. A
shotgun, though, Irk is right. You’re leaving an awful mess.”
The campfire group that evening included Abel, an info systems consultant; Baker, a hippie
landscaper; and Carlos, a high school teacher. And Gill Hodges, a wiry, irascible paragon of bad attitude
and inappropriate behavior. If Gill ever wrote a best-seller, it would be How to Get Fired, Get Evicted and
Get Back at Annoying Relatives and Waiters.
Between sips of sweet burning Yukon Jack, the bunch grew very concentrated on the issue of how do
you commit suicide without leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. At the height of the hi-jinx we
invented a shotgun-powered self-closing grave. The last word in self-reliance!
“A man should clean up his own mess.” Gill flicked the filter of his burning cig into the fire. “Leave this
miserable fucking planet a neater place.”
“Ay, Gilly.” I nodded, feeling the warmth of friendship. “Well spoken, lad.”
“So they still have to dig their own hole.” Abel poked at the fire.
I tried to visualize the likely customer. As the owner of a cabinet shop, I was used to anticipating
customer desires. “I’m thinking the person who would buy this will not care too much about how deep
the grave is. They might even prefer a shallow grave, so the remains can recycle faster.”
Baker burped luxuriantly. “You mean so they turn into jerky.”
“And badgers chew off their face,” Gill said, suddenly enthused.
Here’s the details as we worked them out. The instructions would state that in digging the hole the
dirt must be thrown onto the blanket or tarp spread over a frame, which was then dragged over the
hole. One end of the frame was held up by supports, like a lean-to. This would work better on a slope,
so the other end of the frame could rest on the ground just above the deepest part of the divot.
The suicidee, or ‘Dee, as we were soon calling him, would then attach the shotgun and trip
mechanism to the supports, place himself in the recommended position in the hole and press the button
in his hand. The shotgun would activate remotely somehow, sending the ‘Dee’s brains one way and the
tarp supports the other way. Down goes the frame and tarp with the dirt on top, causing a cloud of
dust to rise up and settle over all. In a few weeks the exposed parts of the biodegradable tarp would
meld into the landscape and wa-la! Gone and gone!
After spending about five minutes designing the thing we worked on the name for the next hour.
“The Blast Off Head Blaster” was considered a little too crude even by us. Someone put forth the
predictable “Terminator” and “Inter-Minator.” But I came up with the “Nighty Knight,” and I liked that a
lot. Gill liked it too. He proposed that the shotgun be activated with a “Clapper,” solely so we could
advertise the device using the jingle: “Clap on—Blam!” Of course there would be trademark issues
because the Clapper is a real product made by a real company, not a misanthropic device dreamed up by
a passel of midlife-crisis drunks.
And by the way, who said anything about advertising?
Three years went by. I gave up my cabinet shop, sold the equipment, went to work for someone
else. Julie and I bought a nicer house in the same neighborhood. While Phoenix exploded on the edges
as if infested by desert-eating nanites, the old neighborhood remained much the same, except that every
store that went out of business reopened as a taco shop or Chinese all-you-can-stomach buffet.
Gill continued on status quo. I saw him less because he left town, living in a room he’d built off his
Mom’s house in Cornville. Gill could do that. He’d never be homeless because he could build a home in a
week. But that same stubborn pride was why he was building a room instead of a house. He could
never commit himself to the tyranny of a steady job or a steady girlfriend. God forbid a wife and kids.
He had talents. He could make almost anything out of almost anything. And he did a good job on
the room, with bleached-wood, resawn shelves, saguaro rib wainscotting in the main room. And of
course his own bath. The man was not a barbarian.
One evening in February I answered the door and there he stood. It was cold out, cold for Phoenix
anyway, but he wore long, baggy cargo shorts and a plaid shirt. Sparky curled around from behind me
and sniffed at Gill’s knees.
He bent slightly to scratch the dog’s head and staggered a little. “You know what’s funny? I almost
fell down, but I haven’t had a beer in days.”
“Then lay off the vodka, ya lush.” My way of saying I was glad to see him.
Gill laughed. He came in and we sat in the living room. “Place looks nice.”
I shrugged. “Just paint.”
Julie stuck her head in and said hello. Then she and the dog headed for the kitchen.
“Getting back to falling over, I have Parkinson Disease.”
I felt a flutter in my stomach. “What’s that about?”
“It’s a nerve degeneration. You lose control of your muscles. They don’t move how you want them
to.” Gill looked at his hand, which trembled in his lap. “The weird thing is, it shakes when it’s sitting
there, but not so much when I use it.” He reached into his shirt pocket and slid out a cigarette pack with
two fingers. The hand did not tremble.
“Remember the Nighty Knight?”
“Want to get one ready, huh?” I meant it as a joke.
“Exactly. But I need you to help.”
“Because your hands shake? That’s really over-reacting.”
He moved the cigarette pack back and forth, studying the movement. “No. It’s going to get much
worse. I figure I’m six months away from a nursing home.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Which I can’t pay for. Lucky me, I’ve got what they call Parkinson Plus. They admit the medication
could make me worse.”
He told me about the disease. The first symptoms had only appeared about two years ago, and he
did not go to a doctor for six months. Not that there was much the doctor could have done. Now he
had to concentrate when he walked. He’s get stuck trying to make a simple movement. “It bends you
over. Like some kind of skulker. No one wants to go through life as a skulker.”
“That wouldn’t be my first choice.” Trying to hide the riot of my emotions, I was awed by his humor.
“But the hardest thing is losing the ability to do stuff.” He tried to remove a cigarette from the pack
with one hand, and dropped the pack. “God hates me. I’m withering away one skill at a time. It really
makes you appreciate the awesome complexity of doing something like threading a nut on a bolt.”
“I’m not helping you build a suicide machine.”
“You’re the only one I know who can do it.”
I found this to be a joke pushed way too far. “I’m the only one you thought would do it. But I won’t
do it. It’s sick.”
“Let’s not have a moral debate here. Just help me out. Be my hands.”
How do you turn that down? I shrugged agreement because first of all, I was only helping, and
secondly, he’d never go through with it. Because who would?
So we began. During the spring, Gill came down from Cornville on several Saturdays. Working in my
garage, we quickly built the roof, which consisted of a frame of one-by-fours on edge. We were making
a kit, to be assembled on-site, so we designed the roof frame for quick assembly with carriage bolds and
wing nuts. The roof had to be strong enough to hold the dirt, but for weight and portability we wanted
to use a fabric cover. A movers’ blanket was about the only thing strong enough. We put grommets on
the edges which mated with hooks on the frame. We tested it out by digging into a pile of fill dirt at a
local vacant lot. Worked fine.
Gill did some of the work. But mostly he just directed, or helped with simple tasks. He brought tools
to my house, and would not take them back. He didn’t ask me to, but I cleared off a shelf and kept his
tools together there.
He had begun to get muscle contractions that would twist his right leg and foot with a pain that
brought tears to his eyes. And I could see him beginning to break down mentally. He would forget what
he was doing in the middle of a chore. Okay, that happens to all of us. But he also seemed to be losing
the ability to focus, or rather, the ability to stop obsessing on some detail that brought the work to a
halt.
We were working on the trip mechanism, and had gotten fairly bogged down trying to make it out of
ropes and pulleys and hooks. When the mechanism he had designed sort of fell apart in my hands—
again—I flung the pieces down.
Gill sighed. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re under a lot of stress.” I was sorry for my temper.
He squeegeed his hair back from his forehead with both hands. “And medication.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m losing control of my everything. Body. Mind.”
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
He reacted automatically. “I’m not...” He looked at me square on. “Yeah, I’m ashamed.
Embarrassed. I’m not a control freak, but I don’t want to go out on rubber sheets. It matters how you
go out.”
“Yeah. I believe that. But we want to keep you around. As long as possible. Call us selfish. We like
you. We really like you.”
In the dead silence, a single cricket chirped from a corner of the garage. We cracked up laughing.
We finally decided that to be fail-safe, the trip mechanism would be operated by a powerful spring—a
spring off a car hood, cocked with a lever. The shotgun would only release the spring. After weeks of
futzing around with hood latches, gate latches and so on, we realized that the best trip mechanism was
a car trunk latch. It had a clean short motion and with a lever, which was fairly easily attached, it
required little force to operate.
The power came from a Mossburg twelve gauge pump shotgun. Three hundred something at Wally-
World. We removed the plastic stock and butt and fitted what was left in a three-inch plastic pipe, which
formed a sort of piston inside a four-inch plastic pipe. It held four rounds. In operation, of course, only
one discharge would be required. But the extra rounds came in handy for testing. By this time, Gill
could not drive anymore, so I would go up to his place, and we would take the equipment out on the
rangeland beyond Camp Verde.
Summer came, and Gill faded fast. We wanted to scout ahead for our operational site. Or maybe
you could call it a landing zone. But we never got around to that.
I still approached it as therapy. A chance to do a woodshop project together. “This is what it would
be like,” I told myself. “This is a prototype.” One sweaty evening I was tinkering with the contraption in
my garage when my kids came outside to say goodnight. Already in their jammies. The contrast
between the vibrant children and my dying friend certainly provoked tender feelings in me. But those
feelings did not make me quit the project. In fact, I wanted to make the thing better.
As he got sicker, Gill remained true to himself. Gill Hodges had always been about being right, and
this was just an extension of that. His life had been what he made it. He didn’t whine, or repent, or
show any regret for turns not taken. I had to admire that.
He told me he was making a point of seeing friends, and yes, he had quite a few. Gill saying
goodbyes did not mean that he definitely planned to use the Nighty Knight. No one could say how long
he still had. He swore to me he had told no one about the project. And I sure had not.
Then one Saturday afternoon came the call.
It was August. A season of baking heat in the valley, but a wonderful time of year at eight thousand
feet up a slope. I took Monday and Tuesday off, figuring this would be a ritual. Saying goodbye to the
mountains. That’s what I told Julie. But just in case, I rehearsed the arguments I would use to talk him
out of it.
As we drove up Monday morning, it did not seem like I would need those words. Gill was obviously
uncomfortable. He could not turn his head, and could speak above a mumble only with difficulty. But in
flashes he showed the smile and the smartass attitude of the snowy-cheeked kid I had first made this
trip with two decades earlier. I turned up the stereo and we mostly just let that blast. He brought some
CDs I had not heard for a long time. Maybe it was the mountain air, but my car stereo sounded
fantastic.
It had rained and then stopped raining by the time we left pavement behind in the afternoon. We
had a night around the campfire while thunder rumbled placidly in the distance. I introduced the theme
that this wasn’t the last anything. But that was a lie and we both knew it. Mostly we talked about
previous visits. These mountains had been the site of some of the best times of our lives. Fishing.
Beer. Getting sunburned on the inside of your wrist, which only happens from holding a fishing pole for
hours. Trying to cook fish, while drunk, in the dark.
We talked about the Knight. Reviewed the history from that first campfire at Irksome’s cabin up to
now. Even that night, just three years before, seemed part of a golden past.
“I liked workin’ with you,” I said. “Except for the drooling.”
“Yeah. We’ll do it again sometime. I’ll be in an iron lung, or an iron kidney. Something. I want you
to know...not everybody would have...” he waved his hand, or maybe it weaved. Hard to tell a gesture
from a spasm at that point.
“No, not everybody would. In fact not anybody would, asshole.”
“I appreciate that.”
Time for my speech. “So tomorrow...”
I was not sure he heard me. Thunder rumbled. Gill took a drink out of his bottle of Coke. “Let’s just
do the drill, like we set it up. Take it to the final step. I’m not going to do it, but we came up here to
see if this thing would work. So let’s set it up.”
I let him sleep in the back of the pickup, under the camper shell. “If I go to the ground,” he chortled.
“You might not get me back up. At least if I’m in the truck you can slide me out and tip me upright.”
It was a struggle to get him in there and into a sleeping bag. I slept on the ground, on an air
mattress. During the night I could hear Gill struggling to breathe. It did not seem like he slept a lot.
Despite the good feelings of the whole day, I did not sleep much myself.
We skipped breakfast, driving the damp clayey roads in the bright sunshine. The summer rains had
brought tufts of green grass poking up from the meadows. We ended up going back to a place near
where we’d started, a little campers’ spur off behind some aspens that looked like it had not been used in
years. The place overlooked a long grass slope tilting down to a creek somewhere miles away.
I hauled the stuff across the slope, around the curve of the hill from the road and the campsite. It
was after noon by now, and cottony clouds were building up and greying quickly. The shovel sliced easily
into the earth, and I actually ended up laying strips of sod on top of the dirt on the blanket. A nice
touch, I thought, avoiding an obvious scar in the field.
The contraption flew together in a few minutes. Gill asked to have his sleeping bag laid in there, and I
did that, then he crawled painfully in, did a rehearsal of the movements with the safety supports still in
place. At T-Minus these would be carefully removed and laid flat in the shallow part of the hole by the
suicidee, so only the collapsible legs remained. We had taken the inner webbing of a hard hat and added
straps which fastened to the emitting end of the shotgun. When so attached, there was nowhere the
head could go that the raging pellets of doom could not destroy it.
“All right.” Gill unfastened the straps and began to crawl back out. I reached to help him. “No. Just
watch the thing in case I kick one of the sticks.”
He finally struggled out, rolled a turn down the slope and sat up, dotted with dirt and leaves and
grass. He lit a cigarette.
I was satisfied with the experiment in every way. “Let’s go home.”
He pondered a moment. “No. This is where we split up. You need to go. You can’t be here.”
What was this man saying? “No way, Jorge.”
“I wrote my mom a letter before I left. I told her I was going to a hostel in California because.
Because that’s just what I want to do.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Do it.” He gestured at the contraption. A grasshopper whirred between us.
“No, I think we agreed that...we’re just testing it.”
“I bought a bus ticket from Holbrook to L.A. It leaves at eight forty-five tonight. Fourteen hours,
overnight. Talk about a slow, miserable death.” Gill chuckled.
“So...”
“Did you see me burning something in the fire last night? That was my bus ticket confirmation from
the internet. See, if anyone questions anything, you dropped me off in Holbrook on the way home, after
one last night in the forest. But no one is going to question. You’re in the clear. In my bag in the truck
there’s a sock with money and a letter in it. Take that and throw everything else away. There’s nothing
in there with my name on it. If you ever need it, the letter will clear you. But you won’t need it.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No, it’s exactly the point. I hired you to do something. You did it. We’ve been over all these
details.”
“Not these details, buddy.”
He exhaled smoke. “No, we didn’t. So let’s not.”
We were so high up that the clouds hung just above our heads. Down the slope, the trees got
thicker. Black firs. Silver aspens. I could not move. “It’s beautiful here.”
“I’ll never have a better time and place.”
There the guy sat, literally on the edge of his grave, with an equanimity I could never match. I
thought of Tyler and Zoe in their jammies. “I think I will miss you more than you’ll miss me.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course you will. You’ll have twenty more years. I’ll have...”
“Badgers eating your face.”
He smiled. Then we sat in silence for a minute. I stood up.
“Don’t take this personal, Clete. But don’t come back.”
As I walked away I copped a last look. He was laying back on his elbows, staring up at the clouds.
I drove down the road a few hundred yards, listening involuntarily, shivering. I stopped and turned
off the truck. Thunder rumbled in the distance. But no gunshot. I pondered for a moment whether to
ignore his orders, but I started the truck and drove away.
When I reached the forest road where the redwood sign points to Highway 273 I passed two guys
standing in front of a van staring at a GPS receiver. They and their van looked odd for a back country
road. I drove on.
On the way home I wondered if maybe Gill wrote the truth to his mom and lied to me, and the two
guys were some kind of orderlies that were there to take him to a care facility somewhere. The story got
around that he had gone to a hospice in another state, but that of course was what he wanted people to
think.
The problem for me was that people did not stop talking about him. They still haven’t. The small
circle of friends knew most of the real saga. But we never talked more than a cryptic comment or two
about it. Some of them went back to the mountain a year later. I was going to go but Tyler got sick and
I couldn’t make it. I did not mind. The important thing is that they remembered. I might have been able
to find the actual site, but what would we see if we found it? What would we do?
Sometimes I have a queasy guilt about what I did, but it does not help to think that he was rescued
and taken away to die in bed. I prefer the idea that he really did do it, and is lying there on a snow
covered mountain going back to nature. And the Nighty Knight worked just as it was supposed to.
Slicker’n owl shit, as Gill would have said, if he only had time.
The five of us were sitting around the campfire at Irksome’s cabin at Tonto Creek. “Messy,” said
Irksome. The fire crackled.
“Not necessarily.” Gill fingered his wispy mustache. “A guillotine does the same job very neatly.” He
passed the bottle to me. “You agree, Clete?”
I was not ready to be recruited to the shotgun side. “But a guillotine comes with a guillotine crew.
The head goes into a basket, the blood drains out of the body into the gutter. Very neat and clean. A
shotgun, though, Irk is right. You’re leaving an awful mess.”
The campfire group that evening included Abel, an info systems consultant; Baker, a hippie
landscaper; and Carlos, a high school teacher. And Gill Hodges, a wiry, irascible paragon of bad attitude
and inappropriate behavior. If Gill ever wrote a best-seller, it would be How to Get Fired, Get Evicted and
Get Back at Annoying Relatives and Waiters.
Between sips of sweet burning Yukon Jack, the bunch grew very concentrated on the issue of how do
you commit suicide without leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. At the height of the hi-jinx we
invented a shotgun-powered self-closing grave. The last word in self-reliance!
“A man should clean up his own mess.” Gill flicked the filter of his burning cig into the fire. “Leave this
miserable fucking planet a neater place.”
“Ay, Gilly.” I nodded, feeling the warmth of friendship. “Well spoken, lad.”
“So they still have to dig their own hole.” Abel poked at the fire.
I tried to visualize the likely customer. As the owner of a cabinet shop, I was used to anticipating
customer desires. “I’m thinking the person who would buy this will not care too much about how deep
the grave is. They might even prefer a shallow grave, so the remains can recycle faster.”
Baker burped luxuriantly. “You mean so they turn into jerky.”
“And badgers chew off their face,” Gill said, suddenly enthused.
Here’s the details as we worked them out. The instructions would state that in digging the hole the
dirt must be thrown onto the blanket or tarp spread over a frame, which was then dragged over the
hole. One end of the frame was held up by supports, like a lean-to. This would work better on a slope,
so the other end of the frame could rest on the ground just above the deepest part of the divot.
The suicidee, or ‘Dee, as we were soon calling him, would then attach the shotgun and trip
mechanism to the supports, place himself in the recommended position in the hole and press the button
in his hand. The shotgun would activate remotely somehow, sending the ‘Dee’s brains one way and the
tarp supports the other way. Down goes the frame and tarp with the dirt on top, causing a cloud of
dust to rise up and settle over all. In a few weeks the exposed parts of the biodegradable tarp would
meld into the landscape and wa-la! Gone and gone!
After spending about five minutes designing the thing we worked on the name for the next hour.
“The Blast Off Head Blaster” was considered a little too crude even by us. Someone put forth the
predictable “Terminator” and “Inter-Minator.” But I came up with the “Nighty Knight,” and I liked that a
lot. Gill liked it too. He proposed that the shotgun be activated with a “Clapper,” solely so we could
advertise the device using the jingle: “Clap on—Blam!” Of course there would be trademark issues
because the Clapper is a real product made by a real company, not a misanthropic device dreamed up by
a passel of midlife-crisis drunks.
And by the way, who said anything about advertising?
Three years went by. I gave up my cabinet shop, sold the equipment, went to work for someone
else. Julie and I bought a nicer house in the same neighborhood. While Phoenix exploded on the edges
as if infested by desert-eating nanites, the old neighborhood remained much the same, except that every
store that went out of business reopened as a taco shop or Chinese all-you-can-stomach buffet.
Gill continued on status quo. I saw him less because he left town, living in a room he’d built off his
Mom’s house in Cornville. Gill could do that. He’d never be homeless because he could build a home in a
week. But that same stubborn pride was why he was building a room instead of a house. He could
never commit himself to the tyranny of a steady job or a steady girlfriend. God forbid a wife and kids.
He had talents. He could make almost anything out of almost anything. And he did a good job on
the room, with bleached-wood, resawn shelves, saguaro rib wainscotting in the main room. And of
course his own bath. The man was not a barbarian.
One evening in February I answered the door and there he stood. It was cold out, cold for Phoenix
anyway, but he wore long, baggy cargo shorts and a plaid shirt. Sparky curled around from behind me
and sniffed at Gill’s knees.
He bent slightly to scratch the dog’s head and staggered a little. “You know what’s funny? I almost
fell down, but I haven’t had a beer in days.”
“Then lay off the vodka, ya lush.” My way of saying I was glad to see him.
Gill laughed. He came in and we sat in the living room. “Place looks nice.”
I shrugged. “Just paint.”
Julie stuck her head in and said hello. Then she and the dog headed for the kitchen.
“Getting back to falling over, I have Parkinson Disease.”
I felt a flutter in my stomach. “What’s that about?”
“It’s a nerve degeneration. You lose control of your muscles. They don’t move how you want them
to.” Gill looked at his hand, which trembled in his lap. “The weird thing is, it shakes when it’s sitting
there, but not so much when I use it.” He reached into his shirt pocket and slid out a cigarette pack with
two fingers. The hand did not tremble.
“Remember the Nighty Knight?”
“Want to get one ready, huh?” I meant it as a joke.
“Exactly. But I need you to help.”
“Because your hands shake? That’s really over-reacting.”
He moved the cigarette pack back and forth, studying the movement. “No. It’s going to get much
worse. I figure I’m six months away from a nursing home.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Which I can’t pay for. Lucky me, I’ve got what they call Parkinson Plus. They admit the medication
could make me worse.”
He told me about the disease. The first symptoms had only appeared about two years ago, and he
did not go to a doctor for six months. Not that there was much the doctor could have done. Now he
had to concentrate when he walked. He’s get stuck trying to make a simple movement. “It bends you
over. Like some kind of skulker. No one wants to go through life as a skulker.”
“That wouldn’t be my first choice.” Trying to hide the riot of my emotions, I was awed by his humor.
“But the hardest thing is losing the ability to do stuff.” He tried to remove a cigarette from the pack
with one hand, and dropped the pack. “God hates me. I’m withering away one skill at a time. It really
makes you appreciate the awesome complexity of doing something like threading a nut on a bolt.”
“I’m not helping you build a suicide machine.”
“You’re the only one I know who can do it.”
I found this to be a joke pushed way too far. “I’m the only one you thought would do it. But I won’t
do it. It’s sick.”
“Let’s not have a moral debate here. Just help me out. Be my hands.”
How do you turn that down? I shrugged agreement because first of all, I was only helping, and
secondly, he’d never go through with it. Because who would?
So we began. During the spring, Gill came down from Cornville on several Saturdays. Working in my
garage, we quickly built the roof, which consisted of a frame of one-by-fours on edge. We were making
a kit, to be assembled on-site, so we designed the roof frame for quick assembly with carriage bolds and
wing nuts. The roof had to be strong enough to hold the dirt, but for weight and portability we wanted
to use a fabric cover. A movers’ blanket was about the only thing strong enough. We put grommets on
the edges which mated with hooks on the frame. We tested it out by digging into a pile of fill dirt at a
local vacant lot. Worked fine.
Gill did some of the work. But mostly he just directed, or helped with simple tasks. He brought tools
to my house, and would not take them back. He didn’t ask me to, but I cleared off a shelf and kept his
tools together there.
He had begun to get muscle contractions that would twist his right leg and foot with a pain that
brought tears to his eyes. And I could see him beginning to break down mentally. He would forget what
he was doing in the middle of a chore. Okay, that happens to all of us. But he also seemed to be losing
the ability to focus, or rather, the ability to stop obsessing on some detail that brought the work to a
halt.
We were working on the trip mechanism, and had gotten fairly bogged down trying to make it out of
ropes and pulleys and hooks. When the mechanism he had designed sort of fell apart in my hands—
again—I flung the pieces down.
Gill sighed. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re under a lot of stress.” I was sorry for my temper.
He squeegeed his hair back from his forehead with both hands. “And medication.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m losing control of my everything. Body. Mind.”
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
He reacted automatically. “I’m not...” He looked at me square on. “Yeah, I’m ashamed.
Embarrassed. I’m not a control freak, but I don’t want to go out on rubber sheets. It matters how you
go out.”
“Yeah. I believe that. But we want to keep you around. As long as possible. Call us selfish. We like
you. We really like you.”
In the dead silence, a single cricket chirped from a corner of the garage. We cracked up laughing.
We finally decided that to be fail-safe, the trip mechanism would be operated by a powerful spring—a
spring off a car hood, cocked with a lever. The shotgun would only release the spring. After weeks of
futzing around with hood latches, gate latches and so on, we realized that the best trip mechanism was
a car trunk latch. It had a clean short motion and with a lever, which was fairly easily attached, it
required little force to operate.
The power came from a Mossburg twelve gauge pump shotgun. Three hundred something at Wally-
World. We removed the plastic stock and butt and fitted what was left in a three-inch plastic pipe, which
formed a sort of piston inside a four-inch plastic pipe. It held four rounds. In operation, of course, only
one discharge would be required. But the extra rounds came in handy for testing. By this time, Gill
could not drive anymore, so I would go up to his place, and we would take the equipment out on the
rangeland beyond Camp Verde.
Summer came, and Gill faded fast. We wanted to scout ahead for our operational site. Or maybe
you could call it a landing zone. But we never got around to that.
I still approached it as therapy. A chance to do a woodshop project together. “This is what it would
be like,” I told myself. “This is a prototype.” One sweaty evening I was tinkering with the contraption in
my garage when my kids came outside to say goodnight. Already in their jammies. The contrast
between the vibrant children and my dying friend certainly provoked tender feelings in me. But those
feelings did not make me quit the project. In fact, I wanted to make the thing better.
As he got sicker, Gill remained true to himself. Gill Hodges had always been about being right, and
this was just an extension of that. His life had been what he made it. He didn’t whine, or repent, or
show any regret for turns not taken. I had to admire that.
He told me he was making a point of seeing friends, and yes, he had quite a few. Gill saying
goodbyes did not mean that he definitely planned to use the Nighty Knight. No one could say how long
he still had. He swore to me he had told no one about the project. And I sure had not.
Then one Saturday afternoon came the call.
It was August. A season of baking heat in the valley, but a wonderful time of year at eight thousand
feet up a slope. I took Monday and Tuesday off, figuring this would be a ritual. Saying goodbye to the
mountains. That’s what I told Julie. But just in case, I rehearsed the arguments I would use to talk him
out of it.
As we drove up Monday morning, it did not seem like I would need those words. Gill was obviously
uncomfortable. He could not turn his head, and could speak above a mumble only with difficulty. But in
flashes he showed the smile and the smartass attitude of the snowy-cheeked kid I had first made this
trip with two decades earlier. I turned up the stereo and we mostly just let that blast. He brought some
CDs I had not heard for a long time. Maybe it was the mountain air, but my car stereo sounded
fantastic.
It had rained and then stopped raining by the time we left pavement behind in the afternoon. We
had a night around the campfire while thunder rumbled placidly in the distance. I introduced the theme
that this wasn’t the last anything. But that was a lie and we both knew it. Mostly we talked about
previous visits. These mountains had been the site of some of the best times of our lives. Fishing.
Beer. Getting sunburned on the inside of your wrist, which only happens from holding a fishing pole for
hours. Trying to cook fish, while drunk, in the dark.
We talked about the Knight. Reviewed the history from that first campfire at Irksome’s cabin up to
now. Even that night, just three years before, seemed part of a golden past.
“I liked workin’ with you,” I said. “Except for the drooling.”
“Yeah. We’ll do it again sometime. I’ll be in an iron lung, or an iron kidney. Something. I want you
to know...not everybody would have...” he waved his hand, or maybe it weaved. Hard to tell a gesture
from a spasm at that point.
“No, not everybody would. In fact not anybody would, asshole.”
“I appreciate that.”
Time for my speech. “So tomorrow...”
I was not sure he heard me. Thunder rumbled. Gill took a drink out of his bottle of Coke. “Let’s just
do the drill, like we set it up. Take it to the final step. I’m not going to do it, but we came up here to
see if this thing would work. So let’s set it up.”
I let him sleep in the back of the pickup, under the camper shell. “If I go to the ground,” he chortled.
“You might not get me back up. At least if I’m in the truck you can slide me out and tip me upright.”
It was a struggle to get him in there and into a sleeping bag. I slept on the ground, on an air
mattress. During the night I could hear Gill struggling to breathe. It did not seem like he slept a lot.
Despite the good feelings of the whole day, I did not sleep much myself.
We skipped breakfast, driving the damp clayey roads in the bright sunshine. The summer rains had
brought tufts of green grass poking up from the meadows. We ended up going back to a place near
where we’d started, a little campers’ spur off behind some aspens that looked like it had not been used in
years. The place overlooked a long grass slope tilting down to a creek somewhere miles away.
I hauled the stuff across the slope, around the curve of the hill from the road and the campsite. It
was after noon by now, and cottony clouds were building up and greying quickly. The shovel sliced easily
into the earth, and I actually ended up laying strips of sod on top of the dirt on the blanket. A nice
touch, I thought, avoiding an obvious scar in the field.
The contraption flew together in a few minutes. Gill asked to have his sleeping bag laid in there, and I
did that, then he crawled painfully in, did a rehearsal of the movements with the safety supports still in
place. At T-Minus these would be carefully removed and laid flat in the shallow part of the hole by the
suicidee, so only the collapsible legs remained. We had taken the inner webbing of a hard hat and added
straps which fastened to the emitting end of the shotgun. When so attached, there was nowhere the
head could go that the raging pellets of doom could not destroy it.
“All right.” Gill unfastened the straps and began to crawl back out. I reached to help him. “No. Just
watch the thing in case I kick one of the sticks.”
He finally struggled out, rolled a turn down the slope and sat up, dotted with dirt and leaves and
grass. He lit a cigarette.
I was satisfied with the experiment in every way. “Let’s go home.”
He pondered a moment. “No. This is where we split up. You need to go. You can’t be here.”
What was this man saying? “No way, Jorge.”
“I wrote my mom a letter before I left. I told her I was going to a hostel in California because.
Because that’s just what I want to do.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Do it.” He gestured at the contraption. A grasshopper whirred between us.
“No, I think we agreed that...we’re just testing it.”
“I bought a bus ticket from Holbrook to L.A. It leaves at eight forty-five tonight. Fourteen hours,
overnight. Talk about a slow, miserable death.” Gill chuckled.
“So...”
“Did you see me burning something in the fire last night? That was my bus ticket confirmation from
the internet. See, if anyone questions anything, you dropped me off in Holbrook on the way home, after
one last night in the forest. But no one is going to question. You’re in the clear. In my bag in the truck
there’s a sock with money and a letter in it. Take that and throw everything else away. There’s nothing
in there with my name on it. If you ever need it, the letter will clear you. But you won’t need it.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No, it’s exactly the point. I hired you to do something. You did it. We’ve been over all these
details.”
“Not these details, buddy.”
He exhaled smoke. “No, we didn’t. So let’s not.”
We were so high up that the clouds hung just above our heads. Down the slope, the trees got
thicker. Black firs. Silver aspens. I could not move. “It’s beautiful here.”
“I’ll never have a better time and place.”
There the guy sat, literally on the edge of his grave, with an equanimity I could never match. I
thought of Tyler and Zoe in their jammies. “I think I will miss you more than you’ll miss me.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course you will. You’ll have twenty more years. I’ll have...”
“Badgers eating your face.”
He smiled. Then we sat in silence for a minute. I stood up.
“Don’t take this personal, Clete. But don’t come back.”
As I walked away I copped a last look. He was laying back on his elbows, staring up at the clouds.
I drove down the road a few hundred yards, listening involuntarily, shivering. I stopped and turned
off the truck. Thunder rumbled in the distance. But no gunshot. I pondered for a moment whether to
ignore his orders, but I started the truck and drove away.
When I reached the forest road where the redwood sign points to Highway 273 I passed two guys
standing in front of a van staring at a GPS receiver. They and their van looked odd for a back country
road. I drove on.
On the way home I wondered if maybe Gill wrote the truth to his mom and lied to me, and the two
guys were some kind of orderlies that were there to take him to a care facility somewhere. The story got
around that he had gone to a hospice in another state, but that of course was what he wanted people to
think.
The problem for me was that people did not stop talking about him. They still haven’t. The small
circle of friends knew most of the real saga. But we never talked more than a cryptic comment or two
about it. Some of them went back to the mountain a year later. I was going to go but Tyler got sick and
I couldn’t make it. I did not mind. The important thing is that they remembered. I might have been able
to find the actual site, but what would we see if we found it? What would we do?
Sometimes I have a queasy guilt about what I did, but it does not help to think that he was rescued
and taken away to die in bed. I prefer the idea that he really did do it, and is lying there on a snow
covered mountain going back to nature. And the Nighty Knight worked just as it was supposed to.
Slicker’n owl shit, as Gill would have said, if he only had time.
THE NIGHTY KNIGHT
by Webster Street
by Webster Street
