Ben’s suicidal crisis

Ben’s suicidal crisis is an ongoing intention, not a single desperate gesture: after putting his father’s shotgun in his mouth, he continues planning to die while disguising that purpose from Renee. Its force is sharpened by the contrast between his private preparations and his later insistence that a sick stranger receive care, even as the barriers to that care expose how precarious other people’s lives can be.

The crisis and the inherited gun

Earlier that morning, Ben had put the side-by-side shotgun in his mouth. Later, when his dogs pursue a coyote across the desert, he takes the same gun from his gear, loads two shells, and sets off after them. In the moonlight it seems dreamlike, but its history is starkly material: it is his father’s gun and the weapon he had already considered using to end his life. He regrets every gun he has held, yet carries this one onward, bound to both his suicidal plan and his family inheritance.

The weapon’s absence becomes a practical obstacle as well as an emotional one. Ben has no shotgun with which to carry out his plan, and buying another in Wenatchee would invite questions if he were found dead with a new gun while his old Winchester was missing. He wants the Winchester chiefly as a prop for his suicide, but also because it belonged to his father and he cannot accept losing it. The crisis therefore gathers around an object he both regrets and feels compelled to reclaim.

Concealment and a constructed return

Ben plans to call Renee with a version of events that will make his absence seem temporary and ordinary. He intends to tell her that the night is over, that he is safe in his motel, and that he will hunt blue grouse west of the river without a dog while Rex recovers. In a day or two, he says he will bring Rex home in a rental car; he even gives Tuesday or Wednesday as their expected return. These details make the lie persuasive by giving it the shape of a family itinerary.

He also prepares an explanation for his injuries. He will tell Renee that one eye is swollen shut, so that she can later attribute his mistaken judgment while crossing barbed wire to impaired vision. He imagines her reconstructing his final hours and arriving at that explanation, rather than discovering his intention. His deception is explicitly directed toward leaving quietly, not toward personal advantage: the planned account lets his daughter understand the visible evidence without knowing the purpose behind it.

Recovering the Winchester and specifying the plan

Ben’s plan requires him to return to William C. Harden’s Wolfhound Orchard near Malaga and get his gun back. He recognizes that an appeal to rightful ownership or fair play, or another apology over the death of a dog, is unlikely to persuade Harden. Yet theft is beyond what he can imagine doing, leaving the recovery of the weapon unresolved even in his own calculations.

The rest of the itinerary is precise. He arranges a Greyhound bus journey upriver and reserves a rental car through a Wenatchee company. After trying to retrieve the gun, he intends to walk for grouse in the Colockum Country, find a barbed-wire fence, and shoot himself in the neck. The planned hunt provides the outward activity; the fence is the setting he has chosen for the death he continues to conceal. His practical arrangements do not signal that the crisis has passed: they organize it.

Medical duty amid the crisis

During the journey, Ben turns toward a different life-and-death emergency. Catherine Donnelly introduces him to the apple pickers as a doctor who wants to help. He considers tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other possible infections, but is clear that he cannot diagnose or treat the sick man: he is traveling without even a stethoscope. His immediate request is that the patient go to a hospital as soon as they reach Wenatchee, because the illness is serious and could worsen or become fatal.

The decision is constrained by more than the patient’s symptoms. Catherine explains that hospital staff may ask for identification or a visa and that the workers fear deportation. Later, she reports that Angel’s brother will not let him go because he feels responsible for him and says they cannot afford a hospital. Ben insists they will not have to pay and that treatment matters most, but Coleman disputes his assurance, saying undocumented workers are not eligible for federal help. Odle counters that a hospital can apply for assistance through the Emergency Medical Office; Coleman maintains that this will not apply to these men because they lack permission to be in the country. The exchange leaves the practical question unsettled, showing Ben’s effort to secure care colliding with disagreement over cost and legal status.

The tension between death and care

The scenes place Ben’s deliberate pursuit of death beside an insistence that another person not be abandoned to illness. He is planning how to retrieve a gun and conceal his own purpose, yet he presses the adults around Angel to seek hospital care and argues that payment should not obstruct it. The contrast does not establish that Ben has abandoned his plan; the evidence continues to show his intention as active. Instead, it gives the crisis a consequential tension: a man who imagines his own death as an arranged exit still acts, in this encounter, to keep another life within reach of help.