The Happiest People in the World

by Brock Clarke

  “There’s a bus,” he said. “You could also rent a car.”

  “A car,” she said, as though the word itself were extremely distasteful. “For just one person? So wasteful.”

  “Fine,” Ronald had said. “Take the bus.”

  “Will Jens be there to meet me?”

  “Sure,” Ronald said. “Why not?”

  Except now the bus was late. At least an hour late, they said at the drugstore that was also the bus station. Meanwhile no one had seen this Jens Baedrup character since that first time, two days earlier. Ronald had not counted on the guy just disappearing like that. And he had really disappeared, too. Ronald had looked for him everywhere. He’d even taken the day off from work today to search for Baedrup. But he didn’t see him. No one had seen him. The last person to see him was Ronald himself, as far as Ronald knew. And the last person before that was Henry.

  Well, that was interesting, thought Ronald, and then he further pursued the interesting thought. Baedrup had gone to see Henry. That was a fact. It was also a fact that four years ago someone had killed Baedrup. Except that Baedrup wasn’t dead, apparently. He shows up and visits Henry, and then no one has seen him since.

  Henry Larsen had killed Jens Baedrup—this was the place to which Ronald’s interesting thought was leading him. To keep it interesting, Ronald allowed the thought to briefly turn upon himself. Ronald, after all, was the last person to see Baedrup; if anyone had killed him, it could well have been Ronald. Except that Ronald had gone directly to see Ellen at the bar, to tell her about seeing this Baedrup with Henry.

  Meanwhile, where had Henry been during that time?

  He’d been walking around. This was what he’d said, three hours later, when he got to the Lumber Lodge: “I took a walk.”

  “With your friend?” Ronald had asked him, and Henry had made that face. Henry’s mouth had said, “What friend?” But his face had said he knew exactly what friend. And no one had seen the friend since.

  Henry Larsen killed Jens Baedrup. Ronald returned to the place where his interesting thought had brought him. Henry Larsen killed Jens Baedrup, just like Henry Larsen killed my sister, and I know he killed my sister because he killed Jens Baedrup. But why would Henry have wanted to kill either of those people? This was the next place to which Ronald’s interesting thought led him, or would have, if it hadn’t already led him to drive home to get his gun.

  Five minutes later, Ronald returned to the square, got out of his car, holding the gun, as he was allowed by law to do. Ronald’s gun was one of those hunting rifles that you could swear was really an assault rifle, but if you swore that, then the hunter who carried the assault rifle would swear that it was really a hunting rifle because he hunted with it. Anyway, Ronald was holding the gun. His intention was to charge into the Lumber Lodge and shoot Henry to death. If Henry wasn’t in the Lumber Lodge, then Ronald was prepared to shoot Henry to death in another place, too. But before he could shoot anyone, the bus pulled into the station. It was more or less on time after all. The door opened. Ronald heard the driver call out, “Broomeville! Who’s getting off at Broomeville!” Ronald could see a woman walk down the aisle, then down the stairs, stopping at the last step when she saw Ronald standing there with his gun. She was a pretty woman with white-blond hair and sharp cheekbones and black-rimmed glasses. She was wearing dark brown wool leggings and green clogs and on her back was a pack with many pouches for water bottles and two thick shoulder straps, of course, but also a thinner strap that crossed the chest, just in case, and all in all she appeared to be one of those forty-five-year-old women who looked about twenty years younger than they were, but who acted, and also felt, about forty years older than they looked.

  “Are you Ilsa?” Ronald asked.

  “That is certainly a fake gun,” she said, and when Ronald said that it certainly was not, Ilsa nodded. Her clogs made clomping horse-hoof noises as she walked backward up the stairs and into the bus. The door closed. The bus drove away.

  60

  The end comes only after you think it’s already come. Henry was behind the bar, feeling good, as though the past were finally and truly behind him. Tomorrow, this time, he would be married to Ellen. He was already practicing for their life together. He’d even made the executive decision to open the Lumber Lodge earlier than its usual five o’clock opening time. Across the bar from him was Dr. Vernon, drinking a Saranac. My wife and I own this bar, Henry was thinking. Together, we run the bar. Together, we live above the bar with Kurt, her son, my stepson. Dr. Vernon’s glass was empty. Henry reached across, grabbed it, refilled it, pushed it back toward his colleague, who nodded his thanks, red eyes flashing off the red palm trees on his yellow shirt.

  “I know you sell drugs to Kurt,” Henry said. Dr. Vernon stopped midsip. He looked at Henry over his glass.

  “Drugs?”

  “I want you to stop,” Henry said. “And if you don’t, I will tell Matty and Ellen. And I’m sure they will tell you to stop, too, if they don’t tell the police first.” The deep fryer hissed. Henry walked over to it, put on a mitt, grabbed the metal basket handle, removed the basket from the bubbling fat, dumped the twelve wings into a plastic basket lined with wax paper. He arranged six celery stalks around the perimeter of the basket, squeezed blue cheese out of a large bottle into a small cup, placed the cup between two celery stalks, picked up the basket, and placed it in front of Dr. Vernon.

  “I knew you were a narc,” he said.

  Narc? Henry didn’t know that word. But surely Ellen did. She was walking into the bar right now. She walked underneath the streamers, past the table on which the DJ would set up his turntable and play his wedding tunes, and then moved behind the bar, toward Henry. She leaned forward, as though to kiss him, and Henry leaned forward also, but she did not kiss him. Instead she whispered, “Køkkenbord equals ‘counter’ in Danish.” Then Ellen stood back. Her eyes were flashing many things, but love and marriage were not among them.

  “Ellen,” Henry started to say, but Ellen held up her hand to stop him.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Ellen said. “I told myself just one more thing.”

  “My real name is Jens Baedrup,” Henry started to say, but Ellen stopped him again.

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. You lied to me. Now go away forever.”

  Go away forever? To where? He had only ever lived in two places. Here was one of them. The other place was Skagen; he was told he could never go back there again. Meanwhile, Dr. Vernon was watching and listening with the keen, undisguised interest of a man who suddenly is less pathetic than the man who is about to be seated on the barstool next to him. “But there’s nowhere else for me to go.”

  “You can start,” Ellen said, “by getting the hell out from behind my køkkenbord.” Henry did that. He moved to the other side of the bar and sat next to Dr. Vernon, who pushed the basket of wings in front of Henry. Henry picked one up and ate it, almost without thinking, already in that loser’s living afterlife of a loser, where you take consolation from wherever you can find it, even while insisting that you’re not giving up, you’re not going anywhere, until somebody listens to what you have to say. When he was done eating the wing, Henry dropped it into the basket, and he was about to say to Ellen that he was not going to go anywhere until she listened to what he had to say, when he noticed that her eyes had gone big and were staring at something behind him.

  61

  Capo was in Doc’s, sitting at a table, surrounded by his students. “Have I ever told you,” he asked them, “about my turn as Don Pedro in that very interesting production of Much Ado in Sarajevo?” The students shook their heads to indicate that he had not. In attendance were four boys who looked like younger versions of Mr. Klock in their knit ties and corduroy blazers and trimmed blond beards and who had been regular participants in Mr. Klock’s after-school club for some time now. “I was there, of course, because of the so-called Butcher of the Balkans. He was playing Don John to m
y Don Pedro. And do you know that the Butcher said something very interesting to me.” Capo paused, as though trying to remember the Butcher’s exact words. “The Butcher said, ‘I pretend to be Don John. But you, you are Don Pedro. You do not pretend.’ ” Capo paused to let his students consider the point. “My point is this: when you are in our funny little business, you must not ‘act,’ even when you are ‘acting.’ ”

  The students nodded. They sipped their coffee, legs crossed, trying not to seem awed by the Butcher or the Bard or Sarajevo or the funny little business or anything. They were following Capo’s suggestion: they were being adults by acting like adults. Meanwhile, Capo had grown thoughtful. Doc and Crystal were watching him from behind the counter. Crystal whispered to Doc, “He’s talked about acting; now he’ll talk about the Mass Grave.” “Sadly,” Capo said, “the Butcher was right about his performance, which was lacking. Perhaps he would still be alive if he’d dedicated himself a bit more to the Stage, and a bit less to the Mass Grave.”

  The door opened, its bell tingling; everyone turned in that direction and watched Jenny enter. The students asked Capo, with their alarmed looks, What’s she doing here? He ignored them. “Jennifer, you’re late,” he said, and Jenny stood in the doorway, nervously fingering her neck stud. He beckoned with his hand and she walked toward him. When she was close enough, Jenny leaned over, placed something in Capo’s hand, and then whispered several things in Capo’s ear. “But sometimes tardiness is unavoidable,” he said when she’d finished whispering. “You’ve more than redeemed yourself, Jennifer.” He gestured toward an empty seat and Jenny took it. Then Capo turned and said in the direction of Doc and Crystal: “Quickly, quickly, find”—and here he glanced at the boy students, then back at Doc and Crystal—“London.”

  “What about his car?” Crystal said. Because this was the procedure: when you do not want someone to flee, you first take away his preferred method of flight. But Capo shook his head, held up several greasy plugs with wires growing out of them. “Perhaps I erred after all,” he said to the boys, “in forbidding you to take Automotive Shop. It seems that Jennifer, at least, has learned something useful there.” He swung the plugs in lazy circles as he thought about Joseph, not Joseph now but Joseph ten years earlier, when he was just sixteen years old, and like all sixteen-year-olds was wondering, wondering, wondering what kind of adult he wanted to be, listening to Capo’s stories, thinking this was the kind of adult he wanted to be. It turned out that this was the worst kind of adult for him to want to be. And now, Capo thought, he would never have the chance to be another kind. But that was an imprecise thought. Capo would never let him have the chance to be another kind. That was a more accurate thought, although of course Capo did not like to think it.

  “Please just find him,” Capo said. But Doc and Crystal were already at the door. They looked out it, and Crystal said, “Found him.” Capo stood up and then walked over to the window. Through it he saw the bus pulling away from the square, and Joseph running after it, waving his hands and shouting wildly in the “why is this happening to me?” manner of people who have just missed their bus. Then Joseph stopped running, looked in the direction of Doc’s, and saw the three of them looking at him. Then he started running in the other direction, back toward them at first, and then he cut into the alley between the post office and the Lumber Lodge. But before disappearing into the alley, Joseph had passed Ronald, who was holding an automatic weapon and walking with great purpose toward and then into the Lumber Lodge. Capo had been waiting, waiting for Locs to arrive in Broomeville; in fact, he’d pictured her holding a gun, walking with great purpose toward the Lumber Lodge. But once Capo saw Ronald, he forgot all about Locs, the lesson being that the person you see with a gun trumps the expectation of the person you might see with a gun.

  “Children,” Capo said to the students. “Go home.”

  “But we are home,” one of the boy students said. Capo, of course, had taught them to talk like that, to think like that. But sometimes it really broke his heart to see how fully they’d learned their lesson. Even Jenny, whom he hadn’t really even begun to teach, was looking at him in a pathetic way, fingers furiously messing around with her piercing. “Jennifer,” he said, his meaning clear enough. Jenny moved her hand away from her neck and put both hands in her jeans pockets as a failsafe. “Go to your other homes,” he said to the students. “I will see you all at school tomorrow.” The students did what their Capo told them to. Then he turned back to Crystal and Doc. He could tell what they were thinking: they were thinking that they were going to have to shoot a lot of people. But that was not the way Capo liked to think. He told Doc to get Joseph. “He ran down a dead-end alley,” he said. Capo, thinking, thinking. He asked Doc if he had his badge, his cuffs. Doc patted his jacket pocket to indicate that he did. Not many people knew that Broomeville County even had a coroner, let alone that Doc was that coroner, let alone that that’s why Doc was called Doc, let alone that Doc, as the coroner, was automatically deputized, which meant that he had a badge and cuffs and had the right to arrest people.

  “Bring poor Joseph in cuffs into the Lumber Lodge,” he said to Doc. Doc nodded, ran out the door. “Come,” Capo said to Crystal.

  “You know we’re going to have to shoot a lot of people,” she said.

  “That’s not the way I like to think,” Capo said. But she was already running toward the Lumber Lodge.

  62

  They had not taken the bus, because Locs hated taking the bus, and so she lied to Mr. Korkmaz about there not being a bus to Broomeville. Instead they rented a car. Who knew what kind it was. Locs wasn’t paying attention to that. She drove, following the snaking highways and bridges through New York City, then up the Hudson to Albany, then west, along the canal as far as Utica, then north. She registered the changes in scenery without really paying any attention to them. The entire way she was thinking nothing but, Matthew, Matthew, love, love, until thirty minutes from her destination, when she remembered to think: Broomeville. Five minutes later they came to the house of the guy who was well known for selling illegal fireworks and much less well known for selling illegal firearms. But Locs knew: two years earlier, on the run from Broomeville to Denmark, she’d sold her many guns to the guy for traveling money. Now she was back. “You’re back,” the guy said. Everyone called him Buddy, but Locs refused to call him by that name or to refer to him, even in her head, as anything but “the guy.” Locs was hoping the guy would sell her something high caliber. But all he had were handguns. With Mr. Korkmaz’s money, Locs bought two handguns.

  “Who’s the fucking old man?” the guy said, easily loud enough for Mr. Korkmaz to hear. The guy himself was probably forty, but he had an enormous white beard, big enough to hide things in, and dressed in denim overalls and dusty brogans and a faded floppy hat, as though at any second he expected to be whisked back to the Dust Bowl, and in all respects he looked like an old man himself, which presumably, in his mind, gave him the right to refer to actual old men as fucking old men, rather than with the respect they deserved. Locs didn’t know why she was getting so worked up about this. Maybe because she was preparing to get worked up about other things. Quickly she loaded the gun and handed it to Mr. Korkmaz. “Go ahead and shoot him,” she said.

  Then she walked back to the car. “Hey!” the guy said, but then she didn’t hear Mr. Korkmaz shoot him, which was too bad. Locs got into the driver’s side, and a second later Mr. Korkmaz got into the passenger’s. They drove onward. Locs turned on the heat. It had gotten cold; snow was starting to fly. That was the right way to describe it, too: the snow was not falling; it looked, as with an airplane, like it was proceeding horizontally from one place to the next. Broomeville, Broomeville. Then a sign saying it: BROOMEVILLE: 7 MILES.

  “I would not shoot that hairy man,” Mr. Korkmaz said.

  Locs almost drove off the road. Not because of the sentence, but because Mr. Korkmaz had spoken: Was it possible that he’d really not spoken for over four
hours? What had he been thinking? It occurred to Locs to ask him something. Locs knew her plan: She would somehow evade Capo et al. and go to Matthew’s house, where he would be, and then they would figure things out from there. Love. Barring that, she would shoot people until she found Matthew, and then they would figure things out from there.

  “What’s your plan?” Locs asked Mr. Korkmaz. She didn’t see the gun. He was wearing a heavy waxed coat with many pockets. Locs assumed the gun was in one of them. She’d bought both guns for herself; she had not intended to give one to Mr. Korkmaz. But she didn’t ask for it back. Old, frail Mr. Korkmaz would not look, to anyone who didn’t know him, as though he was likely to have a gun, let alone be able to use one. It might end up being good to have someone who didn’t look like he’d have a gun, have a gun.

  “My plan?”

  “We get to Broomeville . . .,” she said, turning to look at Mr. Korkmaz, who was looking out the window at a billboard that said NIRVANA: THERE’S ONLY ONE! She had no idea what the billboard was advertising or whom it was quoting.

  “You assist me to find Søren. I prevent him from murdering the cartoonist. We return to Skagen.” He shrugged, rubbed the dashboard as though for good luck. “Or we stay here.”

  “In Broomeville?”

  “In America,” Mr. Korkmaz said. “PT Cruiser.”

  “What?”

  “What does it mean, PT Cruiser?”

  Locs realized that he was talking about the rental car. It was a PT Cruiser, the most ridiculous of all the ridiculous American cars with their ridiculous names: it was humpbacked and clunky and was supposed to remind you of American gangsters standing on the running boards with tommy guns in the movies and no one actually getting hurt except for the one or two guys who absolutely deserved it and the one or two guys who were totally expendable.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Locs said. “It’s supposed to remind you of America.”