The Black Tongue

by Marko Hautala

  “Just because,” Samuel said casually. He had a chance at acting casual when he was drunk, as long as he didn’t draw any attention from the moped boys. He stood up and walked over to the girl. She didn’t put her camera down until he was right next to her.

  “Hi.”

  “Hey,” Julia said.

  “What are you filming?”

  “Everything.”

  “Is that supposed to be a video camera?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it’s so small.”

  “It’s a camcorder. It has a VHS-C tape in it.”

  Julia turned the camera over and opened it. A funny-looking tape was nestled inside. It looked like a normal VHS tape, but much smaller.

  “Where can you get those?”

  “Maybe nowhere,” she said, “around here.”

  That last sentence sounded annoyingly cocky, so Samuel stopped talking.

  “Is this supposed to be a barbecue?” Julia asked.

  “A what?”

  “Like a grilling party.”

  Samuel thought for a second. Then he nodded. “A grilling party, yeah.”

  “Cool.”

  “Right,” he said. “Where do you live?”

  Julia nodded to the left, meaning that she lived in either a townhome or a single-family home. Either way, her parents owned their place. Samuel’s dad had always said that tiny parasites sucking on the common workingman’s veins inhabited the townhomes, while the single-family homes were nests for the big-boss bloodsuckers. The only occupied single-family homes in Suvikylä were right next to Patteriniemi Road, and those houses were huge. Only people who voted for the Coalition Party lived there, and that one traitor Social Democrat who had been getting money from the CIA.

  “Want a sausage?” Samuel asked.

  Julia smiled, shook her head.

  They managed to introduce themselves. Just as he couldn’t come up with anything else to say, Anita appeared.

  “And who are you?” she asked, teetering.

  “I’m Julia, ma’am.”

  “What the hell is a ‘ma’am’?” Anita laughed.

  “It’s spelled like ‘madam,’” Julia explained calmly. “But you pronounce it ‘ma’am.’”

  “Like in the TV show Dallas?” Anita giggled.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “What’s that on your shirt?”

  “You can probably read it for yourself.”

  It said “D.A.R.E. To Keep Kids Off Drugs” in English. Samuel didn’t get it.

  “Raimo is looking for you,” he told Anita, who was spelling the text on the shirt out loud, one letter at a time. He was embarrassed for her. Luckily Anita was so drunk she didn’t even notice the camera. Otherwise she would’ve asked Julia to record her drunken bullshitting. Anita jumped and turned toward the crowd, which had started singing a song by Kirka.

  “It’s. Your time.”

  Anita began to sing along and started on unsteady feet back toward the grill.

  “I’m sorry.” Samuel knew she had saved Julia from an inane conversation about the Beatles, but he felt it was polite to apologize.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Why do you say ma’am?” he asked.

  Julia shrugged. “We used to live in the States.”

  “For real?”

  “Mm-hm. In LA.”

  “And you moved here?”

  Julia nodded.

  “Are you pretending to be something?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like an American or something.”

  “No. My grandmother still lives there, but I was born in Finland and went to school here for the first three grades. I’m not pretending to be anything.”

  “You’ll get your ass kicked here if you speak English,” Samuel said quietly. “Everyone will think you’re trying to be better than everyone else.”

  Another shrug. Samuel wasn’t sure whether the girl really would be beaten up, but he’d heard how Maisa from the townhomes had been shoved against a wall really hard for some reason that wasn’t meant for kids to hear. Most of the perpetrators had been girls the same age as Samuel, but they all dated boys who owned cars.

  “When did you get here?”

  “Yesterday, duh.”

  “So you don’t even know anyone yet.”

  Julia nodded, and the nod revealed how scared she was. Samuel wouldn’t have paid any attention to it if he hadn’t secretly drank out of his dad’s bottle with Aki right before the party. Now he wasn’t afraid anymore and could clearly see the fear in her. How could someone from America be so afraid of Patteriniemi Road?

  “Don’t worry,” Samuel said. “I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

  He felt as if he could command Jape and his pals. His ears hummed.

  “You mean, to those guys?” Julia nodded toward the party.

  “No, I mean to all the good people. Like Harri, and . . . the rest of them.”

  “What are the rest of them called?”

  Samuel hadn’t expected such a direct question. All the reasonable names in the world disappeared from his brain and the only ones he could think of were Arthur and Väinö.

  “Well, let’s just start with Harri.”

  Harri was the only boy on Patteriniemi Road who hadn’t had Samuel in a headlock. He listened to Mercyful Fate because his older brother made him. Samuel could always go to his place to listen to the kinds of records the neighborhood idiots knew nothing about. He wouldn’t have dared to even store some of the records on his shelves. Mercyful Fate’s Don’t Break the Oath was the worst. Looking at its cover, Samuel started thinking how it might actually pay off to go to church and pray, as long as no friend would ever see him do it. They’d had the guts to listen to Venom’s At War with Satan backwards, but only for ten seconds.

  “All right.” Julia smiled. “Introduce me to Harri.”

  Samuel knew she’d called his bluff, but it wasn’t the end of the world. He could tell by the way she smiled.

  “Where exactly do you live?”

  “Oh, you want to walk me home?”

  “Sure.”

  They walked past the town houses toward the homes occupied by the small parasites’ hosts.

  “Your mom and dad are rich,” Samuel said when they stopped at a single-family home. It had at least three floors, if you counted the garages downstairs. And there were two garages, as if it were obvious that the people living there had two cars. It was the last house before the woods began, the woods that stretched all the way to the sea. Samuel had always thought that the previous family moved out because the house was too close to the wilderness. In the dark it looked like bears and wolves and who knows what lived there.

  “My dad is,” Julia said. “Super rich. He knows Chuck Norris.”

  Listen to this bullshit.

  “Where’s your mom, then?” Samuel asked, because he didn’t want to catch Julia lying.

  “Dead.”

  Samuel didn’t ask anything else. He just said, “My mom’s dead, too.” He then worked up the courage to ask her, “Want to hang out tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  He walked back to the party as if he weren’t walking at all. He glided through the air that had been softly scented with rain and reeds and the sea, and he looked up and saw the tops of the trees with the sky behind them, and the sky stretched all the way out into space.

  Later in the evening, as he sat around with the other kids and drank Raimo’s liquor and beer that the adults had forgotten next to the grill, he thought about the tilt of Julia’s head, her greenish-blue eyes, and how America had landed on Patteriniemi Road.

  Maisa’s reaction to the threat she had received was completely opposite from its apparent intention. She did not draw her curtains in the evenings. She didn’t gl
ance over her shoulder as she jogged through Hoviska Park and on Palosaari Island. Or at least she didn’t admit to it.

  When she thought about it, the photo and the threatening note quickly became an integral part of her bedtime ritual. Their memory haunted her behind her eyelids when she turned off her reading light. Sometimes she turned the light back on and read the letter, which she’d placed on her night table. She looked at the grotesque photo, enchanted, clutching it triumphantly like a kid with a glass jar in which she had captured a baby snake.

  She drove to Suvikylä every day and strolled to the point in the peninsula. Her childhood memories led her to the Boundary effortlessly, to the place with the twisted beech. Leafless, its branches looked like tentacles. There used to be a small single-family home nearby, but all she could see from the path was a foundation covered in grass. A wet path that began at the beech led to the shore, which was overrun by reeds. But the path was still visible. Once she’d get to the shore, she’d see the Bondorff villa.

  Maisa realized she’d been holding her breath, so she stepped over the Boundary as if to mock it, letting her adult weight crush the wet branches and bits of reed. She looked down the path until her breathing had evened out, then turned back.

  On her way to the car, she noticed a police van next to the Patteriniemi Road apartment buildings. The sight jabbed at a corner of her soul, but she didn’t want to get in touch with Sagal again. The girl’s phone records would already show nearly ten calls from Maisa. She didn’t want to think about all the questions and what she’d give as answers—that would just mess up her thinking patterns.

  Everything would’ve been fine if she only knew for sure that Sagal was all right. She felt energetic, cocksure, and optimistic. She slept well, and when she couldn’t it didn’t matter; for whatever reason, three hours of sleep had sufficed lately.

  If Sagal had only answered her phone or at least sent her a fuck you in a text message, everything would’ve been as perfect as it possibly could’ve been in Maisa’s world.

  She got into her car and buckled up. She’d already started the car when a group of girls gathered at the corner of one of the buildings. They lit their cigarettes and formed a broken circle in unison. It was easy to tell who was the leader, who was the ass-kisser, and who barely had permission to be there. Without a soundtrack it was easy to see how naturally these roles were filled.

  Maisa watched the girls for a while. Her hand was still on the key. She nudged it and the engine turned off.

  “Excuse me,” she said, approaching the girls.

  None of them heard her, so she repeated it slightly louder, not sure whether she should’ve aimed for an adult’s authority or peer-like youth. She ended up sounding somewhere in between and insecure.

  The entire circle turned toward her. Judging by their faces Maisa had accused them of something she wasn’t allowed to bring up.

  “Do you girls happen to know why that police van is here?”

  One of the girls whispered to another.

  “The fuck should we know?” the apparent leader of the group said. “Ask them.”

  “What’s your name?” Maisa asked, trying to stare the girl down. She wanted to show her that she could see through the exaggerated makeup and the nonchalant pose all the way to the girl’s fragile self-esteem.

  “What’s it to you?” the girl asked.

  The group froze. Their faces flickered with fearful defiance.

  “You better answer,” Maisa said and walked unnecessarily close.

  “Are you some social-worker bitch or what?”

  “Your name,” Maisa demanded. “Or you bet I’ll go talk to those cops.”

  Abracadabra. The girl’s mask cracked. The c-word always worked, no matter how vague the threat was.

  “Mira.”

  “Last name?”

  A long drag from the cigarette. The answer came on the wings of smoke. “Mickey fucking Mouse. It’s an honorary title.”

  The group chuckled quietly, but the mask on the girl who had introduced herself as Mira continued to crack.

  “Listen, Mira Mickey fucking Mouse,” Maisa said. “Do you know why the police are here?”

  “Someone ran away from home.”

  “Ran away.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because she’s fucking talked about it for a year. Can I finish this cigarette or not?”

  Maisa weighed her options, and while doing so she realized her own facade could come crumbling down any moment. All it took was an unsure glance for a split second.

  “Who’s the kid?”

  “This one Somali girl,” a girl hiding on the outer edge of the circle piped up. “Her dad doesn’t even let her use the Internet. He beats her. Now he’s yelling up there, being all ‘Me love me girl.’”

  Some more laughing, but less enthusiastic than when the leader had cracked a joke.

  “What’s your name, then?” Maisa asked.

  “Mine? Yunomi,” she said and blew smoke. “My dad’s Japanese. My last name is Fukuyu.”

  The group let out a lazy guffaw. Only the leader remained stone-faced.

  Maisa looked at the girl who’d just spoken, not knowing whether she should be relieved or worried more than before. Kirsi had given no indication that Sagal had problems with her father when they’d talked about her. Actually, quite the opposite: the father had sounded like a responsible parent.

  Maisa jumped when a cigarette butt flew past her. Not that close, but close enough. Mira stared at her quizzically, feigning innocence.

  “Can we go home now, miss?” she said. “We have such a dreadful amount of homework.”

  Maisa was quiet. Whatever authority she had had was gone.

  “Thank you all,” she muttered and walked back to her car.

  She expected to hear shouting or sarcastic comments behind her, but instead she heard absolutely nothing.

  Once she sat in her car, she saw the girls leaning in to each other, whispering. The leader, Mira, stood with her head held high and talked to each girl in turn with a relaxed face, but the circle around her had gotten tighter. Only one of the girls was looking at Maisa, but just briefly before she snapped her head back to Mira, as if by command.

  Maisa turned on the engine and tried to find something positive from her exchange with the girls. Teenage girls ran away from home all the time—maybe even more often now than back in her day. Most of them came home when their barely adult friend kicked them out, or the older boyfriend who’d promised the girl the moon didn’t get what he wanted. There were plenty of explanations.

  Unfortunately none of those scenarios explained Sagal’s disappearance.

  The phone kept on ringing in the morning, but it didn’t interrupt Aki’s sleepy breathing on the lower of the bunk beds. He just ground his teeth and snored. Samuel could’ve fallen asleep again to the sound of the phone, but Aki’s teeth-grinding was too much. Once, Samuel had decided to sacrifice a piece of Juicy Fruit and smuggle it between his brother’s teeth, but it had only been soaked in drool and bent against the teeth. Screech, screech!

  “Hello?” Finally, their dad’s annoyed voice in the foyer. It would remain annoyed unless the caller was from the labor union or a member of the Communist Party.

  “Who’s this? Yes . . . he is,” he said. “Just a moment.”

  Samuel tried to shut his eyes quickly, but his dad had already opened the door.

  “It’s for Samuel,” he said and wobbled back into the living room.

  That sentence sounded weird. Even Aki stopped grinding his teeth for a moment before launching back into it again. Their dad would’ve eavesdropped and teased Samuel about the call if he hadn’t been hungover from the party.

  Samuel jumped out of bed and went to the phone. The receiver rested on a small table in the fo
yer. He picked it up, catching a glimpse of his knotted hair in the mirror. He needed a haircut again.

  “This is Samuel,” he said.

  “It’s Julia. How are you?”

  How are you? What the hell kind of a question was that?

  “Just a bit tired, otherwise I’m all right.”

  “Good. I was just wondering if you’d want to go for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere, I don’t know.”

  “Sure. Right now?”

  “Why not?”

  They agreed to meet in front of Julia’s house. Samuel ran back into his room to put his pants on. Suddenly Aki’s head popped up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  “Just stay here and grind your yellow buckteeth.”

  “So what? You’ve got pubic hair!”

  “Why do you have to be such a goddamned brat?” Samuel mumbled. “Go get yourself checked.”

  He wore the same shirt he’d worn the day before, although he was slightly worried it smelled and Julia would be wearing a fresh set of clothes. His dad hadn’t had the energy to do laundry in the communal laundry room after work, so Samuel had to look for clothes that smelled the least. Right now he had no time, though; Aki could get dressed any moment now and follow him. His brother was clearly frustrated: their dad had taken him home from the party already at nine in the evening.

  “You’re pretending to read fancy poetry by some French ‘Ballselaire,’ and you’re just sitting around growing your pubes.”

  Aki’s voice sounded on the verge of tears. He was coming really close to tagging along. Samuel wouldn’t have time to brush his teeth if he wanted to duck out in time. He had to be careful which way he was breathing. And he had to worry about smelling like sweat. And to look around to make sure Aki wouldn’t jump out of some bush and attack him and Julia. What a joy to have a little brother.

  “I’m going,” Samuel said. “You keep scratching your ass and sniffing your fingers.”