“They were in their sixties,” Rune shouted.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“There’s a lot of old graves here,” Rune said softly, as if to himself. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I glanced back; the girls stood in the far corner, by the boy who had been stabbed. In the car, Rune was happy again. “And a lot of new graves, too.”
Later, in the shop, Arild sat down beside me. I thought he was hinting to me to mow the lawn, but when I stood he gestured me back down. “You understand,” he said, “that Rune’s favorite thing is chainsaws.”
“I understand,” I said.
Arild took his time pouring a cup of coffee. He sloshed the thermos—it was running low—and raised his eyebrows, so I went to the hallway to start a new pot. When I got back he continued: he had dragged tree trunks from the hill to the sheep field, but he needed them cut into firewood. Rune had been promising to do it for months. “So today I said to he Rune, ‘Rune, now you must sit down and relax, because I’m going to teach she Blair to use a chainsaw.’ And so now suddenly he is out there cutting wood. You can see it best from the upstairs window.”
I followed Arild up the stairs. “Here’s binoculars,” he said, handing me binoculars. There was Rune in an orange coat, bent over a stack of logs. As I watched, a chunk of wood fell off and landed in the mud.
“I think that was pretty smart,” said Arild.
I agreed that it was very smart. Did he want me to cut grass?
“No,” said Arild. “Please relax. I just wanted you to see that.”
That night, Arild’s friend visited from the city, as he did every few weeks. His name was Nils, but since he kept a trailer on Mortenhals, Arild called him Camping Nils, to differentiate him from Thailand Nils. Camping Nils was a newspaperman in his late fifties, a soft-spoken retiree who radiated quiet, amused kindness. His favorite candy was milk chocolate with dried fruit and hazelnuts, which I knew because every time he was coming, Arild sent me down to the shop for a big bar of it.
I joined the men on the patio, as I always did with Arild’s guests, but before long Arild glanced at his watch, wondering aloud if I was tired, poor pia kept awake with the boring chatter of old men. I faked a yawn and cleared the table, checked the lambs, slipped back into the house. When I fell asleep at last, it was to the sound of the men’s inaudible conversation drifting through my window, late into the blue night.
On Saturday, Rune was drunk for his morning coffee. “Do you want to know the future?” Arild said, after Rune had stumbled out. “In a few hours, Rune will come back and buy twelve more pils. Then tomorrow, when the shop is closed, he’ll call and ask me to bring him some more. I’ll refuse. I’ll say that I can’t drive because I’ve had a drink myself. So Rune will call back five minutes later and say he’s gotten a taxi and will soon be arriving at the shop. How far do you think from his house to the shop? A kilometer? The taxi will cost him three hundred kroner”—around fifty dollars—“but when he’s damp like this, that won’t stop him. Then he’ll run out of money and we’ll have to feed him for the rest of the month.”
Three P.M., Rune walked back in. Saturday was the busiest day of the week: not only did the city folks come out, but it was gambling day. A dozen customers stood around the table, guessing randomly about the success of various foreign soccer teams, buying lotto tickets with their extra change. This afternoon Arild was in the city, meeting his lawyer, so Anne Lill managed the rush herself. I helped where I could, ringing up purchases and restocking shelves.
“So you’re gambling?” Rune boomed, and then he started to laugh. He was so loud. The customers quieted. Though plenty of locals gambled, these were mostly city folk. They came to their cabins on long summer weekends to get away from the bustle of life—to remember, for a few days, what Norway used to be. Two women sat in the corner, looking at shoes. One of them lifted an enormous men’s sandal. The movement caught Rune’s eye.
“It’s too small for you!” he bellowed. His hands fell heavily on the table. “It’s only a forty-six,” he said. “It’s too small!”
The women seemed to shrink, ignoring him, and Rune turned his attention to the other customers—clapping their shoulders, critiquing their gambling cards. I should do something, I thought—take him by the arm, bribe him out the door with talk of chainsaws, anything. I could help. But I found myself staring at the tabletop with everyone else, oddly paralyzed. How could I confront him, what would I say? Maybe I could leave to make more coffee.
Eventually Rune stumbled to the beer fridge. He bent over, revealing a stretch of delicate butt crack, and grabbed two six-packs off the bottom shelf. Then, still chuckling, he lurched out the door.
“Is he gone?” someone asked Anne Lill.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank goodness.”
Anne Lill didn’t approve of Rune hanging around the shop, on this day or any day. She couldn’t understand how Arild tolerated him—why, even encouraged him. She preferred things orderly; she mopped every evening, and twice a year she washed the customers’ coffee mugs, despite their fervent objections. Nor did she like children running down the aisles. “This isn’t a cafe,” she’d say to herself, following with a rag to wipe up their dirty footprints. The only children she longed for were Jeanette’s, still ensnared in bureaucracy; their court date had been postponed once again, this time until September. Anne Lill seemed to take the children’s absence personally, a corrupt intrusion on private rural and family life. The injustice steeled her. She told anyone who’d listen about Jeanette’s skill as a mother: how Jeanette had been mistreated herself as a child, so she knew better than anyone not to pass it on. One afternoon, Anne Lill doodled the names of the missing children on a scrap of paper, surrounded by flowers and hearts. She left the note in the middle of the coffee table, where it lay untouched for a week.
Anne Lill had stood by the shop through the hard times, when it was her work—and her outside money—that helped to keep it afloat. And she’d stand by it through the current times, too, as Arild and his sister battled over rights. Anne Lill believed that Ingeborg was doing wrong, and her disdain for wrongdoing aligned her with her husband. She’d been there when Ingeborg showed up, started grabbing things off the shelves of the Old House. She’d been there when Ingeborg had burst into the shop itself, and tried to nail the door shut, and when the men at the coffee table had risen to their feet and stood behind Arild, a wall of muscle and support. She knew what keeping a shop entailed.
So when news came that Egil was stepping down, and that Martha, the American, was taking over the Sand Shop, Anne Lill snorted and fell still. She did not reflect on the end of an era, or on what the change might mean for her own business. She thought only of Martha. There was not a trace of amusement on her face. “I’m amazed she can bear it,” she said.
That night my phone rang. It was Anne Lill. “Have you seen?” she said. “Have you seen what’s at the dock? What is it?”
“Right now?”
“Oh,” she said, “something’s here now. I’m going down to look.”
I was happy that she’d called. Anne Lill was never unkind to me, but she had at times seemed ambivalent about my presence, and I’d often wondered what she thought of the fact that I had essentially moved in with her husband. Lately, though, I’d sensed a shift. Maybe she’d had the time to feel me out, or maybe it was the work I put in around the shop, but she’d started drinking coffee with me, sharing gossip, catching my eye in exasperation when one of the men said something particularly vulgar. Anne Lill reminded me of girls I had admired in school, smart and self-assured and cattier than I dared to be. I was grateful for her welcome.
I got to the Old House just as Anne Lill came out the side door, and we walked the gravel road to the dock together. At first glance, it seemed the dock was empty. The boat was so low that only its top was visible, a mess of wires and poles, bobbing slightly; closer, we looked down on a long wooden skipper, painted green and blue, with two leather
couches on a deck piled high with backpacks and sleeping bags. A coffee table was covered with spilled beer cans. As we watched, a half dozen teenagers skipped past us without even a hello, clambering down into the boat. One wore red-and-black-striped pants with a yellow poncho; another, a one-piece blue rabbit costume. They had come from the church.
Two young men sat on the couches. One wore a fringed leather vest and held a camera with a lens as long as his arm; he raised it lazily and snapped a picture of me. The other man wore a clean fleece jacket and was sitting quite upright with his hands in his lap. His eyes fastened on Anne Lill.
“Mom?” he said.
Anne Lill raised her eyebrows very high. But before she could say anything, a man emerged from the cabin. He wore a leather jacket and tight black jeans; gauzy curtains of curly red hair formed a sort of froth around his head and shoulders. The cowboy: Helge Jensen. He reached up and grabbed my arm, tugged me down into the boat before I could say that I could climb in just fine by myself, thank you. The deck gave under my weight; the camera boy walked over, shook my hand, and, without releasing it, led me to the couch and tried to pull me down next to him. I had to use my other hand to wrench the first free from his grip. He winked.
A gold plaque on the cabin spelled the word Abdullah.
Helge Jensen touched my back and followed my gaze. It seemed we were already friends, no introductions needed. “Abdullah,” he said thoughtfully. “When I first saw it, I thought fuck, that’s some Arabian shit. I don’t like that. But actually it’s a brand of Turkish tobacco from before the war. There used to be all sorts of shops like the one Arild’s got now, and boats like this would travel up and down the coast selling them wares. So this one sold Turkish tobacco. I got it south of Bergen, after the last owner died and his wife didn’t know what to make of it.” Helge Jensen stared at me. He didn’t appear to have any eyebrows. I waited for him to look away, and when he didn’t, I turned to find the camera boy watching me, too.
“Show them the picture of the fly,” Helge Jensen told the boy.
“I didn’t take it,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Helge Jensen. “It’s unbelievable.”
The boy swiped through his phone, and eventually held up an iridescent close-up of a housefly on a leaf. The fly was green with metallic swirls of pink and orange, like an oil slick. It had a lot of eyes.
Anne Lill giggled. Helge Jensen made her nervous.
The air on the ship was one of languor. The boy in the bunny suit sat down on an overturned bucket and began to eat marshmallows out of a brown paper bag. His eyes were unfocused; he picked the marshmallows from the bag one by one and pushed them into his mouth and swallowed and then ate some more. Somebody threw a live fish and it flew through the air and landed on the couch behind us. It gasped its gills on the black leather. Nobody moved it.
Helge Jensen glanced at the pulsing fish, then reached into a pile that I took for trash and pulled out a dried fish, two feet long and rock hard, with a gaping hole where its head had been. He held it by the tail and waved it like a wand. “Dryfish,” he said. “You’ve had it? This one’s a little strange because I left it out on the boat over the winter, but it’s still good to eat. We’ll hammer it flat and eat it. You can buy this but it’s very expensive. A thousand kroner.” He put his hand on my lower back and rubbed me in gentle circles. “This boat,” he said, “she sailed tobacco up and down the coast. Turkish tobacco.” More circles. I stepped away from him.
Instantly, as if filling a vacuum, two girls walked over and put their arms around Helge Jensen and he grabbed their hips and held them both tight against him. “My daughters,” he said, kissing their foreheads in turn.
“How many kids do you have?” I asked him.
Helge Jensen looked around. “All of them.”
Helge Jensen’s son had been stabbed to death two years before, after a fight broke out at a party. Now he was surrounded by children. He closed his eyes and pushed his face into his daughters’ hair; their affection seemed so intimate that I felt myself blush. Anne Lill caught my eye and we both climbed back onto the dock, waved down at the waving teenagers, walked briskly up the road to finally burst into laughter. “I’ve never seen such hippies,” Anne Lill remarked. “And my own son!” She sounded skeptical. “It’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t marry one of Helge Jensen’s daughters.” Then she stiffened. “Don’t look,” she said, “but you see those houses on the hill?” They were lined up beside the church, to our right. “I’m sure they’re all watching to see what’s going on. And now—oh, no.” She laughed and frowned at the same time. “Oh, now they’ve all seen us getting off Helge Jensen’s boat!”
On Sunday, Arild moved his car from the shop to the Old House, so that it would be out of sight. When Rune called and asked for beer, Arild shook his head sadly. “Gee, Rune. I wish you’d called earlier. We already left for Finland.”
Rune was desperate. Was Anne Lill around? Wasn’t there a hidden key to the shop? Was there an open window to the basement?
Finally Arild relented and left a six-pack on the front step. When the cab pulled up, he ducked into the barn and hid.
That week, a new drama consumed the village: cloudberry season had come early. When Arild drew me a near-incomprehensible map to show where I might find “approximately ten berries” behind the RV park, he tore up the paper after I’d seen it. Berry patches were private matters, passed down within families and guarded fiercely, and cloudberries were gold. Northern Light published a front-page story about a man who reported false bear sightings on Facebook to try to deter his neighbors from berry picking, but the story was just a new spin on old news. Cloudberry bears had been around for generations, and at this point, the only people who believed in them were outlanders and small children—and children caught on soon enough. I got to the patch and found dozens of empty stems and eight remaining berries, blister-swollen and salmon-colored—what Martin’s mother, who was famously crude, had once compared to rosy dick heads scattered across the tundra. The berries were sour and seedy. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about. He the Rich One explained it to me: nothing tasted as good as what your neighbors couldn’t find.
Nobody could remember getting berries this early. But then, they mused, it had been an unseasonably warm May. In fact, this had been a summer of records: the warmest May, the wettest June, the earliest potato harvest, the most ice cream sold nationwide. When salmon season opened, T-shaped nets scarred the surface of the fjord, but the nets were empty; the salmon had already spawned. The fields bloomed cream and magenta with fireweed and cow parsnip; though cold kept the trees small, the summer flowers were enormous, this year even more so than usual. But the tall grass and wildflowers, left on their own, were stressful. Women pursed their lips, passing, and men shook their heads. The growth meant that the land that had taken so long to clear was being left untended. Clumps formed in the grasses, saplings took root, forests closed over what had once been opened. The trees ate the land. But a cut field, with its mowed spirals, its rows of soft grass drying in the sun, was beautiful. It meant there was life in the village.
With cloudberries came haying season, for those who still hayed. Farmers drove their tractors to the shop for sodas and leather work gloves. Arild was proud that out of all the farmers on the peninsula, it was his right to hay the graveyard. After all, the shop had hosted traveling priests when he was a child, and, although he was not now religious, this connection to religious life made him more intimate than most with matters of the church. He was not even afraid of the graveyard, he bragged, so long as he had a proper reason to be there. And so it was with pleasure, humming a tune drowned out by the sputtering engine, that he left Anne Lill in charge of the shop and maneuvered his tractor up the hill. When he’d acquired a critical mass of hay, he brought me to the hay room in the back of the barn to admire it. The hay was heaped higher than my head, mounded like snowdrifts in February. An old ladder led to a loft by the ceiling. I cli
mbed up for the view, and Arild followed.
Dust filled the air like fog, swirling in pinstripes of light that shone through the wooden walls. We looked down on the hay. “We used to jump from here, when I was a boy,” Arild said. He glanced at me. “You can try, if you’d like.”
I didn’t like heights, but that wasn’t the point. With a deep breath I jumped and fell, rolling down one of the soft mounds to land disoriented by the door, spikes of hay pricking my waist and neck and ankles. I couldn’t stop laughing. “You coming?”
“Blair,” said Arild, “you understand that an old man in his sixties does not jump from the hayloft.”
“You’re not that old,” I told him.
“Thank you,” said Arild, “but I am.” And with perfect posture he stepped into the air.
A few days later, Rune didn’t show up at the shop in the morning, or even in the afternoon. Customers came with rumors, one by one.
Rune was dizzy.
Rune had fallen by the side of the road.
There was an ambulance.
He’d been taken to a hospital in the city.
Rune was dying.
Perhaps, they said gravely, he was already dead.
Nobody seemed devastated.
At five minutes to closing, Rune came to the door, looking for beer.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
He rubbed his hand over his mouth, his beard. “Yeah,” he said. “There was an ambulance, jo.” He giggled through his hand. Six beers.
Arild watched him shuffle out to his car. “Rune the unhealable,” he said, sounding at once mournful and impressed. “He’s been a dirt clod all his life.”
But the next day Rune bought two apples and two pears. Nobody had seen him buy produce before. The doctor had scared him straight.
When I rang up the fruit, Rune didn’t look at me. He stood by the counter, hands in his pockets, and thrust out his chin. He gazed around the shop, his eyes skimming over the familiar racks: the shoes, the lotto tickets, the tobacco, the magazines. He handed me twenty kroner, clasped the bags of fruit in a blackened hand, and paced out.
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 13
