Black River

by Will Dean

  ‘Love it,’ I say.

  ‘My name’s Sally Sandberg,’ she says. ‘People call me The Breeder.’ Sally stretches over to shake my hand, then turns her fingers so I can take a closer look.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I say. ‘So intricate.’

  The tessellating reptile scales are beautiful. Like honeycomb.

  She inhales from her e-cigarette and blows dragon smoke out her nose. The vapour smells minty.

  ‘When I saw you driving around and around I thought to myself, now who’s this, Sally? You was going round in circles like a Norwegian lost on a roundabout.’ She laughs at her own joke. ‘But now I see you’re alright. Where’s that photo of your missing friend so I can take another peek?’

  I show her two photos on my phone. She bends closer. Sally’s about fifty-five years old and she has the smooth skin of an angel and hair to die for.

  ‘Ain’t seen her, I’m sorry to say. But if she does turn up here I’ll let her know you’re searching for her. Tuva, you said your name is?’

  I nod.

  ‘Are the people with the shipping containers home?’ I ask. ‘Could I go speak with them?’

  ‘They tell people round here they’re cousins,’ says Sally, her eyebrows up by her hairline. ‘Well, you don’t need to study no biology schoolbooks to see that’s a bunch of prime hokum.’ She adjusts her snus and I see dribbles of brown saliva rolling down her teeth. ‘Cousins!’

  ‘They’re not cousins?’ I ask.

  ‘They got a boy, funny kid. They took him outta school even though he ain’t finished his books yet. Those two ain’t true genetic cousins, mark my words.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I know all about bloodlines, see,’ she says. ‘I’m a certified breeder. I practice breeding every day.’ She smirks at me and shakes her head. ‘Get your mind out the gutter, friend, I don’t mean it like that. I’m a specialist. I bred for years now, ever since Sven passed. If I cross an albino python with a reticulated python, I know pretty much what I’ll end up with. In my professional opinion, those two ain’t so much cousins as you and me are.’

  ‘You breed snakes?’ I ask.

  ‘Breed them, do handicrafts, you seen my nails. I’m as ethical as I can be, not like them two Utgard sisters making them ugly little men. I use the whole animal and respect each one like family.’

  I try to peek inside the house. There are red stains on some of the deck boards and others look like they’ll snap if I step in the wrong place.

  ‘Can I see?’

  ‘You ain’t afraid?’ she says, smiling.

  I shake my head. I need to look inside every house, every shed, every lock-up, so I can discount them from my search.

  She stands and walks over to her front door. The undulating way she moves is hypnotic, it’s like she glides. ‘My friend will be here soon as his shift’s over, so I ain’t got long.’

  I follow her in, the deck boards creaking under my every step. It’s dark inside and the walls are pine like a giant sauna. An airport multipack of Park Lane cigarettes sits untouched on a window sill. The place smells of warm rot and vinegar.

  ‘Them’s the rooms,’ she says.

  There’s a corridor with perhaps forty doors, all padlocked.

  ‘Them’s the boxes,’ she says, pointing to a rack on the far wall. She walks over and pulls out a plastic box with a white label. ‘This one had her babes last night. Take a look, won’t hurt you.’

  There’s a mother snake, a thing about a metre long with a diamond-shape pattern along her back, and she has about twenty offspring.

  ‘This type give birth to live young. But some’s stillborn, poor dears. They’ll go to my others. Nature’s way,’ she says.

  ‘What are in the padlocked rooms?’ I ask.

  ‘Secrets.’

  ‘Secrets?’

  ‘I’m just messing with you. ‘The big ones are locked up,’ she says. ‘The antisocial ones. And the mean ones.’

  There’s a dull thud from somewhere inside this place.

  ‘Sally?’ says a deep voice from behind us.

  ‘Hello, friend,’ says Sally with a big smile, extracting her snus packets from under her lip with the discretion and swiftness of a master magician performing a trick. ‘This is Tuva, she’s just leaving.’

  ‘Hi,’ I say holding out my hand to the handsome Viking paramedic I’ve seen before around town. He has a fresh blood stain on his sleeve. I guess that goes with the job.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, shaking my hand, then turning to Sally and kissing her full on the lips.

  ‘Thanks for dropping by, friend,’ says Sally from behind the paramedic’s tattooed neck. She scratches her cheek with a snakeskin fingernail. ‘See you again soon.’

  5

  I leave them to their kiss. It’s the kind of kiss I haven’t had for four months and it makes me yearn for Noora. But part of me knows that if I’m still here when Noora gets back from her Gotland holiday then that means Tammy will still be missing. And I don’t want to think about that possibility.

  I leave the acidic house, Sally and the paramedic still locked together, and retreat to the covered deck. There’s a rifle leaning against a pine pillar and I’m not sure if it’s a BB gun or a lethal weapon.

  Behind Sally’s house is the river but there’s something else back there. Halfway between the shack and the bubbling water there are ten or twelve large white vats. Buckets full of God knows what. I can’t see from back here and something tells me Sally wants me off her land now her ‘friend’ is here. I get into my truck.

  I’m sweating and I have a bad taste in my mouth. Not sure if it’s from Sally’s house or from feeling so impotent in this search. Unprepared. Powerless. Or else it’s the fact I’m surrounded by thousands of wrecked cars and that always makes me queasy. Takes me back to the night of Dad’s crash. I thought it was my fault. Me, a fourteen-year-old girl. I never got to see his car again. Never got to see him again.

  I always blamed myself for his accident. All through my teens. He was planning on staying overnight after his conference and I pleaded with him to drive back so we could have his birthday breakfast together. I don’t blame myself anymore. I’ve dealt with that. But I will always be aware that if he had not driven back that night he’d still be alive today.

  An Utgard crow caws high above. I amble up to the warehouse with my windows down. There’s a forklift parked next to the corrugated steel structure and there’s some kind of hideous animal head mounted on the wall.

  A hunting trophy?

  My dash reads twenty-one degrees but it feels more like thirty. No wind. I step out and walk to the loading doors. Sally said her son lives here but it doesn’t look like he’s in. The animal on the door is staring at me like it’s guarding the place. At first I don’t recognise the breed, the size of its teeth. But it’s a wolverine. The head. Looks like a shrunken, bloodthirsty bear or a rabid rat. All sharp incisors. Its jaws are wide open and this Karl-Otto character, the man who apparently dated or is dating my best friend, has placed his doorbell button inside the wolverine’s mouth. I’ll have to stick my finger between its razor-sharp teeth to buzz. So I do. What kind of meathead chooses a doorbell like this anyway?

  The buzz is more like an insect drone.

  ‘You lost?’ asks a voice behind me.

  I spin on my axis towards the gleaming cars and the sun’s reflection is so dazzling I need to shield my eyes to see him.

  ‘Looking for Karl-Otto,’ I say.

  The man comes closer. He’s carrying an exhaust pipe in one hand and he’s wearing a baseball cap.

  ‘Not here,’ says the man, who, on closer inspection, is more boy than man.

  ‘My name’s Tuva Moodyson,’ I say. ‘I’m a friend of a friend of

  Karl-Otto’s.’

  ‘You sick?’ he says.

  What?

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Why?’

  ‘Your voice is all weird. Like you got a cold or something.’

  ‘
I’m deaf,’ I say.

  He looks at me and then looks over to my Hilux and then looks back at me.

  He says nothing for a full minute.

  ‘Can you drive a truck if you’re deaf?’ he asks.

  Do not test me today, kid. Do not test me.

  ‘I can do everything except hear. What’s your name?’

  ‘Viktor.’

  ‘When will Karl-Otto be back, Viktor?’

  He shrugs and carries the exhaust pipe towards the loading doors. This kid’s good-looking except his eyes are too far apart. Looks like a hammerhead shark.

  ‘You seen a woman around here in the last twenty-four hours, Viktor? She’s Swedish but her parents are both Thai. Name’s Tammy.’

  His head snaps around to me. His eyes are almost round by his ears.

  ‘Karl-Otto knows a Tammy. Heard him speak about her.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  He shrugs and blinks. ‘Can’t…can’t remember.’

  I catch a whiff of my own sweat.

  Can’t remember?

  ‘Are your parents here, Viktor? Can I speak with them?’

  He looks over towards the shipping container home.

  ‘Mum’s shopping,’ he says. ‘Karlstad city. Axel’s with her buying his stupid audio equipment. Thinks he’s got a voice. I call him my uncle but he ain’t really.’

  ‘Can I check inside?’ I ask, pointing to the loading doors. ‘Just for a minute? Want to check Tammy’s not hiding in there.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Karl-Otto told me to keep it locked up tight. We had problems one time someone stealing his cameras and his computers and stuff. Have to keep it locked up real tight.’

  Below this kid’s denim shorts are a hundred raised red bumps. Bites.

  ‘Mosquitos bad this year, eh?’ I say.

  ‘Loggers,’ he says.

  I frown, like ‘sorry?’

  He points behind the warehouse towards Utgard forest. Impenetrable trees as tall as space rockets. ‘Two lumberjacks in there harvesting. Reckon it’s a whole summer’s work. Got ‘em living in a caravan and they got this cat, more like a lynx uncle Axel says, anyway it ain’t been fixed, and it’s making bitch cats pregnant all over the area. Axel says they’re all pests, them two and their tom cat.’

  ‘Where’s the lumberjack’s caravan, Viktor? I might need to talk to them.’

  ‘Top of the Mossen hill just before the troll-carving sisters’ house. Got their caravan near a passing place. Outsiders, not from round here. Axel reckons they’re ex-cons.’

  I give Viktor my card and tell him to call me if he hears of anything at all about Tammy and he looks at it.

  ‘You from Malmö? What you doing all the way up here?’

  ‘I lived in Gavrik for years. I’m back to find my friend.’

  He nods and stares towards Sally’s shack with its snake rooms and its rifle shining in the June sun. ‘Good luck with that,’ he says.

  I drive off, thirsty from the heat. I trundle along at 10kph and my eyes are everywhere. Every wreck, every patch of head-high weeds, every hollow and dip.

  The shipping containers at the six o’clock area are deserted. The red flowers in the window boxes have opened more since my earlier drive-by, each bright petal flexing to maximise its ration of light. This doorbell has no incisors. The patch of garden is parched brown. Normal-looking. But the house itself doesn’t look like any house I’ve ever seen. On the left: two long shipping containers stacked on top of each other, painted dark green, with windows and blinds. On the right: two more containers. They’re all connected. I suppose there’s a good amount of living space but it looks uninviting. Gloomy. I see shipping containers and I think exploited people being smuggled from one side of the globe to the other. Decent people being taken advantage of. Some of them dying on the voyage.

  I step out of my truck and walk around pretending I don’t know there’s nobody home. There are maybe twenty or thirty more containers stacked and scattered around the place, and there’s a crane, and there’s a long loading lorry. Some of the containers haven’t got windows and others haven’t been painted yet; they’re still sporting names like Maersk and Pacific Cargo.

  There are pipes sticking up out of the ground. Maybe ventilation ducts? Or some kind of drainage system? And then something shiny catches my eye. I walk towards a grey container. It has a window hole cut out and inside I can see timber joists and beams. The shiny thing on the wall, hanging from a nail, is a pair of steel handcuffs.

  I step towards them and whisper, ‘Tammy?’

  Nothing.

  I peek inside the container and say, ‘Tammy, are you in there?’ But it’s completely empty.

  I photograph the handcuffs on my phone and send the photo to Thord. But if someone kidnapped Tammy they wouldn’t leave handcuffs lying around, would they? Would they even use handcuffs?

  Something behind me.

  The hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

  I turn.

  It’s Viktor. No exhaust pipe. One hand in his pocket. He’s walking towards me with a claw hammer hanging from a loop on his trousers. I walk fast towards my truck.

  ‘Best come back when Karl-Otto’s here,’ he says, his eyes flitting from my T-shirt to my face.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, jogging now to get to the safety of my Hilux.

  He speeds up.

  ‘Karl-Otto don’t like people here,’ says Viktor.

  I get to my truck and climb in and close the door and lock it. Then I nod at Viktor through the window. As I switch on my engine I look forward and there’s an EPA tractor parked up – a small truck with a red triangle in its rear window, the kind of truck that farmers use. This one looks about twenty years old and there’s a wooden lid bolted down onto the flatbed to enclose it, and the wood’s been covered in roofing felt.

  But that’s not what I’m staring at. I’m staring at the dry earth beneath the truck. The sticky patch. I’m staring at the dark blood dripping down from the back of the truck.

  6

  I fumble with my phone as Viktor stares at me through my windscreen. I turn my key in the ignition. Nothing. I try again but something’s wrong.

  I speed-dial Thord.

  Viktor looks at me then looks at the EPA truck. My phone isn’t connecting. Viktor bangs my bonnet with the flat of his hand and then he turns and tries to heave the wooden cover off the flatbed of his EPA tractor.

  I try the key again. What the hell is wrong with my truck?

  ‘Thord speaking.’

  Viktor removes the claw hammer from his tool belt.

  ‘It’s me, I’m at Snake River, I’ve found a truck. There’s blood dripping out the back…’

  ‘Are you in danger, Tuva? Can you get away from the scene?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Tuva, listen to me very…’ but I’ve tuned out. Viktor’s managed to open the homemade lid on the back of the pickup. He’s staring at me, hammer in hand, and he’s pointing to the roe deer lying in the truck. There are half a dozen black flies buzzing round the torso of the animal. A sheet of blood cascades from the truck.

  Viktor’s lips are saying, ‘Roadkill.’

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘It’s my mistake,’ I tell Thord as I stare at its broken neck. ‘It’s just a deer.’

  ‘Deer?’ he says. ‘This time of year?’

  ‘Roadkill,’ I say.

  ‘Well, alright then,’ he pauses a moment. ‘Tuvs, it’s good you’re out searching but don’t go putting yourself in any danger, you hear? Can you do this with a friend or something?’

  ‘Tammy’s my friend,’ I say, still staring at the dead deer not much larger than a family Labrador.

  ‘Yeah, I know. But you make sure you get some rest and some food. Keep your stamina up.’

  ‘Sure.’

  I end the call and Viktor gestures for me to wind down my window. Deep breaths. My gear is in drive. That’s why the truck isn’t starting. I move it to park and start it up. Another
deep breath. I open my window a few centimetres because I don’t feel safe here even though my engine’s running and I can leave any time I want.

  The smell of blood. An iron tang from the carcass.

  ‘Didn’t shoot it, I promise on my mamma’s life. Found it on the side of the road, I did.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, looking back at the deer, its head twisted round, its shiny lifeless eyes staring right at me, judging me. ‘We’ll spit-roast her over at the firepit by Karl-Otto’s place. Got some hog fat in the freezer that’ll juice her up real nice.’

  ‘I have to go,’ I say, letting my foot off the break, winding my window back up. It feels good to be moving again and to be hermetically sealed inside my own vehicle. The Snake River site doesn’t feel like anyplace I’ve ever visited before. It has a frontier vibe, like the laws of the land don’t quite reach all the way out here.

  I drive past more shipping containers, some partially buried in the dirt, some carved out with display windows in their sides like giant fish tanks at an aquarium. There’s a rusting sail boat called Lena III up on stilts and wrapped in tarp sheets. Everywhere I look I see a hiding place: a void or a room where someone could be holding Tammy against her will.

  When I turn back onto the road I’m sweating and my heart’s beating too hard. Too little sleep, too much coffee. Classic Midsommar combo.

  Utgard forest bears down on me, the monstrous pines standing straight, like malevolent spectators looking out at the world. Waiting. Poised.

  As I drive back to the underpass I see the volume of traffic on the E16. It’s not a jam but it’s getting there. Cars, most stuffed with toddlers and spare bedding and sweating strawberries, are trundling along at about 30kph, windows open, tanned arms hanging out and scooping back air. This week, the Midsommar week, is peak summer-home time in Sweden. People pack up their shit and head to whatever lakeside shack their granddaddy built, or whatever forest cottage they bought off the internet, and they grill outdoors and they have lots of unprotected twilight sex and they get bitten by a thousand bloodthirsty insects, insects that have been waiting for them since the last snows melted away back in April.