Black River

by Will Dean

  ‘Sells them for big money,’ says Axel.

  ‘Real big money,’ says Alexandra.

  ‘Seen a thing one time and it’ll stay with me till the day I die,’ says Alexandra.

  ‘Day she dies,’ says Axel. ‘Tell her what you saw.’

  ‘She does the taxidermy, you know, stuffing and posing and that sort,’ says Alexandra, her face glistening with sweat. ‘This was a boa or a python, I’m not an expert, and it was coiled round a wolverine about ten times, strangling the last breath out of the poor thing, only I expect she bought it shot and it’d never seen a boa constrictor in its life. Then she arranged them like that. The snake twisted around the wolverine and then, at the front of the whole thing, the wolverine was posed so it was biting into the neck of the snake and the snake was there biting into the neck of the wolverine. Like some awful battle where nobody comes out alive. She sold it through her own website.’

  ‘The dark web,’ says Axel.

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ says Alexandra. ‘Think she sells through Blocket, through Etsy. And through her own site, too. Sells tickets to some kind of live show. Karl-Otto, he’s her son, he’s much more of your normal sort; a bright man, eBay trader, good economy. He helps her with the technology aspects.’

  ‘Sounds like niche taxidermy,’ I said.

  ‘Niche?’ says Alexandra, pulling out a slender book of matches from her pocket and then placing it back. ‘I’ll never forget it.’

  ‘She never will,’ says Axel.

  ‘So,’ I say, trying to change the subject so I can get access to more buildings, more potential hiding places. ‘Such an interesting home you both have. Could you show me around, if that’s not intruding.’

  ‘It is,’ says Alexandra.

  ‘Intruding,’ says Axel.

  ‘We haven’t cleaned or tidied, you see,’ says Alexandra.

  ‘It’s not convenient,’ says Axel.

  Either side of their front door, the door they’re blocking like a pair of stone statues, is a strip of fly paper about two metres long. Each strip is spiralled and it’s blowing in the wind like some geometric wind-chime ornament. Except these are littered with corpses. I can see – adhered to the sticky paper – I can see hundreds if not thousands of stinging, biting, blood-sucking parasites. Most are dead but some are still flexing in a last-ditch bid for freedom.

  The cousins look at the fly paper.

  ‘Lumberjacks,’ says Alexandra.

  ‘Two lumberjacks,’ says Axel.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Alexandra points towards Utgard forest. Her arm is strong like a farmer’s arm and there’s a small tattoo on the underside of her bicep. Looks like a pair of chopsticks.

  ‘Two lumberjacks working through Utgard,’ she says, putting her arm back down so her fingernails almost graze her cousin’s again. ‘They’ve been at it for a month and I’d say they’ve felled five per cent. It’s a big elk forest, you see. Biggest in the Kommun.’

  ‘By far the biggest,’ says Axel. ‘And when they fell a few hectares, especially if it’s close to us at Snake River, we get a huge increase in the incidence of rats, mice, mosquitos and bog-toads. They felled quite close to us back in early May after the thaw and it looked like a goddam plague out here. Looked like the end of the world.’

  ‘End of the world,’ says Alexandra. ‘I said to him, it’s a good job our container home’s as secure as it is: airtight, watertight, soundproof, high-security doors. That’s what I said.’

  ‘She said that,’ says Axel. ‘We’ve had more moose out here, we’ve had angry bull moose out looking for trouble. No way they’d bother us inside there,’ he points behind to his container home. ‘High security. If we get more critters fleeing the forest, more vipers from the riverbanks, we’ll be just fine.’

  ‘Should put that on the marketing,’ says Alexandra, smiling, turning to her cousin.

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he says.

  ‘You do the marketing?’ I ask Axel.

  ‘Marketing, sales, accounting. Anything numbers based, customer focused, anything you can do from inside an office, that’s my work.’

  ‘I do the real work,’ Alexandra says, elbowing her cousin gently in the ribs. ‘All the welding, cutting, carpentry. I put in the pipework and so on, do all the drywall. That’s our system.’

  ‘System works,’ he says.

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, I really am. But I’m desperately worried for my missing friend. You have a lot of outbuildings here, places someone could hide. Could I take a quick look? With one of you with me, I mean?’

  ‘Not the house,’ says Alexandra. ‘But I’ll show you the workshop.’

  ‘And I can show you the office real quick,’ says Axel, lurching away from a hornet the size of a goddam Tampax.

  ‘Don’t bother that wasp and it won’t bother you,’ says Alexandra to her cousin.

  He nods to her and then turns to me and says, ‘That same rule goes for us.’

  We walk, the three of us, them so close they could be holding hands, me trying to take it all in, trying to look at the sheds, under the insulation packages.

  ‘Workshop and storage,’ says Alexandra. I step closer and I can smell her now. She reeks of out-of-date meat. Like forgetting a steak in the fridge when you go away on holiday then coming home and taking off the wrapper from the Styrofoam pack. Out-of-date meat that’s gone dark.

  ‘I don’t come in here,’ says Axel, his tone serious. ‘Just so you know.’

  ‘Tools, materials, equipment,’ says Alexandra. ‘I have another two just like this.’

  There’s a nail gun attached to some kind of air pump. There’s a circular saw and a jigsaw and a range of cordless power tools. Behind them is a stack, no, two stacks of cat-litter bags as tall as the ceiling.

  ‘You have cats?’ I ask, pointing at the sacks of ‘zero-odour’ litter.

  Axel looks furious with his cousin, his eyes boring into her.

  ‘No cats,’ she says. ‘We bought these wholesale real cheap. We’ll sell them on. We do that sometimes as we have so much dry, good-quality storage.

  ‘No better storage than a shipping container,’ says Axel, his grimace changing to a warm smile. ‘If things can stay dry inside on the back of a container ship for months at sea, I’d say it’ll be fine and dry out here.’

  ‘It’s part of our guarantee,’ she says.

  ‘Sure is,’ he says.

  We walk on, past Viktor’s EPA tractor, with its blood-stained chipboard flatbed, and onto another shipping container, this one spray-painted dark grey.

  ‘My office,’ says Axel. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’

  He opens the steel doors and we step inside. It looks like an actual office. Wooden floors, a desk with two computers, a sofa and a bookcase. On top of the bookcase is a pair of antique pistols.

  ‘For protection?’ I ask.

  ‘Hardly,’ says Axel. ‘They’re over a hundred years old. Purely for decoration.’

  ‘And over there?’ I ask. ‘Beyond the partition?’

  Axel and Alexandra look to the back of the container. ‘My private restroom.’

  ‘Can I look?’ I say. ‘I’m so impressed with what I’ve seen so far I might invest in one of these. Could you ship to Malmö?’

  ‘We ship worldwide,’ says Alexandra.

  ‘One of the benefits of them all being shipping containers,’ says Axel, a conceited look in his eye. ‘Here,’ he passes me a brochure. ‘No need to look at my toilet back there when I can give you one of these. Take it with you. Have a read.’

  I flick through. Some of the homes are huge: eight or more containers bolted together. One looks like it’s in Arizona or someplace hot. Maybe California. Part of the container is cantilevered on top of another so there’s an overhang like a veranda. It looks architect-expensive but if you sit under that overhang to enjoy a glass of wine I reckon you’d worry you might die any second from a catastrophic collapse. It’d just
take one engineer to get the calculations wrong. Splat. There are containers adapted into swimming pools and others into friggebod guest-cottages like super deluxe XL versions of the one I’m currently living in at Lena’s.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  Axel looks at Alexandra and says, ‘We need to prepare lunch now, if you don’t mind.’

  They usher me outside and then stand there side by side. I look around at the containers. Must be twenty or more here on site. Like a tsunami hit a shipyard.

  ‘We’ll walk you to your Toyota,’ says Alexandra, and I can smell her again as she ushers me away from Axel’s office. They look unnervingly similar but she smells rancid and he smells clean like he just stepped out of the shower.

  ‘Good luck with your friend,’ says Alexandra.

  ‘Best of luck with that,’ says Axel.

  I open the door of my Hilux.

  Alexandra and Axel both look away.

  I see a man in the distance sprint through the tangle of corroding car wrecks.

  And then someone screams.

  14

  Alexandra and I run towards the screaming voice but Axel stays rooted to the spot.

  Other people are standing on car bonnets and truck roofs, some are running towards the centre of the junkyard. One man’s filming on his phone. The scream came from the Ford area. I can’t tell that myself, my hearing isn’t good enough to be able to pinpoint the source, but that’s where everyone’s running towards.

  Alexandra moves faster than me. She’s like a lynx cat: long muscular limbs and good balance. I’m out of breath by the time I reach the Ford Transit vans.

  There are no more screams.

  It’s a Ford Escort.

  Six of us stand looking at the car, Alexandra consoling a young, pregnant woman. The screamer.

  Inside the car is a figure.

  The windscreen’s covered in filth and old leaves. The doors look buckled and the bonnet’s rusted to a rich brown.

  ‘Is it..?’ says a man pointing through the shattered glass of the driver’s door.

  Karl-Otto arrives and barges the other man out of the way and cups his hands to the broken glass and looks. Then he pulls at the door. Something sticky on the handle. He pulls but it’s too mangled. He can’t get in so he goes around to the passenger side and heaves that open.

  There’s a smell.

  Karl-Otto steps back.

  He removes his cap.

  ‘Look,’ he says.

  Alexandra approaches. I step up with her.

  She’s in the driver’s seat. She’s wearing a blonde wig and a painted face, and I guess the screaming pregnant woman thought it was Lisa from ICA. It almost could be. I reckon that’s what scared her. The disfigured mannequin has eye shadow on and bright red lips. A green-bodied spider scurries out from her neckline and runs over her cheek. There’s a dirty handprint on her torso. Her head’s caved in on one side. With the car in such bad shape, and her right there with her seatbelt on, she looks like a crash-test dummy stranded in purgatory.

  ‘Why is she there?’ asks the pregnant woman, Alexandra’s arm around her for support. ‘I thought it was the girl.’

  ‘Just a doll,’ says Karl-Otto. ‘Probably kids. Just a big doll.’

  He’s sweating, dribbles of salty brine running down from under his baseball cap and finding their path down between his bristles and then dropping off his jaw onto the baked earth.

  There’s another doll sat next to her. A smaller doll, a normal doll. Seatbelt on. Skin blistered. Head turned round the wrong way.

  People ignore the small doll and go back to scavenging their transmission parts and their bumpers and their rubber floor mats. They’ve paid a flat fee, most of these people, so they want to get their money’s worth.

  Sally’s on her deck. She’s gesticulating with a kinked metal pole. Karl-Otto looks at his mother and waves but she shakes her head and points the metal pole at me. I raise my hand tentatively and she nods so I give her a thumbs up and point back to my Hilux.

  I drive to her.

  She’s there on the two–man swing seat, smiling like it’s the most beautiful day in the world in this cemetery of a junkyard.

  ‘What they find, friend?’

  ‘A mannequin,’ I say. ‘Strapped in, looked very lifelike. The face had make-up on and everything.’

  She cringes and I step up onto her deck.

  ‘You know they’re doing face transplants these days in the big hospitals, you hear about that?’

  I sort of nod-scowl.

  ‘I mean, tell me this. You start swapping people’s faces around, or their bodies, amounts to the exact same thing if you think on it hard enough. You start swapping and how on earth do I know who I’m really speaking with? I mean, sure, nine times out of ten it’ll be fine and Ingrid will be Ingrid, not just Ingrid’s face on Anna’s body, but that one time. Do you see what I mean? How can I be certain who I’m talking to anymore?’

  ‘You have a point,’ I say.

  ‘Face transplants,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what it’ll be next I surely don’t. You want a drink?’

  Sally’s swinging on her squeaky seat and she’s pointing to a small stream that flows next to her house. It’s more of a drainage gulley than an actual stream, part of some underground ditch system that runs under the junkyard, and it has about a dozen bottles sunk into the silt, each one submerged up to its neck.

  ‘That your fridge, Sally?’

  ‘My drinks cooler,’ she says. ‘Beer or soda, take your pick.’

  ‘You want one?’ I ask.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ she says. ‘Soda for me. I’m a ginger ale girl.’

  I take two bottles of ginger ale from the small brook and give her one and open mine. The water’s done a decent job of keeping it cool.

  ‘They found your pal, yet?’ she says, taking a swig.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘There’s a police press conference about her and Lisa this afternoon.’

  ‘My friend already told me,’ she says. ‘Paramedics like to keep up-to-date with local developments. Two young women in this tiny place. It ain’t right. But I’m pleased Björn’s taking it serious. Always takes the old boy a while to get his engine cranked up if you get my meaning.’

  ‘Sally,’ I say. ‘Could I take a look at your other snakes, please? I’ve always been fascinated.’ This isn’t true – I’ve always been wary. Not phobic, just wary. But I need to check private spaces. I need to cross as many places off my list as quickly as possible.

  ‘You like the reptiles?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I lie.

  She gets up out of her swing seat with the ease and grace of a teenage ballerina, and then she sashays past me to her door. ‘Come on, friend.’

  We go in and I get hit by that same vinegar tone in the air. The place is dark and the pine walls give it an abandoned social-club feel. There’s a vape e-cigarette charging in one corner.

  ‘Over there’s my rattlers,’ she points to a locked door. ‘Then my boas,’ she points to a row of locked doors, each one with added bolts top and bottom. ‘I’ll show you my pythons, come this way.’

  She takes a key from inside her dress pocket and she opens the far door. I follow her in.

  The room is the size of an average living room but the walls are covered in storage racks. On each rack sit dozens of plastic storage boxes, small at the top, at head height, increasing in size down to the bottom layer, where each container is the size of a human coffin.

  There are stickers on each box. Stickers showing the scientific symbol for male or female and then listing what I guess are the names of the snake’s parents. Then there are dates and other numbers. Family-tree diagrams. Lineages. She pulls a box from the middle of the rack.

  ‘Take a look at Henry,’ she says.

  The snake is white with yellow markings. It looks like the most exotic thing I have ever seen, with a body as thick as my forearm.

  I step back.

  ‘Ain�
��t venomous,’ she says. ‘Henry’s a squeezer, ain’t you Henry. He’s only small but when he’s full grown he’ll be able to coil himself round you and squeeze the air from your lungs and the blood from your heart.’ She strokes the snake. ‘Most muscular thing there is, ain’t you, Henry.’

  ‘You breed them, then what?’ I say, aware of the coffin-sized box at my ankle level.

  She opens a drawer at shoulder height.

  ‘Babies,’ she says. ‘Born about a week ago, these were. All healthy gooduns.’ She looks at me. ‘They grow up so fast.’

  ‘And that?’ I say pointing down to the largest box and stepping back a little.

  ‘Kristina?’ she says. ‘She’s a moody bitch but I’ll give you a li’l peek.’

  Sally takes a long, kinked metal bar from the wall. It has snake blood on one side of it, dried plasma congealed like patches of rust. She heaves and pulls the box out. ‘You having a good day or a bad day, friend?’ she says to the snake that I can’t yet see. And that takes me back to Mum. That’s what I used to ask her. Feels like such a dumb question now but if I’d asked ‘how are you’ I’d usually get silence and then a kind of snort or a ‘how am I usually?’ but I’d give anything to be able to ask her one more time. ‘Hi Mum. Only me. Good day or bad day?’

  Sally pulls the plastic box from the cabinet and I see the size of it. Kristina is as thick as my thigh. Thicker. As thick as Sally’s thigh. The snake ripples as she moves.

  ‘Easy, friend,’ says Sally moving the metal pole in and then pulling the box out some more. ‘Easy.’

  Kristina’s head is as big as my hand. It’s flat on top and her eyes look intelligent and they look angry. Because we’ve disturbed her or because she’s incarcerated in a plastic storage box. I’m not sure which. Both, I guess.

  ‘Over five metres,’ says Sally. ‘Just look at her markings.’

  Sally has love in her eyes when she says this. She clearly adores her snakes but I’m not comfortable with the way they live. The way they exist.

  ‘Is there enough space in the box?’ I ask.