Black River

by Will Dean

  I take an orange neon jacket and a ski pole and a bottle of water. We spread out into a thin line. I rub myself all over with insect repellent.

  The horn blows.

  I take a deep breath and walk into the forest.

  There is no path here. I walk through the outer trees, one tree deep, two trees deep, three trees deep. The light leaves us and the air changes. It’s still. Earthy. Thick with pine resin and dry needles, each one as flammable as a petrol-soaked matchstick.

  I’m less than a minute into Utgard forest and brambles and tree roots are tugging at my boots. Already. Most of the time I can’t see the man to my left or the woman to my right. After one minute. The spruce forest swallows people; it takes them deep within itself before they even know what’s happening.

  Someone whistles. The sun penetrates the canopy in places, washing the forest floor in blinding patches of bright June light. I hear dog barks and my boots settle into a rhythm. Crunching. I feel alone here on my search for Tam, not just because I might be the only one focusing on her, but because my senses are under attack. In a town or in an office building my hearing aids help. They don’t make things easy but they help. Here, with midges buzzing beside my ears, with unfamiliar snapping noises underfoot, with loudhailers and dog barks to my left and right, my hearing aids are playing tricks on me. And I’m worried about the sweat. My truck dash said 26 degrees and I’m covered up to protect against bloodsucking, disease-carrying parasites, a hi-vis non-breathable jacket, heavy boots to help against adders and jagged ankle-snapping rocks. I’m sweating and my aids will not thank me. They don’t appreciate moisture.

  I keep walking.

  Tam, are you here? Did someone bring you to this never-ending nightmare of a pine forest? I have to find you. I am craving your face, the looks you give when I say something dumb, the laughter you gift to me. But I don’t want to find you out here. It wouldn’t be a good resolution, not all the way out here. I can’t imagine how that could be good. I want you found in Gothenburg or in a small cabin north of Falun. Not here. Not like this.

  I brush a fire ant off my hand.

  The woman on my left walks close to me for a while because she can’t scale the glacier-scraped granite cliff in front of her. We walk close together but we do not speak and with every metre I feel more guilty. Because I’m safer with her so close and this isn’t about me feeling safe. My feelings are irrelevant. This is about Tammy and Lisa. Only them. I have an urge to stay close to this red-haired woman I don’t recognise but we have to spread out again. Ten to twenty metres. We need to see the forest, to probe as much of it as possible, we need to find a clue.

  I take a sip of water and turn around on my heels. Every direction, every single degree of rotation looks exactly the same. If Lucifer himself were to curate a sculpture, an eternal prank, a ground-level, pine-scented limbo, then this might just be it.

  There are more insects than humans in this forest right now, by a factor of a billion or more, and I’m not even exaggerating. Outnumbered doesn’t even begin to cover it. I’m dive-bombed by hard-shelled horseflies, each one armed with a serrated knife-like mouth appendage. They hit my cheeks and my forehead, greedy for mammalian haemoglobin, they’re not fussy which kind, deer or rat or Tuva. They ping off me, and the aggression with which they assault my skin is extraordinary. Greedy little fuckers.

  With every step I probe with my borrowed ski pole. I don’t like it. Feels as though I might place the sharp end of this ICA pole down and hit something. Someone.

  I try to keep vigilant but my thoughts stray. I’m sweating and my feet are starting to ache. I’m thinking of Tam and of Dad. Tam, here, picking mushrooms like she used to. Alone, or with her mum. And Dad. How he’d be helping us today if he were still alive, out here with his old brown boots that I have boxed up in a self-storage lock-up in Karlstad, along with all of Mum’s possessions that I haven’t had the heart or strength to go through yet. His brown leather boots, the laces all dry and mud-crusted. He’d be here helping and doing his part, not as one of the confident ex-military leader types, just as another pair of eyes. Just as a person trying to find someone who’s gone. Just as my dad.

  There are fallen pine branches on the needle-laden ground. Snapped branches now as dry and as brittle as breadsticks. They crackle and crunch as I break through them, and they throw up dust and fungi spores as I traipse like a graceless ogre through this eternal forest.

  Dogs start barking.

  The woman to my left runs straight past me and there’s some kind of commotion so I run as well, tripping through ferns so tall they brush my face. More dogs. Someone yelling words I can’t make out. I see the hi-vis jackets, yellows and oranges. Flashes of neon between the pine trunks. The colours group together, they move closer like the view from a kaleidoscope.

  A woman is heaving to keep her dog from sniffing something. She’s pulling on his collar and digging her heels into the earth.

  I step closer.

  Flies.

  Not a cloud but a mass. A dark mass. Heaving. Flies and something else. Wriggling. More maggots than I have ever seen.

  A woman takes her walking stick.

  ‘No,’ says a sunburnt man with a baseball cap. ‘Don’t touch it.’

  I step closer, my palm over my mouth.

  She prods with her stick and I can see the maggots writhing around on top of each other and through each other, a tangled knot of soft bodies and semi-translucent membranes.

  White bones.

  I almost gag.

  Death and life. Something gone forever. And everything else living, feasting, thriving.

  I hold my breath and my heart pulses inside my ears, inside my temples.

  The woman uses her stick some more.

  ‘Deer,’ she says. ‘Deer bones. Recent. Don’t know what got to it.’

  ‘You sure?’ asks the man.

  The woman moves the bones around some more, unleashing a fresh horror of carnivorous flies the size of rotten black teeth.

  ‘Red deer,’ she says. ‘Could be a wolf kill. Let’s get back into formation quick as we can.’

  We do as she says.

  It wasn’t Tam. Or Lisa. Just some unfortunate deer taken down by this forest, by the enormity of it, by the range and variety of killers hidden within its spruce walls.

  It wasn’t Tammy.

  We reach the Mossen road. Are there wolves here right now? A pack? Watching us? I see the back of Viggo Svensson’s house. A low-built dark red torp. Hunting tower next to the wall. A range of gnarled fruit trees in the backyard. I can see a jordkällare cold store, an underground outdoor-fridge alternative that I wrote about in the Posten last spring. They’re becoming popular, especially amongst eco people. It’s essentially a hole. A hole with ventilation and earth piled on top. Constant eight degrees inside, so they say, come summer or winter. Good for storing food and wine. Canned goods.

  Viggo’s a Class-A creep. Could Tam be in that dark, dark place? The woman to my left turns to trek back but I stay. I hop the dry stone wall. Viggo’s little boy has small stick dens at the base of each tree – I remember them from last year. There’s nobody around.

  I approach the underground cold store.

  A crow caws from above and then beats its black wings and leaves me all alone down here.

  ‘Tam?’ I say, but my voice comes out weak and broken. ‘Tammy?’ there are doors down on the ground like the ones you see at tornado shelters in Kansas or Oklahoma. There’s a metal bar sealing them shut so I move the bar and lift one of the doors.

  ‘Tam?’

  It’s dark inside but my eyes start to acclimatise.

  A noise behind me.

  It’s just an old apple tree creaking in the breeze. Scaffolding poles and vertical planks hold up rotten branches.

  ‘Tammy?’ I say.

  The room echoes a little and I step down one step. My eyes adjust. The room is the size of a car. About two metres high. White plastic. Completely empty: no food, no wi
ne, no Tammy. Smells like any other basement. I close the doors and jump the wall, my heart beating too fast, and jog a little way to catch up with the others.

  A blackbird starts to sing but then stops abruptly.

  Silence.

  I stumble through dead branches.

  It takes me two hours to trek back the way I came and yet I do not recognise a single feature or tree. The rocks look bigger. The lichen-pocked beech trees stand resolute in the warm air. The forest floor is uneven and dotted with holes and burrows dug by night creatures; it’s at once full of writhing variety and at the same time uniform in its dry, vertical monotony.

  I emerge from the treeline with five or six mosquito bites and a cluster of blisters.

  My stomach rumbles.

  I’m about half a kilometre from the main camp because you can’t walk in a straight line through a forest the size of New York City. You can try but you will fail.

  Smoke’s rising from grills. Maybe ten or twelve separate barbecues now. The smell of bursting sausages drifts up the shallow hill to me and I drift down to find them. Does someone here know more than they’re letting on? Is one vile person here to relive their crime? To gloat? To keep Tam from me? To provide themselves with alibis? Is there a kidnapper here today? Is there a killer walking among us?

  17

  Some searchers leave but most stay for the free food.

  A group of kids wait in an orderly Swedish queue to have bloodsucking ticks removed from behind their ears and their necks and their ankles by a short-haired woman wielding a pair of steel tweezers and a magnifying glass. She looks like she might be related to the wood-carving sisters.

  The smells come and go. Herby pork sausage, sage, and then someone walks by reeking of tropical-strength bug spray. And sweat. I walk a little further, past the Volvos and the ’70s Oldsmobile, and the air turns to dill and grilled burgers and then the scent of coconut, someone’s sunscreen, you can never be too careful.

  I recognise some. There’s a nurse from the Vårdcentral and she’s bandaging people up and applying plasters to cuts and grazes. There’s a stamper or two from the liquorice factory handing out hot dogs and bottles of Coca-Cola. Bertil Hendersson, the bee man, he’s sat on a car bonnet playing his nyckelharpa – basically a long oddball violin – and the string music mingles in the hot summer air with the smell of burning charcoal briquettes and cigarette smoke.

  ‘There are four search parties big as this one all out looking for her,’ a man with a lazy eye says to me, ‘out by the Toyota place, another checking the farm, you know, the one with the silo. One more in town going door-to-door type thing. Reckon we’ll find her soon.’

  ‘Her?’ I say.

  ‘The Svensson girl,’ he says, lines deepening across his slightly burnt forehead.

  ‘You mean them,’ I say. ‘Lisa and Tammy.’

  He nods his head and crushes a bug against his cheek.

  ‘You want something to eat you better get in there right quick, it’s getting gobbled up faster than hog grits at feeding time.’

  I move away.

  ‘Them loggers,’ I hear one man say. His voice is loud and clear and I’m walking slowly towards him. ‘Two loggers from Norrland. Out-of-towners by nature. Bad tomcat causing all kind of trouble. Rumours following that pair round rural Sweden like a bad stink. I’d start with them two old boys.’

  I’ve heard others talk about the loggers. They’re living out of a squalid caravan deep inside Utgard. There have been other women that have gone missing in other small forest towns this summer. Some turn up again and some don’t. If you wanted to dispose of a body then forests like Utgard are as good a place as any. Like dropping someone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the Gobi desert, in outer space.

  ‘You back up here, is it?’ says a man as he taps me on the shoulder. ‘You come back?’

  I do not recognise this guy at all.

  ‘Tuva Moodyson, is it? You came back up to Gavrik, is it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘To search for Tammy Yamnim.’

  He nods. He has a flat nose like he was a boxer or an ice hockey player at one time.

  ‘You’re deaf, am I not wrong?’

  I nod.

  ‘And yet you can come back up here and participate in all this? Well ain’t that something.’

  ‘My ears don’t work well,’ I tell him. I want to flatten his nose a little more but that’s between you and me. ‘Rest of me works just fine.’

  ‘Sausage?’ he says, pointing to a grill.

  ‘I will,’ I say, leaving him.

  People are clustered in either family groups, school groups or neighbourhood groups. I have no group. I take a hot dog and squirt ketchup and mustard and mashed potato on top – it’s a Swedish thing – then sprinkle it with crispy deep-fried onions. It tastes amazing.

  ‘Water?’ says the kind-faced woman who gave me the hot dog.

  I take it and nod my thanks.

  There are mosquitos emerging from the edge of the pine trees like a guerrilla army making their silent attack. A classic ambush. The trees are as tall as a city block and the mosquitos can smell us better than we can see them.

  I take a step back from the cars and portable shade shelters and look out at the fields. The forest doesn’t have much in the way of colour once you’re inside – it’s all browns and greys and greens. The fields are much the same but the fringes are a festival of soft pinks and yellows. Creeping meadow buttercup and wild mint. Flowering clover. Tangles of scented weeds that most people kill, but the weeds get a chance to thrive and show themselves on the thin edges of fields and on verges and dry ditches.

  There’s a lake of sorts. More of a farm pond. A hunchback scarecrow on the far side of the water wears an undertaker’s top hat like a lifeguard overseeing the cesspools of hell. Children are throwing mud and one or two are swimming in their underwear. I feel warm air at the back of my neck.

  ‘You taking a bath, Tuva?’

  I pull away and turn. It’s Viggo Svensson.

  ‘No,’ I say, almost spitting the words into his pallid grey face. How can he still be that grey in June?

  He moves to reveal his little boy, Mikey.

  ‘Say hello to Tuva, Mikey. You remember her.’

  Mikey stares at me then looks down at the ground.

  ‘Say hello, son,’ says Viggo. ‘Then you can take a bath with the other children.’

  ‘I don’t want a bath,’ says Mikey.

  This takes me back to my London days. One scorching August my friends and I went to Hyde Park because we heard you could swim in the Serpentine. When we got there I said ‘I need a bath so bad,’ and everyone fell about laughing. Turns out the phrase doesn’t translate too well.

  ‘You’ll love a bath,’ says Viggo. ‘Look at the other kiddies.’

  Viggo and Mikey are both carrying loudhailers. One blue, one red. One large, one small.

  ‘Hi Mikey,’ I say, crouching down. ‘How old are you now – you’ve grown so much since I saw you last.’

  He looks at me. A miniature version of Viggo, all pale skin and eye bags.

  ‘I’m over eight,’ he says. ‘I’m a young man now.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ I say, holding out my hand.

  He just stares at it.

  ‘Well, it’s good to see you two getting along,’ says Viggo. ‘Happy little trio.’

  I want to stab Viggo with my ski pole for trapping me in the back of his taxi when I was drunk last year. For playing romance music out of his cab’s speaker. For not letting me out. He did, eventually. Nothing happened. But I feel like stabbing him anyway.

  ‘Look,’ says Mikey.

  He holds out a jam jar.

  ‘Closer,’ he says.

  It’s a bug jar with a magnifier lid. He’s got some spiky-looking beetle in there going half-crazy, spinning around on a dandelion leaf. Probably cooking inside that glass.

  ‘My beetle,’ he says, letting a drip of water fall onto the bug from his wate
r bottle.

  ‘You want some cake with us before the evening search?’ says Viggo.

  ‘I like to find out about insects, study them for school,’ says Mikey.

  ‘No,’ I say to Viggo. ‘No cake. Good to see you, Mikey.’

  I walk away and they both look forlorn. Viggo because he has some weird, twisted fantasy about us dating, and Mikey because he probably needs some escape, any escape, from his father.

  Multi-packs of fluffy ICA burger buns are stacked in pallets behind the grills. And then it hits me. I loathe small towns and I loathe nature. All of this. But I realise that it’s also a miracle. This wouldn’t happen anywhere else, not so quickly. The benefit of all the gossip and the rumours and the way everyone’s related to each other is that they’re all invested. The word goes out and with no notice, no reward announced, they’re all here. Searching and feeding and giving hunt dogs bowls of cool water to drink. They’re all giving up their free time to help.

  I take a cardboard punnet of strawberries from a middle-aged guy with perfect teeth.

  ‘Swedish,’ he says to me. ‘Not foreign, they’re Swedish.’

  I don’t get this. I never will. They’re fucking berries, just let it go.

  Something Thord said comes back to me. About how you should keep an eye out for who turns up to a search because sometimes the bad guys can’t resist. For the thrill of it or just to see how close people are getting. So I scout the crowd. Must be over a hundred locals now, reinforcements arriving for the evening search. I can see a cutter from the liquorice factory, and Bertil the bee man’s still playing folk music on his nyckelharpa. There’s the whole of Lisa’s family in a huddle listening to the news bulletin on a portable radio. Then Sally ‘The Breeder’ Sandberg with her thick silver hair and her snakeskin nails. But no sign of Karl-Otto. You’d think he’d bother to turn up and help, wouldn’t you? You’d think he’d give a damn seeing how he dated Tam and all?

  I walk on.

  There’s a tub of hot water full of pre-grilled panbiff burgers and they look like the least appetising thing on earth. Uneven brown things floating in warm water, globules of oil and beef fat coagulating on the surface, artificial meat rainbows stretching this way and that.