Black River

by Will Dean

  ‘I heard,’ I say. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Viggo, looking down at his son. ‘So are we.’

  ‘Can I sit in your truck?’ says the boy. ‘In the back part?’

  I frown and Viggo says, ‘It’s okay with me.’

  ‘Sure.’

  I switch off my engine and pull the handbrake so I don’t accidentally injure the kid. He’s wearing a backpack. I can see him climb up my wheel arch and sit in the flatbed, watching me.

  ‘He never even knew his mother,’ says Viggo. ‘They were inseparable until he was ten months, then we thought she’d moved to Spain. Emigrated so to say.’

  Viggo’s eyes are not teary but he looks desperately sad.

  ‘She even bought her airplane ticket,’ he says. ‘But she never made it onto her flight. And to think I’ve had black thoughts about her all these years, about what she did with the Grimberg factory boss, and others. And then me thinking black thoughts about her gallivanting all over Spain – Spanish men, you know the kind, macho men on beaches and sunshine and me left here all on my own raising Mikey. And all along she was deep in this forest hiding in a beech tree. I can’t talk to the boy about it. I don’t have the words.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It must be such a shock.’

  I’m genuinely sorry for Viggo now. I can see from his face he did not know. I can see from his eyes that this is all new information for him.

  ‘This is how I want to remember her,’ he says, holding out a photo with wrinkled edges. It shows him and Linda on a balcony someplace hot, wearing matching silk robes, peach-coloured, their names stitched onto the fabric, tanned, smiling. A self-timed selfie before selfies were a thing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say again.

  I look through my rear-view mirror and Mikey has opened his backpack and taken out some kind of red plastic toy, and a bug jar with magnifier. He looks at whatever poor bug is inside the jar.

  ‘Can you talk to him?’ says Viggo. ‘You’re good with children.’

  How can I say no?

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’ll try.’

  I get out and climb up into the flatbed with Mikey. Viggo walks off into the shade of his little red torp cottage and watches us.

  ‘What kind of bug, Mikey?’

  ‘Wolf spider,’ he says. ‘Just a little one.’

  I clear my throat.

  He unscrews the lid and drops in a piece of leaf.

  ‘I’m sorry about your mum, Mikey. My dad died when I was young, as well.’

  He stares harder at his wolf spider through the glass. He doesn’t look at me.

  ‘I was a baby,’ he says. ‘I haven’t talked to my mamma. But I’ve seen her picture.’

  That’s a thump to my heart, right there. I look over at Viggo and he has tears in his eyes now. He looks away.

  ‘She loved you very, very much, Mikey. You know that.’

  He taps the side of the jam jar.

  ‘She hasn’t seen me as a big boy,’ he says. ‘She’s gone to heaven now.’ He looks up at me then back down again. ‘I’m still down here.’

  ‘She loved you,’ I say. ‘And your dad loves you, you know that.’

  He nods.

  ‘And you’re going to be okay.’

  ‘It’s a wolf spider,’ he says.

  I stop myself from hugging this kid because I’m not sure he wants a hug from me right now. To be honest a hug would be more for me than for him. Two motherless kids in a forest in the back end of nowhere. Two only children and one trapped bug.

  I climb down and offer to help Mikey down but he says he can do it by himself. And he does.

  ‘Thanks for letting me,’ he says.

  ‘Anytime, Mikey.’

  The kid trots back to his father and his father waves at me and I drive off up the hill with all the weight of the world on my shoulders. That child. The hell his mother went through making her decision, forced into that godawful choice by her own body and her own mind. Makes me want to turn back time and see Mum one last time and tell her, ‘you did your best, Mum’. I want to say, ‘you were numb with pain in every cell of your being and you managed to stick around. For me?’

  For me.

  Tears wet my cheeks as I crest the hill and Viggo is right, it does look like some thermonuclear device has detonated up here. Broken branches and abandoned nests. Vast tracts of barren earth and fresh stumps like the taste buds of some Cretaceous giant.

  I park up in a passing place on the track. It’s bright up here and my headlights have turned themselves off. I step out into the heat, and the smell of pine resin is delicious. Like a hundred childhood Christmases.

  Midges. Horseflies. I walk for half an hour towards the machines, the killing machines, the harvesters. The sky darkens. I step into the pines and shiver. My skin is covered with midges and their larger cousins, the floodwater mosquitos. Both types trying to mine through my epidermis to reach my own blood. To drink it. To live out their own destinies.

  Ten trees deep. Twenty. I’m in true forest again and I can hear the harvesters slicing and scraping and chopping up spruce trees three times as old as I am. Hundreds of deaths per day, right here. A woodland euthanised under contract.

  There’s a granite boulder in front of me and it is vast. Like a smooth, grey submersible breaching the surface of a green moss sea, after months lurking deep underneath.

  I clamber up the smooth escarpment, ants and woodlice teaming all over its surface, my face too close to them as I climb, each one heaving a pine needle or a slice of leaf for the good of their community. I scratch my leg on a dry bush, its branches snapped by an elk or a roe deer, and that’s when I see it.

  A hollow.

  Some kind of basin or canyon formed long ago.

  Trees spread well apart.

  And attached to each tree trunk, a piece of paper. Laminated. A4. Shining back at me.

  I scramble down to a birch.

  It’s a flyer. One of dozens here. It’s my friend.

  It’s Tammy’s face; damaged, cut, defaced, lost out here in the endless hell of Utgard forest.

  36

  What is this place? Who would do this? I can see Tam’s face everywhere I look but the posters are decomposing, the paper breaking down, the plastic peeling. I run to another tree in the hollow, this one a Scots pine, and her face is almost completely erased. Some grey remnant of her features, one eye, the word ‘Missing’ now reduced to the word ‘sing’.

  Trees creak all around.

  The posters stare at me, posters I helped to produce. Tammy’s eyes. Are these the early flyers removed from Storrgatan? Did someone bring them deep into Utgard forest and put them back up where they would never be seen? Why? The sound of chainsaws and snapping branches grows louder. The sounds come from all around me like there are chainsaws in every direction and me stuck here in the eye of the storm surrounded by rotting missing persons posters of my own best friend.

  I start to turn in circles. Too fast. My breathing. My heart. I can’t faint. Not out here. Who in God’s name did this?

  I hold onto a birch tree and that anchors me to something. Not something good, these trees are all connected underground through their roots and mitochondria. It’s all one giant enemy. One forest. But I hold it. The bark is rough with dried reindeer lichen. Red ants scurry over my hands like I’m just another limb of the birch.

  My camera’s in my pocket. The chainsaws out there are still growing louder, thousands of razor-sharp steel teeth, oiled and lubricated, biting into heartwood and coughing out wood chips. I photograph the scene, and then I video it. The trees. The flyers. There’s something hanging from branches. Something else. I walk over to another birch, this one growing up into two trees from one root, and there’s old-fashioned 35mm camera film hanging down from the low branches like strands of human hair.

  It’s hanging from more of the trees, I see it all around me. Flyers and loose, unravelled film from years ago. Together. Here in the dar
kness of Utgard.

  Some of the film is coiled like Freddy Bom’s blond ringlets. Like the fly paper flanking the cousins’ container home. Old film spiralling and falling down and twisting in the pine breeze. The evil of it. Rotting depictions of Tam’s beautiful face out where the elk and the wolves and the polecats roam free. I inspect some of the film, trying not to touch it, and it looks unused. New, but old. And then I hold it up to the light. I can see things. Sepia images with pine branches as backdrop behind the semi-translucent film. Feet. Shoes. One photo of a forked tongue. A beach with palm trees. A gun cabinet. A bee pinned to a board. A series of three dams. Turbines. Some kind of control panel. More close ups of toes. A half-blurred photo of a car battery.

  I place the film carefully into my bag. For Thord.

  There’s more film sitting on the forest floor among the needles and the cones and the alder catkins. Ribbons of dark 35mm film like leftover party streamers from a psychopath’s birthday dinner.

  More chainsaw screams. A distant gunshot. Two more.

  I start to run in the direction I came from but I don’t recognise anything. I must not break my ankle, I must not fall. Can’t spend a night alone out here in this infinite nightmare, I cannot do it.

  My chest starts to hurt. I walk as fast as I can, staring around me. What must I look like? Some helpless mammal who took a wrong turn. Several wrong turns. So many. And now this mammal skips through the trees, possibly in the complete wrong direction, possibly heading deeper, deeper into the nothingness.

  I take a wine gum from my pocket. Not for the sugar, although I need that too, but for the comfort. Something man-made. Pear. Lucky hit. I chew it fast – saliva, fructose, artificial pear – looking to my left and my right, the chainsaws even louder than before.

  A flying tick hits my head. It might not be a tick, it might be a catkin or an acorn or a horsefly. But then when I try to pull it from my thin blonde hair, it starts to burrow. I stop and this monster digs deep, hungry for my scalp. No, you don’t, no you fucking do not. I scratch at my hair, my own nails scraping my scalp frantically, and I find it, and I pull it out, one of its legs and its back half trapped under my nail. We’re taught as kids to kill these little vampires, to burn them or crush them with a rock, to wrap them in foil till they suffocate. But I just drop it and flee.

  A clearing up ahead. Something to run towards.

  I get back into the sunlight and start to speed up. My boots crash through dry bracken as brittle as sun-baked bones, and I keep on going. There’s an elk or a deer on the far fringe of the trees and its head raises and then it runs away into the shadow of the pines.

  When I get to the track I’m almost as deep as the wood-carving sisters’ workshop so I turn left and run towards my truck, towards the hill.

  I climb inside and lock the doors and pant. I am soaking with sweat and I’m convinced an army of microscopic bloodsuckers got into my shirt and up my jeans. I wriggle in my seat and breathe deeply to calm myself and then I set off.

  Down the hill, past Viggo’s dark-red torp cottage, past the hoarder’s derelict nightmare house, up onto asphalt. Cold air washing over my damp, sunburnt skin.

  Who hung that 35mm film from the trees? Who even uses 35mm film anymore?

  Very little traffic on the roads. Most people are celebrating the Midsommar weekend on their sailing boats at Lake Vänern, or at their aunt’s shack down in Småland or else by the caravans next to the reservoir. Raggare cruising around with their windows down and their bluegrass banjo music turned right up to the max.

  I drive between McDonald’s and ICA Maxi and decide to take a longer route back to the office. I drive past Tammy’s place. Her building. I want her back inside there, back sleeping in her own bed, available on the other end of the phone line. I want her safe so much my nerves are stiff with me wanting it so badly.

  I park and jog over to the cop shop.

  No ticket, I just ring the bell on the counter.

  Chief Björn opens the door and looks at me and says, ‘You been in some kind of ruckus?’

  What?

  ‘No, Chief, I need to give some information. About the missing persons. Can I talk to you?’

  He scratches his nose.

  ‘Better off talking to Thord. Let me see what I can organise.’

  His lack of urgency makes me want to scream. Maybe it’s because he’s calm and experienced and Swedish. Maybe it’s a good thing. But I still want to shake the man.

  Thord replaces Björn at the counter.

  ‘Tuvs.’

  ‘Can I give you a statement? I have some information, clues. I don’t know how to describe it. Can I talk to you?’

  He sneezes once into the pit of his elbow.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. Then he starts to say the word ‘hay fever’ but he sneezes three more times before he can get the word out.

  ‘Back here?’ he says.

  I nod.

  He takes me back through the key-code locked door and I just make out the Chief leaving out the back along with two suits from out of town.

  ‘Sorry about the heat in here,’ says Thord, looking at how wet my shirt is. I’ve dried up some in the Hilux, but not completely. ‘We got fans but the air ain’t really conditioned.’

  ‘I’ve been out at Snake River and in Utgard forest,’ I say.

  He nods and takes the top off a biro. There’s a whiteboard in the corner of the room with photos of Tammy’s friends and associates. Blue marker-pen lines connecting them. Question marks and arrows. I can see Older married lover? and Business rival? ringed in red ink.

  ‘Never mind that,’ says Thord, noticing me looking. ‘Just brainstorming.’

  ‘I’ll tell you it all in order. Don’t stop me, and please don’t say it’s nothing. Hear me out.’

  Thord sticks out his bottom lip.

  ‘Sally Sandberg, she has the shack nearest the riverbank.’

  ‘The breeder,’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘She has locked rooms, a whole corridor of locked rooms, like a rabbit warren only the rabbits are the ones getting eaten. Padlocks on some, bolts on others. She has vats of acid and a gun, at least one gun.’

  I see him write down one word: Sandberg.

  ‘Go on,’ he says.

  ‘Her son, Karl-Otto Sandberg. Lives in the warehouse building.’

  ‘Spare-parts man,’ says Thord.

  ‘I saw him take two Asian women into his warehouse. He photographs them in his private studio at the back.’

  ‘Does he now?’ says Thord. ‘I did not know that. You see anything else in Karl-Otto’s warehouse?’

  ‘Teeth in his firepit. He says they’re pig teeth but I have no idea if that’s true. And he just gives me an off vibe. I can’t fathom why, as he was dating Tammy, why he never attends any of the searches. Not one.’

  Thord sneezes again and then says, ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Two cousins who live out of a shipping container at Snake River,’ I say.

  ‘They live out of a shipping container?’ he says. ‘Why they do that?’

  ‘It’s their business,’ I say. ‘They convert them, put windows and kitchens and doors and all that inside. Sell them as custom built prefabricated houses. Cheap shipping, I guess. Just strap them on the back of a truck.’

  ‘Some people,’ says Thord, shaking his head.

  ‘They make soundproof containers, for music recording studios. No sound.’

  ‘No sound, eh?’ he says. ‘And?’

  ‘And Tammy and Lisa could be locked inside one of their containers and nobody would ever hear them.’

  ‘And why would they do a thing like that? These cousins?’

  ‘Alexandra, the woman, she used to have a Chinese takeaway out of one of their containers. Used to have it close to Tam’s van.’

  ‘Imperial Jade?’ he says.

  ‘Jade Dragon,’ I say. ‘Never worked out and she blames Tam in some way. There’s bad blood there.’

  ‘That
wasn’t Tammy Yamnim’s fault,’ says Thord. ‘I tried just about everything on that Chinese menu and nothing was much good, I mean nothing. Big shame, we could have done with some more food choices in Gavrik town.’

  ‘Where’s Noora?’ I ask.

  ‘Domestic disturbance,’ says Thord, squirting nasal spray up his nostril. ‘Some guy out near the duck pond, you know, the one where they’ve never had a single duck visit, some guy started yelling at his next-door neighbour, they been friends for thirty-five years, starts yelling about him keeping his flag up even though Midsommar’s over. He tells his neighbour it’s not an official flag day. Can’t keep it up. Well, I don’t know if one of them’s been drinking or hungover. Probably both. But then the wives got involved and they came to blows out by that duckless duck pond. Noora’s having words.’

  ‘There’s one more house I’d like you to visit.’

  ‘Well,’ said Thord. ‘I never promised nothing about no visits. Who’s house?’

  ‘Freddy Bom.’

  ‘Shoe-shop boy?’

  ‘He has some kind of foot fetish and he’s fascinated with small feet and binding. And he has a locked garage in his garden. You know the place, got a tall spruce hedge, lives close to Lena.’

  ‘I know it,’ says Thord.

  ‘Will you visit?’

  Thord rubs his nose. ‘Tell you the truth, Tuvs. We have about ten stronger leads than all these. Actual sightings and the like. I got tech specialists in Karlstad working on connections between Tammy and Lisa, dredging social media and the like. Common friends. But I’ve made a note and I might pay these folks a passing visit. Can’t force them to let me in, mind. And them Snake River people, Chief was pals with big Sven but he calls the rest of them river rats, they never been too fond of us authorities. But I’ll see what I can do.’

  I hand him the 35mm film.

  ‘And this is?’

  ‘Film,’ I say. ‘Found it deep inside Utgard along with the missing flyers. All hanging from trees in the middle of the woods.’

  ‘Kids,’ he says.

  ‘Look into it, please. Fingerprints?’

  He looks at me like you do your job and I’ll do mine.