by Brock Clarke
Ilsa Baedrup, originally and now currently of Aarhus, that’s who. He found a phone listing for her, no trouble. Trouble, trouble, Ronald thought again. But for whom? Henry, he hoped. And Matty, he also hoped. But who else? Then again, did it matter? Ronald was like most people who get hurt: they think they have immunity for every hurt they cause while seeking full reimbursement for their own original hurt. And by hurt, he wasn’t thinking about his hand. He wasn’t even really thinking about his sister, Sheilah, either. It was just everything. By this point, Ronald thought of life as one large hurt-giving enterprise, and he was just going to keep giving and giving until . . .
Ronald looked up the country code for Denmark, then dialed the number. After two rings a woman answered. “Hi, hi,” she mumbled. She’d clearly been asleep.
“Is this Ilsa?” Ronald said, in English obviously.
“Yes,” Isla said in the same language. She’d said the word at normal volume, too. Not like she was in bed with someone and trying not to wake them up. Ronald could picture her: lonely woman, middle of the night, wondering about her long-lost husband.
“I know where your husband is,” he said.
“Is he safe?”
“Yup,” Ronald said. “Just saw him a few hours ago.”
“Oh, thank you,” Ilsa said, sounding like she really meant it. “I’ve been worried about him. I’ve missed him.”
“Really?” Ronald asked, not really caring about the answer, just thinking out loud. “You have?”
Ilsa laughed. “I know,” she said. “That surprises me, too.”
“I’m glad I called, then,” Ronald said. “I just thought you’d like to know that he’s thinking about you, too.” And then it was Ilsa’s turn to say, “Really?” “Yes, really,” Ronald said. “He asked me to call you and tell you so.”
“Why didn’t he call me himself?”
“Safety reasons,” Ronald said.
“He’s still not safe?”
“Anywhere else, maybe not,” Ronald said. “But here, yes. More or less.”
“Where is here?”
“Broomeville, New York,” Ronald said.
“Where?”
Ronald laughed at that, and then told her.
PART SIX
49
Thursday morning. Henry, up by six and without the help of the alarm, as usual, spotting a piece of paper on the floor by the door, not as usual. Henry got out of bed, quietly, quietly, so as not to wake Ellen. He remembered the last time he’d found paper on the floor by the door. It’d been his first night in Broomeville, his first night with Ellen, his first night as Henry Larsen. On those pieces of paper had been the Danish and English words for “counter,” and also the cartoon he’d drawn of himself, with a big black X scratched through it. He’d thought Kurt was responsible for the X. I’ll have to keep my eye on Kurt, he’d thought back then. And he had. And what Henry had learned from two years of watching was that he loved Kurt, like a son, but also that he didn’t totally trust him, also like a son.
He bent over, picked up the piece of paper. On it, the name JENS BAEDRUP had been written in large, uneven black block letters, with a big black X scratched through the name. Whoever had written the name and the X had pushed down so hard that in places the pen had poked right through the paper.
“Kurt?” Henry thought and must have actually said, because Ellen repeated, still mostly asleep, “Kurt, honey? Are you OK?”
“He’s fine,” Henry said.
“He?” Ellen said. “Kurt?”
“I’m fine,” Henry whispered. “Go back to sleep.” Luckily, Ellen did that, and Henry crumpled the note, stuffed it into his satchel, and then went into the bathroom to get ready for work.
50
Arson! Now that, they all agreed, was the way to protest something. Not the way so many other people did it. For instance, that kid who had graduated from the high school a few years earlier. This was during the graduation ceremony. The kid had apparently had some long-standing beef with the school about something. Or maybe he just didn’t like to sit. Or maybe that was his beef with the school: that it had made him sit. In any case, when it was his turn to walk onstage and accept his diploma and shake Kurt’s dad’s hand, he brought his folding chair with him, in protest of whatever. Everyone laughed at him except for Kurt’s dad, who, to his credit, just shook the kid’s hand that wasn’t holding the chair and then stuck the diploma into it. The kid seemed oblivious to how pathetic the whole thing was: after he received his piece of paper, he turned to the crowd and raised both the diploma and the chair in triumph, as if to say, See! I did it! Now the kid worked down at the pharmacy, where he was allowed to wear a pharmacist’s smock even though he wasn’t really a pharmacist. He was one of those people who dress like someone they will never actually be. This was what happened when you chose such a piss-poor form of protest. But arson!
“But what’s he doing here?” said Tyler. He was sitting next to his twin, Kevin, on the ratty, burn-marked tan corduroy couch. Across the steamer trunk from them was Dr. Vernon, sitting on a kitchen chair. Next to him, semisubmerged in a black beanbag chair, was Kurt. This was in Dr. Vernon’s office. Not his school office, which as a permanent substitute teacher he did not even have, but his home office, which only he called his office, which only he found hilarious when he called it his office. His office was the second story of his detached garage. In it, he dealt and did drugs. Mostly pot, which he dealt to and smoked with students, mostly. Mostly before school. It was the only way Dr. Vernon could face the day. “Sticky bud courage!” he called it. “Wake and bake!” he said. “Breakfast of champions!” he said. All of this spoken at top volume. Sometimes, Kurt had to smoke pot before going to Dr. Vernon’s office just to endure the pot smoking in Dr. Vernon’s office before then going to school.
“Who doing where?” Dr. Vernon said. He’d just finished telling them about what he’d heard the night before in the Lumber Lodge about the stranger who’d come to see and then fled from Mr. L. and who, if he really was who Mr. L. said he was, was involved in this crazy situation involving cartoons and Muslims and murder that was apparently not murder and Scandinavia and also arson.
“The new guy,” Kevin said.
“Yeah, the arsonist,” Tyler said.
“What?” Dr. Vernon said. “No?” He paused seemingly to consider the steamer trunk, on which was a Habitrail of marijuana buds, stems, and seeds; rolling papers and one-hitters; Baggies and twist ties; a scale and a bong and the bong bowl, which Dr. Vernon himself had just emptied. On the floor, next to the trunk, was one of those shower caddies, if that was the term for it, and in his current state Kurt was not at all sure that it was, but anyway, it was a white plastic contraption with a handle that contained several bottles of Visine, a tin of breath mints, a bottle of mouthwash, and some kind of vaporizer or deodorizer spray bottle thingy that made you smell like a just-cleaned public restroom but at least stopped you from smelling like you’d just smoked a lot of pot. But deodorizer? Vaporizer? Was either of those correct? No. More like a bug bomb. Or not a bomb. A fogger. That’s right. A bug fogger. Jeez, Kurt was feeling pretty fogged himself. Although not nearly as fogged as Dr. Vernon. “Right,” Dr. Vernon finally said, and he started whacking the cartridge against the trunk, trying to empty it. “Not sure why the arsonist is here.”
“Come on,” Kurt said. “The stranger isn’t the arsonist.”
“That’s what I said,” Dr. Vernon said. “The arsonist is the other guy.”
“What other guy?” Tyler said.
“The other guy,” Kevin said, and he socked his twin in the right thigh and then socked him again. “Not the stranger.”
“Stop calling him ‘the stranger,’ ” Dr. Vernon said. “The man has a name.” And here he stopped, clearly trying to remember the man’s name, clearly failing. As for Kurt, he had no idea what the stranger’s name was, either. During his telling of the story, Dr. Vernon had referred to him only as “the stranger.” “But, anywa
y, yes,” Dr. Vernon finally said.
“Yes what?” Tyler asked, but Dr. Vernon didn’t answer. He repacked and reinserted the bowl and passed the bong to Kevin, who stuck his face into the bong’s cylinder and sucked. Then he handed it to Tyler, who did the same. Tyler passed the bong to Kurt, but Kurt had had enough. He knew he’d had enough because before he started smoking pot he’d intended to ask Dr. Vernon whether he thought Mr. L. might be a spy. But now after smoking pot for an hour, the idea seemed unforgivably stupid. Some people knew they’d smoked enough pot when the most stupid ideas started making a lot of sense; Kurt, on the other hand, knew he’d smoked enough pot when ideas that had earlier seemed quite reasonable now seemed unforgivably stupid. “I’m good,” Kurt said, and then he passed the bong on to Dr. Vernon.
“Come on, just one more,” Dr. Vernon said in an accent—British, supposedly—that let Kurt know that what Dr. Vernon was saying came from a movie Dr. Vernon would say he couldn’t believe Kurt hadn’t watched after Kurt told him once again that he hadn’t watched it. “It’s only a wafer thin.”
“No, thanks,” Kurt said. Dr. Vernon then smoked Kurt’s share, then his own, and then he put the lid on the bong, put the remaining pot in an ornate wooden box, wrapped the one-hitters in a piece of velvety blue cloth and placed them in another ornate wooden box, sprayed himself and the room with his fogger, put several breath mints on his tongue, and in general conducted all the various rites of his particular priesthood. The boys were mesmerized by this display, even though they’d witnessed it many times before. When he was done, Dr. Vernon said, “You know, I think the stranger might be a narc.”
This was entirely predictable: Dr. Vernon tended to think pretty much everyone might be a narc. The only person who he seemed to think was not a narc was his wife, mostly because she treated him so fondly, like he was a somewhat mischievous child she couldn’t help but love. Speaking of which, Grace Vernon yelled up from the garage below: “Don’t come to school reeking of pot, you old fool!”
“I won’t!” he yelled back, his voice bright with love. They listened as the automatic garage door went up, the car started and pulled out of the garage, the door closed. Then Dr. Vernon turned back to the boys, his face and voice dark with treachery again. “A narc,” he repeated. “That’s why I’m being so careful these days.” This struck Kurt as the most ridiculous thing he’d heard that morning—Dr. Vernon was possibly the least careful human being he had ever met—but then Dr. Vernon reached inside his billowing orange-and-blue riot of a shirt and pulled out a handgun.
“Is that a gun?” Kevin asked, and then it was his twin’s turn to punch him in the thigh.
“You can’t be too careful, can you?” Dr. Vernon said. This was clearly a rhetorical question, and so Kurt didn’t respond to it. He tried to climb out of the beanbag chair, but the chair resisted, and Kurt ended up having to kind of wrestle the chair into submission before getting out of it. By the time he did so, he felt like something had changed for him. He did not want to smoke pot in that chair in this office with these human beings ever again. It was Dr. Vernon whipping out that gun that had changed everything. It wasn’t that the gun had scared him. It was that it made him feel deeply ashamed. He had an image of his father walking into this stupid room and seeing Kurt stuck in that stupid chair after smoking stupid pot with these stupid people, one of whom was waving around his stupid gun. And how would that make his father feel? He had never thought or cared to ask that question before. But he was asking it now, possibly because his father had asked him to keep his eyes open and had given him that important task, and here he was, getting high with these idiots, his eyes barely open, his lids so heavy, not keeping his eyes open for Mr. L. or the stranger or anyone. And how would this make his father feel? He was asking the question, but he did not want it answered. If you had to ask the question, How would that make your father feel? then you already knew that you didn’t want to know the answer.
Kurt’s skateboard was leaning against the wall next to the door. He walked toward it. “Hey, where you going?” one of the twins said, but Kurt didn’t turn to see which one, and he didn’t answer the question, either. Good-bye, he thought, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
“I think his buddy might be a narc, too,” Dr. Vernon said.
“His buddy?” Kurt said. He turned around. Dr. Vernon was pulling a blue linen blazer over his garish shirt, which presumably was once again hosting the handgun. In any case, it wasn’t in Dr. Vernon’s hand anymore. He grabbed the lapels of the blazer and stretched it, then buttoned it.
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “Mr. L.”
“That’s what I was saying,” Kevin said. “The other guy.”
“Mr. L. is the arsonist?” Kurt said.
“What?” Dr. Vernon said. He sat back in his chair, clearly thinking about what he was supposed to be saying. His stomach bulged, testing the moorings of his blazer’s buttons. “No,” he finally said.
No? Kurt thought but did not say. There was something important about Mr. L. that was floating in the outer atmosphere of his memory. But in between him and the memory were all sorts of other memories, plus the pot he’d smoked, and also all the people in this room, talking, talking. He’d never get to the memory if he stayed where he was. So he grabbed his skateboard, told everyone he’d see them at school, and left the office.
51
Henry walked to work. He had a car, but he preferred to walk because it was not far and because in doing so he often walked by people who liked him. For instance, now: Lee Truesdell, whom everyone called Lugnut. He had just emerged from his car, parked in the lot outside Hammond Lumber, where he worked. Lugnut was a large man with large feet made even more enormous by his tan work boots with their steel toes and foot-long laces. Lugnut’s son, Dana, was a sophomore at the high school, and Henry had just talked Dana through an especially difficult time during which Dana did not feel like doing any homework. Basically, Henry had asked Dana why he didn’t feel like doing any homework and then said nothing, just frowned, arms folded, and listened to Dana figuring out for himself that his reasons for not feeling like doing any homework made some sense and were shared at one time or another by every other student who had ever gone to school at Broomeville Junior-Senior High or for that matter any other school on the planet and so did not make him anointed or rebellious in any way, and by the time he was done talking, Dana felt like doing some homework again.
“Mr. L.,” Lugnut said.
“Lugnut,” Henry said.
“You know, my name is Lee,” Lugnut said. Like a lot of big men, Lugnut’s voice was soft and gentle, and in fact his whole bearing was completely pacific, which had the strange effect of making him seem constantly on the verge of committing some terrible violence. “But everyone calls me Lugnut.”
Henry nodded to indicate that he, too, had been guilty of calling Lugnut by that name.
“People have called me Lugnut since I was fourteen. Do you know why?”
“Because you’re so big?” Henry guessed.
“That’s my theory, too,” Lugnut said. “Except, have you ever seen a lug nut?”
Henry said he never had. “You’re saying they’re small.”
“They’re big,” Lugnut said. “But only compared to other nuts.”
“Have you asked people to call you Lee?” Henry asked, but he didn’t even require an answer: of course Lugnut had, and of course people had not done what he’d asked. You could not just ask people to call you what you wanted to be called if they’d already been calling you something else. He and Ellen had tried this with Kurt. Kurt had always called him Mr. L. But it seemed strange to Ellen that Kurt would call his stepfather by this name.
“What about ‘Dad’?” Ellen had asked, and Kurt had made retching noises.
“Henry?” Ellen had suggested.
“But that’s what you call him,” Kurt had said, as though Henry were not right there, in the room, listening to this conversation.
“Call me
Mr. L.,” he’d finally suggested, back then, to Kurt, and he said to Lugnut, now, “Call me Lugnut.”
“Lugnut,” Lugnut said.
“Attach other words to the name, as in a greeting,” Henry said, turning his back to Lugnut. “Pretend you’re greeting me in the morning, afternoon, evening. Ask me if you could borrow my lawn mower.”
“Good morning, Lugnut,” Lugnut said. “Good afternoon, Lugnut. Hey, Lugnut, my grass is getting kind of long, Lugnut,” etc. Each time, Henry made no response. When Lugnut seemed to have had enough of the exercise, he said, “OK, Mr. L,” and Henry turned around and said, “See?”
“But your name isn’t Lugnut,” Lugnut said. “Oh, I get it.”
Then Lee shook Henry’s hand, told him that would probably never work but thanks for trying anyway, and disappeared into the lumberyard. This was why Henry liked walking to work. This was why Henry liked living in Broomeville. Because people here trusted him. But would they trust him once this man he’d said was Jens Baedrup was through with him? The stranger would probably try to kill him, especially once he discovered that Henry had given him the name of the man he was probably going to try to kill. That was bad enough. But what else would he try to do before he tried to do that?
Henry resumed walking. Past the Nice n’ Easy. Past the fairgrounds. Just ahead was Bonny Courts, a subdivision between the fairgrounds and the school. At the entrance of the subdivision was a wooden sign carved into the shape of a castle, and behind the sign was a fiberglass statue of, for some reason, a brown bear, eight feet high on its hind legs, its front paws held palms-out. The effect was probably intended to be menacing—Don’t enter here unless you live here! the bear probably wanted to be saying with its paws—but to Henry, the gesture seemed full of joy, like the bear was on the top deck of a cruiseship, saying, Good-bye! Good-bye! to the nice people on the pier below. Anyway, Henry was ten feet from the bear when he saw a boy on a skateboard careen out of the subdivision and onto the sidewalk. It was Kurt. Henry knew this because Kurt was the only person who rode a skateboard in Broomeville. The skateboard was a large wooden thing, so wide that you wouldn’t think anyone could fall off it. But once on the sidewalk, Kurt attempted some sort of hopping maneuver and in doing so lost his balance and struck his head on the castle, and his skateboard shot forward at an incredible speed, hopped off the sidewalk, and sailed across the road and into a ditch. Kurt rolled around on the ground for a few seconds, then made a loud animal sound, then pulled himself into a sitting position, head between his knees. “Fuck!” he yelled, three times, and then suddenly he got to his feet, sprinted to his skateboard, picked it up, and then sprinted back toward the sign, with the obvious intent of beating the castle with his board, but before he got close enough to the castle to beat it, he slipped and fell, striking the back of his head on the sidewalk. He was still lying there when Henry reached him.