“I’m fucking dying for some fresh rolls. And a Danish. I’ll drive down and get us some for breakfast.”
He began swimming towards shore.
“Are you sure you can drive, Bengt?”
“What do you mean?”
“The whiskey.”
“Fuck, that was yesterday. And I’d bet a hundred thousand there isn’t a cop within fifty miles.”
“We don’t have a hundred thousand,” she said and turned her back again.
He turned left at the swim sign and left again at the three-way junction in town. The church plaster gleamed so brightly that his head started to ache despite his sunglasses.
Three hundred feet ahead of him a pickup was parked across the road.
A man in a baseball cap stood in front of the car. He raised a hand.
What the fuck.
He rolled down his window. The man leaned down.
“What’s happening?”
“A large family of moose is crossing,” the man replied.
He spoke in a vaguely recognizable dialect, an intonation he’d heard somewhere but couldn’t place.
“I can’t see any.”
“It’s a bit further on. We don’t want people to get hurt.”
“You’re really on it.”
“It’s our job.”
“I thought your job was to shoot the moose,” he said and gave a short laugh.
“So it is,” the man said, smiled and straightened. “But this time of year, it’s all about the moose safaris.”
“Yeah, sure, like on all those signs.”
“Did you see them?”
“Hard to miss them.”
He had seen the blue-and-white signs at two of the exits from the town: the words MOOSE SAFARI, a fat, pointing arrow and a picture of a moose.
“So have you ever seen a moose?” the man asked.
“Lots of times.”
“Really?”
“In photos,” he said, giving another short laugh. “But never in real life.”
The man smiled again.
“Wouldn’t be hard to fix.”
“How do you mean?”
“We’re going out tonight, at dusk. I can guarantee you’ll see something you’ve never seen before.” He smiled again. “In real life.”
“Well, I don’t know.” He tried looking past the pickup, but saw no moose. If he had seen any, it would have been easier for him to decline this offer, or whatever it was.
“What are they really?” he asked. “These moose safaris?”
“We’re a small group of people who know where the moose usually can be found in these woods. So we bring people out there and show them those places. It’s as simple as that.” The man bent down again. “And of course we bring some food along, and some beer and schnapps. We have a lean-to where we set up a barbeque late in the evening.” The man smiled again under the beak of his cap. You couldn’t make out his eyes. “Mostly we have a pretty nice time.”
Lean-to, barbeque, woods. Wild animals. It really sounded like an adventure, a very modest one, but still. Beer and schnapps. His throat was already dry, as were his lips. He could see himself by the fire, a glass of colorless liquor in his hand. Guys all around. A world of men, damn it.
“We do a pentathlon, too. Most people like it a lot.” The man smiled again. His teeth were dark. Perhaps just from the shade cast by his cap. “Usually it’s pretty wild.”
“What . . . what do you charge for it all?”
“Five hundred kronor. But as much meat you can eat and as much liquor as you can drink is included. Along with the moose.”
“What time?”
“We set out at seven. We meet up on the church green,” the man said, nodding in the direction he had come from. “Just before the intersection.”
“Will there be a lot of people?”
“So far five, six if you join us. It’s just enough—too many people worries the woods.”
Worries the woods, he thought. Well put. As if the woods had a life of their own. Maybe they had. Perhaps the winking lights he had seen last night were the eyes of the forest.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
When he returned she was just getting out of the water.
“That felt good,” she said.
“So I told you.”
“Did you get the rolls?”
“You bet your ass!”
“So what’s made you so happy all of a sudden?”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“No, no.”
“How about being a tiny bit grateful that I drove off to get you fresh rolls, and Danish?”
“Well, it was your idea.”
“So there’s no reason for you to give a fuck, is that what you mean?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Maybe I should just have stayed here instead?” He hefted the paper bag in his hand. It felt heavier now than when he had carried it out of the bakery. “Maybe we’d just as well not have these for breakfast?”
“Bengt, please don’t be silly now.”
“Silly? So now I’m silly?” He took a step towards her. “Are you calling me silly?”
He saw that she flinched. As if he was going to hit her. It had happened before, but he knew that she understood why he had to do it that time. Or those times. She had gone too far and he hadn’t been able to stop his hand, or his arm. They’d talked about all that. She got it. But what he didn’t get was that it seemed that she still didn’t get it. She called him stupid. On their vacation. When he’d been shopping, really exerted himself. Just as he’d started to feel relaxed.
When he was going to see real, live moose. Would she call that silly too?
He hefted the paper bag in his hand. He threw it as far away as he could.
It was heavy enough to fly pretty far out over the lake.
He saw it float with the current.
He heard her give a sob but didn’t turn. So it went when you didn’t appreciate what someone did for you. If you didn’t there would be no fresh-baked buns. There would be hell to pay instead.
She was silent at lunch and that was just as well. He only drank two beers with his food. Any other day he would have had a couple of schnapps as well, but it would be a long evening.
He had told her and she had nodded, almost as if she’d already known. At least that was the funny feeling he got. He had told her about the moose safari and she had nodded and looked away, at the lake and the opposite shore, towards the place where the lights had winked last night. As if someone was standing there. But it was just her way of taking in what he’d said. She knew that it wasn’t her place to object. Christ, it was his vacation as well, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t he too be able to have some fun?
“Will you . . . spend the night?” she asked after a few moments.
“No, no. We’ll break camp sometime after midnight.”
He liked that expression. Break camp. There was something robust about it, between men. Breaking. Camp.
“Where is that . . . lean-to?”
“Out there,” he said, pointing to the woods all around them. “That’s all you need to know.”
Again, she looked away.
He drank the last of his beer and stood up.
“Enough of this, I’ll have a dip.”
He went straight in and let his body sink through the water. It was much warmer now than it had been this morning. He took care not to swim out. He had heard somewhere that it could be dangerous to swim after eating; you could sink like a stone. He didn’t want to become a stone. There were enough of them on the bottom of this lake, on the shore.
He saw her stand up and walk into their tent. After a minute or two she came back out and went off to the washing bench to get a plastic tub for the dirty dishes. If she had just taken it easy for a while he would have had a chance to offer to take care of the dishes. Now it was too late.
He lay on his back to float on the surface. It was easy, as if there wa
s at least a little salt in the water. He smelled the fragrance of the forest and the beach and the water. This swimming spot was really something. The only strange thing was that they were the only people who’d come here. It was true that this was a deserted part of the country, but this was vacation time, and even the deserted places were filled with people from all over half of Europe. He had heard German spoken when he walked into the bakery. The Germans ought to have found their way here. The main road was a blacktop and the swim sign was easy to spot. There should have been more tents in the camping ground. Thankfully there weren’t, but still. And some people from town ought to come here to swim. There must be kids on the farms. There were several farms nearby. And the fucking yokels themselves at least ought to come here to wash off the hay after a working day.
But nobody came.
Maybe it was too hot, he thought. Maybe the kids had all gone to some summer camp by the sea. But hardly. In any case it was more probable that a few kids from the city should have come here for the summer. Summer kids. A funny expression, as if those kids existed only during the summer, were kids only as long as the summer lasted.
She had been a summer kid. He couldn’t remember when she had told him, or if somebody else had. Whoever that might have been. But surely she had spent a couple of summers in the country when she was a kid? Maybe somewhere similar to this, he thought. He couldn’t remember where she had been. But she never became a farmer’s wife. The only thing left since then was a strange remnant of some strange dialect, a single word or two now and then. Strange, like that baseball cap guy, the moose safari guy. Maybe all hicks sounded the same, maybe it was a universal thing.
He smiled, kept on floating.
At five to seven he parked his car below the church green. The sun was still very strong. He locked his car and walked up the hillside. At some point during the evening she would come here on foot to pick up the car. It wasn’t more than two or three miles to the camping ground and the lake. She had suggested it herself. He’d like her to come up with more ideas as good.
The church looked almost fluorescent in the white sunlight. Everything here was white: the church façade, the grass and the graves against the light, the sky all above him. In an hour or so the blue evening light would lower from the sky. That was the best time of the day.
He stood in front of the iron gate. The graveyard inside was quite small, just some twenty graves bearing witness that few people lived here, or rather had lived here. Few had led their lives around here and so only few had died. He wondered briefly if he would be able to live here. The answer to that question was a simple no. Sure, it was okay when the sun was shining, but when it didn’t? This was the uplands. In the middle of winter it must be around twenty below. Even the thought almost made him shiver. He looked at the graves again. Could he die here? Hardly. If you didn’t live here you didn’t die here, did you? He smiled. He heard the sound of a car motor behind him and turned. The pickup truck drove onto the gravel and the man with the baseball cap stuck his head out the driver’s window.
“Jump in,” he called.
He went down to the car and jumped in on the passenger seat.
“Where are the others?” he asked.
“Waiting out in the woods.”
“I thought we were supposed to meet here.”
“They were early. My partner drove them out.”
He asked no more questions. They drove back the same way he had arrived. The wind blew warm through the open window. He saw grazing cows on the pasture to his right. Their udders were swollen. It would soon be milking time. The cowboys would come riding to drive the animals in. Movin’, movin’, movin’. Many years back he had watched some TV show, and the theme song had stuck. That show could have been set here. Nothing seemed to change here, except for the horses having been replaced by pickups. But there were still plenty of riding horses in the fields.
They drove past the turning to the lake. Or at least he thought they did.
There was no longer any sign there.
He turned back when they had passed.
Yes, no doubt it was their turning. He recognized a twinned spruce about a hundred feet down the road to the lake. He turned to the driver.
“The sign is gone.”
The man in the baseball cap gave him a brief glance but didn’t reply.
“The swim sign for the lake. I’ve put my tent up down there.”
The man raised his glance to the rearview mirror.
“Sign?”
“Yeah, sign. Blue and white. An ordinary swim sign.”
“Yeah. You’re right,” the driver said, his eyes still on the rearview mirror. “I think there used to be one of those.”
“It’s not there any longer.”
“Well. Maybe they took it down to fix it or something.”
“In the middle of vacations?”
“Well, how should I know?” The man threw him a brief glance. “Does it matter?”
“No, I guess it doesn’t . . . I just think it’s fucking strange.”
The man gave no reply. He suddenly swung onto a forest road impossible to make out even a few seconds ago. There was no sign.
The road was no road, more like a broad track. Maybe a moose thoroughfare, he thought. Here they calmly walk along, without any apprehension, while the yokels sit waiting up in their moose towers, aiming their guns. He glanced at the driver. Better be careful. He had a hick beside him. Wouldn’t do any good if he suspected what he was thinking. He looked like a tough bastard.
They arrived at a three-way forest junction. The road split like a crooked poker and he suddenly remembered the late-night barbeque. The schnapps and the beer. He hadn’t even had his afternoon whiskey and he was starting to feel it. His throat was dry. His tongue felt like something not quite belonging in his mouth. I’ll never again waive my afternoon whiskey, he thought.
The pickup bumped up a slope. The forest thinned out and disappeared entirely at the top. The driver stopped and turned off the ignition.
“Here we are,” he said and climbed out.
Up here it was like standing on the roof of the world, or at least of the county. You could see for miles. It was like the middle of an ocean, the tops of the spruce forming the horizon all around you. The sun had finally started to sink towards the western horizon. Your eyes could follow it all the way down until it turned yellow as a firebrand, then follow it as it rose again if you just stood there long enough.
But it was time to move.
“There are the others,” said the man in the baseball cap.
A few people came strolling out of the edge of the forest below them. He counted four men. They were dressed in sturdy jeans and plaid shirts, rough boots and baseball caps, just like the man standing beside him. They all looked to be from around here. He himself didn’t look like a local. He had a blue linen shirt tucked into a pair of chinos. And Top-Siders, by all means sturdy, but still. He didn’t have a baseball cap.
The man in the baseball cap introduced him to the others, as if he were the only stranger. Perhaps he was, he thought. Perhaps five hundred kronor is a lot of money to these hicks, a hundred each. With that money they can drive down to the farmers’ co-op and buy a few sacks of whatever the hell they need.
But nobody has asked me for any money yet, he thought.
“All right, let’s take positions,” the man with the baseball cap said. He thought of him as the man with the baseball cap even though they all had baseball caps. The expression was a bit strange: Let’s take positions.
The man in the baseball cap walked ahead to a kind of watchtower that looked newly built. It almost seemed unnecessary to have such a thing up here, but perhaps it gave a still better view of the moose. Perhaps the idea was not to disturb them.
It was higher than it looked from the ground, but then that was always the case. He always got that feeling when he stood at the top of a diving platform, but it was a long time since he last stood at the top of a di
ving platform. Or any kind of tower. Suddenly he felt that it was a long time since he had done anything at all. Mostly he had existed, whatever that might be. He hadn’t climbed any tower, as he did now. Nor lit any fires. He had drunk liquor, but then you could do that anywhere. He believed that he had lived in reality, but this was reality.
Up there he felt the wind.
He felt both large and small at the same time.
“Look down there,” he heard one of the men say.
He looked.
Something moved below among the spruce. He could see the branches shake, rise, fall. He saw something brown, or black; it was difficult to see any colors now since the sun had begun sinking beneath the horizon and that meant that colors had begun sinking into the ground.
He saw the moose walk on to the three-way junction down there, or the three-track junction, and walk on east. The moose! His first moose! They looked like a family, even though from up here all the moose seemed to be about the same size. They appeared as if to order. For a moment he thought that they were trained to show themselves just when people had climbed the tower, but that was just too impossible to believe. Though you never knew. People in this backwoods might well communicate better with animals than with city dwellers like himself.
The moose walked on east, without hurrying. A couple of times they stopped to nibble the branches, as if to check on their freshness and taste. Their movements were jerky and a bit clumsy, but at the same time there was something magnificent about them. Kings of the forest, and queens. Suddenly he wished that his wife had been standing here beside him. He surprised himself with that thought. He thought that everything might have been different. They might have been a family, a real family.
Like the moose down there.
Now they were disappearing, walking back into the forest again. The moment was past. He had had his moment in reality and now it was gone, slowly walking east.
He looked around and saw that all the men were watching him. Watching his reactions. He was fairly certain of being the only one here paying, but that didn’t matter. He had had his moment.
He had become someone else.
He wanted to tell her that, do it at once. But that wouldn’t be possible. He wouldn’t be able to find his way back, nor walk the whole way back, and the other men would have to give him his money’s worth. To them it would be a matter of honor and if he demanded to be driven back already he would insult them.
A Darker Shade of Sweden Page 7