Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  Sandoval started in with Karla about the layout of the farm, asking where she had seen the unicorn—he called it “the sighting in question”—and Karla took Liza with her to the far end of the porch to point out the location.

  “Why didn’t you drive here in a car?” Gunnar was leaning back against one of the porch columns, looking up at him with his arms crossed. He was wearing a heavy metal T-shirt, black and too big for him, the design flaking and indecipherable.

  “We couldn’t find one.”

  “Oh.” This seemed to satisfy the boy. “We have trucks. We have a farm truck over there and my mom has her little white truck. My dad has a four runner. He lets me drive it.” His Icelandic accent was slight compared to his mother’s.

  “That’s cool.” Brian gestured at the bike on its kickstand. “I’m actually just borrowing that.”

  Sandoval wasted no time: at the end of the porch, he handed Karla Hauksdóttir a sheaf of paper and began going over the contract she’d need to sign before they could legally start their investigation. He marveled at Sandoval’s faith in himself as A Brand. He had, after all, just dry-heaved on the woman’s lawn moments before. If Brian had an ounce of the man’s fearlessness, he’d already be submitting his dissertation to publishers.

  No, scratch that.

  A little fearlessness and he’d be in the hospital, under the knife right now. They’d be pulling that tumor out with a pair of salad tongs. If he had even an ounce of bravery inside him.

  He sat down on the steps and peered up at Gunnar. Felt the worn, rough-hewn wood beneath his palms. “How are you not freezing, by the way?”

  The kid shrugged. “It’s not really cold anymore. It was a while back. In January it was really cold.”

  “What kind of stuff do you guys do around here? For fun.”

  Gunnar shoved his hands in the pockets of his shorts, kicked the toe of his shoe against the chipped paint of the porch. “We ride bikes. Go around the farm. Mamma pays us money to pick bugs off the pumpkins sometimes. I have a racetrack around the corner of the house that I made.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “And we’re starting a band.”

  “That’s awesome. What kind of music is it?” Look at this—here was Brian, suddenly chatting with a ten-year-old.

  “It’s metal.”

  Bian smiled. “Nice. My sister loves metal.”

  “Liza’s going to play drums, my mom’s playing bass. I’m going to sing.” He peered down at Brian through the sweep of his hair. Shrewd, a little shy. Trying not to let his eagerness show. “You can play guitar if you want.” Trying to make it sound offhand.

  “Ah, you know, I can’t really play guitar, unfortunately. I played the trumpet in school but I was really bad at it.”

  Gunnar nodded. “Maybe you can learn guitar,” he said quietly. He kicked the floorboard again with the toe of his shoe.

  “Yeah, maybe. It’s a definite possibility. What kind of metal are you into? Like, black metal? Hair-metal? Nu-metal? There’s all different kinds, right? That’s what my sister says, anyway.”

  “I see you know your stuff,” Gunnar said like a wizened eighty-year-old man, and Brian suddenly laughed again for how strange his life had become in the past seventy-two hours, tumor and all. “I mostly like American heavy metal from the ’80s and ’90s, with some thrash thrown in,” said Gunnar, with all the precision of someone who’d had it memorized for some time.

  “His father gave him some cassette tapes when he was little,” Karla said from her spot at the end of the porch.

  “Oh yeah?” Brian smiled. “That’s cool. I’d like to hear more about that sometime.”

  This was prompt enough, apparently: Gunnar immediately dropped to his knees. It was only then that Brian realized the kid had sharpied big black gauntlets on each wrist. Sharpied warrior bracelets, something sandwiched between Mad Max and an ’80s Sunset Boulevard guitarist. The boy burst into a passably snarling falsetto, an invisible microphone clutched in one dirty little fist in front of his face.

  “Na na na na na na!

  I’ve got you, got you in my sights!

  Na na na na na na!

  I don’t know if it’s wrong, wrong or right!

  Na na na na na na!

  But I’m gonna give you, give you

  a love bite!”

  “Gunnar, please,” Karla said, laughing with a hand over her mouth. Liza grinned and wrapped her arms around her mother’s leg, rubbing her face against Karla’s thigh.

  The boy stood up, casually brushed his knees. A showman.

  “That was pretty good,” Brian said.

  Gunnar flicked his bangs out of his eyes. “That was the song ‘Love Bites’ by the band Steel Viper.”

  “Yeah, I haven’t heard them, I guess.”

  “It came out in 1988, off the album Chain the Viper. It’s a really good album. I can show you the cover later.”

  “You remember all that stuff?”

  “Yeah. I listen to them a lot. There’s a really good solo later on in the song. So you’re going to live here, right?”

  “Gunnar,” Karla said. “They just got here.”

  Gunnar looked from Brian to his mother and back. Quieter, he said, “But you are, right?”

  6

  The front door opened into a large living room. Plants and toys lined the deep-set windowsills, and through an archway was a dining room where a chorus of mismatched velveteen chairs circled a long glass-topped table. Karla suggested they put their bags there for now. Their footfalls were loud on the wood floor. There was a stairwell off to one side, and the stairs leading to the second floor were dotted with plastic horses and a red bucket. Through another archway lay the kitchen. The kids’ art hung on every wall in every room, as far as Brian could tell, and was bracketed amid framed, age-yellowed portraits of dour, unsmiling men and women. Standing, sitting, people clustered in dooryards or in front of unadorned, simple churches. Dozens of small frames on each wall. It could have come across as oppressive, but to Brian it felt quietly celebratory, reverent. He liked the house immediately.

  They dropped their bags and headed back into the living room where the children, already unconcerned with them, lay splayed out on the couch. Amid the highbacked chairs and heavy, tied-back curtains, the plasma screen on the wall seemed the room’s one concession to modernity.

  Brian was not particularly surprised to see the lasagna show unfolding silently on the screen.

  Sandoval spoke politely to Karla about the surrounding area, any neighbors she might have. Recon masked as small talk, Karla gesturing at the window as she spoke. Onscreen, the oldest daughter leaned into the open refrigerator, and the quavering, glistening lasagna—what the fuck was this show called?—scooted closer to her across the tabletop. Predatory and quivering, the means of the lasagna’s locomotion was unclear. It strained forward, and just as it was about to make contact with the young woman’s ass, noodle-to-denim, she straightened up and exited the kitchen. The lasagna trembled.

  Brian pointed at the television and said, “Karla, do you happen to know the name of this show? I watched it as a kid but I can’t remember.”

  She turned to the screen, and stared at it for a moment, frowning. “I’m sorry, I don’t. I don’t think I’ve seen it before.” A string of Icelandic flashed at the bottom of the screen as the lasagna soliloquized on its plate, now alone in the kitchen. Breaking the fourth wall, addressing the camera, gruel slathered and quivering below a pair of googly eyes. Karla said, “It seems strange. It’s probably not great for the children, actually.”

  Liza took her fingers from her mouth. “I want to keep watching it,” she said.

  “You can’t even read what it’s saying yet, Li-li,” said Gunnar.

  “I can too.”

  “Do you mind,” Karla said, turning off the televis
ion, “if we do this in the kitchen? I’d like to go over these papers, but the children’s dinner is on the stove.”

  “Mamma! I was watching!”

  “Come color in the kitchen, Li-li.”

  Karla led them to the kitchen in the rear of the house, Liza hanging her head and stomping her way along, Gunnar behind them all, trumpeting loudly through an invisible air horn. The kitchen was careworn and clean. There was an old, burn-marred wooden island in the center, and through a large window above the sink there was a gorgeous view of the northern woods. Jars and cans and plastic baggies of herbs lay inside stacked cabinets with their doors removed. A cast iron pot sat quietly bubbling on an old four-burner stove. Next to the back door sat a round-edged Frigidaire festooned in magnets, more photographs of the children. Trinkets and drawings. The house resounded with the sense of sturdy, long-used things valued and cared for. The children took their seats at the island, drawing supplies already scattered there. Karla offered coffee in heavy ceramic mugs and Brian and Sandoval each took one gratefully.

  “I really like your house,” Brian said.

  Karla lifted the lid on the pot. “Oh, thank you.” She stirred the contents with a wooden spoon, divined the need for a pinch of something that lay in a baggie on the counter. “It’s a family home. We’ve been here a long time.”

  “Those are pictures of your family, then? On the walls?”

  “Yes, exactly. Farmers and fishermen, mostly. During the war, some sailors. My great-grandfather built the house.” Sandoval cleared his throat, picked at a piece of lint on his jacket. He squared the pages of the contract where it sat on the counter. Impatient to begin. “We’ve lived here since then,” she said, “my family, except for a little bit during the war.”

  “World War II?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What happened then? Do you mind if I ask?”

  Karla peered at Brian over her shoulder, assessing him. “Of course. It was . . .” She turned back to the stove and gestured with the spoon, roved it in a circle. “I don’t know the English word. The British, when they came here, used the fields as storage. For their bombs, their shells and vehicles and things. Some officers lived in the house then.”

  “Wow. Really.” He and Sandoval shared a look. Sandoval shrugged, nodded. Context for the book, sure.

  “Then they left in . . . 1942? And the Americans took it over. They returned the house to my grandfather in 1944, because by then they had built the base at the end of Vegurrin Sjö.”

  “Road Seven.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right there!” Liza said, pointing at the wall of the kitchen with a crayon. “Vegurrin Sjö.”

  Brian walked to the kitchen window, raised his mug. He could see another rutted road like the driveway out front, a kind of mud-hewn back trail that led to the gray ribbon of the road that eventually disappeared through the mouth of the trees beyond. “There’s a base up there?”

  “Yes.”

  It took him a second. “There’s a US military base on the island?” He was thinking of the haphazard scattering of buildings he’d looked at online. “Really.”

  “Yes.” She clacked her spoon against the pot, covered it. “I mean, it’s small. You don’t really see the men very often. They hardly ever come into town, but sometimes. Sometimes you can see things are being delivered to them by helicopter.”

  “It looked like there’d been a forest fire around it.”

  “Oh, they burn the woods around the base all the time.”

  “Really,” Brian said. He kept resisting the urge to eyeball Sandoval. Are you hearing this? “Why’s that?”

  Without hesitating, Karla said, “Because of the álagablettur, of course.” She smiled as she said it, and turned to face them. She crossed her arms, this air about her of . . .antagonism? Of daring them to say something. He wracked his brain trying to recall the term, couldn’t pull it from his slim Icelandic vocabulary.

  “What was it again? The what?”

  “The álagablettur,” Liza piped up, looping big scrawls of blue crayon across her paper.

  “It means the woods are haunted,” Gunnar said. He was rededicating himself to his wrist gauntlets with a Sharpie.

  Liza said, “There’s ghosts out there.”

  Now he and Sandoval shared a look.

  Karla said, “And you’re not to go out there, are you?”

  A chorus of two: “No, mamma.”

  “Anyway,” she said, shedding the strangeness of the moment just like that, or at least moving past it, “I’m sure they just burn the woods so they can see the cars and things that come down the road.” She stepped toward the sink, brightening. “Can I get you anything else? Water? More coffee? A beer?”

  The meal took longer than planned, so the children were sent out to play during the last stretch of daylight. Karla Hauksdóttir retrieved her reading glasses and took a seat at the kitchen island next to Sandoval. Brian stood at the window, looked out at the dense copses of pine and birch, many of their trunks gnarled and bent as arthritic hands, everything growing dark in the gloaming. The children ran in the yard, Gunnar (he’d finally put a jacket on) trying to throw pinecones into a basket that Liza held, her squeals and laughter seeping through the glass.

  “Will I need a lawyer for this?” Karla said.

  Sandoval opened his mouth, shut it. He scratched at a spot next to his eye. “I’ll be honest. It’s a pretty boilerplate contract, Karla.”

  She waved her hand in the air. “I don’t know what this means, boilerplate.”

  “It’s a pretty standard contract.”

  “Ah.”

  “But if you wanted to get a lawyer involved, I certainly wouldn’t say no. We want you to feel good about us being here.”

  “Of course.”

  “But my concern,” said Sandoval, and here he spread out his hand atop the papers, tapped them with all five fingers. “My main concern is that we can’t actually start our investigation until the contract’s been signed. My publisher is very clear about that. No photos, no filming, no interviews, nothing. Technically we’re not even supposed to have our gear here.”

  “I see,” Karla said, nodding. She flipped a page, peered at it over the tops of her glasses.

  “And we’ve only got a limited amount of time, so. . .” He let it hang there. Smart. Mercenary, but smart: Put the onus on her. Unspoken, but claxon-loud in the room: You called us, remember?

  He took a pen from inside his jacket, showed her the places she needed to sign and date, set the pen down. Outside, Gunnar threw a pinecone high in the air and it bounced off the top of Liza’s head and into the basket she held. For a moment it looked like she might cry and then she began shrieking with laughter, her eyes wide white O’s.

  Karla signed, and Sandoval rolled the contract up into a tube and mock-bowed, thanking her. He went to secret it away in one of his bags. “I guess that’s it then,” she said, and it was impossible to read the tone there; she could’ve been resigned, or concerned, or quietly grateful. She rose, took off her glasses and folded their stems and put them on the counter. A loaf of rye bread was removed from a covered basket on the counter and she handed Brian a knife, handle first, and asked him to cut it up. She stepped out the kitchen door onto the porch to call the children. The sound of the ocean filled the room faint as a whisper through the doorway. It was another world here.

  Sandoval came back in from the dining room. “Did you see how big those fields were?” Brian offered quietly as he sawed through the bread. “This place is way too big, man.”

  Sandoval rinsed his mug out in the sink. “We’ll just have to move them every twenty-four hours. Saturate the area.”

  “You think that’s gonna work?”

  “We’ll map it out. We’ll come up with something.”

  “Those greenhouses, man. So much for
line of sight, you know what I mean?”

  “We’ll figure it out, Brian.”

  They ate in the dining room. The last gasp of twilight limned the mountains that stood beyond, snowcapped and serrated as monster jaws. Occasionally, very occasionally, the headlights of cars could be traced making their way down the road. Brian was incredulous to find that Gunnar had made the bread they were eating.

  “Metal fan and a baking genius? Impressive.”

  “Thanks,” said Gunnar, frowning into his bowl, red-cheeked and thrilled.

  “And this stew is delicious,” said Sandoval. He’d salted it so much that Liza had stared.

  “Reindeer,” said Gunnar. “It’s expensive.”

  Karla looked at him.

  “It is, though,” Gunnar said. “It’s a treat, right? Mamma said it’s because we have people visiting.” Karla tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and sighed, smiling a little.

  After dinner, Liza and Gunnar moved a pair of the island stools over to the kitchen sink and began doing the dishes. Gunnar washing, Liza drying. Brian watched as the children held a glass baking tray in their four little hands, stacking it into the dish drainer together. Sandoval went outside to begin scouting the area—he said this without a trace of irony or embarrassment—and Brian and Karla brought the rest of the dishes in from the dining room.

  “Those are awesome kids you have.”

  Karla stacked silverware onto a plate, gazed in at them where they sat on their stools. “They’ve been through a lot. I’m glad they have each other.” There was another indecipherable smile.

  •

  That evening Sandoval cornered him out on the porch. He took him around the side of the house. It was full dark, the sky a shotgun-scatter of stars, a night fanged with chill. He leaned in close and said quietly, “There’s no fucking reception here.”

  “No? You sure?”

  “It’s spotty, apparently.” Sandoval scrubbed his hand down his face once, savagely. “Karla just has a landline.”

  “I don’t even have a phone at this point,” Brian said.