Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  “Yeah, well, it’s a pain in my ass, okay? No internet, no phone? Again, Brian, I can’t stress how important this kind of thing is. Knowing this stuff.”

  “Okay,” he said. “We just didn’t have a lot of jump time between me getting hired and me getting on the plane. You know what I mean? I get that it’s part of my job, but there just wasn’t a lot of time.”

  Sandoval looked out at the woods. He sucked at his teeth, and the light from the window sectioned his face in clear, delineated planes. He cursed once and then nodded. “No, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, it’s fine. Believe me.”

  “It makes things a little complicated, though. I guess we have to go into Kjálkabein to send emails. I can make calls via the landline here, but that’s expensive as hell. It just means a lot more back and forth than I was thinking.”

  “Well hey,” Brian said, “look at this way. If you wanted a space free of distractions, we just got dealt a royal flush. Right? No one can bother us out here.”

  And it was there and gone again: the dawning on Sandoval’s face. Fast, but not poker-player fast.

  Fast but noticeable.

  It was relief. A look of pure, unbridled relief on Sandoval’s face.

  •

  Karla offered once more to let them sleep downstairs. “It gets very cold at night. The wind’s bad.” She jabbed her hand out toward Sandoval’s chest, like she was stabbing him with her fingers. “It cuts.”

  “It’s okay. We don’t want to miss anything,” he said, hoisting a bag over his shoulder. “But thank you.”

  They pitched their tents in the yard where the cold glare from the porch light threw long shadows on the ground. They were new, expensive tents that Sandoval had bought, weatherproof and oddly alien in their shape. Brian’s headache had snarled and coughed to life, then settled to a hum. It was impossible now not to think of it as something alive, separate. His breath hung in tatters as he assembled his tent.

  Gunnar and Liza sat huddled on the top step of the porch, bathed and fresh-faced in their pajamas and heavy socks and puffy thermal jackets. They plied the men with questions as they worked.

  Gunnar: “Have you seen those tents that unfold all by themselves, right when you open them up? Vroop!”

  Liza: “Do you snore when you’re sleeping? Gunnar snores.”

  Gunnar: “I do not. Hey, Brian, where did you get your sleeping bag?”

  Liza: “What’s the biggest pumpkin you ever saw?”

  Gunnar: “Do you like snow better, or the ocean?”

  Liza: “What’s the most candy you ever ate?”

  Gunnar: “Do you know the Dokken song ‘Breaking the Chains’? It’s famous.”

  Liza: “Do you know how to play the guitar? Brian, do you? We’re having a band.”

  “He doesn’t, Li-li,” Gunnar answered. “I already asked him.”

  Eventually Karla came out, ushered them upstairs. The single video camera and three motion-activated digital cameras they’d brought were all cued in to Sandoval’s laptop. His tent would be their headquarters, in a sense, this little bubble of fabric and polyester the nexus of their life for the coming weeks. The house would sit like an appendage, Brian imagined, gargantuan and seldom utilized.

  The unicorn, Karla had said after dinner (and she’d said it so straight-faced and sincerely that Brian, his stomach sinking, realized that she believed her story, if nothing else, with utter conviction—how had he not thought of this before?) had seemed to favor the outer edges of the fields. That was where the video had been filmed. Well beyond the greenhouses, in the area skirting the woods. They’d directed the eyes of their equipment there, though Brian was confident they’d need two dozen more cameras and a series of floodlights connected to heat and motion sensors. At least. Yet here they were. Playing games in the dirt. Sleeping in ice-grass.

  They were the guest of a woman who remained utterly convinced she’d seen a unicorn. This was no giggling, self-conscious claim of a child seeing an ernicee while drifting off to sleep, its wings aglow. No sailor’s booze-mad, red-faced proclamation of a magyr swimming along the bow of his ship, flexing its webbed hands as moss hung in serpentine trails from its breasts. This was a mother, a business owner, in a house, with a job and children—who insisted sober and straight-faced that she had witnessed the impossible.

  His earlier jubilance was quashed, sloughed off by his headache. What rose in its place was a quiet flurry of doubt, insistent as heartburn. What in the hell was he doing out here? He checked the batteries on the cameras once more, checked the sight lines, checked that everything was running clean on Sandoval’s laptop.

  The two of them bid each other goodnight, and Brian lay in his sleeping bag, both tired and not. In spite of his doubt, he felt the strange calm that came with having the next month or so of his life planned out, as ridiculous as it was. An alarm would sound on Sandoval’s laptop if any of the cameras were activated. They’d made it. They were here. Tomorrow he would return to the Hotel Magnificence and get the rest of their gear, and they’d begin their work in earnest.

  The dome of fabric above him was a blank, featureless sky. His thoughts churned: he wondered about Sandoval, his mother, these little kids. Brooke. His father. Traci and her possibly fake boobs and Brooke’s unyielding desire for the woman’s ruination. He thought of Don Whitmer’s clear disappointment in him, and how he hadn’t even been able to apologize to the man before he left.

  After a while Brian unzipped his tent and put his jacket on and crawled out. Stretching, he turned and saw the dim shape of Karla Hauksdóttir sitting on the porch steps. He let out a little bark of surprise and then raised his hand in greeting. She raised hers in return, and the motion detector turned the porch light on with a loud click. A tendril of smoke purled above her head.

  She was wrapped in a man’s coat, the collar edged in fur, and Brian sat down on the step below hers. The world beyond was a scrim of darkness spattered with stars, a slivered moon. The weak gleam of the greenhouses. They watched a single car thread its way along the road and disappear.

  Karla said, “Couldn’t sleep?”

  He shrugged. “Jet lag, I guess. How about you?”

  “This is my only time to relax, really. After the kids are in bed, before I check on the crops in the morning.”

  “Got it.”

  “There’s some coffee left, if you’d like that. If you want to stay up and wait to see if something will happen.”

  For a moment he was confused, thought it was an offhanded attempt at hitting on him, and then he blushed at his own foolishness. “Does it come out often?”

  She smoked, and he waited for her answer.

  “No,” she finally said, ruefully. “Just the once. Just that one time.”

  “Okay.”

  “I keep hoping it will appear again since I emailed Mr. Sandoval, but it hasn’t. Which is a little embarrassing to me.”

  “It’s okay.” He’ll find a story either way, Brian thought. “Have you ever thought about trying to trap it? Setting a trap out there?” he asked.

  “No,” she said stiffly. “I haven’t thought of that.” It was clear she was bothered by the idea, that he’d made a mistake by suggesting it.

  They listened to the wind sloughing through the woods, listened to it moan and curl around the corner of the house, ripple the fabric of the tents in the yard. Sandoval’s snore, light and pinched, served as the cross-note. Karla lit another cigarette. “You know, there’s a word they have across the way.”

  “Across the way?” He turned to look at her again.

  “Iceland,” she said. She lifted her chin then tucked her face back in the folds of the coat’s collar. “The important people across the way.” Impossible to miss the sarcasm.

  “Ah. Gotcha.”

  She stretched her legs out in front of her, thunked he
r boots on the step next to him. Sandoval’s snoring halted, picked back up. Quieter, almost a whisper, she said, “So, they call this word ástandiö.” Brian turned to her, braced his back along the railing. Beneath the porch light, she waved her hand in a circle, drew errant scribbles of smoke. “It means, like, the condition. Or the situation we have to deal with right now. Okay? It was a term they used during the war.”

  “This was World War II again?”

  She nodded. “It was a word they used because of all the British soldiers that went there—to Reykjavík mostly—and all the Icelandic girls that fell in love with them. And had babies! It was a real situation. So, ástandiö.” Her laugh was stilted, with little love in it. “People were unhappy. By 1942 there were probably as many British as Icelandic men over there, okay?”

  “Sure,” Brian said. “How do you know all this?”

  She pulled her head back to look at him. She was frowning. “These are the stories we tell to each other. This is our history. You don’t have stories you tell with your family? Passed down?” Brian thought of his angry, distant father doing a wobbly downward dog at a sun-blasted nudist colony outside of Scottsdale, arms trembling, his balls mashing his yoga mat. He suppressed a shudder.

  “Not really,” he said.

  Again the waving hand, the curls of smoke. “Well, this is our history. Our stories. So. In Iceland, the people were unhappy. All these British men. Boys. These pregnant girls. But the funny thing is, the thing that’s interesting to me, is that there was no ástandiö in Hvíldarland during the war. None. Do you know why?”

  Was she angry? Is that what he heard? Was it anger at him, or anger at the past?

  “No.”

  “There was no ástandiö here because we were so grateful! This has always been a poor little place. Hard ground, lava rocks, moss. So hard to grow things here. Before the war, there was no little airport in Kjálkabein. Kjálkabein itself was much smaller. We had the hot springs. The woods. Little groups of houses here and there. And this place, the farm. We relied on trade with Iceland. Wool, timber, what little we could grow. Fishing. Then the war came. And the British took over my grandfather’s house.” She pointed off to the side of the house, away from Road Seven. “Over there you can still see the pieces of a building they took down. The children will play and find little things here and there. A key, an old American cigarette pack. Bullets. One time a rusted bayonet.”

  “Wow.”

  Karla shrugged, lifted her cigarette hand dismissively. She took a drag and the bright orange glow lit her face for a moment. “It was wartime. The Germans had invaded Norway and Denmark. Iceland asked us—the one time they asked us anything, really—to remain neutral, like them. We had no defense force. We said yes. They said we would be rewarded for our loyalty. My mother was very young at the time, younger than Liza is now. She’d never seen a gun before. Never seen an airplane. There were less than twenty officers here at the farm, then they all moved to the base up north. Three hundred men here total? There was no point to it, and still we were grateful. It was like they were put here just so the Germans could not take it. My grandfather thought we were safer with them here, that we would be protected. Is this boring you?”

  “No. I should be writing it down, actually.”

  “Oh, you’re kind.” She smoked. “Everyone was placed on rations. They had even less than before because they had to report their crops to the British, who took some. Blackout conditions at night. Not that that was hard.” He decided that Karla seemed still wounded by the story, tethered to it.

  “So what happened after the war? The British left, right?”

  Karla smiled at the wordplay. It took Brian a moment to get it. “Oh, I mean—”

  “No, that’s funny.” She leaned over and stubbed her cigarette out on her boot, holding her ponytail against her neck with her free hand. She put her cigarette butt in a nearby coffee can. “The British thanked us for our service and reminded us Iceland would reward us politically in the years to come. Then the Americans came and stayed at the house while they built their base up north.”

  “Did you ever get paid back?”

  “By the end of the war, Iceland had money. They were becoming a republic. We should have celebrated: no one in Hvíldarland was made to fight the Nazis. We were safe. We were still poor, but we were our own people again. Mostly.”

  “So they didn’t pay you back.”

  “In the past eighty years? They’ve helped us sometimes. Food, aid. But they do it like an older child to a younger one, you know? As if they were giving us a great gift. As if we should be so grateful. It did not help our relations over the years.”

  “Your English is really impressive, Karla. My Icelandic is terrible.”

  “Well, we learn it in school. And my ex-husband is from Idaho.”

  They sat, looked out at the darkness, the way the land seemed lighter than the sky. For lack of anything else to say, Brian asked where they’d met.

  “He was stationed at the base.”

  “Oh.”

  “I had a flat tire on Vegurrin Sjö once and he stopped his big military vehicle and changed it.” She turned shy at the memory; he could sense her burrowing into her big coat, into the memory itself.

  “Pretty smooth,” said Brian.

  “Oh, but I knew how to change a tire,” she said, smiling.

  He laughed. “Nice.”

  “A few months later he came to my house and knocked on the door. My mother was still alive then, and he asked us both to dinner in Kjálkabein. He was done with the army.”

  “He’s still in the picture?”

  “Oh yes. You’ll meet him. We share the children. He’s a veterinarian now.”

  “Wow. I’d love to talk to him about the base. What they do there.”

  She shrugged, pulled an invisible shred of tobacco from her lips. “He said they did boring things with satellites. Weather satellites, data collection. Mostly, he said, they stood around.”

  Brian pointed a finger at her, squinted one eye shut. “That’s right, stood around and burned back the álagablettur. Kept back the bad spirits.”

  She looked away from him, looked out at the fields. After a moment she said, “You laugh, but some people believe it. I do. Many Icelanders and Hvíldarlanders do.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re a scientist.”

  “I’m an anthropologist,” he said, wanting to curl up at the lie, at the grand act of conceit that saying such a thing required. A lazy, petulant, privileged dropout was what he was.

  “I don’t know what this means.”

  “I study cultures. Societies. How they develop.”

  “I see.”

  He said, “And a lot of times, the old monsters help us. They show us what people cared about. What they were afraid of, what they valued. You want to learn about a society, learn the stories they told their children when it got dark out.”

  “Well, I tell my children that those woods are full of ghosts.” She drew out the last word, light and airy. She fluttered her fingers. And then she turned hard, unsmiling. “I tell them that, and I tell them to stay away.”

  “So you believe in ghosts. And you think you saw a unicorn.”

  “I did see a unicorn, Brian.”

  “We thought, Mr. Sandoval and I, that it might be a reindeer that someone had . . . operated on.”

  She said nothing.

  “Or ponies. A horse.”

  Karla shrugged. “I know what I saw. It was a unicorn.”

  “Is everyone in Hvíldarland this open-minded?”

  He couldn’t tell if he’d upset her. She picked up her cigarettes and he thought she would rise and leave and then she set them back down on the steps. “I grew up on the stories as a child. The huldufólk. The einhyrningur. The álagablettur. We all did, people my age. In school, outsid
e of school. I don’t think much of it, really. But I also don’t let the children play in the woods. When the British were here on the farm, they were building a big gun on the edge of the sea over there”—she pointed to the east—“that they dismantled when they left. But they were carrying a bunch of the shells through the woods, a group of soldiers, when a single shell exploded. And then boom boom boom, like a chain, all the shells blew up. My grandfather said that eight men died. The only British casualties in Hvíldarland during all of the war. And now it’s said that they haunt the woods around here, these men. Bad-spirited and angry, lost.”

  “Pissed off at dying in such a dumb way.”

  She picked up on his tone. “You don’t have to believe anything, Brian. You can study the culture all you want, and believe none of it.” He winced at the cutting tone of it. “But I don’t let the children play in the woods. You can call it an álagablettur or common sense, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She shrugged again and now she did hoist herself up with one hand on the banister. “Who’s upset? I will say, though, you are in a funny business. Not believing in fantastic things but hunting for them.”

  Brian stood up as well, his knees popping like bubble wrap. “You know, people keep telling me that. Like wanting proof is some inconvenience.”

  “Oh, it’s not a bad thing,” Karla said. “But what happens if it’s right in front of you and you refuse to see it? Have a good night, Brian. Welcome to Hvíldarland.”

  7

  The wind ran strident hands along his tent and finally woke him. His little world filled with the dim light of morning. He lay there, his eyes closed, and did this new thing, this thing that he’d begun after Dr. Bajeer had shown him his CT scans, both a lifetime and a number of days ago: He lay there and kind of tested the interior of his head. Tried to picture the tumor, tried to locate the malignancy growing there, like a man feeling a room in the dark. But he felt nothing. Or rather he felt the same. He couldn’t find it inside himself.