by Keith Rosson
“Let’s go,” Sandoval said, astride his own bike. “You got this.”
Once more they rode. The woods were dark now but unwavering. The woods were polite. The woods kept their distance. After a while the trees began to thin; shards of moonlight began to shine through their trunks. By the time they left the forest and saw the Hauksdóttir house glowing pale as a cataract in the bowl of the valley, he’d almost convinced himself that it was an act of imagination, a panicked byproduct of having guns pointed at him. Maybe even because of the tumor, hell. Some odd vision borne of his own mind.
•
The driveway was packed. A silver BMW sat next to a jacked-up black 4x4—big tires, overhead lights, one side panel primer gray—and Karla’s little two-door pickup. Brian and Sandoval slowed in that no man’s land between the greenhouses and the house itself, stopping just beyond the reach of the porch light.
Brian fished the handkerchief from his mouth. “Karla believes in the álagablettur,” he said. The Icelandic word came out strangled behind his split and swollen lips. His poor mouth. His poor face. God, everything from the neck up was on the slag heap. “Like she really believes in it.” Shit, he thought. Don’t I? After what just happened? What did just happen?
Sandoval lifted his chin toward the driveway. “Whose cars are those?”
Neither of them could answer that. “Then let’s,” Sandoval said, “keep what happened between us for now. Might be safer that way. Okay?”
“So I just wrecked, you mean.”
“You just wrecked, exactly. The dumber we look, the better off we are.”
“My mantra,” Brian managed, earning a smile from Sandoval.
•
Gunnar marveled at the sight. “So much blood,” he said from his spot at the kitchen island, enthralled at the trail of red spatters on the floor that Sandoval was wiping up with a wet rag.
It’d been madness when they entered the living room moments before. Everyone rising up, Liza crying out, this sea of faces turning to them—there’d been two other men in the room besides Karla and the children.
As a group they’d moved quickly to the kitchen then, a bevy of hands holding him up, drops of his blood pattering to the floor behind him. A chair was grabbed from the dining room and he sat in it, leaning forward and spitting red into the sink as everyone whirled industriously around the room. The children’s father, Shane—dark hair to his shoulders, band T-shirt—leaned down in front of him, lifted Brian’s chin toward the light.
Gunnar said, “It’s like the front of Kill ’Em All, right, Dad?”
“That’s right,” Shane said. He’d splayed out a tackle box on the island behind him, a massive steel thing, dense with folding trays and compartments, and now he turned and rifled through it, a curtain of hair obscuring his face.
“So you’re a doctor?” Brian said, which earned big laughs around the room from the adults.
“Vet,” Shane said.
“Oh.”
“But what happened?” asked Karla.
“It just got dark out there,” said Sandoval. “Really fast.”
“No night pollution,” said the other new man. “A way deep dark out there, you bet.” This one was heavyset, a gray head of hair that just hung over the shirt collar. Face as doughy as a rumpled towel, blue eyes lit with a kind of sad bemusement. Hound-dog eyes, Brian thought. The same eyes you’d see affixed to any number of old men eternally perched on bar stools or church pews.
“Oh, I’m sorry. So, yes, that’s the children’s father, Shane, and this is Vaughn,” Karla offered. “A friend of the family.”
“Hi there,” said Sandoval, standing now and tossing the bloody rag in the sink beside Brian. He started washing his hands. “Mark Sandoval,” he said over his shoulder. Brian, seated where he was, saw threads of blood lacing their way down the drain and turned his face away.
“Vaughn Keller. Good to meet you. And I’d shake your hand,” Keller said, turning to Brian, “but damn if it doesn’t look like you’re right in the middle of the something.”
All this activity. Karla reached into the sink and wrung out the bloody rag and opened the back door, tossed it out onto the porch. She took a clean washcloth from a cupboard and poured some alcohol on it from a bottle beside the tackle box. “I can use this, right?”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Shane said. “Just get all the blood out of there.” The leaning branches and darkness of the forest seemed a century ago, Hamms and Dr. Bajeer even longer. He’d had his ass handed to him by white supremacists and a tree in the span of four days.
Something inside him was stirred by Karla’s touch. It wasn’t sensual, wasn’t remotely sexual—it was an unexpected flare of gratitude; this was the first time he’d been touched in a conciliatory way since Hamms, since the fight—if it could be called that—with the four men, and that had been a touch of stark utility. And what about before that? She gently dabbed his cuts with the alcohol-soaked washcloth, her fingers cupping his jaw. He resisted the urge to thank her through the sting of it. He found himself surprised at the urge to weep.
“You lost a tooth,” she said.
Sandoval brightened and reached into his jeans. He set the tooth down on the counter with a flourish.
Gunnar and Liza squealed in delight, leaned over on their stools to get a better look.
“Shit,” Shane said, impressed, nodding at Sandoval. “Nice work.”
“Shit,” Gunnar said.
“Gunnar,” warned Karla.
“Sorry, mamma,” Gunnar said. Liza hunched her head, clapping her hand over her mouth to hide her giggles.
Karla said, “Does that word show your light to the world, Gunnar?”
“Daddy said it.”
“Daddy,” said Karla, “can make all the kúkur words he wants, because he’s big. Are you big yet?”
“No, mamma.”
Shane leaned back, eyed Brian in frank appraisal. “You know what’s coming next, right?”
•
Surgery loomed, inevitable and bloody, and the children were exiled to the living room. Gunnar kept trying to peek around the doorway until Karla barked something at him in Icelandic and he shuffled off. Moments later, a laugh track—punctuated with bursts of calliope music and Icelandic shouts—began churning from the living room.
Karla began threading a needle for sutures, and Shane in his blue latex gloves removed a few plastic-wrapped syringes, set them on the counter. He withdrew a vial and held it up, squinting at the ceiling light.
“God, I hope this works,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Brian and Sandoval traded looks and Keller bellowed laughter from where he stood in the doorway, the sound phlegmy and raucous. He pounded a fist over his heart. “Guy’s got one joke,” he rattled, “and I laugh every goddamn time.” Shane grinned and inserted the tip of the syringe into the vial’s lid, jacking a minute amount of liquid in.
“How’s this?” Karla said, and held up the needle and its thread.
“Perfect.” This cadence between them. Shane took the needle gingerly between his fingers, laid it on a piece of gauze on the island. Some sad, quiet smile was at play on his face as he took it from her. The face of a guy walking through the hallways and rooms of an old love. Someone noting the requisite landmines and oases both. Brian didn’t even know them and it was hard to miss. He wondered how long they’d been divorced.
“How’s the pain?”
“Pretty bad,” Brian admitted. He turned and spat in the sink again.
“I bet it does. This is just a little bit of lidocaine. It’ll sting, and then your mouth’ll be numb for a couple hours. Cool? And I can give you a pain reliever for the tooth until tomorrow.”
Sandoval leaned against the back door, his arms crossed. He said, “So, Shane. Idaho, huh?”
It was only a minute pause, the way the syri
nge froze in transit as it traveled toward Brian’s face. But it was there. Brian himself might’ve been the only person who saw it.
“Born and raised,” Shane said.
“How’d a guy from Idaho corral a gig as a veterinarian in Hvíldarland? That’s got to be a story.”
The needle sank in the skin above Brian’s lip. He let out a hiss of pain.
“Well, he was the other kind of vet first,” said Keller. Heads turned. Keller rubbed his stubbly chin, pointed a finger at the darkness over Sandoval’s shoulder. “Stationed up at Camp Carroll.”
“Oh yeah?”
Shane withdrew the syringe, laid a wad of gauze over the injection site. “Yeah. Last two of my four years there. Then Karla and I hooked up.” He set the syringe down behind him. “Had those two nerds in there.” He tossed the square of gauze in the sink.
“You went to school here? Veterinarian school, I mean?”
“Nah, across the water. Akureryi, up north. Folks here don’t care too much about diplomas and certificates. I do good work and they see me around town. That’s mostly what matters.”
From the television down the hall came the sound of shattering glass, a trashcan being knocked over, a car horn, followed by the children’s laughter.
“Let’s give that a second to work,” Shane said to Brian, and leaned back, his gloved hands resting between his knees.
“What’s Camp Carroll all about, anyway?”
Shane turned and grinned at Sandoval. “Karla told us you went up there. They weren’t too hot on letting you in, were they?”
“Nope.”
Brian went to touch his face and Karla tsked him, leaned over and gently pushed his hand down with her own cool fingers.
“That’s good,” Keller said. Lifted his bottle to his lips. “That’s their job.”
“The guys at Carroll didn’t do this, did they?” Shane asked.
“He ran into a tree,” Sandoval said.
“Looks like it,” said Keller, and heaved another one of those phlegmy laughs. “Looks like the tree ran into him.”
“I wasn’t paying attention,” Brian said.
Shane picked up the needle. “I’m about to stitch you up. Okay? You probably don’t want to talk.”
“Sorry.”
Karla blurted out, “You found the álagablettur, didn’t you? You did.”
“Babe,” Shane said wearily.
“Ah, again with the haunted woods, Karla,” Keller said. He frowned at the beer bottle he held to his chest. “Come on, hon.”
Sandoval said, “You’re not a believer, I take it.”
“Not,” Keller said, “in the least. And I don’t think the earth is flat either.” He set his empty beer on the counter and leaned into the refrigerator, helping himself to another.
“You can believe what you want,” Karla said stonily.
“And I sure as hell don’t believe in unicorns, my dear.”
Shane turned back on his stool and said, “Hey, Vaughn? There’s no grand requirement that you have to be a dick, okay?”
Landmines abound, Brian thought.
“Well,” Sandoval said, breaking the awkward pall that had suddenly fallen on the room, “all that aside, we didn’t see any alaga-whatever. I mean, I still want to hear more about it, but it was just dark out there, you know? We couldn’t see a damn thing. Next thing you know, boom. We’re not used to this kind of dark in the States. At least not in the city. Like you said, Vaughn, light pollution.” Even to Brian, he sounded believable. Casual enough. And then he changed the subject, smooth as a sleight-of-hand artist, and asked if there was a dentist in town. Brian could feel the tension dissipate, thin as vapor.
Shane said, “Sure. Down in Kjálkabein. The one by the airport, right, Karla?”
“Yes, she’s good. That’s where we take the children.”
Sandoval said, “Any chance we can get a ride tomorrow morning? I owe this guy some dental work.”
“Of course.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Just the faint murmur of the television down the hall. They heard Gunnar say, “Liza, stooooop, that’s mine.”
“Well, trust me,” said Keller, frowning at the floor and drumming his fingers against his beer bottle. “There’s nothing going on out at that base that’s worth a shit.”
“No disrespect,” Sandoval said—and once more Brian was reminded that he was just one of those guys that could pull it off without sounding like a total asshole—“but how would you know?”
Shane gently pushed Brian’s face to the side, his fingers splayed on Brian’s cheekbone. He couldn’t feel it at all. The needle broke through the skin of his lip with a distant sense of tugging. It wasn’t pain exactly. Just a pressure.
“Hell,” Shane said with a curious, unreadable smile, “Camp Carroll is practically Vaughn’s home away from home. Isn’t that right, Vaughn?”
12
Four days passed. Five.
A routine was established.
The morning after Shane stitched his lip, a visit to the dentist in Kjálkabein yielded a bottle of pain pills. The dentist was trepidatious about implanting the tooth again once she discovered that Brian was sleeping outside in the elements. The decision to wait to get back to the States for a tooth to get grafted into his jaw wasn’t a hard one. Who needed the agony of that while sleeping on a bedroll inside a tent? Sandoval agreed, of course. But a few days after the accident, Brian had begun to welcome the looks he got from locals, the double take his mashed face and missing tooth earned him. Rather than hindering things, it seemed to help with the interviews, made people more forthcoming. Locals wanted to talk to him about his injuries, compare battle wounds; there was an air of camaraderie about it. As rural as Hvíldarland was, as reliant upon the machinery of their bodies as the land and sea made people here, there was no shortage of folks with which to compare wounds. The pain pills both nauseated him and worked a little too well, so he took them at night. He would drift to sleep high, his body rootless and lost on some voluminous sea, mind swaddled in gentle, feathered arms. But they also left him brutally groggy in the morning, his sleep shot through with weird dreams.
Even without pain pills, the place seemed to have the same disorienting effect on Sandoval. One morning Brian unfolded himself from his tent and immediately saw Sandoval at the edge of the woods, standing with his back to the house. The ground was thatched, as always, in standing fog. Sandoval’s hands hung limp at his sides. Brian called his name but Sandoval didn’t turn. Brian crouched in the mouth of his tent and put his boots on, never taking his eyes off the man. He heard the faint Doppler of a passing car on the road. Sandoval never moved. Just stood there in his pajamas; sweatpants and a thermal shirt. No shoes. No socks. The ground rimed in frost.
Brian had called his name again, louder, and started walking toward him. Every low-budget horror movie played through his mind: he’d touch Sandoval’s shoulder and the man would suddenly spin around, zombiefied, or with some kind of tendriled alien parasite seeping the life’s-blood from his face, or he’d be cast in ice, some kind of frozen, lurching man-thing—
When he was halfway there, Sandoval did indeed turn slowly, his hair corkscrewed with sleep. He lifted a hand, wearily calling Brian’s name in greeting.
Brian froze. “What the hell, dude?” His own voice seemed loud in the still morning, stanched in unease.
Sandoval had started walking toward him, but he walked stiffly, like he’d been stationary for a while in the chill.
“Boss, you okay? You freaked me out a bit there. I called your name.”
“Long night,” was all Sandoval said. “Sorry.” And then, the only time it’d happened, he’d crawled back into his tent and slept for another hour while Brian drank coffee on the porch and waited for him to come out.
Little weird, really.
More
than a little weird.
Meanwhile, Brian still played the game each morning before rising, spent a few minutes trying to isolate the tumor inside himself, trying to locate its specific mass in that bowl of bone behind his eyes. Taming the beast. When he traveled to Kjálkabein for whatever reason—to place the online order Sandoval had meticulously drawn up to replace their destroyed gear, to hunt down a half-remembered volume of local lore in a bookstore some fisherman had told him about—he never checked his own emails and staunchly avoided any search terms that would bring him closer to understanding what was happening to him. Ignorance was a reprieve, chickenshit or not.
The villages that sparked off Road Seven: a small grid of cobblestone streets, ancient boats and trucks moored in overgrown yards. Cinderblocks barely visible among weedy fields. Snarls of fallen chain link, or warped wooden fences leaning like teeth from a broken jaw. But the sunny, brightly-painted little homes lay tucked in amid all this, neat as rows of playing cards. And all around these little hamlets stood nature’s insistence on a beautiful disorder: the rumpled lava beds, the pools of ice-blue water dotting massive fields of shattered stones. There were a dozen or more of these villages that fanned like spokes off the road.
His bad Icelandic, when he spoke to people in the villages on his own or translated for Sandoval, was met with polite, commiserating grimaces and responses in English. When he asked about unicorns he got nothing at all, confused shakes of the head as if they’d never even heard the word. Pressed about the álagablettur, he discovered that many Hvíldarlanders viewed Karla as an eccentric. “You’re staying with that woman, the pumpkin farmer?” a man named Olafsson had asked him. A wiry red beard hung to Olafsson’s navel, his crown pale and freckled as an eggshell. “She’s an odd one, her. It’s her people that’ve spread those rumors about the woods. My wife says, anyway. Because of those military folks that died on their land, yeah?” Sandoval had trekked across the road, deciding to try interviewing folks on his own, and Brian and Olafsson stood outside a garage on the outskirts of one of the villages. Olafsson and a handful of his friends appeared to be taking apart an ancient semi. Blocky chunks of motor lay on the oil-stained pavement around them. A few of the men had openly laughed at the bike Brian had leaned against the building, but then quieted once they saw the stitched-up turnbuckle of his face. “It’s all bullshit, that whole story. Your United States, now. That’s a crazy place,” Olafsson said, his mouth curling with distaste. He spat on the pavement. “My wife and I went there one time. New York. Too many people. We don’t have anything as bad as that here.”