Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  Vaughn Keller stood there, a knit cap jammed on his head, snow turning to droplets on the purple scarf wrapped around his throat. He looked at me and the two men and took his hand from my shoulder.

  He threw a sheaf of króna on the bar between them. A big enough amount to widen their eyes. “My friends, get yourselves a few rounds.”

  Keller herded me back to our table with a hand on my elbow. He leaned in close; his breath stank of cigar smoke and booze. “What was that about? What’re you pissing off the locals for?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  Keller laughed. “Oh yeah?”

  “Seriously. I was just trying to order a drink.”

  “You just got one of those faces, huh?”

  “I guess so.”

  Sandoval frowned when the two of us came up to the table. “Vaughn, right? What brings you here tonight?”

  “Honestly, I was running some errands in town and saw a certain pair of children’s bikes outside. I just had to come in and say hi.”

  Sandoval shook his Coke can, set it down. “I thought you were getting another drink, Brian.”

  “We should probably go, actually,” I said. “It’s getting kinda late.”

  Keller grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. “I would be honored,” he said, “to give you two gentlemen a ride.”

  •

  The evening snow scoured our jackets like sand. Fine granules of it glossed the streetlights, softened their coronas of light into something angelic. Keller led us to his BMW.

  We put the bikes in the trunk. I sat in the backseat. Keller turned the heater on, unpeeling his scarf from his neck like someone doing a magic trick. Something from my parents’ era—Bob Seger?—drifted low from the speakers. Cologne and cigar did battle with that indefinable new car smell.

  We took off. The car was practically silent. “Almost didn’t recognize you, Brian,” Keller said over his shoulder. “You’re all healed up.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be entering the Prince Kjálkabein pageant any day now.”

  “Decided not to fix the tooth?”

  “Dentist didn’t really want to do it,” I said. “We’re sleeping outside. It’s cold, dirty. She was willing, kind of, but I just figured it was easier to wait ’til I made it home.”

  Driving those dark roads, Sandoval and Keller’s silhouettes limned in the dark, I couldn’t help but think of all the car rides I’d taken with my family as a kid. My father silent behind the wheel, fiddling with the radio stations as he drove. Brooke and I constantly getting into fights, until my mother—who had never been remotely religious—would finally bark, “God give me strength! Not one more word or else! This is my last nerve!” And then, unified by our mom’s outburst, Brooke and I would sit companionable and quiet the rest of the way home. It brought to mind that way I’d felt enveloped by the darkness, the quiet. Ensconced in it, safe.

  The three of us stayed steeped in our own silence until Sandoval, being who he was, couldn’t help but throw a feeler out there. “How long you been at the base, Vaughn?”

  “Oh, hell. Years now. I’m a terminal fobbit.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “Fobbit. Someone who stays at a base, doesn’t go to the front lines. No risk, no danger.”

  “Ah.”

  “I stay in the back and tap keys on a computer.”

  Sandoval said, “Never seen combat?”

  “God, no. I’m not military. I have a Masters in Statistics. I’m part of a civilian crew that does data analytics, weather stuff.”

  “You live on the base?”

  Keller shrugged. “I mean, I’ve got a room at the base, but it’s not much to look at. I keep an apartment in town.”

  “They let you do that?”

  “Sure. Like I said, civilian.”

  Sandoval said, “Listen, you sure you won’t help us check the place out?”

  Keller’s wet death-rattle of a laugh that turned into a coughing fit. “I got no pull there, guys. Sorry.”

  “Well, I had to ask.”

  “Sure. But listen, Mark. Brian. Can I be square with you?”

  Sandoval looked at him. “Yeah.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Keller said as he pulled off onto the shoulder of Road Seven. unfettered darkness all around us. “I like Shane. And I care about Karla Hauksdóttir and those kids. I’ve known this family for years, and I want to be kind when speaking about Karla. But the whole thing with the horseshit, guys? The jewels? It’s all over the island. You guys are . . . Well, whatever credibility you might have had when you got here, that’s been expended. People are laughing at you.”

  “Well, Jesus, Vaughn. There’s no shortage of people who’ve laughed at me,” Sandoval said. This was said matter-of-factly, kindly.

  “Someone’s playing you. You know that, right?”

  “Could be,” Sandoval said. It was impossible to miss that smugness, that surety. The righteousness of a religious convert.

  Keller glanced at me over the seat. “I implore you to reason with this guy,” he said drily.

  “If I could have,” I said, “I’d have done it already.” Sandoval laughed.

  Keller sighed and started the car. After a few minutes, we passed the white rocks and started our way up the driveway. The house loomed large, windows frosted with incandescence. He held out a hand at the scene before us. “Look at this. You guys are out here sleeping in tents. Walking around in the woods, freezing your dicks off. For what?”

  We pulled to a stop next to Karla’s truck. I could see into the dining room, all those long-dead Hauksdóttirs in their tin frames on the walls.

  Sandoval cracked the door open. “God himself must needs be traduced, if there is no unicorn in the world,” he intoned in a pretty terrible British accent, one foot on the ground.

  “Shakespeare never slept on the ground in Hvíldarland. You’re letting all the cold air in.”

  “It’s not Shakespeare,” Sandoval said. “It’s from a guy named Edward Topsell. Religious guy. Compiled a bestiary in the early 1600s, and that’s what he said about unicorns. Essentially, God himself must be blamed if there are no unicorns.”

  “Bold shit.”

  “Indeed.” Sandoval and I stepped out.

  Keller leaned over the passenger seat to stare up at us. “Listen, you know what’s happened since the 1600s, right?”

  Sandoval grinned, pulled his collar up. “What’s that?”

  “About four hundred years of us collectively pulling our heads out of our asses. Science is your friend, bud.”

  “Thanks for the ride, Vaughn.”

  •

  Later that night, the four of us ate dinner while Sandoval strode the black fields. Looking for his unicorn. Listening for a whisper of those dead British soldiers. A telltale hot spot among the trees, a gravelly, mournful response to the questions Are you there? Can you hear me? on his EVP recorder. Looking and listening. For anything. Something to anchor him here. A ghost. A unicorn. Anything. He had a book to write, after all. It was the only reason I could figure why he was so reluctant to leave the island, why he kept trying: it was hard to make something, and even harder to make something from nothing.

  •

  That night, I decided to scout along the tree line myself. Some way of trying to align myself with Sandoval. Some last vestige of hope that my allegiance would make it easier for him to listen to me. I put on the second pair of NVGs, spent a few minutes adjusting them, and when I was done, the field was awash in a cold blue light. It was slightly grainy, nothing like the hot, bright-green images I’d seen in films. The sky suddenly hung incandescent with stars and I was momentarily chilled; it reminded me of the sky I’d seen as I pedaled back from the base, before I’d had my run-in with the tree.

  I walked easily through the woods now, snarled as they were. I tur
ned back and the house shone bright, each window a rectangle of white light. I listened for Sandoval, expecting to come across his lighted form. But there was nothing. Nothing alive, anyway. Nothing with four legs, or two. Just the cutting wind, the trees, the ceaseless call of the sea over the mountains.

  I walked deeper into the woods. It was nothing like how I remembered the álagablettur, that crushing sense of closeness.

  I turned, walked further away from the house. I heard the soft crackle of twigs underfoot and made my way around a large tree trunk. In the goggles, it was the bleached blue of Karla Hauksdóttir’s eyes.

  And something stood in front of me. Its eyes gleamed.

  I made a strangled chuffing sound and stepped back; I had the briefest moment to think, It’s real the woods are real, as panic and jubilation both rocketed through me, and the thing turned and trotted away, its mane feathered in the wind.

  Fucking miniature horse trotting through the trees in the middle of the night.

  I stalked out of the woods and peeled off the NVGs, tossed them in my tent. Heartbeat knocking in my throat. Sandoval was sitting in a chair on the porch, writing in his journal. His breath plumed from his mouth. “Hey,” he called out, “you tried the goggles! See anything?”

  “Nope,” I said, crawling into my tent and zipping it closed. Fury and terror warbled my words. “Not a thing.”

  2

  Our routine—post–Bejewelled Turd Discovery—deepened. It had shaped up like this:

  After waking, I’d spend those first few minutes trying to gauge the depth and severity of the tumor, then wander bleary-eyed and cold into the house to wash up. Some mornings the headache wouldn’t even be there, which was almost more worrisome. Like an intruder somewhere inside your darkened house. Karla had insisted that we make ourselves at home, but Sandoval and I both had a sense of propriety that bordered on aloof. We stuck to quietly recharging our gear and making coffee in the morning, using the bathroom, taking dinner with the family. That was about it. Otherwise we were outside.

  Occasionally we’d get hit with a dusting of snow and Sandoval would take his laptop or his notebook into the dining room and write at the Hauksdóttirs’ big glass-topped table, but usually he worked on the porch or in his tent. I made coffee, did some dishes or took a shower while the house came alive around me. If the kids weren’t staying at Shane’s, I helped a bit there. They were hilarious in the morning, struck monosyllabic with sleep, flattened hair and pillow lines in their faces. Staring off into some middle distance as they ate the cereal and toast I put in front of them. Karla seemed grateful for the help. It was a weird rhythm to fall into, curiously domestic, but I liked it. I liked these people, like Karla’s willingness to embrace the odd, kooky angles of herself, and it all helped me ignore how I’d pretty much cut off contact with my own family. I knew it was temporary, I knew it was a mirage, but it felt like this brief hiccup of normalcy. I savored it.

  I’d go outside after the kids had gone to school and Karla’s work crew had arrived. They’d all head out to the greenhouses, and there would be Sandoval on the porch, scribbling in his notebook in his fingerless gloves and North Face jacket, hood cinched tight.

  Trying to get Sandoval to eat something would produce middling results, and in late morning he’d either keep writing or head into the woods or to one of the hamlets radiating off of Road Seven. We steered clear of Camp Carroll and the álagablettur, everything north of the house, and I liked that just fine. He kept insisting that would be the endgame—the base or the álagablettur, but he also insisted we had to “exhaust all the other possibilities first.”

  Part of Sandoval’s blooming paranoia had to do with the internet, with communication. He’d sent the unicorn shit off to a lab in Atlanta and worried that his email could get hacked. That if the results came back positive—“And they will,” he assured me daily—and someone found out about it, we’d be screwed out of one of the greatest discoveries in history. So he wanted the results to be sent to me.

  “Why wouldn’t my email get hacked?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “No one knows who you are. No one cares about you.”

  Mark Sandoval, that envoy of delicacy. But he had a point.

  So the best part of my day, hands down, was pedaling into Kjálkabein on my little bicycle to check the email address I’d set up to receive the news. I’d ride to a coffee shop not far from the Hotel Magnificence, take refuge in the comfort of brewed coffee, of people talking quietly, of rain beading the windows. Reveling a little in the normalcy of it, the routine. There were a great number of things I was afraid to do while I was there, of course: check my personal email, reach out to my friends and loved ones, enter the term Stage III astrocytoma into even the lamest of search engines. I would hold tight to that sense of normalcy until it killed me.

  I was heading back out of town after another fruitless visit and was pedaling along that stretch of Road Seven where everything went sagging and industrial when someone honked behind me. A blat like a clown car.

  I veered onto the shoulder and waved them on, still pedaling. The horn sounded again—bluuunk!—and I turned and saw a little blue Peugeot puttering along behind me, swaths of paint in different hues like someone had taken spray cans to it. The driver honked again, and an arm came out of the driver’s window, motioning me over. The size of that arm did not dispel in me the notion of a clown car—it was a massive appendage, poking out of the little blue vehicle like that.

  Both of the men in the car wore black balaclavas tucked into their collars.

  I thought about pedaling as fast as I could down that straight stretch of road, but the ridiculousness of it stopped me. It was broad daylight! We were on a highway! The main road! I halted, my scalp tightening, my body flooded with that loose, watery feeling that was becoming so familiar, that feeling that screamed run. I felt the space where my tooth had been, the little knot of scar tissue on my lip.

  The car rose on its shocks when the two men stepped out. The passenger was tall, thin, the driver short and muscled. Warped, funhouse versions of each other. Both wore gloves, cargo pants tucked into combat boots. Those masks. Only the pale skin around their eyes showed, their lips.

  The skinny one held a wooden fish bat in one fist.

  I rode the bike into the field, had some vision born of decades of bad cinema—as if my feet would be a blur on the pedals, as if the men would grow to distant, frustrated specks behind me as I rocketed toward the tree line.

  I made it ten, fifteen feet, until my front wheel hit a lava rock embedded in the earth. I toppled over the handlebars, rolled, got a face full of gritty loam between my molars. Someone grabbed a fistful of hair and yanked me up to my knees.

  My arm was hoisted behind my back and I was frog-marched back to the car. “Help,” I yelled, and across the road, a sheep bleated as if in response. The men laughed. The one holding my arm smacked my forehead against the lip of the roof when he pushed me in the backseat.

  Not another car anywhere.

  They sat in the front—the shocks sank again—and turned to me, each putting an arm over their seat.

  “Let me start off by saying kiss my ass,” I said, my voice cracking at least twice in the process, and the driver, almost casually, punched me in the eye. My head bounced off the seat behind me. It was so close in there, he hardly had room to extend his arm. It still hurt.

  “Shit,” I said.

  He said, “You need to get out of my country, man.” It was spoken in a bad Hvíldarlandic accent, like an American shooting for a bad punchline.

  This was to be my hell, then—to be beaten repeatedly, while my assailants said the same dumb shit over and over again.

  “Get out,” said the passenger. “Go home, don’t come back.” This was said in a heavy Russian accent, and he made a shooing motion towards me like he was being harried by flies. Everything on them looked brand
new. Gloves, masks. Even their teeth were white and beautiful.

  The tall one reached over and gently tapped the fish bat against my ear, twice. Action films once more ran dizzyingly through my head—I could take the bat, break his arm, hoist my legs over the seat and choke the other one out. I had to piss. I felt like I might have already pissed when I had fallen in the field. There was still grit in my teeth.

  A car drove by, an old white pickup stacked high with caged chickens. It kept on going, had no interest in the drama that was unfolding in this little square of a car. I looked out into the field and saw my little bike out there, its color forlorn and strange amid the desolation. “You’re wasting your time,” the driver said. “There’s no such thing as an einhyrningur, okay?” The other one pressed the roughened tip of the bat against my forehead.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what that is.”

  The passenger pushed the bat against my forehead until I was looking up at the roof of the car, and then the driver leaned over the seat and gripped my testicles and squeezed. That dark roiling ache exploded up into my guts. I bellowed and tried to curl over but the passenger kept the bat against my forehead so instead I raised my legs up, tried to curl into a ball that way.

  “Forget about the fucking unicorn,” he said, pronouncing it like eyooni-corn. He pushed the bat against my forehead once more and then took it away. “Nobody wants you here. Go home.”

  In between gasps, I said, “You’re the guys that trashed our stuff. At the hotel.”

  “Maybe,” said the driver. “Or maybe all of Hvíldarland wants you gone. Maybe wherever you go, someone’s watching you. Maybe time ran out for you a while back.”

  “Go home,” said the passenger. “We’re not asking again, tovarishch.” Languorous and slow, a single eye winked beneath the mask.