“Fuck yeah! You think I don’t know the type? Eh? Women married to shrimps like him—men that feel guilty every time they get a hard-on—you think I haven’t met their type before? What they need is a right good fucking from a man with more to him than a fancy CV, only they’re not allowed to admit it, to themselves or anybody else. They’re programmed to say that what they want are soft, gentle men who’re always giving them hugs, who say gosh instead of fuck and who think it’s so important to talk things over. No wonder they become frustrated and mean, no wonder they become bitter and miserable, no wonder they start to hate anybody that bears any resemblance to a real man.”
Uncle Willy stood there with his hands on his hips, shaking with laughter, rolls of fat jiggling.
“They’re all the same, vicars’ wives and other churchgoin’ women. The same goes for them women’s-libbers and feminists. They’re all the same, there’s nothin’ they’d like better than a real man, but there’s no way they can let themselves or anybody else have that, so they start to hate men and sex and all that. Homespun psychology, maybe, but it’s true!”
Uncle Willy’s laughter turned into a long coughing fit.
“Well,” he said, as soon as he was finished coughing, “why don’t you tell her what she’s missin’, man?” He cleared his throat and wiped away the tears of laughter.
“Yeah, maybe I should,” Odd Kåre said. “I’m not much of a knight in shining armor, but I suppose I could make an exception in her case and offer to come to her rescue.”
Uncle Willy burst out laughing again.
“Actually, that’s not such a bad idea,” Odd Kåre said, turning his eyes upward, frowning and appearing to consider the matter. Uncle Willy laughed and shook his head. Odd Kåre eyed Uncle Willy, then he cupped his balls and squeezed, making them bulge between his fingers. “I’ve got a long load here inside my Levi’s, you see, and now that I think about it, I wouldn’t mind runnin’ it through the vicar’s wife’s tunnel,” he said.
Uncle Willy’s roars of laughter lapsed into another hacking coughing fit.
“Hey!” Odd Kåre suddenly shouted. “Mrs. Forberg!”
“No, man … don’t,” Uncle Willy gasped. He looked at Odd Kåre and shook his head, but the wicked grin on his beefy face was quite clearly telling Odd Kåre to go right ahead.
“Mrs. Forberg!” he shouted again, eyes fixed on the open veranda door.
“Hey! For Christ’s sake,” Uncle Willy said, grinning. “Leave the woman alone, you! We’re working here.”
But Odd Kåre was not to be put off.
“Mrs. Forberg!” he shouted for the third time.
And then your mother appeared. She stood in the doorway studying Odd Kåre for a moment, then she came down the short flight of steps and onto the veranda.
“Yes,” she said.
“I was just wondering if it was going to be a while before the vicar gets home?”
She waited a second before answering.
“Why d’you ask that?”
“Well …” Odd Kåre said with a shrug. “You know … a lot of men don’t like their wives being left alone when there are workmen in the house, so we were just saying that maybe we should put our shirts back on till he comes home. For your sake, I mean. So there won’t be any ructions in the boudoir later.”
A hiccup of laughter escaped Uncle Willy, he put a hand to his mouth and kept his eyes fixed on the gravel, shaking with laughter.
“Yeah, well, we talk from experience, you see,” Odd Kåre went on. “There’s a lot of jealous husbands around. And we can kind of see why. I mean, there’s plenty of women that sit at home alone feeling frustrated, and naturally, if you’ve got a workman or two in the house, well … things can happen.” Odd Kåre held your mother’s eye and smiled innocently.
“Just get on with your work, would you please?” your mother said.
“Right you are,” Odd Kåre said brightly. “Actually, we were just thinking it might be time to bring in the bed.”
At this Uncle Willy doubled up, slapped his knees and howled with laughter.
“If that’s okay with you, that is,” Odd Kåre said, looking up at your mother with that same innocent look in his eyes. She said nothing, simply stood for a moment looking at him, then she turned and went back into the house. You were still standing like a ghost at the dark window upstairs. Rigid and staring with your arms hanging by your sides. Me and Bendik lay where we were for a little while longer, then we slid down off the warm, smelly mound of grass.
Had Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre Hindmo known that your mother was Erik’s daughter they would obviously never have behaved the way they did when you moved in, and had me and Bendik known we would never have carried on where Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre left off, but because we looked up to them and thought they were great, that, of course, is exactly what we did, right? We pestered the life out of you and your mother from day one and we went on pestering you until we found out that you were Erik’s grandson.
So who was Erik? Yeah, he was your grandfather. But who was he to us?
Erik wasn’t just a close friend of our family, he was also our grandad’s “business partner,” as they called it. He worked on some of the fishing boats and shrimp boats when they needed extra men and at the sawmill when they were short-handed, but all of that and the little bit he made from selling firewood and Christmas trees from the little copse your family had on Otterøya was just a cover, because what your family actually made its living from back then was the “distillery” that Erik had built in the barn and that he ran with his brother Albert and the rest of the hicks on Otterøya. He was careful as hell, and even though he’d been making illicit liquor ever since he stopped working for the highway department in the late 60s or early 70s not many people knew what he did. Everybody in my family knew, though, because Grandad was one of several middlemen Erik used to sell his liquor.
Once or twice a month Erik would roll up in a battered old army truck with a tarpaulin over the back or a white Hiace with a number plate so caked in dirt and muck that the number was unreadable. Once Grandad had opened the doors of the big, yellow-washed shed behind our house Erik would back the vehicle up until the rear end was inside the shed, and then all they had to do was unload the jerry cans and stack them behind a whole wall of old banana crates that were only there to screen the booze from prying eyes. None of the neighbors suspected a thing: everybody simply assumed that Grandad was taking delivery of more stuff for his junk shop, but me and Bendik (and later you too) usually kept a lookout anyway, just in case some busybody should come by, the plan being that if we stuck our fingers in our mouths and whistled loudly Erik and Grandad would haul some scrap out of the van that Erik always had with him just in case, then they would pull down the tarpaulin or slam the car door shut and say: “Right then, that’s the lot for now.”
Erik had been delivering moonshine to us for as long as I could remember and was a regular visitor at other times too so I’d got to know him pretty well, not just directly, but also through the countless and outrageously far-fetched stories he and Grandad were forever telling about themselves. He had a big, pear-shaped face with eyes set close up against his nose; he was well over six feet tall, so broad that your mother had to sew a panel into the backs of his jackets and shirts so they’d fit, and if you took his hand it was like sticking your fist into a boxing glove. “The only thing that man bows his head for is the top of the door,” Grandma used to say and it was true, because just like Grandad he had a remarkably powerful need to be his own man and a fierce hatred of being ordered about, managed or controlled. As far as Grandad was concerned I think this had something to do with him being a tinker, because if there’s one thing about a tinker it’s that he likes to be his own master and to go where he wants when he wants. Erik was a bit like that too, because as the son of a fisherman and farmer on Otterøya who personally provided just about everything his family needed, he had been taught to take care of himself and not rely on anyone
else. And any man who learns to live like that is obviously also going to learn to love freedom as much as he learns to hate everything and anybody that tries to limit that same freedom.
“We’re soon gonna have to ask the fucking authorities for permission to wipe our own asses,” he used to say. “There’s no way I’m asking leave to put out a coupla salmon nets, and no way I’m asking leave to bury asbestos panels on my own land. It’s a flaming dictatorship, that’s what it is.
“Aye, and when some poor bastard up at Lierne shoots a bear that’s attacking his sheep, fuck me if he doesn’t get a stiffer sentence than if he’d shot his fucking neighbor,” Grandad says.
“Aye, and they call that progress,” Erik says.
That’s how they went on when they were sitting having a drink. It was always the same: at some point they would start to get hot under the collar about something they weren’t allowed to do, or that they’d been criticized for doing, and they would get more and more steamed up until they were sitting there fizzing and fuming at the council and the government and politicians and rich people and everybody else that poked their noses into things that were none of their business and that they knew next to nothing about. This need to be one’s own master, to be a free agent, was also, I think, one of the main reasons why they made and sold illicit liquor. The money was definitely the chief incentive, obviously, but producing and selling moonshine was the same as breaking the law and breaking the law was the same as refusing to do what the authorities and power-mad politicians told them to do, and since this in turn satisfied their great need to see themselves as free men I think they would have done what they did whether they made money from it nor not. It’s a bit like me taking a trip across the Swedish border to buy drink and cigarettes. I don’t save a lot of money on it, but by Christ it feels good to do the greedy, toll-mad, duty-happy Norwegian state out of a few kroner.
I once visited the farm where you and your mother and Erik lived and where he had his still. Like I said, Grandad had a scrapyard and a junk shop, and one autumn day when I had gone with him to pick up stuff from an estate sale out on Otterøya he decided to call in on Erik and Albert and the rest of the hicks for a drink. After driving for a good ten to fifteen miles, stopping every hundred yards to shoo sheep and cattle off the road, we turned onto a narrow dirt road so rutted and potholed that Grandad’s false teeth broke with a loud crack as we bounced over the last bump.
“You’ll have to do something about the suspension on that pickup of yours,” Erik remarked, grinning, once Grandad and I had climbed out of the truck and Grandad was standing there in the muck, glumly inspecting the damage to his dentures. “Ain’t that right, Albert?” he said, glancing at his brother.
“Aye, must be somethin’ wrong wi’ the suspension,” Albert agreed, leering and baring a row of rotten stumps that glinted in the sun.
“The suspension?” Grandad growled. “The boy and I switched places I don’t know how many fuckin’ times just over that last few hundred yards.”
“Yeah, yeah, now come away in and sample the last batch,” Erik said, laughing as he laid his great bear paw on Grandad’s skinny shoulders and pushed him up the ramp and into the barn where the still was kept.
I’d seen plenty of illicit stills before this, of course, because back then most of the fathers in our neighborhood had their own still gurgling away in the basement, ensuring them of their weekend tipple and a bit more besides, but the sight that met my eyes when I walked into the baking hot, yeasty-smelling barn was something else again, and that’s putting it mildly. The must was stored in three green septic tanks, each of which had to have held 5,000 liters; the three gleaming condensers at the very back of the barn were enormous and could probably have distilled hundreds of liters of must at one time, and in front of a whole wall of ten-liter cans containing the finished product hung row upon row of charcoal filters. I’ve no idea how much liquor Erik and his team produced in an average year, but we’re talking thousands of liters, certainly. Thinking about it now, though, what really puzzles me is: what on earth did they do with the money? The profits must have been huge, but going by their homes and their clothes and their habits, anybody would have thought they were dirt-poor, every one of them. The house where you and Erik and your mother lived was small, crooked and lopsided and according to Grandad it was so drafty that there didn’t have to be any more than a fresh breeze outside to give you a center parting as you sat in their living room watching the evening news. And as if that weren’t enough, they went on using the outside privy in the barn until well into the 70s. Erik normally wore old, washed-out flannel shirts with leather patches on the elbows and when he paid us a visit I used to charge my friends fifty øre for a peek at his massive shoes parked in the hall, so I clearly remember how worn the soles were on one side and so thin that he must have felt every pebble or bit of grit under his feet when he walked. The only thing that Erik quite evidently spent money on was motors: he was a member of the local Amcar club and sitting in the yard alongside the Hiace and the army truck that he used for delivering liquor were a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 1960 Oldsmobile F-88 convertible—cars that cost a fortune even back then.
But however shabbily dressed Erik was and however dilapidated the house where you lived might have been, it was nothing compared to the state of his brother Albert’s place fifty yards farther up the hill. Albert lived all alone in a tumbledown wooden shack with the once red paint peeling off its walls and two broken windows that he could never be bothered to change, but patched up instead with black plastic and bits of cardboard boxes. He never washed and rarely changed his clothes, and Grandma said the inside of his shack was a sight to behold, because he stoked his stove with tree trunks he found lying around in the forest and saw no point in chopping them up when he could simply stick one end in the stove and keep stuffing the trunk further in as it burned down. This meant, though, that the stove door had to be kept open while the fire was on, so the walls were pitch-black with soot and a heavy, acrid stench hung in the air, the sort of smell you get in old, burned-out buildings. Not only that but he couldn’t be bothered throwing garbage in the bin or taking it down to the shore and burning it. He simply lifted the trapdoor in the floor and dropped it all into the cellar, where it lay and reeked and brewed and stewed, and the unbearable stink of the midden seeped through the cracks in the floorboards and mingled with the stench of smoke and soot. Albert himself was totally unaffected by it, he was used to it, Grandma said, and anyway he didn’t smell any better himself, because not only didn’t he wash himself or his clothes, he didn’t bother to brush the few teeth he had left in his mouth either, so you had to stand well back when you spoke to him—word had it that the fetid odor of stale fish and sour roll-ups could kill flies at ten yards.
“I wash the kitchen from top to bottom every time he’s been to see us,” Grandma used to say.
Grandad believed there was only one explanation for Erik’s and Albert’s pauper-like existence and that was greed. Albert survived mainly on fish he caught himself and food that he got for free from the staff at the Co-op because it was past its sell-by date and they were going to have to throw it out anyway. His evenings were usually spent tucked up inside the foul-smelling shack drinking moonshine and cold water in the glow of a twenty-watt bulb, and the farthest he was prepared to go in terms of extravagance and generosity was to invite his only grandchild to the new Chinese restaurant in Namsos, because she was anorexic so she was never hungry anyway. Erik probably wasn’t quite as mean, Grandad said, but he nicked toilet paper and packets of salt and pepper from the Community Center Café on Saturdays and if stewed prunes were fifty øre cheaper at the ABC supermarket than at Thor’s Cut-Price, then you could bet your boots he’d put the pack back on the shelf and amble on down to the ABC. So yes, he was fond of money, too.
But we had no idea, when you and your mother came to town, that you were closely related to our good friends Erik and Albert and that you had grown up in dee
pest, darkest hick country out on Otterøya. Since you had moved in with the vicar we just took it for granted that you were a simple country boy who went to church every Sunday and never swore, and as far as me and Bendik were concerned I think this was an even better reason to give you a really warm welcome than our admiration for Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre Hindmo and our desire to imitate them.
It was one thing that Grandad was a tinker and that the Church’s persecution of tinkers in Norway had left him with a hatred of churches and churchmen that had rubbed off on me and everybody else in our family, but quite another, and much worse, that your stepfather was a disgusting slimeball who was always making passes at my ma and other single mothers in the neighborhood. Before he got together with your mother he was actually known all over Namsos for using his position as vicar as a way of getting to meet single women—as he probably had to do if he was ever to get lucky, because to be perfectly honest Arvid wasn’t the most attractive of men. He had no eyebrows, and he suffered very badly from psoriasis so his face was often covered in red, running sores. He wore freshly ironed shirts that he buttoned right up to the neck and their backs were always covered in a white dusting of dandruff and dead skin. Not only that, but he was a creepy, snakelike character who reeked of scheming and ulterior motives and put everybody with any sense on their guard when they saw him slithering towards them. According to Grandad he always wore that smarmy vicar’s smile no matter how angry or annoyed he might be feeling, and whether there was any reason for it or not he would shower people with compliments, flattering and soft-soaping the women in particular, as I know only too well because when he was after Ma he was always clapping his hands and going into ecstasies over things that other visitors scarcely noticed, far less remarked on. “Oh, Laila, what a beautiful tablecloth,” he’d cry. “Did you embroider it yourself?” Or: “I must say, Laila, these are the best doughnuts I’ve ever tasted.” He chattered like a woman and the only reason Ma didn’t tell him to go fuck himself was, of course, that she and Grandad and Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre were planning to milk him for a few kroner—and that they did, very successfully. One day when the vicar from hell was sitting on our sofa, trying to come up with more fine words, Ma resorted to the good old ruse of ripping her blouse and screaming rape. Me and Bendik were helping Grandad to fix his ancient Corvette that evening and I had gone in to get some soldering wire to mend a hole in the exhaust when I heard her scream. The next second Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre burst into the room through two different doors. They pretended to be outraged, shouting and bawling that they were going to kill Arvid and send him to the bottom of Namsos Fjord, and then Grandad walked in and played the good guy, urging everybody to calm down and trying to prevent things from turning violent. They were prepared to let Arvid go, that was no problem. They could even be persuaded not to report the incident to the police, but Arvid would just have to make it up to them in some other way, Grandad said—the message obviously being that the vicar from hell had better get out his wallet or else. And that he did, terrified and confused as he was.
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