Burnt Land

by Tua Harno

  “Lucky for me you showed up,” Sanna said halfheartedly.

  Martti looked at her with concern. Sanna averted her gaze. She wanted to go somewhere, but not to her room at the hotel.

  The blonde came by to ask if Martti had everything he needed and shot a lightning-fast glance at Sanna. She lowered a hand to Martti’s shoulder and said something Sanna couldn’t hear. She and Martti both laughed, and it occurred to Sanna that they might have been involved at some point. It was weird how interested the girl seemed; Martti was twice her age.

  The girl took her bubble-butt and moved off, turning to give Martti one more smile as she went.

  “You don’t smoke, do you?” Martti said, getting up.

  “Not since I was a teenager. By high school I had a boyfriend who was a sports freak.”

  “So you started using snuff instead?”

  Sanna grunted and shook her head. “No, but I’ll come out with you.”

  They stood a couple of yards away from the other smokers. Sanna noticed a display board outside listing the bar girls for every day of the week, like menu items. The Friday and Saturday girls, Super-Lexi and Holy Joanna, were presumably local celebrities—their ornamental names were followed by exclamation points and hearts.

  Martti’s cigarette smelled comforting.

  “My mom smokes. That’s why I smoked when I was young, and also why I stopped. I wanted to be different. I don’t know if it would have been the same if I had been a boy and smoked with Dad. But it freaked me out that I was turning into my mom. I got a good look at her mouth and teeth, and it started grossing me out when we smoked together.”

  Martti nodded and blew the smoke off to the side. “Yes, it would have been different, if you’d been a boy smoking with your dad.”

  Sanna narrowed her eyes and asked what Martti’s dad had been like.

  “My dad died when I was twelve.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “It’s been a long time. Besides, I don’t really smoke.”

  Sanna smiled. “So what is it you really do, then?”

  “How so?”

  “What are you doing with your life? You have a daughter you don’t see, you bounce around between Africa and Australia, you hit on young women—”

  “You’re not that young.”

  The corners of Sanna’s mouth twitched. “I meant that blonde bar girl, but OK.”

  “I wasn’t hitting on her! That was Lexi, and this sounds pretty bad, but I know her mom.”

  “Is her mom a skimpy, too?”

  Sanna ran her fingers across the brick wall. Uneven and filthy, it reminded her of elementary school, where she’d usually stood next to the wall and smelled the damp cement, the other children off in the distance, at the limits of her perception. Sanna tried to block them out, and they were gradually replaced by the voices of the other smokers and the people waiting to get into the saloon, the engines of starting cars, the ticking as they cooled.

  “Are you listening?”

  Sanna glanced at Martti. He had that concerned look on his face again.

  “I was saying that you’ve probably met Mary’s mom—she’s the one who handed you the safety gear at the pit.”

  She vaguely remembered a woman with bleached hair like her daughter’s.

  “I’ve never hit on her, either,” Martti said.

  Sanna smiled faintly. “You said you don’t have a home. So where do you want to live when you retire?”

  Martti sighed. “There’s one place I’d like to go back to, but it might be nothing more than a miner’s dream. Has anyone told you what that is yet?”

  “I thought that’s what the bar girls are.”

  “Come on now, we’re not that stereotypical.” Martti coughed and drew a breath. “Well, as you know, the pay is good, but mining is hard work. A lot of folks plan on retiring by the time they’re middle-aged. During their shifts, they dream about what they’ll do when they’re retired, how they’ll sail around the world or buy a winery or move to Bali.”

  “So they’re all big dreamers. Do their dreams come true?”

  “No. No, they don’t. Most of the men die not long after they stop working, if not before. The wife and kids are long gone, and the men don’t want to travel on their own.”

  “So what do they do?”

  “The same thing they did when they were working: sit in a bar or at home and drink.”

  “Is that what’s going to happen to you, too?”

  “No. You never know, of course, but that specific fate is one I think I’ll try to avoid.”

  Sanna nodded, then asked if it’s possible to avoid fate.

  Drunken bellowing from in the bar could be heard but no one outside reacted. The walls of the buildings were smoky blue in the midnight gloom, and the curvy girl in the neon sign rocked her hips from right to left.

  “I don’t think so,” Martti said, stumping out his cigarette against the wall. “But then again, I don’t believe in fate.”

  “So what do you believe in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What have you lived on up till now?”

  Martti laughed. “At some point it’s always felt good to leave and move on to a new place.”

  “How does having a kid fit into that picture?”

  Martti gazed steadily into Sanna’s eyes. “You’re pretty good at judging people.”

  Sanna looked away. “I’ve been thinking it might have been nice if my dad had been around when I was a teenager.”

  When Sanna next made eye contact with Martti, he looked surprised.

  “Dad’s the one who arranged for me to come here, but we’re not close. It’s easy for six months or a year to pass without us seeing or talking to each other. My parents divorced when I was nine.”

  “But things went really well for you. You got yourself into university and got a sports-freak boyfriend.”

  Sanna laughed in spite of herself. “Right, really well. I’m single and unemployed. And oh yeah, I’m pregnant.”

  Martti was silent for a moment. Sanna’s breathing grew shallower, and she looked uncertainly at him. Martti nodded.

  “That’s pretty much what I figured. Don’t ask how I knew, I just had a hunch. You know what?” Martti’s eyes were kind. “Things aren’t as bad as they seem. Kids have been born into all sorts of bizarre circumstances.”

  Sanna was at a loss for words.

  “Should we go? You play pool, right?” Martti asked.

  They went back inside and waited for their turn. She went to the bathroom, feeling relieved that Martti knew. When she stepped out Cooper was leaning against the wall in the narrow hallway. He was studying his phone. Sanna cleared her throat to get by.

  “Hey, Sanna, how ya goin’?”

  Sanna nodded.

  “Y’know, I’ve been thinking. Maybe we oughta get to know each other a little better,” Cooper said.

  His face was determined; Sanna noticed a thin film of perspiration, the pale freckles, the lips the same color as his skin. His fingers seemed soft, like his big cheeks. Strawberry-blond hairs sprouted from under his shirt collar. He smelled of yogurt.

  “I was just leaving,” Sanna said, to get out of the situation.

  “You avoiding me?”

  Sanna tried to smile. “That would be pretty hard since I see you every day.”

  Cooper smiled and leaned his right hand against the wall. Sanna felt like she was caught in a trap. She focused on the pictures of the kids tattooed on Cooper’s arms.

  “How old did you say they are?” she asked when Cooper leaned in toward her.

  “You’re a pretty one, ain’t ya?”

  Sanna squatted and slipped by, but Cooper grabbed her. She glanced over into the bar. If only someone would rescue her, but Martti wasn’t looking her way, and the strangers’ faces were indifferent.

  “What’s so different between me and the old man?”

  Sanna tried to yank herself free; Cooper grunted and held on. Sanna hiss
ed and spit. That was enough for Cooper to push her away.

  Sanna was on the verge of walking right out, but she decided she didn’t want to leave until she finished the game. Martti gave her a quizzical look when, a moment later, Cooper walked by to get a pint and shoved Sanna as he passed. Sanna shook her head.

  “Did he do something to you?” Martti asked. “I’m not trying to be patronizing. I’m sure you know how to take care of yourself.”

  That’s right.

  She was surprised to realize that it wasn’t a complete lie. She wasn’t sure she would have known how to handle Cooper in a more isolated location, but at least here she had been capable of defending herself.

  “It’s a side effect of the job, I can’t help keeping an eye out for risks. I warned Cooper he’d be banging his head against the wall with you. The choice is yours, of course. I don’t mean to sound like your father, or your pimp.”

  Martti looked embarrassed.

  Sanna shook her head and laughed. “Wanna play?”

  11

  Sanna woke up before her alarm went off, a little after four in the morning. Studying her mood like an unbroken shell she’d found on the beach, Sanna found she didn’t feel tired or unhappy. The beep of a truck backing up, loud talk, and garbage cans being dragged across the sidewalk carried up from the street.

  She got up and looked out at the day that was just dawning, a bleary, washed-out yellow, like sunrise filtering through a covered veranda. Blue paint sloughed from the wall of the building opposite; the windows were black as an icy road. This is kind of atmospheric, Sanna thought, feeling a suspicious joy. How had Martti guessed her condition? She slipped her hand under her nightshirt and ran her fingers across her belly. She didn’t feel a bump. She hadn’t thought of Martti as particularly intuitive.

  The alarm on the phone rang. As she went to shut it off, she noticed a message from Cooper: Out sick. Postponed all your interviews until Monday. Have a good day.

  Sanna couldn’t enter the mine without an escort. She shifted her toes over to the splotch of light-warmed rug and snorted. Today, of all days, the first day she would have gladly gone to the pit. Now Saturday stretched before her, wide open and empty.

  Had Martti been serious about going stargazing? Sanna bit her lower lip. Did she dare remind him of his proposal? She quickly tapped out a text before she lost her nerve, then tossed the phone on the bed, as if it had burnt her fingers.

  This place is growing on me, and I’m voluntarily spending time with miners. This isn’t going to end well, Sanna thought. I should give Ralda a call and listen to the voice of reason.

  The hours passed; Sanna went downstairs, bought a baguette for lunch, and continued transcribing her interviews. But around three o’clock, she noticed she kept replaying the recordings. She had been fighting off the fatigue but it overtook her.

  Martti hadn’t responded, which irritated Sanna, although she tried to ignore her reaction. It didn’t matter. She considered taking a nap, but she wanted some fresh air. She picked up a to-go coffee across the street, but instead of returning to the hotel she started ambling aimlessly down the road. The morning’s easygoing ambiance had vanished; Kalgoorlie was back to its normal, dirty self. Sanna avoided the gazes of oncoming men.

  When she saw the train station up ahead, Sanna turned and headed down a side street. Even from a distance, you could tell the station was always completely empty, except for that one time of day when the train arrived.

  A pack of feral dogs was running down the road. Sanna picked up her pace and arrived at a pink corrugated-metal building featuring the painted silhouette of a big-breasted woman. To the left of the plywood woman sat a real woman, who was drinking tea and reading the paper. Hearing the crunch of Sanna’s footfalls, she sat up and looked at Sanna questioningly.

  Sanna realized this was the bordello. She had heard there was still a functioning whorehouse in town, established around the same time they struck gold in Kalgoorlie. The corrugated metal made the structure look like a jury-rigged garage that could collapse at any moment.

  Sanna said hello to the woman, who she assumed was the madam, even though nothing about her appearance was particularly reminiscent of a bordello keeper. With her neatly trimmed gray hair, long white trousers, and a knit top, she looked like a clean-cut grandmother. She wore her nails short, with a discreet pearl finish.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sanna said, looking at the building and the fenced concrete courtyard, in the middle of which a large eucalyptus tree had punched through the pavers to make room for itself. Sanna introduced herself and explained what she was doing at the mine.

  “The reason the bordello was founded was to decrease violence against women,” said the madam. “Men could satisfy their urges here, and it worked well for a long time, still did when I bought the place. But now things are different.”

  Sanna glanced at the door. There was an iron grille across it and she wondered what the place looked like inside. The closest Sanna had been to a bordello was walking on Janne’s arm through Amsterdam’s red-light district. Then like now she experienced the same inner conflict. Was staring allowed? She felt like a stupid schoolgirl.

  “Why were things better before?” she asked.

  “There aren’t any rules anymore!” the woman exclaimed, as if the answer were obvious. “Before, girls—I mean these girls—couldn’t go into town without the madam. They had to stay in the house or the yard. They couldn’t work the main street because that’s where housewives went shopping with the kids. Now there’s sex everywhere, the kids are gone, and there are cheap girls from Asia.”

  The madam saw herself as an old-fashioned holdover who looked after the surrounding community. These days, according to her, the competition didn’t give a fig about anyone. Sanna couldn’t tell if she was joking.

  “Would you like to have a look inside?”

  Sanna nodded, even though she couldn’t justify the visit to herself.

  “I’m Arlene,” the woman said as she opened the door.

  The ceiling was even lower than it seemed from the outside. The lobby resembled the parlor of an English cottage; every stick of furniture was covered with protective fabric. Rugs were strewn across the carpet, lace doilies were on all the side tables, cloth coasters awaited glasses, colorful antimacassars and neck pillows were set out on armchairs, and the upholstery of the ottomans displayed a cross-stitch rose pattern. There was a desk in one corner, with an old-fashioned computer and a monitor showing split-screen footage from four security cameras. Sanna could make out movement in one of the images. Arlene remarked that a girl named Norma was entertaining a guest.

  Arlene showed Sanna a room where hooks and ropes had been bolted to the walls. It reminded Sanna of the TRX straps at the gym, but the way the handles and bars jutted out was incongruous, because in all other respects the space looked like a teenage girl’s bedroom. There was a collection of stuffed animals on the dresser and frilly pink curtains hung over the windows. Black-and-white headshots of movie stars adorned the walls. A white polar bear lay sprawled on the bed; it was wearing a harness, a muzzle, and fake leather underwear. A whip had been set out in front of the bear’s black plastic eyes.

  “A lot of the customers who want this room bring their own gear, some of it homemade,” Arlene explained.

  Sanna wanted to laugh at the polar bear, the curtains, and the satin sheets; they reminded her of the catalogs she and Mom used to flip through and ask one another what they would order if price were no object. One time Mom had circled a shiny zebra-print robe and matching underwear, a thong and a see-through bra. Sanna had quickly turned the page.

  Even later, when Sanna was older, she was incapable of shaking the unpleasant sensation she got when Mom talked about sex, or remarked on the touch of some man she was seeing. Sex is the most normal thing in the world, it’s totally normal, Sanna would repeat to herself. That’s what they’d been taught in school. The sc
hool nurse had pounded into their skulls how normal everything was, including curiosity and masturbation. It was fun and healthy! Now get out there and start exploring your bodies! But despite all that, Sanna wanted to forbid her mother from ever talking about sex with her. Mom thought Sanna was being childish. She laughed at her, told Sanna to listen. “His skin is like bread dough after it rises! It feels like you could press a hole in it with your finger and it would start to hiss. But he’s a sweet man. He doesn’t care how fat I am.” Except when their skin chafed raw from the rubbing and the sweat stung, one of the many details Mom had disgusted Sanna with. “What’s wrong now?” Mom would say. “Do you always have to be such a prude about everything? Why can’t you be normal?”

  “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t put you in this room,” Arlene said, touching her shoulder.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’d be surprised at how many are shy like you at the beginning. I have one Dutch girl, tall and blonde like you, straight out of The Sound of Music, completely innocent, not a clue what to do. But there are men who like that sort of thing.”

  Sanna fumbled for the words to express that she would never consider working as a prostitute, but her English had escaped her. She just blinked and felt a completely inappropriate urge to cry.

  “I’m not . . .” she started, after an overly long silence.

  “I know, you just came to see the place.”

  “No, I’m serious. I’m pregnant.”

  “Why, that’s no problem at all.”

  Sanna turned to leave, tried to look like she wasn’t fazed, but her feet were sawdust, her hands heavy water jugs. The hallway was long and she was dizzy, but she wasn’t going to faint in this place. She had to make it outside. She thanked Arlene one last time.

  The grille over the door made it look locked and Sanna panicked. She rattled the door, the tongue of the lock clacked as if teasing her, but then it popped open. Meanwhile, another one of the doors in the hallway opened. Sanna glanced back and saw Cooper. For a second he was stunned, but then his leering smile returned.

  “Hey, how’s it going?”