“This is a brilliant summer, Erik,” he said as we approached the channel of reeds. “In every way. It’s probably the best I’ve had.”
I was struck by how much I liked Edmund. There were only two weeks to go until the Incident, my mother was dying of cancer, my toe was busted, but yes, it really was a brilliant summer.
In every way. So far.
Neither Edmund nor I thought that Midsummer at Fläskhällen was a winner. Sure, Britt Laxman was one of the first people we saw as we pulled up in the boat, but she was being escorted by some redhead wearing sunglasses and winklepickers, otherwise there wasn’t much there. A few drunks in sports clothes were sitting around drinking coffee spiked with moonshine. The three-man band was on a break when we arrived. They really should have kept taking it easy all night. They played the accordion, guitar, and a double bass that seemed to be strung with old rubber bands. Four couples pretended to dance along, some wearing clogs, some not, some to the music, some not, and a few scattered groups of people around our age were hanging around trying to look like President Kennedy or his First Lady. We played a round of golf and tried to get in with two giggling Jackie-alikes from Skåne, but they soon retreated to their families’ trailers, which were set up over by the camping tents.
The campsite wasn’t exactly big, but it was by no means full: four trailers, as many sagging tents, and a half-dozen cows who either had taken the wrong route or had been brought there as lawnmowers by the farmer, Grundberg, who also took care of the rigamarole at Fläskhällen beach.
Inside the café was a new pinball machine. It was called a Rocket 2000; we tried our best to have a turn, but a group of kids from Askersund who had arrived on mopeds seemed to have a flood of one-krona coins to pour into the machine. In the end we decided to postpone the game. Shortly thereafter we saw Britt Laxman and the red-haired boy sitting down by the fire on the beach grilling sausages on the same stick, so we gave up and rowed back to Gennesaret.
My father had taught me that there’s no point plowing on when the odds are against you, and Edmund agreed wholeheartedly.
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going, you bastard son of a loose mosquito,” he’d said. He’d insisted that was the kind of thing you said man-to-man deep in the forests of Hälsingland, and I had no reason not to believe him.
When we were out on the water, Edmund told me a secret. He started by asking a question.
“Have you ever been beaten up? I mean taken a real pounding.”
I don’t think so, I said. I’d never been given more than a slap or an Indian burn or an accidental blow to the solar plexus. Or a few whacks with Benny’s hockey stick after I broke it by accident because I didn’t look where I was sitting.
“I have,” Edmund said gravely. “When I was little. By my dad. A helluva lot.”
“Your dad? What are you talking about? Why would your dad—?”
“Not him,” Edmund interrupted. “The other one, my real dad. Albin is just my stepdad; he married Mum after my real dad disappeared. Boy, he let rip … on Mom and me. Once he hit Mom so hard she lost her hearing.”
“Why?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.
Edmund shrugged.
“He was like that.” He thought for a moment. “You never forget. How it feels. How … how scared you get, lying there, waiting. Waiting is almost worse than the beating itself.”
“I understand,” I said. “Is that why your mom is an alcoholic?”
“I think so,” said Edmund and dipped his glasses in the water to rinse them clean. “He drank like there was no tomorrow, and taught her how … but she was born with a pedigree. Grandpa drank enough for an entire platoon.”
“Where’s he now, your real dad?”
“No idea,” said Edmund. “He disappeared when I was five and a half; Mom refuses to talk about him. Albin came into the picture pretty quick after that.”
I nodded.
“To hell with people who fight,” Edmund said as he put his dripping glasses back on. “Who prey on the weak. I can’t stand it.”
“It sucks,” I agreed. “You shouldn’t have to stand for it.”
Henry was gone by the time we got back and we spent the rest of the night playing Chinese chequers and chewing gum. We came up with our own variation where we played using gumballs. There was something about having to chew your opponent’s gum if you jumped over it, but we never quite settled on the rules. We went to bed early; we hadn’t slept much the night before, especially Edmund, and we couldn’t care less about putting flowers under our pillows and all that romantic nonsense.
I drew a few panels of my comic before I fell asleep, and Edmund wrote a letter to his mother at Vissingsberg. He hadn’t been happy with his previous drafts, and now he was trying a lighter, more masculine approach. When he was finished, he tore the page right out of his notebook and handed it to me.
“What do you think?” he said chewing his pen.
It read:
Mornin’, Mom!
I’m having a gay old time out here. I hope you’re sober and are as happy as a clam. See you in the fall.
Your one and only Edmund
“It’s great,” I said. “She’s going to frame it and hang it over her bed.”
“I think so too,” said Edmund.
Not a single sound came from downstairs that night, not even from the tape deck or the typewriter, but at some point towards morning I woke to the sound of firecrackers being shot off and rockets being launched over at the Lundins’. Apparently, they were having some sort of family gathering; we hadn’t heard a peep from them for two weeks, but it was just like them to announce themselves in this way. And on Midsummer’s Eve, too.
Anyway, I fell back asleep, and had a strange dream about Henry getting his tie caught in the typewriter. He was frantically pounding on the keys trying to get free, but with each line the tie was pulled tighter. In the end—when his nose was practically on the roller—he called for help. Well, it was more of a hiss because he could barely breathe. I cut off the tie, and as thanks he slapped me and explained it was a damn expensive tie and I’d ruined an entire chapter for him.
Even as I was dreaming, I thought it was strange, and when I woke up I was still mad at Henry. It was rotten of him to slap me after I’d saved his life. It didn’t matter if it was a dream or reality: it was unfair.
But when I got up, he was already sitting on the lawn, writing and smoking. In just his underwear and without any sign of a tie; it must have just been one of those dreams that had gotten out of hand. Meaningless, no matter how you turned it around. I went out to him.
“How’s it going?” I asked. “With the book.”
He leaned back and squinted at the sun, which had just broken through the clouds.
“Rolling along,” he said. “It’s rolling along, little brother.”
And then he laughed that short, sharp laugh of his and went on clattering.
I hesitated before asking, “Did you find yourself a new girl?”
He typed until it pinged at the end of the line.
“I’m working on it,” he said and looked pensive. “Yes indeed. There’s a lot I’m working on.”
I couldn’t figure out what he meant, so I asked.
“It means everything,” my brother said, then laughed again. “Everything.”
-
10
During the last week of June it was so hot the outhouse barrel was boiling.
At least it felt that way if you forgot to cover it properly with peat moss litter; there was a distinct advantage in waiting to go until the evening.
The need to cool off by taking dips in the lake became much more pressing—as well as the need to finish the pontoon dock. Pushing the boat out every time you wanted to take a dip was too involved, and none of us—neither I nor Edmund nor Henry—was
especially fond of teetering around on the sticky bottom where you might find yourself sinking down knee-deep in a mud hole or tripping on a root and landing on your face.
So, the dock. It was about time. We’d already transported six empty barrels from Laxman’s and Henry had sketched it out. Hammers, ropes, nails, and saws were stored in the shed by the outhouse. All we needed was wood.
Planks.
“The Lundins,” said Henry when the sun was high in the sky of a new day, hotter than Marilyn Monroe’s kisses. “You’re going to have to nab a few planks from the Lundins’ pile.”
“Us?” I said.
“You,” said Henry. “I’m up to my ears. You want a dock, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I said.
“All right, then,” said Henry. He put on the old straw hat he’d bought at a flea market in Beirut and rejoined his typewriter in the shade. “Twenty kronor if you’re done before nightfall!” he called out from his chair. “Shouldn’t be a problem for two sharpshooters.”
“Who says it’s a problem?” said Edmund. “What a load of crap.”
But he said it quietly, certain Henry couldn’t hear.
The Lundins’ timber stockpile lay next to the path down to their house, not more than ten meters from the parking spot up by the road. It was a considerable pile, hidden by an old, moldy tarp, and it had lain there as long as I could remember. Most likely it had been lifted from a building site a long time ago and they couldn’t be bothered to carry it any further than just out of sight from the road—and most likely none of them would care in the slightest if a few planks went missing from the pile.
Especially if they didn’t notice.
The safest thing would have been to launch our mission in the small hours. But you never really knew with the Lundins. They had their own circadian rhythm. It was also clear that they’d arrived for the summer now. At least a few of them had; we’d heard a bit of a ruckus over the past days: cursing, glass breaking, and all that.
Another reason not to go at night was of course those twenty kronor on the line, so we really just had to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and get on with it. No hesitation, no objections: Edmund and I agreed on that point.
You could say our mission was a success. For a few hours, we dragged planks through the marshy, inhospitable mosquito and gadfly hell that lay between the Lundins and Gennesaret. We swore and were pricked by thorns, swore and were bitten, swore and made our way down. Got scratched up and bruised all over. The heat drove us mad, but we did it. We made it.
By twelve thirty we’d amassed a respectable pile of planks, which Henry—leaning back, lifting his hat, squinting, and lighting a Lucky Strike—deemed sufficient.
“That’ll do,” he said. “Need a hand building it? It’ll cut into your fee, obviously.”
“Like hell we do,” we said.
We sawed and hammered and fastened, and talked about Edmund’s real dad. And about why he was so violent. Because it seemed strange—at least to me.
“He was sick,” said Edmund. “He had a unusual brain disorder. When he drank, he had to fight.”
“Sustained,” I said. “Why did he drink?”
“That was another part of the illness,” Edmund suggested. “He simply had to have alcohol. Or else he’d go nuts. Yup, that’s how it was …”
I considered what he said.
“So, either he went nuts or he went nuts?”
“Exactly,” said Edmund. “That’s how it is for some people. It’s a shame it had to be my dad.”
“A crying shame,” I said. “He shouldn’t have been a dad at all.”
Edmund nodded.
“But it wasn’t like that in the beginning. Before I was born. The illness came creeping … then it was what it was.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Is it hereditary?”
“Don’t know.”
A few seconds passed.
“But I hate him anyway,” Edmund said with rising anger. “It’s damn cowardly to attack people who can’t defend themselves. And with a belt … Why did he have to use the belt, can you tell me that?”
I couldn’t.
“Hitting a person when they’re down—”
He stopped there. I pictured Mulle unconscious, his ruddy face, and recalled how Super-Berra had lifted it up and bashed it into the ground. “Mm,” I said. “There’s nothing worse. Do you think you’ll look him up when you get older? Your real dad. Track him down and corner him?”
“Yessir,” said Edmund. “You can count on it. For that reason alone I hope he’s still alive. I have it all worked out. First I’m going to find him and not tell him who I am, then I’m going to be nice to him, sweeter than honey, buy him a coffee and some cake … and a drink … and when he least expects it I’ll tell him who I am and give it him so hard that he’ll hit the ground. And then—
And that’s when Edmund hit his thumb with the hammer and started swearing and screaming blue murder. I never found out how he was going to continue exacting revenge on his father. I wondered what I would have done in his shoes … Would I have thought and felt the same way? I couldn’t work it out.
So, I decided this was the sort of situation I didn’t want to think about at all. One more. Cancer-Treblinka-Love-Fuck-Death …
And Edmund’s dad.
I slotted him in between Fuck and Death. Preliminarily.
Even though it was hot, I liked sawing and nailing and building. Especially nailing. When you hammered nails, you seemed to be able to free yourself of all the things you didn’t want to be thinking about. You could just concentrate on what you were doing. Bang. You just had to bang away. Drive the nail into the wood. Bang. Bang that bastard. Bang. Bang. Bang. And with an extra bang for good measure. When it couldn’t go in any further.
Bang. To put it in its place. Now you’re in there, you lousy nail, and that was the idea all along. No matter how hard you tried to be stiff and crooked and worm your way left and right. You shitty nail. Bang. I’m in charge here. Damn right. I thought of our carpentry teacher Gustav in school and about how there was woodwork and then there was woodwork.
The sun was still high when we were done. Henry inspected the eight-meter-long construction project, checking to see if the barrels were secured properly. He said he was going inside to make pancakes while we put the dock in place. “Okay?”
“Sure,” said Edmund and we started to drag the fruit of our labor to the edge of the lake. Following Henry’s drawing, we moored the dock with four ropes to two stable birches and anchored either end with a half-slack hawser. A bit of slack was essential, Henry had explained, but not too much. Then we stood and admired the wonder for a while before we slowly and with pride strode out over the planks. It was a little wobbly and in certain places your feet sank below the water line, at least when there were two of you, but, yes, it worked. We had built a goddamn dock.
Now we had a pontoon dock and twenty kronor. We looked at each other. Satisfaction.
“A brilliant summer,” said Edmund with a tremble in his voice. “Hoo-hip, as they said in Ångermanland.”
At the far end of the dock the water was nearly two meters deep and we managed to dive off thirty-eight times before Henry came out and shouted that the pancakes were ready. We ate as though we’d never seen food before and then went out and dived into the lake thirty-eight more times. We thought the sun might never set that night, so after Henry had made his diving debut and paid us each our promised ten kronor, we lay on the dock, reading or playing cards, which was tricky. You had to keep your ass in the wagon—as Edmund said in his Norrlandish way—otherwise the cards got wet.
But never mind. The point was that we were lying on planks we’d swiped and hammered together ourselves. And were floating on barrels we’d transported ourselves all the way from Laxman’s and had expertly bound together. That was what this hot, n
everending day was all about. Lying on your own dock.
“King of spades,” said Edmund. “I hear a moped coming.” I listened. Yes, the sharp noise of a moped zipping along was coming from the forest. It seemed to be just about in line with the Levis’ place.
“Yes,” I said. “Pass. A Puch, I think.”
We played another few hands before we heard it stop and switch off up by the parking area. That made us lose our concentration. If we’d had any to lose in the first place.
“Eh,” said Edmund. “I’m tired of this game. Let’s call it a day.”
“Works for me,” I said, collecting the cards. I sat up on the dock with my legs in the water and looked toward the edge of the woods. Henry walked out onto the lawn. He had changed into jeans and a white nylon shirt.
I don’t know if I had time to sense what was coming—anyway, afterward Edmund claimed he had—but about a minute after the moped’s engine had been turned off up by the road, Ewa Kaludis appeared on Gennesaret’s lawn. She was wearing a short white dress with a red shirt over it; when she spotted Henry she laughed and pulled a bottle of wine out of her tote bag—then she pressed herself against him and his white shirt.
Right then Edmund started to hiccup, an affliction that would last for several hours.
“No shit, hic,” he said. “Your brother and Ewa Kaludis. Then it was them, hic, I heard … no shit.”
I got up. Wobbled and almost fell into the water but I caught myself. Made my way to the shore. Henry and Ewa Kaludis slowly turned toward me. Edmund hiccupped again. I felt paralyzed. Like I’d lost all sensation in my legs and so I had no choice but to stand on that patch of lawn for the rest of my life. In a dripping, faded bathing suit—oh well, it’d dry eventually—I swallowed and shut my eyes and counted to one, then Henry said:
“So, Erik, my brother. There’s a lot I’m working on, like I said. A lot.”
“Hi, Erik,” Ewa Kaludis said. “And hello, Edmund.”
The Summer of Kim Novak Page 8