Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

“I have missed you,” Matty had told Locs on the phone.

“That’s the second thing,” she’d said.

So he’d agreed to hire this guy — whoever he was, whatever kind of trouble he was in — as his guidance counselor. “Is he going to come here by himself?” Matty had asked. He waited for Locs to answer. But she didn’t. She was waiting for Matty to tell her something. Either: Because I want you to bring him. Or: Because I don’t want you to bring him. And before he could ask himself, again, Am I really going to do this? he’d said, “Because I want you to bring him.”

“Maybe I will,” Locs had said. “But then again, maybe I will not.”

And then she hung up, leaving Matty with two visions of the future. Both of them gave him a bad feeling.

“I have a bad feeling,” Matty said.

“Well, as I was just saying, I had a bad feeling that December in Turku as well,” Lawrence said.

“Uncle Lawrence!” Kurt yelled, and then he waved at Uncle Lawrence to come over.

“I’m being paged,” Lawrence said, and he walked over to his nephew. Matty then turned in the opposite direction and thought, Where are they? And a second later, there they were: Ellen and a man walking toward him through the snow. The man looked tall — taller than Matty — and thin; he had gray hair and had lost most of it except for on the sides, but he was one of those tall, fit men who cut their remaining hair very short, and so he looked youthful even though he was not young. Locs had described the guy — Henrik Larsen — as a goofball. But he did not look like a goofball. Matty, on the other hand, was dressed in his ridiculous homemade umpire uniform. The uniform was supposed to be a joke, but now he wondered whether he’d succeeded a little too fully in making it so. He was wearing Kurt’s old soccer shin guards, and the pieces of black plastic barely covered half the length of his shins. He’d also stuffed a pillow into his red sweatshirt for a chest protector. And while his mask was a genuine umpire mask, it was ancient, and several bars had been broken, so that the ones that remained were too far apart to stop anything — a ball, a rock — from reaching his face. He’d dressed like this for the fourteen years he’d umpired this game, but today, for the first time, he felt like a man who was absolutely ill equipped to go into battle.

Matty shook the guy’s hand when he got close enough, and said, “So you must be my new guidance counselor.”

The guy didn’t say anything. He just took his hand back, then crossed his arms and frowned. Locs was supposed to have told this Henrik that he was going to be the new Broomeville Junior-Senior High guidance counselor. Did this frowning and arm crossing mean she hadn’t told him? Although she had told Henrik to call him Matthew. What else had she told him? Locs, Locs. He felt her nearby. She might even be sitting in the stands, watching him. He looked at Henrik, making sure he didn’t look anywhere else. “Henry,” Ellen said. “This is Matthew.”

Henry? thought Matty. “I go by Matty,” he said to Henry.

“Or Big Red,” Ellen said.

Matty felt his face turn unhappy. He wondered whether Henry could see it behind the mask. Henry was still frowning; his arms were still crossed. “I went to Cornell,” Matty explained to Henry.

Henry let his frown disappear. For now. It felt so good, knowing he could and would be able to return to it. Earlier he’d wondered whether there was a difference between Jens and Henry. This was the difference: Jens was always a little out of control, even though he insisted that he was in control, that everything would be just fine. But Henry had a method. And Ellen had given it to him. Henry had known her for only a couple of hours, but already she seemed like the most incredible woman he had ever met. How could Matty have cheated on her (Henry had not asked with whom, and Ellen had not volunteered the information, but he had a hunch it was Locs, because Locs had said, “Matthew doesn’t even know who he is,” and you don’t say something like that about a person unless you’re in love with him), Matty who apparently went to this Cornell? Henry had never heard of it, but the way Matty had said the word—“Cornell”—made it sound like some mystical, faraway place. Timbuktu. Kathmandu. Atlantis. “I went to Cornell,” Matty had said.

“And when did you get back?” Henry asked.

Ellen laughed. But Matty did not laugh. He lifted the mask up off his face and seemed to be prepared to say something unpleasant when a woman and a man walked by. The woman was dressed like an Arctic explorer with her fur-lined and hooded anorak. The man was wearing what seemed just to be a lined, checked shirt and a tasseled hat with the word SKI-DOO ringing its perimeter.

“Hello, Bossman,” she said to Matty. “Hello, Me,” she said to Henry. The woman smelled strongly of alcohol. She might once have had other smells, but the liquor had eradicated them. The man didn’t say anything. He just extended his hand in Henry’s direction and Henry shook it. There was clearly something wrong with the hand — the fingers seemed fused together and hard, so that it was like shaking a closed frozen lobster claw with human skin on it — but Henry shook it anyway, the man looking deeply into his face, seemingly daring Henry to in some way acknowledge the claw. Henry didn’t; he didn’t even need to frown, since the man wasn’t actually saying anything. Finally the man retracted his hand, and he and the woman walked away, past a group of sweatshirted teenagers standing next to a chain-link fence, whispering conspiratorially and not even trying to hide the fact that they were pointing at Henry. It was easy to read their pointing: it said, Who the fuck are you?

“I fart in your general direction!” someone yelled in what seemed like a French accent. Henry looked in the direction of the voice. It clearly had come from a large man wearing a very colorful short-sleeved shirt who was looking — but as far as Henry could tell, not farting — in Henry’s direction. A woman descended the bleachers behind the man, long braids trailing out of her ski hat. She had a martial look on her face, and sure enough, she struck the man in the arm, then ran back up the stairs. The man rubbed his arm but otherwise seemed unaffected by this sudden violence. Although he did seem cold; he wrapped his arms around himself and yelled in Henry’s and Matty’s direction, “Hey, chief, play ball already!” Henry looked at him. Henry looked at all of them, the whole crowd. And what did he see? What did he not see? He did not see one Muslim in the crowd. He did not see one person who by evidence of their skin color or headgear or dress or anything seemed likely to want to kill him. Henry did not like himself for noticing this. But neither did he like himself being around people who might be trying to kill him. He turned back to Matty, who was busy feeling that crushing combination of shame and defiance known only to people in small towns who are forced to welcome an outsider into that small town. I know this place is awful, was Matty’s feeling, and also: But don’t even think about telling me how awful it is. “I apologize for the freak show,” Matty said.

“I really think I’m going to like it here,” Henry said.

“You do?”

“Yes,” Henry said. “I think everything is going to be just fine.” He allowed himself to say these things one last time, as a way of saying good-bye to Jens, the way Matty’s baseball game was his way of saying good-bye to summer. Then Henry crossed his arms again. Now that he’d started truly being Henry, he couldn’t imagine ever wanting to be anyone else. Meanwhile, Matty was looking at him in amazement. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard anyone say “I think everything is going to be just fine” before. And Henry had sounded like he’d meant it , too. Was he talking somehow about Matty and Locs? Matty felt sure Henry was. He glanced at Ellen, who was now talking to Lawrence and Kurt, and then said, “How is everything going to be fine?” Henry didn’t respond to that, except with his frown, which communicated, to Matty, Oh, you know how. Matty did. He’d known it last time, and he knew it this time, too. He just needed someone else to remind him.