Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

“Can I put this on his head now?” the man asked the people in the front seat. The driver didn’t speak, and would not speak, but the woman laughed. It was a dry, barking, mirthless laugh. A smoker’s laugh if Søren had ever heard one.

“I don’t know why you need to put it on at all,” the woman said. “What’s he going to see? Who’s he going to tell?”

“Just in case,” the man said, and the woman laughed again. It made Søren’s lungs hurt to hear it. Otherwise he felt calm, maybe because the conversation was so obviously meant to make him feel scared. Suddenly he saw himself at his father’s house. He was finally telling his father that he was the one who’d burned down the cartoonist’s house. He pictured his father listening carefully, the look on his face making the journey from disbelief to disappointment to shame to relief as Søren told him the story of how he had not killed the cartoonist after all, that he’d only been manipulated into thinking so, and then manipulated by the American agent into going to America to kill the cartoonist for real, which he ended up not being able to do, and then, once he told these three American agents this, told them where in Skagen the other American agent was living, they would let him go. Søren would tell his father all this, and his father would say, “Don’t worry, Søren, everything is going to be just fine.” How had Søren not known he would say this? How had he not seen that everything really was going to be just fine?

“It would make me feel better, OK?” the man next to Søren said, and the woman sighed. And only then did the man turn to face Søren. He was holding the bag with his left hand. With his right hand he ruffled the back of his head, the way you do when you’re trying to get used to a new haircut. “I’m sorry,” the man said, and before he put the bag over Søren’s head, Søren thought he saw the man’s eyes watering a little, and that ended up being the last thing that Søren ever saw.

Wednesday, October 6, 2011, 11:48 p.m.

From: undisclosed sender

To: undisclosed recipient

Subject: re: Broomeville

The plan has changed. As yours did for me. Plans change. Is this the nature of plans?

The Lumber Lodge wasn’t even officially open. The front door was unlocked, but the beer lights were off. The chairs were still on the tables, the barstools still upside down on the bar. The floor was still sticky from the night before. Why, Ellen wondered, is the floor sticky even though I mopped it? And then she remembered that she hadn’t mopped it. She’d been too tired to mop it. But she’d not been too tired to put the chairs on the tables and the barstools on the bar. Even though she knew that she was not going to mop the floor, even though she had no intention of mopping the floor, she had still put the goddamn chairs and stools up. And why? Because she always put the goddamn chairs and stools up before she mopped the goddamn floor. And you really did have to mop the floor before you went home. Because if you didn’t, then the next day you would hate yourself, and your floors, and your bar, and your life . Ellen’s feet made a disgusting sound as she walked. It sounded like a mouse getting stuck in something over and over again. Saturday, she thought, smiling. Saturday, I am getting married on Saturday, and maybe after that I will sell this bar, and Henry and Kurt and I will. . But she didn’t get to finish the thought. Because just then, Ronald Crimmins walked in. He must have just come straight from school, because he was wearing his janitor’s uniform and smelled faintly of chemical disinfectant. His bad hand was sort of snuggled into the mouth of his pants pocket while the other was bouncing against his thigh.

“We’re closed,” Ellen said.

“Then let me help you open,” Ronald said. He walked over to the nearest table and with his good hand took the three chairs off it and put them on the floor. Then he worked his way around the room, taking chairs off the tables, placing them around the tables. He did this quickly, but not carelessly the way Ellen herself sometimes did. Sometimes, Ellen just dumped the chairs wherever, which gave the impression that a tableful of people had gotten up in a hurry and probably also run out on their bill.

Now the chairs were around the tables. Ronald had taken the barstools down, too, and was sitting on one of them, legs extended. The toes of his brown work boots were so scuffed they were almost white, and the laces were double-looped and knotted and still they were too long. Ronald was staring at Ellen, head cocked, as though to say, What else?

“I’m not hiring, Ronald,” Ellen said. Because she knew this was how Ronald had gotten his job at the school: he’d basically hung around the school on a volunteer basis, emptying trash cans and erasing graffiti and basically making himself useful until Matty had just gone ahead and hired him.

“Why’d you do that?” Ellen had asked him. This was a year and a half ago, a couple of months after Ellen had moved out, but before the divorce had officially gone through, and so Matty still had hopes of proving to her that she shouldn’t leave him after all and that he was a good guy.

“Because I’m a good guy,” Matty had said. That was part of it. But the other part of it was that Matty felt guilty about firing Ronald’s sister, who then killed herself. That was Matty all over. When he wasn’t being a good guy, he felt guilty for not being such a good guy.

“I’m not hiring, Ronald,” Ellen said. Which was true. But that’s not to say she couldn’t stand some help tonight. Other than the nights before and after Christmas and Thanksgiving, her busiest night at the Lumber Lodge was the night after the baseball game. The faculty and staff always seemed very thirsty then, possibly because Matty always bought them several rounds. He sometimes made a toast, too. The toast often included some kind of classical allusion — Virgil, Shakespeare, Patrick Henry, the fifth president of Cornell University — which always made everyone drink even more desperately, and it was sometimes hard for her to keep up. Plus, she was worried about Henry and Matty being in the same room together. They were in the same room together at school often enough. But tonight in the same room with them there would be alcohol and also her, the ex- and future wife. Besides, Ellen was getting married in just three days, and like so many people in that particular state of limbo, she couldn’t shake this sense of impending doom. If I can just get married, then I know everything will be just fine, was her feeling. This, of course, is a common feeling among people about to be married, even among people who have already been married.

“I already have a job,” Ronald said. “In fact. .” And he made a big deal of looking around the bar for someone, even though clearly they were the only two people in it. “Is Henry here?”

“No. He’s probably at the baseball game.” Ellen looked at Ronald. It was perhaps wrong to so dislike a guy who was crippled and whose sister had killed herself in such a spectacularly awful way. But Ellen did dislike Ronald. Ever since his sister died, Ronald had seemed as though he was up to something. “Why?”

“Oh, just wondering.”

“You seem like you’re up to something, Ronald.”

“That’s funny. Because I saw someone running out of Henry’s office today. I’m not up to anything . But that guy, he seemed like he was up to something.”

“That guy?” Ellen said, thinking, Married, married. Thinking, Doom, doom. Thinking, I’m going to marry Henry in three days. Please let me marry Henry in three days. “What guy?”