Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

“A car,” she said, as though the word itself were extremely distasteful. “For just one person? So wasteful.”

“Fine,” Ronald had said. “Take the bus.”

“Will Jens be there to meet me?”

“Sure,” Ronald said. “Why not?”

Except now the bus was late. At least an hour late, they said at the drugstore that was also the bus station. Meanwhile no one had seen this Jens Baedrup character since that first time, two days earlier. Ronald had not counted on the guy just disappearing like that. And he had really disappeared, too. Ronald had looked for him everywhere. He’d even taken the day off from work today to search for Baedrup. But he didn’t see him. No one had seen him. The last person to see him was Ronald himself, as far as Ronald knew. And the last person before that was Henry.

Well, that was interesting, thought Ronald, and then he further pursued the interesting thought. Baedrup had gone to see Henry. That was a fact. It was also a fact that four years ago someone had killed Baedrup. Except that Baedrup wasn’t dead, apparently. He shows up and visits Henry, and then no one has seen him since.

Henry Larsen had killed Jens Baedrup — this was the place to which Ronald’s interesting thought was leading him. To keep it interesting, Ronald allowed the thought to briefly turn upon himself. Ronald, after all, was the last person to see Baedrup; if anyone had killed him, it could well have been Ronald. Except that Ronald had gone directly to see Ellen at the bar, to tell her about seeing this Baedrup with Henry.

Meanwhile, where had Henry been during that time?

He’d been walking around. This was what he’d said, three hours later, when he got to the Lumber Lodge: “I took a walk.”

“With your friend?” Ronald had asked him, and Henry had made that face. Henry’s mouth had said, “What friend?” But his face had said he knew exactly what friend. And no one had seen the friend since.

Henry Larsen killed Jens Baedrup. Ronald returned to the place where his interesting thought had brought him. Henry Larsen killed Jens Baedrup, just like Henry Larsen killed my sister, and I know he killed my sister because he killed Jens Baedrup. But why would Henry have wanted to kill either of those people? This was the next place to which Ronald’s interesting thought led him, or would have, if it hadn’t already led him to drive home to get his gun.

Five minutes later, Ronald returned to the square, got out of his car, holding the gun, as he was allowed by law to do. Ronald’s gun was one of those hunting rifles that you could swear was really an assault rifle, but if you swore that, then the hunter who carried the assault rifle would swear that it was really a hunting rifle because he hunted with it. Anyway, Ronald was holding the gun. His intention was to charge into the Lumber Lodge and shoot Henry to death. If Henry wasn’t in the Lumber Lodge, then Ronald was prepared to shoot Henry to death in another place, too. But before he could shoot anyone, the bus pulled into the station. It was more or less on time after all. The door opened. Ronald heard the driver call out, “Broomeville! Who’s getting off at Broomeville !” Ronald could see a woman walk down the aisle, then down the stairs, stopping at the last step when she saw Ronald standing there with his gun. She was a pretty woman with white-blond hair and sharp cheekbones and black-rimmed glasses. She was wearing dark brown wool leggings and green clogs and on her back was a pack with many pouches for water bottles and two thick shoulder straps, of course, but also a thinner strap that crossed the chest, just in case, and all in all she appeared to be one of those forty-five-year-old women who looked about twenty years younger than they were, but who acted, and also felt, about forty years older than they looked.

“Are you Ilsa?” Ronald asked.

“That is certainly a fake gun,” she said, and when Ronald said that it certainly was not, Ilsa nodded. Her clogs made clomping horse-hoof noises as she walked backward up the stairs and into the bus. The door closed. The bus drove away.

The end comes only after you think it’s already come. Henry was behind the bar, feeling good, as though the past were finally and truly behind him. Tomorrow, this time, he would be married to Ellen. He was already practicing for their life together. He’d even made the executive decision to open the Lumber Lodge earlier than its usual five o’clock opening time. Across the bar from him was Dr. Vernon, drinking a Saranac. My wife and I own this bar, Henry was thinking. Together, we run the bar. Together, we live above the bar with Kurt, her son, my stepson. Dr . Vernon’s glass was empty. Henry reached across, grabbed it, refilled it, pushed it back toward his colleague, who nodded his thanks, red eyes flashing off the red palm trees on his yellow shirt.

“I know you sell drugs to Kurt,” Henry said. Dr . Vernon stopped midsip. He looked at Henry over his glass.

“Drugs?”

“I want you to stop,” Henry said. “And if you don’t, I will tell Matty and Ellen. And I’m sure they will tell you to stop, too, if they don’t tell the police first.” The deep fryer hissed. Henry walked over to it, put on a mitt, grabbed the metal basket handle, removed the basket from the bubbling fat, dumped the twelve wings into a plastic basket lined with wax paper. He arranged six celery stalks around the perimeter of the basket, squeezed blue cheese out of a large bottle into a small cup, placed the cup between two celery stalks, picked up the basket, and placed it in front of Dr. Vernon.

“I knew you were a narc,” he said.

Narc? Henry didn’t know that word. But surely Ellen did. She was walking into the bar right now. She walked underneath the streamers, past the table on which the DJ would set up his turntable and play his wedding tunes, and then moved behind the bar, toward Henry. She leaned forward, as though to kiss him, and Henry leaned forward also, but she did not kiss him. Instead she whispered, “ Køkkenbord equals ‘counter’ in Danish.” Then Ellen stood back. Her eyes were flashing many things, but love and marriage were not among them.

“Ellen,” Henry started to say, but Ellen held up her hand to stop him.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Ellen said. “I told myself just one more thing.”

“My real name is Jens Baedrup,” Henry started to say, but Ellen stopped him again.

“Well, yeah,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. You lied to me. Now go away forever.”

Go away forever? To where? He had only ever lived in two places. Here was one of them. The other place was Skagen; he was told he could never go back there again. Meanwhile, Dr. Vernon was watching and listening with the keen, undisguised interest of a man who suddenly is less pathetic than the man who is about to be seated on the barstool next to him. “But there’s nowhere else for me to go.”

“You can start,” Ellen said, “by getting the hell out from behind my køkkenbord .” Henry did that. He moved to the other side of the bar and sat next to Dr. Vernon, who pushed the basket of wings in front of Henry. Henry picked one up and ate it, almost without thinking, already in that loser’s living afterlife of a loser, where you take consolation from wherever you can find it, even while insisting that you’re not giving up, you’re not going anywhere, until somebody listens to what you have to say. When he was done eating the wing, Henry dropped it into the basket, and he was about to say to Ellen that he was not going to go anywhere until she listened to what he had to say, when he noticed that her eyes had gone big and were staring at something behind him.