Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

Not far after the bridge, Helle waved to someone on the shore. There was a bicycle lying on its side and a man sat beside it with something, a T-shirt, Henrik thought, held up to his head. He was sure this was Jesper, the village drunk who, he didn’t know, had died that spring. Jesper was struck by lightning while searching for Viking relics in an abandoned pasture on the island’s northwest corner. “It’s Jesper,” Henrik said and waved. “He’s fallen from his bike.” They all turned to look at the accident and the man waved to them and made some kind of gesture toward his head. Helle raised her arm to wave again at the man and Henrik looked at her right breast. As they passed, Henrik thought he heard Jesper call out to them. He turned to the noise, but was careful to keep one hand steady on the wheel. The canal was shallow at its edges. The man fell to his side. Several hundred yards inland, the spot where Jesper’s body had been discovered was still marked by orange flagging tape that no one had bothered to remove. It flapped in the wind and no one saw it.

The Baltic was open in front of them. On cold days, cargo ships passed upside down on the horizon. Henrik spent hours in the early fall searching for these mirages through a pair of old binoculars he found when he and Lisa moved their summer things into the house. He rounded the headland smoothly. The wind was blowing a little harder across the open water and he could have let out the sails, had some fun. Instead, he tucked in close to the coastline, giving it just enough throttle to keep the boat at a comfortable speed.

Docking made him nervous, but he guided the boat in easily. Peter and Helle dropped the fenders over the side, and the boat nudged the dock. Lisa jumped to the dock and tied up the boat with two knots. Henrik cut the engine and began preparations. This was his favorite part of owning a boat: securing lines, covering sails, wiping up shoeprints and water from the deck. Lisa wanted to go back to the house immediately. It was midafternoon and she’d planned a marinade for the pork. Peter followed her; he needed to make a phone call. This left Helle and Henrik alone, together, on the boat. Henrik watched his wife and colleague walk up the path to the house. A low slope of red rock jutted into the path. Peter walked up onto it and then jumped down, as a child might. The sun was shining.

Henrik wiped down the cockpit with a damp towel in his good hand. He worked more slowly than he normally did, enjoying Helle’s concentration on him. He admired his own forearm. It was tan and muscular. Helle put her hand on top of Henrik’s. “I’ve missed you,” she said. He took her hand and led her down the steep ladder into the cabin, where they made love quickly, leaning against the door of the head. When he was finished, Henrik tucked his still-erect penis back into his shorts. They walked slowly up the path to the house. He avoided the red rock.

Inside, Peter was sitting on the couch, reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln in English. Lisa was in the kitchen. There was the sound of the coffeepot finishing and the smell of the previous night’s pie warming in the oven. They drank coffee and ate pie and laughed. The rest of the afternoon passed this way, and soon Henrik found himself on the back deck with a glass of scotch in front of a newly flaming barbeque. Peter was leaning against the deck railing next to the barbeque. The tomato plant Henrik planted that spring was coming along nicely. Peter had, for the last several minutes, been talking his way around a delicate work issue for which Henrik was indirectly responsible. Henrik nodded and agreed and promised, as he’d done twice previously, to look into the issue on Peter’s behalf. It pained him to lie; there was nothing he could do about the problem. Henrik hoped that without his saying so Peter understood this and was after reassurance rather than action. Their wives came out onto the deck. Lisa set a plate full of vegetable skewers down on the small table beside the barbeque. Helle held two glasses of white wine, one of which she handed to Lisa. A smoking citronella candle on the deck produced a silky cloud of smoke from behind the table. Peter made an awkward toast to another good day with good friends. Henrik and Helle looked at each other. Clouds were moving in over the Baltic. He suspected rain by sunset.

After the table was set and the four of them sat down in the places Lisa had assigned them and the wine was poured and the meat cut, the telephone rang. Henrik got up to answer. The phone at the summerhouse didn’t often ring, so he immediately suspected the worst, although he had no guess as to what the worst might be.

He took three long steps across the kitchen and answered the phone on the third ring. It was Fredrik Holm, chairman of the homeowners’ association, with whom Henrik had had a bitter argument the previous winter regarding the dues he and Lisa were expected to pay for snowplowing. “I’m calling with bad news,” Fredrik Holm said. “Rolf Strand passed away earlier today. He appears to have had a bicycle accident. A young girl, the Källström girl, found him this afternoon.”

Rolf lived three houses down, and Henrik had often run into him out walking in the evenings. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.

Fredrik explained that the accident had occurred at around one in the afternoon, just after he and Rolf had finished their tennis match. “Rolf was on his way home,” Fredrik said. “For some reason he took the canal path. I can’t imagine why.”

Before he could stop himself, Henrik said, “I saw a man on the canal path this afternoon. We were out with the boat.” He immediately regretted admitting this. The inconvenience of now having placed himself, however circumstantially, into the event bore down on the rest of his evening. He dreaded further explaining the afternoon to Fredrik and was eager to get back to the meal. Before the phone rang, Helle had, when she sat down beside him, hooked her foot around his leg and begun stroking it up and down. Even as he listened to Fredrik go on and on about neighborliness and immutable responsibilities, Henrik felt aroused. After a late fall and winter during which Henrik and Helle had only seen each other sporadically, he’d lately found himself eager to spend more time with her.

There was a great deal of blood on the canal path that afternoon, Fredrik insisted. It was a gruesome scene. Henrik tried to concentrate on this, but Helle’s thighs were so smooth and round. He heard her voice out on the back deck. She was laughing. Her bikini bottom had stretched across her hips in such a way that he had earlier wondered if he didn’t want to have children someday after all. There’s something uncontrollable inside of me, he thought.

“Why didn’t you stop?” Fredrik asked him.

He pictured Rolf Strand lying facedown on the dusty canal path, thick tributaries of blood surrounding the body. He turned and looked out the small kitchen window to the deck. Helle waved at him, and he loved her, he was sure of it. He took a deep breath. “I saw a man sitting on the canal path,” he said, somewhat defiant now. “Who’s to say it was even Rolf?” He picked at a dried splash of something brown on the counter with his thumbnail. His buzz was slipping away and he felt cold in his shoulders. “Whoever it was we saw seemed to be fine. He waved at us.”

“I would have stopped,” Fredrik said.

Outside, he took his seat, and sighed deeply. Lisa was just placing her knife and fork across her empty plate. He’d always found comfort in the thoughtless, habitual actions. “What is it?” she asked.

“Rolf Strand died,” he said.

“The grumpy old man from down the road? That’s terrible.”

Henrik took a bite of his cold meat, sipped his wine. “It was a bicycle accident.”