Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

The wind was warm and he had to squint against the blowing sand. When they’d reached a spot at the foot of a tall rise, where there was an open space between dunes, Matthias dropped the bags he was carrying and said, “Here.”

They worked fast. Anneke stretched a large square of dark green nylon between two articulated poles Matthias had removed from a cylindrical case, unfolded, and driven into the sand about two meters apart. She and Matthias tied guy lines to each pole, pulled the lines tight, and fastened them to stakes anchored in the sand.

Using a length of rope, Matthias measured out a rectangle about the size of a small car. This didn’t take him long. Soon he was arranging more articulated poles on each side of the rectangle. He then spread out a net and stretched it to reach the poles.

While Matthias worked, Anneke took the decoys from the bag one by one and fastened a metal spike to the undersides. She held one up to Lennart. “Birds are like us,” she said. “They’ll always come to where they find others.” He’d never thought of himself that way but he supposed the morning had proved that he was.

“What happens when the birds land?” he asked.

“See the poles Matthias is working with?” Anneke said, pointing with a decoy. “The joints are hinged. The birds come in like this.” She brought the bird back toward her body. “They land beside these decoys and when the wind conditions are ideal, we pull on the line, the net rises up into the wind, and falls over the birds. It’s called a clap net.”

“Does it injure the birds?” asked Lennart.

“Rarely,” Anneke said. She picked up another decoy, pushed the metal spike firmly into the body, and placed the bird with the others. “We’ve named each of these wooden birds,” she said. “It’s funny to think about. This one is Frank. Do you have a family, Lennart?”

“A girlfriend,” he said. “She has a daughter.” Tove had just started school that fall. She was in kindergarten. Most days, Lennart walked with her the three blocks to her school. It was a part of his day he usually liked.

Anneke tapped the decoy on the sand. “Matthias and I aren’t really married. Well, he is. I was once, too.”

Lennart wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. She pushed a metal spike neatly into a decoy. He watched this. “I’m sorry?” he said.

“We’ve worked together eighteen years this fall,” she said without looking up from the birds. “When we travel for our research, we pretend we’re married. It started as a joke. I think Matthias was just too afraid to tell me what he wanted.” Lennart looked to Matthias, who was tethering the net to the poles forcefully. “The first time, we were in France, close to Dunkirk, in a hotel near the beach, I’ll never forget. We don’t talk about it during the rest of the year. Only when we’re on trips like this one. We stay together in one room, we sleep together.” She looked down at one of the decoys. “His wife has no idea. We travel twice every year for our work. Once in the fall and once in the spring. I imagine you think it’s terrible.”

Lennart leaned back on his heels. His legs stretched uncomfortably. “Not at all.” Perhaps she was joking and the punch line was going to be his incorrect reaction. Marie did this to him all the time. She’d tell him a story about work or about Tove and if he wasn’t listening closely enough and responded the wrong way, she’d tease him for his inattention, for a faulty moral judgment that would allow him to excuse some terrible thing someone at work had done, or a story on the news. He looked at Matthias again. Any second he expected Anneke to cry out with laughter.

“Do you know,” Anneke said in a tone that was unexpectedly quiet. She held the decoy out in front of her. “I used to dislike it. But not anymore. It’s like living a make-believe life.”

Matthias was squatting beside the net and moved quickly, crab-like, farther down the array to the corner closest to Anneke and Lennart.

“After every trip,” she said, “Matthias goes back to his wife and their two sons. The boys are almost grown now.”

When Matthias had finished with the net, he walked slowly over to where Anneke and Lennart were kneeling. Each of his steps sent a spray of sand up around his feet. He leaned forward and kissed Anneke on the top of her head. She closed her eyes and bowed into his kiss.

Lennart helped place the decoys at even distances across the space where the net would fall. They settled the birds into the soft sand. Matthias checked the hinged joints, lifting and releasing the array several times. The wind filled the blind. Later, Matthias served coffee from a thermos. “Now we wait,” he said as he handed Lennart a cup.

They sat in the shade of the blind for a long time. He watched the shadow change shape. He didn’t want to seem rude to the Germans so he insisted, whenever either of them offered, that he was more comfortable on the sand. His back hurt. He wished he had something to drink. The sand was warm and the sun was hot when the wind wasn’t blowing. He took two short walks up the dunes but never got so far that he couldn’t see the Germans. There weren’t many other people out. Given the time of year, this didn’t surprise him.

It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon when Lennart returned from one of his walks. Anneke and Matthias were speaking in German to each other. Lennart tried to guess what they might be talking about, but he could never seem to string together enough words to be sure. When they’d stopped talking for a little while, Lennart turned to Matthias and said, “Anneke was telling me about your sons.” The wind was blowing hard against the blind.

“Our boys,” she said and smiled at Matthias. Lennart looked at her, curious if he’d catch a playful smile, some evidence of a lie. “We have two boys. Matthias, after his father, and the younger one is named Karl. We’ve been so lucky.” She stroked Matthias’s arm. “Matthias, the older boy, is at Konstanz, where we teach. He’s just started and he wants to be an engineer.”

“And Karl?” Lennart said. “What about him?” The sun was warm on his face. He closed his eyes. The father of a boy he’d known in school had had a secret family, a wife and three children in Finland. Something small, a postcard or a bill, maybe a birthday card, had caused the lie to collapse. People in the neighborhood where Lennart grew up still gossiped about it.

“Karl lives in Munich,” Anneke said. “He works at a bank. We’re very proud of him.”

Another hour passed and the birds still hadn’t come. Anneke spent the time solving math puzzles in a torn and creased paperback, chewing on the tip of the pen and nodding her head slowly. Her feet were in Matthias’s lap. He was leaning back in his chair, his hat pulled down low over his eyes, one of his hands resting across Anneke’s crossed legs. Lennart read the newspaper he’d taken that morning from the hotel. There was a car crash in Frederikshavn. Two Volkswagens, identical in every way except that one was from Denmark and the other from Sweden, had had an accident in a traffic circle near the ferry terminal. No one spoke.

Lennart saw the birds first. A low-slung black cloud shook and pulsed on the horizon. He placed the newspaper in the sand. At first he couldn’t tell what he was looking at. The cloud moved as if it were a single body. When one side expanded outward, the opposite side followed, closing any open space. He watched for a moment before it occurred to him that he was looking at a flock of birds. “There,” he said, pointing. When he spoke he heard that his voice sounded higher-pitched and unfamiliar.

“Come closer to the blind so that you don’t frighten them,” Anneke said. Lennart crawled through the sand toward Anneke and knelt beside her. The birds approached and a group split from the flock and landed in the sand all around them. They were taller than the decoys and much more dramatically colored. Some had yellow mixed in with black and gray feathers along their backs, and a long S-shaped line of white along the sides of their heads. The birds shook and stepped in short, rapid movements while Matthias and Anneke whispered to each other, also moving quickly, and before Lennart knew it had happened, Matthias pulled the line and the net rose straight up into the wind. The net paused at the apex of its arc and everything seemed to fall silent and then the wind caught the net and it clapped down violently. The birds not in the net exploded into the air from the sand. He listened to the caught birds trying to flap their wings beneath the net. Soon they stopped struggling and there was no noise, only the net rising and falling with the birds’ heavy breathing.