The Happiest People in the World: A Novel Page 10

  Capo opened his eyes and called London. London was already in his car. He was closer to Route 356 than any of the rest of them. Besides, he had helped make this mess. It made sense that he be the one to clean it up. Capo gave London the information, told him what to do. Then Capo hung up. Five minutes later, just as Capo was about to tuck into his eggs and hash, London called. Crying. Really crying. Not as though he was afraid he had done something wrong, but as though he knew it. The poor boy. Perhaps Capo had been wrong after all to recruit him. This was the dangerous part of recruiting among the young. You never knew how much they weren’t going to change when they got older.

  “Drive away,” Capo said. “Calmly, calmly. The roads are treacherous. Don’t worry. The county coroner is on his way.” At that, Doc took off his apron, withdrew his black bag from under the counter, and ran out the door. Not many people knew that Broomeville County even had a coroner, let alone that Doc was that coroner, let alone that that’s why Doc was called Doc.

  That was that. London had killed the wrong woman. Locs was gone. Who knew where? She was an excellent agent; they probably wouldn’t be able to find her. They would probably have to wait until she decided to come back to Broomeville again. In the meantime, Capo, Doc, Crystal, and London would keep watch over the cartoonist. No one else in Broomeville would know his true identity. But what about Matty? Doesn’t Matty know who the cartoonist is? Capo asked himself, and then quickly answered, No, Matty doesn’t even know who he is. Matty doesn’t even know who I am.

  That decided, there was nothing left for Capo to do except eat Doc’s eggs and hash. He did love Doc’s eggs and hash. He often rhapsodized about them during his time away. “Broomeville! Oh, I’ll never forget the eggs and corned beef hash at Doc’s!” he would say. Since his return, he’d spent as much time there as his other job allowed. In fact, he had been there that Saturday morning, seven years earlier, drinking his coffee, in the company of his clocks, looking out the window. Matty had just gotten out of the car and walked away, but Locs was still sitting inside. Capo knew what she was doing: she was trying to figure out whom to blame; trying to figure out where she was going to go; trying to figure out what she was going to do next. Capo finished his coffee, walked outside. Locs’s head was thrown back against the seat; her eyes were closed. He tapped on the window and her eyes sprang open and she gave him a calculating but still furious look. A very promising look. Although also a very dangerous look. He gestured with his hand for her to roll down her window, and she did that.

  “What the fuck do you want, Lawrence?” she said.

  “Lawrence,” he repeated. “Some people call me by another name.”

  “Creep?” she suggested. “Asshole?”

  Capo tried to ignore that. “I am sorry my brother”—and here Capo paused, pretending to search for just the right word—“dumped you. But you should have known something like that was going to happen.” When Locs didn’t say anything to this, he asked, “What will you do next? Where will you go?”

  “What do you care?” she said. And then, in a different, lonelier voice, she said, “I really don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry,” Capo said. “I know some people who will take you into their home.”

  25

  Broomeville Bulletin, October 12, 2009

  Sheilah Crimmins, age 47, was found dead in her automobile on State Route 356 early Thursday morning. The county coroner has ruled that the deceased died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to reports, Ms. Crimmins had a history of substance abuse and was distraught over recently losing her job at Broomeville Junior-Senior High, where she’d been employed as a guidance counselor for eleven years. She was a lifelong resident of Broomeville and is survived by her older brother, Ronald, also of Broomeville.

  Well, that was bullshit, as far as Ronald was concerned. This was what he’d told Doc the day the newspaper report had come out, which was the day after the police had told him what was going to be in the report, which was a week after Sheilah had died. Ronald was sitting across Doc’s counter from Doc. Doc, in his early sixties, was about fifteen years older than Ronald. He was from Broomeville, too, but Doc must have gone away at some point in his life, because then he’d come back with Crystal, grouchy Crystal. But anyway, as far as Ronald could remember, Doc had always been on the other side of that counter, with his spatula and his greasy apron and his yellow-arm-pitted T-shirt. This seemed like the only thing there was to know about him. But now, Ronald had just discovered another thing.

  “You’re the coroner?”

  “Elected.”

  “I didn’t vote for you.”

  Doc nodded. He picked up the coffee pot and refilled Ronald’s cup. There was no one else in the place. There was basically never anyone else in the place. “Well, somebody did,” Doc said.

  “My sister never owned a gun,” Ronald said, “let alone fired a gun.”

  “I am sorry,” Doc said.

  “If she killed herself,” Ronald said, “then why was the window blown out?” Because this was what the police told him: a bullet had gone through the passenger’s side window, destroying it. Meanwhile his sister’s dead body had been found in the driver’s seat.

  “There were two bullets fired,” Doc said. “One through the window, and then one into her head.”

  “Why would she fire a bullet through her own window?” Ronald wanted to know.

  “Why was she stuck in a snowbank? Same reason she shot out the window before she shot herself. She was really drunk, Ronald,” Doc said. “I’m sorry, but she was.”

  “But she was always really drunk,” Ronald said. “Why would she kill herself?”

  Doc shrugged, as if to say, Hey, I’m just the coroner. “She’d just lost her job,” he said. “Maybe she was distraught.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Ronald said.

  “What part?”

  “All of it.”

  And it was. Ronald knew this because of what had happened earlier that night. The new guidance counselor had shaken Ronald’s fucked-up hand at the baseball game, and it’d bothered the new guidance counselor not at all, and later on Sheilah had said, “Your hand didn’t work.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ronald had said.

  “Hey, it’s all good,” Sheilah had said. They were sitting in the kitchen in the house they shared, which before that had been the house they’d shared with their parents. Sheilah was drinking vodka out of a juice glass. No ice or mixer or fruit or anything. At least she wasn’t drinking it straight out of the bottle. “I wasn’t much good as a guidance counselor anyway.”

  “Maybe you’ll end up being good at something else,” Ronald had said, and Sheilah had lifted her glass in his direction.

  “Maybe I already am,” she’d said. It’d made Ronald so sad to hear his sister say this. But Sheilah had not seemed sad saying it. She did not seem like a person who three hours later, after all the vodka in the house was gone, on the way to doing more of what she was good at at the Lumber Lodge, would decide, You know, maybe I will kill myself, and then somehow, somewhere, from someone, get a gun and then drive herself into a snowbank and then shoot a window and then herself. It was bullshit and Doc was bullshit and the county that had elected him was bullshit and the town in the county and everyone in it was bullshit, including the principal who had fired his sister for bullshit reasons and then hired this guidance counselor, this bullshit Swede or whatever he was, and the bullshit principal’s wife, who was bullshit herself if for no other reason than she’d served Ronald’s sister so many drinks and made so many people laugh at Sheilah and not love her the way Ronald, her bullshit older brother, had loved her, and he, Ronald, was the biggest bullshit of all with his bullshit hand, which was not magic or any bullshit like that, it was just mangled and disgusting and weak and pathetic and it did not tell him anything, it did not tell him, for instance, not to have a funeral for Sheilah, he decided on his own not to have one, because he was afraid that no one would come to the funeral and
how awful that would be, and can you believe that bullshit, oh God, he had not even had a proper funeral for his sister, his only sister, instead he had had her cremated, which is the bullshit term for what you do when you don’t know what to do with a dead person’s body, and then after he did that, he did not know what to do with her ashes, either, there was no special enough place for him to scatter her ashes, no place she loved, and so he just kept the urn on the top of the kitchen cabinet with the dust and that fondue pot, and sometimes when he tried to remember her, to remember her when they were young, for instance that time when their mother was reading a book to them, maybe Sheilah was three and Ronald was six and the book had an armadillo in it and Sheilah said, “What means armadillo?” and Ronald and their mother laughed, it was cute, how she’d said that, and so they laughed, and Sheilah didn’t know why they were laughing or what armadillo meant, and so she said, really mad now, “What means it?” and then they laughed even harder, but whenever he tried to think of that person, of that time, the urn and the supposed self-inflicted gunshot wound to the face and the shot-out passenger’s side window and the car in the snowbank and the alcohol in the bloodstream and all that bullshit got in the way, and the only way he knew to get that bullshit out of the way was to find out who murdered his sister, and it was probably one of two people, either the principal or the new guidance counselor, or maybe it was both, either way, he would find out, he would prove it, and if he couldn’t prove who killed her, then maybe he would just go ahead and kill both of them, and while he was at it maybe he’d kill all of them, maybe he’d kill every single human being in this town and then let the coroner deal with that bullshit, unless Ronald decided to kill the coroner, too.

  26

  Good morning.” This was Matty, talking to Ellen. It was three in the morning. It was after three in the morning. She’d just gotten home, had tiptoed into the room, and had slipped into their bed. Now she was just lying there, hands clasped over her chest, staring at the ceiling, in the way of married people who have slunk into bed too late and think they’ve gotten away with it and are now wondering, Now what? Matty knew this because he’d been, and somewhat still was, the slinker, the wonderer.

  “Good morning.”

  “Jesus!” Ellen said, sitting up straight. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “Well,” Matty said. “I’m not.”

  The wind roared. It would be even colder tomorrow. It would snow some more, too. The wind roared, the windows rattled in their frames. Matty had grown up in this house; he’d bought it from his parents right before they moved to Florida and then died—not on the beach or the golf course, as is the dream, but from a carbon monoxide leak in their condo while they watched television in the middle of the afternoon. Anyway, Matty had lived in this house his entire life, more or less. When the wind was up, the windows had always rattled in their fucking frames. His father had never done anything about it, and so neither had Matty. God, it sounds like the glass is going to break. But no, the glass won’t break, because the glass has never broken. God, I should have lived somewhere else, Matty thought. Anywhere else. But where?

  Ellen lay back down. Matty was on his back, too. She was as close to touching him as she could possibly be without actually touching him. Matty remembered when they were in high school and they’d gone to see a movie and their elbows were on the same armrest and Ellen was as close to touching him as she could possibly have been without actually touching him. This was exactly the opposite of that.

  Still, they didn’t talk. Matty’s mind was nervous. It flitted from Locs to Ellen, Locs to Ellen. Where are you? his mind asked Locs. Where have you been? it asked Ellen. He turned a little and watched his wife watch the ceiling, watched her watch the ceiling for an unbearably long time, thought of the most irritating question one person can ask another person, remembered how Ellen had reacted to his asking that particular question many times over the years by answering as truthfully and pain-givingly as possible, tried to stop himself from asking that question, failed.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked her.

  “That I want a divorce.”

  “Seriously?” he said, and Ellen nodded, still looking at the ceiling, and then Matty rolled onto his back to look at it, too. Why did people look up in times of great distress or sadness? Matty could imagine a student paper on the subject: Throughout the history of mankind, in times of great famine or strife or war, people of all faiths and persuasions would look to the stars for guidance and comfort. That paper would probably get an A–, despite the gross generalizations. But he and Ellen weren’t looking at the stars; they were looking at the ceiling, which needed some serious replastering. Not much comfort there. The whole thing might fall on their heads at any time. Maybe then they could see the stars. Of course, they might already be crushed dead by the fallen ceiling. And possibly there was your comfort.

  “Wow,” Matty said.

  “You asked,” Ellen said.

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Matty,” Ellen said, and she sounded like she meant it. She even put her hand on Matty’s forearm and left it there for a little while, and by the time she moved the hand, Matty felt like he was married again, marriage being in this case something you feel like fighting for only after you’ve already lost it.

  “Am I really going to lose you?” Matty asked.

  “Yes,” Ellen said. “I’m going to sleep now.” Then she rolled away from Matty and did that.

  I am not going to lose you. I am going to fight for you! Matty thought but did not say—mostly because of the transparent emptiness of the sentiment, but also because he wasn’t totally sure whether he was thinking it about Ellen or Locs. And in either case, with what weapon would he fight? And at whom would he aim it?

  PART FOUR

  27

  I have blood on my hands, Søren had decided to say to Jens Baedrup’s widow.

  “I’m going to tell her I have blood on my hands,” was what he said to his friend Tarik.

  “Not literally,” Tarik said.

  “Well, I might not use that exact phrase.”

  “No, I mean you don’t literally have blood on your hands.”

  “Gasoline.”

  “And not even that anymore,” Tarik said. He’d had gasoline on his hands, too. But not blood, literally or figuratively. And in any case, it had been four years ago. Tarik’s general feeling on the matter was, Come on, that was four years ago.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Søren said. “You don’t have blood on your hands.”

  They were walking along Skagen Havn. It was a Saturday, early fall, which felt a lot like early winter. The cold wind was making the sailboats wag and bobble and strain at their moorings. The light was low and giving shine to the dull tankers as they chugged in and out of port. Søren and Tarik had worked all day at the boatyard. Their jobs were decent, decent jobs they hadn’t had four years ago. Four years, four years. The wind gusted and the white awnings flapped over the red fish houses.

  Tarik said, “Why do we paint the fish houses red when we paint every other building in this town yellow?”

  Søren didn’t miss the “we.” Four years ago, Tarik would not have said “we.” That was why they both had gasoline on their hands now, except that Søren had more than just gasoline. That’s why he needed to go see Jens Baedrup’s widow.

  “We,” Søren repeated.

  “Just keep my name out of it,” Tarik said.

  “You wouldn’t say ‘we,’ ” Søren said, “if you had blood on your hands.”

  28

  Søren thought it would probably be difficult to find the address of the widow of a cartoonist whom he’d murdered in what the newspapers had called a terrorist firebombing, but that was not the case. It hadn’t been difficult to find the cartoonist’s address, either. It hadn’t been difficult for Søren to burn down his house, or for Tarik to burn down the newspaper’s offices. It hadn’t even been difficult for them to escape ca
pture after the firebombing, after the newspapers had reported that the cartoonist had died in the fire Søren had set. No one from the police or the Danish Security and Intelligence Service had ever questioned them, even though there were barely any Muslims in Skagen, and even though it had been the only murder committed in Skagen that year, and the year before that, and so on. Murder, murder; blood, blood. That was the difficult part: having the words murder and blood crawl through his head for the past four years. Although he supposed the murder hadn’t been easy for the cartoonist, either. Not to mention his widow.

  Anyway, she lived in Aarhus, just a couple of hours south. The newspaper reports had given him her name. The Internet had given him her address and then directions how to get there. But first Søren had to borrow his dad’s car.

  So he went home, which was less than a mile from the boatyard where he and Tarik worked, right across the street from OC Trawl, where his father worked, making fishing nets. His house was the house in which Søren had grown up and in which he still lived. It was yellow, of course, and had a red tile roof, also of course. His parents’ names were Faruk and Benan, but they’d named him Søren, although their last name was Korkmaz. As far as Søren was concerned, they might as well have just named him Dane, Son of Turks.

  Søren walked in the front door. His father was sitting on the couch, watching professional handball on TV. Handball was his father’s favorite sport, even though he didn’t understand the rules, because pretty much no one understood the rules. You were allowed to run and leap and catch and hurl the ball, except, in some circumstances, for some mysterious reasons, when these activities were forbidden.