The Happiest People in the World: A Novel Read online

  Go to the Lumber Lodge and ask for Matthew. This was what Locs had told him to do. “Broomeville!” the bus driver was calling. But Henrik did not move. Suddenly this seemed like a terrible idea; a moment earlier the new world had seemed full of hope, but now it seemed full of mystery and menace. Why would Locs send him to this strange place with its strange flag? Why didn’t she bring him herself? Who was this Matthew? Matthew doesn’t even know who he is. That’s what Locs had said. But what was that supposed to mean? And did that really need saying? Does anyone really know who he is? I do, thought Henrik. I’m Henrik Larsen. OK, but who was he? Was he any different from Jens Baedrup? How? Who was going to teach him how Henrik was different from Jens? “Who’s getting off at Broomeville!” the bus driver yelled before exiting the bus.

  The man across the aisle scooted toward him and whispered, “That’s you.” Henrik didn’t know how he knew this. But the man was right. Henrik got out of his seat, walked down the aisle, down the stairs, picked up his bags from where the bus driver had placed them on the sidewalk, and walked toward the Lumber Lodge. He had to. There was absolutely nowhere else for him to go.

  11

  He did what?” she asked into her cell phone, and then she listened to the whole story again. At the end of it, she had two questions.

  “Why did you say it was Stephen Ray Vaughan’s birthday?” Locs knew it was Stevie, not Stephen, but she refused to refer to grown men, even dead grown men, by their boyish diminutives.

  “Because it really is his birthday,” the agent said. “And his name was Stevie. He hated to be called Stephen. His mother called him Stephen.”

  Jesus Christ, Locs thought, they’ll let anyone be an agent nowadays. But maybe they’d always let anyone be an agent. The agent who’d recruited her, for example.

  “And why did you say that about Stephen Wonder?” she asked. The agent didn’t say anything back at first. Locs knew he was wondering whether he should correct her again, and if he did, whether she would have him fired or murdered.

  “Because the guy looked so sad,” the agent finally said.

  “But hopeful,” Locs said.

  “That made it even sadder,” the agent said. “I wanted to hug him.”

  “Or slap him,” Locs said. “Either way, he failed the test.”

  “You knew he was going to.”

  “I didn’t know,” Locs said. But she did. The test was for the agent to try to get Henrik to call attention to himself, to do something stupid, which she had specifically told Henrik not to do. And if Henrik failed the test, then Locs would have to go to Broomeville under the lame pretense that she and she alone could make sure he didn’t do anything else stupid. In truth, she’d already gotten a rental car and was well on her way to Broomeville. She’d known Henrik would fail. And in knowing that, she’d known that she would fail, too.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t just drive him to Broomeville in the first place,” the agent said.

  Because I wanted to give myself one last chance not to go back to Broomeville, Locs thought but did not say. “Because Capo wanted it to happen this way,” Locs said. “It was his idea.” This was untrue. Capo was her superior and the agent who’d first recruited her. As far as Capo knew, she was still in Berlin. And if Capo found out that she wasn’t still in Berlin . . . well, Capo was well known for the manner in which he took care of people who weren’t where they were supposed to be. But Locs didn’t want to think about Capo just now.

  “Capo—” the agent started to say, but Locs cut him off.

  “You shouldn’t be worried about Capo,” she said with authority, because she was the agent’s superior, the way Capo was hers. “It’s me you should be worried about.”

  Then Locs went quiet and let him think about that for a while. The agent was still on the bus. She could hear its noises in the background—the in-bus movie, the people in the back softly debating whether they could do drugs right in their seats or whether they should repair to the bathroom. Where did the bus go after Broomeville anyway? Canada? Canada was its own country. It had sovereign rights. Nevertheless, she had people in Canada.

  “Please don’t have me fired,” the agent said.

  “Or murdered,” Locs said, and she hung up. Two hours from now, she would be in Broomeville. It had been seven years since she’d last been there, eight and a half years since she’d first moved there, eight years since she’d first kissed Matthew. Locs back then was not yet Locs. She was still Lorraine. Lorraine Callahan. She’d moved to Broomeville to work for the national wildlife department’s northern New York division. Her job: to look through binoculars. She was looking for American bald eagles on land that was owned by the federal government and leased to Broomeville Forestry Resources Management, a company that, had it been given a more accurate name, would have been titled Broomeville Lumber Company. Or better yet, Broomeville Tree Killers, Inc. It had been that kind of joke that had made Locs especially friendless during her first six months in Broomeville. Her job hadn’t helped, either. If she saw an American bald eagle in one of the trees leased to Broomeville Forestry Resources Management, then she would report it to her superiors, and BFRM would no longer be allowed to manage resources in that particular part of the forest. So far, she’d spotted six eagles in six different parts of the forest. This was another reason she’d been especially friendless during her first six months in Broomeville.

  Anyway, it had been early November. Snow was falling lazily, as though it mostly couldn’t be bothered. Lorraine was in the forest, looking through binoculars, even though it was a Saturday, because what else did she have to do? “Locs,” someone said from behind her.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Lorraine said, wheeling around, dropping her binoculars. It was the principal. She’d of course met him. In a town this small, you couldn’t help but meet the junior-senior high school principal. She’d even been to a party at his big old gloomy stone house out by the river. This was the kind of party to which anyone who was anyone was invited, and in Broomeville, if you were a new person, then you were someone, even if you were someone whom no one particularly trusted or liked or wanted to stick around for very long. Lorraine liked the principal, maybe because he seemed to like her. His wife, Ellen, she didn’t like so much, maybe because Ellen called her husband Matty, which Lorraine hated, or maybe because Matty’s wife didn’t seem to like Lorraine much, maybe because Lorraine made a big deal out of calling him Matthew.

  “Matthew,” Matthew had repeated when she’d called him that at the party. He smiled, showing teeth. He was the Broomeville Junior-Senior High School principal, which was lame, and he was ten years older than Lorraine and also married, with a kid, which was lame, too. But Lorraine did like him when he smiled like that. “No one ever calls me Matthew,” he said, smiling, and his wife looked at him in that way married people look at each other when they’re promising to get into a really big fight later on, when there aren’t so many people around.

  Lorraine hadn’t been invited over to Matthew’s house since that once, but she saw him often enough around town, and each time, they talked and acted as though they’d known each other longer and better than they actually did.

  Matthew bent over, picked up the binoculars, handed them to her. He was wearing clothes that you wore in the woods during hunting season, even if you weren’t hunting—a bright red-and-black lined flannel shirt, a red hooded sweatshirt underneath, somewhat fouled jeans, work boots—but also a red baseball hat emblazoned with a white letter C.

  “I was just out for a walk,” he said.

  “I like your hat,” she said.

  “I went to Cornell,” he said.

  “And that’s why I like it,” she said. “I went there, too.”

  He smiled at her in that way again, took off his hat, and put it on her head, and when she started to protest, he said, “Don’t worry. I have lots of them.” Then he looked around and said, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Lorraine looked away from him and back at the fores
t. It was snowing a little bit harder now. The maples and walnuts were stark and naked and tough-looking even without their leaves; the evergreens and their droopy branches caught and held the snow. It sounded like the wind was blowing somewhere, but it was not blowing there. It is impossible to feel warm and cold at the same time. But where they were standing felt warm and cold at the same time. It really was beautiful. How could Lorraine not have noticed this? You missed a lot when you spent so much time looking through binoculars. She turned back to Matthew, and he was looking at her the way she’d been looking at the trees, the snow.

  “What did you call me earlier?” she asked, and he repeated it, a sheepish smile on his face.

  “Short for Lorraine Callahan,” he admitted. “I sometimes call you that, in my head.” He was still smiling at her, but not so sheepishly now. Locs, Locs. It was, heard objectively, an unforgivably stupid nickname. But Locs did not hear it objectively. It was the first time anyone had ever given her a nickname.

  “Are we really going to do this?” Locs had said. Matthew didn’t say anything. He kissed her, but before he did that, he reached over and softly, softly, traced the marks the binoculars had made around her eyes.

  12

  The first thing Henrik noticed in the Lumber Lodge was the moose head on the wall opposite the entrance. Then the neon Saranac beer paraphernalia—neon signs, canoe paddles, T-shirts nailed to the walls—scattered everywhere. And then, finally, the large, beeping video game machine in the back corner. There were three teenage boys facing the machine; the one in the middle seemed to be the one playing the game, and the two on either side of him were spectators, or cheerleaders, or critics, Henrik couldn’t tell which. “Get it!” the two kept yelling. “I’m trying!” the one in the middle kept saying, but this didn’t seem to have much of an effect on his companions. “Get it!” they screamed. “Get fucking it!” After another half minute of this, the machine made a sound that was somewhere between laughing and dying, which caused the boy in the middle to smack the machine with the palms of both hands. “You didn’t get it,” the boy on the right said, and the boy in the middle struck the machine again.

  “Easy, Kurt,” said a woman’s voice, coming from Henrik’s right. He turned and saw her, behind the bar, where she hadn’t been a second before. Behind her, on the wall, was a mural featuring hunters and large wild animals in snowy nature, neither group paying attention to the other, both of them basically just hanging out among the pines and boulders and snowdrifts, everyone minding their own business.

  “Soup!” the woman said in the direction of the boys. The first thing Henrik noticed was that she had yellow hair. This was not a problem with translation: the woman’s hair was yellow, not blond, the difference being that yellow is a color found in nature whereas blond is a color found in hair. Her face was ruddy, raw-seeming, but still somehow smooth and shiny. Her cheeks were round and high, and on them were brown freckles, and above them were blue eyes, ice-blue eyes that looked as though they were melted. In other words, her eyes were watery. Possibly because she’d come from the kitchen and was holding three bowls of steaming something. This might have explained the color and texture of her skin, too. But nonetheless, to Henrik she looked rough, and beautiful: like a valuable rock cut with indelicate tools.

  Henrik was obviously paying lots of attention to the woman, but the woman hadn’t seemed to notice him, and the boys hadn’t seemed to notice either of them. Instead they seemed to be having an argument about letters. “I-G-N,” one of them said. “That me, that’s my high score.” And another said, “You’re not an I nor a G nor an N, botard.”

  “Boys!” the woman yelled. “Soup. Now!”

  This time, the boys paid attention. They scuffed over, heads lowered, and, without a word of thanks or any other word, took their bowls and retreated to a table adjacent to the machine, where they commenced slurping.

  That accomplished, the woman finally recognized Henrik’s presence. This is not to say that she said anything to him. She merely tucked her hair behind her ears, then began taking dirty glasses from the bar surface and depositing them into a container of steaming water. As she did this, she looked directly at Henrik, not at the glasses or the water. This was something he’d learned to do in art school. His teacher made Henrik draw without looking at the drawing. “You can see the soul only when you are not looking,” his teacher had taught. The teacher, with his gnarled hands and his whiskers, had seemed like the cartoon of wisdom, and so Henrik always listened to him, although Henrik never did learn whether he was supposed to be seeing the cartoon’s soul or his own, or maybe his teacher’s. Anyway, two by two, the woman whisked the glasses off the bar top and deposited them somewhere below, her eyes peering through the steam. Those eyes, those eyes. They really did make Henrik feel like she was looking into his soul. Her eyes were so beautiful they could make you forget who you were, or at least who you were supposed to ask for upon entering the Lumber Lodge. But Locs had given Henrik the impression that the Lumber Lodge was going to be his new home. Except it seemed to be only a tavern, not a hotel or pension or anything like that.

  “Are there rooms here?” Henrik finally asked, and the woman raised her left eyebrow to say something with it, possibly, Why, yes, you’re in one. So he clarified: “Are there rooms to let?”

  “To let?” she said, with her mouth this time, although also with her eyebrow, which remained raised.

  “Yes,” Henrik said, trying to sound sure of himself, although he wasn’t. He knew let was the word he wanted, but he wasn’t sure whether it was the word the woman wanted or one she even knew. What other word might be the word he was looking for? Sale, possibly, but he did not want to own the room, and when he was done with it (he assumed he would be done with it eventually, and possibly sooner than that), he didn’t want to have to sell it to someone else. Rent was another possibility, but didn’t that word also mean “torn”? Did it only mean “torn”? Henrik didn’t want to take the chance and end up asking the woman whether she had any torn rooms or whether he might tear one that wasn’t already torn. Then she might never let him let a room. And once he thought that sentence, he wondered if let was the right word after all. But he decided to stick with it anyway. “Let.”

  “Let,” the woman repeated. “Let you do what?”

  “Excuse me?’

  “In the room,” she said. “You’d want me to let you do what in the room?”

  Henrik turned to look at the boys, but they didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything but their soup. He then turned back to the woman, who was still peering at him through the steam. Was this an invitation? And if it was, would Henrik accept it or decline? On the one hand, he was married. On the other hand, he was dead. You have to act like I’m dead, he’d told his wife. I can do that, she’d said. She hadn’t even needed to think about it. “Hey, wait,” the woman said, her face brightening a little, “are you. . . ” She seemed to want Henrik to finish the sentence for her.

  “Henrik Larsen,” he said.

  “Right,” she said. “Do you go by Henrik or just Henry?” The way she said “Henrik” left no doubt that he should go by just Henry.

  “Just Henry,” Henry said, and then he finally remembered what he was supposed to do, once in Broomeville. “Is Matthew here?”

  “Matthew?” she said. She said the name like she’d said “Henrik.”

  “Matthew,” said one of the boys, in the same voice.

  “That’s my son, Kurt, and those are his cronies,” the woman said, gesturing behind Henry. Henry didn’t know that word—cronies—but he guessed it referred to the two boys who had forsaken their spoons and were now drinking directly from their bowls. That meant Kurt was the thin, curly-headed boy with the spacey blue eyes who’d been striking the machine earlier. Now he seemed to be paying attention to Henry. He nodded at Henry, and Henry smiled in return, and the boy scowled back. Henry turned back to the woman.

  “Matthew,” she said again. There was an expressi
on on her face that suggested she really wanted to punch someone. Henry took a step back from the bar. “Do you mean Matty?”

  “Do I?”

  “Matthew,” she said. “No one calls him Matthew.”

  “No one?” Henry said. Because he’d been given very strict instructions. Go to the Lumber Lodge. Ask for Matthew. Meanwhile the woman still had that look on her face.

  “Almost no one,” she said.

  13

  Matthew, Matthew. Kurt’s mother must have said “Matthew” about a thousand times, like it was more than just a name. It wasn’t. It was just a name: his father’s name. Although it was true that almost no one called him that, except for his mother, and only when she was mad at him. And even then, when she called him Matthew, it was like she was impersonating someone else who called him by that name. Like when he called Kevin and Tyler his cronies, which was not his but rather his mother’s name for them.