The Happiest People in the World (24 page)

T
wo days later. Henry had disappeared. Kurt had been shot, but just barely, and had already been released from the hospital in Utica. He'd be OK. Kurt's father was still in the hospital. He would probably be OK. Uncle Lawrence was still in the hospital, too. He would definitely not be OK. He would die. Everyone else who'd been in the Lumber Lodge, including Kurt's mother, was already dead. Now, Kurt was back in the hospital, in his uncle's room, trying to find out why.

“Why is this happening?” he asked his uncle Lawrence, and Uncle Lawrence told him. Uncle Lawrence told him every last thing he knew, which was a lot. It was a long story. By the end, Uncle Lawrence was gasping more than actually speaking. “What's going to happen next?” Kurt asked him, and Uncle Lawrence told him that, too. “It is illegal for private citizens to buy, sell, or own firearms in Denmark, unless for the purposes of hunting or sport shooting, and only then on rare occasions, and with a hard-to-procure permit,” Uncle Lawrence said. It was like he was making a presentation in social studies or something. If there was anything more pathetic than an adult making a school presentation on his deathbed, then Kurt didn't know what it was. “But just because it's illegal to buy a gun doesn't mean it's impossible.”

Soon after that, Uncle Lawrence died. Several weeks after that, Kurt's father was well enough to go home. By now, it was the second Sunday in November. Kurt got the woodstove going. He sat his father in the chair right by the stove, with a blanket over his lap. Kurt made his father a drink. They watched the late football game, mostly in silence. When it was over, Kurt turned off the TV and told his father that they were going to go find Henry. Jens. It didn't really matter to Kurt what his real name was, as long as they found him and killed him for killing Kurt's mom. Matty didn't argue. The shooting had changed their relationship. Matty was forty-eight, and Kurt was sixteen, but they were already at the point in their lives where the son had become more capable than the father. “But where do you think he is?” Matty asked. “If you were him, where would you run?”

Here, Kurt thought. “Home,” he said. And a week later they were on a plane from JFK to Copenhagen.

PART EIGHT

U
pon exiting the Copenhagen Airport, the first thing Matty asked Kurt was, “So where can we get a gun?” Matty had never owned, held, or fired a gun, let alone bought one, let alone bought one in another country. Except for Canada, which everyone knew didn't count, Matty had never even
been
to another country before now. Neither had Kurt. But Matty knew that Kurt had done his homework, meaning that he'd probably just looked it up on the Internet before they'd left home.

“It is illegal for private citizens to buy, sell, or own firearms in Denmark, unless for the purposes of hunting or sport shooting, and only then on rare occasions, and with a hard-to-procure permit,” Kurt began. It was like he was making a presentation in social studies or something. Oh, buddy, I love you so much, Matty thought. If there was something more guaranteed to make a parent love their child than watching that child make a presentation at school, then Matty didn't know what it was. “But just because it's illegal to buy a gun doesn't mean it's impossible. According to my research, the best place to buy a gun in Copenhagen is Nørrebro.” They took the train to Nørreport Station, then walked across one of the bridges that spanned one of the five lakes, about which Matty wanted to say, Wow, look at all the pretty lakes. Except that the lakes were really ponds and most of them were so choked with algae and who knows what else that even the swans were swimming with care, trying not to drink, eat, or even touch anything that might make them throw up later on.

Anyway, Matty and Kurt walked across Dronning Louises Bro and onto Nørrebrogade. Kurt knew where they were supposed to be going, so Kurt was in charge of the map, so Matty was able to look around. As far as he could see, Copenhagen was gloomy and beautiful. It was a very northern kind of beauty. Once in a while a shaft of sunlight would break free of the black clouds, and when it did, you could really appreciate how dark and gloomy everything was. They were walking through a neighborhood of churches. The churches looked prosperous but sooty. This is not to say they were dirty. Matty was pretty sure they'd been made to look that way. Even the stained-glass windows were black in the sun. If you didn't find that kind of thing beautiful, then you might as well get out of Copenhagen. Matty thought it was the most beautiful place he'd ever been to. But then again, he'd only been to a few places, and regardless, he and Kurt were getting out of Copenhagen, just as soon as they managed to buy a gun.

“Dad,” Kurt said, yelled actually. He was a block ahead. He flapped and then folded the map, then gave his father a look that said, Come on, old man, this gun isn't going to buy itself. Matty had two questions: Who is responsible for turning my sixteen-year-old son from Broomeville, New York, into someone who knows how, and can't wait, to buy a gun in Copenhagen? And, Are we really going to do this? But the first was only a rhetorical question. And it was too late to ask the second. He ran to catch up to his son, and then they continued north, north, toward Nørrebro.

W
ho do you buy your pot from?” Matty asked. They were in the heart of Nørrebro now. Or what Matty assumed was the heart. It was crowded, at least. On their right was an endless stretch of somewhat shabby three-story apartment buildings that at some point had been painted pink and yellow but now had gone mostly to grime. The buildings' first floors were storefronts that still had their metal curtains pulled down. On Matty and Kurt's left were card table after card table loaded with cassette tapes, CDs, books that had probably been lifted from a library, pipes you could smoke tobacco and drugs out of, pipes that were intended to make water flow in and out of your kitchen sink, kitchen appliances and utensils of all kinds. There was one table that featured only ceiling fans, a half-dozen ceiling fans, all of them with the wires sticking out. But mostly the tables were laden with blue jeans. Piles and piles of blue jeans, piles so tall that you wouldn't be able to riffle through them to find your size without causing a huge mess. Where did all these blue jeans come from? Matty wondered. And who bought them? None of the people selling them were wearing jeans; they were wearing dashikis. That's what Matty thought they were called, at least. And very few of the potential customers were wearing the jeans, either; they were mostly wearing dashikis, too. The only people wearing jeans were Matty and Kurt and most of the people riding their bikes and ringing their little bells as they streamed past in the bike lane. The bikers never yelled. If someone even looked like they might cross their path, the bikers just gently went
ding, ding.
And people actually got out of their way! It was incredible. The bike lane separated the tables and the street proper. Behind the tables was a ten-foot-high yellow wall, and the wall was periodically interrupted by enormous wrought-iron gates. Matty could see through the gates that on the other side of the wall was a cemetery. Matty wondered aloud what is was called and whether it was known for anything.

“Assistens,” Kurt said. “Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen are buried there.” But mostly Matty and Kurt didn't talk. Mostly they just walked slowly by the tables. To Matty it felt like they were window-shopping for a gun, which Matty guessed would not be on display, and in any case there were no windows. Kurt was saying the same word over and over again, under his breath, so that only the vendors, or whatever you called them, could hear. The vendors all looked, more or less, from Matty's point of view, like the stranger who'd ended up not being Jens Baedrup—most of them had dark beards, some of them were sleepy-eyed, all of them had dark skin, or at least skin that was darker than Matty's or Kurt's—and so far none of them had responded to the word Kurt was saying, although several of them raised their eyebrows and screwed up their faces, the universal sign for, Sorry, what? Matty couldn't quite understand the word; it was probably some Danish buyer's code for guns
.
Kurt had probably learned that from the Internet, too. Or maybe he learned it when he'd learned the American buyer's code for pot. “Who do you buy your pot from?”

“Who,” Kurt repeated. “From.” This was Matty's own tactic, and the tactic of all educators and parents everywhere. Anytime one of his students or his son made a grammatical error, Matty repeated the error, out loud, just so the poor kid could hear how incredibly
wrong
it sounded. But you know, sometimes it didn't sound all that bad. Better, at least, than the grammatically correct alternative. Matty could tell by the tone of Kurt's voice as he said the word in Danish that he was starting to get impatient. But even so, Kurt was obviously having a hard time not smiling now; Matty knew Kurt was looking forward to hearing his dad say,
From whom
did you buy your pot?

“Who do you buy your pot from?” Matty repeated.

“
Dr.
Vernon,” Kurt said.

“No.” This genuinely shocked Matty. He'd always considered Vernon a friend, or at least not an enemy. At the very least he didn't think the guy dealt drugs to students. Matty should have been furious with him. But all he could think was, Poor guy. Although it did explain some things. Although mostly he still couldn't believe it. “
Dr.
Vernon sold you pot?”

“Sometimes,” Kurt said. “But mostly I just smoked his.”

“Well, that
is
a relief,” Matty said, and Kurt looked at him. The look was strange. With it, Kurt seemed to be trying to say, I don't want to hurt you anymore. It was basically the opposite of every look Kurt had ever given Matty since Matty could remember. It made Matty want to take back all the things he'd ever said that had caused Kurt to look at him that way in the first place.

“Don't worry, I'm done with that,” Kurt said. Then Kurt started muttering that word again. Muttering it and muttering it until they were almost at the end of the block. Matty could see the cemetery wall turn left. Straight, across the intersection, were more tables, more blue jeans, more dark-skinned men in dashikis. But right before the intersection, there was a man standing alone behind one of the tables. On the table were two enormous towers of blue jeans. Kurt leaned over and said that word, and the man smiled, scratched his beard, and in English told Kurt, “Your friend needs new dungarees.”

Dungarees! Matty thought but did not say. “No, thank you,” Matty said.

“Dad,” Kurt said. And then to the man, he said, “How much?”

“I don't need new jeans,” Matty said.

“I think you do,” Kurt said.

“Two thousand kroner,” the man said.

“
Two thousand kroner
?” Matty repeated. He tried to do the math in his head. “How much
is
that?”

“How much is two thousand kroner?” the man asked. He seemed honestly baffled by the question. He scrunched his face in Kurt's direction, and Kurt scrunched his in Matty's.

“Dad, please,” he said.

“But isn't that way too much for a pair of jeans?” Matty said. Denmark was expensive, but he knew it wasn't that expensive. Plus, there was nothing special about these jeans. They seemed to be Wranglers, but not really: There was something wrong with the stitching on the back pockets. The
W'
s were all wobbly, as though they'd been sewn by a passenger on a small boat sailing in a big sea.

Kurt leaned away from the man, toward his father, and whispered, “I don't think we're really paying for the jeans.” And then Matty finally got it. He reached into his front pocket—he could not be made to say “fanny pack,” let alone wear one—pulled out his wallet, and handed the man the cash. The man took it and counted it. He then folded the jeans carefully and slid them across the table. Kurt held the jeans to his chest, and he and Matty went back the way they'd come, past all the tables, back on the train, back to the airport, to the rental car counter, where Matty got the car, because Kurt was too young to get the car. Kurt did drive it, though, out of Copenhagen and onto the highway, as though he'd been doing this all his life. At one point, just outside the city, after the traffic had thinned, Matty turned and noticed that the dungarees they'd bought were flung across the backseat. Clearly there was no gun in them. Kurt must have put the gun in his jacket pocket. And only then did Matty ask his son, “What was the word you kept saying in Nørrebro?” Even Matty heard himself mangling the pronunciation. He was like a lot of Americans: he pronounced foreign words with a dramatic French accent, even though he didn't speak French, either.

“Nørrebro,” Kurt said, getting it right, Matty assumed. “Capo.”

“What?”

“Capo,” Kurt said. “That's the word I was saying.”

“Capo,” Matty repeated. The word didn't sound Danish. Matty was pretty sure it was Italian—he'd probably heard it in a gangster movie—and that it meant “boss,” or something. “Isn't that Italian for ‘boss'?”

“No,” Kurt said. “It's a made-up word. It doesn't mean anything.” Matty recognized Kurt's tone. It's the tone you take with your kid when you want him to stop asking you annoying questions and go to sleep already. Matty did that. When he woke up, they were going over a bridge. The bridge was enormous. So were the fjords. The cliffs. The yawning open water. How was it possible, Matty had wondered, for such a small country to be made up of such big things?

And then they reached the other side, and the landscape had changed, dramatically, away from the dramatic.

“Is that wheat?” Matty asked. He pointed out the passenger's side window at the fields, where something stumpy and brown was growing, or dying, in neat rows that stretched from the road to the sea. Kurt told him that they were just over an hour from Skagen. The rain was falling, dark was falling, the temperature was falling: the dashboard said it was 2°C, whatever that meant. They were driving a white BMW sedan; it had been the cheapest rental car available at the Hertz in the Copenhagen Airport. Which is not to say it was cheap. I am in Denmark, Matty thought. I am in Denmark with my son, who is driving a luxury automobile. Then Matty pointed out the window again. “I wonder if that's wheat,” he said, and when he did, he could hear Ellen laughing. Matty liked to think that he was the most cosmopolitan man in Broomeville. And other than his brother, that might have actually been true. But one second in any place outside upstate New York, and Matty had always started to act like the rube he'd always tried very hard not to be. On his and Ellen's honeymoon in New York City, for instance, Matty hadn't been able to get over how expensive everything was. When they went out to dinner, he took one look at the menu and said, unbelievably loudly, as though he were addressing not just Ellen but the entire restaurant, “Jeez, I hope the water's free!” Ellen had laughed at him then, and he wondered whether she would have laughed at him now, too.

“Do you think that's wheat?” he asked, and then he started laughing.

“What's so funny?”

“I was just thinking about your mom,” Matty said, and then Kurt's face went stony. This had been happening lately. Kurt would not talk about his mother. He would not talk about her at all. The subject made Kurt mute. For instance, a week after the shooting, when Matty was still in the hospital, Kurt had come to visit him and caught his father crying.

“Hey,” Kurt had said. He'd leaned over Matty's hospital bed and hugged him.

“I was just thinking about your mom,” Matty had said into Kurt's shoulder, and immediately Kurt had stopped hugging him. He'd plopped down into the chair next to the bed and started watching the soap opera on the television set, not looking at his father, not saying a word. He wasn't saying a word now, either. They passed a sign that read
SKAGEN
90 km. Matty had run a 10K once, and so he knew that ninety kilometers was fifty-five miles, more or less. He could imagine his son not speaking for the rest of the trip, and maybe not ever, if Matty kept talking about Ellen. “I'll shut up,” Matty said.

“That might be a good idea,” Kurt said. His voice was strangled. It's the way your voice sounds when you're mad at someone for almost making you cry.

“Fair enough,” Matty said. But he was surprised when, a minute later, Kurt said, “Anything you want to tell me?”

Matty turned and saw that Kurt was looking at him with cold, tired eyes. He was like the cop in the movies who says to the criminal, I know about everything you've done, so you might as well just tell me about everything you've done.

And wow, Matty almost told Kurt. He almost said, I cheated on your mother with a woman named Locs. He almost went on through every terrible thing, every lie, every bit of deception and duplicitousness and doubt. And Matty actually might have done it, too. He might have told that story, if it had ended with, And that's why your mother died. That's why every single person in that room except for me and you and Henry died, and I'm sorry, because really, if you look at it a certain way, if you look at it a lot of certain ways, if you look at how it began and who it started with, then it started with me, and it's my fault that your mother was killed, and I would do anything to change that, but I can't, it's my fault, I'm sorry, please forgive me. Matty might have actually told that story, if it had ended there. But it would not have ended there. It would have gone on, into the hospital room, when Kurt had caught Matty crying and Matty had said he'd been thinking about Ellen, which was not true. He'd thought and cried plenty about Ellen, just as he'd thought and cried about his brother, his poor, weird brother, whom he'd never loved well enough. And he'd thought and cried plenty about Kurt himself, Kurt, whom he'd turned into a half orphan, Kurt, who clearly would have been better off if Matty had been killed and Ellen had lived. But in the hospital room that day, Matty had not been thinking of any of those things, nor of any of those people. No, he'd been thinking about Locs, about the first time he'd kissed her; he'd been thinking about how he really did love her; he'd been thinking about how all of this could have been avoided if he'd just gone ahead and done what he'd promised Locs he would do, and that if he'd done that, everything and everybody would have ended up just fine. That's what he'd been crying and thinking about in the hospital room that day. That's where the story would have ended. And Matty just couldn't tell Kurt that story. He looked away from Kurt and out the window.

“That's gotta be wheat,” Matty finally said, and neither he nor Kurt said another word until they reached Skagen.