The Happiest People in the World (25 page)

W
hen they got to Skagen, Matty wondered aloud, “Well, what now?”

Kurt shrugged. It was his first moment of indecision this entire trip, if you could call what they were on a trip. They were sitting in the car, at a red light. Off to their right was the harbor, which was also, apparently, known as a
havn.
There were no boats in it. It was too late in the season. The little waves washed over the slips. Somewhere a bell made its lonely clanging sound. The rain had turned to snow. “I hear,” Kurt finally said, “that they have good hot dogs on the pedestrian mall.”

So they parked their car and walked to the outdoor pedestrian mall. In the middle of it was the hot dog stand. It served a dozen different kinds of hot dogs. The descriptions of the dogs were in Danish, but the names of the dogs were in English. There were French hot dogs and German hot dogs and also Chicago hot dogs and New York hot dogs and, of course, Danish hot dogs. Matty and Kurt each had two of those. Basically they were hot dogs. But they were very good. Matty and Kurt ate them while sitting on the bench and watching the pedestrians: there were more people in the mall than boats in the
havn,
but not many more. When they finished their dogs, Matty got up to get them two more. And that's when he saw Henry. He turned to see whether Kurt had seen him, too. Kurt had: he was already on his feet. Henry was walking in the direction of their car. They followed him, keeping twenty, thirty feet back. The wind was up and with a
clang
it knocked over a metal sandwich-board sign
.
Henry wheeled around and Matty and Kurt ducked into a doorway. Too late, Matty thought. Matty thought that Henry must have seen them, but maybe not: he kept walking in the same direction, at the same speed, until he reached a car that was parked a couple of blocks away from theirs. Henry got in and drove off. Matty and Kurt ran to their car, jumped in, tried to follow. It seemed as though they had lost Henry, but Kurt kept on the main road, which was called Oddevej. The water was still off to the right, but Matty couldn't see it until they went around the traffic circle, following the sign pointing toward Grenen. Suddenly there was ocean; suddenly there was sand. It was not even four o'clock, but the sun was almost gone. Soon the road was gone, too. It ended in a parking lot. Out of the parking lot was a path that led, it seemed, through the dunes. They parked their car right next to the car Henry had been driving. He was not in it. But he'd stuck a parking pass on the dashboard. The parking pass had come from a machine near the mouth of the path. Jesus, the man is being chased and he stops to make sure he isn't parked illegally. What a . . . , Matty started to think, until he noticed that Kurt was doing the same thing. Oh, buddy, he thought, and he smiled at his good son, and then his son caught him smiling and said, “What?” not smiling.

“Nothing,” Matty said. Kurt stuck the pass on the windshield of their car, and then they walked toward and down the path, which led to the beach, which then led to a long, long spit of land. Matty could barely see the end of it in the light. But he could see a human being between the end and them. Matty and Kurt walked toward the human being, who was looking out at the waves, the dying sun, the tankers way, way off in the distance. “Henry!” Matty called out when they got a little closer. Henry turned to face him. Matty kept walking, and as he did, he keenly felt his bullet scars: one on the right side of his rib cage, one in his right calf. No one had seemed to know whether Henry had been shot. Even if he had, the wounds couldn't have been so bad. He'd gotten away, after all, out of Broomeville and all the way here. But now Matty was near enough to see Henry's face. God, he'd lost a lot of weight. It looked as though his cheekbones were the only things preventing his face from pouring into his neck. He smiled sadly at Matty. The last thing Matty had heard Henry say was, “Please just kill me.” Matty knew Kurt had dreamed of doing just that. Matty had dreamed of it a few times himself. But now he wondered, Are we really going to do this? Is there a point in killing someone who is worse off than you? Because Henry was clearly worse off than Matty. Henry was all alone and Matty was not; Henry had lost everything, but Matty still had Kurt. So Matty was going to say to Kurt, Let's just go home. And because Matty was Kurt's father, Kurt would listen to him. He would give Matty the gun, and Matty would throw it into the water, and then they would go home. But before they did, they would look at the pretty scenery. “It's really beautiful,” Matty said to Henry, and Henry smiled a little less sadly and turned, and they watched the waves from two different seas crash into each other over and over and over again. It was difficult to watch something that beautiful and eternal without thinking that everything really was going to be just fine after all.

“Turn around,” Kurt said. “Both of you.” Matty could tell from Kurt's voice that he was pointing his gun at them. Matty looked at Henry, and Henry nodded, and then they did what Kurt had told them to do. Kurt was standing not five feet away from them. Both of his hands were on the gun, his right index finger curled around the trigger. Even in the darkness, Matty could see that his son did not look scared or angry. He looked like a man who was totally prepared to shoot two men who deserved it. “Kurt,” Matty said, but Kurt wagged the gun as though to say, Don't. That was fine. Matty didn't know what he'd been about to say anyway. He tried to think of something fatherly and authoritative. Put the gun down, Kurt, we've all suffered enough, he wanted to say, but Kurt would probably think that wasn't even close to being true. Is that thing even loaded? Matty thought to ask, except that he was leery of the way Kurt might try to answer that question. Come on, buddy, he thought of saying, let's just go home. That sounded better. He almost said it, too. But then Matty thought of home, where every little thing would remind him of all the lives he'd ruined or ended, where everything—the school, the bar, the diner, the woods, the woodstove—would make him think of his brother, of Locs, of Ellen, and now of Kurt, who hated his father so much that he'd wanted to shoot him to death on a beach in Denmark, because his father deserved it and would always deserve it.

“Oh, buddy,” Matty said. He closed his eyes and took a step toward his son. “Please just kill me,” he said. Then Matty took another step. He felt something on his right, close by, and realized that Henry had taken those steps, too. Matty wasn't sure how to feel about that. Would it be better or worse to die standing next to someone who also deserved it? Anyway, he and Henry stood there, waiting. Matty knew, even through his closed lids, that it was dark outside. He felt dark inside, too. The waves crashed into one another, so loudly that Henry couldn't hear anyone breathing—not Kurt, not Henry, not even himself. For a second he wondered whether he was dead, whether Kurt had already shot him and Matty had somehow missed it, when he heard Kurt yell, “Fuck!” three times. Then Matty heard sprinting noises. He opened his eyes. Kurt wasn't standing in front of him anymore. He glanced to his right, and Henry was standing there, looking at Matty with big eyes. Matty then turned to his left and squinted into the dusk and saw his son, his beautiful boy, run into the sea, up to his knees, and then hurl the gun as far as he could. It landed with a
plunk
. Then Kurt turned and walked back toward them, jeans wet, looking sheepish, the way you do when you make a big, dramatic gesture and then have to go hang out with the people who saw you make it.

“Don't say anything,” Kurt said when he got back to where Matty and Henry were standing. They didn't. They turned away from the sea into which Kurt had thrown the gun and stared at the other sea for a while, until finally Kurt said, “I don't want to go home.”

“Me, neither,” Matty said.

“But where . . . ,” Henry began to say. His voice sounded scratchy, as though he hadn't spoken to anyone in a very long time. He cleared his throat and tried again. “But where will you go?” Henry asked. And frankly, Matty had no idea. He thought of all the places they could go, all the places he'd never been. There were too many of them, and he was afraid that in all of them, there would still be his brother, there would still be Locs, there would still be Ellen. No, Kurt would have to decide. Kurt had decided not to kill him, and now Kurt was going to have to keep deciding until he decided otherwise.

“Tell us about Denmark,” Kurt said. “Tell us about Skagen.” When Henry heard that, his head jerked back toward the other sea, where Kurt's gun was. It seemed, for a second, like he was going to run toward it. But instead he stood there for a long while, armed crossed, frowning, seemingly in the process of making his own decision. His lips were moving, as though he were talking to someone, even though neither Matty nor Kurt could hear any words. Finally, Henry nodded and said, “It is said that the Danes are the happiest people in the world, and if that's true, then the people from Skagen are happier even than that.”

“That sounds nice,” Kurt said. He'd meant for that to be sarcastic but was in fact startled by how much he wanted it to be true. Henry smiled at him and said, “It does.” The three of them then walked away from the water, toward their cars. When they reached the dunes overlooking the parking lot, Henry said, “I think everything is going to be just fine. I really think you're going to like it here.” He didn't sound as though he totally believed it himself. But they got into their cars and drove back toward Skagen anyway. They had to. There was absolutely nowhere else for them to go.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks, once again, to Keith Lee Morris, Trenton Lee Stewart, and Michael Lee Griffith.

Thanks to all the people who, over the last four years, listened to me talk about this book, or distracted me from talking about this book, especially: Sarah Beth Estes, David Stradling, Jodie Zultowski, Nicola Mason, Leah Stewart, Pete Coviello, Mike Paterniti, Sara Corbett, Mark Wethli, Cassie Jones, Aaron Kitch, Allison Cooper, Ann Kibbie, Kevin Wertheim, Jon and Naomi Mermin, Justin Tussing, Sarah Maloney, Barb and Michael Stoddard, Marilyn Reizbaum, Nicole Lamy, Josh Bodwell, the Longfellow Books crew, Rupert and Kiki Chisholm, Dorn and Jan Ulrich, Tara and Trent Ulrich, Anne Maclean and Colin Clarke, Alonzo Clarke and Carla Romano Clarke, and E. G. and Peter Clarke.

Thanks to the writers who allowed their kind words to be printed on this book's back cover.

Thanks to my friends, colleagues, and students at Bowdoin College, University of Cincinnati, and University of Tampa.

Thanks to Bowdoin College for its financial support.

Thanks to the editors at
Five Points,
who published an excerpt from this novel.

Thanks to my agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman.

Thanks to Chuck Adams, and to everyone at Algonquin Books.

And thanks especially to Lane, Quinn, and Ambrose, for traveling with me to Denmark, and for everything else.

Brock Clarke is the author of
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England,
which was a national bestseller and has appeared in a dozen foreign editions, and three other books. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College. Find him online at
www.brockclarke.com
. (Author photo by Selby Frame.)

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© 2014 by Brock Clarke.

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This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

eISBN 978-1-61620-429-7