Out on the deck of the express ferry, Elias wills the woman in the billowy blue windbreaker to return inside so he can drop the backpack that is at his feet into the sea. Under the stones in the pack lie the belongings of a Spaniard found dead in a park near Elias’s home.
The woman is photographing the vacation cottages and boathouses, flagpole pendants slithering in the wind. The ferry passes a gap in the islands and skerries where the chop and wind from the North Sea find direct passage. She holds onto the railing, as does he; wind and gravity now less-friendly forces in his old age.
The dead man’s backpack came into Elias’s possession a week earlier, in the same hour that a Spanish woman ran up to him while he was gardening. She asked if she might have a glass of water, then remained in his kitchen, sipping. She told him she’d come into town on a cruise ship that morning and wasn’t going back. She had planned her disappearance from her husband for over a year. When Elias suggested the police, she said her situation was too complicated. She didn’t have the English words to explain it.
Elias offered the woman his bedsit for the night, the one he rents to university students during the school year. He went up the steep stairs with a towel and a set of clean bedding while she made a phone call from his kitchen. He liked the idea of his house being a place of refuge. He swept the windowsill’s audience of dead flies and wasps into his palm, unlatched the window, and tossed them out. He heard a cruise ship’s horn beckoning its passengers back. Then he heard a man’s voice growl downstairs, followed by sounds that bruised, sounds he hadn’t heard in ages. Pummeling.
Seeing the Spanish woman in a headlock, Elias reached for the stove’s poker and swung it into the back of the man’s head, turning the intruder into a heap on the floor. Released from the man’s hold, the woman gave the body a probing nudge with her shoe. She began kicking the fallen man’s head until Elias pulled her away. The woman was stronger and went back to the body, tearing the man’s backpack from limp arms that reached out, as though aware of what she was taking: cash, credit cards, a phone. She ran out the door. Elias went after her, as much to escape the man lying in his kitchen as to demand answers. But without his cane, his pace was cautious. He lost sight of her after a few minutes. He still believed, back then, that the story she’d told him was true. That the man was her abusive husband. Heading back home, Elias saw the man stumbling downhill, blood smeared against his misaligned jaw and painted on his shirt. Elias felt a dizziness come over him, a sense that he was both there and not there, his mind ready to disassociate from the pain of a coming blow.
“You see a woman?” the man’s tortured voice asked.
Elias realized that the man didn’t recognize him. Elias shook his head and the man went on with a curse and a wince.
Back at the house, Elias locked his doors. He wiped the blood from the kitchen floor, then returned the poker to its stand. He found the man’s backpack behind the kitchen table where the woman had tossed it. He knew he should call the police, if only for his own protection should the man return. But how would the matter of his assault look to them, especially with the woman gone and as good as a figment of his imagination? Elias had experienced some trouble years ago, and his life’s purpose ever since had been to avoid inviting it back.
The man he bludgeoned didn’t return. The body was discovered in the park that night, making the radio news in the morning and then the national TV news the following evening. The unidentified victim was described as having been violently attacked. An investigation was underway. Elias felt decades of good behavior evaporate.
The ferry slows as it approaches its next stop at the village of Bekkjarvik, the engine’s drone pitching from a rage to a grumble. The woman in the blue windbreaker finally leaves the deck, but as Elias heaves the backpack up onto the railing, he notices the security cameras at the corners of the wheelhouse, dark orbs that doubtless see and record all. The ferry is also close to shore now, the water too shallow to keep secrets. Elias scuttles his plan. Without one, his body listens to itself and hunger rushes in.
He disembarks after the woman and follows her to a café with outdoor seating, turning his attention toward the contours of her day to escape his future’s rougher outline. The woman places her own backpack in an empty chair, removes her windbreaker, and sits at one of the dozen picnic tables. Behind her, modest pleasure craft putter into the narrow harbor in search of mooring. She seems taken with them and snaps yet more photographs. Elias places his order inside, then takes a small table by the window, setting the Spaniard’s backpack on the floor with care so the stones won’t clink. When the woman comes inside to order, Elias detects a Dutch accent to her English.
They eat lunch. Between their tables sit women in pale summer dresses, the men shirtless and deeply tanned. Everyone appears to have satisfactorily overindulged, here at the end of summer. The flower boxes marking the boundary of the cafe’s seating area make it seem as though rain, snow, and interminable darkness can’t possibly return. There is a satiated mood in the chrome-bright air, a sense that everyone here is good and without secrets, causing no one, least of all themselves, any trouble.
Elias uses the cafe’s bathroom, hanging his cane on a coat rack. He opens the backpack and considers placing the Spanish man’s things in the trash. He catches himself in the mirror. Who is this ancient man wearing his clothes and wielding a stone? He wishes he didn’t know. He hoped he’d never see him again.
When he was young, Elias and his older brother would roughhouse for money, their schoolmates paying to watch them fight. They bore no animosity toward one another; it was purely business. On the day his brother lost one eye and damaged the other, they’d been out in the woods at the edge of a narrow gorge. They’d scouted the location the day before. Elias doesn’t remember how many classmates watched their fight, but he does remember both of them spilling into the ravine, Elias rolling over the whips of blueberry bushes and ferns, his motion halted by the stomach punch of a tree trunk. His brother managed to keep upright, his feet leaping and slaloming downhill as though winter’s snows already lay deep. Mounting a boulder at the bottom of the gorge, his brother declared himself victor. Walking home afterwards, they quarreled in earnest over how to split their winnings, and in the course of their scuffling, Elias, stomach-sore and rib-bruised, without even the excuse of an audience to goad him on, hurled a handful of road gravel at his brother just as his brother looked at him. It would be the last clear image his brother would take in with uninjured eyes.
His brother’s dream had been to become a commercial airline pilot and travel the world. Model aircraft hung from fishing line nailed to the ceiling of their shared bedroom. Whenever the teacher drew down the map of the world over the chalkboard, Elias felt continents of regret over all the places his brother would now never visit. Had Elias known then that a lifetime of care and atonement can’t shield one from doing far worse later in life, he might have explored territories promising greater rewards than those he had allowed himself to visit. He might have risked chasing a happier life.
After lunch, Elias continues to follow the Dutch woman. Envious of her aimlessness and ease, he tries to imagine himself equally carefree. When she comes upon a small sandy cove, he follows her down to the green water. The woman shakes out a towel from her backpack, then grinds a water bottle into the coarse sand. Elias takes an unoccupied bench nearby in the flickering shade of a spindly birch. He observes the scene the woman photographs: a young mother, her belly slack and honest, bends over her toddler, encouraging the child’s responses of delight to the little silver waves. Children leap from a wooden diving platform farther out at the end of a rocky promontory. The Dutch woman is patient, her camera firing only when the kids are in mid-leap. Elias can’t see the water the children cast themselves into, though he can hear the splashes. He notes that the tide is low, revealing the bedrock’s black lip. But the kids look like locals; they would know how safe it is.
Elias imagines walking out to the point and descending one of the wooden ladders that dip into the cold sea, down the soft and sandy rungs, through the sashaying sea grass, stowing the Spanish man’s backpack as deep as he might dive. But he’s too old for swimming, and the pack would be raked to shore by the next winter storm. Easier to burn the Spaniard’s things, but not all of it can burn. Not the set of keys he found in the pack, not the switchblade, not the silver capsule of unknown pills.
The Dutch woman disrobes, revealing a blue one-piece swimsuit. Something stirs in him, a wish that someone like her, someone with this presence that’s drawn him to dry land, could have filled a great span of his life. The woman tests the waters, then enters the sea. After a few minutes, Elias spots her climbing the diving platform, waiting her turn. He looks away when she jumps. He digs into the Spaniard’s pack and frees the dead man’s passport from under the stones. He doesn’t recognize the face staring back at him, the unbroken nose, the bloodless chin. The police seem to have the details, though. Organized crime and gang member are the operative phrases in the news a week on, the man’s victimhood worn thin.
That the mystery of the man’s demise is known only by Elias and the Spanish woman is as equally unnerving as the role he played in that death. How strange to live all these years unaware that fate would cross his life with the end of another’s. But Elias doubts the police would see things philosophically if he came forward. They want facts. But there’s nothing he can share that would achieve anything other than his arrest for battery—at a minimum. The Spanish woman? He never even knew her name. Still, he wishes he’d gone to the police from the very start, before the man tracked down the Spanish woman, before Elias’s hands decided on the fire poker. Regret, he’s learning again, swells until it assumes the shape of sin.
Elias returns the Spaniard’s passport to the backpack and removes the stones. Not all of them, but enough to make the pack less burdensome. When he looks up, the Dutch woman is swimming back into the cove. She emerges from the water with a limp, her expression pained. At her towel, she keeps one foot off the ground, drops of water tapping onto her splayed paperback.
Elias steps forward. “Here,” he says, and extends the handle of his cane to her.
She tries to laugh off his offer but ends up taking hold of the cane. He sits back on his bench and looks up at the sky as she dries off and changes, both done with difficulty, he glimpses, but eased by the cane. He reaches into the backpack and removes the remaining stones.
Back on the express ferry, Elias returns from the galley with a bag of ice. The woman’s injured and elevated foot rests on his backpack on the seat across from her. He sets the bag of ice gingerly on her swollen skin.
She thanks him, and when he returns a second time, treating her to a coffee and a waffle, she laughs.
Turns out she’s Belgian, not Dutch. A newly retired lawyer. He asks her about her retirement travels to distract her from her injury. When the ferry docks in the city, he accompanies her to the taxi bay, then to the hospital—it’s on his way, he explains—and then afterwards helps her to her hotel. He wishes her a quick recovery from her treated sprain and parts from her in the lobby. Separate from the woman’s thanks, he feels a great satisfaction from having committed a selfish good deed. He wonders if all guardian angels are devils trying to lighten their burdens.
That evening, Elias feeds his stove until the sides glow. Into the fire go strips of the Spaniard’s backpack and wallet. He uses tongs to place the passport into the heart of the fire and tests the embers later with the poker that started this mess. He listens to his body and to the room for any indication that he’s making a mistake. There’s only the cries of gulls outside and the crackle and drowsy warmth from the fire. It’s such a relief to know that no one will ever hear his name uttered alongside the dead Spaniard’s name and the mention of a crime. Not the woman from Belgium, not the passengers on the ferry, not the people at the cafe in Bekkjarvik, not the swimmers in the cove, nor listeners to the news, nor anyone who’s ever known him. His life, worn for decades into narrow grooves of calm, will not have been for nothing.
Elias returns to the harbor a few days later and takes the express ferry on a full loop. At the stern, the propellers boil the sea into a froth that simmers away into a separating set of simple waves, like a fight grown tired. Elias reaches deep into his jacket and pulls out a handkerchief in which lie the Spaniard’s knife, keys, the blackened zippers of the backpack, the pill case, the melted slugs of plastic pried from his cold stove. He litters them into the white churn and blows his nose on the kerchief afterwards. He keeps his eyes on the fast-receding spot where the items are now sinking, where he sees three older boys in a small outboard chasing after the ferry.
Elias watches the boys speed through the ferry’s wake, their little skiff humping over a trailing wave and punching up a wall of spray that rains over them. He can’t hear them laughing, but he can sense their joy in the shapes their bodies hold. Was he ever filled with such raw happiness? He has to believe there were moments like this. He watches the boys repeat the act again and again until they can no longer catch up to the quicker ferry, the bow of their skiff settling down into waters that appear to have never been violently disturbed.
Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and Water~Stone Review. His published work can be read at www.storiesandnovels.com.
Doric Literary 