Norwegian by Night

of the fortress, where a small path descends to a squat stone tower and then on to the harbour.

At the waterfront they turn right and stroll casually towards the cruise ship, where the colourful blobs have coagulated into small groups flowing northwards towards Sheldon’s intended mark.

‘Watch this,’ he says to Paul.

As they pass an especially large and distracted pod of vacationers, Sheldon bumps into one of them and casually — with unusual grace — lifts a thin, orange Gore-Tex jacket from an open backpack. Rather than hide it, he immediately slips it on despite the clement weather.

‘You hide in plain sight. It’s where they never look,’ he says to Paul. ‘Now, over there, onto that pier.’

Walking among the sandal-clad minions now, Sheldon and Paul go with the flow like leaves on a river. He talks to Paul as they shuffle up the road.

‘Why do people always compare the size of a growing foetus to food? “It’s the size of a lima bean. Size of a pea. Size of a cherry. Size of a banana.” There’s something creepy about that. Don’t you think that’s creepy?’

Paul looks at his feet as they walk. It has been less than twenty-four hours since he hid in the closet. Sheldon is not unaware of this. He simply does not know what to do about it.

‘They never say, “It’s the size of a small-change purse” or “It’s the length of a parking ticket.” They’re thinking of eating you before you even show up. There, there, look. Over there. That’s the one. All we have to do now is look purposeful.’

Sheldon and Paul walk past the three-masted steel ship and hug the waterfront, breaking off from the colourful flow of city-goers. Like convicts, they slip down behind the port authority to a small flight of stairs that lets out onto a short dock. To the right is an unoccupied police boat bobbing on the calm water just in front of the boat that Sheldon has decided is now his.

Once painted brightly in the red, whites, and blues of the Norwegian flag, the little boat now looks haggard and tired. It looks to Sheldon like an over-sized rowboat with a small outboard motor at the stern that has to be steered directly from the tiller.

Sheldon regards the vehicle. He shakes his head at Paul.

‘Jews aren’t supposed to eat shellfish. I think it was His way of letting us know we aren’t a seafaring people. All right, let’s do what needs to be done.’

Sheldon takes hold of a mooring line and pulls the little boat so it is close enough to step in to. He puts one leg cautiously inside and then reaches out to Paul.

‘Come on. It’s OK.’

Paul does not step forward.

‘Really, look, I’ve been in a rowboat before. And that one didn’t even have an engine. I can do this. I can. Really. No problem. None at all. I’m sure. More or less.’

The impulses and inner worlds of children have never been entirely clear to Sheldon. When his son Saul was a little boy, under two years old, he would spring out of the stroller and run like a little drunk to the toddler swing.

Go da, go da, he would say.

‘Go there? You want to go there? Sure. Why not.’

So Sheldon would lift Saul into the swing, upon which Saul would immediately break into tears and a squirming fit.

‘This wasn’t my idea. It was your idea! I’m nothing but a human forklift! I pick you up and put you down. You said in, I put you in. So down now? OK.’

And out Saul would come, which would enrage him further. It was this sort of behaviour that Sheldon blamed entirely on female influence.

How come Paul wouldn’t get in one moment, and then did the next?

Who knows. That’s why.

Once in the jon boat, Sheldon works quickly. He hasn’t hotwired an outboard engine since his training for Korea. At the time, it was part of a host of fun and unexpected lessons they taught his group as part of the ‘scouting’ portion of their training. The logic came down from his drill sergeant, as so much wisdom often did.

We can’t push you out of a plane with a rifle, have you march twenty miles across enemy terrain, evading commie forces and local wildlife, only for you to show up and realise you forgot the key. So we’re going to learn to live without keys. Lesson one starts with a hammer…

Lesson ten (or so) involved more sophisticated techniques, like how to find the relevant bits in a motor’s power head and get around the main wire harness to jump the starter directly from the battery. It wasn’t brain surgery, so long as the motor was simple. And this one was.

Sheldon checks the fuel level by following a tube from the intake pump to a plastic tank on the deck. On the outside of the tank are small indicator marks. It has about ten litres. It is a small four-stroke engine — which gives it a better range than the older two-strokes — so he takes a guess and figures that they can get about four or five hours out of it, which is plenty. No real telling where they would end up, of course, but that doesn’t matter for now.

As Sheldon checks whether the spark plugs are corroded, a police officer walks down the stairs onto the pier and heads in their direction.

Sheldon is removing the plastic housing from the twenty-horsepower engine as the police officer walks by without looking at them.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he says to Paul as he works. ‘Don’t we look suspicious? The truth is, we don’t. When was the last time you heard of an eighty-two-year-old man wearing a bright orange jacket stealing a boat moored next to the police? Never, that’s when. It’s inconceivable! This is how you get away with things on this planet. Do the unimaginable in plain view. People assume it has to be something else.’

As the engine starts with a sputter and cough, Sheldon unties the mooring lines from the cleats and throws the lines to the pier.

‘Tougher to do this in New York, though. Some smart-arse would have come over to tell me how to fix the engine, or asked what I thought of the Yankees losing to the Red Sox. You know what I think? I think it’s great — that’s what I think. The Yankees deserve to lose. Let’s just hope no one asks us anything in Norwegian.’

Sheldon pushes the tiller hard to port and gently twists the throttle, easing the little boat away from the dock and out into the Oslo fjord. He runs their little raft along the edge of the Christian Radich and its gleaming steel hull, and out to the deep, blue sound, leaving Oslo and the little he knows of this strange country far behind him.

Part II RIVER RATS

Chapter 9

Sheldon has only been on the water in his imagination until now. It started with visions he described to Mabel in 1975. Their source was vivid, though mercifully simple: a letter from Herman Williams, one of Saul’s buddies from the boat who was with him when he was wounded. It explained the circumstances of Saul’s death.

In this way, the visions were derived from facts, but they were larger than the facts themselves. They were terrifying and alive, and became truly enveloping and relentless when Rhea came to live with them in 1976.

In this vision, Sheldon was patrolling the Mekong Delta with Saul, Herman Williams, Ritchie Jameson, Trevor Evans, and the Captain — a man they called the Monk.

It all began with a sort of open-hearted optimism.

Sheldon was on assignment for Reuters. His early photography book was just the sort of in-your-face realism