a pang of arthritis in his knuckles, he manages to straighten the coathanger and then bend it into a giant, curvy ‘W’. Giving a wink to Paul, he weaves one end of the coathanger through one side of the woollen cap and out the other. Pulling the hat into position, he centres it on the bent wires, forming ram horns. He slips the cardboard tubes onto each horn and then very, very liberally wraps each one with tin foil.
The result is what Vikings might have worn in outer space.
Satisfied, Sheldon slips the whole contraption on Paul’s head and then pulls him over to the mirror again to get a gander at himself. With the expression of someone trying to sell a motorcycle to a pregnant woman, Sheldon smiles BIG as he presents Paul to himself.
‘Paul the Viking! Paul the Completely Disguised Albanian Kid who is not on the run through the Norwegian hinterland with the Old Fool. What do you think?’
‘Oh! But wait! One more thing. What’s a Viking — or
Back to the kitchen one more time, Sheldon finds a nicely worn wooden spoon, and slides it into Paul’s leather belt.
Then he stands back and looks.
‘One last touch.’ And, with that, Sheldon draws an ancient symbol on Paul’s Viking chest with a black marker he’d noticed earlier in one of the kitchen drawers.
Sheldon is proud of himself.
Paul, with a newfound sense of purpose — and no longer looking like Paddington or any other stowaway — goes into the master bedroom again to pose in front of the mirror.
Sheldon takes the lull in his childcare obligations to fill his satchel with more water, some crackers, and the last of the moose jerky.
Leaving the back door open, he goes out to the yard and down to the pier to check on the boat they borrowed from Oslo. The sun is already high above the horizon, despite it being only eight o’clock. There is a chill in the morning air, but this only suggests a high front and continued good weather. He could turn on the television and find out the proper forecast easily enough, but he worries that the murder will be on the news. Every moment that Paul does not see his mother’s face, or can find a respite or even a distraction from the wider reality, is a blessing that Sheldon does not want to forsake.
With his hands on his hips, Sheldon walks out onto the pier and scopes out the spot where he had moored the boat last evening. It is a nice spot, gently shaded, well protected from most angles. The kind of place a person might go for a picnic with a loved one, and lay out a blanket and throw stones into the water. He can see all this very well now, because the boat isn’t there blocking his view.
It’s possible it was borrowed by some teenagers, or even that it floated off on the tide. Whatever the cause, the effect remains the same. They now have one fewer option than they had a moment earlier.
‘All the better,’ says Sheldon quietly as he turns away from the river for good.
From the pier, and with less to demand his attention than there was last night, the old scout-sniper also notices something else that had escaped his eagle-eye vision — namely two massive tyre tracks leading from the edge of the water to the back of a garage beside the house.
With nothing else in particular to do, Sheldon follows the tracks. The garage looks like a small American barn that should be red, but instead is the same bright blue as the lonely house belonging to the couple with cancer.
The doors to the garage are painted white, and there are windows at eye level. Using the trick he tried to teach Paul the night before, Sheldon presses his nose against the glass and peers inside. There are windows across the way on what he suspects are identical doors on the other side, but they do not illuminate the otherwise dark room. All he can really tell is that it is filled with something long and large.
Sheldon tries the handle, but is surprised to find the doors locked.
This brings him to his drill sergeant’s Lesson No. 2.
Nothing was too obvious not to deserve a formal lesson in the United States Marine Corps.
In the kitchen, where he’d found the marker, there is a ring of keys with labels on each one. The labels are in Norwegian, but, as chance would have it, one of them does in fact unlock the padlock to the garage door facing the street.
So, without much optimism, Sheldon opens the padlock, places it back on the door in an open position, and then swings the doors open in a dramatic gesture, for no other reason than because it feels good.
What he sees inside gives Sheldon the first genuine desire to laugh since Rhea told him about the miscarriage.
Leaving the garage door open, he shuffles back to the living room and finds the lower half of the Viking alighting from under the vintage three-seater sofa. Sheldon addresses the boy’s bottom.
‘Whatcha doing under the sofa?’
Hearing Sheldon’s voice, he slides back out. When he’s fully out from under, he turns over. The boy holds up a very large ball of dust and hair.
Sheldon pulls over a curvy Danish chair and sits in it. He considers first the boy and then the dust bunny he’s raising overhead like a trophy.
‘That’s a mighty impressive hair ball you’ve got there.’
Paul considers it.
‘You know, this is a good sign. I guess. You see, before Huck and Jim hit the road, Jim had a hair ball. His could talk if you put a coin under it. I don’t have a nickel, though. And this one probably speaks Norwegian. I think we should go now.’
Sheldon takes a pillowcase from the bedroom and places the dust bunny in the middle of it. He folds the four corners over it and ties them together. From the hall closet he takes a broom and unscrews the handle from the plastic head. He slides the handle through the knot on the pillowcase and puts the whole rig on Paul’s shoulder.
‘Now you’re a Norwegian-Albanian Dust-Bunny Hobo Viking. Bet you didn’t know you’d be one of those when you woke up this morning.’
Their battle Wellingtons on, the dishes washed and put back, the beds stripped, the sheets piled on the floor, and the toilets flushed again for good measure, Sheldon snaps his fingers a few times to signal that it’s time to go. He shoulders his satchel and adjusts the strap so it rests better on his thin shoulder, and walks with Paul out into the light of a new day to show him his special discovery.
‘Come, come, come. Now, you stand there. And don’t move. OK?’
It’s not OK, and Paul has no idea what Sheldon is talking about, but, horns and all, he stands at attention as Sheldon disappears into the garage.
There is a long silence. Paul looks down to the fjord, where beautiful sailboats skim over the surface of the cold and salty sea. Where seagulls glide, high and free in the morning sky. Where…
A thunderous noise startles the boy, who steps away from the garage.
Smoke billows from the open door and slips in from under the closed one. The windows undulate, and the birds all fly away. And out of the darkness comes Sheldon Horowitz on a massive yellow tractor, pulling a huge rubber raft on a two-wheeled boat trailer with a Norwegian flag affixed to the stern.
‘River Rats!’ he shouts, flapping his map high above his head, ‘Let the journey commence!’
All around them the world is alive and in bloom. The road winds and twists with gentle curves, and the wilderness is close enough to touch. The birches and spruce stand tall and gallant amidst the beech and pine. Birds, relishing the long summer days, sing full-bellied songs that dance through shimmering leaves and pipe above the gently swaying tips of tops of trees.
Paul’s rubber-clad feet flip and flop around inside the rubber boat as he waves his spoon at passing cars, and carries on almost like a normal child.
Sheldon shifts the tractor into the wrong gear about a dozen times before figuring out — to a point — how the thing works. Once he gets into a groove, at about twenty kilometres an hour, he holds his course and counts his blessings.
