Norwegian by Night

‘It’s part of your charm.’

‘What should I have done?’

‘You mean, when he came in? Started questioning you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You should have hugged him and said how you felt.’

‘I did say how I felt.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘What do you know?’

‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’

‘So how did I feel?’

‘You felt love and relief. You loved him so much you had to keep your distance.’

‘You talk like a girl.’

‘That feeling — in your hands. The one that makes you clench your fists sometimes. Do you know what that is?’

‘It’s arthritis.’

‘You never touched him. That last time. In your living room. He was right there. And you never held him. Never touched his hands. Never put your palm against his cheek like you used to do when he was a baby. You never pressed your cheek against his. That’s what you wanted to do. He was such a beautiful boy. Can you remember? He glowed with the eternal. And you didn’t touch him. And you can’t get the feeling of it out of your hands.’

‘What feeling?’

‘The emptiness. You told him about the silence. You never told him about the emptiness.’

‘You’re a real killjoy, Bill. You know that?’

‘The lake is coming up. Now’s your chance to hide the tractor.’

‘Yup.’

They have been travelling for fifty kilometres. There, on the left and coming up slowly, is Rodenessjoen. It is a small lake in Akershus, and it is Sheldon’s planned destination for the day. They have been on the road for hours. The boy is probably hungry, and he’s certain they both need to pee.

What Sheldon is planning to do would best be done at night, under the cover of darkness. The time of day when most fakakta ideas get a second look and start to seem better than they did a few hours earlier.

With an aching back and stiff hands, Sheldon pulls the tractor to the side of a quiet and wooded street, and turns off the engine. He waits a full minute before gingerly stepping down the full metre to the pavement.

Paul is napping in the raft. He has not taken off the Viking helmet, and his right hand clutches the long wooden spoon. The magic dust bunny is safely tucked under one of the bench seats. Sheldon smiles and chooses not to wake him.

Standing back from the rig, he notices how tall the tractor really is. The top of it must be a good two metres high. The tyres alone come up to the middle of his own chest. It isn’t an easy item to hide — you can’t put an orange tarp over it and hope it goes unnoticed.

This is farm country. He does not know the people, their mentality, their ways of getting through the day. But the trappings of this place resonate, and he suspects they are not as foreign as their language. People here probably know one another. There are likely to be only a few schools, and they’d cater to a rather wide age-range of children. Families would be familiar with each other’s children. Cars and maybe even livestock might be known to one another.

They are not far from Oslo, and this is not a desperately rural terrain. It is, however, a place where societies form tighter bonds and people begin to speak of the land, not ‘real estate’.

So the cover of night would have been better. Because this is definitely the kind of place where people would notice a tractor that didn’t belong here. It is probably also the kind of place where they’d talk if they saw someone drive one directly into the lake.

Once again, as has so often happened in Sheldon’s life, there really does seem to be only one reasonable course of action. As Paul rests in the boat, Donny stares at his amphibious recreational unit and considers the situation. The most important fact at the moment is that he was pulled over by a local cop. He was asked if he was American. There are good explanations for that. One — which he doesn’t believe for a second — is that his fake German–Swiss accent wasn’t good enough to fool Barney Fife back there. No chance on earth he could sense that Sheldon was from New England.

None.

The other, however, is more troubling and more plausible.

He has not turned on the television for Paul’s sake, so he does not know for certain that the police haven’t issued a missing person’s alert on him — assuming that such things even exist here. But it’s possible that they have, and that Rhea is behind it. Even if they haven’t, they could certainly have told other police about him and the boy. It’s possible that he was stopped because he fitted some profile.

Like, for example, ‘Foreign old man with young boy.’

But maybe he got lucky. Maybe they said, ‘American old man and young boy missing.’ In that case, he and Paul didn’t fit the box.

Who knows? In any case, it all points to the same conclusion: this tractor is going to be trouble, and needs to go in the drink.

Looking both ways before crossing the street again, he steps back to the raft and releases it at four points from the trailer frame. He checks very carefully to be sure nothing is connected or would obstruct it from detaching itself when the time comes.

When he is satisfied, he starts up the tractor again. As the beast coughs and gurgles, Paul wakes up. Sheldon can tell because he can see silver horns in the mirror. He turns around and waves. Paul, he is delighted to find, waves back.

He pulls back onto the road now and, staying in first gear, drives along slowly, looking for a parallel, subsidiary path along the lake. This does not take long. The absence of power steering makes the hard-left turn a challenge, so he leans hard into it like a bus driver through a city street. The tractor falls right in line, and soon enough they are chugging along the western side of the small lake.

In five minutes, a nice open space emerges, and Sheldon executes a sweeping left-hand turn away from the lake, and then swings the wheel all the way to the right, bringing her in face to face with stage two of Operation Hide the Tractor.

It is all working perfectly. All he has to do now is drive straight into the lake. If it is deep enough, and the tractor lives long enough, it will disappear below the surface where it belongs, and the raft will gently drift off the trailer onto the clear and bright waters where Paul can then start the engine and sail off into the distance alone, because Sheldon will end up under the lake behind the wheel of the tractor.

This is not a perfectly devised plan as such.

A stick would do it. He could just wedge the stick under the seat and on to the pedal. That would probably work.

The trouble then — which has been the same trouble he’s been facing for three days — is that he is eighty- two. How exactly is he to get on the moving raft? Outrun it? Dive onto it as it rushes by? Have Paul hook out an arm and wrestle him up like a rodeo cowboy?

Once again, logic dictates the final conclusion: I’m going to get very, very wet.

Over the course of five minutes, Sheldon stands on the ground talking to Paul, the Balkan Jewish Viking who stands in the raft. They both have their hands on their hips. Sheldon points and gestures. He explains and draws pictures on his palm. He makes quizzical faces and explains the odds.

Paul nods.

Sheldon smiles.

It is all going to work out just fine.

So he starts the engine and wedges the stick under the seat, and if he’d been a Christian he would have made a cross or kissed one, and off goes the whole contraption towards the water.