The girl on the hall steps spoke first.
“You’re the one asking about the Norwegian.”
It was seven o’clock on Thursday, the eve of the festival, and every light in the Sons of Norway hall was on. The hall stood at the top of the town, white clapboard with painted flowers round the door, and through the open door Thorsen could see a man with a phone on a gimbal walking very slowly backwards in front of three women at a griddle, while a fair woman held up a reflector and told them to just be natural. Two small children in horned helmets were running under the tables. Marj had told him about them: a family up the hill who put their lives on the internet. The Larkins, she had said, in the voice she kept for weather.
The girl sat at the far end of the top step with her hood up and a phone in her lap. She was the Larkins’ eldest, Hazel, twelve and small for it, with a pointed face and her father’s colouring and none of his expression. She spoke as if she were reading the words off something, at an even pace, with no punctuation she did not need.
He sat on the step below hers, at the other end, and looked at the harbour.
“Dad thinks he deleted it,” she said. “I keep everything.” She held the phone out to him across the gap between them without looking at him. “It was up for a day. Last August. This is the upload.”
The video was called We Took a JET BOAT into CANADA?! (glacier, waterfall + a WOLF DOG??), and it opened on the sky.
A drone came down a canyon: grey rock on both sides, wet, birch growing out of the cracks at angles, a white thread of waterfall far back at the head of it. There was music over it, something bright with a banjo, chosen afterwards in a kitchen. In the bottom corner small white letters came up in a typewriter font and stayed. 1:48 PM.
The drone came out of the canyon mouth over brown water and a wide grey river, and a float, and a gravel bar, and came down low over the bar. A young man stood on the gravel with his feet apart, looking up into it with a hand over his eyes. He had on a sweater, red and white, the pattern thick and bright on the yoke even at that size, the kind of sweater that was knitted rather than bought. Beside him was a black dog with a white chest, looking up too, with its whole body.
At fifty-two seconds the young man took his hand away from his eyes and waved. Both arms, over his head, crossed and uncrossed, the way you wave at a ship. He was laughing. You could see that even without sound: his head going back. Then the drone climbed and swung away over the river, and he was a red point on the grey, and the screen cut to a title and a woman’s voice said brightly, Okay. So. Today was INSANE.
Hazel took the phone back and scrubbed forward without looking at it and gave it to him again.
Six minutes and ten seconds in. A camera low on the bow of a boat, spray beading on the lens. The boat coming upriver towards the right bank, where a creek came out of the trees in a fan of gravel. A float with tyres along its side. A green steel container at the back of the bar with CALDERA NORTH stencilled down it, and beside it, on a post, a white sign: KESTREL RIDGE PROJECT — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“That’s Canada,” Hazel said.
The man from the hall swung into the frame on a stick, upside down and then right way up, in a beanie with the channel’s logo, saying: So we are officially, technically, in CANADA. And we are not technically supposed to be here. Gordie, are we supposed to be here?
And from off the edge of the picture, over the engine, flat and unamused: Turn that thing off.
Thorsen gave her back the phone.
He got up and walked to the rail at the edge of the hall’s gravel, where the hill fell away to the roofs and the water. He stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets. In Los Angeles he had sat in front of a great many screens with the last minutes of somebody on them, and he had been good at watching the hands and not the face. He had not seen Sindre Eiksund move before. He came back and sat down.
“I put him at the front,” Hazel said, to her phone. “I cut it. Dad does the talking bits and I do everything else, after they go to bed. The light was good and he did the arms. You have to put the best thing first or they scroll.” She pulled her cuffs down over her hands. “Then he was dead, and it was still the best shot.”
“Why did it come down?”
“The border.” She glanced at him to see whether he was the kind of adult who needed it explained. “You’re supposed to stop at the Landing and phone Canada. Gordie never does. Dad told Mom in the kitchen, when he thought I was asleep. Gordie hadn’t reported, and Dad had put it on the internet with a flag on it. Gordie came to the house the next night and stood in the kitchen and didn’t say anything, and Dad took it down while he was standing there.” She looked at the water. “Dad’s scared of everything.”
“Was it only the border?”
She gave the question the seriousness of a child who is not often asked one.
“That’s what Dad thinks,” she said. “Dad doesn’t think about other things. That’s why he’s nice.”
The phone buzzed in his pocket. She had sent him the file.
“Not to anyone else,” she said, standing up. Inside the hall her mother’s voice called for a shot of all three children by the cake. Hazel put her phone in the pocket of her sweatshirt and kept her hood up, and on her way past him she said, low, without turning her head: “Don’t tell them I showed you. They’d want to film it.”
On Friday morning he took the tracking number for Ingrid’s parcel to the post office, and the woman at the counter looked it up and then looked at him over her glasses. The parcel from Norway had come in on the Juneau mail on Friday the fourteenth of August, after the camp’s own plane had gone. So it had gone into the Caldera mail sack behind the counter, for the river, and it was always Gordie who took the sack.
At five that afternoon the parade came down Main Street, and Marj sat on her folding chair on the kerb with her hand on his arm and made him tell her who was in front.
Behind the Vikings’ cook tent on Saturday, four aluminium pots the size of dustbins sat on propane burners against the seawall, roaring, and Gordie Marsh stood among them in a horned helmet pushed too far back on his head and rubber gloves to the elbow, lifting a basket of shrimp out of the steam with a boat hook.
Thorsen waited until the two boys in aprons had carried the bowls into the tent. Then he stood beside Gordie at the pot and held up his phone in the shelter of his own body, where nobody in the tent could see it, and started it at forty-one seconds.
Gordie did not want to look, and then looked. The canyon. The bar. The sweater and the dog and the arms going up. Thorsen let it run to six minutes and stopped it on the sign, and let it run three seconds more, until the voice off the edge of the frame said Turn that thing off.
“Doesn’t say what day,” Gordie said. He swung the basket to the table and tipped it. “Doesn’t say whose boat.”
“His grandmother posted him that sweater in July. Tracked. It came in on the Juneau mail on the fourteenth of August, after the camp plane, and went into the Caldera sack. The woman at the counter says it’s always you who takes the sack.” The burner roared. “He’s wearing it on that bar in the afternoon. He was wearing it in September when you found him. Nothing went up that river to him between Saturday and Sunday night except you.”
The boat hook had stopped.
“When I give this to the Mounties, they’ll have the last man who saw him alive. Who carried his parcel to him in his own boat, into a country he never reported entering, and then told them he was never past the hot springs.” Thorsen put the phone away. “They won’t start with the river, Gordie. They’ll start with you.”
For a second the other Gordie was there, the one who had run freight on that river for thirty years and been the hardest man on it: the shoulders came up, the gloved hand closed on the boat hook, and the colour climbed his neck. Then he took the helmet off. He looked at it, the two plastic horns and the fake fur round the rim, and put it down on the table among the shrimp. Without it he looked his age.
He told it with his hands busy, a basket at a time, and Thorsen did not interrupt him.
There was a phone box on a post at the Landing, the first village on the Canadian side, where you were supposed to tie up and ring Canada with your names and your passports and your guns and your cash. Some days it took ten minutes. Some days it was an hour and a half on hold with a boatload from Ohio who wanted to see a glacier. So he didn’t. He hadn’t for years. Nobody who ran freight up there regularly did. The river did not know where the line was, and there were two Mounties for two hundred and fifty miles of it.
The Larkins had paid him twenty-four hundred dollars for a private run to the top. Content, they called it. He had Caldera freight going up anyway, a couple of crates of pump parts and the mail sack, so he had taken them all on up to Mink Creek. He had told Larkin not to put it on the internet. Larkin had said sure, Gordie.
“He was on the bar when we came round the bend,” Gordie said. “With the side-by-side, waiting on the freight. And the dog. He saw that parcel and knew who it was from before I had it out of the sack. Brown paper, string, about a hundred stamps. Tore it open on the gravel and put it on right there, in the rain, over his T-shirt. Grinning like a kid at Christmas. He made Larkin’s wife take a picture of him in it on his phone, for his grandmother.” He tipped the basket. His face was wet, and it was steam or it was not. “Forty minutes. We unloaded. Larkin flew his toy. The kids threw rocks at the water. I said that’s it, we’re going. And he stood on that bar till we were round the bend.”
Then the river had come up behind them all afternoon: a glacier lake let go somewhere up top, six feet of it, more, whole trees coming down roots and all, and Gordie running the middle the whole way to the border with three children in the back. At nine that night the Mountie had been on the sat phone to the shop. Kid missing. Did he see him.
“I’d have lost the boat,” Gordie said. “Not the licence. The boat. Canadian customs seizes it, the Americans fine you on the way home, the insurance walks.” He said it as a fact about money. “And I told myself what does it change. They’d look in the same river.” He picked up the boat hook again because the pot needed him. “If I’d said, they’d have known he was standing on that bar alive at the middle of the afternoon. They’d have known when. That’s what you’re going to say to me.”
“Could you have gone back up?”
“With a glacier lake on my back and three kids in the boat who’d paid me to bring them home?” He put the hook down very carefully across the pot. “Ask the Larkins.”
“The Larkins deleted everything you asked them to. Nearly everything.”
Gordie looked at him, and at the pocket where the phone had gone. “Yeah,” he said. “I see that.”
The pot boiled between them. Thorsen thought of the two steel bowls by the shop door.
“Who feeds the dog?”
It was not the question Gordie had braced for. He blinked.
“Old lady at the Landing. Ruth. Ellie Bourque’s grandmother. He went to the dump in the winter and she fed him there. Till freeze-up I’d put a bowl down whenever I had the village freight.” He wiped his face with his forearm. “He’s back at the camp landing now the boats are running. He hears the engine and comes out of the willows and down to the float, running. Every time. Then he sees it’s me.” He reached under the table and took out an old phone in a waterproof case and turned it round. A gravel bar, grey water, willows. At the end of the float, very small, sitting upright, a black dog with a white chest, looking upriver.
Thorsen gave it back.
“Monday,” Gordie said. “Five o’clock, the shop float. I’ve got freight. Ellie Bourque’s coming too, she’s been at some meeting in Juneau and wants a ride home. I radioed Rennick, the camp manager. He says come up Friday. Caldera’s got nothing to hide, he says, which is what you say.” He picked the helmet up from among the shrimp and put it back on, too far back, the horns pointing at the sky. “And I’ll report at the Landing this time. I’ll stand at that box and phone them, and I’ll tell the Mountie the rest across a table.”
“You’ll lose the boat.”
“Maybe.” Gordie lifted the next basket out of the steam. “Twenty years I’ve run past that box without stopping, and my wife’s stopped asking where I go. I’d sooner lose the boat.”
He packed on Sunday evening in the back room at the top of Marj’s stairs. A dry bag from the marine store, with wool socks and waterproofs and the sleeping bag. A head torch. Bear spray in a holster, which the man at the store had made him practise drawing in the aisle, twice, with a straight face. Passport in a plastic bag.
Then he crossed the hall to Sindre’s room and knelt by the duffel and took out the grey watch cap. He did not hold it to his face. He put it in a freezer bag from Marj’s kitchen drawer and pressed the air out and sealed it, the way he would have bagged anything that might one day matter, and zipped the duffel shut over the paperback at the bottom.
At supper Marj put a plate of fish cakes in front of him and sat down with her tea.
“Paige Dolan came by yesterday,” she said. “While you were at the shrimp. She stood on the porch and wouldn’t come in. She asked if Sindre’s phone had come back in the duffel.” Her hand went round the cup. “I said they never found his phone, it was in the river with him. She said was I sure. I said I’ve been through that duffel twice and folded every shirt in it. She said okay, and went down the steps.” Marj turned her head towards him. “That girl’s been carrying something since September. I’m not saying it’s anything bad. I’m saying she’s carrying it.”
His phone rang at four minutes past midnight.
It was a Norwegian number, and there was a brass band on the line, very close, playing a march with great enthusiasm and not much agreement, and over it a long ragged cheer of children that went up and up.
“Daniel. It is the seventeenth of May. Ten o’clock in the morning here, and the sun is out, which it is not always, and the whole town is in the street.” Ingrid was raising her voice over it. “I am standing outside the bakery in my mother’s bunad. It still fits, which I tell everyone. Sindre walked in this every year from six, in the school band, with the trombone. Not well. He liked it because you are at the back and nobody can see when you are only pretending.”
Thorsen wished her a happy seventeenth of May, in the only Norwegian he had, which was his father’s.
There was a small surprised laugh in Ulsteinvik. “You say it like Karl.” The band went away down a street he could not see, and she moved somewhere quieter. “Now. Tell me something. Not everything. I know you will not. Something.”
He sat on the edge of the bed with the window grey behind him and told her about the film. A family on a tour boat had made it, at the landing where Sindre went for the freight, in the afternoon. He was in it for a few seconds. The man who brought the boat had her parcel in the mail sack, and Sindre had known who it was from before he got it out, and put the sweater on there on the gravel, in the rain. A drone had come over, and he had waved at it with both arms, like you wave at a ship, and he was laughing.
The line was quiet for a long time, a quiet with a street in it, and gulls.
“Then I can carry the rest,” Ingrid said. “I think I can.” And then, away from the phone, in a different voice, a name.
The phone changed hands.
“This is Rune Eiksund. Sindre’s father.” Good hard English, the consonants very clean, the voice of a man who designed ships and was used to calculating loads. “My mother is crying on the steps of the bakery on the seventeenth of May, in front of the whole town, because a man in Alaska tells her there is a film of my son on the day he died.” A breath. “I will tell you one thing so that you do not waste your time with me. In April a court in California made Google give me my son’s account. Four thousand one hundred and six photographs. I have not opened it. They are not for American television. They are his.”
“When you want me,” Thorsen said, “you have the number.”
“I won’t want you.”
The phone went back to Ingrid, composed, as if nothing had happened.
“He is like his father. Per also said no first. To me, in 1966, on the quay at Hareid. Three times.” A pause. “Go up the river, Daniel. Be careful on it. It took one of us already.”
At ten to five the harbour was the colour of pewter and so still that every piling stood on its own reflection.
Gordie’s boat lay at the end of the shop float with her engine running and her cabin lights on, freight lashed under a blue tarp in the open stern and the mail sack on top of it. Gordie raised one hand through the wheelhouse glass and did not come out.
On the float, on a hard yellow case beside a duffel, sat a woman in a Guardian programme jacket and a black toque, with a paper cup of coffee in her hand. She was thirty-four or so, slight, with her hair in a short braid. She looked at him coming down the ramp, all the way down, and drank some coffee.
“You’re the cousin,” she said. “Gordie says you don’t talk. Ellie Bourque.” She did not offer a hand; she had coffee in one and the other on the case. “I’m getting a ride home. You’re getting a ride to the end of the world. I’m mostly coming to see Gordie report.”
Gordie put his head out of the wheelhouse door and lifted his chin towards the hill.
Above the harbour and the roofs, on the street that ran up under the dark trees, there was one light on in the whole town. It was in Marj’s kitchen window. She could not have seen the boat from there, not with those eyes, not at this hour. She had put the light on anyway.