Read Online The Happiest People in the World by Brock Clarke - Free Book Online

“Get it!” they screamed. “Get fucking it!” After another half minute of this, the machine made a sound that was somewhere between laughing and dying, which caused the boy in the middle to smack the machine with the palms of both hands. “You didn’t get it,” the boy on the right said, and the boy in the middle struck the machine again.
    â€œEasy, Kurt,” said a woman’s voice, coming from Henrik’s right. He turned and saw her, behind the bar, where she hadn’t been a second before. Behind her, on the wall, was a mural featuring hunters and large wild animals in snowy nature, neither group paying attention to the other, both of them basically just hanging out among the pines and boulders and snowdrifts, everyone minding their own business.
    â€œSoup!” the woman said in the direction of the boys. The first thing Henrik noticed was that she had yellow hair. This was not a problem with translation: the woman’s hair was yellow, not blond, the difference being that yellow is a color found in nature whereas blond is a color found in hair. Her face was ruddy, raw-seeming, but still somehow smooth and shiny. Her cheeks were round and high, and on them were brown freckles, and above them were blue eyes, ice-blue eyes that looked as though they were melted. In other words, her eyes were watery. Possibly because she’d come from the kitchen and was holding three bowls of steaming something. This might have explained the color and texture of her skin, too. But nonetheless, to Henrik she looked rough, and beautiful: like a valuable rock cut with indelicate tools.
    Henrik was obviously paying lots of attention to the woman, but the woman hadn’t seemed to notice him, and the boys hadn’t seemed to notice either of them. Instead they seemed to be having an argument about letters. “ I-G-N, ” one of them said. “That me, that’s my high score.” And another said, “You’re not an I nor a G nor an N, botard.”
    â€œBoys!” the woman yelled. “Soup. Now!”
    This time, the boys paid attention. They scuffed over, heads lowered, and, without a word of thanks or any other word, took their bowls and retreated to a table adjacent to the machine, where they commenced slurping.
    That accomplished, the woman finally recognized Henrik’s presence. This is not to say that she said anything to him. She merely tucked her hair behind her ears, then began taking dirty glasses from the bar surface and depositing them into a container of steaming water. As she did this, she looked directly at Henrik, not at the glasses or the water. This was something
he’d
learned to do in art school. His teacher made Henrik draw without looking at the drawing. “You can see the soul only when you are not looking,” his teacher had taught. The teacher, with his gnarled hands and his whiskers, had seemed like the cartoon of wisdom, and so Henrik always listened to him, although Henrik never did learn whether he was supposed to be seeing the cartoon’s soul or his own, or maybe his teacher’s. Anyway, two by two, the woman whisked the glasses off the bar top and deposited them somewhere below, her eyes peering through the steam. Those eyes, those eyes. They really did make Henrik feel like she was looking into his soul. Her eyes were so beautiful they could make you forget who you were, or at least who you were supposed to ask for upon entering the Lumber Lodge. But Locs had given Henrik the impression that the Lumber Lodge was going to be his new home. Except it seemed to be only a tavern, not a hotel or pension or anything like that.
    â€œAre there rooms here?” Henrik finally asked, and the woman raised her left eyebrow to say something with it, possibly, Why, yes, you’re in one. So he clarified: “Are there rooms to let?”
    â€œTo
let
?” she said, with her mouth this time, although also with her eyebrow,