Karate Chop: Stories

MUTUAL DESTRUCTION

HE WHISTLES HIS DOG TO HIM, PUTS A COLLAR ON IT, AND PULLS IT a short way back from the edge of the wood so they’re not stuck out like a sore thumb. It’s late in the day and there’s a big fallow field between him and Morten, so he can remain standing here. Morten is going about the farmyard with the red bitch at his heels. It’s lean and rough haired, and he’s always only ever had dachshunds. Small, aggressive animals that chew the lead and the floor mats in the car, and Henrik doesn’t like small dogs. But when they go hunting foxes, Morten takes his dachshund, and when they go shooting by the fjord, Henrik takes his small munsterlander and the decoys. They’ve sat many times in the caravan on the Gardeners’ land down in the bog, drinking weak coffee from plastic cups, the air dense with the smell of wet dog, talking about how practically things divided up, Henrik having a big dog for the one thing and Morten having dachshunds for the other. But now Morten’s down there in the farmyard alone. A single light is shining from the kitchen window. He must have forgotten to switch it off, and the dog reaches only to his bootlegs. It looks like he’s trying to fix some part of the door in the gable wall. There’s a lot needs fixing now. There’s a lot needs to sink in. Henrik, for instance, always thought it was the wife’s fault, because she gave you the feeling that one of the things she liked best about Morten was that he wasn’t good enough. It can’t have been easy for Morten, being married to someone who was always looking for the horizons in everything. She talked big, and Morten must have felt awkward about the students at school calling her Skylark, and you can see it in the house down there as well. The windows are the sort with narrow wooden bars and they’re painted red like in Sweden. There’s some wickerwork by the main door, and when you come in it’s all long tables in the living room and hand-sewn cushions, and on the walls what they called expressive art.

You always ended up feeling a bit wrong when you visited Morten and his wife. Tina, in particular, came across as the kind of person who had nothing against sticking her hand into a duck and pulling out the gizzard. It was because she was brought up in the country. She knew how most things looked on the inside. And she wasn’t bothered if it smelled, as long as it was useful for something. She didn’t mind taking her turn and getting her hands dirty, but Morten’s wife was one who hoarded from her surroundings. Things had to have diplomas, titles, and certificates. Even Morten’s dogs had to have pedigrees and long names, but Morten liked that about Tina. And he thought she looked fantastic with her school-bag, her blond hair, and her little smocks. He liked that his dogs, which he called Muggi and Molly and Sif so as not to be laughed at, underneath had sophisticated names. One of them was called Ariadne Pil-Neksø. The last part after a kennel in Northern Jutland, and Morten liked to say how much Ariadne Pil-Neksø had cost, but Ariadne Pil-Neksø had never been able to flush a fox out of its hole, and Henrik shot it on the little patch of land behind the house while it was digging in a molehill.

Like it should be, he thinks to himself and puts his hand down to his big dog. It’s twilight, and its wet tongue licks the palm of his hand. He watches his hunting pal going about the yard, back and forth, with what looks like an electric drill. Morten has his dog with him, too. A lively little thing, all instinct, but basically slight and always in danger of coming out worst. This strange bond between dog and hunter, he feels unable to put it into words, but maybe it’s something like crossing piss streams, and it’s why a hunter should always be able to shoot his own dog. That’s the way it is: shoot your best friend, but know your limits, too. That was how Morten had put it back then, almost ten years ago when they’d been sitting in the kitchen and he’d said that the dog he had then had cancer.

“You’ve to know when you’ve not got it in you,” Morten had said. “If you shoot this one, I’ll take yours when its turn comes.”

He’d gestured with a finger at Henrik’s first hunting dog. Such a lovely big dog, lying there in front of the radiator looking up at him.

They’d agreed to keep it to themselves, and he shot Morten’s dog, the one with cancer, as promised, and three years later Morten shot the first of his. They were quits then, for the next of Henrik’s died all by itself. But it had been different with Morten’s, and nothing wrong with that. From the dog’s point of view, and the hunter’s, a clean shot was the best thing. It wouldn’t be right for an animal to be crammed inside a car and driven to the vet. A clean shot when the dog’s doing something it likes is a good death for a dog. He wouldn’t mind going that way himself one day when he was as far up in Tina as he could get. That’d suit him fine, but still he’s standing here at the edge of the wood with an unpleasant feeling inside him while Morten goes about the yard in a way that makes it plain his wife and children are gone. It can’t have come as much of a surprise, though. Everyone had known for years she was the leaving kind. Everyone had thought for years that Morten looked so small alongside her. It had always been good company in the Gardeners’ caravan, even though Morten had become such a bigmouth. They’d always been friends, but there was a lack of balance in it. He had never let him down. He shot the first of Morten’s dogs as it came up out of a foxhole. The next one he shot in the plantation with the Christmas trees. The third had been in such pain for some reason; Morten said it had been run over, but it could just as well have been something else entirely. It was so bad Henrik had to lay it in place for the shot, and the dog with the stupid name he took care of on the little patch behind the house. The fifth he shot in the back garden one day when the wife wasn’t home, but now it was the last of them, the last dachshund, going about the yard at Morten’s heels down there. A man and his dog in the twilight, but something more. He had to take it in. Take a good look, because that’s how it was: there was something inside Morten that shunned the light. Something Tina said was a kind of complex. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know what to say about it, other than that it smelled like offal, and that the smell was spreading.