Read I Refuse for Free Online

anything in this world, but not on a car. The few times Jonsen lifted the bonnet his mind went blank and he slammed it back down and then he delivered the car to Lysbu at the BP garage if there was something wrong, and as a rule there was very little wrong, only some trivial thing that Jonsen could have fixed himself in a couple of minutes if for once in his life he had taken the time to look. And what would he do now that Lysbu was about to retire. It wasn’t far off, he was sick of the whole business, of loudmouthed women with weightlifters’ biceps and bandits like Tommy Berggren’s father, of shitty cars, of Wartburgs and Skodas, of threshing machines and Volvo lorries racing to the mill at a hell of a speed and back home again, sending the swirling dust up from the flatbeds of their open trailers and into his house and blocking the roads when they stopped for the drivers to talk with their window open, and they didn’t even bother to pull over. He was sick of wily farmers he wasn’t even able to talk to without getting confused and furious, he would never get used to how they made conversation, never going straight to the point, forever beating around the bush in evasive circles, always with a cunning grin on their faces, he was from Sarpsborg, he didn’t get it, there was always something funny and he never got the goddamn joke. So it was over now, he was going to retire and move to Oslo, to his sister’s, at Lakkegata 7, by the Akerselva river and Schous Brewery with its large, shiny copper vats inside, you could see them through the windows as you walked past on Trondheimsveien. Jesus, was he looking forward to that.
    They cycled off. It was a Friday, it was crime-time tonight, and the ride home was summer all the way, and holidays were only two weeks off and everything was green as the meadows were green, and the leaves of the birch trees were green as the spruce trees were green, and wherever you turned to look in this world everything was as green as every other thing was green, and the fields were green and not golden as they were in the early autumn. Tommy had started school again, he had been away since the day after Whit, and for the first week he saw the world through one eye only. The doctor in Mørk came out and did his stitches and left again, and no one but Jim was let in to help now that the girls and Tommy were alone in the house. The sergeant from the district police station came out and had to leave again, we will get this thing sorted out, he said, this is no good, you just wait, he said, but he couldn’t get past the threshold to see how they were doing inside the house, he couldn’t get past Tommy. Goddamn that boy, he said on his way to the car, how the hell are we going to deal with him. And Tommy didn’t budge and not one of the neighbours dared go anywhere near. So they walked up and down the road and went in and out of their houses and went to work in the morning and came back and had dinner and watched TV in the evening, watched
The High Chaparral
on the Swedish channel at half-past seven if it was a Saturday night, and Victoria had such pretty teeth, someone said, maybe Sletten said, and it was a strange thing to say, even though it was true, that she had beautiful teeth. You could see them when she smiled, it was really something, and no one in Mørk had teeth like hers, and whenever a neighbour passed on the road down by the stone path and the dustbins, he would look up at the windows in the house where the whole Berggren family had once lived, where only Tommy and his sisters lived now. It was a scandal.
    Jim and Tommy came round the last bend on their way from Mørk on their bikes, along the gravel track and then on past Sletten’s house. He was sitting on a bench under the window with his accordion and a bottle of beer in his hand, watching them, he hadn’t mowed his lawn for weeks, it looked a mess, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He was in free fall, that man, on his