by Leif Enger
It seemed good advice. Tendrils of tea-colored smoke uncurled to explore the immediate region. I felt a sudden wave of dizziness.
Leer turned from the fire. He took a rag from his pocket, wiped his face and hands, and gave us an honest look at him. Mortal after all was my thought, just a man with thinning silvery hair, a well-maintained smile, and the lengthening ears old men gradually obtain. He had a plain solid handshake and there was nothing to mark him as a person of standing except his eyes, which flickered and probed like someone trying the door.
Instinctively I looked away.
Leer however, our famed conundrum, seemed expansive, even friendly.
“My father’s house,” he mused, in dry lament. “Mold in the cellar, shingles turning to compost, squirrels in the eaves.” He shook his head, eyes fastened on Ann. “Poor stewardship, that’s what I call it.”
Ann said, “Oh, now—nobody thinks that, Mr. Leer,” and I shot her a look she ignored.
“That’s extremely tolerant of you,” he replied. “It’s what I appreciate about Greenstone. No one’s sitting in judgment. Not like on the coasts! Listen, Ann, I’m looking to do some sprucing up. Nothing ostentatious. Clean and simple, that’s what I’m after. Trim back those aspens, do a little asphalt repair. Manage the yard. If you know anyone who could help with some late season cleanup, I’d be more than gratified.”
“My husband’s a fine landscaper,” Ann right away declared.
Jerry wasn’t a landscaper of any kind, never had been that I knew of—the Fandeen place was in fact a model of chaotic vegetation and topographical dismay. That no doubt accounted for at least some of Ann’s strong feelings on the subject of tall grass.
“I knew this would be a good time to come home,” Leer said. “Synchronicity! Maybe you’d mention me to him.”
“I will,” Ann said, then added shrewdly: “Of course, it’s the end of the season, as you say—Jerry’s in high demand.”
“The good ones always are. Tell him I’ll compensate for any rearranging he may have to do. May I give you my number?”
Ann unsnapped her purse and began to rummage.
“No need,” Leer said, for a pen had appeared in his fingers. He took her hand and gently wrote some numbers on her palm, still watching her closely—so entire was his focus I half expected her to levitate. He said, “Ann? Ann. I hope you’ll keep this between us and us alone.”
“Oh!” she said, and blinked. While they went on in this way, Ann saying Count on me with a disquieting blush, Leer noting the blush and appearing somehow to perpetuate it, a shade at the edge of the yard caught my eye. A clutch of dead ferns parted and a fat raccoon bumbled blinking into our company.
“Why, it’s Genghis,” I said cautiously, for it was Tom’s prodigal coon.
“So you know him,” Leer said. “He’s been lurking here ever since I arrived.”
Genghis approached and circled us without fear. He was used to people and kind of a bully. Tom had tried returning Genghis to nature several times including once driving him sixty miles up-shore and releasing him in a campground fragrant with bratwurst and Doritos. Genghis always returned. When Leer squatted and offered his hand to the raccoon, I said, “Whoop, careful there,” but Genghis went to him like an affable pup, ducking under Leer’s hand and rolling at his ankles.
“Good animal.” Leer rested a palm on Genghis’s head as if imparting a blessing, then stood, turning to me. “Now Virgil—Virgil Wander—from what I hear, you’ve had a near escape. Good thing Mr. Jetty was on hand. Have you always been lucky, or is this new?”
I was surprised by his question and thought it over. “It feels new.”
“Excellent. May it continue.” Down in the whickering flames a moldy pants leg caught the wind and flopped end over end as if making a break for it. Leer gracefully snared it with the rake and moved it back onto the coals. “I imagine some city business is on your mind. Some deal you want to close.”
He wore the relaxed expression of an old friend, leaned in like a confidant. My lips assumed an ingratiating smile. Not that I liked Leer—no—but I found, against my will, that I very much wanted him to like me. Marshaling my wits I laid before him the upcoming Founder’s Day event, the community’s ongoing respect for his father, and so on. My truncated vocabulary rendered me concise. I used no more than twenty seconds laying out the city’s request.
“No indeed,” he simply replied.
Just like that! After all his talk of negligence and stewardship, his eagerness to hire local sprucer Jerry Fandeen, I’d expected he might be amenable.
“It would display your public spirit,” I said, experimentally.
There was a dim flash as something rose in his eyes—his shoulders shifted with a fluidity that made me think of the sea. The flash faded and he said, “I’m honored you would ask, Virgil. Truly I am. But speechmaking is a phobia of mine. After all these miles what I come back for is quiet. I’m sure you understand.”
I said of course I did.
“I’ll just stay here and watch the fire if it’s all right with you,” he said, by way of dismissal.
“Thanks again,” Ann sang out.
“Go on,” Leer said to the raccoon, who stirred himself and came with us. Leer turned back to the flames. Genghis trotted along making small chirring sounds. When I opened the truck door he climbed in as though he were tame and settled himself between the seats.
I was glad to leave—once again I’d overdone. Out we jounced over Leer’s pitted blacktop, Genghis alert between us, me woozy and weightless as a head on a pole. The truck sighed and sagged. I wondered how long it would take to quit smelling those smoldering clothes.
Ann on the other hand was still blushing.
“I think he might do it,” she said. “Speak at the festival.”
“He made it pretty clear he won’t,” I replied, shutting my eyes against the overall twirl. I didn’t care whether Leer spoke or not. For that matter I didn’t want to hear Ann speak for a while. If things could only be still and quiet and aroma-neutral for a minute or two, I might yet avoid a depressing road puke.
“He might, though,” Ann said, craning back for one last look at the house before it went behind the aspens. “He might speak, Virgil, if I asked him for you.”
We delivered Genghis to the newspaper office where Beeman was not glad to see him, then Ann let me off at the Empress. I passed the afternoon as a kind of sentient vapor, wafting through rooms listening to NPR, napping, blinking, and drifting to the roof-deck where I watched weather systems gather and disperse above the indifferent waves. Attempting to focus I lit the blue candle and thought about Mom and Dad.
A word about the candle. I’m not Catholic, but there was a girl in high school I sure liked being next to and when her grandma died I went with her to church. Beth had a quiet voice and tremendous thick dark hair which turned auburn when she struck the flame. She was a very reverent girl. She was reverent about Mass, popes, martyrs, saints (especially Isidore, patron saint of farmers), the working poor, the idle poor, and Jesus; and she was most determined to light candles for her grandma, whom she never liked—I met the grandma once at a picnic and remember only black eyebrows and a disquieting Frank Zappa soul patch. Beth felt guilty because she had feared and avoided the old woman, who was now dead. Beth was steadfast about the candles. She said they made her feel calm.
After the derailment I started lighting candles too.
All Orry and I ever learned for certain was that the train had failed to slow properly for a stretch of bad track. Eleven people died including all six in their car. There were fractured bones and sun and flies and water befouled by diesel and everything was hot. My imagination filled in moans and smells, inadequate last words. What made me light the candle was the fact I was supposed to be along. Mom and Dad were not trained missionaries but laypeople wanting to be of use. Kind and mostly patient believers, across my high-school years they became steadily more fervent. The prevalence of lost souls bec
ame unendurable to Mom in particular. She dreamed of people weeping in darkness. With growing excitement and a sense of destiny they plotted a six-month tour in Mexico at an ecumenical mission in the Sonoran foothills, where they would plant fruit trees and the Word of God, reaping an eternal harvest. They learned Spanish from cassettes and how to cook with peppers. Pitching the trip to me as a lifetime adventure, they assumed I would happily go, but by then I was seventeen, with school and a job and a hundred entirely temporal ambitions. In the end after long deliberation and what seemed to me an embarrassing amount of out-loud prayer on the matter, they allowed me to stay home by myself. When they drove off I vaulted into the backyard howling Libre al fin. Four days later I got a call from the American consulate in Hermosillo. I’ve been lighting candles ever since.
Now the blue candle flickered in a draft from the window—I’d fallen asleep. Blowing it out I found myself thinking of Lanie Plume, the Citgo girl. As she pointed out, I’d been “briefly virtually dead.” The message was that I should’ve died, but hadn’t. That was the sense I kept getting. Everyone was nice about it, but I was a living mistake. The notion that I’d somehow put one over on mortality was exhausting.
Was a quest really necessary? Did I have to seize the day? In the circumstances, I wasn’t even sure what the phrase meant. I could barely walk straight. My eyes were unreliable and cognition did not feel definitive. Only that morning I’d thrown out most of my clothes, convinced they’d been smuggled into my closet by devious Salvation Army volunteers. Seize the day suggests the day has a handle or a set of lapels. I distrust epiphanies. During my brief theological misery, Orry sent me a Western Union telegram saying, “Existence is great but don’t read so much into it.”
Yet this much couldn’t be argued: I’d gone to the edge, and got back alive by the slenderest chance. Maybe I was “here for a reason,” as the optimists continually insist.
You’d think there might be comfort in the idea, but no. I remained sick. My stomach lurched, my head was sore, and my muscles were tired. In fact I’ll confess to recurring ingratitude and even annoyance toward Marcus Jetty, who’d pulled me to safety. What was he doing outside in that filthy weather? Was he so desperate for one more shabby herring float? Was there no one else’s beeswax he could mind?
Given my attitude, you may think what happened next was purposeful. It wasn’t. I made toast, watched some Deadliest Catch, rinsed knife and plate. I scrubbed my face and brushed my teeth and called that sucker a day.
Apparently I got up later.
Apparently I couldn’t sleep, swallowed two tablets, and lit a burner under a pan of milk.
It seems I then just cruised on back to bed.
Of this I can assure you: despite my grumpy existential stance, I was glad to be alive. Glad for my friends, for the strident dizzying world, for my beat-up equilibrium and plundered lexicon—all of it. I was also grateful in no small measure for the Empress. Carp as I might she was my own, my sweet ball and chain, my museum and mistress. God in heaven, I loved the Empress. I promise you I didn’t mean to burn the old girl down.
7
I HADN’T SEEN KATE WILSEY SINCE SHE FLED TOWN FOR A CATTLE rancher in deepest heartland. It seemed strange that a woman who supported Greenpeace and made wishes on sea glass would uproot without notice to Tulsa, Oklahoma, but she was a bright hungry woman and I suppose local beeves were inadequate. Now she was back, standing on the sidewalk in the morning when I let myself out.
“Why, Kate,” I said.
She didn’t reply but stood there fetchingly in a dappled sarong rippling in the very slight breeze.
“It’s good to see you, Kate,” I said. “You are lovely and diaphanous.”
Unmoved by the adjective she looked past me with a blank expression as though at unfurling disaster. There was a rank smell like Adam Leer’s pyre except more industrial. I looked northeast toward massive Slake International displacing its acres of sky. No smoke there. Turning back to Kate I watched her mouth open real big—it just kept opening, like a sinkhole. A noise came out of it—eeee—a scream with no bottom. It went on and on. She screamed as though the body snatchers were in there. The horror was such I was almost relieved to wake to a house fire. I snapped on the light and brown smoke stung my eyes. I leaped out of bed, caught the doorframe with my shoulder, and fell into the hall. Flames explored the square yard of ceiling above the stove. The pan of milk was a black clot throwing sparks. Bits of pressboard dropped hissing on counter and floor. I skidded forward on my knees and whipped a fire extinguisher from under the sink. A practically new dry-chemical model. Pulling the pin I blasted the ceiling and blew tiles all over the kitchen. The burning ones I hit again. The sparking milk pan skidded off the stove and I twisted the gas knob, blistering finger and thumb. A slim vine of smoke curled from the ceiling. The extinguisher was empty but I’d kept the old one. I climbed onto the table and pulled down every tile in reach. Squinting at warrens of insulation and wiring I saw no flames but stuck the nozzle up there and pummeled each opening with foam.
My head roared, my stomach trembled.
I threw open the windows, silenced the alarm, and leaned out over the marquee with my elbows on the sill. It wasn’t yet six in the morning. The streetlamps were still on. Only the bakery across Main was lit—Betsy Shane would be trundling around behind the counter. A distant storm door opened and thumped, a semi jaked on the highway. A few geese flew overhead in the dark blue—I couldn’t see them but heard their fanning wings.
My head soon cleared but my fingers shook. The courteous doctor had warned of lapses. Again I owed my life to luck, or providence, or, now I think of it, my own cautious nature—a fresh nine-volt in the smoke alarm, not one but two extinguishers at hand. “Just think,” Beeman later cheerfully remarked, “if you weren’t such a sensible bastard you’d be seared like a nice fillet.”
I slid to the floor. Foam dripped from the ceiling in irregular blobs that spread when they hit. The electricity was intact, though. Ceiling tiles are simple to replace. I got to my feet. When you live above a movie theater, mops are never far away.
At ten a.m. I carried the last ruined tiles to the roof-deck and dropped them on a blue tarp. My fingers had quit shaking and my thoughts were in order. I’d half-convinced myself the whole event was no more than an embarrassing fluke. When I stepped back inside, the Empress landline was ringing. I answered and was informed by a woman named Rita I had missed my follow-up with Dr. Koskinen.
“I didn’t know about this follow-up.”
“You did know,” Rita said. “Your appointment was this morning at nine. We set it up with you in person before your release. We left a confirmation voice mail on your cell. We sent two text messages, one yesterday and one this morning.” Rita paused. “Therefore you knew.”
“I’m sorry … hmm, gosh.” I did feel bad about missing the follow-up, but less so the longer I knew Rita.
She said, “Dr. Koskinen asked me to reschedule. Would you like me to do that now?”
“Sure.”
“If we make another appointment, Mr. Wander, will you go to the trouble of keeping it?”
I could’ve explained, of course. My cell was in the lake and I’d forgot to buy a new one. The appointment was on the wall calendar, which I had forgot to check. Then last night I’d forgot to shut off the burner, which resulted in a busy morning. I could’ve explained but instead just hung up.
It was rude, absolutely. The previous tenant wouldn’t have done it. The previous tenant would have groveled and then held a grudge.
The phone rang again. Rita said, “We were cut off.”
“We weren’t, no. I hung up because of your tenor.”
“My tenor?” she repeated. “Excuse me—do you have an issue with my tenor?”
“Well, I do, yes. It’s tremendously hostile, Rita.”
I experienced an unspooling sense of freedom—genuine antagonism is something I’ve rarely encountered, and it felt good to respond with honesty ins
tead of obsequious scraping. There was also enormous linguistic relief. How could Rita know what a triumph tremendously hostile represented?
She hung up.
After a few minutes the phone rang again. “Virgil, it’s Paul Koskinen. How are you?”
We didn’t talk long. I expected to be lectured or at least handled with care and instead he was nothing but kind. He inquired whether I could walk without tripping, or read normal print, whether meat and potatoes had begun to taste faintly of aluminum. He asked about limb tremors and headaches and impossible visions. Did I own any firearms? If so were they stored in appropriate fashion? He asked how my memory functioned and I said it was fine—I tried to say runs like a top but couldn’t remember the spinning toy so the phrase petered out. This may have alerted him to something. I don’t remember how he got to the truth about the kitchen fire, but he got there. There came a long silence in which I anticipated rebuke.
At last he said, “Find someone to stay with you, Virgil.”
“I’d really rather not.”
“Only for a few days. Maybe a week. You can do this, I think.”
I said, “You know, doctor, it’s okay. I put the fire out and I won’t start another. Alone is all right with me.”
A stymied silence on the other end. I could hear the moist wheeze of a heavy man in deep concern.
“Humor me,” he said at last. “Otherwise, I’m going to worry about you.”
I opened my mouth to object, but then the doctor coughed softly—he wheezed, and I faltered. He was a patient old Finn, this Koskinen. He had called me back himself, the rarest of physicians. He spoke in a tone of forbearance. He was going to worry if I was alone! Suddenly I had a lump in my throat as hard as a buckeye. Blinking fast I promised the doctor I would find myself a houseguest before the day was through.
It was true what I said—alone was all right with me, and had been for a long time. Orry comes every year for a week and while she’s terrific mordant company there’s no denying the lift I feel at her receding taillights. Beeman is the best friend I’ve had since grade school, but I couldn’t imagine him settling in for more than a few hours, ducking his bison head under the archways, knocking around in the guest bedroom with its lopsided futon. Of course because of the dream I thought of Kate Wilsey—she’d settled in once for quite a while and seemed to like it, but Kate was in Tulsa with her sinewy stockman.
