by Leif Enger
It’s odd to realize you know everyone in town—you’re a fixture, an endearment for God’s sake—yet can no more ask for help than sprint in the Naked Olympics.
Out on the roof I gathered the edges of the tarp. Ninety pounds or so of tiles and rags, the blackened pan, also the retro chrome toaster Orry had given me, now ruined with chemical foam. I tied the whole business in a corpselike bundle and dragged it to the cornice overlooking the alley. Earlier I’d gone down and opened the lid of the rusty green dumpster. Now I heaved the bundle atop the cornice, balanced it there, and let it go like a burial at sea. Straight into the dumpster it dropped, crinkly-whack, the weight rocking the unit forward so the lid fell neatly shut. The perfect shot gave me a sensation of lift, of unseemly liberation, as when I had been impolite to Rita. I looked out over the waterfront, the marina with its few bobbing sailboats, the Shipwreck Tavern’s trashy lakeside veranda, the city pier and swimming beach, and the tall black ore-loading dock like the last of all permanent things.
The breeze picked up. Halyards sang against their spars. The broad water surged along, deep blue with chevron whitecaps angling up-shore.
For a moment the world made its welcome old sense.
Then from behind the ore dock rose an improbable shape—through the October haze it came into focus. It was a dog. A massive, jowly, sad-eyed dog. The dog was low in the sky, ears up, nose down, scouting the horizon. At first I was spooked. Hallucinations aren’t necessarily a disaster but are rarely propitious. Where was it going to end?
Then the dog hesitated in midair. While I watched it shook itself, and the sound gave it away—a shivery rattle, like blown newspaper.
I didn’t know the dog—not yet—but I knew its master.
I laughed on the rooftop as the dog loped out over the waves.
8
RUNE’S SECOND KITE (WHAT I THOUGHT OF AS HIS SECOND, THOUGH he’d been building kites for decades) was a tribute to his favorite animal, a short-haired mutt given him by a friend. The mutt had bloodhound genes and a keen nose—too keen for the friend, Espen, a renowned Casanova in his wind-scrubbed Arctic village. Espen simply couldn’t get away from the dog, which slipped all leads and followed him everywhere. Anyone wondering where Espen was had only to see at whose doorway the dog was lying any given afternoon. As the trumpeter declares in The Commitments (1991), it ruffled his savoir faire.
“A loyal soul—we had him twelve years, Sofie and me,” Rune said, clearly pleased both by the dog and its hovering look-alike. He was in good humor, standing on the cobbly rocks north of the pier, wearing a pair of cowhide gloves so new you could smell the leather. A cluster of sparrows worked the nearby grasses for seed. The kite, more lifelike the closer you got, hunted to and fro over the water. It was at least nine feet from nose to tail and a hard puller. The heavy string whistled in the wind—those gloves were a good idea.
“Whereabouts do you live?” I asked.
“Tromsø,” he said. “We, I, live in Tromsø. Not Espen—these days he spends most of his time in Svolvær.” He paused. “There are some charitable women in Svolvær.”
“Ah—Norwegian.” I wouldn’t have guessed from the accent, which had to me the weathered consonants of not just a distant place but an ancient time.
Rune said, “Tromsø, Norway. You’ve heard of it, hmm? The Paris of the North?”
“I’ve not heard that exactly.”
Already low over the lake, the trusting dog began sinking tail-first toward the steaming waves. Rune let a few feet of line off a wooden reel, gave a quick tug, and it stabilized; like an actual dog, the kite demanded attention.
“And your project here? Your detective work, I mean. I hope you’re finding what you wanted.”
He nodded. Today his face appeared level right across, not like the downhill slide of our last meeting. “I went to their house—Nadine and Bjorn’s. How gracious she is. We had roast beef, some very good potatoes. She showed me photographs. Fishing, picnics, the neon signs. I don’t know many things about baseball.”
He looked out toward the water, keeping his voice level and his eyes away from me to veil his palpable melancholy. It was impossible not to imagine him in Nadine’s living room, facing proof of a life for which he was directly responsible, yet had missed from beginning to end. Had he seen eyes like his own looking up at him from the photos?
In a subdued tone he said, “They have no reason to show me kindness, yet they do.”
“Alec was kind as well. You should be pleased he was yours.”
“Takk,” he said softly.
I thought he would now bring up the matter of Alec’s disappearance, his amended and suspect reputation, the obvious axis on which his name revolved. But he didn’t. He allowed the dog to sink within inches of the wave tops, then walked it slowly forward, a neat trick.
“How do you get on with Bjorn?” I asked.
Rune didn’t reply. The question seemed to demarcate a zone of caution, and why not? Bjorn was a spirited small boy, impetuous and sociable, but that changed after Alec’s departure. He fell sick in fact—developed a recurrent fever and cough, a reedy elongated wheeze that made you want to draw your coat over his ever-bonier shoulders. His lucent pallor outlasted the fever and became his permanent shade. He lost his ability to imagine the future. Maps were as fiction to him; as his friends took up soccer or resolute truancy, Bjorn just fell away. He was counseled, exhorted, and drugged. He could no longer lay the plans boys lay. His taciturn gaze attracted aggressors. Reassured by her friends that Bjorn would in time recover himself, Nadine instead witnessed the flowering of an ominous quirk. As though the father’s abrupt disappearance were genetically ordained, like gray eyes or long fingers, Bjorn too began vanishing at chance moments. He and Nadine might be watching a movie, she would glance over to find him gone. He wasn’t “running away” or demanding attention; often he was only upstairs, perched on his bunk or peering outside. He began to sleepwalk. Waking to the impression of an empty house Nadine would throw on a jacket and retrieve him down the block in his stocking feet, or adrift in the leaf-blown alley behind the bakery. She found him once in a willow swamp on the edge of town, once climbing the abandoned ore dock under the moon. Now he was seventeen. A dreamy boy can get in deep. This past summer he had taken up surfing, always alone, a dicey endeavor on North America’s coldest water.
A southerly gust caught the big kite and sent it overhead with clattering ribs. Rune leaned back against it, the tails of his coat whipping forward. “Bjorn is uncommon,” he said. “He is careful with words. It is a good quality.” Rune’s understated manner in no way disguised his pride in his grandson, though he admitted the feeling was not reciprocated.
“It would be easier if I looked like Alec. For example, tall,” Rune conjectured, as a clutch of sparrows spooked up out of the grass and circled him tightly a moment. Distractedly he held out a gloved hand and two of the birds landed on it while he talked. “If I were lanky, yes? If I had my son’s nice face, instead of this damaged edition. It might be easier for Bjorn if he looked at me and saw a man he could almost remember.”
“He’ll adjust.”
Rune looked at me searchingly, as though I had been dismissive of his grandson. And maybe I had. Maybe I was recalling my own hard adjustment at seventeen; maybe I was also thinking of Nadine, who for a long decade had raised that boy alone.
“What a patient woman she is,” Rune said, as though reading my mind, sadness stealing into his voice.
“Nadine is resilient,” I said, grateful that a circumspect word was the one to surface. What if I’d said appealing or, worse, bewitching?
I had long guarded my speech where Nadine was concerned.
“She is a beauty,” Rune said, observing the sparrows at ease on his hand, then gently flicking them off. “Why did she not remarry?”
This was a subject I could scarcely talk about, and not just because of my withered terminology. After Alec vanished any number of men came knocking—loud entrepr
eneurs from Duluth; a Twin Cities surgeon in a Mercedes convertible; not one but two track coaches from farther up-shore, both weirdly fond of polyester shorts. Beeman took his shot, as did the local school superintendent who’d been disciplined but not fired for goosing cheerleaders in his office. Even old Adam Leer took a run at Nadine during one of his hometown sabbaticals. Through it all I watched Nadine discourage, deflect, delay. Of course some were more persistent than others. One of the coaches went so far as to secure a purchase agreement on a house in Greenstone, as though this somehow sealed the deal. Yet like the others he soon hit the road, moaning about vain pursuit. It made me think of Penelope waiting for Odysseus—Penelope at her loom, not missing a trick, lumpen suitors everywhere.
I said, “Maybe she believes he is still alive.”
Rune watched the kite, moonwalking it backward with rattly precision. “Is that what you believe?” he asked.
“I believe if he were alive he would have come back to her.”
Rune reached into his back pocket and tossed me a pair of leather gloves.
What a winning kite, that big dog, with perky ear and downcast eye—so much care had plainly gone into its fashioning, the previous tenant would’ve been terrified to fly it lest it dive straight into the lake. Rune showed me how to hold the wooden reel in my left hand and adjust the string with my right. If I paid out line, the dog backed toward the water; if I tugged, it bounded joyfully into the air.
Flying had immediate effects. The wind seemed a clarifying agent. My dizziness, severe after last night’s fever, disappeared. The headache smoldered far away. A pleasant tension traveled down the string. The whir entered my fingers and went up my arms. It hummed in my brainstem, shaking up vowels. My face ached from grinning. The dog hunted gleefully over the harbor and I was out there with it, land far behind, wind in my ribs, waves shooting along below. Nothing seemed out of reach or even unlikely. It was like entering a whirlwind where ambition and disappointment are flung off, yet you remain calm in its eye. Rune asked a question about Alec, and the whirring line gave wings to my memory.
When I was still seeing Kate, she cooked up an idea. Often she spent the evening with me up in the booth, the old Simplex projector spinning along while she got cozy at my side, riffing on noxious real-estate clients or designing in the air the splendid pile she expected to attain. What a promising couple we briefly made! In this connubial spirit she one night said: Hang on, boy—ain’t we young professionals? At her happiest Kate violated grammar just for the joy of it. Ain’t life splendid, and ain’t we got this vintage theater at our fingertips? Yes yes and yes, I said, my eyes on her generous wide smile. Ain’t it a shame then to shut things down at the fogy hour of ten p.m. and shoo out the crowd and lock up? It was indeed, said I, not pointing out that the “crowd” that night was seven adults and three children. What was on her mind, I asked. And she leaned in whispering: after-party.
I reached for her but she swatted me away—No, you big nast, I mean a party. Like with pizza! She had a dauntless practicality, Kate. I was quite in love with her. It’s never been hard for me to fall in love, a quality that has yet to simplify one single day of my life.
So we concocted an after-party, even though the primary event was only a seven p.m. screening of the latest Pixar, and even though after-party suggests a coastal hipness that not a soul of us possessed. The guest list was minimal. Alec and Nadine, little Bjorn too, Don Lean who sold insurance then and later ran for sheriff, Beeman with whichever wife he had at the time—Darla, I think it was. When the last customer left we extinguished the marquee and I laced up an illegal print of the old Marlon Brando–David Niven comedy, Bedtime Story (1964). We played it with the lights half-dimmed, kidding each other through the slow parts, enjoying gas-station pepperoni and substandard beer, becoming, of all things, friends. Alec was at his disarming best that night—checking on Bjorn who was asleep on a blanket, ribbing Tom and me about our respective empires in media and entertainment, ribbing himself about making it big in neon, when really none of us were making it, all of us just bleeding wherewithal, week in and week out, except of course Kate who was selling swampland hand over fist to hard-shell Y2Kers hoping for the worst.
So pleasant was this after-party, such a tight little club were we, that a month later we threw another, with lasagna and box cabernet and another unauthorized print from the vault (Ensign Pulver, also ’64). Soon it was our regular deal. Your own theater with art deco lighting and unlawful film stash is not a bad venue for personal whimsy.
Rune may have asked another question. It seemed to come from far away. Without really hearing it I answered at length—even minus adjectives I babbled along, and the more I babbled the more I remembered. The dog romped hither and yon, the kite string hummed like a prayer in my head, I had access to stories not remembered in years. When the high school biology department was getting rid of old taxidermy, Alec snagged the moldering Great Horned Owl and one evening hid in the shrubbery outside Beeman’s house. Beeman was delayed at the Shipwreck so Alec crouched in the junipers humming to himself for two hours before finally scaring the actual bejeebers out of Beeman coming up the walk. Alec really was funny. The owl story reminded me of a few more, and when I finally looked over, Rune seemed fatigued. He’d taken a seat on a large rock and was resting elbows on knees like a man out of breath. One of the sparrows had lit on his shoulder and regarded him now with a concerned tilt of its tiny round head. Rune’s face had again the tumbledown appearance of rockslide scree.
“Oh—sorry,” I said.
He gave a patient, preoccupied nod. Several people had arrived on the waterfront and hung shyly about. Shad Pea was among them. I recalled Lily saying he’d met the old kite flyer and now here he was, boots untied and his hair stuck down, a pencil tucked back of his ear. Rune put on his gloves and motioned for the reel. I hated to give it up—I very nearly couldn’t—with that beautiful hum in my veins. As I handed it over an idea came to me. I’d thought of it earlier, but forgot.
“Rune, where are you staying? Did you find a motel?”
He turned to point inland. There’s a small grassy lot just up from the water, with swing set and drinking fountain and a former tennis court turned desolate skateboard park. At the curb was an orange VW camper van, its canvas top propped at an angle. I’d walked right past it on my way to the waterfront—even at a distance, the van smelled like corned beef.
“Pretty cold for camping,” I said.
“Goose down bag.”
“Good, but it’s supposed to freeze tonight. If you want to get out of the weather, there’s an extra room up at the Empress. That’s the movie theater up on Main. It’s warm and it’s private. You won’t be bothered.” He looked indecisive so I added, “The truth is you’d be doing me a favor.”
Relief crossed his tired old face. I knew I should warn him my brain was on sick leave, I might puke without warning or fall to the floor, but before I could do so Shad Pea stepped in and seized Rune’s hand, the hand not holding the string. “Remember me?” Shad asked in a loud voice—he had roaring tinnitus from decades of snowplows and outboard motors and had to shout to hear himself. “Shad Pea! We talked last night, or the night before!”
“Of course,” Rune kindly replied. “How are you, my friend?”
“Pretty okay!” Shad said, though he looked awful—sallow and rank, fingers twisting a bandanna into a greasy snake. He had a hungry, dark-eyed expression. “Look, I brought you something.” Hiking up his jacket, Shad pulled a flask-shaped bottle from his hip pocket. “Maple syrup, from last spring—me and Galen made it.”
“Shad, takk, how thoughtful.” Rune held the bottle up to the light. A ghost of sediment slid along the bottom. “Would you care to take a spin?” Rune asked him.
Shad said nothing but reached for the string with both shaky hands.
9
I WAS VACUUMING THE HALLWAY BETWEEN THE TWO AUDITORIUM doors. The ceiling kept dropping tiny motes of dust. I’d painted and textur
ed and painted again, but nothing kept the streams of dust from dribbling down. Sometimes in the proper light you could see tiny iridescent threads descending to the carpet. If I didn’t vacuum several times a week, there would be dime-size cones on the floor. Through a magnifying glass they looked like a chain of volcanoes.
A motion drew my eye—a man at the door. I thought it might be Rune and had a moment of lift, but it wasn’t him. It was Jerry Fandeen.
I was nearly done vacuuming, so held up a hand and Jerry nodded while I cruised back and forth, sucking up the last of the dust volcanoes. The thought of having to talk to Jerry Fandeen made me tired. I had never talked with him all that much, but when I did it was heavy lifting—he was a hearty one, a big bluff beefsteak tomato, a man who shook hands and held on a long time. For some reason it was harder work than talking to Ann. Still, there was nothing for it—there he stood looking mournfully in through the glass, his nose deep purple, his fingers white. He had a long red steel toolbox tucked under his arm.
I unlocked and he came right in.
“What can I do for you, Jerry?”
“Hi, Virgil, I’m glad you’re all right, you know, with the accident.”
“Thank you.”
He set the toolbox on the floor and blew into his fingers. “It’s eerie—I drove up and had a look where you went over. It’s a long drop.”
“It sure is.”
“I said to Ann, Poor Virge. What a thing! The dude upstairs stepped in for sure. Tell you something, though,” Jerry said, in a confessional tone, “In all these years I never drove past that spot without thinking what it would be like to do what you did. Floor it, man. Over the edge. Get it done with. Lights out—not that you were trying to do that!” he added hurriedly. “Not saying that! A guy thinks about it, though, is all I’m saying.”
