by Leif Enger
I’d planned to go in to work, but that fled my mind straight off. It’s strange, and again I plead brain damage, but those days I couldn’t see a kite without wanting to fly it. As a kid I’d enjoyed kites, but only in the usual way of kids, losing interest once they were airborne and manageable. Now I thought of flying daily, hourly. I didn’t hold the string so much as climb it, and once flying I felt small and unencumbered, as if the moving sky were home and I’d been misplaced down here. Maybe I wanted the broad reach, as Lou Chandler had said. That great wide open.
On the landing I found the cracked hockey stick which had made a helpful staff earlier. The crack was worse from the weight of me leaning on it. I wrapped it with silver duct tape I tore off with my teeth.
By the time I reached Rune a little throng was gathered. Well, twelve people. Still quite a few to accumulate around a shabby kite-flying eccentric. Most were local and some passing through—a trio of blaze-orange deer hunters, the bread-truck lady en route to Grand Marais, a frowsty ancient couple in a Buick Regal fleeing interventionist children. Marcus Jetty was on hand with his windswept daughter. Julie from the Agate had got off shift and waved to me. Also back for more was Shad Pea—he couldn’t seem to stay away from Rune. Maybe kites had joined big fish in Shad’s realm of fascinations. Galen circled his dad like a border collie, as though to keep him together.
In the midst of this loose crowd stood Rune, untidy and jubilant, coat unbuttoned, hat brim flexing in the peppy breeze, fingers bare against the blue-white day. He bent down to a blonde pixie in a pink stocking cap. She might have been six. The pixie told him something with extravagant drama. She clapped her mittened hands.
Rune was flying the dog. It dipped down as if noting our presence, then shot away.
A restless mender and fixer of trifles, Rune had got out his paints and retouched its eye and body. The edits were small but significant. Yesterday the kite was any old hound, easygoing and set on cruise. Overnight it had matured, its brown gaze deepened. So here’s what you saw as you came spinning uphill on Highway 61: the long snowy slope with tall tan grasses, white-robed monks of jutting stone, the milky sky scrolling overhead—then up it bounded, the last thing you’d expect, this marvelous animal, this rippling big cinnamon hound. To see it was to laugh aloud, to sense that it liked you already.
How could you not pull over?
The pixie shed her mittens, jammed them into her coat pockets, and pulled on the big stiff gloves Rune offered. What a game creature! Her whole self hardly ballast enough yet on she clamped, leaning against the pull with tiny backpedaling steps. It still stands out to me, that morning—that scatter of people, together by accident, as if they’d all been called to the place with no idea why. There was a current of solidarity, expectancy, a knock-wood perception of something bound to happen. The pixie flew until she tired, gave Rune the string, and ran skipping to her dad who lounged against his tailgate eating buttered bread. Rune hummed and flew, handing the string to all who approached. People talked and nodded, stretched out their arms, scratched and smoked, and watched the dog in the sky. A pickup arrived in a pod of exhaust and a tetchy old lady emerged. Another car pulled in, the driver toothless and lesioned, then another, a man fifty and a woman thirty he sucked in his gut to impress. A man in a navy peacoat bowed to Marcus’s daughter who smiled and twirled away. Rune was delighted at this orbital spin, but not surprised, I think. He had a little Pied Piper in him. There was even a tatty big raven who landed on a stone near his elbow. It rubbed its beak on its wing with proud tuts, shifting from one foot to the other.
As for me I held back. I confess to a jealous twinge on reaching the lookout to find him so surrounded. It’s childish, but I probably took for granted a kind of exclusivity. Didn’t I greet him on his first day in town? Wasn’t I first to fly the big kite, and didn’t I see that he slept in a bed, instead of that manky VW? He’d called me his rare friend—now here were all these other people, the lot of them hopeful and hungry and greedy to take the string.
I couldn’t stay grumpy, however—the sociable mood was infectious. The smiling Julie now opened her trunk and produced a box of raised glazed. Someone turned up a radio playing a Chopin waltz. Hand to hand went the kite string. Did you know my son? Rune asked all who flew, and quite a few of them did. A small town like Greenstone is thoughtful and nosy. It had got around fast that Alec’s father was here. Rune wrote with a pencil in a pocket-size notebook while the dog clattered high in the gusts. He hummed sometimes, he whistled through his teeth. He wrote as fast as he could.
Because of what happened I have this etched memory. Shad Pea and Galen were there, as I said, Shad staying out on the fringe. His limbs were shaking and his knitted stocking cap kept falling off, revealing his purply bald spot. He seemed the worse for yesterday’s encounter with Leer.
Then Rune handed him the kite string, and Shad relaxed. He moved it back and forth, speaking easily without shouting. He laughed aloud and Rune laughed with him; his tremors subsided, and his cap stayed on.
13
RUNE FLEW UNTIL SUNDOWN—HE’D HAVE STAYED TO THE LAST HOLDOUT, but I was abruptly exhausted and frozen, my voice dissolving in shivers. On getting back to the Empress he was distracted, rubbing his hands and then blowing into them as though keeping embers alive.
“I spoke with Shad,” he said, in an exploratory tone; while I filled a kettle and lit a burner he went on, “I have been asking, and people think one of two things about Alec. He perished in the sea when his plane went down—that is the main one. Or he simply—hmm—”
“Absconded?”
“Yes—abscond. That he started over elsewhere.” He paused. “Shad Pea thinks neither of these is correct.”
I busied myself with mugs and brown sugar and cloves and butter and rum.
“He believes the airplane was spoiled, tinkered. Sabotaged? In fact,” he said, pretending not to watch my reaction, “he thinks my son’s death was a murder.”
At the word his voice fell off into grief. He’d read about the so-called Alec sightings—unlikely as they were, they allowed him to imagine his boy alive, working in a machine shop, or spraying crops, or bending neon, still striving somewhere under a name we didn’t know.
On the other hand, the notion that his son had abandoned Nadine and Bjorn for some unspecified life haunted Rune terribly. He’d got to know them now. Already they were his own and had no imperfections.
“Maybe Shad is onto something,” he said.
I was quiet. Rune had cruised all afternoon on currents of goodwill. The last thing I wanted was to cut his string and see him tumble to earth.
“Ah—you don’t credit him, I see.”
“Rune, I just think you want to be careful.”
He caught my eye and held it. “Your friend is not honest?” Rune wasn’t angry or defensive but was losing altitude all the same; there he stood declining. “Shad is not genuine? Is that your hesitation?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Shad’s a good man. Better than most of us, maybe. But he’s …” I shut my eyes, looked for adjectives, and could come up only with “not reliable,” a choice I instantly regretted. Shad had plowed snow twenty years, in dangerous weather, for embarrassing pay. Reliable is exactly what he was. Yet it was also true he had a headful of spiders which woke now and then and altered his personal scenery. Somehow I’d managed to disappoint one friend and rat on another at once. “Don’t listen to me, Rune—honestly don’t. I spoke out of turn about Shad.”
But he’d crumpled, his face half slack and his color all fled.
I passed him a mug of hot buttered rum. He didn’t reach for it.
“Well, I’m going out to Shad’s anyway,” he finally said. “He invited me to fish with him—tomorrow maybe. Soon. But don’t worry—if he explains how my son was murdered, I’ll be careful not to believe him.”
I was taken somewhat aback, and not just by Rune’s sad taunt, which I had coming. I’d known Shad Pea most of my tour in Greenstone, watche
d his daughter graduate, helped him with paperwork when his wife moved to memory care. Until Rune showed up, he never asked me to go fishing.
At last taking a sip of the rum, Rune seemed to change gears. “Maybe I am doing this wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“You see how it is. Everyone has a story about Alec. A baseball game, a neon sign, a funny thing he said. I like that Lou Chandler, very much,” he said. “But none of it gets me close to Alec,” he added, with an intensity of sorrow that kept me quiet. “With Sofie, I know how much lemon in the tea, I know the songs she sang while stirring up the bread. She became vain for a while after a man at the café mistook her for Grete Nordrå. She was proud of her nice long hands. When arthritis came, she hated the disfigurement more than the pain. If I could know Alec this way, none of the rest would matter.”
“You understand this is the sort of thing you can only begin to get from Nadine and from Bjorn.”
He nodded.
“You worry you’re being a bother. That it’s painful for them, having you around.”
“Not Nadine so much. It’s hard on Bjorn.”
“I could talk to him.”
“No.”
What else to say? Rune wanted the impossible. Regardless of bloodline, how can you know the absent ones you never got to meet?
It made me rethink my own memories of Alec. He had many friends, but friends drift. Even friends who still live down the street. Over time I had drifted into thinking of Alec as most people did, as a likable man who had some bad luck or succumbed to his singular darkness. In fact, until Rune appeared and reminded me, I’d begun to forget I was his friend.
I was, though not the kind of friend who could supply what Rune was seeking. I didn’t know Alec’s vanities, or his weaknesses, or what songs he hummed when cooking.
Rune sipped and sighed and tapped his fingers on the table. He was so downcast it began to infect me. My back ached, a thumb came to rest against my heart. My gaze moved past Rune to the lakeside windows, the small blackened fireplace rimmed with tin plating, the door to the north closet. The sight of this door with its faux-crystal knob reminded me I was not without resources. I was Alec’s friend—moreover, I owned the Empress.
“I do know one thing,” I stated, “and that’s what Alec’s favorite movie was. And it’s here. You want to see it?”
He looked at me listlessly without understanding.
“Well come on—I can’t describe his aftershave for you, or what made him come over all misty, but I’ve got his favorite picture. I’ll show you the same print I showed him. Shoot, I can probably put you in the same seat.”
I’d never been grouchy with Rune before. He perked up and grinned, which for some reason made me grouchier. “Take it or leave it,” I said.
The picture, one of the few actual classics in my vault of illegals, was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—Newman and Redford, 1969. Though he was from the remotest of climes, I assumed Rune had seen it; this was the film that made Redford as common as hamburgers. But Rune hadn’t seen it—when I told him the title, he only shrugged. It was as if I’d mentioned a pair of local roustabouts.
While Rune washed out the cups, I retrieved the reels from the closet and carried them down to projection. A feature film contains over two miles of celluloid so is quite heavy, properly so since it contains the labor of hundreds of people over many months to produce your two-hour vacation. How good it felt to be in there again! My booth is a low-ceilinged rectangle with blue carpeted walls and analog dials. I switched on the power and opened the flat tins with their golden-age Eastman Kodak smell and spun the reels one at a time onto the massive horizontal platter until the whole feature lay spliced up dense as a manhole cover. I get a little chill at this point in the proceedings, a chill of expectation.
I looked down and saw Rune settle into the seat I’d pointed out—center section, third from the aisle—then rise and search out another more comfortable. Fair enough. Finding a better seat he looked around, trying to locate me. I started the film, lowered the volume to allow for the empty auditorium and my own newly sensitive ears, and went down to join my friend.
As for Butch Cassidy—well, the picture still thrives. I credit Newman. There’s barely a frame where he isn’t laughing, at least with his eyes and often with his entire face. Redford mainly broods but that’s his job here and he holds to the brief. Best for me was watching how it played for Rune. At first he leaned forward, visibly edgy during the long sepia opening. He later acknowledged straining to “watch like Alec watched.” But the pressure was lifted from him early, at the comic scene where Butch puts a boot in Harvey Logan’s crotch and establishes cred with the gang. Rune hooted like a chimp, and after that the movie picked him up and carried him along. He smiled at the benign train robberies and paled like the boys themselves when things got tight in Bolivia. I believe he also appreciated Katharine Ross—to this day a glimpse of certain bicycle handlebars can lure me into sun-drenched sadness.
As the picture went on I perceived that the more Rune forgot Alec, the more like Alec he became—he had Alec’s high laugh, a similar melancholy at the eyes. Although saying this, I realize it may have been illusory. Memory’s oldest trick is convincing us of its accuracy.
When the credits rolled I went up to the booth. I switched off the lamp to save the expensive bulb and let the film run through, then ran it back, desplicing the celluloid onto the original reels. With the digital coup all but accomplished, film-handling gets labeled a “dying art.” Soon I’ll have to show movies from a hard drive like everyone else, a disturbing idea. I would say projectionists aren’t more sentimental than blacksmiths except that we probably are.
When I came back down Rune hadn’t moved. Though it was quite late, he was reluctant to leave the auditorium. “All this is wonderful,” he said, looking at the faded paint, the faraway ceiling. “Magisk,” he added. The Empress does look fairly magical at that hour, golden and dim, the ratty seats lining up in the gloom, the screen retaining a remnant of light much as your mind retains the fading pleasure of the story. I was pleased. I got into the business for magisk. Once in a while it’s not indefensible.
“How is it you have this film?” he inquired, as we went up the aisle. “Do you keep them all?”
I explained that I rented and returned the films, but also had a few old prints in a closet, like Butch, though these were not actually mine. His confusion was evident so I added, “I came into them by accident. It’s not the most legal situation.”
He absorbed this ambiguity before asking, “If they aren’t yours, whose?”
“They are the property of the studios who made them. And no, they don’t know I have the prints.”
“And this bothers you,” he observed.
“I don’t screen them for profit,” I replied, sounding lame—it was tempting to add that I’d rarely screened any movie for profit, but why confuse matters?
“What would happen,” Rune mused, “if these studios found out you had some of their movies?”
As you might expect I’d looked into this question. I told Rune about an amateur collector in Memphis with a print of a popular biblical epic. This man wrote a warm letter to the studio head in 1996, praising the film as an artifact akin to the gold of Ramses himself. He assured the executive he’d kept it pristine and offered to ship the print to the studio at his own expense. Days later this fellow was frog-marched into court, tried for wrongful possession, fined five thousand dollars, and given six months in jail. This news item from Cinematique alarmed me so much I telephoned the collector. Money aside, what he regretted was his naïveté. He’d bought the print—from an unnamed citizen—because he loved movies. For the same reason, he’d written that letter to the studio in the convivial tone you might use with a revered but distant uncle. His reward for this overture was a brisk mugging. The collector had his jail time commuted but the story subdued my confessional urge. If my conscience took a hard right I’d have to adm
it I had not only Butch Cassidy but dozens more films, all of which I’d wrongfully possessed for twenty-five years.
“No leniency, then,” Rune said sadly. He thanked me for the movie and I said there were more he might like.
It was after eleven. Rune went upstairs while I doused the auditorium lights and performed a dispiriting lobby check. Enchanting the Empress might be, yet more sawdust volcanoes had risen. The carpeting smelled like a seedy hotel. Some kids had nosewiped both front doors.
Back upstairs the landline phone was flashing.
The message was from Lily Pea, sounding ragged. Shad had gone fishing and hadn’t returned. She checked the usual places: the public pier, the Green Street Bridge, a backwater known as the Pasture for its grassy weeds. Around ten thirty she found him. He was rotating facedown in an eddy of the Pentecost River, near the mouth where it empties into Superior.
I crouched, leaning against the wall. Rune lowered himself to a chair. After a long silence Lily continued. It appeared a fish had taken Shad’s lure. It looked like he’d slipped and his waders filled. Maybe a big fish pulled him off balance, or maybe he was that way already. Please could I call, she wanted to talk. She said her dad’s face didn’t look scared. More like exasperated. Lily’s voice was like something left out in the weather. I looked over at Rune just as a bright tear slid down his face. The last thing Lily said on the message was that nothing went right for her dad for as long as she could remember.
14
A STRAIGHTENED-OUT HOOK—THAT’S WHAT WE SAW THE NEXT morning. A heavy-gauge hook pulled straight as a nail.
Shad’s house was half a mile north of the Pentecost under some spindly jack pine. He was proud of the house, having built it himself from a shipping container acquired from Marcus the tinker. He did the plumbing and insulation, installed a woodstove and some rattly windows retrieved from a demolition in Hibbing. He painted it a pleasant celery color. It still looked like a shipping container and got very loud in a rain.
