Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  By the time Lily had answered her phone, at nearly midnight, her first shock had dimmed and she asked me to come in the morning and bring Rune if he was willing. Lily had an apartment in town but had stayed the night with Galen at Shad’s. She emerged from the house as we drove up. The sun was out and the snow in retreat. She kicked through the slush in a pair of green wellies, leaned into the passenger window, and put her forehead against my neck.

  “What can I do, Lily? What do you need right now?”

  “Two hours’ sleep,” she said. “And the brain of Solomon when I wake up. Thanks for coming. Are you Rune?”

  He smiled—his cheeks were pale and bruised.

  “Dad talked about you a lot,” she said. “Alec Sandstrom’s father.”

  Despite the grim circumstances Rune shifted and brightened. I was to see many times the alteration this description worked on him.

  “Come in, I made coffee,” said Lily. “It’s a cyclone in there, so excuse that, and Galen.”

  Cyclone was right although no more than usual. Shad had filled his home with tools, toasters, dorm fridges, folding chairs, fishing tackle, leaning towers of Field & Stream, and dishes clean and filthy. There was a framed Charlie Chaplin poster on the wall next to a wedding photo of Shad and Maria back at the outset. It was an outdoor wedding. They were laughing, the sun in their faces.

  The sink brimmed with suds and there was a foot or so of clear countertop where Lily had made a dent. Galen was at the table with his dad’s tackle box open in front of him. A swampy smell came from the box. Galen looked sallow and pinched. Rune set down a box of Danish pastry we had brought and pulled up a chair.

  “You okay, Galen?” I said, as though he might be.

  He nodded.

  “Lot of people will miss your dad.”

  Galen had a ziplock bag in his hands. It was full of garish blue and violet worms. They resembled the gummy candies kids enjoy, but these were fishing bait. Galen looked the worms over as if they were evidence.

  “Galen, you remember Rune?”

  The boy gave him a glance, set the worm bag in the tackle box, and picked out a jar of brined pork frogs.

  “Give it a break now, Galen. Have a Danish.” Lily put some on a washed plate and poured coffee into mismatched cups. Galen ignored the Danish and handed me what looked like a barbed finishing nail.

  “That was on the end of his line,” Galen said.

  It took me a moment but then Rune said, “That is a very big fish,” and I understood.

  Shad had been working a favorite spot. Usually Galen went along but last night he’d been coughing and Lily came and made him hot lemonade. They watched some TV. Shad set up his gear on a mudbank and waded down in. It was shallow but soft-bottomed. You had to be careful in those conditions. The paramedics had made note of an empty Don Q bottle in Shad’s tackle box.

  “It wasn’t the rum,” Galen said. “They’re going to say it was, but it wasn’t. It was the fish.”

  While the paramedics loaded Shad into the ambulance, the sheriff’s deputy located his fishing rod. It was caught on a submerged aspen branch, the reel end sticking up like a mortified hand. Deputy Stumbo got hold of the heavy braided line which stretched down through the riffles into the lake and pulled it in, two hundred feet of it culminating in a few split-shot weights and a steel leader attached to the ruined hook.

  “I seen the fish before,” Galen said. “A bunch of times. Big old sturgeon—we know that fish.”

  I glanced up at Lily whose look said See what I’m up against? Galen caught the look and bridled, but Rune said, “My dad was a fisherman too.” He peered into the tackle box. “What have you tried before, on this sturgeon? You must remember, if you can.”

  While they talked Lily caught my eye and we retreated to a far corner. Her hair was pushed into matted escarpments. It smelled like sweat and looked like panic. Lily’s everyday competence made you forget how young she was but now she was both anguished and cornered. Grief aside it’s expensive to die. So far as she could tell, Shad kept no papers. What if there was debt? How to get him buried? What to do with a painted shipping container on two acres of mud with seven pine trees?

  I could do little except try to be useful, a man who’d lost some relatives and knew who to call. She wasn’t a church person but I wrote down the name of a woman in Duluth whose lifework is leading unprepared survivors past funeral directors and other death-industry vampires. I said, “At least Shad went doing what he loved.”

  “Shut up, geez,” Lily said.

  Over at the table Rune and Galen were eating Danish. They had their heads together, both of them drinking coffee, nodding like accomplices. I heard mention of nine-aught hooks, the allure of beef liver or poultry in steep decay, the hours when a monster might let down his guard and swallow whatever horrifying baitgob.

  I was proud of Rune—he made himself Galen’s ally and encourager. Lose your dad at that age, you want a scapegoat. What better than a giant fish? Soon enough—in days or weeks, maybe longer but finally certain as winter—the mundane facts would come forward. Shad polishing off the Don Q, taking one step too many, the late stab for balance as the freeze flooded in. The world always comes for you. Let Galen chase fish for a while.

  As we drove out of the yard the tires spun in what remained of the slush. Lily stood in the sopping yard, her fingers white on Galen’s shoulder. She’d thanked me for coming and Rune for connecting with her little brother. You want to offer a person relief, but there was no relief on her face. In the house she had whispered with quickening despair, Virgil, Jesus, Galen’s up to me now. As for Galen he had no expression. He could’ve been a boy from some hopeless wartime photograph—mud to his boot tops, arms crossed, black around the eyes.

  the bottle imps

  1

  WHEN I CAME TO GREENSTONE AS A GROWN ORPHAN AND FAILED theology student, the town was already past—the mines finished, the Slake plant padlocked. Kids would shout on Main Street and listen for the echo. The silent ore docks on their stilts had an impenetrable air, as though constructed by aliens or, why not, Egyptians.

  For me—as for Tom Beeman later, as for Alec and Nadine—ruin was part of the draw.

  In 1987 you could buy a house a block off the lake for nine thousand dollars, or a movie theater with an art deco marquee and catastrophic upholstery for thirty. I was fresh out of God but had adequate cash. I did both.

  “Another,” said Orry, “in your long succession of brilliant choices.”

  I told her to stuff the sarcasm, but she was right. We were a mining and shipping town from which mining and shipping had vanished with no hope of return. Unlike those in the nearby Mesabi Range, which supplied the iron for two world wars plus millions of Bel Airs, Hudsons, Eldorados, and Mustangs, the Greenstone deposits were smaller than first believed. To this day the Mesabi produces ore, if not at historic levels; the Greenstone mines waned after a decade. By the mid-seventies most local miners, engineers, blasters, and mechanics went elsewhere. A few decided to sit tight, pick up a few hours at the gas station or grocery, coach a little football, and wait for things to turn around. No one’s waiting anymore. The photogenic waterfront once featured in a Life write-up titled “Surprising Villages of Rural Charm” now hosts a barren swimming beach, a tilty pier where old men cast unsuccessfully for trout, and a quiet marina with a few aluminum skiffs and ragtag sailboats bobbing in it. Every so often a gang of earnest sailors will lobby the state to upgrade our disused port into a “harbor of refuge,” where pleasure boats can shelter from the frequent gales, but that would require constructing a breakwater. Breakwaters are expensive—as the state contends, there simply aren’t that many boaters looking for pleasure off the remote coast of Greenstone.

  All this gloom and money sorrow has been accompanied by surreal ongoing juju. Maybe you’ve heard of our frog monsoon, a true story. It wasn’t just a frog here and there tumbling out of the sky—this was thousands of frogs, raining down from a dense black cloud. I�
��d just wrapped up a matinee and was cruising over to World’s Best Donuts when the frogs started hitting the pavement, mostly small brown specimens and a few greens. Some atomized on contact, others bounced and lay still. A few survivors hopped blindly in circles while overjoyed seagulls picked them off. The frogs received a neat riff on Letterman but were no joke on Main Street where they hydroplaned vehicles.

  That same summer our archaic hillside water tower slid off its footings with a hundred thousand gallons inside. Dishes rattled across town as it rolled through a residential block. Luckily most residents had moved away. The cylindrical tank flattened four vacant bungalows and a city councilman in his Buick who saw it coming but froze at the wheel.

  We made headlines in 1995 after Arnold Markey woke up with an eastern pipistrelle stuck to his arm—these are the smallest bats native to Minnesota. Arnold was a retired school bus driver famed for toughness, a man who confiscated water pistols and drove over them to combat recidivism. He killed the pipistrelle and threw it into the trash. A few weeks later Arnold complained of neck pain, then limb weakness, a fear of light, and a horror of water. At last he lurched out of his house, two doors from mine at the time. He shrieked and chattered and roamed the street. When the police came there was a dreadful standoff in which Arnold lunged at an officer who’d ridden his bus as a child. Please Mr. Markey the officer said. Eventually Arnold Markey was raced to the hospital where he died of rabies days later. The sympathetic officer got a bad scratch and twenty-one shots in the midsection with a long needle.

  Before my time there was even a high-profile kidnapping, when Las Vegas comedian Marvin Booley brought his wife and baby daughter to a local resort and the Booley child was instantly abducted. No ransom, no phone call, the infant gone like breath. After months of pleading and public frustration Booley left Las Vegas forever and wrote a book called Sorrow which revealed him as a philosopher of disquieting clarity, the last thing anyone expected. He was briefly the celebrated face of bereaved parenthood. He sat for 60 Minutes. He met Mr. Reagan. He went to Nepal and tried summiting Everest but strayed off the path and froze himself to death. He is still up there if you know where to look.

  All this and frankly much more connected to one tattered city of two dozen short streets, a new water tower already rusting at the seams, a few spires, an exhausted block of brick façades, and of course our mightiest edifice, the shuttered monolith of a taconite plant. I saw it all once from the seat of Alec’s plane. It was late April and the town was circumscribed with litter and plywood and discarded couches revealed by melting snow. Alec handed me a pair of those vintage binoculars that fold into a little tin box. They didn’t work very well. My eyes stung and filled. The airplane was noisy and delicate. We circled Greenstone twice not saying a word, then Alec pulled back on the stick and pointed us north. His voice crackled like an astronaut’s over the headset. “Great wide open, amigo,” he said, and we rose out following the coast.

  The Empress when I got here was what you’d expect—the single screen, the porous roof, the faint ammonia scent old theaters acquire. Why was I interested? Because I was young, with a tragic inheritance I was determined to spend. Youth and folly aren’t inseparable, yet it’s true that at twenty-one I had no grip on economics, no means of sizing up the cost of repairing a water-stained ceiling or the neon of a lifeless marquee.

  What I had was the doltish conviction that romance finally wins.

  Not even the theater’s owner could dissuade me, though he bravely tried. I street-parked my coughing Dodge beside a shaggy giant slumped in the posture of apology. He was an old Australian who came to work in the mines, became a bouncer at several iron range establishments, and ended up showing movies. His name was Edgar Poe—a gift from his dad, “equally given to books and bad jokes, he were a frosty one,” Edgar revealed in a mournful tone. I doubt he in any way resembled the unhinged literary master. This Poe was bear-like, with the demeanor and syntax of tender confusion and hair too thick for combs and massive hands that didn’t know where to land. He led me upstairs to a dusty apartment with a view from atop the marquee. Down in the middle of Main a small black dog with a white muzzle decided to curl up for a nap; behind me Mr. Poe dropped an armload of ledgers on the kitchen counter. It would’ve been easy for him, faced with a credulous youngster, to conceal that he’d not had a paycheck in eight years. Instead he was honest. He said the Empress was less a business than a fading public service. There were nights he sold five or six tickets, nights he sold none at all. He frankly wasn’t sure whether to sell the place or just turn off the lights.

  I have an unclear memory of speaking up at this juncture. No doubt I declaimed the ageless wonder of cinema, the power of stories to surmount market forces, demographics, VCRs, and ever more facile demons roosting up the sleeve of technology. In those days I was a proud campaigner for the impossible. Eventually the old proprietor closed his books, shook his head slowly—very much the flummoxed bruin at that moment—and offered me his hand.

  The Empress was mine.

  When I told Orry about it she said I had been Tom Sawyered for sure. It’s easy to see why she’d think so, but then Edgar started appearing weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings before matinees, explaining in his melancholy fashion the quirks and beauties of the Empress, its tricks of plumbing, the moods of the clanky Simplex projector. He stayed for hours expecting nothing. Sometimes I caught him looking at me sideways as though awaiting a signal. One evening he cleared his throat and asked my opinion of the north closet upstairs, the one next to the bank of windows overlooking the harbor.

  “Good you asked,” I replied, “I tried all the keys but none of them work. It’s locked up tight.”

  His eyes widened. “You’ve not peeked in the closet.”

  “Locked,” I repeated.

  “Never,” said he. “The door sticks but it weren’t locked. There were never a key. You go up there tonight, your two hands on the knob, you give her a pull.”

  “Why? Come on then—what’s in there?” I demanded, but Edgar wouldn’t say or even meet my eyes. Had he dangled this ten minutes earlier there’d have been time to run up, but it was seven o’clock, a Friday night, a dozen teenagers flirting in their gaudy big shoes underneath the marquee—the picture was Robocop as I recall. You can believe it was a long evening for me, conjuring whatever skeletons or hidden kingdoms or casks of amontillado Edgar Poe had left behind in that closet, while the auditorium rocked and Peter Weller heaped bodies on-screen and I laid my palm on the brow of the trembling projector every few minutes like a nurse checking for fever.

  When I finally did take hold and yank, the door opened so easily I fell backward.

  A tomb smell, a light switch, a bulb that whined when lit. Before me was a wide shallow closet. Its shelves were stacked with movie reels in silver metal canisters. A distant frying sound started in my brain. The cans were labeled in Magic Marker on white cloth tape peeling at the edges. I reached for one labeled Hombre. Hefted it in my hands. The tin had a dull shine and was stamped EASTMAN KODAK USA.

  I lifted off the cover. It was Reel One of the Paul Newman western from 1967.

  Holding my breath I opened more canisters. Hound of the Baskervilles (Rathbone edition). The Hanging Tree with Gary Cooper. My fingers shook. I wanted to call Edgar and ask about this trove, its provenance and value and dubious legality, but it was past midnight. Finally I tried anyway. The number was out of service. I went to the kitchen and made a toasted cheese sandwich and ate it standing at the rear windows looking over the lake.

  The final tally? Thirty-two movies, each composed of five or six reels. One hundred seventy reels in all. The newest was Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, from 1974; the best-preserved, Death of a Salesman. That one shows virtually no wear because it’s depressing as graves—that’s my theory, anyway.

  In the morning I went to see Poe. He lived in a gray paperboard rooming house on a block otherwise abandoned. He didn’t answer my knock that day or the
next. His landlady said he’d stopped his mail but she didn’t know for how long.

  What could I do but settle into a life showing movies in a fading town? No doubt it sounds dismal, but I loved it and felt made for it. The north closet was an entrancing distraction. I examined the reels and laced some of them up and watched them in solitude. Who had collected these artifacts? How did they end up here, at the whistling edge of the earth?

  After a month Edgar showed up. He was thinner and quite tan, with the solemnity of a reformed addict. He’d been staying with a friend in San Diego, which had easy winters and a nice zoo—he especially liked the seals. When I asked about the north closet his eyes widened in apology.

  “The films are on my conscience,” he said. He described buying the Empress from a local grump named Bill Plate who feared the apocalypse and thought about it constantly. Plate had renounced women and stylish clothing and the concept of private ownership. He sold Edgar the theater and took the cash to Chicago to propagate the Krishna.

  “He never explained about the reels?”

  “No, and I didn’t stumble on them until my second week. Then I wrote him two letters. Sent one to a William Plate of La Crosse—his papa I think. The other to Bill Plate care of the Lunt Avenue Krishnas. The first one got no answer, the second got returned.”

  Edgar walked through the lobby as he talked, admiring the cheap area rugs I’d thrown over the threadbare carpet. He ran his fingers wistfully over the COMING SOON poster display. He grew pensive, then said, “Listen to me, Virgil. I should’ve told you about those films, before we made the deal.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It isn’t. I put you in a spot. I needed a buyer and here you came. A young person. A true believer. I let myself be swayed. But now I wake up nights. It isn’t just that I sold you a failing business.” He leaned in with pale and fiery eyes. “Those old films are trouble. Imps in a bottle is what they are. I wonder at the mischief they might cause.”