Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  “Well, he isn’t going to,” I said. It was late, I was out of momentum. The auditorium lights browned and flared. The back seats were full of man-shaped shadows.

  “Why would you say that?” Rune asked.

  “Because I don’t think it’s easy to catch any sturgeon, let alone the precise specimen you have a grudge against. Plus, Galen’s a boy. He doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds. If the fish is so big, how is he going to haul it in?”

  “Pessimist,” Rune said.

  “That’s me,” I replied, but Rune was alight somehow. Clearly his talk with Galen had given him something to ponder, something that pleased him and set him on edge. In absent fashion he rolled a whitecap of popcorn in front of the broom, then finally asked whether I’d heard anything else about this fisherman the boy had mentioned, the American Indian. How long ago was the sturgeon adventure? Was the Indian still around? If so, would he talk to us? Could we maybe go see him?

  There were times Rune was so foreign as to seem Martian. And yes, this would’ve been a good time to remain lighthearted—to roll with it, make a joke. But I was shaky with vertigo, my ears rang, confusion crowded the margins. I shut my eyes and squeezed the mop handle. “It isn’t a real story, Rune. It’s a tedious poem by a nineteenth-century American. It’s called ‘The Song of Hiawatha.’ It has nothing to do with actual Indians. Sturgeon don’t get that big.”

  This nickel rant pulled him down for a time. He swept up the last of the popcorn in silence while I rinsed Coke out of the mop and shoved the bucket on its rattly casters up the now tidy aisle. Soon, however, Rune was back to smiling, uttering strange words to himself. Weeks later, during one of our late-night akevitt sessions, he declared that just because a thing was poetry didn’t mean it never happened in the actual world, or that it couldn’t happen still.

  8

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON ANN FANDEEN CAME INTO MY OFFICE. “DID you see my car when you came in this morning?”

  “No—did you get that serpentine belt fixed?”

  “Serpentine belt! Just come over here a minute, you, come on!”

  She beckoned me to the window, where I peered out not at Ann’s old ride or Jerry’s weary pickup but at a late-model Buick LeSabre, maroon, with glinting wax and a white vinyl steering-wheel cover. She said, “Look what I found last night down in Duluth.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “I looked at a Jeep Cherokee and a little blue Mazda, but you know me,” Ann said. “I’ve always been partial to Buicks.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. She stood real close to me. Her skin was pink and shining.

  “It’s all because of you,” she exclaimed, and went on to clarify: because I had forced her to drive to the Leer property, and because she had deftly worked her intuitive connection with Adam, Jerry now had employment again. After the early snow melted, Jerry had started with a “fall cleanup special,” which meant mowing the grass and then mowing the thick parts again, after which Adam asked him to re-spline a couple of screens where the squirrels got in. Now he’d tackled Adam’s encroachment of aspen, rendering small logs and slash piles he would burn once there was more snow.

  “Sounds like he’s been up to a spot of plumbing, as well.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she replied, then continued with the news that it appeared Adam was back in Greenstone to stay. He had lots more work for Jerry—installing bat excluders, repainting the guest quarters over the garage. Adam had certainly taken Jerry under his wing, Ann divulged—often the two men ate lunch together, sandwiches accompanied by posh brown ales out of Adam’s own fridge. During these sociable pauses Adam relaxed his guard, even expressed regret about his high-octane past. The pretensions, the eyeliner and pharmaceuticals, the faceless desperado sex marathons. People back then thought cocaine was good for you. Jerry was actually counseling Adam, when you thought about it. Guiding him by example back to the wholesome small-town life from which he’d come. Adam was receptive and curious. He asked Jerry’s advice about community matters, the value of downtown locations. Closing my office door Ann took a less upbeat tone, confiding she’d divined Leer’s motive for the sprucing up. He expected a visitor in the near future. A woman. Jerry didn’t know who, but Ann suspected somebody famous.

  “Like who?”

  “Somebody from the movies, that’s what I think. Didn’t he have a thing once with Andie MacDowell?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  It occurred to me that Ann Fandeen had not said this many words to me in our six years working together. I noticed too that besides the LeSabre, she had new earrings. They looked like gold dangly feathers. She said, “Do you want me to talk to Adam again? About the festival? Now that he’s come back to his hometown? Think what this could mean to Greenstone,” she added in a coaxing tone.

  “Don’t do it,” I said.

  “Oh no—did you find somebody else?”

  “Working on it.” I wasn’t. I just didn’t want Leer to speak. When I thought of him in front of a crowd, it never went the way it should. In my imagination his voice spread slowly overhead like a cloud of infectious mosquitoes.

  Patting my shoulder Ann formed the sly smile of she who will have her way at last. “I know you’re not driving yet, Virgil. Just ask, if you need a ride someplace.”

  9

  ADAM LEER’S FAMOUS VISITOR SWIRLED INTO GREENSTONE ON A hard-core North Shore day—twigs snatching in the gale, black filth at the storm drains, the sea hissing in dismay. It was a better day for leaving than arriving, so Lucy DuFrayne got noticed, waltzing up Main in a vivid yellow coat that went to her ankles. Sashaying, as the oldsters say. Only an ingrate could fail to admire it. The coat billowed, it misbehaved, it was the brightest thing in forty miles. Lucy went straight to the Agate to see who was still around.

  “Always such a big wheel,” Margaret told me later. “Even as a kid she’d show up smeary and breathless. Like she was kissing somebody ten seconds ago.”

  Of course with me Margaret was her normal disapproving self but seeing Lucy she’d flown out of the kitchen and they hugged like sisters. Lucy was not local but had visited every summer with her parents, back in the days of high employment, days when the beach had a lifeguard. Lucy’s nickname then was Bangles. It still seemed to fit.

  “You’ve come back to see Adam,” Margaret guessed. “Oh, you’ll be surprised at the house! He’s just been working so hard!”

  They talked a little—“Longer than I wanted to,” Margaret later declared—long enough apparently for Lucy to decline Margaret’s offer of a sit-down visit, and to glaze over at Margaret’s segue into pressing local matters. Margaret was gathering talent for a community production of Oklahoma! Lucy smiled and was out the door with her yellow tails wheeling in the wind.

  Lucy DuFrayne wasn’t as famous as Andie MacDowell, but she had in fact been a little famous for several minutes among a post-beatnik splinter of jazz freaks. She made a successful record for Columbia, which I tracked down—standards and forgotten near misses in a sultry contralto. Lucy DuFrayne was Leer’s first cousin and the first girl he ever fell in love with.

  While this same Lucy accelerated north through the chilly gray scale of Main Street, Rune and I were up at the lookout. He’d launched a new kite in the shape of an ambiguously European car, with a dissipated-looking fellow at the wheel and a small white dog poking its head out the rear window. Rune let me fly it until I got a desperate crick in my neck, at which point I stepped out of the bitter wind and sat in the camper van opening my mail. There was a check from the insurance company for twenty-five hundred, the value of my Pontiac; also a box from Orry containing a set of noise-canceling headphones, and a handwritten query about the Empress. The query came from a man in Des Moines who’d always wanted to run his own business and thought a movie theater “seemed like a fun way.” He wrote in pencil on lined paper to prevent the government from reading his e-mails. He thought my price was high and wondered whether the theater would “comfortably
support” his family of five. Fifteen hilarious responses popped into my head. A person should write these things down.

  I was reading the headphone instructions when the sheriff’s cruiser pulled into the overlook. Don Lean was driving, his tiger cat Roger in the passenger seat. Roger thought of himself as a dog and rode everywhere with Don, who bought a booster seat so Roger could more easily observe the passing world.

  Don parked and got out, leaving the cruiser running so Roger would be warm. He waved to Rune, came over to the camper van, and climbed in. “I stopped by the Empress,” he said. “Got a bike for you, but I wasn’t sure where to leave it.”

  I could see its spoked wheels angling up in the car’s back window. “Thanks, Don—if you leave it here, I’ll ride it home.”

  “Great, I’ll get it out for you and be on my way.” But Don just sat there and didn’t get out. He drummed a short rhythm on his knees. Over in the cruiser Roger was in motion. He had big shoulders for a cat and a massive square head that bobbed two or three times as though he were halting a mouse with his paw.

  “What’s Roger doing?”

  “Hitting the down button,” Don said. As he spoke the cruiser window lowered an inch or so at a time. Every time it went down, Roger tried to push his lion head outside. You could see from the way Don watched he was proud of his big smart cat.

  “Is there something else?”

  “There is. I understand you got Bjorn Sandstrom working for you.”

  “He’s terrific. Right now I’d have a hard time running the place without him.”

  Don nodded. “Do me a favor. Convince him to give the surfing a rest. At least until the days start getting longer. I see him out there in this cold dark weather, it isn’t normal.”

  “I’ll talk to him, but he enjoys it out there. He says the waves are better, now that it’s getting cold.”

  “If people just weren’t so foolish,” Don began, then his phone rang. He answered, “Sheriff—this is he. Wait, hang on.” He took a notepad and pen from his jacket. “Go ahead.”

  From the questions Don asked I gathered someone was reporting a break-in. There was a greenhouse several miles up the shore that sold hanging flower baskets in the spring, garden gnomes, gazing balls, tomato cages, topsoil, and bags of manure. The place closed in October, reopened briefly after Thanksgiving to sell Christmas trees and pinecone wreaths and local cider, then closed again. It wasn’t the sort of place you imagined getting robbed.

  “One set of wind chimes,” Don said. He was a slow and meticulous notetaker. While Don asked questions, Roger finally got the window down far enough to squeeze himself out. He leaped to the ground and trotted up to Rune, spooking the shaggy raven who had arrived again and was perched on a boulder. Sometimes it said things that were almost words.

  “Well, look around,” Don said into the phone. “Check the doors and the rest of the windows. I’ll be there in twenty.”

  He hung up, shaking his head. “Marcie put up some wind chimes once, out on the screen porch. They tinkled in the slightest breeze. At first I really liked them, but they never stopped. Not for a minute. After a while all that tinkling started making me angry. I heard it all the time—in the car, in my office. I can hear it right now, if I try. If someone had stolen those wind chimes, I’d have shaken his hand.”

  Don got out of the van and whistled to Roger who trotted right over. I followed them to the cruiser where Don extracted the bicycle with considerable twisting and huffing. He snapped down the kickstand and set it in front of me.

  “I pumped up the tires, but don’t know how solid they are.”

  “It’s really decent of you, Don.”

  “No problem. And no hurry. I have five more.”

  After he left I took the bike by the handlebars and gave it a lift. It was a ten-speed Schwinn from the ’80s, narrow leather saddle, deep blue lacquer with gold metallic on the lugged joints. It had the dropped handlebars wrapped with padded black tape. Just seeing it buoyed me—I felt as excited as I would’ve in junior high. I began to imagine how nice it would be to coast downhill, cruise around town, make the late-night cheese run. Why had I been without a bike for so long? If it worked out, maybe I wouldn’t need to replace the Pontiac. You can’t buy much of a car for twenty-five hundo, but you can get an excellent bike.

  While I mused on this, a blue Ford turned in off the highway and parked. I hadn’t realized how dark the afternoon was becoming until its headlights went off. The car door opened and a startling stripe of yellow stepped out.

  “Hello?” called the stripe. This woman had shoulder-length silvery hair that moved across her face in the wind, a coat bright as a honeybee belted at her waist.

  I helloed in return. Rune looked at her over his shoulder and raised a hand.

  “What a cute shiny car,” she said, nodding at the kite with a laugh—an appealing laugh, slightly gritty and right there at the surface. It would turn out she was another easy laugher. This is sometimes seen as a trait of the nonserious or inexperienced, the too easily satisfied. With Lucy DuFrayne I think it had to do with the fact that she went around all the time with her eyes open.

  “Kind of a shiny one yourself, on a day like this,” Rune observed, his voice somehow clearer than usual.

  “I’m Lucy.”

  “Rune,” he said—again I noticed how he seemed to condense, to gather light and substance. “This is Virgil Wander.”

  Lucy smiled. She stepped forward taking a hand from her deep coat pocket. “Wander—what a name. It’s almost a calling. You’ve had some adventures, with a name like that.”

  “Not yet really,” I confessed.

  “No? Well, watch out then,” she said, looking lightly up and around, as though a whole sky full of escapades were imminent and would soon gush down in a cloudburst of destiny justifying my audacious surname. She turned to Rune who stood guiding the kite this way and that, precise as you please. She seemed to belong here, though maybe she was the sort to belong wherever she was at the time. She was obviously taken by the lively kite, and by the old man flying it, and maybe also by the large raven which was still around. She had a soft rounded face that looked used to smiling. When she smiled, her eyes looked hopeful. She seemed to have a lot left.

  “Easily the prettiest flyer I ever saw,” she told him.

  “How kind you are to say it,” he replied. With a small jolt I realized the two of them were flirting. Rune would smile and look away, while Lucy leaned slightly in his direction. I was glad, though I also became aware of a hollow back behind my ribs. It wasn’t dangerous or new, the hollow—it had been there a long time, so long it was just geography, the weedy depression or crater at the back of the property.

  Lucy laughed her low laugh. The sun had dropped behind the hilltops and stripped the kite of most of its color. Its profile was still striking, though. She said, “It looks like a car I rode in a few times, just outside Berlin. It looks like a Citroën. Is it a Citroën, Rune?”

  At this they shared a look like two strangers surprised to discover they are from the same town. Happily he explained the kite was indeed modeled on the ’49 Citroën his uncle had owned back in Bergen. His uncle liked it because you could take the whole car apart panel by panel and replace whatever was broken. You needed only pliers and a crescent wrench and the sense of a common farm duck, “all of which,” Rune said, “my uncle possessed.”

  Lucy’s laugh was a woe-ho-ho that started small and opened outward until you wondered whether you’d got the whole joke.

  Rune stood with his head slightly tilted. He said to Lucy, “You would maybe care to take it for a spin.”

  She stepped close to him. At this I recalled I was supposed to meet Bjorn down at the Empress. It was Friday, and there was a new film to lace up.

  “I’m glad to know you, Virgil Wander,” Lucy called—already she had the string in her fingers. The wind was in her hair. Rune shot me a stunned smile, then looked immediately away.

  I swung a leg over
Don Lean’s bicycle and bumped away slowly over the grass. Reaching the pavement I bent low over the dropped handlebars and let gravity take hold. It was immensely pleasurable to coast down toward the lights of Greenstone. The wind felt icy with speed. Though I’d gone in a moment from loyal friend to third wheel, I wasn’t unhappy. It was heartening to see two people roughly half a generation further along strike a few sparks. Besides, I liked very well this clear-eyed Lucy, and what she had said about my name. Of course I put no stock in it, but I liked it all the same, and liked her for saying it.

  I let go the brakes and flew down Highway 61 with speed thumping in my ears. You see I’d forgotten my poor balance. The Schwinn sizzled down the painted line. I met a car coming uphill and waved at the driver with confidence, wondering how fast I was going, thinking of the great scene in Breaking Away where Dennis Christopher hits sixty. Then something small and solid came out of the grass on my right. My first thought was Roger but it wasn’t a cat—maybe a large weasel or small mink, something with that humping mustelid trot. A mink traveling at dusk doesn’t anticipate a grown man racing down on a silent machine. I tried to brake but couldn’t reach the handles without losing control. Vertigo returned in a rush. The creature reared back. The bike veered and buckled. The road rose up to bounce me into the ditch.

  I didn’t black out that I know of but lay in the grass awaiting the pain. It soon arrived. I attempted to rise but something slipped inside my shoulder and I fell back yipping. I wondered where the bike had wound up. The wind was cold but I was mostly protected by the tall ditch grass obscuring my view. There was nothing to do but lie and wait. Highway 61 doesn’t sleep for long. The sky darkened perceptibly and in ten or twelve minutes a car slowed and stopped. A door opened, a radio switched off, steps came seeking me out.

  A lady peered down—she was older than me, with a kind, fearful face. She leaned tentatively away, in case I were faking and preparing to lunge. Seeing this made me feel shy and grateful. What makes a Samaritan good is the possibility of the lunge.