by Leif Enger
“Are you conscious?”
“Yes—thank you, I am.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Yes, it feels that way.”
“Should I call 911?”
She had her phone out. I said, “Actually, I’d rather you don’t. I live just down the hill in Greenstone—if I could use your phone a moment, maybe I’ll call a friend.”
Calling 911 would’ve been the smart decision, but it also meant another ambulance ride all the way to Duluth. I’d taken that ride only a few weeks before, and my whole life had changed—right or wrong, I felt to call an ambulance now was to concede another serious hurt. I said, “I’m just too tired for 911.” She knelt down and handed me her phone.
I tried Beeman first, but he didn’t answer. I thought it through—Rune hadn’t a phone; Lily Pea would be working; Ann Fandeen had offered, but who could face it?
Then I remembered Bjorn.
He happened not to be surfing. He said he’d get his mom’s car and come right out; in the meantime, Mr. Wander, don’t you move.
“I’ll stay until he gets here,” said the Samaritan—she really was a good one. She went back to her car and turned on its hazards, then opened the trunk and got out a thick quilt that was rolled up and tied with a ribbon. She covered me with it, a quilt all shades of blue and cream. It smelled like cinnamon and cardamom. I felt heavy and warm, drifting toward sleep.
“No, don’t you do that. Open those eyes and look at me. If you have a concussion, you need to stay awake.”
I nodded. She got up and dragged the Schwinn off the pavement. It had a bent front wheel and a cracked fork. “You ought not to ride after dark.”
“Let me write that down.”
“What’s your name, smart guy?”
“Virgil Wander.”
She sat down next to me in the grass. “I like that. A good unusual name.”
Twice in an hour, women I didn’t know had complimented my name. Whatever came next, my day was a success. I said, “Thank you. I figure it’s like a calling.”
“That’s probably too much to put on it,” said my practical Samaritan.
We didn’t talk any more. The clouds had blown off and the stars were out. Orion chased the Seven Sisters. When I was a boy I could pick out all the sisters individually. Now they were a vague patch, like milkweed fuzz. When the fuzz began to rotate like a carousel I shut my eyes. I tried to imagine a center of gravity, something I could grip when things spun too fast, then wondered what would happen if I just let go. How far would I fly? Would it hurt to land, or would I be all right? Lying under the quilt I opened my hands. For a man named Wander I’d spent a long time in one place.
10
IT WAS ACTUALLY NADINE WHO SHOWED UP. BJORN STAYED BEHIND to run the Empress. Tickets, popcorn, projection, the whole buffet—I missed the evening but it seems he thrived, even traipsing down front to introduce the picture for twenty paying customers. When someone called out, Where’s Virgil? Bjorn said, He went off the road again. They all roared and Bjorn said, No, really.
The Samaritan left when Nadine arrived. My left shoulder was dislocated, the arm dangling a foot below normal when I lurched up out of the grass. In the headlights my thrown shadow was more than half chimp. The sloped shoulder, the low-hanging knuckles—Nadine turned briskly away, I thought to spare herself the grotesquerie but really to spare my feelings. She helped me into the Wagoneer where I lowered my arm between the seats. The hand was palm-up and oddly distant. I moved the fingers and they waved back like homesick colonists. Nadine saw this and put her forehead against the steering wheel. She shook with laughter.
“I’m delighted this is great for you,” I said. It was nice to hear her laugh, though. In fact she had difficulty stopping—she’d straighten, clear her throat, check the rearview, set foot on clutch, then glimpse my faraway dismal gorilla hand and go to pieces again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, getting hold of herself. “That shoulder’s going to tighten up. It’ll be hard to set.”
She was right. I could feel the bereft socket deliberating, consolidating its losses.
Still, I wished she would laugh some more.
“Why didn’t you call an ambulance?”
“Because I am tired and stupid. I was hoping to avoid the ER.”
Switching on the dome light she looked me over critically. There lay my hand down by the stick shift. She said, “I might be able to reconcile that joint of yours.”
“Seriously.”
“No guarantees, but yes. Maybe. Bjorn dislocated his shoulder when he was twelve. We were out West and he fell off a horse. After that it started happening every few months. I got pretty good at popping it back in.”
“I’m game.”
We got out of the car. I sat on the front bumper with my back against the grill. The headlights were blinding so she put on the fog lamps instead. Bending at the waist she took hold of my left wrist and straightened my arm at the elbow, shifting it experimentally.
“Can I ask what you were doing, racing downhill on an antique ten-speed at dusk?”
I told her about Rune, the scarlet Citroën, Lucy Yellowjacket walking out of the gloom.
“You’re getting some language back,” she smiled. “Sounds like you felt uncomfortable up there. Got on your bike and rode away.”
“You’re never too old to repeat junior high.”
“And you hit, what, a pothole? Loose rock?”
I described the mink sliding out of the grass. Nadine sat beside me on the bumper. In the fog-lamp glow her years were visible. The shadowed crease between her brows, her scribed cheekbones, the faint veiny delta of her temple. Drawn is an adjective meaning careworn, but Nadine looked drawn in the verb sense too—as though the slight softening of her cheek, the swanlike parentheticals at her mouth were the careful work of pencils or charcoal. I’d long thought of her as an unfading Penelope, but that was the lazy eye of infatuation. In truth she’d aged more than the decade elapsed since Alec disappeared. Yet somehow the years revealed her strength. Like a willow she turned all weathers to advantage.
While I mused on this she stood, took my arm, and made a simple firm upward motion. There was a moist pop in my shoulder. Radiant warmth eased through my whole arm, right down into the fingers.
Nadine said, “That’ll be a thousand dollars.”
I stood up carefully—you’d expect some residual pain, but no. She brushed her hands as if saying Job done. I said, “Can I buy you dinner?”
We went to the Wise Old because neither of us wanted the glaring lights of the Agate, or the regulars at the Shipwreck. Most of the tavern’s lights were turned off but the kitchen was open and we took a booth by a latticed window looking out at the parking lot with its soft blue snow piling up. Lou brought out a loaf of sourdough and a plate of cheese. He mentioned the fisherman’s stew, the hot spiced wine he brewed every winter with cloves and lemon peel. We ordered everything he suggested.
What we talked about I remember less than the atmosphere of promise. No one else was there, just Lou in the back, occasionally stepping out with refills and samples of dessert, pleased, it seemed, to see two people he liked smiling in each other’s company. His surly charm made us laugh, though quietly, in keeping with the low lights and thickening snow; and while Nadine’s auburn hair and pretty lines and low confident voice were right up front, what persisted for me was her equilibrium, her loyalty to Bjorn, her choice of words and expenditures of silence. It seemed significant to discover she’d lived a stormy girlhood about which I’d never heard a word, with parents neither more sensible nor less loving than my own. I think there was an interlude where we sat looking at the snow, instead of saying things, maybe for quite a while, and that Lou stayed back and let us have the place. At some point I craned around and noticed that the graceful sign Alec had made—the owl in flight—was no longer illuminated. It was lit as usual when we first came in. Lou must have switched it off.
When I looked back at Nadine sh
e was leaning slightly forward, studying me as though I were absorbing, or disquieting, or tragic—that is, as though I were someone else entirely. I was happy then to have flown off the Schwinn.
“What’s this you’re turning into, Virgil? Come on—you’re turning into something.”
“I don’t know. Some beat-up version, maybe. Whatever I say you should pay it no mind.”
“That sounds like a disclaimer.”
“It might be.”
“I get the same deal, then. No judgment. Whatever I say, forget it immediately.”
“Deal.” I felt offhand and daring. What was I turning into? And what might she divulge that begged forgetting? Tingly questions at this hour, with snow purling at the window and spiced wine surging in my veins.
At this juncture, however, Nadine’s cell phone rang—Bjorn was done at the Empress, how was Mr. Wander, when would she be home?—after which we seemed to have nothing worth disclaiming. Each of us settled back. I suppose we took stock. She fell into talk about the business—Alec’s business, which she had stepped into and was good at but did not love. She asked did I love the Empress and I confessed I did. Despite the building’s porous roof and inverse profits it remained a pleasure to spool up a tale for whatever handful of souls on a given night. It still felt useful. Frame by frame a hard moment could be endured because the next was always rolling in. The next might sweep you up.
She said, “Virgil, is there something you want to ask me?”
There very much was, but first there was a matter to address. “I invoke the disclaimer.”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you think Alec is alive?”
She sank back. “Well nobody knows, do they? I’m tired of it, though. Everything’s unfinished. Nothing’s ever done.”
“I’m sorry about that, but the question is not unfair.”
“No. The sightings threw me for a while. Journalists would phone me up. Alec’s in Winnipeg, Alec’s in Vancouver. After a while they passed the job along to an intern. You could hear how mortified they were.”
I wanted to leave it there, but couldn’t. “So you believe Alec is dead.”
Her brows lifted.
I said, “What you think matters to me.”
“I see that. Well, dead doesn’t seem precisely the word, does it, for what he is.” She looked away, then back to me. “But yes. Probably. He flew out over the water. Little plane made of plywood and cloth. I could lift the tail myself.”
“All the same,” I said. “Search turned up nothing. There’s always the chance.”
“Right, the chance.” Nadine looked at me, a little unfocused. The day was wearing us down. An insistent ache returned to my shoulder, reminding me of the hour.
Lou ran my Visa card while Nadine went out to start the Jeep. Crossing into the city limits we saw Lily Pea in her snowplow surging toward the municipal lot. Other than that no cars were out. Main Street under the lights was an Arctic island chain. Nadine pulled up in front of the Empress to let me off.
“Thanks for dinner,” she said.
“Thanks for mending the shoulder.”
“You’ll want to move carefully the next few days.”
“Nadine, there’s something I want to ask you.”
“Nope,” she said. “Nope, not now. It was a promising evening but I’m tired. The disclaimer is no longer in force.”
“I’ll ask another time.”
“You should do that.” As I stepped out of the car she said, “Virgil.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t forget. Honestly, don’t wait too long. It’s possible to wait too long.” She gave me a weary, lovely glance. “Maybe you know that already.”
11
I LET MYSELF IN SLOWLY. RUNE, I’D LEARNED, WAS A LIGHT SLEEPER and fellow insomniac—more than once I’d risen in the small hours to find him standing at the window, watching stars or distant freighters. But he wasn’t there now and his door was shut. The apartment was unlit save for the skewed Bakelite wall sconce which threw a drowsy corona. I went to the fridge, poured milk into a pan, lit a match, and got down vanilla and sugar.
I was past tired and wanted to think about Nadine, who’d smiled so easily and answered my intrusive questions and perhaps believed I was not a bore. I wanted to think about the way she said Don’t wait too long and what this meant or did not mean.
The hot milk cooled and grew a skin. I poured it out, noticing now that the kitchen table was covered with Rune’s kite-making tackle—usually fastidious, Rune had left things in a heap.
I looked for a completed kite but saw none. As though on cue the door to the roof-deck opened wide and Rune came gusting in.
“You are home! Come out on the roof, come on!”
He wore his straw hat and long-tailed coat with glistening buttons and snowcapped shoulders.
“Did you think I was sleeping? Did you think I would leave such a mess? But I’ll get it later. Come on!” He plucked my coat from the chair and lobbed it my way.
“It’s two in the morning,” I said, but was glad to see him, glad for the disturbance and his startling energy. Out he went onto the roof. The lawn chair was covered with snow except for a dark blot like a large teakettle. The blot had a round shining eye. The raven rustled its feathers and gave a truculent tut.
My eyes adjusted slowly to the cobalt glow cast by signs and streetlamps. The snow came in smokelike squalls from the south. I saw a string tied to the deck rail rising out of sight.
“Here is a secret,” Rune said. “To fly at night in the snow is the best of all. Have a spin.”
I untied the string from the railing and held it tight. It’s strange to fly a kite you can’t see. Even more than usual it seems you’ve caught a living creature, sometimes fighting, sometimes singing. Soon I felt Greenstone fall away. The snow came in lighter and lighter plumes. The string buzzed sleepily. I was quiet and happy and aloft. Rune scratched up a flame and pulled it down into his pipe. I said, “What is it?”
“What’s what?”
“The kite. I can’t see it. What’s the design?”
He was distracted and didn’t answer the question, instead remarking, “Lucy DuFrayne is a splendid woman.”
“In what way?”
He told me some things he had learned in a few hours of kite flying with Lucy—her jazz career ended when nobody bought her second album; her first and only marriage had yielded triplets, two girls and a boy, now scattered down the West Coast in assorted nonprofits and lost causes; her husband, a sound engineer and rash optimist, had succumbed to pancreatic cancer—it took him fast. Now Lucy was come to Greenstone for the first time in twenty years to visit her cousin, Adam Leer, whom she’d not seen in even longer.
“Lucy is sixty-four,” Rune said. “Sixty-four, and Virgil, she believes her best years are still coming.”
I admitted that was pretty splendid.
“Do you think the hour is late?” he mused.
“Late for what?”
“For me. Time is not the friend it was. You’ve seen what happens. I could dissolve any moment. Maybe the hour is late.”
I looked him over. His face had not slid downhill—my own felt gravity pulling, yet his was smooth and lit by snow. “I suspect the hour is fine.”
At this he took the reel from my numb fingers and played out a good bit of line. He meant to fly a while. The raven shook snow off its back. I plodded to the door and turned to say, “Nadine is splendid too.”
He didn’t answer. No doubt he was too caught up. I could hear the kite rattling above in the dark snowy puffs but still couldn’t see it—in fact I never knew which kite I flew that night, and Rune refused to tell me, insisting it was a curious privilege, one he himself had never experienced, to fly without so much as a glimpse or perception of the wing.
maximum ceiling
1
THIS WAS EARLY IN RUNE’S PERIOD OF FEVERISH CREATION. HE DROVE to Duluth and returned with dowels and epoxies, brushes and rice paper, te
n shades of ripstop, a wild carousel of paints. The shortening days made him sunny and voluble, framing up his wings while admiring the icy squalls speeding to and fro over Superior. The apartment’s broad field of east-facing windows made the Empress as good for watching weather as movies. Like most Greenstonians I took pride in our grim conditions, but Rune good-heartedly mocked them.
“This is nothing—you still have light,” he pointed out. “It still gets light in the morning, and stays light until late afternoon.”
I hadn’t thought about that. Except for lovestruck ’64, Rune had spent every winter above the Arctic Circle. In his boyhood village north of Tromsø, the sun fell into bed in November and didn’t crawl out again until February. “Twelve weeks lit only by stars,” he said, with grim frivolity. “And the moon, of course, two or three planets, the borealis. There is a small twilight at midday, but really it is night for two months.”
“It sounds magnificent,” I admitted—I knew about the dark far-north winters, but only from tenth-grade science, the Discovery Channel, and my hazy reading. It’s hard to explain, but the very fact of a two-month night made me long to endure one myself.
Rune smiled. He said at first you scarcely noticed the sun was gone, the days were so short by then. Further in, it got strange. Dogs normally friendly frothed at your passing. It was said by children that empty houses became occupied by minor devils and that big fish patrolled the shoreline, beguiling the friendless. There were quarrels and disappearances. Rune remembered a pair of American university researchers, a married couple studying the psychological weight of the long dark. They carried notebooks and were overly friendly. By spring the husband had fled for the dusty sunlight of Spain and the wife was ensconced with a Nordic sculptor who’d lost half a hand in the cannery.
If many of Rune’s stories had a fable-like atmosphere, the kites he constructed during these weeks were also fabulous. One looked like a stained-glass window, another a cloudberry pie. One had the body and motion of a sixteen-foot catfish—low over the water it grazed, as though it had lately evolved levitational properties, long barbels streaming down into the lake. He built a fireplace kite with a crooked brick chimney and flames of loose orange that flapped in the wind; its flying companion was an overstuffed armchair, its winged back looming oddly forward, as if having just tipped an unwary sitter into the fire.
