Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  All this building and talking and flying made me homesick. It wasn’t logical, since I was at home, but that’s what I came to perceive—a fulminant ache high in the rib cage, a sense of time’s shortening fuse. After the first accident, it had felt as though my apartment belonged to someone else; after the second, I began to feel as though there was a home I belonged to, and this one, though pleasant and likable, wasn’t it. The previous tenant would’ve rejected such nonsense, but then the previous tenant never had an eccentric foreign houseguest, sewing up artworks to hang in the sky, talking to ravens, spinning twilit Arctic stories. My weary old ground was broken and watered, and what sprang up was a generalized longing. I began to feel like a character myself, well-meaning but secondary, a man introduced late in the picture. I wished to spool back and watch earlier scenes, to scout for hints and shadows, clues as to what might be required of a secondary actor when the closing reel began.

  Lydia was right—it turned out Bob Dylan did remember Greenstone. So said his West Coast booking agent the day she finally called back.

  The first time we spoke I’d told her about the singer’s personal connection with our mayor, which made her laugh in a way that made me think we had a shot. The agent had then contacted Dylan, whose curt reply was a memory of driving through en route to Thunder Bay in 1964—he got a flat tire on Main Street, unloaded guitars to reach the spare, jacked up the car, and made the switch only to blow another tire half a block later. While the service station fixed the second flat he went to a café and ordered a meat pasty. Inside the pasty was a thumb-size sliver of dark brown beer-bottle glass. That was his Greenstone story. Apparently he wrote a song about it. I don’t know which one.

  “So he won’t come back?” I asked. “Surely we could expunge that old verse, and give him something glad to remember.”

  “I have to tell you,” she said, sounding pained, “he’d really just rather not.”

  I went into Lydia’s office. She stood at the window in a low frame of mind. An inch of snow had fallen overnight and it slithered around over the icy parking lot. “Dylan can’t make it,” I told her.

  “Oh well,” she said. Lydia wasn’t someone to dwell on bummers, but her eyes turned glossy and large.

  In the wake of this letdown we had an impromptu powwow. Lydia was determined to settle on a theme for the festival. She called in Ann Fandeen—a concept gal, she said—and also veteran councilman Barrett Becker whom she regarded as an ally. Ann entered the office with enormous energy—she wore a dress the shape and color of a chili pepper, and a fanlike gold necklace. Her ideas were appealing: she’d learned of a traveling accordion orchestra that played for twinkle-light dances; a retired ore-boat that could be hired to tie up at our dock and give tours; a former circus elephant that had learned to hold a paintbrush and now did freelance caricatures for twenty dollars a throw.

  Barrett Becker listened in silence. He’d recently had a number of precancerous moles removed from his face and scalp. While Ann spoke, his fingers wandered from lesion to lesion, seeking out loosening scabs.

  Ann said, “What’s the problem, Barrett?”

  “Liability,” he replied. He swiveled his big pitted head to pin Ann with his eyes. “An elephant is no respecter of persons. Accordions draw lightning. This is Greenstone—your dance-hall ship will probably sink at the pier.”

  Lydia looked stricken. First we had lost her friend Dylan. Now Barrett Becker, for decades a reliable booster, showed up tossing grenades. She said, “Let’s table this.”

  But something was coming to Ann Fandeen. You could see it happening. She said, “Hold up a minute.”

  “What now,” said the dispirited mayor.

  “Barrett, you’re exactly right,” Ann said. “Greenstone is cursed. We had mines, but they shut. Ships used to dock, now they sail past. Our water tower comes loose and rolls over people, our congressman gets leprosy, Bob Dylan drives through and gets two flat tires.” Ann glowed as the idea coalesced—she couldn’t have been more incandescent if she’d physically caught fire. “Hard luck! That’s our legacy. You know it’s true, Lydia. It’s a dreadful one, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  “It wasn’t leprosy, Ernie got psoriasis,” Lydia said. The former congressman was a longtime friend. “What are you suggesting, exactly?”

  “Hard Luck Days,” said Ann. “That’s our festival. We take the one thing Greenstone is known for and ride it as hard as we can.”

  “What would this look like?” said Barrett, interested at last.

  Ann threw out a few notions—a parade along the path of the rogue water tower, a submarine lowering tourists to the bones of a sunken ship. Excitement made Ann even shinier as Lydia paled at the cheekbones. I felt bad for her—Lydia had a strong utopian impulse. She didn’t want to preside over an ironic three-day toast to our humiliations.

  “Hard Luck Days,” Barrett mused. His jaw made sideways ruminant motions. “Hard Luck Days! Hoo hoo!”

  What chance did Lydia have? She never would have said so, but it seemed to me the awful luck of Greenstone had found her, reaching forward in time from a pair of flat tires in 1964.

  Barrett took my elbow as we left. “The Sandstrom boy, working for you over at the movies.”

  “Yes.”

  “You keep a close eye. He’s damaged. Goes out in the lake and straddles a plank in the waves. I do not approve.”

  “He’s not damaged,” I replied. “He’s surfing.”

  “Don’t you contradict me,” Barrett said, squeezing my elbow as though I were a problem teenager and himself my petty tyrant. “His dad was unstable and so is the boy. He’s trying to kill himself, is what I think.”

  Abruptly annoyed, I reached for a quick adjective or two in Bjorn’s defense—perceptive would’ve filled the bill, or solitary, or even just clever. I took a breath and searched, trying to picture the word I wanted printed on a page, a trick that sometimes worked. The page stayed blank while Barrett glared. Finally I said, with the gruffness of defeat, “You just shouldn’t talk, sometimes. Can’t you see that, Barrett? When you talk, you sound ignorant.”

  Right away I knew it was bad form to call Barrett ignorant, and probably not without consequence—he stiffened when I said it, and Lydia drooped a little. Barrett wasn’t my boss, but we talked at meetings and city events, especially since I started keeping the minutes several years earlier. Barrett was a stickler about the minutes. Things had always gone smoothly between us because I was good at the minutes, and probably also because I hadn’t yet called him ignorant. His actual ignorance didn’t excuse my bad form. It was my job to put us back on track.

  With a clumsy smile I said, “Look—Bjorn made me a staff,” offering it for inspection.

  “Keep that stick away from me,” he barked. “You know, I called the sheriff on that boy. Two different times. ‘There’s a boy in the lake,’ I said. I don’t even know what to think about a county sheriff who won’t get off his giant butt to drag a disturbed boy out of a freezing lake. Don Lean—how did he get that job?”

  “He got elected,” I reminded him, “twice,” but Barrett didn’t hear me. We had just stepped out of the building. The setting sun got him right in the eyes. He swatted at it bitterly.

  2

  WHATEVER ELSE HE MIGHT BE, BJORN SANDSTROM WAS GOOD FOR business.

  Besides being a natural projectionist, he gave movie introductions that were funnier than mine—when he stood onstage gaunt and pallid it was impossible not to smile along. The girls in particular liked him, Lanie Plume and her friends, and there was another girl, with lank hair and passerine eyes, who sat by herself a row or two back of the others and seemed not to breathe while he spoke. Going over the books I saw we averaged almost five more tickets per night than in the same month a year earlier. It was marvelous timing—between fuel costs and the autumn doldrums, November is stark for the Empress.

  Still, I had to admit old Councilman Barrett wasn’t entirely wrong. There was something damaged about Bjorn. I
ncreasingly he seemed distracted. His shoulders folded in upon each other; you could see his slow pulse in his temples. I say this as a damaged man—so often adrift myself, I could see him drifting away.

  On our first night of truly dangerous wintertime cold, Bjorn abruptly went missing.

  He’d just screened a little Jack Black comedy about amateur bird-watchers. He’d rewound the film, put the booth in order, then come down and tallied receipts while I swept the auditorium. Attendance was light so there wasn’t much to sweep, although someone did squirm around for two hours on an unwrapped Baby Ruth, so that took a bit of time. When I reentered the lobby Bjorn was gone. He’d left nothing undone, even turned off all the lights except the Bogart neon, which I always douse last.

  Still, the lobby felt wrong. It wasn’t like Bjorn to leave without letting me know.

  I killed the Bogart and marquee, checked the locks, and climbed upstairs. It was almost eleven. My disturbance wasn’t logical—a young man needn’t say good night to his boss. Yet I was edgy. Rune had turned in and fallen asleep, his light snores emerging from the guest room. I stood at the window watching a fast scrim of clouds obscure the stars, then took my Army-surplus parka from the closet. Back downstairs I wheeled the Schwinn out the alley entrance. Marcus Jetty had welded the burst fork and found me a new front wheel.

  The alley was a wind tunnel. Later the talk was all about the freakish cold pouring down out of Alberta, engulfing the unwary; all I knew was that my eyes watered and lips numbed as I stood in the alley. I zipped up the fox-fur hood. A cardboard box bounded past like sagebrush in the gloom. I strapped the quarterstaff to the bike so it stuck out in front like a lance. Streetlamps quivered on their poles, my tires skidded this way and that. I turned out of the alley and rode up to Main and didn’t see Bjorn or anything else alive.

  Surely he just went home.

  Three blocks north I turned left into residential Greenstone. Bjorn and Nadine lived in a neat squat bungalow with a wide Russian olive tree in front. The leafless tree flailed. The porch flood and lights inside were on. Nadine stood looking out the picture window. She wore a heavy knitted sweater and had a coffee cup in her left hand. You could tell from its angle the cup was empty.

  She had the door open before I got up the porch. By the time I said, “He’s not here?” she was getting her coat on.

  I’m not sure how long we drove around. The Wagoneer got warm, so long enough. I suggested we call Don Lean but Nadine said not yet. First we tried places where she’d hunted down Bjorn before—the ore dock; two of Bjorn’s favorite surf haunts; the giant abandoned Slake edifice, where he’d broken in once and been fetched by a lecturing deputy. We came close at the bowling alley. The owner, Vera Ness, said he’d come in ninety minutes ago but didn’t stay. It was glow-in-the-dark-bowling night and the place was full of church youth groups, the last hope of small-town operators. “He took a seat over there.” Vera pointed. “Under the pizza sign—his dad built that sign, you know,” she added to me in a whisper.

  This gave Nadine an idea. We got back in the car and drove to the Shipwreck. The tavern had two signs of Alec’s—the seascape he’d repaired, and a handsome blue rowboat with a white-bearded fisherman in it. Inside we quickly ascertained Bjorn wasn’t there. “Shoot, no,” said the proprietor, Lester Billings. “And you can’t find him? I’m all yours, Nadine.”

  While she spoke to Lester I went outside. Wind went up the back of my coat. I tucked in my hands and walked round to the back.

  There sat Bjorn on an overturned recycling bin. He held a lit cigarette in bare fingers and was leaning against the siding. Pale light fell on him from a window above. I hadn’t seen him smoke before. It made him look younger and awfully sad.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, Mr. Wander.” He looked surprised to see me, but not unhappy.

  “You doing okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Nothing seemed like the right thing to say, so that’s what I said for a while.

  “I would’ve gone home pretty soon,” he told me.

  “We got a little worried with the dirty weather.”

  “Is Mom with you?”

  “She is.”

  He sat there looking regretfully at the cigarette. The clouds had layered up over the moon. You could just make out waves racing parallel to the shore—their crests rushed forward like blown yellow paper, subsided, gathered up, and rushed again.

  I started for the parking lot but Bjorn stayed put. Turning I saw he was sitting in the glow of the sign his dad had built—the neon fisherman in the rowboat was visible through the window. Bjorn said, “Hey, you’re using the staff.”

  “I take it everywhere. People fear it. There are restaurants that won’t let me in.” Bjorn grinned at this. It was a relief to see.

  He got up and walked down to the water. Moving away from the window he seemed to lose form. His arms and legs became part of the night. Not much was left of him except the sound of his shoes on the loose round stones, the glowing dot of tobacco at the edge of his wavery shape. He seemed to dissipate like a note of music. The thought occurred that Nadine might come round the corner of the Shipwreck, only to see Bjorn recede altogether from hearing and sight.

  Then he must’ve bent for a rock and flung it—the rock briefly shone before plunking into the face of a rolling wave.

  Watching him there, immaterial at moments, made me think of his dad—he wasn’t as tall as Alec, but seemed taller from being so thin. Like the cigarette, his gangly limbs rendered him younger; there was so much play in his joints they barely held him together. In fact the longer we stayed the less he reminded me of Alec and the more of Galen Pea, another boy who seemed stranded somehow. I was no one’s protector nor ever had been, yet standing behind the Wreck, peering out from my furry hood at Bjorn’s hovering self, an unfamiliar burden settled on my shoulders. I shifted on my feet; there was actual weight. An adjective bloomed and it was answerable. The yellow-crested waves surged past under the clotted sky. The lake looked cold and violent. I gripped the quarterstaff. It was nice to have but it was only a stick. Anything could happen and I was small security.

  The orange speck arced from Bjorn’s hand and was gone. A moment later Nadine’s voice called, very distant behind the waves. “Bjorn? Are you here?”

  His shoes scuffed on the rocks—he assumed form again as he neared. I offered him a pack of breath mints from my pocket. He shook one into his palm and passed them back.

  “Virgil?” Nadine called, coming around the corner.

  Seeing him she ran lightly over the stones. Bjorn went to meet her—he seemed glad, a little sheepish even, bending down to let her hug him. She kissed his neck and looked at me over his shoulder. I remember that look, that bright liquid smile. I smiled back. Solid and self-possessed is how I felt, like a man with work to do—in other words, useful for once.

  After this I began to keep closer tabs on Bjorn. I gave him more jobs at the Empress—had him repaint the auditorium in a two-toned scheme, seafoam and mahogany, which took nine afternoons and attenuated my budget. I showed him the tiny dust pyramids that kept growing on the carpet and asked him to discover their origins. Whatever I requested he was happy to do, and yet he was distracted. He flickered and blinked. When a person is gripped by a fugue or idea you can’t just busy him out of it, not for long anyway. What I wanted was something to engage him.

  In the end he came up with an idea himself.

  It was a Friday afternoon and he’d just laced up the next week’s film, which was Midnight in Paris. Everyone has their favorite Woody Allens and mine are the ones without Woody in them. With time on his hands, Bjorn had previewed a good chunk of Midnight—it has a wistful allure.

  “I know you’re about to give up your stash of old movies,” he said, coming down into the lobby where I stood at the window with a cotton rag, wiping out a late hatch of slow-moving flies.

  “That’s the idea.”

  He nodded. “I wonder if we could s
creen a few. Just a few of the good ones, right? Before they go forever.”

  That’s how we reinvented the after-parties. We started small. The first night Nadine brought a lasagna in a quilted bag. Rune arrived with his windburned face, and Bjorn took projection as though the job were his all along. He’d picked out The Ladykillers, from 1955. Alec Guinness is a con man with mule teeth, leaning in the shadows. His nemesis is everyone’s snowy grandma whose wily innocence is her sword and shield. You could fret all day and not choose a better picture—with its music-box opening and EALING STUDIOS in jiggly letters you don’t expect much. What you get is sly as Bergman but with less freight, and more fun to think about later.

  Honestly, if Bjorn had pulled out a dog—and there were plenty of those in the vault—the whole thing might’ve derailed. I like a terrible movie as well as anyone, but people need to know going in if you’re cuing up Muscle Beach Party. On the other hand, Ladykillers filled us first with relief and then with mushrooming joy. Nadine seized my shoulder whenever Mrs. Wilberforce thwarted the robbers; Rune unleashed a gusty chuckle. Bjorn said later he “didn’t buy in right away” but by the end was bobbing and quaking in his seat.

  After that the old band more or less reconstituted, with several new faces of course. Lucy DuFrayne, now flying with Rune almost every day, appeared in a fedora and turned-up collar she seemed born to wear, kissing Rune who blushed happily, pretending it was nothing. Don Lean showed up with an anxious expression and his ex-wife Marcie whom he was trying to win back. Tom Beeman appeared laughing as though this whole business had never stopped—he even landed a new girlfriend for the occasion, Connie Swale, a displaced hippie from a cannabis ranch outside Beaver Bay. In the old days I used to worry over the number of people who knew of the vault and its contents. This time around it didn’t matter. Soon Bjorn invited someone, a girl named Ellen Tripp whom I recognized as the waif sitting behind Lanie Plume’s posse at the Empress. Just a kid of fifteen, Nadine told me—got pregnant last year and had an abortion, lost all her friends and her folks kicked her out, although she was back with them now. Ellen was working things through. One week she’d show up plain as a hymnal, eyes cast down and her hair yanked back; the next she arrived in glitter and paint, short and bright as a puffin. Regardless of dress her most piercing weapon was a smile that burst out when least expected, as though too much to contain. Inside of five minutes we all adored her.