Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  Finally he sneaked out.

  Because it was calm he chose a wide white wing that would fly on a rumor. He walked south out of town on the highway, curving inland past the city limits. There’s a place where the trees clear and the lake is a distant black line. He stepped down into the ditch, crossed an abandoned rail line, and set out through a field of stunted spruce where none of the trees reached past his waist. The quarter moon came and went in the dense high clouds.

  The spruces gave out as he neared the lake. A grove of pines stood black to the south, then a line of boulders or upthrust crags and a dead tree trunk that bent toward the lake as if it had kept watch for years. Rune tied the wing to a reel of the lightest string he owned.

  I pictured him calling up a breeze. It seemed to me the wind loved Rune Eliassen, and rose from nothing when he asked, and other days calmed its violence to give his kites free passage. The wing moved up and out like a messenger. It was gone from sight in a minute. The night was slap cold. It smelled of snow though none was falling. With height the kite got traction. The line tautened in his gloved fingers.

  Twenty minutes he flew, half an hour, letting out line, the wing seeking farther and farther abroad. At a quarter mile out it reached the end of the line. This was when, as Rune described it, the bent tree overlooking the water straightened as though fixing a crick in its neck.

  It shook itself and moved toward him. “My veins slowed down—they became very cold,” Rune told me. “Is that the expression?”

  As the tree approached it acquired limbs and a smile.

  “How long have you been here?” Rune asked.

  “Not the question I expected,” replied Adam Leer, for now it was plainly he.

  “You were here when I arrived. I thought you were a tree, you stood so still.”

  “Cold doesn’t bother me. Neither does waiting.”

  “What were you waiting for?”

  “That is not the question either.”

  “What question do you want?”

  “You know. Surely you know. You’ve practiced it on everyone but me.”

  Rune was silent.

  “You’ve forgotten. I’ll remind you. Ask me if I knew your son.”

  Rune felt the string in his fingers. The kite dodged and shivered. The wind had come out of the west to begin with, but clocked around and came off the water. Soon the line pointed nearly straight inland.

  Leer said, “If you won’t ask, then I have one for you. Why do this? Fly these kites?”

  “I like to fly.”

  “You more than like to. You need to. I drive past the lookout, there you are. Come down to watch the sea in peace, here you come to fly. I can’t picture you another way. At first I thought discipline but as time passes lunacy seems more likely. I don’t understand it.”

  “Why do you need to understand?”

  “Because I’m curious. I’m a long time in this world now. People are simpler than they let on. Tell me what this gives you that you pay it such regard.”

  Rune didn’t reply. Instead he offered Leer the string.

  Leer waved it away.

  Rune said, “The only way to understand flying is to fly.”

  “Then I pass. I don’t know why anyone would play this game of yours.”

  Leer stood a long time without speaking, so long he seemed to bend and stiffen—even up close he looked a little like a tree again.

  “I knew Alec,” he said at last. “I knew him just a little—in other words, exactly as well I wished to. Tell me, did Nadine really say to you he was an honest man?”

  “Honest how?” asked Rune.

  “A man whose word would hold. One who wouldn’t abandon a woman or a child.”

  Rune replied that he hadn’t asked the question in precisely this way, but yes—she said Alec was honest.

  Leer nodded and started walking toward the water. “I see that is enough for you. I’ll say no more about it. Good night.”

  Rune watched him go. At the same time he felt the loss of resistance in his fingers. The wing went into a long swoon as the wind died entirely. He hauled in string by arm’s lengths, it fell in heaps beside him. Soon the line was a thin trail on the snow leading inland. He followed it hand over hand. Through the tree farm it went, over the abandoned railroad. Reaching the highway he saw the slight glow of the city of Greenstone against cold moist clouds to the north. He crossed the pavement following the string until it rose static before him. He imagined it caught in a tree. He pulled. There was give so he pulled harder. A faint crackling erupted. Later he realized the crackling came from inside his head. He went down as though clubbed. The crackling turned to a grotesque buzz and a frying smell. Snow hissed on his burned tongue. His ribs knocked together and he threw up in the snow. His fingertips seemed to whistle. The glow over Greenstone faded slowly to black, then his own lights went out as well.

  We sat in the living room with only the reflected light coming in off the roof. Rune held his side. His face had fallen. He flailed a little getting to his feet.

  “Are you all right?” I said. He’d taken more akevitt than was strictly recommended for an electrocuted man on bed rest.

  “When I was a boy a fever swept through,” he said wearily. “Neighbor girl died. One of my friends lost the sight in one eye, my sister was frail for a year.”

  “And you?”

  “Inside my fever I walked in the mountains. A man approached who was not a man. His eyes were flat and his hands were fire. He touched my face and it began to die.” Rune shrugged. “When the fever departed my face was still changed. It changes now when I am tired, or afraid, or losing one fight or another.”

  “You can rest as long as you need to,” I said.

  The door opened and Bjorn came in. He turned on the kitchen light and stood squinting. He’d screened a film and swept the auditorium. Rune was trying to unfasten his side bandage which needed changing. This was usually my job or Nadine’s because Rune’s hands still had their own ungainly wrappings, but Rune hated to have us do it—his injury embarrassed him.

  Without a word Bjorn stepped in and peeled away the cotton. He set it aside and went to the kitchen and put warm water in a basin with antiseptic. He found a washcloth and dipped it and cleaned the wound. It was still an ugly hole. Rune looked away while his grandson daubed on antibiotic, folded gauze to the size of his palm, and placed it over the hole. Bjorn patted dry the clean skin. He found the white tape and tore off four strips and taped the gauze down neatly.

  “Thank you, Bjorn,” Rune said.

  “You ought to sleep,” Bjorn replied. “Mr. Wander, there were new leaks tonight. Three or four of them. Lanie Plume took one down the back of her neck. I found more buckets in the basement so we’re all right for now, but if we don’t get some snow off that roof we’ll have to start handing out ponchos.”

  5

  I’D WONDERED HOW LONG IT WOULD BE UNTIL THE LEAKS FORCED action at the Empress. I meant to do something about it the next day, but an important commitment took priority—the truck was coming in from LA to possess my bottle imps.

  The driver phoned from ten miles out. The snow didn’t alarm him as much as the midday gloom—“You guys got some medieval-type darkness here,” he said, adding heartily, “Oh well, bring it on,” as if propping up his courage. I had a weather map open before me. He was going to arrive between fronts.

  Bjorn and I went down to the lobby to watch for the truck. Streetlights blinked on. Betsy Shane came out of the bakery and looked around and up at the sky and went back in. Two cars went through south to north, then two pickups. The cars had skis strapped to their roofs. The pickups were full of sled dogs.

  Beeman arrived just before the truck. He wanted to document the event. I’ve never been a journalist but once the truck arrived anyone could see a feature story looming. The driver called himself a “relic courier.” He was a raffish lout in a long coat and scarf. Besides repatriated films he told us he’d transported cabernet salvaged from the Ti
tanic; slivers of the True Cross; the fossilized eggs of a Saltoposuchus, swift small predator of the late Triassic; and molars from a talkative French aristocrat whose guillotined head had briefly kept chatting. With him was a black-eyed, wiry man speaking continuously to himself in a language I didn’t recognize. His glance darted everywhere and he waved in annoyance at the little shocked cloud of his breath. He handled the reels like an acrobat—they slid from the closet shelves to his long limber arms to a stand-up dolly and down the steps to arrive at the truck unruffled as a wedding cake.

  In under an hour the reels were stowed and strapped in. The day was cold in a way that made your teeth creak yet the cargo hold felt like a greenhouse. Beeman and Bjorn stood on the twilit sidewalk. Nadine arrived looking nostalgic, but I felt nothing of the kind—in fact when the driver waved and the acrobat nodded and said Bye-bye, I could only grin. The truck pulled away. It was a murky afternoon, but I felt light and pleasantly shriven.

  As it happened, the films were only the first purge of the day.

  I’d seen Rune that morning retrieving his piles of kites from the film closet. I thought he was just getting them out of the way, but then he began to organize, brushing off the more weathered individuals and setting them out in some order sensible to him.

  Light steps climbed the staircase and hesitated on the landing. There came a shy knock at the door.

  “Hello, yes,” Rune called, and Amanda Nelson poked her head in. I knew Amanda—she taught second grade at Greenstone Elementary, though she looked barely out of high school herself. Apparently she was a regular flyer.

  “What can I do for you, Amanda?” I said.

  “Oh—didn’t you know? I’m here because of what Rune is doing.” And she picked up the kite nearest her, which looked like a stone fireplace, and waved it about so the orange flame whickered with a sound close to actual fire. “Oh, it’s beautiful!”

  “Thank you,” Rune told her. He didn’t look my direction.

  Amanda lifted the kite at arm’s length and trotted in a tiny circle around the kitchen, the kite following agreeably. She went to Rune and gave him a hug. He looked at me dolefully over her shoulder.

  It came to this: he couldn’t face kites for a while. Though his burns were healing, his hands still hurt badly; the thought of all that sketching and cutting and folding, not to mention the lively tug of a finished kite in the air, was painful. There was more to it than that, I suspected—he seemed to regard his creations reproachfully, as if they’d let him down in some way. When Amanda stopped by the previous week, he’d offered the kites to her second graders. She agreed to take the lot of them. Later I learned she hung them overlapping around the classroom like a mythic parade. The catfish alone took up half of one wall. The kids wrote Rune letters saying Thank you Mr. Eliassen. Please get well. Please come see us when you do.

  “I miss them, though,” I admitted to Rune—the apartment looked clean and vast; the walls were dull and cold to the touch. The maple floor was a glacier. “I miss you working on them.”

  He nodded and went in his room and emerged with the one kite held back from Amanda. It was the big cinnamon hound, the one that first got my attention when I looked from the roof-deck after the fire.

  “I saved you this one—you always liked it,” Rune said, handing it over.

  We finally got the roof cleared off—Bjorn came over, Beeman too, and they managed it in a couple of hard shifts, pushing the snow into a berm along the alley-side cornice, then heaving it over with shovels. They came in winded, chaffing me about faking a ruined shoulder.

  “Almost forgot,” Beeman said, digging into a pocket of his insulated jacket, “I got something for you, Rune.” He handed over another cassette. “It’s not much. A little compilation. Interviews with your boy Alec, back in his pitching days.” Beeman looked apologetic. “We probably did fifty or sixty short hits like this, after ball games, but it was all analog then, we had to recycle our tapes. These were all I could round up. Nothing brilliant here—I just thought you’d like to hear his voice.”

  Rune stood looking ambushed but happy. He performed a small bow. “Thank you, Tom. Stay, sit down. Listen with us.”

  “Not a chance,” Beeman said. “I’m on one of Ann’s dread committees—I’ve got to prep for a meeting, or concoct an alibi.” And he fled down the steps like an avalanche.

  Rune clicked the tape into the player. The first thing we heard was Alec’s laugh—it was high-pitched and easy as ever, and Rune rose an inch off the floor. Alec was talking about a game he’d just blown. He’d lost control of the Mad Mouse, filling the bases, then walking in two before a relief could be summoned.

  “Couldn’t keep her in the zone,” Alec said. “I tell her where to go, but she rarely complies.”

  A significantly younger Beeman said, “The Mad Mouse is a girl?”

  “I guess she is,” Alec mused. “Does it surprise you?”

  “Not all all,” Beeman said, and they laughed. I hardly dared look at Rune but he was simply alight. There wasn’t a line on his face. Why would there be? This was his first time hearing his son, and he liked him awfully well.

  I soon learned those few brief interviews by heart. Rune played them whenever there were no visitors around, and Nadine wasn’t here—he feared that hearing Alec would make her grieve. Bjorn had never heard the interviews either; he didn’t say much, but seemed to lean toward the lighthearted voice of the dad he had mostly forgotten. Beeman had rescued only four short Q and A’s, maybe six minutes of Alec on tape. Alec wasn’t hard on himself. He didn’t like losing, but this was Single-A baseball in Duluth, Minnesota. He wasn’t delusional. He complained about the cold, joked about the monkey, and praised his teammates. “Did you see Hambone’s sliding catch? Whoever knew?”

  The one time Alec seemed pensive was moments after the perfecto. Of course a lot was on his mind—career performance aside, before the sun rose he’d be rushing Nadine to maternity. “Nothing seems the same, now,” he told Beeman. “Whoever knew?” he said, again. This time the expression had an undertone, a gravity lacking earlier. Bjorn caught it too. “Listen to him,” he said. “You hear that? This was just before I was born. Like hours. It’s landing on him now, like bricks,” he added wistfully. “I’m landing on him, that’s what I think—those bricks are me.”

  6

  ALL IT TOOK TO END THE FLOW OF PILGRIMS WAS THE RETURN OF Lucy DuFrayne.

  The day she got back from California there were seven people I didn’t know in the apartment. They meant well. The raven regarded them with hatred. Both Nadine and I had talked with Lucy on the phone—she knew what to expect, yet the sight of Rune’s ebbing self drained the tan from her face. She transmuted her alarm into efficiency. She was so kind and sly that in five minutes the pilgrims were gone. People found their coats on and themselves on the street. They had the illusion they’d left of their own choosing. Lucy was air traffic control.

  To celebrate her return we had a quiet dinner which ended early when Rune fell asleep at the table. He was so pleased to have Lucy back that his energy at first seemed a miracle, only to slur and fade. In front of our eyes he bent slowly forward until his head came to rest adjacent to a twice-baked potato. When Lucy placed a hand on his shoulder he opened his eyes muttering Na ga over vinden, which means something like “Now go over the wind.” She got him to his feet and led him blinking to his room.

  In the evenings we changed his dressings—more accurately, Bjorn did. It seemed no one else had the proper technique. I was too rough with the tape. How could anything heal with such crude handling? Was that a washcloth or sandpaper?

  Even Nadine was not up to standard; with Lucy he affected a prim self-consciousness about his wounded skin. Obviously he wanted Bjorn to do it.

  Thankfully Bjorn didn’t mind. He wasn’t squeamish. His hands, so deft at splicing celluloid, were equally adept with gauze and tape. “My dad was good at bandages,” he said, with pride. “He’d say, Don’t worry, kid, Dr. Sandstrom
’s here.”

  “Now you are Dr. Sandstrom,” Rune said.

  “You got that right. Now suck it up.”

  Every day the snow kept falling. The days got longer but no brighter. The raven kept Rune company and listened to Beeman’s tapes with him. At night Bjorn screened the films, then came up late to change dressings. Despite his efforts the tear in Rune’s side remained open and painful. I wondered if it would become a permanent aperture, as with the nineteenth-century patient whose stomach let doctors peer firsthand at grotesque digestive wonders.

  While Bjorn attended him, Rune used the opportunity to impart family history. It was Bjorn’s family too after all. He began with twin sister Gretchen, whose short poetry career an Oslo critic had called “a Roman candle fizzing and snapping above the Arctic Circle.” Gretchen had died three years ago of a stroke. She was talking to students on the library steps when she appeared puzzled. Hva kaldt vann! she exclaimed, meaning What cold water! Then she slumped down in the shrubbery while the alarmed students mistook her words for a request and sprinted off to get her a drink.

  “Geez,” Bjorn said. “Sorry to hear it.”

  Rune’s father Søren was a fisherman and sometime ferryboat captain now residing in the city of the drowned. His crew were sleeping when he vanished so details were scarce, but Rune imagined Søren leaning over the rail, black stocking cap, horned-rimmed glasses blurry with spray, enjoying the cranky weather just before Death eased him over the side.

  “What cold water,” was Bjorn’s cautiously wry remark. “What about your mom?”

  “Her sanity was sporadic. She thought she was a seal or porpoise. She accused the neighbors of being Nazi cryptographers. She believed my father had returned to life as a clock, always a few minutes behind.”

  If these were dark stories they did not bother Bjorn. He seemed to appreciate the practical mortality of his newfound forebears. They fished or farmed or taught, then they died. Rune spoke of Death not as an abstraction but as a corporeal being likely to show up sooner than we wish. Bjorn was curious what this personage might look like and Rune described the covetous robed skeleton of medieval woodcuts.