Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  “How about that, the band is here,” Don said. “Excellent.” His collar glistened with sweat; all of him was extremely damp and pale as a big summer squash.

  “People need to know,” said Lydia.

  Don stood up, seemed about to say something, and sat down again. “Thing could be anyplace,” he said at last.

  “Anyplace you can hide an Audi wagon,” Stumbo helpfully added.

  Don squeezed the cell phone in his palm. Officers were watching the two roads into and out of Greenstone—61 going north and south, and Green Street, which becomes County 12 beyond the city limits. Two fire departments had arrived and were scouting alleys and back streets. Stumbo had drafted a public statement and was eager to set it free. Don had no such zeal. He had been sheriff six years. He dreaded questions until he had answers.

  “What we have to do,” said Lydia urgently, “is we have to send people home.”

  Stumbo opened a file and badgered Don to select a photo of Jerry for media use.

  “Good grief. That one.” Don pointed. It was the only recent picture, showing Jerry as he presently looked—skinny, gray, oddly shocked. I hadn’t noticed before how his neck had got thin and long, like some turtles’ necks that keep stretching and stretching out from their shells. His eyes were dismayed and surprised—arched brows above and blue bags below. If you didn’t know Jerry it might make you laugh. It made me see I had failed him.

  “Get it ready, but don’t make it public. Not yet,” Don said. “Anybody got a picture of the car? We need the car—hang on,” he added, his cell phone barking.

  It was Homeland. The Duluth agent was on his way, whistling up 61 behind a pair of state troopers, talking so noisily Don held the phone away. The excited agent seemed to be arguing for a general evacuation of Greenstone. Don wanted to issue what he kept calling a “shelter in place” bulletin. He dreaded a panic. The two did not seem near agreement.

  Hard Luck Days was earning its name. Slipping out of Lydia’s office and over to my own, I called Nadine on the landline.

  She said, “I saw Jerry not an hour ago—he drove past my house, then drove past again in the other direction. Moving slowly, Virgil. That old car of his was scraping the pavement, even worse than yesterday. He looked more bewildered than violent, to me.”

  “Where’s Bjorn?”

  “Off with Ellen someplace—I’ll try his phone but doubt he’ll answer. What are you doing?”

  “Whatever gets asked.”

  My stout quarterstaff was propped by the window—I’d been doing without it lately, but now it seemed like a good thing to have. I tucked it under my arm and left the office to find City Hall empty. I didn’t know what Don and the agent from Homeland had decided, or where any of them had gone.

  I locked up and walked down to Main. The festival rolled on without apprehension. The street was stuffed with kids in bright jackets, glow sticks circling their necks. Some had dogs on tangled leashes and others had freed their dogs to gather near sausage vendors. I smelled fry bread and mini doughnuts and almonds roasted with cinnamon. The Ferris wheel turned, its long spokes lit with bulbs in primary colors. I passed the beer tent and headed toward the stage where musicians or roadies were building a stack of speakers. Main was so crowded I had to thread a path sideways. I spied Rune with Lucy at a bakery stand. He waved. Lucy took a step toward me only to stop abruptly and dig down into her handbag.

  Here and there people reached simultaneously for their phones.

  The mood changed. Electronic devices rippled downstreet, digital layers of shudder and yip. An alert had been issued. Blocks off, a siren ascended and died; kids looked for their friends and zigzagged through the crowd. People laughed in disbelief, saying What the hell or Is this a joke until a tall yellow fire truck turned off the highway and came swaying down toward us. Harsh lights bounced off homes and façades. I looked past the stage to the campground. People were standing still and alert, interpreting facts and gauging their sense of alarm—then as I watched, a tall young woman lunged at her tent, tore it down in under a minute, and stuffed it loose into the back of a car. Engines woke, headlights bloomed and queued. Rides were still twirling on the midway as the first cars crept out and away. The beer tent swelled and then emptied; some of the vendors simply shut off their grills and hustled away.

  “Look at all that unguarded bratwurst,” Beeman remarked—he’d found me in the thinning crowd. “What gives, Virgil? Are we finished at last?” He was reading his phone as he talked.

  About this time we saw the first runners. They were dodging a motorcycle that wove in and out, its rider jerking forward in bursts. The Ferris wheel slowed and stopped—the last rider took off his jacket and waved it around in the breeze. Downtown drivers lost patience and tore through the ropes of the temporary parking lot. The ropes caught on bumpers, dragging weighted posts behind them.

  Half a block west the troopers arrived. Don bent over talking to one of them through the window of his cruiser. A four-wheel-drive pickup wheeled out of the campground and bounced through front yards as a shortcut. Two more trucks followed its path before a subcompact tried it and got hung up on the curb. People swore at cell phones. An ambulance crept up onto the sidewalk, its driver talking into a headset.

  Past the stage I glimpsed Bjorn talking to a trooper, the man shaking his head, talking on his radio, waving Bjorn away.

  Beeman said, “Hey Virgil, I found Lydia.” He held up his phone. “She’s talking to Anderson Cooper.” He then took a call himself. The news online was mushrooming; #greenstonebomber had liftoff, along with #hardluckjerry.

  I hated to think about Jerry this way. He didn’t want notoriety or Internet fame. What he wanted was already lost. Wife, job, self-regard, whatever his name was worth—those things were gone.

  The Ferris wheel was empty, its lights doused. The sun was low and the street was shady blue and hazy with the exhaust of inching traffic. Bjorn came trotting up looking bothered and excited. “Maybe he’s at Leer’s.”

  “Jerry?”

  “He might be, right? Leer gave him his job. He practically lived there—come on.” Without waiting he turned and headed up the street toward his house.

  13

  RUNE JOINED ME AS I RUSHED TO CATCH UP WITH BJORN. HE WAS full of breathless questions. While filling him in I failed to detect an approaching curb and cartwheeled harmlessly onto the boulevard. By the time we reached Nadine’s, Bjorn was backing the Jeep out of the garage.

  It took a few minutes to escape town since everyone else was escaping too. A hundred yards from the highway Bjorn pulled off into the ditch and four-wheeled us past a storm of shouts and honks. He turned north as the sun fell between two high hills to the west.

  We climbed 61 past the lookout. Bjorn slowed and turned into Leer’s drive. Boulders loomed around us, an early owl hunting among them. Leer’s house drew near looking flat in the gloom. Jerry’s car was not visible, but there was light in the house—movement too.

  I knocked hard once, then opened the door and Leer looked up unsurprised. I called out that we were looking for Jerry and Leer went wordlessly out the back door. We shouted his name. He did not stop. He seemed not to rush yet stayed well in front. We reeled along fast but he was already at the edge of the trees. Then Bjorn flat-out ran, to keep Leer in sight, and I staggered along with my staff. Inside the woods it was dark and dreamlike. Sometimes I felt Rune’s hand at my elbow and tree limbs brushing my face. I glimpsed Leer in the shadows ahead. His stride betrayed no anxiety. He even turned and might have smiled, dropping something behind him. Bjorn bent down and lifted Leer’s suit jacket and flung it back to the ground. Forward we struggled and stumbled and ran, and forward Leer strolled before us. He tossed another shape over a branch: his cotton shirt. Now he was visible only for his white undershirt drifting ahead in the trees. Water burbled near—I remembered the river that crossed his property running down to the lake. A melody fragment reached my ears. Was Leer now singing a madman song, losing his clothe
s and mind? Bjorn tripped and rolled in the dead winter leaves and came up holding a shoe. The river came closer. Leer stood naked in the moving shallows. He seemed to sink. The water curled. We raced to the river’s edge.

  It is not deep there or especially swift except for a little waterfall where it drops over a shelf and pools and swirls before continuing. Rune took my shoulder and said There in my ear, pointing down into the pool.

  Not ten feet away a great long fish lay swinging its fins on the bottom. It had a spine like a person’s spine. Its long jagged face was mottled gray and it watched with a glimmering eye. Bjorn didn’t see it but trotted upstream, hunting for a place to cross. I felt something going to happen and took a tight hold on the quarterstaff. The fish turned slowly about and finned itself downstream. What leisure it seemed to have. A fish that size fears nothing.

  Bjorn thought my wits had flown, because while he peered over the water trying to glimpse Leer skulking among the trees I bounded into the shallows. I flailed the staff wildly. Bjorn laughed from shock. Something large was the matter with me, bashing the water as if driving out devils. But Rune was moving along the bank, tracking the surface, and at last the fish slid over a pebbly spot, so all of us saw its darkling spine break through in a slick of fast water. Then Bjorn leaped in after me and downriver we went, the fish out in front of us, leading us on, searching out places with depth for concealment, then being driven out as we crashed to our knees and our waists and one sudden drop-off over my head. Far off there were sirens. At a bend of the river we came out of the trees into a pasture. There was very little sunlight left and it threw a lemony warmth over the heavy grasses and two horses who stood watching us plow downstream. The staff helped me keep my feet in the river, Bjorn splashing next to me, Rune on the bank. I lost sight of the fish, then caught it again, slicing along a steep cutbank—having an easier time of it now as the river hastened away. Lunging forward onto my face I got a hand on its tail but it twisted away. The lunge cost me badly. I lost the staff. Strength left my body. Bjorn got out front and took control of the chase. The landscape changed to tall grass and saplings. The Green Street Bridge was somewhere in front. Past it the river narrowed and sped. The fish would be down to the sea in minutes and lost to us forever.

  Bjorn shouted then. I could hear no words, only noise and joy. I took my eyes off the fish and looked up. Galen Pea stood on the Green Street Bridge. We were some ways off but I knew it was Galen. Nobody else had hair that white. God knows the days he’d haunted this river—always from the bridge, against sense and instruction, but as Galen had told me long before, a fish can’t look up. The sturgeon powered forth with confidence, attaining speed, water surging along its sides. It couldn’t see what we saw, which was Galen Pea dropping like a stone dislodged.

  It was a nervy leap. He timed it well. He made a thack instead of a splash. Thack is the sound of a boy in Red Wing boots landing on the back of his enemy.

  I don’t remember a struggle—not really. The fish was stunned, as you would be if ninety pounds jumped from a height onto your spinal column. When I panted up the fish lay on the surface. Its gills worked arrhythmically. Galen stood in the thigh-deep river. He had mud on his cheekbones like war paint and the fish’s tail in his hands. He leaned back hard but the sturgeon was three times his weight. Just as it seemed to regather its wits Bjorn joined Galen and took hold too. Between them they dragged it over the mud and up onto the grass.

  “Don’t let go,” Galen warned, then ran stooping to the foot of the bridge and came back with an oval rock the size of my two fists together.

  With Bjorn holding the tail Galen knelt down in the dying glow and looked the sturgeon full in the face. It looked straight back. In the day’s last sun its gills opened wide. A gust of wind hit Galen then and his hair was a storm at sea. He brought the rock down like the great Hiawatha and cratered the top of its head.

  The fish lay quivering in the grass. I was breathing hard and sank onto a hummock beside it. Rune joined us, at the end of his strength. He sat down beside the fish. It was still trembling—it trembled quite a while.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what just happened. Bjorn slumped down a little confused. Galen bent over the fish, taking its measure with a piece of waxed thread he carried in his pocket. Finally Rune chuckled lightly. “Well my friend. You took him. You said you would take him and you took him.”

  Galen grinned; he danced with every step. Few are allowed the revenge of their dreams and this was also the fish of his life, bigger than himself and his dad together. He’d taken it with only his hands and his feet and a stone that he found on the bank.

  The air chilled, fog rose out of the grass. Dark was urgently upon us, and I thought of Jerry Fandeen out in it somewhere, parked alone with his colossal firecracker, more frightened, it seemed certain, than all those he had frightened out of town.

  Galen said, “I got to get this home somehow.”

  None of us mentioned Adam Leer.

  I rose unsteadily. The hard fall earlier had spoiled my balance. I stuck out my arms like a ropewalker. My stout quarterstaff had slipped downstream—it was driftwood again.

  14

  WE DROPPED GALEN OFF AT HIS SISTER’S. HE STAMPED A LITTLE because we couldn’t take the sturgeon, but it wouldn’t fit in the Jeep. We had to leave it there in the weeds. Lily thought he was downtown during the mad outward rush and was angry and crying to see him.

  Don Lean stood beside the vacant music stage with a couple of troopers. There was yellow tape around the Hoshaver Building and the loose tape lifted and bent on the breeze. A third trooper knelt looking up into the wheel well of the Storm Warning bus which was parked behind the stage. As we neared I saw that the bus had a flat tire.

  “No Jerry?” I asked.

  Don shook his head no, frowning at my soaked clothes. “Virgil, what, did you drive in the lake again? Who dragged you out this time?”

  I explained we’d helped Galen Pea land his big sturgeon. Annoyance flitted across Don’s face, quickly replaced by appreciation.

  “No kidding. He caught the bastard? You take a picture?”

  “Didn’t think of it. What’s next here?”

  Don said there was an “all points” out on Jerry but that no one had seen him or the Audi in hours. It was full dark and a half-moon had risen. Even with the streetlights on, certain stars looked swollen and close.

  “He’s got to have holed up, that’s what I think,” Don said. “That old wagon isn’t going far. Tomorrow we’ll put some eyes in the air and see what we can see.”

  At the far end of Main a slender stooped figure came walking out of the night. He had his hands in his pockets and walked in a familiar shuffle.

  “Well now,” Don said.

  No one ran toward him, they just let him come. He stopped at an abandoned stall and took a bratwurst off the grill and poked around and found a bottle of mustard and then reached into a serving tub with his fingers and pinched up some kraut. He draped it over the sausage and walked toward us eating it.

  Don was laughing quietly.

  The trooper said, “Wait—is that Fandeen?”

  “Yes.”

  A trooper reached to unsnap the holster on his belt, but Don put a hand on his arm. “Hold tight a second here, Dale.”

  Jerry continued up Main. There was another vacated stand, fry bread at this one. Jerry stopped and picked a couple of rounds off the rack and helped himself to some napkins and came toward us eating one of the fry breads and holding the other in his free hand. When he saw the little group of us standing together next to the Storm Warning bus, he smiled and held up the fry bread in greeting.

  “Don,” he called, “I’m glad to see you—can we talk?”

  “Stay where you are,” the trooper ordered.

  “Dale, relax—I’m glad too, Jerry.”

  When Jerry got close there was a sudden tight scuffle—Dale and the other troopers lunged in and got hold of his arms and yanked them back so he dropped the fry b
read, and they put him on the ground on his face. I felt sick to watch with his shirt riding up showing the saggy white skin on his back. I understand the troopers needed to lay hands on him but come on. What stuck for me was Jerry’s shock, the humiliation in his eyes, and fear and pain when Dale knelt down with his knee jammed up between Jerry’s flappy shoulder blades. I tried to crouch near him so he could see someone friendly but a trooper kept shoving me away.

  The whole time Jerry kept saying I never, I never.

  Eventually of course they had to let him up and then he wouldn’t look in anybody’s face, not mine, not Don’s. If Don was aghast at the troopers’ intensity he didn’t let it show. He spoke gently to Jerry, asking where the bomb was, and Jerry looked down at the pavement where his fry bread was lying along with some nickels and dimes from his pockets and said it was parked up at Slake.

  “You’re telling me the truth now Jerry?”

  Jerry nodded and glanced up a moment. You could see he was afraid they would put him on the ground again. His chin was bloody and his cheek embossed with gravel. He said, “I got a dumb idea, Don. I had forgot about things, but I remembered myself—do you see?”

  Don said, “I see it. I do. You want to go sit down in my office?”

  “I guess,” Jerry said.

  One of the troopers was already talking on his radio and now Don unhooked his own radio from his belt. A bomb squad had been assembled and was evidently arriving from Duluth or Minneapolis. I heard Don issuing directions to the taconite plant.

  A calm settled. A flock of low-flying geese went overhead, the undersides of their wings gently illuminated by streetlights. People began to come out from where they had been. Music came on somewhere, a door slid open, somebody laughed. Don took Jerry’s upper arm and headed toward his cruiser which was parked in front of the Empress.

  Then the air got white and flashbulb filthy. We turned in time to take the concussion on our chests and faces. A column of smoke ballooned upward and part of it caught fire. The sound of the world returned in cotton. The sky was shreds and flinders.