Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  15

  PEOPLE SWEAR IT RAINED HARDWARE—A CLOUDBURST OF LAG SCREWS and bolts. This was no doubt true near the blast itself, but downtown it mainly sprinkled dirt and chaff. You felt it against your face. My chief impression was of trash in the air, rags and plastic, fly ash, smoke stink, gnats rushing by. You expect a carnage tableau, but no. There was a general freeze, then a scurry, the stirring sight of an ambulance crew. People stood in clumps looking up at the smoke which remained its lit self, turning and swelling, glowing inside like a hot summer cloud. A horror, yes, but overall what you saw was relief. The worst arrives and you are still whole.

  Jerry’s statement was somber and scattered. He attempted no defense but described in rueful terms the explosive, his knack for ignition, the fuel at hand. Asked the big why, he struggled to speak. When he did, it was as if he were describing someone else. He’d felt for years that his edges were dull. Like Greenstone itself, he was largely past. An empty room. He got lost in his days, his thoughts didn’t hold.

  That changed when he went to work for Mr. Leer.

  Leer welcomed Jerry. After one day working for him, Jerry already felt different. He began to like mornings, and the feeling of purpose he got the moment he turned onto Leer’s scrubby drive. He mowed and pruned, he painted walls. Around Mr. Leer Jerry didn’t feel lost—he felt refilled, and even prized. Soon he required no guidance whatever. He put his hand to the task before him. When one job was finished, another appeared.

  Leer was the first ever to shake Jerry’s hand and say he had maximum ceiling.

  A few weeks into his time with Leer, an idea came into his bones. It weaseled inside and took hold of the levers. The concept was simple: everything ends. Work, people, football, dogs, The Bachelor, towns, money. They outlived themselves, they came to an end. Jerry felt stirred with private knowledge. Something that seemed to be his alone. He’d hit the intelligence, struck the vein. A conviction developed. As a boy he had worried that the world would end. Even the Bible said it would. Now it was coming, and was nothing to fear. He felt free. He might be a prophet born for this. The day he moved into the Hoshaver Building he knew what to do, and how.

  The neglected Hoshaver stood in the center of town. It had been everything, during its life—dime store, dealership, grocery store, café. Always a hub. He walked through it, lovingly. The idea came to him clean and complete. Hard Luck Days was coming. Like Jerry himself, the Hoshaver would be useful once more.

  He accumulated bit by bit—scrap-iron shrapnel, dynamite caps. Little homebuilt igniter to set the thing off. The fuel oil was already on-site, in a bulk tank down in the basement. At last he lacked only the fertilizer and got badly lost, seeking that greenhouse. Mile on mile of one-lane road, a webby tangle of tamarack swamp. Increasingly roads confounded Jerry. But he found the place after all, on a Saturday evening, unprotected. Not even a barking dog. As a bonus he spied those pretty wind chimes, and took them as a present for Ann.

  He briefly panicked when the sheriff showed up—banging on his door, on the very day! When Don quit knocking, Jerry piled the crates of scrap-metal shards into the back seat. He opened the alley slider and eased on out. Went north first, toward his brother Owen’s shack, then realized people would look for him there. He got shaky then—he didn’t want to be found, but also couldn’t bear to be lost.

  To get out of sight he turned around and drove back to Slake. The gate was locked but the hardware was old. Simple to lift the gate off its hinges, drive through, and lift it back on. He crept the wagon around to the rear and backed in under a loading ramp.

  He stayed with the car all afternoon. He napped and thought of the end of things and got out and stretched his legs. Peering round the southeast corner he could see Greenstone—the water tower, the Hoshaver façade, the Ferris wheel, some sailboat masts. It looked long past. It looked like a picture in a museum or a book about how people lived once. He heard the distant midway rides. Mostly he watched the ore dock. He remembered the ships that used to load, the long chutes lowering, their drawbridge grace, rivers of taconite pouring out.

  By late afternoon he knew they were looking for him. County vehicles kept going past. State police. An ambulance. Once he heard the voice of a trooper who’d parked by the gate talking on his radio. The trooper signed off and stayed there to eat. He sat on the bumper enjoying a bratwurst, then a second. The trooper kept waving to cars driving past. He ate a maddening third bratwurst, then leaned back on the trunk and turned his face to the sun. He dozed like this until his radio crackled. Then he drove away.

  Jerry was hungry. He’d eaten little for months and didn’t care, but now an end was coming. After the trooper he smelled bratwurst everywhere—on wisps of breeze, on the swells of beach waves and far-off laughter. He felt himself fading. Cheese came to mind, and strawberry milk. A long-ago picnic with Ann when she was unexpectedly generous.

  It was pleasant and painful, thinking of Ann. She might not want him any longer, but he was still proud of her. Look what she’d done, making everything click down at City Hall. She always hoped to be big and successful. Now she had made it—a person had only to look at that carnival, smell all the food. A wave of noise reached him, a roar of gladness from a thrilling ride.

  The last ray of the sun struck the water tower. For half a minute it was the radiant pale inside of an orange. A breeze came up and Jerry felt it go straight through him. It seemed to throw open the first window of spring, all the stale air swept out in a moment, replaced with fresh and sweet.

  Jerry’s throat lumped.

  His Greenstone was over, but Ann’s was not.

  The kids on that ride still had Greenstone in front of them.

  He’d got off track. He didn’t mean to—he’d only been doing what came next to hand, glad for a purpose, doing his job, so pleased inside his private knowledge he’d forgot that the world was large.

  I was mistaken, Jerry thought.

  But the blasting-cap switch wasn’t yet wired in; he’d waited on that critical, final step. He could leave the car there—the half-ton project, the end of it all. He’d walk back and talk to the sheriff. Don was an understanding man. Maybe he’d go and get Mr. Leer. They’d sit down together and sort all this out. Maybe start something new.

  He slipped through the gate and walked into town. Cars drove past him and nobody stopped. Greenstone was spilling people fast. The music had ended. He walked past the carousel, empty of children—fun house and swing ride, nobody there. Hunger absorbed him—he smelled roasting almonds, the slight burned aroma twinged in his jaw. When he got to the vendors they’d all disappeared. Some had left food right out for grabs.

  Jerry still won’t talk about being dogpiled onto the pavement, except to say that he didn’t expect it, walking up as he had of his own volition, grateful for his returned self and some nice fry bread. Maybe his pride is hurt, or maybe his mind jumps past it to the way the ground thumped, and everything was silenced. In his memory it’s not the glaring whiteness that lingers, but the fine black dust that began to descend.

  16

  NOBODY DIED FROM JERRY’S BOMB.

  To this day he insists it should not have gone off. Alarm still rises in his face when you mention it; he turns blotchy, like a child near tears. He swears on his life that his little igniter wasn’t even connected. In his defense, an investigator did point out the car’s battery placement beneath the back seat, not under the hood as is common. More than one such car has blazed up when overloaded seat-springs touched against battery posts.

  None of which matters. The explosion hit like a meteor on the outskirts of Greenstone and burned us a deep new scar.

  Groups still meet at the school to talk about it. Lanie Plume wrote a fine college-entrance essay about the experience which resulted in scholarship offers. Beeman published the essay in the Observer. She used the word propulsive.

  After nearly a year we prevailed on Slake International to clear away the gnarled hulk that once was Greenstone’s bread
. It was an empty eyesore for decades, but people still felt mournful to lose it. Losing it proved for good we were no more a mining town.

  In a gesture of goodwill, Slake sold us the land lease for a dollar. Ann wrote a grant, and we turned the site into a grassy park, our cheapest and prettiest option, with a picnic-table overlook and one of those interpretive historical markers your aunt reads aloud while nobody listens. Standing there—standing anywhere in town—you really notice how the sky has changed. When that looming trapezoid came down, the sky got wide. The light is vast. The lake is clean and the hills look blue and hazy. Ellen Tripp said, “You just see way farther now, and what you see is way better.”

  Last year a shop opened that rents bikes and kayaks in the summer, skis in the winter—no one expected it to succeed, but the place is usually busy. A microbrewery opened on Main. The beer is expensive but made right there, and they hired Nadine for the neon. In the fall the Department of Natural Resources announced plans to build that expensive breakwater after all, and designate a Harbor of Refuge.

  It’s hardly a renaissance, but it’s a start.

  And Hard Luck Days itself has thrived—Ann’s idea was strong. A year after the blast, Storm Warning returned and played a beautiful set dedicated to resilience and high hopes. I don’t know if it skidded the paradigm, but those were some pretty songs. Greenstone is riding a little wave, it seems. Every year the festival lands another improbable act. People like an underdog. Last spring Bob Dylan overcame his wariness and played our Main Street stage. I missed it, but Lydia went with a lemon pie, and ate it with Dylan after the show. She reports he said little, but his eyes were expressive. He called the pie “better than the Nobel.”

  We retain our proud affliction tales, our rotating hit parade. New ones dominate the repertoire. The Slake explosion, the Christmas Eve Blackout. Shad Pea and Galen—death by sturgeon and bold revenge. We struggled to contain our voles for months, the creatures laying waste to gardens, scrabbling up drainpipes, using superior numbers to overwhelm confident tomcats. It seemed they might actually drive us out until the following January, when a record irruption of great gray owls drifted down out of the north to swallow them whole.

  Alec Sandstrom’s vanishment has almost entirely dropped from the playlist, supplanted by Adam Leer’s. There are theories—Leer drowned in the lake, or he fled to escape his fraud, his vague promises to our town having had no basis in reality. He was never in touch with a beer magnate or any other kind. The chopstick factory was a figment. Investigators combing his house found nothing to suggest any conversation about the reinvigoration of Greenstone. What they did find were artifacts, some incriminating and some only creepy, among them a hand-carved fishing lure of Shad’s and a woman’s bright Mexican scarf. Also a set of small vintage binoculars that fold into a tin box—the same, we’re fairly sure, that Alec used in the Taylorcraft. Some posited that Leer sabotaged the plane. Shad Pea’s wild story supports this, Leer showing up near the Wise Old the morning Alec flew out. So do some of Rune’s sea-creature tales, if you credit such things. Unlikely? Well of course. What in Greenstone has not been unlikely? Maybe the world isn’t small, as we constantly say, but expanding all the time.

  In his absence Leer’s home was locked down tight. The aspens returned. The yard went to pigweed and thistles and woodchucks. Siding and shingles began to flake off. Eventually some kids went out on a Friday night, drank deeply of life, and burned it down, an act of vandalism that failed to raise the usual indignation.

  Let him be a phantom now. I think he won’t be back.

  Not long ago I stopped to see Lily Pea, to drop off a card of congratulations for becoming a public accountant. She wasn’t home, but Galen was. He’s still got the head of that massive fish. In the end it was all he managed to save, sawing it off with the French sailor’s knife Bjorn had in his pocket. He keeps the head on a bookshelf, where it stares out with ancient, malignant eyes. It looks like an eater of worlds.

  When the Cinematique article came out, I was surprised to see that the reporter, Frida LaPlant, had been in touch with most of the studios whose movies I’d returned. Because of my status as a man of no prospects, and perhaps because she owed Fergus a favor, she made me a primitive folk hero, a boonies Quixote or man of the people, as though I were baking bread in my kitchen and handing it out to the urchins. It was absurd but I rode it out. Of interest to me was Frida’s exchange with a studio publicist who had gushed about the “exquisite condition” of one of the films. Frida asked if the film might be useful in a planned reissue of the movie; and if so, she pressed, whether the studio intended to reward me for my “humble stewardship and conscience.” The publicist, caught off guard, said the studio intended to make an “in-kind contribution” to the Empress. I heard nothing more of this until Fergus called me one day.

  “Anything you need?” Fergus asked me. “Digital projection?” He didn’t sound tired now—he sounded like a man rubbing his hands together.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ye have not because ye ask not,” said Fergus.

  “Don’t really want it,” I had to admit. I’m very foolish but it’s tough to get excited about hard drives.

  “I don’t even know what to say to you.”

  “We could use a new roof.”

  “How much would that be?”

  “Ten or twelve thou.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” said Fergus.

  A few weeks later came a sweet cool Saturday up on the lookout. High clouds, birdsong, a slight offshore breeze, the sea sprouting columns of smoke that drifted lazily outward. Don Lean met us there, not in his uniform but in a dark blue suit from his banker days. He looked dapper and chubby and pleased—he happens to be an ordained minister along with everything else.

  Bjorn had left early and fetched Nadine’s parents. I’d met them only a few weeks before. What accepting people. Orry flew in from Colorado, a lot of white hair now infiltrating the red. She whispered the white hairs were “incorrigible,” but she just looked more like herself. She had a small new tattoo of a smiling skull—I don’t completely get it, but I like it. Rune stood up with us, and Bjorn, and Beeman, and that was the whole little tribe.

  Or it was at first. People kept pulling over—the lookout’s no secret and we kind of stood out, Nadine in her creamy cotton, a rosebud crown in her hair. Drivers slowed their cars for a look, coming up the hill; they pulled in, then rolled down their windows and tried not to make themselves obvious. Soon there were a dozen cars lined up. Inside them were people important to us—Julie from the Agate, and Lydia, and Ann Fandeen; Marcus came, and Lily Pea arrived with Galen. They all hung back until Nadine walked down through the twisting grasses. She spoke to them laughingly, teased them out of their cars so they followed her back with sheepish looks. By the time we said the important words they were twenty-five or thirty, dressed in their everydays, glad to be witnesses, wishing us well. Your tribe is always bigger than you think.

  I’d like to give Jerry Fandeen a happy ending, but no. Jerry’s in the penitentiary south of St. Cloud having a terrible time. I go see him sometimes. He enters the visitors’ room looking heavy and pale—he tried to get strong, as in prisoner movies, where it’s all weight lifting and yard fights, but prison’s not that dramatic for Jerry. He says it’s more like a long wait for something never to come. It’s a bad time to be the man who built the bomb. He says it’s as though he were being filled with despair, trickling in, day upon day, despair building up in his organs like mercury in certain big fish. He says the despair is now under control. He takes medication, but you glimpse the old trouble crossing his brow. Lost among strangers, that’s how he looks.

  Ann on the other hand thrives in the world.

  After the bombing she divorced Jerry in sixteen seconds. He’d stolen those wind chimes for her, hoping their beautiful low tones would make her love him again. He’d hung them in a tree by her house where they bonged all night until she shrieked. In the end he took them awa
y.

  “How was I supposed to know they were stolen?” Ann asked Beeman, who was writing it up.

  “It was in the paper,” he said mildly.

  “Like I read it all the way through,” was her retort.

  I admire Ann, though; she might be the only person on whom Leer had no ill effect. Maybe he even had a good one—maybe she touched that spinning flywheel and glanced off toward joy and fulfillment. I thought she might leave town and start over. Instead she stayed and ran for mayor, winning easily. Ann has ideas for Greenstone. She believes things are breaking our way. Maybe she’s right. I’d love to see her preside over a renewal of our misty, blinking town. Yes and amen. That said, I’m not working for her—at present I’m busy with theater stewardship, making improvements that seem worthwhile, now that the roof is repaired. Ann wants me back as city clerk when my leave of absence is over, but I don’t know. I did that job a long time. The previous tenant might’ve done it forever, but he seems on extended leave. Really, I doubt his return.

  It took many months to afford and arrange, but we took Rune up on his invitation. We arrived in Tromsø in late November—just before sundown, for the long blue night. Against expectations it’s not very cold. I like the noon twilight, the way snow is welcomed, the clean vivid ferries tonking away down by the swooping bridge. Maybe my name is really a calling. When insomnia strikes I go outside. Three in the morning and people are walking—locals and tourists, come for the borealis. We nod to each other, this league of insomniacs. All of us look up.

  In our absence Bjorn is running the Empress, although we won’t have him long. Finished with two years at the U of M, he leaves in the spring for Long Beach and Cal State’s oceanography program. My guess is, he’ll surf a bit too. In the meantime he’s helping us evaluate offers—that’s correct, for the Empress. Two offers came as a result of the magazine article and its follow-ups. In the insular movie-house world, the Empress is fleetingly famous. A bid also came over the transom from a California retiree who would be frankly rich in the Midwest, and another from a pair of St. Paul attorneys who believe in the “Greenstone Renewal.” The offers are fair, but we’re undecided. We rise in the morning and sometimes—just laugh. Stay and be part of whatever comes next, or sell and step out the door? Livings get made in all sorts of ways. There’s not a bad option, as Beeman says.