Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  5

  TAKING NOTES AND ASKING FAVORS was actually the job description offered me years before by Greenstone’s mayor Lydia Fatz—she’ll want you to know it rhymes with pots. After Lily departed I spied one of Lydia’s own vigorous notes on lined tablet paper sitting on my desk. I remembered the note with a pang of guilt. It had been there since before I went over the cliff.

  Virgil

  If you have time please accost Mr. Leer about speaking at

  Festival—

  Guess he’s in town but who really knows?

  Absolutely a long shot!

  Leer no hometown fan.

  If he did make an appearance it would be to burn something down.

  Let’s try anyway!

  Lydia

  Among my de facto burdens as clerk of a shriveling town was to organize cheap galas, jubilees, and hoo-has celebrating past glories like taconite, the smelt run, and prosperity itself. Nobody really shows up, but you have to try. Lydia was intent on having Adam Leer—our scandalous filmmaker and malcontent, son of Greenstone’s venerated founder Spurlock Leer—give a speech at next spring’s city fiesta.

  It wasn’t a bad idea. Leer’s first and only film success (Herselves, 1980) had endured scattered boycotts in the Midwest and throughout the Bible Belt. Critics called it fresh or frank or repugnant. Obviously this was decades ago, but given the tedium of most city events, Leer was a peppery choice. I remembered now having delayed out of timidity my visit to the Leer compound.

  For a moment I looked over the note with dread.

  Then a strange thing happened. Maybe certain fears had been disabled in the accident, or maybe it occurred to me that even the worst result—a profane improvisation, a slammed door—would be more interesting than whatever procrastination I devised. Whatever the reason, the dread leached out of Lydia’s note. What remained was only a request from my boss—my boss, Lydia, whom I’d always liked. It carried no freight but was simply a thing that was mine to do.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Lazarus?” asked Ann Fandeen. I’d closed up my office and was striding past her desk. I thought I was striding, anyway—given my tentative equilibrium it’s more likely I was listing along like a wearisome TV zombie.

  “To see Adam Leer,” I said, my spirits on the upswing. “Go pin him down for the festival.”

  “Reborn as a hard charger, you.”

  I smiled—Ann used to put me on edge, but now I wanted to laugh. Maybe the injury had left me impervious to sarcasm. I’d have to ask Dr. Koskinen about it.

  “And where are you meeting the great one?” she asked.

  “No one seems to know his cell number,” I said. “Since he’s back in town, I’ll just be heading up to his house.”

  “Is that what you’ll be doing? What will you be driving, then?”

  Ann had me there. My unexpected gust of mojo had blown clean away the fact that I was still under orders not to drive. Also I was carless, though technically I still owned the Pontiac.

  “Maybe you’d drive me,” I said, and was struck with quiet surprise—like my shoes and the apartment earlier, my voice seemed to be someone else’s. Yet it sounded appropriate to the moment: a simple voice, adjective-free, unapologetic, and satisfyingly deep.

  Ann rolled her eyes. She had a marvelous eye roll, refined through long discipline, precise as acupuncture.

  “Right now?” she inquired, when I failed to backpedal and stood expectantly at her desk.

  “Why not?” said my upgraded voice. “Let’s go.”

  When it came to Adam Leer, hearsay definitely routed our poor supply of facts.

  He was vaguely thought to be a pampered silver-spooner ashamed of his Midwestern backstory. Following his initial success, his profile diminished—gossip had Adam laboring in the lesser cinematic environs of South Africa, Indonesia, Denmark. Nobody seemed sure whether this was the case, but if Leer was really the truculent brat of legend, then how nice to imagine him suffering botfly attacks in the fever swamps of Malaysia. Over pints at the Shipwreck, Beeman had neatly summarized what locals were pleased to believe—“Fifty percent practicing wastrel, forty percent seducer, ten percent expatriate film whiz.”

  The few certainties are these: Adam Leer was the second and last child of the geologist Spurlock Leer, who discovered minable concentrations of taconite after World War II and is considered the founder of Greenstone. Spurlock’s firstborn, Richard, died in the Blizzard of ’64. Popular Richard and his girlfriend, Madeline, were driving back from a basketball tournament in Duluth when the storm rose up off the lake. This was one of those record weather events that dwarf current experience, a violent, smothering, intensely local storm that dropped eight feet of snow in some places on its narrow and serpentine passage. Roofs buckled, trees lost crown and limb. People who were there describe a resounding deafness in which the sharpest cracks and bursts came wrapped in muffled thumps. So much snow fell that things simply vanished, including Richard and Maddie. They made it nearly home only to skid off into a steep ditch. It took six days to find them, entombed in Richard’s GTO, indigo-lipped and frozen to antiquity.

  The stunned Leer family was further beset by a story that wound through Greenstone in the weeks and months after the tragedy. The tale, supposedly delivered in boasting fashion by Adam to his second-grade classmates, was that his father enlisted him to ride shotgun when they drove through the blizzard looking for Richard’s car. Adam didn’t want to go. Richard, he claimed, was a rotten brother—made fun of Adam all the time, made him look stupid in front of people. Let Richard find his own way home. But Spurlock needed extra eyes and made him go. Mrs. Leer sent them out with blankets and a thermos of coffee while she waited by the phone. The poisonous detail is that Adam, watching the precipitous ditch as they crept through near-whiteout conditions, spied the faint glow of a taillight shining up through deepening snow. Adam was seven. He saw the glow and knew what it was. He didn’t say anything. The glow receded as Spurlock, eyeing the opposite ditch, drove on.

  Adam’s school photo shows none of the dead-eyed gaze we associate with tragic children. In fact his eyes are narrowed and focused slightly up and to the left, as though on something looming up behind you. Later he scoffed at the notion that he would let his brother die, or tell such a grisly story. But the photo works against him. There’s a spark in his face. An ignition. You can’t look away, or else you have to.

  Suspicion shadowed him thereafter. People thought him allied with malignant energies. At thirteen he was humiliated at a pep rally when two spirited seniors hauled him up front and yanked down his pants during “The Minnesota Rouser.” Within weeks one of the seniors went blind overnight; the other got dizzy in wood shop and neatly sawed off his own hand.

  At sixteen Adam left Greenstone and vanished like a sylph. There’s a black hole in the ledger until he pops up in California seven years later, directing Herselves which brought him notoriety and accolades. It also brought him his first wife—the ethereal wisp Simone Blaise, who played the titular schizophrenic. Many continue to believe that he murdered poor Simone, although the hospital record shows it was he who rushed the girl to the ER after she swallowed more than sixty quaaludes from her mother’s limitless reserve.

  His father died at the wheel of Adam’s car, which he often used while Adam was off ravaging his inheritance. Spurlock had loaded several cases of heavy core samples into the German sedan for delivery to a geologist at the University of Minnesota. Somehow while he drove a fire broke out and in confusion he mashed the accelerator instead of the brake. The state patrol estimated Spurlock was going eighty or so there at the end, bouncing across the median and under the wheels of an onrushing logging truck. The trucker said the car was so full of smoke he didn’t see the driver until moments before impact, when Spurlock unfortunately poked his head out the window.

  Adam inherited his father’s house and the six hundred forty acres surrounding it, including a musical stretch of the Pentecost River with its cutbank
s and riffles and shimmering trout. He occupied the place only sporadically, a year here, six months there. He was said to despise his origins, to prefer his house in Sweden or Spain or Mozambique, depending on who said it.

  It’s also said he wrote two more screenplays which were never produced because, as one film agent drily observed, “the nihilist market is shrinking all the time,” and that he composed a long essay entitled My Radiant Death so venomous yet enthralling that the few who read it died themselves within hours. At some point folklore takes over.

  Besides these few facts, there’s a notable lack of proof around the life of Adam Leer. Two marriage licenses are on record, but no ex-wives survive—neither Simone nor the subsequent Christine. No children exist that we know of; no high-school diploma, no college degree. There is of course the usual bureaucratic stream of tax records, passports, DMV receipts, social security documents, but what could they truly explain? There aren’t even many photos of Adam. There’s the grade-school picture mentioned above, the boy of seven already with something going on; another taken on a sidewalk in LA moments after the civil ceremony in which he married Simone—they’re laughing, Simone in an achingly humble white dress and himself in a paisley jacket and mountaineering sunglasses with side-leathers. There’s a sort of nasty mouth-open portrait from a 1982 profile published in Esquire, with the oddly memorable first line, “Adam Leer oscillates faster than you.” And then there’s the widespread snapshot from a mid-eighties Cannes Film Festival in which Leer and enigmatic playwright Sam Shepard slouch on stools inside what looks like a white canvas tent. Shepard is laughing hard at something; Leer has a smirk on his lips and that same brash ignition in his eye. What completes the photo is that the tent flap is open and famed Minnesota escapee Bob Dylan has just stuck his head in. Dylan looks dismayed at being left out. What’s he missed? Adam isn’t saying—you can tell by the smirk. The picture always makes me feel a little melancholy on Dylan’s behalf. Being your generation’s cherished poet doesn’t mean you’re in on all the jokes.

  “It’s not what he’s done or hasn’t done that irks me,” Ann said. “What do I care? I just abhor the looks of his yard.”

  She was driving a Nissan pickup that made sighing noises and pulled hard to the left. The pickup belonged to her husband Jerry. Her own car had quit working. It needed a serpentine belt. She couldn’t afford a serpentine belt because Jerry had also quit working.

  Ann said, “Just look around, when we get there. He doesn’t mow. He doesn’t trim. The yard is full of rocks.”

  “He rarely comes back, Ann. His house stands empty most of the time. Fastidious lawn care might be asking too much.”

  I was proud of fastidious, which had returned without fanfare, but Ann didn’t notice. She said, “If he’s not going to mow, he ought to sell the place.” She thought it over. “Or rent it out to people who mow.” Then the Nissan sighed round a bend and we came upon Galen Pea fishing illegally off the Green Street Bridge.

  “Looks like my day for Peas,” I told Ann. “Stop here if you would. I want to talk to Galen.”

  Galen Pea was Lily’s little brother—he was ten, wearing what looked like his sister’s flip-flops, pants rolled up to his knees, fishing pole in one hand and a flathead chub in the other. His salvage-yard bike lay in the tall grass. Ann rolled to a stop on the narrow bridge, next to the NO FISHING sign.

  “Morning, Galen.”

  “Mr. Wander,” was his wary hello. Suddenly he stepped close and poked my forearm, which was resting on the car door. “You’re still alive,” he said.

  “And you’re still playing hooky.”

  Galen glanced past me at Ann, clearly sensing her disapproval—not only was he playing hooky, but his hair, actually his entire appearance, could be described as unmowed.

  “Nope,” he said, “I’m sick today,” meeting my eyes straight on.

  “Your dad got a client this morning?”

  “Hangover.”

  “Your sister Lily just paid me a visit. She failed to mention your illness.”

  The boy said nothing but tilted his head slightly left. Like his father Shad, Galen Pea was devoted to the pursuit of big fish and to whatever truancy might further that pursuit. He haunted waters like a fish hawk, and in fact resembled a young raptor—large eyes steady in a small round head shifting this way and that across his shoulders.

  “You know where’s good to fish from? Right—down—there,” I said, pointing out my window to a grassy cutbank where the river slowed curling on its way to the lake.

  “If I go down there the fish will see me. If they see you they don’t bite.”

  I’d fished from that grassy spot myself. Never caught anything, so Galen was probably right. “All the same, you remember about Curtis.”

  Curtis Menlow was Galen’s age when he got hit by a car almost exactly where Galen was standing, call it twelve years ago. Curtis wasn’t fishing, he was playing Pooh Sticks, but the sign went up anyway and no kids had died on the Green Street Bridge since then.

  “It’s useless to fish down there,” Galen complained. “Put a worm in front of ’em they still won’t take it. Last summer, was a giant fish, fins moving like this—he didn’t bite because he saw.” He gave me a dark look. “They’re not dumb, like people think.”

  “But don’t they see you up here just as well?”

  “They’d have to look straight up to see me here,” said Galen, incredulous. “A fish can’t look straight up—they can’t bend their necks,” he explained, as though I were the record idiot.

  “Even so.”

  He stood holding the despondent chub in his fist. I waited to see whether he’d head down off the bridge or change the subject.

  “Where you going this morning, Mr. Wander?”

  I kept the smile off my face. “Up to talk to Mr. Leer.”

  Something moved inside his eyes. “Don’t do it, Mr. Wander.”

  “It’s okay, Galen. I’m just going to ask him something.”

  “Don’t go up there, no.”

  “What are you talking about? Galen, what is it?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t astim for nothin. Just don’t go up there.”

  I said, “Have you been bothering Mr. Leer? Did you go up to his place?”

  “No I dint.”

  “You can talk to me,” I began, but he just stood there with his head jutting forward, those fierce shiny eyes fixed.

  Maybe I could’ve worked Galen a little harder, but if he’d had an issue with Leer I suspected I’d hear about it soon enough. Meantime a car was coming up the road. I wanted the boy off that bridge.

  “That minnow’s going to die in your hand, Galen Pea. You go down there right now and catch a big fish. Don’t wait. We’ll be back this way in an hour—you catch one big enough, I’ll give you something for it.”

  He nodded morosely. As Ann eased forward I turned and watched Galen pick his way down through the high ditch grass, holding the rod up over his head. There weren’t many kids his age in Greenstone. The others all had Xboxes. Galen fished alone.

  6

  I DON’T PUT MUCH STOCK IN A PERSON’S YARD WORK, BUT ANN HAD a point about the Leer place. Grasses and wild daisies had bolted up through the narrow drive’s crumbly asphalt. It was October so the daisies were dead. Ann eased forward through dry foliage scraping the sides of the truck. The sky had crowded up with tiny, hard, tumorous-looking clouds. The driveway wound through a field of boulders big as Volkwagens strewn at random over the general scraggle. It was disorienting.

  Ann said, “So he’s got a house in Mozambique? Let him stay in Mozambique. Mozambique doesn’t care about long grass. All kinds of tawdry business goes on in Mozambique.” Then she went quiet as Leer’s house peeked into view behind a stand of quaking aspen.

  It was nothing extraordinary, the house—an aging foursquare with narrow clapboard, buttercream paint going chalky, roomy old porch with a slant floor to shed the rain. Not an unfriendly house, and the sight of it rem
inded me it used to be visible from the county road, long ago. Kind of a landmark actually, the Leer place. Then the aspen took hold. I don’t know if Adam planted them there or they just saw their chance and moved in.

  We parked in the front yard. The place looked deserted, no car visible, shades drawn. Even the birds had departed—despite the healthy aspens and poplars there was no sound of any kind save the whisper of desiccated leaves.

  A scorched smell hung in the air. It was so trenchant we didn’t even approach the front door but followed the reek to the backyard. There stood Adam Leer beside a sizzling dark pile. I’d never actually met him and was surprised at his average height. His back was to us and he swayed as though asleep standing up.

  At my hello he turned. He had a smooth face for a man that age and it glimmered with what looked like amusement. He had black leather boots on his feet, a long-handled rake in his hand.

  “Sorry to intrude, Mr. Leer,” I said, introducing myself and Ann.

  “It’s all right—I’m nearly done.” A tilted pyramid of flagging cardboard boxes stood to one side and he was disposing of their contents, pushing flames about with the rake and coaxing moist rags to catch fire. He moved with a precision and strength unexpected in a professional wastrel.

  “What’s this you’re burning?” Ann inquired, as if that weren’t clear—it was a heap of old clothing. Shirts and pants, neckties, at least one pair of satin-striped tuxedo trousers, wide-lapel jackets, what might’ve been a cravat, a top hat haloed in woolly blue smoke. It was a heavy, nasty, humid fire which even up close resembled a pile of bodies.

  “Why, it’s evidence,” Leer said, looking sideways at Ann. He had a close, curious way of observing people. You could mistake it for admiration.

  “Oh?” Ann was watching, not the flames, but Leer’s kinetic form. Despite the cold he was sweating from the work, his light denim shirt clinging to limber back muscles. She said, “Evidence of what?”

  “My own negligence, I’m afraid. Two years ago I stored some things in the basement. Now I return to sixteen boxes of black mold. Everything burns at last. Don’t stand downwind.”