Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  There in the window glass she caught his eye.

  He stopped, of course. He meant to say Hi or perhaps Good morning but instead said, How do you do? A formal English phrase in his looping Arctic cadence. The girl smiled. In a rush she explained she had just bought this novel and was nervous about reading it. A Japanese story known for its ruthless view of the world. Her mother had borrowed a library copy and proclaimed it ghastly. She’d never read a book so fast before. The girl opened her arms. The book was The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Rune hadn’t heard of it. He was already half in love with the copper-haired girl. He said, I am recently off the sea myself.

  Actually he’d come off the sea eight weeks ago in Florida, glad to leave the moaning freighter after twelve rough days on the Atlantic. He traded kroner for dollars, then dollars for a wood-paneled Ford De Luxe from a fibrous old woman in Live Oak. Standing on her porch he asked how to register the automobile. She replied that America was cash only. She sized him up through the smoke of her hand-rolled cigarette. He tried to show only the right side of his face. The left side slouched badly. The sagging eyelid was the worst of it—he felt it gave him a degenerate appearance. But the woman would not be put off. She took his chin in her parchment fingers and turned his head as if gauging its worth in currency. Ducking inside she returned with half a loaf of bread, a Ball jar of water, a Pure Oil road map.

  So Rune drove west—on gravel, macadam, on bone-dust tracks past Aermotor windmills and sharecropper huts. The De Luxe smelled like leaf tobacco and rattled badly. At fuel stations he acquired more maps and over the weeks he traced an oval through the browning, desiccated, snapping-turtle South and upward across the Great Plains. Sleep was evasive. The back seat was cozy but the flat North American dark gave him tremors. Station attendants avoided his eyes. At night he perceived things watching in the dark. His face was numb. Blood thumped headlong through his veins. Day by day he thinned. The trip seemed a mistake except when he was watching the sun fall through columns of ocher and yellow dust, colors not seen in boreal Norway.

  As autumn declined he hit more familiar latitudes. Frost napped his fenders in the morning. One evening with the sun at his back he crested a rise and beheld an inland sea. He’d heard of Lake Superior and now here it was. Far to the east the sky was already dark and night sped toward him over the water. Duluth smoked and blinked as the lights came on. The air was wet as a lung, with the spiky smells of nails and fire. The forest leaned in over the city. A steely-looking river twisted fjord-like into the steep-sided hills.

  He asked for the YMCA where he ate a bowl of ham broth and slept in the sheltering reek of an Army blanket. The other mattress was occupied by a renegade prophet, a haunted man with trembling limbs. The prophet’s head was bald and scabbed. He wore an eye patch which he flipped up and down while delivering his monologue of complaint. God Almighty was after him. Fearsome was Jehovah, but irritating too. His petulant silences! His demands for attention! The prophet wore hook-laced boots spattered with cryptic effluent. He left them on to sleep.

  Rune dozed guardedly and tiptoed out early. He bought coffee and carried it past redbrick warehouses to the waterfront, crossed the Lift Bridge into shoreline dunes covered with saw grass and willow. Two boys about ten had a driftwood fire at the water’s edge. They’d killed a fat bullfrog gone torpid from cold. They were trying to cook its legs over the fire but kept scorching their fingers. Without a word Rune produced a small jackknife and shaved down a pair of willow-twig skewers which he handed to the boys, then walked on while they roasted the frog legs and ate them smacking and boasting. He walked another mile down the strand. The cold sand shifted underfoot, the dying grasses moaned in the offshore breeze. The wind blew strength into his frame. It cleared his mind and raised his vision. Walking back he developed the conviction that his travels were finished—ikke mer av dette! No more of this! He became convinced that here his affliction could be erased. As he hiked back toward the city the boys waved him over. A third boy had joined them, smaller with thin reddish hair. The others deferred to him because he carried a diamond-shaped kite they wanted to fly. The kite was made of a Texaco road map. Tied to a fist-size ball of twine it went up ducking in the breeze, pulling its scrappy tail. While the frog-eaters fought over the string, the red-haired kid picked up a burning twig and lit a cigarette with practiced poise. Rune smiled because his uncle Arne had taught him to roll cigarettes at this age. The tobacco smelled pure in the cold lake air. The kid took a puff and handed the cigarette to Rune who puffed lightly and handed it back. Then the frog-eaters wanted to smoke and shoved the kite string into Rune’s hands. Grasping it he began to laugh, a quiet laugh he could neither explain nor squelch. The kite clattered and roamed about. Rune experienced sudden forgetfulness and expectation, a sense of things widening.

  And then, when he was walking back to the YMCA, this nimble girl met his eyes in a bookshop window.

  So Rune fell in love—like rolling downhill was his tender confession. So did Roberta, just as you please. A pale-cheeked foreign boy with an inner burden and a face that broke in two when he was tired. He believed Roberta was part of his cure.

  A decent first act, wouldn’t you say? I’d say so—in fact I did. “Why, that’s a perfect first act,” I declared, but Rune put his elbows on the table amid plates and crumpled foil, his hands over his face. Blithe as he’d been earlier, when the food was hot and the flask inviting, he was that defeated now. Somewhat belatedly I realized it was all still new for my guest—the realization that this long-ago girl had walked all over the city with him, held his hand, showed him off to her family, got so close to him she was carrying his son, which is close by any measure, and yet she never told him. Instead she chose to break his heart, and back he went to Tromsø. Not until her death did she send this old fact into the light. Think of being told You have a child, and a moment later Your child is dead. The knowledge was still new, and I saw that it harrowed him.

  “I would have married her without hesitation,” said he. “Without regret. I thought she knew it. Whatever she asked, that is what I would have done.”

  “But you did, Rune. As I understand it, you did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Did as she asked. She asked you to go home. You went.”

  Rune looked at me over the table, the skin papery under his eyes. “You’re saying she meant to spare me something.”

  I hadn’t been saying that, not exactly.

  “She spared me—what?—an unfairness,” he ventured. He made scales with his two hands, tipping right and left. “A disparity.”

  “It’s possible.”

  Rune resettled, swirled the flask. “Maybe she saw how it was. I loved her more than she could ever love me.”

  It wasn’t an idea I wished to muse on. Unrequited is an adjective I’d have happily lost in the accident but of course that one clung like a tick.

  “Even if this were so,” he said, “I would have stayed and raised my son. Everything would have been other than it was. Alec might be living now. I would badger him to come around and help me paint my house.”

  I said, “What about Sofie?”

  Surely he was heading that way before I even asked. His face lifted as I said her name.

  “Yes—yes, you are right. Virgil Wander, my rare friend! I would have missed Sofie if I stayed. And I wouldn’t miss Sofie for this world.” On reflection he added, “Or any other,” as though this were a bargain a person might be offered.

  It was late—we were both, I think, at the end of ourselves, the end of the evening, the end of the akevitt. But there was one more thread I meant to pull.

  “What was the affliction, Rune? What happened? Why did you come here, of all places, to recover?”

  But I’d waited too long to ask. His face had slid back downhill. He got to his feet and was instantly winded, as creaky and stooped as November. “Why don’t we just set these dishes in the sink,” he said. “I will wash them in the morning. Is that al
l right, Virgil? Maybe the morning would be all right.”

  11

  AT THREE A.M. I POPPED AWAKE, GASPING, FROM DREAMS OF RAIN. Sometimes I hunched in the shivery rain, sometimes I watched a girl lean into the wind while the rain slicked her cotton dress against her skin. In one extremely satisfactory dream I was the rain and fell with merry violence on streets and asphalt rooftops, on foam-specked waves, on the deck of a tiny ship where a slickered helmsman squinted uneasily at the sky.

  I switched on the lamp. Close at hand were reliables from my rotating stock—Lucky Jim if I wanted a laugh, Copperfield for underdogs and vigor, a few razor-faced Zane Grey saddle tramps, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter if miracles were required. Also a Brontë novel or two, as if Greenstone were not dark enough. Insomniacs have a leg up in the reading game, but in the end I just turned off the light and lay fretful under the gray square window. All I wanted was to get back to that dream—the one about being rain. It brought an ache but I didn’t wish to fade. It felt recent and familiar. I shut my eyes and fished for the dream, the heeling ship in the winey sea, teak hatches glowing under the foredeck lamp, the anxious upturned eyes of the helmsman. What finally answered was not image but sound, the sound of rain soughing across the waves. That or something close to it I remembered—not from any actual rain or boat ride, but from Rune’s soaring kite. Scouting the heights it had produced and sent down through the string a kind of rolling arterial whir, like crowd noise on the radio, like a description of the heavens I could nearly transcribe. I don’t know how else to explain it. The wind pervades your cells blood and bone. Your fingertips tingle, the brain quickens. Off the ground come your heels. Pants and shirtsleeves snap like pennants as you rise.

  On second waking I was greeted by a muscular hangover that adjusted its claws for a better grip whenever I turned my head. Beeman’s cheerful hypothesis that hangovers exist for our benefit didn’t sweeten the noise of my doleful groans while lurching toward the kitchen for coffee.

  It was a slight jolt to remember I had a houseguest—his depleted satchel hung on a ladder-back chair. The greater jolt was how the kitchen looked. We’d given it up for lost, I now recalled, table and countertops smeared and despoiled by wrappers and grease and bottles and tins. Yet now the table was cleared, the sink emptied, the floor swept. The drawer-pulls and chrome faucet shone. Except for the fire damage—ceiling tiles missing, a few black craters on the countertop—the kitchen gleamed as though polished by elves. Somehow Rune had gathered the leavings, bagged the trash, washed and dried things and stowed them away, mostly in the wrong places, it transpired. Either he made no sound or I’d slept the sturdiest sleep of my grown-up life.

  I found him on the roof-deck, smoking his fragrant blend and studying the clouds. He said, “What would Alec do, if he were here today?”

  “He’d go buy lunch,” I replied. “Give me an hour to let the coffee work, and I’ll show you where.”

  The Wise Old didn’t get much of a lunch rush, which worked to our benefit—mine because my head hurt and the quiet was medicinal, and Rune’s because the Wise Old was Alec’s favorite, and the last place people saw him alive.

  Lou Chandler called out and emerged from behind the bar when we entered the dusky room. He was in his eighties and starting to run low, though he still had the beef-roast forearms acquired during his years laying block, and he must have heard of my accident, for he looked carefully at my face and gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  “You are different now,” he told me, quietly, adding, “it isn’t bad.”

  When I introduced Rune, Lou smiled with real delight and asked to join us a while. He told how Alec came in one day to sell him a neon sign. The tavern had once been called the Wise Old Owl, but the word Owl blew down in a storm, after which it became the Wise Old, because it was cheaper not to fix the sign. Alec wanted to build him a replacement. Lou did not have the money.

  “We stood over there,” Lou said, indicating the broad set of windows along the west wall. Looking out, the two men could see Lou’s grass airstrip, the metal-sheathed pole barn he used for a hangar, and the sprightly aircraft, half a century old, that was Lou’s dedicated passion.

  Alec had inquired, “Are you a good pilot then?”

  Certified flight instructor, Lou replied.

  “Always wanted to learn,” Alec said.

  “See, I knew,” Lou told us. “He was a little wild—the usual things didn’t frighten him. Failure and such. People liked that about him then, though now I guess some resent it. But he wanted what all of us want.”

  “What’s that?” Rune asked.

  Lou gave a rumpled smile. “The sky, you know? The broad reach. The great wide open.”

  Standing at the westerly windows Alec had said, “Teach me to fly and I’ll build you your sign.”

  And that was how it went. Lou gave Alec a short stack of books, flight theory, the mechanics of stick and rudder, heavy-weather manuals, followed by instructional flights in the Taylorcraft until Alec soloed. In return, Alec built a sturdy neon owl five feet tall with blinking yellow eyes and mounted it on the roof. When Alec wanted to keep flying, Lou bartered flight time for more signage; over the course of three years Alec built a foaming pitcher; a woman in a red dress, peering through a spyglass; and a second owl, this one in full glide, with subtly upswept wing tips, which still hung over the bar. Observing Rune watching the owl Lou said, “People put up with my lousy beer selection just so they can look at it.” Lou rose from the table, announcing a round on the house. To Rune he said, “I didn’t really need all those neons. Alec was just nice company.”

  Rune blinked and turned away, just as Shad Pea came through the door squinting into the gloom.

  “Over here, Shad,” said Lou kindly.

  His eyes still adjusting, Shad seemed to swim toward us. He said he couldn’t stay but had noticed the camper van outside. “Rune, I wondered if you want to catch fish,” he said.

  “Yes, when?” Rune said.

  “Tomorrow,” Shad said, “or the next day. The bite improves after dark. Virgil knows where I live. Virgil, you are welcome too.”

  I was about to ask what time when Lou, trundling back to the kitchen, gave a deep bark. “Ho! You gave me a start—didn’t see you come in. What can I get you?”

  “Whatever the house round is, Lou,” said a voice I knew.

  Adam Leer rose from the booth directly behind us.

  “I got to blow,” Shad said, but he didn’t blow right away—Leer’s pull was strong, his eyes and teeth alight, his glance including us all.

  “Shad, Shad Pea,” he said, grasping his hand. “After all this time! I see you’re just leaving and I’d never delay you.”

  Shad said nothing but seemed to retreat without moving his legs.

  “Are we good, Shad, you and I?” Leer asked, reeling him in an inch. In a low confident tone he said, “Bygones?”

  “Bygones,” Shad mumbled.

  “Good!”

  Shad was released to hurry away. Leer stood at our table as though expecting an invitation, then joined us anyway when none was offered. He made a vague remark or two about Shad, to the effect he was a fisherman unequaled in zeal and imagination; toward Rune he was curious, toward me jaunty and familiar. Again I had the sense of someone trying the door, a quiet insistent presence outside, testing locks and hinges. Again I looked away; but as he spoke, Leer’s own eyes began troubling him—he rubbed them with his thumb, then tried blinking them clear, as if they refused to focus, or were painfully dry, or as if the soft glow of the neon owl was to him a piercing glare. When Lou arrived with pints Leer rose to accept his, tipped his forehead, and returned to his dark booth. We fell quiet. The Wise Old became unstayable. When we left our money on the table, Adam Leer remained silently in place, swaying, I thought, with his eyes fast shut; the last thing we heard was Lou, behind the bar, beginning to cough as though his lungs would split.

  That night Rune, organizing a tackle box full of paint, fabric, scisso
rs, and thread, asked why Shad had fled at the sight of Adam Leer—what was the old feud between them?

  I told him what I could recall. Leer’s acreage contained a stand of pristine sugar maples. One spring while Leer was overseas Shad hauled in his taps and lidded buckets and harvested sap for twenty days. No one would have known but he failed to leave no trace and Leer returned in early summer to find a maple trunk healing around a galvanized spile. Suspecting Shad, to whom he’d refused permission more than once, Leer approached with a pretense of friendliness. He teased out Shad’s confession and accepted his apology, then, still smiling, offered to buy all the syrup Shad had produced that season—several thousand dollars’ worth, easily a quarter of Shad’s yearly income. Leer laughed, gripped Shad’s shoulder, and declared him a man of spine, further promising a bonus if Shad delivered the syrup in his pickup truck. Shad promptly did so and went immediately to the bank, where he learned Leer’s check had been stopped. Redress was impossible. He applied to conciliation court but had no case. He’d trespassed on Leer’s property every day for weeks, had drilled holes in Leer’s trees, and had stolen Leer’s sap. He was advised to be grateful he wasn’t a defendant himself.

  Rune muttered a word that sounded like gruesome and is Norwegian for cruel.

  The incident had at the time sent Shad on a monstrous bender, which cost him a lot, including custody of his young children for a while. Even now, with his feet mostly under him, he was apt to slander Leer recklessly at a specific inebriate phase. “Shad’s never forgot it,” I said.

  Rune sat a moment in indignation. “I think Leer never did either.”

  12

  RUNE WAS UP AND OUT EARLY NEXT MORNING—HE WASN’T ON THE roof-deck this time, though from there it was plain where he’d gone. Standing in the air above the Greenstone cliff was a rising speck. A spot of cinnamon in the milky scrim. The speck moved west and hesitated, darted east, then climbed with a flourish.