Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

I did, but so what? When I was growing up in Minnesota’s dairy country, we had a neighbor who talked about “old farmer’s lung” which many old farmers developed after years breathing hay in the mow. The neighbor’s uncle had this condition. It poisoned him bit by bit and he never saw it coming. One day he expired with his lips all blue. The stockroom made my eyes run. I said, “If you’re going to sleep in here, at least run an air purifier.”

  “How come?”

  I nodded at the trail of rodent sign along the wall.

  “I don’t even smell it, no. It’s fine.”

  “I have one I’m not using. A purifier. I’ll bring it over.”

  “Don’t, I’m good.” Jerry was suddenly distracted by something out the front window. “Hey Virgil, somebody’s busting into your place.”

  I squinted out the window. A figure was indeed trying to jimmy open the door to my stairwell, probably with a credit card. The figure wore heeled boots and a long woolen coat that flared at the bottom. “That’s no robber,” I said. “It’s a mayor.”

  “Oh, right,” Jerry said. He seemed relieved I wasn’t being robbed, and also that I was leaving. “Thanks for coming, Virgil, good-bye.”

  4

  LYDIA WASN’T BREAKING IN—SHE WAS ONLY LEAVING A NOTE. IT WAS tucked in an envelope she’d folded twice and was jamming into the door crack.

  “Why not just come in?” I asked, startling her as I walked up.

  “Virgil! But I don’t have much time.” She followed me upstairs anyway and stepped in stamping snow off her boots.

  “Ann says she talked Adam Leer into speaking at the festival next spring—you must be pleased,” I said.

  “She surely did,” Lydia replied in a subdued tone. “Now I want you to go talk him out of it.”

  “Out of it? He just got in.”

  She started to say something but stopped herself. She was strangely skittish. “I want you to rescind the invitation.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to need a reason.”

  She didn’t want to give one. She stood twisting a pair of black driving gloves in her hands.

  “It feels like we’re in another bad stretch,” she finally allowed.

  This was so vague I let the silence go on. When her gloves were a knotted rope she said, “Shad Pea drowned in that dismal river. You almost died too. Even the animals are out of whack. A squirrel got into my furnace, it was horrible. Voles have been reading my mail. Beeman’s dumb old raccoon is still out there, biting everything he can catch.”

  “Why disinvite Leer?”

  “Oh God.” She scrunched her face together. “You’ll say I’m superstitious. You’ll think my hold is slipping.”

  “I doubt your hold is more tenuous than my own.”

  “Remember the frog monsoon?” she said.

  “In detail.”

  “Me too,” she said, and told about driving home from her daughter’s place in Hibbing. Nearing Greenstone she saw a man at the edge of a hayfield, standing still as a column of rocks. As she passed it began to rain. The first frogs struck her roof and windshield with ugly wet thumps. The wipers smeared, a yellow haze came off the earth. Recognizing the man as Leer she slowed, meaning to offer him a ride, but he stayed where he was. In fact he produced an umbrella and popped it open, watching the car with an amused expression while dead and stupefied frogs trampolined in all directions. The image was so indelible she kept it to herself and eventually began to believe it never happened.

  “But now that he’s agreed to speak I can’t get it out of my head,” she said. “There we were in the midst of plagues, and he just looked at home.”

  “Can I ask why you were so anxious to invite him in the first place?”

  She looked at me with regret. “Because of his father Spurlock, of course. Finder of iron ore, founder of Greenstone. And Adam is a famous director. Or was. And don’t we all moderate, with time?”

  “Do we?”

  “I always thought so, before. So he moved back and I figured, Why not?”

  “I’ll tell him we’re going a different direction.”

  She sighed. “Am I being foolish? People say he’s single-handedly repaired poor Jerry Fandeen. They say he’s in touch with a brewing magnate who could bring in two hundred jobs. I heard he’s even talked to Slake about retooling the taconite plant.”

  “Really? Retool it for what?”

  “Chopsticks,” she said. “Matches, pencils, cribbage boards—we’ve got the forests, you see.” She sighed. “Maybe I’m just nervous right now. My grandson Oliver is graduating from preschool in Minneapolis in the morning. I’m driving down to watch him get his degree.”

  “They get a degree?”

  “Do this for me, Virgil.”

  “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

  Lydia nodded. As the light declined I realized she needed to get on the road. Even in perfect weather it’s a generous three hours to the Twin Cities. Lydia didn’t like driving after dark.

  “You better get going.”

  She hugged me and departed. I stood at the window and watched her appear on the sidewalk. Her white Lumina was parked out front. She circled it, peered at the tires, rubbed at the windshield. Clearly she was dreading the trip. The headlights threw a comet shape on the snowy street as she eased away from the curb.

  Galen was at the river’s mouth when I coasted in on the Schwinn. He’d been there a while—the snow was trampled and his tackle box lay open. His bike was thrown down next to the river where it shallowed nearing Superior. In that gray scene the lone color was a green Day-Glo float riding over the current. The float marked the location of a sturdy hook Galen had baited with venison liver. It was the last chunk of liver from a deer Shad had poached in the spring. As I approached, Galen held up his fingers at arm’s length toward the horizon and declining sun. He was measuring daylight.

  “We got forty minutes,” he said. “Then twenty more before it’s too dark to see.”

  “Anything yet?”

  “He never comes early. He waits till just about dark.” Galen spoke in low tones, however, in case the sturgeon broke protocol. As usual he was underdressed, baggy denim jacket, cotton gloves, no hat. His ears were white-tipped and his feet were somewhere inside roomy basketball shoes with two pairs of socks poking out. He’d propped his fishing rod in a forked twig and kept warm by walking up and down the path he’d trodden in the snow.

  A wet easterly wind snaked in off the lake and slipped down my neck. I unstrapped a thermos of cocoa from the Schwinn—not as good as Lily’s but Swiss Miss was what I had. I poured some into the lid and handed it to Galen. He downed it in four seconds, then pointed out the venison liver, a hovering dark gob in fourteen inches of moving water. It seemed very shallow but Galen said the fish liked that spot.

  The Day-Glo cork went under, popped to the surface, and seemed to tug itself upstream. “Is that him now?” I asked.

  Galen lifted the rod so that its thin tip bent slightly and the bait rose reluctantly to the surface. It was unmolested and surprisingly drained of color, a knob of liver the size of my fist.

  “Just a sucker fish,” he said, lowering the bait again.

  Next time the float dipped and spun I saw what he was talking about—a tubby fish twenty inches or so was nosing the bait around on the bottom. The fish had pale brownish skin covered in overlapping scales like guitar picks. Again Galen lifted the rod and spooked the sucker away, but it was back in a minute prodding the liver. Galen trotted to his bicycle where he’d leaned an old BB rifle with a plastic stock. He pumped the stock a few times and shot down into the river. At his second shot the sucker moved left a few inches. The third time the light was just right and I actually saw the golden BB at the end of its strength touch the fish’s side and bounce off. Galen said, “Lift the bait almost out,” and when I did the fish followed it to the surface where Galen stung it again in the tail. We watched it fin away upriver, more annoyed than afraid.

  “Dumb old suckers,” Galen s
aid, smiling. It was clear he liked the curious fish and probably appreciated their company while waiting for the murderous sturgeon to appear.

  After this the action stopped. We walked up and down the riverbank as light leaked out of the sky and the world became a gray-blue wash. The luminous float didn’t dance anymore. The darker it got the more Galen talked. His voice was hoarse and scratchy as always. He said he didn’t mind living with Lily, Lily wasn’t bad. It wasn’t as good as living with his dad, though. His dad got him, and in fact got some other things a girl like Lily didn’t get. He was sorry his dad would never move to Florida like he wanted, though Galen himself was glad not to go. Galen didn’t want to be warm all the time. He liked the cold and never got sick. This reminded me that when Galen was a baby Shad brought him in to City Hall to show him off—it was December, below zero, a bitter day. Maria came too, still lively and sharp. Maria had made up a big plate of Christmas cookies and Shad carried Galen in a woven basket like the baby Moses. When they came in the door his bare feet stuck out in the wind, yet Galen was cheerful, he whistled and chirped. You could see he would grow up to be tough. When he got a cold his dad gave him blackberry brandy with a little hot water and that made it go away. “That’s something else Lily’ll never do,” he said, in his hoarse low voice.

  The sun was down, but strong twilight remained. The moon was just past full. Moonlight came up out of the snow and gleamed on the smooth milky stones of the river bottom. Galen quit talking. The river burbled along. The east wind slackened but was still cold enough that I started to think of the ride home. The ride would warm me up. It would be dark, though. If I planned to keep riding at night I would need a battery headlight. Galen had one, I’d noticed.

  Quietly Galen said, “There he comes.”

  He pointed and I focused on the stippled tan rocks which seemed to shift and breathe under the flowing water. Then a long solid shape came down among the rocks and approached through the shallows with effortless sweeps of its tail. Galen squatted to reach for the rod. I could still make out the black fist of venison liver on the bottom. The sturgeon came close to the fist and hung there. A long heavy shadow like a sunken timber. It arrived quietly and hung in the current, playing it cool. If we hadn’t been looking we’d never have seen it. I wondered then and still wonder what giants we miss by not looking.

  The sturgeon backed off and re-approached, keeping the liver between us. In a low voice Galen confided he wanted to shoot it. His dad owned a lightweight Springfield .22, but Lily had thwarted him by locking the gun in a steel safe in her closet. Galen searched weeks without finding the key. She allowed him only the BB rifle. It was an insult to his manhood but he carried it to discourage suckers. Now the sturgeon was coming every night, hovering at the bait, giving Galen the stinkeye, yet still Lily refused him a firearm. I’ll say again the fish was massive. There was no way Galen would ever reel it in. It held itself in place in the swift cold water. Now and then the surface parted around its knobbly spine which closely resembled the human backbone.

  “Look at him watch us,” Galen said. “Look at him, the bastard.” As if to demonstrate the fish’s brazenness he took from his pocket a small flashlight and shone a beam at its face. Its eyes caught the light and shone it back, two yellow insouciant moons.

  “He’s never gonna bite,” Galen said. “Bait’s right there, he’ll never take it.”

  The sturgeon hung motionless. Galen switched off the flashlight. “You know what it wants now?”

  “No.”

  “Me.”

  “Now, Galen—”

  “Nope, nope, watch him now,” Galen said. “He got Dad, and he wants me next. Because I know what he did. You see it as much as I do.”

  We looked down at the sturgeon which glided backward in the shallows, against the current, into deeper water away from the moonlit stones. Then we didn’t see him anymore.

  5

  NEXT MORNING RUNE’S DUTIFUL RAVEN FRIEND PLUNKED ONTO THE window ledge and tapped the glass twice. It was a big raven with a beard of black feathers and a heavy scarred bill.

  Rune ignored the bird—he was refining a kite. It was a box design that looked like an anvil with the horn coming forward. The very idea had him exclaiming and pleased with himself. An anvil! Up in the sky!

  The raven tapped again. Rune sighed and went to the bread box, which Orry gave me years earlier and I never used until he arrived, and tore off a chunk of rye. He went to the window and opened it a few inches meaning to slide the bread out, but the raven simply ducked its head and stepped into the room, a civil and elegant gesture. It stood on the sill looking pleased and curious, then lifted its wings and jumped lightly to Rune’s shoulder.

  “Oh, now,” Rune said to the bird. “I agree you are smart, but such bad manners.” He held up the bit of rye and the raven pushed it aside, looking only at Rune. The bird rubbed his nose with its ample beak. “Fy, off you go,” he said gently, and neat as you please it hopped back to the sill and stepped out. He handed the bread through the window and this time the raven took it and he slid the window shut. The bird settled itself there on the ledge. It ruffed up its feathers and made itself comfortable. A light snow began to fall.

  I spent the morning hunting for cassette players. For days Rune had mined Beeman’s paper files, stories, and notes on Alec’s disappearance. Beeman had also handed over a box of Maxell cassettes—interviews conducted a decade ago as he covered the search. I used to have a cassette player but now couldn’t find it; Beeman gave us his, but it smoked when we plugged it in. Finally I called Marcus Jetty who said he had a boxful, come on up.

  Greenstone Salvage & Tinker is an exalted iteration of Shad Pea’s shipping container. There are stacks of painted pine boards, crates of outboard motor parts, a wall of beer signs and taxidermied pike, record players, cigar boxes, a wardrobe stuffed with putrescent hardcovers by Horatio Alger and G. A. Henty, tables of bird’s-eye maple and trash pine, bins of Gameboys and joysticks and leather-cased Argus cameras. The smell is of slow-moving organic rot and quite comforting. When I arrived Marcus was pulling boxes of loose electronics off the shelving along the back. He set the boxes in a makeshift wheelbarrow and pushed it up to the counter. The floor was uneven, which gave his progress a slow bounding motion—that barrow had a fat bouncy tire.

  We piled cassette players on his glass countertop: Emersons and JVCs, Sonys, Technics, and one labeled Holiday sold by the gas station chain. Those with cords we plugged in. We tested them with a cassette copy of Graceland.

  In the end only one of them worked. I pushed start and stop a few times. The speed was a little fast and wavery but high fidelity wasn’t the mission. I said, “Would you look at this, it’s just like my old Panasonic.”

  “It is your old Panasonic. You brought it in years ago with a load of crap.” Marcus allowed himself a thin smile. “Now you need it and here it is. Rare service in these unfriendly days.”

  “How much,” I said.

  He waved me away. “It ain’t in high demand.”

  We talked a few more minutes, then I nodded good-bye and left with the player under my arm. I did consider refusing to take it for nothing, but that felt silly—I already owed Marcus more than I could really repay.

  I continued up 61 with northwesterly gusts nearly knocking the bike over. I didn’t mind. My legs were stringy but becoming more powerful. My lungs worked better than they had in years; language itself seemed to fall into a nearer orbit; and my heart, which had beat at high speeds since my hospital stay, descended to normal range. Nearing the lookout, I saw Rune’s newest kite aloft—there it squatted at five hundred feet, not even trembling, a solid, familiar, iron-black hole in the sky. The anvil was instantly one of my favorites—so stable as to seem immobile and therefore strangely at home. If anvils could fly they would fly like this anvil. Rune saw me coming and nodded. So cold was the wind we didn’t speak. I handed him the cassette player and he gave the string into my fingers. It pulled hard and evenly with a di
fferent hum from previous kites—a deep one, down to the marrow. I flew a few minutes. Warmth came down the line through my fingertips into my veins and extremities. My heart slowed and my mind felt clear and sunlit.

  “Where’s Lucy?” I asked—she nearly always flew with him now.

  He nodded at the camper van. Lucy sat behind the wheel with a book. I handed him back the string and went to say hello.

  She had the heat on and a Brandenburg Concerto playing. The book was about small-scale goat farming. One of the things Rune admired about Lucy was her impractical curiosity. She was writing notes in the margins.

  “Why Virgil,” she said, pleasantly. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m on my way to visit your cousin. I’d appreciate any advice.”

  She asked about my errand with Leer. I struggled to describe it politely and used the word disinvite.

  “Oh, oh—ho ho! Are you afraid he’ll be offended, when you rescind the offer? Angry with you?” Lucy looked at me fondly as though Adam Leer were one of those lessons a person must learn from experience.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Then why ask me for advice?”

  “He makes me nervous,” I admitted, though it was of course unfair to blame my coffee-shop reverie of the deathly Pontiac on Adam Leer, just because he was there when it happened.

  “That’s reasonable,” she said. “Be direct. State your business without apology. And Virgil, keep it brief.”

  “Brief.”

  She said, “No one seems to benefit from his direct attention.”

  “He makes you nervous too,” I ventured.

  “Me? Not a bit! Although,” she added cheerfully, “I did choose not to stay at his charming little guest house.”

  “Ah.” I wasn’t sure how to proceed. On the long uphill climb I’d been ruminating on Lydia’s story of Leer, grinning in a field under steep black clouds while frogs ricocheted off his umbrella.

  “My cousin was never standard issue,” Lucy said. “Fascinating, yes. But not normal or regular. That would’ve been Richard, you know?”