Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  “No he didn’t.”

  I said, “Does Lily know?”

  “Couldn’t reach her,” Bjorn said. “Left a message. We’re just about there.”

  “Get to the ER. We’re on our way,” Nadine said, although Bjorn had the Wagoneer and I had no car at all.

  “Okay.”

  “My shoe’s full of blood,” said Galen’s distant voice.

  “It’s okay,” Bjorn said. “You’ll be okay.”

  “Ima get rabies.”

  “You aren’t either. They can stop it. They give you a couple of injections and you’re all right. You won’t get it. This happens all the time to people. It does. Stay on your side.”

  We could hear road noise from the Wagoneer, the metallic click of a seat belt engaging.

  “How many injections,” Galen said in a rising voice.

  “Not many,” Bjorn told him.

  “Liar, it’s like a hundred. I read about it before. It’s a needle this big and they stick it right in your belly button.”

  “I have to go, we’re here,” Bjorn said.

  Galen made a gnashing sound.

  “Be careful,” said Nadine.

  The last thing we heard as Bjorn hung up was Galen pounding the dashboard—from his panicked shrieks it was obvious rabies seemed less scary to him than a hundred needle stabs.

  As it turned out he needed only five injections—they gave him the first right away, in the arm not the belly button, to everyone’s relief. By the time we arrived at Rune’s camper van things were fairly tranquil. Lily came straight from night class. Galen was cleaned up and glassy-eyed. He was impressed by his hospital bracelet and the warm cotton blankets delivered by nurses. Two separate doctors stepped in and looked at his chart and pointed lights in his eyes—they both assured him he wouldn’t get rabies. This and the fact of only four remaining shots, as opposed to ninety-nine, freed Galen to see the upside. Other kids in his class had broken their arms or had their appendixes out, but he, Galen Pea, got a rabies bite. Nothing was worse except maybe quicksand. The second doctor described what would happen if he wound up with rabies full-on. You’re a lucky man, the doctor told him. If you hadn’t got in right away there’d be nothing we could do. You’d get thirsty but wouldn’t be able to swallow. You’d snap your jaws and claw yourself. Four or five days of torment, then the end.

  Galen was overjoyed. Everyone who visited heard the electrifying news. “Five days,” he said, hunched on his bed like a vulture. “That’s how it goes if you don’t catch it fast. Five days of torture, then you die!”

  “A doctor told you this?” said Rune, aghast.

  “I’m a lucky man,” Galen said darkly.

  The event was adequate reason to keep Galen away from the river, and Lily laid down the law. He’d been attacked and bitten and rushed to the hospital. Enough. Galen folded at last. The doctors had warned him the shots would make him sick. He felt it coming on. The weather was getting cold anyway. Galen agreed to stay home and quit sturgeon hunting for now. He would take the winter off. The sturgeon would still be around in the spring.

  No one felt worse about the incident than Beeman. He wrote an Observer piece about Galen’s courage and Bjorn’s heroism, then a self-flagellating editorial about Genghis and the hubris of subjugating wild creatures. After Galen’s release he began dropping in regularly to bring the boy comics, flashlights, steel pulleys, rolls of parachute cord, survival candles, a Zippo lighter. He watched superhero DVDs with Galen so Lily could get back to her accounting class. Despite his efforts, Galen got discouraged—that vaccine is no seaside vacation. His face swelled painfully. Puffy red hives broke out on his limbs. Beeman’s spirits dived as well. He dropped his asking price for the newspaper another ten thousand. He was quiet when we met at the Shipwreck for pints. I asked whether he was still seeing Connie Swale and he said she’d been spiritually awakened and didn’t want to know him anymore.

  To cheer him up I suggested one final Empress after-party. We’d pick a worthy movie, maybe two. I promised raisin pie. Beeman laughed and rightly so. Pie and a couple of rickety classics won’t lift anyone for very long. Beeman knew the truth—I wanted one more evening with my corpus of illegals, before the truck rolled in next month and took them all away.

  3

  WE HELD THE PARTY CHRISTMAS EVE, ON THE TAIL OF THE NEW SHERLOCK Holmes. Abandoning secrecy we invited the fourteen paying customers to hang around for a bonus flick, and three or four of them did.

  Nadine had at first discouraged the idea, reminding me of Fergus Flint’s admonition. I employed the last-chance argument—the finale for my illicit vault, the end of my outlaw career. No one in Hollywood would know.

  First to appear were the usuals—Lily and Galen, Don Lean and Marcie, Ellen Tripp who kissed Bjorn on the mouth then departed for a dread family holiday. Jerry Fandeen drifted in but left straightaway, and just before showtime Ann arrived in sweatpants and a white-wine smile.

  We also drew people I didn’t expect. Dr. Koskinen drove up from Duluth with his wife Celeste—I’d mentioned it to him at my appointment the previous week. Marcus Jetty appeared, the first time in all these years I’d seen him at the Empress; even Julie and Margaret from the Agate Café came over, having shut down for the holiday.

  Moments before the lights dimmed Jerry Fandeen returned from the Hoshaver carrying a pair of men’s leather boots in a small size. “For the kid,” he told me, meaning Galen Pea—it was hard not to notice Galen’s delaminating footgear, which resembled heavy felt slippers. The boots had been left in Jerry’s brother’s hunting shack years earlier. “Probably won’t fit,” Jerry said, but they did—high-test boots, too, barely used Red Wings with flexible soles and the speed-laces that snap into place. Jerry waited for Galen to see him, then handed them over without explanation. Galen stepped out of the slippers and the Red Wings were his. “You want the right shoes for the job,” said Jerry, and that was the whole transaction.

  The movie was We’re No Angels, the 1955 Bogart about escaped convicts, a covetous businessman, and a viper in a box. There was plenty of laughter during the show, some of it from the comedy and some from people catching up with each other. In the dark Nadine took my hand and moved her fingers up and down my arm. So it seemed a decent Christmas—maybe even a kind of pinnacle, given the realities of a place like the Empress; and it didn’t escape me that this little group belonged in a movie itself, the fatigued ragtag ensemble unlikely to win the day. Of course in the movies they generally do win the day—in the final scene of We’re No Angels, the viper bites the businessman and is rewarded with sainthood and halo.

  Not that we got to see it.

  The projector suddenly quit. Light died off the screen. The sound track ground to a silence so total somebody laughed with nerves.

  It was the stillness that told me what was wrong, even before I felt my way to the lobby and saw no lights there either, no LEDs, no glow coming in off the streetlamps. The electricity had failed. People crunched popcorn or half-stood, whispering. Blinding little smartphone lights bounded here and there. I think everyone expected the power to return, and when it didn’t people started blundering into their coats, scouring seats for gloves and hats. Already the temperature was falling. Soon a slow parade of tiny beams ensued until everyone was in the lobby, then finally out the door. Nadine stood in the diffuse moonlight coming through the glass, trying to call the power company.

  Bjorn was on his phone too, with Ellen Tripp. He said, “I don’t know. I don’t see him. Here, ask Mr. Wander,” and he handed me the phone.

  I said, “Ellen?”

  She said, “Hi—is Rune with you at the theater?”

  I realized I hadn’t seen him in the confusion.

  “My mom’s an EMT, you know? They called her after the outage. I got a text from her, like a minute ago. She’s with the ambulance.”

  “What’s happened, Ellen?”

  She was reluctant to say it. “Mom says an old man flew a kite into a power lin
e. That’s why everything got dark.”

  Some time must have passed because she said, “Mr. Wander, are you there?”

  “Is he alive?” I asked.

  She said, “A minute ago he was.”

  4

  ATTACHMENTS ARE EASY TO SPOT IN THE MOVIES—THE FOND GLANCE through a clouded window, the nod returned from across the room. In reality I never saw my own attachment forming, nor recognized its symptoms. I found myself thinking sometimes of Rune and sometimes of my dad. There was a physical ache, novel yet dreadfully familiar. It was like scraping, like the lining of my stomach being flensed with a blade. Waking at night I could hear it.

  When Beeman’s father was dying back in North Dakota, Beeman phoned me in varying states of distress from the hospital waiting room. His anguish surprised me. Beeman never said much about his family. I knew he used to call the old man Saturday mornings to talk baseball or politics, trying to keep him from sinking into the marsh of incurious disapproval that swallows so many ancients. For all their amusing battles Beeman had never thought to imagine a life without his dad. I on the other hand had never stopped imagining a life with mine, so that Beeman’s fulsome suffering seemed a luxury to me. What I’d have given for a similar chance!

  Now I sat in a waiting room myself, sometimes with Nadine, sometimes with Bjorn, while the snow slid streaming down the windows.

  These were Rune’s wounds: two blackened burns on the second and third fingers of his right hand, where he’d held the string and been unable to let go. A similar burn on the thumb of his left, this one marked by what resembled an exit wound, as though the current tearing through his body had arrived at the end of that unlucky digit and holed his thumbnail to escape. There was a third burn on his left side, halfway up the rib cage—it looked like a furious mouth. Though his vision was unimpaired, the whites of his eyes were entirely crimson.

  Despite all this his heart was steady. He didn’t exhibit the arrhythmia common with electrocuted persons. The nurse gave him a sedative so he’d sleep a good long time. No one knew what he’d be like when he came to. At noon Nadine remembered it was Christmas Day and insisted that she, Bjorn, and I walk out into the swirling flakes. We found an open café with no customers and a “banquet special” of roast turkey and dressing with candied yams and corn pudding and red velvet cake. The waitress delivered us a tale of boyfriend woe in installments while refilling our coffees. It was a good meal and the waitress was funny. The boyfriend didn’t know what he had. Afterward we wrapped up and went down the Lakewalk ankle-deep in snow. The wind was shifty and cold. Waves came ashore with hardening spray. The dark clouds moved like shoulders. At a spot where the wind had blown the beach clear, Bjorn and I spent a little time flinging stones at a deadhead log floating twenty yards out. I was more accurate but Bjorn had Alec’s powerful arm. The rocks zipped out like bullets but the target was never in danger. Nadine caught my eye and smiled. A woman in a white parka with a big white sled dog passed us on the walk and said to Nadine, What a lovely family you have. Nadine thanked her. I didn’t say anything. I felt unreasonably pleased and shy. That remark was Christmas enough for me.

  When we got back to the hospital Rune was still sleeping. He slept until early the next morning when he woke suddenly and began to speak, sliding without warning into moments of private history. As green lights flashed and a nurse took his blood pressure, Rune described in detail the expression on Sofie’s face while they were riding a Lofoten express ferry a decade ago. The boat was a new fast one and Sofie’s silver hair whipped in the wind, and she leaned sparkling over the rail as if into the future itself. Hardly pausing for breath Rune ran down a short list of names he and Sofie liked for the newborn girl whose adoption they never achieved: Birgit, Gunda, Else, Jorunn, also Dusty, after Springfield whom Sofie adored. Rune rolled his red eyes and continued his scattershot monologue. He told about a city inhabited by the drowned, an ancient metropolis filled with fishermen, women who’d hurled themselves into the sea, Argonauts, master-race submariners, P-51 pilots, Vikings, Rune’s father and two of his uncles, people pulled in by wights and fishes, children who fell through the ice. You’d think it a saturated place of muted colors and indistinct booming sounds but no, the city was bright and warm. It lay on the shore of a benign and stormless sea in which you couldn’t sink. On the beach walked beautiful drowned girls with vivid scarves drifting behind them in the breeze. The old men, sailors, longboatsmen with braided beards, gathered at plank tables over glasses of whiskey and mead. The sun shone as if through stained glass. Tiny drowned children crouched in the shallows feeding pieces of bread to huge speckled fish as friendly as dogs.

  By the third day the present seeped into him. He remembered our names and stopped retelling chance memories. This should’ve been encouraging, yet it seemed to me as the present gained purchase Rune also retreated. For example, by this time I’d brought in three or four of his liveliest kites and hung them here and there in his room—an idea of Nadine’s, who thought of bright colors as restorative stimulants. When we arrived the next day the kites were gone. A nurse informed us he’d found them disturbing. He slept a great deal and I suspect feigned sleep to avoid our conversation. He didn’t laugh at words or ideas that might’ve pleased him before. Beeman came and told funny stories, trying to coax out Rune’s high-pitched laugh. But Rune was impassive behind the Ray-Bans he fumbled on whenever people visited, so as not to horrify them with his crimson eyes.

  Out in the hall, Beeman was unnerved. “He used to laugh if I just said yawp.“

  “We’re bringing him home tomorrow. At least it’s supposed to be sunny—maybe that will help.”

  And sunny it was, late the next morning, when Rune was released. He wore the sunglasses when the nurse wheeled him out to the Wagoneer, then shaded his eyes with bandaged fingers while Nadine drove north. Her cheerful monologue soon ran dry. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. First we ran out of talk, then we ran out of sun. Clouds mustered above. They appeared as the usual benign lambs but quickly turned to steel wool. Sure enough, a mile from the Greenstone city limits, snow began to fall.

  That night at Rune’s behest I took down the kites that had hung from trim boards and doorknobs since his arrival. They hurt his eyes he said. I stacked them in the north closet along with the illegals. The apartment looked clean and boring without them. Rune took off his sunglasses and it took all my will not to look away. You don’t get used to bloody whites.

  Nadine came in the morning to cook. No doubt she suspected I would feed Rune irresponsibly. Bjorn may have revealed to her the Guinness breakfast theory. She cracked eggs into a bowl, toasted up a good local sourdough, fried sausages, and made a blueberry coffee cake. The kitchen got steamy and rich-scented. How could it fail? Hadn’t my own appetite returned, thanks to her? Yet Rune wasn’t much cheered by her efforts. Electrocution had flattened his palate. In fact not much cheered him until the shaggy old raven flumped onto the snow-covered sill and pecked at the glass to come in. At this Nadine said, “You are not serious,” but Rune’s expression was so hopeful she opened the window. The bird soon developed a low sort of chatter like an AM radio or a sidewalk café half a block off. It perched on the coffee table, muttering and playing with nickels and quarters and kroner that lay in the bottom of a turned wood bowl. The raven tolerated the rest of us but treated Rune like a brother. If he was sleeping on the couch it would keep its voice down. It glared if you laughed or got loud. If Rune slept too long the bird would get nervous. Then it would hop over and peck him lightly, just to watch his eyes open, or to drop a bright coin into his palm.

  As word of what happened went around, Rune attracted a stream of visitors. Don Lean puffed up the stairs with snow on his hat and big stripy Roger in the crook of his arm. Marcus Jetty came with a 1945 issue of Life about the heroic liberation of Finnmark. Lily Pea brought Galen whose stoic ferocity made Rune smile.

  I hoped the flow of company would trail off. Instead it intensified. Some days I returned
from City Hall to find strangers standing around the apartment. They were like pilgrims after the source of something, some of them tongue-tied, some scanning the apartment as if performing reconnaissance. “They’re looking for the kites,” Nadine informed me. One woman confided she had conquered a lifelong fear after flying two times with Rune. She never said what she was scared of. She offered to stay and nurse him full-time.

  I appreciated these pilgrims’ concern but confess to an introvert’s desperation. Would the influx never stop? Would no one ever say, Why, this is your home! What were we thinking, to drop by uninvited, and stay so long? Still, I let it continue. Rune liked people in a palpable way. They warmed to him easily, and he seemed to enjoy them even as they wearied him terribly.

  Those early days he asked often for Bjorn, but Bjorn had returned to the water. Along with the snow and low heavy clouds came a spate of northeasterlies with tall curling waves. Nadine begged him in vain to stay ashore. Several times I walked or cycled down and watched him hunting over the breaks. Ice gathered at his elbows and eyebrows. His board was a yellow dart across the hard blue waves. The weather came in so dark and low I couldn’t tell where lake and sky parted until Bjorn appeared on his feet coming out of a cloud. Evenings he arrived at the Empress dressed in two or three sweaters, having risked hypothermia earlier. He made the little speech, climbed into projection, and essentially ran the Empress, while Nadine and I looked after Rune, and changed his nasty dressings, and tried to hold fast against defeat.

  On a bleak night in early January, Rune emerged from bed where he had been all day and asked for akevitt. I poured some, and he told me what happened on Christmas Eve, when he left that final after-party to be alone with the sky.

  He wasn’t feeling melancholy, as I had assumed—he missed Lucy, yes, but he also missed the wind. It was one of the rare days when he’d failed to fly; as the movie droned on, dropping its hints about the avaricious villain and the viper in the box, Rune thought of the wind outside, and wondered how strong or light it was, and what it might be saying.