by Leif Enger
One day I arrived home unexpectedly early from City Hall. Climbing the steps I heard the raven chattering. That bird sounded more human all the time. Rune didn’t hear me come in. He sat at the table with his bandage off and his lower lip between his teeth. His fingers picked at the wound. The skin had begun to heal, but he was pulling it apart.
The raven said something—nearly a word. It sounded like “hurry.” Rune looked up and saw me.
“Oh,” he said. I could see him wondering whether I’d realized what he was up to.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
He was terrible at obfuscation. In fairness it’s probably hard to obfuscate convincingly in your second language.
I said, “Bjorn seems glad to spend time with you. He might actually like it better without the bandage routine.”
Relief crossed his face. “That would be nice—ouch, fy,” he said, taping the gauze back in place. Thereafter the wound healed quickly.
7
I WAS TAKING NOTES IN ANN’S DREAD COMMITTEE. BEEMAN MUST’VE found himself that alibi—in fact the only people who showed for this festival update were Ann herself, Lydia, Don Lean, and declining councilman Barrett Becker. This was less than half the committee but Ann was undiscouraged. She had news—the band she’d been pursuing, Storm Warning, had agreed to open their tour with a performance on Main Street. No question this leveled us up. We’d need to cordon things off, hire security, commission a stage, and nail down the beer situation, also sausage and fry bread and glow sticks. When Ann veered into detail about the hiring of a carnival midway company I found myself hung up on the memory of a ride called the Gravitron, a round enclosure with slanted walls. You enter, and as the ride spins faster you are held against the wall by speed itself. Centrifugal force holds you tight to the sides. All around you the world is flying apart—you know it is, yet you can barely lift your arms.
Don was supposed to talk about the county’s role in keeping Hard Luck Days under control—now that we’d got a famous band it seemed likely there’d be an actual crowd, our first in decades, in Greenstone. But when Ann opened the floor for questions or remarks, Don stayed quiet in his folding chair. His eyes were open but not alert. He sat at a slight tilt, and I found myself tilting the opposite way, silently willing him upright.
“Took a short nap in there,” he confessed afterward. The meeting had gone long and he stopped at the Empress on his way home. Bjorn was up in projection, the movie ten minutes in. Don and I hung out in the lobby eating popcorn and drinking gritty cocoa out of the machine. “I just can’t keep up,” Don said. “I’ll admit, I’m sick of the job.”
He was talking about the recent spree of thefts, which came in the wake of a sizable pot bust he made a few weeks ago in the northern wastes of the county. He’d got a call from a man claiming the loss of a hundred grow-lights and four gas heaters from his nursery operation. Don drove out to investigate. The man came to the door sleepy and startled. His head, including his eyebrows, was shaved and his bare feet were thick and fungoid. He wore what looked like a sleeping bag with holes for his arms and head. With a despondent air, he led Don to what had once been a pig barn. Hundreds of lightweight chains dangled from the ceiling. Under the empty chains stood cafeteria tables containing four thousand marijuana seedlings. The seedlings had once been robust but now looked stricken and peaky. Clearly the tipster had also been the thief, boosting his own operation while thinning the competition.
Don said, “I’m guessing it wasn’t you who called, about the stolen lights.”
The arrest won Don a few accolades, then things began to fly off. While DEA agents and deputies packed up the pig barn, Don got a call from a rural-supply store reporting a robbery. The thieves loaded up four Quonset-hut kits, a Knipco heater, and two cases of Nut Goodies. Two nights later someone stole fifteen rolls of camo netting from Northland Unclaimed Freight, and the night after that he heard back from the greenhouse man—the one who’d lost his wind chimes, earlier. The greenhouse fellow had just returned for spring inventory and wished to amend his report: besides the chimes, he was missing a long-handled spade, six hundred feet of garden hose, and half a pallet of high-quality fertilizer.
“What kind of a person goes out, dead of winter, to steal fertilizer and wind chimes?” Don asked, annoyed.
“Large tomatoes and inner tranquillity are a bewitching combination.”
“What’s happening,” he complained, “is someone’s getting a jump on the next big cannabis ranch. This county’s the size of an eastern state. They plant in the woods and between corn rows. There’s no money for staff. I’m tired of this.”
“At least the rabies outbreak is over,” I said.
“Sure, but the vole plague is only beginning—now that’s another thing,” he said. The wet autumn had displaced thousands of meadow voles that promptly established new homes all over Greenstone. Voles don’t hibernate but multiply year-round. Now spring was coming. Beeman had reported a flood of voles spreading like an oil spill down Ladder Street in the moonlight. On the school football field they tunneled so hard the snow collapsed, revealing capillaries in a thousand directions.
“We need more foxes,” I said. “Foxes enjoy a vole.”
“We have tons of foxes—the foxes can’t keep up,” was Don’s dark reply. “These foxes are as tired as I am. We got a crowd coming in for the Bad Luck deal and they’re going to be treading on voles. Ann’s in my face about it. She thinks I have time to be a vole trapper along with cannabis and rock bands and carnies. There’s too much going on,” he said. “I got a defective disk in my spine. It’s starting to slip. Everything is slipping. It’s out of hand.”
“It’s centrifugal,” I said.
“It sure is.” Don finished his cocoa and peered at the bottom of his cup as though a forecast lay in the sediment. “I used to be a banker,” he added.
“You hated it and were bad at it.”
“Those things are true.”
He gazed off though the glass lobby door. Jerry had gotten tired of people craning in at the showroom window, so he’d taped sheets of tan paper across it. Probably sensing impatience with his progress, he’d painted ALMOST on the paper in enormous block letters.
“I wish he’d take that down,” Don said.
Poor Jerry—the sign described him exactly. He was almost a husband to Ann but not quite. He almost got promoted, then almost went to prison. He almost had the tools for the job.
From the auditorium we heard a few distant, desperate laughs. For a while there it was all bleak comedies.
Rune’s side wound had healed, and his hands had also improved, though they sometimes still pained him and at other times were numb, so he often dropped bread on the floor. One Saturday afternoon I noticed him sitting in a kitchen chair out on the deck. It was a dream of a March Saturday, the sun twice its usual size and thermals shimmering off the rooftops. An eight-knot breeze pushed ripples up the shoreline. I poured two cups of coffee and carried them out along with a stale doughnut for the raven who sat on the balustrade practicing its English. Rune accepted a cup. I followed his gaze into the sky where several bright paint chips danced on the breeze. They were kites, recognizably Rune’s. As the raven broke the doughnut in pieces and decided which to eat first, I retrieved a cheesy old spotting scope with which I watched passing ships. The bicycle was flying above the water tower. The black anvil rose out behind the Slake plant, the bowler-hatted man over the ore dock, the fireplace above the deserted swimming beach, and the giant catfish up at the lookout. In all we counted eleven of Rune’s kites in the air. Amanda Nelson had distributed them to her second graders as academic rewards and they all agreed to go out that afternoon and fly if weather permitted. For a minute or two I was careful not to look at Rune. When I did he was suffused with color. He watched the kites fly, murmuring hums of approval. When we went inside he got out some lightweight paper and began to sketch at the table.
/> Bjorn too continued his upswing. His movie introductions got tighter and funnier. He helped me tarp over a section of roof to reduce auditorium leaks. The Empress didn’t fill but got gradually less empty. If this continued into the summer I’d be at risk of turning a profit.
I don’t know precisely when those two began to seem like men of the same family. Across the weeks Bjorn began to appropriate certain of Rune’s facial expressions, especially a widening of the eyes signifying delight; as for Rune, a quickness reentered his limbs, and one night I arrived upstairs to find him at the table surrounded by scraps of paper and thread, designing a kite the size of his hand. This one was the simplest delta of wrapping tissue, its leading edges kept from collapse by a reinforcing fold over a strip of glue. He set it aside to dry. In the morning I found him flat on his back—after a moment of panic I spied the tiny yellow sail adrift near the ceiling on a barely visible thread. It circled and shifted at an altitude of seven feet. It paused for long moments. When inevitably it stalled and began to slip backward, Rune moved his wrist in short quick tugs and the kite regained movement and height. I made a good breakfast that day, eggs and sausage with fried potatoes. Rune ate it, and wanted more.
Bjorn also discovered the source of my dust volcanoes. They were from something called a powder-post beetle, which had got in somehow and bored microscopic tunnels through one of the lobby’s exposed beams. Edgar Poe had installed the beams in a brief 1980s decorating spasm. Bjorn said the best way to evict the beetles was to extract the beam whole, so I walked over to the Hoshaver and hired Jerry to help. It didn’t go well—Jerry seemed stilted and incapable, his gaunt serifed frame perplexed on the ladder, asking for screwdrivers and chisels and other wrong tools for the job. At last the old timber dislodged and crashed down while we leaped away. It made a big gash on the wall. We dragged the beam out the front and around to the alley. The wall looked bad and the ceiling worse. I called Marcus Jetty who had a big stack of reclaimed timbers to choose from.
Bjorn drove me to the Salvage & Tinker. Marcus was watching a Match Game rerun on a snowy TV, drinking a bottle of Rolling Rock. He walked us out back where the timbers were stacked under a patchwork of rusting shed roofs like the mottled slums of Mumbai. There were light oak beams, a warped crimson one, several in architectural white, and a few scorched numbers rescued from fire. One was the color of honey just starting to crystallize—that’s the one I was after.
“Give a hand here, Bjorn,” I said, but Bjorn wasn’t there. He was out in the yard in a patch of sun, scratching his neck, looking down at Marcus’s homemade wheelbarrow. It was full of the handsome clay roofing tiles you see in the southwest. He called out, “Mr. Jetty?”
“Yeah, son.”
“Where’d you get the wheelbarrow?”
Marcus said he whacked it together from yard parts.
“Where’d you get the parts?”
Marcus’s memory was well-known but even he couldn’t recall the specific origins of the scrummy homebuilt barrow bits. He’d welded the big steel tub from odd pieces lying around. The varnished handles he’d probably cannibalized from another old wheelbarrow—they were standard barrow handles, anyway.
“I mean the wheel,” Bjorn said. His voice wasn’t usual. It was in retreat somehow.
The wheel Marcus did remember. He’d got it years ago off a Texan passing through after visiting his sister in Ontario. The Texan had picked up the tire on the rocky shoreline near his sister’s home in Rossport. Marcus gave him a golf bag for it. The tire was a practical size.
“Bjorn,” I said.
He had that deadpan expression but this time it didn’t look like a way of joking or hiding out. His eyes were glazed. “I’m pretty sure it’s from the plane,” he said.
“What plane is that?” said Marcus.
And Bjorn said: “Mr. Chandler’s plane. The one my dad flew out.”
What Bjorn recalled was the name TUNDRA SLICK which was embossed in white letters on the smooth puffy tire. It connected with one of the rare memories Bjorn had of his dad as a pilot, specifically a day when they’d landed the plane in a hummocky pasture—they’d eaten a picnic lunch there, watched by Highland cattle. Alec ate standing while little Bjorn sat on the tire tracing the upraised capitals with his fingers. He remembered asking his dad, “What’s tundra?” and Alec grinning and saying, “This right here,” tapping the soft lumpy turf with his toe.
We don’t have actual tundra in Minnesota, but close enough.
Nadine met us at the Empress. She carried a curling glossy of Alec beside the plane. At that time the tires were new. With a magnifying glass you could read the sidewall lettering, in a gentle arc beside Alec’s left ankle. Nadine knelt to look at the faded old tire which Marcus had removed from the barrow. Waves and currents would have carried it up the shore, perhaps between Isle Royale and the mainland, taking who knew what loops and detours, past lighthouses at Lamb and Battle Islands, past caribou coming down to drink, past Canadian bays called Thunder and Black and Nipigon, washing up finally near the hamlet of Rossport.
Of course there was no proving the tire was part of the Taylorcraft’s landing gear. Don Lean did take a serial number off it, which eventually established its manufacture in Anchorage in 1992, but beyond that no record existed. Lou Chandler had a look at it but could only confirm that Tundra Slicks are a specialty tire favored by backcountry pilots, himself included. It’s fair to say not many end up in Minnesota, let alone floating in Lake Superior.
The discovery seemed to make Nadine weary, rather than sorrowful—Rune was the one who went to pieces when we told him of Bjorn’s find. He looked at the photo of Alec, wearing his Dukes baseball jacket and a Hemingway grin, one foot propped on the tire of that plucky sparrow of a plane. Nadine wrapped Rune in her arms while his shoulders heaved. He didn’t make a sound. Nadine rubbed his back but did not cry herself.
None of us had much to say for a while. Eventually Bjorn went home with Nadine. Rune shut himself in his room. I had a bottomless, hollowed-out feeling, as when Orry and I first saw one another after our parents had died. I slung on a jacket, then saw the big kite, the cinnamon hound, leaning against the living room wall. It didn’t look like any sort of answer but it looked upbeat and ready to go. I disassembled it and rolled it up and rubber-banded it to the driftwood staff and rode the Schwinn to the lookout.
I’ll confess to nerves—this was my first solo flight if you will. I was never sure how much of the magic of flying was the old Norwegian, how much was the kite itself, how much my minor trauma. The moment the dog slid out of my hand I knew that none of it mattered. Up it went in a bright southwesterly. Straightaway the string began to whine. I gave it whatever it wanted. In moments I seemed to shift angles on the sun and earth, looking down over the blue-green water and brushy slopes and foamy talus shoreline. I flew for quite a while. The day was warm but the wind cool and it got up under my shirt. I thought of Nadine who was taking new sights, adjusting her navigation. She’d said once she would get along better with Alec dead than alive. If he were alive then he still got up in the morning, considered his options, and made the choice to stay gone.
A shape appeared by the cliffside. A man stood out of the tall dead grass and stood wavering in his sleeves. It was Adam Leer. He’d been sitting there silent since before I arrived, it was jarring to realize.
“Mr. Leer,” I said, as he approached.
“Poor Rune must not be recovered. Is that it? He seems to have passed the baton.”
“He’s all right.”
The wind gained urgency. There was a turbulent stream at five hundred feet where the dog spun around and began to shake. I fed it line; it climbed out of the rough air and relaxed. Leer stood watching and I wondered would he wax eloquent now about our evolving selves, or high ceilings. Whatever his subject I was indifferent. In fact I resolved not to listen. But, strangely for him, Leer seemed discomfited. He blinked as though at sand in his eyes; he seemed for once not the master of his surroun
dings. He did muster a wisecrack about men who play with children’s toys, as though a kite were beneath him.
“Would you care to take a spin?” I asked.
With an arch expression Leer accepted the string.
The big dog pulled him off balance and he stumbled a few steps forward. His lack of finesse surprised me. On a gusty day with that much sail you need finesse above all, whereas Adam Leer seemed to fly with a sense of opposition. He moved in odd stabs and lunges, held the reel in both hands and sawed it back and forth. The kite groaned and shivered and backed away. Leer fought it when no fight was needed. My heart leapt to realize the kite was fighting back. At some point it would refuse him. Leer jerked the string around until sweat popped on his brow. His mouth was a nasty crease. I offered to take the string but he snarled and slashed the reel to and fro as the kite bent shuddering to a slow sideways dive.
I knew what would happen before it did. When the kite descended to five hundred feet, that powerful stream of air seized it and bent it nearly double. Leer didn’t have the hands for it. “Give it line,” I urged him, but with an impetuous pout he leaned back holding tight. The kite bent in the middle until it was a shivering column.
Then the string snapped. The kite sprang to shape. It lost momentum and swooped forward fifty or sixty feet; but instead of tumbling to earth it stabilized, found purchase on the breeze, and moved out over the water. Leer flung the reel away in disgust. The kite, glinting, caught another brisk layer of air. It began to gain altitude. In moments it became a beautiful bladelike sail on the sky. It got smaller every second, then faded into a skein of cloud moving toward Michigan in no particular hurry.
Adam Leer squinted after it. A car came rambling in and parked. Jerry Fandeen opened the door and got out and stood by the old Audi wagon. I lifted a hand but he didn’t wave back. He seemed to be waiting for Leer who said, “Oof, we have a meeting. Wouldn’t you know it, now he’s the one keeping me to a schedule.” He gave me a grim look. “Never save anyone, Virgil, unless you wish to be at the mercy of their potential.” And with that he walked to the Audi and slid into the passenger seat. The car stalled briefly when Jerry put it in reverse but he got it going with a minor backfire and they left the lookout trailing gray smoke.