Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  “The car what?” Nadine said, pressing the phone to her left ear while blocking her right with her hand. “It quit? Where are you?” She kept shaking her head while Bjorn gave her spotty directions.

  It took us a while to find them. We took 61 northeast four miles, then turned left on County 7 for another six. When you cross the range of hills like small mountains guarding the lake, the land levels off and descends to bog and tamarack. What I didn’t mention to Nadine was the famous make-out spot for which we seemed to be heading. It’s a wildflower meadow surrounded by poplars that make a soft sound in the wind.

  Soon a dark outline appeared on the long straight road and up loomed the dispirited hatchback with Bjorn and Ellen standing beside it. Bjorn looked sheepish and Ellen practical. Nadine eased past and did a three-point turn and parked nose to nose. She had a set of jumper cables, never used. I hooked them up and Bjorn tried starting the Ford. It moaned to no avail. The cables were terribly cheap, with jaws of light bendy copper that kept slipping off the batteries.

  Nadine was about to call Beeman when a car appeared—a slouchy old station wagon, the only car in Greenstone looking worse than Bjorn’s. It chugged up and coasted to a stop on the centerline. I couldn’t imagine what would bring Jerry out here but it was our good luck. Without a word he opened the back and rummaged under a tarp and came up with heavy cables. I clamped them appropriately. Bjorn started the Ford and Ellen got in beside him. Jerry collected the cables and wound them around his arm. As he did so the Audi stalled.

  I said, “Do you need a jump start now?”

  Jerry shook his head. He was used to the Audi. He looked straight forward in silence. In a minute or two he tried the ignition. The car started with a massive backfire that raised the rear end on its goner shocks and made a thready black cloud in the air. Jerry rolled up his window and drove away with his back bumper an inch off the ground. The oily cloud remained behind. It looked like a virus under a microscope, or the cruising soul of someone wicked who had died.

  Bjorn and Ellen seemed suddenly in a hurry, nodding to us and heading back to town. Nadine and I stood alone on the road.

  “There’s a kind of notorious meadow down this way, if you know where to look,” I said.

  “Is that where that is?” she said.

  The meadow was unoccupied when we got there. I don’t honestly know how much traffic it gets anymore, but Don Lean used to run over at least once a week in his sheriff cruiser and rap on steamy windows. There was a fire pit full of ashes and the rims of burned beer cans, and there were colorful bits of paper where firecrackers had gone off. It was early for the real zoo of wildflowers but we walked around a little until the sky changed—a gust came in over the poplars and the air got cool in a hurry.

  We got back in the car. The sunny day darkened before us. A cloud front that looked like huge belligerent knuckles appeared over the trees heading for Lake Superior.

  “Should we go?” Nadine asked.

  “Let’s sit tight a minute.”

  The enormous dark knuckles took over the immediate sky. They were low and fast. Behind them came a long sweeping veil of rain. By the time it reached us it was snow. It peppered the Jeep and stuck to the poplar leaves and the heads of grass still standing. Wherever it stuck, it glowed. A beautiful, five-minute, mid-May blizzard.

  “What’s that sound?” Nadine asked—she heard it before I did.

  At first it was like a distant train whistle, but of deeper timbre. A low note held by an organ. It held and held—that note had all kinds of sustain. Sometimes the note seemed to fracture or separate in the wind and become a droning chord.

  “I think it’s wind chimes,” Nadine said—though it sounded deeper than that to me. It was impossible not to think of some madman working the pedals of a magnificent pipe organ, miles away, perhaps underground, the notes reverberating up through layers of stone until they rang in the open air. It was mournful and lovely. Then the wind subsided. The front passed. Melting snow dripped from the trees. The sun came out, and the music vanished.

  10

  WE GOT BACK TO GREENSTONE AS THE PARADE WAS LAUNCHING.

  Parades always made me cringe—the sight of so many people lockstepping along, chests out, elbows pumping, seemed to denote an unearned pride or a humiliating need for attention. I have generally found something else to do, if any parades were nearby.

  This time around it felt different. Under Ann’s direction the Hard Luck Parade was at once daft and clever. There was only one marching band, a grubby-looking troupe procured at short notice from a high school up the shore—and they played a mournful foot-dragging dirge that upshifted suddenly to ragtime, like the funeral jazz of New Orleans. Behind the band came a hundred grade-schoolers in green frog suits, flinging themselves around out of time to the music, and after them a quartet of 4-H girls on horseback, trying to keep their fitful animals in check. This was difficult because twenty feet behind the horses was a fire truck that kept hitting the siren in bursts every time they started settling down. Last came a flood of reunionites and Storm Warning groupies who’d bought into the Hard Luck theme and dressed as unfortunates of every stripe: chained ghosts and zombies, shipwrecked mariners, a Stevie Ray Vaughan complete with sombrero, some cheerful fellow with a bear trap closed over his head, and a huge extended family of the damned who’d done up their skin in a crackly finish and gone for the red contact lenses. That was the whole strangely joyous brief parade, roughly following the four-block path taken by the runaway water tower, funneling everyone down to Main where there was street food and tent beer, as well as the Empress whose marquee was lit up with the titles of terrible movies.

  It was a long messy night at the theater, and lucrative for once; people came and went throughout, getting swallowed by the trickier seats and extricating themselves, slipping out for corn dogs and returning to find their places filled by others. Sometimes the crowd drowned out the sound track; I wore the hermetic headphones, which amused Nadine. Afterward Bjorn despliced the films and took off with Ellen while Nadine vacuumed the aisles and I mopped up a cola pool of horrifying viscosity.

  As the night assumed a stunned torpor we strolled through town, ending up on the waterfront. A slight swell touched the beach; the ore dock breathed against the sky. At the marina a handful of sailboats stood leaning around in their slips. A few of these were lit below and several had people decompressing in their cockpits—a zombie and a couple of frogs murmured hello and we nodded back, then stopped to greet a rumpled codger sitting on his foredeck eating spaghetti from a dented pan. His boat was an old pocket cruiser with wood spars and a long curved tiller tied off to the side. It had no electricity and the only light came from two paraffin lanterns shackled in the rigging. The codger looked happy and tired. He was leaving the next day. He waved us aboard, pointing at the sky which had a slight green wash of borealis. Tomorrow promised a brisk westerly. He would cross to the Apostles and from there to the Keweenaw Peninsula, after that the Soo, Georgian Bay, the Thousand Islands. I asked when he expected to return and he replied probably never. The world was mammoth and he had yet to see most of it. Telling us to hold still he disappeared down the companionway. We heard him clinking around in the dark. Soon he emerged holding three teacups and poured each of us a tot of something. It tasted like smoke and went straight to my fingertips. We toasted his voyage and stepped onto the dock. We were halfway to shore when he called quietly to Nadine, “If I had one like you, I’d stay.”

  At her front door she put her arms around me for a while. “What happened to you, anyway, Virgil?”

  “Bump on the head,” I said.

  She reached up for a kiss.

  “You know what you’re getting here,” I said. “I’m still fairly far reduced. I may never be unabridged again.”

  “None of us are unabridged, as you are well aware.” She leaned back and looked me in the face. “Worthy adjective, by the way.”

  “Thanks, I was saving it.”

  I
walked home. The city campground was full of trailers and fifth-wheel campers with a few tents scattered among them. Some kids crouched around glowing coals, roasting the night’s last marshmallows. The air smelled lakey and fresh.

  It was three in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. After rolling and flipping my pillow for an hour I turned on public radio where a recorded newscast announced a body had been recovered from the Duluth harbor. It was Josephine Sayles. Her car had been located in a lot near the waterfront. Divers found her drifting on the bottom. Her pockets were full of stones.

  Slowly I came up out of a dream in which people were dancing on the Empress stage. They wore costumes and swayed to music, and the song was the long low breaking chord Nadine and I heard during the five-minute blizzard. Coming fully awake I remembered Nadine saying wind chimes. I thought of Bjorn and Ellen stopped by the road, of Jerry arriving like a somber angel to jump-start the Ford. The memory urged me from bed.

  It was past noon.

  In the kitchen I poured cold coffee, then went to my bookshelves. I got down a county plat book, pages of maps with the landowners’ names written in on their holdings. Every nosy person should have one. I ran my finger along County 7 as it straightened through the boglands. Here was where Bjorn and Ellen got stalled; a bit farther on, the necking meadow; just past that, a gravel road cut north along an eighty-acre parcel.

  The name on the parcel was Owen Fandeen.

  So that’s what Jerry was doing out there.

  I dressed quickly, feeling the vague dismay of hours lost—after hearing about Josephine I’d found Rune’s bottle of akevitt and finally got to sleep. Grabbing notebook and pen I went out on the roof-deck. The midway was at full crush, its mishmash of music clearly insane. At the top of the hour the Lutheran church added its bells to the racket. The bells had long sustained tones. Again I thought of what Nadine and I heard in the meadow. They chimed two o’clock and stopped.

  I opened the notebook and started a list.

  hardware

  fuel oil

  wind chimes

  I remembered Don Lean’s question: what kind of person goes out in the winter to steal wind chimes and fertilizer? I’d answered him with a joke at the time, but now I thought maybe I knew.

  I had a question for Ann Fandeen, but she didn’t answer her phone. When I’d filled a notebook page with everything that seemed even slightly germane I dialed Don Lean. He was at the campground, sounding annoyed—many of the campers had complained about rodents wriggling under their tents in the small hours. Hadn’t he predicted this?

  “I think there’s a larger problem than voles,” I said.

  “What’s going on, Virgil?”

  I said, “You understand I am often wrong …”

  “That is true and I have always said so—”

  “So I’m not trying to alarm you. Or cause trouble, or make anyone panic. Especially now I shouldn’t be trusted, plus I prefer not to rat on a man whose luck has been rotten forever. In other words, use your discretion. It’s probably only what I think.”

  After a pause he said, “Well that’s a marathon disclaimer. I hope you are comfortable now.”

  “Not really.”

  “What is it you think, Virgil?”

  “Jerry Fandeen is building a bomb.”

  11

  DITCHING THE VOLE COMPLAINANTS, DON GOT TO THE EMPRESS IN minutes—he sounded like six men coming up the stairs.

  We stood in the kitchen while I read him the first couple of points on my list.

  And they sounded—well, amateur, really they did, now that the sheriff was there, breathing hard, expecting a damning recital. Don was unimpressed by my inductions. He sure seemed more the elected official and less my friend and ally. Earlier, when I was alone with my cold coffee, the list had seemed unassailable indeed.

  He first affirmed that the stolen chimes, so far not recovered, were the deep-voiced variety. “I figured Brandon was inflating for insurance,” he said. “Who pays six hundred for garden decor? But these aren’t your tinkly porch chimes. They’re ‘Basilica Classics.’ They’re supposed to sound like a pipe organ.”

  He also affirmed that the fertilizer, stolen alongside the chimes, was based on ammonium nitrate—the common ingredient preferred by terrorists from Brussels to Bali, not to mention our homegrown bedlamites in Oklahoma City. More recently a Kansas fertilizer factory blew up, killing sixteen and startling a wistful space-station astronaut gazing down from above.

  He then gently reminded me of the scope of my assumptions. “The sound you heard might not have been those chimes. If it was, it doesn’t mean Jerry stole the fertilizer too. And if he did, he probably didn’t build a bomb.” Don stretched out his shoulders and arms. “Have you considered that Jerry might just want to fertilize something? He might be planning a large pumpkin patch. Corn or tomatoes. Marijuana’s a popular option. You asked for my discretion,” he added.

  Having led with what I felt were the high cards, I reluctantly went down the list. Jerry’s spillage of fuel oil in the Hoshaver. His years of explosives experience. His collection of screws and bolts and hinges, “hundreds of pounds of shrapnel,” I lamely explained—at the risk of receiving a knock at the door, I’d researched bomb-building on Google. Don kept his own counsel but it showed in his eyes. I finished with some halfhearted observations about Jerry’s mental state, his loneliness and confusion, his envy of the dead.

  “His mental state seems fine to me,” Don replied. “Look, Virgil—he’s only now sort of got things together. He’s kept himself clean—I wouldn’t mind losing weight like he’s done. He’s making a wage and not drinking it all, doing that Hoshaver project for Leer. I’m trying to see the sense.”

  “He isn’t himself.”

  “An overall improvement.”

  “You buy that Leer is helping Jerry, giving him some purpose,” I said bitterly.

  “What pokes you so hard about Adam Leer?” Don asked.

  And what could I say to that?

  What poked me couldn’t be proved or measured.

  You can’t convict a man of a vibe—can’t talk about the feeling you get that something is trying your door. Yet Leer spoke into Shad Pea’s ear, his last day on this earth. He appeared to Rune who was nearly killed; spoke to me and I saw my death; took the hand of Josephine Sayles, and she gave herself to the lake.

  Someone was climbing the stairs. Bjorn knocked and entered, the raven riding his shoulder.

  “Morning, Bjorn—who’s your friend?” Don said.

  “I think he got lost,” Bjorn replied. He’d awakened to find the bird on his windowsill—it drifted to his shoulder when he went outside, and hadn’t left him all day.

  Don said, “Friend in high school tamed a crow. Looked real sinister, and knew a couple of incendiary phrases. Does your bird talk as well?”

  “Whoever knew?” said the raven.

  “Not me, no matter what they say,” Don replied. “Listen, Bjorn—have you seen Mr. Fandeen today?”

  “Nope, what’s going on?”

  “Need his assistance,” said Don.

  At this I remembered an item I should’ve put on the list. “Bjorn, tell how Jerry solved that septic issue, out at Adam Leer’s.”

  “Blasting cap,” Bjorn said with a grin. “He was trying to clear the toilet with one of those sewer snakes, but it broke. Jerry was mad—he had some blasting caps in his truck and fed one down on a wire.”

  At blasting cap Don looked at my eyes. He said, “Well, you guys have a fine afternoon. I’ll just pop down to the Hoshaver and see if old Jerry’s around.”

  12

  HE WASN’T AROUND, OR AT LEAST DIDN’T ANSWER THE DOOR. DON had to go back to his office for the security key vouchsafed him by the previous owner.

  When he finally got in, the Hoshaver stank of fuel and rodents.

  The fuel reek came from a fifty-gallon tank with a floor of congealing slurry. In the stockroom he found fourteen empty fertilizer sacks and two full ones.
He looked for the crates of bolts and hinges and other trash hardware I’d told him about. The crates were gone. Don opened some windows. He called one of his deputies, Stumbo, and they drove to the Fandeen hunting shack. Still no Jerry. Blasting caps and alligator clips lay in disarray on a coffee table alongside two spools of coated wire.

  While they were searching, the wind picked up. Low tones reached out of the trees. Stumbo, who preferred classical, said, “Sounds like the Canon in D.”

  Don called me from outside the shack. He had a bad cell signal which gave his voice an airless urgency. He asked what I’d noticed about Jerry’s car, the day before, when he stopped to jump-start the Ford.

  I told him the Audi was riding low, chassis bottoming out in the dips.

  “You said that earlier. You didn’t notice the payload he had in the back, to make it ride so low?”

  “No—we were just glad for the help.”

  He said, “I got some calls to make.”

  Here’s who Don had already called by the time he got back to town: Homeland Security, the FBI, the state patrol, two more part-time deputies, three volunteer fire departments from up- and down-shore, two sets of ambulance personnel, and a game warden.

  Defending himself against unleveled charges of overkill, Don laid it out: from what they had found (empty sacks, drained oil tank, electronic supplies) and also from Stumbo’s estimated payload of putrefied station wagons, Jerry Fandeen was believed to be tooling around with a thousand-pound bomb.

  Don and Stumbo and Lydia and I were in Lydia’s City Hall office. From her window we could see hundreds of people, a back corner of the beer tent, a slice of the stage with its overhung canopy, and the top of the Ferris wheel.

  I’d never seen this many people in Greenstone. No doubt there used to be more on occasion, back in the heyday of mining and construction, but certainly not in my time.

  If only we could’ve enjoyed it.

  As we watched, a silver bus eased up behind the stage—its air brakes hissed, a few onlookers whooped.