Virgil Wander Read online

  “No wind,” I pointed out.

  “Not yet,” he agreed in a tone of mild irritation, as though the wind were being delivered by UPS. He took the kite from under his arm and shook it out. I hadn’t flown one in thirty years and was ambushed by a sneaky sense of longing.

  “It’s good in the air, this one,” Rune mused. “Not that it behaves. No no! Its manners are very terrible! But what a flyer!”

  As if hearing its name, the kite woke riffling in his hands. A wild sort of face was painted on it. He soothed it in the crook of his elbow like an anxious pet. My fingertips fairly trembled—it seemed as if flying a kite on a string was precisely what I’d wanted forever to do, yet somehow had forgotten.

  He held out the kite. I reached for it, a mistake. Everything whirled. Colors blurred, my ear canals fizzed.

  “I’m not so well at the moment,” I said, then asked—a third time—“What was the name of your son?”

  He turned to me. For an instant his whole face seemed to rise. He looked as though he might lift off like a kite himself.

  “Alec Sandstrom,” he said. I can’t forget how he watched my eyes, saying it. Or how I looked away.

  Did I remember Alec?

  Good luck finding someone in Greenstone who didn’t.

  2

  WHAT MOST PEOPLE KNEW ABOUT ALEC SANDSTROM, OR THOUGHT they knew, could be traced to a silken Sports Illustrated piece published on the anniversary of his disappearance.

  The magazine’s expenditure of four thousand words on a failed minor-league pitcher testifies to Alec’s peculiar magnetism. In two seasons of small-time baseball, Alec was often compared to eccentric Detroit phenom Mark Fidrych, who is remembered for speaking aloud to the ball itself as though recommending a flight path. Alec didn’t talk to baseballs—his quirk, adored by fans of the Duluth-Superior Dukes, was to break out laughing during games. Anything could set him off: an elegant nab by the second baseman, a plastic bag wobbling like a jellyfish across the diamond, a clever heckle directed at himself. His merriment was unhitched from his success. Sometimes he laughed softly while leaning in for the sign. His fastball was a blur, its location rarely predictable even to himself. Sprinting on-field to start the game, limbs flailing inelegantly, Alec always seemed sure his time had finally arrived.

  “Reality wasn’t strictly his deal,” Beeman recalled. “My God he was fun to watch.”

  Engaging as Alec could be, he’d never have received the elegiac Sports Illustrated treatment had he not strapped himself into a small plane at dawn, lifted off in a light westerly, and banked out over Lake Superior never to return.

  The few who witnessed his departure saw nothing unusual. The aircraft was a 1946 Taylorcraft, flimsy and graceful, owned by the fastidious proprietor of Alec’s favorite tavern. The plane had few instruments; Alec, a licensed amateur, navigated by sight. It was a clear morning. He circled Greenstone twice as was his habit, waggled the wingtips for anyone watching, then up the coast he went. North was his favorite direction.

  Like his vanishment, the SI piece was stylish. Forthrightly sentimental about its subject, it began with a tender recollection of Alec’s live arm—his fastball had its own nickname, the Mad Mouse, after the twisting roller coaster that made you wish you were somewhere else. The article detailed his struggles with sporadic depression, with off-season jobs (bartender, stump grinder), with his inability to “get serious” on the field of play. A good deal of ink went to the “immaculate moment” that resulted in his feverish blip as a prospect courted by major-league scouts. At last the story followed him right out of baseball and up-shore to Greenstone. I remember clearly the splash of his arrival. He was charming and goofy, imprudent with money, adored equally in this hapless village for his brush with greatness and for never achieving it. We were proud to have him and we mourned his loss. A year later we were not above enjoying a bit of reflected glory when the Sports Illustrated reporter showed up, a young woman named Eunjin Park who interviewed the town to exhaustion. When her story appeared, we griped at our depiction as rubes and bought extra copies for friends and relatives. I appear briefly as “a sun-deprived projectionist” with “a degree of forbearance approaching perpetual defeat.” As if proving the point, I could make no quarrel with this.

  In any case the story was widely consumed, won some awards, got anthologized in a collection of literary sportswriting, and propelled Eunjin to a commentator gig on All Things Considered.

  There were aftereffects locally, too. Occasional pilgrims began appearing at the Agate Café (Alec’s favorite for its hot beef sandwich) or having beers at the Wise Old, or parking in front of the shaded bungalow where Alec’s widow, the tempestuous Nadine, still lived with their young son Bjorn. It happened enough that Nadine began striding out to intercept snoops. “What are you waiting for? The resurrection?” Once she jerked open the door of a Ford Ranger which had surveilled the house for two hours and dragged its surprised occupant into the street.

  Maybe it was inevitable that Alec began to crop up again.

  Some months after Eunjin’s piece, the owner of a hardware store up in Marathon, Ontario, claimed to have spied the “absent American pitcher” trying on work gloves before leaving without a purchase. The hardware man boldly took a picture, which got picked up by the Associated Press and shown on cable news. It’s blurry but looks like Alec. The lanky build is right, the corners of the mouth evoke the familiar grin, and Alec did in fact own a pair of those iridescent wraparound sunglasses, though as Nadine pointed out, so did everybody else. While the so-called Marathon Man was never positively identified, there followed a number of sightings. Photos were snapped in northern California, in darkest Idaho, in Killarney up on the snow-goose plains. Most of the entries in this weird little parade bore small resemblance to Alec. Only that first one, in the hardware store, ever gained any traction—it had what Beeman called “an echo of authenticity.”

  It’s worth mentioning there were no mysterious Alec sightings in Greenstone. We’d made our peace, it seemed.

  I heard a cough and rustle of paper—the old kite flyer was watching me attentively.

  “I’m very sorry about your son,” I said. “I liked him awfully well.” Which was true, of course—besides being a friend, Alec did some sign work for me at the Empress: repaired the marquee and built a fine original neon of his own design, a green Bogart silhouette. It burns clean and quiet to this day.

  “Call me Rune,” said the old visitor. “Would you please describe him a little?”

  His request took me aback. “Describe your son?”

  “Please, yes. You were friends, I think.”

  “We were, yes we were. All right then, Alec was funny, pleasant, popular,” I said, only to run dry of adjectives. Rune stood waiting. He watched like a boy who hopes the answer is yes. In fact he seemed like a boy, bobbing gently on his toes, his fingertips tapping the rolled paper of the kite. His sea-green eyes were clear. I felt silly and mute. Finally I resorted to the classic evasion of turning the question back on him. “Wait,” I said, in a lighthearted tone, “You’re his dad, after all—why don’t you describe him to me?”

  At this Rune looked away. “I wish I could, but we didn’t know each other,” he said in his faraway lilt. “I am quite foolish, you see. Look—he was my son. Alec Sandstrom of Greenstone, Minnesota. But until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know there was any such man.”

  When he turned back to me he had faded. It was a jolt—for a few minutes he’d seemed an intriguing old wizard with his kite and his pipe smoke, a beaten-down angel or holy fool. Now he just looked ancient and beleaguered. The left side of his face was oddly crumpled—how had I not noticed before? It was half an inch lower than the right, as if it had slid downhill.

  I felt terrible to have been so glib—all he asked was a detail or two about his tragic son. I longed to make up for it by describing poor Alec in strong honest words—if they’d been within reach I’d have gone with impulsive, comedic, sarcastic, droll. In fac
t the longer I looked at Rune and his tumbledown face, the more clearly I remembered the baseline decency of Alec: the apologetic way he told jokes, knowing he would botch the punch line; his relief at being done with baseball and the expectations that went with it; and his intervals of anxiety, which he described as “narrowing,” times when he felt like the Mad Mouse himself, whistling through life at precarious speed, hoping not to hurt anyone in his passage. I remembered these things but couldn’t describe them. My ears rang and my mouth was empty. The moment stretched out. At length I managed to ask, “What is it you’re looking for, Rune?”

  “Only to know who the man was,” he replied. His voice slumped into a croak. “Fy, listen to me. I am not even used to saying my son. Of course he is old news here, yes, I realize. An old story with a sad end. But my son all the same. I will have to be”—he idled a moment—“a detective.”

  It occurred to me that the kindest thing for this fraying pilgrim would be a ticket back home.

  “Do you think,” he asked, “do you suppose people will talk to me?”

  “Oh, I suspect so,” I said, warily—it wasn’t going to take much to resurrect Alec Sandstrom, a favorite local topic. People were probably more than ready to hash through the old business again.

  Rune now seemed to rouse himself. His gaze fell on the kite in his hands, and when he looked up I saw humor again in his glittery eye.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to fly?” he asked, nodding at the kite. “The wind is nearly here.”

  “Another day,” I replied, then wished him good luck and headed slowly up the street, steadying myself first against buildings and then with a cracked hockey stick I spied behind the bowling alley.

  Before I reached Main the wind arrived. A scatter of sparrows surfed along in the torrent, dipped and spun, and were gone. At the intersection where left leads to the failing hardware store, the padlocked union local, Amy’s Grocery, and the storefront evangelicals, and right to the Empress Theater and World’s Best Donuts, I turned and looked back.

  Rune stood at the end of the pier. At this distance all his boyishness was back. He bobbed on his toes and reached back and forth in the air before him. Already he had that kite in the sky.

  3

  TWO YEARS BEFORE MOVING TO GREENSTONE—AND EIGHT BEFORE igniting a fruitless and profligate manhunt—Alec Sandstrom pitched the only perfect game in the history of the Duluth Dukes of the Northern League.

  It was May 1994. I had season tickets that year, nice seats down the first-base line. I’d hired a capable high-school senior to operate the Empress just so I could take in those games, usually in the company of Kate Wilsey. Meticulous Kate! After all these miles my memories of her are more tender than specific, though she did have access to an offhand cruelty that mitigated my grief at her departure. Baseball made her impatient, as did cold weather. She also disliked Wade Stadium hot dogs, despite their low price and all-beef components.

  As for the Dukes, they were mostly on the ropes. Eventually the franchise would say enough and depart for Kansas City. Poor lost Dukes—they never had another pitcher like Alec, the laughing southpaw with the precarious fastball. And poor lost Alec! For he never pitched another game like that perfecto down at Wade with the bitter fog tumbling in off Lake Superior. Typical cheery night in the old town, temp in the high wet forties—fans is too dismissive a term for that tiny tribe of loyalists crouched in ponchos and lumpy blankets. Later would come freezing mist and cars slipping sideways through traffic to reach the park, but here’s what I remember early on: Alec Sandstrom out on the knob with his elbows and shanks, throwing a brand of magic even he could not believe. Oh, his speed was no shock—speed was never Alec’s problem. It was his precision that astonished. Because listen: How many pitchers in any league have a fastball with its own nickname? And what kind of fastball earns the name Mad Mouse? I will tell you: the kind that twists in crackling without one notion where it’s going. The kind you don’t see but hear hissing to itself like the bottle rocket before the bang. People liked Alec Sandstrom but everyone knew the Mad Mouse made its own decisions. There were hitters in the Northern League who wouldn’t approach the plate with Alec on the hill. Young men with ambition, benching themselves. The pay did not merit the risk.

  For one night in May, that changed utterly. For one game, the Mouse did precisely what it was told.

  The catcher that night was Ron Jenks, the rare Northern Leaguer with history in the bigs (fifty-eight games with the Royals across two disconsolate seasons). Later he said he’d never caught pitches thrown that hard. Saberhagen threw hard but these fastballs of Alec’s were smears, they were lit ghosts. Hitters blinked and waved. Alec was no sophisticate, you understand; the Mad Mouse was his only pitch. So Ron propped his mitt where he would—at this or that corner of the strike zone, or straight over the plate. That night it hardly mattered. Alec would nod and reach back, right leg rising up like a pump handle, knuckles grazing the sand—then arm-blur and launch, a carbonated hiss, and Jenks would flinch awake to the smoky pop of the ball in his mitt.

  It happened that way all night.

  Alec’s practice was to grin over at his wife Nadine, in her spot behind the home dugout, after every strikeout. Sometimes he also winked. This attention embarrassed her, but especially that night because there were so many strikeouts, and also because she was gigantically pregnant. Beautiful, absolutely—but eight months is a lot of pregnant, and Bjorn was a lot of baby. Of course staunch Dukes partisans, the all-weather tribe, knew Nadine by sight—the with-child darling of that handsome, daffy, terrifying Sandstrom boy.

  Around the fifth inning, people began to understand a singular game was in progress. I mean to say they started watching it. At their best the Dukes were rarely compelling and a night game at Wade was more than half social occasion—a sportswriter for the Duluth News Tribune described the season ticket as “a standing invitation to freeze in company.” But as Alec kept firing home, as hitter after hitter flailed at strike three or stood in rooted disbelief, the men in camo and women in quilts and even the half-dozen Italian sailors off the grain ship in the harbor began to sit upright in the sparse old grandstands and look at one another. A hush descended. We leaned in when Alec pitched, leaned back at the end of innings. Even the play-by-play man, Ivan Maitlin, broadcasting the game on a Twin Ports radio station, did not specify what was happening. A shambling poet and diesel mechanic, Ivan had come out of retirement for the privilege of describing baseball on the air. He guarded his tongue until the Dukes finally scored three times in the bottom of the seventh. This uncommon event Ivan took for a sign, and he joyfully relented and explained how it was: history afoot in the port city, a feat heroic, a wondrous groove. Ivan stood up in the tiny press booth and preached it: Can I get a witness! Forthwith people began spilling down the skinny streets to the ballpark, arriving in vans and the backs of pickups, pushing through icy fog with their parkas and thermoses and video cameras. By now the ticket window had closed and you could just walk in. It seemed, and still does seem, like good news to me that the final innings of the best game of baseball ever pitched in Duluth were witnessed by two hundred and eight deserving customers, plus Ivan Maitlin and another two thousand or so who got in by grace alone.

  Hours after the perfect game, Alec Sandstrom hustled a gasping Nadine down the hill to St. Luke’s. The delivery was so sudden it nearly happened on the midnight sidewalk under the glowing EMERGENCY sign. Bjorn was a month from due but, as Alec said, maybe he was tired of the dark. Ready for action! That’s what he told the News Trib sportswriter who got wind of the birth and placed the phone call.

  “He’s robust, amigo,” Alec said. “He’s been ready for a while. Whoever knew? You should see his shoulders. We got a little Viking.”

  “Middle name?” asked the sportswriter.

  “Don’t know yet,” Alec said, affecting a pause. “He was only Bjorn an hour ago.” And he laughed—Alec was never a man to forgo the easy pun.

  The spor
tswriter was Tom Beeman. Of the people who knew Alec in those gold-rush days, I suspect Tom saw him most clearly. The perfect game resulted in Alec’s being scouted by at least four big-league teams—the Twins, Brewers, Red Sox, and Giants. An elbowing cadre of scouts, Beeman called them. But sparks aside, a scout needs to see a little consistency. And God knows Alec did his best—he slept with the window open, worked with a guru, pursued reproducible motion. After that lone, tantalizing perfecto, the Mad Mouse refused to be tamed. Alec walked batters; he hit batters. One night at Wade Stadium a greenhorn catcher missed a high hard one and it glanced off the poor umpire’s ear. The ump soon recovered, but the scouts were gone forever.

  Beeman, by then a good friend to Alec, suggested other careers—in sales, real estate. Careers enhanced by Alec’s affable nature. Beeman also warned him against moving to Greenstone. It wasn’t a lucky town, he said. Alec pointed out the cheap housing and low taxes, the profuse beauty of the North Shore—its rock battlements, bald eagles, the lights of wheelhouse freighters gliding past like enchanted cities at twilight. Beeman would himself eventually succumb to these dreamlike attractions, but he was firm with Alec: Greenstone was cheap and beautiful, but awfully out of the way. And not lucky.

  “Well, I’m lucky,” said Alec—and he completely believed it, notwithstanding his loss of a baseball career. And who could argue? He may not have got to the majors, but a lot of people thought of Alec Sandstrom as lucky. The fastball, the seeming weightlessness, the healthy kid, and the incandescent wife: no doubt a lot of men looked at Alec, looked at Nadine, and felt themselves diminished.