Virgil Wander Page 3

  So Greenstone it was. They bought a gilded button of a house—the kind called a tract home when Slake International built it in 1952, along with two hundred identicals, but veneered and replumbed and reroofed since then. They rented an office above the hardware store where Alec pursued what he optimistically termed “graphic design.” He wasn’t a designer. He had an eye. Knack would be a better word. He painted some signs. I’m afraid Sign Me Up! was the name of the business. He got into some vinyl, some plasticized magnets. Nadine helped with layout and drawing—she stood back from his drawings and squinted her eyes. She rescued him is what she did. She understood color and the rule of thirds and other laws of proportion. She knew what lines meant. She put a lot of stock in fonts. They did all right—drove to Gooseberry Falls on summer nights and bought bakery rolls on Saturday mornings. And Bjorn, the baby Viking, turned into the gladdest sort of little kid, the tall-for-his-age sort who laughs with his whole body and goes outside a lot because it’s interesting out there, and attracts other little kids, and becomes their roguish captain.

  And their luck?

  It held pretty well. They got some sign commissions. They made friends and stayed healthy and worked hard and hoped for the best. Their luck did last for a while.

  It lasted—this is my read, anyway—until the summer evening a charcoal-colored sports sedan rolled up quietly behind them. Nadine recalls this clearly. They were out for a twilight stroll, counting the swallows emerging in the blue hour to fill up on gnats and mosquitoes. The sedan—not the usual indigenous bucket but low and exotically rounded, a Porsche or BMW— accelerated onto Ladder Street, then slowed abruptly and kept pace just behind them, as though the driver knew them, or thought he knew them, or were seeing a sight he wished to prolong.

  “Did you know that man?” Nadine asked, when the car finally passed and turned at the next corner. “Ooh, Alec”—I imagine her winking here—“do you suppose it was the scandalous filmmaker?”

  There was a scandalous filmmaker in town just then, a libertine son of Greenstone on R&R at his wuthering manse, but Alec shook his head. He wasn’t interested in filmmakers, or scandals, or European sedans. He was ahead in the bird count and didn’t want to lose out to Bjorn, who at five was his dad’s sharp-eyed impersonator. Alec was also used to being married to Nadine. This was not the first time a passing motorist had slowed down for the view.

  “Just a stranger enjoying the local attractions, I expect,” Alec said. He had a guileless smile she loved. “I guess it’s the price of beauty. Whoever knew?”

  Alec said that a lot—“Whoever knew?” You couldn’t be around him long without hearing it.

  Nadine says he maintained a state of wonder as a refuge from unease.

  The first time I heard about the swallows and the sports car I thought it simple rhapsody. When I heard the story again, years on, it seemed to me the shadows were deeper, that Alec’s optimism was forced, that only little Bjorn was immune. By her third telling—to me alone, more recently—the birds were fewer. Bjorn was pale and silent. And the charcoal exotic creeping at a growl indicated, not the price of beauty, but instead the very moment when their luck began to slide.

  4

  IN THE MORNING I WOKE FEELING LESS LIKE MY OWN SAD GHOST. I’D taken two painkiller tablets the night before, something the doctor said I should do only if the headache made sleep impossible. The headache was manageable but I took the pills anyway. It was wonderful and gauzy, going to sleep that way, like drifting in a small boat over a rippling sea. Two or three times I woke in the night, but instead of worrying about my brain or the Empress or my soaring deductible I would remember I was still in a gently bobbing boat, a boat built for the single purpose of allowing me to sleep, and fade out again with enormous satisfaction.

  Getting dressed in a shaft of maple sunlight, I still had the sense of borrowing clothes from my former self, but decided to push through. I put bread in the toaster, got out the brick of white cheddar and an overripe tomato from the vegetable drawer. While the toast browned I sliced tomato and shingles of cheddar. This was all muscle memory requiring no thought. I didn’t have to apply any adjectives to the toast, only plenty of butter, followed by cheese and finally the slices of beefsteak tomato, over which I rained a bit of salt and some coarse black pepper.

  I pulled on the blue wool sweater my sister Orry gave me during her brief intense knitting addiction and went downstairs to Main. People vacationing on the North Shore claim shock at our brisk weather, but it’s hardly a secret. Duluth in ancient days advertised itself as the Air-Conditioned City and it is well south of Greenstone. Even now, bus drivers from steaming Minneapolis and office managers from the airless burbs, plus a good many melting Iowa farmers, head north during heat waves to poke their feet into our icy Great Lake—they’re a common sight, sitting stunned in plastic lawn chairs carried into the shallows. Not everyone wants to see his breath in the summer but this is the bargain you strike up here.

  Julie at the Agate Café brought me two coffees to go—one black, one cream—then while I stood peering into my billfold she came around the counter and wrapped me in her nice soft arms and kissed my cheek. It was very agreeable. I never really knew Julie—her sister Margaret owned the Agate and Julie moved here to help after they both got divorced the same year. Margaret slams your food down in front of you like an outrage, but Julie can set out your bacon and eggs with no more sound than the kiss I had just received. There is nothing wrong with being kissed on the cheek by a sweet round woman in a café after you have nearly died. She said it was briefly rumored I didn’t make it, people were sad, I was a fixture in Greenstone—endearment was the word that she chose.

  I expected she would pause there and ask me some questions I would lack the descriptive power to answer, but no. Julie gripped my arm with her very strong fingers and said coffee was on the house. Moreover, she said Marcus Jetty would never pay for another meal at the Agate as long as he lived. Later Margaret would fine-tune that policy, but it still strikes me as a fitting reward for a deed as brave as Marcus’s—jumping into cold stormy waters to yank a man out of a sinking Pontiac. Marcus was a citizen at the edge of penury, the Agate was a good café. Now he could go in there anytime and have a first-rate hot beef sandwich. He could have the chicken and dumplings, or the peach-and-blueberry pie. I was glad for Marcus. I would not have minded for Julie to kiss my cheek again.

  I took the two coffees and went on my way. Full sun is rare in October and when it happens everything shines—the streets shine up through their layers of grit, the cottonwoods and jack pines and silver maples shine, the darting flycatchers shine around picking off the last sluggish deerflies before heading south to Mexico. It was beautiful but too intense for my eyes. A headache flared at the edge of sight. At Citgo I set the coffees down on the sidewalk and went in and bought a pair of Panama Jack sunglasses. They had black rims and dark fake tortoiseshell temples, like Nicholson’s. The instant I tried them on my headache shrank away. I’d never paid more than ten dollars for sunglasses but when the girl said, “Forty-two eighty-five,” I handed her my Visa without a moment’s shilly-shallying. A lavish bargain, that’s how it seemed. I’d have paid a thousand if she asked. My habits are frugal but my joggled brain informed me it was only money.

  I smiled at the girl—sixteen or so, glossy black nails, black hooded sweatshirt with a Mexican skull painted on it in joyful colors. I knew her from the Empress. She and her friends spent whole screenings tapping at their phones, but then a ticket is a ticket. She said, shyly, “Hi, Mr. Wander.”

  “I’m sorry, I should remember your name.”

  “Lanie Plume. I heard what happened. What a deal! I’m happy you’re okay.”

  “Thanks, me too.”

  “Somebody said you were dead—well, it was my boyfriend Kyle—that you went through that fence and sank in your car all the way to the bottom. He said you banged on the window but couldn’t get out! He said there would be air bubbles coming up from the car
for months, and the bubbles would pop and smell like dead person—I’m sorry to be ghastly,” she added.

  “It’s okay. Marcus Jetty happened to be down on the shore. He pulled me out before the car sank.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  The headache was approaching—I could feel it getting nearer. I was anxious to put the new sunglasses over my eyes, but the girl hung onto them, swinging them back and forth in her fingers, a pensive set to her chin. “Mr. Wander, can I ask what was it like, going over the edge?”

  The question was so direct it took me by surprise. She mistook my silence for confusion and clarified: “The edge of the road, I mean.”

  “Right, got it. I don’t really remember. I remember driving along, listening to the radio, and snow coming down, but not the going-over part.”

  “Oh.” She couldn’t hide her disappointment. “Did you get knocked out then, I guess?”

  “I got concussed. The whole thing is …” I wanted foggy or misty or better yet shrouded but instead trailed off with a shrug.

  She finished ringing me up. I took the tags off and put the glasses on. I felt better immediately and wondered what else a person could buy for forty-two dollars that would bring such immediate joy. As I went out the door Lanie said, “It would be super rad if you remembered, you know?”

  “Remembered what?”

  She laughed. “Flying off the cliff that way—I mean, everybody’s seen it in a hundred movies, but no one actually does it.”

  “Didn’t I actually do it?”

  “Sure, but you don’t remember,” she said. “I mean, you were almost dead. Like briefly virtually dead. You went right up to it. My mom said you maybe got a peek at whatever. She thinks heaven or hell. I don’t really, I think you’re just here and then it gets dark, but if there is a whatever, you maybe saw it. How cool would it be if you remembered?”

  “I could write a book.”

  “Do some podcasts,” she said.

  “Doctor Phil.”

  “Maybe it’ll come back to you after a while.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know what I think,” Lanie said. “I think now you have to go on a quest. That’s what this sort of thing means. Carpa deem,” she said, with a precocious smile. “That means seize the day.”

  “Maybe after I seize a nap.”

  “Bye, Mr. Wander.”

  The two coffees were still on the sidewalk. Bending down I saw my two pale ankles sticking out of my shoes. I’d forgotten socks. Dr. Koskinen said I might forget to turn off the faucet, might gas myself somehow, set my sleeves on fire. He wasn’t thrilled that I lived alone. He suggested I ask a relative or friend to stay with me the first week or two. I did borrow Beeman’s phone and try Orry, but she was out of the country—I’d forgotten that too. Orry’s husband Dinesh is a star surgeon, a holder of patents and doctor without borders. Whenever Dinesh flies off to heal the sick, Orry goes to Prague or Paris or New Orleans. A connoisseur and gourmet, my sister. She has three handsome tattoos that I know of, including one of a literate bar menu encountered in Florence. Vino Allegro! She says it is necessary to offset a little of Dinesh’s overwhelming decency, which at times is more than she can bear.

  My ankles were cold, so I kept walking. For the first time I tried to recall how it was to burst through the barrier and fly off the cliff. Nothing came. Marcus had described with hand motions the Pontiac’s sweeping twist into the lake, so I had an approximate visual, but that was all Marcus. Where was my own memory? What if I’d seen the lit hillsides of glory? Maybe even glimpsed my parents, who died serving Jesus when I was seventeen. I will say more later about their departure in a train derailment in a Mexican canyon while I stayed at home—a dawdling, reeking junior in high school. After the derailment I wondered obsessively about the great whatever. Much seemed to ride on the character of the whatever, including the degree and tenacity of my guilt in the matter. But miles pass, years climb up your shoulders. My insistence on Mom’s and Dad’s joyous afterlife gradually dimmed.

  It was disconcerting to think it might’ve shown itself at last, only to be swaddled in the bubble-wrap of concussion.

  On the plus side, it was nice to be noticed. Everything looked warm and auburn through the new sunglasses. I did feel vertiginous, a word then unattainable to me, but also grateful and friendly toward the world.

  A block past Citgo I arrived at a squat rectangle with ribbed steel siding and exposed rivets. Often mistaken for a welding shop, this is Greenstone City Hall. It was built to replace the lavish oak-and-sandstone hall that was constructed during the taconite boom of the 1950s and that burned down twenty years later. Arson was never proved but the town was careful to replace the stately edifice with one impossible to mourn should such a thing happen again. I set the coffee with cream on the desk of Ann Fandeen, who raised her plucked brows and covered her phone with her hand.

  “As I live and breathe,” she said.

  “Hi, Ann,” I replied, suspecting I was about to receive more of the fond affection granted the recently dead. But Ann said, “You look real stupid in those sunglasses. I guess going over the cliff that way turned you into some sort of a big shot.”

  “Clearly not.” I took them off, squinting at the slightly meaner world.

  “Well, you’re late. Your appointment was here twenty minutes ago.”

  I didn’t remember an appointment, but then I didn’t remember my socks. Ann took a sip of the coffee, gave it a quick stare of disapproval, and returned to the phone. I proceeded down the short hall with its jaundiced paint to my office. I was glad to see the door, which had V. WANDER on it in gold hardware-store lettering, right above the title CITY CLERK.

  Did you think I made a living at the Empress?

  It’s part-time work, of course—a city like Greenstone requires scant clerical effort. I keep the minutes and write the checks; there are usually papers to be filed or contracts to let. This morning it was a meeting with the Pea Brothers who are annually lone bidders on the city’s request for snowplow services. Since my early years here the striving Peas have cleared snow and ice from the hall lot and various city properties—the park, the skating rink, the municipal liquor store. Shad Pea was actually the last surviving brother since Marty died of a heart attack brought on by televised hockey, but Shad’s daughter Lily had grown up in the business and it was Lily who was seated at my desk when I entered. She didn’t get up but paid me the compliment of a grin. “Hey, it’s the ghost of Virgil Wander—and look, he brought me coffee.”

  “Good morning, Lily—how do you take it?” I asked.

  “Black.”

  I handed her my coffee. She said, “I was kidding,” while accepting the cup with both hands.

  “Your dad along today?”

  “Hangover. He said to go ahead and sign the papers.”

  “Which you are welcome to do, if I can find them.”

  I went round the desk and knelt at a bottom drawer to look. Lily was twenty-one—a slight blonde with wide-set eyes and arresting dimples, plus an impish wit. As a junior in high school she sang the lead in Annie Get Your Gun which had all Greenstone fired up about her Hollywood future even though Lily herself disliked entertaining. She never performed again unless you count posing for a calendar that appeared on the walls of automotive garages in the five-state area. Looking at her you don’t automatically think snow removal professional, but you should see her navigate the hairpin corners at the base of the Greenstone water tower.

  “Here they are,” I said.

  She stayed at my desk casting a dubious eye over the contract, hardly windfall money for the Peas. They also landscaped for summer people, tapped a few hundred maple trees for syrup in the spring, and ran an occasional fishing guide service during the autumn season. Lily said, “Have you ever noticed nobody in this town has only one job? Not even you, and you run the city.”

  “I take notes and ask for favors.”

  “I was teasing about the hangover,” she said.
“Dad got a fishing call last night. He’s out with a client.”

  “Shad doing okay?”

  “I stopped in last night to drop off the groceries, and he was sitting on the kitchen floor making a kite out of dowels and butcher paper.”

  “What is it with kites right now?”

  “I don’t know. He met some old dude flying one off the end of the pier and couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

  I didn’t mention my similar enchantment. Lily grimaced at the contract, then signed it. “So Dad’s retiring next year, has he told you that?”

  “He hasn’t, unless he has and I’ve forgotten. Good for him.”

  “Not retiring like in the commercials. Old friend of his runs an RV park in Florida. He’s been after Dad for years to move down and be his handyman. Dad laughs at Florida until the middle of January, then he gets quiet about it.”

  “Why, he’ll thrive down there.” It was nice to picture Shad, an obsessive fisherman, beach-casting into the sunset. “What will you do, Lily?”

  “Probably stay. Dad thinks I’ll be ready to take the reins by then. He talks about reins a lot now. He’s evolved from hold your horses. But Virgil, just so you know”—she smiled and tapped the contract with the tip of the pen—“when Dad leaves? We’re renegotiating this baby.”

  Lily left without further acknowledgment of my wondrous survival—she didn’t kiss my cheek or call me an endearment, and she didn’t ask for eyewitness testimony of the icy plummet or a description of the place where let’s hope the good people go. But it’s true while I knelt at the desk drawer, shuffling through files for her contract, she rested her hand on my shoulder. I felt its warmth through my knitted sweater. If I were younger I would have fallen in love with Lily Pea. Maybe I did fall in love with her, for a minute or two. Probably I did. Who wouldn’t? Besides being pretty and smart, Lily was reliably kind.