They were the first to see the car and its driver. It was a Plymouth Fury III convertible, the blanched and cracked yellow of day old vanilla pudding, and the driver’s fringe of long white hair was swept back and Osterized as he barreled past. He was driving north on State Highway 65 with the Fury III’s top down and the windows rolled up, the speedometer needle edging tremblingly toward ninety.

It was late April, the couple blown around from their annual spring task by the tuber-nosed longhair in the Fury III, his pink bald spot shining like a wad of bubblegum in the morning sun. They lived five miles outside of Port Nicollet in a tinny mobile home and were unwrapping the winter plastic from the place. Ready to pull back on a strip of duct tape that held down one edge of the plastic sheeting, the man told his partner, Virginia, who stood on the ladder, “That looked like the ghost of Richard Brautigan.” Then he slipped his hand up her fuchsia broomstick skirt and along her dimpled inner thigh.

Virginia smiled, not down at him whose fingers she let traverse her vulval cleft, but down the state highway. “No, Beaner, that was the Norseman.”

*     *     *     *     *

“You’re shitting me,” was how Leif Eriksen responded when Beaner related the incident to him. Leif had been out to the family plot in the Namekagon Cemetery, just checking on how everyone had done over the winter, tucked the way they were among the Northern white-cedar and weeping willow. His mom and dad, his aunts and uncles, Arne and Lydia and Betty and Sig. Grandma Berit. Grandpa Roald, who had passed away in October of 1952, one month before Leif’s birth.

“No,” Beaner Tobin laughed. “That’s what my lady said, man. Virginia said, ’No, Beaner, that was the Norseman.’ I’m telling you, Leifer, it gave her that vernal frisson.” Recalling Virginia’s pleasure, Beaner took a deep breath. “She was righteously jazzed.”

It could have been a mark of Leif’s confusion, but he had difficulty in recalling when the last time had been that he’d seen the Norseman. Erik, his cousin. The confusion was due in part to Leif’s being the patriarch of the family now, since Arne had passed away back in July. There had been no one else. Leif and his wife Desiree were the only Eriksens remaining in Port Nicollet. So he assumed that made him patriarch. But of what? He had been the baby of the family for fifty-one years. Now he was the patriarch of nothing but graves. He tried to recall the last time he had seen his cousin, but when he thought he had it pinned down he would recall another instance, then another, and another after that. It was as though Erik, who had been absent from northern Wisconsin for thirty-six years, was forever attempting to leave, but never did. But he did leave. It hadn’t been a clean break from Port Nicollet, like Leif’s brother and sisters and other cousins had made, but the Norseman did leave. The archives proved that. Now he was back.

*     *     *     *     *

Entering Port Nicollet from the south on State Highway 65, Leif watched for the Norseman like he watched for black ice at intersections every winter, aware of the hazard, slowing down in time, in control. Where 65 turned into Beacon Avenue, Port Nicollet’s main drag, he expected to see the Norseman strolling from the Dew Drop with a woman on each arm, or pictured him bent under the hood of the reported Fury III, ratcheting with main strength and skinning his knuckles against the recalcitrant engine. Leif irritated drivers unlucky enough to find themselves behind him, cruising through Port Nicollet’s South End at the posted speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour, his eyes panning left to right.

The Norseman wasn’t hanging out on any South End street corner. His cousin had a taste for beer—he would show up wasted at high school basketball games—so he could be in any of the bars along the Beacon strip, five in South End, beginning with the Dew Drop, and twenty more right in downtown Port Nicollet. The names Leif could tick off alphabetically or ranked by police calls. This wasn’t some obsessive Dewey decimal system of tavern science. Leif had been elected to the City Council earlier in the month and placed as chair of the liquor licensing subcommittee.

He was out of South End, past its taverns, the Ace Hardware store, an empty Ben Franklin, its windows covered with brown paper, then through the buffer separating South End from Port Nicollet proper, the fairgrounds with its grandstand and racetrack on the east side of the avenue, the big box stores to the west, Here-a-Mart, There-a-Mart, Everywhere-a-Mart-Mart. He half expected to see the young Norseman waiting at the fair’s turnstile under the paint peeled archway.

Port Nicollet along Beacon Avenue was like South End, but whereas South End was a snapshot of the economy belly up, Port Nicollet was the panoramic view. While the bars turned a profit, the rest of downtown was one big false front, a movie studio backlot he had glimpsed once on The Learning Channel. The county social service agency had commandeered the old post office building when the post office relocated to an empty elementary school on the east side, across the street from the middle school where Leif taught American history. The five-and-dimes on Beacon were empty. The exception was Kresge’s, transformed into a senior citizen center after standing empty for years. Surveying the decay, Leif realized he had been wrong. He had been looking for the Norseman minus thirty-six years. Beaner had told him he was old and bald now, looking like that dead hippie writer-poet.

“For Christ’s sake, Norseman,” he said. “You’re an old fart now, aren’t you? So, where the hell are you?”

The last time Leif had seen the Norseman—the last time that crossed his mind now, though it could have been one or another from the vast catalog of last times—was in the summer of 1967 at their Uncle Arne’s cabin on the Namekagon River, just when Erik’s acid-inspired Norwegiomania was peaking. He had been the frenzied but arrhythmic drummer of the Love Trolls during the band’s historic single performance during Port Nicollet’s Crazy Days Sale and Street Dance. The Norseman wore a T-shirt patterned after the Norwegian flag with the short sleeves ripped off, a pair of faded blue bellbottoms, and, credited with wearing the first pair on the south shore of Lake Superior, huaraches. In 1967 he was also in the habit of carrying on his shoulder a violin in a scuffed green alligator skin case, sans handle, just in case he ran into some old son of Norway who could teach him how to play Hardanger fiddle. And that summer he nicknamed Leif, four years his junior, King Oscar, and whoever Leif was dating at the time his Kipper Snack.

Summer evenings on the Namekagon, the younger cousins would allow themselves to fall victim to terminal goose bumps by gathering in a circle in a dark, moldy alcove of the cabin, singing first, “The ants go marching one by one,” before segueing into, “The worms crawl in. The worms crawl out.” One afternoon, donning a mask of outsized nose, mustache, eyebrows, and spectacles, the Norseman arrived at the cabin to sing his own song. “Hello, I must be going.”

In the lotto of the times, the unlucky Norseman heard his birth date called out, dryly bureaucratic, as number seven. He saw it as a game of old timers’ bingo with a grim, defined edge. And it prompted his appearance at the cabin in his Groucho disguise. He had to be going. Now.

At a neighboring cabin’s yard sale that summer, Uncle Sig had come across a recording of Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suites. The LP was in reasonably good shape, it wasn’t warped, and the few hisses and pops he blamed on the stylus of the Montgomery Ward portable stereo Arne had installed in the cabin’s knotty pine-paneled living room.

Leif and his young cousins were led by their mothers and fathers to the riverfront lawn for a picnic so that Sig and Betty and their son could talk in the cabin. When Sig’s voice rose, someone turned up the volume on the stereo, the speakers distorting “The Abduction of the Bride,” this classical buzz melding strangely with the racket coming from the Panasonic radio on the picnic table, a Twins-Red Sox game broadcast from Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota. The distortion caused to the abduction played out like crowd noise to a Harmon Killebrew homerun.

Before the record’s last note, Sig exited the cabin, man-titted and swim-trunked, and barged his way down the lawn, through the trees, a-thump to the end of the wooden dock, to launch himself, the human cannonball, into the sky blue river. A Hamm’s Beer ad if ever there was one, with Sig the cartoon bear.

Betty, too, had walked from the cabin, freshly powdered but eyes puffed and red. She joined the picnickers; Leif’s mother and Aunt Lydia, a noncommissioned officer in the Salvation Army, who drew close in support, the scene quiet except for the splendid baseball commentary of Halsey Hall. Leif’s father, Pete, and Uncle Arne feigned interest in the ball game, while the women found out what had happened.

The words Betty managed to hiccup sounded like a lot more than what she actually said. “Draft. Dah. Ger. San. Fran. Cis. Co.” Then she sobbed into Lydia’s shoulder. Aunt Lydia had tried to save the Norseman more than once. But now this proved what she’d told everyone, the boy was the family’s curse.

Although Leif was only fifteen, he wondered why the Norseman hadn’t simply planned an escape to Canada, right up the North Shore from Duluth. Or Sweden, where he’d heard Julie Newmar, the star of My Living Doll, was from.

By the time Leif reached the cabin to offer these suggestions, he heard a car rumble to a stop out on the river road, a car door slam, then the departing rev and fade. Uncle Sig didn’t return from his river swim until after dark, Aunt Betty walking back up to the cabin with him from the river, her face the mottled white of an Eriksen Christmas dinner: lutefisk, lefse, boiled potatoes, and white sauce.

The Norseman was an only child and he and his parents lived in Port Nicollet’s South End. Sig kicked him out of the house when he was only seventeen because the boy was already incorrigible, a truant, a drunk, a stoner—this was the Sixties in northern Wisconsin and no one considered anything on the order of family counseling to iron out the wrinkles of dysfunction. Not Sig, anyway. He was staid. Staid, that is, until the weekend card games at any one of the Eriksen brothers’ homes, when the Christian Brothers brandy flowed like bottled water in the twenty-first century.

Once, Uncle Arne had to break up a fight between Sig and the Norseman in Betty’s kitchen. Sig had his only son by the throat and up against the Frigidaire and, bear-like, Arne pulled them apart. “What in blue blazes do you think you’re doing? You can’t be choking hell out of your own kid, you know!”

Sig grumbled about marijuana, about the Norseman smoking at his bedroom window, the red coal that had dropped and burned Elvis’ silhouette into the soft pine floor. “Goddamn, Arne. The kid burned the King into the floor. You want to see it?”

“No,” Arne said. “Get your hands off the kid’s throat.” Even though father and son were three feet apart, Sig’s pink right hand held the boy against the avocado refrigerator.

Arne and Sig related the story to Pete with surprising nonchalance during the weekly game of cards and quaffing of brandy, and Pete later told Leif, adding that he didn’t know why Arne got so God Almighty self-righteous about it. “He cold-cocked our old man once.” It was the Eriksen family berserker tradition that fortunately hadn’t carried over to the relationship Pete and Leif had as father and son.

It was him. It was the long hair, the platinum blond with tobacco stained streaks bleeding through that forced Leif into a U-turn on Port Nicollet’s downtown strip. Horns blared, fingers were flipped, but he had spotted the Norseman cadging a smoke off Andy Kipp outside of the Reef Lounge.

Leif parked and watched them laugh, then, though suddenly nauseous, he got out of his car. Before he reached the two men, Kipp, squinting at him under the gray sky, beached in the Reef Lounge too long into Sunday afternoon, said, “Hiya, councilman. Check out who rolled in with the rain last night.”

Leif looked, Parents’ Night smile locked in place, wondering what to say after all these years. But it wasn’t the Norseman. It was the pony-tailed chair of the state university’s history department, back from taking a group of undergraduates on a tour of the U.K.

The professor greeted him with a nod and, Leif thought, a look of wonder on his face. What could possibly have prompted the illegal maneuver on Beacon Avenue by this elected city official?

Leif knew what Desiree thought of the Norseman and she thought this in spite of the wrongheaded admiration he’d had for his cousin as a kid. The first time she met him, at a dance at Superior’s Onaway Club, he’d called Leif “King Oscar” and Desiree his “Kipper Snack, Number 5”.

Where others might have blushed and said nothing, Desiree spoke up. “Let me get this right. You’re calling me fish? You’re calling me, what, some kind of fish snack?”

The Norseman blew her off. And Leif considered himself lucky: Desiree didn’t hold his cousin against him, although she did call the Norseman “an arrogant asshole and a bullshit artist to boot.”

Knowing what his wife thought of the Norseman, and his having been gone for so long, Leif didn’t bring up his return to her that afternoon or that evening and almost managed to fall asleep that night without bringing him up, but then Desiree mentioned Carly Gustafson. The lights were off and their bodies curved against each other.

“Did I tell you I saw Carly Gustafson? She was in town for her nephew’s wedding. She told me her new name, she just got remarried herself, but I can’t think of it now. Did I tell you this already?”

“Ffumph—no,” he said, stretching. Carly Simon? Carly Gustafson.

Desiree was quiet; he thought she’d fallen to sleep. “Didn’t your crazy cousin rape her and then disappear?”

That woke Leif up. “The Norse. . . . Erik? Rape her? No, no. They ran off together.” Another instance of the Norseman’s leaving. Leif told Desiree about that departure.

Carly Gustafson was going to marry one of the Paulson boys from the lakeshore neighborhood. Leif didn’t know if the Norseman was in love or horny or inspired by The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman, but he stole her away during the wedding rehearsal dinner. The Norseman had the gift for gab—

“Bullshit artist,” Desiree interjected.

—and Carly simply left with him, willingly, left behind relatives, soon-to-be relatives, the sliced ham, the meatballs, the cheesy potato bake, her virginal Paulson boy, who, incidentally, had saved himself for marriage and had recently gained admission to the Midwest States Bible Academy in Minneapolis. She threw it all away, leaving with her wild-hair-up-the-ass Norseman.

Carly Gustafson called home in tears two days later from Hayward, from a room in a cold, one-story motel. She was pissed off at the Norseman. After the romancing under the bad art—

“Consensual,” Leif added.

“The bad art?”

—the Norseman had gone out to watch a logging competition, much like going out for smokes at the corner store, and never returned. He and Carly had discussed thumbing out to San Francisco. Together, she thought. She found out differently.

“ . . . And, um, speaking of him, I heard the craziest thing from Beaner. He and Virginia were sure they saw him headed into town, God, it must’ve been this morning or yesterday, something like that.” He stretched again and produced a poor yawn.

“Why that arrogant. . . . ”

“But I never saw him.”

“The return of the arrogant asshole and bullshit artist par excellence.”

The Norseman appeared on the streets of King Oscar’s dreams. The Norseman in blue jeans, chambray shirt—a rune embroidered on one shoulder—and lemon yellow fleece vest stood in front of the Reef Lounge with Andy Kipp lighting a cigarette with the wind off Lake Superior blowing straight down the avenue. Stood there in, hide boots?

“What the hell do you have on your feet?” King Oscar asked his long lost cousin.

The Norseman took a drag off the cigarette. As if to call him a dumb shit, he replied, “Why, they’re finnesko, King Oscar. Authentic reindeer hide.” And he laughed, and in the wind that laughter sounded frightening, like something from the Hall of the Mountain King.

2:38 in the morning and Desiree breathed heavily in her own dreams. Her left arm was draped over Leif’s belly, but he needed to only gently shift and the arm slid away. Her lips smacked, a soft, wet puff, and he crawled from their bed in the dark.

Down the hall was the spare bedroom, but more truly their computer room and Leif’s office away from his history classroom at the middle school. He flicked the switch inside the door and waited until his eyes adjusted to the light before going over to the closet, popping its bifold doors, and taking the heavy cardboard archive box down from the closet shelf.

Leif sat with the blue box on his lap, on the futon sofa that opened into a double bed for company. The walls of the room were covered with his collection of Sixties era posters. Jefferson Airplane, San Francisco, concert posters from Fillmore West and Winterland, the lettering and art fluid and dazzlingly colorful, and the iconic posters in black and white, Monroe, Dean, the Marx brothers, Laurel and Hardy, John and Yoko nude, two virgins.

Opening the archive box, he began pulling pieces of information out at random, a primitive search engine. Messages from around the country, the world, on café napkins from rural Podunks to linen from upscale venues, the Viaduct Café to the Top of the Mark, in e-mail, on postcards that featured:

     The Elusive Jackalope,
     Minneapolis, Minn. (Bird’s-eye View, 1931),
     Carol Doda onstage, San Francisco, 1964,
     A Bevy of Strippers, Crazy Horse Saloon, Paris, (1967),
     The Space Shuttle Challenger on a red, white, and blue field, and
     The Daniel J. Morrell, Sailing the Great Lakes.

All of these communications, from friends, distant relatives, acquaintances, and strangers who knew Leif was interested, had one topic and one topic only. Where was the Norseman last spotted and what was he doing? The last message was five or six years old. They had just stopped.

Leif flipped through these communiqués, sightings and cracked memoir. One woman reminisced about streaking with the Norseman and Carly Gustafson through the Namekagon Cemetery in midwinter. Another knew him as a roadie for one week with Iron Butterfly. The Norseman was seen handing out flowers at the airport in Vancouver, his head shorn and his beatific free hand held out for spare change. He was known for writing poor folk songs and performing them even worse, all the while claiming that Bob Dylan had stolen his North Country thunder. Someone who’d signed her name as Monica Pleiades wrote that she was one of the Pleiades sisters and the sisters owned a Greek restaurant in San Francisco. The Norseman, she wrote, not only stole their seven hearts, he also stole the blue plate special, a family secret. It was a boxful of outrageous stories.

He had carried on when the cards and letters, the e-mails and napkins no longer arrived in the daily snail and e-mail. He went on as if he had never received the first piece of information. Leif closed the lid and went back to bed, otherwise he would have wanted a beer, more than one beer, and the whole night to read the saga of the Norseman.

He was in the teachers’ lounge having a cup of coffee, listening to his colleagues’ debate the roller coaster writing for The Sopranos, when the telephone rang.

“Yes, Leifer? Beaner here.”

This was strange. A first.

“Sorry to bother you at school, man.”

“Say, no, that’s okay.” He saw the Norseman again? Driving out of Port Nicollet? “I’m between classes. What is it? Is it Erik?”

“Yes, the Norseman,” Beaner replied, hesitancy replaced by whispering jubilation. “He’s here. He came in yesterday and spent the night. And I think he might want to stay on longer.”

“He can stay with us.”

“Oh, no. That’s not a problem, man. He’d just like you to come over, you know, whenever.”

“This evening?”

“This evening is cool, sure.”

“But how is he? What’s he like?” There wasn’t an immediate response. “Beaner?”

“He’s been on the road a long time, man. And he looks it. Aged, road weary. I tell you no lie, man.”

What was true was hollow-cheeked and frayed. The Norseman was not the robust cousin of Leif’s dreams and memory, locked down tight and seamless. He was the walking contradiction of an old country-western song: emaciated and double-chinned, longhaired and balding, used as a chewed up gob of Bazooka Joe and hard as nails.

They shook hands warily and Leif caught a whiff of cheap, sweet cigars, fallen leaves, and creosote. He had found the Norseman with Virginia and Beaner, sitting on the cinder block patio behind their mobile home, looking out over the pond that would be layered with poplar leaves in autumn, like a pool of gold, but now, in April, was murky and brown.

The cousins sat outside with their hosts on shellback metal lawn chairs. During the small talk—

“When’d you get into town?”

“Ah, Saturday morning. I didn’t want to bother you and Desiree right away, so I poked around the old stomping grounds. It’s gone to hell.”

“Only looks that way. It’ll be back.”

“Could be right, because I am.”

—and the small talk’s lulls, Leif kept looking at the Norseman’s face in the late afternoon sunlight. The Norseman returned the stare until Leif looked away.

He sniggered. “Why’re you looking at me so hard, King Oscar?”

“It’s just I can’t get over how much you look like them, all of them rolled into one. My dad and yours. Uncle Arne.”

“I’m just an old shitkicker, ugly as the bottom of a boot. But I’ll take that as a compliment.” Antsy throughout, he finally got to his feet and said, “King Oscar, do you think we could we drive out to the cabin?”

The river flashed and the green of the budding trees vibrated in the setting sun. The two men stood on the splintery dock, stationary above the flowing river. “You cook much then, King Oscar?”

Leif said, “The usual. Burgers and steaks. I can cook up a twelve-alarm chili that I can’t eat anymore. If I do, I have to have a side of extra strength antacids.”

The Norseman cocked his eyebrow and smiled. “I’ll bet you think you know why an onion can make you cry. Why it can make a grown man weep. Am I right? Some chemical reaction?” He waggled his index finger. “Not it, though.” He looked back down the river. “You peel that onion sometime, layer by layer. Get to the center, there’s nothing there. Peel away at the damn thing to infinity, you won’t find a goddamn thing.”

The sound of the river was one of an unceasingly headlong rush. The Norseman walked to the end of the creaking dock. “Uncle Arne left the old place in good shape. Not that I’m surprised. Now, if it had been my old man, that would have been a different story. Hunting from a tree stand. That was his gig.”

He didn’t come back when his parents died. Going to those funerals, he had said, would have been hypocritical.

“I’m broken down, King Oscar. Mentally crisped. Emotionally skinned. The docs tell me I don’t even know how to manage my money properly. I guess they’re right. My disability check, it comes every month. Holding on to it is like sticking my hand in the Namekagon and trying to get that old river to stop, one-handed. The government says I need a payee, a protective payee.” His head bobbed and he sat down on the end of the dock, pulling off his work boots and gray stockings, flinching as he dipped his yellow, callused feet into the river. The Norseman looked back at his cousin. “I was thinking that might be you.” Like the give underfoot when walking on the dock, Leif felt his stomach lift and drop. “You can think it over, of course.”

Early the next morning, dark yet on the Namekagon, the cousins went trout fishing.

The Norseman’s voice rumbled low, his picaresque stories coming bumptiously, one after another, from hilarity to waste, a close reading indeed of Leif’s boxed archives. But now there was this, the return home. He gave his line some play. “I can’t undo history. The family and me, you know, we turned our backs on each other. I wouldn’t even give the Norseman the time of day and I’m him. Hell, I apologize for being him if that helps any.” There was a tug, but then the line went slack.

Leif continued to fish, from time to time glancing his cousin’s way. So, he thought, this is the family’s curse. They stood there, legs braced in the rushing river, listening to the birds and watching the trace of their fishing lines.