Return to Oakpine (19 page)

“Name this tune,” he said to her.

“No,” she said.

His head was against the side of her head, and as he took in the big wooden room, he knew he was different than he'd been even a week ago. He knew he was different than he'd been an hour ago. He was a kid who had always been on balance, and now he felt as if he were fighting not to fall. There was a vague lump in his throat that had been there since before the football game, that he had thought was excitement but now felt like an urgent sadness; actually it felt like both. His whole body glowed with bruises and this dim rushing joy. There was a clear blue footprint along the bottom of his ribcage. He leaned back a few inches to say something to Wendy, and she took the signal and leaned back, and their faces in that proximity stunned him, and he only looked at her for a startling second and pulled her close again. Closer, in fact, than he'd intended. It was purposeful that he didn't kiss her.

“Larry?” she said.

It was all he needed, an opening. When he leaned back this time, it was as if he were leaning out of an airplane with nothing beneath him, and he knew he was going to say absolutely anything. What he said was her name, and he saw her face when she heard it, and now she put her head into his shoulder. But he was going on. “Do you think, at the advanced age of seventeen”—and he couldn't stop—“that love and sex are the same thing? Is one required before the other? Are they related at all?”

“Larry,” she said.

“Do you know Wade talks about you?” They were still dancing somehow, but the room was subsumed in shadow and the music was far away, and from this place Larry went forward. “Do you know Wade said he bit you, your breast? Has he?” When Larry said the last, his voice broke, and the lump asserted itself as a clear anchor wanting him. Anybody who looks at me
,
he thought, will know what I am saying
.
Wendy was in his face now, her expression stern and ready, as if challenging him to say more. Now they had stopped dancing. “Don't let him,” Larry whispered to her. Saying that winded him, left him nothing, and he was sure he was going to drop Wendy, who looked at him with horror and understanding. She shifted so she could put the flat of her hand on his chest, and he felt the lump, the pressure, double. Their eyes were welded.

“I'm sure he didn't say it that way,” she said. Her face was hard. “And you're too late.” And then as an awkward footnote, she again said his name, “Larry,” as if calling roll, and she folded herself against him for the duration of the song. He could feel her four fingertips in the top of his shoulder. They couldn't speak again because the music stopped, and suddenly Wade and Stephanie were before them.

“This wild thing can dance!” Wade said. “She's a bona fide mover.” There was a line of sweat along Wade's hairline, and Stephanie's face shone under the leafy canopy. Larry turned to Wendy one last time before claiming his own date, but he saw she was looking past him at Stephanie, the significant tops of her breasts. “What say we depart these premises?” Wade said. “You guys ready to get some dinner?”

“In a minute,” Larry told Wade. “One more dance with my date. May I call you my date?”

“I am your date,” Stephanie said. “And you can call me that all night long.”

Holding her now and moving away in the shadows calmed Larry. He liked the way she put the corner of her forehead against his cheek, and he held her floating as the music waved through the room. How many times had he danced? Not a dozen. It was a strange activity in which, listening to music and responding to your partner, you moved with no clear destination. He loved it. Larry knew immediately that he would not dance enough in his life.

“Did you go to the junior prom?” he asked Stephanie.

“No. Did you?”

“I didn't. What were we thinking of, missing that?”

“Let's go next year. We'd be alums—they'd give us a discount.”

“Good plan. I'll meet you on the gym steps at seven o'clock.”

He could feel her fingers climb his shoulder as she pulled herself closer to him. After a minute, he said, “Did Wade behave himself?”

“You know he didn't,” she said. “I'm glad I'm your date.” When the music stopped they stood in the loose embrace for a minute until he heard Wade call.

“That's fine, Miss Barnes,” Larry said. “But please, watch out for me. I'm untamed actually. Efforts to tame me have failed—efforts by experts—and your efforts in that regard will fail.”

“Excellent,” she said.

At the door Red Harwood stopped Larry and Stephanie, as they walked by, and put both of his hands on Larry's shoulders, facing him. “Ralston, whoa. Is Elvis leaving the building? You are the man.” Red Harwood was the stalwart tackle on the football team, and he wasn't drunk yet, but he would be in half an hour. Now he took Stephanie's arm and started to say something but then stopped and threw a long glance over her breasts and down the front of her dress. “Stephanie,” he said to her chest, a comic, “I need to have a word with you. I want you to be careful when you squeeze this man, because I know as a stone cold fact that he cracked a rib today under the foot of the barbarian nose guard from the republic of Jackson Hole.” He looked up into her face. “I happened to be on the ground nearby, where I had been rudely thrust by that same giant, and I heard it snap.” Red put his arm carefully around Larry and snuggled against him. Wade and Wendy stood arm in arm, closing this little circle. “So squeeze him like this.” Young Harwood snuggled against Larry's neck. Larry looked at Wendy during this charade, and she looked back at him, their eyes a connection. “Not too hard, see? I missed that tackle today, I did. I missed it. I tried and I failed, and if in your postprom enthusiasm, you jump on him and break it further, well, it will still be all my fault.”

“I'll be careful,” Stephanie said. “Your wisdom is a great help, Red, as always.”

“Cushion it all with some soft part of yourself, if possible,” Red Harwood said, again checking her bosom and raising his eyebrows.

“Thanks, Red,” Larry said, “We're headed out now. Be careful.”

Red stood up straight and took Larry's hand and shook it. “I'm sorry you got hurt, man.”

“Forget it. We beat them. It was a good game.”

“A great game,” Red added. “I'll see you all later.”

In the parking lot of the old high school, Larry got Wendy's door and closed it after her, and then he helped Stephanie up into the backseat of Wade's dual cab truck, and when he stepped in beside her, she grinned and waiting a second before kissing him.

“I want it to just be a habit,” she said against his face. “Tonight it can be our habit.”

“You've got a smile,” he told her.

The windows of the Tropical were steamed up and marbled with murky green light from the neon palm tree above the door; it looked as if the young people were going to enter an aquarium. The bells on the door rang in the little foyer, and behind the screen in the larger room Larry could see tables of kids from the prom sitting around in the little thatched huts, drinking sweet drinks out of ceramic skulls and playing around during the rainstorms. On the way to their table, thunder sounded in echoing layers. Stephanie laughed and took his arm tighter and said, “I love the rain.”

“This goofy place,” Wade said. “When was the last time you were in here?”

“The day we graduated from Overburden Junior.”

It rained every twenty minutes in the Tropical, starting with distant thunder, the calls of birds, and then the first drops gave way to a regular downpour on each of the little cabanas. The rain dripped to one side into the series of connected pools, and a waterfall at one end of the two-tiered room hissed and splattered throughout the evening. Wade and Wendy and Larry and Stephanie sat near the wall mural opposite the fountain. The wall was painted as a Pacific seascape stretching to the golden blue horizon. When the rainstorms ended, the birds began again to chitter, now accompanied by a soft soundtrack of ukuleles. It was a fun place with the overwritten, oversize menus and the waitresses with their leis, but the whole evening Wendy cast sober looks at Larry while everyone else ate the pupu platter and the island teriyaki chicken. Wade poured his whiskey into his skull and offered around a pint of Jim Beam. “None for me,” Larry said. “Not in the tropics. Remember that one guy.”

Wendy laughed. “He went too far.”

“That was the general opinion of Miss Argyle's class.”

“Where are you going to college?” Stephanie asked Larry.

Wade said, “He's going down to Laramie with me—roommates. It is going to be a blast.”

Larry felt the first part of his life end. It was a slow-motion moment. He'd never seen Wade in a tie before, and he didn't recognize him, and Wendy's face was shining. The word
blast
had made him angry; there was something stupid about it, and he felt stupid, and he knew whatever he said next would be crosswise. “We'll see,” Larry said. “I've been such a good boy, as you can all attest, every day of my fucking life . . .”

“Larry,” Wendy said.

“It's okay,” Larry said. “I've been saving up. I've got a shitload of foul language to accompany the wild life ahead. I am going off the tracks big time. If you look for Larry in the good-boy line, you'll be disappointed.” He leaned and poked the table softly with his finger. “Fucking disappointed.”

Stephanie laughed and took his arm. “Good, you savage. You untamed savage.” Her head collapsed against his shoulder, and she laughed and whispered, “Good-boy line.”

“Oh, you're headed for prison all right, sunshine,” Wendy said.

“Don't call me that unless you mean it.”

Two waitresses appeared with four large and two small platters of kung pao chicken and kung pao beef and ham fried rice and kung pao shrimp and white rice and chicken curry and wontons and an orange bowl of sweet-and-sour chicken. Chopsticks were distributed, and the table was bumper to bumper as the young people filled their plates. The plates steamed in the rainy room, and they ate for a while.

Larry leaned and pointed at Wade. “A blast. I don't know. Wade's already got a scholarship at every two-year school in the state and a few in Idaho. He's got some choosing to do.”

Stephanie leaned away from Larry, squinting. “You should be a teacher.”

“Right,” Wade said. “You could be Mr. Peck and give a ridiculous quiz every day.” He held his ceramic skull in front of his mouth with both hands, sipping. “I think it's time to get out of school and into the real world.”

“This is the real world, Wade,” Larry said. “Look at the four of us. It could be thirty years from now.”

“Wow,” Stephanie said.

“No, it couldn't,” Wade said. “High school is not the real world.”

“This will be revealed to us,” Wendy said.

Wade looked at her. He said, “Whatever. I'm going into business. You get the money, then you can do whatever else you want.”

“What kind of business?” Stephanie said

“I don't know. What you got?” He laughed. “I think I'd like to buy some property. How hard could it be? You've seen some of the guys who run Oakpine?”

Larry felt Stephanie's leg shift against his leg, the warmth. “Are you going to study science?” Wendy asked Stephanie. “Is it medicine?”

“I think so. I'd like to do research.”

Larry offered everyone the dish of hot mustard. “You were in Denver last summer at the hospital?” Larry said.

“Yeah.” She turned to him now, closer, and put her arm along the back of his chair. “It was an internship, and I was in a lab where they were working on different kinds of diabetes. I liked it very much.” She held on to Larry's forearm while they picked at the platters of sweet-and-sour chicken and wontons with chopsticks.

“Did you experiment on rats?”

“They have white mice in the lab, but I didn't work with them.”

“You'd look good in a lab coat, doctor,” Wade said. He downed his drink. He poured another lick into the cup and put his arm around Wendy's chair. “And we're going to be in business and then travel.”

“I'll take some of that,” Larry said.

“Good man,” Wade said, handing him the bottle along the side of their crowded table. Larry took it and put it in his pocket. “Hey,” Wade said.

“Where will you two travel?” Larry said, defending himself with his chopsticks.

“Give me the fucking bottle,” Wade said to Larry.

“To the islands,” Wendy said. She said it in such a way that Wade leaned back and looked at her. She pointed to one of the islands on the painted mural. “The one behind that one.”

“What's its name?”

“I'm not going to tell you,” Wendy said. “That's what happened to Pago Pago.”

Stephanie laughed.

Wade said, “Hawaii'd be nice. They don't scrape ice off their windshields night and day all winter.”

Larry felt his lungs fill with air, and he knew he was going to say something. “I have unlimited affection for the ice on my windshield, you halfback. I'm not going to have you saying anything about it. Do you even know what it is and where it comes from and what it means, you—”

“Islander,” Stephanie said. She was grinning.

“Plus, they have ice in Hawaii and an ice festival.” As Larry said this, he knew he was going to fight Wade; this whole year had been too much. Knowing he was going to fight made him terribly, urgently happy.

Wendy smiled and shook her head. “You guys.” She lifted her eyes to Larry's. “Don't spoil Wade's dream.”

“Are you drunk?” Wade said.

“Wade”—Larry lifted his hand open over the table to stop traffic—“what do you suppose Wendy is going to study in college, should she decide to go?”