Return to Oakpine (3 page)

Carol Terry, who was almost his age, called out, “We've never seen that boat before. I didn't even know you had a boat, Edgar.”

The little crowd dispersed slowly, some of them, while the kids hung around to watch Craig work, the way they'd been watching the changes all month. Mr. Brand came out across to the boat and put his hand on the bow.

“Sure is pretty,” Craig said.

Mr. Brand looked at him.

There are a thousand things, a thousand stories, and their parts that never get said,
Craig thought, looking at the old man.
It's just a boat and just a garage, but they've choked him all this time. I'm no better. Words don't weigh an ounce, and I can't haul them.
“We'll cover her right and tight,” Craig said to the older man, who without a nod or a word went back into his house.

•   •   •

While Larry stapled insulation in the plank walls of the old garage, Craig refitted the little bathroom that Mr. Brand had installed so long ago. Sweating in the early September days, the two worked without speaking. At quarter to five every day, Larry set his tools in a milk crate, folded his tool belt on top, and drove off to football practice. His forearms were dusted with chalk from the sheetrock. Craig stayed on an hour and prepared for the next day, making a materials list. He stood at the little sink, the porcelain bowl crazed with the web of faint cracks from all the winters. He'd seal it, but he didn't have stand-alone hot and cold faucets of this type at the hardware store; he'd have to take them apart and fit them with new gaskets. He turned each, and the water bubbled and then ran clear, but they both leaked from under their silver letters: H and C.

These were funny days for Craig, which was his word,
funny
, because he felt something working in him, something that had been sparked by being back in the old neighborhood, the light through the mammoth cottonwoods and poplars on Berry Street, the smell of the Brands' garage, the turning year. He'd been ten or twelve years old when the structure was erected in a weekend, and he could still remember hearing the old gas-driven cement mixer churning, and watching the way the men shoveled and troweled the heavy wet concrete into the waiting floor forms. His initials were in some corner under a wall brace. The event had the feeling of picnic; there must have been coolers with beer. Craig remembered the bright wood of the framed walls lying on the ground and then being lifted by groups of neighbors, helping Mr. Brand. The yellow two-by-fours were swung up to vertical and nailed at the corners, and then the building stood where no building had been. When he thought of Jimmy Brand coming home, it seemed just strange, like a visit from a lost world. They'd been friends, close friends, a million years ago. The last time he'd seen Jimmy Brand was at the party at the reservoir two days after graduation.

Marci was surprised to hear of the prodigal's return. “He's a writer, I thought,” she said. “What's he coming back to Oakpine for?” Marci had dated Jimmy in high school, had been his last girlfriend. “Stewart has shown me clippings at the museum from the book review. It'll be good to see him.”

“He's sick,” Craig told her. “His mother told me he's sick.”

Marci came out of the bedroom carrying her short maroon coat and her shoes and her purse. She sat at the kitchen table by her half cup of coffee and pulled on her shiny pumps with a finger. She looked smart. When Larry started high school three years before, she'd gone back to work, having acquired a job she loved as administrative assistant at the museum. Stewart Posner had done everything he could to change it from frontier culture, as he called it, into a real museum. What he liked to do, everyone knew, was shock the town at least once a year. He was the only guy in Oakpine besides all the Popes, who ran the mortuary, who wore a tie everywhere he went. Even the rodeo.

Marci looked good. She shopped through the catalogs and had a quiet taste. Her dark brown hair was parted to one side and fell to her shoulders. She looked just like she had in high school, to Craig. She'd been class historian and wore the Executive Board sweater and a kilt once a week and looked absolutely put together. They had married the year after graduation, and then Craig had gone to Vietnam while she stayed in Oakpine and interned and taught social studies and geography at the junior high. When he returned, he found Oakpine “all changed,” that is, all his buddies were gone, and so he and Marci went to Clearwater, Florida, where a guy he'd met in the army ran a huge orange orchard, and Craig worked there “doing everything,” which meant all the building and vehicle maintenance, while Marci tried to “do Florida” and grew homesick. When people go to Florida, the summer is hot and wet, but the fall is hard on them because their bodies wait to feel the change that never quite comes. Marci missed the changing leaves and walking in them, but she also missed the mornings with the furnace on and wearing sweaters even to the store, and the roadside stands of squash and pumpkins, and the rainy afternoons, and the twelve shades of gray a sky could go against Oakpine Mountain. Plus Marci didn't really care for the beach, and both times she went out in a boat more than a quarter mile, she became seasick. They gave Florida almost four years.

Craig wanted to get a job with the railroad or Chevron, where he could work, fix things, and not sell parts and tools to people, but there were slim pickings, and he went into the store with his dad and that was that. He put on some weight and became used to it all, especially after he started to make a little money. Marci wanted a house in Oakpine Heights, and so the job made sense. By the time they'd moved in, Craig was a hardware salesman. They waited to have a child even longer while she finished her degree, commuting to Laramie, which took two extra years.

It had been a life. Hunting and football in the fall. The store. Christmas with Marci's parents there in town, now that his were gone. Spring cleanup and sales at the store. Fishing. The years. He hadn't felt old, ever, except for twice. When they came back from Clearwater and he started at the store, but he got over that. And now he felt it again upon hearing Jimmy Brand's name, that he was coming back to Oakpine.

“We've all changed too much,” Marci said. “All the stuff we knew, those times are long dead twice . . .”

“Thirty years,” Craig said, not believing it. There was no way to believe it. “It will be amazing to see him,” he said, drinking his coffee. His white nylon jacket had his name on a patch, and his white shirt underneath also said
CRAIG
. He'd work in the store until noon today and then go prep to paint the inside of the Brands' little garage guest room.

“We'll have to have a dinner for this bona fide reunion.” She stood and saw the look on her husband's face. “Listen, don't brood over your remodeling project for Mrs. Brand. It's going to be okay. I can't fathom what the Brands are doing making him stay in that garage. I'm going to run. I'll see you later.”

Craig sat for just a minute looking out at the village of Oakpine spread below him and, beyond that, the sienna steps of greater Wyoming layered to the west. Marci got in her blue Saab and drove through the scrub oak along their gravel drive and disappeared. This was the good life, and Craig was happy. He thought it again more slowly:
This is the good life, and I am happy.

The garage project for Mrs. Brand was the best work he'd had since the back deck on his house. Before that it was sheds; he always tried to go with one of the guys when they built the little storage sheds that he sold as kits out of the store, but those only came up four or five times a year, most of them prebuilt and hauled away. He had the front double doors of the hardware store propped open every morning as the noonday warmed, and he helped customers and made keys, and in his head he planned the afternoon's work at the Brands' garage.

Larry worked in the store all day in the summers, and he made his disdain for such work very clear. This was his third year of cleaning the storeroom, repainting the rest room, dusting and washing some of the fixtures, weeding the alley behind the building, running errands, and making deliveries. Deliveries were his favorite, and he stretched them, swinging by to see his buddy Wade at his house to lift weights or drink a soda while the Ralston Hardware van sat out on the street. Craig knew all about it, and he knew that Larry thought working in a hardware store was beneath him, beneath everybody. Anybody with any dignity got out of Oakpine. Wade, who was the football coach's son, was going to play football at some college next fall, probably Laramie. Larry had no idea where he was going, but he was going, that was for sure.

At three, he joined his father at the Brands. Craig finished taping the drywall, and Larry came behind him with his sandpaper blocks. The garage door was lifted open in the late summer afternoon, and their sandpaper dust floated golden in the light. “What's she going to do about the door?” Larry said.

“We'll staple it with our heavy plastic sheeting,” Craig told him. “It won't be perfect, but the seal will keep the cold out. They're going to want to use this garage again.”

“After your buddy dies?”

“That's what we'll do with the ceiling too,” Craig said, pointing above them, where there were still a lot of boxes stored on planks on the bare rafters. “We'll do that tomorrow and then paint. Remind me to bring some solvent for this floor.” Under all the sawdust there were oil stains in the old cement. The two stepped out into the sunlight, and Larry slapped at his pant legs, freeing clouds of chalk dust.

“When I come home years from now with all my problems,” he said, “are you going to stuff me in the garage?”

“Are you coming home?”

“Should I wait for an invitation?”

Before Craig could answer, Wade pulled up in his black Nissan pickup, turning into the narrow driveway. It was a beautiful vehicle, and they could see Wendy, his girlfriend, in the passenger side.

“A new truck,” Craig said.

“I don't need a truck, Dad,” Larry said. “I'll see you later.” He got in, and the three kids were gone to football practice. Craig remembered the summer workouts, running twice a day on the rough practice field behind the school. He'd never liked to run, but he'd never quit, and he remembered sitting on their truck tailgates after practice drinking well water from glass gallon jugs and smelling of cut grass. He could see it vividly, and the feeling he'd had climbed up his chest like some heavy thing in the great afternoon shadows: they could run for two hours; they could run until the sun quit and the dark came up. They would live forever.

He was losing the light, but he lifted the box of floor tiles and turned to see a gray Mercedes drive by on Berry Street slowly, and Craig recognized the driver: Mason Kirby. Craig walked out to the front of the house and saw the big car drift slowly three houses down and stop in front of the old Kirby place. He waited, but the man did not get out of the car. Craig took the box and went back to work.

Craig got onto his hands and knees and laid adhesive tile squares on the floor of the tiny bathroom, cutting and fitting the pieces expertly. They were a speckled tan, and he looked into them a thousand miles. Alone like this, working carefully, Craig felt good. It was late in the day, and Mason would certainly stay a day or two. He had probably come up to sell the place. For some reason he remembered an afternoon standing with Jimmy in the Brands' backyard, plucking the last garden tomatoes and throwing them at Frank and Mason up at his place, laughing and dodging the incoming.
Memory,
he thought,
what is that good for? I'm fifty years old, and I'm on my knees in the Brands' garage, and I don't have anyplace better to be.
“Oh my hell,” he said aloud, and heard the words. “You're lonely.”
I'll put in a garden box with two-by-twelves,
he thought.
We've got the space. Marci won't want to, but I can grow some tomatoes, even if the deer eat them.
He took his time, and when he set in the last corner, it was almost dark, and the small piece of tile fit like a jewel, and he pressed it there with his hand and with the handle of his hammer until the seam disappeared.

Home

Mason Kirby had never been lost in his life, not even as a kid out of Oakpine in the real wilderness on backpacking trips or the like. Nor had he been lost in Europe, or in London, or in Alaska on a fishing trip, which was only business, or even drunk in college, or on one trip to South America, Caracas; and on that trip he became the go-to guy when it was time to find the small van that took the elite tour group around.

And now he pulled his plum Mercedes off the two-lane onto the gravel shoulder, and in the bland midday cloud cover and on the dry grass plain, he didn't know the number of the route or if he was still going north or northeast or east. He could see in all four directions the flat grassy earth. He was lost. He stood out of the car and noted that there were small weeds able to work through the cracks in the old road. He'd been driving for four hours, which meant he was either in Nebraska or about to come right back to Denver. He went back and opened the trunk just to see again the tangible evidence of his decision. His clothes were laid in a fan on one side, and he smiled to see he'd brought his suit. Maybe he'd have a job interview. His beautiful leather Dopp kit, the gift from Elizabeth six, seven years ago, his valise, swollen with the papers concerning the pending sale of his firm, and the black shoe box, which he now lifted and opened to see the $21,000 stacked there. A shoe box. It was such a raw maneuver, bringing that cash. He didn't need it, and in fact every time he'd had two or three thousand dollars cash in his wallet or in the console of his car, Elizabeth had said, What good thing can come of that? But he knew he'd gone to the bank and obtained all the hundreds in the zippered bag, not a tenth of what was in his account, so he'd have proof of his decision. Sell the firm, take a break, go. A shoe box; it was such a joke. He was so dramatic.

Again he scanned the horizon, not a hill, no smoke, not a clue. The sky was a seamless gray. He could turn on the GPS and know in a minute, but he hadn't turned it on after the first week with this car. The woman giving directions spoke French. That was okay, but he disliked the world jumping at him that way:
line line line, turn right, line line
. Plus, he had never been lost, and now he knew he was, and he felt it in the top of his stomach, the way a kid would. He felt the gravity of Denver pale and fade, and yet there was no pull from anything else. He'd never been between things; maybe that was it.

He stood and felt the realtor's letter in his sport coat pocket. Shirley Stiver, same class at the high school. His old house was in fact empty, the renters fled, and what to do? He could call her back from right here right now, assuming there was a satellite also lost above this place, and have it handled with four sentences, but no. He was lost, but he knew where he was going.

He thought of his BlackBerry but didn't check it, because he knew not to. He'd learned well as a lawyer to leave it until it beckoned. He looked at the thing twice a day on principle: first and last. He'd made sure it was off and thrown it into the trunk. Done.

Back on the road, still lost, he thought that like everything else in his life, this would last ten minutes. But an hour later the terrain had shifted to shallow hills run with sage, and dropping down a short incline, he came into the hamlet of Garrell, the two churches, the auto parts, the Grocery Basket, the old Rexall drug store, and the Bargain Barn, which had been in a former day a department or furniture store, and at the far end of town two bars, the Wasatch and the Divide, which didn't have a window in the front, even in the old painted red plank door. The two other license plates in the gravel parking were from Kansas. He hadn't had a drink in the afternoon for ten years, but now he was dislocated, feeling more like a blank page than he could ever remember.

“A man walks into a bar,” he said, pulling the door open. “No,” he said. “A lawyer walks into a bar.” The bartender was sorting a rack of thick glasses, nesting them in rows behind bar, and he glanced over as Mason entered, looking for the person he was talking to.

“Just me,” Mason said.

There was one other person in the place, an older man whose hair had been printed by the circle of a cap, but there was no cap on the bar. He was dressed in a blue oxford cloth shirt and khakis, and he watched Mason step up and sit two stools down at the bar.

“A dumb fat lawyer walks into a bar.”

“What's that?” the bartender said. He was forty and thin-haired and pale. He was the owner. Mason could tell by the way he'd handled the glasses.

“Just a draft of Fat Tire,” Mason said. “And a shot of whatever whiskey goes with it.”

“They've all learned to go with it,” the barman said.

“Any then.” Mason turned to the other patron. “You want any Any?” he asked. “I'm buying.”

“I don't know,” the man said.

“Oh-oh,” Mason said feeling suddenly like arguing. He'd been floating all day since he'd dropped off the keys to his loft with Allison at the office, and now he wanted to argue. “A truth teller.”

“Yeah, pour me one, Gene,” the man said.

“How long have you had the place?” Mason asked Gene.

“What's your guess?”

“I guess one year. The place is polished up, no dust on the shoulders of the bottles, even the old blue brandies, and optimism is in the air.”

The man sitting at the bar turned, “And you're a realtor or a professor.”

“I was a lawyer,” Mason said.

“I won't ask,” the man said. When Mason held his glance, the man said, “I manage the little satellite TV store in Farview.”

“That's hardly bar-fight material,” Mason said.

“Did you come in to fight?” Gene said. “Is that why you wore the sport coat?”

“I don't know. I don't know how I started the day. But since we're talking, I think I came in here to get hit.”

The television representative shook his head. “You deserve to be hit?”

“Certainly,” Mason said. “Should I provoke you?”

“Oh, I'm provoked,”

“Gene, your new bar is a powder keg.”

“We haven't had a fight in here since I bought the place.”

“People don't fight anymore,” the man down the bar said. “They swear and they shoot each other later, but they won't fight. It's too genuine.”

Mason tossed back his whiskey. He lifted his beer. “You want to hit me?” he said to the man.

“Let me just say it,” the man said. “I wouldn't know how. I'd hurt myself, and I'm not provoked enough to want that.”

Mason put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and said, “Let's have another. Gene, can I buy you a drink?”

“Then you ask me to hit you? No thanks.”

“No hitting,” Mason said. “I can't remember the last time I made a fist. Is that good news or bad?”

Gene set the beer bottles out and poured the Jack Daniel's.

“Where you from?” Gene asked Mason.

“Denver. I'm out for a drive.”

“Yes, you are.”

Mason took in the room now that his eyes had adjusted, and he noted the four mismatched pool tables and the old red banquettes along the wall, and above each, high in the cinder-block wall, were windows made of six glass bricks. Those windows and the girder ceiling made Mason turn back to the barman.

“Is this the old Annex? Was it called the Annex?”

“It was called the Emporium and built by Wallace Debans when he came back from the war, and he sold furniture to all the ranchers out of this building, including washers and dryers, and as he used to say, the washer and dryer won the West. By that he meant that they had made this windy place habitable for women, and I think he also meant that he sold thousands of them and was able to retire. He's still alive and lives in Brook. Do you know where that is?”

“And then it was the café, the Annex, right?”

“You've been in here before.”

“I was in this building thirty years ago on a night when we were coming back from a football game in Chadron, and our team ate at two long tables that were set along the wall there and there. I played junior varsity one year. I think this was a big chicken restaurant.”

“The Annex was famous for chicken. Sundays were crazy. People would drive, sometimes from Denver, to have the deep-fried chicken.”

“What town was it?” the man down the bar asked Mason.

“Oakpine. I grew up there.”

“I've got an aunt in Oakpine,” the man said. “Or used to.”

“Where is it?” Mason said. “From here.”

“Two hours and some. North on twenty-one until you cross the state line, and then you'll see the signs.”

The owner, Gene, leaned on the back bar and folded his arms. “You going home?” he asked Mason.

Mason looked at the man. “I am now,” he said. His voice had a shadow in it, and the barman looked at him seriously.

“What's the matter with you?” he said.

Immediately something rose in Mason to deflect this inquiry, and he had nothing ready in a second, the nothing he'd used like a windshield all his life, but the question touched the quick, and he knew his face had registered its canny accuracy, and he had another thought rise up:
Why hide it? Wherever you are, it's there too.

“Five things or six,” Mason said. “But the real thing is that I am simply over with the one life, I guess. I thought I wanted it, but what? Not really.” He had to whisper the last.

All three men were still in the big room. And the silence ran along until the cooler motor shuddered on and the silence ran under that, and then Mason said quietly, “Do not say anything. I regret my remarks. It's okay.”

The silence bore on almost another minute, and then the man down the bar said, “I'm sorry, man.”

Mason used the blow to lift and drink his whiskey. “I'm not a drinker. And I'm not a fighter. I'm a lawyer who until ten minutes ago was lost in the West.” And he knew that until ten minutes ago he was another man choking on his sublime unhappiness. The mathematics of everything had grown murky and was now impossible.

“You got any coffee?” Mason asked Gene.

“Let's make some fresh coffee right now,” the barman said.

•   •   •

Three hours later, driving in the late summer twilight, Mason could sense a fence along the old highway, a fence he knew, and then the ruined tower of the abandoned wooden water tank along the railroad tracks off to the right, so old now it wasn't even photographed anymore, an artifact he knew from fishing trips with his father when he was five and six; it told him when they were almost out of town. Now the prairie still glowed, and he could see the empty shacks popping up on each side of the highway, places so desolate it would be hard to last a season in any, and the creatures who had lived there had been gone longer than Mason, and then the failed equipment yards, the broken fences and derelict vehicles and trailers, welcome home, and the lights now ahead of his hometown twinkling feebly as if unsure they would last the night.

Finally the road turned, and he rose over the railway on the one overpass and came into the west side of town, fitting into Mason's memory like a key he didn't want. Suddenly a figure flashed across his headlights, a tall boy running across the corner lot like a ghost, some lost soul running where no one rightly ran, but purposeful those strides, and now gone. Mason rubbed his eyes. Did he really see that? He closed his eyes, and the figure was printed there, a white runner. Well, and there in the rubble lot at the edge of his old hometown was the old burned husk of the Trail's End Motel, the nine units having been burned in 1985 or so by the first of the meth squatters, a charred skeleton lying under the crazy sign of the covered wagon and the feathered arrow. In the dark it came at him hard. He and Jimmy Brand had stayed there two nights thirty years ago, Jimmy hiding and about to flee. When Jimmy was finally on the bus, Mason went back and paid the bill to Mrs. Durfey, and he remembered it was some sixty-eight dollars. It was Mason who had taken Jimmy's handwritten letter in the motel envelope to Mrs. Brand. Beyond her and perhaps her husband, no one else knew where Jimmy was, and Mason didn't tell them. Now, in the Wyoming night, he drove past the old high school and took a room at the Best Western, in what had been an alfalfa field when he was a boy.

•   •   •

In the late twilight Craig Ralston pulled the little side door of the garage carefully closed and saw his reflection in the new glass. He wiped the window ledge again. The place would smell like paint for two days. After storing his tools in the steel box in the bed of his pickup, he went around and sat in the cab, one leg on the ground. He breathed on purpose and was glad for it. Up Berry Street as far as he could see, shadows webbed and traded on the patched roadway. It was like fatigue, but he wasn't tired. He climbed in and started the vehicle and drove back toward the store, but at Main Street he turned there for the tracks and dropped two blocks to park in front of the Antlers. He knew this town by memory, by heart, through every incarnation the storefronts had had for forty years. Frank Gunderson owned the Antlers, had for years, and five other three-story red block buildings down here. Craig was still wearing his Ralston's Hardware shirt, which was run with shorelines of dirt and sweat and full of chalk powder. It was the middle of September, and he had finished with the Brands' garage an hour before, rolling the bay floor with a coat of barn red, scraping and washing the paned window in the door, and then freeing up the doorknob. He'd had to disassemble and sand it before spraying the sleeve with lubricant. Tomorrow Larry and his friend Wade were going over to help Mrs. Brand move the bed and some other furniture into the room. When Craig had gotten the ancient doorknob to function, oiling it and then resetting the screws so that it registered fully closed, he stood there looking in, and he felt something, again funny, weird. He wasn't used to having the end of the day work in him in any way, and now he felt heavy, sad, and excited. He was proud of what they had done, but it was more. He hadn't been to the Antlers all summer, but here he was. It was just dark.