Return to Oakpine (7 page)

•   •   •

Saturday morning Larry Ralston delivered a television, a little Sony with a remote that Craig had pulled off a shelf in Ralston Hardware and offered Mrs. Brand as a loaner. Jimmy was reading in the old upholstered wing chair in the small space when Larry knocked.

“You must be the guy that ordered a television,” Larry said, backing through the small door with the appliance.

Jimmy watched the boy cut a distended silhouette in the rectangle of daylight, and the sudden sight shocked him, and he took a breath and decided to say what he saw, even the gambit of a joke: “It is without a doubt Craig Ralston Junior bringing it in.”

Larry footed the gray milk crate around and placed the set on it. “Oh, please don't say that. I can't look like my father.”

“Twins. You are twins.” Jimmy put his book on the bed. “Thirty years between models. Haven't you ever seen the photographs? And I've heard your football exploits celebrated by an expert. I think, that rainy day, I might have seen you play. This was at some distance.”

The door opened again, and another figure cut the light. A young woman stood there with a long cardboard box and an extension cord. “Hello!” she said, then quickly taking in the oddly bright room, she added, “This looks great.”

Larry went to Jimmy in his chair and introduced himself and turned to the girl. “This is Wendy.”

“Hi,” she said. “Where do you want this?”

They spent ten minutes arranging things, adjusting the television, fooling with the rabbit-ear antenna, the girl sitting on the bed while Larry turned the ears, trying to get the PBS cooking show to come in clearly. The chef was making a clam sauce. Jimmy smiled at the two young people. He hadn't been lonely, but their association affected him, filled the room. They talked and moved in a way that told him unmistakably that they were falling in love, destined to, an orbit of innocents, but neither knew it yet. The garage was too small a space not to reveal all the unspoken things between them. It was a heady dance they did, and he smiled and smiled, saying, “Not to worry. I'm not going to be doing any cooking.”

Wendy pointed at the screen from the bed: “You almost had it. Go back.” Larry was on his knees in the corner.

“Is that static, or is he frying bacon?” Larry said.

“Both,” Jimmy said. “And both is perfect.”

Larry came around, and they all watched the chef bend and pull half a squash from his oven on a tray. He raised his fork, waving it once, and grinned at the camera. Then he raked the squash into spaghetti strands.

“Spaghetti squash with clam sauce,” Wendy said. “We could do that.”

“Looks good,” Jimmy said.

“So are you Mr. Ralston's friend from New York?” the girl asked.

“I'm Mr. Ralston's friend from Oakpine. But I lived in New York for a long time.”

“You're the writer.” she said.

“I was,” he said. “I wrote some books, reviews of plays.”

He could feel her now looking at him. “It's pretty weird that you're out in the garage,” she said.

Larry had opened the long box and was carefully assembling the tubular electric radiator. “Dad said this will heat the whole place,” he said. He lifted the unit and secured it on a wheeled frame and plugged it in and rolled it over beside the wide garage door. “It heats the oil,” Larry said. “There's no fire danger.”

“We're not afraid of fire,” Jimmy said.

Larry sat down on the bed beside Wendy. She had been looking at Jimmy again for a moment, and now he watched her lean forward and touch his knee, pat it with two fingers.

“Are you afraid?” Wendy said. She and Larry sat still, their faces without irony. Such young faces; they were at the edge of their lives. It was okay to envy the young. You knew all about them and you knew all about what was to come, and it was all right to envy them anyway.

“This is an unusual girl,” Jimmy said to Larry. “Isn't she?”

Larry's face lifted at the setup. “She is an unusual girl. She'll say anything. It's all over this town about her unusual qualities.”

“Yes, Wendy,” he said. “I am afraid.”

He saw Larry take her hand, and by her reaction Jimmy knew it was one of the first times such a thing had occurred. The sunlight came through the one window like a bright joke, and it fell across their shoulders. “Well,” Larry said, standing. “Do you need anything else?”

It was so wonderful to talk about things to do. Jimmy had known it all his life and seen it keep things afloat a thousand times. It didn't move things forward, but it kept you from crashing. He could see Craig Ralston in Larry now, the tall young man standing there, his hands ready for the next thing.

“There's one thing.” He leaned back. “I think there's something up there”—he pointed—“in the rafters that I'd like to get down.” They all looked up through the translucent plastic into the dark space. “I may be hallucinating—no, I have been hallucinating—but besides that, I think I see my old case, a guitar.”

Wendy scooted farther onto the bed and lay back. “I see it,” she said, pointing. Larry lay back beside her. “Oh yeah.” Jimmy looked at the two reclined figures. These kids were just the ticket. If he could keep them here, he'd last all year.

“Could we get it,” Jimmy said, “without tearing up all this work? If it's too much trouble, let it go.”

Larry retrieved the ladder from behind the garage and leaned it against one wall and began tenderly to pull the stapled plastic away.

“What did you write about?” Wendy asked.

“I wrote a book about being seventeen in Oakpine,” he said. “About my life in the city. About someone I loved.” They watched Larry lean onto a rafter and reach for the neck of the guitar case. “Be careful,” Jimmy said.

The black case, printed with a grid of dirt, appeared through the plastic, and then Larry slowly slipped it down through the opening and handed it to Wendy. “Wow,” she said, “what is it?” Larry stepped down and took the dusty case outside and batted it with a rag and then laid it on the grass and wiped it off. He returned and placed the case across the arms of the chair and opened it. He lifted the red and white electric guitar from the blue velvet and laid it in Jimmy's lap, and Jimmy felt the hard plastic shell on his bones. It hurt. He couldn't even hold a guitar.

Larry said, “It's a Fender Stratocaster.”

“Like its owner, this is an absolute antique.” He was wiping at the dust with his handkerchief. He would ignore this pain. The strings were sprung, only one still in place. Larry took the ladder out and returned, saying, “We'll come back and restaple that plastic this afternoon.” He saw Jimmy with the guitar.

“You guys actually had a band.”

“For seven months some years ago, that is, for seven months several decades ago, we were
the
band in Oakpine.”

Larry turned to Wendy: “I might as well tell you: my father was in a band.”

“So cool,” Wendy said. “What did he play?”

“Craig Ralston was the best drummer in Wyoming,” Jimmy said. The ache in his legs had simply taken all his strength, and he sat very still.

“No way,” Larry said. “This is science fiction.” He opened the door for Wendy.

“Hey,” Jimmy said, “thanks for all the gear.” He was empty now. His leg was afire; the ache along his backbone was warm, and he could feel a pressure in his head. They all said goodbye, and then he added, “Wendy, there's a book of mine out back by the garden in the grass. You can take it if you'd like.”

She disappeared for a moment and then came back with the book, looking surprised. “Thanks,” she said. “I'll read it.” And then she asked, “What was the name of your band?”

Jimmy felt pinned in the chair by the guitar, so heavy was it now. “Life on Earth,” he said. “That was our final name.” When they left, he couldn't get up. The guitar was like a bar holding him, and the pain beat in his legs and then crescendoed as he went into the kind of delirium he hated. His mind slipped and slipped again, the sensation was of sliding down a dark vortex, trying to stop, but unable to form a sentence or an image, grab hold, he just descended. There was no rest in it, a thousand spinning defeats, a terror.

Sometime later in the early dark, his mother came out and lifted the guitar from him, and he felt it in his tattered dreaming as a blow. He was then sick, and she helped him into the bathroom and then to bed. He couldn't eat the meatloaf, but even later, at nine or ten, she came back, and he had a bowl of applesauce while they watched a situation comedy on the television with the sound turned off.

•   •   •

The next morning, Sunday, Mason Kirby stood in front of his house again and shook hands with his old friend Craig Ralston. The Ralston Hardware van had been parked in front when Mason pulled up. He'd left Denver just before five and had felt charged and alive in the dawning day as he drove. He still had the backseat full of clothes and a ragtag box of whatever tools he could gather in the trunk of the Mercedes; some were his father's and he hadn't had them in his hands for twenty years. What he felt was young and old at the same time. Being up before dawn in the fall of the year like this meant he was going hunting with his father, coffee from a thermos, apples. But leaving Denver meant shifting clients, nothing life or death, but this was different. He remembered his father, who worked tech maintenance for Chevron in the fields, saying, as he'd arrive home at night, “The way the workday ends is that you leave. If you don't leave and go home, one thing will lead to another all night.” Driving through the beautiful mesas in the strange first light as he crossed into Wyoming, Mason knew that was what he was after: a change, an end, some new chapter in this old life. He'd start with a month of work on an old house. He wasn't lost now. This was not an inquiry; this was a serious trip.

“The attorney comes to Oakpine,” Craig said smiling. “Good to see you.”

Mason took the other man's shoulder. “I need a little help here.” They walked around the place and pulled open the garage. They forced the back door open and found the house full of bad news. The basement was dank with garbage. The old floors on the main floor were ruined, as was the ceiling, which was boiled up and peeling. The tub was cracked, and one toilet was shattered. There were two motorcycle wheels on the window seat of the bay window, and the rest of the motorcycle was in the kitchen. The fridge was gone, and a layer of gray furze covered everything. While Craig climbed his ladder to look into the attic space, Mason wandered the rooms. He could still see, of course, where the piano had been and his mother's plants and his father's chair. He went out on the front porch and sat on the ledge. It was a good house. The door sills were solid, and the wood trim inside, the mantel and ornate ceiling moldings, were restorable walnut.

Craig opened the large front door. The vintage diamond-shaped, beveled-glass courtesy window in the center was chipped, but the thick oak classic closed precisely and latched with a sound Mason remembered from his boyhood. “You're fine above the ceiling,” Craig said. “The rafters are all solid, and there is no water damage, though you can see the sky in a couple places. You want to start with the roof?”

“You?”

“We want to beat the weather.” Craig was happy to be starting this. “Let's get the roof,” he said. That afternoon a truck delivered a huge blue dumpster bin, setting it alongside the house in the driveway, and they began.

•   •   •

Two weeks later Mason and Craig sat on the exposed planking of the roof of the old house in the benevolent October sun. The old boards were deep brown as if burned by their age. The men sat on the angled surface with their knees up. They'd torn off all the old shingles and tar paper along with two or three of the one-by-eight planks. The rusted rain gutter had fallen off voluntarily. Mason had gouged his left palm on a broken nail, and so he'd been to the clinic and now wore a padded bandage on that hand under his work gloves.

On the roof, his hand ached in a way that was all right. He'd hurt it; it would get better. The two high school boys Larry and Wade had joined Mason in cleaning the house, and they had emptied most of the debris from the interior and had shoveled trash and swept. Below the men now, the dumpster seemed a marker of some kind of accomplishment, almost full.

Craig had a thermos of coffee, and he poured two cups. They had their gear—lunches and jackets and extra tools—stored on a plank they'd tacked level near the roof peak. It had been better work than Mason had imagined, the teardown, removing the old shingles shelf by shelf, brittle things that had been facing the steady plains weather forty years, and they came off easily, almost neatly, nails and all, as if ready to quit. Mason was surprised not to be in worse shape. He regretted the hand because there were nails everywhere, and he'd been methodical, he thought, but he hadn't seen the stub protruding from the planking. He immediately lifted the torn palm as the blood welled up, and as it did and he looked for a place to wipe it, finally settling on his trouser leg, he realized he hadn't bled since he was here last, not even a good paper cut. There was something perverse in the way he watched it bleed as he thought: I'm going to get some good out of these hands yet
.

He made a fist on a wadding of paper towel and drove over to Oakpine Clinic. The young medic had him sit on the papered examination table, and he scrubbed out the gouged flesh so they could decide on stitches or not, and suddenly Mason found his hand in the hands of a woman, her red hair curling in wisps at the corners of her forehead, and he almost started to see his old friend Kathleen Gunderson, and his second take was without question a flush of embarrassment as he waited while she examined his naked lawyer's hand.

“It's true,” she said. “Here you are. What'd you do to yourself?”