Return to Oakpine (8 page)

“I became a lawyer,” he said. “Can you do anything for me?” He was going to go on, say something about it, some small joke at the expense of his soft city hands, but she freed his hand then and folded her arms and smiled and said, “It's your call, Mason. We can put two little stitches in there, or tape will do if you're careful.”

“Hello, Kathleen. I think I'm in a careful phase right now, despite my old house. Let's go with the tape.”

She scrubbed his hand again, which glowed now, and pressed the gauze and tape into place. She gave him several packets of gauze and half a roll of the tape.

“Over on Berry Street?”

“Right,” he said. They walked out into the nurses' station and spoke over the counter while she checked down an instruction sheet for him. “Craig Ralston is over helping me prepare to sell it.”

Kathleen Gunderson now directed the clinic; she'd been a nurse for twenty-five years. They'd seen each other two or three times in the thirty years since the spring of graduation. “Are you having a small moment of déjà vu?” Mason asked.

“I don't think I held your injured hand at any time,” she said.

“Must be the pain,” he said. “I haven't had an injury for twenty years. I'm reassessing what I've been doing with my hands. I type. I unfold napkins.”

“You do good work in the big city,” she said. “And you talk the same bullshit you did in high school.”

“Not exactly the same,” he said.

“No stitches,” she said.

“I'm going to fix that house up. I'm on vacation or something.”

“I'll see you around, Mason. Be careful with your project. You look well,” she said.

“I'm holding up. You look the very same.”

“Did you see Frank?”

“I haven't, but I heard. Are you okay?”

“We've been coming apart for a long while. Everybody's okay.”

“And business is booming,” he said, nodding back at the waiting room.

She walked him to the glass doors and out into the angled sunlight. “We used to have a lot of drug-related work accidents,” she told him. “Now it's more just drugs, sometimes a car.”

“I'm here for a month.”

“We'll get a coffee,” she said.

“Maybe dinner with Marci and Craig. I've been staying there.”

“Keep your hand dry,” she said. “We'll see you.”

•   •   •

Up on the roof at the center of the day, Mason said to Craig, “I've never been up here. I lived in the place seventeen years, and I was never on the roof. I was on the garage, and I was on top of Jimmy's house once, getting a football out of the rain gutter, and the two shoes we'd thrown at it, but this is a first, this week.” They had laid three overlapping sheets of tarred roofing paper and had three to go, working their way up the planking. They wanted the paper down by nightfall; there was no more rain on the way, but still. Mason had hired a roofer for the green asphalt shingles, which stood on pallets in the side yard right now. Mason's shirt was soaked through and flecked with tar paper lint. He hadn't sweated through a shirt for twenty years, and it felt good. Tomorrow he and Craig would be downstairs working inside.

“When was it that Mr. Starkey fell off his roof?”

“Oh my god,” Mason said. He ran his packing knife through the black paper and stapled both corners. “Mr. Starkey.” He sat down next to Craig for a minute and pointed. “Where'd they live?”

“Behind the Millards.” Craig raised his hand, wandering over the houses an alley away. “There, the blue one with the carport. It used to be green, but they sided it.”

“I was in tenth grade,” Mason said. “Virginia Starkey was in my class.”

“She was a beauty.”

“She was,” Mason said. He was grinning, about to laugh, and he put his hand on Craig's shoulder. “And what was it? The old man was on the roof? Oh god, I'd forgotten this whole story. It's in one of Jimmy's books.”

“Matt Brand saw it. One night Virginia was in there changing—I guess she never closed the curtains, and Matt was out back of his house over there, cleaning his football cleats with a stick.” Craig pointed across the yards, each effulgent garden, and as he did, they saw Mrs. Brand come out of the garage with a tray and go into her house. “And he saw some guy lying head down on the roof, trying to hang over and look in on the girl, and then the guy screamed or yelled and fell off. Matt said he saw the guy fall and heard the thump. He said there was no way he didn't land on his head.”

Mason was laughing, and Craig finished the story. “As it was, he broke his arm and had a wrist cast that summer. He worked for the board of education, a painter.”

“And she closed her curtains.”

“Right. She got curtains and started closing them.”

“Virginia Starkey was a remarkable personage. Where'd she go?”

“California, I think. She married that kid whose dad owned the drugstore. He was a Lloyd, a couple of years older than us.” Both men looked out over the houses. They could see Mrs. Brand's garden, the deep green of the large squash leaves in a jungle the way it had been when they were kids. It was three houses down and through the open backyards. “We had a lot of dinners there,” Mason said.

“Yes we did. No band ate together more than we did. The food was much better than the music.”

“I've been in every house all the way across Tribune Street,” Mason said. He spread his hand out over the neighborhood. “All of them. Hardmans and Griffiths and Goodsells.”

“Starkeys too?”

“I'm sure. Some cookout or Christmas party in grade school. We all had the same carpet. That guy came through here with his big carpet truck and did some good.” Mason went on, “Yeah, Jimmy put that Starkey fall in one of the novels, though it wasn't the old man. It was the boyfriend. He changed a lot of things. I guess writers do.”

Mrs. Brand appeared again with a thermos and went into the garage. “It's hard to believe the old man won't let him in the house.”

“Brand was a strong guy, remember? He's a strong old guy, and he's using it all to keep a grudge.”

“Is it because Jimmy's gay or because of what happened to Matt?”

“Who knows? By now it's just the cluster of hurt, the reasons all gone,” Craig said. “But everything's years old. And none of it's worth this. You could lay out the case to him a, b, c, but some things don't get a fair trial. He got hurt when Matt died in that accident, and then Jimmy is who he is and left town, and it just hurts, and no facts can put it back in line.” Craig stood and lifted the diminished roll of roofing paper, lined it up for Mason to staple, and began to run a layer down the roof. This paper would protect the house. It was such simple good work, and Mason was glad to have it.

The light seemed to last longer on the roof, because by the time they'd step off the ladder, it would be full dark, and they'd just drive up to the Ralstons. Mason wanted to get over to see Jimmy, visit his old friend, but every day they'd worked late.

That evening he and Craig saw Wade's beautiful black pickup drive onto the front lawn beneath them, and Larry and Wade jumped out. Young guys jump everywhere. In the bed of the truck, besides mops and buckets, was the frame and mattress of the futon Craig had arranged for him and a little square refrigerator and two tables and some chairs. Larry lifted the coffee table out of the truck and balanced it aloft on one leg. He waved at his father with his free hand and then tossed the table up and caught it with both hands. “I hate to see you move in here, Mr. Kirby. The few days you've stayed with us have been fabulous for Marci Ralston's teenage son. She has worn her robe every night.”

“Don't pick on your mother when she's not here to give it back.”

“I'm not, Dad. I'm proud of her. But Mr. Kirby, please be sure to compliment her on that robe. You must admit it is so robelike and so perfectly opaque.”

“You talk,” Wade said to Larry. “This kid is a case.” Wade lowered the tailgate, and the boys hauled the bed frame to the porch and called, “Give us an hour, and this place will be home sweet home!”

•   •   •

Mason's actual plan had been to return to Oakpine and camp in the house; he'd been ready for something spartan. But the place had been too torn up and dirty. Marci and Craig had insisted, and so he'd been staying up in the guest room at their new house on Oakpine Mountain for five days, but he was moving down tomorrow. Marci had been in their class and was part of the circle of high school friends that centered on the old band. Mason and Craig were up early every day and gone before Marci came downstairs, but yesterday she caught them, and she and Mason had coffee while Craig readied the van.

“I'm sorry to hear about Elizabeth,” she said. Marci moved about the kitchen, putting breakfast things away and loading the dishwasher. She wore a brown checked tweed jacket and a snug black skirt. Mason had been surprised by her appearance every time he'd seen her.

“Right,” he said. “We were good for a while, and then we fell asleep at the wheel.”

She looked at him questioningly. “There's a metaphor.”

“And?” he said.

“As opposed to the truth.”

“It was my fault. It still sounds like a metaphor. I don't have an answer for it except to know I won't be that guy again.” When he went into this place in his thoughts, he shook his head, and he shook his head now. “I'm a success, you know. You get a couple of divorces with that.”

She folded her arms and nodded.

Since they weren't playing games, he went ahead. “It hurts. I hurt some people. You don't start out to hurt anyone, but I evolved, we'll say. I felt bulletproof, which means arrogant and careless, and I lost true north and made my own personal mess. I'm glad to have this house to pound on.”

“Well,” she said. “I'm sorry. We met her at the wedding . . .”

“Seventeen years ago.”

“She seemed nice.”

“She is nice,” he said. “And she's a success too. Denver's full of success.”

“I'm going to rinse this pot. You want another cup?” She held up the glass carafe.

“I do.” She poured the coffee. “You've got a fine character in Larry,” Mason said. “He's brighter than we ever were.”

“He's seventeen. You were a genius at seventeen too.” She had lifted a white paper box of pamphlets for the museum show onto the counter and taped it shut.

“My dad, who was not a poet, said that part of us is always seventeen.”

“Could be.”

“I'll carry that down for you,” Mason said, standing. “Larry says you're a ticket.”

“Meaning?”

“I wouldn't know. Just a metaphor. I'd say you have the look of a successful person.”

“Oh, for chrissakes, Mason. A woman wears a suit to work in a small town, and she's lost?”

“I wouldn't know,” he said. “I'm just talking. You and I could always talk.”

“We could,” she said. And she was thinking that:
We could talk.
But it was a flat and hard surprise to her that this person before her, whom she had meant to offer shelter for a few days as he changed lives, was still that same seventeen-year-old, part of him. He'd been so confident and assertive yet never part of the mainstream in high school. He viewed it all from a distance, and the distance bothered her. Maybe he could see something. She was dressed for Stewart—and for part of herself; she wanted this life or the illusion of it. She liked being held, petted, in her good clothes, while he held her in his office and ran his hand up inside her jacket. She liked his dry aftershave, how lean he was, the clean office space. It was a rush, she knew, but a good rush, the rush she wanted. It gave the day a drive she wanted. And now here was Mason, from high school, telling her to be careful.

She picked up her purse and turned to go. She saw him examining her face. He said: “You have everything.” It infuriated her. Outside, Wyoming spread brown and yellow to the west in the new sunshine, lines of chimney smoke drawing north over the old town.

“And who is taking inventory? You? The attorney from Colorado.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. He stood holding the box before him. “Something's happening to me, Marci. Honest to god, don't listen to me. I'm up here, and I climb right in, don't I? Something's got a hold of me, and something has tricked me into thinking it's all still here for me, that I fit in, that I know anything at all about this town, because I grew up here.” He backed and pushed open the glass door onto the entry deck. They heard a concussion and saw Craig close the hood of the van and wave up for Mason to come along.

They went down the redwood steps, and Mason laid the packet into the backseat. He held her car door and said, “Really. Marci. I'm sorry. I'm here because I finally know that I don't know a thing. It is real good to see you all again and to be here. That's all I meant. It's your life, not mine. I used mine up.”

She looked at him. “Come down to the show,” she said. “I'm proud of all of it. You haven't seen the museum. The opening's tomorrow. Bend down now and kiss me on the cheek and go to work.” He did as instructed and went around to the van. If she hadn't said the last, he would have thought his notions about her were all wrong.

1969

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in October 1969, Frank Gunderson, one of Oakpine High School's best halfbacks, swung right on a strong side sweep on a critical third down. He collected the football that floated out his way in the gentle lateral pitch from the quarterback, tucked the ball up under his folded arms, and sprinted, digging hard for the corner. It was the second game of a promising season for Oakpine, and the stands were crowded. They were full for every game. Football Saturdays always closed the town down. The play took a while to form, bellying back and gathering blockers. Craig Ralston, exactly two hundred pounds that year, pulled from his guard position and sprinted parallel to scrimmage. He loved these days, playing full out, throwing himself into football, literally, just throwing himself. He liked this wide play, the Single Sweep, because he got to run, lead the play if he could, and block downfield. They also had the Fake Sweep, where he started to pull and then blocked back as the quarterback faked the pitch and came back to his side on the draw. But now Frank had the ball tucked away and was coming from the backfield, swinging for the sideline, trying to beat the traffic, make the turn. He was going to graduate in May and go into the Marines and to Vietnam. He had a plan. When he got back, he'd join the sheriff's office. The turmoil of the war and its protest had not rattled Oakpine very much, and Frank thought of enlisting not as a good thing or a bad thing, though he resented the little he heard about the protesters. He simply thought of it as something he was going to do. The military had been a real and useful thing for his father and some of his older friends. He didn't want to go down to Laramie to college like so many kids did, and he didn't want to stay on and try to get into the oil fields, where his dad worked. He liked being a senior finally and having some sway. He had no steady girl, but he could see having one from the group of friends that was forming in the new school year. He was thinking about joining the band that Jimmy Brand was putting together. He and Craig Ralston and Matt Brand were going hunting tomorrow morning early; his truck was packed with camping gear and beer. Antelope season started at dawn. The sunlight now on the people in the bleachers and the smell of the turf as he ran made Frank exult. He had the ball and he had two and now three blockers, and they leaned forward together, his hand on Craig's back as they crossed the line of scrimmage. What he didn't see was the safety for Sheridan, who was among the fastest high school football players in the state and who would set a state track record that spring in the 220 and the 440, streaming down upon them all. This kid came across the front of Craig like a car racing a train and, diving, he met Frank Gunderson exactly in the left knee, way low, folding that leg out and under with a pop that they all, even as other bodies rained and tumbled around them, clearly heard.

Jimmy Brand put the sound, a simple crisp snap, in a book, saying that it was the one time he was sure to have witnessed the exact turning point in someone's life. This was in a novel, and the character was not exactly Frank Gunderson, and he was turned from other things than those that changed for Frank that afternoon. Frank missed the hunting trip, letting Craig and Matt take his truck way out to Yearbow, where they took two pronghorns the first day, some of which would be part of their many dinners at the Brands. Frank was prevented from joining the Marines because of his leg and the pin in it; in fact, all military service was beyond him now. Because of the attention he got in school that fall, a hero, the crutches, help with books, homework, he had to change, come out. Just deflecting all the attention caused him to develop a wry and quick sense of humor, so that he became a kind of entertainer. He started saying “Nothing, it's okay,” standing there on his crutches, and the phrase tilted with understatement and became funny, as did his other phrases: “Thanks for the help. Just put my books there, Champ. See you after class.” This was the first time he'd kidded with his classmates, talked to girls at all. It all gave him a kind of confidence, an understanding of how to deal with people that would become such an integral part of his career. When everyone went off to college or the war, he remained in Oakpine, hanging out, schmoozing with the locals, and in two years, when the economy faltered, he'd borrowed and bought three buildings, including the Antlers, and he was in business.

But the moment that everyone remembers was in the hospital, the day after Frank Gunderson broke his leg. Jimmy Brand and Mason Kirby had already talked to Frank about forming a band, but Frank had deferred because of football. Jimmy had been fooling around with his guitar for years. He'd received a red Fender for Christmas when he was sixteen. Mason played the rhythm guitar well, his father's Gibson, and they'd jammed together on the Brands' back porch, just idling, two guys who were not going to play football. They played together once at the Junior Talent Show, two songs, Mason singing the second, an up-tempo but not altogether wacky version of “Tom Dooley.” Craig had said, “You need a drummer, guys. You made that song sound like he was going to be released, or at least escape.” Jimmy and Mason walked into Frank's hospital room and made a campy presentation of the secondhand bass guitar, holding it out like the most honorable award, while they bowed their heads and hummed an ominous bass line from “Tom Dooley.” Frank was drowsy but still run with adrenaline, and he took the guitar with a smile. Little Bobby Krause, in the next bed, a day after his appendectomy, watched the whole deal and said, “Cool.”

Frank fingered the strings a moment and looked up. “I'm going to need something to do. I'm out for the season.”

“And it fits,” Mason pointed.

“Craig said he'd drum if you'll play bass,” Jimmy said. He nodded at Mason. “We can play at the Fall Festival if we want. They're going to have some bands.”

Frank snugged the instrument tighter under his arm and tested it again, thumping the strings in a slow rhythm.

“What do you say?”

There were three flower arrangements on the tables in the room. There would be a dozen by evening. Oakpine had won the game after his injury, using the unfortunate incident as a spur to make up a twenty-point deficit. The entire team had come by the night before on their way to the victory bonfire, but he'd been in surgery, and now flowers had been arriving all day.

“Does it hurt?” Mason said.

Frank shook his head without looking up from the guitar. “Naw. It will later.”

“It sure made a noise,” Jimmy said.

“I guess,” Frank said.

“When is the Fall Festival?” Bobby Krause said from his bed by the window.

Frank Gunderson looked up at Jimmy and Mason. “When is it?”

“Two weeks,” Jimmy said. “We'd only need two songs. We'd only need to work up two songs.”

“And a name,” Frank said. He was a little dizzy in the white room. “A band needs a name.”

•   •   •

They had three names, in the first three weeks. They played the Fall Festival in the gym as the Rangemen, doing two Rolling Stones songs, “Lady Jane” and “Mother's Little Helper.” Frank did in fact play bass, sitting against a high stool in his leg cast, Jimmy played lead guiitar, Mason sang (along with Jimmy) and played rhythm guitar, and Craig played drums. At rehearsal the night before the festival, Craig spray-painted the head of his bass drum cherry red and glued half a cup of sparkles to it. Their first performance came between the three Griffin sisters, who lip-synched “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” and the Four Sticks, a coed baton team. The Rangemen were a little raw, and they knew it. In fact, they were terrible, and they knew it. No two elements of their playing coincided correctly. Both their numbers sounded purposely discordant, as if in some thematic link with the lyrics, drug songs, and happy to be here. People in the gym milled about nervously during the eight minutes of punishing music, some stopped short by the sparkles drummed loose from Craig Ralston's drum kit, flecks that floated up in the little thermals present in the old wooden room.

But what stayed for the four boys—every one of them sweating to catch up to melodies, chords that raced ahead, every one of them certain of at least partial humiliation in this, the first real independent venture of their lives—was that from the first chords of Jimmy Brand's Fender and then the raucous drumbeat and visceral bass guitar under Frank Gunderson's fingers, twenty, maybe thirty of their schoolmates, not just girls, came up to the plywood stage and stood in a crescent around the one AudioVox speaker, and these kids leaned there and took it. And when the Rangemen finished their set with the last three descending notes of “Mother's Little Helper,” these twenty kids clapped and stayed after the applause and looked at the band, and a couple of them came up and helped Craig move his flaking drums. Three or four kids lingered at the side of the stage when Jimmy and Mason and Frank came down, and there was something there that had not existed nine minutes before, and now it was different. They'd gone up there four odd ducks in the early days of their senior year in high school, and they came down as a band. They didn't need to say it or clap hands or even go
oh wow
; it had happened, and though they had been so ruthlessly terrible, they were a band. They would get better. They were a band.

It was a great night, a night that Jimmy Brand put in a book, assigning the euphoria and confidence the four of them felt to other young people, kids at a party. He'd disguised it. But his feeling always had been that it was a great night, one of the top ten for him. The other great nights were mostly in New York, with Daniel, small victories that they shared. He'd been a writer, he realized early in his career, because he lived for loveliness and intensity but only if he could know about them, be aware, have the distance and the words that would make them ring and ring in him. He'd been self-conscious as a kid, and he knew that night that something had happened for them all that was beyond the ordinary, and at seventeen he loved the knowing.

Without really plotting it or planning, they started rehearsing every afternoon in Jimmy Brand's garage. Craig's drums were already there, and Mason lived three houses down. After football practice, Craig would pick up Frank, who would be in a full leg cast until December, and they'd pull into the Brands' driveway. The garage door was open, and Jimmy and Mason were in there tuning up. They learned their instruments a song at a time. Craig had taken drum lessons and had the basics, and Mason had had some guitar, but it was uphill for everyone. They'd pick a song and learn it line by line, so that the neighbors that year got used to hearing random electric noises suddenly galvanize into ten or fifteen seconds of “Help Me, Rhonda,” or “I Get Around.” Leaves from the giant poplars and cottonwoods fell across the mouth of the open garage and scattered red and yellow as if urged by the music.

At some point in the session, Matt Brand would get home and wander around to the garage. There were always six or seven neighborhood kids sitting and standing around the open door. They gave Matt way, as everyone did. He was the kind of kid that came around once a generation in a place like Oakpine, the single apple of the town's eye that year. It was the football and his strength, of course, but it was his confidence and youth mostly. He would live forever. He was moving through, moving on to bigger things, and everyone he knew was proud of this polite and energetic kid. His black hair and straight broad shoulders drew people toward him, and after the kids moved aside so Matt could lean against the doorframe, they came back up and stood near him.

“Rock 'n' roll,” he said. “My brother is Mick Jagger.”

“Your brother is Jimmy Brand,” Jimmy said back. Then to the guys, “You ready: one, two, three . . .” And a clashing bangfest of “Barbara Ann” exploded for five seconds, then ebbed.

Matt pointed at Craig on drums. “Don't hurt your ears, big boy.”

“What?” Craig said. “I can't hear you. I recognize you, but I can't hear you.”

“He can hear you fine if your hands are at his butt and you're saying, ‘Hut four, five-four, hut'!” Frank said.

“Again,” Jimmy said. “Barbara Ann. When you have a song named after a girl, she's cute and unobtainable. When you have a song named after a man, he's on death row or about to be hanged in some lonesome valley. Ready: one, two, three . . .” They blasted into two or three bars of the song and then unspooled and stopped.

“You guys,” Matt said to the band. “You've got a future. I can say I knew you when.” He stood now and cuffed playfully at the kids orbiting around him. “I'm going to eat and head out.”

“Say hello to Kathleen for us,” Frank said. “If you can remember.”

“Not a chance,” Matt said from the driveway. “I say one thing about this band—”

“The Rangemen,” Jimmy told him.

“I say one thing about the band knowing her name, and she'll be out the door and over here, and I won't get any homework done.”

“You won't get any homework done anyway, Champ,” Frank called back. Matt was in the back door now. He would eat a quick dinner and go over to his girlfriend's house for some homework and television.

Mr. Brand would arrive while the band was rehearsing, park on the driveway beside the house, and come to the open garage door. He liked these boys and the loud simple music they attempted. There always was the possibility of politics when rock 'n' roll was played, but this wasn't any of that. “Generation gap”—the phrase was only a few years old, and it did not apply. The Democratic Convention in Chicago a year before had seemed, like all television, remote and unrelated to life in this village. The images of people, young people in the streets protesting, seemed theatrical and bizarre. Mr. Brand listened to two or three of their four-bar explosions and kidded with them about when he would again get to park his precious truck in the garage.