by Ron Carlson
Stewart was Mr. Enthusiasm at the annual projection meetings, but as the shows approached, he became increasingly useless. Or maybe it was that he didn’t become anything; he just kept his distance. One thing that was known as an empirical fact among the staff of six at the museum was that he had never, ever opened a crate. He loved to call a meeting to discuss the overview or the game plan or any wrinkles in the calendar, but he never took his jacket off. The headline on him was that his favorite mode was walking backward with his arms folded while he nodded like an expert. They all mimicked him, doing the walk and going hmmm, hmmm, hmmm. The opening was two weeks from Sunday.
They were well under way with “Terrain” now, but Stewart had still been going on about what he felt was important about this particular show at this particular point in time, when Marci interrupted: “We can go with ‘Here We Are’ for the descriptive and ‘Here We Are?’ for the evaluative.” Everyone at the conference table had already picked apart their styrofoam coffee cups and placed the pieces on their ink-doodled notebooks like mosaics. They looked up hopefully, three young men who were glorified interns, and Wanda Dixon, who was Stewart’s secretary. Marci was acknowledged as museum coordinator. Stewart leaned forward. “Say it again,” he said. She knew it was his way of running a good idea through his posture, while everyone looked at his thoughtful face, and then making it his. When he had heard, he said, “I like it! We change the stakes with a single question mark.” He stood up. “Marci, you are too bright for this town.”
“You should be in Sheridan,” Don Levitt said. He was from Sheridan.
Marci looked around the little conference room. She knew all about it. She’d been here for three years. It wasn’t much, but it was what you got. You made enough money to order a few catalog suits, which you got to wear in Oakpine. You went to lunch at the same four places. You let Stewart grope you a little from time to time, just enough to feel you have a separate life, have made a decision. You have your own office with a door and a telephone, and you get to work with the interns and tell them what to do. And once or twice a year you suggest something that will be carved in the layered plastic signage that will tell people what they are looking at and which way to go. It was so close to being enough. She was in some kind of weird era. She recognized that if she stood still, she’d sink. It was hard not to hear the football crowd and sense that the game was the real business of this town.
Stewart came around the table and kissed her on the cheek, his hand briefly on the back of her skirt. When he left to go to his office and get on the phone, she looked at the interns and said, “You know the drill now. It’s heavy lifting and fragile, fragile, fragile.” She passed out a sheet with the numbered locations of each painting. “Let’s just get everything we’ve got uncrated today, okay?”
• • •
It hurt Jimmy Brand to sit for so long. It always hurt, but now he’d been sitting for half an hour in the Suburban, and the pain had grown. He tried to do the exercises he’d learned at the free clinic in New York, the imaging his group had done, isolating the feeling and then moving it piece by piece slowly back out of the body. He had a lot of places in his mind, and he’d written them from his deep vision, the desert reservoir with the blond clay banks in the sunlight and the sage knolls at each inlet, and the meadows and moose ponds up along the old road on Oakpine Mountain shadowed and surrounded by the dark wall of pines. But his default was Bleecker Street, around the corner from his apartment with Daniel, and then shop by shop up one side, the movie poster shop, the archaeological artifacts, the comic store, the cheap Italian shoes, the Bleak Arms, the green pub, and cornice by cornice to the grocer and his tiers of oranges and the nest of lemons, but he couldn’t get a hold of it today, no image would take.
It had been raining now for a little while, and the water sheeted and merged as it ran down the windshield. It blurred the scene before him, the people across the football field in their coats, dots of red, brown, yellow, green, blue, three hundred people in the rain of Wyoming. They would blur and focus in the glass. He concentrated on them as they came and went. The rain was a soft pressure on the van. He lost it and then started awake and made a note to stay awake and lost that. It was a short step from the swimming windshield to his hallucinations to the high dreams. He could not feel himself breathing, and he made that note and then lost it.
Maybe he was already dead, these colored dots come to greet him, witness his induction, rows and rows of the dead blurring in this great gray room, a tray of apples. The dozen friends in New York, one by one, and suddenly the bottom dropped out. Eldon Rayalf had died in elementary school, shot one stormy fall out on the antelope hunt. He was shot in the head, the story was, and the second story was that his uncle, bored in the million-mile afternoon, had been playing with his rifle, up, down, shooting-bushes bored, and wheeling by the boy, he’d touched the trigger early, and instead of offering a noise that would have rung his ears for a week, he took off most of his forehead. Jimmy remembered the funeral in the Mormon chapel, the closed coffin, all the town it seemed, and then the ride to the cemetery. Was he the first? Jimmy’s dad’s hands were on his shoulder, and Jimmy could see Mr. Rayalf, the back of his head, his dark hair shiny from Brylcreem. Old man Rayalf would have been thirty-one or thirty-two years old at the time, and now he had something he would never get out from under, ever. It became the shadow, the pressure that would press his drinking, and he was a good, quiet, diminished man forevermore. But Eldon wasn’t the first. There were two girls with the flu, and Boyd Mildone in junior high, drowned in the river, swimming or fishing. He must have been fishing alone before school, and his waders taken suddenly with the cold water like a scoop, he drowned. There was a place beyond the old Knop junkyard, the spillage of ruined cars, where the river bent and the cattails grew tall, and it had always been only one thing, the place where Boyd had drowned.
Now Jimmy focused suddenly on the furrowed windshield of Chuck Andreson’s truck, and beyond he could see the rainy home-team stands, all black dots and yellow dots, raincoats and the red umbrellas here and there, and one green one, a golf umbrella. The plangent dizziness arrived like a breeze, and Jimmy wondered at it again, the merging of the world and idea; how could he ever parse what he was seeing from what he was thinking, especially now with the five kids killed in the car driving back from Cheyenne in the year 1967, all five, and he knew them, middle names and all. And now in a car humming with the impinging friction of the rain, he could hear their voices, Claudia DeSmet, who reminded Jimmy always for some reason of a goose, a girl with a great straight nose and a woman’s body at fifteen, now dead thirty-three years.
Before him the clusters of dots, the people in the stands, shifted and reshifted, running in the rain on the glass, and he knew as an idea, as a thing, that he had been writing for them all. They were his audience. So strange. He’d written a thousand reviews for deadlines and for the magazines in New York, and all the stories and the novels, and he’d been writing for the kids they’d all been. He slowed his thinking down and started in sophomore year with homeroom, with Mrs. Scanlon, and he saw the classroom and went down the rows chair by chair looking for the dead. She had the alphabet, in large examples of cursive writing, in a lined banner around the top of the walls, and Jimmy felt the letters now, the weird feeling they’d given him where they were listed above the blackboard and the door and the windows that opened onto the great western desert running west to places that as a boy he could not imagine, though he had tried.
He was dozing lightly, the pain still a hard, untenable force along his spine, when Chuck came back. The big man was wet and smiling. “This one is history.”
Jimmy looked at him, unsure for a moment who he was and what he was speaking of. History? “Craig Ralston’s boy is the most amazing receiver we’ve had in some years—he can scramble. We’ve got Sheridan by two touchdowns with five minutes. You knew Craig Ralston, right? He runs the hardware?”
On Berry Street the rain had stopped, and water dripped generously from the trees in the dark sky. Chuck pulled up and came around to Jimmy’s door, but Jimmy could not get out. He smiled faintly at the driver and said, “I’m having a little moment here. We might need some help.” As he said it, a woman came out of the front door of the house with a windbreaker over her pale blue housedress. She was carrying an umbrella, and at her first movement, he knew it was his mother. He had spoken to her once a year on her birthday, and there were times when she called him on his, but he had seen the woman, who was now coming toward him, only twice in thirty years. His head reeled. He had dreamed of this, this old place where he grew up, many times. And of course he had written about it. Seeing her there, he knew he had dreamed this too, his mother coming to him, taking his hand, her look of concern, her embrace. Her impossible cheek, cool and papery and sweet. The dreams were a blessing.
“Jimmy,” she said. Her tears were on his neck. “Jimmy.” Now her hands were on his shoulders and the side of his face, and it all rose in him, and he felt as if he were going to black out. He looked at his mother’s face, and it registered like light throughout his body.
He whispered, “Mom,” and his voice broke. “Mom, I’m sick.”
“You’re home,” she said.
“I’m sick, Mom. I’m so sorry.” He hadn’t planned anything to say, and he said this, and then he began to cry. He hadn’t planned on crying. He hadn’t cried in almost a year. “Oh shit.” She held him, drawing him out of the vehicle so he was standing in the gloomy afternoon. Chuck put the four bags on the porch, and now he stood out front of the Suburban. Mrs. Brand held Jimmy up, and they began to walk down the driveway. The rain dripping from the trees magnified itself in Jimmy’s ears and became a crystal ringing. He could see through their yard to the Hendersons and the Dorseys and one more to the Kirbys.
“I’ll get my purse, Chuck. Just a minute.”
“Mrs. Brand. It is no problem, and there is no charge. Good to see you, Jimmy. Take care. I’m going to get back and see the end of the game. We’re kicking Sheridan’s butt, which has been long overdue.” Chuck climbed in, backed carefully onto the wet street.
Louise Brand helped her son to the garage and showed him the refurbished room with some pride. He sat on the edge of the bed. There was only the faint smell of paint, almost pleasant. She turned on the lamp and showed him his bureau and the table where a television would go. She turned the light in the bathroom on and off, and she showed him the bathroom. He was burning with the day now, his body glowing with pain. It hurt to cry, so he sat still while his mother helped him with his shoes. Her hands at his feet sent him back to some ancient morning, and he thought he heard her say, “Now the other foot.” The ghostly sound pushed Jimmy over, and he lay back and was asleep.
His dreams were like no other, not even the cinematic nightmares he’d toured when his partner Daniel had died. He was gathering everything he owned and putting it back in the basement of this, his childhood home. There were his baby toys and the two framed movie posters he and Daniel had had on their apartment wall in SoHo. It was an unending inventory, and no one was helping him. He saw some friends he didn’t recognize at the house, and he saw his parents upstairs. They were young. But when he’d return with more stuff, these people weren’t helping. Some of the things he’d brought back were gone again. It was hard work, and as he wandered through the dream, everything he saw was something of his, his responsibility. He marveled that he could carry such huge loads. His high school chemistry book, the bicycles, a tassel from the rearview mirror of his first car, an oatmeal box full of watches, a shell necklace, folded shirts, his guitar, his cowboy boots, a large glass stein from Germany, his journals, a wooden cigarette box, a ceramic clock from his kitchen in New York, and a fabulous kitsch rooster that Daniel had given him to remind him of his ranch-town home. Gathering the items was a kind of pleasure, but leaving them was worry. Every time he returned, more were missing. Maybe someone was taking them, but there was a chance they were just floating away.
• • •
The September rain moved steadily into Oakpine. It rained all week on and off, not all unpleasant, the stoic little town sensing the first real shift in the weather. The football team practiced in the old gym, running patterns in tennis shoes. These were always goofy sessions in the strange tight space under the yellow lights, the footballs careening off the walls, and the hours seemed rehearsals for some bombastic drama. Coach Nunley put in a new series of parallel passes that were aimed at his son Wade, who had showed he could move and catch the ball. Wade was to start downfield and, after five yards, cut parallel to the line of scrimmage as the other receivers streamed long.
At the museum, Marci had her hands full with the wet weather. In refurbishing the old station, they had never fixed an adequate loading dock. They used it only a dozen times a year, but on rainy days they had to move the crated paintings briskly into the building or cover them first. She had to be there every minute with a towel over each shoulder.
Downtown Frank Gunderson used the rain to find the two leaks in the Antlers roof he’d ignored all summer. They’d been too busy getting the little brewery on line. The one leak was easy in the front bar, dripping down the old light fixture, but the other that sent a rivulet of water wandering down the side wall was trickier. He stood on the roof of the old building in the rain in his old black cowboy hat holding a yellow crayon. He’d already swept the gravel off the one spot and circled the tear in the tarpaper. But along the side he swept but couldn’t find it. He swept again, his shirt already soaked. He hadn’t planned on being up here that long. Nothing. When he circled the three seams, he found the one that wasn’t sealed and put an X in that circle. When he stood, he felt the old hot ache where he’d broken his leg, and he looked out over the village: a dozen rooftops, the park, the school, the houses and trees, and always across the rail yard, the larger western plain, as if waiting. This was a nice town, small and too windy and most of it needing a coat of paint it wouldn’t get before winter came, but a nice town. He could see Oakpine Mountain obscured in the weather. His entire history was here; there was no other place he knew like this one. To the west, the sky was three big shipments of gray coming in. He knew it was raining over the rail yards and into the implacable North Platte and beyond out into the reservoirs and the backs of a million antelope that wouldn’t mind this last warm rain. He didn’t mind it. Now he had to climb down and change the buckets under these drips. When the sun came out, he’d be back with a tub of asphalt tar and get this old place right and tight.
At the hardware store, Craig Ralston always liked the rain, the lights in Ralston Hardware a kind of shelter from it. People came in for the tarps and the roof seal, both plastic and tar, and a lot of guys came in for reloading gear and gun-cleaning kits, and there would be those with basement projects the rain had brought to mind, some plumbing or some hobby stuff, the balsa wood and glue. Craig got lost in it, of course, and he took a real pride in knowing good gear from second-rate, though he carried both because people had to decide for themselves. He wasn’t unhappy as he stood in the open doorway and felt the air edge of the rain, but he felt what? Kept.
In the Brands’ garage, Jimmy slept, weaving his dreams into a long exhausting saga. He’d been worn out before being taken to the airport in New York, and he had flown in a dream west to his old home. The knowledge that underlined this capitulation was that he would die, and so every afternoon or morning, when he would waken to his mother’s tray with tea and sandwiches and soup and her homemade cakes and Jell-O and lemonade, moving from one dream to the other, he was surprised to be alive. It all surprised him. He stayed in bed this way, heavy with his weary blood, for a week, leaning on things to ge
t to the bathroom, and after a week of such rest, he woke one morning to see the perfect parallelogram of sunlight from the back window printed on the wall like a cartoon from his former life, and he thought, I’m in the garage. I’m home in the garage. And then he said it aloud to taste the words: “I’m home in the garage.” He said again: “Home.” His voice sounded like a radio in the other room, but the bright badge of light seemed to give him strength. When his mother came out with her towel-covered tray, he was sitting up, making some notes in his journal.
They talked. She sat on the bed and felt his forehead, and he sipped the coffee and had some toast. It was the first time they’d spoken without tears. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said.
“It is,” she said. “Sunny and clear. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m tired. You’ve done a nice job on the garage. Is this all for me?”
“I’m sorry you’re not in the house with us,” she said. “Your father just has too much on his mind with all of it.”
“I understand that. Believe me. I didn’t think I’d be back here causing you this trouble.” He lifted his hand, the fingers. “I need to talk to you.”
“It’s not any—”