Return to Oakpine

by Ron Carlson

  “Lose your virginity to one of our fine groupies?”

  “Any girl who loves music is a friend of mine.”

  “Any girl who loves our music is disturbed,” Frank said.

  “Better,” Mason said. “She’d go for me just fine.”

  “Next year,” Frank said, “you going to Wyoming?”

  “I’m going where I get in,” Mason said. “I wouldn’t mind Laramie.” Mason Kirby took in the dark meadow, expectancy rife in the place. He took Jimmy Brand’s arm; it was his habit to take Jimmy’s arm. “Are these our people, Jimmy?” It was the way they talked.

  “They are, Mason.” He looked at his friend in this deepening year. “Whether they like it or not.” He pointed at his brother. Across the open space they could see Craig Ralston and Matt Brand wrestling with one of the kegs on the tailgate of Craig’s truck. A crowd was gathered around them, and suddenly a cheer went up, and Matt stood up and raised a glass of beer.

  “They got her tapped,” Frank said.

  Craig came through the crowd in his Oakpine sweatshirt. His hair had dried in a wild nest. “Gentlemen,” Craig said. He stopped and drank off his cup of beer and threw it into the air. He stepped up and rattled his drum kit, checking left to right each wing nut.

  “For you,” Frank said, producing two sets of drumsticks from behind his back.

  “Always a pleasure,” Craig said, taking them. He was consumed with happiness, the open air, the night to come.

  “Mr. Ralston,” Mason said, “I hear we kicked their asses.”

  Craig shook the snare assembly one last time and, finding it sound, stood and looked at the other three. “We won the game,” he said. “But everybody, including your drummer, got his ass kicked. I don’t want to play that game over even in my mind.” He climbed in, sat down, and played a riff on each of the drums. He smiled at them. “This is more like it. Music. Let’s play some soothing music.”

  A group of football players grabbed Matt Brand from his perch on the truck and carried him around the space on their shoulders. He’d been on other boys’ shoulders a dozen times in the past two years. He held his beer cup aloft, slopping some over the sides as the gang lurched toward the precise and twisted obelisk of lumber. Jimmy could see Kathleen leaning against the back of one of the cars, arms folded in the dark. They were referred to as Matt-and-Kathleen, a compound noun now, coupled and permanent in that high school way.

  Ross Hubbard came running and jumped onto the low band platform. “As fire marshal—”

  “I thought you were Fire Wizard,” Frank said.

  “Thank you, Frank Gunderson. I am, but I didn’t want to intimidate you. But as fire wizard, I must advise you that you are in what we in the profession call the circle of big fire. That is, you guys are going to get a little toasted here, do you think?” he said, measuring the distance to the pyramid of wood.

  “You’re toasted right now,” Mason told him. “We’ll be all right. It’ll be hot for a while, but Ross, we’re tough. We’re from Oakpine.”

  Saying the word Oakpine sent Ross into the Oakpine cheer, a martial chant that was picked up in the meadow and carried to its whooping conclusion. When the calls had subsided, Ross shook Mason’s hand. “Okay, sounds good. Just so you’re fireproof.” Ross went on. “Gimme a drumroll, and we’ll get this party under way.”

  Craig started with a low simmer, which he built up in a blur, which he threw to his bass drum and then held up again in a floating snare. The drums quickened the night, and the circle of a hundred boys and girls with their cups of beer tightened around the site. Craig now ran a classic drumroll, and Frank plucked the first dozen notes of the theme to The Twilight Zone.

  “All right, Oakpine!” Ross yelled to the crowd.

  “All right, Oakpine,” Frank deadpanned into the mike.

  “Oh, there’s a mike,” Ross said, turning. He spoke into it then: “All right, Oakpine. Let’s have Matt Brand, Matt Three-Touchdown Brand, start what we call the official fucking fire! We won, and we won’t leave without a conflagration!” Ross jumped forward and ran to Matt, pressing a book of matches into his hand.

  “Quite the speech,” Mason said.

  “Get ready, guys,” Jimmy said. “The Rangemen are about to play their second American date.”

  “Wildfire,” Frank said.

  “Whatever,” Mason said. “I am ready.”

  Matt Brand, obviously full of beer, held the matches aloft and then dropped them to great laughter. Then, resupplied and with another flourish, he struck one. He stepped forward and threw it at the lumber, falling as he did. Ross and Doug Leeper pulled him back, standing him braced against Kathleen. Then Ross rolled a tube from one of the paper flyers and lit it, and when it flared, he went forward and thrust it into the thatched stack of wood. Instantly a bright yellow spearpoint of fire arose and slipped through the mass, rising until inside of a minute there was a four-story blaze standing in the meadow. The kids backed and then backed again as the heat registered, their faces two-dimensional in the strange moment.

  In the sudden light flashing against the side of everyone, Jimmy Brand said, “My friends: one, two, three . . .” and the band kicked into “Be True to Your School,” a song they were shaky on, but it was simple and loud enough to carry. The speaker and the amplifier filled the mountain with ten tons of sound, enough to go with the ghastly fire, and the figures in the firelight pulsed to the hard beat, their shadows dancing distorted and gargantuan on the wall of trees in Bear Meadow. The party had begun.

  The band knew nine songs well, four fairly well, and two were rocky possibilities, and so their plan was to play each with an extra chorus or two. They were worried about running out of stuff, but there was no need to worry. Before they were halfway through the third song, “Let Him Run Wild,” that Beach Boys tune, the night had fallen into an easy pattern for which the band was a steady background. They worked at furnishing each room in all the songs completely, overdoing it, taking all the corners wide and coming together in the performance better than they’d ever done in the garage. They’d never had this much room, and they’d never let go like this, played so loud. It seemed to Jimmy that they were playing slowly, but it was right on tempo. The meadow teemed with kids, a circle around the fire as it flared and collapsed once and then rose again as a real fire, not a temporary tower. A lot of the young people lined the stage, some dancing, though only a few, and the rest coming and going from the woods and the cars and the groups of four or five in letter jackets, and smaller groups in conspiracies of mischief and affection.

  The band worked, rising above themselves, into the music. After the first few songs they felt no longer like the center of attention, and it was all like a big open rehearsal, fun. They didn’t pay any attention to the party, because it seemed that the party was out there, remote. Even the half-dozen kids dancing seemed to be part of something else. Between songs they could hear kids calling for more, clapping, whooping for this song or that, as if taking requests were even a possibility. From where he stood, Jimmy watched it all, and Mason saw him take it in. Jimmy had words for things and Mason could see his friend formulating his overview. When they looked at each other, pounding out “Wendy,” the look sparked, and Mason’s faced closed up in a smile, and Jimmy came across and hugged his friend with an arm around the neck, brushing faces. The moment, the happiness, was choking.

  Kathleen Pullman came up to the band, her arms folded in her jacket, and smiled at them. She nodded at Jimmy and rolled her eyes at him, a thing she did sometimes that always meant: Matt. He could see his brother way back sitting in the center of a group of boys on the hood of a car. Matt was drunk. It was his right as a hero, and he took it. In the flashing firelight the black and white scene seemed to Jimmy a tableau from the Iliad. Matt gestured with his arms, telling stories, and the boys laughed.

  Their classmates stumbled around the fire, spillin
g beer, sometimes coming to the edge of the musicians’ platform and toasting them, “You guys are fucking great!” All night long guys and girls came up to Frank and signed his cast, many with bits of charcoal from the fire, initials in black, and smiling faces, until he was smudged thoroughly. Elsewhere in the meadow some couples had paired off, only a few surprises, retiring to the cars as the evening grew late and the fire tumbled into itself every once in a while, sending a thick flock of red cinders pooling briefly into the chilly air.

  Between “Satisfaction” and “The House of the Rising Sun,” Mason stepped over to Jimmy and now said, “You’re a little old man at the kids’ picnic.”

  Jimmy looked at his friend. They both were tuning their guitars.

  “I’m afraid you’re right. I don’t know what that’s about, but I keep looking at the stars, the woods. It’s nine miles to Oakpine, and then what?”

  “Let’s do one more and take a break,” Craig said from behind them.

  “You got it,” Jimmy said.

  “This is good, right, the band?” Mason asked him. “There’s something more to all this than just the music. Let me know if you find out what it is.”

  “This is real,” Jimmy said. “This is the best.” His eyes shone. He turned to Frank and Craig. “This is the best.”

  “We are rocking,” Frank said. “And I finally know all the lyrics to these songs. That’s really the hard part. And now we are absolutely rocking.”

  To no one, he said, “We have a year of this.” And then he turned to his friends and said, “My friends, at the ready! One, two, three . . .”

  They did almost four sets of the music they knew, as well as some extended jamming. They played until the fire was a heap of pulsing orange embers and the generator had to be regassed. They played until there were only three cars left in Bear Meadow. Craig Ralston threw his drumsticks onto the glowing coals, and they flamed briefly, white-yellow ciphers in the deep red. He loaded Matt, who was passed out, into his truck and hauled him home. Jimmy, Mason, and Frank put on fresh, dry shirts and jackets and broke down the gear, and they loaded up with the help of four or five of the band’s new followers, including Kathleen Pullman and her girlfriend Marci Engle. Marci came over and put her arms around Jimmy. “You don’t know,” she said to Frank and Mason, looking on, “he might be my boyfriend.” When they were packed up in Mr. Brand’s truck and Kathleen’s car, the boys shoveled a short berm around the ten-foot firepit and then tossed a layer of dirt over the whole pile until it was dark and reduced to two or three steaming streams of smoke.

  Mason walked over and rapped on the trunk of Dougie Shelton’s Plymouth to wake Dougie and Yvonne, who weren’t exactly asleep. “Honeymoon is over,” Mason called to them. “Don’t be the last couple on the mountain.” The dark empty space made it feel very late on the mountain, and a kind of seriousness had assumed the lonely place. Jimmy started his truck, and Mason got in. Frank Gunderson climbed into Kathleen’s car with Marci, between them in the front seat, Mason noted.

  Marci rolled her window down and called toward Dougie’s car, “Come on, you two bunnies! Three times is enough for any bonfire! You’re going to freeze your parts off!” She laughed, and Kathleen honked. The dark car started, and the lights came on, and Doug called, “That’s a good band you guys have got going.” He backed out and eased tenderly out of the clearing. A moment later Kathleen followed down the mountain. When all the cars were gone, Jimmy stepped out of the idling vehicle. “I’ve got to take a leak.” The two boys stood out behind the vehicle, one facing north and one south, a million worlds within their view. The wheel of stars had broken and turned, and the Big Dipper was a only a handle now, rising from the trees.

  When they climbed back into the truck, Jimmy said, “Just this.” And he leaned and took Mason’s shoulder. “Life on Earth,” Jimmy said into the windshield of stars. And the band had its third and final name.

  FIVE

  High School

  Marci was together. That had been the word for her in high school. She was organized and looked organized, wearing her smart dark-brown hair in a part around her pretty face. She had been elected class historian and then did all the work for Matt Brand, who was president of everything. In the fall of her senior year, she dated Jimmy Brand because he was the first focused boy she’d met, and he was kind and solicitous and gave her some of his writing. She was impatient with being sixteen and then seventeen; she’d read about it, adolescence, and stood outside of it, waiting for herself. They would kiss on her front porch like a couple out of yesteryear, and then she’d find flowers in pop bottles there in the morning. His mother’s gerbera daisies. He talked to her, laid out his plans; he loved drama, reading the plays. He spent the night at her house twice that last spring, but only on the couch after close sessions kissing. A couple times she’d whispered, “You can,” moving his hand under her shirt, and he had lifted his palm to hold her as if in measurement so that the light touch burned her, but he wouldn’t press, and she was confused by the ache—was it affection? His mouth against hers, she remembered him saying, “High school.” And she could feel both of their mouths smile. She knew then, years ago, but she didn’t ask him or say. It was okay, and it was okay now.

  Then at year’s end Matt Brand was killed, and a week later Jimmy Brand left Oakpine. The funeral was tough, and when Jimmy left, Marci knew that something real, something not high school had happened. She received two letters from Jimmy, one that summer and one later the next fall when she was starting to see Craig Ralston. They both were full of thanks and affection, and in the last he said, “Thank you for kissing me,” and they were both signed “With love.” She still had them somewhere. Then her life unfolded a week at a time: with Craig and their travels and return to town, work in the community and getting the store going, and then Larry as a baby and the new house and their plans and comforts and what. And now Marci was still together, the organizing force at the museum, and known for it, but with Mason back in town, the high school wise man, and Jimmy back in town to die, Marci felt the old adrenaline, threads of it. Here we are, she thought. It’s all high school. Everything is everlastingly high school. Marci thought it first when she was fourteen and about to enter Oakpine High in the ninth grade and somebody had broken up with someone (she could remember the names), and for a week it was a federal case, a walking tragedy, and then somebody else got a necklace with a little Woolworth’s ring, and all the talking went marching off in another direction. And every day she dressed for school, she felt like a chapter from a book, knowing what would be said about her by Kathleen or the other girls in the old lunchroom, every half hour had its half hour telling. And her studies were all a federal case, the emergency run-up to the chemistry test, the aching essays for Mr. Lanniton in history, worse than a job. And not dating was a federal case, and then dating was a federal case, the only boy she kissed, really kissed was Jimmy Brand because he was the only interesting kid in the place, or so she said, interesting being her word. And her crush on him, and the way he looked out for her and gave her the few poems and the surprise flowers in pop bottles on her porch some mornings, was a federal case.

  To think about him at times was to start or say stupidly and unbidden, “Oh my,” and even her husband, Craig, knew now what it was after thirty years. Every two years or so Marci would start and shake her head or say those words, and Craig’s hand would come to her shoulder, perhaps the only thing in the freaking world that is not high school, that understanding. And raising Larry, year after year, in a village of folks who knew him, a whole town like a high school. A day running errands, the grocer, the cleaners, stopping by the hardware for Larry to say hi to daddy was like walking the halls, class, class, locker, locker, did you hear this? Or this? And somebody’s pregnant, like high school, and someone gets a new car, all the way from Casper, or a parent is dead and those two are breaking up, my god, oh high school, old Oakpine, the Oakpine Cougars, red and b
lack, and underneath an entire nation of activity the old school song, “Our memories linger after, sing the praise and voices raise to Oakpine . . .”

  She didn’t know what to do with this thinking; it seemed so rueful and wrong, a big game. Even when Kathleen and Frank separated two years ago, it felt like something achieved along a row of lockers opposite the office, and now her play with Stewart at the museum was exactly stolen kisses behind a closed door, one eye open. Behind his office door she had stood and taken him in her hand and pushed him to stillness with a long kiss, the clenched hand still and still until she felt him shudder. There was adrenaline in it, in every new sentence in the high school story, but Marci felt something else too. Was it a game? Was she just out for sport? Craig had hauled the drum kit out to the Brands, and Larry now was practicing guitar when he wasn’t being lord of his life, an omniscient agent in their house, sometime traveler. This season wouldn’t last. High school. She could think that far and then no further. She was married to someone she had met in study hall when she was fifteen; they had a new house, and it was fall again. There’d be new babies in town and a fall after that, grandchildren on the football team, as strange as life gets. Or normal. She knew all about it, outside herself again, and even Kathleen would point at her over coffee and say it: “You are so together,” when in fact it was Kathleen for whatever reason who had become the adult.

  The Oakpine Museum still smelled new. Three years ago they had finished refurbishing the old train station: they’d knocked out some walls and scoured all the original brick and block walls and carpeted the two galleries. As a last touch, Craig had come out with a ladder scaffold and enameled all the wrought-iron scrollwork in the eight arches engine black. The first show had been the “The Age of Aquarius.” Stewart, the curator, had gotten two large but minor Peter Max paintings and some original album art from Cream and Big Brother and the Holding Company, as well as a mongrel assortment of psychedelic art from San Francisco and New York. That show had been Marci’s first assignment there, writing copy for the poster art, and she’d won the day by noting that “the museum had hung this crazy show, but it would be off the wall.” They had piped in elevator versions of acid rock, and the retrospective, parts of it, received campy reviews all around the country. Stewart, who was from Milwaukee, lost a little of his big-city mystique with his overenthusiastic response to Marci’s program puns.