by Ron Carlson
He moved the case slowly, as the plaintiffs wanted, and he went step by step. He never talked money with them, even when the city’s attorney tried again and again to cut a deal. Mason already knew what a life meant in a settlement, but the city attorney told him again anyway: $2.6 million. Mason told the woman that that wasn’t the issue. His clients wanted a trial. They wanted to tell what happened, be heard, be seen. Their lives were changed. By now Mason knew his life would be made of stories. And so it went to trial, and because Mason was methodical and quiet and obviously thorough and in no hurry, and because he used the three weeks in court to display and listen to the stories of all the victims, then the bleacher company, an aluminum girder expert, another engineer and a metallurgist, and the comptroller from the City of Denver budget department, the plaintiffs won the award of $41 million dollars. He got almost eight, the agreed percentage.
He moved the office to an old building downtown, which he bought, and took in two partners, one of them a woman he would marry some years later, Elizabeth. His evolution was begun. The case made him a hotshot but a strange one. He was respected, but he had few friends. He hired two serious attorneys. Kirby, Rothman, and Phelps began to turn work away.
• • •
Mason knocked on the Brands’ front door. Up and down the block he could see lights on in the living rooms, televisions, families. The storm door rattled, and Mrs. Brand appeared in the glass. She pushed the door open to him. “Mrs. Brand,” he said. “It’s Mason Kirby. Do you remember me, Hilda and Ted’s boy?”
“I knew it was you, Mason. Come on in. I’ve seen you down there at the house.”
He stepped into the small carpeted front room. Mr. Brand stood from his big red recliner and shook Mason’s hand. He wore a blue plaid shirt and a pair of clean overalls, and he looked the same to Mason: a large man in working clothes. “What are you doing? Selling the place?”
“Good to see you, sir,” Mason said. “Yeah. I’ve been proven to be an ineffective landlord, and my sister has no interest in returning to Wyoming.”
“Where is Linda?” Mrs. Brand said. “She was a sharp one.”
Mr. Brand sat back down and motioned for Mason to take a seat on the couch. He turned the television down with the remote.
“She’s out in California, which was always her goal. Her two kids are almost in high school, married a guy who is something in UPS, middle management. She’s doing well.”
“And you’re a lawyer,” Mrs. Brand said. “Craig told me that you’ve done well too.”
“Is there much work in it?” Edgar Brand said. “All you hear now is lawyer this, lawyer that.”
“There’re plenty of lawyers,” Mason said. He sat on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees. “There’s some work in it. You meet with people who are pretty torn up, and you try to figure how to help. It’s been interesting. I’ve had some luck, and mostly I think I’ve been on the side of the good guys, but that’s my opinion. I am a lawyer.” He opened his hands and shrugged. “I’m having more fun fixing up the old place than I ever have in Denver.”
The little room with its carpet felt terrifically close to Mason, especially after all the air and stars and leaves. They’ve lived their lives in these rooms, he thought. He didn’t know anybody anymore who lived in one place. There were several family photos framed on the wall, and he picked out Matt Brand in his football uniform and a studio portrait of all four Brands taken when the kids must have been eight and nine. The muted television was on to an evening news program, 20/20 or Primetime or such, but the room itself was decades removed from Mason’s world.
“We didn’t see much of your last renters.” Mr. Brand said. “They had a daughter, and the old man drove an El Camino, which is a vehicle I never did understand. Light blue.”
“They had some problems,” Mason said. “I think the bottle had him by the neck. It happens. Listen, I understand Jimmy’s here”—Mr. Brand’s face changed in the lamplight, went blank—“and I came down to see if I—”
“Come in the kitchen, Mason,” Mrs. Brand said, holding the door open for him. Mason stood and followed her into the bright back room. As the door closed behind them, he could hear the television resume. Mrs. Brand moved about the kitchen for a minute, preparing two cups of tea for them, and then she sat opposite him at the gray swirls of the Formica table, which swam suddenly into his memory.
“This table’s served me more than once,” Mason said.
“We had fun here.”
“But you’ve changed the room.”
“Yes, we did. We moved the fridge and changed the back door. Remember, you used to come in here by the basement stairs?” She showed him the arrangement.
“And you put a little deck over the back porch.”
“Right. Edgar built that sometime ago.”
“It’s tough for him to have Jimmy home.”
“Edgar’s all right. He can do what he can do. He’s a good man, but this all is beyond him. He got hurt real good a long time ago, and this is just a heartache.”
“I know that.” Mason laid his hands on the old table. “Forgive me, Mrs. Brand, but I’ve had clients lose children, and I don’t think people get over it. And I’m not even sure they should. Matt was a remarkable kid. And now Jimmy’s pretty sick.”
“Thank you, Mason.” Her face was a slate. “I think he is.”
“Well, I came down to see what I might do.” Mason assessed the woman, and she seemed ready to talk. “Should Jimmy be in hospice there at the clinic? I think we know where this is going.”
“Jimmy says he knows, and yes, I know. It’s not surprise we’re after. I’m so glad he’s home. That’s all. We’ve talked about it all, Mason.”
Mason reached past the teacups and took her hand. “I can help with any of the expenses. Absolutely.”
She patted his hand. “I want him here. If it gets too bad for him, we’ll go from there.”
“Has anyone from the clinic been out? Has he seen the doctor?”
“That’s next.”
“Look. Let me call Kathleen Gunderson down there and have her come out. There may be some things they can do for him. She’s the head of the clinic.”
“I see her around town once or twice a year.”
“May I call her?”
Mrs. Brand’s eyes closed for a moment, and she nodded. “It won’t hurt.”
Mason stood and leaned into the front room, “Nice to see you, Mr. Brand. Take care. I’m going to slip out the back.”
“Mason,” the older man said as farewell, without looking up.
On the back deck Mason asked Mrs. Brand, “How’s your garden? I can smell the squash growing.”
“Come back tomorrow, and I’ll load you up.”
“That’s a deal. Goodnight. Thanks for the tea.”
“Goodnight. Thank you, Mason.” She stepped back inside and closed the door.
In the chilly silent night under the ancient trees, Mason scanned the neighborhood. It was confusing how so many pieces of this old map fit. Lights were going out; half the houses were dim. The garage in which Jimmy Brand slept his sleep looked like a cottage in a fairy tale in which children were in danger. Mason walked backward out the Brands’ driveway. He wasn’t dizzy, but it was strange to be here, strange to walk. He’d let it get too late again and he had wanted to see Jimmy.
The books had affected Mason, and he had read them all. The first novel, Reservoir, was the story of that last week, the accident, the long day. He’d read it when he was a struggling attorney, and he wanted to tell Jimmy about reading it in his one-bedroom condominium in Denver, because it was the only book that had ever made him gasp and hurl it across a room, breaking the glass on a framed Weston Grimes print that hung above his old leather couch. The first nice piece of art he bought. He had then gone over and picked the book from the glass and reread t
he section about the party at the reservoir aloud, making sure, and then he had thrown the book again, this time into the corner where all it could do was gash the wall. Jimmy had gotten the scene just right, the wind in the ancient dry cottonwoods, the sound the car tires made easing over the river rock by the old boat ramp, the powdery white dust puffing from every footfall.
Mason saw himself in the whole novel as Mark, the responsible one, the sardonic one. In the last third of the book, the day at the reservoir, Jimmy had changed one thing. He’d changed what happened so that now when the angel boy, who was Matt, named Zeke in the book, full of beer and sorrow, as drunk really as Mason had ever seen anyone, takes the boat out into the reservoir, somebody goes with him. The somebody was Jimmy, whose name in the book is Cameron, and the two of them fight in the book, and Zeke does not return. Zeke, like Matt, never returns. Mason knew how to read such a scene in such a book; he knew what fiction is and what nonfiction is, and he also knew it was just a book, a story. And still when he finally picked it up again two days later and cut himself on a little triangle of glass caught in the cover, he was filled with the great urge to throw it again. That day had been the best and worst day of his life, and he’d been full of the sense of the day as a pinnacle. His whole life had been coming together for seventeen years, and he knew it was a false feeling, but he gloried in it that day at the reservoir, and knowing what had happened was important to him, essential to him. It rankled him to have Jimmy make it fiction, but he loved that the book glowed with the feeling of the day. It rankled him more to be such a callow reader.
Now Mason wasn’t dizzy, but it was unearthly to walk on the dark driveway, to be in the past this way, deeply in the old days. He turned in a circle, taking in the Brands’ house, the whole night world, his old world, blades of light flared at the edge of things. He drifted toward the street watching the little garage, and the quiet shelter seemed to float in the familiar dark.
• • •
Wendy Ingram rode her blue bicycle one-handed up the uneven center of Berry Street and halfway up the driveway of the Brands’ house the next afternoon. The sunlight caught in the great loads of heavy yellow leaves gathered and waiting in the old trees, and she stood and looked up; the whole street felt like a glowing cavern. She carried three books and walked back along the driveway to the garage, where she knocked lightly on the side door and then peeked in. “Hello?”
“Come in,” Jimmy Brand said. He was sitting on the bed in a white dress shirt and a pair of corduroys typing on his laptop. There was a pillow under it.
“You’re writing,” Wendy said, coming in a step. “I’ll come back later. Do you remember when I was over with Larry? I’m Wendy. I got your book.” She held it up, along with the two others in her hand. “I got another. I read them. I’ll come back when you’re not working.”
“Don’t come later.” Jimmy smiled and tipped his head back. “Come in the door right now. How’s the weather?”
“I love the fall,” she said. “The leaves are just turning and it’s still pretty warm out, but it’s all so . . .”
“Sad,” he said.
“Some,” she said. “I guess. But it’s a beautiful day. You want me to open the door? It’s not cold.”
“Let’s do that, Wendy,” he said. She opened the door, and a plank of white light fell onto the floor, and light took all the upper corners of the odd room, reflecting off the plastic sheeting stapled there. “Well,” Jimmy said. “Hello. That’s better. It is a day. With the leaves, you can be sad or get ready with your rake. In the old days we made some leaf piles like haystacks.”
“We still do it, but everybody has a blower.”
“Of course they do.”
She sat down, the books in her lap. Now she was uneasy and unsure of what to say, why she had come. “How are you?” she asked. “Can I get you anything?”
“I’m fine. I’ve got everybody hopping, and my mother is taking remarkable care. How’s your Larry?”
“Larry’s great. He’s always been great. But he’s not my Larry.”
“Oh?”
“I go with Wade. Did you meet him? We’ve been going out about a year.”
“A marriage,” Jimmy said.
“How’s that?”
“Nothing. I’m teasing, but I’m not very good at it.”
She pointed at his notebook. “Are you writing? What are you writing?”
“I’m just paddling around, taking notes. Do you keep a journal?”
She looked at him seriously, and he saw that this was what she’d come to talk about. “I do. It’s just something I do. I’m not sure of it. What should it be?”
“What is it?”
She shook her head and smiled. “It’s everything, a mess. It’s what I see and what I do and sometimes what I feel.”
“And sometimes all three.”
“Yes.”
“Like three guys trying to get through a door?”
“That’s it,” she said. “Except five and in a rush.” She met his smile and asked, “What do I do about that?”
“Take your time. Don’t push. Let each idea enter the room and find a chair. Give them half a page and then a page. Can you do it? Am I making sense? We’re really talking here.”
“I know what you mean, and I can do it sometimes. But what I get is nothing like what you write.” She lifted one of his novels in both of her hands. “It’s not like this. It’s not clear like this.”
“You read the books?”
“I loved these books. It’s like something I’ve never read before.” She sat back, embarrassed to have spoken so freely, and then she looked up again. “I never read a book about Oakpine before. I knew a lot of the places. The mountain, the reservoir, the town. It hasn’t changed very much.”
“Right, sometimes a book about a familiar place can seem—”
“No.” She stopped him. “I know what you’re going to say. I don’t mean that. It’s not the town. Because I feel the same way about this.” She held up the second book. “And this.” She held up the third. “And I’ve never been to New York. I don’t know what it is. That’s why I’ve come over. I didn’t tell Larry or Wade or anyone, but I wanted to talk to you.” She had come forward in her chair, her face a serious thing. Jimmy felt as awake as he had since returning. “How do you know what I’m feeling?” she said. “How’d you write it?”
He’d had a thousand discussions about writing with people, at conferences and on the radio, some on television, so many in person after dinner somewhere with Daniel, and Jimmy had been appreciated, celebrated at times for his work, but he’d never had someone ask him this way about what he’d done. He’d had all the workaday questions, and the social impact questions, and the courage questions and the risk questions and the syntactical questions, and he’d worked at answering them all with true honesty, but that wasn’t this. He’d never really taught, though he had spoken at seminars on fiction and on reviewing, and there he’d met students who were always earnest and smart, but their questions were practical in the main, not really artistic, not really personal. Now he felt relocated, found, and he saw Wendy’s questions as real things, his heart suddenly thudding in his wrists as he took the questions on the way you might lift a load, a book, or a box of personal effects. The sunlight rocketing around the room pleased him, and he looked at this young woman, her hair edged with the white light and measured his words. His vision was going, and he knew he would be sleeping in minutes.
“I apologize,” she said, “for my stupid questions. I know I have a lot to learn, and you’ve already—”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “I want you here, asking me these things. These are the only questions. We can talk and talk. Why do you keep your journal?”
“Because there’s too much,” she whispered. “There’s too much, and it wants to come out. My heart, whatever it is, maybe n
ot my heart, but it feels like my heart is full, and I write it down. I have to write it down.”
“What is it like when you read it later?”
Wendy sat back in the chair and folded her arms. “It’s not the same. I mean I’m glad I wrote it down, but it doesn’t have the feeling. Like when I read about Cameron. That’s you, right?”
“I guess,” Jimmy Brand said. He decided not to stand on a lesson; this was a new place long past where a lesson about point of view or persona or anything but the true writing would suffice. She was a shape now, a silhouette in the shimmering gray light.
“Where Cameron goes back to the reservoir that night into the cottonwoods and everybody’s gone, and he goes to the campsite on the shore where they’d parked the boat. The wind is warm, remember, and he finds Mark’s knife by the campfire stones, and he puts it in his pocket. When I read that scene and then reread it, it pulls me apart. He wants to go back and have the day over again and prevent the accident, but he wants to go on, leave town, leave for the future. No one will know, ever”—here Wendy leaned toward him, her hands woven together—“ever know”—and she dropped her voice—“what is in his heart. Sometimes I want to leave so badly.”
Jimmy sat still in the bed. It was a blurred waking dream, and he had both worlds in his heart, what had happened so long ago and what he had written, and both were alive to him.
“How did you write that?”
He was whispering, “What do you want to write?”
She stood and said, “I’ll go and let you rest. Thank you for speaking to me.”
“What,” he said again quietly, “do you want to write?”
“I don’t know, but I know I do. More than anything.”
“More than being with Wade?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yes, I know I’m sure. I went to Dallas last summer, a month ago, for the Spirit Club convention. It’s our service group. And the whole time I felt something calling me, not calling but something that wouldn’t let me sleep. I went to the roof of the hotel in the middle of the night and looked at the city, and the day we left I went up there in the afternoon, and I was all alone and no one knew where I was, my folks, Wade, no one, and then I thought, no one knows my heart, what’s in it. Not even me.” She stood up, frowned, sat down. “You think I’m a schoolgirl.”