by Ron Carlson
He smiled. “Wade.” He touched Wade on the shoulder. “I’m going to give you one more chance, okay? About Jimmy Brand. Don’t call him a fag. It makes you look stupid. Are you stupid?” Larry heard himself say this, and he didn’t shrug or duck or laugh. He’d said it, and he’d meant it. He was surprised but happy with that. He was likely to say anything.
“Wendy said he was a fag.”
“No, she didn’t. She didn’t say that.”
“She goes to see him,” Wade says. “It’s sick.”
“Let’s run.”
“‘One more chance’?” Wade said. “What does that mean?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Larry said. “Tell Wendy hi for me.” And now he turned and filled his lungs with air and plunged away, starting fast and staying there, striding powerfully down the street, each step a flight, faster than he’d ever taken such a distance. As the motion adjusted itself and he settled into the pattern, pushing and reaching, pushing and reaching, he knew that his heart was good for all of it. There wasn’t enough road for this heart. There was no way he would slow down before he flew into the park.
“Wendy,” he said as he ran and again, “Wendy, watch out, my dear, for stupid Wade approaches.” Oh god, he thought, and he heard the words as they came from his mouth, “Who am I now? Who am I now?”
• • •
Painting the Kirby house went very well. Frank Gunderson came by and joined Mason and Craig for the job. The three men did prep for two days, taping and sanding, and then they struck the entire interior with an airless sprayer in one long day, working with two lamps as the fall twilight fell and doubled. “I’m a get-it-done painter,” Frank told them as they masked the light fixtures and doorframes. “We paint the men’s room five times a year at the Antlers. I’m not really into your fine work.”
“How many times have you painted the front since we did it that summer?” Mason asked him.
“Twice, I guess. Maybe three times. Every ten years, if it needs it or not.”
“What did old Wattington pay us?”
“Four days.” Mason said, calculating. “I think he gave us sixty bucks apiece.” He had finished papering the two large front windows. “Jimmy would know.”
“It was the money we used for the reservoir remember? Somebody went with me to the Bargain Basket, and we filled two carts, piled it up, steaks, watermelon, tons.” Frank looked at Mason, and his smile dimmed.
“We’d played at Snyder’s up in Gillette that weekend and were already flush. Life on Earth. A four-hour drive, a two-hour gig, and four hours back in the dark,” Mason added. “What were we, nuts? What’d we get for that?”
“I know it was two hundred dollars,” Craig said. “It was a record for us.”
They’d all stopped working. The taping was finished. The sanding was done.
Frank spoke. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“Nobody did. We’d been out there before,” Mason said. “There’d been worse parties.”
“No, I mean in general. I thought, I guess, that we’d just be a band for a few years, something. But we go to the reservoir, Matt drowns, and everybody vanishes. It was like time broke in two, and then we’ve had the rest.”
“He got cut to pieces,” Craig said.
Frank uncoiled the hoses on the airless paint sprayer. “Who’s painting?”
“I am,” Craig said. “Tomorrow.”
The three men, dusted like ghosts, went out onto the front porch in the deep gloaming. Frank had brought a cooler with bottles of his new beer, and they cracked these open and sat on the steps. It was dark earlier now, and as they sat brushing dust off their arms and the tops of their shoes, they could hear men and women call for children from time to time.
“Old man Brand could call,” Mason said.
“God, could he. ‘Ma . . . att! Jim . . . my!’ He had a quarter-mile radius. We heard him one time when we were on the railroad bridge,” Craig said. “Matt and I were down there spitting on a freight train.”
“Now it’s cell phones and beepers,” Mason said.
They heard a voice call, “Dav-ey! Time for dinner.”
“Let’s go over there,” Mason said, “see what they’re having.”
“What else you got on this place?” Frank said.
“Clean up, polish the floors.”
“You want to put in a dishwasher?” Craig asked.
“We’ll probably do the kitchen,” Mason said. “Cabinets. That lighting.”
“No hurry, sounds like.”
“I need this job to last a couple years,” Mason said. “Until I get my head on straight. Until I find my head and get it on straight. Oh, just my head. Forget straight.” He lobbed his beer bottle out onto the thick front lawn. “Good beer, Frank,” he said, taking another. “But we’ll probably finish up and hand it over to Shirley Stiver in a couple weeks.”
A white Land Rover pulled up in front and a young man got out and came up the walk. “Mr. Ralston?”
“Yes, sir,” Craig said, standing up.
“I spoke to you about a remodel up on the mountain?”
“Right,” Craig said, and walked the man back to his car, where they talked for several minutes, looking at a short roll of papers the man handed Craig. Behind them on the street, four kids stepped by arm in arm, girls, their baggy white sweatshirts floating like their voices in the dark.
“You know, Jimmy put that day at the reservoir in one of his books,” Mason told Frank.
“He did?”
“Yeah, but he turned it all around. He put himself in the boat with Matt. The names were all different, but you can see what he did.”
“Right, Matt took off. Hell, I could write that day and put it in a book. Matt was fucked up.”
“Was Kathleen with him?” Mason asked.
“Kathleen never said word one about Matt Brand. But Matt was out alone, and he was as drunk as you get to be.”
Mason pointed down the block. “The reason Jimmy Brand is bunking in the garage is that Old Edgar thinks that thirty years ago he was in the boat. He thinks Jimmy could have done something. I’m sure of it.”
“Jesus. How is Jimmy? Now I hear he’s feeling better?”
“Kathleen—you know I spoke to Kathleen?”
“Right.”
“Kathleen says he’s a little better. She arranged some medicine. He can get out of bed every day now. You want to go down there this week?”
Craig shook hands with the man at the car, and the man drove away.
“I think I will,” Frank said.
“Is that another job?” Mason asked Craig.
Craig sat down on the steps and took a fresh beer from Frank. “Absolutely. My life is just beginning.”
“And this is simply the weirdest season in my fucking life,” Mason said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was happy. Sand the walls, sweat, drink beer.”
“Lawyers,” Frank said.
“That goddamned boat,” Mason said.
Another car pulled up, Frank’s Explorer, and the window slid down. “Come on over a minute,” Frank said to Sonny, who was driving. “Meet my old friend Mason.”
• • •
Many days that fall after school Wendy came early and helped Mrs. Brand prepare a tray for Jimmy. Whenever she arrived to talk, Wendy stood by the little door in the side of the garage and looked across at the kitchen window, and if she saw the older woman moving in there, she’d go and knock. Wendy was already a fair cook, but in those weeks Mrs. Brand led her through the construction of a huge apple pie with a cross-hatch crust. A pie they made one day while Jimmy napped. Mrs. Brand was glad for the company, and the young woman helped her go deeper into the cooking than she would have alone, sometimes making snacks for Jimmy, tea sandwiches and canapés of all kinds, a kind of flour
ish, and sometimes, if Jimmy was sleeping, they’d plow ahead and make dishes with the garden’s riches, great pans of layered zucchini lasagna, and stuffed peppers with wild rice and sausage, and late in the season two golden pumpkin pies. The first two or three sessions were a little stiff, with Mrs. Brand pointing and suggesting, and they moved carefully, to not bump into each other in the little space, but then they simply fell in, and Wendy knew where the bowls were and the shallow pans and such, and they talked or didn’t talk. Had Mrs. Brand known that Jimmy would be a writer?
“I don’t know,” she said, laying out rashers of bacon on a broiling pan. They were going to make bacon crumble to sprinkle on top of a pan of fettucine. “He was a skinny little kid, much smaller even into high school than his brother, Matt, and he was bookish, I guess, and the teachers said he had an imagination. He skipped a grade, and we didn’t know if that was good or bad.” Mrs. Brand laughed. “We knew it was good. Then he got involved with the music and the band for the year before he left, but I knew he was writing. Like you, he had notebooks.”
There were narrow pages of pasta laid out on waxed paper on the counter, and Wendy began to construct the layers in the glass pan. “It must have been hard to read some of his books, the ones about Oakpine.”
“It was only for a minute, and then I saw that it was his way of sorting it out, making a kind of sense of the terrible accident, and I could read them. I read all of them.”
“That’s amazing.”
“And now you’re talking to him about writing?”
“I am.” Wendy looked down at their huge creation. It was always like this. They made ten times more food than Jimmy would ever eat. If a dish had an extra feature or the possibility of one, they included it. Mrs. Brand’s fridge was full.
“I feel lucky about this fall, Mrs. Brand. I’ve never learned so much.”
“I’m glad he’s here too,” Jimmy’s mother said.
• • •
The garage at Mason’s house was in mean shape, great deep stains in the concrete floor, and the walls were bare splintered wood, also for some reason lathered with oil spills, the whole room dark as if burned in a fire, and the two old doors sprung on the ruined steel plate hinges. Mason retrieved the ladder and went up into the garage rafters and pulled down long sheets of aluminum siding and a dozen ruined bicycle tires and twenty greasy fan belts stretched and cracking and coils of wire nailed to the rafters and four old cardboard cases of empty cans, rusted through, and the cracked plastic windshield of a motorcycle. As the pile grew in the center of the floor, Mason got more and more committed to his plan. He knifed the windowpanes so they could be reglazed, and he tied his kerchief around his nose and mouth and used the broom to brush the walls, and then he swept up the floor using the old snow shovel as a dustpan, and he threw all the junk into the Dumpster. It was only noon. He could feel the backs of his legs burning a little from toeing that ladder; it felt good. He came out into the fall day and again took in the gigantic trees on the old street. He could hear the motor of the paint sprayer in the house. Something moved between the trees, and Mason stepped clear so he could see. It was two great lines of sandhill cranes in long V’s flying south. They were silent in the distance, as if something observed on a remote screen. There was a motion out front of the house, and the hardware van crossed onto the driveway and parked in front of the Dumpster. “Lunch!” Larry Ralston called, jumping from the driver’s seat with a white paper bag.
Mason waved at the boy to come over.
“You’re gutting the place,” Larry said.
Craig came out the back door, pulling off his paper-painting mask. “I see reinforcements are here,” he said.
“Not really,” the boy said. “You’re still on your own. I’m off to other deliveries, and then my life as a teenager. Perhaps you remember that era, then again, perhaps not.’
“Enough!” Craig said, looking into the bag and extracting a beautiful baguette. “Are there drinks?”
“As ordered,” Larry said, running back to the vehicle and returning with two huge paper cups of soda. “See you soon.”
Mason said, “Larry, bring me back a mop and charcoal lighter. Any.” And as the boy waved and departed, Mason stepped over and sat on the grass in the dappled shade, and Craig joined him. “I’m halfway inside, and I will say it is white, but not too white.”
The baguettes were Muenster and chicken salad with Chinese mustard. Mason tore off half and took a bite and said, “My god, we’re rescued.”
“I love it when we eat like lawyers,” Craig said. “These are from Edelman’s just to show we have some capable luncheries in Oakpine.”
Mason, still chewing, pointed at the open garage with his sandwich and said, “What do you think, old friend, of our band’s new rehearsal hall?”
“Okay,” Craig said. “Good, good. But what is our name? Did we have a name?”
Mason said quietly, “Life on Earth. We were mainly called ‘Those four guys from Oakpine,’ which is kind of truth in advertising, but I remember Jimmy wanting ‘Life on Earth.’” They were talking and chewing and gesturing with their paper cups of pop.
“Whatever fits on the flyer,” Craig said.
“How much paint have you got?”
“Plenty,” Craig said. “Do you want to paint this?” He indicated the garage.
“I do. Tomorrow afternoon. I’d like to spray it like the enemy and move in.”
Craig sat still, unnerved to be happy this way, his old friend in town, all this old new stuff ringing his ears. “Done,” Craig said. “I’ll finish in the morning and bring out the gear.”
They were silent for a while after eating, old friends, and the day ticked in them, leaves falling along the street and the sun rolling away, weaker every day. “Okay,” Craig said finally. “I’ll finish upstairs by six or so, and then we can make plans for tomorrow.” They’d talked like that the whole time, measuring the steps.
After lunch Mason found the little brass pressure nozzle for the hose and hooked it up. When he turned on the water, the old green rubber hose snared and bulged and then shot a sharp narrow stream twenty feet. Mason grabbed two loops of hose and marched into the open garage, shooting his avenging water into the upper corners of the little building and then back and forth along the walls, as scraps and splinters and dirt and spider webs flew free in the powerful wash. He was having fun. The place would blow-dry overnight and he could spray it tomorrow, but when he turned to the back wall, the jet of water caught the window and two panes blew out, and as he moved the spray to the sidewall to assess the damage, the pressure slapped two planks loose, and so he gave the entire room the careful once-over, loosening ten or twelve wallboards, smiling, thinking, I’m going to wash this house down.
Having found a project he hadn’t anticipated, Mason climbed into it with both feet. He bought a dozen fresh one-by-eights and laid them on sawhorses the next day before the doorless garage shell. He could see light between the planks in many places. He was able to cinch about half the loosened boards, running two screws into each end. Then he pried off the five or six that were worn and weathered beyond reclaiming and threw them in the dumpster. He measured each missing slot and cut his new lumber with Craig’s bright circular saw, tapping them into the wall with his hammer, each piece snug as a puzzle. The golden sawdust misted up into the afternoon sunlight, and he was happy to have a good day. At one point he was on his knees behind the building, laying in a bright new board along the base of the foundation, and he caught a motion in the corner of his eye: Jimmy Brand waving from his chair just outside the Brands’ garage.
“Be careful!” Jimmy called.
“I know you!” Mason shouted back. He stood and waved his drill motor. “The new clubhouse. The band is going to sound real good at this distance. When I get cleaned up, I’ll come down for a drink.” Again, standing in the weak pure light looking down throu
gh the gardens of the backyards and calling to his friend rushed Mason with a vertigo that he couldn’t understand, a gravity, a recognition. It wasn’t déjà vu. He waved and smiled. Waving a drill—it was a wonder.
He brushed the new spots and the rough spots inside and out with gray wood primer, and then he cleaned the doorframe of the old hinges and plugged the old screw holes with split shims and mashed them flush with the head of his hammer, and then he measured the aperture twice and wrote down the numbers on a card in his pocket. He’d install a new door, a lift door on tracks. Craig would know how.
SEVEN
Kathleen
The next day by noon, Mason had run one more spray of house-white exterior latex along the bottom plate of the wooden garage. He’d given a good coat to the inside and the outside, and he backed out of the space looking right and left for any streaky holidays. The backs of his legs were pinging, and his eyebrows were dusted white. Craig was geared to go with the airless sprayer, and as he began painting the interior with the first of twelve gallons of Navajo white, which he would use by nightfall, Mason went out and cleaned the yard once again and then cut the front lawn. The day rose and held on the fulcrum of the ripe summer morning, then tipped without a breeze or a weighty cloud into a fall afternoon, the yellow light now an ounce removed and shadows drawn from the old book, unmistakable; the season had capitulated. Mason edged the front walk with a shovel, realizing he was just hanging out. He washed the shovel and leaned it inside the bright garage with his rake and broom. The old cracked cement inside the garage was clean; he’d scrubbed it with the charcoal lighter, a solvent. From the house he could hear the periodic hissing of the airless. His furniture, such as it was, was all covered with tarpaulins, and he’d spend tonight up with Craig and Marci while the paint dried. For a moment he lifted the rake and thought about pulling through the lawn one more time, the satisfaction, but he put it back. Mason walked down the old block to the Brands and stood at the end of the driveway for a moment. He approached Mr. Brand’s boat and put a hand on it, a boat he hadn’t touched in thirty years, and as he did he heard voices, a female voice, and by the cadence he could hear that a woman was reading. By the open side door he stood and listened for a minute, the words coming steady in a young woman’s voice. Mrs. Brand’s garden had stepped out of its bed. Several pumpkins showed their orange shoulders in the dusty green growth. The voice stopped, and Mason considered knocking, calling hello, and then he heard Jimmy Brand’s voice, the same voice in a tenor whisper. Jimmy was remarking on whatever she had read, and Mason heard only parts: “No, it’s going to tell you where to go now. It’ll take all your attention, but you’re in. Well done.”