Return to Oakpine

by Ron Carlson

  “Don‘t say that,” Mason said. “Well. Ricky Leeper. His dad ran the Sears Outlet those years.”

  “Yes, sir. Rick’s over in Chadron, Nebraska. Coaches something at the high school.”

  “You lost your virginity right back up there.” He smiled at her.

  “In all the world, that’s the place. It was more like the Garden of Eden in the old days.”

  “Every place was.”

  “What about you? You were taking your time, I noticed.”

  “I waited all year and then some. I went up to college in Mankato and got drunk enough at a party to take some girl back to my dorm. To my shame, I do not know her name because I never knew it. Isn’t that terrible?”

  “I wouldn’t know terrible,” Shirley said. “Life goes fast. There’re some bumps.” She was still looking into the hills. “Yep. Right over there.” The wind was steady and uninteresting, a noise that didn’t build, didn’t fade. The light channeled darker and lighter as the layers of cloud cover shifted in their approach to Oakpine Mountain. He stood in the lonely place with the woman. Too much sky. Mason had thought this would be some other place, that there would be something here instead of nothing, and his foolishness hurt him.

  “If life is lived between two points,” he said, “this is one of the points. I’m still looking for the other.” The leaves, yellow and brown, came across their feet, and behind them the smoky shadow of Oakpine Mountain, low and dark in the distance.

  “Matt came back and got her,” Shirley said. “From the other side.” She pointed over the rise. “The cove there. Kathleen was in the boat with him.”

  “He was drunk,” Mason said. “It was an accident.”

  “Oh, I know it was. I’m just saying from where we were, I saw him come back.”

  “Nobody could have changed a minute of it. Matt had the drinking from antiquity, his dad and his granddad. I remember when old man Brand stopped drinking; it was a weird thing to do in the day. The only reason Jimmy didn’t get it is because of what happened that day.” Mason turned to Shirley Stiver and shook his hands in the windy air. “Shall we go back?” he said.

  “What else, Mason? Go on. It was the day Jimmy left, right?”

  Mason looked at the woman and nodded. “He did. Or a day or two later.”

  “It was a confusing afternoon.”

  “When we heard, we came down here.” Mason said. “We’d been up under the trees with the guitars, and we heard about the accident, and then somebody said they were bringing the body back, and I think we saw the boat or somebody’s boat coming around there, the point, and . . .”

  “Jimmy never even saw the body.”

  “Right.” Mason said. “Right. He just left.”

  Shirley took Mason’s arm and turned him for the car. “Did you drive him?”

  “I did.”

  “What did he do? How did he leave?”

  “He took the bus,” Mason said. “I put him on the bus a few days later. If he’d have gone home and told the story, he’d be in the house today. In all these years there are five or six sentences that haven’t been said, and now it is too late to say them. It was Matt’s fault. Jimmy tried.” Mason stopped again in the everlasting wind and tucked his hands under his arms.

  Shirley stood still on the bleached concrete ramp, her jacket flapping. “Edgar lost a son, and he looks like a tough man, but he isn’t. Some guy works for the railroad for years on end, you think he can’t get a broken heart. He did. He never came back from it.”

  “I know. You never come back,” Mason said. “And maybe you shouldn’t.”

  “Come on,” Shirley said. She took his elbow. “What about another coffee then? In town. And we’ll go over the paperwork.”

  • • •

  Frank Gunderson drove up slowly and parked his big Ford double cab on Berry Street in the late afternoon, the sky scrubbed to a dark iron, and carried a wooden case of beer up the driveway to the Brands’ garage. He could hear the stuttering guitars start and run a line or two, then stop and blink and start again. He stood at the door and listened for a minute, then tapped the door with the toe of his cowboy boot. Larry Ralston, his hand on the neck of his Martin six-string, opened the door. Jimmy sat in the chair with the red Fender braced above his lap on the arms. Frank could see his face now, narrow, and the angular chin and the bones in his shoulders through his shirt. Frank pushed by his first remark about his altered friend and said, “It is the older version of Frank Gunderson, stopping by with the fruits of his labors.”

  “Frank,” Jimmy said. “It is good to see you.”

  “Hi, Jimmy. I don’t know if you can have this or not, but it’s just full of good nourishment and no preservatives and about two hundred calories a bottle. You can squander it on your company if need be. I’m sorry I haven’t been over sooner. What is this, a lesson?”

  “We’re just playing,” Jimmy said. “This kid goes door to door doing charity work.”

  “I do not,” Larry said. “Hi, Frank. I don’t have any friends my own age.”

  Frank stepped to Jimmy and took his hand, “You look good.”

  “I do not,” Jimmy said. “But I’m sitting up and trying to achieve a few chords that aren’t too murky. You want to play some?”

  “I do, and I see by your attitude that we’re going to get the band back together one way or another. Jimmy, I’ll come by tomorrow with my bass. It’ll take two weeks to tune.” Mrs. Brand appeared at the door and came in.

  “Do it,” Jimmy said, “and we’ll find a drummer.”

  “I know one,” Larry said.

  “Frank,” Mrs. Brand said, “I’m glad it’s you. I’ve got a job for you.” Frank pointed at Jimmy and said goodbye. He went out, and Mrs. Brand gave him two shopping bags full of zucchini off the back porch. “Put them on the bar and see if they walk away,” she said.

  “They will,” Frank said. “We need a festive touch at that old place.”

  • • •

  The little white garage on Berry Street saw more comings and goings in October than it had in all the thirty years before. Many times there were vehicles parked across the street, Mason’s Mercedes or Frank’s truck and the hardware store van three times a week and Wendy’s bicycle leaning against the wooden wall. And these people, carrying bags of croissants or coffee or bottles of beer or musical instruments or books and folders, walked up the driveway in the gray weather or the slanted autumn sunlight as it washed against the Brands’ old house, rinsed of its warmth, but light anyway. And often the visitor would glance up and catch a ghosted face in the kitchen window, perhaps, as Mr. Brand wandered his house and watched the desultory cavalcade of pilgrims and friends who came to see his son. Once a week all the guys showed up, and they played music, the drums set in the doorway so that Craig Ralston had to sit in the open door on a milk crate. They didn’t play long, never quite an hour, but they played, and it was disjointed but full hearted, and there were moments when they’d round into the chorus and it fused and took off. The favorites became the Beach Boys and the simple Beatles songs, with Larry fingering the intros and Mason taking Jimmy’s guitar after a song or two and leading them through “I Get Around.” Larry showed them how to roll forward into “Don’t Worry Baby” and then mute it still rolling, holding his left hand out flat, quiet boys, so that Jimmy could sing, his voice a tenor whisper, his eyes closed, and this soft refrain made everyone lean closer. They played the song with careful measure. Jimmy’s singing that way, sitting in his bed, made them a band again. Behind where Craig sat in the doorway, the neighborhood kids, four or five of them, would stand listening, trying to see into the garage.

  Jimmy Brand came to know the bump of Wendy’s bicycle handlebar as she’d lean the three-speed Raleigh against the building and then knock on the door, two and then two more, before she turned the knob and leaned her face in, saying quietly, �
��Hello, are you awake? Am I too early?” It was amazing to see the face of someone who was writing, see that she’d been off in her own dark, writing stories. The writing tutorials went well. Wendy met every deadline, keeping a pressure on herself that she embraced. She wrote two stories for every assignment, printed them out, and then let Jimmy Brand pick one, left hand or right. She made him smile with that, and he was cheered and humbled to see her commitment. It was the way you did it, a page at a time, steadily, until the pages began to assemble themselves and want their own way. Pages and pages. He’d known a hundred writers, and most binged and floated.

  Jimmy Brand had Wendy come over twice a week for the half hour before the musicians arrived. With her, he always had twenty good, lucid minutes, more if she did the talking, before he felt the first erosion, his energy dimming, sliding away. The friction in his blood seemed to gather, and by the time Mason and the other guys arrived for a short practice session, his arms and legs ached. Speaking with her and then sitting with his old friends as they practiced was a test, but one he savored, and at the end of an hour he was blissed out and burning. The crowded garage became hallucinogenic, a rolling cartoon some days. He smiled at it, but the smile hurt. He’d wake, and Larry Ralston would be playing the guitar. How did he learn to play the guitar? When?

  As the band dipped and plunged through rocky versions of “I Get Around” or “Tell Her No” by the Zombies, Jimmy Brand could see the percussion on the inside of his eyelids, and then the silence when his musician friends stopped was a roaring vacuum that made him gasp. It was all physical. The medicines helped, but he could feel the half-life of each ticking within. Some days he was certain he could feel the crumbs of calcium bleeding out of his bones. His arms were useless. Other days those forces abated, and he could sit and see clearly, and talking was the pleasure it had always been.

  Wendy’s fifth story was a long one that crossed territories for her. There was dry anger in it: a girl being pressured for sex. When she handed the story to Jimmy, she had asked if she could request from him a favor. She sat on the edge of the easy chair at the corner of his bed and asked if he could be careful with the story when he fell asleep. She knew the musicians would be arriving. “If it’s no trouble and you can remember.”

  “No one is going to read this story except me. And I am going to read it. You’re worried that I’ll pass out and somebody we know will come by and find this manuscript and read your work.”

  She looked at him unable to speak because he had spoken her fear.

  “I will guard your work with all of my armies, my dear. I promise.”

  “I did what you said,” she whispered. “I went for it. I wrote into something that matters to me.”

  “I’m alerted and on guard,” Jimmy said.

  She’d tried hard with the story, she said, and then apologized for asking such a favor, and she said, “I know you’ll be careful—you’ve been so kind.” And then Wendy sat back in the chair, and without moving at all, not a shoulder, she began to cry. Her crying was a strange thing to watch, and Jimmy Brand knew he was seeing something primal. She might have been singing. Things were still happening on this far edge of his life. At such moments he felt his chest open up and fill with air, and it was as if he were young again, the beautiful hurt. Her story was heavy on his lap. Finally Wendy lifted her chin and pressed the back of her wrist against her eyes and came out blinking. She wiped her eyes again and reached for her story. Jimmy now had it in his hand too, and when she tugged, he felt the pleasure of holding on. He looked at her. “I’ll be utterly vigilant,” he said. “I give you my word.” They both still held the manuscript. “We’re in a project here, right? You’ve done a lot of work. We’re going onward. I want to read this.” He let it go. “But I won’t unless you want me to.”

  “Oh, I do.” Wendy held the story in both hands before her and looked at him and said something he knew she believed, something he vaguely felt he’d heard long ago, some faded déjà vu: “It’s no good. I’m not sure it’s any good.”

  “Well,” he said, “you look like a writer.” He gave her his smile and counted on two fingers: “You look like you were up late typing and that you have recently been crying.” Those were the two unmistakable tells.

  Now she opened her face to him, and her eyes glistened with an intention he hadn’t seen anywhere in years. He knew they were in it now, no quitting, just the work, words and lives, as they talked of her stories. It’s a real thing, something to live for, he thought, but I’m not going to live for it.

  Later he would tell her something he’d said in conferences when he’d taught in them: that you’re not really started until someone has cried. He had said it to lighten tough moments, but everyone knew it was true.

  Then Jimmy asked her if they could change the routine and not talk about the story she’d given him three days before, but instead read the manuscript on her lap, the one she was wrinkling in her grip.

  She began quietly steady and measured without inflection, word for word reading as if presenting each sentence for inspection. In the story, the two young people are deliriously happy and exchange strange presents as their courtship ascends. She named them Steve and Eve and stopped the first time she’d read that and pointed at Jimmy Brand sitting in the bed. “I did that on purpose,” she said. “If it’s stupid, I’ll change it later, okay?”

  Jimmy said, “It’s fine. It’s like the words ‘woman’ and ‘man.’ They’re not stupid.”

  Eve runs a roadside bait stand, selling night crawlers for two dollars a dozen. She gathers them at night from the city parks and from the four acres of sod behind the house where she lives with her mother. There is a good deal of night crawler lore—Eve has developed a knowledge and skills about gathering the creatures. Steve, who lives in town, has less patience for her work, even though he understands it is going to pay her way to college. The summer before, she made thousands of dollars. Eve has plans to go to the University of Hawaii and study oceanography. Steve wants to use her hours to neck in his pickup, but she soon learns that if she goes out after midnight, she has less success, and she doesn’t get enough sleep. Eve’s mother likes Steve. Everybody likes Steve. Eve likes Steve, but there is wear and tear in their relationship. It is impossible to go so far in his pickup. Eve wants college—she’s wanted it all her life, but Steve is right there in her face. After he gets her shirt off, he wants her pants. Without her shirt, in his truck, she feels as if she cannot breathe. All the final scenes are about her pants. She isn’t giving them up. Steve says that she can have his. “I don’t want your pants off,” she says.

  While Wendy read, there was a noise outside and then a knock. She started and put her pages in the folder before answering the door. It was a kid Wendy knew from school, Michael Ganelli, who delivered for Walgreens. “Hey, Wendy,” he said, coming into the small room. “Mr. Brand?”

  “Yes?”

  “They said the garage.”

  “This is it.”

  The boy stepped out and returned with a folded walker, bright blue aluminum with wheels. He opened it and secured the little basket on the handle and stood it by the television. “From Mrs. Gunderson at the clinic,” he said.

  “It’s Christmas,” Jimmy said.

  “Sir?”

  “Presents,” Jimmy said to the boy.

  “Can you sign?” Michael Ganelli held out his clipboard, and Jimmy Brand initialed it. “Thanks. See you, Wendy.” The boy closed the door and went out along the driveway.

  “That’s cool,” Wendy said. Her eyes were sad now, in the story.

  “Sit down,” Jimmy said to her. “I’ll go for a stroll later. Please, let’s read. That’s how you know you’re doing it, Wendy. Someone gets a present in the middle of your story, and he still wants the rest of the story. I’m serious.” She resumed the story of Eve and Steve. She was reading faster now but soon slowed as the story unfolded. Steve i
s pressing Eve for sex, and every night they go out becomes a kind of skirmish. They twist tighter into this corner, until it becomes apparent one night that Steve is going to go ahead with his plans for her, over her wishes. In the struggle he cuffs her, and they stop. He is standing in the open pickup door above her, and they are contesting her pants, which are now at her knees, where he has pulled them. There is one moment when he might apologize, but he lets it pass. They both hear the unmarked silence. He’s hit her on the cheekbone, and it was a surprise to both of them. “Let go,” she whispers. The blow has hurt her head and changed something in her. Steve cannot let go. Her pants and underpants are fisted in his hands. He tugs again. “No,” she says. He is looking at what he is doing and avoids her eyes. “No,” she repeats. Steve now has the clothing bunched at her ankles. Suddenly she stops and says, “Okay.” This causes him to look up. He’s already thrown one of her shoes behind him onto the gravel shoulder. “Okay,” she says. “Steve, Okay.” He makes an odd smile, his eyes narrow.

  Wendy stopped reading in the old garage. The story carried perfectly well, and Jimmy was alert in it. “There’s one more half page,” she said.

  “Go on,” Jimmy said.

  “Is it sick?” Wendy said.

  “Not at all,” Jimmy said. “If I understand what you mean.”

  “When I wrote it, this part, I wondered.”

  “Go ahead. Read.”

  “Did you always know what you were going to feel when you wrote your books?” She was leaning back in the old overstuffed chair, slumped there now, out of the pool of yellow light in the gray afternoon.

  “No, Wendy, I didn’t.”

  She started now to read again, and he had to ask her to read louder. She sat up again into the light, holding the pages there, and she read the end of the story aloud.

  Steve stands over Eve and bunches her jeans and underpants, stuffing them into the pickup bed with his left hand. When she says okay now, she adds, “But you’ll have to hit me again, and then you can do what you want.” Her head aches from the first time. He pretends not to hear, and she pushes him with her foot and tells him, “No. Steve, you have to hit me or give me my pants.”