by Ron Carlson
“What?” Wade said. “What’d you say?
“I’m talking to myself, Wade. Again.”
The girls’ short rabbit fur coats bristled in the cold Wyoming breeze. A week ago it had been warm. “He’s okay,” Wendy said. “I’ve seen him drive worse than this. Let’s just go.” She went around and climbed into the cab of the truck. Larry looked at Stephanie, and she leaned against him and said, “It’s okay, Larry. Come on.” In the narrow backseat, she slid against him for warmth, pretending to chatter her teeth. “Turn on the heater,” she said to Wade. “It’s cold.”
“I sort of thought it might be raining,” Wendy said. She was sitting with Wade in the front seat. “It’s been raining in there for two hours.”
Wade wheeled them onto Main Street and said, “We can’t go to Wendy’s. Her mom waits up, and she’d get us all in a big game of Scrabble.”
They passed Fendall’s and the gaggle of shiny cars parked there. The big front windows were full of the A group having coffee and banana splits, the girls in primary colors going from table to table sampling the ice cream, their shoulders shining. Larry felt he was seeing some time capsule cartoon of a life he had known. He wondered how they could breathe in that bell jar. Wade then drove them down Main Street and through the gravel parking lot of the Dome, naming the cars there behind the old pool hall, a dozen friends inside in fancy clothes playing eight ball. You could drink there if you were careful. “Just drive,” Wendy said. “We’re not going in there tonight.”
“There,” Larry pointed. “Pull into the Trail’s End.” The old motel was dark as charcoal in the night. The windows of the office were broken out, and weeds grew along the walkway in front of all the rooms. “Should we get a room?” Larry said.
Wade was confused and did a U-turn to drive into the littered parking lot of the ruin.
“Yes. They told us to get a room, and we should get a room,” Wendy said, laughing.
“I don’t know how many people just told us to get a room,” Stephanie said.
“Twenty. ‘Get a room,’ they said,” Wendy added. “Twenty people. Trusted individuals.”
“I get that,” Larry said, “and it sounds like good advice. Who doesn’t like a room? But what exactly do we do with a room? I’ve already got a room.”
“Me too,” Stephanie said.
“What is it?” Wade said.
“We’re good,” Larry said. “I just wanted my date to be able to say I took her to the Trail’s End.”
“Do you have a room?” Stephanie asked Wade.
“Let’s can it, boys and girls,” Wade said, and he floored it and spun his wheels onto the highway out of town. They felt the old prairie darkness swallow the car. He turned at the lane for the cemetery and eased, lights out, up the hill and around the fenced property. There were no other cars on the dark plateau. Usually on weekend nights in good weather there was a car or two parked off from each other above the speckled lights of town.
“I guess we’re all alone,” Wade said.
For Stephanie, Larry pointed out at the graveyard and whispered, “Except for.” She was in his other arm, and he could feel her hand on his hot rib cage. There were a dozen antelope bedded down in the poplar grove behind the cemetery, and they were watchful but didn’t get up. Byton Hartman was singing a song about his country and how much it meant to him, by god, and how it would always mean a lot to him. He had a voice so deep, it seemed to have been machined. Wade set the vehicle in park and left it running and pulled Wendy across to him. The cab was large but small, the rear seats close but separated by the high seatbacks, and the dark warm space smelled of the dry floral scent of the girls’ perfume and the newness of the heater and soy sauce and ginger.
Larry saw Wendy slide to Wade, and then he turned to Stephanie, who had lifted her face up for the kiss. She had somehow gotten her hand inside his shirt, and he felt the impossibly smooth surface of her palm on his fevered ribs. For a while everything was shifting satin and breathing and the singing, a nonsense bass thumping, and the windows screened with condensation, and Larry let go a little and then a little more with Stephanie against him, sweet and more muscled than he’d imagined. He hadn’t imagined anything really, and here now she arched up as if she had made a decision. She bumped his chin with her forehead in such a way that he knew to unzip the back of her dress a stroke. “Larry,” she whispered into his mouth, “be careful of my dress,” and she helped him slide his hand along the moist side of her breast; she gasped, or it seemed she did, and he stopped breathing to feel the weight of her, the contour and the wonderful warmth. Their kissing was seamless. He could hear the couple in the front seat, and he realized his ears were out for every noise from there, Wendy’s breath and Wade’s little directional “uh’s” every once in a while.
• • •
The night wind on the old garage on Berry Street sucked and rattled the door like a visitor, and Jimmy woke with his lamp still on. He opened his eyes and heard the familiar rattling of the entry door with a clarity that surprised him. His head was clear. When he rolled his head, it didn’t hurt or drift, and he sat up and saw that it was midnight exactly. He drew a breath and then another, and he felt as if he had slept all night. He hadn’t felt this well for a year. He pulled his legs up and took his bare feet in both hands and stretched his neck down, and it didn’t burn. “I don’t know what this is,” he said aloud. He put on his slippers and his robe and the jacket with a kind of pleasure, and he stood up, and his vision did not swim. The door still tapped, and he went to it and pushed a folded paper into the jamb, and it was silent. Then he opened the door and felt the fresh night in his face. He sat on the bed again and pulled the new walker over and tested it. There were wheels and a brake and a basket and a little padded seat that folded down. It was deluxe.
• • •
In New York he and Daniel would walk to the river sometimes instead of going straight home from the paper. Daniel would come to the office on West 22nd Street, and they’d strike west, kicking and talking about their days. Daniel had once done a piece for a slick travel magazine on the theme of island getaways, and he’d included a famous sketch of Manhattan, referring to the various possible beaches up and down the East and Harlem rivers and then the Hudson, making each shoreline something out of the guidebooks, cabañas and piña coladas optional. Jimmy would have already been to some off-off Broadway play and then come back to the office to write it up, and it was wonderful to be out in the late night, especially in winter, the streets theirs all the way to the water. Even after Daniel got sick, and he was sick a long time, they still went down to what they called the beaches when they could, arm in arm to the waterfront, the new docks on the old piers, and the luminous water and the serious smell of the Hudson, and the lights of New Jersey in electric palisades.
Jimmy directed the walker out to the driveway now in the windy midnight neighborhood. All Wyoming was night. The air quickened everything and Jimmy was thrilled to be out this way. There was no moon, and the wind kept finding the leaves in ranks and rolling them past him. “‘Pestilence-stricken multitudes,’” Jimmy said, the old Shelley poem. It was cold, and at first it was pure tonic, and then it settled on his neck and his forehead and his hands. “Go on,” he said. “I’m walking to the street. A person walks to the street. Just to the old street and back.” Halfway he realized he should have worn gloves, and his hands cramped and opened and cramped. And then he felt a sickening pain rinse through his body, as if he’d spilled something on his shirt; he wasn’t able to be able to be able. You’re sick now, mister. It was a long way, he saw. He might have made a mistake.
• • •
At that hour Larry listened. He held Stephanie Barnes, but now sometimes her head was in his shoulder, and they sat close. In the front, he could hear Wendy and Wade whispering a little now and again, something like whispering. He kissed Stephanie, and she was smiling at him, a
nd he was happy too, he supposed. He should be. He heard Wendy whisper, “Not here.” Stephanie heard it too, and to cover, she kissed Larry and embraced him, shifting her weight then suddenly and sharply to her hand on his ribs. The white light went right to the tops of his eyelids, and he said a sharp “Oh!” and Wendy’s face appeared over the seat.
“What?”
Wade pulled her sharply back, and she said, “Goddammit, Wade, no.”
Wade said something that Larry couldn’t hear, and Wendy’s face was there again. “Are you all right?” she asked Larry.
He was breathing through his teeth, and Stephanie was apologizing, and then Wendy was jerked away, and she swore again, and then Wade said, “Okay,” and then after a silence he said loudly, “Fuck this! Just fuck this!” It was loud, but Larry was not surprised. Wendy scrambled back to the passenger side, and he came across for her, and Larry said, “Wade. Hey, buddy.”
Wade said to him, “Don’t you talk.”
Wendy said no again and no again, and Larry could hear them cuffing and pushing.
“Wade.” Larry sat forward. “Wade, let’s go back. Let’s just go back.” He saw Wade put his hand against Wendy’s face and push her head back against the window. “Stop it, man.”
“Don’t you talk, you shit.”
Larry slid to his door and jumped out of the truck, opening Wade’s door and dragging him out onto the windy hillside. “Leave it,” he said. “Cool down, and let’s go home.”
Wade hit Larry below the eye, following with his right hand to the ribs, and Larry went down, and Wade jumped on him, swinging down now and missing. Larry’s chest was on fire, and he threw Wade off and tackled him, rolling in the dirt, beyond angry, way beyond like some old man looking at himself, and then standing and lifting his teammate by the arm and the collar and throwing him in a spin to the ground.
The girls had climbed from the truck. “Stop,” Wendy said. The antelope had risen silently and leaped the cemetery fence and drifted through the tombstones, disappearing. “Stop.”
Wade sat splayed on the ground and then got up. “Fuck you, Larry.” Wade stood up, scooping up the little bottle of whiskey, and stepped into the driver’s seat. He revved the engine and backed without closing the passenger door, rocking it closed when he wheeled out of the lonely place and down the hill toward Highway 31.
“Are you okay, Larry?” Stephanie asked. His eyes wouldn’t quit watering from the pain, and he sipped shallow breaths as he brushed himself off.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re good. I think I cracked a rib in that game today, but right now I can’t feel a thing. I think, however, I might have torn these fine trousers.”
Wendy had a hand over her face, her shoulders naked in the night wind. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Oh god, Wendy,” Stephanie said, “it’s not your fault.” Wendy had left her purse and jacket in the vehicle, but Stephanie had hers. “I’ll call my dad.” Larry shrugged out of his suit jacket and put it on Wendy and pulled the collar up and buttoned the two buttons while she looked up at him, and then he tied the sleeves in a loose knot in front.
“And he’ll be happy to come out in the night and find us up here at Memory,” Larry said.
Stephanie smiled and fished her cell phone. “His daughter knows what she’s doing,” she said to Larry. Her face was bright and flushed in the dark. She turned so Larry could pull the back zipper up those five inches. “He’ll be glad I got this far.” She took his arm, and the three walked the perimeter fence with the wind at their backs.
“Those kids from Jackson Hole are just pulling into that town now, grabbing their gear, walking across to the doors of the gym.”
“What?”
“Other people,” Larry said. “Way out in the world.” Then he added. “That was a short fight for such a long wait. Was it even a fight?”
The wind was pulsing through the cemetery shrubs, and when they came to the corner of the iron fence, Larry said, “This is where Jerry Wainwright is—this corner.”
“He was a good kid,” Wendy said. “He was in algebra two.” Wendy moved alongside Larry, and he put his arm around her, and she pushed the side of her face into the hollow of his shoulder. Larry stopped again and looked over the fence at all the dark graves, and he pointed there. “I know what you’re going to say,” Wendy said.
Larry dropped his chin onto his chest in the gusting wind and said, “I think you do.”
“It’s from Miss Argyle’s class last fall.”
“It is,” he said. “You must have been paying attention.”
“I remember the story is all,” she said.
The three young people stood close to each other in the dark place. “What story?” Stephanie said. “With Miss Argyle?”
“I don’t remember the title. It’s what the grandfather said in the story,” Larry said. “He’s old. He points at the graveyard and says, ‘There’s no sense lying there.’”
“Dylan Thomas wrote the story,” Wendy said. “He wrote like an angel.”
Stephanie was still warm from the car, and she stood with both arms around Larry and her face against his shoulder, but by the reference to the story she relinquished her claim and smiled at Wendy, who stood so close also against the boy.
“Look,” Larry said to Wendy, “when you write this, give me a couple graceful moves, like I ducked the punch and caught him with a left jab. Just one. Maybe I said something clever. Oh god, make me clever. No coarse or shitty swearing, like ‘fuck this’ and ‘fucking that.’ My mother might read your story, and I’d get in trouble.”
“You are simply full of it, Larry.”
“I may write it up,” Stephanie said. “This is my first prom, after all.”
• • •
The night wind ran for a hundred miles and then met the town and tore into ragged gusts between the sleeping houses, shuffling and repacking the leaf banks along the hedges and withered flower beds, and Jimmy Brand sat burning on the walker at the edge of Berry Street. He’d made it to the street and was all out. He had closed the throat of his robe, but the wind bit his bare ankles, and he was waiting to pass out. There was no wind in his head, just the hot fog pressing his eyes, and he clenched for balance. The periphery of his vision was shredded and unclear, but he saw something more than the waves of leaves cracking by. A figure crossed between the houses. A figure in the backyards, loping, floating, a figure that became a man, all dark and out of focus, huge with a cape, and then gone. A figure stumbling silently to the old garage and wheeling its arms, a man throwing ashes, something—a lick of light against the structure. Jimmy drew a breath, and it wouldn’t come. He opened his mouth, a child under the great bare trees, and it wouldn’t work. When he opened his eyes again, he saw the flames, a yellow sheet flapping against the side of the little wooden building where he dwelt, fire, where he did dwell, fire, his dwelling. Fire. And then like an answer to his silent calls, the light in the kitchen came on, and he heard the back door and his name in his mother’s voice.
TEN
The Dinner
Larry Ralston drove through the dark town. The big red SUV felt huge on the little streets now, a lumbering gargantuan machine from the future come to visit and terrify the past. He was going twenty and speaking to each of the houses, saying goodbye and goodbye, “and though you will see me around for a while, by next year you will look for me in vain for I will be away.” The fingers of his left hand made guitar chords on the steering wheel, and he was singing the sentences. He pointed at a little wooden bungalow with pale pink siding and said, “Oh, I ate pudding in your tiny kitchen when I was seven or eight with Bruce McDougal, who was in Mrs. Dennis’s class with me. Whoever heard of pudding for a birthday, not that it wasn’t good. Goodbye!” He named the houses as he drove and kept talking to them. “We knew each other well, or fairly well, or not at all, I’m not sure, but I recognize y
ou tonight and so: goodbye.” He turned slowly onto Berry Street and stopped and then carefully backed his father’s red Cherokee along the Brands’ two-track driveway, a lane made for narrower vehicles. Now the ancient sycamores and poplars along Berry Street stood barren in the gloom. It was an early twilight, and the cold, ever-present wind had risen with the dark, sucking leaves along the ground. It was twenty-five degrees. As he stepped out of the vehicle, the back porch light came on, and Mrs. Brand came out that door in a sweater. Arms folded, she hurried to the garage and met Larry there. “It smells like snow,” he said.
“We’ve had a gracious fall,” she said, “but it is definitely over.” They went into the warm little room where Jimmy Brand was sitting in the green easy chair in the lamplight. Beside him on the bed was his red Fender guitar. He leaned back watching the plastic ceiling as it billowed and then suddenly drew up against the rafters, the corrugated valleys looking like ribs. He wasn’t dreaming, but it was easy to drift now, a short step from any light in the window to his rich compendium of memory. There’d been a lot of sweet quiet in his apartment with Daniel, their ritual reading with popcorn after ten o’clock at night. Popcorn. He smiled with his head against the chair, watching the clear plastic struggle against the staples. It made a muted flapping sound that was soothing and somehow domestic, and he thought: This would make anyone hallucinate. He breathed as the image drew air, and he was aware of his lungs in their workings.
“You’ll need this,” his mother said to him, holding open a brown car coat. It had faux wooden toggles for buttons. Still sitting, he leaned forward while she helped him into it. “Thank you, Mother,” he said. Larry gave his arm, and Jimmy pulled himself up and straightened the coat. “Well,” he said to Larry. “Standing up in real clothes. Who would have thought?”