by Ron Carlson
“Your honor,” Frank said, “out among the people.” He said to Mason, “Tom’s the mayor.”
“I’m undercover,” the man said.
“And out of town,” Frank added. “Good to see you.”
“When do you guys play?” Shirley asked Mason, tousling his hair.
“Too soon,” he said. “You’re going to want to get a drink, more than one.”
“Break a leg, Oakpine. We’re working the room.”
“Everybody’s working this room,” Mason said.
“And Shirley,” Frank called to her, as the couple moved back into the crowd, “I already broke my leg. We’re just going to make some noise and stay out of the weather.”
The milling around didn’t really stop after the break, as the room had filled even more now. All the latecomers out of the dark shook off snow in the entryway and called out to their friends. The next band was called the Cutbank Cowboys, and they had some difficulties, stopping their first number right in the middle so somebody could hand the bass guitarist a glass of whiskey. They tried to start over, and there was hooting, and Bobby Peralta came up and said, “Just go to your next song.” The drinking musician looked at Bobby and took the microphone and drank and said, “I’d rather have this glass of jack than the goddamned trophy, Mr. Peralta.” He was drunk and got a huge cheer by his remarks, so he added, “Besides, we are filing a protest. Are there any lawyers in the house?” This got a huge cheer as well. He drank again and dropped the empty glass and said, “Goddamned lawyers!” This raised the roof, and Mason called out, “Amen!” The Cutbank Cowboys finished with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” and the dance floor was shoulder to shoulder.
The next band took a while to set up as they changed the drum kit to their own, with their name enameled on the facing, the Moonlight Gamblers. “Hey, we’ve got troubles,” Frank said. “I’ve seen these guys down in Laramie. They’re for real.”
“I thought this was amateurs,” Craig said.
“No, it’s all comers.”
The room filled with the sinister prelude to “Hotel California,” and it got as quiet as it had been for an hour. It was clear these guys were good, and while the dance floor overflowed again, a group of three dozen adoring fans stood in front of the stage. Mason rolled his eyes at Frank. “Fate is speaking.” The song closed, and the ovation rocked with whistles and calls for two minutes.
A woman came up to the varnished wooden lounge corral. She had on a tricolor cowboy shirt and snug white levi’s. She folded her arms, waiting for Larry, who was bent making notes on the jam-packed table. “Can I help you?” Marci asked her.
“Not really, ma’am. Unless you want to dance. I’m waiting on this gentleman.” Larry looked up. “Yeah, you. Let’s just dance, if you will?
“You go, boy,” Frank said. “We’ve got two bands to go.”
Larry colored slightly and shrugged and lifted himself over the rail and said, “Okay then.”
Marci watched the couple melt into the clog of dancers, as the lead singer of the Moonlight Gamblers lifted his hand for silence, which he received, and then sang the word, “Maybe,” as the soulful beginning of Willie Nelson’s song “You Were Always on My Mind.” Marci’s face bore a version of astonishment. “He’s underage,” she said.
“This is Gillette,” Frank said. “No such thing.”
“We’re dancing,” Marci told Craig, and she stood up.
Craig smiled. “I think we’re on surveillance,” he told the table as he led his wife around to the floor. “But hell, I’ll hold you close, and you can spy all night.”
Frank stood and took Sonny’s hand. “We’ll spy on them.”
Kathleen and Mason were alone at the table, which was a landslide of glasses and bottles. “You know Shirley Stiver then,” Kathleen said.
“She’s my realtor, but I’m letting her go.”
“Why’s that.”
“I’m keeping the house.”
“What for?”
“I need a place to take you to dinner.”
“I’m not ready for dinner, Mason.” She put her hand on his elbow.
“I know, Kathleen. But every day has a dinner, and there’ll come a day.”
“You’re so sure?”
“No, I am not. But I know what is good for me, and I’m going to stay up in Oakpine and work at it.”
“Good luck,” she said, leaning to him to kiss his cheek. “Good luck to you.”
Now a young woman in a blue cloth coat came up behind them, unbuttoning it. “Hello,” she said. “Have you played yet?” It was Wendy Ingram.
“Wendy,” Kathleen said. “You’ve got snow in your hair.”
The girl stepped back and brushed herself off. “It’s snowing. Somebody’s in the ditch a mile out. There was a backup.”
“No, we’re up in a band or two,” Mason said. “Sit down.”
“Is Larry here?”
“He’s out there somewhere.” Mason pointed at the mob. “But he’ll return.”
“Jimmy gave me this note,” the girl said, and handed the folded paper to Mason.
The Moonlight Gamblers were perfect with the song, and the sixty couples on the dance floor moved imperceptibly in a fluid shuffle to the extended apology. Craig held Marci close. Everyone was being held close. She craned her neck for a while and then gave it up, her son out there somewhere with a woman. Her face was on Craig’s shoulder. “We haven’t danced in ten years,” he said. “Twenty.”
“It’s like a joke,” she said, holding him. Her mind was afloat, and it was a pleasure and a pain. It was as if she could feel the snow falling all over Wyoming and on into South Dakota, where they had gone once on a trip when Larry was a baby, taking a picture of him with the four stone presidents. This snow would be covering them now and on the ground until May, June in the hills, and she felt it falling, keeping them all in this strange room. She was weary of walking the tightrope, and she could feel it in her arms and chest, the wasted energy.
“You’re a good dancer, Craig,” she said.
“Are you going to be okay?” he said.
The question went through her as if someone had opened a door on the storm, and she put her teeth in her lip to stop the tears. What she did then was drop his hand and put her arms up around his neck while they made little steps and the singer sang and her eyes were closed.
Again, the Moonlight Gamblers got a long and steady applause and calls for an encore, and Wendy stood and waited at the edge of the dance floor and found Larry as he escorted his partner back to her table. The young woman had a good hold of his arm.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he smiled, and turned to her. “You came. I’ll be right back.”
She watched him walk the young woman to her table and wrestle her chair free so she could sit with her friends.
When he came to her, she said, “Your ribs must be healed.”
“I’m good,” he said. “Where’s Wade?”
“Get real,” she said happily. “He’s not interested in music.”
“I should get real,” he said. “But how does one do that? How far from here is it? Is grinning part of it? I’m glad to see you.” He wanted to grab her up and twirl her around, and he shook his head and held the grin.
“What is it?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s get you a coke.” He led her to the bank of folks waiting at the bar, and they were squeezed together for a moment, pushed, and they were laughing, and finally she said, “Let’s just go back and find your folks. I’m good. You can owe me a coke.”
By the time they rejoined the others and found an extra chair, the next band was set. The lights went down and came up on four women in white shirts with string ties, one with long brown hair and a fiddle, and after the calling from the audience had subsided, the lead singer, h
er dark hair parted right down the middle, opened “Desperado,” with a pure note that held the room still, and it remained still. “Whoa,” said Larry, and Wendy pulled his arm to her and whispered in his ear: “Hey, let her sing. You’re with someone.”
“What?” he said loudly. “What did you say?” The table looked at him, interrupting the song. He stood and pulled Wendy with him to the side of the room under three mounted antelope heads. “I’m serious,” he said in her ear. “What did you say?”
“It’s true,” she said, her face victorious. It was like using walkie-talkies; she speaking in his ear, he in hers.
“Say it,” he said.
“You’re with someone,” she said, and smiled ridiculously.
He looked into her eyes.
She tapped his chest. “I put you in a story.”
He looked around at the people near them by the wall, every face in the room focused on the amazing singer in her stunning white shirt. The room was shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, packed.
“Is that a good idea?”
She nodded—it was easier than yelling.
“Want to hear something?” he said. It was intoxicating for him, because whatever he was going to say, he wanted to hear it too.
“I can hear everything,” she said.
“I want to kiss you,” he said. “I’m trying to get real.”
“Here I am.”
He pulled her past a group stamping their boots in the side doorway and out the tracked entryway into the sudden silence of the cascading snow. It was so quiet it hurt, and even in the new dark the world glowed as an underwater scene. Every three seconds the entire snowfield flashed blue and then white in the pulsing neon profile of the huge pronghorn antelope that was the bar’s sign. The dark sky was layers of fat flakes now floating in unending echelons, tons as ounces, an ocean of it all, and they were snowy in a minute. “Have you felt like this before?” he asked her.
“You haven’t and I haven’t.”
“You haven’t and I haven’t,” he said. His ears were ringing. He put his hand on her elbow and leaned and watched her face in the snowfall. “Snowy people,” he said, and they were both briefly dizzy as if the planet had shifted or become some other cold place rich with falling snow. “Stand still,” he said. “Watch me closely. Study my resolve.” Then he said, “Resolve,” again and put a finger up between them as if it were the key to the lesson. “Watch me not kiss you.” And then his lesson disappeared as she grinned and pushed his finger aside, and their faces fused, and they kissed standing in that parking lot until they were capped with snow.
“I watched you,” she said. “I studied your resolve.”
“Good, because I forgot. But come on, who am I in the story? I hope I’m a detective. Shy but brilliant, right?”
“You’re the young man who dances with the girl and scolds her all the while.”
“What does she do?”
“He’s a character who runs everywhere, and he’s a scolder. But she can’t hear him because her ability to hear has been canceled out by his hand on her back. She can feel his hand on her back, right where it’s supposed to be from dancing class. She can only feel his hand.” She reached and brushed the snow off his hair. “I love the snow,” she said.
“It’s snowing,” he said. “But the snow has nothing whatsoever to do with what just happened.”
• • •
In Oakpine it was snowing hard. There was a thing with Jimmy’s eyes now every time he woke up, and it was that the light hurt them in a way that he almost felt as pleasure. He could feel the muscles in his eyelids working, and then the patterns struck his eye like a cold wind, burning in a blurred focus for a few seconds into the resolution of the room. The shimmering plastic that formed the ceiling and covered the large door was always moving like water, and Jimmy turned his head when he was lying down so he could see the hard outline of the chair or the table or the sill of the pretty little window. He was amused by the illusive beauty his eyes brought, and he was patient with their weariness.
Now he heard a sound, a human sound, and he opened his old eyes again. There was always a little vertigo, and he turned to anchor himself. There was someone in the chair, a shadow, only gray, unmoving. Jimmy Brand could hear a hissing now, a friction he realized was his own blood working everywhere he touched the sheets. The shadow in the chair did not move, but Jimmy knew it was no hallucination. It was a person made of charcoal sitting still, both feet on the floor, square and sound as Lincoln’s statue in his temple. Jimmy’s eyes ached against the light, the air, and he squinted them down as if to focus, trying to focus, but they would not be hurried. He tried to swallow and could not, and then he tried to breathe, and he could. With special energy, he lifted his hand from under the covers and brought it to his face, where two fingers rubbed his eyes. He could feel his sharp cheekbone. When he dragged his hand away, the lights were sharper, and now the man in the chair was three shades of gray, four, five, and now some blue.
“What line of work were you in?” The voice was deep and soft.
“I was a writer,” Jimmy whispered. “I worked every day at a newspaper for years, eighteen years.” He cleared his throat. His hand appeared again and lifted toward the little bed stand and his cup of water. The water was sharply cold, and he registered it and thought: Good, I still can tell cold. Now he was fully awake, and he looked across the room at his father.
“How does that go? Did you write the news? Did you have an office?”
“Dad?” Jimmy Brand said.
“Yeah,” his father said. “I just come out for a minute. You okay?”
Jimmy shouldered his pillow so he could sit up slightly. His eyes were settling, but there was still a terrific ripping blur at the peripheries. “Is it snowing?” The window shimmered and flared with fabulous light, lifting the room.
“Yeah, it started when your buddies left. It should go all night now.”
“Snow.”
“Yeah, a real storm.”
Jimmy looked at his father, sitting in his overalls like always and always. Now his big hands were in his lap like a boy’s, and his face was still and serious and new with an expression Jimmy knew there were no words for, and his father started to speak and Jimmy also knew what he would say, and he said it quietly, “I just come out for a minute.”
“I’m glad you did. How do you like my room?”
“Old Craig done a good job, I’d say.”
“Do you want to hear about my job?”
“Was it good work?” his father asked.
“It was a good job,” Jimmy said. “I loved to write, but it wasn’t exactly news. I covered events like the museum shows and art galleries. One time I covered the Metropolitan Car Show, early on, about 1984, all the new cars and actors and a big show. You’d have gotten a kick out of that. Women in costumes opening the car doors. It was deluxe.”
“Were you working days?”
Jimmy smiled. His father hadn’t moved. “It was a day shift for a long time,” he answered, “but then I started reviewing plays. It was good work, Dad. That was more of a swing shift. The plays were at eight, and then I’d go back to the office or home and write up the review. Sometimes I had the whole next day, but I like writing for a midnight deadline. I got pretty good at it.”
“Mom said you won some awards.”
“I did. Four awards. You get a glass statue and a little raise.”
“A raise,” his father nodded. “That never hurts.”
Jimmy was trying to keep track of the conversation and he felt it slipping. He’d had a custom all his life of slowing down at moments he wanted to capture, stepping aside and identifying them, so he wouldn’t miss anything, so he could know what it meant, and now he wanted this, his father talking to him, but it was slipping away like smoke. He was tired, and his heart, he could hear it trying to poun
d him softly into the bed. He closed his eyes, and they burned for a moment.
“You tired?” his father said.
“I’m fine,” Jimmy said, his eyes still shut.
“I just come out for a minute,” his father said again. “Your mother said you might like to go up to Gillette for the band, for the show up there.”
“What?” Jimmy said.
“If you wanted to go up and see the band, I could drive you up. Mom has made a kit, some sandwiches and that. If you want to, I could drive you up. The weather’s not great, but I could drive you up.”
Jimmy’s eyes were open now, and he tried to draw a deeper breath. The air came in strings, and his legs were faintly trembling. He pushed himself in three motions up so he sat facing his father. “Dad,” he said, “you know I’m sorry about coming back out here and making problems for you. If I’d had anything else or another way . . .” Now Jimmy’s voice skipped out on him, and he waited. Something new was burning in his spine, and the pain was like static. “That’s all. I’m sorry.”
His father was a stationary silhouette. “If you’d like to go up there, I could drive you. I’d like to drive you. Shit, I’ve driven to Gillette when they wouldn’t take the mail. The day you were born I was out in Stayner with a freight train stopped by the blizzard, and your mother called from Holy Cross downtown.”
“They’d stopped the train,” Jimmy said. He hadn’t heard this story for forty years.
“That was a snow that stopped every damn thing.” His father’s voice was like a hand on his arm. “But your mother had walked seven blocks to Hildy’s house.”
“Aunt Hildy,” Jimmy said, remembering the woman now dead twenty years.
“There was a woman could manage,” Edgar said. “She called me up there and said they were going over to Holy Cross to pick up a baby.”
Jimmy struggled on an elbow to sit up. His eyes were fine now, and he focused on his father as he told his story.
“I told the foreman. It was Sid Jakowski, remember?”
“I remember Sid,” Jimmy said. “I knew his daughters in school.” Something was happening to Jimmy’s face; he could feel it. Strange, he knew at last, I’m smiling. But his back and his chest were knotted in a cramp. His father sat before him, an old man. My father is an old man, and I am an old man. “They were tough girls, Polly and Lucinda.”