Return to Oakpine (16 page)

“Frank does. The band was big for him, maybe the biggest thing. You know when he started in on it? When he was drunk. He'd get drunk and start on the various gigs. The road trip back from . . .”

“Cheyenne, when the blizzard crossed us north of Ardmoor and we stayed at that place—” Mason stopped and dropped his chin to think.

“The dude ranch and their last customers in the lodge.”

“The Wooden Star, it was.” He looked at her. “It was not a small place—buffalo heads, a stone chimney three stories. That ranch is still there. God, what a night. We had about four times like that—when the world seemed like it was just made for four kids from Oakpine.” He smiled at her.

“You never talked to Frank about it when you were up doing paperwork, those deeds or whatever?”

“We're men—we don't talk. We did the deals Frank needed. I never talked in my life, really. I did some business, and I've got a vocabulary for my work, but I have never, ever talked.”

•   •   •

Mr. Sturges had all his hair, and he was dressed in a dark blue robe over a set of light blue pajamas. He had lived in Wyoming all his life, yet he had always radiated a sense that he was visiting from a larger world, come to civilize the children of the frontier. He had called the students mister and miss, and all through his forty-one-year teaching career, he had worn ties with white shirts and tweed sport coats.

“Mrs. Gunderson,” he said, standing from the easy chair in his room. “Mr. Kirby. How kind of you to come. Sit down.” Two folding chairs had been set up for the occasion, and as Kathleen and Mason sat, a nurse appeared at the door and greeted them.

“Tea all around?” Mr. Sturges said.

“Perfect,” Mason said, and the nurse disappeared.

“Well,” the older man continued. “How goes the profession of the law?”

“Just as the papers have it,” Mason responded. “Stalled by self-serving sycophants, such as myself. Justice held hostage.”

Mr. Sturges laughed. His smile when it came showed the small
s
of stroke on the right side. “That's not what I've heard, but you tell me. Which law do you practice?”

“I started a small firm in Denver, and we're primarily doing industrial claims.”

“And he's selective,” Kathleen added.

“I'm sure he is.”

“If you mean I don't advertise on television,” Mason joked. The nurse returned with a tray, and Mason poured three cups of tea, stirring sugar into Kathleen's. “But I think we've been able to help some people. I still harbor the sense that we are doing the right thing.” He examined his cup and toasted his old teacher. “Real china,” he said.

“This is a civilized place for keeping the likes of me,” Mr. Sturges said. “I'm glad to hear that, Mason,” he said. “You were a bright light that year.”

“Who do you think had the hardest time doing the right thing?” Mason asked. “From history.”

Mr. Sturges sipped his tea. “They're easy to spot in the history books. Anybody killed in his prime. We made it easy to kill people in this country. There's no cure for it, except mediocrity.” He smiled again, and his lip fell down. “Listen to me. I sound like I'm eighty again.”

“You were a good teacher,” Mason told him.

“I appreciate that. I enjoyed the career. Now tell me a story or two about your cases. Tell me one where the people in the right were duly rewarded.”

“I know a couple like that,” Mason said. “If you can tolerate my opinion.” Mr. Sturges nodded, and Mason leaned forward and began to talk. The two visitors stayed another twenty minutes until Mr. Sturges's face began to fade. They said goodbye and stood to leave.

Mason and Kathleen drove down to Oakpine High School. “You want to walk out to where Frank broke his leg?” Mason said. Immediately upon opening the car door, they could hear music across the green.

“I don't think so.”

“New scoreboard.”

“New track, all weather, and new bleachers, and new gym.” She pointed each out. “A little walk?” she said.

“Walking,” he said. “You pioneers. But yes.”

The two sets of double doors in the new gymnasium were open and lighted, and they could see boys and girls coming and going with streamers and sheets of paper. “The homecoming dance is Saturday.”

“Want to go? I came home.” He quickly pointed to the white cupola of the old gym. “What's in there?”

“Learning center for second language, dyslexia, computers.” They walked across the corner of the football field and sat on the stone steps of the main building.

“I ate my mother's sandwiches here two hundred times.”

“Have you really enjoyed the law?”

“I have. I became what I expected, I guess. There's no surprise in me. Thirty years later, and there's no surprise in me. What would Matt have been if he'd lived?”

“He'd be dead,” Kathleen said. “He would have played football somewhere, that's for sure, probably Laramie. He had a scholarship. Then he would have come back here to town and relived the glory days for ten years and passed out under a train.”

“You guys were in love,” Mason said.

“Whatever that means,” she said.

“We know what it means, but let's talk about something else.”

“No,” Kathleen whispered. She took his arm in both her hands. “It's nice to talk to somebody. Besides, none of it's a secret.”

“It is if you want it to be.”

“Matt was killed in an accident, and I went down to Denver that summer and started my career in nursing, I guess, by having an abortion. You knew that.”

“I did and I didn't. I never heard it spoken of, but I knew you were gone, and your folks acted funny the time I went to see them.”

“They were freaked out. Absolutely. They loved him more than I did. We were married in their eyes.”

“You've always been a serious person.”

“It's a liability,” she said.

Four kids ran out the side door of the new gymnasium calling, four girls in cowboy hats, and behind them came four boys in chase. They were after their hats. Kathleen sat up and let go of Mason's arm. The girls screamed and ran and separated, laughing, as they'd been caught. One girl threw the big black hat at the boy as he grabbed her, but he ignored it and swept her up in a hug from behind. “Oh, no!” he called. “You're not getting off like that! You're getting the Chinese water torture. Brad, come on!” Another of the boys came over to the squirming girl and began tapping her forehead. “Noooo!” she screamed. The other kids came over, the girls tame now, the boys snugging their hats on. “Doo-on't!” the captured girl laughed. “Don't. No. Oh no!!” “You better not,” another girl said, “she'll wet her pants.” At that the boys sprang away from her, shaking their hands as if to throw off water. “Yuck! Darlys, you learn some manners. We'll tell Chuck about your bladder, and then we'll see if he still takes you to the damn dance.” “Chuck knows about her bladder,” one girl called. “Shut up!” Darlys cried back. She was still laughing.

“I'll take you back up to the Ralston's,” Kathleen said.

“Good deal,” Mason said, “But let's go by the Mountain View and get a shake from the carhops.”

“We can get a shake, but the carhops stop after Labor Day.”

“Still, let's. You got time?”

They opened the car and stood talking over the roof. “Oh sure.”

“It's sweet being tired in this way. I like it. I like this.”

“Mason, who'd you take to homecoming?”

“I just asked you.”

“Did I answer?”

“Not yet. Who'd you take?”

“You don't know, do you?”

“No, I don't remember you with anybody.” She drove them down Main Street to the blue lights of the Mountain View drive-in. “I was over at Brands' garage, picking guitar with Jimmy. We'd played the bonfire the night before, remember, and he and I were fully dedicated to our lives as musicians and to learning some new songs.”

The Window

Two days later the wind came up across Wyoming and entered Oakpine, an invasion, a steady warm layer of all the air that had been heated by the high plains, odd and unseasonal at first, then with an edge of chill and bucking waves. Mason had heard the wind in the trees early in the morning, a sound he knew from his youth. His mother didn't like them, the windy days, and she would get quiet and move slowly about the house until the storm broke and passed. There were so many winds. Mason had the large wooden kitchen window frame on the floor of the torn-up room. It had been there for two days waiting for glass, and now the wind did what it wanted with the sawdust in the room, seizing and dropping in gusts through the four-foot cavity. The fall days had been so benign that he'd thought the window could wait while he refaced the cabinets. There was something about having the window out of the wall that he liked. Of course, in his office in Denver, you couldn't open a window with a crowbar; he'd been sealed in for twenty years.

As the wind blew into the mouth of the vacant window, the doors in the house creaked and banged, the old latches worn round. The window was three rectangular panes, and he'd been an hour in the windy room doing the satisfying work of knifing the old grout from the wooden crossbars, and now he laid the stickered new glass sheets that he'd ordered carefully into each section. He smiled: fixing a window in the weather. He stapled five diamond-shaped galvanized keepers along each side and stood the window vertical on the floor to see if the panes rattled, and they did not. Craig had helped him take it out, and now he tested to see that he could lift it alone. He turned to the sash with his chisel and ran it around the perimeter, smoothing the lintel and the inside frame; the slivers and dried caulk crumbs blew against his shirt.

Outside the trees rolled and shuddered—they were full of the wild air, and he could see Mrs. Brand's garden, the great thick tangle of zucchini vines billowing as if crawling with demons, and every wire fence banked a cache of leaves, and more leaves fled steadily across the hairy fall lawns. Over everything in the West, the sky was purple at the horizon, blowing up to gray. It was a comic book version of a storm, approaching like a creature, and he was the only character in Oakpine with a window out in this western wind. He could lift it. If he could set it in place and refasten the frame, he could caulk it tomorrow. He'd been removing the original pressed-wood doors from the cupboards, which were all ruined with age, and his pockets were full of the little saved brass screws. The new oak cabinet facings had been delivered last night and were on the porch in two cardboard cartons.

Each job in the old house offered a different satisfaction. You could replace six screws, and a new cabinet door looked like a party. This old window was a workhorse, and it was simply needed. When Mason lifted it up onto the sink, he felt it take the pressure of the wind, and he set the bottom along the windowsill and pushed it up, the old wooden frame and sash binding together as they met again. He had made a mistake. He couldn't reach to seat the thing from here; he'd need to climb knees up onto the counter. He pressed his cheek against the center pane and nudged it tighter. The wind was cut off and he felt his face suddenly warm in the closed room. Then with a neat push, the window snugged into place, fitting like a jewel, and he saw that Shirley Stiver, his old classmate, had come up into the noisy room and pressed the side frame.

“Well, thank you very much.”

“The door was open, and the realtor's here,” she said. “The doors and the windows.”

“And the glazier's at home,” he said. “One moment.” Mason aligned the facing piece of quarter round along the top and tapped it secure with four finishing nails. He did the two sides the same and then took an extra minute pushing the bottom solid and then nailing it. “That window was last replaced when Hoover was in the White House, and now it needs new caulk and a little paint. Quite an upgrade, right?” Mason ran the flat of his hand around the surface of the window. “And no leaks.” Outside the trees pulsed and the hedges flared, and it felt very still in the kitchen. Mason turned the lights on against the dimming day.

Shirley Stiver was wearing dress jeans and a kelly green blazer. “It is a fact that you can sell a house in this country where the windows don't close. Well, about half the time, there are windows broken. We try to find all the doors though. You're doing a good job. I like the new paint out front. This place is a gem.”

“And we've got all the doors, even the one downstairs, which is still pockmarked from antiquity, a door into which I threw a thousand darts competing with Frank Gunderson and Jimmy Brand.” Her briefcase was on the wooden kitchen table, and she stood above it and removed two blue folders.

“You want some coffee?” Mason asked the woman. He was washing his hands and considered the kitchen. “I'm not making coffee here. Let's go downtown and do your paperwork.”

Outside the wind had the day in its grip, everything pulling and bobbing, wanting to go east. In her car she asked, “What's your schedule?”

“I'm seriously not sure,” he told her. “I've lost my clock. I'm going to stay for a while. I know that.”

She gave him a short look, but enough for him to show her both his hands and say, “It's not a crisis. I'm not big enough for a crisis. I want to do this house right, and Jimmy Brand is back this fall. I'm not recovering anything. I'm covering, perhaps. I like these fall days. Every time I say I like them, I like them more.”

They drove downtown, and Shirley parked in front of Oakpine Java, a block from Frank's bar. “This was what?” Mason said, looking at the new glass facade.

“It was Maryanne's,” Shirley Stiver said. “Hair salon. Didn't you ever walk by and get a whiff of permanent solution? This whole block smelled like burning hair.” Inside they got a bag of chicken salad croissants and two tall lattes. “No Starbucks, yet,” Mason said to the young guy who made their coffee.

“Yeah, there is. Inside the Food King by the deli. That right there is the best coffee in town though,” the kid said.

Mason stood again in the street as the air streamed by, and Shirley joined him. They heard the train in the track yard jostle and jerk into slow motion. “Shirley, you ever eat in your beautiful car? Could we just take a drive?”

“I'm yours until three,” she said, giving him the keys. “And the rain won't hurt the car, when it comes. Just don't spill your coffee.” Mason drove them back along Main Street, turning past Craig Ralston's hardware store, the front doors closed in the wind. He followed First Street to the small highway, then went west there past the little airport, a one-story building on the vast plain, the wind sock at high alert standing on the roof. He loved small airports, the ticket agent also working security, then handling the bags. A moment later he turned right on the road to the cemetery. The way was paved for two hundred yards, and then came bladed gravel, a quarter mile up the sage hill to Oakpine Memorial Gardens, which every one just called Memory. Here the old pfitzer hedge had gone wild and grown into great hands surrounding the graveyard; the fingers were deep green and shot with yellow aspen leaves and plunging around today in the unreliable air. Mason parked by the gate. The maples were red, and a few had limbs down in the long grass. The two sat in the quiet car feeling the bump of the wind from time to time and sorted out the napkins and the coffee, and they ate looking at the gray sky bladed by clouds crossing over the town below.

The cemetery itself was two acres, fenced with wrought iron and the hedge ran along two sides. There were ten old oaks still standing in the graveyard among the other trees, most of their leaves gone now. Shirley pointed, “Miller Trumble and his boy mow it all summer and haul the branches way back behind for the bonfire in February, remember? But they may be done for the year. If you want to go over, go ahead. I'll wait here.”

Mason opened the car door carefully against the wind and stood in the weather. He walked through the old arbor gate and out to where his folks were buried. The wind was at his pant legs while he stood and read their names. He felt it would have been strange to speak, but then he was talking to them for a while, saying he was okay and the house looked good and he'd replaced the kitchen window and it was another windy day and he'd been in trouble but was going to work through it and he missed them and loved them. The air took each word away. The circumstance of being in the graveyard standing over where his parents were buried seemed impossible. Where were they, really? Below, a freight train slowed going into town, and he listened for its call, but there was no call. When he moved again, he felt he'd been there a long time. Had he been asleep? You spoke in such places, but you never finally said the right thing, the thing that helped. Okay, he said, and turned for the car.

It was warm in the car in the gray day, and Mason said, “Let's drive out to the reservoir. Just to see it. I'm on a break from home repair, and the owner's paying me by the hour anyway.” He drove down the dirt lane into the wind and turned onto the highway out of town, looking back up the hill. “Miller Trumble played varsity football as a sophomore, and he ran like a rat, and his nickname was Rat. We loved that no one could tackle him, and we called him Rat. I'm glad you said his name, because if I saw him in town, I would have trouble finding the Miller. He's done a good job with the cemetery.”

They continued out across the ten-mile plain. The same abandoned houses stood every mile or two, back from the highway, only half of them boarded up, the same car rusting the yard as when Mason had been a boy. Looking at the lonely places, it was difficult to believe anyone had survived there even part of a good year. There were some drill sites and clusters of antelope against the foothills, standing confidently, rumps to the wind, the way Mason's dad had always noted, saying they knew it wasn't hunting season quite yet.

“Slow, slow,” Shirley said, and Mason braked, but still he'd missed the turnoff. There wasn't another car in sight, and he eased a U-turn and went back. “The sign is down,” Shirley said.

“It's not that. What is this? Where are the trees? You'd always see the cottonwoods.”

“Right there.” Shirley pointed ahead to the small cluster of great cottonwoods, and Mason eased the car along the smooth but uneven white stone road.

“There were hundreds, right? There, there, and there.” Now he could see the blue water white-capped all along the mile-long dish of the broad desert reservoir. He pulled the car into the bladed turnaround overlooking the broken boat ramp. The boat dock and little marina building weren't there anymore. The concrete boat ramp was cracked in plates and grown with weeds. “This was the place, right?” Mason said.

“It was. Doogan pulled his dock farther west, and the state poured a new ramp there closer to the highway.” She pointed. “He's got a gas station and bait shop down there. It barely goes. This section is multiple use, and I've leased it out four times, and no one can make it go. You know, there's a pretty marina up at the mountain lake now, a log cabin with a big wooden dock, and it's full all summer. There are probably people there today. People like a lake in the trees.”

“Where do the kids party after graduation?”

“San Diego. They don't come out here anymore. At all.” The dark blue expanse of the reservoir looked serious. “It is not pretty.”

Mason wanted to say, Except in an end-of-the-world way
,
but he opened his door and excused himself with “It shouldn't take me long to look at nothing. This isn't even the same place.” He stood now in a heavier wind and stepped up onto the ancient cement sheet of the boat ramp. He walked down to the water's edge, staying well back with the wind. Now it was strange for him, this place, where he'd never returned since an afternoon thirty years before. There'd been twenty boats and banners in the trees and fifty trees that weren't even here now, and the water had been brimming blue, ten feet higher than it was today. And young Doogan had been on the dock lifting coolers into the boats and calling out. Now the gray wind crushed everything; it would be cold tonight.

They'd water-skied a little in Mr. Brand's new boat, and then Matt had dropped Mason and Marci and Craig off here. Matt was drunk, and there had been a scene at the dock. Jimmy had argued with him, tried to climb onto the boat. The boat was idling. Mason remembered Kathleen's face as she waited in the back of the boat to see what was going to happen. Matt's good nature was all used up; he was mean. He'd proved a brittle drunk, always charging into it with high spirits and always fighting or passing out. Mason had known many alcoholics through his career, most of them quieter, all that vodka, finally all the vodka alone, but he always remembered Matt, how the alcohol had him stamped by the time he was eighteen. In talking about it, someone always said, “He could pound them down,” and that was what he did, pound them. Mason wondered why people want pounding. It was so common, not just the drinking but the trouble, wanting to be pounded. Mason was a pounder and played to feel the register of his work. He was being dreamy today, he knew, but this terrible windy shithole reservoir had him by the throat, and he could see Matt, without blurring any of it, on that sunny day three decades before.

Matt Brand had by any measure been the best athlete in this half of Wyoming. You could watch him run without looking at any of his astonishing statistics and know by the fact that you could not look away. He flew. And when he drank, it was always a fierce, one-way descent. That day he was done with high school, and the engines that would carry him full-ride off to golden days at the University of Wyoming were two months away, and he wanted to be alone with Kathleen, and he wouldn't listen to anyone nor answer a question. Jimmy pleaded, but Matt struggled with his brother, finally backing him with hard palms-open pushes, until Jimmy tumbled back into the water. Before Jimmy swam ashore, Matt gunned it and turned sharply for the open reservoir, throwing a violent wake in the wakeless bay.