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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 is 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.”

The last two sentences of Wendy's story were “Steve leaned in the open cab and placed his left hand heavy on her hipbone. His other hand was out of sight.” Immediately upon saying these sentences, Wendy stood and put her papers away. “Thanks for listening,” she said, already turned for the door.

“Wendy,” Jimmy Brand said, “congratulations. Please sit. This story is solid and fine and finished, and now you get to do what real writers do.”

“What is it?” she asked. “I'll do it.”

“You get to write another and bring it next week. Or sooner. If you can. Wendy, I think you should make it sooner.”

She was standing and looking at Jimmy Brand and said, “Thank you,” and she went out and closed the door carefully behind her. And in the quiet now in his temporary quarters, Jimmy Brand felt lucky. I'm lucky to meet her this fall
,
he thought.

He heard voices outside, and then a moment later it was the next afternoon somehow, or much later the same day, and there literally was a drumroll, a snare, and the door opened again, full of his old friends talking and greeting him, Craig Ralston grabbing the milk crate at the door and Mason handing Jimmy a bright sheet of lyrics and stepping back so Larry could reach his guitar. Someone said, “Is Frank coming?” and then Frank said, “I've got forty minutes for my art,” and then Mason saying or someone saying, “We should rename the band, to be honest, and call it the Half Hours, Three Days a Week.” And someone said, “Forty minutes for my art.”

Then the notes were firing from Larry picking at the Fender. Jimmy saw that the boy could link passages now, his fingers awkward half the time in the transitions. It was strange. The music halted and flowed. It sounded like it flowed. Jimmy had shown him how to work his left hand on the frets, using his thumb sometimes, and it had been unnatural at first, but now it worked.

Frank stood behind Larry with his bass. “You're hired,” Frank said.

“Of course, the pay is abysmal.”

“Abysmal, dismal, nadir, etc. Vocab deluxe.”

Jimmy leaned back. He didn't dare close his eyes because the day would flee. They geared up and stumbled through a far-ranging version of “Johnny B. Goode.” None of them could hear it, whether it was good or bad or even clear, but Frank's grin was magnified as the chords subsided. “This is such a crazy idea,” he said. “Let's do one more.”

And then the door shut and the light failed, and it was quiet even with small wind coming over the small shelter, and then another long quiet day and the air inside the garage a liquid blue, the quiet like a humming, and only the door turning white, the light of the world, and in the space a man saying something, “Are you all right out here?” Jimmy was floating; it was sweet not to hurt. He could see his father's face. “Are you all right out here?” He wanted to answer the question; his father was so close, the voice he hadn't heard in decades, and the humming silence filling up the room. His father was in the room a step and then back in the doorway. “Look at this.” Then there was the patchy silence. “Craig did a good job,” he said. Jimmy wanted to answer, but no air came in or out. He heard the door. The door was real.

When he heard his father's voice, inside his heart he felt as if something tore, a page of paper being torn, paper torn slowly, a page from a book, but the tear was so old. He had imagined talking to his father five thousand times or ten; it was all the same with him in his life. What he had done was out of a great empty helplessness and a hurt, the stab that was the start of the tear. There was that whole beautiful year with the band, the way the music had tightened everything in the world, and the pure ascending joy of learning the guitar, and every week hoping Matt would sail out of his drinking, fly out of it, step out, and it had all spun to a single moment at the reservoir when in the sun-struck afternoon Matt pushed Jimmy from the boat, cursing him with a phrase that burned Jimmy instantly and that instantly in deep reaction he forgot. When Jimmy swam ashore after his drunken brother pushed him from the motorboat, Mason helped him up, and Jimmy put his arms around his friend, but Jimmy knew like a brick in his throat that Matt was going to have an accident and that he was going to kill himself. Jimmy suspended his mind and played guitar with Mason in Frank's open jeep for those hours, sunburning his shoulders, in a way that would see them peel four days later when he was already on the bus and would earn him the scar with freckles which he still bore, but his head was blaring the whole time with a noise that came real in an hour in two friends running up the broad boat ramp, “It's Matt, Jimmy. It's Matt.”

Then an hour of confusion, hell with kids, not one person standing still.

Frank Gunderson holding Jimmy back when they brought the body up in someone else's boat. And then the ambulance. And then the ambulance driving up the boat ramp slowly with none of its flashing lights, just a humble white station wagon, now turning for town without haste. Jimmy remembered Mason putting the guitars away in their cases, the lining of Mason's case was garish—whorehouse purple, they called it all that year. Jimmy heard the brass latches take. He was awake through the rest of the day, but he didn't remember how he got back to town, who drove, or what it was like standing in his kitchen, a goodbye torn from his mother—he had to go—and then two nights at the old motel with Mason, refuge, and then the bus away.

And now as a fact his father's hand on his shoulder, warm and heavy, and the real words, “Are you okay out here?” Sleep crushed him and his answer, but he had heard what he had heard.

Homecoming

Homecoming dance lit Oakpine for the two weeks beforehand with heady expectation, and it caught the whole town in its gears. The florist made his year with corsages and roses, and the two alteration shops watched the thirty dresses they'd been fussing and adjusting fly away on hangers in the yellow light of Saturday afternoon, and half the windows downtown were painted with colorful bulging letters in some version of Homecoming Sale Special, the bakery, the saddlery, and even the furniture and appliance outlet, as if the big home football game might be a first-rate reason to buy a new stove. This siege of preparation took an edge when the tailgaters began to arrive at the high school the morning of the game, eight hours ahead of time, setting up their households in the open air, all the furniture and the open fires for charcoal and the bratwurst to come, and then the smell of lighter fluid and burning charcoal and before noon the smell of cooking meat in the steaming crosshatched rising smoke.

Frank Gunderson had an outpost set up, chairs and folding tables under his canvas A
NTLERS
banner, and he and his barmen grilled hundreds of sausage sliders, heaped on platters for all of his patrons and their friends and their friends. Frank ran the grill for a while midday and then gave the spatula to Leander, his cook, and he washed his hands and stashed his apron and put on a beautiful gray Stetson with a small silver band and moved among the crowd like the mayor. There were a thousand plastic cups and samples of his new beer, one in the hand of the genuine mayor, who had graduated from Oakpine five years after Frank and his friends. “You know it's past noon when the mayor is younger than you are,” Frank said, tapping the man's shoulder in lieu of shaking his full hands.

In the thin fall sunlight, the parking lot and three streets became a dense little village of their own, filling with tall characters in fresh cowboy hats who had been at the school going back through the decades and still owned this part of it; it never faded. Someone would start telling a story about a football play, a perfect slow-motion draw play or a wide-bellied double reverse, which had lasted twenty seconds twenty-two years ago in a game at homecoming, and before it was half told, there would be five tellers or six, with necessary flourishes including the names of the players and what they went on to do and where they now lived and how that place in its own way was inferior to Oakpine, and in some cases how they died, the kid who ran like a demon, low to the ground and fast, and could never be caught all that day so long ago, who later lost his life in the famous rail accident south of Gillette or all his toes on a late-winter elk hunt.

When the football game itself started, Oakpine was as deserted as a town in a movie about the end of the world, not a noise except for the train every two hours, and even the train sounded reluctant to move through, and the streets were empty north and south. Jackson Hole was being hosted
and toasted,
as the saying had it, and from the opening kickoff, in which Oakpine crushed the runback out at the six-yard line, Jackson Hole was in fact toasted and then just burned. The game was a deft display of Oakpine's speedy offense and their smashing defense, and the game was fully decided by halftime, but not a soul left the overcrowded little stadium. It was a rout, but a nasty one, thirty-nine to three, and when Jackson Hole saw their fate, they played every play to the death, with a grudge, piling on, hitting hard even when their strategy was soft.

Larry Ralston, breaking from the huddle for each play, scanned the arena, all these people, and he knew the names of two hundred or three, and beyond this shell, the tiers of the stadium, he could see the sun caught in yellow slashes on the rooftops of the little downtown and the hazy horizon smoking on the curved world's edge. He had a kind of vertigo, and even with seeing Stephanie Barnes waving and Wendy there beside her where the students stood behind the end zone, he felt removed, and he thought
,
I wonder if those girls know the guy they are waving to
.
Larry didn't know what to think about the minute he was in and he heard himself say, “High school,” and he knew it to be just part of the craziness, the new craziness he realized was his life now.

Larry Ralston played weak side end, and early in the fourth quarter of the game he took a shot to the ribs, a knee after he had tackled the halfback, that had him wincing at the bottom of every breath, a pain and pleasure at once, which endured unto the final whistle, the three referees dancing out onto the field waving their arms making crazy shadows that ran twenty yards in squirming clusters: game over. Immediately the hometown crowd rushed the field, and the entire population of Oakpine was as densely packed as they ever became once a year, and a player or two appeared above the mob on shoulders as if pushed there perforce.

Larry Ralston never got his balance back after the game. There was the jamboree of bumping and twisting through the crowd, everyone batting his shoulders and tapping his helmet until it was pulled off his head and handed to him by Stephanie Barnes, who, jostled, kissed his sweaty neck, laughing, and then he went up the gym steps into the old locker room for the last time. He showered along with his exhilarated teammates, the room a riot, thirty-two animals scrubbing eye grease off their faces, spontaneous whooping and whistles and song, though the songs were hooted out and replaced by the names of these heroes called back and forth in the bright, tiled room. They threw their towels in the same game as always, trying to lodge them above in the hanging lights, so the room appeared to have exploded. Standing on his towel and buttoning his shirt, Larry put his fingers against his side and thought:
I broke a rib. Or two.
Then he said, “I broke a rib, but it does not matter.”

He imagined the Jackson Hole team in their two buses, gray motor coaches crawling north in the cool fall twilight, wet hair, already past the loss, past football, scheming someplace to go tonight, that wonderful mix of hope and fatigue, sixty lives headed away. He knew that road as it rolled off the plains and into the first mountain junctions. Buses on a night, just any night, not homecoming, just a night.

Larry and all his mates had the homecoming dance, and soon the locker room was half empty and half again, and then just Larry and the center, Chuck Seebord, who had brought his suit to school and was lying in his dress shirt and his boxers on the wooden locker-room bench, his ankles crossed in gold-toed black socks. They had both played every down. Chuck pointed at Larry, and Larry nodded; it was the entire conversation. Larry loved the quiet room, the water still dripping in the showers and the hundred towels above and beneath. The air smelled like talcum powder and the mint of the trainer's balm. Larry sat down and pulled on his old school loafers. He was sharply sad for almost a minute, and he breathed until it lifted. He was smiling. For some reason he couldn't figure, Larry wanted to be the last one out of the room, but Chuck wasn't going to roll out for half an hour.

Outside in the twilight the cold air took his neck, and he drove home and showered again, running the hot hot water on his bruise, which was now a blue shadow. He watched his hands in the mirror button his shirt. With his hair combed back and his face rosy, he went down into the kitchen and did a turn for his mother and father, pointing out the dimple in his red silk tie.

“Here's a handsome young man,” Marci said, kissing her son on the cheek, “who smells quite good.”

“What happened to the life, Marci?” Craig Ralston said. “Play football all day and dance all night.”

“My aging parents,” Larry said. “The night of the prom their hearts were full of”—and he opened his hands to them—“something.”

His father came up and put his hand inside Larry's jacket on his ribs, just a pressure. “Take a breath.”

“I'm okay, Dad.”

“Just one deep breath.”

Larry inhaled and felt his father's fingers on his bones.

“It's just a bruise.”

His father tapped the rib right where the fire was. “You still bend,” Craig said. “That would be broken on most folks.” He stood back and smiled. “More to the point, I happen to know Mr. Barnes and his curio store,” Craig said.

“Antiques, Dad. And I know him too. I deliver bubble wrap there twice a month. You can get the full prom report from him later, as much as Stephanie will confess. For Pete's sake.”

“She's a beauty,” his mother said.

“She is,” Larry said. “So many of these girls are.”

“Is Wade drinking?” Craig said.

“He's driving.”

“Is he drinking?

“Not with me in the car,” Larry said. He pointed at his mother's merlot and the beer bottle on the table. “You two behave. I'll get the report on you.” There was a honk, and Wade's headlights flared up the oak-lined drive.

“Romance awaits. Don't stay up. I'll see you later.”

“Nice game, Larry,” Craig said. “Have fun.”

Larry went out again into the dark and thrilling cold and said to the shiny vehicle, all glass and billowing exhaust, “The next thing. Good luck to us all.” He pulled the door open, and he said to Wendy and Wade, “Dear friends, classmates,” which had Wendy laughing immediately. “I saw you both earlier today at Oakpine High.”

“You are so full of shit,” Wade said. “Get in.”

“Despite that, I am glad to see you again.” They drove to Stephanie Barnes's house, and they all went in and stood in the carpeted living room and listened to Mr. Barnes recap the game in a funny synopsis that featured each of Larry's plays and ended with his number: “. . . and the question was answered when number eighty-seven plucked the ball from the waiting arms of the receiver and went forty-five if not fifty yards with the interception.” After every sentence Stephanie, in her strapless gown, said, “Dad, we were there, remember?”

“Yes, I remember, dear, but the excitement lingers. Or it should,” he said. “Let's have something linger. I'm not going to be the one to say on whom youth is wasted.”

“My parents have got the same thing, Mr. Barnes. You're not getting through to us. Not to worry. Nobody's getting through to us. We're kids.” Stephanie's mother lined the teenagers up every way she could and took a dozen flash photographs.

“Where are you going for dinner?” she asked.

“Probably the Tropical,” Wade said. “It's a big night.”

The homecoming dance was held in the Oakpine gymnasium, and the senior boosters, twenty juniors and seniors who wore their sweater vests every Thursday, had titled it Flames of Fall and colored leaves were the theme. In the eight thousand shadows of the two thousand leaves hung in the nylon netting over the room, Larry danced with Stephanie Barnes, stepping through the spotted pools of rolling lights, blue and green and red and yellow. They were fairly comfortable—that is, they moved without touching and mostly in time with the music—and they did not stick out from the crowd of dancing teenagers, all dressed up in the high middle of the evening. Immediately after they'd started dancing, Stephanie did a funny thing. She took his hand and pulled him out to the rear stairway and put her fingers on his cheek and made it clear he should kiss her, and he bent and they kissed. “I wanted that out of the way, Larry. Many thanks. I missed your mouth out there on the field. We've never kissed, have we?”

“Just this once,” he said. “And now twice.” He put his arms delicately around her bare shoulders and kissed her again. “It's surprising to be so good at it.” She took his arm in both of hers, and they walked back into the dark dappled gym.

“Where'd you go?” Wade asked them.

“We had some housekeeping,” Larry said, and they began again to dance. Couples and clusters of friends drifted by and put their hands on Larry's arm and shoulders and said things about the game and greeted Stephanie. She was number one in their class, having always been number one, and president of the Student Tutor Society. She was the only girl in AP physics and AP chemistry. Tonight she had her bright brown hair pinned back, and she wore a green satin dress. She smiled as she danced, catching Larry's eye from time to time, her old friend from every single grade in school. It was the night of the year when the boys at Oakpine High School saw more cleavage than any other night, and Stephanie Barnes, who'd had famous breasts since seventh grade, was a big part of that viewing.

Wendy and Wade danced nearby, Wendy in a conservative black dress with spaghetti straps but a high front. Wade danced as if he were hearing sudden noises from afar, but Wendy was the smoothest dancer in the room.

Stephanie's face was bright, and her look made him ask, “What is it, Miss Barnes?”

She put her mouth against his ear and said, “Perhaps you could help me with something else.”

“Perhaps,” he said. Larry's head was empty; he was thoughtless in the bottom of this speckled pool, his arm on Stephanie and then away and then her arms on him turning or meeting or touching as they danced. An hour into the affair, when the disk jockey changed tunes, Wade stepped across Larry and took Stephanie Barnes's hand for the next dance.

The charge had been up ever since Larry squeezed in the front seat of the double cab pickup with Wade and Wendy, but now Larry was in new territory. Something had been at him all day. He had never thought before about how people had different motives for things, different from his. He saw the way Wade treated Wendy now as different than he'd seen it before. He knew their public side, and the three of them did a lot of things together, like kids, but something in Larry now allowed him to see further, and this disturbed him in a way that he'd been expecting. These new ideas made Larry feel slow and obvious, and now with his body buzzing after the game and his ribs glowing, and knowing how Stephanie felt in his arms, he held Wendy and felt powerfully, oddly jealous. I'm too late to be having so many thoughts for the first time.
Was he like Wade and just waking to it? He knew in the quiet center of his heart that he wanted Wendy too, and now he was dancing with her. He'd known her for six years, and they were easy together. The song was something half slow, and half of the kids in the dark, gleaming gym elected to dance fast, but Larry took Wendy in his arms, and with her right hand in his left, he stepped with the spaced beat of the music.