Return to Oakpine

by Ron Carlson

  It was a great night, a night that Jimmy Brand put in a book, assigning the euphoria and confidence the four of them felt to other young people, kids at a party. He’d disguised it. But his feeling always had been that it was a great night, one of the top ten for him. The other great nights were mostly in New York, with Daniel, small victories that they shared. He’d been a writer, he realized early in his career, because he lived for loveliness and intensity but only if he could know about them, be aware, have the distance and the words that would make them ring and ring in him. He’d been self-conscious as a kid, and he knew that night that something had happened for them all that was beyond the ordinary, and at seventeen he loved the knowing.

  Without really plotting it or planning, they started rehearsing every afternoon in Jimmy Brand’s garage. Craig’s drums were already there, and Mason lived three houses down. After football practice, Craig would pick up Frank, who would be in a full leg cast until December, and they’d pull into the Brands’ driveway. The garage door was open, and Jimmy and Mason were in there tuning up. They learned their instruments a song at a time. Craig had taken drum lessons and had the basics, and Mason had had some guitar, but it was uphill for everyone. They’d pick a song and learn it line by line, so that the neighbors that year got used to hearing random electric noises suddenly galvanize into ten or fifteen seconds of “Help Me, Rhonda,” or “I Get Around.” Leaves from the giant poplars and cottonwoods fell across the mouth of the open garage and scattered red and yellow as if urged by the music.

  At some point in the session, Matt Brand would get home and wander around to the garage. There were always six or seven neighborhood kids sitting and standing around the open door. They gave Matt way, as everyone did. He was the kind of kid that came around once a generation in a place like Oakpine, the single apple of the town’s eye that year. It was the football and his strength, of course, but it was his confidence and youth mostly. He would live forever. He was moving through, moving on to bigger things, and everyone he knew was proud of this polite and energetic kid. His black hair and straight broad shoulders drew people toward him, and after the kids moved aside so Matt could lean against the doorframe, they came back up and stood near him.

  “Rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “My brother is Mick Jagger.”

  “Your brother is Jimmy Brand,” Jimmy said back. Then to the guys, “You ready: one, two, three . . .” And a clashing bangfest of “Barbara Ann” exploded for five seconds, then ebbed.

  Matt pointed at Craig on drums. “Don’t hurt your ears, big boy.”

  “What?” Craig said. “I can’t hear you. I recognize you, but I can’t hear you.”

  “He can hear you fine if your hands are at his butt and you’re saying, ‘Hut four, five-four, hut’!” Frank said.

  “Again,” Jimmy said. “Barbara Ann. When you have a song named after a girl, she’s cute and unobtainable. When you have a song named after a man, he’s on death row or about to be hanged in some lonesome valley. Ready: one, two, three . . .” They blasted into two or three bars of the song and then unspooled and stopped.

  “You guys,” Matt said to the band. “You’ve got a future. I can say I knew you when.” He stood now and cuffed playfully at the kids orbiting around him. “I’m going to eat and head out.”

  “Say hello to Kathleen for us,” Frank said. “If you can remember.”

  “Not a chance,” Matt said from the driveway. “I say one thing about this band—”

  “The Rangemen,” Jimmy told him.

  “I say one thing about the band knowing her name, and she’ll be out the door and over here, and I won’t get any homework done.”

  “You won’t get any homework done anyway, Champ,” Frank called back. Matt was in the back door now. He would eat a quick dinner and go over to his girlfriend’s house for some homework and television.

  Mr. Brand would arrive while the band was rehearsing, park on the driveway beside the house, and come to the open garage door. He liked these boys and the loud simple music they attempted. There always was the possibility of politics when rock ’n’ roll was played, but this wasn’t any of that. “Generation gap”—the phrase was only a few years old, and it did not apply. The Democratic Convention in Chicago a year before had seemed, like all television, remote and unrelated to life in this village. The images of people, young people in the streets protesting, seemed theatrical and bizarre. Mr. Brand listened to two or three of their four-bar explosions and kidded with them about when he would again get to park his precious truck in the garage.

  They were blessed days for Louise Brand, all the teenage traffic in her house, the time in a person’s life when everything has a use, the garage, the porch, the kitchen, and her skill as a cook, life at the limit, as full and delicious as a world gets. Her boys were both still in the house, and when she heard the concussive music from the garage, she cleaned the kitchen and prepared dinner with a sense of well-being so complete she couldn’t have described it. She always loaded her oven with squash, which was coming in faster than she could bake it, and when Edgar came in and went to wash, she’d wait for his word, and it came every night: “Invite them in—let’s feed these musical prodigies.”

  “They’re going to be good, Dad,” Matt said, finishing his meal, placing his plate on the counter.

  “And you’re off to Lady Kathleen’s?” his father said.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be back when my homework’s done.”

  “Will Mrs. Pullman be home?” Louise Brand asked her son. She asked him every night.

  “She will, Mom.”

  “He’s got homework, Mother,” Edgar spoke to his wife. He looked at his son. “And he remembers to honor the family name.”

  “Whatever that means,” she said.

  “It’s as close as we’re getting to the birds and the bees, Mother,” Matt said to her. “And it’s close enough. You’ve raised a good boy who minds his manners.” He went to the door. “And does his trigonometry with his girlfriend. I’ll see you in a while. After the Beatles have eaten.”

  When he left, she put her husband’s dinner on the table, a steak and baked potato with a steaming slab of butternut squash. They didn’t speak because they didn’t need to. She hummed a little. A moment later he might say, “Trigonometry,” and they’d smile, two people. The spirited periodic cacophony would close down for the night in fifteen minutes, and the boys, Frank, Mason, Craig, and Jimmy, would stumble into the house for the dinner she’d prepared.

  These nights were the very center of her life. Her kitchen brimmed with these boys, how they could fit, all talking, reaching for the platters of food, assembling three-story burgers and buttering the squash. There was an ongoing wrangle about which songs to learn, and it was a real debate because none of the four had any clear favorite; this was all new to them. Jimmy loved Buddy Holly but was open and ready to hear more. They were lined up on the mainstream, some Beatles and the Beach Boys, a few songs, and the Rolling Stones. They were divided about whether to try some Kingston Trio; Mason liked them but knew it was too slow and years old. They trashed bubblegum and the conversation grew loud, Craig mocking “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” and then they joked further, laughing and singing parts of “White Rabbit,” which was not anywhere near their style. “We grow our hair long like Al Price and take drugs!” Frank called. “We change our name to Wyoming Acid Trip.”

  “You won’t get the right girls with that move,” Mason said. “Shawnee Despain will go out with you right now and save us the time of learning any music.”

  “‘Shawnee’ would be a good title for a song.”

  “Not really, she’s attainable. But she is cute.”

  “Watch your language at the table.”

  “Sorry, but I have it from a good source that she’s been attained.”

  “I’m not in it for the girls,” Frank said, and he was hooted down. Craig whined a few l
ines of “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and there was an appreciation of the Four Seasons, but it wasn’t their style. After they’d spun through a dozen bands and twenty songs, Jimmy brought them back to the Beach Boys, where there were ten songs they wanted.

  “‘Let Him Run Wild,’” Jimmy said. “It’s made for us. It’s got all the stuff.” The table was an empty ruin now, the serving trays decimated, the last roll pulled from the basket. Craig started a rhythmic bom bom bom, the four-four beat of “Let Him Run Wild,” and the boys waited and picked it up, humming and tapping the song, the table rocking faintly as they built and focused. Mason sang the lyric, and Jimmy came along in harmony. Craig rapped his fingertips on the edge of the table, and Frank mouthed the bass line. Louise Brand turned from where she’d cut the pumpkin pie and watched them, how serious they were about the fun they were having.

  Edgar Brand came back to the kitchen door. “Louise, hold the pie until the boys in the band have heard something that will change their minds for good.” He hoisted his beautiful black and white accordion to his chest and began a slow version of “Little Brown Jug” that filled the room with sound. They all knew he played, and he had the instrument out every Christmas back to the edge of memory, playing any of the dozen polkas he knew. The tune grew faster and faster as it progressed, and when he finished the last bar and called, “Hey!” the boys clapped and cried out. “Now there’s a song that will get the girls, men,” he said, pulling the straps from his shoulders. There was no room on the table for another thing, not a glass, and yet the pie was distributed and those plates found places, and the pie was devoured.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Brand, Mr. Brand,” Mason said, standing up. “I better get home for supper.” They all laughed. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

  “You’re welcome, Mason,” Louise said. “Say hello to your folks for us.” And suddenly the dishes were clattering again in their transit to the drainboard, the boys clearing up, cleaning up, and departing. Outside it was fresh now, almost cold, and Craig helped Frank down the porch in the new dark, holding his crutches while he hopped to Craig’s old truck for the ride home.

  Jimmy stood as was his custom; he would walk Mason halfway home. On the narrow sidewalk, they strolled with their hands in their pockets and had a joke of bumping shoulders to jostle each other out of stride. It was always quiet on the old street, their ears worked over from the practice session. One night in the fall, a week before homecoming, where they would play at the party, they stopped, and for some reason Mason took Jimmy’s arm. “What’s going to happen to everybody, Jimmy?” Their faces were very close, so strange, and they just looked at each other. Mason let Jimmy’s arm go and stepped back and then put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and then let that go too and made a little wave, and silently the boys turned and walked to their homes.

  One week later they played for the homecoming bonfire as Wildfire, a name that not only didn’t last, it barely existed. Matt, as captain of the football team, had volunteered them for the late-night party on Oakpine Mountain, and he had forgotten their real name and told Kathleen Pullman, his girlfriend, to put Wildfire on the flyer. She inked in the letters, making them look like flames, and she ran off a couple hundred mimeographed sheets that were circulated in the stands at the homecoming game against Cody.

  Bear Meadow Bonfire after our Victory over Cody. Kegger, bonfire, and the rocking tunes of Wildfire! Bring a friend, two logs, five bucks, and an attitude.

  Go Cougars!

  Craig kept some of the flyers for a scrapbook, but no one ever said the word aloud: Wildfire.

  Edgar Brand arranged for a gas generator and let them use his truck to take their gear up the mountain in return for a promise that they wouldn’t drink. They set up in the aspen grove about halfway up on Oakpine Mountain, where the bonfire had been for every homecoming sixty years running, from when the high school had been in the wooden building that was now used for storage by the railroad. It was exhilarating for the three of them to be in the hills like this, alone with the tower of ruined lumber that the spirit committee and some of the industrial arts guys had been delivering all week. Jimmy and Mason set up the generator and ran the power cable to the little platform stage that Frank had constructed by bolting plywood sheets to milk crates. He hopped on one foot at times, used his crutches at others.

  They’d had to leave the game early with the score tied ten to ten, but as the fall twilight swallowed the meadow, Frank looked up and said, “Listen.” For hours the only sound had been whippoorwills and the banging noise of the setting up. The three boys stood still in the mountain air, and after a moment they could hear the bleating of distant car horns, the concussion of approaching vehicles. “We won,” Frank said.

  “Must be,” Mason said.

  “Oh yeah,” Frank continued. He held up his two hands, listening. “By two touchdowns. This is going to be a party.”

  A few minutes later the first four cars packed with kids circled into the meadow, easing over the grassy, uneven ground, all of them parking nose in toward the pile of lumber. Ross Hubbard, who was spirit leader, one of the boys who would go to Vietnam and never return or be found and would be Missing in Action, jumped out of his rusty Datsun and started waving the others away as kids piled out of every door. He walked along in front of gathering vehicles. “No, no!” he yelled. “Back up. Back, back! Do you understand? This is going to be a fire! Davis, you want to burn up your father’s car and have him kick your ass once more? Back it up! Move these or lose these!” he pounded on the hoods of the cars. “Back! Move it back!” He swept his arm. “Park back by the trees!” Immediately a kind of controlled chaos set in, boys and girls everywhere, some diving straight for the trees to relieve themselves, some throwing more wood on the pile, calling greetings, screaming out fiercely, joyously, for no apparent reason other than that they were young people out of town under the sky in this little random village in the woods. “Leeper!” Ross Hubbard yelled at one boy who was standing on the hood of a car. “Move this heap unless you want to burn it up!”

  “My dad wouldn’t appreciate that!” Leeper said, dropping to the ground.

  “I don’t think he’ll like those footprints either.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Leeper said from the driver’s seat. “We kicked Cody’s ass!” He laid on the horn, and two other horns jumped to join the noise.

  The two boys, Doug Leeper and Ross Hubbard, started hauling and restacking the assemblage of lumber, making a cross-hatch chimney of four great logs and then filling the center with the hundreds of ruined four-by-fours they’d gathered last fall when the railroad dismantled the huge shed for the train roundhouse. Hubbard showed a group of boys how to interleaf the dozens of pallets they had so that they wouldn’t fall over. After half an hour the two leaders were standing atop the structure, which looked like a huge wooden soldier with a square head. Someone threw Ross Hubbard a rope, and with some effort he hauled up five gallons of kerosene and drizzled it down through all the vertical timbers while Doug Leeper walked the circle calling out, “No matches, no flames!” They hauled another five gallons, and Ross spilled it happily. Then there was the problem of getting him down. “It’s all right,” he called. “Burn me with it. It’s worth it, the way we beat Cody. Just a sacrifice, small but sincere.”

  “Stop screwing around,” Janice Day said. “You’re not funny, big man. Somebody get him off there.”

  “Move back,” Ross said, making as if to jump. Then he tied the rope to the top beam and shimmied down. Though they wrangled with the rope for ten minutes, the knot would not be jogged off the post. Doug Leeper cut it as high as he could.

  “That,” Ross told him, “is my father’s anchor rope for the boat he loves more than his firstborn son.”

  “Will he know it’s thirty feet short?”

  “I’ll ask him as he drifts away,” Ross said. “It’s a sixty-dollar rope. Let’s get a donation.” An
d then there was a call for “Rope fund! Rope fund!” And Doug Leeper went in two big circles around the encampment with his football helmet out for cash, counting as he received each bill and coin, returning with forty-one dollars and fifty-five cents.

  “Why do you have your helmet?”

  “It goes everywhere with me,” Leeper said. “We’ve got a special arrangement.”

  Two dozen cars lined the edge of the clearing when Craig Ralston arrived in his old blue Ford pickup. It was full dark. Kathleen Pullman and Matt Brand were with him in the cab, and in the bed of the vehicle were four bright kegs of beer. He orbited the bonfire pile slowly three times as kids jumped on and off the back of his truck. His hair was still wet from the showers.

  Jimmy Brand and Mason and Frank had all the instruments set and watched the wild parade from the band’s little platform. “The heroes have arrived,” Frank said.

  “You ever want to play football, Mason?” Jimmy asked him.

  “I played last year, remember? But not really,” Mason said. “I had other plans for my youth. Did you want to?”

  Jimmy watched the antic parade. “It would have been fun. We were in high school—it’s part of it.”

  “Right. This is high school, boys. Wake up.” Frank said. “And what were your plans for your youth, Mason?”

  “Play guitar in the mountains a couple times. Not break my leg. Get out of Oakpine in one piece.”