Return to Oakpine

by Ron Carlson

  “How do you feel, dear?” his mother asked.

  He reached his hand and took hers. “I love you, Mother,” he said. “Larry. Always, always, every chance you get, tell your mother you love her. It’s always true, and it’s the kind of fact that just improves everything, the room, the furniture, the task at hand.”

  “Yes, sir,” Larry said. “I’ll try it.”

  “And there ends the advice,” Jimmy said. Outside, after they’d helped Jimmy into the big automobile, Mrs. Brand came around to Larry with a bag of vegetables and then another. “I know your mother doesn’t have time for a garden now with her work at the museum. Your dad likes his squash.”

  “He does, Mrs. Brand. Thank you.”

  Jimmy Brand felt electric. The medicines Kathleen Gunderson had arranged for him were powerful; there was no way to take them and keep a balance. Some days he’d sleep for hours, a thin, almost waking sleep in which he could not move. Some days he’d speed, too wired to even write, and that’s when the guitar was a blessing, and he’d pick it until his legs—under two pillows—could no longer stand the pain. He was giving Larry lessons. Now, he felt awake but off center. He was used to this feeling of being tilted, not quite sure he was standing straight and facing forward; and he was glad, as Larry drove them slowly in the large vehicle through the village and up Oakpine Mountain, past the strange yellow windows in the thick undergrowth, to be out in the night. To Jimmy, all the lights appeared to be sparkling ferries in the glowing harbor, ships coming, sailing for the sea.

  There were four other cars in the Ralstons’ big circular driveway, and when Larry Ralston helped him down from the car, they stood a moment, and Jimmy again pulled at the big coat to straighten it. The toggle buttons in his fingers sent him back forty years. “This is my father’s dress coat,” he told the young man. “If he knew I was wearing it, he’d burn it tomorrow.” Seeing Larry’s confusion at such a confession, he added, “Forget I said that. What I meant was, add your dad to the list—tell him you love him too, early and often. He’s a big man and needs a double dose.”

  “That’s going to come a little harder.”

  “Absolutely,” Jimmy said. “But you’re a strong guy and young—you can learn it.”

  Larry looked at Jimmy, and Jimmy added. “I know I can’t walk, but I know who I’m talking to. We’re friends now, like it or not, and you listen to me.”

  “You have my best interests in mind.”

  “You know I do.”

  They could now hear a thumping from the house that resolved itself into a muffled drumbeat, the slow rhythm of a song. “‘Help me, Rhonda,’” Jimmy Brand said. “He’s got the drum kit out.”

  “Let’s face it,” Larry said, “my father is a drummer. He is drumming night and day. He hasn’t drummed since I was a kid, and now this fall he shows his true colors. The hardware store has been some kind of twenty-year cover-up.” He took Jimmy Brand’s arm, but Jimmy stood and walked easily toward the house. “That is a great song,” Jimmy said. “But as long as I’ve lived and as far as I’ve traveled, I’ve never met a woman named Rhonda.”

  “We’ve got one in my class,” Larry said.

  “Well, talk to her for me,” Jimmy said. He was happy. “Look at me walk. This party has started.”

  The house was rich with the smell of a savory roast and the promised early turkey and something nutty and laden with butter; the air was loaded. Larry did have to help Jimmy up the stairs, and Jimmy measured each one. Halfway up, Jimmy could feel each step double and then double again. It was as if he were giving blood. At the top he stood in the bright kitchen, every counter full of dishes and carafes, and his eyes clouded in a way that made it seem simple just to fall back down. He was gone for a moment, unable to speak, the breath he needed badly only seeping in. Marci came suddenly to him as he started to fall, wiping her hands on her apron, but Larry caught him, and then with a sweeping lift he was in the overstuffed chair in the den, the fire in the grate another hallucination. He heard his name and felt Kathleen’s hand on his forehead; he knew her hand. He knew to gather a big breath and hold it for three seconds. Then quietly, he came back.

  “Hello,” he said. “I wanted an entrance.”

  “And some ice water,” Marci said, handing him a blue wineglass full of cold water. She kissed his cheek. “I’m so glad you could come up. Is this going to be too much?”

  “No, not now. We’re here. I can tell there’s a turkey in the late stages of being roasted somewhere in this house, and your mushrooms sautéing in butter and garlic have revived me. And the music!” The drumming had continued, not always steadily, and now Jimmy could hear two men singing with it. From time to time a guitar rushed in, quit, rushed in.

  “Craig!” Marci called. “Let it rest, dear. Jimmy’s here.”

  “Send him in,” Mason called. “We need that electric guitar.” There was a flurry of drumming and a cymbal clash closer, and the two men, Craig and Mason, ambled in from the back, each with a drink, and greeted Jimmy, taking his hand. “Larry, my boy,” Craig said, “there’s a hole the size of your ten-year-old foot in my snare drum. What do you say to that?”

  “That’s no problem for duct tape,” the young man said. He was spreading a cracker with cheese. “Plus: seven years ago? I think I’m innocent by now.”

  “You can get your innocence back?” Kathleen said to him.

  “Oh yes, ma’am. I’ve read about it.”

  “Show me those books,” she laughed. She had a glass of wine and settled onto the huge shaggy couch. The coffee table was the scarred walnut top of the stationmaster’s desk from the old depot, and it was spread with glass dishes of olives and pickles and cheese on toothpicks and two open bottles of wine.

  Mason sat down next to Kathleen. “What you’ve got with a drum set lying around the house is a classic case of the attractive nuisance. A ten-year-old is required to kick a hole in at least one of the drums. It’s like gravity. It is unstoppable. I’m surprised he didn’t jump in with both feet.”

  “Mason,” Jimmy said, and reached to take Mason’s hand.

  “I think I did,” Larry said. “Both feet.”

  “Don’t you have someplace to be?” Craig asked his son.

  “Ma said I could hang out.”

  “The football star doesn’t have a girlfriend?” Mason asked him.

  “Yes, he does,” Jimmy Brand said over his glass. “But it’s in the incipient stage.”

  “What?” Marci said. “Stephanie is really after you?”

  “They’re all after me, Mom.”

  “They should be. He rescues them two at a time.”

  Craig had passed a plate of cheese and smoked oysters and crackers, and Jimmy Brand was nibbling a wafer. He held it up. “Eating a cracker with you guys,” he said.

  They all heard a noise below in the entry, and then Frank Gunderson’s voice called, “Larry, you got a hand?” Larry stood and went down. A moment later Frank stepped into the kitchen with a baking pan covered in foil: an antelope roast. After him came Sonny, tall and dark and twenty-nine, her long black hair in a single braid. She had two bottles of red wine in her right hand and a long loaf of French bread in the other. Behind her, Larry came in with a pony keg on his shoulder.

  “Set that right here, and let’s have the finest beer in Wyoming. Who’s interested?”

  Craig had gone into the kitchen and greeted them. Mason stayed on the couch, watching Kathleen as they heard the other woman arrive in the next room. He took her wrist and lifted her hand onto his krnee and then took it away. They both looked at it, some joke in the air. “That’s nice, Mr. Kirby, if it’s an advance. But if you’re being solicitous, keep your hands to yourself.” She looked past him to Jimmy Brand. “We’re fine here. This is a dinner party.”

  A round of beer was poured into little glass tasters, and the large coffee table filled with
little dishes of horseradish and mustard and soy sauce and a platter of antelope strips. Introductions were made. It all stopped for a minute when Larry stood to shake Sonny’s hand, and when it became clear who she was, he said, “Oh, sure. You’re Sonny,” and everyone heard it as They’ve all talked about you. Craig stood in the silence and made a little team project out of selecting the music, putting the Beach Boys CD on and then holding up another. “The greatest band with only one album,” he said.

  “The Zombies,” Mason said. “Let’s turn it way up a little later.”

  Jimmy held the little glass of beer up to the fire, turning it and sipping. “A couple pints of this, and I’d be back to fighting weight,” he said. “Congratulations, Frank.”

  Everyone fell back into chairs, Larry giving his spot on the couch to the woman he’d embarrassed, and crackers were spread with Brie and chutney. Frank pulled up an ottoman and asked Kathleen how things were going at the clinic. “She has delivered unto me the Harley Davidson of walkers,” Jimmy interrupted. “A sleek blue machine that I’ve already had to the street.”

  “In the middle of the night,” Kathleen added, shaking her head.

  “What was that fire?” Frank said.

  “Some prank,” Jimmy said. “Some kid found the lawn mower gas and went for a walk. We were lucky he didn’t smash Ma’s pumpkins and wax the windows.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a prank,” Mason said. “But it was stupid enough that it might as well have been.”

  “We’ll repaint on the first clear weekend,” Craig said. “It’s not much, a lick of soot.” He had a mouth full of cheese.

  “Then I’ll see you in May,” Jimmy said. Everyone heard it, and in the bare silence Kathleen poured herself some wine and said to Frank, “We’re fine at the clinic. Summer is injuries at home and work and up at the lake—this frost is as good as a vaccine.” Mason could tell she’d gone into some kind of mode, because she could not look at Sonny, and she felt mechanical, forced. “We’re still losing nurses,” she went on. There was a steady turnover at the medical center because the women’s husbands’ jobs kept disappearing. “We’re going to end up with a bumper crop of trainees and assistants.”

  “How’s Mr. Brand here doing?” Frank asked her.

  “He’s been worse,” Jimmy said. “This woman’s an angel.” He had spoken quietly, and the quiet now grew again.

  “I’ve made an executive decision.” Marci came in from the kitchen and leaned on the doorjamb “We are not going to sit in the dining room. We are going to eat right here. We’ll make a little buffet table and be ready in a minute.” Kathleen stood and sidestepped into the kitchen, and Sonny asked Marci if she could help with anything. Craig asked who needed any wine, and he put two more logs on the fire. Frank asked Larry if he’d tried the antelope. Mason looked across at Jimmy and said, “You here, or are you dreaming already?”

  Jimmy’s face broke, and he smiled. He was nodding faintly along with the song “In My Room.” “This is too slow, what a gambit, and it requires a great vocal,” he said.

  “And a touch depressing,” Frank said.

  “Brian Wilson,” Jimmy said. “He is a giant—the sad giant.” Suddenly the room filled with the smell of steaming turkey, and the business of the dinner began. A hundred dishes from the depot desk were shipped into the kitchen, and forty others came the other way. Marci brought Jimmy his plate of turkey and mushroom dressing and five tender spears of asparagus under melting butter and flecked with pepper. As platters rattled and knives were dropped and wine poured, one by one the diners crept back into the den settling onto the corners of things. Larry came last with a drumstick as big as his fist, and when he sat on the floor, Jimmy tapped his glass and held it out to the room. “Friends,” he said, “Thank you for moving this holiday up for me. Happy Thanksgiving. It is sweet for me to be here. Thank you, Marci.” In the silence as the CDs changed, each person in the room leaned forward and touched his glass with theirs.

  “Please eat,” Marci said. “You’ll be up here for real Thanksgiving too, big boy,” she said to Jimmy, “unless you spill on the couch.”

  “This is so good, Mrs. Ralston,” Sonny said. She sat beside Frank on the ottoman, her plate on her knees.

  “It’s Marci, please.” Marci told her.

  “I better make my announcement right now,” Frank said, stabbing the air with his fork. Faces lifted in alarm, and the quiet was so strange that Frank said, “Hey. It’s just this. Gentlemen, I am a liberty taker, and I have taken the liberty of entering us into the battle of the bands up at the world-famous Pronghorn Bar and Grill outside Gillette. I applied using twenty-five dollars of my own money, because the deadline was yesterday. I’m hoping you will all join me in thinking this a worthy, kick-ass venture that would be more than any of us has had lately, meaning the last thirty years, more or less.”

  “The what?” Craig said. His mouth was full of turkey. “What?”

  “Let’s just do it. Who’s driving?” Jimmy said. “I’m in. Not that there’s much of me.”

  “A battle of what bands?” Craig said.

  “You play two songs.” Frank said. “There’s prizes.”

  “When is it?” Mason asked.

  “In three weeks. The day after Thanksgiving. Friday.”

  “You want to?” Mason asked Craig.

  “What the hell is it with this fall?” Craig said. He lifted and drained his wine. “I want to do everything.”

  “Suddenly all our practice assumes a focus,” Jimmy said.

  “Two songs,” Craig said. “Hell, we knew six or seven in the glory days.”

  “Six,” Mason said, “We knew all the words to nine, at least Jimmy did. And this would be one of them.” Mason went to the CD player and adjusted the volume louder as the Zombies sang “Time of the Season.”

  “You know this?” Jimmy said to Larry.

  He shook his head no. Mason and Frank were already singing along. Kathleen joined them. Craig mouthed the drumbeat, and Jimmy took the lead, his ghosted tenor blending with Kathleen’s: “‘With pleasured hands . . . promised lands . . . It’s the time of the season for loving!’” When Jimmy stopped, his heart was pounding in his arms, and he closed his eyes.

  “We’re in,” Frank said. “Life on Earth is in. On the application I put that we’d had a professional career sometime ago, but we’d taken a little time off for personal reasons.”

  At this Jimmy Brand laughed out loud, the first time in a year at least, and it shocked him to laugh as if something had burst in his face, and he rode it out and along, his head against the back of the couch until he was coughing. “Oh god,” he said settling down. “Oh god.”

  “Battle of the bands,” Craig said again. “That is a road trip. Marci, you up for that?”

  “We’ll see. I may have to work.”

  “Let me see.” Craig rose and stepped around the room pouring wine. “You can either road it with a dangerous rock ’n’ roll band, hang out, tell people near and far that you’re with the band, or you can go to work at a museum. A tough call for the modern woman. Kathleen, tell me what it is about the modern woman? What does the modern woman want?”

  “The modern woman wants exactly what the modern man wants.” Kathleen swirled the last of her wine in the bright stemmed glass. “She wants to put out the fire and rescue everybody, and then when it’s safe, she wants to go back in and wait to be rescued. I know we’re among friends, but it hurts to tell the truth.”

  “Is that it?” Craig said to Marci. “How do I arrange it?”

  Marci turned quickly to Jimmy Brand, who had pushed his food around and eaten a bite of everything but not much more. “Jimmy?”

  “I’m okay. It’s a wonderful meal.”

  “Elizabeth, my wife, would have said a woman wants to have fungus-free toenails and the chance to dance once a season,” Mason said.
r />   “I’ve got that,” Marci said, kicking her stockinged foot into the air. “It’s like everything else. They say there’s a cure, but there’s no cure.”

  The basket of hot dinner rolls made a trip around the room hand to hand, and Craig brought in the gravy boat for a tour. “Take notes on this, Larry. It could save you some trouble.”

  “Could but won’t,” Frank said.

  The coffee table was as laden with dishes as a table gets. If one more were pushed onto the surface, another would fall off the other side. They all looked at it as if it were some strange altar that had arisen for rites not fully explained. Mason crossed his legs and sank deeper into the couch, his wine in two hands on his lap. “I am well nourished,” he said. Marci nodded at him, and he said, “What?”

  “No ‘what,’ you innocent boy. You’ve had enough time to get your innocence back four times. What happened to you?”

  “I played to win—that’s what happened.” Mason set his glass down carefully and looked up. “Everything I did. It was just me. When I got to Minnesota for school, I don’t know whether it was because I was insecure or scared or arrogant, which I have certainly been since, but everything I did, I did to win.” He looked around at his friends. “You know me. I studied people and I watched. I learned how to dress and I learned what to say, and as I met people, one by one, I won them. I made myself important to them in some way. The guys in the dorms, my professors, all my professors, the staff of the union building, the newspaper, the frat guys, and every single girl I ever met.”

  “You were an asshole?” Frank said. “I don’t get it.”

  “Mostly,” Mason said. “I got close to these people, mirrored something they needed. I was a good listener, and I was about half bright. They took it, as I did sometimes, as friendship. Something. The women took it as love. Don’t mistake this. I didn’t set out to hurt anybody. I was good to everyone. I had the three P’s: I was prompt, polite, and I came with small but tasteful presents.” Mason drank his wine. “So yeah, an asshole. You think I can get over it?”