Return to Oakpin(113)

            Then they were off the stage, Larry carrying his guitar with Wendy down the far side, and Frank and Mason off the back. Craig went to the bar but got pushed by the crowd into the kitchen hallway. Someone grabbed him from the back, Marci, her face laughing, and she hugged him, focused, and kissed him. “Let’s get a beer,” he said. He was sweating. “My god. Did we do that?”

            “You were great, honey.” The hallway was booked solid, and Craig backed against the ladies’ room door off balance, and the two of them were pushed into the room, but before the next woman could follow them, Craig reached past her and put his hand on the door holding it, and pulled her up with an arm, and kissed her against it as they felt the bumping traffic. “Yes,” she said, “I love you.” She felt the words in her elbows, her neck, and she took a deep breath.

            He examined her face. “That’s good news for this drummer.” They kissed again, and a woman tapped him on the shoulder waiting to exit.

            “Whenever you two are through,” she said.

            “We’re just starting,” he said to her, “but let’s all get out of here.”

            Back at the table it was strange: they were quiet. People came by and said things about the way they played, but they all looked at each other knowing something had happened that they didn’t need to talk about. Two of the red-shirted Coyotes from the next table raised their glasses, and one of them called, “Okay, okay, keep the lady. We knew she was pretty. We didn’t know she was smart.”

            “How do you feel?” Marci asked her son.

            “I see now why anybody has a band,” Larry said. “I get it. It’s like anything that scares you so much, you want a little more. Let me tell you, for old guys you did very well. I have it in the report.” They ordered another round, and then a Pronghorn special Round the World pizza, but before it came, Larry and Wendy stood up. “We’re going to drive back, go tell Jimmy how it went.”

            “It isn’t over yet,” Frank said.

            “That’ll make it a better story,” Larry said.

            “You be careful,” Craig said to his son.

            “It’s four-wheel, Mr. Ralston,” Wendy said. “And the plows have been through by now.”

            “Tell him about the girl who saved the day,” Mason said. “Tell him we sang his song.”





Memory

            The afternoon winter wind was slow and ponderous and unrelenting and ultimately called fierce, though it was nothing except the icy air moving along the frozen plates of the world, and the snow had crusted and blown into waves against the fences along Berry Street in Oakpine, Wyoming. The day was closed. It was five days since the battle of the bands, and it had snowed every day since. Mason Kirby stood in his kitchen listening to the arctic air work his old house with the ghostly sounds of joists first nailed together during the Great War, short cries and groans he remembered from his boyhood. He turned from his reflection in the glass of his perfect kitchen window, and he pulled slowly the cork from a bottle of red wine in the warm room, and poured a glass, which he handed to Kathleen.

            “You’ve done a nice job on this place,” she told him. “I like these counters.”

            “I could never design a room,” he said. “It is a published fact, but this will be my place.” He pointed to the large framed photograph of Mickey Mantle over the stove. The ballplayer was in full swing, his forearms bulging in the black and white print.

            “It should be.”

            He touched her glass, and they tasted the wine. “Oakpine,” he said. Outside the kitchen windows, which were cornered with snow, they could see two dozen cars parked crazily along the drifts in the gloomy twilight on Berry Street, as if part of some sudden winter disaster.