Return to Oakpin(13)
“You got any coffee?” Mason asked Gene.
“Let’s make some fresh coffee right now,” the barman said.
• • •
Three hours later, driving in the late summer twilight, Mason could sense a fence along the old highway, a fence he knew, and then the ruined tower of the abandoned wooden water tank along the railroad tracks off to the right, so old now it wasn’t even photographed anymore, an artifact he knew from fishing trips with his father when he was five and six; it told him when they were almost out of town. Now the prairie still glowed, and he could see the empty shacks popping up on each side of the highway, places so desolate it would be hard to last a season in any, and the creatures who had lived there had been gone longer than Mason, and then the failed equipment yards, the broken fences and derelict vehicles and trailers, welcome home, and the lights now ahead of his hometown twinkling feebly as if unsure they would last the night.
Finally the road turned, and he rose over the railway on the one overpass and came into the west side of town, fitting into Mason’s memory like a key he didn’t want. Suddenly a figure flashed across his headlights, a tall boy running across the corner lot like a ghost, some lost soul running where no one rightly ran, but purposeful those strides, and now gone. Mason rubbed his eyes. Did he really see that? He closed his eyes, and the figure was printed there, a white runner. Well, and there in the rubble lot at the edge of his old hometown was the old burned husk of the Trail’s End Motel, the nine units having been burned in 1985 or so by the first of the meth squatters, a charred skeleton lying under the crazy sign of the covered wagon and the feathered arrow. In the dark it came at him hard. He and Jimmy Brand had stayed there two nights thirty years ago, Jimmy hiding and about to flee. When Jimmy was finally on the bus, Mason went back and paid the bill to Mrs. Durfey, and he remembered it was some sixty-eight dollars. It was Mason who had taken Jimmy’s handwritten letter in the motel envelope to Mrs. Brand. Beyond her and perhaps her husband, no one else knew where Jimmy was, and Mason didn’t tell them. Now, in the Wyoming night, he drove past the old high school and took a room at the Best Western, in what had been an alfalfa field when he was a boy.
• • •
In the late twilight Craig Ralston pulled the little side door of the garage carefully closed and saw his reflection in the new glass. He wiped the window ledge again. The place would smell like paint for two days. After storing his tools in the steel box in the bed of his pickup, he went around and sat in the cab, one leg on the ground. He breathed on purpose and was glad for it. Up Berry Street as far as he could see, shadows webbed and traded on the patched roadway. It was like fatigue, but he wasn’t tired. He climbed in and started the vehicle and drove back toward the store, but at Main Street he turned there for the tracks and dropped two blocks to park in front of the Antlers. He knew this town by memory, by heart, through every incarnation the storefronts had had for forty years. Frank Gunderson owned the Antlers, had for years, and five other three-story red block buildings down here. Craig was still wearing his Ralston’s Hardware shirt, which was run with shorelines of dirt and sweat and full of chalk powder. It was the middle of September, and he had finished with the Brands’ garage an hour before, rolling the bay floor with a coat of barn red, scraping and washing the paned window in the door, and then freeing up the doorknob. He’d had to disassemble and sand it before spraying the sleeve with lubricant. Tomorrow Larry and his friend Wade were going over to help Mrs. Brand move the bed and some other furniture into the room. When Craig had gotten the ancient doorknob to function, oiling it and then resetting the screws so that it registered fully closed, he stood there looking in, and he felt something, again funny, weird. He wasn’t used to having the end of the day work in him in any way, and now he felt heavy, sad, and excited. He was proud of what they had done, but it was more. He hadn’t been to the Antlers all summer, but here he was. It was just dark.
Wedged between the mountain bike store and Oakpine Java, the new coffee shop, the old black-tin front of the Antlers hadn’t changed since he and Frank and Mason Kirby had painted it the last summer they were all together thirty years before. Inside, the place was half full because of Monday Night Football, and Craig slid onto a barstool. The old back bar was a hundred and twenty-four years old, an elegant monstrosity that the former owners had found in Bozeman and shipped down in four parts in two trucks sometime in the fifties. It was dark cherry and had fluted pillars and carved doors, and fourteen cherubs swam across the top, seven on a side, each big as a real baby, centering a figurehead nude, a placid woman with long hair and small breasts. She was seventeen feet from the floor, Craig knew, way above the two televisions at either end of the long, scarred cherrywood bar, so high nobody even looked for her up there in the dark. The beveled mirror was set in three huge sections, and the three bullet holes along the top of the center panel dated from prehistory, although they were featured as the punch line in a thousand stories, all about big jealousy and mistaken identity, and all sworn to be true and very recent.