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The September rain moved steadily into Oakpine. It rained all week on and off, not all unpleasant, the stoic little town sensing the first real shift in the weather. The football team practiced in the old gym, running patterns in tennis shoes. These were always goofy sessions in the strange tight space under the yellow lights, the footballs careening off the walls, and the hours seemed rehearsals for some bombastic drama. Coach Nunley put in a new series of parallel passes that were aimed at his son Wade, who had showed he could move and catch the ball. Wade was to start downfield and, after five yards, cut parallel to the line of scrimmage as the other receivers streamed long.
At the museum, Marci had her hands full with the wet weather. In refurbishing the old station, they had never fixed an adequate loading dock. They used it only a dozen times a year, but on rainy days they had to move the crated paintings briskly into the building or cover them first. She had to be there every minute with a towel over each shoulder.
Downtown Frank Gunderson used the rain to find the two leaks in the Antlers roof he’d ignored all summer. They’d been too busy getting the little brewery on line. The one leak was easy in the front bar, dripping down the old light fixture, but the other that sent a rivulet of water wandering down the side wall was trickier. He stood on the roof of the old building in the rain in his old black cowboy hat holding a yellow crayon. He’d already swept the gravel off the one spot and circled the tear in the tarpaper. But along the side he swept but couldn’t find it. He swept again, his shirt already soaked. He hadn’t planned on being up here that long. Nothing. When he circled the three seams, he found the one that wasn’t sealed and put an X in that circle. When he stood, he felt the old hot ache where he’d broken his leg, and he looked out over the village: a dozen rooftops, the park, the school, the houses and trees, and always across the rail yard, the larger western plain, as if waiting. This was a nice town, small and too windy and most of it needing a coat of paint it wouldn’t get before winter came, but a nice town. He could see Oakpine Mountain obscured in the weather. His entire history was here; there was no other place he knew like this one. To the west, the sky was three big shipments of gray coming in. He knew it was raining over the rail yards and into the implacable North Platte and beyond out into the reservoirs and the backs of a million antelope that wouldn’t mind this last warm rain. He didn’t mind it. Now he had to climb down and change the buckets under these drips. When the sun came out, he’d be back with a tub of asphalt tar and get this old place right and tight.
At the hardware store, Craig Ralston always liked the rain, the lights in Ralston Hardware a kind of shelter from it. People came in for the tarps and the roof seal, both plastic and tar, and a lot of guys came in for reloading gear and gun-cleaning kits, and there would be those with basement projects the rain had brought to mind, some plumbing or some hobby stuff, the balsa wood and glue. Craig got lost in it, of course, and he took a real pride in knowing good gear from second-rate, though he carried both because people had to decide for themselves. He wasn’t unhappy as he stood in the open doorway and felt the air edge of the rain, but he felt what? Kept.
In the Brands’ garage, Jimmy slept, weaving his dreams into a long exhausting saga. He’d been worn out before being taken to the airport in New York, and he had flown in a dream west to his old home. The knowledge that underlined this capitulation was that he would die, and so every afternoon or morning, when he would waken to his mother’s tray with tea and sandwiches and soup and her homemade cakes and Jell-O and lemonade, moving from one dream to the other, he was surprised to be alive. It all surprised him. He stayed in bed this way, heavy with his weary blood, for a week, leaning on things to get to the bathroom, and after a week of such rest, he woke one morning to see the perfect parallelogram of sunlight from the back window printed on the wall like a cartoon from his former life, and he thought, I’m in the garage. I’m home in the garage. And then he said it aloud to taste the words: “I’m home in the garage.” He said again: “Home.” His voice sounded like a radio in the other room, but the bright badge of light seemed to give him strength. When his mother came out with her towel-covered tray, he was sitting up, making some notes in his journal.