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.