“One million years ago,” Frank Gunderson said, crossing the street. “Lorna,” he said, “this is the front man for my band, the Rangemen, other names, then Life on Earth, Mason Kirby.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said. Mason could still see Frank’s high school face underneath the goatee and the gray streaks in the sides of his hair and the smokers’ wrinkles and weather.
“And this is Lorna and Roger Beckstead, who are related to the approaching railroad engineer. Roger is just now one year old.”
“Fourteen months,” the woman said.
“Oh?” Mason said.
“Come, come,” Frank said, steering the stroller now toward the steel train fence. “It is so good to see you, Mason.”
They walked in the flat sunlight, and Mason could see the woman listening, and then he heard the old friction himself. He shook his head. “Trains.” Now he could see the boy was aware of the air changing. “I need more trains in my life.”
“Let’s hold him up for Darrell,” Frank said, bending to the child. Frank lifted Roger and straightened the little blanket and handed him back to Lorna. He was a heavy baby, but she held him up easily as the locomotive rose along the fence line and passed in a rush. A moment later with the train gone, she tucked the boy into the stroller and walked up around the block for the little coffee shop.
“Lucky kid to have a dad work the railroad.” The two men shook hands. “How are you, Frank?”
“Still on plan A, but keeping my options open.”
“That’s what Kathleen said,” Mason said.
“That’s what Kathleen would say,” Frank said. “Come on in. I heard you were in town.”
They walked back into Frank’s bar and talked business for an hour, surface stuff, Mason’s firm, his plans, a lawsuit that he’d helped Frank with fifteen years before. Frank had five buildings now, four of them nicely leased. “I don’t know. I’ve paid attention to business,” Frank said. “For the first time I’m kind of stepping back and taking a look. I mean, I’ve worried about money all my life, and now the whole package is about right. It could carry me. I kind of wish I’d gone to college or got out real good for a while. Even Craig got out for a while. I mean I’m having fun, I guess, but there’s something working at me.” Frank drank his beer and poured them both another glass from the pitcher. The two men were silent. “You got any of that going on?”
“Plenty,” Mason said. “But I’m not thinking about it these days. My thinking might be faulty. I’m into renovation, carpentry, plumbing, electrical, another month of it here before I have to start thinking again.”
“Have you seen Jimmy yet?”
“I haven’t. I saw his folks. I’m going to wait until I hear from Kathleen about it. She said she’d go over there tomorrow morning.” Mason leaned back and put his hands on the table. “I don’t know why I haven’t been down there. I guess I’m scared or something like it.”
“He’s dying, Craig says.”
“I believe he is,” Mason said.
The two men sat in the quiet bar. Suddenly the light dimmed again under a cloud, and it was a moment that went out on them, through the big plate-glass window across the gray street and up above the town in a moment, reaching past the last house and the few bad roads newly bladed into the prairie and the antelope in clusters on green-gray hillsides beyond that and then hovering beyond and beyond, the world, their lives, the full gravid sense of afternoon. There was nothing to do or say except ride this part of the day together there, both men feeling the weight register, the men they’d become. It was a beery afternoon in their hometown.