Return to Oakpin(60)

            “How many times have you painted the front since we did it that summer?” Mason asked him.

            “Twice, I guess. Maybe three times. Every ten years, if it needs it or not.”

            “What did old Wattington pay us?”

            “Four days.” Mason said, calculating. “I think he gave us sixty bucks apiece.” He had finished papering the two large front windows. “Jimmy would know.”

            “It was the money we used for the reservoir remember? Somebody went with me to the Bargain Basket, and we filled two carts, piled it up, steaks, watermelon, tons.” Frank looked at Mason, and his smile dimmed.

            “We’d played at Snyder’s up in Gillette that weekend and were already flush. Life on Earth. A four-hour drive, a two-hour gig, and four hours back in the dark,” Mason added. “What were we, nuts? What’d we get for that?”

            “I know it was two hundred dollars,” Craig said. “It was a record for us.”

            They’d all stopped working. The taping was finished. The sanding was done.

            Frank spoke. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

            “Nobody did. We’d been out there before,” Mason said. “There’d been worse parties.”

            “No, I mean in general. I thought, I guess, that we’d just be a band for a few years, something. But we go to the reservoir, Matt drowns, and everybody vanishes. It was like time broke in two, and then we’ve had the rest.”

            “He got cut to pieces,” Craig said.

            Frank uncoiled the hoses on the airless paint sprayer. “Who’s painting?”

            “I am,” Craig said. “Tomorrow.”

            The three men, dusted like ghosts, went out onto the front porch in the deep gloaming. Frank had brought a cooler with bottles of his new beer, and they cracked these open and sat on the steps. It was dark earlier now, and as they sat brushing dust off their arms and the tops of their shoes, they could hear men and women call for children from time to time.

            “Old man Brand could call,” Mason said.

            “God, could he. ‘Ma . . . att! Jim . . . my!’ He had a quarter-mile radius. We heard him one time when we were on the railroad bridge,” Craig said. “Matt and I were down there spitting on a freight train.”

            “Now it’s cell phones and beepers,” Mason said.

            They heard a voice call, “Dav-ey! Time for dinner.”

            “Let’s go over there,” Mason said, “see what they’re having.”

            “What else you got on this place?” Frank said.

            “Clean up, polish the floors.”

            “You want to put in a dishwasher?” Craig asked.

            “We’ll probably do the kitchen,” Mason said. “Cabinets. That lighting.”

            “No hurry, sounds like.”

            “I need this job to last a couple years,” Mason said. “Until I get my head on straight. Until I find my head and get it on straight. Oh, just my head. Forget straight.” He lobbed his beer bottle out onto the thick front lawn. “Good beer, Frank,” he said, taking another. “But we’ll probably finish up and hand it over to Shirley Stiver in a couple weeks.”

            A white Land Rover pulled up in front and a young man got out and came up the walk. “Mr. Ralston?”