They’d water-skied a little in Mr. Brand’s new boat, and then Matt had dropped Mason and Marci and Craig off here. Matt was drunk, and there had been a scene at the dock. Jimmy had argued with him, tried to climb onto the boat. The boat was idling. Mason remembered Kathleen’s face as she waited in the back of the boat to see what was going to happen. Matt’s good nature was all used up; he was mean. He’d proved a brittle drunk, always charging into it with high spirits and always fighting or passing out. Mason had known many alcoholics through his career, most of them quieter, all that vodka, finally all the vodka alone, but he always remembered Matt, how the alcohol had him stamped by the time he was eighteen. In talking about it, someone always said, “He could pound them down,” and that was what he did, pound them. Mason wondered why people want pounding. It was so common, not just the drinking but the trouble, wanting to be pounded. Mason was a pounder and played to feel the register of his work. He was being dreamy today, he knew, but this terrible windy shithole reservoir had him by the throat, and he could see Matt, without blurring any of it, on that sunny day three decades before.
Matt Brand had by any measure been the best athlete in this half of Wyoming. You could watch him run without looking at any of his astonishing statistics and know by the fact that you could not look away. He flew. And when he drank, it was always a fierce, one-way descent. That day he was done with high school, and the engines that would carry him full-ride off to golden days at the University of Wyoming were two months away, and he wanted to be alone with Kathleen, and he wouldn’t listen to anyone nor answer a question. Jimmy pleaded, but Matt struggled with his brother, finally backing him with hard palms-open pushes, until Jimmy tumbled back into the water. Before Jimmy swam ashore, Matt gunned it and turned sharply for the open reservoir, throwing a violent wake in the wakeless bay.
Mason had helped Jimmy up. Tears cupped his eyes, and his lip split. A moment later they heard the boat return, still not slowing as it passed the warning buoys, and approach the dock. Matt stopped short, or tried to, and scraped the dock hard. Kathleen jumped out nimbly, barefoot, onto the wooden planks, her towel around her neck, and Matt again spun and sped away, as the other boaters cursed him.
“We were one of the last classes to have a deal out here at all,” Shirley Stiver said, walking down to meet him, pushed by the wind. “After Matt Brand, parents got wary. Don’t forget this was a new lake then: six, eight years old. It was just finally full that year.” She looked at the wasteland, the water. “Even two hundred kids and sunshine couldn’t get it back. It’s just a lonely place.”
The wind flagged their clothing, her jacket flying, until she turned her back to the weather and clutched the front together. “You were here, right?” She looked at him. “I came out for the party, but if you want the god’s truth, I was up in the bulrushes on the other side of the parking lot.” She pointed. “That hill or that hill. With Ricky Leeper. He’d waited all year, and we were up there awhile. I remember later seeing you and Jimmy and those guys camped under the trees, but I didn’t come down because I knew you could read my face like a book. You would have been a good lawyer in high school.”
“Don‘t say that,” Mason said. “Well. Ricky Leeper. His dad ran the Sears Outlet those years.”
“Yes, sir. Rick’s over in Chadron, Nebraska. Coaches something at the high school.”
“You lost your virginity right back up there.” He smiled at her.
“In all the world, that’s the place. It was more like the Garden of Eden in the old days.”
“Every place was.”
“What about you? You were taking your time, I noticed.”
“I waited all year and then some. I went up to college in Mankato and got drunk enough at a party to take some girl back to my dorm. To my shame, I do not know her name because I never knew it. Isn’t that terrible?”