“I wouldn’t know terrible,” Shirley said. “Life goes fast. There’re some bumps.” She was still looking into the hills. “Yep. Right over there.” The wind was steady and uninteresting, a noise that didn’t build, didn’t fade. The light channeled darker and lighter as the layers of cloud cover shifted in their approach to Oakpine Mountain. He stood in the lonely place with the woman. Too much sky. Mason had thought this would be some other place, that there would be something here instead of nothing, and his foolishness hurt him.
“If life is lived between two points,” he said, “this is one of the points. I’m still looking for the other.” The leaves, yellow and brown, came across their feet, and behind them the smoky shadow of Oakpine Mountain, low and dark in the distance.
“Matt came back and got her,” Shirley said. “From the other side.” She pointed over the rise. “The cove there. Kathleen was in the boat with him.”
“He was drunk,” Mason said. “It was an accident.”
“Oh, I know it was. I’m just saying from where we were, I saw him come back.”
“Nobody could have changed a minute of it. Matt had the drinking from antiquity, his dad and his granddad. I remember when old man Brand stopped drinking; it was a weird thing to do in the day. The only reason Jimmy didn’t get it is because of what happened that day.” Mason turned to Shirley Stiver and shook his hands in the windy air. “Shall we go back?” he said.
“What else, Mason? Go on. It was the day Jimmy left, right?”
Mason looked at the woman and nodded. “He did. Or a day or two later.”
“It was a confusing afternoon.”
“When we heard, we came down here.” Mason said. “We’d been up under the trees with the guitars, and we heard about the accident, and then somebody said they were bringing the body back, and I think we saw the boat or somebody’s boat coming around there, the point, and . . .”
“Jimmy never even saw the body.”
“Right.” Mason said. “Right. He just left.”
Shirley took Mason’s arm and turned him for the car. “Did you drive him?”
“I did.”
“What did he do? How did he leave?”
“He took the bus,” Mason said. “I put him on the bus a few days later. If he’d have gone home and told the story, he’d be in the house today. In all these years there are five or six sentences that haven’t been said, and now it is too late to say them. It was Matt’s fault. Jimmy tried.” Mason stopped again in the everlasting wind and tucked his hands under his arms.
Shirley stood still on the bleached concrete ramp, her jacket flapping. “Edgar lost a son, and he looks like a tough man, but he isn’t. Some guy works for the railroad for years on end, you think he can’t get a broken heart. He did. He never came back from it.”
“I know. You never come back,” Mason said. “And maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Come on,” Shirley said. She took his elbow. “What about another coffee then? In town. And we’ll go over the paperwork.”
• • •
Frank Gunderson drove up slowly and parked his big Ford double cab on Berry Street in the late afternoon, the sky scrubbed to a dark iron, and carried a wooden case of beer up the driveway to the Brands’ garage. He could hear the stuttering guitars start and run a line or two, then stop and blink and start again. He stood at the door and listened for a minute, then tapped the door with the toe of his cowboy boot. Larry Ralston, his hand on the neck of his Martin six-string, opened the door. Jimmy sat in the chair with the red Fender braced above his lap on the arms. Frank could see his face now, narrow, and the angular chin and the bones in his shoulders through his shirt. Frank pushed by his first remark about his altered friend and said, “It is the older version of Frank Gunderson, stopping by with the fruits of his labors.”