And then the door shut and the light failed, and it was quiet even with small wind coming over the small shelter, and then another long quiet day and the air inside the garage a liquid blue, the quiet like a humming, and only the door turning white, the light of the world, and in the space a man saying something, “Are you all right out here?” Jimmy was floating; it was sweet not to hurt. He could see his father’s face. “Are you all right out here?” He wanted to answer the question; his father was so close, the voice he hadn’t heard in decades, and the humming silence filling up the room. His father was in the room a step and then back in the doorway. “Look at this.” Then there was the patchy silence. “Craig did a good job,” he said. Jimmy wanted to answer, but no air came in or out. He heard the door. The door was real.
When he heard his father’s voice, inside his heart he felt as if something tore, a page of paper being torn, paper torn slowly, a page from a book, but the tear was so old. He had imagined talking to his father five thousand times or ten; it was all the same with him in his life. What he had done was out of a great empty helplessness and a hurt, the stab that was the start of the tear. There was that whole beautiful year with the band, the way the music had tightened everything in the world, and the pure ascending joy of learning the guitar, and every week hoping Matt would sail out of his drinking, fly out of it, step out, and it had all spun to a single moment at the reservoir when in the sun-struck afternoon Matt pushed Jimmy from the boat, cursing him with a phrase that burned Jimmy instantly and that instantly in deep reaction he forgot. When Jimmy swam ashore after his drunken brother pushed him from the motorboat, Mason helped him up, and Jimmy put his arms around his friend, but Jimmy knew like a brick in his throat that Matt was going to have an accident and that he was going to kill himself. Jimmy suspended his mind and played guitar with Mason in Frank’s open jeep for those hours, sunburning his shoulders, in a way that would see them peel four days later when he was already on the bus and would earn him the scar with freckles which he still bore, but his head was blaring the whole time with a noise that came real in an hour in two friends running up the broad boat ramp, “It’s Matt, Jimmy. It’s Matt.”
Then an hour of confusion, hell with kids, not one person standing still.
Frank Gunderson holding Jimmy back when they brought the body up in someone else’s boat. And then the ambulance. And then the ambulance driving up the boat ramp slowly with none of its flashing lights, just a humble white station wagon, now turning for town without haste. Jimmy remembered Mason putting the guitars away in their cases, the lining of Mason’s case was garish—whorehouse purple, they called it all that year. Jimmy heard the brass latches take. He was awake through the rest of the day, but he didn’t remember how he got back to town, who drove, or what it was like standing in his kitchen, a goodbye torn from his mother—he had to go—and then two nights at the old motel with Mason, refuge, and then the bus away.
And now as a fact his father’s hand on his shoulder, warm and heavy, and the real words, “Are you okay out here?” Sleep crushed him and his answer, but he had heard what he had heard.
NINE
Homecoming
Homecoming dance lit Oakpine for the two weeks beforehand with heady expectation, and it caught the whole town in its gears. The florist made his year with corsages and roses, and the two alteration shops watched the thirty dresses they’d been fussing and adjusting fly away on hangers in the yellow light of Saturday afternoon, and half the windows downtown were painted with colorful bulging letters in some version of Homecoming Sale Special, the bakery, the saddlery, and even the furniture and appliance outlet, as if the big home football game might be a first-rate reason to buy a new stove. This siege of preparation took an edge when the tailgaters began to arrive at the high school the morning of the game, eight hours ahead of time, setting up their households in the open air, all the furniture and the open fires for charcoal and the bratwurst to come, and then the smell of lighter fluid and burning charcoal and before noon the smell of cooking meat in the steaming crosshatched rising smoke.
Frank Gunderson had an outpost set up, chairs and folding tables under his canvas ANTLERS banner, and he and his barmen grilled hundreds of sausage sliders, heaped on platters for all of his patrons and their friends and their friends. Frank ran the grill for a while midday and then gave the spatula to Leander, his cook, and he washed his hands and stashed his apron and put on a beautiful gray Stetson with a small silver band and moved among the crowd like the mayor. There were a thousand plastic cups and samples of his new beer, one in the hand of the genuine mayor, who had graduated from Oakpine five years after Frank and his friends. “You know it’s past noon when the mayor is younger than you are,” Frank said, tapping the man’s shoulder in lieu of shaking his full hands.