Return to Oakpine (2 page)

He heard Wade call and turned to see that the dark had taken everything but the lights of town in a blister at the end of the silver rails, and he saw the dotted yard lights on Oakpine Mountain, one of them his house. It looked like it was on another planet. He'd run back then and found Wade exactly where he had stopped, and he approached Wade's pained face and ran by until he heard his friend running behind him. “You're overdoing it, Ralston. We're already in shape.” Wade called this way for three or four minutes, falling farther behind. It was the way all their runs ended. Tonight Larry had followed the railroad back to the river and crossed at the trestle.

Wade slowed his pace precisely to short-step across on the ties, and he said, “See you later, Larry. I'm going to stop and see Wendy.” It was what Wade said every night they went out. He'd run twenty minutes and then detour to his girlfriend's house. Wendy was in their class. Tonight Larry had crossed the river alone, smelling the rich clay before the reflection of the water appeared, and he dropped onto the new bike path, which drifted toward the park.

“I think I'll stop and see her too,” Larry said, running in the middle of the unnamed road that marked the south edge of town. “For you are not worthy to touch her fair hand. Her little finger. Oh you could touch her little finger, say, if she were wearing protective gloves and you were giving her back a book that you'd borrowed, not that you'd borrow a book, unless it was just full of pictures . . .” And with a start Larry suddenly passed a couple walking their Irish wolfhound, a dog he and everyone else knew very well, Shamrock, known as Rocky, the largest dog in the county, four feet tall, but he didn't know the dog's owners except that they were the Drapers and they were older than his parents, and he had scared them by approaching at a run, a young man apparently yelling at someone. The large gray dog and the two people stood still while he drifted by, his long silent strides giving him just a chance to whisper a hoarse “Hello,” in such a different tone than he'd been talking that it stilled them even more.

He took a dozen more long running steps and thought to turn and call back “Sorry,” but they were lost in the dark now, and he was glowing with all his power, and he turned and loped through the weedy vacant lots between the little houses of old town and the highway department equipment sheds, and he said, “I'm sure your dog understood that I was making perfect sense.”

There was a pleasure in the running now, and he took the ditch at the field's edge in a stride and continued the long miles beside the airport. He ran the packed ditch bank alongside the two-lane highway and drifted effortlessly by the lit edifice, a four-gate airport with a dozen flights a day, and here in the open world the wind bumped him once and twice, smelling of rain somewhere out in the prairie night. “Come on wind,” he said. “Let's go.”

He came to the end of the dark rocky lane, which years before had been a real road, when two bars and the Trail's End Motel lit that far edge of town, enough neon to beckon some and warn others. Now the two bars were unmarked ashy heaps and one garish chimney, and the Trail's End stood mostly burned, squalid and gothic and ruined, its sixty-foot sign showing stars through the letters. There was a single car cocked in the glass-littered parking lot, utterly out of place. “Citizens,” Larry said at the empty building shell, “sleep tight.” And as he spoke, he was startled as a head appeared in the glass of the automobile, which wasn't a derelict at all but some kind of Audi, a face and then two hands, and then gone in the dark again. It was across the street, and he knew that he would know who was in that car with whom. The car was familiar, and he looked back again, but the headlights beamed, blinding him to further revelations, and the car, seemingly silently, turned a gentle turn through all the tiny fragments of broken glass and swept onto the abandoned street, two massive two-tone taillights receding into the night. “Or not!” he called to the vanished car.

There had never been a person running through this place, night or day, going back to forever. In the fifties the Trail's End had been a nifty motel waiting for the town to grow out to it, and it was even featured in a famous postcard on which it stood as a gateway for the village behind it, an emblem of the modern world, and then it slid for thirty years and had been empty almost twenty. Headlights now appeared, approaching, and Larry saw that this car could not see him, and so he leaped across the two-lane as it passed, another huge expensive import, a Mercedes of all things, and he cut through the old motel's broken landing, stepping high in the crumbling concrete, and now Larry found the corner and turned back toward his hometown, running ten minutes and then crossing the tracks and entering the congested little three-story downtown.

It was close and claustrophobic now to be among things, after having run out on the surface of the planet, and he seemed to be sailing unreasonably fast, up by the Antlers and around two blocks, even as he had done in the past, to greet his father's hardware store, where he worked part time, and then through the old city park under those thick leafy trees, which he loved, and where Wade always stopped running to turn for Wendy's house, and Larry always wondered if Wendy asked where he was and if Wade told her he was still running.

“Still running,” he said now, and instead of steering through the village and up the hill home, he saw he was going to run around the whole town proper, which meant that he had to do a five-cent U-turn right in the street and loop out around Poplar Grove, the oldest neighborhood of redbrick bungalows and all the old tree giants, which were great to run under, but not tonight, tonight he was Magellan, and he ran out the cemetery way and up the unpaved sloping road, and he called as he passed the iron fence on the grassy plateau on the dark hill studded with gravestones and the old poplars, which were the most common trees in town, “Not yet, my dear friends.” He called into the fenced graveyard. “Not yet.” He thought he might see that car again up here, since the packed dirt parking for the cemetery was a place for that, but it was empty tonight.

The footing was tricky beyond the fence, and he slowed to find his way to the far slope, which was a sage hill untouched by the millennia. The snakes that lived here were direct descendants of those vibrated out of their dens a hundred and fifty years before by the first wagons swinging around this very hill toward the water, where the river bowed and then widened for a crossing at what was now Bank Street. “No snakes,” he said, “no snakes,” and he slalomed down in a sinuous course as if skiing, and when he felt the earth grow flat again, he took it as greeting, and he opened his stride and then opened it wider. He crossed from running into flight, a velocity at which he knew he would trip on a root in this blistered plain, and he didn't care. He could feel the night on his eyes, and he wondered what the sleeping coyotes might make of a man moving this way. His legs were on fire, and then beyond that they ached wonderfully as if he were growing with each breath, and he used the feeling to push, dropping into the ravine before Oakpine Mountain and skiing again, some of his downhill steps eight feet long, and he expected to be upside down at any moment.

Then suddenly he was on the bladed gravel of the snowplow turnaround and then on the pretty new asphalt of Oakpine Mountain Drive, the smoothest surface all night, his footfall a whisper, with only five or six blocks winding up into the new development of two-acre lots and the smell of scrub oak rich around him, along with the smell of rain, which the wind now delivered, having caught up with him again as he crossed the property line and turned and walked backward up the expansive well-made driveway, regarding the lights of all the lives below, and he said it. “I ran around the town.”

Upstairs in his room in the new-carpet-smelling house, Larry felt a catch in his breath or an ache in his breastbone, and he looked out his window and saw the town again, glittering, and he saw the two yellow lights at the trestle where he had run forty minutes ago and all the dark houses he had circled, and he said, “What is it?” And then he knew that he wouldn't stay. He'd known he was going to go out of state to college, either to Wisconsin or Michigan, but now he knew he wasn't coming back. He sat on his bed in the space that they had painted Bay Blue from the big paint book, and he looked around at the bare walls, his few pictures still leaning here and there waiting to be hung, and he felt old now knowing the first long season in his life was over. He would play football and finish at Oakpine High in the spring and then go. So funny. He loved the town and was done with it. “There's your paradox, Mrs. Argyle,” he said, invoking his English teacher's name, as in this year she had become audience and arbiter of his monologues, though she would never know it. “There's your ineffable conundrum, you gorgeous old lady, you mistress of the vocabulary cabinet.”

His door opened and his mother in her robe said, “What?”

“Nothing, Mother, Nice robe. Lovely robe. You should wear it all the time,” Larry said. He felt kindly for her now with his secret. “Come in for a moment and tell me to clean up my room and get to bed, and I'll say, ‘Oh Ma,' and you say ‘I'm going to talk to your father about this,' and I say ‘Good night, Ma,' and ‘I love you, Ma,' and you say, ‘What a strange kid.'”

His mother looked at him, and then the smile. She shook her head as if it were too full to stay still.

“Goodnight,” he said again. “You can go, so I can throw my clothes on the floor.”

“Goodnight, Larry.”

•   •   •

It took three weeks at the end of summer for them to complete the garage. Larry was a careful worker, fast but careful, but though he was handy and methodical, he wasn't keen on a life of projects the way his father was. He was worried by what he was beginning to hear when he was in the store and drove the weekend delivery truck; people were expecting him to come into the store, three generations of a hardware family, and what a good thing it all was for everybody. Craig never said anything to the folks who made the remarks, and he had seen from the beginning that the store wasn't a fit for Larry. The boy could go his own way and should. But the expectation was between them in the air as they worked; Craig could feel it unsaid.

But there was a lot of good labor in revamping the old garage: lifting and some clean drywall work, and the boy was running for football, and he took it all as a kind of muscular play and fell to the work with rapacity. It was easy after all the projects they'd done on their house. First they'd had to get Mr. Brand's boat out of the garage, a new old boat. The boat from the story. It was thirty years old and hadn't been used for thirty, a red and white MerCruiser that was packed in amid boxes and house goods in such a way that when Craig and Larry finally pried the old garage door open, it looked like a wall of stuff and no boat at all. They moved every box, crate, and lamp into the backyard. There was a lot of gear and half an inch of velvet dust on everything. Then they found the boat trailer's tires flat and rotten at the folds. Craig didn't even tell Mrs. Brand about that because it would have seemed a cruel expense for her to have to replace them. He robbed the outside tires from the worn-out horse trailer behind his place, and he and Larry, pulling like mules, inched the pretty boat and its fine fur coat of dust into the daylight for the first time in thirty years. When they'd got the bow outside, Craig stood to wipe his brow, and he saw Mr. Edgar Brand standing at the back door watching them.

It was understood this was all done over Mr. Brand's objection. Mr. Brand did not want Jimmy back, wouldn't have him in the house. But when his wife stood before him and said that Jimmy would stay in the garage, that none of it would cost her husband a nickel, not one nickel, he relented. She was confused and heartbroken by this turn of events. Her grief in its layers had settled, she'd thought, and now it was blazing anew. She would take her son in. “He's our son,” she said to her husband. He looked at her, a stony look that invoked all the past and the hard emptiness of the days around them, and he did not answer, not even with the dark rejoinder that he'd used so many years before, the year Jimmy Brand had finally left their house.

Larry, a strong boy and the promise of Oakpine High's fall football season, and his father drew the boat down the driveway and then pushed it back onto the lawn parallel on one side of the garage. All the boxes and gear on the Brands' back lawn had quickened the interest in a neighborhood that wasn't used to any change, and the appearance of this boat emerging from a building drew a little crowd under the high canopy of tree shade. A handful of kids, a couple of young mothers, and the Terry boys, who had been working in their yard, as well as Ed Hannah, who delivered for the Sears catalog store. They stood in a little crescent near the sidewalk and watched the two men struggle with the trailer. The original pale green canvas over the boat was rotted through in several places, and Craig cut it off, revealing the bright red and white craft, pretty as a toy. The life preservers and two wooden paddles were like new. He threw Larry his keys and told him to run down to the hardware for one of the extra large blue tarps, so they could wrap the boat against the weather.

Craig saw Mr. Brand on the porch in the overalls that he had worn forever, working at the railroad, around town, and at home. Underneath was a plaid flannel shirt, and Craig saw him there and thought,
Either he's got an endless supply of those shirts, or that one is thirty-five years old.
Craig raised a hand in greeting as he moved around the boat, making sure it was square on the trailer and checking the fittings. The gesture startled Mr. Brand, who moved down the steps for the first time in all of this.

“Okay, everybody,” he said. “You can go on.” He waved them back. “You've seen a boat before.”