Return to Oakpine (11 page)

“Larry!” his dad called. “You want to get some lunch?”

“Naw, you guys go on. I've got four more stops, including all this Romex for those guys building the duplex in Rosepark.”

“You run those blocks, every stop?” Mason asked the young man.

“I do.” Larry grinned. “It's mine for the taking, Mason. My legs want every block. It's a way to put the charm on this sleepy town.”

“Nice game, I hear,” Mason said.

“Strike early, stay ahead,” Larry said. “And be real fast and real lucky. We've got Jackson Hole this week—the city kids will be a test.” Larry pointed at Mason. “How is that hand?”

“Cured. Stronger than ever. I just wear the bandage for show. I see you down at the Brands. What's up with Jimmy?” Mason put down a section of gutter and hopped to the ground, coming over to Larry's window. “How's he doing?”

“Sleeping. Yesterday he said he'd like to see you.”

“Come back later if you can,” Mason said. “We'll take him down some dinner.”

The roofers gathered up their tools and fastened their two extension ladders to the top of their truck rack in full dark. Two of them walked the yard picking up the old shingles and throwing them into a large cardboard box they dragged around the whole house. Mason wrote them a check on the hood of the vehicle and shook all three men's hands. When they'd driven off, Craig came from around back, where he'd been putting his own tools on the porch. “Okay,” he said. “Let it rain. Tomorrow we can go inside and start spackling and test some of the wiring and replace the cracked switchboxes.”

“You like this, don't you?” Mason asked his friend.

“It's good work, don't you think?”

“I believe it is,” Mason said. “It beats kissing ass around a conference table.”

They had walked across, and Craig got in his truck. “It beats pricing tubes of caulk. You want to come in tomorrow, pick out the paint.”

“No, just bring it out. We'll go with that sky white. It's workable and leaves the new owners plenty of options.”

“Good with me.” Craig began to back his truck out the drive.

“And bring some of that caulk,” Mason said. “Bring plenty.”

•   •   •

When his friend had left, Mason went in and showered, holding his injured hand above the spray. It was healing fast. He was utterly at sea, and he welcomed being lost and had no haste about emerging. He liked his new little Spartan life in the back of this old house. He had the kitchen and his parents' old bedroom and the tiny bath that adjoined it. His suitcase was open on the hardwood floor, and it pleased him to open the closet and see five shirts and two pairs of pants hanging in the empty space. He dressed, put on the one sport coat he'd brought, a brown tweed that was almost twenty years old, and sat back down on the little futon Craig had loaned him. He couldn't quite think, gather his life up yet, but it was coming.

He was openly surprised by how quickly his bright notion of his own life had rusted in the open air of Oakpine. In Denver he was his reputation in the workplace, and he was feared in the way that comes to be called respect. He wasn't liked, but people didn't speak badly of him. Now his knees ached, and it was that feeling, along with the burn in his upper arms, that he wanted to know about. His footing was slipping and then gone, and he didn't want it back. Success. It wasn't so simple, the chase and the money. He could feel something coming. He hadn't cried in his life, not even under a bicycle as a child.

Though unchanged except for five or six coats of paint in the last thirty years, the room felt radically different to Mason, strange and new. His parents had had wallpaper in here, in much of the house, a dreary vertical floral pattern, mauve and gray, that made them seem even then only old, made the house seem meant for adults, something from another era. Certainly it would have been papered on before the war. There had been a crucifix on the wall opposite the bed, Christ on a gold cross that must have been a foot tall. His sister must have that out in Portland. And there had been a gilt-framed mirror over the bureau to one side. His parents' bed had a little cabinet headboard on which there had been a maroon runner embroidered with gilt thread and a wooden shelled radio and a shiny black porcelain panther his father had brought back from Manila after World War II, when he was in the navy. Mason lay back on the bed. The original light fixture was still in place, a milky glass bowl hung on the old brass chain, and he remembered it. Now he saw it was the same type as the one in
Lost Weekend
in which Ray Milland hid a bottle of whiskey. This one was too small for that, but he could put a minibottle in there if things got real bad. Mason rubbed his eyes. Where was he? What was he doing? He had the urge to call Elizabeth in Denver and tell her he was confused; she'd take it as a sign of humanity.

His love for her was full of airy spaces, he saw now. As a driven man who had made his life around driven men and never known it, he was off balance in the quiet house. If he'd only found this silence ten years ago, she would not have gone away. It was the first still part, the first quiet part of his life. He could feel it pressing.

What he did was sit up and then stand up. In the kitchen he clipped the ends from two potatoes and put them in the oven. He had two folding chairs and the Formica table the Gunnars had left behind. Leaving the lights on, he went out the back door and walked down three houses to the Brands.

He didn't walk anywhere now. He hadn't walked for years. In Denver he parked his car in the basement of his office and walked to the elevators; he parked in the basement of his condominium and walked to the elevators. There were two places in his office building where he could get lunch, one up and one down, and to get to them, he walked to the elevators. He was never out of doors. It didn't happen. He took an inventory now quickly and saw it was true. He walked fifty feet on painted concrete to the elevator and then upstairs, though the entry to his offices, and down the hallway on carpet. He would live the rest of his life and never wear out a pair of shoes. And now in the dark that smelled like turning leaves, he walked up to Jimmy Brand's garage, a walk he'd taken a thousand times years and years ago. Sometimes he'd run. The sidewalk on Berry Street had been buckled by the poplars and cottonwoods, repoured, and buckled again. He'd been in some of these trees. The air was at his neck, not cold, but sweet and sharp. He couldn't quite get the right stride, walking this route, and he felt exposed out in the old world, and this feeling too was part of his confusion. He felt strange and exposed tonight. He didn't know what to do with his arms. It would have been ridiculous to drive.
I'm so highly evolved that I can't even walk,
he thought.

He hadn't seen Jimmy Brand for thirty years. He didn't need to do the math. He had the morning in his head like a photograph. The days they'd spent in the Trail's End Motel and after their encounter, Mason had twisted in a way he thought would certainly kill him, and then Jimmy let him off with a hand on the side of his face, that touch, and saying, “Let us get over ourselves. It's okay. It's over. The year. My life here.” He had smiled. “And that band is over with. Mason, I have to leave. Ten reasons, and you are not among them. I will see you again.” It was a morning in June, and the birds were crazy in the trees, calling, and Mason retrieved the car, and Jimmy came out of the room with his duffel. They drove without a word to the Greyhound station, which was an anteroom on Front Street by the tracks, and the bus was there idling. It had come and gone all his life, and Mason had never seen the bus before. Jimmy got out of the car and leaned back to say, “Don't be an idiot. You were kind to me. Don't look back. I'll see you.” He shut the car door and went into the bus. A minute later the bus door closed, and it eased onto Front Street headed east. Mason turned off the car and got out and stood and looked across the street at the Antlers, bright from its new coat of paint, but still a dive. Two men sat on the sidewalk against the facade of the building, rolled blankets in their laps. If they got up and crossed the street, they could sit in the sun. The town was a plain little place before him, his home, and it felt now empty and without one mystery of its own.

•   •   •

Now he moved down the sidewalk on Berry Street stiffly, new at this game. He'd walked at first. He'd beat the streets for two years when he first came to Denver. Every time he'd hear of a firm with an opening, he was there. It was an era of close calls but no callbacks. Everybody liked him, and everybody knew him, but by the time there was a bona fide position ready for him, his own business had taken off. He'd started alone, taking what he could, some corporate spillover from the big companies. An old associate, on hearing that Mason did wills, trusts, and divorces, sent him some work. He wrote deeds. Mason did DUI's for friends of friends only. He made a lot of money in a wrongful death suit on behalf of a family run down in a movie line by a drunk driver. Then the year he was thirty a big case fell on his desk. Fourteen people had been injured in one of the city's softball complexes when the aluminum seating failed. Two would never walk again, and a child had perished. They had had representation by a firm in his building that hurried the deal and started talking money at the initial strategy session. The plaintiffs were hurt and shocked. Mason literally met them in the elevator, the five people from the three families that were suing the city. It was an accident, but he knew who they were. His first words when they got into the car and he assessed their faces were “You want a glass of water?”

He didn't say it was a ploy, but it was a ploy. They talked two hours that first day, and he learned to listen, to try to grasp the weight of the damage. It was as close to empathy as he could get, and he learned that it helped him know how to talk to them.

He moved the case slowly, as the plaintiffs wanted, and he went step by step. He never talked money with them, even when the city's attorney tried again and again to cut a deal. Mason already knew what a life meant in a settlement, but the city attorney told him again anyway: $2.6 million. Mason told the woman that that wasn't the issue. His clients wanted a trial. They wanted to tell what happened, be heard, be seen. Their lives were changed. By now Mason knew his life would be made of stories. And so it went to trial, and because Mason was methodical and quiet and obviously thorough and in no hurry, and because he used the three weeks in court to display and listen to the stories of all the victims, then the bleacher company, an aluminum girder expert, another engineer and a metallurgist, and the comptroller from the City of Denver budget department, the plaintiffs won the award of $41 million dollars. He got almost eight, the agreed percentage.

He moved the office to an old building downtown, which he bought, and took in two partners, one of them a woman he would marry some years later, Elizabeth. His evolution was begun. The case made him a hotshot but a strange one. He was respected, but he had few friends. He hired two serious attorneys. Kirby, Rothman, and Phelps began to turn work away.

•   •   •

Mason knocked on the Brands' front door. Up and down the block he could see lights on in the living rooms, televisions, families. The storm door rattled, and Mrs. Brand appeared in the glass. She pushed the door open to him. “Mrs. Brand,” he said. “It's Mason Kirby. Do you remember me, Hilda and Ted's boy?”

“I knew it was you, Mason. Come on in. I've seen you down there at the house.”

He stepped into the small carpeted front room. Mr. Brand stood from his big red recliner and shook Mason's hand. He wore a blue plaid shirt and a pair of clean overalls, and he looked the same to Mason: a large man in working clothes. “What are you doing? Selling the place?”

“Good to see you, sir,” Mason said. “Yeah. I've been proven to be an ineffective landlord, and my sister has no interest in returning to Wyoming.”

“Where is Linda?” Mrs. Brand said. “She was a sharp one.”

Mr. Brand sat back down and motioned for Mason to take a seat on the couch. He turned the television down with the remote.

“She's out in California, which was always her goal. Her two kids are almost in high school, married a guy who is something in UPS, middle management. She's doing well.”

“And you're a lawyer,” Mrs. Brand said. “Craig told me that you've done well too.”

“Is there much work in it?” Edgar Brand said. “All you hear now is lawyer this, lawyer that.”

“There're plenty of lawyers,” Mason said. He sat on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees. “There's some work in it. You meet with people who are pretty torn up, and you try to figure how to help. It's been interesting. I've had some luck, and mostly I think I've been on the side of the good guys, but that's my opinion. I am a lawyer.” He opened his hands and shrugged. “I'm having more fun fixing up the old place than I ever have in Denver.”

The little room with its carpet felt terrifically close to Mason, especially after all the air and stars and leaves.
They've lived their lives in these rooms
, he thought. He didn't know anybody anymore who lived in one place. There were several family photos framed on the wall, and he picked out Matt Brand in his football uniform and a studio portrait of all four Brands taken when the kids must have been eight and nine. The muted television was on to an evening news program,
20/20
or
Primetime
or such, but the room itself was decades removed from Mason's world.

“We didn't see much of your last renters.” Mr. Brand said. “They had a daughter, and the old man drove an El Camino, which is a vehicle I never did understand. Light blue.”

“They had some problems,” Mason said. “I think the bottle had him by the neck. It happens. Listen, I understand Jimmy's here”—Mr. Brand's face changed in the lamplight, went blank—“and I came down to see if I—”