Read Online Return to Oakpine by Ron Carlson - Free Book Online Page A

village: a dozen rooftops, the park, the school, the houses and trees, and always across the rail yard, the larger western plain, as if waiting. This was a nice town, small and too windy and most of it needing a coat of paint it wouldn’t get before winter came, but a nice town. He could see Oakpine Mountain obscured in the weather. His entire history was here; there was no other place he knew like this one. To the west, the sky was three big shipments of gray coming in. He knew it was raining over the rail yards and into the implacable North Platte and beyond out into the reservoirs and the backs of a million antelope that wouldn’t mind this last warm rain. He didn’t mind it. Now he had to climb down and change the buckets under these drips. When the sun came out, he’d be back with a tub of asphalt tar and get this old place right and tight.
    At the hardware store, Craig Ralston always liked the rain, the lights in Ralston Hardware a kind of shelter from it. People came in for the tarps and the roof seal, both plastic and tar, and a lot of guys came in for reloading gear and gun-cleaning kits, and there would be those with basement projects the rain had brought to mind, some plumbing or some hobby stuff, the balsa wood and glue. Craig got lost in it, of course, and he took a real pride in knowing good gear from second-rate, though he carried both because people had to decide for themselves. He wasn’t unhappy as he stood in the open doorway and felt the air edge of the rain, but he felt what? Kept.
    In the Brands’ garage, Jimmy slept, weaving his dreams into a long exhausting saga. He’d been worn out before being taken to the airport in New York, and he had flown in a dream west to his old home. The knowledge that underlined this capitulation was that he would die, and so every afternoon or morning, when he would waken to his mother’s tray with tea and sandwiches and soup and her homemade cakes and Jell-O and lemonade, moving from one dream to the other, he was surprised to be alive. It all surprised him. He stayed in bed this way, heavy with his weary blood, for a week, leaning on things to get to the bathroom, and after a week of such rest, he woke one morning to see the perfect parallelogram of sunlight from the back window printed on the wall like a cartoon from his former life, and he thought,
I’m in the garage. I’m home in the garage.
And then he said it aloud to taste the words: “I’m home in the garage.” He said again: “Home.” His voice sounded like a radio in the other room, but the bright badge of light seemed to give him strength. When his mother came out with her towel-covered tray, he was sitting up, making some notes in his journal.
    They talked. She sat on the bed and felt his forehead, and he sipped the coffee and had some toast. It was the first time they’d spoken without tears. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said.
    â€œIt is,” she said. “Sunny and clear. How are you feeling?”
    â€œI’m okay,” he said. “I’m tired. You’ve done a nice job on the garage. Is this all for me?”
    â€œI’m sorry you’re not in the house with us,” she said. “Your father just has too much on his mind with all of it.”
    â€œI understand that. Believe me. I didn’t think I’d be back here causing you this trouble.” He lifted his hand, the fingers. “I need to talk to you.”
    â€œIt’s not any—”
    â€œIt’s trouble, Mom. I’m glad to see you, but it’s trouble. I mismeasured it in New York, thinking my money would outlast me, but I couldn’t sit there anymore. At the end I wasn’t even with friends of friends. They had no way of handling, of dealing with—”
    â€œWe want you here,” she said. “The garden’s coming in.”
    â€œThank you,” he told her. “But I need you to