Read Return to Oakpine for Free Online

building thirty years ago on a night when we were coming back from a football game in Chadron, and our team ate at two long tables that were set along the wall there and there. I played junior varsity one year. I think this was a big chicken restaurant.”
    â€œThe Annex was famous for chicken. Sundays were crazy. People would drive, sometimes from Denver, to have the deep-fried chicken.”
    â€œWhat town was it?” the man down the bar asked Mason.
    â€œOakpine. I grew up there.”
    â€œI’ve got an aunt in Oakpine,” the man said. “Or used to.”
    â€œWhere is it?” Mason said. “From here.”
    â€œTwo hours and some. North on twenty-one until you cross the state line, and then you’ll see the signs.”
    The owner, Gene, leaned on the back bar and folded his arms. “You going home?” he asked Mason.
    Mason looked at the man. “I am now,” he said. His voice had a shadow in it, and the barman looked at him seriously.
    â€œWhat’s the matter with you?” he said.
    Immediately something rose in Mason to deflect this inquiry, and he had nothing ready in a second, the nothing he’d used like a windshield all his life, but the question touched the quick, and he knew his face had registered its canny accuracy, and he had another thought rise up:
Why hide it? Wherever you are, it’s there too.
    â€œFive things or six,” Mason said. “But the real thing is that I am simply over with the one life, I guess. I thought I wanted it, but what? Not really.” He had to whisper the last.
    All three men were still in the big room. And the silence ran along until the cooler motor shuddered on and the silence ran under that, and then Mason said quietly, “Do not say anything. I regret my remarks. It’s okay.”
    The silence bore on almost another minute, and then the man down the bar said, “I’m sorry, man.”
    Mason used the blow to lift and drink his whiskey. “I’m not a drinker. And I’m not a fighter. I’m a lawyer who until ten minutes ago was lost in the West.” And he knew that until ten minutes ago he was another man choking on his sublime unhappiness. The mathematics of everything had grown murky and was now impossible.
    â€œYou got any coffee?” Mason asked Gene.
    â€œLet’s make some fresh coffee right now,” the barman said.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Three hours later, driving in the late summer twilight, Mason could sense a fence along the old highway, a fence he knew, and then the ruined tower of the abandoned wooden water tank along the railroad tracks off to the right, so old now it wasn’t even photographed anymore, an artifact he knew from fishing trips with his father when he was five and six; it told him when they were almost out of town. Now the prairie still glowed, and he could see the empty shacks popping up on each side of the highway, places so desolate it would be hard to last a season in any, and the creatures who had lived there had been gone longer than Mason, and then the failed equipment yards, the broken fences and derelict vehicles and trailers, welcome home, and the lights now ahead of his hometown twinkling feebly as if unsure they would last the night.
    Finally the road turned, and he rose over the railway on the one overpass and came into the west side of town, fitting into Mason’s memory like a key he didn’t want. Suddenly a figure flashed across his headlights, a tall boy running across the corner lot like a ghost, some lost soul running where no one rightly ran, but purposeful those strides, and now gone. Mason rubbed his eyes. Did he really see that? He closed his eyes, and the figure was printed there, a white runner. Well, and there in the rubble lot at the edge of his old hometown was the old burned husk of the Trail’s End Motel, the nine units having been burned in 1985 or so by the first of the meth