Return to Oakpine by Ron Carlson

“Terrain,” and there were two big sections, each involving eleven artists. After the initial decision to have the two motifs, one descriptive and one interpretive, Stewart balked on what to call them beyond that, and they needed the nomenclature today. The museum was the old train station in Oakpine, and the transition to museum had been surprisingly successful.
    Stewart was Mr. Enthusiasm at the annual projection meetings, but as the shows approached, he became increasingly useless. Or maybe it was that he didn’t become anything; he just kept his distance. One thing that was known as an empirical fact among the staff of six at the museum was that he had never, ever opened a crate. He loved to call a meeting to discuss the overview or the game plan or any wrinkles in the calendar, but he never took his jacket off. The headline on him was that his favorite mode was walking backward with his arms folded while he nodded like an expert. They all mimicked him, doing the walk and going
hmmm, hmmm, hmmm
. The opening was two weeks from Sunday.
    They were well under way with “Terrain” now, but Stewart had still been going on about what he felt was important about this particular show at this particular point in time, when Marci interrupted: “We can go with ‘Here We Are’ for the descriptive and ‘Here We Are?’ for the evaluative.” Everyone at the conference table had already picked apart their styrofoam coffee cups and placed the pieces on their ink-doodled notebooks like mosaics. They looked up hopefully, three young men who were glorified interns, and Wanda Dixon, who was Stewart’s secretary. Marci was acknowledged as museum coordinator. Stewart leaned forward. “Say it again,” he said. She knew it was his way of running a good idea through his posture, while everyone looked at his thoughtful face, and then making it his. When he had heard, he said, “I like it! We change the stakes with a single question mark.” He stood up. “Marci, you are too bright for this town.”
    â€œYou should be in Sheridan,” Don Levitt said. He was from Sheridan.
    Marci looked around the little conference room. She knew all about it. She’d been here for three years. It wasn’t much, but it was what you got. You made enough money to order a few catalog suits, which you got to wear in Oakpine. You went to lunch at the same four places. You let Stewart grope you a little from time to time, just enough to feel you have a separate life, have made a decision. You have your own office with a door and a telephone, and you get to work with the interns and tell them what to do. And once or twice a year you suggest something that will be carved in the layered plastic signage that will tell people what they are looking at and which way to go. It was so close to being enough. She was in some kind of weird era. She recognized that if she stood still, she’d sink. It was hard not to hear the football crowd and sense that the game was the real business of this town.
    Stewart came around the table and kissed her on the cheek, his hand briefly on the back of her skirt. When he left to go to his office and get on the phone, she looked at the interns and said, “You know the drill now. It’s heavy lifting and fragile, fragile, fragile.” She passed out a sheet with the numbered locations of each painting. “Let’s just get everything we’ve got uncrated today, okay?”
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    It hurt Jimmy Brand to sit for so long. It always hurt, but now he’d been sitting for half an hour in the Suburban, and the pain had grown. He tried to do the exercises he’d learned at the free clinic in New York, the imaging his group had done, isolating the feeling and then moving it piece by piece slowly back out of the body. He had a lot of places in his mind, and he’d written them from his deep vision, the desert