Beneath the Bonfire

by Nickolas Butler

  But she loved him. Did not yet know all of him or understand all of him, but she wanted to. She had not yet known him all of one season and wondered if they would always have the energy to expend on each other that they had then—their bodies young, everything still fresh and curious.

  He had bought her a dildo for the times when he was away, and she would lay in her bed alone while he was gone, staring out the window of her apartment at the lights of the city and the flat white plain of the lake, but the purple toy only made her more lonely for him. She kept it inside a cotton bag in a drawer, the drawstring neatly bowtied.

  She worried that she would get tired. She worried about so many things. She did not know how not to worry. In bed, without Pieter, she would think about work or her car and how it needed an oil change, a new windshield, more pressure in the balding tires. She would think about her sister, about how she ought to call her more. She would think about visiting her aging parents up in Cadott. About how she ought to exercise more. Why didn’t she use the time she spent worrying to exercise more? Why didn’t she leave her bed and lay on the floor, crunching her stomach muscles into Jillian Michaels’s flatness? Why didn’t she go back to school, graduate school? How many nights had she started applications before simply abandoning the process to gorge on hours of Netflix or Hulu? Hours and hours becoming whole days she’d never ever recover, totally wasted on television she’d already watched a whole decade before.

  In the past, it had begun to interrupt and then dissolve her relationships with men. She worried about calling them or their not calling her. Sometimes in the nights, frequently on the cusp of too late, she did call them, her voice perhaps a little too earnest, the desperation in it a little too honeyed. It had shocked her that such a gesture, a friendly telephone call, could be enough to tip things into silence or anonymity. And then they disappeared from her world: her Facebook, her email, their telephone numbers changed, disconnected.

  And then, undone and alone again, she tried to put the worry away. She would go out on a Friday night with a friend and drink too fast. Approach a man at a bar, even an ugly one, and try to take him home or get his number. But those nights were failures as well, her tack always too eager, too forceful, her face too shining, her eyes too clear or too sad. Something.

  But with Pieter she felt swaddled. Swallowed by his strength. He would not let her get away or come unraveled. Even this, though, his gravity, worried her.

  She worried about the near-invisible dimpling on her thighs. She worried about her student loans: $52,161.00. She worried about the shape and length of her pubic hair. She worried about her mother’s increasing forgetfulness. She worried about the whiteness of her teeth. She worried about her inability to finish Moby-Dick. She worried about Pieter. She worried about love.

  * * *

  Just then and through the blackness, a light: bright white and cold and enough to make her heart stop its wild pounding. Pieter. He grabbed her arms and held her away from his body. But she would not look at him. He wrapped himself around her, held her face in place and stared at her. She sealed her eyes against him, against this underwater nightmare he’d dragged her into. When she opened them he held the cord, in his hands, pulled it, and her arm jerked gently, like a marionette. His eyes were calm. She could see that, the light told her that. He took her gloved hand and led them purposefully. In the distance she sensed a warm glow and a hint of movement. The bonfire, she thought. Her mind was foggy. What were those other movements? Freshwater dolphins? No. Great fishes? Seals? Her hands hurt and there was barely spirit enough inside her to move the flippers and propel herself through the water. She felt dragged along, the way she imagined a net followed a boat, the rope between them taut. They were moving quickly toward the light now, and she could see bodies in motion, the crash of divers plunging down, naked, their flesh very pale and some of the women not entirely nude, but wearing brightly colored lingerie. The thrashing of bare feet and sudden sweeping of hands unnerved her after so much time in such austere silence, stillness. Here, underneath the bonfire, the water felt warmer. Could that be? she thought.

  And then, Why did he leave me?

  Pushing through the school of swimmers Pieter rocketed out of the water. A moment later, his two black-gloved hands plunged down and she took them.

  On the ice he tore off her mask and she gasped in the cold air for several moments. A blanket came for her shoulders and he began stripping off the gear that all of a sudden felt impossibly heavy. He lifted her blanketed body up, carried her toward the bonfire, now substantially diminished, and though he laid her down some twenty feet away, she still felt as if she were bathing in the oppressive heat of a blast furnace. She stared at the fire. He touched her all over, rubbed her shoulders, ran his fingers on her face, held her head to his chest. His mustache had drooped over his lip, obscured his teeth.

  “Why did you leave me?” she asked finally.

  “What?” he said.

  She began to cry. “You left me. Down there. In the fucking dark.”

  “No,” he said, “we were always together. We were always tied together. Always.”

  “No we weren’t!” she screamed. “No we weren’t!”

  They were aware of faces turning toward them, toward the fire.

  “Kat,” he said calmly, “Kat. I would never do that to anyone. Never.”

  But she would not look at him. There were many bottles littered upon the ice, and cans. In the air, the tang of marijuana and the smell of pine comingled.

  “Kat,” he repeated.

  “What?”

  “Kat,” he said. “Kat, please.”

  She looked at her arm, where the cord was still tied about her thin wrist. It lay on the ice between them, already frozen in the unrelenting cold, and the stars above them blinking and throbbing. The bonfire popped and wheezed, and she watched as many millions of balsam and fir needles went white with heat before incinerating into nothing.

  “Kat,” he said, “look at me.”

  But she stood and walked away from the bonfire, toward the sleeping neighborhood where her little blue car was parked, while behind her, skinny-dippers were still laughing and someone had started the chainsaw again to cut another hole. She walked away, the wet suit a second, thickened skin, and she did not know what or how to feel anymore. Behind her, the frozen cord dragged from her wrist and Pieter stood still, calling her name out over the frozen lake.

  SWEET LIGHT CRUDE

  PRELUDE

  “THE DAY OF THE SPILL,” Foreman said into the pay phone, “I was out in my rowboat. Right out there on that little lake. I call it my pond. The lake is so small a person hardly needs a motor, but the fact is, I’m getting old, weak. So last summer I attached a little two-horse Evinrude. Bought it at an estate sale for five dollars. Thing gets me across the lake in half a minute. Saves my back and arms.

  “Anyhow, I was out that day, fishing. Nothing biting. So I used the motor a lot. Back and forth, figuring if they weren’t biting in one corner of the pond, they’d be biting in another. Maybe if I ran that little motor enough I could herd ’em all into one little bay and clobber ’em. Slay bluegills and crappie all day and have myself a little dinner.

  “It got to be about lunchtime and I went in. My bladder isn’t what it used to be, either. Was a time I could piss into a coffee can I kept for bailing and just fling the output into the lake, but now I ain’t agile or dexterous enough. Afraid I’d flip the boat. So I went in. Turned on the radio. That’s when I heard.

  “The man on the radio talked about flames hundreds of feet high. Clouds of black smoke. People dead in the water, blown to smithereens. No end in sight, either, just oil gushing out of the ocean floor. I heard people days later down at the café in town, and they said it was like the planet was bleeding. I suppose that’s about right.”

  The old man dropped two dollars’ worth of quarters into the pay phone and scanned the road for passing vehicles. Nothing. Just him alone in this rest area of picni
c benches and lichen-encrusted boulders. The badly potholed parking lot in need of new yellow paint. A historical marker recalling French voyageurs and canoes full of fur, beads, blankets, knives.

  “Day of the spill I came back out of the cabin and walked down to the pond. I was just about back in the boat when I looked at my pond. There was oil in the water. Not much. You know how it is, though. You got to mix your gasoline with oil for them two-stroke motors and there must have been some kind of leak in my line. And I could see right there in the water where I’d been. Like tracks you see, trails of oil. Them rainbows, everywhere. God, I felt so bad.”

  The old man was quiet a moment, then wondered if he even still had the connection. Could not even hear his contact breathing, coughing, anything.

  “You still there?” he said, hoarse.

  “I’m here. I’m listening to everything.”

  “Good, that’s good. I don’t mean to ramble on, such as I am. But I’m alone now, and goddamnit, I want to help. To be of assistance. Well, I seen that pond all coated in oil and I took the motor right off and threw it in the shed. I was so embarrassed. I can’t tell you. I ain’t been fishing since. I swear.

  “Anyhow, I don’t have much time,” the old man said into the receiver, “and I don’t have nothin’ to lose. So I’m willing to help out. Any way I can. You tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

  HOUR FOUR

  Hazelwood’s lips were black from the oil, and there was oil on the old floorboards from where he had already spilled three glassfuls. Foreman refilled the juice glass from a five-gallon plastic jug full of sweet light crude that sat beside the only door of the little cabin. It went into the clear vessel and might have been prune juice, though there was the smell, the strange rainbow sheen of its surface. The old table was now ruined, slicked over with oil. The table was older than the cabin, built by Foreman’s immigrant kin long gone. The room was cold. It was autumn on the northern tier, the rusted leaves of fall already down in a dry carpeting. The sky outside gray.

  Foreman set the glass down again in the middle of the table and fed the small fire in the hearth with kindling. Just enough heat to warm his palms and his kneecaps when he bent close to the little flames. Hazelwood remained at the table, three of his limbs duct-taped to the wooden chair, one hand free as could be.

  “Can I have a cigarette?” Hazelwood asked.

  Foreman shrugged, reached into his breast pocket for the pack, shook one cigarette loose, and placed it between the man’s oily lips, the oil already drying there, crusting. He lit a match and held it before the man’s face. Hazelwood leaned into the flame and inhaled. The cashmere sweater he wore, once white, now was spangled in black and muddy at the elbows. His khakis too, stained and ruined. His loafers ridiculous for the country around him. The combed lines of his thick head of aristocratic silver hair had somehow endured despite the impact of the sawed-off baseball bat Foreman thumped him with. Hazelwood’s eyes very blue and hard.

  With his one free hand Hazelwood removed the cigarette and said, “I could drop this cigarette to that spill there, start a fire.”

  “Go on,” said Foreman, “save me the trouble. I’m giving you a chance.” Then “You don’t know shit about fire. I could spit such a fire as that out. Piss it out if I had to. What you need is gasoline. Jet fuel. Kerosene. If you want a fire. If I was you I’d stop spilling that shit and get it over with. But you assholes, you like to spill. Don’t you?”

  Hazelwood inhaled again, blew a stream of smoke at Foreman. His smile was black, a thin veneer of oil on his otherwise perfectly white and aligned teeth.

  “I know fire,” Hazelwood said. “You don’t become CEO of one of the world’s largest oil corporations without knowing about fire. Every Detroit engine is based on fire. Every home furnace. Don’t condescend to me.”

  Foreman walked over to the man and punched him in the kidney as if he were a side of beef. Hazelwood coughed, spitting blood and oil comingled.

  After a time he looked at Foreman. “Where’d you even get that stuff?” he asked, pointing to the jerry can. “Not like it’s available on the open market. Normal people can’t just buy that.”

  Foreman pulled a chair toward the hearth, began whittling a little branch of dogwood into a point.

  “It wasn’t so hard,” he said, not looking at Hazelwood. “Turns out there’s a damn ocean of the shit down off Florida. Off Louisiana. Off Alabama and Mississippi. I don’t know if you seen that on the news or not. A fucking well blew up. Millions of gallons everywhere. A friend sent it to me. Loaded it on the back end of an eighteen-wheeler along with the last shipment of oysters and shrimp bound for Minneapolis. Trucker brought it up here for free. As a favor. Once he heard what our plan was for you.”

  “Our plan?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Huh. It’s all bigger than me, you know,” Hazelwood said. “People think these things, these drills and spills and tankers and pipelines. They think they’re one thing. They think you can just put your finger on that one thing and call it bad, but it doesn’t work like that. Half the time companies send out a press release, they’re doing it to rile up stockholders, future stock buyers. They’ll build a road to a future mine site just to generate excitement. We drill for oil somewhere, we don’t even always intend to get that oil out right away. See what I mean? How big it is? I didn’t spill that oil down there. There are about three companies between me and that responsibility. Three boards, three CEOs, three companies worth billions in stock. You understand? I’m not the bad guy.”

  Foreman rose and moved away from the fire to the other end of the table. He watched Hazelwood smoke, suddenly very tired. A draft blew through the cabin and shook the windowpanes.

  “This place yours?” Hazelwood asked.

  “I ain’t here for a dialogue,” said Foreman. “This here is about penance.” He smiled coolly, folded his hands on the table, considered his fingernails and the sliver moons of dirt and oil beneath them. He saw that Hazelwood was not afraid. He wondered if the man’s wealth was some kind of comfort to him. “You knew that well would fail.”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You knew that it probably would, and you didn’t do anything about it.”

  “Not my company.”

  “It was your oil.”

  “It was their failure. Their systemic failure. My company has a nearly unblemished environmental track record. Look, we sponsor whale research in the Antarctic Ocean, rhino research in southern Africa. We fund some guy around these parts who’s obsessed with dragonflies.”

  “Oh, bullshit. You pricks are corrupt as the day is long, and you know it. Greedy is what you are.” Foreman pounded the table and the juice glass of oil trembled, the black liquid sloshing to its rim.

  “How much is it you want me to know, anyway? I mean, how much can I really be responsible for?”

  “Everything. It’s your company. You get the big bonuses. You cash those checks, don’t you? The big tax breaks. Why are you immune from the big penalties?”

  “And this is a penalty?”

  Foreman inhaled the last vapors of Hazelwood’s cigarette intermingled with the smell of the woodsmoke and the cold. “Recompense. Justice. Just deserts. I don’t know anymore. Something. Something.” Foreman pushed the glass toward Hazelwood. “Drink up and I’ll take you to a hospital.”

  “It’ll kill me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I promise you this: I’ll get you to that hospital quick as I can. Thirty-minute ride. If you can’t talk, I’ll talk for you. I’ll own up to what I’ve done to you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Or I can set fire to this cabin with you in it and they won’t find you at all.”

  Hazelwood fidgeted against the chair, but he was bound tight. “I’m done with this cigarette.”

  “Drop it away from that spilled oil.”

  Hazelwood did so and Foreman rose to collect the smoldering butt, tossing it into the fireplace.
His back to Hazelwood, he heard the glass once again knocked off the table, the vessel finally breaking, oil joining oil in a black puddle on the floor.

  Hazelwood laughed. “You dumb old fuck,” he said. “We can do this all day.”

  Foreman turned to observe the viscous spill on the floorboards. He watched the fluid find the irregularities of the floor, the rises and falls. After several moments the oil pooled in one place and was still. Foreman said nothing. He did not have much time, but he had time enough. He looked at the CEO.

  Foreman said, “I got the cancer.”

  “The fuck do I care? You fucking kidnapped me.”

  “You should care. I just told you all you need to know.”

  Foreman kneeled beside the fire, probed the embers of the little fire with a poker. His hands were gnarled, the nails flat and yellowed. Along his forearm and wrists the sign of needles marking the course of his blue veins—where the treatments had been plumbed into him. His arm hair was white over a tanned brown flesh peppered by liver spots. He would leave behind no widow and no orphans. There was just enough left inside him for one more thing, and then that was it.

  “What I know now is that you’re the one in need of a hospital. More than me. I can wait you out.”

  “Ain’t nothing they can do for me anymore,” Foreman said. He coughed. “They laid out my options before me, and the only thing left is more chemo. I done the chemo for three years. My wife died. I was too weak to come to her funeral. Puking in a goddamned bed skinny as a scarecrow. We were married forty-four years.”

  Hazelwood looked irritated, puzzled. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “You’re a dumb sumbitch, ain’t you?” Foreman said, and it gave him some level of pleasure to talk to a powerful man with such indignity.

  “They’ll find me. You know they will. Everyone’s looking. Won’t be long. Won’t be long and we’ll be surrounded. You know how this ends.”

  Foreman nodded, smiled, “Here’s how it goes. You don’t get shit ’til you drink that crude. You don’t get water. You don’t get bread. You don’t get to take a piss. You just sit there and look. You decide. How long can you go? It’s up to you. Will they find us before that time? Will some goddamned jarhead sniper pick me off? I don’t know. But we’re well hid. I got what I need. An icebox well stocked. Water, beer, cheese, bread, butter, apples, lemons, fish, steak, mushrooms, onions, eggs. I brought books. Poems. I have started to read poems, you know, since I began my dying. So, Mr. Hazelwood, I really don’t give a shit. I’ll just sit by the fire and read. And I got a hunch that we’re hid better here than you think. We’re a four-day hide. Maybe five. What I mean is, even with them searching twenty-four and seven, I still think it’ll take ’em that long to come knocking on yonder door. Question you got to ask yourself is, Can you make it five days? Four days? Three days? Two days?”