Beneath the Bonfire

by Nickolas Butler

  He lowered his head, scratched the remaining fibers that clung to his scalp. He glanced outside and the snow was still falling, though more slowly now—the snow of the cinema. Foreman opposite him at the table, spitting oil onto the floor. The fire had died out and their breaths were visible inside the cabin.

  “I’m cold,” said Hazelwood. “I can’t feel my feet. I can’t feel my fucking feet.”

  HOUR FIFTY-FIVE

  Foreman and Hazelwood beside the revived fire, the prisoner wiggling his feet close to the flames, a puzzled look on his face.

  “I’m moving them, but I can’t feel anything.”

  Foreman was reading a slim volume of haiku, his thick reading glasses balanced on his nose. He did not look away from his book.

  “I think this tape is too tight,” Hazelwood said. “I can’t feel my toes.”

  Foreman licked his fingers as he turned the brittle pages. The fire crackled on.

  “Back in college, I studied archaeology,” said Hazelwood. “But there weren’t any jobs in that field, so I began getting frustrated just before I graduated. I wasn’t always rich. But then, the spring break before I graduated, a big oil company sponsored a trip for us. We visited four digs out west. Utah, Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona. The oil company covered everything. Our bus, our food, our lodgings. We stayed in cheap motels, but it was great, we didn’t know any better. I couldn’t’ve been more than twenty-one, twenty-two. Watching TV in some motel room and drinking warm beer and smoking cigarettes. One of the best times in my life.”

  Foreman had turned from his book.

  “Well, at the end of the trip, this executive gets onto our bus and we gave him a round of applause. He was an alum of our college, so we immediately liked him even though he was this rich old fucker. But he encouraged us to all apply for jobs at his company. Said that we had similar skills to the geologists they hired. That he liked hiring archaeologists because that was what he had studied. So that’s what I did. That fall I was in Houston for my training. Then they shipped me off to Saudi Arabia. To the North Sea. It was great. It was how I saw the world. They took good care of me. They really did.”

  He spat into the fire and the fire jumped. He smiled darkly.

  Hazelwood looked right at Foreman now. “I swear to you, I am not a bad person,” he said. “I am not a bad person.” And then: “My stomach is burning. I can feel that.”

  He looked back into the fire and Foreman returned to his poems.

  HOUR FIFTY-SIX

  Hazelwood hopped his chair away from the fire and began shuffling it toward the old, stained immigrant table. Foreman regarded him from beside the hearth. It took the CEO a good two minutes to cross the small room. When he was finally beside the table he snatched the tin cup and drank the remaining oil down in one quick gulp. Then he clutched his own throat and began gagging again, only this time there was no vomit. He could not even make a scream of protestation. Foreman moved from his chair into the kitchen and poured a tall glass of water, held it to the man’s blackened lips. Hazelwood drank quickly and then spit the water out and oil came too, though only a little.

  “A rag,” he said hoarsely.

  Foreman found a fresh handkerchief and held Hazelwood’s head, swabbed out his mouth for him. The man had gone very pale and his body was convulsing.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Foreman, and he went out into the falling snow and turned the truck over, its engine revving, black smoke coughing out the tailpipe. He turned the heat on high. “Son of a bitch did it.”

  He went back into the cabin and wrapped the man in blankets and carried him to the truck, laying him across the bench seat. “I’ll get you there,” Foreman said. “I promised I would.” Though now he was afraid. The gravel drive to the cabin was buried under three feet of snow and there were no chains on the truck’s tires. He wondered if there was enough weight in the bed of the truck. He’d thought that he had taken every precaution. He felt, in that moment, a murderer.

  He pressed the gas pedal lightly and the truck lurched into the confusion of snow, pressing its front bumper into the wilderness of white, only to refuse further progress. He slid the truck into reverse and went back over their tracks. This time he pressed the gas pedal down a little farther. They went up and over a drift, the truck settling onto a plain of snow like a misbegotten raft, the tires resting on nothing but a drift of snow that offered no purchase.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Foreman said. “Oh, I am sorry, brother. Sorry, sorry, sorry.” He slammed the gas pedal, but there was no traction now, just the melt and slide of snow beneath hot rubber. “Oh, goddamn, Hazel, I’ll get it. I’ll get us out. I’ll get you there. I promised you, you son of a bitch.”

  Foreman slung out of the truck and into the snow, already crotch-deep, but saw that it was fruitless. He reached into the bed of the truck for the snowshoes and then realized he would need only one pair. Hazelwood was passed out, a rivulet of sweet light crude issuing from his mouth onto the fabric of the seat. Foreman quickly strapped on the shoes and pulled the dying man from the truck. Then he stopped, afraid he would not be able to reload him back in. He pushed Hazelwood back into the warmth of the truck. Foreman slapped at the man’s face until his eyelids fluttered open, took a handful of snow and held it to Hazelwood’s face and neck, let the snow melt on the man. “Wake up!” he said. “Wake up!”

  Hazelwood looked at him dimly.

  “That oil could kill you, but I think it’s too early. You got time. We can make it, goddamn it. Stick with me. Wake the fuck up. You got to get back to your family! Your goddamn family! Wake up, Hazel!”

  The CEO pulled himself up on the bench seat, still woozy.

  “You’re going to drive out of here,” said Foreman. “I’m going to make you a path.”

  He shut the door to the truck and moved back to the cabin for a shovel. He came back to the truck with tire chains and a large scoop-bladed shovel. He began digging beneath the tires, sweat pouring off his face. Steadily the truck lowered itself to the earth as Foreman shoveled and the truck’s own heat evaporated snow beneath it. Worked the chains on the tires and then Foreman got in front of the truck and began shoveling out two paths, two grooves in the deep white snow. Their spot on earth still many miles from town. The night an impenetrable wasteland. Their going, futile.

  Foreman leaned against his shovel, dripping.

  Hazelwood at the wheel, whispering Every precaution, every precaution, every precaution.

  HOUR SIXTY-SIX

  Morning, the world absolved, bathed in white. Little birds in the boughs of the pine trees. The sky so blue, the sun still hidden behind the forest, white and yellow. The two men at the table, asleep in their chairs.

  Foreman awoke first, so sore from the frantic shoveling he was almost unable to rise. He went to the hearth, began to build a new fire, perhaps his last. He let the heat unwind the pain in his hands. Hazelwood snoring, but there at least, hunched over on his chair, asleep beside the hearth, and alive. Foreman shuffling over to the stove, pouring water into a kettle for coffee, measuring grounds, lighting the burner. He watched Hazelwood sleep. He would put the man back together, see him to the hospital and away.

  Foreman cracked eggs into a cast-iron frying pan, breaking the shells against the lip of the pan. In another pan, bacon popping and the smell of its grease in the air. Hazelwood lifted his head. The CEO looked like hell.

  “I have to shit,” he said. “That oil. It’s like my wife.” He ran into the bathroom.

  They ate together at the old table, newly stained black with Gulf oil.

  “I’m going to get you fed,” Foreman said. “We’re going to drink some coffee, get your strength back in you, and then we’re going to hope like hell a plow has come for that outer road. The driveway, I think, might be impassable. But at least we can get you to the road.”

  Hazelwood nodded, ate ravenously. He was gaining color in his face again. He did not look at Foreman.

  They watched water drip from the ea
ves, the day warming, the sun climbing back to its throne. Two pots of coffee, a pound of bacon, a brick of cheese, a half-dozen eggs. Hazelwood scurrying into the bathroom every hour, returning, eating more. At noon he looked at Foreman, as if sizing the old man up. “I’d like to borrow some clothes. I don’t want my kids seeing me like this. The way I smell.”

  Foreman nodded. They moved around each other warily.

  They tried the old truck, but the going was impossible. At last Foreman took a map from the glove compartment and spread it across the old rusty hood. He pointed to a small blue speck and a broken brown line on the map and said, “You’re here, all right? You see this. It’s an old logging road. That’s at the end of the driveway. Get on that road and it’ll take you just outside of town. Take this,” he said, pushing the map into Hazelwood’s chest. “Point out where you come from to the cops. They’ll know where to come.”

  Foreman gave Hazelwood a pair of snowshoes, his parka, mittens, and a wool hat. A thermos of coffee and a backpack of food and supplies. “Go on,” he said, “you outlasted me. Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind. Go. Or I’ll just shoot you.”

  Hazelwood eyed him, moving backward awkwardly in the shoes, the snow sticky and heavy. Foreman turned his back to the man and went back inside the cabin, sat at the table and looked outside. Then he stood, took a bottle of wine, uncorked it, and drank without a cup until his teeth were a dark purple.

  HOUR SEVENTY

  Evening clouds drooping down close to the snow-burdened balsams and the spreading crowns of the white pines. The old floorboards slick with gasoline and oil, kerosene from the lamps and lanterns. The dying widower hunched over at the table with a box of matches, the main room of the cabin pungent with fumes, though dark. No lights. The white of the earthbound snow enough light for the old man’s failing eyes to see that there was nothing left to do but what he had all along intended and thought to be right.

  He struck the sulfur of the match tip and held the little flame in his hand for a moment before flinging it into the darkness. And then he waited at the table, drinking water from his favorite glass, the tin cup now empty except for its own little lake of fire. His body growing hot, little flames dancing near his shoes, his trouser legs.

  CODA

  Sirens and the strobe of blue, red, and white lights through a winter forest, plows leading the parade, pushing the snow to the sides of the backcountry roads. The missing person, the CEO, in the town’s only motel, guarded by two state troopers, his wife en route from Duluth.

  Ahead of the police cruisers, the forest begins to glow yellow and red, and then they smell smoke. The driveway is too narrow for the state plows, so the police and SWAT leave their vehicles and come high-stepping through the snow, their assault rifles held high, a few dogs pulling at their leashes, fangs bared, slobbering white bubbles. The driveway is a long corridor of white, overhung by snow-burdened tree branches. They move through the tunnel of boughs toward the fire, which is loud and huge. Already the cabin is falling in upon itself.

  They find the truck, chains on the tires, the shovel abandoned. They watch the flames jump up to threaten the boughs of a huge white pine. They listen as windows and glasses and china explode. They stand back farther. They begin looking for prints, tracks in the snow. Some sign of escape. But there are no tracks to be found.

  And in the night their sirens, and far off, a pack of wolves. The ice of the little pond creaking in the cold and a house on fire.

  IN WESTERN COUNTIES

  HER FACE HAD BEEN MADE into a jigsaw puzzle. Aida saw how the poor girl tried to hide the scars: the cake makeup, the masking hands, the long hair and baseball cap. The edges of the puzzle pieces purple and crudely lined. Her mouth crooked, but somehow sweet. She smiled painfully at Aida. Pushed an envelope of money across the sticky surface of the café table. The envelope was not thick; it was all that the scarred woman had left.

  The restaurant was abandoned. The waitress hovered around them, refilled their mugs, nodded gamely at Bethany. Said to her, “These are on me.” Then leaned into the table, wiped the surface with her bleachy rag and said, “There’s a way out. Always is. I been there too. Don’t let him beat you like that. You’ll be dead inside a year by the look of it.”

  Some of the fortitude seemed to leak out of Bethany and she deflated slightly, set her mug down, and readjusted the bill of her cap. She looked up at the waitress and said, “God bless you.” But Aida could see that she didn’t believe in God at all, that her eyes contained only anger and fear.

  The waitress nodded and then went away, near the coffee urn, where she watched them, sometimes kibitzing with the cook, a pock-faced man with a long ponytail who peered out at the two women from behind the heating elements glowing red and orange.

  They sat for a while, saying nothing, glancing all around the café, and then Aida said, “Let’s go outside, then,” taking Bethany by the elbow and gently lifting her up. She took the money and stuffed it into her jacket. Hoped she would remember it was there. She was always losing things, so many things.

  They went to Aida’s truck, an old F-150. Aida opened the door and guided Bethany onto the bench seat. She went around behind the truck and looked at the woman’s slumped shoulders framed in the rear window. Bethany, she reminded herself. With her long finger, she wrote the name in the palm of her hand, making the calloused skin go white where the letters were: BETHANY. She wrote the name again in the dirt and dust that clung to the metal of her truck: BETHANY. There were chains in the bed of the truck and a tire iron. A spare tire, a bag of last year’s autumn leaves, and two cement blocks.

  Aida was not in the habit of driving the truck. That morning, en route to Red Wing, she forgot where the knob for the headlights was. She’d just retired from the state highway patrol after twenty-five years and was accustomed to driving a police cruiser. She kicked the gravel. Hail was in the forecast and she waited for it to hit, the violence of the blue-white pellets. She got inside the truck, slamming the door. Bethany shuddered.

  “I’m tired of it,” Bethany said. “Tired! He does this to me, but there ain’t anything for me to do. Nothing to do to make him stop! Goddamn it!” She beat her fist into the dashboard.

  Aida rolled down her window and withdrew a package of cigarettes from her jean jacket. Offered the package over to Bethany, who shook her head. Aida rarely smoked, but just now needed the fire and smoke to fill the silence she was incapable of filling herself. She took a Zippo lighter from the glove box and lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply. Still no hail, but the sky was yellowing, the clouds scudding quickly, oddly no wind to rile the ditch grass. It was late in the year for hail. Bethany’s outburst apparently over, they sat again in silence. Beyond the café and the highway running past it: a barbed wire fence, the concrete skeleton of an abandoned silo, the stone footings of a bygone barn. Then just blue and yellow sky and rapidly circulating clouds. Aida’s ears popped, the pressure changing.

  “All right,” Aida said, her voice husky and sandpapery, “what do you want me to do?”

  Bethany stared back at her pitifully. She had once been attractive. The huge blue eyes, a thick rope of brown hair. Her skin otherwise alabaster, perfect. Aida could see how quickly the bravery came and went in her face, how the strength was braided together with rage, and how Bethany was most cogent when the memory of her attack resurfaced and she needed to strike out and be her anger. All the violence that had preceded her mauling.

  “You know what I want you to do?” Bethany said. “I want you to get him. And I don’t care what you do as long as you understand that I want my revenge. You look at my face if you need a reminder of what I want you to do. And don’t take him to your friends in the police, either. ’Cause we already know that ain’t going to help.” Her voice quaked. Aida squinted behind the smoke and dimly remembered that her old colleagues would not be of any assistance. She felt something in her chest like remorse, the knowledge that she had failed this woman, Bethany, before. B
ethany, Bethany, Bethany.

  “Is he out there?” Aida asked. “On that farm?”

  Bethany seemed to shake her head just slightly, as if she could not understand how Aida had forgotten some crucial detail. It was a politely confounded expression she had seen on more and more faces of late, and it frustrated her. It had been her job to look strong, to appear inscrutable.

  “Do you need to write this stuff down?” Bethany asked.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Aida said, breathing out smoke. “No, I’ll take care of it. But you need to leave town for a while. I’ll take you to the Greyhound station and then you have to go away. I don’t care where.”

  The hail hit miles away from the bus station, and they pulled over under a bridge crumbling and rusted. Swallows swooping in and out of their nests. They watched the hail bounce off the asphalt. Ping-Pong balls of ice out on the road. They rolled down the windows and felt the cold in the air. Aida opened up her door and slid out, stood underneath the last vestige of protection that the bridge provided. She collected a stone of hail from the ground and held it in her palm, then watched as it melted away. She drank the remaining water. Far away she saw a conical cloud lower toward the ground, but it never did touch and after a while it seemed to lose steam, retreating back up into the heavens. Then the sun reappeared, and a rainbow broke extravagantly across the sky, deep-toned and immense.

  They drove over the hail-strewn road toward the city of Albert Lea and the Greyhound depot, nothing more than a glass room attached to a Shell gas station. There were old magazines on tables near the big windows and a view of the prairie and passing eighteen-wheelers. Two children were pounding the Plexiglas of a vending machine where a candy bar hung on a thin spiral of aluminum. Their little fists and bodies unable to shake the machine adequately. Bethany punched the squat rectangle once and the chocolate bar fell into an awaiting trough. The children snatched the bar and then looked up into her face, as if to thank her, but their own diminutive faces fell apart and they ran away, outside the waiting room. Aida watched as they ran across the parking lot to a woman—their mother, she guessed—and pointed back at the stranger with the hideous face.