Beneath the Bonfire

by Nickolas Butler

  “It’s a cat,” Sunny said. The girls trilled behind their tiny fingers.

  “Baby,” I said, “get back in the house, it’s freezing.”

  “All the more reason to bring this cat inside,” she responded. Her voice was sharp.

  I never argued with Sunny. She’d had a hard life before, and I wanted her life with me to be easy. There were times she pushed me around, times she even gave me black eyes, but it was worth it. Everything was better with Sunny. Even when she was casting flour around the kitchen or accidentally setting the drapes on fire. Being in love with Sunny was like that; it was like a fistfight. She entered every relationship with brass knuckles, and I had a glass jaw for love. I was willing to be beaten down for those evenings when she crawled back into bed after the bars, her face against my chest, her hair all cigarette smoke, her voice raw and throaty.

  “I love you,” she always said. “You should leave us, you know? Do yourself a favor and leave us.”

  But I never said anything. It was better to just be quiet and to let things mellow, my fingers combing her hair in the red glow of the clock radio. Sunny was the best lover I’d ever had. Some nights we took the mattress off the bed frame and made love on the floor, where it was more quiet, my fingers in her mouth to keep her mute, her teeth digging into me and making marks.

  Sunny finally grabbed the cat by its scruff and held it up into the corona of the porch light. The creature could not have weighed five pounds.

  “I’ll get a bowl of milk,” said Nina.

  “Warm it up!” yelled her younger sister, Char. The girls ran off toward the kitchen and there was the sound of dishes crashing to the floor.

  “I’m allergic to cats,” I said to Sunny, but she just kissed me, her lips wet with the rain.

  “Benadryl,” she said, patting my stomach gently and then letting her hand run down a little lower.

  She walked into the house with the cat, and following her, I closed the door on the night. My shift at the paper plant started in less than five hours, and the three women in my life were all screaming with delight as they bathed the putrid feline in the kitchen sink. From the entryway I could see spilled milk and broken china on the kitchen’s linoleum floor. I made a mental note to clean it up when I awoke in the morning.

  * * *

  I had met Sunny almost exactly a year earlier, in November. I was down by the river, fishing with the old Hmong men and the old black men, all of us hunched over on plastic pickle buckets, all of us looking out over the swirling eddies, waiting for something to happen. I had always been a bachelor; I didn’t know how to meet women, not really. I’d had lovers in college, but it was always almost accidental, those magnetic couplings wrought out of beer and pot, intimacies that by morning had come undone, unbound, and sometimes we’d drive to a truck stop or a café for breakfast, but frequently not, and the girls would simply collect their clothes in a ball and leave without a word.

  The fishing had been steady that day, and I had just hooked a pretty good-sized carp when a car slammed on its brakes at the top of the riverbank. Reeling hard, I glanced over my shoulder and saw a figure pushed out of the automobile, an old Hornet, just as it sped off, its open passenger door clapping shut. None of the other fishermen seemed to notice. I hesitated before cutting the line, but it was the only thing to do. I scrambled up the talus of the bank in my old Wellingtons, out of breath.

  She was lying down on the asphalt, knees up in the air, boots on the pavement, her hair arrayed around her head like a black halo. One arm was flat on the ground, the other moving a cigarette toward her lips. She had a cut on her forehead, not big, the blood already coagulating in the cold.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer right away, and if she hadn’t been smoking, I might have kicked her softly with a boot to see if she was alive. Behind me, the river moved huge and slow, one great broad brown stroke of movement and sound, and beyond it I heard a whistle from the paper plant and the beeping sound of a forklift in reverse. I moved closer to her and extended my hand. She was crying, I saw now, only without making any noise.

  “Get up,” I said, and it was the only order I ever gave Sunny. She took my hand and struggled up. I handed her a red handkerchief, which she used to wipe her face and nose. Then she stuck the cloth in her pocket as if it were her own, something she’d just happened to find. On the handkerchief were my initials, stitched there by my grandmother, now gone.

  “Want something to drink?” I asked.

  She nodded her head and we moved back down to the river. I helped her navigate the talus, and when we reached the shore I motioned to my pickle bucket. She sat and crossed her muscular legs. They were the legs of a gymnast or a volleyball player, thick and shapely. She flicked the last of her cigarette into the water, and I watched the filter do pirouettes in the water until a carp rose and made it disappear into the murk.

  “Did you see that?” she said. There was excitement in her voice as she pointed to the disappearance.

  “They’ll eat anything,” I said.

  “It ate my cigarette,” she said, delighted. “It ate my fucking cigarette.” Then: “I wonder if it was still burning a little.”

  I unscrewed my thermos and poured her a cup of coffee. She reached for it through the cold air and I could see that her fingers were long and beautiful and trembling slightly with what I thought was the cold. There were many rings on her fingers and her nails were painted a color between black and purple.

  “My name is Bruce,” I said.

  “Sunny,” she answered, shifting the coffee from one hand to the other as she shook my hand. Her grip was strong.

  “Got any milk?” she asked. “Sugar? Brandy?”

  “I have this,” I said, and reached into a pocket of my vest, producing a silver flask that my best friend had given me many years before, just after high school, when we were still in touch.

  Sunny unscrewed the top and sniffed.

  “Bulleit?” she asked.

  I raised an eyebrow. “It’s my favorite.”

  I didn’t know then that Sunny was an alcoholic, and later there were times I wished I had known, because early on, we would sit together by the river, drinking Bulleit or sometimes splitting thirty cans of Hamm’s, and I would think how she drank faster than anyone I’d ever seen, as if she were drowning but couldn’t help herself and kept gulping down the burn until it almost shut her faculties off, until she would either pass out or go about the world like an angry zombie and sometimes I could escort her home without incident, but there were more nights when she would start swearing at me in the street or in a bar or even on the front lawn, the girls’ faces pressed to the front windows and a skittish babysitter behind them, a telephone in her hands.

  “One of mine too,” she said, taking a pull off the flask and then pouring more than a few thimbles into her coffee.

  I began tying a new leader to the line, then clamped a new lead weight on the line and selected a big, bright lure. It made me happy to have company, and when I looked down the shore, the Hmong men and the black men were smiling at me, their faces shiny and happy, their own flasks and Styrofoam cups raised in a quick toast.

  “I like it down here,” Sunny said. “It’s peaceful. Except for that paper plant over there.” She motioned to the long complex of buildings and stacks, then sipped her coffee.

  “I work over there,” I said.

  “Oh,” Sunny said. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Not exactly a glamorous job.”

  Sunny smiled out over the water and then I felt her eyes on me, even though I was concentrating on a knot and attempting to look my most rugged and trying to ignore her just enough to let her know I was interested. The thing was, I didn’t know what to do with my own eyes, and when I finished the knot I took a chance and looked at her, right in the eyes, and that was the first time I recognized how beautiful she was and she swept some of her long black hair away from her face and I co
uld see that she wore big silver hoop earrings and that I was in love, all of a sudden. And I knew it, could feel it, right in my heart. She looked right back at me.

  “Want to get out of here?” she asked.

  I packed up my tackle box and rod and almost forgot my thermos until the other fisherman saw me working my way up the bank and yelled and started laughing, pointing to the thermos sitting right there atop the pickle bucket, big as an artillery shell.

  Sunny moved in a month later, and the girls came with her, and all of a sudden my house felt like a new dwelling, warm and loud and full of the smells of women: soap, perfume, hair spray. Sunny smoked, but it was all right because mostly she stood on the front porch and watched the river through the naked trees, but sometimes she kept an ashtray beside our bed, and after we made love she would set the ashtray on her flat brown stomach and smoke and I would have to open a window, even in winter. She always tried to get me to smoke too, but I’d never liked anything other than White Owls or Swishers, and this made her laugh.

  “First man I ever had who didn’t smoke,” she said, shaking her head. “Who am I gonna bum ’em from now?”

  Sometimes Sunny said things like that—things that were supposed to sound funny but just came out crass or ugly. I never talked to her about the women I’d been with, and I didn’t like to imagine her with her past lovers, lying in bed together and sharing a single cigarette because it was an intimate thing and something I knew we would never share.

  Sunny never worked and I never asked her where the money she had came from. She didn’t have much most of the time, but then suddenly she would, and she would come home from the grocery store and suddenly our cupboards would be full and the girls would be eating their favorite sugary cereals. Once I came home from the plant to discover four huge lobsters boiling in a pot and a bottle of champagne in a snowbank beside the front porch.

  “You win the lottery?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said, wrapping her arms around my waist and kissing me, the taste of drawn butter already on her mouth.

  “Seriously,” I asked.

  “Seriously!” She pantomimed.

  “We found it,” she crowed, “didn’t we, girls? In a briefcase down by the river.”

  The girls nodded, as if previously coached, and continued their crunching. I kissed them both and hung up my coat on the rack. Then picked up three other coats off the floor and hung them up too.

  “You found the money for lobsters and champagne and all that other stuff.”

  Sunny nodded her head and crossed her muscular legs. She liked to wear shorts in the house, no matter the weather outside, and she knew this discombobulated me. I could see that her legs were freshly shaved and she had changed the polish on her toenails. The house felt warm and I checked the thermostat.

  “Eighty!” I cried.

  The girls laughed, and so did Sunny. I could see that Sunny was drinking mimosas, and I wondered if there was already an empty bottle of champagne somewhere out in the backyard, wedged into the snow.

  But then we ate dinner together, the girls laughing and heckling me and Sunny running her foot up my thigh under the table and our bellies full of opulence, and like always, I let it go, the idea that maybe Sunny was running marijuana or meth, or that she’d been out to the casino while the girls were in school. I didn’t want to be alone again—that much I knew.

  And after we put the girls to sleep, Sunny slid a tape into the old cassette player near my bed and we would listen to Annie Ross while we made love, our bodies warm in the second story of the old house, the champagne turning us into two bubbles floating over the frozen world, and the paper plant across the river glowing through the window blinds nothing more than a chimera I could wish away while Sunny swayed over me like a sexy cobra, holding me in her trance.

  * * *

  Sunny didn’t like my neighbors and my neighbors didn’t like Sunny. Maybe they didn’t like her because she was a new face, an outsider to the neighborhood, or maybe because my once-quiet bachelor pad had grown so loud and bright. Maybe they didn’t like her because once a month the cops were called to our house because Sunny was playing Bon Jovi or Poison too loud. Or maybe they just didn’t like her because she was so beautiful and they were jealous. I could imagine the possibilities, and yet Sunny was a mother to two beautiful girls and she was just as likely to bake someone brownies as she was to wake them in the middle of the night.

  The thing was, I left for work before the sun even rose and wasn’t home usually until dusk, pedaling my old Schwinn over the iron bridge and waving to the Hmong fishermen below me. So I wasn’t around if there was drama during the day. The only thing I ever heard was Sunny’s complaints.

  “Crackheads!” she’d roar. “And meth addicts. You ever see those two bitches?” she’d ask.

  “The sisters?” I’d say. “They don’t bother anyone.”

  The sisters lived across the street from us, their backyard sloping all the way down into the river. They were in their fifties probably, and had inherited the house from their mother, who passed on just a few years after I had bought my house. The mother had been a kind old woman, and I’d shoveled her driveway and mowed her lawn sometimes. One Christmas she knit me a pair of mittens two sizes too small. I’d never met her daughters, though. They kept the house dark and rarely ever seemed to leave.

  “That’s who you have to watch,” Sunny would say. “The fucking quiet ones. I’ll bet you five cartons of cigarettes they’re running a lab out of their basement. I’m telling you, next time you see those bitches, take a good look at their teeth and their eyes. Those women are high as kites. Trust me.”

  “How would you know?” I’d ask. When I came home from work I always wanted an inch of Bulleit or maybe a cold can of Hamm’s, but with Sunny I had to watch these things. I dipped my hand into the refrigerator and grabbed a Coke.

  “Never mind,” Sunny would say, eyeing me viciously. She knew I wanted something to drink. Sunny could be mean. She liked to fight, liked to raise her voice to see what would happen. “You can’t even say it, can you? You think I’m an addict too. Coming home nights and drinking your Coke. Don’t tell me you can’t taste that bourbon right now. A working stiff coming home and drinking Coke? How old are you? Sixteeen? Come on! Where’s the Bulleit? Let’s get it. So nice—mixin’ in with that sugar in your Coke? Let’s make us some! How ’bout?”

  I shook my head.

  “What happened with the sisters anyway?” I redirected.

  Sunny grabbed the cat off the linoleum floor and began stroking his fur, the coat by now thick and lustrous.

  “Geronimo was over there today,” Sunny said. “And I’m telling you, I saw those bitches giving him milk.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  “Wake up!” she snapped. “They want to steal him!”

  “Nobody wants to steal Geronimo,” I said calmly. My eyes watered when the cat was close. Sunny waved him in my face like a weapon.

  “You never wanted him anyway,” she said. “Poor old kitty.”

  Sunny put Geronimo down and there was anger in her face. “I’m going out,” she declared.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, nibbling her fingers, her eyes suddenly skittish and alive.

  “What about the girls?” I asked, though guilt never worked with Sunny.

  “I don’t know. Make some macaroni and cheese. Or hot dogs. I just need to get out—you know, breathe a little.”

  “You want to take a walk?” I suggested.

  But such lame niceties rarely merited even a sarcastic reply. She headed upstairs, and suddenly there was a spring to her movements. I watched those thighs propel her up, that butt. I could not stay angry at Sunny.

  We had many nights like that. Me and the girls at the table, eating something out of a box. They talked to me about school, and sometimes we sat on the couch together afterward, both of them leaning into me as the blue light of the televis
ion washed over our faces. We made popcorn together, and the truth was, in those moments, as much as I loved Sunny, I loved the girls more. Maybe because there weren’t those same lows, when I felt confused or hurt or jealous, and after I put the girls to bed I would move a rocking chair to the front porch and smoke a White Owl in the darkness and watch the river, knowing that the first green shoots of spring were popping out of the earth, that the river was swollen and huge, the banks being eaten away all the time and carried into the water and away from us—south, I suppose. I liked to imagine the bottom of the river and all the things slowly rolling on toward New Orleans and then all the way out into the Gulf of Mexico. Ancient Studebakers, old televisions, skeletons maybe, and all the debris from the paper plant that I knew was down there: pallets and metal drums and all the detritus of industry.

  Sunny would come home and sometimes I would be awake, silently fuming in my porch chair. Other times the sound of an approaching motorcycle would wake me and I would flick the remains of my White Owl out into the yard and sit up in time to watch Sunny dismount the bike and nod toward the biker, always a different stranger, and then he would plow on into the night, just a red light behind him, and I would never see him again. Each time I wondered who he might be, if I could trust him or not, always in that moment focusing on him, not on Sunny as she teetered toward me, her face glazed and beaming, the orange glow of a cigarette illuminating her sparkling eyes, misty with the sadness that always shadowed her moments of joy. She would sit in my lap and look at me in the darkness and I did not know how to tell her how I felt because I was always afraid the man on the motorcycle would come back, idling his machine in front of our house.

  “Such a sweet guy, you are,” Sunny would say, peering at me sadly. “Why do you stay around?”