Beneath the Bonfire

by Nickolas Butler

  And then she would rest her head against my chest, holding her cigarette off away from me, still there and glowing.

  “I love you” was all I could ever say. “I love you.” And on those nights, when I told her I loved her, saying the words almost hurt because they were so true and big, and I believed in them as much as I believed in the river. But I did not believe Sunny. I did not believe, for instance, that she really heard me, so that most of the time when I told her I loved her it was like talking to someone who had died that you badly missed, someone you wanted to confide in still, but who was gone from the world, except for your memory or idea of them, haunting you like a ghost.

  After such nights, things would go quiet for a while. Sunny would stay home and help the girls with their homework. The house would be clean, and sometimes when I came home from my work on my ten-speed, I would see Sunny on the front porch, smoking a cigarette, a nonalcoholic beer in her hand and a can of Hamm’s ready and cold for me. We would kiss and I would sit beside her, happy to be outside, the river low in the summertime and obscured slightly by a new blind of leaves, the paper plant happily out of sight, just the smell of it in the thick, warm air.

  “I’m taking a break,” she would say. “I’m sorry about the other night.”

  Happy to have her back, I wouldn’t say a word.

  “I wish…,” she began quietly on one of those nights, “I wish sometimes you’d tell me what to do. You know? I wish you’d tell me to stop.”

  “I don’t want to tell you anything,” I said.

  “I know it. But maybe you should. Like that time you told me to get up.”

  I was surprised, in a way, that she remembered that, the first time we met.

  “You didn’t think I remembered,” she said, taking a drag of her cigarette and then offering me a puff, as she always did. “I remember. I remember that creep pushing me out of his car and then laying there, thinking, ‘The fuck is wrong with me? Why do I do this to myself?’ And then you were right there and you said, ‘Get up,’ like some hard-ass angel or something. And I remember that fish eating my cigarette and the coffee and you know, that afternoon, making love and how your hands still smelled like the river. I remember how at first I didn’t like that, but then I did and I liked how you had quit your fishing just for me.”

  She looked at me.

  The thing is, most people in the world are like me, boring. But then sometimes you meet someone like Sunny, and you forgive them for being crazy or whatever, because if there weren’t women like Sunny, everything would be like how my life was before her. And there would be no lobster dinners financed with magic. No beautiful daughters. No making love to jazz or making love before work and all day having her scents on me like a perfume that I could smell and be happy for.

  “It was a Hornet,” I said.

  She looked bewildered.

  “That creep, he drove a Hornet.”

  She shook her head at me and kissed me, and as much as I loved her, there were times I hated to taste her cigarettes, but that was Sunny’s taste too, and I did love her so much.

  * * *

  In mid-August, when the river was at its lowest, we took the girls down to swim. The house was stifling, and without air conditioning we were all sleeping down in the basement where it was cool. Sometimes we pretended that it was a camping trip and lighted candles, and Sunny and I would take turns reading scary stories until the girls finally fell asleep, their skinny little bodies close to us.

  The river in August was not the river in November or April. It was all sandbars and islands of gravel, junked cars visible here and there and old I beams laying around like pickup sticks from some other, more brutal time. The girls ran in and out of the water while Sunny lay on a blanket rubbing olive oil on her skin, her tan growing darker and darker, and sometimes when I glanced over at her through my sunglasses she would smile and pull her bikini bottom down a bit, where her skin was nearly as white as mine, and she would run her fingernails over her legs, and in this way I would frequently spear myself with a fishing lure or drop the rod into the river.

  The fishing was not good, but I had never been much for reading, so I enjoyed the lazy work of casting into the shallow pools. It was good to concentrate on the river, watching for riffles and movements of things unseen below the surface of the water.

  The largest common carp ever caught in Wisconsin was measured at over fifty-seven pounds. The fish I caught that afternoon in August was not far behind. Huge and hideously ugly, it slammed my jig and immediately began running away from the gravel bar where I stood and out into the main channel of the river. Sunny let out a hoot and jumped up, and the girls forgot their frolicking and everyone stood around me, a tiny crowd cheering me on as I reeled the behemoth in, careful not to break the line and trying to play things calmly, as if fifty-pound carp was commonplace in my own angling annals. When I finally managed to beach the monster, I sat down heavily in the gravel, sweat pouring off my face. The girls circled the fish, nearly as big as they were, tentatively poking at its huge scales with the longest sticks they could locate on short notice.

  “You think I’m cooking that thing,” said Sunny “you’re crazy.” Her hands were crossed over her chest.

  “The carp is the largest member of the minnow family,” I told her, out of breath.

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  “I’m too tired to bullshit,” I said. “It’s true. That’s basically a gigantic minnow.”

  “Daddy,” said Char, “you’re a good fisherman.”

  Sunny and Nina looked at the little girl who had just called me her father. Already buzzed from the battle with the carp, my body felt suddenly electric, invincible. Someone in the world, this little girl, thought I was her father, her dad. For the first time in my life I felt bigger than the person I was really, someone strong and worthy and heroic, and it is true that my heart ached right then with pride and love.

  “Come here,” I said to Char. “You too,” I said to Nina. The girls ran over to me and hugged me hard, their little arms encircling me, and I squeezed them back and was happy.

  “We need to get that fish back in the water,” I said after a little while.

  “I can hear it breathing,” said Sunny.

  “Yeah, it’s a beast,” I said.

  Sunny and I grabbed the carp by its tail and the girls gingerly placed their hands on the sides to steady it, and in this way we moved the fish back into the river, where it paused, waving its fins for a little while before muscling back into the depths.

  “Awesome,” Nina said. “That was the coolest fish I’ve ever seen.”

  “You like that fish, then we really ought to go down to Chicago,” I said. “Visit the aquarium down there. Go see some sharks.”

  The girls returned to the river, splashing more cautiously now, and Sunny and I sprawled out beneath the sun, our fingers brushing and sometimes my own exploring the contours of her ribs, the plane of her stomach.

  “They’ve never called anyone that,” she said to me, to the sky. She was serious. “Their real dad left too early.”

  It was easier for me to tell the girls my own feelings than it was to say in that moment to Sunny that I loved her girls, and that even though we weren’t married, I loved them like they were my own, like I was their father. So we lay that way, occasionally turning ourselves over or applying lotion or olive oil to each other. Sunny turned the color of walnut wood while my own skin became so pink that in the evening I slept in the bathtub because even the bedsheets of our cool basement encampment felt too warm.

  * * *

  On December first, just before my shift was to begin, and with a blizzard blowing so fiercely that the fire trucks couldn’t even leave their garages, there was a fire in the paper plant. The plant burned for three days, flames the height and width of cathedrals licking the gray winter sky. We watched the inferno from our house across the river, and the colors reflected in the water made a second, watery blaze. The front of the house
was strangely illuminated for those three days, and the smoke and fumes were so bad that we thought about checking into a motel, but of course there was no money for that, and from the look of things, not likely to be more any time soon.

  “What are you going to do now, Daddy?” Nina asked.

  I rubbed her hair, tickled her neck; she giggled. “Don’t worry about it, kiddo,” I said. “We’ll be all right. And don’t worry about Christmas, either.”

  “Okay,” she said, surveying the destruction across the river, still smoldering, little wisps of gray smoke crawling into the air off the wrecked site.

  “Once, in the city of Cleveland, the river caught fire,” I said.

  “Must have been one nasty river,” Nina said.

  “The mighty Cuyahoga,” I said. “Go get the atlas and find it.”

  The truth was, I was worried about Christmas. Since summer, things had been as smooth as ever between Sunny and me, almost eerie quiet, and the girls were consistently calling me Dad. I had wanted to organize an extravagant Christmas, but now I had no idea how I’d pull that off. That night I lay in bed with Sunny and said, “I think it might be a light Christmas. Do you think the girls will notice?”

  Sunny lay beside me, quiet, gazing at the ceiling.

  “Sunny?” I asked, propping myself up on an elbow.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “We’ve always been poor. We never expected anything before, don’t expect anything now.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “What’s happening? Look, I’m just trying to put my best foot forward here. Trying to make things nice for the girls.”

  “What? I can’t make things nice for my own daughters?” she said, her fighting voice sprung out of nowhere. She reached for her bedside cigarettes and lighted one. I opened the window and the air was bitter cold.

  “Shut that fucking window,” she snapped.

  “Sunny, you know the smoke makes my eyes hurt.”

  “You want me to go outside?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Look, this is our deal, right?”

  “Fuck that.”

  “What’s wrong, babe?” I asked.

  She was up now, pulling on a pair of tight blue jeans and a low-cut blouse. “Don’t worry about it, Dad,” she said as she slipped into a pair of cowboy boots. “I’ll be back when I’m back.”

  But she did not come back that night, and I waited until dawn, peering out the frost-latticed windows, watching for headlights or the growl of an approaching motorcycle.

  I made pancakes for the girls in the morning and sent them off to school. When they asked where their mother was, I told them she was sleeping. They shouldered their backpacks and shrugged. Sunny frequently slept in on weekends, often until noon. The only oddity was that it was a school day.

  After the girls had gone I made a pot of coffee, filled the thermos, and opening the door to go down to the river, barely noticed Geronimo escaping the house.

  “Shit! Geronimo!” I cried, running down the street after the cat, but it was too fast and made toward the river and the line of trees at the apex of the riverbank. The cat was well and gone and the day cold. I trod down the bank to the river, and finding a discarded white pickle bucket, sat down heavily as I pulled the flask from my coat pocket.

  Great rafts of ice were moving down the full-bellied river, and I remembered my old best friend telling me about a time that he had been fly-fishing at night, with only the light of a full moon. I remembered that he said this was a good time to fish because it was quiet and he could stand in the river in waders and smoke a joint of marijuana without anyone bothering him. He was out fishing with another friend of ours one night when a sheet of ice quietly broke away from shore and clipped the kid at his hips, cutting him in half like a giant sword had just passed through his body.

  “I didn’t know he was gone,” my best friend said. “I was stoned. It was dark. That ice goes down the river without a sound unless it hits something, like other ice. He was gone for hours before I looked up and couldn’t find him.”

  I remember telling my best friend that trains can be that quiet too, especially in winter. That my dad had worked for the railroads and guys were killed every winter because the trains moved so quietly sometimes in the yard in the cold that workers hit by slow-moving trains were just run over before they could so much as scream. No train whistle. Not enough speed to produce a sound or rhythm. Just hundreds of tons of steel moving in a slow, arced line.

  I watched the ice flowing down the river and wondered how far it could travel before melting into nothing. I watched the ice move and felt like that full-moon fisherman, his legs taken out from beneath him, dunked underwater and frozen. Sunny was gone, maybe, like I’d known she always would be. And now it was just me and the girls.

  The bourbon in the flask tasted good and warm, but there was the feeling that if I kept up drinking, the girls would return from school to find a drunk dad and no mother, so I placed the flask in my pocket and took a sip from the thermos.

  Then I stood up, screaming into the empty air, reached into my pocket and threw the silver flask as far as I could out into the river, and it made only an almost inaudible splash. I walked back up the riverbank to my house and telephoned my father, who was happy to hear from me, and I asked whether he might like visitors for Christmas and I told him that the plant had burned to the ground and I had no money for presents and barely enough for the mortgage.

  Dad’s voice was gruff from the rail yards, from talking over locomotive engines, from the rotation of pipes he kept in a breast pocket of his shirts. “Brucie,” he said to me, “get up here and bring those girls with you. How’s Sunny?”

  “Dad, she’s gone, and she left me with the two girls.”

  “You call the police?” he asked.

  “I don’t think it’s that kind of disappearance.”

  I heard him exhale deeply. He’d met Sunny only once, at a Fourth of July barbecue, but he had fallen for her hard drinking and he liked that she smoked cigarettes and tolerated his pipe. Late in her teenage years Sunny had been a hobo and rode the rails herself, and she and Dad had talked about that and he was amazed that such a beautiful woman had survived such an odyssey. On my refrigerator under a magnet was a photograph of Dad and Sunny, his arm around her waist, her arm around his shoulder, a cigarette between her lips, his pipe balanced between his teeth and his white and blue conductor’s hat happily askew.

  “She comes back,” he said, “you don’t ever let her go again. All right? We’ll get her help. Kicking the sauce ain’t easy, but it can be done. Your mom and I can come down if we have to.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know that she’s ever coming back,” I said.

  “She will,” he said, “she will.”

  “Dad, I love you.”

  “Me too, kid,” he said. “See you soon.”

  * * *

  It was the first winter in memory that the river froze, and I couldn’t help but think that all these years it had been the paper plant and its hot excrement that kept the water from freezing. Some days I would stand at the front windows and gaze out at the frozen vein of water and think about my flask and where it was now on its journey down the Mississippi and sometimes I thought about leaving Wisconsin altogether and taking the girls to some point warmer, but there was always the chance that Sunny would come back to a house inhabited by strangers, and that unnerved me as much as the chest of drawers in my bedroom filled with her clothing and lingerie.

  I told the girls that their mother was on vacation, which I didn’t consider to be an outright lie, because in a way, I told myself, that was exactly what she was doing, what she had done. Vacated the premises.

  Christmas had been a success. Dad and Mom bought a pile of presents so vast and tall that it was quickly apparent the girls had never seen anything like it on Christmas morning. There were dolls and clothing and candy and board games and Dad had bought all manner of train paraphernalia, which he told the girls they had to s
hare with their mother.

  At one point during Christmas morning Mom was on her hands and knees with the girls, helping them to dress dolls, when Dad patted my shoulder and handed me two presents wrapped in newspaper, which was his signature.

  “A little something,” he said.

  “Dad,” I protested, “I didn’t get you anything. You didn’t have to.”

  “Shut up and open it.”

  The first present was a box of Cohiba cigars, and as I examined the markings on the cedar container, it became clear that this particular box had not passed through U.S. Customs.

  “Dad, all I smoke is White Owls,” I said. “Sometimes Swishers.”

  “Time for that shit to come to an end,” he said. “Open the other one.”

  It was an old flask, heavily dented, adorned with an engraving of a naked woman in repose. It felt heavy and I shook it: something sloshed inside.

  “Maker’s,” Dad said. “It was full, but you know. Call it a toll sip.”

  It was strange, I told Dad, that just a few weeks before, I threw the flask my best friend once gave me into the river.

  “Don’t ever throw this one in any river,” he said. “You do and I’ll disown you. This was your grandfather’s flask from the war.” I turned the flask over in my hands, felt its weight. “You don’t know about this flask, do you?”

  We went down into the basement, where his workshop was, all his tools hung neatly from pegs on the walls, immaculately spaced and preserved. There were two old recliners down there, chairs my father had used upstairs over the years until they became too stained or threadbare and my mother banished them to this subterranean parlor, where Dad would sit for hours, smoking his pipes and reading Zane Grey.

  The flask had belonged to my paternal grandfather, Gus, who had been an Airborne Ranger and had parachuted down over France late in the war. Dodging German artillery, they’d had to alter the plane’s flight path such that Gus and his comrades jumped out of the plane over forest heavily entrenched with German infantry, who proceeded to pick them off one by one as they lazily came down to earth, their parachutes so many white mushrooms against the clear blue sky. Gus had seen his friends die, some terribly wounded as they sailed down to the angry earth. Some cut their parachutes off, risking the fall, rather than remain such a slow-moving target. But Gus stayed right as he was, and as he drifted down, he thought about Wisconsin and my grandmother and occasionally nipped off the heavy pewter flask he carried, and sometimes he prayed for protection and sometimes he whistled “Over the Rainbow,” but mostly he just enjoyed the ride down, marveled at the patchwork tableau beneath him, the vision of pastoral beauty and wartime horror. Not long before he touched down, still alive, he replaced the flask in his breast pocket, where he was promptly shot, the bullet ricocheting off the metal into a stand of ancient French oak trees. Thereafter Gus traveled everywhere with that flask, carrying it with him even to his job as a high school janitor, where he would sometimes install himself in a broom closet, listening to a transistor radio broadcast baseball games out of Milwaukee as he sat filling the tiny room with cigarette smoke and relishing his brandy or whatever the day’s flavor might be.