Beneath the Bonfire

by Nickolas Butler

  “It’s good luck,” Dad said. “Your mom still looks around the lawn for four-leaf clovers, but I don’t have the knees for that kind of shit. Besides, you can drink out of this.”

  He slapped my knee and I hoisted the flask in the air to take my first drink in weeks. It burned of hot metal and fire but tasted like caramel too. Dad extended his hand and we drank like that for a little while, just the two of us, until Mom called from the top of the stairs and we went back up into the light.

  “I could use some luck,” I said to him.

  “Who couldn’t?” he said.

  * * *

  By late January, the remnants of the paper mill were no longer smoldering, and I had gotten notice that it would not be rebuilt, that the parent company of the mill was consolidating operations, and that the plant I had bicycled to five days a week had not been profitable even before the accident, would likely never reopen. But a call had come from my old manager Bud, saying that the company had found me another job at another plant, in the panhandle of Florida in a town called Apalachicola.

  “It’s a promotion,” he said. “You’ll do what I did up here.”

  “Bud,” I said, “no offense, but mostly you sat at your desk and read Playboys.”

  “Best job I ever had,” he said.

  I called my dad. “What do you think?” I asked him. “And what about the girls?”

  I could hear that he was in his workshop, the low volume of his old transistor radio behind him, the soft scratch of a broom sweeping as he talked, the gentle clinking of tools being put in their place.

  “She’ll find you,” he said. “She’ll find you or she’ll find us. Either way, you can’t turn this down. You got to go. Your mom’s ready for a change anyways. She’s always talking about those Airstream trailers. Goddamn monstrosities if you ask me, but you know how these things go. My hands are tied.”

  “Dad,” I said, “I can’t just leave with the girls. They aren’t mine. Not legally.”

  “Put in the paperwork,” he said. “Adopt. I got a friend down there’s a judge. Put that paperwork in before you go.”

  “I miss her,” I said to him. “She was bat-shit crazy, but I miss her.”

  “She’ll find you,” he said again, and I could picture him nodding his head in confidence. He loved her too.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “All right, kid,” he said. “Keep me in the loop.”

  * * *

  The FOR SALE sign was staked into the half slope of our front yard, and I spent the spring painting the house while the girls were in school. It was the happiest time of my life. In the mornings I would burst into their bedrooms, opening the window shades and singing, and they would throw pillows at me, but they always cooperated and it thrilled them that I never told them what to wear or how to do their hair, and I began taking the time to cook hot breakfasts of pancakes and sausages and scrambled eggs and bacon, and before they boarded the bus we would sit around the kitchen table or sometimes on the front stoop and eat together, and they liked to drink my coffee when I wasn’t looking, adding huge tablespoons of sugar to my mug. After the girls left, I would drag a radio out onto the lawn and listen to baseball or sometimes old-time rock ’n’ roll and I would talk to my neighbors and the neighborhood was a different place during the daytime, a good place, with old people out walking together, holding hands. Or the Hmong fishermen walking toward the river, carrying their buckets and poles and tackle boxes, and sometimes they would stop and show me their catch.

  One day, on the ladder, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sisters as they unfolded themselves from an old sedan and walked toward the back of their house. In one of their hands was Geronimo, looking as forlorn as he had that first night.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey! That’s my cat! That’s my motherfuckin’ cat! That’s Geronimo!”

  I had fairly run down the ladder, dropping a full bucket of paint onto the lawn. Either they couldn’t hear me or just pretended not to notice, but they pushed into their dark house just as my feet touched the lawn. I ran across the street and into their backyard, banged on their screen door, my fists warping the frame’s cheap aluminum.

  “Open up!” I ordered. I banged on the door severely, my knuckles and palms sliced open by holes in the old screen, loose screws. “Open this fucking door and give me my Geronimo!”

  A tattered window blind parted and I saw a pair of eyes squinting at me. Heavily wrinkled and bagged, the sunken eyes that stared out at me were red and angry, and I heard one of the sisters croak, “Fuck off.” Then the blind collapsed again and there was silence.

  “Oh no,” I said, realizing perhaps what was about to happen.

  My whole life maybe I’d been too meek, and there were times I thought about that and what it had gotten me. It had been enough to work a blue-collar job, dull and anonymous. Enough to lose track of my best friend from high school. Enough to snag Sunny, but not enough to keep her. And there was no guarantee that being who I was would be enough to keep those two little girls in my life. Suddenly I felt a rage, a fury course through me. Fury at the thought that I would watch things be taken from me, that I would fail to fight back.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and ripped the screen door off its hinges with my bare hands. I heard one of the sisters scream a witchy cry. Then I kicked the shabby wooden back door of their broken-down house with my boot. I kept kicking hard and rhythmically.

  “Open that fucking door!” I said. “That’s my cat. You hear me!”

  The blind parted again, and this time there were two sets of red eyes staring at me, both rimmed in fear. The sisters.

  “He’s our cat!” they cried. “Our Jerry!”

  “Oh, no,” I sneered. “The hell he is. Stand back, bitches. Sunny was right about you.”

  * * *

  When the girls came home that afternoon, there were police cars parked sloppily along the margins of the street, rooftop cherries ablaze, and I remember waving to the girls as their yellow school bus pulled to a stop in front of our house, all the little faces of its riders pressed up to the foggy windows. They ran to me that afternoon with such desperation and love I might have been Grandpa Gus, coming home from the war. Geronimo was in my hands, and he stunk of neglect, but the girls rubbed their faces against his haggard face and the policeman who was interviewing me even sat down beside me on the stoop and took off his hat.

  “Some day, huh?” he said.

  “I’ve had better,” I said, my skin itching, my eyes red with allergies.

  “We ain’t going to charge you,” he said.

  “For what?” I asked, passing Geronimo into the girls’ eager hands.

  “Battery, for one,” he said. “Breaking and entering, for two. The lesson here evidently is that if you’re going to play Dirty Harry, you best accidentally break into a meth lab. You’re lucky, is all. The courts normally frown on those types of seizures.”

  “They had our cat,” I said.

  The cop took my statement, showed his service revolver to the girls, and then left us on the stoop. Geronimo rolled onto his spine and produced a disgusting stained belly for the girls to rub.

  “Inside,” I said. “Get that cat to the bathtub now. She’s your cat. You clean her up.”

  The girls raced inside with Geronimo, offering no argument, and I dragged myself over to the refrigerator for a beer. My face was swollen, Geronimo’s oil and dander on my skin everywhere. Spring was full on, the air heavy and perfumed with lilacs, on the streets everywhere a dusting of yellow pollen, flowers protruding from the thawed earth, proud as arrows. I sat on the porch and lit a Cohiba with a strip of flaming cedar. I drank my beer and watched the river sashay between its banks. In the kitchen, the girls were bathing Geronimo, giggling, and there was the sound of sudsy water spilling onto the kitchen floor.

  The next day the house sold, and weeks later, the bank presented me with a check two digits longer than any I’d ever seen before. The girls and I celebrated by taking a
trip to Chicago, to the aquarium, where they were impressed by the sea turtles and sharks and killer whales, though they still talked about my carp and the feel of its leviathan sides against their little fingers, and the awful sound of its giant breathing.

  * * *

  She never came for us, for me, and eventually she became a name that we did not speak, and then, later yet, became like something benign and passing, an epoch of our lives at once sweet and low. The girls sometimes asked about her, but it was with a far-off kind of tone, and I would shrug my shoulders and that was good enough for them. Mom and Dad sold their house in Wisconsin and moved into a nearby trailer court, where they hung Christmas lights shaped like peppers from their Airstream, and in front of the silver bullet of their home was a patch of green turf carpeting, a picnic table, and several chairs, and at nights we would visit them, eat boiled shrimp and drink Budweiser from sweaty aluminum cans.

  I bought a blue bedazzled leash for Geronimo, and after dinner we’d walk along the beach with the girls, and they liked the way the cat high-stepped in the sand and fled the very waves he’d just been chasing. My mom would help the girls look for sand dollars while Dad and I loped along behind, swaying sometimes, happy on beer, and occasionally sharing a Cohiba, our pant legs rolled up around our knees, our toes still white from Wisconsin winters, though growing darker every day, and Dad would say, “I think she’s still coming, champ. I’m sure of it. Train people, we just move slow.” And he would put a hand on my shoulder and I never looked back after that, the salt air good enough for me, the lean and dance of the palmettos something new and exotic, and my little office heavily air-conditioned and issues of a glossy magazine stacking up inside my empty desk drawers.

  APPLES

  LYLE WAS DIABETIC, and the doctors had already lopped off two of his toes. He moved sometimes unsteadily, but he was a strong man with big hands and most people paid attention to his wide chest and knotty arms. He owned a big smile and rubbed his hands together when he was happy and this made other people happy too; in church on Sundays one might observe the people he greeted almost mimicking his movements, with oversize grins on their shining faces.

  He sold appliances his whole life until one day his new boss held a meeting and told the sales staff that they no longer had jobs. There was no fanfare, no pep talk. Everyone walked out to the yellow crosshatched parking lot while behind them the door was locked and the OPEN sign reversed to CLOSED. He went home that day and mowed the lawn. Took greater care with the passes he made using the old red Snapper, the lines in the lawn neat and diagonal. He refilled the birdseed feeders. Cleaned the gutters. When he finished this litany of chores, it was still not even lunch. He stood in the driveway and scratched his head.

  Lyle’s wife came home that night and he told her the news. It hadn’t been a complete surprise. Things had been slow at the store.

  “Well,” she said, smiling. “You can do whatever you want to now.”

  He gently rapped his knuckles on the dining room table, making two minor knocks.

  She smiled at him and reached over to rub his shoulders, all bone and muscle.

  “What do you think you might want to do now?” she asked.

  “I’ve never had to think about it,” he replied as he looked at the table. “I’ve always just had a place to go in the morning.”

  She reached for his hand and smiled at him as he studied the carpeting, which at that moment looked old, though he had never taken any notice.

  * * *

  His brothers were farmers who worked the land south of town near a village called Strum, and they had work for him, under the table and in cash. They owned some rental properties on the edge of Strum that needed maintenance, so every morning he drove thirty minutes to their small farming town, his truck loaded to the sideboards with saws and tools and scrap lumber.

  All of the farms employed Mexicans who lived in the brothers’ rentals. Lyle did not speak Spanish. When he entered their apartments, the tenants smiled at him and some of them sat on the beds or at the kitchen tables and watched as he worked. He had always worked with other people and liked having the Mexicans around, even if he couldn’t properly commiserate with them.

  Sometimes when he was on his hands and knees measuring a piece of lumber, he might point at the back of the truck and say to a small child, “Hammer, por favor.” He would make the motion for swinging a hammer. The child would run to the truck and return with his hammer.

  “Gracias,” he would say to the child.

  “You are welcome,” they would say. The mothers always smiled at Lyle and sometimes they made him strong instant coffee. Other times they sat in a kind of happy awkward silence and ate hot tortillas and black beans. He would spend those meals concentrating hard to conjure up any Spanish words. Frequently he would end the meal by smiling, bowing his head, and saying, “Gracias.” His favorite word in Spanish.

  * * *

  He sat at the kitchen table one night with his wife and they listened to the workings of the old grandfather clock. Their children were gone, scattered around America, and now their evenings were predicated around dinner and television. They liked to fall asleep in front of the blue television, under blankets.

  “How are things?” she asked.

  “There isn’t much left to do,” he said. “I’m afraid of being fired by my own brothers.”

  “Oh, come on, you were not fired,” she said, smiling.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “I mean before. You were just laid off. It happens all the time.”

  “I know. Basically the same thing in the end, though, isn’t it? Either way you don’t have a job anymore.”

  They sat in silence for a while, and he gripped his coffee mug and rubbed his feet against the carpeting. He had very little sensation left in his feet, but he had never told anyone that. He was always afraid of losing more toes. He did not want to be in a wheelchair. Sometimes he had dreams like old reel-to-reel movies in which he was back in his teenage body, with a football in the crook of his arm, running. He woke from those dreams smiling and a little melancholy.

  “Are you sad?” his wife asked. Her hair was long and mostly white, but her face was young and full of color.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not sad. But the thing is, having a job makes you feel important. People need you more. I miss my clients. I miss helping people. I miss feeling important.”

  “Oh, Lyle,” she said, “everyone knows how important you are.” She reached for his knobby hand. The doctors said his hands would grow knobbier and lose some of their cartilage and muscle as he grew older; the diabetes. Sometimes he didn’t recognize his own hands or feet.

  “Am I still important to you?” he asked her quietly, looking down at the floor.

  “Oh, Lyle,” she whispered.

  She never slept well because she always worried about his diabetic strokes. She did not want to be sleeping if he passed away in the night. He had the episodes about twice a year, and she would awaken to bedsheets soaked in perspiration, her husband delirious, unable to communicate what was wrong. She would run to the telephone to call an ambulance. Then she would run to the refrigerator and pour him a glass of orange juice. She would force him to eat chocolate bars and peanut butter. But she could show no fear, had to be calm for him. They would ride in the ambulance and she would hold his hand as the lights blinked red and blue. He hated that the neighbors might see him being carried away in the ambulance.

  She worried almost every day about becoming a widow. They had been married more than thirty years. Sometimes she told the women in her book club that he was like the sun or the moon or the stars to her. It wasn’t just that she loved him so much. It was also that he truly seemed to have inhabited her life as long as those celestial bodies had. “How could I get out of bed without him?” she would ask the women of her book club. “How could I fall asleep without Lyle? Why would I eat?” These weren’t rhetorical questions. She asked them because she did not have the an
swers.

  His brothers ran out of work for him within three months. He had fixed all the apartments and then moved on to their own houses, where he repaired broken garage doors, window screens, and door locks. He leveled all the refrigerators and checked all of the washing machine hoses and pipes. His brothers’ wives pointed at leaking faucets and dead mice. They made him coffee and asked about his retirement.

  “Well, I’m not exactly retired,” he would say. “Look, I’m right here working.”

  “Don’t you want to be retired?” everyone would ask.

  “I don’t know,” he would say. “I’ve never been.”

  * * *

  During the hottest night of the summer Lyle was watching one of his youngest brothers play softball on a baseball field surrounded by corn just outside of Strum. It was adjacent to a bar that sponsored the softball league, and the neon lights of the establishment glowed red and blue like a promise or a reward. Lyle sat in the bleachers with four of his other brothers and they drank pitcher after pitcher of cold, golden beer. It was a familiar beer, a beer that Lyle had drunk in college by the keg, but that night, sitting on the bleachers with his brothers, watching the softball pop so high into the thick August air, the beer tasted better than ever. It tasted like honey. It tasted like butter. It tasted like dandelions. It tasted like summer. The brothers drank pitchers and pitchers of the beer. They took turns walking into the bar for refills, standing in the cold air conditioning, already lonely and excited to rejoin the crowd. They cracked peanuts and threw the shells into the darkness below the bleachers. They watched their youngest brother rope sharp line drives into the outfield. They laughed at him when he stretched a double into a triple and dove headfirst into third base like he was Pete Rose in a gasoline suit. They stood like a small choir to cheer him on until he stood on third base and bowed deeply like a triumphant matador. The other people in the stands burst out laughing too. Everyone knew the brothers.