Beneath the Bonfire Page 10

  Hazelwood spat at Foreman’s boots.

  “If I were you,” Foreman said, “I’d save my water. You dumb prick.” He stoked the fire, and on his grizzled face the light was a dirty gold and he allowed himself to smile, his old teeth almost worn down. It was the gloaming, evening already settling onto the shoulders of the land.

  HOUR EIGHT

  “How did you find me?”

  Foreman rocked a chair, smoked a filterless cigarette, the paper dry on his lips. The fireplace popped and sucked air. Through the trees, the sound of a wolf. Foreman leaned forward in his chair and listened to the animal’s call and it was everything he might have sung too.

  “How did you find me?”

  The oil in a new tin cup, on the table before Hazelwood.

  Foreman coughed, his body riddled with pains everywhere. His bones a matrix of agony. “Soon as that well blew up, a call went out. No, that ain’t right. It was after that dumb-ass press conference of yours. Right after that. Then we all saw you again, racing yachts and what have you. Oil spewing out into the ocean and you’re racing yachts, as if you lived on another planet entire.”

  “A call?”

  “I guess they call it ecoterrorism now. Back then, we were just burning down signs, blowing dams, spiking trees. Anyway, there’s a few of us left. We slipped back into things, the world. There wasn’t a name back then for what we were doing, but we’re all still out here. Free. No trace of what we done or who we were. But we’re still connected to one another, you know. You see a computer around here? We use the mail. Pay telephones. Word of mouth. I was a monkey wrencher from way back. Then I got married. Got straight, laid low. Didn’t harm no one. But now I’m going to do this one last thing. You.” Foreman pointed a finger at Hazelwood.

  “Who called you?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

  “What does it matter? I’m probably going to die here anyway. That’s your grand plan, isn’t it? I die if I drink the oil, and I die if I don’t drink the oil. Sort of a win-win for the insane, aged ecoterrorists.”

  Foreman looked out the window. He studied the needles of a nearby white pine outside, its trunk nearly four feet wide at the base. An old thing left over from another time. A historical marker. “A buddy,” he said, exhaling. “His brother’s a shrimper down there. Got a sick kid with sky-high medical bills. Hard to pay bills when all the shrimp tastes like Castrol.”

  “But how … how did … How’d anyone know I’d be up here?”

  “Just because we don’t have the Internet doesn’t mean none of us don’t use the Internet. There are libraries. Cafés. Friends. They watched you. That fucking yacht race or what have you. Real sensitive. Then the backlash and you disappeared. Someone found your biography. Guessed you might come home. We found out about your cabin. If that’s what you call it. Goddamn castle. I was embarrassed at first. Couldn’t believe an ingrate such as yourself could’ve come out of here.”

  “I left this place as soon as I could.”

  “Yeah? Should’ve stayed gone.”

  “Should have.”

  Hazelwood spat on the floor again. “I’m thirsty,” he said.

  Foreman raised an eyebrow and after a few moments rose from his chair and went to the old refrigerator, which ran off a generator behind the cabin, both machines humming and rumbling more or less incessantly. He extracted a tall pitcher of water and shut the refrigerator’s ancient and heavy door. Reached into a cabinet and produced a small glass, then sat back down opposite Hazelwood and placed the pitcher of water on the table. He held up the glass.

  “When they first found the tumor,” Foreman said, “they cut it out of me. Put me on all kinds of pills. Had me taking vitamins. This glass here was my best friend. Wake up in the morning and eat breakfast, make coffee, write a letter. Then sit down and eat my vitamins. Put one in my mouth and drink a glass of water. Put another in my mouth and drink a glass of water. And so on.” He filled it with water. “This is my pill glass.”

  Hazelwood licked his chapped lips.

  “This is artesian water. Come up out of the ground in a secret place not five hundred yards from here. Bubbling forth. It tastes sweet to me. Untainted. Days I’d be out hunting or come back from a fishing trip and I’d walk that path out there to the spring and get down on all fours and drink right out of the earth. Sometimes I’d scare deer or bear doing the same thing. Cold too. Goddamn, is it cold there. Cold and sweet.” Foreman held the glass in a toast to Hazelwood. “Mud in your eye.”

  He drank it all down in two gulps and poured another. He drank and drank. He drank until his guts were cool and overfull. He let some of the water run down the crease of his old chin and intermingle with his whiskers. He stared at Hazelwood and said, “I’m going to take a piss now, and then I’m coming back in here, and when I do I’m going to make a steak. I’m going to sauté some mushrooms and onions and I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine.” He stood up, turned to Hazelwood. “Thing is, as sick as I am, I don’t get hungry much anymore. But it’ll give me some pleasure to eat in front of you.”

  He left the table and walked outside. He undid his belt and the zipper of his pants and urinated. The night was crisp and he shuddered. The ground smoked where he pissed. His pants were too loose and he cinched the ancient belt over his bony hips; a series of new hand-tooled holes in the belt, bored there with his pocketknife. A rush of loneliness swept over him and he recalled his wife, the nights and days they had spent in the cabin, the sound of her feet on the floorboards. Then the loneliness was replaced with something like determination, because the only thing left for him was the notion that she was waiting for him beyond, beckoning to him like a star or a ball of light both warm and cool all at once, distant and so familiar. He did not believe in God, but he believed in her out there somewhere, and he had to, else the world was too bleak for him to continue. He went back into the cabin.

  The tin cup was on the floor in another pond of oil, the floor stained anew. Hazelwood’s chair was tipped over, his free arm pinned beneath him, one foot in the air, flailing. Both loafers off and his feet white blue with cold. Foreman lifted the man and the chair back upright; he felt strong when it came to punishing the younger man.

  Suddenly Hazelwood swung at him with his free hand but Foreman deflected it and punched the CEO in his teeth. Hazelwood cried out, tears in his eyes, and for the first time he looked scared. Hazelwood spat a bloody tooth into the spilled oil. Then he regained his composure, hissed through a hole in his smile, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

  “You’re wasting time,” Foreman said evenly and moved toward the stove, where he positioned an iron skillet onto an old propane burner. From the refrigerator he removed a piece of red meat. He set it on a white plate. Proceeded to season the steak with salt, pepper, garlic. In the pan he dropped a pat of butter. He chopped onions, garlic, mushrooms. Added them to the pan, reduced the heat. He peered at the flame below the pan and reduced the fire to a minor candle.

  “I always cook things out of order,” he said. “Greta never would’ve started them onions and mushrooms so quickly.”

  Foreman found another pan and set it on the stove over a separate burner. “I prefer to grill,” he explained, “but the situation, such as it is.” He shrugged. From the pantry: a bottle of red wine. He found another glass.

  “I’ll let you cut that oil,” Foreman offered. “If that’d help. Pour it all into one big mug.”

  “Fuck you,” said Hazelwood.

  “I met a man once. A vintner from Argentina. You know what he told me? He told me wine cellars are for the vain. He told me, don’t ever keep more than six bottles of wine in your house. Keep what you can drink. What your friends can drink. Think about a party. Keep that much wine. You know why? This vintner, this old man, he told me, you keep a cellar, so what? Someday you’re going to die with all those bottles in some dark room and you’ll never even have tasted them. And they’re down there for what? So one of your kids can drink
them? So they get to auction your collection like a bunch of goddamned stamps? No. Drink your wine. Always be drinking wine. That’s what he told me. Man was a millionaire many times over and he didn’t have a wine cellar. He owned two or three vineyards, but inside his own estate, he never kept no more than a case of wine.

  “Day after I first spotted you, I bought this. It’s French. You imagine? A bottle all the way from France somehow found its way up here. Nowhere. Another thing: that old vintner. When I met him, he was ninety-one years old. Married to a forty-year-old woman who looked like Sophia Loren.”

  He laid the meat into the skillet with some butter and minced garlic and, leaning forward, wafted the cooking smells up into his nose.

  “You are one sick old bastard,” Hazelwood said.

  “The thing is, I can’t hardly taste anymore. Something about the cancer. Stole my taste right out of me. But I’ll tell you what, I can taste garlic. I can still taste garlic.” Foreman flipped the steak with a long-tined fork. “I like it rare. Juicy. I like to taste the animal.” He examined the other pan: the onions caramelizing, the mushrooms fragrant. He waited another moment or two, lifted the steak onto the plate, then spooned the mushrooms and onions beside it. He brought the plate to the table and his glass of wine also.

  “Shit,” Foreman said. “How rude of me.” He stood from the table and reached for the tin cup on the floor of the cabin. He went to the door where the jug of oil sat. He refilled the cup and set it before Hazelwood. Then he returned to his place. Raised his glass again.

  “To greed,” Foreman said. “You’re greedy for money and oil. And I’m greedy for this here free-range steak and glass of wine.”

  He drank. “Oh,” he said, “this is good. I can’t taste much anymore, but I can taste this. You know what’s striking? The mouthfeel. It’s both thick and juicy in my mouth. But there’s some acid too. Something cleaning up my palate.”

  He began to saw into the pink of the steak. “You strike me as a man with a wine cellar,” he said, his mouth full.

  “I have four,” Hazelwood said. “My wife and I own a vineyard in California.”

  “Well,” said Foreman, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, “I guess that’s too bad.”

  HOUR TEN

  Hazelwood was squirming in his chair, Foreman sitting heavily in his own. The plate empty and streaked with thin blood, his wineglass again full and the bottle thoroughly diminished. Foreman picked at his teeth, now purple with wine.

  “I’m about to piss myself,” said Hazelwood.

  Foreman shrugged.

  Below the confined man, a new stain began to spread, acrid and yellow. The man’s khaki pants wet at the crotch and all down his legs to his numb, blue feet. Hazelwood stared at Foreman.

  “Jesus, can I get a blanket or something? I’d like a motherfucking blanket at least. Something to cover my feet for the night.”

  Foreman nodded. “Yeah, it is about that time.”

  He rose from the table and disappeared into a small bedroom. Returned with a woolen blanket that he draped over Hazelwood’s lower half. The imprisoned man took another swing at him and this time landed it against Foreman’s gut. The old man grunted in pain and dropped to a knee. The CEO had been quick and strong, but bound as he was, there could be no second move.

  Foreman took his time rising. After he had collected himself, he motioned to the tin cup. “I assume you ain’t drinking this tonight then?”

  “Fuck yourself, old man. You come close to me again, I’ll kill you.”

  Foreman removed the tin cup from the table and set it beside the stove. Then he approached Hazelwood again, this time circling behind the secured man. He checked the duct tape that joined Hazelwood to the chair. Then, moving to Hazelwood’s indefensible side, he punched his prisoner twice in the face, making the legs of the chair teeter each time. He found the roll of duct tape and went to the man again and bound his free hand so that he was utterly immobilized. Then he stepped away to consider the man’s bruised face, his blackened lips, the missing tooth. Foreman tore a length of the tape from the roll and palmed it securely over Hazelwood’s mouth.

  Then he shut off the lights, blew out the lamps, and fell into his bed in the next room over. He dreamt of his wife, of her hands at their sink, washing orange carrots in the afternoon sunlight. He dreamt of her laughing, of her face shining with happiness and the glow of summertime, but in the dream, he could not hear her laughter or her voice. His dreams were always without soundtracks.

  HOUR EIGHTEEN

  Foreman woke to the nearby sound of wood scraping against wood. Four pegs walking. He sat up in bed to find Hazelwood suddenly beside him, still bound, eyes wide, the tape gone from over his mouth and now replaced with a steak knife clenched between his jaws. Foreman jerked his feet loose of the bedsheets and scissored a kick to the CEO’s face, sending the knife clattering to the floor. Another series of blows tipped Hazelwood wobbling slowly over.

  “Let me go, you old fuck! Let me the hell go! Let me go!”

  Foreman was out of breath, his nerves well rattled, his old heart beating uncontrollably. He grabbed his chest.

  The businessman laughed. “You dumb old bird. This how you want to go out? Over this? A little oil spilt? Some fucking birds, some whales, a couple of dolphins? Some shrimp some fat fuck can’t eat at Red Lobster for a few months? You going to kill me, old man? Over oil? Over some fucking oil.” Hazelwood was overturned, his face on the floor, his feet blue, the toenails ravaged with his effort.

  Foreman sat on the bed and breathed deeply, his hand on his chest. He looked down at the man bound to the chair. Behind the overturned chair, four erratic grooves in the floors marked the crippled progress of the CEO into his bedchamber.

  “My die has been cast,” Foreman said at last. “This planet. It’s worth a hell of a lot more than any of us. Oil ain’t worth dying for. But this planet sure as hell is. And I want it known that I tried my best, that I didn’t give up or shrug my shoulders. I believe that.”

  “You’ve been reading too much poetry. You sound like an old faggot.”

  They stayed that way for some time, looking at each other, their hearts racing, sunlight careening through the windows and outside the birds singing and deer moving in the shadows. The old man began coughing, tasted his own blood and bile, last night’s meal not sitting well in his fragile gut.

  “You’re safe enough here, anyway,” Foreman said. He pulled a duvet over the fallen man until it covered him like a tarpaulin. “I better head into town. Make things look normal.”

  He moved unsteadily into the kitchen, made coffee, drank water. His hands shaking apart.

  HOUR TWENTY

  The little town teemed with police, unmarked cars, television crews. The main street packed with automobiles, vans, strange pedestrians in suits and ties and skirts and high heels. Foreman drove slowly, hands loose on the wheel of the old truck as he gaped at the ruckus. His legs trembled in his trousers. If they were not already looking, they would be looking soon. He pulled into a parking space and sat a moment collecting himself. He would spend the day in town being seen.

  He left the truck and pulled his barn jacket tight. He had lost so much weight that it felt more like a robe of tattered canvas. The wind seemed to pass through his body as if his flesh were gauze. He knew he would not make it to see the end of winter, and maybe not even the beginning. He shuffled down the sidewalk.

  In the post office, to one side of the counter, a television woman was interviewing Father Malloy. The priest was praying for the CEO, calling for forgiveness. A light was attached to the camera aimed at the priest and the light shone so brightly as to make Malloy’s skin translucent as milk. Foreman knew Malloy and had never trusted him. The priest’s hands too soft for Foreman’s liking. The priest that had shepherded the town prior had been a miner in his youth, who split five cords of wood every autumn before the snow began flying. That priest had hands covered in sandpaper and leather. Hands like paws. Rumors
abounded that in his mining days, he could beat all comers at arm wrestling. He’d had a beard that seemed full of the magic of God. Black eyes. You did not want to sin because something in his countenance made you believe that he knew your sins and would wrestle them out and away from you. Beat them out of you, if necessary. Absolve and redeem and make you repent, weeping like a scared child. This new priest looked like a spy. Foreman gathered his mail and left. There wasn’t much—a few sweepstakes circulars and some catalogues addressed to his wife. Sad little reminders of her.

  He walked across the street to the town’s only café. It was crowded. Unable to sit beside the bay windows, he took a seat at the counter, where the loggers, farmers, and old men sat. He ordered toast and coffee. His stomach was upset. He drank slowly, the hot coffee in his belly warming him.

  A logger he knew leaned in, said, “Truth is, I don’t give two shits if some rich bastard gets lost in the woods, wanders off. Fuck him. Should’ve packed some expensive Gore-Tex. Some fancy wool. Shit. Could’ve thrown some locals some money. Hired a guide.”

  “Amen,” said Foreman. “Well, they think they’re indestructible, bulletproof. They think they know everything.”