Beneath the Bonfire Read online

  “I heard a report on the news,” said the logger, “that there was enough oil down there to fill Yankee Stadium. Maybe more. Who’ll ever know? Goddamn travesty. Fucker should’ve been hung, is what should have happened. But it don’t work like that, do it? You know the drill. You got money … Shit. They set you up at the Club Fed. Probably get shrimp cocktail for dinner, only it don’t come out of Galveston, that’s for sure.”

  Foreman nodded. “So he just wandered off then?”

  The logger blew his nose in a handkerchief, not managing to remove all the particulate from his mustache. “It don’t really make sense to me. The maid showed up at his place and all his shit was still there. Posh car. Luggage. Like he just disappeared. I think he just got himself lost. Fucker left his wallet on the counter next to his keys. They ain’t got any idea of anything.”

  “How long’s he been out there?” Foreman asked.

  The logger shoveled catsupped eggs into his mouth, shrugged. “Less than a day, they figure. No idea.”

  They watched the television suspended in a corner of the café. It was surreal, the way the world was seeing their town live. They watched time unspooling before them, turned occasionally to peer at the main street, where the faces broadcast on the TV talked into cameras and microphones. It was dizzying, as if two worlds nearly identical existed just ten seconds or so apart, their actions and drama otherwise almost indistinguishable.

  Foreman and the logger sat at the counter a good hour or more. There was nothing else to do. They traded sections of the battered newspaper out of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Played several games of cribbage. Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and pair of sevens for two equals eight. In the sky, gray clouds scudding quickly and the fallen autumnal leaves tumbling faster than passing cars.

  “Snow coming.”

  “I feel it too. Thought it was the cancer this morning, but maybe it’s just the weather.”

  “Christ, Foreman, I am sorry about that.”

  Foreman blew on his coffee. “That’s kind of you. But it’s all right. I’m going to be with my wife.”

  “She and my mom used to play bridge together. I never heard an unkind word.”

  Foreman’s eyes had suddenly become misty and he looked away from the logger. He said very quietly, “I miss her.”

  The logger left some money on the Formica counter and touched Foreman’s back. “You need anything, don’t be afraid to holler.”

  Foreman nodded and stared into the diner’s kitchen. He would wait until dusk before leaving.

  HOUR THIRTY

  Foreman found Hazelwood where he’d left him, in a pool of his own bright urine, the seat of his pants filled with shame. The man was broken and weeping, shivering. Foreman dragged him toward the fieldstone hearth, then began working quickly, balling up a few sheets of newspaper, building a structure of wood and paper intermingled with twigs and kindling and pinecones. He struck a match and touched the paper with fire. He blew on the little flames tenderly, coaxing them to climb the ladders of wood. He tore curls of birch bark from the woodbin and added them to the fire.

  “I’m so cold,” Hazelwood complained. “I shat myself.”

  “You know the deal,” Foreman said. “Drink up and we’re done. I told you, I’d even cut it. How do you guys say it? I’d blend it.”

  “I’m so goddamn thirsty.”

  Foreman warmed his palms and felt the fire through his garments.

  “What if I change?” Hazelwood asked. “What if I make a public apology?” He snuffled. “There has to be another way! I’ve got a wife. Three kids! I’ve got pictures—take a look—on my phone. Please! Please!”

  “About your telephone,” said Foreman. He went outside briefly, came back in. In the palm of his old hand, the destroyed components of the telephone. “You never know,” said Foreman. “I thought maybe they could track you or something. Technology such as it is these days.” He tossed the wrecked cellular into the fire, then stood from the hearth and went to the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of water and watched Hazelwood. Against the windowpanes, stars of snow sizzling briefly and then expiring.

  HOUR THIRTY-FOUR

  Both of them at the table, their eyes locked. Between them the tin cup, and outside a November blizzard come down out of Alberta and through Saskatchewan and the Dakotas. The winds shook the cabin and the fire in its place wheezed and snapped.

  “This ain’t going to help your cause,” said Foreman.

  The other man was now dying too, if only a little. He continuously licked his blackened lips, but there was no moisture left inside the hole of his mouth to lubricate anything. His lips had grown chapped too. “I’m so thirsty,” he said in what was now a tragic loop.

  “These early storms are sometimes the worst. Heavy snow full of moisture. The plows not yet ready. The salt trucks not loaded. People not used to driving through such conditions. No chains on their tires. They ain’t gonna find you in time now. It’s all up to you. You got to drink up. Pay the piper. You drink from that tin cup and I’ll give you all the water you can drink. Wine even. Feed you. Take you straight away to the hospital in Duluth. I give you my word on that. But I ain’t budging on this thing, either. We’re here together now, you and me. And if we both die, we both die, and I am at peace with that.”

  Foreman stood from the table and went to the refrigerator. Came back with a glass of water and an apple. He ate the apple slowly, chewing its skin, his old teeth biting into the white meat of the fruit. He looked out into the storm and watched the swirling of billions of flakes, watched drifts gathering at the bases of young balsams. He would have to go out at least once during the evening to start the truck and charge the battery. He would take every precaution. There were two pairs of snowshoes in the bed of the vehicle and chocolate and brandy in the glove box. Candles and matches and extra clothing and an ancient blanket.

  “Honeycrisp is my favorite apple. The best acidity. Cleans your mouth right out.”

  The cabin was quiet then. Foreman’s chewing and the fire’s spare music.

  Hazelwood said, “My wife drank oil one time.” The bound man seemed to hang from his perch, his body leaning forward, head bowed.

  Foreman stopped chewing a moment and then continued, watching Hazelwood.

  “Our first child was overdue. Just didn’t want to come out. And my wife, she wanted to do things the old-fashioned way. No drugs during the birth. She’s crazy. I mean, I love her, but she’s crazy. You two might get along.” He shook his head, worked his captive hands in their knots. “The midwife gave her castor oil. I remember that now. Mixed it with a little orange juice. She drank it all down. I remember that. Never complained. Meredith was born about an hour later. In the bathtub. You know what that stuff does? It irritates the bowels, I guess. And that in turn stimulates the uterus. I took a sip. It was awful. I’ll never forget.

  “You never had children, did you?” asked Hazelwood, looking up now at his captor.

  Foreman gnawed at the apple and glowered at his prisoner.

  “I bet it makes it a helluva lot easier for you to kill me, doesn’t it? Without having kids of your own? Without knowing what it means to be a father? Without anyone to embarrass or to take the shame of what you’ve done. You fucking environmentalists. Living in the abstract. Your goddamn hearts are two sizes bigger than your heads.”

  Foreman threw the core of his apple square at Hazelwood’s face. “Eat that.”

  Hazelwood stayed cool. “You think I’d do something to leave this planet worse for my kids? You think I’d do that? Knowingly? How could I face them? It wasn’t my fault. I’m just a man. One goddamn man.”

  “Why ain’t I surprised that a CEO is sitting before me shirking the responsibility, rather than standing up and trying to change things, to make things better. You fuckwads get paid big money to sit before Congress without a recollection of a thing, to smile into the camera and lie, to find new ways to bilk people. Push comes to shove, you’re salesmen. Plain and s
imple.”

  And then they glared at each other for hours, the tin cup between them still full of its patient blackness. Foreman glanced at his old nicked wristwatch. Midnight; a new day. He stood from the table, bent down for the thrown apple core and went out into the blizzard to run the truck, charge the battery. Two feet of snow on the ground heavy and wet as new cement not yet hardened. He sat in the truck with his eyes on the cabin. He could see the top of a leg of Hazelwood’s chair and he could see that the chair wasn’t moving. He turned the heater up and sat in the flowing warmth until the heat of the engine had melted the carpeting of snow that had obscured the truck in whiteness. Then he cut the engine and went back inside.

  “No blanket tonight,” Foreman told Hazelwood. Then he dragged the man’s chair into the bathroom and kicked him over. “I’m locking this bathroom. Wake me up when you’re ready to drink. I’ll hear you.”

  HOUR FORTY-TWO

  Foreman woke up, his bladder full and burning. Outside: the world seemingly erased and made anew. Everywhere: whiteness and snow yet falling from the well-obscured sky. A strange sound coming from the bathroom. The old man shuffled quickly to the locked door. His key in the knob, he tried to press into the room but he could feel the CEO resisting. The door slightly ajar, Foreman could see that Hazelwood had somehow forced himself up at one point and drank from the porcelain toilet bowl. The front of his cashmere sweater, already ruined by oil, now also a V of dampness. His back was against a low cabinet and his feet pressed against the door, still taped up to his chair.

  Foreman said, “You quit this shit or I’ll break your motherfuckin’ legs!”

  Hazelwood relaxed his legs after a moment and the door caromed open. The oil magnate was laughing through his missing front tooth, his gums and teeth slightly less black. “I pissed all over your floor,” he said. “I drank for hours. Best water I ever had.”

  Foreman jerked the man and chair out of the room and across the house, their path delineated by marks across the wooden floorboards. Foreman dragged him outside, kicked him down a small set of stairs, and let the man come to rest in a dune of snow. The old man went back inside. He had been beaten again. Tore at his scalp, the flyaway hair.

  “Dumb,” he said to himself. “Dumb, dumb, dumb.”

  HOUR FORTY-THREE

  Near hypothermic, Hazelwood was incoherent. Foreman pulled him back inside and set him beside the fire. The captive man smelled awful. Foreman had been unprepared for any of his own failings, and unprepared as well for the fortitude of this captain of industry, the man’s resolve. He smacked the back of the man’s cold head and the contact felt good, so he hit him again. Then Foreman slunk into a chair and stared at his willful hostage.

  HOUR FORTY-FIVE

  “The idea come to me one day, not long after the spill,” Foreman said. “I was thinking about my childhood and this memory come to me unbidden. It popped right into my head, like a bubble. And I remembered how when I was a little boy, maybe four or five, my daddy was furious with me. It was because I kept shitting my pants. And I guess he thought I was too old for that. It embarrassed him or something.”

  Hazelwood looked up at his keeper, his face dull, smudged.

  “And what I remembered was this time in the kitchen, in the kitchen of the home where I grew up. And I’m sitting at this table. This table right here. Only I’m a little boy. And my grandpa is there too because he’s telling my daddy what to do. He’s saying, Make him eat that shit. That’ll stop it. Make him eat it.

  “And then I remember that they put my diaper in front of me. Me sitting in a chair, but I was small, so my eyes were about level with the table, with the diaper, and it was a terrible one, overflowing, and it smelled something awful and then my grandpa dropping a spoon into it and saying, Do it. He ain’t no baby anymore, it’s his own goddamned mess. And my daddy holding my face and that spoon and me thinking, Please don’t make me. Please don’t make me eat my own mess. Please, Daddy. I remember them pushing my face toward it. My own diaper. And I remember that my mom was in the kitchen and I couldn’t understand why she didn’t stop them. Why didn’t she stop them?”

  He gazed out the window, drumming this thumbs against the table, Hazelwood watching him.

  “So that’s what this is about,” Hazelwood finally said. “You want me to eat my own shit? Some sick revenge fantasy. Some twisted revenge against your father, maybe authority figures in general?”

  Foreman said, “Maybe.”

  HOUR FORTY-SEVEN

  Hazelwood had been smiling at Foreman for an hour, his face and spirits oddly revived.

  “You ready?” Foreman asked.

  “Bring me over there,” Hazelwood said. “I’m going to beat you at your own game. And then I’m sending you to prison. I’ve decided not to kill you. Nope. I’m going to send you to prison and keep you alive and in pain for a long time. By the end, if your wife is watching from heaven, she won’t even want you.” He spat on the floor and began hopping the chair on his own toward the table. “Free my fucking hand,” he ordered.

  Foreman obliged and set the tin cup in front of Hazelwood, then sat down and watched, eyes wide.

  Hazelwood raised the cup to his lips now and drank two big gulps. He gagged and held his free hand over his mouth, but spit most of the oil right back out, much of it running down his chin and neck. Some of it sprayed onto Foreman’s face and clothing.

  “I can’t!” gasped Hazelwood. “Christ, it’s down my throat. I need water!”

  Foreman’s chair clattered over as he stood up abruptly. He seized the tin cup and held it to Hazelwood’s lips. “Drink! Drink, goddamn it!” Hazelwood choked and Foreman held his nose. The man’s throat pumped and then he gagged again and vomited a terrible black mess. Both their faces: masks of black oil and terror. Hazelwood gagging and coughing. Foreman standing over his prisoner, Hazelwood’s free hand now on Foreman’s thigh in protest and agony.

  “Goddamn it!” Hazelwood roared. “Get that shit out of my mouth! I can’t do it! I can’t!” He spat and spat, looking terrified now, all slick and black, so different than when Foreman had first seen his face on television, sea spray threatening to dampen his yachting clothes, a martini glass held jauntily above and against the legions of Atlantic waves while he laughed like a man who owned the world. And then Foreman thought of the images he had seen of the Gulf. The oil-slicked birds. The pods of dolphins. Turtles dead in their shells. Millions of dead fish afloat. He settled into his chair. Studied the oil left in the tin cup. Remembered a vacation with his wife, dolphins racing the bow of the little charter boat that skipped them over the Caribbean. How he’d never seen a dolphin before.

  “No deal,” said Foreman. “But I’ll get you some water. You earned it.” He set a glass of artesian water before Hazelwood, who drank lustily.

  “Get me a goddamn rag! Something to wipe out my mouth,” raged Hazelwood. “For chrissakes!”

  Foreman retrieved a rag for the man and watched as Hazelwood worked the cloth inside his mouth, over his teeth and gums and cheeks. Foreman set three slices of buttered bread before Hazelwood. The man ate ravenously, glaring at Foreman.

  “There’s still oil in that cup,” said Foreman.

  “Fuck you. I drank what I could. I can’t do any more.”

  “Well. Here we are.”

  But the old man was tired and did not know if he could carry out the one thing he had thought himself capable of finishing. There was a tinge of something inside him that questioned what he had begun in the first place. He knew that if the man finished the oil he would have to take him to the hospital and feared that the man might receive more sympathy than punishment from the outside. He could imagine all of those cameras from downtown following Hazelwood, zeroing in on the concerned faces of his wife and children. Foreman stared at Hazelwood. The man covered in oil, only the whites of his eyes bright. Foreman looked at his own clothing, also ruined. They sat looking at each other again, panting. But there was no other course for Foreman
, either, and he knew it.

  “You know what bothered me most about that spill?” Foreman said.

  “I don’t give a shit, you sick old fuck. I really don’t.”

  “Loons. They’re my favorite birds. Prehistoric things. You know their bones are solid, not hollow, like other birds. Makes them less buoyant so they can swim underwater. Disappear for minutes sometimes. We had a game, my wife and I. A loon would go underwater and we’d try to predict where it would surface. We used to sit out on that porch and listen to the loons sing. It’s an eerie sound, and beautiful. It don’t sound like anything else. Well, I ain’t a birder or nothing, but I’ll tell you something. Loons don’t winter here. They migrate. Down to the Gulf. They’re soon to head down there. And I can’t imagine what they’ll see or think. I hope they come back up here, but the truth is, I’ll be gone anyway, I suppose.

  “I don’t have much to live for anymore. The planet gets worse and worse, if you ask me, and nobody does anything about it. So I don’t know. Maybe it is worth it. To kill you. To put you down. To be the one who sends you away for all times. Because I don’t believe that you do care. I don’t think you’d know a loon from a flamingo. I don’t think you care about them whales or dolphins, and I suspect you could give two shits for those shrimpers and fishermen down there. But they’re people too. With kids and wives. What are they going to do? Take your dirty blood money? Take your money and shut up? Go work at a Walmart. Greeting shoppers, maybe. Hullo, my name is Dan, and I used to be a captain of a boat. Employed four guys. Brought dinner home every night fresh out of the ocean. Calluses on my hands. I used to smell like the sea. You have a nice fucking time shopping today. Buy a new TV. Buy some ice cream for those kids. Some toilet paper.”

  Hazelwood spat black.

  “I don’t know anymore about anything,” said Foreman. “Like I said, I used to be a monkey wrencher. A goddamned sabot. I blew up a dam one time. It was beautiful. All that water gone out in one big rush. The river free and unbound. I’ll never forget that. Other than marrying my wife, it was probably the best thing I ever did. Sitting on the riverbank, watching that water go where it wanted to go.”