Beneath the Bonfire Page 2

  It was Luna that found me, wandering the woods, after I interrupted two lovers moving against the night: a woman bent over a pile of firewood and her lover entering her from behind, their asses glowing in the darkness. I had come upon them quietly, not even comprehending at first, and then afraid that it might be Nancy, and at last the man had turned to me and said, “You want a turn?” his dick in his hand like a skeleton key. Then the woman grabbed his narrow hips and moved him back into her, laughing.

  I had turned away and begun wandering away from the lights, mumbling Nancy’s name, when Luna grabbed my shoulder with one hand, a lantern glowing in the other and swinging, its golden light illuminating the detritus of the forest floor.

  “Noah!” she shouted. “Noah!”

  I fell down in the snow and sat that way, looking up at her, this woman I had known when we were two fumbling teenagers, kids really, necking on a mattress in the bed of my pickup truck as a drive-in movie lit the summer nights and I remembered the fireflies I sometimes found in her red hair, the paleness of her white skin. “Shelly,” I said. “Shelly, I feel drunk.”

  She kneeled in the snow and touched my face with her gloved hands.

  “Christ, your face is a mess,” she said, laughing softly, her fingers under my chin. Her eyes were wet.

  “I’m so happy for you,” I said. “You’ll make a great mother.” I was not lying, and the thought of her holding a baby made me want to weep with happiness and longing and then I did begin to cry, the tears on my face hot and painful on the new cuts and scrapes covering my face.

  * * *

  Since the moment I met Nancy I had wanted very badly to be a father, a dad. It was the night of Thanksgiving Day. I had taken my mother into the hospital. She had cut her hand while carving the turkey. I remember her standing at the sink, running the tap over her bleeding fingers, all the color draining from her face. “It’ll be okay,” she said to me, quickly covering the wound with a towel. “No way, Mom,” I said, and we drove to the ER, where we sat for ten minutes in a waiting room watching highlights of the morning’s parade in a faraway city. They took her into the ER and I sat leafing through some battered magazines.

  After some length of time, I stood up and began wandering the hospital. I found the neonatal wing, the nursery, with its rows of babies lying in small transparent bins, not cribs, but trays, all of their little heads covered in blue or pink hats, bodies tightly swaddled. Some slept and some cried out. Nancy moved from baby to baby, picking them up and holding them to her chest. She swayed with them in her arms, like slow dancing, her lips close to their little heads. I watched her, transfixed, until my own mother was standing beside me, her finger bandaged. She pressed against me warmly and I was not embarrassed. Nancy had not noticed us.

  “You were such a beautiful baby,” my mother said. “We loved you even before you were born.”

  I didn’t say anything, my eyes still on Nancy, my body suddenly loose and relaxed amid the ambient sounds of the hospital everywhere, the relative cool and dimness of the building. The beautiful woman swaying before me, behind a giant pane of glass separating us from all those very small faces. I found myself happily drowsy.

  “You’ll have your chance,” my mother said.

  But I already had the sense even before seeing a doctor about it that I would never conceive a child, that something was broken inside me. There were moments in my life that I might have pointed to by way of explanation—the serrated tip of a figure skate, the cleated foot of a runaway fullback, moments when my anatomy had suffered specific insults. But the more I yearned for fatherhood, the more I understood somehow that any child I might raise into an adult would not be the product of my genetic line. I would be some kind of surrogate. And so, accepting that deficiency within me, I had begun waiting for orphans to enter my life, like figures of golden light.

  I came back to the hospital one day later, a bouquet of flowers in my hands, and found Nancy. Her coworkers blushed and then applauded quietly, their eyes dancing uncertainly. I had just gotten my hair cut and even gone to the local men’s clothing store, where I bought a navy blue suit coat with shiny brass buttons. She was holding a baby, of course. A new girl named Daphne.

  * * *

  Shelly breathed in deeply. “I want to leave this place. Will you take me?” she asked.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She erased the wetness of my face with her fingers.

  “Let’s go,” she said, lifting me up.

  “I have to get Nancy,” I insisted.

  “Don’t. Don’t go looking.”

  “But I have to. She came with me. I love her.”

  The bonfire was out of control, and as we skirted the edge of the party, there was a man juggling three chainsaws in the air, all of the machines rasping and grumbling, and each time one of the chainsaws fell into his hands, he revved up its small engine and the teeth of the saw went round and round, sharp and shining in the grimy light. The violinist was sweating profusely even though he wore no shirt, and the bow he used to make the music that went out into the night moved furiously against the cold strings of the instrument. There was nothing left of the pig when we walked by the pit, just the face of a misbegotten animal and its four still hooves.

  Inside the church candles were swaying on the windowsills and many bodies were laid out over the floor. A man was walking between the figures, and in his hands were doses of acid. The supplicants extended their tongues as if in acceptance of a communion wafer. They were listening to an opera screech out of the ornate horn of a hand-cranked Victrola, powered by a man in the darkness, working its crank as needed.

  I found them in the loft. Nancy on a bed, sitting on his face, his beard billowed out around her crotch. That was the last time I ever saw her, her hands holding her own head and hair and his fingers in her mouth, her breasts heavy and beautiful inside the church, where the light of the bonfire seeped in through the tall stained-glass windows and made the building a kind of terrible hallucination I will never forget.

  Shelly was outside the church, a bag in her hand.

  “I could burn the place down,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” I said, taking her bag and throwing it into the bed of my truck.

  “You’re parked in,” Shelly said.

  “Wait beside the road,” I said.

  She went off into the darkness and I climbed into the truck and revved the engine. I yanked the transmission into reverse and stepped down hard on the gas pedal. The big black pipes of the truck went back into the car behind me and pushed it several feet into the next vehicle. There was the sound of breaking glass and broken metal. Then I dropped the truck into drive and plowed forward, slamming the vehicle in front of me ten feet ahead and sending it toward the bonfire, where the music suddenly stopped, all three flying chainsaws landing in the snow. I put the truck in reverse once more, demolishing another vehicle before finally pulling out onto the road and waiting for Shelly. She moved into the truck gingerly, holding her belly, and then I slid the truck into gear and we left the derelict church and all those beaten automobiles and the bonfire and the pig and the secret new lovers and a disembodied Italian soprano, wailing into the night.

  * * *

  I raised Samuel with love and fervor, and though he grew up into a boy who appeared in so many ways as his father had in my own childhood, I was comforted at times by his deep blue eyes and dark hair. When Samuel and I went fishing or traipsing through the forest in search of morels or fiddleheads, and I might glance his way, there were times in which I found myself time traveling, back into a past when Bear and I were tightly bonded friends exploring the world together.

  Many years after that chainsaw party I attended, we drove by the church on a cold, bright winter solstice afternoon. It was just a lark, a drive through the countryside, with enough time and psychic distance that neither of us cared, I suppose, if we saw Bear or Nancy off in the distance, perhaps pulling their own children on a sled through the December snow.
Shelly had said, “I’d like to have a look, one more time.” So the three of us piled into the pickup truck and drove that way, southwest toward the great river. But there was no soirée. The woods all around the church were utterly free of any chainsaw cacophony, and when we passed the church it looked abandoned, a great plank nailed to the two front doors. The white paint of the steeple and chapel were chipping badly and a few of the windowpanes had been broken and were spider-webbed with cracks.

  “I wonder where they are,” I said.

  “Who?” asked Samuel.

  “Some old friends,” said Shelly, though there was no softness to her voice.

  “Your mom used to live here,” I said.

  Samuel quickly turned his head and stared at Shelly. “That place?” he asked.

  “You were almost born in that church,” she said.

  “I’m glad I wasn’t,” he said, fidgeting on the seat. “It looks haunted.”

  Then we drove off, away from the church and the site of all those chainsaw parties, and many years later I would learn that the volunteer fire department had burnt it down to the blackened earth. I had run into one of the volunteer firemen at a wedding, and he described the church in detail to me, saying, “After we lit the fire, it went up quickly, and then you wouldn’t believe it, from underneath the place hundreds of snakes came out and half the department ran off. I never seen anything like it.”

  “They used to have parties at that church,” I said, “chainsaw parties. That’s how I met my wife.”

  RAINWATER

  THE OLD MAN and his grandson sat on the porch swing watching it rain. They swung according to the old man’s rhythm; the little boy’s feet dangling, his shoelaces untied, still inches off the sinking porch. Water collected in the grooves of the dirt and grass two-track driveway, and toward the barn chickens bobbed their heads and cooed low, high-stepping as they pulled earthworms free from the saturated black soil. A flag drooped heavy on its rusted and listing pole.

  “Where’s my mom?” the boy asked, not unhappily. He wiped his nose and looked at the old man, who simply stared off, away, blinking his pale blue eyes slowly. “Grandpa?”

  The old man scooted his grandson closer, rubbed his towhead with a thick old hand. She was late, a day late, and every number the old man dialed went unanswered. He could not say that she was in danger; she was wild and always had been. She dropped the boy with him on Friday afternoons, like a package. Left him without food or toys and sometimes without extra clothing. What did the old man know about taking care of a child?

  So Friday nights he and the boy drove into town, ate supper at the diner beside the railroad tracks, watched passing trains, shared a sundae. Drove to the hardware store and bought die-cast trucks and tractors, little-boy underwear, overalls, thick socks, T-shirts, and sweat shirts. The little boy falling asleep across the bench seat of the old man’s pickup truck as they jostled down county roads and toward the fallow farm, where the old man would park, admiring this little boy before lifting him out and carrying him inside, to his own bed, where he lay the boy and pulled the sheets and the gray wool blanket up and over his shoulders and kissed his forehead and touched his little-boy ears and then sat listening to his alarm clock tick and waiting for the sound of his daughter’s car to come down the driveway until at last he went to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of cold coffee and wrung his hands and wondered silently how he had failed her.

  “Hold on a minute,” the old man said. “Hold still. Be back in a minute.”

  “Grandpa,” the boy said tentatively, and the old man recognized the edge of fear in the boy’s voice, at the thought of being abandoned for even a second. The boy looked at him balefully.

  The old man motioned through the screen door, inside the house. He cleared his throat. “I’ve got to pee.”

  The little boy nodded uncertainly, and the old man went inside, careful not to let the screen door slam. Walked through the sitting room with its ancient TV and grandfather clock and duck paintings and dusty duck decoys and taxidermied deer mounts and tired furniture. Into the bathroom he went, closing the door lightly, and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. Maybe, he thought, she wasn’t coming home this time. His urine came haltingly. He stood in front of the mirror afterward and washed his hands, looked at his face: his white hair, the broken blood vessels across his nose and cheekbones, the loose skin beneath his chin like that of a turkey, two days’ worth of whiskers. I ought to look better for him, he thought. I have to be strong.

  From the porch he heard a little voice: “Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa…”

  In the kitchen he found a tin cup, then padded back to the boy on the swing, who sat smiling up at him.

  “Here,” the old man said, handing the boy the cup.

  The boy looked down into the cup. “It’s empty.”

  “You ever drink rain?”

  “No, Mom won’t let me go out in the rain.”

  “Well, I’m saying that you can.”

  “It’s okay. I’m not that thirsty.”

  “Well, all right then, go get me a cup.”

  The boy slid off the swing, approached the edge of the porch, where the stairs descended into overgrown grass and dandelions. He held the cup out. Rain fell off the eaves in big slow measured drops. The old man moved to the swing, watching, with arms crossed. Parenting, he remembered, was all about creating work, jobs, games.

  “No, go on out there,” he said. “Go out in the rain now. Get me some fresh stuff. I don’t want that runoff from the roof. Go on now. Don’t worry ’bout getting wet.”

  The boy stepped into the rain, droplets turning the blue cotton of his shirt a color closer to black. The rain began to slick back his hair; he laughed. “It’s warm.”

  The old man smiled behind a hand. “Go on. Get me some of that fresh rain.”

  The boy moved farther away from the porch, a thick shoal of gray clouds slung low overhead. He held the cup out away from him, then over his head.

  “Grandpa? What does rain taste like?” the boy called out.

  “Clouds, I suppose. Mostly like clouds.”

  The boy brought the cup down, glanced inside the little vessel. “Is this enough?”

  “Sure, sure it is. Bring it up here. You won’t drink, I sure will.”

  The boy scrambled up the steps onto the porch, careful not to spill. He passed the cup cleanly to his grandfather, jumped onto the swing, and sat, hands in his lap, looking at his grandfather.

  The old man held the cup in his hands for some time, looking at the water there. I don’t know that I have ever tasted rain, he thought. He tried to recall some summer afternoon, some spring evening, when, perhaps out walking with his wife in town or on the tractor, or even back in his war time, when he might have opened his mouth for a raindrop to find or held his helmet out like a cup, when his young tongue might have slipped out of his mouth to lick rain-slicked lips. But nothing came to him.

  “Grandpa?”

  “You take the first sip. Go on. You collected it, you ought to drink it.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. It’s yours.”

  The boy raised the cup to his lips and took a small noisy sip. The old man watched him.

  “Well?”

  “Good. It tastes good, I guess. You want some, Grandpa?”

  “Sure, sure I do. Here, hand that thing here.”

  They sat that way, the old man swinging them, his right hand on one of the chains that kept the swing moored to the ceiling of the porch. Now the air smelled of ozone and the rain came harder, more violently. The ground trembled with faraway lightning and there was the guttural sound of thunder. The boy inched closer to his grandfather, collapsing what little distance there remained. The old man placed his hand on the boy’s head, the air charged with electricity and their skin almost wet, the hairs on their arms at attention, like two scared cats.

  The old man raised the cup to his mouth and sipped. A lightning bolt, blue and hot white, split the
sky not a mile away, and the thunder that filled their ears not even a second later seemed impossibly big, made them jump. The air sizzled. The old man imagined his daughter. Was she driving toward them, her windshield wipers frantically casting water toward the yellow center line? Or was she blissed out somewhere, a belt cinched around her pale, skinny arm, eyes half shut, slumped halfway out of a chair and resting on a dirty floor? Or in a motel room with two strangers, sipping her favorite, Southern Comfort, out of clear plastic cups and the tapping and scraping of credit cards making fine white lines on the bedside table? Or someplace much worse: a shallow ditch, a dank basement, the hot dark trunk of a sedan, a Greyhound bus, a hospital—where, where, where?

  He drank the remainder of the rainwater and began rocking them with more vigor. He hugged the child fiercely, felt his own lips meeting the top of the boy’s head.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s go inside. Get you a hot shower and those clothes in the dryer.”

  “Grandpa,” the boy said, “could you taste the clouds?”

  The old man looked toward the flooded driveway, held the cup in his hands, so small.

  “Grandpa?”

  “Come on,” the old man said. “I’m not gonna ask you twice.”

  Inside, the old man drew a hot bath, steam warming the small white-tiled bathroom. Behind him, the little boy removed his clothing, then stood on tiptoe and peed into the toilet. When the old man stood and shook his red hand of the hot bathwater, there was his grandson, stark naked, pale and smiling. The old man handed him a new bar of soap.

  “When you’re done, call me, and I’ll bring a warm towel.” The old man averted his eyes. So long since he’d seen another person naked, least of all a child. “I’m gonna throw these clothes in the dryer.”

  * * *

  In the basement, he tossed the ball of wet clothing into the dryer and started the machine. The whitewashed walls of the cellar bled with rainwater, and in the dark corners of the damp room, an unseen cricket sounded slowly. He sighed deeply. More thunder, even closer this time. The single hanging lightbulb flickered. The floorboards above him seemed to shiver. He took the stairs slowly. He could hear the water still running in the bathtub, the little boy talking, singing to himself.