Beneath the Bonfire Read online

  The old man walked out to the porch, held his bony shoulders in his hands. He kicked peeling paint off the floorboards with his boots; great chips sloughed off and then went sailing out into the yard. Sat down heavily in the swing, watched his driveway become an ephemeral stream, and waited for his grandson to say his name.

  SVEN & LILY

  SVEN WAS SEVEN FEET TALL. He was a beanpole of a guy with a little paunch of a belly and big goofy hair that he was always combing. At bars he stood behind the scrum at the rail and looked at his hair in the mirror behind the bottles and coiffed that kahuna wave of a thing up another four inches on his head. Sven and my wife went to med school, and she was always trying to get us together. To make us buddies, like you do with little kids or maybe dogs, I don’t know. You push two things close enough that they become one thing.

  Sven was good people, and I didn’t know at first if we could be friends. He was smart. Smarter than me by a country mile. He read biographies of the presidents for fun, and had opinions about the Episcopal church and fuel efficiency and even good Southern barbecue. He didn’t give you that vibration of a guy who liked to drink or smoke or steal looks at women, either. And he was tall. Sven was close to a foot and a half taller than me. He called me Lily, for Lilliputian. Nobody had ever given me a nickname before Sven; even my wife didn’t call me honey or sugar. But when we were at the bar, shooting stick or throwing darts, he wouldn’t call me Lily because he didn’t want other people to get the idea that he thought I was small or deserved a girl’s name or whatever. But I started to think of myself as Lily, and if you asked me what my name was at a bar, a few beers into things, I might tell you it was Lily.

  We became partners, Sven and I. We looked after each other. Like brothers, but closer too, because most brothers I know aren’t half as close as me and Sven were. Sven would go to the wood for you. He was loyal, dependable, I’ll say that. The kind of guy you can count on, which seems to me to be a diminishing resource these days. He didn’t have much meat on his bones, but he was rangy and he could grab dudes before they got to him. Once he had them, I’d come along with a pool cue or an eight ball and do the rest. But Sven was good people always. He didn’t start those things, and I don’t mean that we were always mixing things up, because we weren’t.

  But we would a little.

  Sven didn’t like to fight. Bad guys found him because he was a giant, and bad guys always want to take a swing at the giant. In the end, we almost always made friends with the bad guys too, Sven throwing his long arms around them like lassos, bringing them in, making them smile.

  “See,” he’d say, “that was stupid. Stupid fun. You gotta get me to the floor! You don’t fight a tower by climbing up its side. You knock the goddamn tower down with a stick of dynamite! But I tell you this, Spider, I like you! I like your spirit!”

  Sven was good with names. When he met people, he squinted down at their faces while he was pumping their hands, and in this way he took a mental Polaroid of them. He walked into bars and befriended everyone, learned their names and the names of their partners. He could win over anyone. One minute a guy was swinging at Sven’s chin with a glass beer mug; the next, Sven had him in a headlock, rubbing his bony fists into the guy’s scalp, asking, “What’s your name? Huh? What’s your name? Not gonna’ stop ’til I get a name!”

  Finally the guy would break, worn down and embarrassed. “Fuck it! Spider! Okay, goddamnit, I’m Spider!”

  “Well, all right, Spider,” Sven would say. “I think you owe me and my buddy here a drink.”

  And so Spider or whoever would buy, and after we’d left the bar that night, we’d all be peeing in the alley together, or maybe weaving our way to the nearest KFC to split a bucket of chicken. And Sven would’ve added him to our ad hoc army of barroom confederates.

  Sven was like that. Before med school, he was an engineer. Wicked smart. He could build you a bridge or a goddamn motor and the next minute give you sound advice on your taxes or an invention idea that your dad had scrawled out on a napkin. His mind worked in mathematics and angles. He told me that he liked having me around because I had a low center of gravity. He said I was his pit bull Lily, and thereafter that’s just how I thought of myself, as a pit bull, or maybe like the pit bull was my spirit animal. Like an emblem or a logo that is more what you are than what you are really. I even started carrying myself like a dog, my shoulders all balled up around my head. At night I did push-ups and crunches until my gut disappeared and what was left over became all bulging ab muscles. I began looking like a linebacker.

  Sven was one of those guys your wife puts you with because she sees only the good in him, and she thinks that maybe if you just buddy up with him, you’ll get better too. My wife saw white light coming out of Sven’s eyes and asshole. To her, he farted choral music or those big damp notes of the organ at church.

  * * *

  Kids loved Sven. They loved his cartoon name, his cartoon hair, his cartoon giant size. They swung off his ropy arms like playground equipment. They shrieked with laughter at the size of his hands. Slid their miniature feet into the dark caverns of his shoes and giggled themselves wet plodding around our house, or Sven and Tessa’s apartment.

  My daughter loved Sven, which was only further evidence for my wife that Sven was magical.

  “Mr. Sven?” Lola asked one night when he was over.

  “Yes, Peanut,” he said.

  “Do you like Girl Scout Cookies?”

  “I love Girl Scout Cookies.”

  “Would you buy some of my Girl Scout Cookies?”

  “Of course. Do you have Oreos?”

  “No!” Lola laughed.

  “Do you have … Nilla Wafers?”

  “No!”

  “Do you have … Thin Mints?”

  “Yes!”

  “Okay. I’ll take five boxes of Thin Mints.”

  Lola clapped her hands and leapt off the ground. Then she became shy again. Folded her hands. Looked from Sven to the ground.

  “How tall are you, Mr. Sven?” she giggled.

  “Thirty feet tall,” he answered, straight-faced and nonchalant.

  “No!” she cried. “How tall are you really, Mr. Sven? How tall?”

  “Ah, let me think,” Sven said, nursing a bottle of beer. “Fifteen feet tall.”

  Whereupon Lola’s mouth went slack, into a kind of incredible O. She walked over to my wife, Nadine, and whispered into her ear, “Mr. Sven is fifteen feet tall. And he’s going to buy five boxes of my cookies!”

  “He is a very tall man,” my wife said, winking at Sven as I cleared empty beer and wine bottles and swept Lola’s crumbs into my empty hands.

  * * *

  Sven liked pool. Maybe because his height meant that no shot on the green table was an impossibility. His long fingers made perfect bridges. His engineering mind found the truest angles and shortcuts and banks. His medical mind pieced out the logic and practicality of his most geometric shots. His only handicap was the pool-hall lamps that hung low over the verdant tables. Sometimes I would hold the lamp off to the side for him as he stretched out over the table like a praying mantis.

  “Stupid lights,” he would say, motioning to the odd scars on his forehead, courtesy of various collisions with hanging things.

  We became friends, real friends, shooting stick. Two grown men orbiting the green felt of the table. Organizing the rainbow of balls. Spinning the cue under a blue cube of chalk. Orchestrating the jukebox. Wilson Pickett. Sam & Dave. Gladys Knight & the Pips. The Rolling Stones. Sven and I never walked into a bar or pool hall without a soundtrack in mind. And I liked Sven because he had a sense of fairness that is rare in most watering holes. We took turns buying each other beers, gave each other quarters or dollar bills for the Wurlitzer. When our guts were full of beer and we had to return to our wives, we’d sit down together to eat, alternating as to who grabbed the check. Sven took care of me, and I tried to take care of him too.

  I knew that with me, he could be
someone different. Not just the future doctor who’d been an engineer. He could be a little bad too. Or at least he could play bad, mix it up a little, rub up against a skirt in a bar and not worry that the news was going to get back to his wife. If he got scraped up in a fight I’d tell Tessa that he’d had one too many beers and gouged his head into a billiards lamp hung too low over the table. That sort of thing.

  “If he wasn’t so tall,” she’d say, shaking her head and putting her arms around his narrow waist. Sven was her baby. Her great big too-tall, skinny baby. Sometimes at the end of an evening, I’d hear her talking to him, whispering into his ear, almost the way you might talk to a baby, all molasses and maple syrup poetry. Her fingernails were long, with deep burgundy polish, and she liked to stroke his long goofy face with those nails. But I liked Tessa very much. Sven deserved a woman like her.

  * * *

  Sven liked me, I think, because I knew where the trouble was and how to get close to it without getting burned or scarred too much. Sven and my wife were older than the other med school students, who were mostly just kids, still fighting back greasy faces smudged in acne. Still rubbing up against one another in too-expensive bars, trading diseases like baseball cards. Sven and Tessa came over to our place almost once a week for dinner or brunch, but Sven and I hung out once a week for sure.

  “You and Sven,” said my wife, “you guys sure hang out a lot. Should I be jealous?”

  “Nah,” I’d say. “Poor guy just needs to blow off some steam.”

  “Sven?” she’d say. “There’s no steam in Sven. He’s mellow yellow.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I’d say. “I’ve seen him get wild a few times.” I never talked about the fights, the alleyway pukes, the occasional bathroom joint.

  “I don’t believe it,” she’d say seriously. “Engineers don’t even have that in them.”

  “Yeah, but he’s going to be a doctor,” I’d argue. “Doctors have egos. Doctors need to let their steam out too. All that stress you guys are under?”

  “Not Sven,” she’d say. “He’s too sweet.”

  It irked me, to tell you the truth, her inability to see him the way I was able to. It made me feel jealous, I guess, as if I was worth less than he was. It made me feel heavy with knowledge too, and if it hadn’t been Sven, I swear I would have blown her vision of him into a million little pieces. But when you know someone like Sven, you defend him, because you want there to be good people in the world and it doesn’t do anyone any good to break them down into something as bad and ugly as everyone else.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re probably right.”

  * * *

  One night I picked Sven up in our beater Toyota Camry. It took him a long time to fold himself into that little car, even with the passenger seat pushed as far back as it could go. He rode around town with his knees near his chest, hugging them through his pants. He rolled the window down, and I watched as he lapped up the first warm spring air, like a happy golden retriever, cheeks and lips practically flapping in the wind, gums bright pink, his too-large teeth immaculately white. I rubbed my tongue over my own teeth, stained yellow brown from too much coffee and a chewing tobacco habit that I kept secret from everyone but Sven. I offered him the pouch of shredded tobacco. He loved to chew tobacco with me and had begun bringing a toothbrush with him when we went out so that he could brush his teeth before I returned him home to Tessa.

  He pinched a generous helping of the tobacco from the pouch and tucked it into his mouth for his molars to grind, then smiled like a chipmunk, and we both spat out our windows, careful not to streak the car with brown, tobacco-flecked juice. Evidence of our shenanigans.

  “Goddamn!” said Sven, tapping out a rhythm on the roof of the Japanese automobile. “Where we going tonight? Shoot some stick? Toss some darts? What’re you up for, Lily? Huh? What’s the plan, Lily-man!”

  I did have the evening mapped out, actually, into a kind of plan. I had heard of a bar out in the country, a half hour’s drive, with a pool table Minnesota Fats had once played on and whose name was supposedly etched in the side of the table like a goddamn testament from God.

  Sven seemed tickled. “I want to touch his name,” he said, with some gravity. “I want to run that table like it was a basement floor. I want those balls dropping into rabbit holes.”

  He spat out into the countryside, already all around us, the sky loud with the wings of Canada geese, the world thick with the perfume of freshly spread cowshit. It made me happy to see Sven already so carefree, even before the beer or the billiards. Before we even stepped into yet another dark, dense rectangular bunker of a building and began punching numbers and letters on a new jukebox. We were a missile in that little car, a billiards-seeking missile with two passengers on a guided course toward a happy motherfucking target.

  * * *

  The bar was at a crossroads of country lanes and soybean fields with a gravel parking lot and an abundance of neon glowing in the windows like some pirate casino shipwrecked out on the lonely prairie. We left the Toyota in the lot, among all the Fords and Chevrolets, where it looked utterly out of place. We spat out our tobacco, our heads fuzzy, warm, and reeling.

  Sven entered the bar first, ducking under the low doorway, me following behind him like an early-afternoon shadow smaller than its maker. We found stools at the bar and ordered a couple of tappers as we took in the place and found the table, on one end of the bar under a cone of yellow light, its felt not the dense Technicolor green of a new table but a pale, well-used green ripped and patched in places, its rails hard and fast and brutalized. It was a crabgrass gravel sandlot of a pool table.

  “Fast table,” said Sven.

  “She’s seen better days,” I said. “I’m gonna pump the juke.”

  It was a hillbilly/yokel jukebox chock-full of dated singles, almost like a time capsule intended to teach the history of country and western music. I played the standards: Hank Senior, Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard, Bob Wills, and then some “newish” stuff to placate the younger regulars: Clint Black, George Strait, and Garth, but steering clear of the teenybopper BS.

  Sven had already moved over to the table. The balls were big confetti on the abused felt, and he raked them in the triangle. Then he began moving around the table, touching all the surfaces with his hands, like they do in movies when someone is looking for the entrance to a secret passage. I watched him from the juke, my tapper already mostly gone.

  I watched as he stood up quickly and said, “Found it! I found him!”

  “Sweet!” I ordered another and walked over to the table.

  The man’s name was carved near the quarters slot. Four letters, carved deep and crude into the wood: FATS. I touched his name and voltage went through me, electrified my finest hairs, curled my toes. I had touched Jim Morrison’s tombstone once, on a family vacation to France. It was like that. Like what I imagined God and Adam touching fingers felt in that painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Electricity.

  “I’ll be,” Sven murmured approvingly, scratching at the scant whiskers peppering his checks. “How many pool tables in the world can brag that Minnesota Fats broke their balls? Huh? Not too many, I’d say.”

  We shook our heads in wonder and took a few long sips off our beers. Then Sven pointed to me and I selected a cue off the wall and broke.

  * * *

  Sometimes a bar is like a cocoon or a womb, a place you wish you never had to leave. Everything you need is there: cold beer, familiar music, frozen pizza thin as paper, warm cashews if you’re lucky. Baseball or football on the television. Jerky in a jar. Pickled pig’s feet. If you’re good people, if you’re punching the juke and minding your business, people take care of you too, in a way that doesn’t really happen in the real world. The house buys you a drink, maybe. The bartender says she likes your taste in music and slips you a fiver to keep the machine humming.

  I had gone to the bar to order some more beers, leaving Sven at the table, where he was r
acking. He liked to rack, insisted that a broken triangle of balls was like a bad foundation; the rest of the game was then broken too, and suspect. He was good at racking, and I’d seen him rerack a set of balls five, six, seven times, laboring to unify them just so. Rolling them around the table again and again and snapping them into rigid formation.

  “Two more,” I told the bartender, an older woman with a hard-worn face, an unlit cigarette dangling loose between chapped lips.

  “Looks like your buddy has a friend,” she said, nodding toward the table.

  I’d looked away for only a second, but there was a beautiful blonde moving toward Sven in a languid kind of sashay, jeans tight on long, long legs; it was excruciatingly wonderful watching her move. Her waist was impossibly narrow, and even from my vantage across the room at the bar, I could make out a set of high cheekbones and bee-stung lips that reminded me of a Russian ballerina.

  “Where the hell’d she come from?” I said to myself, drinking fast and trying to piece together the world in front of me.

  “Careful with that one, though,” said the bartender. “She’s a goddamn man assassin. Eats ’em alive. Her there, she’s been divorced thrice.”

  I held up three fingers, brows raised. The bartender nodded gravely.

  “She looks a little young for that,” I offered lamely.

  “They start early ’round here. Anyway, you watch out for your friend.”

  “Oh, Sven’ll be okay.”

  She was near the cues, touching them, and she selected one from the forest of other sticks and motioned to the table. I could see a shit-eating grin crack over Sven’s face like he’d won at bingo or found a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk.

  Maybe I should and maybe I shouldn’t have, but I left the bar just then for a dip of tobacco and a sip of my beer. A girl like that was something out of a dream or a movie, and I didn’t want to watch Sven or be around for whatever happened. There was something almost pornographic about the scene that I didn’t want to be an audience member of, although that hadn’t stopped the rest of the bar, rubbernecking for all they were worth. No, I’d seen enough, thank you. Sven was laboring toward a secret I didn’t need to be privy to the details of. I couldn’t lie to Nadine about a crime I didn’t witness.