Beneath the Bonfire Read online

  Deere was so stoned he passed out in the bed of Coffee’s truck before his friends reached the base of the hill. His skin, pale as milk only six hours ago, had darkened to an angry pink.

  “Deere!” yelled Rimes as he slapped the side of the truck. “Put on a goddamned shirt, man. We’re going to a nice establishment.” He threw his friend a T-shirt and Deere slid it on, wincing, then promptly fell back to sleep.

  Rimes and Coffee slid onto the bench seat of the truck and pulled out, winding through the valley bottoms. In the fields, sandhill cranes stabbed at the black earth and the yellow stubble of cornstalks, leftovers of the autumn harvest.

  “There was a time people shot those birds,” said Rimes.

  Coffee shook his head. “Lucky there’s anything left of anything, the way people are.”

  The hills had emptied of people like them, and Rimes and Coffee knew it. Old men who’d run general stores for decades were dying, leaving their shelves empty, their doors unlocked. The children of those entrepreneurs taped FOR SALE signs in the windows and then left. Those buildings stayed vacant and then other buildings went vacant until whole communities came to a standstill, as if something had come silently through and sucked the breath of life away, leaving only the husks of a former time. In the newspaper stands long ignored, stories now years old moldered into history.

  And yet even as the towns themselves hollowed out, the hills and coulees were being resettled. The Amish had found the Driftless, all the farms without farmers, barns without cows, and they had come out on their horse-drawn buggies and bought things up. But they were like a thing apart and unto themselves, moving around the area in a loud silence, all in black, always somber. So the hills were gaining people quietly, mute new inhabitants whose language seemed to be labor and prayer.

  Coffee and Rimes had hung on, two outliers, two stones too stubborn to erode away. Rimes the tractor and seed salesman and Coffee the marijuana farmer. Rimes had bought his parents’ old home while Coffee lived in a small Airstream at the nape of a lost coulee, a nowhere geography not easily photographed by passing airplanes or satellites.

  “Where to then?” asked Coffee.

  “Let’s hit up the Antlers,” said Rimes. “They got good burgers.”

  Coffee nodded his head and peered over his shoulder at their slumbering friend, his lips moving in some secret, nonsensical language.

  The Antlers was a low bunker of a bar, dark and festooned everywhere with taxidermy, much of it from a time when animals populated the draws and coulees in greater numbers. The walls were sharp with great baskets of antlers, and below the American ivory were glistening eyes like minor stars that held the light of the pastel glow of the jukebox.

  Poachers sat at the bar, bags of mushrooms at the feet of their stools, heavy and fragrant with the earth and the specific rot found beneath a dense carpet of leaves. The three men sat at the bar, Deere unsteady on his stool, Coffee and Rimes seated close beside him, holding Deere to the planet he threatened to spill off of.

  “Three beers and three burgers,” said Coffee to the bartender, a woman named Trixie whose son had been lost in Iraq, a contractor who drove jet fuel through the desert. His high school graduation photo in an ornate frame near the cash register.

  The beer came first, and Coffee and Rimes downed it lustily, the apples in their throats working like thirsty pumps. Deere bobbed and weaved on his stool, his eyes jacketed behind heavy lids.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “The Antlers,” said Rimes as Trixie deftly delivered their plates onto the counter in front of their resting elbows and dirty hands.

  “Looks like a zoo,” slurred Deere. “A zoo full of dead things.”

  “Taxidermy.” Rimes laughed. “Eat that burger now, the mushrooms are going to start to pop.”

  “Zoos make me sad,” said Deere as he picked the burger off its paper plate and opened his mouth slowly, hugely, before deciding he needed to finish the thought. “Just a damn jail. A jail for animals. No better than going to a jail and poking at the inmates. Throwing food at them. Getcha fuckin’ killed.” Suddenly he Frisbeed a hamburger bun at the frozen bust of a sixteen-point buck.

  The poachers at the bar were staring down the rail at Deere, and Trixie’s arms were folded tightly near the cash register, where behind her the lost son smiled broadly, his haircut already slightly dated.

  “Eat that burger,” ordered Coffee. “Eat that burger and sober up and be halfways good, for chrissakes. Maybe we can get out of here before somebody tries to kill you.”

  “Fuck ’em,” said Deere, his mouth full of meat and dripping grease. “I’m ready.”

  “Check, please,” said Coffee, offering Trixie a tight-lipped, handsome smile.

  “Sober him up,” she said as she handed him the bill. “Sober him up ’fore he says something stupid. It’s too early for that philosophical shit anyway. Hard to believe he come from here at all.”

  Coffee paused. Looked at her hard to let her know that Deere was still his friend. Conveying to her that they were bonded just as brothers are or the strangle molecules that hold the rain together or the particles of a boulder.

  “He’s as much this place as anyone else and probably a good goddamned deal better than any of us,” said Coffee quietly to Trixie in a tone and volume meant for her only. “And he’s my goddamned friend. And we’ll sit here all fucking day and drink your beer if we so choose.”

  He brought the wad of bills down on the bar inside a knuckled fist, his thick hand making a crack like a walnut detonating into fragments. It stilled the bar, turned the poachers’ faces down, where they stared at the bubbles rising in their beer glasses. Trixie’s eyes flitted to the crumpled money, twice what their bill had been, and she lowered her head too, pretended to survey her toenails, which needed a new coat of paint. Coffee never took his eyes off her. Trixie acted tough at the Antlers, but Coffee knew her from all around and knew that she was mostly broken by her son’s death, and sometimes when she came down his driveway in an ancient Bronco with a younger girlfriend looking to buy pot, he would invite them into his trailer and they would smoke together in a tight circle where he could watch as her sorrow lifted or faded like the early evening sun becoming night. He knew the money he’d just left on the bar would come back to him, but he always wished it wouldn’t and that she might just move on to someplace else.

  “Come on, Deere,” said Coffee, lifting his friend from the stool. “Let’s get us some morels.” He shot a glance at Rimes, who nodded as they lifted Deere’s arms over their shoulders and shrugged him out of the bar, carrying their friend, the walking wounded, stoned and drunk, back into the daylight just as the sun found its zenith in an unblemished sky.

  “Let’s get him to drink some water,” said Rimes. “I got a canteen somewhere.”

  “Beer is water!” said Deere loudly to no one in particular. Then, quieter, “Beer is water.”

  Rimes found the canteen behind the bench seat and, unscrewing the cap, took a small sip before holding the vessel to his friend’s parched lips.

  “Artesian water,” said Rimes.

  Deere nursed the canteen greedily and finished its contents, burping into his hand and wiping his lips. He seemed instantly more sober.

  “I tell you what,” he said, his voice already more steady, “that’s a whole lot better’n city water. The stuff back home? Tastes like pool water and cleaning products. I can barely drink it. Even my ice cubes smell funny.” He shook his head. “Artesian water, huh?” He looked at Rimes admiringly.

  “Right out of the earth,” said Rimes. “Best thing in the world. Cold and sweet and free.”

  “I’d like to find an artesian beer spring,” said Deere, imagining his Big Rock Candy Mountain. “All the free beer a guy could drink. What do you think of that?”

  They laughed and Coffee slapped Deere on the back, causing him to wince, his sunburn now a suit of pain.

  “Daniel Deere has risen from the dead,” said Coffee
happily.

  “All right, then,” said Deere. “Let’s go find some fucking morels.”

  And so all three men piled onto the bench seat of the truck, their favorite pew, and the truck carried them away from the Antlers full of food and newly revived. On the radio was an old Merle Haggard song, and inside the car they beat their fists against whatever halfway flat surface they could reach, and through the countryside the truck went, a motley kind of percussion section accompanied by a trio of happy voices as the men sang together, butchering the lyrics but always perfectly synchronized on the refrain. Their bellies were full and they felt invincible and high and an unlikely family only occasionally reunited.

  The truck pulled to a stop beside a steeply inclined hill that rose into a sharp nipple in the sky, its slopes everywhere studded by dead elms.

  “Got the beers?” asked Deere.

  “Got ’em,” said Coffee.

  “Got the weed?” asked Deere.

  Coffee patted his breast pocket. “My man,” he said. “We got enough weed to get a buffalo high. Now, you ready, or you need another fuckin’ catnap?”

  Deere smiled. “I know those mushrooms are popping now. You can damn near hear ’em if you just try.” Deere did not smoke either cigarettes or marijuana usually, but he did in the company of Rimes and Coffee. “Let’s make hay,” he said, lighting a joint and beginning to storm the hill.

  The mushrooms were indeed popping now. Everywhere beneath the elms they emerged from the earth, their form a dunce cap textured like brain, just slightly harder than cottage cheese. Beneath the trees the men went on their hands and knees, careful not to disrupt the forest floor too much, knives in hands, cutting the mushrooms free of their bases, stuffing the morels into their bags. They did not shout upon discovering a cache of mushrooms. There were other men in the forests too, and voices carried between the hillsides, through the valleys. So the three friends just whistled low to one another, always careful to stay close, their whistles like the call of a strange new bird, their own flock of three.

  At dusk they stopped.

  “How much we got?” Deere asked excitedly.

  They emptied bag after bag into the trunk of Coffee’s truck and surveyed the bounty as they sipped beers.

  “Must be twelve, fifteen pounds,” said Rimes, shaking his head in wonder. “A good goddamned day is what I have to say about it all.”

  The three men shook hands and grinned widely. They were filled with a kind of glow, warm and big in their chests.

  “You ought to take all these mushrooms back for your wife,” Coffee said to Deere. Rimes looked up, mildly aghast.

  “The hell are we gonna do with fifteen pounds of morels?” Deere laughed. “Shit. I love Diane too, but mostly we eat out anyway.”

  “Still,” continued Coffee, “you could show her what we do together. What it’s like to live up here. What you’re capable of finding for free just walking around the woods. Shit, you two could walk into any fancy restaurant down there and probably sell these mushrooms for three, four hundred dollars.”

  “Well, we’re doing just fine,” Deere said casually. “We don’t need the money. Maybe you two oughta split the takings. I don’t mind. Leave me enough for an omelet or something.”

  A look of subdued hurt streaked quickly across Coffee’s face, the celebration of only a moment earlier abruptly extinguished. Deere seemed to flinch too, perhaps recognizing in the after-moment just how different their lives were. Here his friend had been trying to give a nearly priceless ephemeral gift, and he had turned it to ash.

  Rimes saw their glows fading and spoke up. “You know what I think. I say we go back to my place, fry up a couple pans of these fuckers, grill some steaks, and hit the bars tonight. We can rehydrate, build a little base in our stomachs, maybe chase some tail, what do you think?”

  With some relief Deere said, “Sounds good to me. Let me drive, though, huh? I never get to drive a pickup anymore, least of all on these roads. Crack me a beer, Coffee.”

  Deere had already moved behind the great loose wheel of Coffee’s pickup truck as the man reached into a heavily dented cooler to produce the last three bottles of beer, only now the slightest bit warm. Coffee didn’t like money. Didn’t like to talk about it, didn’t even like the transactions of his business. Some nights in his Airstream, alone with the stars or the static of the radio, he thought about his measure as a man, the stock a stranger might take in him. He was more than what he seemed, but there were times in which he knew no better way of displaying himself than by flashing a fat roll of bills at the bar, yet in those moments he felt dry and shallow too. Deere’s success intimidated him, the kind of wealth that opened worlds and people and knowledge that Coffee could not fathom. Deere’s life was an unknowable and elegant charade to Coffee.

  They all drank as the truck weaved over the road, stitching a jagged path between the painted lines, the headlights illuminating the marble eyes of animals along the way. Coffee let the money talk recede from his consciousness and relaxed against the bench seat, enjoying being chauffeured about the countryside. His eyelids closed and he eased into a light sleep, a faint smile easing across his face.

  “Deere!” screamed Rimes suddenly. Coffee’s eyes flashed open. He braced his thick arms against the dashboard.

  What filled Deere’s head in that instant was confusion as he turned his face away from the road to look at the horrified Rimes. He had thought Rimes was trying to say, “Deer!”, but the driver of the drunken pickup saw no deer, and in turning to observe Rimes, he neglected to see the blaze orange reflective triangle affixed to the rear of a horse-drawn buggy. And so Coffee’s truck hurtled straight into the buggy and smashed through its wood and metal skeleton until it was driving into and over the terrified horse, the animal letting out the stark, anguished scream of a creature losing its life in the night. The horse was clipped at its legs and its muscular body went flying into the darkness of the passenger-side ditch, limbs contorted sickly, the sheen of sweat on its glossy coat vibrant in the headlights, contours of bulging sinew and skin and bone, a beautiful thing wasted.

  Blood on the cracked windshield, and the hood crumpled into a shallow U of steel. Deere hit the brakes and the tires skidded unbearably over the strange fluids now spilled all over the asphalt. And then they were still.

  Deere began screaming and soon was hyperventilating, his breaths ragged and phlegmy with shock and confusion. Rimes grabbed Deere by the head and held him, wrapped him in his arms and held him and shushed him as if he were a man reversed into a baby.

  Coffee kicked his mangled door free and moved into the night. He could hear the blood in the horse’s lungs and the sound of its useless legs quivering in the night and it was almost more than his mind could process. For a moment his resolution was broken and he spun under the stars in a state of disbelief, all his nerves undone and burnt into a circuit of dead sensors.

  The headlights were flickering and unreliable, splashed in red, so he moved blind in the night, using his feet to feel the debris and his ears to reach out into the black for anything that moved or spoke or cried. His feet touched the shredded canvas of the buggy’s body. His feet tripped on the crippled metal chassis, then were caught in the leg trap of a broken wheel, its spokes gone in places. His feet kicked what he thought was a bag of clothing or food, and he reached down and instead touched the smooth face of a child. He jerked his hand back toward his own mouth, but his breath was gone. He knelt down slowly and touched the child again and knew the body was horribly still. He began moving back toward Deere’s sobbing.

  “Does it run?” he barked, not even waiting for a response. “Does the motherfucker run!”

  “Christ, Coffee,” said Rimes. “I mean, Jesus Christ is anyone out there?”

  Coffee put his hand past Deere and touched the keys. The engine inexplicably was still running, ticking now loud against the night. Coffee pushed Deere toward the center of the bench, and though he could not see Rimes, he knew the man’
s face was etched in sorrow and confusion. Deere continued to babble and sing out bursts of unintelligible madness.

  “Shut that door if you can,” ordered Coffee. “Shut that fucking door and help me out here, Rimes. We’ve got to get him out of here. We’ve all got to go.”

  “What about the Amish?” said Rimes. “Are they out there?”

  “It’s done,” said Coffee. “Jesus Christ, man, it is done. All I know is we got to get the fuck outta here, right now.”

  And then a thin wrecked voice called out, weak against the sound of the engine, and it said, “Help.”

  “Goddamn it, Coffee,” said Rimes. “We get ’em and drop ’em in town, for God’s sake. We can’t leave ’em to die.”

  Deere wailed, his face a dripping mask of tears and snot.

  “We’re letting them be,” said Coffee, and he closed his door and eased the truck limping forward and away from the unseen array of carnage.

  * * *

  In the morning, they pushed the truck into the river that bisected Coffee’s land, and it sunk into the brown water and vanished. Rimes built a fire and burned their clothes in a pyre. They stared skittishly at the smudgy smoke that went up out over the coulee. Afterward, Deere just rocked himself back and forth on Coffee’s couch. His face was swollen, his eyes red and haunted. Coffee tuned the radio, searching for news of the crash, but when he found it, turned the volume down so that only he could learn the details. The police were searching for the killers of a small boy, criminals who had crippled a family and killed their horse. Coffee turned the radio off and watched the embers of their fire.