Beneath the Bonfire Read online

  “Let me make a call,” he said aloud and to no one in particular. “Get us another vehicle.” Then, “Rimes, call Deere’s wife and make some shit up. We all need an alibi. I’ll call Trixie and call in a favor.”

  Rimes nodded his head and stared at Deere, still rocking back and forth, like a man who had dropped his faculties all the way down a very deep, dark well.

  They spent the day on Coffee’s land, barely moving at all. They drank tea and artesian water. From time to time Deere went outside to stand beside the smoldering remains of their garments. He threw stones into the water. His friends watched him like a man on suicide watch.

  Coffee smoked a cigarette. He looked at Rimes in a hard way and said, “I’ve been in worse spots than this. We’ll get it figured.”

  * * *

  When he came out of it, the first thing Deere asked was “Where’s their church?”

  “This is real life, Daniel,” Rimes said. “Okay? Coffee’ll take you home to your wife, but then … You can never come back here.”

  Deere looked into Rimes’s eyes. “There has to be a service. Someone got killed.”

  Coffee shook his head, looking out at the river where the truck now rested under twelve feet of murky water. “They don’t have churches,” he said. “It’ll be at a house. The family’s house, probably. Christ, Deere, come on.”

  “Daniel, just stay away from this,” Rimes said. “They’re looking for a long-haul truck driver. We play this smart, it just goes away.” He made a motion with his hand, as if to smooth the air between them.

  “No,” said Deere. “I own this thing. I killed someone. I fucking killed someone.”

  Coffee shook his head, ran his hands over his unshaven face.

  “Goddamnit, Daniel, stay away from this!” snapped Rimes, standing from his chair to loom up over his seated friend.

  “I’m not a fucking kid!” said Deere. “Okay, Rimes! And listen, don’t you fucking worry. I’m not going to squeal on you.”

  * * *

  The house was a tall, rambling affair, a white building on a hill, and they knew that it was the one from the multitude of horses and buggies outside. Coffee pulled Trixie’s Bronco to the margin of the gravel road a quarter mile from the house. He shut off the engine and looked out at the stark structure. Rimes was back to work. It was just Deere and Coffee. Glancing across the vehicle at his friend, Coffee saw that the man had lost weight in just the few days since the accident and that in patches, his hair seemed to have lost its color and gone white.

  “I’ll tell you again,” Coffee said, “I’ll take you to Canada. Shit, I’d drive you to Mexico. Come on, Deere. You don’t have to take all of this.”

  Deere shook his head.

  “Then I’m calling my lawyer for you,” said Coffee. “Christ. Christ, Daniel.”

  They parked the Bronco and walked the last hundred yards or so to the house.

  Even before they came close to the house, they could hear the singing inside. They neared a bank of rectangular windows, careful not to be seen, pressing their backs to the wood clapboards of the building. The hymn came out of the mourners from a low place and went into the air like a bank of clouds. Deere moved closer to the window, positioning himself so he could see. Their backs were straight and their clothes were a darkness clinging to their skinny bodies. The men wore beards, though their upper lips were freshly shaved and ruddy in the cool air. The words were in another language, and Deere and Coffee stood outside of the house and listened and listened, and by and by Deere began silently crying and Coffee put his arm around his friend, held him. Their breaths were on the window of the house and created a gray fog.

  A small body lay in repose at the front of a large room, and the face of the small body belonged to a little boy with blond hair. His hair captured what little light entered the building like fibers of good energy. A coffin was near his body on the floor, and outside the house Coffee thought he smelled freshly cut pine.

  The two men stood outside of the assembly for some time, hardly breathing. Deere had come to pay his respects, but now he was like a ghost just outside the building, watching the dead boy and his people. Deere weeping silently.

  Coffee leaned into his friend. “Deere, I have to have a smoke. Come with me.”

  Deere remained frozen, his body stiff, his color gone, his cheeks wet where the tears had been.

  Coffee touched Deere’s elbow. “Come on, just a cigarette.”

  They moved quietly away from the house and back down the gravel road, and Coffee began walking back toward the Bronco. He lighted a cigarette and rubbed his temples with the rough padding of his fingers.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” he said over his shoulder. Deere moved into the Bronco cautiously, as if it were a trap. Coffee turned the engine over and backed away from the house, and then headed on down a hillside and into a draw of yellow sandstone, where patches of moss clung to the rock, remaining green all year long. They wound their way through a valley, and when they came to the town’s only intersection, Coffee could see that Deere was looking toward the antique streetlights of the old police station, a small square of a brick building with a single cell. Coffee flashed the left directional and they turned southeast, away from the town, away from all of it.

  “Where are we going?” said Deere, his question unconvincing.

  They did not talk. Just marked the herds of deer and the cows resting out in the fields in the warm afternoon mud. They drove past the abandoned farms, the windmills turning fruitlessly and conjuring no energy or water, past cemeteries long ignored and junkyards where dogs ran from behind chain link fences to chase Trixie’s SUV down the road.

  Once outside of the place that had formed them, they stopped at a gas station and filled Styrofoam cups with burnt-tasting coffee. Coffee leaned against the muddy Bronco as he pumped gasoline and looked out over the land, which was noticeably flatter here and everywhere covered by fields of corn in tight lines that showed the contours of the planet as neatly as a topographic map.

  “I don’t want to go to jail,” Deere said. “It was an accident.”

  Coffee nodded. “I know.”

  They drove slowly, watching the telephone lines crest and fall from pole to pole, not a few of them capped with hawks looking out over the yellow plain. And then the telephone lines converged with great high-tension power lines, and from the state line south they watched as energy ran in rivers of cable toward the city, cables of electricity and power in concentrations so vast that when they rolled down their windows, the atmosphere seemed to vibrate with commerce, with information.

  Coffee hated the taste of the city in his mouth, the thick sour air and the layers of brown in the sky that obscured the sun but also made the sunset before them almost apocalyptically beautiful in its intensity, so magenta and pink and orange that in the west the world seemed already destroyed.

  “I’m not coming back,” said Deere.

  Coffee lighted a cigarette and nodded. “No, Daniel, you’re not.”

  Deere’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and when they pulled into the driveway his wife stood illuminated in the headlights. She waved weakly. The house was lit like a cathedral, every window ablaze in yellows and creams and whites, and in the three-stall garage were two new vehicles, both gleaming under the light of a naked bulb. Deere’s wife walked over to the passenger side of the Bronco, and Coffee could see that her eyes were red and puffy, dark bags sagging above her high cheekbones. She could not have known everything, but she knew something.

  “Hello, Chuck,” she said to Coffee, not unpleasantly. He remembered their wedding, when he had shared a dance with her, Diane’s elegant body in his hands, fragile as Fabergé. The only other time he had ever slow-danced with a woman was back at their high school prom. Diane told him that night, “I shouldn’t say this, but Daniel really looks up to you. He’d follow you anywhere. You know that, don’t you?”

  He had chosen to forget her words, and had, too, until that mome
nt in their driveway, the Bronco still idling, her hand now inside the vehicle, resting on her husband’s shoulder. Deere was home.

  “Won’t you come in, Chuck,” Diane said. “I’ll make you a cup of tea or I can fix you something for dinner. You look beat.”

  Coffee smiled in a very tired sort of way. “I wish that I could, Di.”

  He looked out at his friend’s neighborhood. The cul-de-sac a horseshoe of miniature mansions, all bright with incandescent light, each lawn a carefully cut emerald. He extended his hand to Deere and they shook. Then Deere released the latch of his seat belt and slid out of the vehicle.

  “I’ll send down some more mushrooms,” Coffee said. “Daniel forgot his back at my place.”

  Diane looked at her husband and then at Coffee, this time much more warily. “I don’t know that Daniel has ever come back with mushrooms. Makes a girl wonder what you three are up to.”

  Coffee and Deere smiled and Coffee released the brake and rolled down the minor slope of their driveway. He waved as he put the Bronco into drive and aimed the vehicle north.

  * * *

  The butter had all melted in the pan when Coffee added the onions and garlic and then the mushrooms. Immediately the kitchen was dense with the smell of rich earth. A joint smoldered in an ashtray near the hot plate and the tang of the weed was sharp, its bitterness softened by the citric sweetness of hops or maybe lemongrass. It was a week since the accident. Coffee had been lying low, staying close to his coulee and never answering the old rotary telephone near his bed. He had not seen Rimes since before the boy’s funeral. In the newspapers, the investigation was already slowing.

  He saw the police cruiser as it moved slowly up his driveway and took a final drag from the marijuana cigarette before throwing it into the toilet and flushing. He dripped a drop of saline in each eye, moved the mushrooms off the hot plate, and went outside to intercept his visitor.

  “Charles,” said the officer, who had known Coffee’s parents. They shook hands.

  “I just cooked up some morels,” offered Coffee gamely. “Help me eat them before they go cold.”

  “All right,” said the officer as he removed his hat.

  The Airstream was tight with Coffee’s books, DVDs, and television, and from the walls hung posters of famous paintings and early maps of the unglaciated region. The air inside the trailer was unmistakable, and Coffee propped open a window.

  They sat at Coffee’s only table, a tiny rectangle, and ate from the pan with separate forks.

  “Goddamn,” said the officer appreciatively.

  “I know it,” said Coffee. “All that butter finds those chambers of the mushrooms and coats everything.”

  The officer shook his head and collected himself. “Shame about those Amish,” he said.

  Coffee nodded his head but remained silent, and they sat that way until they both looked out the window, to the river, where the waters had dropped after all the upstate snow had melted away. The water was less turbid, and Coffee knew that in a week the skeleton of the truck might be visible at the bottom of the river.

  “Is there something I can do to help you, Officer?” asked Coffee, leaning back in his chair.

  “Actually,” said the older man, “there is.” He scratched the top of his head, where the hair was growing thin. Long blond strands stretched from one ear to the other over the pale, glossy scalp of the policeman. He reached under the table and produced his wallet, which was full of fifty-dollar bills. He set the thick wallet down on the table so the corners of the bills were fanned out just slightly.

  “My ma has the glaucoma,” he said. “And, well, she sent me here because she heard you were the man to talk to.”

  Coffee inhaled slowly, paused. “Your mom is in some pain?”

  “She’s in a good deal of pain,” said the officer.

  Coffee nodded and stood, selected three books off his shelf, opening them to reveal three clear zippered bags full of marijuana. He placed them on the table, and the officer looked over them as he chewed his mushrooms and scratched his head. Coffee rolled two new joints and lighted both cigarettes in his mouth. He passed one to the older man, who examined the joint with some uncertainty before slowly inhaling a great cloud of smoke. He held it inside his lungs for a long time, and then exhaled in a groan, the muscles in his face relaxing until his skin hung in jowls off his jawline, and his lips stretched into a smile.

  Coffee looked out the window again, through the gauze of the smoke to the river, and he said, “I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”

  LEFTOVERS

  KNEELING, NECK-DEEP IN THE REFRIGERATOR, white light suffusing her face, she tosses his mother’s food into a black garbage bag beside her. He stands at the Formica countertop, watching her wrapping dishes and utensils in newspaper. The house is so quiet. All the radios and televisions are gone. Most of the rooms so barren they echo.

  “I count six bottles of mustard,” Renée says. “And butter. Eight sticks in here and four boxes in the freezer.” Four boxes. She lived by herself. Did she put butter in everything?

  Renée wears elbow-length yellow rubber gloves, constantly swipes strands of hair away from her face. Blows at them angrily, as if they were mosquitoes, wasps.

  Mason walks two boxes out to the trunk of their car. He breathes deeply. His mother had never quite approved of Renée, would’ve screamed to find her there in the kitchen, scrutinizing the contents of her refrigerator. He never understood it, how they could dislike each other so politely, so quietly, so instinctually. And Renée, equally obstinate about his mother. Renée had hated his mother’s “fashion,” her interior decorating, her taste in fiction, her cooking. Hated it. All of it.

  A salad, she would say, can’t we mix in a salad? Just for fun? Like an experiment?

  He returns to the kitchen with more newspaper, more boxes. Steadily they are emptying the house out. Their work is almost complete. Only the garage is left, its dirty rags and motor oil and tools and the deflated footballs and basketballs of his youth. Already they have filled a Dumpster with her things. The dusty furniture, the sun-bleached wall hangings, the knickknacks, old socks, old underwear. It was Mason who had gone through her clothing. Renée refused. He had thrown out her silk stockings, her brassieres, her tented camisoles. Dispossessed the wire hangers of their clothing. Cleared out her dresser drawers, those things she had worn, many of the garments mended and remended. The cotton worn so thin, it seemed a gauze. He looked for her wedding dress but never found it.

  “I’m just going to throw these leftovers away,” Renée says. “I mean, this is disgusting.”

  His mother cooked rich food. Mason loved her cooking. Even after leaving home and traveling the world. After marrying Renée, after losing twenty pounds and never regaining it. Still. Cold winter nights he thinks about her lasagna. Her cassoulet. Her chili. Her pâté. Her Bolognese. Her fresh bread. The butter dish. Ice cream and pie and cobbler. The nights he and Renée came to visit his mother, how ravenously he’d shovel food into his mouth, taking seconds, wiping grease and olive oil off the plate with sliced bread. His mother heaping food onto his plate, smiling, feeding him, nourishing him in this way. Renée across the table, politely nibbling, pushing parcels of food around her plate as if her dish had been poisoned. Smiling grimly.

  Standing over the sink, wrapping coffee mugs emblazoned with the names of places his mother visited in her retirement—Branson, Gatlinburg, Galena, Wisconsin Dells—he thinks about nights there, Sunday nights when he might leave Renée at home and come visit his mother. A bouquet of sunflowers in his hand.

  There’s a lightbulb out in that hallway, his mother would say, I’m scared of ladders these days.

  Or,

  The toilet is always running. Keeps me up nights. Would you mind looking at it?

  His mother boiling noodles, steam collecting into droplets on her eyelashes. His mother wrapping leftovers in aluminum foil, handing the food to him like a package, saying, Here, bring some home for R
enée. Tell her I missed seeing her.

  Renée, who loathes leftovers. Who leaves doggy bags and cardboard boxes on restaurant tables for waiters to rush after them screaming, You forgot your food! Renée, reaching for those leftovers as if the container were a bomb she had left there, its timer counting down to 0:00.

  * * *

  He can’t remember the last time they made love. It has become a memory game, recalling that occasion. Sometimes, even when they are together, perhaps at the grocery store or riding in an airplane, he will close his eyes feigning sleep and think, Has it been a year? Two? Three?

  They don’t talk to each other anymore. At least not substantively. Financially they are comfortable, and money is no longer even an entrée into conflict. She plays bridge three nights a week. He is on a bowling league, plays softball with a lineup of other older guys. The only thing they have left are movies. They drive to a multiplex beside the highway. Sometimes they don’t even see the same film. When they do, they rarely speak before the show or after. He works a sudoku puzzle, she peers down at her cell. She falls asleep on the drive home. Sometimes he carries her into their bedroom, removes her shoes, pulls the quilts over her. He has heard her mumble, I love you, but can’t remember when. Sometimes she asks that he leave her in the car to sleep.

  One evening they disagreed so vehemently about a film that she would not talk to him for three days afterward. She banged around their house, slamming doors, rattling pots and pans.

  How does a distance so wide open between two people who live together so intimately? Who have loved each other? He can’t explain it. Can’t explain where the magic went, the love, the friendship, the decency, the partnership. He doesn’t miss their sex. But he longs for her as a companion. A person to walk with, to hold hands with, to watch television with. To be happily silent with. He wonders if she feels the same, or if this rift is just something that has opened inside him.