Beneath the Bonfire (16 page)

Foreman leaned against his shovel, dripping.

Hazelwood at the wheel, whispering
Every precaution, every precaution, every precaution
.

HOUR SIXTY-SIX

Morning, the world absolved, bathed in white. Little birds in the boughs of the pine trees. The sky so blue, the sun still hidden behind the forest, white and yellow. The two men at the table, asleep in their chairs.

Foreman awoke first, so sore from the frantic shoveling he was almost unable to rise. He went to the hearth, began to build a new fire, perhaps his last. He let the heat unwind the pain in his hands. Hazelwood snoring, but there at least, hunched over on his chair, asleep beside the hearth, and alive. Foreman shuffling over to the stove, pouring water into a kettle for coffee, measuring grounds, lighting the burner. He watched Hazelwood sleep. He would put the man back together, see him to the hospital and away.

Foreman cracked eggs into a cast-iron frying pan, breaking the shells against the lip of the pan. In another pan, bacon popping and the smell of its grease in the air. Hazelwood lifted his head. The CEO looked like hell.

“I have to shit,” he said. “That oil. It's like my wife.” He ran into the bathroom.

They ate together at the old table, newly stained black with Gulf oil.

“I'm going to get you fed,” Foreman said. “We're going to drink some coffee, get your strength back in you, and then we're going to hope like hell a plow has come for that outer road. The driveway, I think, might be impassable. But at least we can get you to the road.”

Hazelwood nodded, ate ravenously. He was gaining color in his face again. He did not look at Foreman.

They watched water drip from the eaves, the day warming, the sun climbing back to its throne. Two pots of coffee, a pound of bacon, a brick of cheese, a half-dozen eggs. Hazelwood scurrying into the bathroom every hour, returning, eating more. At noon he looked at Foreman, as if sizing the old man up. “I'd like to borrow some clothes. I don't want my kids seeing me like this. The way I smell.”

Foreman nodded. They moved around each other warily.

They tried the old truck, but the going was impossible. At last Foreman took a map from the glove compartment and spread it across the old rusty hood. He pointed to a small blue speck and a broken brown line on the map and said, “You're here, all right? You see this. It's an old logging road. That's at the end of the driveway. Get on that road and it'll take you just outside of town. Take this,” he said, pushing the map into Hazelwood's chest. “Point out where you come from to the cops. They'll know where to come.”

Foreman gave Hazelwood a pair of snowshoes, his parka, mittens, and a wool hat. A thermos of coffee and a backpack of food and supplies. “Go on,” he said, “you outlasted me. Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind. Go. Or I'll just shoot you.”

Hazelwood eyed him, moving backward awkwardly in the shoes, the snow sticky and heavy. Foreman turned his back to the man and went back inside the cabin, sat at the table and looked outside. Then he stood, took a bottle of wine, uncorked it, and drank without a cup until his teeth were a dark purple.

HOUR SEVENTY

Evening clouds drooping down close to the snow-burdened balsams and the spreading crowns of the white pines. The old floorboards slick with gasoline and oil, kerosene from the lamps and lanterns. The dying widower hunched over at the table with a box of matches, the main room of the cabin pungent with fumes, though dark. No lights. The white of the earthbound snow enough light for the old man's failing eyes to see that there was nothing left to do but what he had all along intended and thought to be right.

He struck the sulfur of the match tip and held the little flame in his hand for a moment before flinging it into the darkness. And then he waited at the table, drinking water from his favorite glass, the tin cup now empty except for its own little lake of fire. His body growing hot, little flames dancing near his shoes, his trouser legs.

CODA

Sirens and the strobe of blue, red, and white lights through a winter forest, plows leading the parade, pushing the snow to the sides of the backcountry roads. The missing person, the CEO, in the town's only motel, guarded by two state troopers, his wife en route from Duluth.

Ahead of the police cruisers, the forest begins to glow yellow and red, and then they smell smoke. The driveway is too narrow for the state plows, so the police and SWAT leave their vehicles and come high-stepping through the snow, their assault rifles held high, a few dogs pulling at their leashes, fangs bared, slobbering white bubbles. The driveway is a long corridor of white, overhung by snow-burdened tree branches. They move through the tunnel of boughs toward the fire, which is loud and huge. Already the cabin is falling in upon itself.

They find the truck, chains on the tires, the shovel abandoned. They watch the flames jump up to threaten the boughs of a huge white pine. They listen as windows and glasses and china explode. They stand back farther. They begin looking for prints, tracks in the snow. Some sign of escape. But there are no tracks to be found.

And in the night their sirens, and far off, a pack of wolves. The ice of the little pond creaking in the cold and a house on fire.

 

IN WESTERN COUNTIES

H
ER FACE HAD BEEN MADE
into a jigsaw puzzle. Aida saw how the poor girl tried to hide the scars: the cake makeup, the masking hands, the long hair and baseball cap. The edges of the puzzle pieces purple and crudely lined. Her mouth crooked, but somehow sweet. She smiled painfully at Aida. Pushed an envelope of money across the sticky surface of the caf
é
table. The envelope was not thick; it was all that the scarred woman had left.

The restaurant was abandoned. The waitress hovered around them, refilled their mugs, nodded gamely at Bethany. Said to her, “These are on me.” Then leaned into the table, wiped the surface with her bleachy rag and said, “There's a way out. Always is. I been there too. Don't let him beat you like that. You'll be dead inside a year by the look of it.”

Some of the fortitude seemed to leak out of Bethany and she deflated slightly, set her mug down, and readjusted the bill of her cap. She looked up at the waitress and said, “God bless you.” But Aida could see that she didn't believe in God at all, that her eyes contained only anger and fear.

The waitress nodded and then went away, near the coffee urn, where she watched them, sometimes kibitzing with the cook, a pock-faced man with a long ponytail who peered out at the two women from behind the heating elements glowing red and orange.

They sat for a while, saying nothing, glancing all around the caf
é
, and then Aida said, “Let's go outside, then,” taking Bethany by the elbow and gently lifting her up. She took the money and stuffed it into her jacket. Hoped she would remember it was there. She was always losing things, so many things.

They went to Aida's truck, an old F-150. Aida opened the door and guided Bethany onto the bench seat. She went around behind the truck and looked at the woman's slumped shoulders framed in the rear window.
Bethany,
she reminded herself. With her long finger, she wrote the name in the palm of her hand, making the calloused skin go white where the letters were:
BETHANY
. She wrote the name again in the dirt and dust that clung to the metal of her truck:
BETHANY
. There were chains in the bed of the truck and a tire iron. A spare tire, a bag of last year's autumn leaves, and two cement blocks.

Aida was not in the habit of driving the truck. That morning, en route to Red Wing, she forgot where the knob for the headlights was. She'd just retired from the state highway patrol after twenty-five years and was accustomed to driving a police cruiser. She kicked the gravel. Hail was in the forecast and she waited for it to hit, the violence of the blue-white pellets. She got inside the truck, slamming the door. Bethany shuddered.

“I'm tired of it,” Bethany said. “Tired! He does this to me, but there ain't anything for me to do. Nothing to do to make him stop! Goddamn it!” She beat her fist into the dashboard.

Aida rolled down her window and withdrew a package of cigarettes from her jean jacket. Offered the package over to Bethany, who shook her head. Aida rarely smoked, but just now needed the fire and smoke to fill the silence she was incapable of filling herself. She took a Zippo lighter from the glove box and lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply. Still no hail, but the sky was yellowing, the clouds scudding quickly, oddly no wind to rile the ditch grass. It was late in the year for hail. Bethany's outburst apparently over, they sat again in silence. Beyond the caf
é
and the highway running past it: a barbed wire fence, the concrete skeleton of an abandoned silo, the stone footings of a bygone barn. Then just blue and yellow sky and rapidly circulating clouds. Aida's ears popped, the pressure changing.

“All right,” Aida said, her voice husky and sandpapery, “what do you want me to do?”

Bethany stared back at her pitifully. She had once been attractive. The huge blue eyes, a thick rope of brown hair. Her skin otherwise alabaster, perfect. Aida could see how quickly the bravery came and went in her face, how the strength was braided together with rage, and how Bethany was most cogent when the memory of her attack resurfaced and she needed to strike out and
be
her anger. All the violence that had preceded her mauling.

“You know what I want you to do?” Bethany said. “I want you to get him. And I don't care what you do as long as you understand that I want my revenge. You look at my face if you need a reminder of what I want you to do. And don't take him to your friends in the police, either. 'Cause we already know that ain't going to help.” Her voice quaked. Aida squinted behind the smoke and dimly remembered that her old colleagues would not be of any assistance. She felt something in her chest like remorse, the knowledge that she had failed this woman, Bethany, before.
Bethany, Bethany, Bethany
.

“Is he out there?” Aida asked. “On that farm?”

Bethany seemed to shake her head just slightly, as if she could not understand how Aida had forgotten some crucial detail. It was a politely confounded expression she had seen on more and more faces of late, and it frustrated her. It had been her job to look strong, to appear inscrutable.

“Do you need to write this stuff down?” Bethany asked.

“I'll take care of it,” Aida said, breathing out smoke. “No, I'll take care of it. But you need to leave town for a while. I'll take you to the Greyhound station and then you have to go away. I don't care where.”

The hail hit miles away from the bus station, and they pulled over under a bridge crumbling and rusted. Swallows swooping in and out of their nests. They watched the hail bounce off the asphalt. Ping-Pong balls of ice out on the road. They rolled down the windows and felt the cold in the air. Aida opened up her door and slid out, stood underneath the last vestige of protection that the bridge provided. She collected a stone of hail from the ground and held it in her palm, then watched as it melted away. She drank the remaining water. Far away she saw a conical cloud lower toward the ground, but it never did touch and after a while it seemed to lose steam, retreating back up into the heavens. Then the sun reappeared, and a rainbow broke extravagantly across the sky, deep-toned and immense.

They drove over the hail-strewn road toward the city of Albert Lea and the Greyhound depot, nothing more than a glass room attached to a Shell gas station. There were old magazines on tables near the big windows and a view of the prairie and passing eighteen-wheelers. Two children were pounding the Plexiglas of a vending machine where a candy bar hung on a thin spiral of aluminum. Their little fists and bodies unable to shake the machine adequately. Bethany punched the squat rectangle once and the chocolate bar fell into an awaiting trough. The children snatched the bar and then looked up into her face, as if to thank her, but their own diminutive faces fell apart and they ran away, outside the waiting room. Aida watched as they ran across the parking lot to a woman—their mother, she guessed—and pointed back at the stranger with the hideous face.

In front of the idling bus Aida handed Bethany the envelope of money. “You hold on to this until I'm done,” she said. “Better you pay me when I finish things up.”
I've been losing so many things
.

Bethany nodded, clutched the money, shoved it back into her purse, and boarded the bus. A few minutes later, the bus driver rolled a placard in the window to
DULUTH
and drove off. Bethany's mutilated face in the window, looking out, her hand pressed to the glass.

*   *   *

He fought dogs in an old barn out on the prairie. Had stolen the land from a widow. He came to her house before dusk, smiling in the glow of the porch light, ignoring the moths powdering his face. She answered the door with a shotgun. He told her that he was her nephew, from Butte, Montana, come with money to buy the family farm. He waved a wad of paper in the air, two fifties on the outsides and nothing in between but thin cardboard coupons for car washes. She looked at him warily, rubbed her forehead as if to loosen out a memory. She undid the lock, lowered the weapon, let him in.

He had watched her for a few weeks from the road with a pair of binoculars. Knew that she rarely left the house and that she lived alone. Knew she was frail. He'd gleaned too that she was senile: she talked to herself incessantly and he had seen her feeding invisible chickens, broadcasting seeds from her hands to nothing but the sparse grass and gravel of her yard. In other cities he had lived in trailer courts or apartment buildings, but inevitably his neighbors complained about the dogs. Their barking, their waste, their potential for violence. He knew he needed privacy and space. The widow's name was Ione Miller. He knew this from stealing her mail.