Beneath the Bonfire (23 page)

The bourbon in the flask tasted good and warm, but there was the feeling that if I kept up drinking, the girls would return from school to find a drunk dad and no mother, so I placed the flask in my pocket and took a sip from the thermos.

Then I stood up, screaming into the empty air, reached into my pocket and threw the silver flask as far as I could out into the river, and it made only an almost inaudible splash. I walked back up the riverbank to my house and telephoned my father, who was happy to hear from me, and I asked whether he might like visitors for Christmas and I told him that the plant had burned to the ground and I had no money for presents and barely enough for the mortgage.

Dad's voice was gruff from the rail yards, from talking over locomotive engines, from the rotation of pipes he kept in a breast pocket of his shirts. “Brucie,” he said to me, “get up here and bring those girls with you. How's Sunny?”

“Dad, she's gone, and she left me with the two girls.”

“You call the police?” he asked.

“I don't think it's that kind of disappearance.”

I heard him exhale deeply. He'd met Sunny only once, at a Fourth of July barbecue, but he had fallen for her hard drinking and he liked that she smoked cigarettes and tolerated his pipe. Late in her teenage years Sunny had been a hobo and rode the rails herself, and she and Dad had talked about that and he was amazed that such a beautiful woman had survived such an odyssey. On my refrigerator under a magnet was a photograph of Dad and Sunny, his arm around her waist, her arm around his shoulder, a cigarette between her lips, his pipe balanced between his teeth and his white and blue conductor's hat happily askew.

“She comes back,” he said, “you don't ever let her go again. All right? We'll get her help. Kicking the sauce ain't easy, but it can be done. Your mom and I can come down if we have to.”

“Yeah, I don't know that she's ever coming back,” I said.

“She will,” he said, “she will.”

“Dad, I love you.”

“Me too, kid,” he said. “See you soon.”

*   *   *

It was the first winter in memory that the river froze, and I couldn't help but think that all these years it had been the paper plant and its hot excrement that kept the water from freezing. Some days I would stand at the front windows and gaze out at the frozen vein of water and think about my flask and where it was now on its journey down the Mississippi and sometimes I thought about leaving Wisconsin altogether and taking the girls to some point warmer, but there was always the chance that Sunny would come back to a house inhabited by strangers, and that unnerved me as much as the chest of drawers in my bedroom filled with her clothing and lingerie.

I told the girls that their mother was on vacation, which I didn't consider to be an outright lie, because in a way, I told myself, that was exactly what she was doing, what she had done. Vacated the premises.

Christmas had been a success. Dad and Mom bought a pile of presents so vast and tall that it was quickly apparent the girls had never seen anything like it on Christmas morning. There were dolls and clothing and candy and board games and Dad had bought all manner of train paraphernalia, which he told the girls they had to share with their mother.

At one point during Christmas morning Mom was on her hands and knees with the girls, helping them to dress dolls, when Dad patted my shoulder and handed me two presents wrapped in newspaper, which was his signature.

“A little something,” he said.

“Dad,” I protested, “I didn't get you anything. You didn't have to.”

“Shut up and open it.”

The first present was a box of Cohiba cigars, and as I examined the markings on the cedar container, it became clear that this particular box had not passed through U.S. Customs.

“Dad, all I smoke is White Owls,” I said. “Sometimes Swishers.”

“Time for that shit to come to an end,” he said. “Open the other one.”

It was an old flask, heavily dented, adorned with an engraving of a naked woman in repose. It felt heavy and I shook it: something sloshed inside.

“Maker's,” Dad said. “It was full, but you know. Call it a toll sip.”

It was strange, I told Dad, that just a few weeks before, I threw the flask my best friend once gave me into the river.

“Don't ever throw this one in any river,” he said. “You do and I'll disown you. This was your grandfather's flask from the war.” I turned the flask over in my hands, felt its weight. “You don't know about this flask, do you?”

We went down into the basement, where his workshop was, all his tools hung neatly from pegs on the walls, immaculately spaced and preserved. There were two old recliners down there, chairs my father had used upstairs over the years until they became too stained or threadbare and my mother banished them to this subterranean parlor, where Dad would sit for hours, smoking his pipes and reading Zane Grey.

The flask had belonged to my paternal grandfather, Gus, who had been an Airborne Ranger and had parachuted down over France late in the war. Dodging German artillery, they'd had to alter the plane's flight path such that Gus and his comrades jumped out of the plane over forest heavily entrenched with German infantry, who proceeded to pick them off one by one as they lazily came down to earth, their parachutes so many white mushrooms against the clear blue sky. Gus had seen his friends die, some terribly wounded as they sailed down to the angry earth. Some cut their parachutes off, risking the fall, rather than remain such a slow-moving target. But Gus stayed right as he was, and as he drifted down, he thought about Wisconsin and my grandmother and occasionally nipped off the heavy pewter flask he carried, and sometimes he prayed for protection and sometimes he whistled “Over the Rainbow,” but mostly he just enjoyed the ride down, marveled at the patchwork tableau beneath him, the vision of pastoral beauty and wartime horror. Not long before he touched down, still alive, he replaced the flask in his breast pocket, where he was promptly shot, the bullet ricocheting off the metal into a stand of ancient French oak trees. Thereafter Gus traveled everywhere with that flask, carrying it with him even to his job as a high school janitor, where he would sometimes install himself in a broom closet, listening to a transistor radio broadcast baseball games out of Milwaukee as he sat filling the tiny room with cigarette smoke and relishing his brandy or whatever the day's flavor might be.

“It's good luck,” Dad said. “Your mom still looks around the lawn for four-leaf clovers, but I don't have the knees for that kind of shit. Besides, you can drink out of this.”

He slapped my knee and I hoisted the flask in the air to take my first drink in weeks. It burned of hot metal and fire but tasted like caramel too. Dad extended his hand and we drank like that for a little while, just the two of us, until Mom called from the top of the stairs and we went back up into the light.

“I could use some luck,” I said to him.

“Who couldn't?” he said.

*   *   *

By late January, the remnants of the paper mill were no longer smoldering, and I had gotten notice that it would not be rebuilt, that the parent company of the mill was consolidating operations, and that the plant I had bicycled to five days a week had not been profitable even before the accident, would likely never reopen. But a call had come from my old manager Bud, saying that the company had found me another job at another plant, in the panhandle of Florida in a town called Apalachicola.

“It's a promotion,” he said. “You'll do what I did up here.”

“Bud,” I said, “no offense, but mostly you sat at your desk and read
Playboy
s.”

“Best job I ever had,” he said.

I called my dad. “What do you think?” I asked him. “And what about the girls?”

I could hear that he was in his workshop, the low volume of his old transistor radio behind him, the soft scratch of a broom sweeping as he talked, the gentle clinking of tools being put in their place.

“She'll find you,” he said. “She'll find you or she'll find us. Either way, you can't turn this down. You got to go. Your mom's ready for a change anyways. She's always talking about those Airstream trailers. Goddamn monstrosities if you ask me, but you know how these things go. My hands are tied.”

“Dad,” I said, “I can't just leave with the girls. They aren't mine. Not legally.”

“Put in the paperwork,” he said. “Adopt. I got a friend down there's a judge. Put that paperwork in before you go.”

“I miss her,” I said to him. “She was bat-shit crazy, but I miss her.”

“She'll find you,” he said again, and I could picture him nodding his head in confidence. He loved her too.

“I love you, Dad.”

“All right, kid,” he said. “Keep me in the loop.”

*   *   *

The
FOR SALE
sign was staked into the half slope of our front yard, and I spent the spring painting the house while the girls were in school. It was the happiest time of my life. In the mornings I would burst into their bedrooms, opening the window shades and singing, and they would throw pillows at me, but they always cooperated and it thrilled them that I never told them what to wear or how to do their hair, and I began taking the time to cook hot breakfasts of pancakes and sausages and scrambled eggs and bacon, and before they boarded the bus we would sit around the kitchen table or sometimes on the front stoop and eat together, and they liked to drink my coffee when I wasn't looking, adding huge tablespoons of sugar to my mug. After the girls left, I would drag a radio out onto the lawn and listen to baseball or sometimes old-time rock 'n' roll and I would talk to my neighbors and the neighborhood was a different place during the daytime, a good place, with old people out walking together, holding hands. Or the Hmong fishermen walking toward the river, carrying their buckets and poles and tackle boxes, and sometimes they would stop and show me their catch.

One day, on the ladder, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sisters as they unfolded themselves from an old sedan and walked toward the back of their house. In one of their hands was Geronimo, looking as forlorn as he had that first night.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey! That's my cat! That's my motherfuckin' cat! That's Geronimo!”

I had fairly run down the ladder, dropping a full bucket of paint onto the lawn. Either they couldn't hear me or just pretended not to notice, but they pushed into their dark house just as my feet touched the lawn. I ran across the street and into their backyard, banged on their screen door, my fists warping the frame's cheap aluminum.

“Open up!” I ordered. I banged on the door severely, my knuckles and palms sliced open by holes in the old screen, loose screws. “Open this fucking door and give me my Geronimo!”

A tattered window blind parted and I saw a pair of eyes squinting at me. Heavily wrinkled and bagged, the sunken eyes that stared out at me were red and angry, and I heard one of the sisters croak, “Fuck off.” Then the blind collapsed again and there was silence.

“Oh no,” I said, realizing perhaps what was about to happen.

My whole life maybe I'd been too meek, and there were times I thought about that and what it had gotten me. It had been enough to work a blue-collar job, dull and anonymous. Enough to lose track of my best friend from high school. Enough to snag Sunny, but not enough to keep her. And there was no guarantee that being who I was would be enough to keep those two little girls in my life. Suddenly I felt a rage, a fury course through me. Fury at the thought that I would watch things be taken from me, that I would fail to fight back.

“Fuck it,” I said, and ripped the screen door off its hinges with my bare hands. I heard one of the sisters scream a witchy cry. Then I kicked the shabby wooden back door of their broken-down house with my boot. I kept kicking hard and rhythmically.

“Open that fucking door!” I said. “That's my cat. You hear me!”

The blind parted again, and this time there were two sets of red eyes staring at me, both rimmed in fear. The sisters.

“He's our cat!” they cried. “Our Jerry!”

“Oh, no,” I sneered. “The hell he is. Stand back, bitches. Sunny was right about you.”

*   *   *

When the girls came home that afternoon, there were police cars parked sloppily along the margins of the street, rooftop cherries ablaze, and I remember waving to the girls as their yellow school bus pulled to a stop in front of our house, all the little faces of its riders pressed up to the foggy windows. They ran to me that afternoon with such desperation and love I might have been Grandpa Gus, coming home from the war. Geronimo was in my hands, and he stunk of neglect, but the girls rubbed their faces against his haggard face and the policeman who was interviewing me even sat down beside me on the stoop and took off his hat.

“Some day, huh?” he said.

“I've had better,” I said, my skin itching, my eyes red with allergies.

“We ain't going to charge you,” he said.

“For what?” I asked, passing Geronimo into the girls' eager hands.

“Battery, for one,” he said. “Breaking and entering, for two. The lesson here evidently is that if you're going to play Dirty Harry, you best accidentally break into a meth lab. You're lucky, is all. The courts normally frown on those types of seizures.”

“They had our cat,” I said.

The cop took my statement, showed his service revolver to the girls, and then left us on the stoop. Geronimo rolled onto his spine and produced a disgusting stained belly for the girls to rub.

“Inside,” I said. “Get that cat to the bathtub now. She's your cat. You clean her up.”

The girls raced inside with Geronimo, offering no argument, and I dragged myself over to the refrigerator for a beer. My face was swollen, Geronimo's oil and dander on my skin everywhere. Spring was full on, the air heavy and perfumed with lilacs, on the streets everywhere a dusting of yellow pollen, flowers protruding from the thawed earth, proud as arrows. I sat on the porch and lit a Cohiba with a strip of flaming cedar. I drank my beer and watched the river sashay between its banks. In the kitchen, the girls were bathing Geronimo, giggling, and there was the sound of sudsy water spilling onto the kitchen floor.